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  • From: "Sutherland, Paul" <Paul.Sutherland AT ccc.govt.nz>
  • To: "Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion" <cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] Protecting copyright at any cost? - was Archiving the web for posterity
  • Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2012 22:33:03 +1300

Gosh - a rant indeed. Heres one back.

Hey and thanks Danyl for your thoughts too. Sorry if you thought I was
defending Copyright over any other economic model.

I do not condone what the actions against Kim Dotcom by various parties were,
and may be.

Nor do I condone the games he played by donating money for favours to various
forgetful politicians.

Nor do I condone our governments actions in tweaking the labour laws to allow
Warners to make cheap movies in New Zealand

Nor do I condone the secret TPP conversations.

However these are stark realities of the world we do live in - and the
ecosystem that has copyright laws and lawyers at the heart of it.

Whether you see the Kim Dotcom fiasco as a saga, a tragedy or a farce I stand
by the comments that "Mega Upload facilitated the illegal duplication and
sharing of copyright material"

As did Napster, PirateBay et al. before them

I do not defend any actions by anyone. Courts good or bad use the tools that
are given to them by the jurisdiction they reside in. They ultimately
determine what is legal or illegal - moral is just an emotion there.

Just how the dotcom saga plays out is a few years away, and no doubt a couple
of copyrighted books, films and maybe even a musical.

I am interested how tools like the Creative Commons (NC or not) can help
change the world, and I am not defending copyright but know we need to
co-exist with the systems that exist.

I am also intrigued that the article you cite does not have any indication
of its copyright status - or date of publication - but from the Generator
meta tag IBM WebSphere Homepage Builder V4.0.0 for Linux I am guessing about
2002.

AND I will try to hold my tongue now on this issue. Nuances sometimes hard to
convey by email.

//paul

See http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-nz/2012-December/000867.html for
the context of the earlier discussions in this thread which now seems to have
been forked



-----Original Message-----
From: cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Danyl Strype
Sent: Monday, 3 December 2012 8:31 PM
To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion
Subject: [Cc-nz] Protecting copyright at any cost?

Kia ora koutou

I will address the archiving issues separately, thanks Leigh for your
thoughts, and Mark for a professional perspective, professionally delivered :)

Speaking of archives though, I spent most of Friday extracting the contents
from a copy of the CC.org.nz web forums sent to me by Matt (thanks Matt), and
loading them into my wiki:
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/ccanz-forums-archive

Conveniently, that archive contains a link to an economic commentary which
neatly skewers the defence of CAAC (Copyright At Any Cost) which underpins
Paul's comments in this paragraph:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/napster.htm

On 29 November 2012 21:17, Sutherland, Paul <Paul.Sutherland AT ccc.govt.nz>
wrote:
>> Regardless of what you think of any aspect of the Kim Dotcom saga you
>> must remeber copyright is a legal instrument to protect the owners of
>> intellectual property who have chosen to use this tool for whatever
>> reason. MegaUpload facilitated the illegal duplication and sharing
>> of copyright material. <<

Let's address these issues one by one:
1) Kim Dotcom, and uncountable numbers of legitimate users from around the
world, had innumerable rights of personal freedom and privacy (eg right to
freedom from unreasonable search and seizure) violated by the NZ state,
through the actions of a number of its enforcement arms - many of the action
themselves illegal. This would be wrong even if Dotcom was a mass murderer.
As is stands, the violations of basic civil rights and the letter of various
laws by police/ spooks are much more serious threats to society than anything
Dotcom has been accused of. I find it disturbing to see these critically
important issues dismissed as a "saga".


2) In enforcing the rights of certain rights-holders in such a scorched earth
fashion, the authorities trampled the rights of MegaUpload to operate what is
now a standard "cloud" backup service for users, and the rights of all the
legitimate users who lost personal or business data, not the mention all the
basic civil rights mentioned in point 1. The corporate shareholders who gain
financially from this violation of rights attempt to justify this, by telling
the public that copyright violation involves "stealing property", rather than
violating a government-granted set of rights. What's actually happening is
that governments are violating fundamental rights in defence of temporary,
government-granted rights.

3) I agree that copyright is a legal instrument, but what kind of "property"
is spontaneously created by legal decree, can be reproduced without limit,
and vanishes by the same legal decree after a fixed number of years?
Copyright is not "property", by any meaningful definition. It exists to serve
the public good, by offering the carrot of a temporary monopoly on
commercialisation, to encouraging publication of material which will
eventually enrich the public domain. The violation is these granted rights of
commercial advantage are appropriately dealt with by civil action, not by
criminalisation, and violation of real property (eg private homes and
servers).

4) MegaUpload, like Napster and the Pirate Bay before them, was accused of
profiting from *potentially* displacing the profits of certain multinational
corporations, because some people were allegedly using the free service it
offered to give away free copies of things those corporations sell. Note that
these users are not making a
*commercial* use, so copyright is not actually violated. Therefore, an
argument must be convincingly made that the ad-revenue of MegaUpload was
received specifically in exchange for "facilitating" exchange of copyright
material, which would be copyright violation (but is allowed in CC
Non-Commercial licenses).

5) We must assume MegaUpload *did* respect privacy, unless somebody has
evidence that they didn't, so we must also assume that any users sharing
material under ARR copyright were doing so without Dotcom's knowledge or
consent. Without this evidence, even if the rights-holders had used the
appropriate civil law mechanisms, rather than involving the FBI, GCSB, NZ
Police (SIS?) etc in a dawn raid on a private home, they would have had no
legitimate case against Dotcom or his company.

Defending the dubious use of criminal law and international treaties to shore
up corporate profits is a strange thing to do in a forum which exists to
promote a creative commons.

Ma te wā
Strypey

--
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and speak to
the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree that free
software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407
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