Copyright or Copywrong: Geof Glass on why we need balanced copyright laws

Dec

2009

Written by Jesse W Kline

Kati was recently given a copy of the book “Shantaram” by one of her friends who had enjoyed it and wanted to share the experience with her. To most of us, the ability to share a good book with friends and family is taken for granted. But could this kind of activity be outlawed in the near future?

Considering the growing popularity of digital technology, this is not so far-fetched. In the United States, it is illegal to break digital locks. That means that if you purchase an electronic book (e-book) that is protected by a digital lock, you cannot copy that book to your friend's e-book reader without breaking the law.

Geoffrey Glass is worried that Canada is about to screw up its copyright laws in pretty much the same way the United States did. Glass is a PhD student in the communications program at Simon Fraser University and the co-founder of Vancouver Fair Copyright, which is part of a larger movement to see the copyright reform process achieve a balance between the rights of content creators, distributors, and consumers.

I recently sat down with Glass at his home in Burnaby, BC to discuss how copyright laws have the potential to affect the lives of ordinary Canadians and to find out what he'd like to see come out of the government's copyright reform process. Here is what he had to say…

On why we have copyright:

“Copyright wasn't originally a property right, it was essentially something to allow authors to determine who could publish their works. Because authors would write a book, which takes a lot of effort, they'd publish it and they'd have to be able to recoup the costs of actually writing the book. Not just the cost of making copies. Someone else could come along, copy the book, sell copies at a lower cost, because they didn't have to pay for the initial creation.

“So what copyright did was it allowed them to [establish] a rule for regulating publishers for the benefit of authors to encourage creativity. And that was for a limited time because basically what we wanted to do with this is we want the authors to recoup their costs. We want them to be able to make a living and we want them to actually produce things.

“It was originally, initially, a privilege, a monopoly privilege given by the government and it was initially something that regulated publishers because they were the ones making copies.”

On how technology has changed the game:

“Now anybody can make copies with technology they have at home. Anybody can break copyright casually. We all have the tools… We all have the technology and the technology by [its] nature makes copies. That's what computers do half the time.

“If you view a web page from the web, in your browser, your computer has to make a copy to show it to you. It's impossible to do otherwise.

“In a digital environment, reading something means making a copy of it. Viewing something means making a copy of it. Listening to something entails making a copy of it. So we now have a law that was originally designed to encourage creativity and basically regulate publishers that is now regulating all our activity.”

On why copyright is important:

“I think people understand stories better than theoretical explanations… There was a woman in the United States and she had a toddler and she was listening to Prince music… You know what happens when you start playing music around two year old kids? They start dancing.

“They just start bopping. They love it. I've got a three and a half year old son. When he was two, that was the time when you just put music on and he starts moving. It's wonderful. So she did the sensible thing, she grabbed a video camera. She videotaped her kid dancing to Prince. And she wanted to share it with her family so she uploaded it to YouTube. And the record label noticed and they sent a take-down and accused her of copyright infringement. The clip is 29 seconds long, it's incredibly low quality, the music's fading in and out and her kids are shrieking. It is absolutely no competition. I would never even have known it was Prince.

“We value [creativity] so much in our children. We want them to do that in school, we want them to be as creative as possible. Do we really want to fence them off and say the things you really care about, the culture you're surrounded with all the time, don't touch it, don't be creative with that. So, that's what I see and that's what I'm worried about copyright clamping down on.

“That's what I really care about and I think the Prince story captures, it could be anyone doing any ordinary activity and then they just run up into the wall. And when the penalties could be as high as tens of thousands of dollars per infringement and you're up against huge legal teams, it's a damper on society.”

On the link between copyright and culture:

“I mean culture in sort of the broader sense of not books or CDs, but how we interact with other people and the stories we tell and the meaning that is important in our lives.

“The 20th century was really different, was really exceptional because before the 20th century, culture was mostly something that we would do. People would play sports and they would sing or they'd make music.

“The 20th century was a time of great change when culture stopped being, so much, something we do and turned into something that we witness. Instead of playing the sports, most people now would watch them. Instead of making the music, most people now listen to music. Instead of telling a story or hearing it from their family members or friends, most people today would probably watch a movie or television. So there's this huge shift in culture and that was the era of mass media.

“There's a movie, it's called The Naked City, black and white film made in 1947 and it's set in New York City. [In the movie] we get to see what New York looks like in 1947… Inner city in New York. It looks like Europe. The kids are out playing on the streets and the playground.

“This movie is important [because] it's just about the last time you can see this kind of life in New York City because two years later, they got television. And when they got television, when people wanted to do something, they'd stay inside and watch the tube instead of going outside and talking to the neighbour or playing with some kids and the street life started to dissipate.

“When I was a kid, my generation was decried for being apolitical… That's probably true. It's not true anymore. You look at the explosion of blogs online… There's been a huge upswing in involvement in politics. It's not all positive by any means but I think it's better than walking away from politics. We see people not just watching movies but mixing up their own versions.

