“Traditional publishers are the slave traders. And the research articles and the many academics are the slaves.” — Richard Smith, board member, Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Last month, Richard Smith, a member of the board of directors at the Public Library of Science (PLoS), gave a speech (.mp3) in which he accused journal publishers of acting like slave owners and open access of acting like abolitionists. A PowerPoint presentation (.ppt) containing gory images of slavery accompanied the speech.

While we at Copycense support the core aims of the open access movement, we find any attempt to use the gruesome, wrenching, genocidal reality of human slavery as a comparative or promotional tool for open access is insulting and entirely unacceptable.

As we condemned former MPAA CEO Jack Valenti for comparing piracy to terrorism, and RIAA spokesperson Matthew Kilgo for comparing the profit from mixtapes to profits gleaned from the sale of illicit drugs, we must also condemn Richard Smith for comparing publishers to slave traders.

The increasingly dark, dire imagery used to characterize issues within the digital content debate too often goes far beyond framing, spin, or public relations. Language like this is grossly unprofessional and personally indecent. Nothing in this debate is nearly as urgent or serious as terrorism, illegal drug trafficking, or slavery, and the people who insist on perpetuating this language should be censured. Enough is enough.

Copycense™: Creativity & Code.™ A venture of Seso Group LLC.

“Countries whose lack of functional copyright law has jeopardized their membership in WIPO have touted open source as the inexpensive alternative that will allow them to comply with copyright while living within their means. Yet free software doesn’t come free — it has strings attached: the strings of copyleft, strings being pulled via a license written with a strong U.S. copyright enforcement landscape in mind.

“The bottom line is that free software lives and dies by the sword of copyright law — and the sword outside the U.S. and Europe is not very sharp. Enforcing free software licenses in the U.S. is hard enough. We all know that noncompliance is rampant in the U.S., though this is due less to defiance or malfeasance than to inattention, poor record keeping, or suspecting that some of the more opaque licenses were actually written by Chinese students who learned English from an official cultural-revolution-era phrasebook.

“So, who will enforce the GPL in India? Or in China? Or in Russia? In lieu of enforcement, do we really expect voluntary compliance in nations where copyright law is a nod and a wink?”

Heather Meeker. Only in America? Copyright Law Key to Global Free Software Model. TechNewsworld. May 16, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“A peaceful crowd of several hundred gathered at the Place de la Bastille in Paris Sunday afternoon to march in support of ‘digital freedom’ — and against digital rights management and a proposed change in copyright law currently on the floor of the French Senate.

“The demonstrators, many of whom identified themselves as open-source software developers, said they were protesting the bill on two fronts: consumers’ right to fair use and software developers’ freedom to innovate.

“The controversial legislation has come under fire from all sides. Often described as the “iPod law,” the bill has triggered anxiety in the business community here and abroad, which fears the mandate for “interoperability” could shut down Apple Computer’s iTunes service based on its proprietary DRM approach.”

Junko Yoshida. Anti-DRM March in Paris Targets Big Tech Firms. EE Times. May 8, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“OpenDocument was ratified as a file format standard Tuesday night by an international standards group, setting the stage for greater worldwide adoption of the open-source file format technology.

“A number of productivity applications, such as OpenOffice 2.0, Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice 8 and IBM’s Workplace, support the OpenDocument file format. Microsoft, however, is not supporting OpenDocument and instead is seeking ISO standardization for its own Office Open XML file formats.”

Dawn Kawamoto. OpenDocument Standard Ratified. News.com. May 3, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Most state governments are not actively tackling the creeping problem of digital archives and long-term access to public documents, according to the head of an industry group.

“Apart from a handful of cases, states have not devised comprehensive strategies for retaining ‘born digital’ documents. Such documents are created in electronic format and do not exist on paper.

“The state of Minnesota introduced a bill last month that would mandate the use of “open data formats” in state agencies by having them use standards-based products. By avoiding proprietary products and formats, the proposal’s backers hope to ensure access to state information.”

Martin LaMonica. States Struggling to Deal With Digital Documents. News.com. April 25, 2006.

See also:

Ingrid Marson. OpenDocument Group ‘Optimistic’ on Certification. News.com. April 20, 2006.

Minnesota House of Representatives. A Bill for an Act Relating to State Government; Requiring State Agencies to Use Open Data Formats. (H.F. No. 3971; 84th Legislative Session). March 27, 2006.

Martin LaMonica. Mass. Hands OpenDocument Reins to New CIO. News.com. January 31, 2006.

Groklaw. Peter Quinn’s First Interview. Jan. 23, 2006.

Stephen Kurkjian. Technology Adviser Quits Unexpectedly. Boston.com. December 28, 2005.

Martin LaMonica. Office Standards Battle Grinds On. News.com. December 13, 2005.

Groklaw. Peter Quinn Exonerated. Dec. 12, 2005.

Stephen Kurkjian. Review Backs Trips by Technology Chief. Boston.com. Dec. 10, 2005.

Martin LaMonica. OpenDocument Format Gathers Steam. News.com. November 10, 2005.

Hiawatha Bray. Senators Question File-Storage Shift. Boston.com. October 29, 2005

Martin LaMonica. Massachusetts Moves Ahead Sans Microsoft. News.com. September 23, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

This question has been batted around in the press for the past week. In a way, the fact that the question is being posed at all is remarkable, because it signals that the digital rights management debate has begun moving into wide public discourse after a long period in which only geeks and lawyers even knew the proper meaning of the acronym DRM. This article outlines the rise in DRM’s Q Score among regular media consumers over the past five months, and discusses Sun Microsystems’ Open Media Commons.

Among people who follow copyright issues, DRM (or “copy protection”) has been controversial since Congress changed U.S. copyright law in 1998 to illegalize any attempt to circumvent, crack, or hack past “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [protected] work” (See Section 1201 of the Copyright Act.) Various parties have complained about the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act since they were enacted into law in 1998; the complaints continue now, as the Copyright Office as it holds its third rulemaking proceeding on the practical effects of Section 1201’s anticircumvention provisions.

Much of the DRM debate, however, has found a limited audience. Copyright lawyers discussed the issues surrounding DRM and anticircumvention because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Companies with extensive copyrighted holdings, seeking to protect their digital assets, discussed DRM as a business and security issue. Finally, scientists and computer technologists whose work was affected by DRM or the DMCA (such as Princeton’s Edward Felten) discussed such issues. But this limited audience was not nearly broad enough for DRM to become a consumer rights issue.

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“The success of open source programmers has had a far-reaching impact on the tech industry. Linux has spread to more than 25% of the world’s servers and has become a legitimate rival to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows. The open-source approach is compelling enough that IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. have become major supporters, utterly changing how they market software.

“Yet in recent weeks the open-source community has been thrown into tumult. Software giant Oracle Corp. has acquired two small open-source companies and is in negotiations to buy at least one more. Many experts believe this is the beginning of a broader trend in which established tech companies scoop up promising open-source startups.”

BusinessWeek Online. Open Season On Open Source? March 13, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.