From NEWS.com.au
Video crooks come in from the cold
By Nick Butterly
December 28, 2005
MILLIONS of Australians who tape TV shows and copy CDs will soon get the right to do it with a clear conscience.
The Federal Government will next year legalise the video recording of television shows for personal use, and the transfer of songs from CDs to MP3 players, in a bid to overturn a ban which has made criminals of much of the population.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has flagged tidying up copyright laws by adding fair-use loopholes that will clear the way for private citizens to copy the content without breaking the law.
But yet to be decided is whether a levy will be slapped on the store price of blank CDs and MP3 players, such as iPods, to compensate artists for the revenue they stand to lose under the new laws.
Though the practice is widespread, it remains illegal to convert a CD to MP3 format for playing on an iPod.
There are more than 100,000 Australian iPod owners, all of whom have broken the law by uploading music.
It is also against the law to tape a television program.
A spokeswoman for Mr Ruddock said the Government was close to completing draft laws that would allow people to copy their CDs on to iPods and tape television programs.
Mr Ruddock foreshadowed the changes this month.
He said there needed to be a balance between the rights of copyright owners and the interests of users.
“We should have copyright laws that are more targeted at the real problem,” Mr Ruddock said.
“We should not treat everyday Australians who want to use technology to enjoy copyright material they have obtained legally as infringers where this does not cause harm to our copyright industries.”
The Attorney-General said he was likely to add exceptions to current laws to recognise “everyday forms of private copying that do not harm copyright owners”.
In Canada, where similar laws have been introduced, a fee was levied on blank CD and iPod unit sales to compensate copyright owners with up to an extra $32 being placed on the store price of individual machines.
Mr Ruddock’s spokeswoman said a similar system had been discussed for Australia, but was unlikely to be introduced.
The Australian Federal Police does not pursue people who have taped TV shows or transferred songs to their iPods from CDs. However, a spokeswoman said all referrals were acted on.
This is great news, but I’ll believe it when it happens. I’m also keen to know just how open-ended these fair use provisions will be.
From The Register
France votes to legalize flat-fee P2P downloads
Zut alors!
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 22nd December 2005 22:35 GMT
The French legislature has voted to amend the nation’s copyright law to legalize internet file sharing with a pot of money being raised, and divided up, to compensate artists and other right holders.
Parliament voted 30-28 to add the following statement, tabled by UMP Alain Suguenot, to article L-122-5: “Authors cannot forbid the reproductions of Works that are made on any format from an online communication service when they are intented to be used privately and when they do not imply commercial means directly or indirectly.”
The lobby groups that proposed the amendment, the Association of Audionautes and the Artist-Public Alliance, want a €2 to €5 a month levy on ISPs to compensate rights holders.
Uploading would remain illegal.
In addition, broadband users would be permitted to opt out, but wouldn’t enjoy the benefits, losing the right to download copyright material.
The Parliament’s vote is at odds with the position taken by the French government and the EU, which want to criminalize fire sharers, and hope the problem of leakage, and therefore compensation, go away.
The French culture minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has said the government will fight the vote.
The Parliament has voted to extend an old idea, traditionally deployed to solve copyright concerns with new technology, into the digital age. Now called “digital media access license”, a “digital pool”, an “ACS”, or “alternative compensation system”, or simply a “flat fee, the mechanism is used successfully to compensate rights holders for radio play and public broadcasts (for example, in a bar) and songwriters.
It’s an idea that’s rarely been seen in the mainstream media, until now, but it has been discussed many times here at El Reg, and advocated by your reporter, as a way of ending the sterile posturing between the copyright and anti-copyright camps. A compulsory licensed was proposed to a Congressional committee as far back as 2000, by of all people, Senator Orrin Hatch, before he was wooed by the Recording Industry Ass. of America.
For even casual music lovers, the figures are compelling.
Professor Terry Fisher of the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center think tank calculated that a fee of $5 per month on a broadband connection would compensate the recording and movie industries for 20 per cent of their current revenue. In an interview last year Jim Griffin pointed out that the US consumer has rarely spent more than $5 per head on music, so the recording rights lobby cannot plausibly claim to be being robbed.
As resilient CD sales have demonstrated, despite commonplace P2P file sharing, there’s a market for added value, whether it be packaging, better quality audio, or simply a tangible product. The only parties who fear such a move are parties who fear they can’t add value. For all the utopian calls for “Free Culture”, the public has little trouble parting with its money when that value is perceived. ®
Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey
The Independent, Online Edition
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article334686.ece
From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.
But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.
The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.
In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.
The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.
More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.
