“When you control the mail, you control information!”
—Newman, the character from Seinfeld
Boyle noted that most people (by 1997) agreed they were living in the Information Age. He acknowledged that the statement “ownership and control of information is one of the most important forms of power and contemporary society” had been so immersed in that culture that it was not credited to any one person. Boyle approached the challenge of governing intellectual property by attempting to define it, construct it, appropriate it, and compare it to concepts and ideas that were concrete to society then.
It is important to remember that this was written and published ten years ago, and not much research was done on the information society, so people had to look to the creators of this area, the “cyberpunks.” Cyberpunk fiction was an introduction into cyberspace for many, and though people could relate to the virtues and vices of the fictitious characters, they could not wrap their brains around the concept of mixing computers and genetics together in the same space.
So much of the information age was linked to cyber-indecency (i.e., Web porn), so most people did not see a real need for governing intellectual property or protecting it. Eventually, the subject of intellectual property was no longer viewed as a special or unique interest to a small minority, it was soon seen as the power behind the digital age, and it was valued at billions of dollars.
The argument for privacy rights in genetic information cases was very similar to the argument for privacy in electronic information cases. Boyle showed how society tried to make electronic and genetic information akin. Most people could justify owning the rights to computer code, but some could not agree that owning genetic code rights fell into the same justifiable category. Others saw the DNA code analogous to computer codes and tried to show the similarities between computers and genetic code processes, specifically, the “natural selection” process of genetic code compared to the “survival” process of computer code. Once similarities were established between genes and computers, attention moved from devoting resources to the message to devoting them to the medium. Companies began protecting their content and placing the value of the content over the value of how the content was delivered.
This power struggle between the message and the medium spilled over into a battle for information access. Regulations were badly needed to avoid granting access to one body or group over another. Each group had a need for information technology, and each group looked to its own advantages of having and disadvantages of being denied access. Everyone wanted a piece of the digital pie.
Boyle’s case study showed that Clinton’s White Papers did not address many issues such as the possibilities that some people will benefit from higher level intellectual property rights while others could still profit well from lower level rights. He believed that the report should have considered the benefits that intellectual property rights have for both the public and the individual. Boyle also pointed out that the press failed to do an accurate job by not contacting sources beyond the well-known “players.” The press needed to talk with those who would be negatively affected by the proposed regulations in Clinton’s White Papers.
Boyle ended his article by taking a look back at how Environmentalists were able to get past the brick wall to the place where they eventually had a voice and a system for engaging in conversations that lead them to policies. He believed that advocates of intellectual property will be able to achieve the same goal, i.e., politics, if they have theories to base the arguments upon.
3/3/08
Cultural Environmentalism?
Here are two examples of the rhetoric of "cultural environmentalism" that Boyle calls for.
- Bound by Law, a graphic novel co-authored by Boyle.
- From the EFF Endangered Gizmos campaign:
copyright video that isn't Disney, sort of
I am not sure how many of you teach younger students, but I found this short video and think it works as a teaching tool. Essentially, it's a compliation of Disney movies that outlines the basics of copyright and fair use (and of course, takes a swipe at Disney).
Whenever I learn something, I try to figure out the best way to relay that information to students in a manner that is easy to understand and delivered in a format that is commonplace for them. While this video is somewhat annoying to adults, I feel it would work well in the classroom because today's students are entranced by flashing images delivered at record speeds.
"A Fair (y) Use Tale" Has a bias or two showing, but that'll make a nice discussion topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Whenever I learn something, I try to figure out the best way to relay that information to students in a manner that is easy to understand and delivered in a format that is commonplace for them. While this video is somewhat annoying to adults, I feel it would work well in the classroom because today's students are entranced by flashing images delivered at record speeds.
"A Fair (y) Use Tale" Has a bias or two showing, but that'll make a nice discussion topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
material relating to presentation tonight
Vuguru article (NYT)
Piracy article (involving a how-to guide for Miro)
Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet. (Source: Surveillance State blog at cnet.com, Sept. 2007)
There were some efforts in Congress to modify the DMCA – Rick Boucher’s Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) and Zoe Lofgren’s BALANCE Act – neither successful.
Timothy B. Lee (Cato Institute): “The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.” (Source: Wikipedia)
List of some recent fair-use legislation
Points from the BALANCE Act (2005) – Zoe Lofgren (CA) et al.
