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Sooner Boomer pointed out:

I just read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. It's about infinite copyright. Story seems rather appropriate.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/...

And it's worth noting that Spider deliberately chose to copyright Melancholy Elephants in the public domain.

It's free to read - and it will stay that way, permanently ...

I just read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. It's about infinite copyright. Story seems rather appropriate.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/...

Off the top of my head:

• Time Travelers: Strictly Cash
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
• Callahan's Place
• Callahan's Con
• Callahan's Key

And then Callahan's Lady and The Lady Slings The Blues (Booze?), which are about a different main cast of characters. I'm sure I missed a few, but there's a list here.

His collaborations with his wife are pretty good, too. He's probably my favorite sci-fi author, or at least in a 3-way tie with Heinlein and Asimov.

It might even benefit society in the end to have ever-increasing copyright terms, if it keeps the GPL strong. We talk about losing our shared cultural history if we can't reuse copyrighted material but most of that was shit anyway and if we just let it fade maybe we can create something new.

Until the owner of copyright in a decades-old "shit anyway" work sues a later author for accidental copyright infringement, as I mentioned earlier. The looming threat of such a lawsuit may discourage people from attempting to "create something new." See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

Before any "original thinking" indoctrination, I think that the young inventors of the world need to be introduced to the "Melancholy Elephants" http://www.spiderrobinson.com/... - there are Billions of educated people who have come before you, and independently developing an idea is far different from developing an original idea that _should be_ eligible for protection as intellectual property.

nice story on this topic

Here's a story that I wish had served SF's goal "not to predict the future, but to prevent it":

Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson

...but then again, if a significant percentage of politicians read Spider Robinson (or a significant percentage of Robinson fans went into politics), the world would be a very different place.

One of many excellent sci-fi books by Spider Robinson.

How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film?

Some media have particular contributors that legislation designates as "authors", such as the film's director. (Source) And in practice, films tend to be derivative works, which bring in copyrights licensed from its screenwriter and the composer of its score.

Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated?

This is a moot point until resuscitation from cryogenic sleep becomes confirmed. Walt Disney was cremated, not frozen.

And what happens if people stop dying?

Then you get a situation like that of the short story "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson, where influential authors go public with the fact that they fear accidentally infringing.

That isn't "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson, is it?

Or turning this around, for instance, why do you have to pay rent for a house?

So why do exclusive rights to an invention last 20 years, to a work of authorship last 95, and to land last forever? Why shouldn't the Shakespeare estate still be getting royalties? Any defense of property rights must answer these.

Some folks think the tragedy of the commons or other such metaphors justify property ownership being generally good for increasing average welfare, but some do not.

For example, some folks recognize a concept of tragedy of the anticommons, in which an author or inventor lacks access to underlying property on which to base his own property, and this lack of access impedes the progress of science and useful arts. Once all 106 million possible melodies are copyrighted, how will anybody be able to write a song anymore? Consider the short story "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

couldn't an argument be made that artists are now forced to create entirely new non derivative works if they don't want to license the older ones?

Eventually authors will run out of distinct works to create. See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

In the diatonic scale, there are seven distinct intervals between pitches, and rhythm can be approximated as either a short or long time from one note to the next. This leaves fourteen possibilities for each note but the last, as the last note has no next note to make an interval or duration meaningful, or 14^(n - 1) distinct melodies of length n. But a song was deemed an infringement for having matched eight notes (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case). This sets n = 8, or 14^7 - 105 million distinct melodies. There are already far more people than that on this planet.

"Melancholy Elephants" is a 1983 short story that attempts to paint a dystopian future caused by the success and extension of copyright.

You might want to read this story - http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html. About just what you said.

It's not so clear cut -- if the shape makes a big difference (40% fuel saving) then, if patents would be a sane system, no. But as patents are only a bit more broken than "democracy" in USA, then yes.

It's not like I can't buy Abidas shoes already that look very much the same like the Adidas ones. If I buy them I'm at fault myself. If Abidas started using the Adidas name, then it shouldn't be legal. But it would become a completely different case before.

It's put only a bit further than patenting a colour, the difference is, most people intuitively know that the amount of colours is limited. They don't think that the amount of shapes is limited, it's huge for any shapes, it's large for functional ones, but it's not infinite: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

More and more, I keep remembering Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

Yes, I know that deals mainly with copyright, but the points about the damaging effects of intellectual property protectionism is still relevant. Besides, these days, the main differences between patents and copyright are mainly that one costs more money and effort to file for while the other is implicit.

> but at least be original and don't ...

We live in the internet age. You present a high bar.

When I can google the term "Faux news" and the second link is the news network being lampooned, I don't find it so far off the mark.

