The copyright hammer

It might just be me, but I've noticed an increase (from about zero) in articles and reports on the way that copyright restricts people's access to information and cultural works, with sometimes negative consequences. This morning, I stumbled across a series of articles in the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "The Copyright Rebellion." They tackle the crucial issue of how copyright law actually interferes with teachers' ability to teach and students' ability to learn by making it unaffordable for professors to place copyrighted works on their curricula, or for music students to play works by composers who have been dead for decades.

Highly recommended, and a good reminder that the purpose of copyright is to promote both creation and dissemination. While it deals with U.S. copyright law, and Canadian copyright law is somewhat different (fair use in the U.S., fair dealing in Canada, for example), the general principles do apply in both cases. Whether copyright actually does promote creation is an open issue for which the evidence isn't all that favourable, as I've noted before. But there's no question that it restricts dissemination, as these articles amply demonstrate.

Supreme Court Takes Up Scholars' Rights

Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars

Pushing Back Against Legal Threats by Putting Fair Use Forward (also has a list of links to articles on copyright and fair use for academics and librarians)

What You Don't Know About Copyright, but Should (U.S. focus)

Election 2011: What did journalists bring to the table?

Interesting conversation on CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition on the media’s coverage of the election. What got me thinking was one of the panelists' contention that the skills reporters bring to the table may not be useful to voters deciding what to do on election day.

Reporters are rewarded for reporting novel facts – scoops – not providing information. For example, as one of the panelists pointed out, journalists and citizens look at leaders’ debates in different ways. Journalists report on them like a horse race – who won, who lost – while voters weigh the performance of the leaders and what they actually said. Facts and motion versus useable information.

So what does journalism contribute to a voter's decision? If you want to know where the parties stand on an issue, you can read their platforms online. If you want a feel for the leaders, you can watch the televised leaders’ debates. If you want to know where the parties stand in the polls, well, there are quite a few websites you can hunt down, including those of the pollsters themselves. Meanwhile, journalists are reporting on the same stuff that your average web-surfer can find in under two minutes.

We already have a one big piece of evidence that the media matter less in an election than one might think. The media as a whole only started covering the NDP in depth once it started rising in the polls. In other words, Canadians massively changed their opinions about the NDP largely absent substantial media coverage of the party.

Discussions about the future of journalism take for granted that journalists play an indispensable role in engaging citizens in the political process. The CBC conversation had me wondering if that’s not a bit wrong – that we as voters get only drabs of information as an unintended byproduct of reporters’ search for the novel and (often) trivial. Balance is of the "he said, she said" variety, often lacking historical and factual context – I'm thinking of the shameful lack of pushback on Stephen Harper's patently false vilification of a possible Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition as unconstitutional in 2008. In other words, journalism as it is currently practiced in Canada may serve the democratic process not directly, but in spite of itself.

It’s at this point where most critics would call on the media to reform itself, to stop treating elections like a sporting event and start providing Canadians with more information. I’m not sure that such a change is possible. Maybe journalists are, by definition, fact chasers: pack animals, trained as generalists, hardwired to suss out novel facts no matter how trivial or irrelevant (I’m not going to bother linking to the latest media-perpetuated smear campaign against Jack Layton). If they can't change their spots (and, given that these complaints recur every time there's an election, I'm betting they can't), maybe we should stop expecting them to behave otherwise and focus on getting our information from other outlets.

Three reasons not to fear the NDP

Like everyone else, the NDP’s surge caught me by surprise. At the outset of the campaign, I was predicting a Liberal minority government, with an outside chance of a Liberal majority. My sense was that Harper had only one card to play – fear of a Coalition – and this fear card would drive Canadians toward the alternative. I didn’t suspect the alternative would be the NDP.

Of course, I have no idea who will come out on top on Monday, but on the off chance that the NDP gets a sniff at government, I thought it might be useful to come up with a list of reasons why we don't necessarily have to fear the descent of a socialist horde. An NDP government (and, again, such a thing seems far, far from certain from the Saturday morning before the election) could govern poorly, sure. Inexperience could mess things up. But it would not be an unabashed disaster for Canada; life would go on as it has lo these many years.

