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net.wars: No, you still can't sing "Happy Birthday" in public

See Larry Lessig's blog for his reaction and links to media coverage and the decision itself.

So, what do we do now?

The law professor Jessica Litman (author of Digital Copyright), said a couple of years ago at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference , that as much as it went against the grain for a law professor to suggest such a thing, she recommended a persistent campaign of civil disobedience.

She also thought we should take back the language by refusing to use the term "piracy" - an emotive term pushed by the copyright industries to put file-sharers in the wrong - and substitute "unauthorized copying".

Robert X. Cringely extended this to suggesting that everyone engaged in unauthorized copying should do the honorable thing and turn themselves in at their nearest police station. After all, it's not the free video/audio, it's the principle, right? Have the courage of your illegal Friends episodes.

Create your own stuff and contribute it to the public domain. Use the "some rights reserved" logo of Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons to prevent commercial exploitation without your permission.

Follow Richard Stallman's and Tim O'Reilly's lead and insist that any books you publish be issued under a license that allows copying and modification. If you are a software developer, use the GNU license or any of the other possibilities . Benefit from Stallman's key insight: that copyright law can be used by the creator or owner to secure rights to the public as well as to the creator/rightsholder.

Help the Gutenberg project digitize works that are, finally, out of copyright but hard to find or access.

Refuse to buy computer hardware and software with embedded digital rights management systems, and tell manufacturers why you're doing it. Support those who sell hacked DVD players, give away firmware upgrades on the Net, or supply software designed to remove such restrictions. Do not buy copy-protected audio CDs. And, as much as it pains me to say this, boycott region-protected DVDs. Explain to Americans - who are the least cognizant of region protection issues and who form the biggest single market - what they are supporting when they buy region-encoded players and discs.

Pick your favorite musician and go see him or her live in concert. In general, they will get a far higher percentage of the money you spend on them if you buy tickets to their shows and your CDs directly from them than if you buy those CDs from a record store/online retailer. Help them create a direct link to their fans by using the Net - lots of on-the-road musicians have little time or technical ability to spend on doing it for themselves. Show them what Tom Paxton is doing in posting free MP3s of his "short shelf-life" songs or They Might Be Giants is doing with daily free Web songs.

Convince songwriters to give permission to outfits like The Digital Tradition to keep their lyrics in their online databases so they are accessible to people who want to learn those songs and sing them.

Pester publishers of books, movies, and music for the release of material that is under copyright but completely unavailable to the public. The Internet Archive assembled an impressive set of figures showing just how much of our cultural heritage is both commercially and non-commercially inaccessible to us because of continued extensions to copyright laws. Bug copyright owners to either release the material into the public domain or make it available for sale at reasonable prices.

Propose "use or lose" laws to require rightsholders to return the copyright to the artists if the material goes out of print - reversion rights clauses are standard in book publishing (though under threat from just-in-time printing) but in general completely unavailable to filmmakers and musicians.

Start lobbying now. Mickey got a reprieve from falling into the public domain; he didn't avoid the prospect altogether. There will be a next time.

Oppose further lmitations on the public domain, such as the US broadcast flag and the WIPO broadcast treaty that may work to limit the public's ability to time-shift or record TV. Continue to oppose existing bad law, such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (and its prospective European counterpart), and the Copyright Extension Act (a law to protect a Mouse championed by Sonny Buono???!). We can't outcompete the copyright industries' funding, but millions of us sure can make ourselves a pain in the ass if we try.

Remember, once upon a time the Supreme Court upheld slavery. Yet a later version of the same Court struck it down, and later made many more decisions supportive of racial equality besides. One must keep battering away at it, like in the battle of Helm's Deep.

Most of all, we must contribute to our own public domain by creating our own work and controlling the rights that are applied to it. We must be careful what and how we sell our creations in the interest of making a living, bearing in mind that the consequence may be that our most valuable ideas will be locked away for centuries to come. We must learn to regard the copyright maximalists as damage, and route around them.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series . She has an intermittent blog . Readers are welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML. Wendy is author of net.wars, and From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age, and also The Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet.

Contact Wendy M. Grossman direct, or mail the Editor here. Photo: Tony Sleep