“Every time you make a car journey already, you’ll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car’s index plates will be read as well,” said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
“What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn’t at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles,” Mr Whiteley said.
The term “associated vehicles” means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes “You’re not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You’re interested in what’s moving with the stolen vehicle,” Mr Whiteley explained.
According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.
“The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured,” the Acpo strategy says.
“This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis,” it says.
Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. “Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism,” he said.
“The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don’t have access to. It’s part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we’d be negligent.”
Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society
By Joost Smiers
de Volkskrant, 26 November 2005
http://www.culturelink.org/news/members/2005/members2005-011.html
(English translation of original article published in Dutch)
Several weeks ago, Carlos Guiterrez, the US Secretary of Commerce, announced a series of initiatives to stamp out the rampant piracy of, among other things, music. Damages resulting from counterfeiting and piracy is estimated to amount to 250 billion dollars annually, in the United States alone. In a press release, he stated, “The protection of intellectual property is vital to our economic growth and global competitiveness and it has major consequences in our ongoing effort to promote security and stability around the world,”
Now I must admit that it never occurred to me that copyright could contribute to global security and stability. This is quite an intriguing message ? and from a US Secretary, at that! Another aspect addressed by Carlos Guiterrez is, however, more obvious. Copyright has increasingly become an instrument for securing huge investments. In the past decade, it has become one of the major driving forces of western economy, and US economy in particular. This development, however, has a major downside: companies owning massive amounts of copyrighted works can, at their whim, ban weaker cultural activities ? not only from the marketplace, but also from the general audience’s attention. This is happening under our very eyes. It is nigh impossible to ignore the blockbuster movies, bestselling books and top-chart records presented to us by these cultural molochs, who, incidentally, own almost every imaginable right to these works. As a result, the most people are completely unaware of all those other, less commercialized activities taking place in music, literature, cinema, theater and other arts. This is a tremendous loss to society, because our democratic world can only truly thrive on a large diversity of freely expressed and discussed cultural expressions.
The common perception is that copyright first and foremost protects the well-being and interests of artists. However, history shows that the first political act somewhat resembling our modern copyright laws already had quite a different objective than safeguarding the artist’s income. The first initiative for protecting the intellectual property of artistic expression was made by Queen Anne in England, who, in 1557, granted the Stationer’s guild a monopoly on printing and publishing books; a monopoly which conveniently banned all competition from printers in other parts, such as other counties, or rival Scotland. In fact, the term “copyright” says it all: it is the exclusive right to copy any particular work; nowhere in early copyright was any mention made of the author or artist who produced the work. Queen Anne had her reasons for installing this copyright. She was not overly fond of the concept of “the free word”, and granting the Stationer’s guild the exclusive right to publishing books gave her full control over which books could be published and which were banned from the market. After all, those who can grant rights, can deny them as well.
This act by Queen Anne is the specter by which copyright is haunted up to this day, and perhaps even more than ever before. Ever smaller numbers of increasingly large and powerful entities own the exclusive rights to ever more works in the fields of literature, cinema, music and graphic arts. For example Bill Gates, widely known as the founder of Microsoft, also owns a rather less known company by the name of Corbis, which collects vast amounts of images from all over the world; together with Getty, Corbis is developing into an oligopolist in the field of photographs and reproductions of paintings ? in other words: an entity which has a large amount of control over the market, just as the Stationer’s guild had in the sixteenth century. The oligopolist has control over which artistic works we may use for which purposes, and under which conditions, in much the same way Queen Anne had control over printed works.
In most cultures around the world, this state of affairs was, and is, highly undesirable, even unthinkable. Artists have always used and built upon other artists’ work to create new works of art. It is hard to imagine indeed that the works of Shakespeare, Bach, and countless others cultural heavyweights could have come into existence without this principle of freely building on the work of predecessors. Yet what do we see happening now? Take, for example, documentary makers, who nowadays face almost insurmountable obstacles, as their work almost inevitably contains fragments of copyrighted pictorial or musical content, the use of which requires both consent from the copyright owner and a fee to be paid. The latter is almost always beyond the documentary maker’s means, and the former gives Bill Gates, or any other copyright owner, full rights to allow the use of “his” artistic content only in a way he deems appropriate. Now where in this scheme of things are our human rights? Human rights should guarantee freedom of communication, and a free exchange of ideas and cultural expressions is what greatly helped build our modern society. This human cultural development will, however, grind to a halt when a mere handful of persons or companies can call themselves “owners” of the majority of pictures and melodies our society has brought forth. This puts them in a position where they alone can dictate whether we can make use of a substantial part of our collective human cultural achievement, and on which terms and conditions. The consequences are detrimental: we are being made speechless; our cultural memory is taken from us and locked away; the development and spread of our cultural identity is stunted, and our imagination is laid in chains by law.
