Seven Chinese posts have been posted to the Blawgdog from December 3rd to December 13th, 2009. Here are the brief one-sentence abstracts for the English readers’ reference:

• A broadcast station = A Karaoke Shop?
  This essay roughly compared the standard of remuneration of using music recordings in the broadcast and TV programs (promulgated by the State Council, and will be enforced since 1 Jan 2010) and the standard of royalty to the Karaoke shops (provided by the state administration of copyright). It seems the former is very low. And it seems the state owned enterprises (all broadcast and TV Stations) always get more institutional benifits than the private enterprises (most Karaoke Shops are of private) in the entertaimet industry.
• Fighting Google Unarmed?
  This article has been translated into English, click here.
• Answer Shizhao: why searching Books will infringe the copyright but searching webpages will not?
  Shizhao is the top cordinator of the Wikipedia Chinese. He asked the question at BlawgDog. As for “why searching books will infringe the copyright”, some of the answers are translated into English at here. As for the webpage searching, I pointed out that actually even (1) searching the webpages; (2) providing the cached pages may infringe the copyright under Chinese copyright law.
• It Is Contrary to the Right Way of the Internet: On Article 36 of the drafting China’s Tort Law
  China is drafting a Bill of Tort Law. In its exposure draft, Art. 36 burdens the ISPs joint liability to all kinds of torts (with a safe harbour of notice -nd-take-down). I strongly opposed this provision in this short comment.
• The Function of the Domain Name Registration Informations: Protect Private Rights but not Aid Social Control.
  The information provided by the registrants for domain name registration are originally functioned as a facilitation of protecting either the rights in trademark or the right of the domain name holders. However, some Chinese administration made the mistake and thought they can be used to aid the social control.
• Academic Paper: The Review and Reflection of the History of China’s Regulations on Domain Names.
  My 2005 paper and had never been published at Blawgdog. I republish it because the new round of  Internet controlling compaign in China is focusing on the domain names. Some of my arguments in the paper are still useful for the current situation.
• Ploughing the way to the Civil Society: the Qualification of Registrating .CN
  China actually had never permit the individuals registering .cn domain names. But the customary law and even the dispute resolution had admitted the right of individual .cn holders. Now the customary law encountered the state law when the government swipe the Internet recently in the name of anti-pornography.

A “Map of Internet Encirclement Compaign in China” was released by some Chinese netizens yesterday. It is very interesting and has been switfly spreaded to BBS and weblogs in Chinese Internet sphere.

 

Here is an English translation of the map (click the picture for a better view):

 

[Background] “The Wars of (anti-)Encirclement Compaign” were a series battles between China Communist Party and the KMT‘s Nanjing Gorvernment in 1930s. At the time the CCP established a government in south-central China (mostly in Jiang Xi Province). The KMT’s army tried five times to attack and encircle the territory of CCP’s regime. And The CCP’s Red Army was almost defeated in the Fifth Encirclement War in 1934. The Long March followed the war and rescued CCP and its army.

The leading Chinese websites of BT sharing are shutting down since the beginning of December. BTChina (btchina.net), one of the most famous such sites, is totally shut down. And the rumour that its webmaster has been arrested was once widely spreaded. Yesterday, the webmaster of BTChina left a very brief message at the webpage:

It says:

I have to clarify that … the Radio, Film and Television Administration noticed me BTChina should be closed because the Register Serial Number of the Website (RSNW) is canceled by the Ministry of Industry and information Technology (MIIT). The reason of cancelling the Register Serial Number is BTCHINA has no “License for Dissemination of Audio-Visual Programs through Information Network” (LDAV). I am safe (not arrested). And this proved the online rumours are not reliable, especifically the news.

Not merely BTChina, many other well-known websites sharing  BT seeds are shut down since last week (read the story in Chinese at here). It is apparently that a campaign of cracking down online piracy has been kicked off by some Chinese central government officers, just following the compaign of shutting down pornographic wap sites for mobile phones.

