I always assume that most of my readership won’t like or care about this stuff, which is why I try to put warnings up front. But really, as far as I know, there are people who enjoy me talking about IP and DRM and CC and copyright reform. Who can tell! Whatever you do, don’t write me about it.

Onward! First there’s this illuminating analogy called DRM Is A Folding Chair, which maybe helps explain why I have such a destructive attitude toward copyright lockdown; if the snow-parking-folding chair situation the author describes had existed at Centre, I know the DBC and I would have made a habit of dumping jars of urine all over those placeholders. Second, and trading accuracy for humor, is Cigarro y Cerveza’s take on cookieright. (Both links via Copyfight, which is better when not everything on it is cross-posted to EFF Deep Links.)

My own contribution: Today’s Penny Arcade newspost points out some absurdities we’ve started taking for granted, as brought glaringly to light after some idiots–actually a lot of idiots–took Wednesday’s strip and its newspost seriously. Leaving aside the fact that this is a comic in which the two protagonists regularly kill each other, Tycho latches onto the key point here: we are rapidly accepting a society in which people with lots of money can secure and bind ideas, with little or no benefit to the people who came up with them, and take away all your money and property if you attempt to break those bindings.

He also mentions a lot of legal stuff in which he and the rest of the humans at Penny Arcade are involved, about which he’s not allowed to talk. This is not uncommon news, but it’s not terribly common either, so I’ll fill in further: a while back, PA produced a book called “Penny Arcade: Year One,” which was pretty much what it sounded like–digitally magnified prints of 72-dpi copies of their very first comics, with some commentary. Everybody bought it, including me; it looked like a great step for webcomics; then they never brought out another book, despite thunderous demand. If you read Penny Arcade, you probably already know this.

What you may not know is that KiwE Publishing, the print-on-demand company through which they produced the books, had a better idea of what they were getting than the PA guys did. This was before PA had any legal or business counsel–they were still selling a full site-month of ads for a tenth of what that was worth, shit like that, and so they tried to understand the contract themselves and then signed it. In return, they received metaphorical splintered broomsticks in their metaphorical you-know-wheres.

KiwE got, with that contract, the exclusive commercial-printing rights for the first five years of Penny Arcade comics. Once Tycho and Gabe understood what the demand for their books was like, and that KiwE was a shitty way to print them, they wanted those rights back. Ha ha! KiwE wasn’t about to give up that gold mine. In fact, I’m willing to bet they tried to get a percentage of PA’s ad sales, since one could interpret web-publishing them and selling ads as a commercial printing. Thus legal wrangling, et cetera, and here we are five years later with no more PA books.

(I should add that I know all this only fifth-hand, through interweb osmosis; feel free to correct me if you have better intel.)

Anyway, the situation’s not that different from what happens between musicians and RIAA member labels every day. Tycho and Gabe should be proud. They’re practically rock stars.

What’s most interesting to me about the situation is that such ripoffs can exist only under the behemoth that is today’s full copyright. Had the PA guys originally chosen to release their works under, say, a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, any exclusivity clauses KiwE had tried to sneak in would have been invalid to begin with. Of course, this wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, since CC wasn’t founded yet, but I think it’s a point that needs making.

(One strong indication that they might have chosen a CC license: if you’ve been reading PA for a long time, you may remember The Bench, a PA-sponsored site which let anybody download Photoshop files with images of the characters and make their own “open-source” Penny Arcade comics–or, actually, any comics at all. The Bench even hosted them for free.)

The situation also could have been avoided with better legal counsel, but then putting some text on your web page is considerably easier and cheaper than hiring a lawyer.

And yes, under that license, some other company could conceivably have downloaded a bunch of PA comics, printed them up, bootlegged them and kept all the profit, legally. So what? Anybody who wants can already read any PA comic they want for free, and it’s unlikely there would have been much of an audience for a PA book produced by anyone other than PA. (How would they market it, anyway? Buy ads on PA’s own site?) This is the genius of loose licensing and web publishing: there’s no incentive to rip off work that’s already free, and yet, if people like it, they will still buy hard copies from its creators.