Contrary to what one might expect, the seemingly endless possibilities of copying and sampling using modern digital technologies have so far only aggravated the situation. Publicly offering even a mere second’s worth of copyrighted work will almost certainly attract attention from lawyers on behalf of the “owners” of said material. Sound artists, who used to freely sample work from others to build new musical creations, are now treated as pirates and criminals. Whole copyright enforcement industries have emerged, scouting the digital universe day and night for even the smallest snippet of copyrighted work used by others ? and those found out, often stand to lose literally everything they have.
Copyright has yet another intrinsic fault which makes it difficult to maintain in a democratic society. Copyright nowadays revolves almost exclusively around so-called intellectual property. This is a problem, since the traditional notion of property is largely irreconcilable with intangible concepts such as knowledge and creativity; a tune, an idea or an invention will not lose any of its value or usefulness when it is shared among any number of people. In contrast, a single physical object, such as a chair, quickly becomes less useful when more people want access to it; in this latter case, the term “property” has a clear meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, in the past decades the legal definition of property has been extended way beyond any physical constraints. These days, almost anything can be someone’s property, such as fragrances and colors; even the makeup of the proteins in our blood and the genes in our body cells are being claimed as the exclusive property of one company or another, which can subsequently bar anyone else from using it. It is therefore high time to reconsider the current concept of property.
With regard to artistic works, it is quite conceivable that no single person should have the right to claim exclusive ownership over, say, a particular tune. We all know that almost every work of art, and every invention, is based upon the work of predecessors. Now this doesn’t mean we should have less respect for artists creating new works of art based on the work of others, and we’re obliged to contribute to artists’ well-being and income in our society. Yet rewarding their every single achievement, or reproduction or even interpretation thereof, with a monopoly lasting many decades, is too much, because it leaves nothing for other artists to build on. In fact, even criticizing the artist’s work can become rather hazardous, as it “damages” his “property”. Unpleasant as this sounds, things get even worse when we consider that the vast majority of copyrighted works is owned by a relatively small group of large conglomerates. These mega-industries create, invent or produce nothing at all, yet demand that artists sign over all rights to their works to them, just for the privilege of having their works distributed.
From this point of view, there is ample reason to send our current system of copyright to the scrapheap. Artists will of course feel threatened by such a bold move. After all, without copyright, they will lose all means of existence, now won’t they? Well, not necessarily.
Let’s first look at some numbers. Research by economists shows that only 10 percent of artists collect 90 percent of copyright proceeds, and that the remaining 90 percent of artists must share the remaining 10 percent of proceeds. In other words: for the vast majority of artists, copyright has only marginal financial advantages. Then there’s another peculiar fact: most artists have entered into some sort of covenant with the cultural industry ? as if these two groups have even remotely similar interests! For example GEMA, the German copyright organization, sends approximately 70 percent of copyright proceeds abroad, mostly to the US, where several of the world’s biggest cultural conglomerates reside. In this process, the average artist is nowhere to be seen.
What is called for, is a way to ensure that artists can make a fair income from their work, without the risk of being pushed out of the market and the larger audience’s attention by the cultural industry’s marketing power. This may sound rather idealistic, and perhaps somewhat unrealistic, but society’s need for cultural diversity should not be underestimated.
The interesting thing is that it is quite feasible for artists to thrive without copyright. After all, copyright is simply a protective layer of armor around a work of art ? and the question is whether the benefits of this protection outweigh its drawbacks. Artists, and their agents and producers are entrepreneurs. What then justifies the fact that their work receives vastly more protection ? i.e. long-term monopolistic control over their work ? than the work of other entrepreneurs? Why can’t they simply offer their work on the free market, and try to attract buyers?
Let’s try to predict what would happen if copyright were abolished. One of the first effects would be intriguing: All of a sudden, it would be no longer interesting for large cultural industries to focus so heavily on bestselling books, blockbuster movies and superstars. If, in the absence of copyright and intellectual property, these works can be freely enjoyed and exchanged by anyone, the cultural industry giants lose their exclusive rights to works of art. As a result, they will also lose their dominating market position which keeps so many other artists out of sight. The market would become normalized, which would enable more artists to show their work, make themselves known, and make a fair income from what they produce. This income initially results from being the first in the market with a specific work. But there’s another factor contributing to the artists’ success. A more normalized cultural marketplace will offer more artists an opportunity to build a reputation, like a brand name, which can subsequently be exploited to sell more works at a higher price. Rapid and widespread copying of an artist’s work, only possible in this digital age, may indeed decrease its market value, but will only serve to increase the artist’s reputation. This gives more artists an opportunity to keep selling their works to a larger audience than the current, industry-controlled distribution model.
