2001: COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT AND CREATIVE COMMONS_A History of EBooks

= [Overview]

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing,

a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on

its website, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation

dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build

upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of

mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to

carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any

combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons

licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20

million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in

2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million

licensed works in 2008. Science Commons was founded in 2005 to

"design strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-

enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007 as "a

division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full

potential of the internet to support open learning and open

educational resources."

= Copyright on the web

What did people think about copyright on the web, when there

were heated debated about print articles and other copyrighted

works being posted and re-posted without the consent of their

authors? Here are some answers.

Based in San Francisco, California, Jacques Gauchey was a

journalist in information technology and a "facilitator"

between the United States and Europe. He wrote in July 1999:

"Copyright in its traditional context doesn't exist any more.

Authors have to get used to a new situation: the total freedom

of the flow of information. The original content is like a

fingerprint: it can't be copied. So it will survive and

flourish."

Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference

website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "The

debate will continue forever, as information becomes more

conspicuous than the air that we breathe and more fluid than

water. (...) Authors will have to become a lot more creative in

terms of how to control the dissemination of their work and

profit from it. The best that we can do right now is to promote

basic standards of professionalism, and insist at the very

least that the source and authorship of any work be duly

acknowledged. Technology will have to evolve to support the

authorization process."

Alain Bron is a consultant in information systems and a

novelist. He wrote in November 1999: "I regard the web today as

a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright

on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything

original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not

formally registered or if works are available without payment

facilities. A solution is to make people pay for information,

but this is no watertight guarantee against it being copied."

Peter Raggett was the deputy-head (and now the head) of the

OECD Central Library (OECD: Organization for Economic and

Cooperation Development). He wrote in August 1999: "The

want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and

end-users want to be able to download immediately the full text

of articles. At the moment, each publisher seems to have its

own policy for access to electronic versions and they would

benefit from having some kind of homogenous policy, preferably

allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material."

Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the

complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October

2000: "Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the

intellectual property thinks that s/he owns what s/he has

created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of

plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case

of book). The business community has not found a new way to add

value to intellectual property. Consumers don't think very

abstractly. When they download songs for example, they are

simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The

music and publishing industry need to find ways to give

consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual

property."

= Copyright and WIPO

Since the web became mainstream, the posting by the thousands

of electronic texts and other documents has been an headache

for organizations in charge of applying the rules relating to

intellectual property.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an

intergovernmental organization, and one of the 16 specialized

agencies of the United Nations. It is responsible for

protecting intellectual property throughout the world through

cooperation among countries. It is also responsible for

implementing various multilateral treaties dealing with the

legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property.

Intellectual property comprises industrial property and

trademarks, industrial designs and appellations of origin.

and audiovisual works. WIPO stated on its website in 1999: "As

regards the number of literary and artistic works created

worldwide, it is difficult to make a precise estimate. However,

the information available indicates that at present around

1,000,000 books/titles are published and some 5,000 feature

films are produced in a year, and the number of copies of

phonograms sold per year presently is more than 3,000 million."

lawful only if we get authorization from the copyright owner.

As explained by WIPO on its website in the section

"International Protection of Copyright and Neighbouring

Rights", the authorizations granted by the copyright owner can

be: "The right to copy or otherwise reproduce any kind of work;

the right to distribute copies to the public; the right to rent

copies of at least certain categories of works (such as

computer programs and audiovisual works); the right to make

sound recordings of the performances of literary and musical

works; the right to perform in public, particularly musical,

dramatic or audiovisual works; the right to communicate to the

public by cable or otherwise the performances of such works

and, particularly, to broadcast, by radio, television or other

wireless means, any kind of work; the right to translate

literary works; the right to rent, particularly, audiovisual

works, works embodied in phonograms and computer programs; the

right to adapt any kind of work and particularly the right to

make audiovisual works thereof."

Under some national laws, some of these rights - which together

are referred to as "economic rights" - are not exclusive rights

of authorization but, in some specific cases, merely rights to

remuneration. In addition to economic rights, authors - whether

or not they own the economic rights - enjoy "moral rights" on

the basis of which authors have the right to claim their

authorship and require that their names be indicated on the

copies of the work and in connection with other uses, and they

have the right to oppose the mutilation or deformation of their

works.

