WJHU Radio

WJHU radio supports the copyleft movement. To put it bluntly, copyright law as it stands now is broken. As a radio station, we keep a very close eye on the music industry, and have seen from the inside how copyright law is being manipulated. Currently, the myriad of laws pertaining to copyright in the U.S. creates a landscape that inhibits rather than fosters creativity. As Lawrence Lessig describes it, current copyright law creates a “culture of permission”, where it is required of any artist, wanting to use any work, to ask for permission first. This alone wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that no resources are given to the artist to help hir find out who the rights holder of any given work is. There is no national database of copyrights, there is a corpus of arcane, barely intelligible and incredible vague law which usually requires legal experts to comprehend, and above it all: there are extreme penalties for failing to comply (we’re looking at you, RIAA).

So what should we do? First of all, us here at WJHU are huge, huge fans of creative commons. Creative Commons seeks to work within the current copyright law, attempting to give resources to those artists seeking permission. Creative Commons currently offers a set of licenses that come with three versions: a human-readable version, a lawyer-readable version and a computer-readable version. The human-readable version allows for the majority of us to know what we are allowed to do with cc licensed work. For instance: everything at WJHU’s blog is licensed under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial-sharealike license (see below and on sidebar). This means that any artist interested in using our work can do so, as long as ze attributes our work, uses it for a non-commercial purpose, and shares hir new work with the same kind of license (this is the share alike part). The lawyer-readable version makes the license conform to the current state of copyright law in the U.S., and the machine-readable version makes it possible for groups like creativecommons.org to keep track of all the cc licensed work out there on the interwebs—creating a searchable archive of works one can clearly use.

Think this stuff doesn’t affect you? Consider this: copyright law is about protecting the unauthorized sharing and reduplication of artists’ works. This model works great for things like books: physical objects that take time to produce, share, and use. However, with the invention of the internet, things have changed. Basically everything you do on the internet involves creating a copy. For instance, when you opened this webpage, you generated a local copy of this page on your computer. If we want copyright to work as it is supposed to—to foster creativity and to protect artists’ rights to the profit of their work—then we need to radically change this model, or we need to radically change the internet. Currently, the latter viewpoint is winning out. Bills are being proposed to put restrictions on the internet—but it’s unrestricted nature if where all of its power comes from. For the first time, a large percentage of the world’s population is connected by a distributed network where any computer (basically) can connect to any other. By ignoring the problems of copyright law, and giving into the desires of content providers attempting to use antiquated models (again, we’re looking at you, RIAA) in the environment of modern technology, we are currently allowing these content providers to change the very way the internet works. If things go the way they want them to, the internet will be a permission-based system: where before any one computer can connect to any other, a user will have to ask a central authority for permission.

Looking for a more in-depth introduction to the copyleft movement? We recommend reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture. Interested in other licenses besides Creative Commons? Look at: the GPL: GNU Public License and the FDL: GNU Free Document License. Interested in taking action? Look at freeculture.org, the Open Rights Group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

WJHU Radio Blog by WJHU Radio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://www.wjhuradio.com/blog.