Reading for 9/16/2010: Second half of Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright
This week's blog will cover the conclusion of the book, Digital Copyright, written by Jessica Litman. Litman's book has two legal, technical, and historical chapters that seem "mind-numbing" to the reader. Litman's self-professed description of the history as "mind numbing" on page 144 explains why she has fully reported all of the Congressional proceedings in such detail: she wanted throw open the doors on how copyright became so difficult to understand. Although I do not know if I will retain any of the ins and outs of the battle for copyright in the 90s, through these chapters, I came to understand that older industries are using their power and tenure in the market to control up-and-coming industries via the use of copyright control. This description of how powerful and well-funded lobbies are used to represent business and their interests, rather than the interests of the American public, was disheartening to me. It also made me feel somewhat frustrated with the process by which our laws are made in the United States. At least I know now that I could never be a politician or lobbyist.
I can't help but make a mental comparison between these copyright issues, as explained by Litman in this book, and Prohibition. Prohibition, which was introduced in the 1920s in the United States, was a wide-reaching social experiment that was enacted to control the public; in that case, to curtail drinking. It did not work, and many people simply ignored the law and went on drinking anyway. Bootleggers sprang up to fill the void of legal liquor sales channels, just as a new file sharing site springs up any time one is deemed illegal. Some failed file sharing sites find a way to promote a legitimate business, such as Napster, which still exists today as a legal subscription-based service. This change in business tactics is comparable to the breweries of the 20s that manufactured malted milk and brewer's yeast during Prohibition. Like Prohibition, copyright law is too restrictive and people do not heed the law. Unlike Prohibition, which was touted to protect the public from the evils of alcohol, the safeguards surrounding copyright law seem to only exist to protect the powerful industries that hold the copyrights.
The Litman book that I am reading is copyrighted in 2001. I found myself smiling about her referral to "internet time" and how things change quickly on the internet. Even this 2001 edition of the book seems very old and antiquated to me. In internet time, I guess this book is from a time that we could refer to as the Digital Awakening. In 2010, unlike 2001, American society is now completely enmeshed with the internet. Litman questions how money will even be made off of the web, and it made me nostalgic to read the examples from the 90s in her book. If Litman re-wrote the book now, would she cover musical "Mashups," YouTube, Bit Torrent, the Pirate Bay, and other more current issues? Would she express surprise that things that happen on the internet are now making it on to CNN Headline News? Would she cover the decline of the newspaper industry? While reading, I was constantly comparing her examples to current digital issues.
Litman's view of the Internet in 2001 is one of cautious optimism, and I believe that she accurately predicts the e-book industry. One industry that I believe Litman fails to accurately predict is that of television. She reports about the downfall of iCraveTV, RecordTV, and Scour in the chapter entitled, The Copyright Wars. These services struck me as before their time, due to the low bandwidth I know was available at that time. In addition, the current surge of services like Hulu and Netflix streaming seem so current, that it seems unthinkable that their predecessors were around 10 years ago. Litman seems to write off the idea of TV on the internet due to these cases. She often talks about recording or timeshifting TV shows via VCRs, however, it seems from her book that this will not continue to occur on the internet. The landscape of television now consists of television companies showing their own TV on their own websites, as well as clips of TV being shown elsewhere digitally; however, there is still a healthy trade in DVDs and Blu-Ray discs featuring whole seasons of TV shows. The case of TV made me want to know more about the current landscape of copyright law regarding TV on the internet. In this industry, at least, it seems that the corporations have given the public what they want in a way that protects normal people from copyright litigation, albeit a few years after the initial need was expressed.
The final concept I want to cover from the second half of the Litman book that can be found on page 108. She talks about networked digital technology's "capacity to generate new classes of unbooks, unmusic, and unmovies." This gave me pause. Ten years later, do we have new classes of books, music and movies? Surely new file formats have arisen, and new companies have been created to sell digital materials. Innovative consumer electronics devices have been built, improved and popularized, such as the iPod and iPhone, as well as the Kindle and Nook e-book readers. Catalogers have had to find new ways to catalog digital materials made available in their libraries. Electronic resource management systems have been created to allow unprecedented access to journal article files via the internet. But isn't the book in print still the same content as the e-book? Is the TV show viewed on cable TV at its scheduled time different than the "timeshifted" version, watched on the internet later in the week on the website of the TV station? I would be interested in pondering this question in class. What exactly does Litman mean by "new classes of unbooks, unmusic, and unmovies?" Am I reading too much in to this, and she is only referring to electronic versions of materials? Or has our current restrictive copyright policy since the inception of the DMCA created a world where we are stuck with the status quo?
Thursday, September 16, 2010
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