Be irritated by the wordplay all you like. But see how apropos the rest of us find it, first.

"Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

Then it's time to trot out Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants", which was thoughtfully released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

Share and enjoy.

so let them make ACTA as draconian as the morons want. who fucking cares?

If we allow copyright owners' power to expand unbridled, imagine not being able to create your own works for fear that they will be too similar to a work controlled by an incumbent publisher. Or imagine not being able to buy a home PC because all the PC makers have switched to making cryptographically locked-down appliances (like the iPad) for fear of contributory infringement liability. Only professional software developers working for established companies are eligible to buy PCs.

probably the starshipsofa reading of spider robinsons melancoly elephants.

the text:
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

the podcast:
http://www.starshipsofa.com/20090923/aural-delights-no-101-spider-robinson/

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

Is well worth a read:

Melancholy Elephants

Spider Robinson wrote a story about what infinite copyright might do to the human race: Melancholy Elephants.

Systems like this would allow people with no artistic talent of their own to strip-mine other artists' creative space.

Late to the thread, anyway here is the obligatory read concerning copyrights (short read, 1.5 pages): Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. Basically, to protect all the artists some must be disadvantaged. The some fight tooth and nail to prevent this. Being disadvantaged is having your work enter the public domain. The "all" who are protected are the artists of today, tomorrow, and forever who get to use ideas to resurrect, reinvent, or just plain re-do. Give all artists these protections and all of us in the wider society benefit, thrive, and grow.

Hooray! Now we can all stagnate. See: Melancholy Elephants but instead of standard writing, apply it to programming writing.

You do realize that patent length has been extended only once in this country, and that to comply with the rest of the world?

Hooray! Now we can all stagnate. See: Melancholy Elephants but instead of standard writing, apply it to programming writing. From a comment in: This Story (which I'm in too ;): "To protect all artists you must disadvantage some. Those some rarely see the logic." which leads to: "Its a horrible future where the copyright maximalist dream (copyright forever and ever) is near at hand, and is finally shown to be a nightmare. The "some" artists that are disadvantaged are the ones who cannot profit from their works in a reasonable time period and refuse to cope with the markets. The Vast Majority who are protected are the Other artists of today and the infinite future, protecting their freedom to innovate, rebuild and even reinvent without some ancient monopoly power looming in the shadows to spank them and call them thieves." Software patents are basically "copyright" for ideas so all of this applies. Now, I'm not saying software patents shouldn't exist but rather in the context of stagnation especially with the pace of development that they should be much shorter than they are now.

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. This is the best-written argument I've seen against non-expiring copyrights (and, by extension, copyrights of inanely long duration).

There are a couple problems with writing, recording, and self-publishing your own album:

• How do you promote it? The major labels have a lock on MTV, FM radio, and XM radio, the traditional ways to discover popular music.

I'm karma-whoring with this post, but the question must be asked--what does MTV have to do with music?

They haven't played music videos this decade so far as I can tell. They may have had some input once, but that time is long since past. No one turns on MTV expecting to hear music any more. You'd have more luck finding new music via podcast or from one of the few internet radio stations still able to afford the MAFIAA's highway robbery.

• How do you distribute it to people who don't have high-speed Internet access? The major labels have a lock on Walmart* and Best Buy, and some genres (such as country music) would appear to be more popular among people who live in areas where dial-up is the fastest (miles from the closest DSLAM, and no cable TV available).

If you're self-published, then you have to work the podcast circuit, the myspace music scene, sell what you can at shows along with t-shirts, etc. Its more difficult and you may never get to live like an RIAA star, but at least you know what you make is yours and your fans like your music, not your publicist. ;)

Besides, those guys who live like that on the RIAA's dime are really just living on fool's gold--all the money they're spending is a loan at incredible interest that they only hope they can pay off before their contract is up. Many of those artists end up heavily in debt to the MAFIAA and for every star you know who makes it, there are bunches of whom die penniless. There's a reason why the Rolling Stones go on tour every so many years you know... The money doesn't last and there's no pension so its off to the studio and onwards for another "good bye" tour...

• How do you plan to avoid or defend copyright lawsuits in case part of your song happens to coincidentally match the hook of a song that was played on the radio? Compare Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.

You don't. You couldn't afford the lawsuit any way--the only ones who get anything out of a lawsuit like that are the lawyers. Besides, nine times out of ten its impossible to know if you've unknowingly recreated a hook or not until someone shows it to you. Read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. Say what you will about the man's politics (I happen to disagree with him on several things) but the man is a flipping prophet when it comes to the issue of copyright law and art. It's only a matter of time before people start blowing their brains out over this kind of stuff.

