Amazon, Kindle and Bible copyrights

The ever-strange Washington Times carries commentary on Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. Fred Reed raises the question about the problems of selling e-book content that is in the public domain. While it’s within Amazon’s business model to sell an “e” edition of a work published by a company, what happens when one charges for a work in the public domain?

From the article:

Kindle is close to being mass marketable. However, the economics seem hazardous for Amazon. The company makes money, legitimately enough, by selling physical books that are out of copyright. If you want your child to read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Amazon will sell you a copy. I don’t know what proportion of a bookseller’s income derives from the sale of books in the public domain, but it has to be considerable — the Bible, the classics and so on.

Reed glosses over the concept that the Bible is in the public domain. It is not. Particular translations of the Bible have copyrights applied to them. The (New) Revised Standard Version is held in copyright by the National Council of Churches. The English Standard Version is held by a division of Good News Publishers. The New American Bible by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Specific publishings of study Bibles are also held in copyright. My HarperCollins Study Bible is the NRSV. The Biblical text is copyright by the NCC and the support material held by HaperCollins, itself a holding of News Corporation.

In the US, only the King James Version is held in the public domain. For the UK, the King James Version is held in perpetual Crown Copyright and not public domain. I’m no copyright expert and won’t touch this one with a ten-foot pole.
So, don’t worry about Amazon raking in money based on Kindle “e” editions of the Bible. They will be paying out big bucks to the publishers and holding companies for the right to distribute particular translations and editions.

Scientology, Christianity and open technologies

ABC News carries this report of Sunday’s protest against the Phoenix Church of Scientology. Lately Scientology has been the subject of a great deal of ridicule. Much of this is deserved but the attention has been more focused so far in 2008. Anti-scientology protesters throw the word “cult” and scientologists throw the word “terrorist” back.

One of the core definitions of a cult is its focus on secrecy and hidden knowledge. Scientology fits this definition and then some, as did the gnostic cults and the cults of Isis and Mithras in past generations.

This good summary in Diogenes Allen’s Spiritual Theology (p. 41):

Civic religion formed the public worship of gentile people. But alongside civic religion there flourished many mystery cults, whose central feature was the promise of life after death. Each cult claimed to provide its adherents with a secret knowledge (gnosis) that was given only to its members. We know little of these cults, but to turn from one of these to Christianity was to turn from secret rituals to what was freely shared, namely, knowledge of Jesus Christ as savior. Rituals and incantations were not a substitute for moral and spiritual regeneration.

We know so little of these cults primarily because knowledge about them was kept hidden. When the adherents died, so did the secrets. This method might be an acceptable one when considering the recipe for Chartreuse, but it’s a lousy way to have your religion endure the ages.

The transition from mystery cults to the openness and freedom of Christianity changed the world. The desire to publish the Bible widely and to distribute the writing of early bishops and doctors aided the widespread adoption of the codex and later the book.

Christianity stands apart from, say, Mithras, Isis and Scientology on these grounds. All believers should have equal access to Scriptures and theology. As a result Christians ought to have a commitment to technologies such as free software and policies such as net neutrality and copyright reform that further these principles.

H.R. 4137 passes; House to confer with Senate

The EFF blog reports that the House passed H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act. The act has admirable aims of reducing the cost of higher education, expanding Pell grants and retaining the Upward Bound program. Also attached to the bill is Section 494, “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention.” It’s explicit aim is the elimination of peer-to-peer file sharing, particularly copyrighted materials. You can get HR 4137 from the House website here in PDF format.

The amendment to the original COA Act is 485(a)(1)(P) is the new subparagraph:

“institutional policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including—

(i) an annual disclosure that explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, may subject the students to civil and criminal liabilities; a summary of the penalties for violation of Federal copyright laws;

(iii) a description of the institution’s policies with respect to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, including disciplinary actions that are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution’s information technology system; and

(iv) a description of actions that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on the institution’s information technology system.’’

In order to police digital copyright infringement, all network traffic needs surveillance. There’s not a good way to tell if the movie you are uploading is for a film production class or is an illegal copy of Spiderman 3. What’s that email attachment–an mp3 or photos to your parents? To the network, it’s all zeros and ones and should all be watched for possible infringement.

There are two principal side effects of this policy. One, campus networks and computers are made slower through the analysis of all of their traffic. The policy requires more and faster computers and staff to support itself, hardly intuitive for an “affordability” act. Second, students are put at increasing risk. Not only are they presumed guilty and open to constant internet surveillance, they are risk of a triple threat if caught: academic discipline, civil liabilities and criminal liabilities.

