[d@DCC] Rabble Rumble & Balance of "Human Rights" in Copyright...

[Seth Johnson]

My basic concern in this area is the way the combination of
a moral right to "integrity" and "support for DRM" violates
the intrinsic freedom of information per se -- disrupting
the fact/expression dichotomy.  Proposing that taking away
the public's ability to parse and process information
contained in an expressive work must be done to support a
creators' "moral rights" takes exclusive rights way out of
scope.  This disrupts the function of the universal logic
device, renders digital information products unuseful for
anything but a very constrained notion of "consumption," and
sets the stage for undermining the fundamental nature and
architecture of the Internet.

You folks know the US Feist Publications Supreme Court
decision, right?  Three big WIPO treaty efforts followed on
that decision.  The WIPO Copyright Treaty, which institutes
the anticircumvention provision of which the DMCA is the
US's national implementation; then the WIPO Performances and
Phonograms Treaty, which institutes this "moral rights"
notion; and finally a treaty to cover database data, which
failed to get consensus.  All because of this case (at least
that's what I recall reading, I think in Siva
Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs):

> http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/feist.html#IIA

Seth Johnson

Russell McOrmond wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Seth Johnson wrote:
> 
> > . . . I hope this doesn't allude to the bogus notion of
> > "moral rights" in the WIPO Performances and Phonograms
> > Treaty (i.e., the rights of attribution, which makes sense,
> > and of "integrity," which is strange in the digital era,
> > except that it becomes abhorrent when coupled with the
> > "support DRM metadata" provisions in that treaty).
> 
>   This is where more thinking needs to be done.  We have had discussions
> where it has been suggested that "moral rights" should extend forever, and
> economic rights should be very limited (matter of years or a few tens of
> years, but nothing anywhere near 70).
> 
>   When you slide from "credit where credit is due" to the "integrity of
> the work", you get closer to what we would think of as economic rights,
> but that some authors consider to be moral rights.  Where that line is
> drawn seems to be different for different people, with some going to an
> extreme claiming that the ability to restrict non-commercial communication
> of a work is somehow a "moral right".
> 
>   A clause saying "support DRM metadata" is too vague.  Somewhere between
> when an author sends something to the publisher, and it reaches our
> senses, that metadata will be lost.  We should be asking questions like
> "lost for what purpose", not making incomprehensable pronouncements that
> stripping or changing metadata is itself a crime.
> 
>   The whole policy discussion around legal protection for TPM and legal
> protection for RMI (TPM meta-data) seems to have been void of any
> technological knowledge, which is why I am so glad that so many technical
> people have become involved at this time.
> 
>   The section-92 review is soon - have each of you spoken or written to
> your MP? http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/36498.html#section-92
> 
> > Seth Johnson
> ---
>  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
>  See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions
>  Submission to Innovation Strategy         | No2Violence in Politics
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> 
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