Please, read the above story from a social-legal perspective. The compaign is obviously aiming at piracy. But the reason of shutting down those websites is not that they don’t have copyright license, but that they don’t have an administrative license of online dissemination of audio-visual programs issued by the government.

Although China has an Administrative License Law to restrict the pervasive application of it, the wide usage of licensing system can be parallel to the technical measures of GFW as the pillars of the Internet censorship. It is apparently that in China, proving a website “has no adminitrative license” is far easier than proving the content of that website “has no copyright license”. When Chinese officers say “the government administers the Internet according to the law”, they are saying mostly the licensing regulations, like the LDAV and the RSNW in the above story. In this circumstance, the copyright owners’ best strategy of fighting piracy may not be filing the case to court, but reporting the authority that the targeted website does not obtain the license of disseminating Audio-Visual programs (or license of disseminating other contents).

I personally don’t like such situation. But it is there, lively. That’s why I say the free culture in China should not merely be the freedom of amateur using copyrighted works, but also be the freedom of disseminating information. This is the premise of discussing copyright issues. I mean, either in a soceity that the freedom of dissemination exist or in a soceity that it does not exist, the copyright law may survive. But the “copyright paradox” in these two contexts should be various.

This is the outline of my talk at Berkman Fellow’s Hour on 17 Nov. 2009. Needs improvement, just post for commentaries.

 

1. Copyright protection is justified in a utilitarian way in the US. Contrary to many people’s granted thought, my study find that although it is deeply affected by the Germeneric-japanese form of civil code system, China’s current copyright law is also based on utilitarian philosophy.

 

2. Pros and cons of the utilitarian justification to the copyright law, as well as some of cyberspace law.

Advantage: that’s the sourse of various thinking to the legal reform.
Disadvantage: when the understandings of “progress” (US Constitution Art. 8; China’s Constitution Art. 19, 20, 47, Copyright Law Art. 1) in different countries conflict with each other, conflicts of the law will be inrooted and hard to be coherent.

 

3. When the US is a giant but China is a dawf in the matters of either economy or civilization, US can impose its understanding of “progress” and the corresponding detailed copyright law to China, as it has been for many years. While if China becomes a giant also, what will happen? No matter how do people celebrate it or demonize it based upon different values/ideologies, the unique “socialist regime with Chinese characteristics” is an existence, and has developed a more and more complicated legal system.

 

4. The first formal head-on confrontation happened at the WTO dispute on the provision of denying copyright protection to the “illegal works” (either content-illegal or procedure-unlawful) in China’s copyright act.

 

5. There is a trend of the isolation of the Internet. The isolated and respectively utilitarianized legal system may enlarge the differences of copyright/information law among countris in future. (example (1) firewalled but flourishing Chinese “Intranet”; example (2) differentiated treatment to the books in the latest Google book settlement because of the needs to comply with the territorial copyright law).

 

6. What would be a uniform legal justification for the future reformed copyright law (or law on “creation in commons”)? Or, in what level, that justification is possiblly uniformed in such a utilitarian world?

November 15th, 2009, at Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2009 in Egypt, United Nations (UN) security took down banner / poster (as follows) of the forthcoming book Access Controlled: The Shaping of the Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2010).

See Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-kxYt2LwKc

Oct 23 2009, Harvard Law School Hauser Hall 104, Free Culture Research Workshop 09. It is the first Berkman formal event I participated since I arrvied in Boston on 20 Oct. Here are some key sentences at the conference.

 

Terry Fisher: (quotes Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself) “Both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it.”

[Note: This can be an excellent overall brief to the conference]

 

 

Lessig: tech today makes possible explosion of non-market production. technology is reviving our earlier sense of how we can produce culture outside of the market paradigm. “professional sex” (production for market) vs “amateur sex” (remix and other free culture production)…  My job as a policy maker is to make sure that both professional and amateur culture can survive…We are not communists…The market isn’t bad, therefore free isn’t inherently good.
 

