A Short History of EBooks

by Marie Lebert

2001: COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT AND CREATIVE COMMONS

= [Overview]

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008. Science Commons was founded in 2005 to "design strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web- enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007 as "a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources."

= Copyright on the web

What did people think about copyright on the web, when there were heated debated about print articles and other copyrighted works being posted and re-posted without the consent of their authors? Here are some answers.

Based in San Francisco, California, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist in information technology and a "facilitator" between the United States and Europe. He wrote in July 1999: "Copyright in its traditional context doesn't exist any more. Authors have to get used to a new situation: the total freedom of the flow of information. The original content is like a fingerprint: it can't be copied. So it will survive and flourish."

Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "The debate will continue forever, as information becomes more conspicuous than the air that we breathe and more fluid than water. (…) Authors will have to become a lot more creative in terms of how to control the dissemination of their work and profit from it. The best that we can do right now is to promote basic standards of professionalism, and insist at the very least that the source and authorship of any work be duly acknowledged. Technology will have to evolve to support the authorization process."

Alain Bron is a consultant in information systems and a novelist. He wrote in November 1999: "I regard the web today as a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not formally registered or if works are available without payment facilities. A solution is to make people pay for information, but this is no watertight guarantee against it being copied."

Peter Raggett was the deputy-head (and now the head) of the OECD Central Library (OECD: Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development). He wrote in August 1999: "The copyright question is still very unclear. Publishers naturally want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and end-users want to be able to download immediately the full text of articles. At the moment, each publisher seems to have its own policy for access to electronic versions and they would benefit from having some kind of homogenous policy, preferably allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material."

Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October 2000: "Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the intellectual property thinks that s/he owns what s/he has created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case of book). The business community has not found a new way to add value to intellectual property. Consumers don't think very abstractly. When they download songs for example, they are simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The music and publishing industry need to find ways to give consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual property."

= Copyright and WIPO

Since the web became mainstream, the posting by the thousands of electronic texts and other documents has been an headache for organizations in charge of applying the rules relating to intellectual property.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an intergovernmental organization, and one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations. It is responsible for protecting intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among countries. It is also responsible for implementing various multilateral treaties dealing with the legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property.

Intellectual property comprises industrial property and copyright. Industrial property relates to inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and appellations of origin. Copyright relates to literary, musical, artistic, photographic and audiovisual works. WIPO stated on its website in 1999: "As regards the number of literary and artistic works created worldwide, it is difficult to make a precise estimate. However, the information available indicates that at present around 1,000,000 books/titles are published and some 5,000 feature films are produced in a year, and the number of copies of phonograms sold per year presently is more than 3,000 million."

Copyright protection means that using a copyrighted work is lawful only if we get authorization from the copyright owner. As explained by WIPO on its website in the section "International Protection of Copyright and Neighbouring Rights", the authorizations granted by the copyright owner can be: "The right to copy or otherwise reproduce any kind of work; the right to distribute copies to the public; the right to rent copies of at least certain categories of works (such as computer programs and audiovisual works); the right to make sound recordings of the performances of literary and musical works; the right to perform in public, particularly musical, dramatic or audiovisual works; the right to communicate to the public by cable or otherwise the performances of such works and, particularly, to broadcast, by radio, television or other wireless means, any kind of work; the right to translate literary works; the right to rent, particularly, audiovisual works, works embodied in phonograms and computer programs; the right to adapt any kind of work and particularly the right to make audiovisual works thereof."

Under some national laws, some of these rights - which together are referred to as "economic rights" - are not exclusive rights of authorization but, in some specific cases, merely rights to remuneration. In addition to economic rights, authors - whether or not they own the economic rights - enjoy "moral rights" on the basis of which authors have the right to claim their authorship and require that their names be indicated on the copies of the work and in connection with other uses, and they have the right to oppose the mutilation or deformation of their works.

= Shrinking of public domain

Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them for free. In 2009, Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of downloads every day. As recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I knew [in July 1971] that the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The Information Age.' That was also the day I said we would be able to carry quite literally the entire Library of Congress in one hand and the system would certainly make it illegal… too much power to leave in the hands of the masses."

As defined by Project Gutenberg, "public domain is the set of cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally", i.e. for books, the ones that can be digitized and released on the internet for free. But the task of Project Gutenberg hasn't be made any easier by the increasing restrictions to public domain. In former times, 50% of works belonged to public domain, and could be freely used by everybody. A much tougher legislation was set in place over the centuries, step by step, especially during the 20th century, despite our so-called "information society". In 2100, 99% of works might be governed by copyright, with a meager 1% for public domain.

In the "Copyright HowTo" section of its website, Project Gutenberg explains how to confirm the public domain status of books according to U.S. copyright laws. Here is a summary: (a) Works published before 1923 entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the copyright date: all these works belong to public domain; (b) Works published between 1923 and 1977 retain copyright for 95 years: no such works will enter the public domain until 2019; (c) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person: nothing will enter the public domain until 2049; (d) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation if the author is a corporate one: nothing will enter the public domain until 2074.

Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the previous one. A major blow for digital libraries was the amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998. As explained by Michael Hart in July 1999: "Nothing will expire for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it is 95 years. And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28-year extension, only on request) before that, and 14 years (+ a possible 14-year extension) before that. So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter of continuing policy."

John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993, got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to understand that copyright is a social contract that is designed for the public good - where the public includes both authors and readers. This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the U.S. now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the 'database copyright' proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. (…) Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it is too often ends up being ('big money vs. rogue pirates'), we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations."

Michael Hart wrote in July 1999: "No one has said more against copyright extensions than I have, but Hollywood and the big publishers have seen to it that our Congress won't even mention it in public. The kind of copyright debate going on is totally impractical. It is run by and for the 'Landed Gentry of the Information Age.' 'Information Age'? For whom?"

Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great "information age" we live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating to dissemination of information. The contradiction is obvious. This problem has also affected several European countries, where the copyright law switched from "author's life plus 50 years" to "author's life plus 70 years", following pressure from content owners who successfully lobbied for "harmonization" of national copyright laws as a response to "globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) was ratified in May 2001 by the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current copyright from expiring for the forseeable future."

= Copyleft and Creative Commons

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), who launched the GNU project to develop a complete
Unix-like operating system called the GNU system.

As explained on the GNU website: "Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. (…) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom. (…) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible. The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the verb 'to leave' — only to the direction which is the inverse of 'right'. (…) The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non commercially."

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof."

There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008.

Science Commons was founded in 2005. As explained on its website: "Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use. Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery — unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing."

ccLearn was founded in 2007. As explained on its website: "ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials."