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Bob Cox has written a clear dissection of the AP vs. Cadenhead uproar that everyone should read carefully. It's not the case of Evil Giant versus the Blogosphere that some of the more hysterical responses have assumed. More like bumbling giant versus bumbling aggregator.

In a New York Times op-ed piece that is so bizarre that it almost seems a Swiftian modest proposal, author Mark Helprin argues for permanent copyright, suggesting that a creative work should forever belong to heirs and not to the culture from which it was born.

He wants the government (at the expense of taxpayers) to enforce this monopoly in perpetuity, arguing that a written work is the equivalent of real estate. But he conveniently ignores the fact that real estate is taxable for the public good, while so-called "intellectual property" is not. And I shudder to imagine the legal nightmares that would ensue. Imagine Samuel Copland having to track down all the possible heirs of stray ex-Shakers to license the folk themes he hijacked for "Appalachian Spring."

Be careful what you wish for.

Perhaps "intellectual property" should be taxed. Property taxation would be one model. Another would be a value-added (oh, the irony) tax on the layers of bloodsuckers who surround artists and musicians. Such taxes would not only shift a tax burden onto the shoulders of some giant corporations, copyright farms and patent trolls, but also perhaps force some untended works into the public domain.

This is a good time to point to a video that explains current copyright laws ... in the voices of characters from the animations of the Disney Company, which of course built its empire by on the public domain world of fairy tales.

Update: Lawrence Lessig has organized a wiki-based effort to explain why Helprin is wrong.

The blogs are abuzz this morning with the news that CNN has decided to allow unrestricted reuse of the televised New Hampshire presidential primary debates. It's the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons. Much of the commentary repeats the claim that CNN is releasing the video under a Creative Commons license, but the announcement makes no such claim, rather using the language "without restrictions."

Both John Edwards and Barack Obama previously had asked that future debates be licensed under a Creative Commons license, apparently reacting to (MS)NBC's hoarding of video from the South Carolina debate of Democratic contenders.

The problem with Creative Commons is that it isn't a license, but rather a confusing family of related licenses, some of which have ill-defined restrictions -- notably "noncommercial." In this world in which everyone can be a publisher, and everyone can paste ad-network code into a website template, what is commercial and what is not? "No restrictions" is much a better policy for the debate video.

Lost in the knee-jerk anti-MSM reaction to the recent Belgian copyright case was a distribution-rights development that could be more important in the long run: ACAP, the Automated Content Access Protocol. It's an initiative to define a machine-readable "industry standard to enable the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate information relating to permissions for access and use of that content."

The project is being driven by traditional publishers, mostly in Europe, which probably taints it in the minds of many. But the aims are not at odds with the Creative Commons, which says its goal is "enabling the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works." Both groups support the idea that a creator of content should be able to encourage usage under limited terms. Creative Commons in fact has about a dozen alternative licenses setting various restrictions on content reuse.

The problem is that there is no standard way of saying, for example, "you may read/index/link to this item but you may not repurpose it into your own website" or "you may republish this, but only without alteration and only in a noncommercial context" in a way that computers can understand. ACAP aims to develop such a standard, building on preexisting technologies.

The ACAP project is expected to deliver a standard by November of next year, and will involve not only publishers but at least one search engine company in the planning process. If it achieves its goals, the outcome will not be a wrestling match between content publishers and developers of new network services, but rather the framework for partnership without misunderstandings, confrontations and lawsuits.

The anti-MSM reaction on the net to the Belgian court ruling against Google News has been predictably hysterical and boils down to a few completely mistaken points:

• Google is a search engine. Google has become a publisher, and Google's activities as a publisher are the ones that are at issue here. Google's search system was not the issue in the Belgian ruling.
• Newspaper publishers are stupid and don't understand basics of the Internet like robots.txt. Nonsense. Everybody knows about robots.txt and about its shortcomings. The so-called robot exclusion standard (theoretically) forbids spiders from visiting pages. It can't encode licensing terms for spidered content. This is why the World Association of Newspapers is proposing a richer alternative called Automated Content Access Protocol.
• Google is sending valuable traffic to publishers, and squaring off against Google is self-destructive. This is not relevant to the question of whether Google's repurposing practices amount to fair use or thievery. But it also isn't automatically true. Publishers benefit from some sorts of Google listings and not from others. Many publishers have a business model predicated entirely on service to a geographically focused community and derive little benefit (and often great expense) from Google-driven traffic. And, of course, publishers suffer when the new summary pages of Google News take away the audience that otherwise would have gone to the publishers' content on their own sites.
• Google is good and MSM is evil. If you think that, you probably haven't read any of Google's one-sided terms-of-service documents or examined Google's collaboration with censors. Google snatches content at will and republishes it, but has this to say about your reuse: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service." Maybe we should just cut-and-paste that into our TOS documents.

I can't read Flemish, so I don't know what the order published on the front of Google Belgium says, but I can read the English-language summary (PDF) published at ChillingEffects.org.

It contains these words:

"Considering that the expert Mr. GOLVERS, who had as particular assignment to describe how press articles are presented and the interactivity between the visitor and the web site of Google News, concludes that 'Google News must be considered to be an information portal and not a search engine'; ...

"... as soon as the article can no longer be seen on the site of the Belgian newspaper publisher, it is possible to obtain the contents via the 'Cached' hyperlink which then goes back to the contents of the article that Google has registered in the 'cached' memory of the gigantic data base which Google keeps within its enormous number of servers; ..."

I'm not eager to see lawsuits against search engines as a primary tool for resolving this issue, but it seems to me that the Belgian ruling is well grounded in the reality of today's Internet. There is a line between fair use and thievery, and it is not Google's to define through unilateral action.

(Disclosure: I run Google ads on my site. Once in a very long while they send me a check for $100, which my wife forgets to cash.)