Right on the big issues

The three biggest issues of the past several years were the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, the financial meltdown and the resulting, shall we say, economic hardships. In all three cases, the NDP had the soundest policies, and it would be nice to see this rewarded. On Afghanistan, the NDP has consistently advocated for Canada’s withdrawal from a war we have no hope of winning (with winning redefined every day) in a land we do not understand. The Harper government’s position on the war has been infinitely malleable, as has the Liberals’. At first, withdrawal was called “cut and run” and Jack Layton’s patriotism was questioned by the Conservatives (the shameful “Taliban Jack” insult). Then, it was on the table, and now I’m not sure what the Liberals or Conservatives see the end game as being.

On the financial meltdown and the recession, the NDP historically is a strong proponent of sound financial regulation, which is what saved our bacon while other countries’ financial sectors were getting trashed. And on the recession, of all the parties, the NDP is most open to the type of government stimulus spending that is necessary when private demand is in the tank.

A history of pragmatism

His time on Toronto City Council and as leader of the NDP has revealed Jack Layton to be a pragmatist. He will work with whomever he can to get something done. In a minority-government situation, this would translate into a functional minority Parliament, which would be cause for celebration in and of itself. It also means that Layton would likely focus on moving forward achievable policies, not pie-in-the-sky revolutionary changes. Canada will not become the Union of Canadian Socialist Provinces.

A more responsible party

For me, the main reason why giving the NDP some responsibility would be a good idea is that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, so does a lack of power. When you never have any responsibility, you can say anything you want, secure in the knowledge that it doesn’t really matter. The NDP's election of Layton, a man with practical governing experience, as leader was a step toward tempering ideals with experience. Placing NDP members in positions of power and influence would help the NDP to think about what their policies mean in terms of actually governing a country, and that can only be a good thing for the country as a whole.

So: right on the issues, a pragmatist at the helm, and the potential to allow a political party to mature. There’s your case for why you shouldn’t fear an NDP government.

Michael Ignatieff's failure

I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation to the emerging consensus about why Michael Ignatieff and his Liberal party are polling so poorly among Canadians. This consensus, echoed by Irshad Manji, Jeremy Keehn and countless others, is that the Conservative attack machine has successfully tarred Ignatieff as a dilettante expat elite who’s too brilliant and accomplished and (therefore) out of touch with “ordinary Canadians.” He’s “too ambitious.” We Canadians, suffering from what Manji calls “petty parochialism,” can’t stand anyone who stands out, and so we attack them as un-Canadian and cut them down.

Here’s a better explanation that doesn't depend on warmed-over cultural and literary analysis: Michael Ignatieff, for all his achievements, is a not a very good politician.

The underlying assumption of all these cultural analyses is that anybody can be a politician, and that success in one field can translate into success into this one. Folks, it just ain’t so. You can be a brilliant economist or academic and be only an average politician. If academic and profesional smarts were enough to guarantee political success, John McCallum (former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at McGill and former Chief Economist of the Royal Bank of Canada) would be prime minister.

Being a politician is a specialized occupation that has a specific skill set: empathy, a strategic mind, and debating and speaking skills (just off the top of my head). Ignatieff does passably well at most of these, although his performance in the leaders’ debates suggests that being able to ask questions as a journalist or a professor does not necessarily translate well into a political debate.

Most of all, however, a successful politician has to understand what his or her constituents want and need, and this is where Ignatieff runs into trouble. I’m going to try to be very careful with what I say next, because it runs very close to the polemical Conservative attack on Ignatieff. Here goes:

The only way a politician can understand what his community (be it a city, riding, province or country) cares about, is to be enmeshed in the life of that community. The longer you’re immersed in your community, the easier it becomes to “read” it. Call it a type of learned intuition.

