1. Who owns the Bits? Digital copyright issues are continually evolving.
IP address do not map to a single person – hard to trace user
Music and movie industry have dominated protection and prosecution
Thousands of lawsuits and hundreds of proposed laws to address issues
- resulting in a “copyright arms race”.
Peer-to-Peer file sharing, central directory of clients files (Napster)
Flooding – content-distribution network – no central dir. (Grokster, Kaza)
Intent of distributor is key in court rulings – not capabilities of software
See DVR – auto-commercial skipping, music players – limited play of wireless copied songs
$750 per infringement (each song – each copy), “Copyright Alert System” a.k.a. “Six Strikes” a.k.a. “The Copyright Surveillance Machine.”
Napster (lost due to keeping list of directories of clients), Grokster – no central
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2. Bits must be copied
Any digital technology requires a copy of the data bits to process them (image, song, document, etc.)
Digital Rights Management (DRM) – industry (Music, movies, etc.) specified rights and expressions
Trusted systems allowed content processing
Analog hole – how to prevent copying at the final stage of playback? – Cannot
1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – outlaws technology for bypassing copyright protection.
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3. Copyright Law Copyright grants six specific rights to owners:
the right to reproduce the work;
the right to prepare derivative works based upon the original;
the right to distribute copies (by sales or other means);
the right to perform the work publicly;
the right to display the work publicly; and
the right, in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
The time limits of copyright protection are the life of the author plus 50 years, or for works for hire—75 years. You may not copyright such things as single words, facts, ideas and processes.
Fair Use doctrine is complex. Fair use provisions allow for the use of copyrighted material without the permission of the owner of the copyright.
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4. Fair Use
Fair use involves the usage of copyrighted material for private, nonprofit purposes. Fair use criteria includes four areas:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use on the potential market for or values of the copyrighted work.
Numerous issues for using material for “projects”.
See: R. Rutherfoord: The Law – Ethical Issues for Software Engineering Educators,
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5. Copyright Protection of Competition Avoidance?
DCMA slang – “Digital Millennium Competition Avoidance”
Anti-circumvention approach can hinder innovation
Copyright – “a deal a government strikes between the creator of a work and the public”
Evolved over a long period with the foundation of laws established before digital technology.
Ordinary people were not involved in most development since they did not have real ability to publish
Now, due to technology they do – but laws are established and slow to change
Creative Commons license
What about national boarders? Bits fly across them easily
Who owns the airspace? - Nationalized
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