= Shrinking of public domain

Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make

electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them for

free. In 2009, Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of

downloads every day. As recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I

knew [in July 1971] that the future of computing, and the

internet, was going to be... 'The Information Age.' That was

also the day I said we would be able to carry quite literally

the entire Library of Congress in one hand and the system would

certainly make it illegal... too much power to leave in the

hands of the masses."

As defined by Project Gutenberg, "public domain is the set of

cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to

everyone equally", i.e. for books, the ones that can be

digitized and released on the internet for free. But the task

of Project Gutenberg hasn't be made any easier by the

increasing restrictions to public domain. In former times, 50%

of works belonged to public domain, and could be freely used by

everybody. A much tougher legislation was set in place over the

centuries, step by step, especially during the 20th century,

despite our so-called "information society". In 2100, 99% of

works might be governed by copyright, with a meager 1% for

public domain.

In the "Copyright HowTo" section of its website, Project

Gutenberg explains how to confirm the public domain status of

books according to U.S. copyright laws. Here is a summary: (a)

Works published before 1923 entered the public domain no later

than 75 years from the copyright date: all these works belong

to public domain; (b) Works published between 1923 and 1977

retain copyright for 95 years: no such works will enter the

public domain until 2019; (c) Works created from 1978 on enter

the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the

author is a natural person: nothing will enter the public

domain until 2049; (d) Works created from 1978 on enter the

public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after

creation if the author is a corporate one: nothing will enter

the public domain until 2074.

Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the

previous one. A major blow for digital libraries was the

amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998.

As explained by Michael Hart in July 1999: "Nothing will expire

for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it

is 95 years. And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28-year

extension, only on request) before that, and 14 years (+ a

possible 14-year extension) before that. So, as you can see,

this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter

of continuing policy."

John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993,

got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in

August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to

understand that copyright is a social contract that is designed

for the public good - where the public includes both authors

and readers. This means that authors should have the right to

exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is

expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that

their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will

once copyright expires. In the U.S. now, there are various

efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair

use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to

make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to

cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the

'database copyright' proposals). There are even proposals to

effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially

much more onerous contract law. (...) Stakeholders in this

debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers

and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use.

If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of

principles, rather than as the power play it is too often ends

up being ('big money vs. rogue pirates'), we may be able to

come up with some reasonable accommodations."

Michael Hart wrote in July 1999: "No one has said more against

publishers have seen to it that our Congress won't even mention

it in public. The kind of copyright debate going on is totally

impractical. It is run by and for the 'Landed Gentry of the

Information Age.' 'Information Age'? For whom?"

Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great "information

age" we live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating

to dissemination of information. The contradiction is obvious.

This problem has also affected several European countries,

where the copyright law switched from "author's life plus 50

years" to "author's life plus 70 years", following pressure

from content owners who successfully lobbied for

"harmonization" of national copyright laws as a response to

"globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of

digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international

treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was

ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European

the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg

Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public

domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and

that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect

another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find

books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people

start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot

continue to double as they come up to the point of already

having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in

the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt

when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws

on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current

= Copyleft and Creative Commons

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a

computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of

Technology), who launched the GNU project to develop a complete

Unix-like operating system called the GNU system.

As explained on the GNU website: "Copyleft is a general method

for making a program or other work free, and requiring all

modified and extended versions of the program to be free as

well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the

software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom

to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every

user has freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the

The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the verb

'to leave' — only to the direction which is the inverse of

'right'. (...) The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a

form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or

other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy

and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either

commercially or non commercially."

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing,

a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on

its website: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation

dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build

upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of

mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to

carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any

combination thereof."

There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003,

4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works

in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed

works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008.

Science Commons was founded in 2005. As explained on its

website: "Science Commons designs strategies and tools for

faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We

identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy

guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and

develop technology to make research, data and materials easier

to find and use. Our goal is to speed the translation of data

into discovery — unlocking the value of research so more people

can benefit from the work scientists are doing."

ccLearn was founded in 2007. As explained on its website:

"ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons dedicated to

realizing the full potential of the internet to support open

learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to

minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and

reuse of educational materials."