Judaism, Free Culture, and the Open Siddur Project
JT | 08/24/2009
“As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.”
So says cultural environmentalist and thought leader, Lawrence Lessig in his book entitled Free Culture. Lessig is an integral part to the copyleft and creative commons movements–legal and social agendas bent on reviewing and renovating the copyright laws that companies like Disney have lobbied long and hard to put in place.
Free culture is succinctly described as one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way. The free culture movement seeks to develop this culture by promoting four things:
- creativity and innovation;
- communication and free expression;
- public access to knowledge;
- and citizens’ civil liberties.
(Hat Tip to Freeculture.org for the pithy definition!)
Which of course leads bubbies across the world to ask…”Is free culture good for the Jews?”
Aharon Varady, the mind behind the Open Siddur Project, would turn the question on its head, “Have all those rights reserved by copyright law been good for the Jews?”
According to Varady, copyright put a clamp on the free transmission of a lively and vibrant culture that thrived on sharing texts and learning by attribution, as is taught in the Pirkei Avot chapter 6:6, “He who quotes something in the name of the person who said it brings deliverance to the world. For it is said: ‘And Esther said to the King in the name of Mordechai.’ Esther 2:22.”
Varady goes on to say, “It’s important to remember that for most of Jewish history Jews didn’t have copyright law. Jewish discourse was preserved and disseminated orally as a gloss on our written tradition. With the introduction of copyright law in 1923, suddenly Jewish publishers initially invested in the dissemination, transmission, and education of Jewish culture, were deputized in the role of gatekeepers and guardians of intellectual property. Tell me how preserving the rights to authors for their lifetime– plus 70 years– aids in the transmission of Torah from one generation to the next? For a living tradition, it doesn’t.”
“Furthermore, the values of pluralism and multiculturalism reflected in the Jewish laws obligating respect and tolerance for diversity between communal minhagim (customs) and nuschaot (prayer traditions) need to re-emphasized at times such as ours when Jewish culture is threatened by homogenization on the one hand and ignorance on the other.”
The Open Siddur Project, lead by Varady and a small cadre of self-taught hackers is both a social network and a digital archive of public domain prayer materials. As a work in progress it is already starting to ruffle the feathers of old-school publishers who have cornered the market on traditional prayer materials.
Varady hopes his free and open platform for crafting new siddurim reaches “creative Jews inspired by the substance and real diversity of historical and contemporary Jewish practice but who are only interested to the extent that they can actively engage this legacy — a legacy that they’ve heard over and over again is their inheritance. If the Open Siddur Project is doing anything radical it is asking Jews who love their siddur how they would improve it — and then giving them the tools to do so.”
Initiatives like the Open Siddur Project are natural allies with the Tagged Tanakh as both ventures seek to aggregate Jewish content for personal and communal purposes. Providing access to central Jewish texts to an ever-widening constituency of interested people lay at the heart of both web applications. Although, the Tagged Tanakh relies on works that are copyrighted (specifically, JPS’ translation of the Hebrew Bible), we hope to make user contributed comments licensed under creative commons, enabling everyone to take and build on those comments while ensuring a chain of attribution to the original author.
Only a few players exist in the Jewish free culture scene and we require both creative and financial capital. Show your support for the Tagged Tanakh by throwing in a dime to help contribute to the digital future of Judaism. The best way to support the Open Siddur Project is by actively contributing to the project as a volunteer developer, researcher, transcriber, translator, artist, or commentator.
History of Jewish copyright law
Thanks for calling attention to Mr. Varady’s project, which is interesting indeed.
However, if he was suggesting that Jewish books began to interact with copyright law in the 20th century, that claim is not correct.
Rather, copyright protection was already a raging issue in halakhah (Jewish law) in the 16th century. Early printing-press publishers were making investments in collating and editing manuscripts, and in working out page layout and alignment issues — only to see other publishers immediately reprint the same book with a fraction of the original cost. Thus the lack of copyright protection reportedly was reducing the incentive for sound initial scholarship and careful craftsmanship.
Thanks for the plug :-) The
Thanks for the plug :-)
The correction above is an important one. Copyright has been around for a long time. Nothing even happened in 1923 itself. The 1923 public-domain cutoff is a result of the Copyright Act of 1976, which increased the term of copyrights to author’s life+70 years (or 95 years for corporations), from a previous maximum of 56 years from publication (1 28-year term+another upon renewal).
From the Jewish perspective, the situation is also a bit more complicated than simply an attribution requirement. It can be argued that the “attribution requirement” is less about a modern notion of “intellectual property” than about maintaining an accurate line of tradition. There’s some interesting and contradictory midrash halacha about this (compare BT Megillah 15a to Midrash Tanhuma, Parshat Bemidbar 22 and Tosefta Bava Kamma 7:3).
In Rabbinic culture, at least since the 16th century, an analogue to copyright developed in parallel to secular copyright. The origin can be traced back to a publishing dispute about an edition of the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah (Tshuvot Rema 10); A Jew’s contract with a non-Jewish publisher fell through, leading him to publish the work on his own. The non-Jewish publisher printed the work anyway and undercut the Jewish publisher’s price. The case was brought before R. Moshe Isserles (the Rema). Among the reasons for deciding in favor of the Jew were that the work of the non-Jewish publisher wasn’t checked for errors, and that the publication violated the prohibition of “hasagat gevul” (unfair business competition). Because the Rema had no authority over the non-Jewish publisher - whose side of the case he probably never even heard - he came up with a novel solution: putting a curse and excommunication on any Jew who buys copies of the Rambam from the non-Jewish publisher. That responsum linked the approbation (which is an affirmation that a respected rabbi thinks the text is correct) and assurance of publication rights - a connection which lasted for another 400 years as a large number of Jewish books were published with limited-time bans on publication of the same work by Jews in limited areas, for limited times (usually around 20 years).
Ironically, one of the major goals of these rabbinic bans was preserving culture by allowing printers to make a living off low-volume printed works by giving them limited monopolies on specific works.
The modern concepts of essentially unlimited copyrights (for the purposes of any cultural work developed today, 2-3 generations will pass before it enters the public domain, barring any additional retroactive extensions), and even exceptions based around concepts like the “public domain” seemed to develop in parallel with the secular law equivalents.
small correction
“ith the introduction of copyright law in 1923” is not factually correct. Copyright law as we know it today traces back to the Statute of Annne of 1709 which in turn replaced the 1557 monopoly granted to the Stationer’s Company. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatuteofAnne and follow links for more information. Perhaps the editor wanted to reference the current cutoff date for works entering the Public Domain in the United States.
very profound! i wish that
very profound! i wish that more people would see things like this.