 

[Note: it always happens in multi-discipline conferences: diverse backgrounds triggered the discussion on the definition of the topics. What is “free culture”?]

 

Lessig: “Strongly resist the idea that Free Culture is Creative Commons. It is not. That would be a failure for CC.”

Lessig: “Free Culture is not just non-market. It is hybrid relationships, it is one strategy to use to continue these relationships.”

 

Gabriella Coleman: “Maybe we can differentiate in the following way: Free Culture vs free culture (explicit vs aggregate dispersed phenomenon).”

I would say “Free Culture” vs “free culture” vs “(free) culture”. – Someone
[Note: forget who said that. while when I searching for this, i found another interesting post by Doc Searls (different context and different contents, but still worth reading)]

 

Mike Linksvayer: Lots of gnashing of teeth re what free culture is and relevance. Stop gnashing and quantify.
 

Aaron Shaw: “we are moving into the Freudian unconscious of the Free Culture movement…the terrain we don’t want to think about it.

 

Giorgos Cheliotis:  “I’d quote: If you want to be wildly interdisciplinary, you must be epistemologically humble.”

 

[Donnie Note: fortunately, ppls shifted to other topics other than the definition…]

 

Lessig: “If Free Culture is innate it doesn’t hurt to educate for it..:) but if it isn’t innate, we should educate to create it.”

Edward Harran: “We need to move from a profit-driven economy to a values-driven economy.”

 

Mike Linksvayer: Need to have case studies of failed free culture platforms.
 

Clay Shirky: “Failure is a feature, not a bug.”

[Donnie note: Free Culture as a movement, or as a practice, it is a problem]

 

Mayo Fuster Morell suggests that free culture may be considered as a social movement because it challenges established production systems.

Thomas Haigh: “Are we researching Free Culture practices or the movement?”

 

Philippe Aigrain: “We must research the practices if we are to research the movement. Only the global landscape gives you a picture.

 

Elizabeth Stark: “Where does the movement end and the research begin?”

 

Kristin Eschenfelder: I think the movement is helpful in consciousness raising that starts people asking questions.

 

Donnie Dong [that’s me]: If free culture has to be a global movement, it must be expanded from sth. about IP to the free dissemination of the information. The reason is: in some late-developed countries like China, the things hindering the “free culture” are far beyond the intellectual property system. On the contrary, the CC’s promotion in China improved people’s consciousness of copyright protection, interestingly. 

 

lessig “We should think about ways to study interesting cultural difference.”

 

“Free Culture can be re-appropriated in each cultural context. Grows very rapidly when there is a challenge. It’s post-modern.”

 

medialabprado Is Twitter part of the Free Culture movement?

 

Mayo Fuster Morell: Facebook is “non-market” in term of users “contributions without monetary retribution”, but not in terms of Facebook company profit.

 

[Donnie’s Note: the following voices are very essential]

 

Herkko Hietanen: “Is this a research or an advocacy workshop? Why are there no dissenting voices around Free Culture and Creative Commons? Are here all Larry’s fans.”

 

“As an academician, I am not interested in the ‘social movement’.”

 

[Donnie’s Note: see the references shared by the attenders via twitter]

 

BiellaColeman http://www.kimberlychristen.com/ —> works on the limits of FC in the context of indigenous groups

Michael Brown: Who Owns Native Culture? Overview of the issues with cultural secrecy:

http://www.williams.edu/go/native/

concept of ‘recursive public’:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Recursive_Public

“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_economy

The trouble of Free Riding
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/tblee/trouble-free-riding 

Open Educational Resource:
http://www.oercommons.org/

Digital Labor Conference Nov. 12-14 New York

http://digitallabor.org/

Another talk by Lessig:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCyaF-Umod0

 

Some script from: http://twitter.com/metamemette
Photo from (sorry Jude use your copyrighted work): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jyew/