Au Revoir, Microsoft – We Thought We Knew Ye (original) (raw)

Our incredible coalition of more than 550 companies and creative individuals recently lost our first member since our inception seven years ago – Microsoft.

It was, of course, an honor to have them with us, but it was also a source of hope. In an era of creative decimation perpetrated by the world's biggest technology companies, one of their very biggest made a point of joining us to stand up for copyright.

But then, just like that, they were gone, the message requesting removal sent along by their team earlier this month. Their reasoning? We published a blog post critiquing the miserable copyright record of one Pamela Samuelson, new Board Chair at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Confused and hurt, we did some digging, and discovered that Samuelson and Microsoft have a long history together, going at least as far back as 2005, when Microsoft gifted a whopping $1 million to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley. At the time, that donation established two yearly faculty research projects at the Clinic along with an annual "Microsoft Fellow in Law Technology."

Two years later, Samuelson would publish a paper defending the company in the lawsuit "Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp," wherein Microsoft was accused of copying a speech encoder claimed by one of AT&T's patents. The case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, and Microsoft would emerge victorious. They continue to support the Samuelson Clinic to this day.

Which is all to say, we get it, Microsoft.

But before you're gone for good, let us make one last plea. Samuelson may well be a lovely person with a kind and tender heart. We have no idea. All we have are the facts outlined in our blog – a long and painful history of siding with companies like Google in their quest to weaken copyright protections so that rampant infringement can continue on their platforms unabated.

It's important that you understand that when you get Samuelson's back, you are simultaneously turning your back on the core copyright industries, which employ more than 5.7 million individuals and contribute more than $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy – individuals, we might add, who don't just produce the films, television shows, video games, books, and music recordings you know and love, but who design the software that make companies like yours tick.

As one of the world's most innovative companies, Microsoft, you should know better than anyone that copyright is the fuel of innovation in this country, the assurance that innovators will be compensated for doing their important work. From this perspective, your relationship with Pamela Samuelson is ultimately a kind of self-sabotage, an attack on the very values that have helped your company thrive.

We're sad to see you go, Microsoft, but we're not going anywhere. We'll keep fighting this fight until every last creative is paid fairly for their work in the digital age. And we hope that one day soon, you’ll rejoin us.