Info/Law

Bill wrote here recently about his experiences teaching cyber and IP law to non-lawyers, many of whom might come to the table with erroneous preconceptions about how the law in this area works. Indeed, even lawyers and law professors sometimes find the rules on IP to be confusing and counterintuitive, in part because the underlying philosophical premises and overarching policy judgments in the IP arena are themselves so hotly contested. One can only imagine, accordingly, the difficulties inherent in trying to explain intellectual property issues to children, an audience still less sophisticated than Bill’s.

Past efforts to explain intellectual property principles to kids have kind of a checkered pedigree because of the distorting effects of institutional self-interest. The Business Software Alliance, whose members include many of the biggest names in the tech industry, has been leading the charge to inculcate in kids a set of norms of behavior that — wouldn’t you know — happen to be strongly pro-copyright-holder. The BSA’s campaign is slick and professional, and they have clearly internalized Madison Avenue’s teaching that, if you’re trying to sell kids something that is, ultimately, unhealthy, you need a cuddly mascot — think Ronald McDonald (and his copyright-disrespectin’ pals) and Joe Camel. The BSA’s cuddly mascot is Garret the Ferret, the Copyright Crusader. In the BSA’s colorful comic book, Copyright Crusader to the Rescue, Garret the Ferret teaches a well-meaning urchin that infringing copyright “is the same thing as stealing.” Another BSA poster, aimed at high-schoolers, ditches the ferret (and any pretense of subtlety) and hammers the same point home (”Q: What’s the difference between copying software from a friend and stealing software from a store? A: Nothing.”). You won’t learn from Garret the Ferret, though, that the Supreme Court thinks “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud“, or that purchasers of software do indeed have the right to copy it sometimes, and can dispose of their own copies of the software by giving or selling them to others, or that copying the software to figure out how it works is lawful, or in general that there is such a thing as fair use. Garret the Ferret’s one-sided account has been rightly derided as poorly reasoned propaganda, although it would be interesting to know whether it has been effective propaganda, or whether kids just tune stuff like this out.

Our Canadian friends took another stab at using a comic character to teach kids to think like copyright maximalists with Captain Copyright, a now-defunct comic and set of teaching materials that, again, conspicuously failed to mention any of the many legal limitations on copyright holders’ rights, or the notion that the purchasers of copyrighted works have rights of their own. So egregious was Captain Copyright site’s failure that it even managed to botch its own official announcement that it was shutting its doors for good: “Despite the significant progress we made on addressing the concerns raised about the original Captain Copyright initiative, as well as the positive feedback and requests for literally hundreds of lesson kits from teachers and librarians, we have come to the conclusion that the current climate around copyright issues will not allow a project like this one to be successful.” This insulting, self-pitying screed only demeaned the whole Captain Copyright effort by trying to shift the blame for the site’s demise to users, rather than to its own ridiculous misrepresentations of the law. Whatever you think of “the current climate around copyright issues,” there’s no evidence at all that a balanced, realistic illustration of copyright doctrine can’t be made perfectly accessible to a wide, nonspecialist audience. Indeed, Keith Aoki and friends have already done it, and I’ve previously blogged about this cute video, which also does a pretty good job covering the basics.

With Garret the Ferret and Captain Copyright as the opening acts, I had pretty low expectations for the Library of Congress’s new teen-oriented site, Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright. Which is not to say, of course, that some sort of project like this isn’t worthwhile, or that the Library of Congress isn’t an appropriate candidate to take it on. The Library’s blog post announcing the project offers this overview:

In this age of downloadable, linkable and cut-and-pasteable everything, it seems that kids are being exposed to copyright issues at younger and younger ages. So what better time than the present to begin educating them?

That is the thought behind a new feature on our Web site (the U.S. Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress) called “Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright.” A group of anime-looking characters led by “Detective Cop E. Wright” talk about copyright matters in a way that’s geared toward young people, with links back to more detailed information. (Even the music, which is vaguely evocative of a Quinn Martin production, is original and thus copyright-friendly.)

The LoC’s site wins some easy points from the outset by flipping the polarity from the BSA’s site and casting kids in the role of creators, rather than copiers of other people’s work. Indeed, the lyrics to the “Copyright Exposed” animation sum up the joint authorship rules with kind of a Zen clarity that the Copyright Act itself never comes close to:

Kids:
We wrote this song together one night,
We all get a share of the copyright

I’ll be thinking of that little couplet every time I try to teach Thomson v. Larson. I suppose it would have been a little excessive to add lyrics about how each of the kids could grant oral or written nonexclusive licenses in their joint work.

Big corporate copyright holders, such as the members of the BSA, do make an appearance in the LoC’s story — but only because they’re trying to take the kids’ works, rather than the other way around:

Kid:
I had a story in my head for a long time,
Typed it up and posted it online,
Now they want to make it a movie,
What does it mean to me?

Cop E. Wright:
Copyright began on your keyboard,
The studio does not get the last word…

Will this work? I don’t know. But appealing to children’s personal sense that it would be unjust for other people (mean old adults!) to copy the kids’ own creations without permission strikes me as at least a little more likely to bend them to a sympathetic view of copyright owners than having Garret the Ferret hector them about installing software they borrowed from a friend. Of course, what might make young people even more sympathetic would be if copyright owners would stop suing them by the thousands, but there’s not much the LoC can do about that.

Where the LoC’s new site really falls flat, it seems to me, is in failing even to try to explain any of the exceptions to copyright holders’ exclusive rights. Unless I missed it (and I looked pretty carefully), the only reference to the public domain in Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright is in a description of the 1710 Statute of Anne; you get no sense from the LoC that the public domain has any ongoing relevance today or that there are any works not protected by copyright. Whether intentional or not, that’s editorial bias of a sort we shouldn’t countenance from the government.

Want another example? Check out the LoC’s list of questions and answers about copyright — it’s nicely written and covers a fair portion of basic copyright doctrine. Want Baker v. Selden in plain English? Try this:

Let’s say you come up with a new skateboard jumping technique, and you write a book about the trick. The copyright of your book will prevent other people from publishing the text and illustrations describing the technique. But it will not give you any rights to prevent others from using your new jump.

But the LoC hasn’t been so thoughtful in trying to explain the limitations on copyright holders’ rights. Here’s how the LoC answers the question, “Can anyone ever use my work without my permission?”

It’s always best for people to ask your permission first, but under certain circumstances (See Fair Use), it’s ok for other people to use parts of your work. Usually, parody, scholarly criticism, teaching, and news reporting may be valid reasons for using a small portion of your work.

You might think that if you clicked that hyperlink in the LoC’s text, you would be taken to a page like this one that explains fair use: copyright’s safety valve for free expression, one of the most important and poorly understood concepts in the law. But you won’t. Instead, what you get from the LoC is the raw statutory text of Section 107. Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that some of the copyright exceptions don’t lend themselves to easy summation in plain English — I teach copyright law, and even I find Section 115 confusing. But fair use?

There’s an unseemly bias at work here. Want to know what rights copyright holders have? The government will reduce them to plain English for you. Want to know what rights readers or users of copyrighted works have? Sorry, you are on your own, but here is a screenful of legalese for you to browse. Making citizens’ rights hard to access and understand cannot help but discourage their exercise. While that’s an understandable goal coming from the BSA, America’s kids deserve better from their government.

Filed under: Copyright, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, RIAA