Categories
Accountability folly government transparency

A Most Bizarre Misuse

Increasingly, folks in government balk at the commonsense requirement for transparency. They don’t like the basic idea of a republic, apparently — that we have rights; folks in government have duties. They are bound to serve us.

And allow us to oversee their work.

The latest bizarre attempt to wiggle out of transparency comes from California. A proposed bit of legislation, AB-​2880, seeks to grant state employees copyright protection — for their everyday work as public servants.

“The bill claims to protect access to the documents through the California Public Records Act,” explains Steven Greenhut in The American Spectator, “but it gives the government the ability to control what people do with many of those records.” Emphasis added — to direct your attention to the enormity of the increase in government prerogatives.

Public records are called “public” not merely because they putatively serve the public, but because they are open to the public. Yet, if this measure passes, those records are essentially privatized … to the government.

That is not what we mean, usually, when we say “privatize.”

Using copyright law to protect “thin-​skinned officials,” AB-​2880 would insulate bureaucrats even further from citizen oversight.

The excuse for the law, to help agencies manage their “intellectual property,” is hardly a big concern, except perhaps in one way: trademark infringement. We do not want private businesses to pretend to be state parks or bureaus. But the overreach beyond this core issue goes so far into crazyland that one must question the intent behind it.

And stop it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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transparency, government, copyright, illustration

 

Categories
crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies too much government

Not Buying a Stairway to Riches

I am not a writer by trade. I don’t make a living off of these daily and weekly writing gigs. I give this stuff away, for free. The donations I ask for are there to cover bandwidth, website expertise, artwork, etc. They don’t cover my contributions.

But that doesn’t disqualify me from my occasional wonder and amazement (and worse) at how intellectual “property” is handled in America.

This week a Los Angeles jury found that the great rock band “Led Zeppelin did not plagiarize the opening chords of the rock epic Stairway to Heaven from the U.S. band Spirit,” the BBC reports. “It said the riff Led Zeppelin was accused of taking from Spirit’s 1967 song Taurus ‘was not intrinsically similar’ to Stairway’s opening.”

So, my surprise, and perhaps yours too, is that a riff, a mere riff, taken from one song and put into another, could be actionable at law. It seems to me that this would be like suing over an essay title (one has no private property rights to your headlines, no matter how original), or clever turn of phrase. Writers copy this stuff all the time. Even more commonly, they inadvertently regurgitate these writerly “riffs” from the far corners of their minds, or even think up these things separately.

But honestly, I didn’t think one could sue over a riff. Riffs and chord progressions vary in originality, but some of the best songs use the same three chords, so there is a lot of apparent “stealing” going on.

Thankfully, the jury wisely knew the difference between What Is and What Should Never Be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Led Zeppelin, copyright, lawsuit

 

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Nab-​N-​Brag

Could America’s obsession with intellectual property be getting out of hand?

Congress has extended copyright protection for existing and old works as well as future works … which looks more like giveaways to major corporations than anything else. You know, like Disney, whose lawyers dread the day Mickey Mouse ever hits the public domain.

Now that patents have been taken out on “business procedures” and even strings of DNA, it seems that almost anything is up for grabs.

The easiest intellectual property to defend is the trademark, since unique identifiers are so important for both commerce and law. But even here there’s a lot of weirdness going on.

Take the recent lawsuit by In-​N-​Out Burgers against Grab-​N-​Go Burgers. The west coast outfit thinks the east coast outfit has, well, stolen its look. The Huffington Post calls it “copyright infringement,” but, in the first report I read, “the suit alleges that Grab-N-Go’s name and color schemes mirror In-N-Out’s signature style,” which sounds more like trademark. But the suit also mentions menu similarities.

Well, the names are similar, and the logos do resemble each other. But they seem quite distinct, and I would have thought common sense would judge Grab-​N-​Go as merely emulating In-​N-​Out, not infringing on rights. Businesses copy each other all the time. That’s capitalism.

It’s even Aristotelian. Keyword: mimesis.

Even innovation is never ex nihilo creation. It’s copying plus modification.

It’s why I call this commentary “Common Sense” and not “Xbligigroobi Blubqui.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary property rights too much government

© Is for California

You might think that there’s nothing a government won’t try. You’d be right. But I was near stupified to learn that the state of California copyrights its laws. And it’s not alone.

The state tries to control — through copyright — how you can access its laws, where and how you store them, etc. The state makes available its building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws online, but requires you to ask for permission to download them!

The state’s out to make money. It charges $1,556 for a digital version, more for a print-​out, and makes nearly a million dollars a year selling what is legally ours.

Yes, what’s ours. We are a nation of laws, not of men, and we have the right to own and reprint our laws as much as we want. The purpose of copyright is to ensure private parties can maintain some control over their intellectual property. But the laws themselves are, in point of elementary political theory, the intellectual property of all. Not of state bureaus.

Thankfully, heroic Internet technician and mover and shaker Carl Malamud believes in government transparency. And he, unlike Al Gore, really worked to help build the Internet.

On Labor Day Mr. Malamud published the whole California code online. Available for free.

Obviously, Malamud is spoiling for a fight. Good. He should win it. He has, after all, the law (if not the state) on his side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.