--bornagainpenguin

Infinite copyrights.... the horror.... the horror....

Won't somebody please think of the elephants?

Which makes little sense from the POV of encouraging publication of new works. Mr Jackson isn't going to write another note and Mr Crichton isn't going to write another word. Nor does increasing copyright terms on pre-existing works.

Of interest is Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, a short story that's about copyright in the post-scarcity future. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

people should have ownership over ideas

I disagree.

Any ideas that I have are, to a considerable (possibly entire) extent, inspired or formed by the ideas that I've been exposed to prior to coming up with "my own" ideas. Really, when you think about it, can any creator take 100% credit for whatever it is they produce? Take philosophy for example, when someone writes up a book with some new philosophical theory, it's guaranteed that the ideas of philosophers going back centuries contributed to the new work.

Maybe the best example is chord progressions and jazz music. A whole pile of great jazz tunes were based on the chord progressions of songs by old timers like Gershwin - jazz artists would take the exact same chords, write new melodies, and improvise great tunes out of them. Imagine though, if copyright law had included chord progressions - jazz music as an art form would likely not exist. And really, why shouldn't chord progressions be copyrighted too? After all, Gershwin came up with some great ones. But the loss to society and culture would have been severe (although nobody would have noticed at the time). And at the same time, Gershwin when he wrote those chords would have been inspired by the musicians of his time that he listened to. So jazz musicians ripped off Gershwin (and other tin pan alley composers), and these guys ripped off previous composers, and society benefited enormously from all of that.

That's something that's all the more apparent today, since something created in one part of the world can be immediately visible worldwide, and won't be forgotten for years. For culture to grow and thrive, you need to be able to rip off, build on, and be inspired by the artists, creators, and inventors that came before you or are your contemporaries. That doesn't happen nowadays.

But the idea itself? You don't deserve to be paid just because you thought about something and put it on paper.

Well, maybe paid a little for putting together previous creators' ideas in a new combination. But in exchange, you have to let other people do the same with yours.


Also, a bizarre but fascinating exploration of perpetual copyright and the future, by Spider Robinson: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

"Melancholy Elephants". http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

"Melancholy Elephants", not "Elephant's Memory".

puts his story about this on the net under a CC license. Read it.

Re: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid. Every artist is influenced by what has gone before. "If I can see further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" applies to art, music, and literature, not just to science.

Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright. Imagine how much poorer we'd all be, how many fewer new devices we'd have, if patents were valid for 95 years? Copyright should be no different.

Anyone not convinced of the harm excessive copyright does to society should read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. It's truly saddening to see the direction all this stuff is going.

While I share your respect for the Founders' vision, the system of copyright we have now is founded in British common law, and in fact harks back to 1662. Copyrights originally carried for 27 years, and currently go for over 100 years. Thomas Jefferson considered 14 years and he was reluctant about even that and was swayed (or more likely, conceded to get a more important concession) by James Madison. Patents originated further back in ancient Greece, around 500BC and originally carried for 1 year but now extend to up to 20 years. Both have been extended to include things not then invented that are far beyond the original scope.

Should every modern presentation of the dramatic arts credit the contribution of Aeschylus? Should each modern electronic inventor credit Julius Edgar Lilienfeld? Maybe. But should some portion of the profits go to them? Probably not. Each was standing on the shoulders of prior giants after all, as are we all, and neither (being dead) would benefit from the cash.

Innovation happens in a climate that encourages or requires it. Perhaps the defining characteristic of Men is that we take the inventions of others and improve them. Each inventor and creator owes a debt to the culture and climate that fostered him or her. That debt is fulfilled when their creation becomes the property of all in the commons from whence a new generation of creator draws from the well and adds their contribution, to profit from for a limited time but ultimately to become part of the common pool again.

The current climate encourages neither business nor innovation. This is a lawyer's paradise where they can make claims of infringements for forgotten claims decades - no, even a whole century - from a prior claim of invention and need prevail only one time in a dozen to reap ridiculous wealth. In the mean time their suits and The duration is being stretched beyond imagining, supported and extended by the wealth of those who support and exploit the inventions of others without inventing, creating, or building anything (NPE). The Crazy Years are truly upon us. I believe there was once a popular author whose histrionic vision included such a period that ended in "the year they hanged the lawyers".

Copyrights and patents have become monsters that must be slain.

Sure, first you reduce every song to a sequence of twelve standard notes. Then you start applying regular expressions to match the patterns, and before long it's meloncholy elephants everywhere.

