Home › Culture › arts & entertainment › Copyright hell: larrakins and astrologers

Copyright hell: larrakins and astrologers

By on • ( 7 )

People who support a reasonable balance between encouraging creation of artistic works by allowing creators to profit from them, and the interests of wider society in benefiting from the free availability of creative works (or even of facts) aren’t having a good day.

Larrikin vs Australian Music

Skud has covered this over at Save Aussie Music:

Today EMI Australia lost their High Court appeal against Larrikin Music in the Kookaburra/Land Down Under case…

Leaving aside the problems with the copyright system, let’s just take a moment to look at Larrikin, the folk music label that holds the rights to “Kookaburra”. Larrikin was founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey, and sold to Festival Records in 1995. Festival, owned by Murdoch, was shut down and its assets sold to Warner Music Australia in 2005, for a mere $12 million.

Larrikin was home to a number of Australian artists, among them Kev Carmody, Eric Bogle, and Redgum

Kev Carmody, one of Australia’s foremost indigenous musicians, released four albums on Larrikin and Festival between 1988 and 1995, none of which are available on iTunes nor readily available as CDs (based on a search of online retailers). …

Warner bought Larrikin Records’ assets — two decades of Australian music — not because they want to share the music with the public, but to bolster their intellectual property portfolio, in the hope that one day they’ll be able to sue someone for using a riff or a line of lyrics that sounds somewhat like something Redgum or Kev Carmody once wrote. They do this at the expense of Australian music, history, and culture.

Lauredhel covered the case earlier at Hoyden too, focussing on whether the claim of infringement stands up to a legal layperson’s listen test and musical analysis: You better run, you better take cover.

Astrologers versus software creators and users

Have you ever selected your timezone from a list which lists them like this: “Australia/Sydney”, “Europe/London”? Then you’ve used the zoneinfo database.

Timezones are complicated. You can’t work out what timezone someone is in based purely on their longitude, have a look at this map to see why. Timezones are highly dependent on political boundaries. On top of that, daylight savings transitions are all over the map (as it were). Some countries transition in an unpredictable fashion set by their legislature each year. Sometimes a sufficiently large event (such as the Sydney Olympics in 2000) causes a local daylight savings transition to happen earlier or later than that government’s usually predictable algorithm.

Therefore computer programs rely heavily on having a giant lookup table of timezones and daylight saving transitions. Data is needed both for the present, so that your clock can be updated, and for the past, so that the time of events ranging from blog entries to bank transactions can be correctly reported.

A great deal of software, including almost all open source software, relies on the freely available database variously called the tz database, the zoneinfo database or the Olson database.

Arthur David Olson (the “Olson” in “Olson database”) announced yesterday:

A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I’m a defendant; the case involves the time zone database.

The ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down.

The mailing list will be shut down after this message.

The basis of the suit is that the zoneinfo database credits The American Atlas as a source of data, and The American Atlas has been purchased by astrology company Astrolabe Inc, who assert that the use of the data is an infringement of their copyright. Whether this is true is apparently highly arguable (in the US it seems to hinge on whether it’s a list of facts, which aren’t copyrightable) but in the meantime the central distribution point of the data is gone. And it could be a long meantime.

Now, people still have copies of the database (if you run Linux you probably do yourself). However, the source of updates has been removed, which means it will be out of date within a few weeks, and the community that created the updates has been fractured. Various people are doing various things, including a defence fund, a fork of the mailing list, and discussions about re-creating or resurrecting the data in other places. All a great waste of many creative people’s time and money, gain to society from Astrolabe’s action yet to be shown.

More information:

Update (Oct 17): ICANN takes over zoneinfo database

On 14th October the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages key Internet resources (notably, the global pool of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) on behalf of the US government, put out a press release (PDF) announcing that they were taking over the zoneinfo database:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today took over operation of an Internet Time Zone Database that is used by a number of major computer systems.

ICANN agreed to manage the database after receiving a request from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The database contains time zone code and data that computer programs and operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Java, and Oracle rely on to determine the correct time for a given location. Modifications to the database occur frequently throughout the year…

“The Time Zone Database provides an essential service on the Internet and keeping it operational falls within ICANN’s mission of maintaining a stable and dependable Internet,” said Akram Atallah, ICANN’s Chief Operating Officer.

I wonder if ICANN’s not-for-profit status is useful here. Just as Project Gutenberg can make United States public domain texts available globally, even though texts published prior to 1923 are not public domain world-wide, ICANN may present a less tempting target for lawsuits than other possible homes for the zoneinfo database.

‹
›

Categories: arts & entertainment, law & order, media, technology

Tags: , , , ,

7 replies

  1. YetAnotherMatt
    2011-10-08 • 1:07 AM

    I thought Kookaburra was someone adding words to a traditional welsh tune, so the music in question was already stolen from somewhere else.

  2. tigtog
    2011-10-08 • 9:24 AM

    Just shaking my head at the astrology company – WTF?

