HIstorian rock star Howard Zinn

People’s historian Howard Zinn has given permission to the folks at History Is A Weapon to put his classic A People’s History Of The United States, online, but that hasn’t stopped HarperCollins from chasing after the website’s developers with threats of a lawsuit for doing so. Last month HIAW published its response to the publishing giant.

While HarperCollins claims both they and the author have not given permission, but the person writing the Cease & Desist order didn’t seem to check her or his facts with Zinn, who had met the HIAW crew in advance and and also gave positive feedback after seeing it online. Download your archived copy here (while supplies last).

The online copy is far from an identical experience to the dead trees version . The site creators scanned the book’s some 650 pages and coded it via hand to correct scanning mistakes, missing some here and there. A lawsuit seems a little ridiculous. The site developers have said they’ll take it offline if and when they ever are asked to do so by Zinn or his family, so HarperCollins could quickly ascertain whether permission was given.

One of the great things about the text is all the ways in which you can get it these days.There are public performances of it, posters, radio programs and lesson plans based on it. An online version seems like a natural progression for something that indeed belongs to the people. For scads of reasons why it’s better to publishin your print book online and give it away for free, you can read pretty much any forward to a book by Cory Doctorow (here’s one now), but we can dispense with the bulk of them that have to do with helping the humans and focus on the one HarperCollins is interested in: money. As publishing giant Tim O’Reilly asserts: it’s not piracy that costs sales, but obscurity. 37 Signals offers an online version of its book Getting Real to sell copies of that book as well as its other one, Rework.

A People’s History of the United States has achieved cult status that any publishing house should be clamoring for. Part of the price of cult status is that you give up a certain degree of control. The advantage is that the community forms a self-creating market and your book is sold to each member who sees it as a point of honor to have and give out to others. HarperCollins should see the book for the national treasure that it is, do away with the copyright and offer it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license where ever there’s a market for it, and with an attribution-only license in parts of the world where there may not yet be a market and get the book translated quickly and efficiently by people in other countries who could turn it into a DIY economic stepping stone.

How much better to share the ideas carried in this book by turning it over to the people themselves?

READ: A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn

CHAPTERS:

1. Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

2. Drawing the Color Line

3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

4. Tyranny is Tyranny

5. A Kind of Revolution

6. The Intimately Oppressed

7. As Long As Grass Grows Or Water Runs

8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

10. The Other Civil War

11. Robber Barons And Rebels

12. The Empire and the People

13. The Socialist Challenge

14. War Is the Health of the State

15. Self-help in Hard Times

16. A People’s War?

17. “Or Does It Explode?”

18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

19. Surprises

20. The Seventies: Under Control?

21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus

22. The Unreported Resistance

23. The Clinton Presidency and the Crisis of Democracy

24. The Coming Revolt of the Guards

25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”

Some pissed off DVD watcher really wanted to just get to his Matrix, I guess. Can’t give an attribution here, because I don’t know who did it, but this thing has been floating around the webosphere all day it seems, and I love a good graphical display of an issue. Marketing bloat is to DVDs what software bloat is to Windows.

Alice is also a founding member of the Open Rights Group. While it would be interesting to hear what Channel 4 executives thought about all this, it’s at least good to see it has staff that are up on the use of content in a way that one would hope the BBC would be.

Good snips:

““Piracy” – as done by teenagers, all my friends, pretty much everyone I know, is simply demand where appropriate supply does not exist. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies – in other words, anti-copying, anti-fair use – are also anti-accessibility. They attempt to block and restrict, and they fail every time. Every single time. To be accessible, work needs to be available, always and to everyone. No delineations, no restrictions: it’s too messy. Too expensive. Too dull.”

And…

“Attention is our scarcest resource. Time ticks on, but there are still and will forever be 24 hours in a day. Attention is everything. We pick out signals from the noise by listening to trusted sources: friends, and favourite authors, bloggers, tweeters, journalists, broadcasters, remixers. Curators, all of them. They spread the word, we investigate, to revel in the shared experience.”

via The Open Rights Group

BoingBoing: Glyn sez, “People accused of breaking copyright over the internet will have their internet connections cut off under tough new laws to be proposed by the UK government today. The decision is noteworthy since it was ruled out by the government’s own Digital Britain report in June as going too far. The Open Rights Group believes the government is breaking its own consultation guidelines by bring in the proposals in the way they have and asks people to write to their MPs.”