This letter from the American Federation of Musicians speaks in favor of the act, specifically for this amendment. The letter repeats the canard, “Musicians may make music for love, but they also must eat and feed their children.” While true, this does not mean that college students should be condemned to constant internet surveillance, especially when students are responsible for only about 15% of digital theft.

My representative, Carol Shea-Porter co-sponsored the bill (gory details here). My question to her and the many others who supported the bill: how does increased capital cost (computers, infrastructure and buildings to house them) and increased staff costs help reduce the enormous financial burden of higher education?

Two-track copyright policy

Yesterday, the Guardian ran Cory Doctorow’s article, “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses.” He distinguishes between business-copyright and folk-copyright. The former is what happens when, for example, a record label negotiates the rights to a song for a particular TV advertisement. One lawyer calls another, writes a contract, money changes hands and the song “Baba O’Reilly” can get used to sell me auto insurance or something.

The idea of folk-copyright pertains to cultural use. The sort of pedestrian usage of a babysitter bringing DVDs to keep her charge occupied, making mix tapes, covering songs in a garage or a bar, or photocopying a comic strip for your cubicle wall.

Nobody calls the lawyers at United Feature Syndicate to ask if they can duplicate yesterday’s Dilbert for hanging the office fridge. What Doctorow advocates is a more descriptive rather than prescriptive copyright law. To describe the situation: on a folk/person-to-person scale, people are sharing copyright material freely. This use is often a cultural exchange (e.g. teenagers learning guitar by playing copyrighted riffs). Cultural exchange simply isn’t going to stop.

Also coming in yesterday is William Patry’s blog post on copyrighted jokes. It’s a thought-provoking angle on Doctorow’s article. It’s one thing to personally compile David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists and publish, distribute and sell them, making oneself a tidy profit. It seems to be another thing to imitate Robin Williams’s jokes on stage. And it’s a third thing to quote Family Guy to my girlfriend.

Among preachers, the practice of a folk-copyright (“cultural exchange”) is routine. In such an oral medium, I do not find offense at someone using an analogy that they lifted out of my preaching. Once a story, an illustration, a sermon is out into the oral sphere, it is free for the taking. Attribution is only a courtesy. This type of folk-copyright has been known in Christian preaching for centuries and serves as a helpful guide for contemporary policy.

Scientology vs. Christianity on copyright

Jonathan Kay, writing for the National Post, muses on one of the differences between Scientology and Christianity (and Islam for that matter). He opines that Scientology, through its litigious copyright enforcement, closes off its primary texts in serious contrasts to Christianity, which keeps its Bible free and open. Further, he says that one of the marks of a “bona fide” faith is the freedom to criticize it.

From the article:

[Officials in the Church of Scientology] have also tried to get Google to exclude anti-Scientology websites from its search results, and used hardball legal tactics to harass, bankrupt and intimidate their critics — many of them disaffected former members. In the United States, the Church of Scientology also has been a staunch backer of draconian copyright legislation. If you want to know whether Scientology qualifies as a “religion” on par with other bona fide faiths, try to imagine the Catholic Church or the Saudi royal family charging people tens of thousands of dollars to learn their religious tenets, and suing anyone who dared republish the Koran™ or Bible™ on the internet.

Read it here.

Copyright and the Biblical Canon

The New Testament is preserved in about 25,000 ancient manuscripts in many languages (principally Greek, but also Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic and others) found all around the Mediterranean. How did we get 25,000 copies of a text, stored in many diverse (off-site) locations, in any number of media (languages)? By rampant copying and duplication.

Even before the advent of duplicating machinery like photocopiers and computers, Christians spread the New Testament text across Europe, Asia and Africa. Not only that, but they did it so well that the text has can generally be considered reliable.

It’s hard to make an appeal to what the Bible says “in the original” when it is made up of thousands of varying manuscripts like this. However, through the exciting and incredibly nerdy science of textual criticism, that’s the endeavor promises to do: a reliable reconstruction from a diverse set of near-duplicates. (Textual criticism’s methods are not essentially different from making computer backups, CRC’s, or diffs.)

Without the freedom to share and the freedom to back up or to copy, there would be no Bible. If the Church in Rome had decided never to make a copy of Paul’s letter or to share it with nearby churches, we would certainly have no record of it today. If Mark decided that Matthew and Luke had to pay exorbitant royalties to make their derivative gospels, Christians would be poorer for it.