1. Copyright seeks to encourage and reward creative efforts by securing a fair return for an author's labor. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975). At the same time, `[f]rom the infancy of copyright protection, some opportunity for fair use of copyrighted materials has been thought necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . .' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 575 (1994).
2. `[P]rivate motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts . . . When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.' Twentieth Century Music Corp., 422 U.S. at 156.
3. On the one hand, digital technology threatens the rights of copyright holders. Perfect digital copies of songs and movies can be publicly transmitted, without authorization, to thousands of people at little or no cost. On the other hand, technological control measures give copyright holders the capacity to limit nonpublic performances and threaten society's interests in the free flow of ideas, information, and commerce.
4. The authors of the DMCA never intended to create such a dramatic shift in the balance. As the report of the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives accompanying the DMCA stated: `[A]n individual [should] not be able to circumvent in order to gain unauthorized access to a work, but [should] be able to do so in order to make fair use of a work which he or she has acquired lawfully.' House Report 105-551, Part I, Section-by-Section Analysis of section 1201(a)(1).
Piracy article (involving a how-to guide for Miro)
Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet. (Source: Surveillance State blog at cnet.com, Sept. 2007)
There were some efforts in Congress to modify the DMCA – Rick Boucher’s Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) and Zoe Lofgren’s BALANCE Act – neither successful.
Timothy B. Lee (Cato Institute): “The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.” (Source: Wikipedia)
List of some recent fair-use legislation
Points from the BALANCE Act (2005) – Zoe Lofgren (CA) et al.
1. Copyright seeks to encourage and reward creative efforts by securing a fair return for an author's labor. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975). At the same time, `[f]rom the infancy of copyright protection, some opportunity for fair use of copyrighted materials has been thought necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . .' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 575 (1994).
2. `[P]rivate motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts . . . When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.' Twentieth Century Music Corp., 422 U.S. at 156.
3. On the one hand, digital technology threatens the rights of copyright holders. Perfect digital copies of songs and movies can be publicly transmitted, without authorization, to thousands of people at little or no cost. On the other hand, technological control measures give copyright holders the capacity to limit nonpublic performances and threaten society's interests in the free flow of ideas, information, and commerce.
4. The authors of the DMCA never intended to create such a dramatic shift in the balance. As the report of the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives accompanying the DMCA stated: `[A]n individual [should] not be able to circumvent in order to gain unauthorized access to a work, but [should] be able to do so in order to make fair use of a work which he or she has acquired lawfully.' House Report 105-551, Part I, Section-by-Section Analysis of section 1201(a)(1).
The Implications of Intellectual Property and Copyright for Identity Politics
Reading Boyle and Barlow, I couldn't help but think of Charles Stross, one of the most interesting and radical of the new generation of cyberpunk writers (a term that doesn't really fit the work but which I use here because Stross's fiction is partly influenced by the work of writers William Gibson and Vernor Vinge as well as singularity theorists like Ray Kurzweil and in fact shares some of their stylistic and thematic interests, but mostly because it communicates the exciting sense of radical newness of contemporary sci-fi as exemplified by Stross and others such as Richard K. Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and Chris Moriarty). Reading this week's articles, I am especially reminded of Stross's best known work, the novel Accelerando, published in 2005 as the final iteration of a famous series of stories originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction between 2001 and 2004.
Obviously it's Boyle's reference to cyberpunk that made me think of this, because Stross uses the situations of the novel to carry the implied ethical problems of copyright and intellectual property specifically as they apply to human identity politics to their logical extreme. Check out the following passages from the book to see what I mean (by the way, if you want to read the whole novel, you might be interested in knowing that Stross has made it available in a number of electronic formats -- go to www.accelerando.org and scroll down a little):
"Let me get this straight. You're uploads--nervous system state vectors--from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"
"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system--use for self-awareness and contact with net at large--then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"
Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters.... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin....
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach....
"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.
"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured.
This is just to introduce the concept of digital brain mapping and personality/memory upload that is central to the novel (as well as many others both by Stross and others). In a later scene, as the potential subjects of digital personality upload are discussed, so too are the legal and ethical implications of digitizing more complex organisms:
"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? .... The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous--they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"
"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko [a robotic pet cat]. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"
"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans--it's a slippery slope...."
[Another character, Bob Franklin, interjects at this point:]
"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient--I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?"
Manfred's finger jabs out. "That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow.... Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."
"Lobsters--" Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"
"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either...."
