Friday, July 17, 2009
The copyright conundrum
The issue of international copyright law has reared its head again this week, in two different but intriguing cases.
First, Amazon.com began to sell e-book copies of two of George Orwell's books, '1984' and 'Animal Farm', for use on its Kindle device. However, BoingBoing reports that Amazon not only stopped selling them, but physically deleted from purchasers' Kindles copies that they'd already paid for, when the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition.
If I were an Amazon customer affected by this, I'd take them to court - after all, if I've paid for a copy, it's mine, not theirs, and I absolutely refuse to allow them to delete something I've paid for! Amazon is entitled to stop selling copies, sure, but surely it has no right in law to delete those already sold? Taken with my earlier remarks about Amazon, it reinforces my impression that they're a dangerous monopoly that should be broken up, for the greater good of the publishing and reading industry. (I note with glee that the BoingBoing reporter tossed in a link to an Australian Web site, where copyright in Orwell's books has expired, so that interested persons can download their own (free) copies if they wish. Take that, Amazon!)
The second controversy has arisen between Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery of Britain. It seems a US-based Wikipedia contributor copied high-resolution images of several thousand paintings in the National Portrait Gallery and uploaded them to the online encyclopedia. Under US law, this is entirely legitimate, as an exact copy of the original can't be copyrighted. However, the National Portrait Gallery insists that under British law, such a copy is, indeed, copyrighted, and it's threatening legal action against the contributor and Wikipedia for what it considers the 'theft' of its materials.
This is tricky. If the copying and uploading were done in the USA, no crime has been committed under US law: and the UK surely can't pretend that its laws are enforceable over those outside its jurisdiction? Nevertheless, the National Portrait Gallery is standing firm, as it sells its high-resolution copies to users to fund its operations, and it wants to protect that source of income.
These incidents highlight the growing problem of enforcing ancient laws in a digital age. Somehow we'll have to find an answer, one that protects the financial interests of authors and publishers, but which also accommodates the real issue of older material - long out of copyright - being made available to readers and researchers. Right now, I can go to Web sites in countries all over the world, and download material which is perfectly legal there, but infringes copyright law here. Can I be prosecuted for that? If so, who decides which nation or set of laws has jurisdiction over my actions? If I publish a picture from the National Portrait Gallery on this blog, using a high-resolution image from Wikipedia, I'm legally entitled to do so under US copyright law: but if a British reader downloads it from my blog, will he be technically in violation of UK copyright law? Who decides?
I don't foresee a quick solution to this one.
Peter
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3 comments:
Want to tell me again what wonderful things those electronic book holders are?
What happens when the present(or the next) commie-in-charge and his fellators in congress decide that they don't like a particular book and pass a law making ownership of same illegal?
Chick, ping, all gone.
Maybe people should buy an actual book. You know, the old fashioned way.
Copyrighted art - I had posted the results of a quiz "What your taste in art says about you" that I picked up on this blog. Heard from the artist (or colleague) in Germany recently and she didn't seem too happy about it,maybe because of my dubious reaction to it, but definitely because "It's copyrighted".
So I took it down and left a short update praising the entirety of her artwork and more importantly, giving it a name and a link (I think it was a top contender on Google images "Name that picture" or something like that).
I wrote to her to apologize and about a future update that she could write herself, but never heard back.
Geez, it was a quiz result! You never know...
There's a little more to the story on the Orwell books. It turns out that the books that were retracted were published without authorization from the copyright holders. Nobody "changed his mind," but rather asserted his legitimate rights. The books remain available from the authorized publishers, though at triple the cost.
Not that it changes anything: the implications are the same. Yes, this was for the right reason, but who's to say the next one will? This is the same reason that web-based news lacks the permanence of print, and we've seen several stories pulled for various reasons. The memory hole is frighteningly real in the digital world.
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