I strongly recommend that everyone read Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants"; it is a cautionary tale regarding the untrammeled expansion of copyright, as we have seen with the successful efforts of the House of Mouse to keep the earliest depictions of Mickey from falling into the public domain. Imagine what the entertainment industry would be like if the producers of West Side Story could be sued for copyright infringement by the heirs of William Shakespeare for creating a derivative work of his Romeo and Juliet...

Obligatory Melancholy Elephants pointer.

I'm so pleased to see that Spider has posted that on his own site (in addition to it being up at the Baen Free Library), and that it's under a CC-BY-NA-ND license. I spoke to Spider at the Heinlein Centennial back in July in KCMo; he'd been represented as having changed his mind about the ideas it espouses on copyright, and that troubled me.

Apropos of the amount of time he had to think about it walking down a hall from one panel to another (Damn, that was a great weekend), he clarified that he hadn't *reversed* his opinion... but more realized that the question isn't as small as it might appear. (I believe I'm representing his opinion correctly; if not, my apologies).

It's a really great story, though, and exactly on point for this subthread.

Heinlein never had children, with any of his three wives, but he does have a granddaughter, Amy Baxter.

Amy is the reason why Spider Robinson has seen fit to... not to "renounce" his opinion about copyright, embodied in his Hugo-winning short "Melancholy Elephants" (which asserts that eternal copyright would be culturally crippling), but to rethink the stance, and opine that perhaps not all the returns are in -- it was the one question (of 5 or 6) that I had to ask him whenever I finally met him which I did actually get asked at the Centennial.

Check the Sun article

"In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. [...] Now you're lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality."

Now, where did I hear something like that before? Oh, yes: Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Winning Short Story, "The Melancholy Elephants"—

"I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity. There are sixteen billion of us alive, Senator, more than all the people that have ever lived. Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. Do you know what it is like to be a composer these days, Senator?"
"I know a few composers."
"Who are still working?"
"Well . . . three of 'em."
"How often do they bring out a new piece?"
Pause. "I would say once every five years on the average. Hmmm. Never thought of it before, but--"
" Did you know that at present two out of every five copyright submissions to the Music Division are rejected on the first computer search?"
The old man's face had stopped registering surprise, other than for histrionic purposes, more than a century before; nonetheless, she knew she had rocked him. "No, I did not."
"Why would you know? Who would talk about it? But it is a fact nonetheless. Another fact is that, when the increase in number of working composers is taken into account, the rate of submissions to the Copyright Office is decreasing significantly. There are more composers than ever, but their individual productivity is declining. Who is the most popular composer alive?"
"Uh . . . I suppose that Vachandra fellow."
"Correct. He has been working for a little over fifty years. If you began now to play every note he ever wrote, in succession, you would be done in twelve hours. Wagner wrote well over sixty hours of music--the Ring alone runs twenty-one hours. The Beatles--essentially two composers--produced over twelve hours of original music in less than ten years. Why were the greats of yesteryear so much more prolific?
"There were more enjoyable permutations of eighty-eight notes for them to find."

Sir Elton John's musical talent may be argued either way, but it doesn't change that he still is an Ignorant Idiot.

This short story was linked to an article yesterday in a discussion on perpetual copyright - I found it thought provoking: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants. html

I encourage people to read Spider Robinson's short story Melancholy Elephants (winner of the Hugo Award for best short story in 1983), where he presents what perpetual copyright would do to human culture. Think for a minute; how many different pleasing combinations of musical notes are there? Not just how many combinations of notes, but how many of them sound musical to the human ear? Imagine what it would be like if every piece of music that someone would want to listen to is already under perpetual copyright, if no new music can appear because all the pleasing combinations of notes are already taken? Legal precedents from copyright suits have already killed the premise that the copyright protects the arrangement of words, not the idea behind them. West Side Story was a well-done remake of Romeo and Juliet, but it was possible only because Romeo and Juliet was in the public domain. A. E. van Vogt sued the producers of the movie Alien for infringing on the copyright on a story he'd written some forty years earlier. The number of good story ideas is limited; once they've all been written and perpetual copyright prevents those themes from ever being used again, what happens?

for this. His Answer won the Hugo for best short-short story in 1983. It is three pages long and worth the read. He makes it available "for free" on his website. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants. html.

Spider Robinson is the author of the "Calahan's Crosstime Saloon" series which inspired the "alt.callahan's" usenet newsgroup.

The Hugo, as most slashdotters are probably well aware is a major fan-voted award for excellence in science fiction and fantasy related literature and art. The Hugo is awarded in several categories each year at the Wold Science Fiction Convention.http://www.worldcon.org/

Note that I am Not Mr. Robinson!
(just a fan)

A better metaphor: http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/bountyhunt ers.htm
and an apropos short story: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants. html