Obviously, abandoning copyright raises several important questions which need resolving, and three major adjustments in particular are called for. The first issue is that the production of an artistic work sometimes involves a significant investment in time and/or money. This would require legal protection for a short period of time, such as a year in the case of literature or cinema, during which the artist can exclusively reap the benefits from his work. This usufruct, however is different from current practice, as the work will automatically enter into the public domain after completion ? as was customary in nearly all cultures before our current intellectual property laws.
The question of course is, why specifically a year, and no longer? Experience shows that the economically viable life span of the majority of works is a year or less. After this period, producing and distributing the same work is no longer interesting for other parties anyhow, because lots of others could do the same, which makes the investment unprofitable. An obvious consequence of all this is that there can be no more illegal use of works of art ? at least outside the protection time span ? since the material in question is no longer owned by any one party. Piracy will mostly be a thing of the past, as will criminalizing and pursuing people who share and distribute works of art, e.g. those who share music via the Internet.
The second obvious problem is that many works of art may not yield any profit in a free market for some time, or at least not within the proposed protection time span of one year. This may happen when a particular work remains “undiscovered” by the major audience. Still, it is important for society that a large diversity of works of art is available for public enjoyment and discussion. Also, artists must have the opportunity to develop their work, even when these are not directly interesting to the market at large. The development of an artist’s skills and personal style often takes a lot of time, yet it is in the interest of society as a whole to invest in this development. For these and other reasons society has an obligation to support the creation of these works of art by means of subsidies or other support models.
The third issue concerns the whole of the cultural market place. Abandoning copyright would remove one major support from under the dominance of our current cultural industries, but this does not necessarily mean that their dominance would end. Established industries would still hold the means to large-scale production, distribution and marketing of cultural goods and services in a firm grip; this is one of the reasons for their current success: keeping total control over artistic works from the source to the end consumer, and this distribution model is what largely determines which films, books, theater productions and image materials we can enjoy.
This concentration of power is undesirable in every branch of industry, but it is particularly detrimental in the cultural field. We could therefore imagine that the cultural market be subjected to a kind of competitive law with a strong cultural bias. This relates among other things to ownership of means of production and distribution of cultural goods. Also, legislation may be called for to force large cultural enterprises to (re)present all of the actual cultural diversity being created by both local and foreign artists. This model would make a world without copyright not just perfectly imaginable, but also profitable for very many artists, and be a veritable blessing to cultural democracy.
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Joost Smiers is the author of Arts Under Pressure, Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization, and a professor of political science of the arts in the Art and Economics Research Group of the Utrecht School of Arts, in the Netherlands
via nettime
I watched all six 30-minute eps of this show the other day. It’s a brilliant dissection of contemporary British politics’ obsession with spin (one of the main characters is clearly based on Alistair Campbell).
It’s basically Yes Minister meets The Office, and was devised and directed by Armando Iannucci, the comedy genius who was Chris Morris’ main collaborator in the early ’90s.
Chris Langham is perfect as the hapless Minister for Home Affairs. Langham is perhaps best known for playing (the voice of) Roy Mallard in the classic mockumentary series People Like Us. Apparently he also used to be a writer on The Muppet Show!
And now I discover that Langham has recently been arrested over child porn. Oh dear… What is it with the prurience of British celebrity culture?
Anyway – check out The Thick of It if you can – you’ll probably have to download it as it’s not on DVD yet, and like most good recent British TV comedy we’ll be lucky if it screens on Australian TV any time soon.
government, media, educators, community ‘leaders’ have all FAILED.
enough with the bullshit about this being ‘unaustralian’. it is clearly australian. time for everyone to take responsibility.
commercial television news this morning is perpetuating the fear and hatred while abrogating itself of any resposnibility. the political response from various sides has been a predictable ‘law & order’ / ‘unaustralian’ line. howard of course denies any responsibility, even though the racism on display in cronulla was a clear echo of his ‘we will decide who comes here’ rhetoric.
i suppose if there is an upside it’s that the virulent racism and ‘racial tensions’ that have been steadily rising in sydney are now well and truly out in the open. but things could still get much worse. sydney will never be the same…
i don’t have any incisive analysis to offer, i’m just feeling very sad right now.
btw ‘cronulla’ is currently the #1 search term on technorati…
and drank too much coffee
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