Too often, the current copyright debate is allowed to be cast soley in terms of the relatively minor issue (no offense intended) of the downloading and trading of music and other entertainment files. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons: First, the issue truely is a much broader one and the recent changes in copyright law and its enforcement go well beyond the question of trading music and related files. And, perhaps more importantly, allowing the copyright issue to be focused on students and entertainment files helps to enable those who are, in fact, attempting to use new copyright laws to restrict a much broader range of discussion and commerce.

Granted, current attempts to restrict the use of copyrighted materials are, in a way, simply an effort to re-fight a battle that was settled long ago and which the entertainment industry lost: consider the old issue of whether the purchaser of a music product had the authority to transfer the music purchased from its original medium to a tape cassette to be played in one’s car or on a Walkman (remember those?). By pretending that digital technology is somehow inherently different, the industry is seeking to revisit that old issue of making tapes for personal use. This is fundamentally absurd.

But, along with the old “cassette tape issue” (for lack of a better term), we are also now seeing efforts to attack the basic “fair use” principle of copyright. Copyright law has always recognized the ability of one to quote or republish material in limited amounts on a “fair use” basis, such as quoting one article within another and similar work that required some reproduction of an original work in order to facilitate publicizing or discussing that work. Why should it make a difference if the appropriate fair use quotation is one done in digital or non-digital form? Arguably, quoting a small amount of someone else’s work to discuss it or make some point involving the original work, even when that quotation becomes a digital excerpt of, for example, a movie or TV show on YouTube, is no different than quoting a length of text from a new book within a review or even another book. The issue of such fair use always was, and still should be, limiting the amount of material reproduced from the original work and ensuring appropriate attribution and credit to the original author. The current attack on copyright use seems to frequently attack such fair use of materials simply because the quotation is taking place in a digital medium. This makes no sense at all and can only serve to restrict free discussion.

Lastly, perhaps a bit off-point, but always a pet-peeve of mine, is the increasing use of copyright to turn public materials – such as government documents or other material and research produced under government jurisdiction and with taxpayer funding – into private materials that the public can only gain access to by paying fees to some private publisher. This sort of think seems to be happening with increasing frequency and seems to me to be a tragic perversion of the notion of copyright. In essense, materials produced by public organizations at the public’s expense, become converted into private documents that the public can often only access by fee – in essense paying a second time for that which it has already paid once.

For the above reasons and more, I would suggest that “Students for Free Culture” is too limiting a name for an organization that is taking on an issue of consequence to a far broader group than just students. Perhaps it is too late to be commenting on the name change, but hopefully the organization will be able to remember that it’s fundamental work goes well beyond the interests of just current students.

-Danny.