It's worth mentioning that the future being imagined here is not decades or centuries from now, but years. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should take this as an immediately cautionary tale (though there are some out there who would)--what I'm interested in is the connection to Boyle. The future Stross imagines here foregrounds the issues Boyle addresses in his article, particularly the increasingly difficult problem of defining the concept of "information" itself in a culture where information is a highly valuable commodity. As Boyle makes clear, it seems our conceptions both of what constitutes information and of how information is to be legally handled become highly problematic when we are unable to differentiate anymore between electronic and genetic information--it's all just code. For Stross, the inevitable end-point of this revolution (which theorists like Kurzweil posit is coming) is that human identity itself becomes more information. The ethical and legal implications are both obvious and frightening. I don't have any answers or even, really, any insights, but it sure is fun to think about, particularly since these ideas have become so central to contemporary sci-fi, from Accelerando to the Sci-Fi Channel's reinvention of Battlestar Galactica (which reimagines the robotic Cylons of the hokey '70s show as fanatically monotheistic cybernetic clones with the ability to upload and download their consciousnesses, personalities, and memories into newly engineered biomechanical bodies).
Oh, and try assigning Accelerando as a reading in a freshman composition class. You'll have all sorts of fun watching your students' heads explode.
Obviously it's Boyle's reference to cyberpunk that made me think of this, because Stross uses the situations of the novel to carry the implied ethical problems of copyright and intellectual property specifically as they apply to human identity politics to their logical extreme. Check out the following passages from the book to see what I mean (by the way, if you want to read the whole novel, you might be interested in knowing that Stross has made it available in a number of electronic formats -- go to www.accelerando.org and scroll down a little):
"Let me get this straight. You're uploads--nervous system state vectors--from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"
"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system--use for self-awareness and contact with net at large--then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"
Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters.... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin....
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach....
"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.
"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured.
This is just to introduce the concept of digital brain mapping and personality/memory upload that is central to the novel (as well as many others both by Stross and others). In a later scene, as the potential subjects of digital personality upload are discussed, so too are the legal and ethical implications of digitizing more complex organisms:
"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? .... The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous--they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"
"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko [a robotic pet cat]. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"
"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans--it's a slippery slope...."
[Another character, Bob Franklin, interjects at this point:]
"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient--I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?"
Manfred's finger jabs out. "That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow.... Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."
"Lobsters--" Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"
"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either...."
It's worth mentioning that the future being imagined here is not decades or centuries from now, but years. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should take this as an immediately cautionary tale (though there are some out there who would)--what I'm interested in is the connection to Boyle. The future Stross imagines here foregrounds the issues Boyle addresses in his article, particularly the increasingly difficult problem of defining the concept of "information" itself in a culture where information is a highly valuable commodity. As Boyle makes clear, it seems our conceptions both of what constitutes information and of how information is to be legally handled become highly problematic when we are unable to differentiate anymore between electronic and genetic information--it's all just code. For Stross, the inevitable end-point of this revolution (which theorists like Kurzweil posit is coming) is that human identity itself becomes more information. The ethical and legal implications are both obvious and frightening. I don't have any answers or even, really, any insights, but it sure is fun to think about, particularly since these ideas have become so central to contemporary sci-fi, from Accelerando to the Sci-Fi Channel's reinvention of Battlestar Galactica (which reimagines the robotic Cylons of the hokey '70s show as fanatically monotheistic cybernetic clones with the ability to upload and download their consciousnesses, personalities, and memories into newly engineered biomechanical bodies).
Oh, and try assigning Accelerando as a reading in a freshman composition class. You'll have all sorts of fun watching your students' heads explode.
3/1/08
Barlow Reading Response
Barlow begins his discussion of the economy of ideas, particularly in the digital age, with a question that defines the heart of the issue "If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?" (1). In the transition from complete reliance on the printed word, with Gutenburg as a reference point, Barlow points out that we have progressed from viewing information as a hard to attain commodity to something taken for granted and exchanged so freely that it becomes difficult to control either the actual movement of information or the value that any work or idea carries. In an effort to control and protect the movement of ideas and their original authors, Barlow sees a level of control that threatens to hinder the actual productions and dissemination of information itself.
