[h2o-discuss] digital wrongs

[Eric Eldred <eldred@mediaone.net>]

see an article on the "Science and Technology" section of
The Economist (not sure if you have to have a sub for this, i do):

>
http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/17-7-99/index_st4132.html
>

the story is datelined San Francisco July 17 and concerns
recent rights management schemes, quoting lessig at the end.

and here is a copy of a letter i just wrote the magazine:


SIR-- Your article "Digital rights and wrongs" (July 17th)
is wrong on several points.

The connectedness of computers on the Internet makes it
easier to identify pirates who illegally sell copyrighted
material, balancing the ease of digital copying, and
thus obviating special protection beyond a copyright notice.

You overlook that some publishers seek to convert public copyright
into a personal property right, and thus prevent legal uses,
as well as any effective return to the public domain when the
copyright term expires.  For example, blind readers
require text input for Braille printers or speech synthesizers,
a right that these rights management systems would deny them
(and so all of us).

The radical liberals who wrote the U.S. Constitution provided for
copyrights and patents, to promote the progress of the sciences
and useful arts, and for a limited term.  But you must realize
that patents and copyrights today are used by publishers and
corporations as much to sequester information, as to make it
available to the public to promote technology's progress.
Those who do not wish to uphold the responsibilities of public
copyright should not expect eternal rights to special protections
for monopoly business models that are becoming obsolete.

Instead of criminalizing digital copying, governments and
private groups should set up voluntary institutions to help more
information to become freely available when its economic value
declines after publication--this would be a good use of tax
deductions
and incentives to promote technology and the arts, in the same way
we promote a common healthy environment.

Copyright retains a useful role in the digital domain--even the
"techno-anarchists" rely on it to make works available.  Schemes
should not be promoted to modify copyright radically to favor big
publishers over authors, inventors, and consumers.  The real
digital wrong would be if the Internet and our common culture
became fully "propertized", from a public place for free political
ideas and an open free market, into the sort of
government-protected
pay TV that Sir John Birt has warned will irreparably divide modern
society, or that might transmute our personal computers into the
two-way tele-screens of "1984".

Eric Eldred
E. Derry, New Hampshire


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