“When they actually go and they do something about that and they engage their creativity and they meet other people. I mean, that's what culture has historically been for.

“So, we've had a society that I think has sort of fragmented apart because we were doing culture less. And now we're starting to do culture more. And you can see how much people want to do it. They love it. There's like this huge hunger. I feel like there must have been this hidden hunger that was under the surface for so long and it's coming out and it's wonderful.”

On the current state of copyright law in Canada:

“The law is incredibly complicated, people have no idea what it actually says. Video taping a show and watching it twice appears to be illegal in Canada.

“You go on YouTube, most of those videos are illegal. Not because they're copies of TV shows, but because they use music from somewhere. And the law's out of step. I think we need to fix that.

“[Copyright is supposed to be] interested in creating a market for creativity and we have all this amateur creativity. It's tremendously productive. But every now and then [creativity] trips up over copyright and something horrible happens.”

On bill C-61, the government's last attempt at copyright reform:

“Bill C-61 was a disaster. It had the one good provision, I think, which was notice and notice and the rest of it was just, it was bad.

“The law had a lot of weird complicated exemptions and provisions that was so far beyond human understanding that when the minister was asked about the situations in which you'd be allowed to tape and watch a TV show, because it had special provisions for that, I think he came up with a twelve step test that determined whether you were breaking the law.

“On a really broad level, my biggest problem with it is it expanded copyright to prohibit legitimate activities. That's my biggest essential problem. The kind of speech and creativity and engagement with society and access to culture that we value, it would have broadened copyright to ban a fairly wide swath of that stuff.

“More specifically with the law, the circumvention of digital locks, the broad prohibition on circumvention of digital locks was bad.

“It was illegal to break digital locks. Just illegal to break digital locks. The technology for breaking digital locks was illegal. You couldn't develop it, you couldn't own it, you couldn't give it to anybody else unless you had special permission. And we're talking about on the level of growing marijuana special permission… This is like the gun registry, only worse. Imagine if we applied a gun registry to reading.”

On why bans on breaking digital locks are bad:

“A digital lock is really just a piece of software on something you own. So it's inside Windows, inside the Mac operating system, it's inside your iPod, it's probably inside your cell phone. It can do anything other software can do, but by being a digital lock, under the law they passed in the United States, it's illegal to modify it or change its behaviour.

“The law that they passed in the United States in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, makes it illegal to break digital locks, which sounds like a fairly innocent thing perhaps, but in practise it actually means in the U.S. that it is effectively illegal to play or to produce software to play DVDs unless you pay fees to a consortium.

“With the iPhone, [Apple has] control over the software distribution channel with their App Store. And they've actually decided there are a number of applications, in that case, they don't like because they compete with Apple and they say okay we won't approve them and then you can't legally install them in the States. You'd have to hack your iPhone and that would be against the law, even though you wouldn't be infringing any copyright per se. No illegal copies being made here.

“If they distinguish between legitimate circumvention of digital locks and illegitimate circumvention of digital locks, then it's basically only going to apply when there's copyright infringement anyway.”

On the effects of piracy:

“The argument is often made that if you can sell bottled water for a couple bucks, you can sell music for a buck. If it's easy to go and buy it, people in many cases will. And so, if you're the group playing music in the bars and pubs, the additional audience that you might be able to get by sharing it, seems to me, would be likely to increase the number of people who come to your gigs and who might buy your music. If you're U2, where your music is so ubiquitous, the people who want to know about you already know about you and so you might have more to lose.

“If you can copy stuff for free, many people will download as much as they can get and they don't listen to half of it. They're not lost sales in many cases… Some of them are lost sales, some of them are just things that happened because they are free and otherwise they have no effect, and some of them will promote further sales and we don't know how that balances out.

“In music the case is indeterminate, it's hard to tell how much file sharing hurts or helps. If you look at other industries though, it's likely to be different… But we can't pass laws that can stop this without infringing so much on the freedom of artists and ordinary people to do reasonable, legitimate things. So I don't know how we can stop it.

“The core things that, as far as I can tell, virtually everybody agrees [on is] that copyright should stop you from commercially exploiting somebody else's copyrighted work. You shouldn't be able to copy a movie from Disney and sell it without their permission… To me that's the real piracy and copyright is really useful for that.”

On what a good copyright law would look like:

“We need to find ways that copyright law and what people actually do in their everyday lives get along. We can pass any pie in the sky law we want, but if we do, say, what the U.S. has done and pass laws that are regularly broken… Well first it's ineffective.

“It breeds disrespect for copyright and disrespect for the law. It's really bad. So we need to find some way to get the two in step and I don't think that you can force people—in their private live, in the privacy of their homes—to regulate their behaviour in ways that they see as being unreasonable and ridiculous. You can't do it, you have to find a way for the law to actually pay attention to what people do and what people think is fair.”