With the roots of copyright law in a time when the internet was far from fathomable, the initial intent of a law to protect an author's rights to their work was focused on something other than profit, an aspect of current copyright law that one would be hard pressed to exclude. Yet Barlow suggests that "It may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place" (5). In arguing that our entire understanding of the meaning of information and the social and legal order that surrounds it must be shifted in light of new technology, Barlow (and his contemporaries) look to reexamine the foundation of intellectual property and their place in a digital society.
The inability of an author to control the "finished" product of their work leaves those who have a more economic stake in controlling their work (and the work of others) relatively resistant to accepting a less structured idea of ownership. In addressing this issue, Barlow points out the less tangible (but more valid) ways that the value of information can be measured. Rather than placing standard values on fixed information, Barlow argues that information's worth is based on its relationship with its audience, proximity to the information and the timeliness of it all factor in to more adaptable concepts of worth in this more modern economic system.
At the base of Barlow's ideas about the changing face of intellectual property and information is a shift towards a more ethics fueled establishment and away from one so severely rooted in law and enforcement. Citing consistent software sales despite increasingly available free versions of software, Barlow argues that people buy those things that become essential to their work and lives. When information, or a program, become important to someone's productivity they look for the aspects of that application that can only come through purchasing the support, updates, etc...
In breaking down the various changes that come with the digital age, Barlow asserts that even semantic concepts of information must change. In shifting our thinking from a noun to a verb, "information" becomes something that is harder to actually own, becoming rooted in need and relationship rather than possession and control.
With the roots of copyright law in a time when the internet was far from fathomable, the initial intent of a law to protect an author's rights to their work was focused on something other than profit, an aspect of current copyright law that one would be hard pressed to exclude. Yet Barlow suggests that "It may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place" (5). In arguing that our entire understanding of the meaning of information and the social and legal order that surrounds it must be shifted in light of new technology, Barlow (and his contemporaries) look to reexamine the foundation of intellectual property and their place in a digital society.
The inability of an author to control the "finished" product of their work leaves those who have a more economic stake in controlling their work (and the work of others) relatively resistant to accepting a less structured idea of ownership. In addressing this issue, Barlow points out the less tangible (but more valid) ways that the value of information can be measured. Rather than placing standard values on fixed information, Barlow argues that information's worth is based on its relationship with its audience, proximity to the information and the timeliness of it all factor in to more adaptable concepts of worth in this more modern economic system.
At the base of Barlow's ideas about the changing face of intellectual property and information is a shift towards a more ethics fueled establishment and away from one so severely rooted in law and enforcement. Citing consistent software sales despite increasingly available free versions of software, Barlow argues that people buy those things that become essential to their work and lives. When information, or a program, become important to someone's productivity they look for the aspects of that application that can only come through purchasing the support, updates, etc...
In breaking down the various changes that come with the digital age, Barlow asserts that even semantic concepts of information must change. In shifting our thinking from a noun to a verb, "information" becomes something that is harder to actually own, becoming rooted in need and relationship rather than possession and control.
Ethics or Fear
Here is a really interesting thread about banjoists and copyright.
In Barlow's 1994 essay, he discusses how with the "third wave" of economic development, in which information replaces land and other tangible items as the mainstay of our economy, a new system of intellectual property protection is needed to replace the now-defunct copyright laws.
Barlow makes an interesting argument in both his 1994 and 2000 essays. He claims that as we move further and further away from effective lawful control of the internet, "ethics are going to make a major comeback."
I find Barlow's argument compelling, and I've personally witnessed its application, but I'm wondering if we are really there yet. In this post, "Musicians Censoring Themselves," isn't it fear that keeps the banjoists from sharing not only musical notation but also personal knowledge? How much of the lack of sharing here is based on ethics and how much on fear of being attacked by the law? Interesting stuff, considering our constitution's copyright law is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art."
In Barlow's 1994 essay, he discusses how with the "third wave" of economic development, in which information replaces land and other tangible items as the mainstay of our economy, a new system of intellectual property protection is needed to replace the now-defunct copyright laws.
Barlow makes an interesting argument in both his 1994 and 2000 essays. He claims that as we move further and further away from effective lawful control of the internet, "ethics are going to make a major comeback."
I find Barlow's argument compelling, and I've personally witnessed its application, but I'm wondering if we are really there yet. In this post, "Musicians Censoring Themselves," isn't it fear that keeps the banjoists from sharing not only musical notation but also personal knowledge? How much of the lack of sharing here is based on ethics and how much on fear of being attacked by the law? Interesting stuff, considering our constitution's copyright law is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art."
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