This is not a con report.

I'm beginning to come down from my WisCon high. I definitely had more of a lobby con than a going to panels con, but it was absolutely the weekend I needed to have.

( Things About WisCon )

Band-aids for copyright?

I've been meaning to rebroadcast wild_irises' Is Copyright Broken?. I still am pretty sure I haven't actually had a conversation with her about it, although we have had at least one "have we had a conversation about that post" conversation.

The following is relatively unformed, especially since I'm in post-con mode (and should REALLY be asleep right now... I'm waking up in less than 6 hours). But I want to get it down before I forget.

The personal statement I wrote when I thought I was applying to law school was actually about my secret excitement about the brokenness of that system, and my desire to dive in and get my hands dirty fixing it. It feels like we're reaching a crisis point--the old system doesn't work any more, and various people are trying to construct new systems, none of which work entirely either. My leftover teenage Marxist wants the old way to collapse in glory leading to a triumphant revolution; the lawful neutral hacker* I've become wants to fiddle and tinker to make the old system run again. Now, even if I'd gone to law school I probably wouldn't have gotten to a place where I could hack the copyright system, and now that I'm looking at Information Science instead (even with a focus on intellectual property) it's much even likely, but this crisis point still excites me.

Actually, the more I think about the issue, the more I think that the best way to wriggle out of the copyright mess we're in is more laws like the DMCA. I'm weird in a lot of the circles I move in, in that I am pretty fond of the DMCA. It's interesting, the perspective that working for a content host provides on the issue. Granted, it is a problem that in many cases hosts assume their users to be guilty rather than innocent when they get served a DMCA notice. But the fact is, for every DMCA takedown notice a big host gets they get thousands more demands that don't go through the process, and DMCA provides them with a legal harbor to ignore those requests without fear of getting sued. A lot of discussions center around the fact that once a notice has been served, the alleged infringer has to file a counter-notice to get their content back up, which burden stops a lot of people from fighting, even if their content is fair use. But what is awesome about the DMCA is the initial burden it creates for the people making the infringement claims.

It's actually a pretty good trade-off in my opinion. It's a practical, flexible law that can actually be made to work for all three players--IP holders, IP users, and content hosts-- if applied correctly.

Applying it correctly, of course, is the major sticking point. (But then, even the most idealistic views of copyright freedom seem to have application problems, or my photography mailing list wouldn't have monthly centithreads about the total meaninglessness and unenforceability of the CC "noncommercial" definition.)

Right now, the advantage is in the hand of big corporations with the resources to automatically serve infringement notices, which makes the burden much higher on the defense side than on the offense side. So, maybe the sort of solution I'd like to work on isn't in changing the laws. Maybe the solution I want is to even the playing field for small content creators, and making the mediation task easier for content hosts with limited resources. Oh man, do you know what I would love to see? An open API that content hosts could tap into to get something like "percentage overlap with what it's supposed to infringe on" (YouTube has something like that piece) and "likelyhood this is fair use" and other handy things that would help them make more sensible decisions. An easy-to-use system for users to tap into the same data to make automated counter-notices.

Presumably other people have had similar ideas before. To do: go to sleep, wake up, see if I can find any prior art in the morning.

* "hacker" used here in the sense defined for "honer" in Diamond Age--my preferred problem-solving technique isn't in inventing new things, it's in tweaking existing things to do the things I want them to do, particularly when they weren't meant to.