Being that this was a public proceeding, lacking any sort of national security concerns and having to do with the common good, I thought this should be a fairly simple process. After all, the footage is openly available on a government website. It’s already been filmed, edited and posted. Getting the raw file should be no big deal. As it turns out, however, UK Parliament keeps about as tight a control on its content as the BBC does an episode of Doctor Who.

The response I got back cautioned me that “The situation relating to the use of Proceedings of Parliament on website is very complex.” And while I could freely link to any recording on the Parliament website I wanted to, should I actually choose to host and play a clip anywhere else or combine it with a video project, “this would be possible subject to a number of conditions.”

The Conditions:

1. The recording must be streamed only and not able to be downloaded by visitors to the site in any form.

2. It must not be able to be embedded in third party websites.

3. It must not be shown alongside any form of advertising.

4. It must be used in an informational context and not part of any campaign.

The response also said “Should we be satisfied that these conditions are met, we would be prepared to release the recording, however due to Licensing restrictions we are not able to release the recording until 14 days after the date of (the) hearing.”

If those weren’t enough hurdles, here’s a high jump bar at the end: “The cost for the recording will be £110+VAT for up to 30 Minutes worth of recording and £180+VAT for more than 30 Minutes.” Up to 30 minutes.  My 5-minute request would still come to £126.50 (VAT included). All for a public-record document (video footage).

This is all sort of added insult to the orginal injury: I had wanted to, at the actual hearing in question, video the portion I wanted to use, but the use cameras by attendees was banned.

And don’t get me started on the website’s rubbish accessibility standards, which rules out entire operating systems from showing its footage without jumping through several Microsoft download plugin hoops. Disgraced Labour MP Hazel Blears not so long ago chastised 10 Downing Street for starting to post video content on YouTube, using her now famous, quasi ironic statement: “YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.” YouTube may still not be the perfect open source, mix and remix medium, but it’s a fair deal more open, accessible and easy to use, reuse and republish than what parliament currently allows, which is another closed door on its constituents.

I’d be more willing to stand behind Google’s aggresive appraoch to using content and challenging copyright if Google would remove the idiotic little © from its website.

During a typical daily trolling of the website BoingBoing, I came across the following interesting nugget about the state where I grew up and attended high school:

“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.”

What you say? a government body copyrighting their laws and barring others from publishing them? Is this actually legal? Are Orgeon laws some sort of privately held intellectual property that turns some sort of profit?

Legal or not, it’s happened.

Being that copyright isn’t exactly part of the democratic system of government and that laws in Democracies such as U.S. states are generally thought to be, well, not “owned” by anyone exactly, but belonging to the people, I thought this was strange. However, as many strange things go, it turns out to be true. Both Justia and Public.Resource.Org have been served with cease and desist letters from the Oregon state government demanding that their laws be removed from public view on these websites.

Public.Resource.Org’s outlaw law compiler Carl Malamud wrote:

“Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we’re going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.”

It got me thinking about what the state can actually claim to own. Shouldn’t pretty much anything owned by the state be considered in the commons? If I take a picture of a state park in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, am I violating the state’s rights by displaying the natural beauty of the state’s land without giving it compensation? If another state wants to enact one of Oregon’s more progressive laws, would they be barred from doing so? How does this effect other community-driven public information tools, like Wikidpedia?

I checked out the section of the Oregon State Legislature website where laws are, and as a web designer, I wasn’t too taken with it. Obviously, matters of personal taste are highly subjective. However, framed in one of the tasty pages here at drew3ooo, I think it’s a stunning work of art, and I prefer to be able to look up drinking ages and various age-of-consent prohibitions in the comfort of my own domain name. So, for all of you who don’t want to go slogging through the ugly, weirdly non-centered, image-heavy and non-web standards Oregon legislatures website to find out what it says about pumping your own gasoline or the the access people have to higher education awards while in internment camps, check out the Beaver state’s laws right here on d3.

My spanking new Oregon State Law page