It is notable that Christian Gnostics, who focused on keeping their doctrines and teachings secret, had their documents lost, quite literally, to the sands of time. Only 20th century archaeologists have now been able to find their hidden witness.

To be Christian is to owe a debt to forerunners who duplicated and copied freely and without concern. We owe it to them to be interested in the same causes today.

Rick Falkvinge on the Middle Ages, Copyright and the Bible

Both Slashdot and Boing Boing are reporting this interview with Rick Falkvinge. Falkvinge heads up the Swedish Pirate Party, a political party whose only platform is privacy advocacy and copyright reform. I’m not up on his work, but it’s a good introduction.

The interview is good and summarizes his talk “Copyright regime vs. civil liberties.” If you have an hour, watch this! There’s two notes about this talk and the comments on it that I’ll hightlight.

1. At 12:00 minutes into the talk, Falkvinge brings up the recurring metaphor of the Catholic Church vs. the printing press that is so common among anticopyright folks. I appreciate their using Christian history and culture to help support their points, as I think that their hopes are ultimately supported by Christian values.

However, as I have written before, the view of medieval and Christian culture is ultimately impoverished. The Dark Ages and the Medieval period are not one in the same. Christian culture during the middle ages is surprisingly fecund and bottom-up with folk religion and culture giving a great diversity of expression. Contrast Julian of Norwich’s visionary experiences with Danse Macabe artwork, centralized papal authority with decentralized monastic networks, or the differences in worship between Salisbury and Milan for a taste of this diversity.

If anything, it was the centralizing effect of the printing press that clamped down on cultural expressions. Printed Bibles lost on illuminated artwork, one standard Roman Missal was used throughout the continent, and London spelling became standard English throughout the realm. Centralizing technology, supported by restrictive government policies, suppressed medieval cultural diversity and did little to expand it.

That said, he introduces Queen Mary’s royal support for the London Company of Stationers in 1554 and Queen Anne’s Copyright Act of 1709 that I haven’t heard brought up before.

2. This comment on Slashdot bring up a point that I’ve been making, “[Y]ou want to put on a Shakespeare play – better pay his descendants or some rich corporation. You want to read your bible in the church. Not before you hand over some cash.”

Beware the implications for the Bible. Remember that News Corp. ultimately holds HarperCollins and Zondervan, two major Bible publishers. Perhaps they will let copyright concerns slide some, just because it’s the Bible, but I don’t want to hope for special exemption.

Cory Doctorow’s alchemy metaphor and bad history

Cory Doctorow’s talks typically include a metaphor on alchemy. He contrasts alchemy and the Dark Ages to science and the Enlightenment and compares them to the difference between DRM culture and free culture. His metaphor is based on some bad history but making the metaphor more accurate improves his metaphor by paying more attention to our present location in history.

One version of this metaphor was the speech at the Singularity Summit, “Singularity or Dark Age?” At about 3:05 into the speech he says,

For five hundred years the dominant mechanism for doing science was to do it in secret and not share what you’d learned. We call that alchemy and we call the five-hundred-year period the Dark Ages. Every alchemist discovered for himself that drinking mercury was a bad idea and not much technological progress occurred.

One day, an alchemist got the bright idea of publishing his outcomes and sharing his knowledge and that begat the practice that we called the Enlightenment and the technological progress that has flowed from it, and we are today creatures of that decision to publish instead of hoarding knowledge.

The distinction of dark versus light is an attractive rhetorical device. From a historical perspective, however, there is no moment when the Dark Ages easily gave way to the Enlightenment. There simply is no support for referring to two adjacent periods of history in this way.

Generally speaking, the concept of the Dark Ages come from Petrarch, who died in 1374. Since then, this period spans the period from the fall of Rome (ca. 500) up through the Crusades (ca. 1100). Starting and stopping points are debated by scholars, but these brackets are approximate to a century or so.

The Dark Ages are said to end with the beginning of the Middle Ages, marked with the Crusades. When the Crusades began, Europe encountered the Middle East. Usually the sensational violence of this period is highlighted and the intercourse with Islamic thought is neglected. The Crusades offered Europeans access to Greek thought (e.g. Aristotle) preserved through Arabic commentators (e.g. Averroes).

By learning what Islam had known for so long, logic and science came to Europe to usher in not the Enlightenment, but the Middle Ages. Gothic architecture becomes possible and the the University system rises. The Middle Ages is a period of the first universities and hospitals in Europe, providing scholastic thought, humanism and scientific inquiry.

Over time, the cumulative effect of this contact with Islamic thought, joined with the freedom of printing and near-limitless copying, gives rise to the Enlightenment.

