Last night there was a live webcast of a superb rational discussion on copyright involving several experts. Recording will be up soon, and I'll post it when available.
Also, in case anyone here is not yet aware of this, the US Register of Copyrights testified before congress last month about how desperately US copyright legislation needs radical reform: "...if one needs an army of lawyers to understand the basic precepts of the law, then it is time for a new law. " and other very strong statements.
I'm a student in the edX CopyrightX course and will have the ability to ask Prof. Lessig questions near the end of the event. Watch the live presentation at http://tfisher.org/hls1x-copyright.html starting at 7:00pm EDT. Anyone who has questions for him, feel free to email them to me at [email protected] or tweet them to @StackCopyrightX before or during the presentation and I'll try to be a proxy/relay for your questions to him. There will also be a Google Hangout during and after the presentation. If you'd like to be a part of that conversation, then say so in email and I'll invite you to the Hangout.
Patent and copyright laws are both in serious need of radical reform in the US and globally. Thank you Rackspace for not caving in to the patent trolls, but as you wrote, it has become a never-ending game of "whack-a-troll".
That's because with existing legislation, the patent troll business model is financially very sound if also inherently corrosive to society as a whole. "The dynamics of local vs. global optimization" is jargon from the team-building and process-design communities that applies here: a successful business strategy for the patent trolls is a huge failure for the community as a whole. This could also be considered a perverse incentive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
There are perverse incentives in both copyright and patent law that undermine the original Constitutional goals of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." that are especially powerful in our age of ever-increasing innovation where digital computers and The Internet have created a radically different "landscape" than that which existed when the first such laws were drafted.
Ideally, thoughtful legislative reforms would prevent such perverse incentives in the future so that both copyright and patent law would once again be aligned to serve the common good rather than the good of a few.
Large and democratic communities (such as those Joel Spolsky helped create) full of good questions and answers could go a long way towards helping to craft such thoughtful legislative reforms. See Ask Patents http://patents.stackexchange.com for such a community on patents, and http://goo.gl/5YDHa for such a proposed community on copyright.
Anyone who feels strongly about these issues, please go get involved by "Follow"ing the proposed CopyrightX community and submitting 5 Example Questions. With enough voting and other participation, the CopyrightX community proposal can graduate to an actual community like Ask Patents.
And with two vibrant communities full of good questions and answers related to IP law, perhaps future legislation will be free of perverse incentives, and we can once again rely on our laws to serve ALL of our best interests.
In the interim, thanks again Rackspace for being willing to continue the costly game of "whack-a-troll" on behalf of all of us.
With all its problems, however, the answer is not to violate copyright law, but instead to get involved in reforming copyright legislation through law-abiding acts. There are lots of ways to do that.
Here are two big ones: (1) get yourself an intellectual property attorney's education in copyright law for free from Harvard Law School's CopyrightX MOOC at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homep... and (2) follow the StackExchange community proposal called CopyrightX at http://goo.gl/5YDHa where if enough people get involved by asking good questions and researching the answers, we can raise global awareness about exactly what ways copyright laws are now working against their original goals. In Everything Is A Remix, Kirby Ferguson's closing words were: "The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by intellectual property. It needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform. That's social evolution and it's not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it's up to us."
But it's up to us to do this in a manner that respects and honors existing law.
Different from Syria, people are not being killed by the thousands in the Copyright Wars, so civil disobedience is not the best way to fight back against the institutions that currently control copyright laws.
The best way to fight back is to educate ourselves and others so that the common good returns to the forefront of copyright law in the minds of everyone affected by copyright law. When enough people are aware of what copyright law was originally intended to accomplish, then the laws will necessarily change in the truly democratic nations.
"Lulu’s Term of Service disingenuously shifts the responsibility of notifying men of their unwitting participation to Lulu's users, which I’m inclined to believe has never happened."
WHAT?! You mean the Lulu app users might not be strictly adhering to the site's Terms of Service?! Well, notify the FBI about that! There's a law created in 1984 https://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa for JUST such criminals as these, and it makes the users guilty of committing a felony offense (a perfectly reasonable use of the law in this case)! Never mind the EFF's Week-Of-Action for reforming the CFAA this week https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/help-us-remember-aaron... . Lulu's users are clearly a threat to society and deserve felony convictions for their awful behavior here.
Just get involved in one of the many CopyrightX discussion groups that are all based on Harvard Law School's CopyrightX course at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homep...
Last night there was a live webcast of a superb rational discussion on copyright involving several experts. Recording will be up soon, and I'll post it when available.
Perhaps also consider following the StackExchange.com community proposal for same at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51342/copyrightx?r...
Also, in case anyone here is not yet aware of this, the US Register of Copyrights testified before congress last month about how desperately US copyright legislation needs radical reform: "...if one needs an army of lawyers to understand the basic precepts of the law, then it is time for a new law. " and other very strong statements.
http://www.copyright.gov/regstat/2013/regstat03202013.html
For more details, see http://copyrightx.org/ and https://copyrightactof1790.wordpress.com/about/