The Copier Wars: Fair Use's Rude Awakening
newart.press
newart.press
> businesses that once relied on the scarcity of information found themselves leaning on courtrooms to protect their bottom line.
We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it.
On one side we'll have luddites who rightfully try to keep humans out of harm, and on the other whole industries which can only brake progress to stay mainstream. While I used to think that it was a lost cause for them, here we are in 2024 still dealing with call centers and getting snail mail spam.
It feels like some industries just found a position where nothing short of a country uprising will displace them, whatever technical advancements we see.
That's not what lawyers do. It's what lobbyists do. Lawyers argue it out in court afterward.
Usually there were red marks over the text that I presumed prevent photo-copying, and a red film you would look through to read the booklet. At some point there was no use as these things would be posted on BBS sites and you could simply print them out.
It remains an excellent example of free information causing chaos in society. The cost of transitioning Europe away from Catholic hegemony - in which widely available English Bibles was certainly a major force - was at least a few centuries of conflict and war, some of which still isn't entirely settled after 500 years. Power transitions, historically speaking, tend to be messy and involve wars. Our own information revolution is not less disruptive than the printing press - I would say maybe more so. So it shouldn't surprise us if we're in for troubled times while things shake out. It is easy to accuse old power of refusing to give it up, and that isn't wrong, but also sometimes that old power was the only thing doing the job of keeping chaos at bay.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentelin-Bibel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Mentelin [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible
> old power was the only thing doing the job of keeping chaos at bay.
One word: Yugoslavia.
Except of course for all of the things that had never been scribed before at scale, such as maps, timetables, dictionaries, sales catalogues, political pamphlets, and numeric tables / explanatory diagrams. Especially for the latter, printing massively reduced transcription errors, which was a game changer for 'technical' content. We tend to take for granted the radical shifts that printing enabled.
Early printshops were the equivalent of disruptive tech startups, with a mix of tech innovation, capital investment, marketing and sweatshop compared with the old scribe-based printing environments.
A student buys a used book, goes to a copy shop,
spends a few hours copying, then returns and sells
the book back, saving lots of money in the process.
The article ends in a strange way:
> It’s hard to imagine that companies once sued churches for making copies.
That's the end of the article haha (and it's not that hard to imagine). I was hoping they would touch on Napster and CD burning and tie it all into what's going on today with AI, leaving the reader with an informed perspective on IP.
And since I'm apparently a writing critic now: The numerous links to court cases, articles, and interviews throughout made it read like a Wikipedia (in a boring way). Provide sources sure, but in a way that doesn't feel like stepping through the history section of a Wikipedia article. For such a relevant topic and decent headline I expected better writing.
Books can't simply be returned (unless still shrink-wrapped), it's a sell-back process, and the spread is much narrower for a used book. For example: $200 new, $120 used, $80 sell-back. The author uses the word "return" to mean visiting the store, not to mean perfectly reversing the original transaction.
If they bought it used for $120 and sold it back for $80 after use vs buy for $120, photocopy, then sell for $80 it's the same overall outcome.
The reason I drew a distinction between school books and others is with some books the infringer might want to keep the photocopied material - I didn't realize we were talking about what is effectively a book exchange anyway (whose profits are the same either way).
Where if I bought Twilight, photocopied it and then returned it, that's a lot different than photocopying a math book that I return anyway - that people return so often there's a system designed around it at the campus bookstore.
This was never solved by lawyers or trials anyway, it was essentially put on ice by e-books and largely overtaken by the music/film piracy conversation and advent of the internet. Could have been a more interesting article is all!
If anything there are even more requirements now. Churches must now purchase individual licenses for music sung in live-streamed liturgies or printed out in programs (through websites like www.onelicense.net).
Thankfully, liturgical music is a pretty old genre (the oldest still around), so there is a huge corpus of public-domain works.