Here at Copycense, we have been investigating our editorial and business models in light of several changes in the way we provide information about copyright, content, media, and information policy to our audience, as well as several changes in the way copyright information is made available online. The purpose of this short piece is to apprise our audience of some of the changes we will implement throughout the rest of 2009.

Editorial Changes

Copycense has been in continuous publication since 2004, but we really began reconsidering our approach to analyzing and writing on copyright and information policy issues about a year ago. During the past year, three things have become clear to us. First, we have realized we do not want to fill Copycense with content that has only ephemeral value. Instead, we want the content here to have lasting value.

Second, we have realized there several outlets are much more capable of, and efficient at, publishing daily reports about copyright, intellectual property, and information policy matters.

Third, it has become clear to us that continuing to focus on the daily news events has hampered our ability to view and analyze such events in a global fashion. It also has made it more difficult for us to connect the dots between law, business, technology, creativity, and society, which is what we believe we do best.

In light of these observations, we announce today that Copycense is managing its coverage of news events about copyright and information policy exclusively through our Twitter account at http://twitter.com/copycense and our FriendFeed account at http://friendfeed.com/copycense. Together, the content on these accounts replaces the Copycense Clippings and Site Check features on this site.

Our Twitter feed has been up and running for about 45 days. We have found it works perfectly for managing daily news updates, but we withheld a formal announcement about its presence and purpose until now in order to work out a publication system with which we felt comfortable.

Our FriendFeed feed provides similar information to what we post on Twitter. At first glance, the accounts seem like they are providing duplicate information. There is, however, one important difference between the information on each site: the FriendFeed site lets us explain and contextualize our Twitter posts (or the stories we point to in our Twitter posts) where we feel context is necessary, or we just want to editorialize, while our Twitter site provides mostly pointers to news stories we feel are important, and witty quips about those stories.

One example of how we use FriendFeed is illustrated by our comments about federal injunctions within the context of civil copyright litigation. In a recent Tweet, we linked to a story about a federal judge’s temporary injunction that blocked the publication and continued distribution of an adaptation J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. On our FriendFeed site, we expounded on federal judges’ willingness to routinely issue injunctive relief in copyright cases even though injunctive relief is supposed to be an extraordinary (and, by extension, relatively infrequently granted) remedy given the standard that is set forth under the Federal Rules.

We also like FriendFeed because it allows to connect to (and post from) other services like Facebook, where we soon will have a full presence.

How does our work on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook affect what we do here here, the main Copycense site? Our work on these external social networking sites means that the work we post here from this point forward will be less frequent, but more expansive and technical. In essence, our social networking sites will provide daily coverage of copyright and information policy issues, while this site will publish some of the scholarly and empirical work our executive editor, K. Matthew Dames, has been conducting recently. This site also will provide a forum for some of the policy work we have been proposing, and connect more tightly with pre-publication papers we post on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

With these changes, we anticipate Copycense will serve our existing audience and new readers by continuing to be a reasonable and respected participant in the broader online debate about what copyright is — and what it should be — in a 21st century networked information economy. And it seems that having reasonable voices in the online debate is more important than ever in light of recent changes in the debate’s constituency.

Changes in the Copyright Debate

While we have been mulling these editorial changes, important changes have occurred in the online copyright debate. While copyright has become a citizen’s issue in the United States like never before, the broader debate about copyright has lost some of its most valuable and well-known online contributors. William Patry? Gone. (In truth, Patry occasionally drops tidbits on The Patry Copyright Blog (TPCB), and he graciously restored his archives for all after he had removed the entire blog last fall. But TPCB is effectively shuttered for business.) Patry left the blogosphere in part because he became concerned that journalists (and perhaps even citizens) of all stripes conflated his work on TPCB with official copyright policy positions from Google, for whom works as Senior Copyright Counsel.

Lawrence Lessig? See ya. He has left copyright to focus his attention on “corruption.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan? Adios. He is focusing his attention on Google, and whether Google will, in fact, avoid evil.

We note these three not because we always agreed with their writings, opinions or conclusions. But each of them did write, regularly, and did so in ways that helped remove the layers of mystery that long have shrouded copyright and information policy — layers we believe no longer can exist now that these issue affect John and Jane Doe as much as they do Multinational Conglomerate Inc. Certainly, there are other strong voices that continue to write well and evenly on information policy issues, but many of those other strong voices are lobbyists for rabidly pro-copyright owner organizations (or more specifically, corporate copyright portfolio owners) whose work and “educational” initiatives are presented to preserve business models instead of fostering copyright balance or equality.

Other strong voices call for copyright abolition, or propose licensing alternatives as a way of getting around U.S. copyright law’s current imbalance. In our view, copyright abolition simply is not an option we ever could support, and we never have supported the absence of a copyright system. Despite its flaws, we actually believe rather strongly in the U.S. copyright system; we just don’t believe in an overly strong U.S. copyright system, which is what we have now.

As for licensing initiatives like those proposed by Creative Commons, we believe they provide worthy alternative approaches, but ultimately do little to calibrate our copyright system back to its historical and Constitutionally-mandated balance. In short, if our copyright system was in balance, would we really need Creative Commons? We believe the ultimate goal should be to restore balance to our copyright system so that an initiative like Creative Commons ultimately is unnecessary.

Then there are a handful of strong voices who have “legitimate” platforms who simply do not know what they are talking about because they have failed to get their hands dirty with the theory, history, grist, and marrow of copyright. We count Mark Helprin as a member of this group. Members of this group are dangerous because they have platforms that our society considers legitimate, and because their opinions may carry weight because of their access to such platforms — even though their knowledge of copyright law, theory, and history is embarrassingly scant.

Copycense 3.0

While we are not nearly as prolific or “credentialed” as some of the others who write about copyright and information policy, we are still here. Therefore, we announce now (albeit with some trepidation) that Copycense will step in and try filling the gap left by Patry, Lessig, and others who used to contribute their work, scholarship, and thoughts to the broader online debate about balanced copyright.

We are, however, going to do things a bit differently. We will not try to do what Patry, Lessig, Vaidhyanathan did. Eaach of them are enormous scholars, and we are unsure we could match them. On the other hand, we do not think they could do what we are attempting to do from this point forward: to make copyright, information policy and related issues clear and understandable to the average citizen creator, be it a 7-year-old making a collage, or a 70-year-old creating needlepoint — all while maintaining high standards of academic and journalistic rigor.

In other words, to paraphrase Public Enemy’s Chuck D, we’ll be breaking things down so that those on the boulevard and in the bourgeoisie can understand copyright equally, with our social networking presences serving the citizenry, and Copycense.com serving the academy and political class. Audacious, we know, but we only live once, so why not do it to death while we’re here?

Education is one of the keys to successfully implementing our plans, therefore Copycense will introduce a number of educational initiatives that will help citizens understand copyright and and how it applies to their creative work, professional work, academic work, and daily lives. Copyright once was something that only concerned specialists, entertainment corporations, and lobbyists. Now — with the lower barriers of creative production and distribution wrought by computer power, software packages, and the World Wide Web — copyright arguably is as much a citizen’s issue as a corporate issue. Citizens now have as equal a claim as corporate owners to being copyright stakeholders, yet few citizens truly understand the doctrine, the issues, or what is at stake. We aim to change this situation.

We have been publishing in this space for more than 5 years, and we thank each of you for taking the time to read and consider our work. We look forward to exchanging useful dialogue and learning about copyright, information policy and related matters so that all may “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” and “secur[e] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Copycense on Twitter: http://twitter.com/copycense

Copycense on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/copycense

Copycense on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Copycense/102610694832

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