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The DMCA and You
The long arm of the law has reached out and grabbed Brad DeLong by the throat:
Well, this is new. My first ever DMCA takedown notice — from HarperCollins, publisher of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics. While other publishers these days are happy to have sample chapters of their authors' works read and distributed on the internet, not so with HarperCollins.
One thing I can do in response is — tit-for-tat — to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday's Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead.
I urge everybody — authors and readers alike — to just say no to HarperCollins in the future.
Well, what does everyone think about this? My first reaction is: fair use excerpts aside, authors and publishers all have the right to decide whether they want large chunks of their material available for free on the internet. If HarperCollins decides against that, fine. There's really no reason to be upset about it.
My second thought, though, is that I'd be plenty pissed off if HarperCollins did this to me without first sending me an email asking me to take down the offending material. Hauling out the lawyers and the DMCA artillery is really uncalled for unless someone refuses a polite request first.
But I don't know if that's what happened. Did HarperCollins ask first and shoot later, or was it the other way around?
Who knows, who cares?
Who knows, who cares?
Regarding the lawyers first, did DeLong first send the Freakonomics authors an email with his comments and asking them for their comments? No, he just divided the world into black and white, decided they were evil and acted accordingly.
DeLong plays to his in group. He writes for other graduate economists, and doesn't bother explaining to the hoi polloi, and he almost never participates in his comments apart from deleting comments with no explanation, so why should us polloi care about his cute little feud now?
The publishers of Going Rogue?
Screw 'em.
Will Brad be Consistent?
Brad DeLong is a devout Free Trader. Yet "intellectual property" is antithetical to free trade, as clearly shown by the theory's original non-hypocritical proponents.
So will Brad give up the copyrights on his textbooks and become a non-hypocrite? Tune in next millennium.
I've no idea what Brad's
I've no idea what Brad's plans for his textbooks are, but he has put plenty of his lectures on the web, certainly for free and I believe under creative commons. Likewise I believe most of the PDF stuff he publishes (papers and such) is under Creative Commons.
Lastly I would hardly characterize him as a devout Free Trader. He has expressed support for real free trade as the best hope for India and China, not as a good deal for America. Whether you like that viewpoint or not depends on whether you think foreigners have lesser souls than Americans, but its not an unreasonable position. He has not shown much sympathy, as far as I can tell for TRIPS and the rest of the crap that converts supposedly free trade agreements from a two page document to a two thousand page document.
Here's another example
of a law (the DMCA) that seems to have been written by lobbyists for copyright owners and lawyers and left for the congress critters to approve.
Repeal the DMCA!
All? Or only some?
Does Harper Collins send out takedown notices to everyone who posts excerpts? Or only those who are critical?
HarperCollins is owned by Murdoch
This is the first salvo in Murdoch's attempt to rein in the Internet. He's also PO-ed at Google and is trying to keep his newspaper content from being accessed.
Oh come now
A polite request just doesn't carry nearly the same intimidation factor. And how are you going to squeeze fair use out of existence without intimidation?
Chapters?
How much did he excerpt? Whole chapters?
Copyright laws are different in Canada, but I picked up a Harper book (the newest by Tim Flannery; not Superfreakonomics: I wouldn't waste my time) and it clearly states: "No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
That would seem to exclude "sample chapters."
You can say what you want.
You can say what you want. That
(a) doesn't make it true
(b) doesn't make it moral
Sample chapters? What he
Sample chapters? He received an electronic version and posted an entire chapter? I suppose it was the one on climate change which appears to be the one they are depending on as their entire marketing strategy.
Brad seems a little boneheaded here. The authors and the publishers are obviously morons also, but not for the DMCA thing.
dr2chase
Sample chapter's a bit much for fair use, but if you go straight to the DMCA takedown, you suck. DMCA is a vile law, boycott is an appropriate response.
Fair use is different from a sample chapter
To be clear IANAL but I do deal with copyright and fair use everyday.
Brad DeLong almost certainly exceeded Fair Use by posting a full sample chapter. Those who downloaded or read the chapter for their own research purposes and not redistributing were within their Fair Use rights. The distinction here is in redistribution and personal use.