The gap between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment spans about five hundred years, rather than the instantaneous movement that Cory suggests. This is not to say that his metaphor is wrong or broken, but it can actually be made better with a fuller look at history.

Could we consider ourselves a part of a Middle Ages, spanning the gap between the alchemical Dark Ages and a knowledgeable Enlightenment? Might we turn to global perspectives as the medievals did in appropriating Islamic thought? Might we seek academic integrity and scientific integrity as they did when establishing universities? Might we be the ones to frame a new world view, relentlessly questioning, as the scholastics did (e.g. Thomas Aquinas)?

Thinking of ourselves as in a Middle Age opens up fruitful metaphors for the work we are doing. Cory’s metaphor for understanding copyright history is a powerful one; only when we understand our moment in that history can we best play our role in it.

Cory Doctorow on the Bible

In 2004 Cory Doctorow spoke to Microsoft on the topic of Digital Rights Management. If you don’t know Cory, run his name through Google Video and watch something of his. Or read bOING bOING. Please do. I’m a superfan and have been catching up on all of his talks lately.

In that talk (video here or transcript here), Cory spun out his excellent talking points in the EFFing lion’s den, Microsoft. This is the oldest talk of his that I’ve seen and it’s always fun to see someone’s presentation skills evolve and his talks get better over time.

There is one analogy that he used that I haven’t heard repeated in his talks since (at least, as far as I know). Cory brought in the Bible. Not using verses as prooftext to make a point, he specifically talks about the changes in thinking about

At 27:25 minutes into the talk, he says,

This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn’t
succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren’t in Church Latin, they weren’t read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn’t represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made
the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for
a new medium pale beside its profligacy.

He returns to the analogy at 30:27 minutes:

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

At 42 minutes or so, a question comes from the audience pointing out that the Luther Bible (in German) and the Gutenberg Bible (in ecclesiastical Latin) are different documents. Cory stands corrected, but his point isn’t finished at all. The language isn’t the issue; the access to the text itself is.

The printing press technology made automatic, cheap and fast what was once manual, expensive and slow. Even more importantly, the technology took away the intermediary of the scribe and the verbal interpreter. In the same way, digital technology is taking away the intermediary of the printer and the footnote commentary.

As Cory says, the technology created something that “didn’t succeed on the axes” that the previous technology depended on. The technology created a new axis and offers a new dimension. For the Reformation, that meant the proliferation of the Word of God. For the Internet, it means the proliferation of words in the computational sense.

For Christians, and especially for Reformed Christians, the propagation of the Word is our prime directive (Matthew 28:18-20). Theologically, the Word of God is Jesus Christ himself (John 1:1-18) and we are called to be agents of his spreading grace. We are also called to spread the Word, which gives us the many, many translations from many, many publishers in many, many languages.

To be true to our theology and to our history, Christians should be interested in the free and unencumbered transmission of words in the literal, computational and theological sense. These principles entail our involvement with free software and looser copyright restrictions.

The NET Bible

The New English Translation (NET) Bible is under copyright, but offers generous provisions for its use. The folks at bible.org were among the first to produce an internet-accessible Bible in 1995 when other publishers seemed fearful to put their translations out there.

Bible.org has an excellent statement about the need for generous copy provisions on Bible translations. An excerpt from their inspiring manifesto:

Bible.org’s ministry objective is to be used by God to mature Christians worldwide. To accomplish this we needed to quote a modern Bible translation in the production of thousands of trustworthy Bible Study resources that could be offered on the Internet for free. We predicted in 1995 that the number of Bible verses quoted in these studies would soon surpass available legal permission limits. We tried for a year, but could not obtain the necessary permissions. Lack of a legal ability to quote the Bible online makes online Bible studies impossible and threatened bible.org’s “Ministry First” model. Quite simply the only way we could secure permission to quote a modern Bible was to sponsor a new translation – the NET Bible. We now want to ensure that other ministries and authors don’t experience the same roadblocks. The NET Bible is not just for bible.org, but for everyone.

You may ask (as we have): “Why not just make the NET Bible public domain? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?” It does solve the permission problem but stifles ministry another way. When a publisher prints a public domain KJV they pay no royalties to anyone, but they still make millions of dollars in revenue – and don’t have to spend any of that money on ministry or charity. We didn’t create the NET Bible to save royalties for such publishers. We think a better approach is to leverage copyright laws to ensure that anyone selling NET Bibles must support ministry.

Link to the Ministry First statement.