In my travels as an economist with various parliamentary committees and associations, I was always impressed by how MPs from all parties, of varying levels of ambition and capability, were always on top of the issues that they knew would be of greatest interest to their constituents. They knew how to talk about and to their constituents. We'd be at the WTO talking trade and they'd keep the conversation grounded. It’s a skill developed over years of living in their community, and years of thinking about and talking with people in the community.

I’d argue that this learned intuition is the mark of all successful politicians. With time, Michael Ignatieff has gotten better at it, good enough to be an okay retail politician. Ignatieff's tone-deafness was clear to all in 2009 when he waded into the debate over asbestos, prefacing his comments by saying, "I'm probably walking right off the cliff into some unexpected public policy bog of which I'm unaware." You don't say: the asbestos lobby, as he should have known, is strong in Quebec.

While this recent campaign has been free of these type of comments that painfully demonstrated that he was not sensitive to Canadians’ political sore spots, Ignatieff’s problem is that he’s not just applying for the job of politician; he’s applying for the job of top politician in Canada. That’s simply not a job that you can parachute into and expect to do well, no matter your bona fides in other fields. You have to be at the top of the game, which is politics and is (I repeat) a specialized field.

It’s the type of job you spend a lifetime preparing for, thinking about Canada and your vision of what it should be. Rather than consider Canada – and even Canada’s place in the world – Ignatieff’s intellectual development over the past 35-40 years has focused on other issues, like human rights and international relations.

I'm not saying that Michael Ignatieff doesn’t deserve to Prime Minister because he isn’t a real Canadian, which is what Manji thinks is the main knock against him. What I’m suggesting is that you can only be a successful politician if you’ve thought long and hard about issues of interest to your community, if you’ve dedicated yourself to listening to and working within and in your community. The higher you aim, the better your skills and learned intuition better be. And Ignatieff's skills  – his learned intuition  – are not good enough. Thomas Walkom made a similar point in 2009, comparing Ignatieff to John Turner, another guy who'd been out of the game too long.

Barack Obama’s a good example of what I’m talking about. Like Ignatieff (another smart cookie), Obama famously had very little experience in elected office before becoming president: a term as a state senator, most of a term as a U.S. senator. But as anyone who’s read his memoir, Dreams from My Father knows, Obama has spent his whole life reflecting on where he fits into U.S. society, and on the nature of that society. He worked as a community organizer. He was editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are all experiences that enmeshed Obama deeply into the political and cultural life of the United States.

Again, it’s not that Ignatieff is too ambitious and too worldly. It’s that he skipped the coursework and now wants a pass on the final exam. Even the most brilliant student can’t pull that off.

My sense, for what it’s worth, is that Canadians have picked up on Ignatieff’s lack of a politician’s understanding of Canada, which Conservatives have twisted into an accusation that Ignatieff is, somehow, not Canadian enough. As Irshad Manji notes, that’s absurd: Ignatieff is as Canadian as Stephen Harper, Jack Layton or (even!) Gilles Duceppe. But just because Ignatieff is a true Canadian doesn’t mean that he has the skills, including the learned intuition about Canada, that we should expect from someone who wants to be Prime Minister. If you don’t spend your life training for the top job in a G-8 country, why should we give it to you?

WikiLeaks cables: U.S. behind drive for Canadian copyright reform (who knew?)

I see that WikiLeaks has finally released the cables from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa. They’ll make for some fine reading as I prepare for my thesis defence (May 26 at Carleton University, Loeb Building A631 at 2 pm – bring your friends!). For now, you can catch up with some analysis from Geist (here (main one), here, here, here, here, and here) and Techdirt. Zeropaid also has a nice opinion piece on the whole release (h/t Russell McOrmond).

I’m happy to note that the cables, at first glance, seem to corroborate my dissertation’s argument as it relates to Canada (summarized here), so that’s good. Two things stand out to me.

First, one of my dissertation’s main points is that the United States usually can only get its way on reforming another country’s copyright policies if it offers something that the other country wants. True enough, but as the cables also suggest, a country can attempt to use the offer of copyright reform to try to get the United States to move on an issue of interest to it. In one cable, Canada says that U.S. movement on regulatory cooperation as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was what it wanted in exchange for Canadian copyright reform.

