Copyright, Friend and Foe when Accessing Knowledge

Access to Knowledge, it’s one issue where you will generally find copyright law lounging smack dab in the middle.  Sometimes copyright is friendly to the surrounding circle, like old Uncle Bob at the campfire, delighting the audience with wonderful tales of giving people access to works through fancy tricks like fair dealing.  Other times, copyright is more like a lion surrounded by warriors, roaring, teeth bared, snarling at anyone trying to gain access to its domain.

One might think that being able to tell Uncle Bob from an attacking lion would be easy, but not necessarily.  And likewise with, it is not always easy to tell when copyright is helping people get access to knowledge, and when it’s impeding that access.  Enter Consumers International and the 2nd Edition of Access to Knowledge, a Guide for Everyone (144pg pdf).

This internationally compiled book explains how copyright law and other areas such as net neutrality, border enforcement and patent law affect people’s access to resources around the world.  The book also discusses ideas for changes to intellectual property law that could help improve access to knowledge and current in-place systems that grant access, such as the public domain.

There’s a neat section in chapter one (p. 21) that explains how the different players, governments, inter-governmental organizations, consumer groups, etc., interact to create the landscape of accessible knowledge.  And in chapter 2, Brazil receives a bit of attention for the country’s forward-thinking laws prohibiting the destruction of fair use via technical protection methods. 

Readers following the ACTA debates may be interested in pages 57-59.  Those unfamiliar with Access to Knowledge can check out the FAQ section and glossary in the appendix.

Access to Knowledge A Guide for Everyone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means you can print out fancy copies you want, give them away, even sell them, without a problem; Uncle Bob won’t bite.

Photo by author: Masai Lion Hunt exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum with author’s friends and family reenacting the exhibit.  More exhibit reenactions here.

The Statute of Anne: a note on the 'original copy'

A lot of people who attend the International Trademark Association (INTA) Meeting each year turn out to be as much involved in copyright and other IP rights as they are in trade marks. One such person whom I met at this year's Seattle conference, US practitioner and creative live-wire Cathy Gellis, has just sent me this link to her thoughts on seeing the original Statute of Anne on display at a copyright history conference in London last year. Cathy concludes with a comment on the effect of copyright legislation on public discourse:

"So we find ourselves at the turn of the 21st century at the same crossroads we were at 300 years earlier, faced with a choice in how we use government power. Do we use it to enable public discourse, or to control it? For although our modern copyright systems trace their lineage back to the author-focused structure of the Statute of Anne, that basic structure alone does not determine which value is fostered. It's the underlying policy value that needs to survive, yet unfortunately today, while the document itself carefully encased under glass has, the historic change it was to herald has not".