Erik Marshall

Cory Doctorow spoke this afternoon at Wayne State’s English Dept as part of the Deroy Chair Lecture Series. He proved to be an energetic and engaging speaker who really knows and cares deeply about his subject. His talk, entitled “State of the Copyfight: how the P2P wars are sapping the techvindustry of its intestinal fortitude, scaring college administrators
into wiretapping campus networks, and sabotaging the future of technology.” revolved around his work with the EFF and international NGOs on copyright laws, beginning with a history of copyright and some of the issues this brings up. His main contention is that copyright law does not work in the internet age and the government’s attempt to enforce with laws forbidding certain types of technology does not work. He also pointed out that the RIAA and MPAA use threats of lawsuits against ISPs so effectively that ISPs will now take down any alleged copyrighted material without consesnt form the end-users, figuring its cheaper to lose the customer than to pay a lawyer to figure it out. As this is a university setting, he addressed the actions of universities in providing Napster 2 and intercepting suspect packets and dropping them before they reach their destination. He also talked about Princeton Professor Edward Felten, who was threatened by the RIAA for planning to present a paper on encryption at a conference. The point is that major industries have used dubious laws like the DMCA and Homleand Security Act to bully people who threaten to circumvent their copyright. None of this, or course, has been effective in preventing infringement.

As for solutions, he mentioned that he is involved in work to standardize copyright internationally, decreasing the amount of time copyrights are held, as 95 years is pretty unreasonable when it comes to software, for example. Beyond that, we all know the EFF has been involved in privacy rights and copyright issues for a long time.

As far as applicability to the academic world, he did mention privacy issues with packet sniffing on university systems, but I think copyright and IP issues run deeper. In the humanities in particular, journals are slow to adopt online distribution, in part due to copyright issues. This is beginning to change, I think, but I also think a fundamental change in how we, as academics, treat copyright is in order. While the peer review process is important to how academia functions, this can take place outside of expensive print journals, and writers can grant Creative Commons or GPL licenses to their work, which could open up the publishing process, and lead the way to a place where we don’t jealously guard our ideas and publications, but participate more openly in discursive activities outside of the current structures. I don’t want to suggest that academics generally shelter their publications and threaten lawsuits, but that a drastic change in copyright law needs to take place, and the universities and academics who work there should be at the forefront. If universities infringe on rights of privacy of its students and employees in the name of limited liability of copyright infringement, academic freedom also comes under threat, not only in terms of fair use, but also in cases like Felton’s, where ideas and descriptions come under fire as potentially dangerious infringements.

I would like to compare this talk to Doctorow’s fiction, which might bring up some relevant connections, but I will save that for a later post.