  3. Mary
    2011-10-08 • 9:31 AM

    Using the word “stolen” is rather buying into the intellectual property framing already!
    I am not sure whether the court dealt with that or considered it relevant. I am not an IP lawyer (or any kind of lawyer) or lay expert, but for various reasons I’ve had a look at Project Gutenberg’s guidelines, and it seems that it works something like this for them:
    – there’s stuff in the public domain, of which anyone can make derivative works
    – it’s possible (normal) to assert copyright over derivative works of the public domain
    – it is possible to infringe on those derivative works
    Some examples, according to my understanding: even though Shakespeare’s words are in the public domain, you can’t freely distribute, eg, either video or audio of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Even though the Hans Christian Anderson text of The Little Mermaid is in the public domain, you can’t freely distribute Disney’s movie.
    This then gets tricky for new derivative works. Were you to make a film adaptation of The Little Mermaid yourself, you would have some risk of being held to have infringed Disney’s version and perhaps have your work cut out legally showing that you had purely worked from the Hans Christian Anderson text and never from the Disney version. I have no idea who has what burden of proof there exactly, but it’s apparently not straightforward.
    Thus the public domain becomes quite impoverished. Not only does nothing new enter it now (in countries that recently extended, including Australia), but coming upon the public domain by way of copyrighted derivative works can mean you can’t (easily) derive from the public domain anyway. Boo.
    I came across What’s Feminist about Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy via Geek Feminism a while ago and found this passage striking, and appropriate here:

    [This passage has extensive inline citations in the original, removed here for clarity. See the original for their sources.]
    The defining concepts of intellectual property generally-and those of copyright in particular-are premised upon liberal and neo-liberal assumptions. At the core of copyright’s functionality are concepts of private rights, ownership, exclusion and individualism. Central to copyright’s justifications are concepts of individual entitlement or desert, on the one hand, and economic rationality and self-interest on the other. Within this model, authors as owners are individuated personalities with exclusive claims to fully control their intellectual works; these works are understood to be the original, stable and proprietary results of authors’ independent efforts from which the public may be justly excluded.
    It is important to emphasize that in spite of its apparent naturalness in the modern age, the modern author is a relatively recent invention: the idea of an author as a maker of an original text would have been alien to literary thought in the classical period. Marilyn Randall has examined the “shift from a poetics of imitation to a valorization of originality” that occurred in the eighteenth century, such that aspirations of imagination, novelty, creativity, and originality came to dominate the aesthetics of the Romantic period. She observes that the distinction between imitation and originality was intricately tied to the perceived nature of man in the sense that true authorship was believed to represent the essence of human individuality. The human agent, as author, could not copy without sacrificing his authenticity and obscuring his intrinsic worth. Imitation was disparaged as evidence of a lesser state of human civilization and development.
    As the institution of copyright emerged in the eighteenth century, it was augmented and given vitality by the general philosophical discourse of the time, wherein concepts of authorship were intimately associated with the “individual” and “property,” and enmeshed with the “vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term ‘individualism.’” The issues at stake in the literary-property debates of the time (which disputed the existence, nature, and duration of authorial entitlement) went to the core of the philosophical underpinnings of liberal thought, or what C.B. Macpherson identifies as “possessive individualism.” During this period, the modern author-as-originator became a proprietor, and his product became a “special kind of commodity.” Foucault famously described the emergence of this notion of “author” as “the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences.” Through this process of individualization, the “author” acquired “a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property.” The individuality and originality of authorship in its modern form therefore established a simple route towards individual ownership (through labour and appropriation) and the propertization of creative achievement.

  4. Mary
    2011-10-08 • 9:42 AM

    Just to conclude the line of thought about Project Gutenberg: for them the result is that you must actually work from texts that were actually printed before 1923, or that clearly state themselves to be merely a reprint of such. Otherwise there’s always the chance of a court case where you need to show that despite scanning a 1970s edition of Pride and Prejudice that may even have a copyright notice in it asserting copyright over the whole thing, it was in the public domain.

  5. Curi-Oz
    2011-10-08 • 12:51 PM

    The alternative is to encourage more people to use Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org.au Which although it can reflect a degree of control, has as it’s basis a sense of sharing creativity with others to build things new.
    I am developing a thought that creativity is actually quite a dangerous thing, and there are those who want to control this dangerous force. (Heavens know what would happen if ordinary people got all creative *snerks*)
    Hence the current state of trying to control creative output by tying it up in red tape and not letting it out to play with new creative ideas …
    Mind you, this is quite black/white thinking of me and it obviously needs developing… please join in *G*

  6. Mary
    2011-10-17 • 8:55 AM

    Update in OP:
    ICANN takes over zoneinfo database
    On 14th October the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages key Internet resources (notably, the global pool of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) on behalf of the US government, put out a press release (PDF) announcing that they were taking over the zoneinfo database:

    The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today took over operation of an Internet Time Zone Database that is used by a number of major computer systems.
    ICANN agreed to manage the database after receiving a request from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
    The database contains time zone code and data that computer programs and operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Java, and Oracle rely on to determine the correct time for a given location. Modifications to the database occur frequently throughout the year…
    “The Time Zone Database provides an essential service on the Internet and keeping it operational falls within ICANN’s mission of maintaining a stable and dependable Internet,” said Akram Atallah, ICANN’s Chief Operating Officer.

    I wonder if ICANN’s not-for-profit status is useful here. Just as Project Gutenberg can make United States public domain texts available globally, even though texts published prior to 1923 are not public domain world-wide, ICANN may present a less tempting target for lawsuits than other possible homes for the zoneinfo database.

  7. Mary
    2011-10-17 • 9:02 AM

    The AP story in various places (eg SMH) has:

    The federal lawsuit, filed on September 30 in Boston, does not affect current time zone information, which comes from tips sent by volunteers through an email list.
    However, ICANN is keeping the historical information in the database.
    “We are aware of the lawsuit,” [Kim Davies, a technical manager at ICANN] said. “We believe it’s important to continue the operation of the database. We’ll deal with any legal matters as they arise.”