The Case for Open Access in China (and indeed, everywhere)

From QuestionCopyright.org:

It is amazing how the Internet makes it possible for people to connect with one another in ways that were not possible a decade ago. Jennifer Howard published an article "What you don't know about copyright and should" in The Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2011. As a research student on copyright from China, I was naturally drawn to this piece and quickly added a comment suggesting that any introduction to copyright would be considered incomplete without a few words on the free culture movement such as Open Source Software and Creative Commons. My opinion was echoed by Mr. Karl Fogel at QuestionCopyright.org, who later invited me to write about "how people feel about copyright in China, especially focusing on the general public's attitude toward copying and sharing and attribution" for QuestionCopyright.org. This article is a result of that fortuitous interaction between Karl and me, which would have been unthinkable if access to Ms. Howard's article were restricted by copyright. This anecdote illustrates the first point I want to make about copyright in general: the copyright regime restricts the distribution of creative works and stifles the conversation that creative works may generate. The Internet has emerged as an antidote to this restriction, as Karl and I could read and discuss Ms. Howard's article online and work together for new articles on the same topic.

Earlier this year, I ran into a book named "Uncommon Sense- Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism" when browsing Douban.com, one of the most popular social networking sites on books, movies and music for young people in China. Authored by two leading scholars from America, the Nobel economist Gary Becker and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, the book was translated into Chinese by a leading publisher and received a high rating from users at Douban.com. But the Douban users also grudged about the relatively high price of the book- RMB 56 (the monthly stipend for a PhD student in China is about RMB 1,500). A Google search quickly located for me a free e-copy of the book, which was uploaded by some netizens to Sina.com, a major web portal in China. The e-copy I got was the original English version, which I could read without worrying about the errors or loss of meaning in translation.

More importantly, I found one essay in the English version that has been expurgated from the translation- "Google in China" discussing how Internet companies like Google deal with censorship of Internet by the Chinese government. It was ironic that the article was knocked out even though both authors expressed certain degree of sympathy with the Chinese government's censorship policies for the sake of social stability. Yet, this removed article on censorship illustrates a paradoxical situation in which many Chinese readers find themselves. On the one hand, our access to information is constrained by the infamous Great Firewall that blocks Facebook, Youtube, Blogspot, as well as by the General Administration of Press and Publication that regulates paper-based publication. On the other hand, the copyright regime restricts what we could read based on what we could afford: no doubt I have violated both international and domestic copyright laws when I downloaded a free e-copy of "Uncommon Sense" from Sina.com. Here comes my second thought on copyright in China: unauthorized copying and distribution of materials from abroad may enable at least some Chinese to access information that is not otherwise available and thereby help build a more open and democratic China in the long term.

Under international pressure, the Chinese government is doing everything it can to promote copyright education. Every year, events are organized all over the country to educate the public about the importance of respecting copyright. But there is a general confusion over the distinction between unauthorized copying and plagiarism. It has to do with an obscure principle in copyright laws, namely, the idea-expression dichotomy or the merger doctrine. Because copyright originated from publishing, it is is primarily concerned with protecting the expression of works – whereas the ideas expressed are not copyrightable. In other words, it is illegal to copy or reproduce a work without authorization, but perfectly fine to borrow one's ideas by paraphrasing. Yet, if you talk with any scholars or professors in China, you will find that most authors are more concerned if others borrow their ideas without giving them credit. It is not a big deal if their papers or journal articles are posted online by others without their authorization. Some of the authors may even be pleased to know their ideas are more widely circulated so long as the works are attributed to their names and are not altered without their permission. Copyright advocates often argue for more protection to produce stronger incentive for authors to create their works. But scholars in general do not get paid for publishing academic papers. In fact, many authors in China have to pay the publishers to get their work in print. But publishing one's works is considered a means to an important end: to get one's works scrutinized and recognized by the academic community. With certain number of papers published in leading journals, the scholars will get a tenured professorship and other opportunities to advance their career, e.g. providing consulting services for commercial companies.

So what can we do with plagiarism which is technically not illegal under the current copyright regime? Recently, a software system similar to Turnitin has been adopted by many Chinese universities to check all master's and PhD thesis against plagiarism. Yet, it is fairly easy to outsmart the system by paraphrasing the papers one has to copy so that the software cannot find any verbatim copying. In fact, a more straight-forward solution for plagiarism in China is simply to abolish all copyright protection for the academic works. According to Linus' Law, all bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs. The mechanism of debugging for open source software can also be transplanted to the context of academic writing in China. By removing all obstacles of accessing the academic papers, any incidents of plagiarism will be easily detected by the public.

In fact, the public has every right to access the scholarly works. Recently, American scholars are making efforts to remove copyright restriction on their works on the ground that many research papers resulted from research studies sponsored by taxpayers' money. It makes little sense if the publishers appropriate the works' copyright and charge the public again for access. An even stronger case for free access to Chinese journal articles can be made considering the fact that most major research universities in China are funded by the central government and most papers with academic merit are based on research projects sponsored by the government.

Since the open door policy was adopted in China in early 1980s, the Chinese economy has taken off and Chinese people have enjoyed dramatic improvement of living standards. Yet, many people are worried that the Chinese have become increasingly obsessed with material goods but ignored the equally important spiritual lives. We spend more time watching TV and less time reading literature. One important difference between TV programs and literate works is that while TV programs are freely accessible in China through sponsorship of the advertisers most books are copyrighted commodities that have become increasingly expensive in recent years. The advent of the Internet may offer new opportunities for the Chinese to access more quality literate works under business models alternative to conventional copyright-based model. With the help of new technologies, we the Chinese may find ways to circumvent both the government censorship regime and the copyright regime to forge a collective readership that is constructive and beneficial for all.

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Raised in Mainland China and Hong Kong, Ho Simon Wang received his undergraduate education from Washington University in Saint Louis, USA and a Master degree in education from Oxford University, UK. He is currently living in Wuhan, China working as an English language teacher at Huazhong University of Science and Technology while pursuing a PhD degree in intellectual property rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.

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What Would You Do if you had the most powerful copying machine in the world?

Watch this film.



IT's a good film about copying, and control of information (monopoly).

A Tale of Two Authors: Why Translations Happen, or Don't.

A repost from Question Copyright.org -- by Karl Fogel.



Why don't books get translated?
If you think it's because it's hard to find willing translators, or because the skills required are too rare, I'd like to offer two case studies below that point to another explanation:

The reason translations don't happen is that we mostly prohibit them. That is to say, translations are what happens naturally, except when copyright restrictions suppress them.

If you're skeptical, consider the following tale of two authors, one whose books are free to be translated by anyone, another whose books are not.

We'll even stack the deck a bit. The author whose books are freely translatable will be a relatively minor author, one whose books are not, to be perfectly honest, of earth-shaking importance. Whereas some of the the books by the other author are acknowledged masterpieces in their original language, and you will see quotes from a prominent scholar about how the absence of translations is "one of the great intellectual scandals of our time".

The first author is me. I've written two books, both available under free licenses, and although I'm proud of them and glad I wrote them, neither is of any great historical significance. The first, published in 1999, was a semi-technical manual on how to use some collaboration software. Despite its limited audience and my having put it online in a somewhat cumbersome format, several volunteer translation efforts sprang up quickly, and at least one (into German) was completed. The other efforts may have been completed as well; I'm not sure, and since the book is old now and I can't read the translations anyway I haven't bothered to track them down. Note I'm really just talking about the volunteer translations — the ones that people started because they wanted to, without asking anyone's permission first. There was also a translation into Chinese, which was completed and which I have a paperback copy of, but we won't count it as evidence here because it went through publisher-controlled channels.
My next book, first published in 2005, likewise appeals to a fairly limited audience: it's about how to manage collaborative, open source software projects — I wasn't exactly aiming for the top of the bestseller lists. But with the gracious cooperation of my publisher, O'Reilly Media, I put it online under a free license, this time in a somewhat more amenable format, and volunteer translation efforts sprang up almost immediately. Several of them have completed their translations: the Japanese, Galician, German, Dutch, and French. The Spanish is almost done, and there are others still under way that I'm not even bothering to list here.

(Yes, by the way, some of those translations are available in high-quality commercial paper versions, and I have copies of them at home. Commercial activity is perfectly compatible with non-restrictive distribution models, as we have pointed out before.)

So... all this for a book on open source software collaboration? Really? What does this tell us?
Well, let's look at a contrasting example.

The author Hans Günther Adler (published as "H.G. Adler") died in 1988 having produced what are widely accepted as some of the core works of Holocaust literature in German. Very few of his works have been translated into English, but recently one, the novel Panorama, was published in English and was widely reviewed.

A look at two of the reviews shows why here at QuestionCopyright.org we consider reframing the public conversation around copyright to be our primary mission. Both reviewers — obviously intelligent, obviously in agreement about Adler's significance, and writing for two of the most influential literary publications in the English language — comment on the shameful absence of Adler translations in English, yet collapse into a curious kind of passive voice when it comes to the reasons for that absence.

First, Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times:

Every so often, a book shocks you into realizing just how much effort and sheer luck was required to get it into your hands. "Panorama" was the first novel written by H.G. Adler, a German-speaking Jewish intellectual from Prague who survived a labor camp in Bohemia, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and a particularly hellish underground slave-labor camp called Langenstein, near Buchenwald. Adler wrote the first draft in less than two weeks in 1948... He wound up in England, but couldn't find anyone willing to publish the book until 1968, 20 years and two drafts later. The book is coming out in English for the first time only now.
It's hard to fathom why we had to wait so long. ... [Adler] is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Only three of his books have been translated: a historical work, "Jews in Germany"; a novel called "The Journey"; and now, "Panorama." That American and British readers have had such limited access to Adler's writing and thought for so long is, as the eminent scholar of modern German literature Peter Demetz has written, "one of the great intellectual scandals of our time." [emphasis added]

 — "A Vanished World. Scenes from the narrator's past are illuminated in H.G. Adler's first novel, appearing only now in English."
by Judith Shulevitz
New York Times Book Review, 30 January 2011

And this from Ruth Franklin writing for the New Yorker:

...Hermann Broch wrote that the book ["Theresienstadt 1941-1945"] would become the standard work on the subject, and that Adler's "cool and precise method not only grasps all the essential details but manages further to indicate the extent of the horror in an extremely vivid form." (The book was published in Germany in 1955 and quickly became a touchstone in German Holocaust studies, but it has never been translated into English.) [emphasis added]

 — "The Long View: A rediscovered master of Holocaust writing."
by Ruth Franklin
New Yorker, 31 January 2011

Now, to be fair, Shulevitz and Franklin were writing reviews of Adler's work itself, not analyses of why those works have been so little translated into English. Yet it is striking that both choose to comment on the absence of translations, at some length, and yet they don't speculate on the reasons at all. They merely describe the situation and express regret, as though it were bad weather. There is no outrage or frustration at the fact that the reason we don't have those translations is simply that they have been suppressed before they could be started.

I'm not even going to put qualifiers like "probably" or "likely" before that. It should be treated as a finding of fact, at this point. If my books — my little tomes aimed a small sub-demographic of the software development world — get translated multiple times from English into languages with smaller readerships, then there is simply no way that H.G. Adler's much more important books, on a much more important topic, would not have been translated from German into English already, if only anyone (or more importantly, any group) who had the ambition to do so had been free to. English and German have a huge overlap in terms of people fluent in both languages, and there is wide interest in Holocaust studies among speakers of both languages. Furthermore, there are non-profit and state funding sources that would have gladly supported the work. That happened even with mine, for example: the Dutch translation was published in book form by SURFnet, who paid the translators to guarantee completion. It would be incomprehensible if funding could be found for that but somehow not for Adler translations.

The fact that the reason for the lack of Adler translations — and the lack of translations for other important works — is not immediately understood by all to be copyright restrictions points a glaring weakness in public debate about copyright. Right now, translators can't translate if they don't secure the rights first, and since the default stance of copyright is that you don't have those rights unless someone explicitly gives them to you, most potential translators give up without even trying. Or more likely, they never even think of trying, because they have become habituated to the permission-based culture. The process of merely tracking down whom to ask for permission is daunting enough, never mind the time-consuming and uncertain negotiations that ensue once you find them.

It is no wonder that so many worthy works remain untranslated, given these obstacles. But it is a wonder that we continue to hide our eyes from the reason why, even as it stares us in the face.


Thanks, Karl, for letting me copy!

Dungeons and Dragons should be Public Domain

Really, I think it's a shame that a few have a monopoly over Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.  While it seems to be a good idea for everyone, it does leave some Memes undeveloped for 4e.  In other words, certain scenarios can only be developed for Pathfinder and not D&D.

What a tragedy, what a shame, for you guys who play 4e.  For you see, I kinda like psions.  Enough to write an adventure for them.  Without the Players Handbook 3 being in the SRD, you have no chance of seeing certain adventures coming to life for 4e officially except if they are printed by the first party.  But they are in the 3.5 System Reference Document and under the OGL.

But Wizards has a habit of buying the rights right out from under the author.  This is work for Hire.  The author gets paid a paltry sum and really . . . who in their right minds would sell their rights?  Especially on a planet with an Internet?  Boy the internet sure screws things up for publishers, doesn't it?

Dungeons and Dragons shouldn't be owned by a few, but by all the inhabitants of the Earth.   Having a Monopoly over Dungeons and Dragons, even a partial one, is insane.

Comic by Nina Paley and republished under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License.

Monopolies on Culture suck

So, they suck.  After all, if we steal their master copies, they don't have it anymore.  We would be subject to the "thou shalt not steal" law.  However, if we copied their master copy, we both have a copy.  Too bad they want to punch us in the face and put us in jail.

