I had the sorry experience of watching two small children trying to watch a new DVD on a computer this week. It wouldn’t play. The DVD player was in good condition — it would play the “extra features” disk just fine. But the main feature didn’t show up when the DVD was mounted. This was a brand new DVD that a colleague purchased for the purpose of entertaining her children. She was not attempting to hack, rip, or otherwise defeat the protection scheme of the media. She just wanted to entertain her kids for a little while so she could work.
DRM rears it’s ugly head. Copyright protects the creative, right? I mean that’s why we have “Author’s Life Plus 90 Years” … Right? So the copyright holder gets the revenue stream in near perpetuity, Right?
Psst. Hey, buddy! You want your article published in our journal? Just send it over, we’ll protect it. We’ll vet it through our panel of experts. We’ll edit it so you look erudite. You can rely on us to make sure that nobody steals your work. All you have to do is sign this paper and we’ll be happy to make sure that nobody can use your work for the rest of your life plus 90 years.
I’m so relieved. Until I realize who’s included in that “nobody” bit.
Now how does that protect me? Where is the incentive for me to create more? Once the journal has the copyright they don’t even have to publish it. My work can be “disappeared” and I have no recourse. I can’t even put it on my vita or reference it in other works.
The reality is that copyright protects the copyright owner (the distribution channel) and in 99% of cases that owner is not the creative person who created the work because the first sale removes the artist from the equation. Some contracts include residuals, and in some cases the residuals can generate revenue streams for creative people. For some small number of individuals these streams can be large, but for the majority they are limited or non-existant.
The current copyright laws are geared to make sure that the little guys stay little and the big guys can get bigger. The people who gave us the TEACH Act and Digital Milleneum Copyright Act saw to it. The RIAA, MPAA, and that ilk made certain that the rights of “artists everywhere” would be “protected.”
We’ve come soooo far from “Hey, buddy. For $25 I can make sure nobody breaks your window!”
But the world is changing. Distribution channels exist on every internet connection in the world. We are not dependant on Sony for our music or on Disney for our video. We do not need Harper-Collins to publish our books. We don’t need ETR&D to publish our research. (Oops. Did I say that?)
AECT is casting about for a social good. Ya, overhauling Education is good. What about breaking the back of the restrictive convenants that are strangling the creative and artistic use of educational media for the benefit of a few corporate entities?
Support Creative Commons. Boycott copyright restrictions.
Update: I should read more before I write. Not sure how this slid past my radar, but if I’d seen it before I wrote this piece, I’d have cited it way earlier.
March 24th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Part of what you are talking about is Property Rights, not copyright, Nate. Here are some interesting sites that might help out (or muddy the waters further):
http://www.nhalliance.org/ip/ip_principles.html
http://copyrightreadings.blogspot.com/
http://www.vraweb.org/copyright/intellectual.html
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/doc/ipnii/
No, as for signing away all rights, well let the buyer beware! Read what you are signing and balance the willingness to give away rights with the need to publish.
Mary
March 24th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Thanks, Mary. Mostly what I’m talking about is that we’re missing a significant point about costs, distribution, intellectual property, and technology.
As academics our jobs all but require us to hand over the rights to our intellectual property to outside entities. The P&T argument that has been bubbling away here over the last few weeks makes it abundantly clear that “You publish (and it better be in a legitimate research journal) or you perish.” We work in institutions as bailees for hire and as such, unless we are very, very careful, we discover that the sum of our creative outputs belong to the schools.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the rules of the game. In order to build an attractive vita, I’m going to have to give up the rights to my work. I’m going to HAVE to publish in a copyrighted journal if I want to get tenure. The process of higher education — at least for now — requires that I sign away the rights to my own intellectual property in return for some modicum of job security. I’ve known that for a long time and I accept it. But you can bet that the work I sign away will NOT be the work I care the most about … Only the pieces that I don’t mind giving up. Only the pieces that are derivative works themselves so that the rights to my main ideas and writings remain with me.
March 27th, 2005 at 12:19 am
[...] ECT — midqueller @ 2:01 am never again , a post that I was connected to via The Protection Racket …brings up the ironic issue of copyright in academic publications. When I [...]