DeLong would have been within his rights to quote large chunks of the text to establish context in a critique and the authors are repetitive enough that editing out vast tracks of rehashing of the obvious would be a blessing. He could also link to any sample chapter at Harper Collins or a distributor that he felt was accurate in representing the book.
Let me make clear that Murdoch is equally unclear about Fair Use which under established court decisions covers indexing, and linking to the copyright holder or authorized distributor is not a violation of copyright. Blocking Google is his right but he will cut his own throat as web traffic to his cites plummet.
Murdoch can burn through all his money in court and Google will still win and get enormously inflated legal fees in the form of his assets. Foogle News anyone?
"One thing I can do in
"One thing I can do in response is — tit-for-tat — to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday's Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead."
Is this the dumbest response ever?
He assumes that his praise effects the sales of one book. He is willing to punish the author of a book to get at the publisher.
More than that, he could avoid the DMCA takedown by submitting "a statement under penalty of perjury that [DeLong] has a good faith belief the material was mistakenly taken down" -- apparently he doesn't believe the takedown is invalid, he just doesn't like it.
And he owns a Kindle.
Inside his enormous polymath mind is a huge whiny brat.
No, that is not the dumbest response ever
Brad Delong's negative reviews made it clear to me that I did not need to buy or read that book, and that its authors should not be rewarded. They lost one sale. Harper Collins use of DMCA takedown was excessive -- it may be SOP for lawyers, but it was more than required. A simple note that "our legal counsel believe your chapter excerpt exceeds 'fair use', please remove it", is adequate, there is no need to set the DMCA in motion (this is interestingly unlike trademark law, which more or less compels to defend your mark like a junkyard dog if you intend to keep it).
If you choose to boycott a large corporation, there is bound to be collateral damage. Such is life; perhaps the other author will find another publisher in the future.
I note quite a lot of anonymous trolling here jumping on Brad Delong, and I think that in itself is somewhat interesting.
Posting an entire chapter at
Posting an entire chapter at once was excessive, but what he could do is come back and re-post nearly all of it in chunks in separate posts short of the full chapter, then claim "fair use".
Somebody in the writing biz
Somebody in the writing biz himself should know better than to reprint entire chapters.
" My first reaction is: fair
" My first reaction is: fair use excerpts aside, authors and publishers all have the right to decide whether they want large chunks of their material available for free on the internet."
This sounds good --- very European "moral rights of the author" and all.
Let's analogize: "I made my money fairly, and I have the right to decide whether to give it to the government". Reasonable?
We believe (at least some of us) that we are part of a community, that nothing, NOTHING, significant gets done by the individual. Whatever you are doing, you are building on the roads, the legal system, the research, the markets of the world around you. And taxes are a fair price to pay for all that. If you'd rather do it all on your own, without paying taxes, move to Somalia.
Likewise with art. Your artistic creations do not spring from your mind independent of the world around you. You build on a tradition of thousands of years. And that does not give you exclusive rights to your work. There is scope for negotiation over the scope of copyright that best achieves certain goals, but the starting point is NOT that you, the creator, have exclusive right to your works; it is that you, the creator, owe pretty much everything to society and history, and WE, society give you rights, you don't give US permissions.
DMCA was a declaration of
DMCA was a declaration of war by the corporate-owned government against consumers. I therefore refuse to pay for anything digital ever again. Viva la resistance.
Give up the fight
One thing I find increasingly frustrating is the response from certain quarters about the whole issue of copyright protection. A content creator (or a rights holder, such as a studio or publishing house) wants to exercise control and the response is either anger or bemusement. Either you get "Piracy doesn't exist and how do you try to stop it!" or "It's all inevitable, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so why are you wasting your time trying to stop it?"
par for the course
A bit late to the discussion but I've received perhaps a dozen takedown notices over the years and they're almost invariably sent directly to the ISP in the form of a DMCA takedown notice or as a letter from a law firm. They're seldom polite emails. Don't know why.
The DMCA is evil...
... and should be withdrawn. The Patriot Act too. The fear of both is preventing foreign companies from dealing with U.S. IT firms because if they do their data will become subject to these two draconian laws. I know, I work for one of those foreign companies that's pulling our servers out of the U.S.
Warren Farrell
DMCA was a declaration of war by the corporate-owned government against consumers.