"IF YOU COMPETE WITH MY MONOPOLY I DON'T HAVE IT ANY MORE!" -- WHAM!!

DRM-tards are probably either clueless, stupid, or dumb.  They are supporting a business model that is obsolete in the face of the internet.  Copyright is one law that is made obsolete by the Internet.  Its time more people understand this.

Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, and the Game System License

I believe that Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast owns a complete Intellectual Monopoly over Dungeons and Dragons and the 4th Edition of said game.  This belief is reinforced by comments on Enworld stating that they believe that Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has the 3rd Party Publishers where they want them.

Contrast this with Paizo Publishing and their efforts to keep 3.5 Edition alive and in print with the Pathfinder game.  Paizo Publishing uses the OGL and encourages everyone to do the same.  This means that Paizo Publishing does not have an Intellectual Monopoly over Pathfinder.  But Wizards of the Coast does over Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

The secret is in the license.  Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast are protecting their intellectual monopoly through the enforcement of the Game System License on third party publishers.  Secondly, they do not allow third party publishers to add to the DDI.  Thirdly, to protect their monopolies, they took down the option to buy PDFs of earlier editions of the game.

Now, why would you think they want to do that?  They wanted to protect their monopoly.  However, locking an important piece of gamer culture away.  Possibly forever.  Future generations will be unable to play the games their parents or grandparents played.  And this is bad.

The U.S. Constitution, an inspired Document made to guide and limit the power of the U.S. Government, provides for Copyrights.  Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, the Copyright and Patent Clause (or Patent and Copyright Clause), the Intellectual Property Clause and the Progress Clause, empowers the United States Congress: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

This is really a good thing -- Copyright is supposed to protect the consumer as well as the production.  But how Wizards of the Coast is using their art is not a good thing, and they are hiding behind the Constitution and various Copyright Laws that came into existence since then.  Especially the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.  About a decade ago, Wizards of the Coast embarked on the Open Game License because Ryan Dancey understood what had happened during TSR, inc's stewardship over Dungeons and Dragons under Lorraine Williams.  TSR, inc. attacked their own fans for posting derivative works of the Dungeons and Dragons game.  To prevent this from happening, Ryan Dancey convinced everyone at WotC to open the game up.  Thus the Open Game License was born!

However the license was a dismal failure.  Not because of the license itself.  But because of WotC itself.  They hardly, if ever, used the license.  WotC kept their own toys to themselves while ironically publishing them.  In other words, they never supported the Open Gaming movement themselves.  They just wanted to keep their own intellectual monopoly on everything they produced.  When 4th Edition was released, I saw the writing on the wall and never bought into the new system.

Wizards of the Coast fears the Open Gaming Movement they inspired.  They also fear the Public Domain, since they believe in intellectual "property" rights.  Such a stance, however, is in line with the Big Six media companies -- one of which is the Walt Disney Company.  Content, information, CULTURE, should be free.  Books, DVDs, Computers, Film Prints, and Concert Performances should not be free.

People should be able to build on the Dungeons and Dragons game and other open games, adding to our culture and enriching the culture base.  Dungeons and Dragons the game, in what ever incarnation, should be free.

So I propose that Copyright should be limited to physical media of distribution -- Books, computers, DVDs, CDs, Film Prints, and Concerts.  And not to the culture contained within.  All information should be released into the public domain for Artistic Expression and Advancement of the Arts; but the containers they are contained in should be restricted by copyright.  Copyright should be a publisher's right to reproduce all culture in a PHYSICAL form.  Culture should be free and in the domain of the public.  The public has the Unalienable Right to produce derivative works on all culture.  No culture should be locked up by Big Media companies.  If it's physical, there should be a copyright or printer's right ("printer's right, I love that!").  If it's energy, or if it exists as 1s and 0s and is transmitted by laser, airwave, sound, or analog communication -- then copyright should not apply.

 Copyright is bad.  Printers' Rights -- the Right to reproduce culture in a physical form -- is good.  Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is doing a very bad thing by enforcing their Intellectual Monopoly.  Lets abolish this and give Artist's the right to endorse a publisher to publish their work on the Internet, in books, on film, or whatever.  Artists create by deriving their work on what has come before, not by creating out of whole cloth.  Therefore, I urge everyone who reads this blog to send a letter to Wizards of the Coast and tell them in no uncertain terms that their Intellectual Monopoly over all editions of Dungeons and Dragons is bad for the gaming community, bad for artists, and bad for the world at large.

If they don't listen, boycott them and buy from 3rd party publishers only.  Or buy from Paizo and send a letter to Paizo that you support the Open Gaming Movement by patronizing them and their products.