Chris Barton: Corporate posturing shows greed behind needless distortion of copyright

The corruption of copyright marched on last week.

There was more mouthing by Rupert Murdoch against Google and closer to home, a standoff involving television programme listings.

Hybrid Television is thinking it could flout Sky Television's copyright of Prime's programme listings by including them on its TiVo electronic programme guide.

The question at the heart of both disputes is how did copyright become so distorted that corporations now think they should be able to make money from signposts?

The programme listing fiasco is particularly ironic because state broadcaster TVNZ has been plundering from signposts for decades - charging newspapers and magazines for the right to run its listings.

Mad I know - but it's an aberration that TVNZ somehow enjoys because the print media hasn't been united enough to stand up to what can only be described as an entirely wasteful, unproductive rort.

All our other television stations provide their listings for free which various print media run as a service to readers. Think about it - listings are essentially advertising to get viewers.

These days listings in digital form fly through the air as part of the broadcast signal and are captured by software in digital video recorders which transform them into electronic programme guides.

Logically, this is service information which should be free to all viewers to help them make their viewing choices. But such is the distortion of copyright that broadcasters regard these listings as intellectual property that can only be provided to consumers if the broadcasters strike deals with one another to allow it.

Hence the standoff at present with both Prime and Maori TV refusing to OK the use of their listings on Hybrid Television's TiVo recorder.

The irony of it all is that Hybrid is a third-owned by TVNZ. Bizarrely, Hybrid is thinking the unthinkable - plucking listing data out of the free-to-air broadcast and using it in its electronic programme guide without Prime's or Maori TV's permission.

Go for it, I say and bring on the inevitable court case to show up the farce. Ditto for the print media. Stop paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to TVNZ for no good purpose and let the state-funded broadcaster bring the legal action.

There is similar nonsense going on in the Murdoch stoush with Google. The media baron's team have worked themselves up into quite a lather about sites that aggregate the news - at various times this year describing them as "content kleptomaniacs", "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet", "parasites,", "vampires" and "giant copyright scofflaws that steal the news".

Which is of course complete bollocks. There's no stealing going on, Google simply provides extremely useful signposts to content.

As Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post points out: "Of course, any site can shut down the indexing of its content by Google any time it wants with a simple 'disallow' in its robots.txt file." But why would you, don't you want more readers?

Copyright law has always allowed fair use quoting with attribution - the very essence of scholarship and academic endeavour which has been democratised for all time by the internet and the hyperlink.

But such is Murdoch's greed that he now wants to make the signposts pay.

For more on the contortion of copyright laws to line the pockets of corporate rights holders at the expense of the public and the artists who create the work, I thoroughly recommend "© kiwiright" (www.vimeo.com/7675598). It's a brilliant 12-minute documentary, employing a fair-use argument, inter-cut with interviews of New Zealand lawmakers and technologists and Disney clips, that defines and critiques copyright law.

Kiwiright documents last year's battle against section 92A - the guilt-upon-accusation clause - of our Copyright Amendment Act. It features Juha Saarinen, the journalist who in 2003 tracked down and exposed New Zealand spam king Shane Atkinson.

Saarinen notes a sinister connection between efforts to strengthen our copyright laws and the free trade agreement negotiations with America.

Not surprisingly it's happening again - secret dealings with Americans on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), just as we're reopening free trade talks with the United States. internetNZ senior research fellow Jonathon Penney writing in Computerworld points out ACTA is actually a new international copyright treaty.

But the bigger worry is that it's "a mass export of the American legislative model - a global version of the US's unpopular Digital Millennium Copyright Act".

Among ACTA's draconian proposals is a "notice and takedown" system where content must be removed by internet providers without proof of actual infringement; and a "three strikes" policy where three allegations of copyright infringement would lead to mandatory internet account termination.

As Saarinen puts it: "Frisking the data streams of every single internet user regularly to see if any copyrighted material is in transit goes against the grain of any notion of freedom of thought and speech and existing laws, but that could be the reality."