Library display

Sony Betamax videocassette tape
The Betamax cassette tape may be obsolete, but it played a role in one of the most important technology cases in recent memory.

In its January, 1984 decision in Sony v. Universal City Studios (also known as the Betamax ruling) the U.S. Supreme Court allowed VCRs to be sold to consumers. The court held that products having substantial non-infringing uses are legal, even if they can be used to infringe copyrights. Decided by a single vote, the Betamax ruling spurred creativity and new technology, providing innovators with the certainty they need to bring new products to market. Products such as DVD and "PVR" recorders (like TiVo) and portable music players (like the iPod) clearly owe their existence to this decision.

Morpheus pin commemorating the MGM v. Grokster oral arguments
This pin was handed out by Morpheus employees to the people camping in front of the Supreme Court in hopes of getting in to see the oral arguments in MGM Studios v. Grokster last March.

In June, 2005, the Supreme court handed down their decision in MGM v. Grokster. MGM Studios wanted makers of filesharing technology (such as Morpheus) to be held liable for their users' copyright infringements, despite the holding in Sony that manufacturers could not be held liable so long as their technology was capable of "substantial non-infringing uses." The Grokster court did not overturn the Sony decision, but it did add a new theory of liability: Producers of technology who promote the ease of infringing on copyrights can be sued for "inducing" copyright infringement committed by their users. The new standard is criticized for being excessively vague; it remains to be seen whether the Grokster decision will chill innovation and prevent new technology from reaching the market.

MP3.com "Digital Automatic Music" CD
At its peak, MP3.com delivered over 4 million MP3 fomatted audio files per day to a customer base of 25 million registered users. All of this content was legal, provided largely by independent musicians who wanted a quick and easy way to get their music out to the public, while getting paid for it. Towards the end, MP3.com started doing "print-on-demand" audio CDs (such as the one on display), producing a CD whenever a customer purchased one. This allowed even artists with a miniscule following to ship CDs to their handful of fans.

MP3.com was sued out of existence after it made the mistake of providing a "music locker" service for its users, "My.MP3.com." This service allowed you to register your personal CDs simply by placing them in your CD-ROM drive, proving your ownership to MP3.com. You could then download mp3's of the songs on your CDs to any computer connected to the internet, allowing you to take your CD collection with you wherever you went.

Since consumers could only listen online to music they already proved they owned the company saw this as a great opportunity for revenue by allowing fans to access their own music online. The record industry did not see it that way and sued MP3.com, claiming that the service constituted unauthorized duplication and promoted copyright infringement. MP3.com lost badly in UMG Recordings v. MP3.com in May 2000, and was so weakened that it could not survive the dot-com bust.

The Wind Done Gone
In April 2001, a federal judge blocked the publishing of The Wind Done Gone -- a retelling of the 1936 saga Gone With The Wind from the perspective of a slave, a half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara. The estate of Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With The Wind, sued on the grounds that the book violated copyright law. The author, Alice Randall, responded that the new book was a parody of and commentary upon the original:

"Gone With The Wind - the book, the movie, the costumes, the quips - has reached the status of myth in our culture. It is more powerful than history because it is better known than history. Unfortunately, Gone With The Wind is an inaccurate portrait of Southern history. It's a South without miscegnation, without whippings, without families sold apart, without free blacks striving for their education, without Booker T Washington and Frederick Douglas. Gone With The Wind depicts a South that never ever existed."

Fortunately, the 11th Circuit lifted the injunction and ruled that The Wind Done Gone was in fact a parody, and therefore falls under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law. Fair uses are instances in which it is legal to use and build upon a copyrighted work without the permission of the author. Fair use protects freedom of of speech from abuses of copyright law, especially when it is necessary to use a previous work in order to critique it or to criticize the society that created it.

Hacking the Xbox
"Get Hacking the Xbox before Microsoft does!"

This hands-on guide to hacking was canceled by the original publisher out of fear of being sued under the Digital Milennium Copyright Act of 1998. The DMCA has several provisions designed to make it legally impossible to circumvent "copy protection" or "Digital Rights Management" systems.

DRM amounts to a set of electronic locks on the music, software or other data that you buy, which limit what you are allowed to do with that data. An electronic book locked down with DRM can prevent you from copying and pasting from the file or printing selections from the book. DRM also has the side effect of preventing you from using your computer or electronics as you would like, e.g. running an alternative operating system such as Linux on your Xbox gaming console. Unfortunately, the DMCA not only makes it illegal to circumvent "copy protections," but also to provide circumvention tools or even to tell people how to get around DRM, threatening security researchers and technology journalists everywhere.

Hacking the Xbox and its author Andrew "bunnie" Huang eventually found a more courageous publisher in No Starch Press, and Microsoft ultimately never filed suit against Huang, presumably wishing to avoid a public relations debacle.

After The Rain
Maybe I'll write this once it arrives at the library...

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
Free Culture Swarthmore was inspired by the concepts in this book. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig suggests that as our society evolves into an information society, we must choose whether that information will be free for others to modify and build upon or locked down by corporations and copyright. Lessig is a proponent of more flexible copyright licenses such as those provided by his organization Creative Commons.

Creative Commons licenses allow you to control which of your rights as creator you would like to make available to the public. For example, you might decide that others can make derivative works or that they can copy your work as long as they give you attribution.

When released by Penguin Books in 2004, Free Culture became the first Creative-Commons-licensed book ever released by a major publisher.

Freedom of Expression® by Kembrew McLeod
The title of this book comes from a media prank where McLeod literally trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression" as a comment on how intellectual property law is increasingly used to limit expression in American society. When AT