These two points are mostly saying the same thing, but the second emphasizes that there can be a significant amount of give and take on such policy debates, even on an issue of great importance to the larger country. Whether it works or not is another issue (the U.S. here saw Canadian attempts to link copyright to an unrelated issue as a stalling tactic. That they would comment negatively on such a linkage also suggests that linkage remains the exception, not the rule, in Canada-U.S. relations).

Second, in reading these cables and others, I’m continually struck by how open the U.S. system of government is. I’d go so far as to say that the great value in the WikiLeaks cables isn’t in what they tell us about the United States, but what they tell us about our own, very secretive government. Going far afield of copyright, the Tunisian revolution was partly sparked by revelations not about what the United States was doing in Tunisia, but about what the Tunisian government was getting up to.

Copyright infringement and high prices

Just a quick note to highlight the release of a new study, Media Piracy in Developing Countries. One of its main points seems to be that copyright infringement in these countries is largely driven by the high (monopoly) prices that companies charge for their wares in countries like Mexico, where almost half the population lives below the poverty line. I've only read the introduction and the Mexican case study (which has lots of good information on the Mexican informal sector in general and Tepito in particular), but seeing as just this morning I was hoping for more copyright scholarship focused on empirical issues, I can't wait to read the rest of the report. I'll even forgive their use of the word "piracy" in their title.

For the record, its case studies are South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and India. They also have a few chapters focused on more big-picture issues.

It also strikes me that the report, which was funded in part by Canada's International Development Research Council, is focused on the big picture:

we see little connection between these enforcement discussions [around copyright] and the larger problem of how to foster rich, accessible, legal cultural markets in developing countries—the problem that motivates much of our work.

This is exactly what we need: a greater focus on spurring cultural production, an openness to different ways of doing so, and less of a focus on copyright as an end unto itself.

The ideology of copyright

Peter Nowak is currently running a series of posts offering predictions about the future of science and techology, including weather control (!). The whole series (actually, the entire blog) is worth reading, but today he has a post about the future of copyright, an issue of some interest to me. It's titled "2021: The move to worldwide copyright," but I wonder if a better title wouldn't be "The move to worldwide licensing." I'm pretty fixated on copyright these days, not so much on licensing, so I'd be happy to hear from anyone with an opinion on the subject. Any thoughts?

Anyway, I've posted a couple of lengthy comments there, including one in response to some typically insightful remarks by Russell McOrmond.

The comments allowed me to put to paper something I've been thinking about for a while: what would it take for people, companies and governments to move beyond a fixation on copyright toward a focus on what copyright is supposed to do, namely regulate the market in creative works. Competition, I think, isn't enough:

When it comes to copyright, we’re dealing with a centuries-old policy that is rooted in two core Western beliefs: property and the individual. The major international copyright institutions (WIPO, TRIPS, and now ACTA) are devoted to promoting copyright. It’s so deeply ingrained that people talk as if it’s an end unto itself, rather than one specific tool for regulating markets in creative works. Once people in power start talking about copyright as a tool that should be judged on its effects, then change will become more likely. My biggest hope for the copyright debate is that it will one day shift from the realm of philosophy and legal theory to that of empirical economics. I’m still waiting.

At this point in time, it’s quite obvious that publishers, the other content industries and content creators who profit from the current copyright system believe as a matter of faith that copying is stealing. Hence the lobbying and the legal battles. A decade of bad press and faltering business models haven’t changed that. As far as I can tell, there seems to be very little evidence to suggest that this will change anytime soon. It has nothing with anyone being stupid. One’s ideologies change very slowly, if at all, since they’re at the core of our self-perception. It’s not surprising that companies, run by humans, leave money on the table all the time and often commit what seems like suicide rather than change with the times. I’m not going to make any predictions, but I’d suggest that taking ideology into account may complicate the story.

Read the whole post here.