Remnant Review
Copyright law is in its terminal phase. I have known this for over 20 years. The Internet is killing it.
I am going to discuss a remarkable example of a website that today has 48 million stolen scientific articles online. It is beyond the ability of anybody to control. It is outside of copyright protection, despite the fact that academic journals want to defend their turf. There is no legal way for them to do this.
Before I explain what has happened, I want to take you back to 1994.
THE GENIES ARE OUT OF THEIR BOTTLES
John Perry Barlow used to be a songwriter for the Grateful Dead. He is also a digital technician. In 1994, he wrote an article for the printed version of Wired magazine, because that was the only way we could buy the magazine. It was published in March 1994, eight months before the release of the original graphic internet browser, Netscape.
Barlow’s article was on the high cost of enforcing copyright in the digital age. The article is still online. Anybody who is interested in the issues of copyright law ought to read it.
It began with a quote from Thomas Jefferson:
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
From the beginning of copyright law in the early 17th century, when England licensed the printing of Bibles by Oxford and Cambridge — academic guild centers — copyright law could only be enforced in the way that it is possible for governments to control the sale of liquor: by controlling the sale of bottles. Governments controlled publishing by controlling paper, ink, and especially printing presses. In other words, they controlled the bottles. But, in the Internet age, Barlow wrote, it is no longer possible to protect the liquid, meaning digits, by means of limiting access to the bottles, meaning printing presses and bookstores. I remembered this argument for over 20 years. It was a graphic argument, which is what a good debater uses to drive home a point. I searched the article for “bottle,” and I got this:
In other words, the bottle was protected, not the wine.Now, as information enters cyberspace, the native home of Mind, these bottles are vanishing. With the advent of digitization, it is now possible to replace all previous information storage forms with one metabottle: complex and highly liquid patterns of ones and zeros.
Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed — floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages — will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.
Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age — all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters — will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word.
This was published eight months before the arrival of the graphic internet browser, which produced the vast expansion of the World Wide Web.
I now invoke that most ancient of economic laws: the law of demand. “When the price falls, more is demanded.” The price keeps falling. Bandwidth keeps getting cheaper. Search engines keep getting more powerful. Copyright laws are now effectively dead for all except best-selling authors and their publishers. It is not economically possible to defend copyright any longer.
48 MILLION PIRATED ARTICLES AND GROWING
A member of this site posted a question regarding copyright law. He had come across a unique website, which claims to have 48 million scientific articles posted on the site. The site is www.sci-hub.io.
I began a brief investigation of the site. First, I wanted to know what the URL designation .io stands for. Here, I got an education. It is a country, but one that I had never heard of before: British Indian Ocean Territory. In the 1960’s, the British government stole a group of about 1000 islands that are located in between Madagascar and India. The most famous one is Diego Garcia. I had heard of that island. The United States government has a major military base on Diego Garcia.
The British expelled the residents of these islands. There is a Wikipedia entry on this island nation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory. But this is more to the point:
Located in the Indian Ocean, the British Indian Ocean Territory is an archipelago south of India, about halfway between Africa and Indonesia. This area includes the entire Chagos Archipelago of 55 islands. The combined area of these islands is 21,004 square miles, about one third the size of Washington D.C. Currently there are no indigenous habitats on these islands. In the 1960’s and 70’s, approximately 1,200 former agricultural workers in the Chagos Archipelago were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles. In November 2000 they were granted the right of return by a British High Court ruling. However, this ruling was overturned in 2008, finding no right for the natives to return. By November 2004, approximately 4,000 United Kingdom and United States military personnel and civilian contractors were living on the island of Diego Garcia in a joint naval support facility.
So, the national judicial entity is based on theft. Historically, lots of nations are based on theft. Probably most entities are based on theft. But, because this was recent, is more obviously a product of the power of empire.
Second, I read this:
.IO has become one of hottest domain name extensions for startups. This is a little peculiar, since .IO has existed since 1997 and was originally assigned as the ccTLD for British Indian Ocean Territory. So, why are startups turning to .IO?With .IO, startups can get short and memorable names, because .IO has great availability. A .IO domain name can be a better option than coming up with a long and confusing domain name that uses a more established extension (or buying expensive premium domains). To put it simply, .IO’s are an easy way to get a great domain for a great price, and .IO has a handful of other defining benefits.
So, here we have a unique legal entity. The original owners were thrown out by the British. The main occupiers are now employees of the United States government. Because of the World Wide Web, people from all over the world are setting up domain names inside the jurisdiction this strange legal entity. It has no court system. It has no lawyers. Nobody lives there who runs one of the sites. Unless the organization that controls the issuing of domain names somehow shuts down a particular website, anybody can post just about anything.
I predicted over a decade ago that this would begin. I said that copyright was basically doomed, because of the multiplication of the number of island nations. As nation-states begin to break apart, there will be a multiplication of these small nations, especially island nations. I wrote years ago that because Web servers can be set up on these islands, an island that decides not to honor copyright is going to be in a unique position to sell domain name server space.
This is probably the best example that I have seen of domain immunity from lawsuits. I don’t know how legal ownership is established in a separate island nation run by the British. For a lawsuit to be successful, it has to be able to get support from some legal entity that possesses legal sovereignty. This is going to prove to be a problem.
What about the website itself? What kind of traffic does it have? I checked Alexa.com. This site is rated a little above number 13,000 in the world — out of a billion sites. That means it is an incredibly popular site. The main visitors come from the following nations, no one of which is above 12%: China, Iran, Brazil, India, and Russia.
The site was first set up in 2011 with a .org domain extension. It switched to .io last November after a lawsuit was filed against it. Yet it has gone from no traffic to a 13,000 Alexa ranking in about four months.
I have been unable to find anything about copyright law in this judicial entity. There are couple of references, but they are effectively dead. There is no information.
Next, I went to Wikipedia to see what there is on the website. I found that there is a lawsuit against the site by a technical publishing organization, but the lawsuit seems to be going nowhere. That is understandable; judicially speaking, there is nowhere to go. Wikipedia reports:
The site is currently involved in a legal case with Elsevier: Elsevier et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. Elsevier claims that Sci-Hub illegally accesses accounts of students and academic institutions to provide free access to articles through their platform ScienceDirect. The case is complicated by the fact that the site is hosted in St. Petersburg, Russia, making it difficult to target within the US legal system. Some question Elsevier’s motives behind its simultaneous attempt to partner with Wikipedia to disseminate their paywalled papers. A similar case is also being run against the site Library Genesis (LibGen), which may be based in the Netherlands or possibly Russia as well. Despite seizure of the websites as ordered by a New York district court on October 28, 2015, the site is still accessible through alternative domains as of December 2015. The site is also accessible through the Tor network.Alexandra Elbakyan has cited the UN Declaration of Human Rights “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation has expressed support for Sci-Hub and its sister site LibGen. The lawsuit has prompted widespread criticism of Elsevier.
This is almost a poster child example of what I described over a decade ago.
I did a spoof on copyright protection almost exactly three years ago.
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