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Part Two: Who Owns Ideas?
No existing copyright law -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act included -- has taken shape with the Net and the Web truly in mind. Traditional views of property have involved tangible products, and the DMCA seeks to uphold those traditional views, as manifested in laws designed for the real, not the virtual world.
These old laws have also had much to do with a society's willingness and ability to police itself. Theft is easy to understand, and easy to deal with, when stolen goods can be quantified, and the thief caught and prosecuted. But such concepts pre-date the Internet era. If you loan a CD to a friend who burns himself a copy, have you stolen from the music industry? What if your friend would never have purchased that particular CD anyhow?
Conceptions of property, ownership and value since the eruption of the accidental empire that is the Net, in ways few institutions have begun to consider rationally.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed 16 months ago and now being used to shut down music-sharing Napster sites at colleges across the country, is a classic example of how irrelevant ideas about law and culture are being unthinkingly applied to a completely new reality.
The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. But acquiring movies, music, games or other intellectual property online is so simple, so ubiquitous, that it's become almost instinctive.
From early adolescence, kids lucky enough to be both savvy and connected pass around games, music and movies gathered online. These transactions are virtual, hence not traditionally associated with property. It's often irresistible -- how can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) music lover to refuse to acquire a 1,000-song playlist she couldn't possibly afford to buy in the manner the recording industry prefers to distribute it? Most important, and most troublesome about attempts to reign such informal trading in, is that it's also fun, and social.
Does American society (or the people running the music industry, for that matter) really want to criminalize the passion for diverse forms of music that new technology makes possible? In effect, laws like the DMCA make it a crime -- and a meaningless one at that -- for kids to love and use technology, to access information freely and to share a passion for a particular culture.
Certainly, notions of exposure and punishment no longer apply. No kid in America has been jailed (yet) for downloading free music, though millions have been doing it for years.
Unenforceable laws like traditional copyright restrictions don't promote morality or lawfulness; they undermine them. What kids learn isn't that it's wrong to steal, but that these kinds of laws are antiquated and toothless. Younger Net users have been able to acquire free music and other culture for so long they understandably view it as a right, not a sudden opportunity to steal. People tend to react most intensely to the loss of rights they already have.
They evolve into older kids, college students and adults for whom the personalization of culture - by no means just music - becomes an integral part of their lives, a right conferred by practice, not by law. Millions of younger Americans , online much of their lives, have acquired vast cultural archives, almost akin to individual libraries.
So the Congressional aide, part of an institution responsible for governing issues like this, is demonstrating that he lives in a completely different universe than he's supposedly helping to represent. For him and the lawmaker he works for, the downloading of music is simple theft, in the same way a bank robber commits a crime. But a generation of Net users will never view property that way again. A rational legislature grasping this will would seek laws that reflect the new reality, rather than an outdated one.
The growing number of powerful conglomerates that have increasingly come to dominate culture in recent years don't seem to grasp these new realities about culture and young.
These companies generate billions in revenue not just by selling content, but by controlling it. The notion of free music threatens the way they work -- which is why the DMCA was passed, and why the music industry is spending tens of millions to shut down free music sites on the Web. So we have the escalating spectacle of unthinking industries aggressively alienating and prosecuting their most important customers and future consumers - an inverted, nearly unbelievable reality possible perhaps only on the Internet.
"Piracy" isn't a very accurate term for what amounts to a bloodless file download, so the usual moral inhibitions apparently don't apply. Popular culture and its distribution are being defined so continuously and radically online that laws like the DMCA are almost instantly pointless. College kids who have lost their Napster sites, for example, are already using other software to strike back, with the help of increasingly politicized geeks. Dozens of sites are cropping up in messaging systems and elsewhere on the Web, say music lovers, most of whom are understandably coy about details.
But to see how immutable the spread of culture is, and how it's being constantly re-defined, go to www.strangecompany.org where an organization called Strange Company is creating a new film form called Machinima. Originally derived from modifications made to computer games like Quake, Machinima is a new animation technique that permits animators with little money to create films rich in special effects -- Hollywood-quality movies on college budgets. If the motion picture industry doesn't like open-source software to decrypt DVDs, wait'll they get a load of this.
"That sounds like the kind of thing the entertainment moguls aren't going to want," Hugh Hancock, Strange Company's CEO, messaged me, "for exactly the same reasons [that] they don't want people releasing their work on MP3. Do you think that Machinima could be next, or soon, against the chopping block?"
He can bet on it.
Empowerment is one of the words most over used to describe the effect of the Net, but it's also one of the most apt. Giving people the ability to access vast music archives, to make films, to download games and acquire other kinds of entertainment is a landmark of the Information Age.
Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments. If corporatism has an Achilles heel, it seems to be that it is astonishingly short-sighted, spewing legal warnings, lawsuits and copyright infringement claims and lobbying intensely for legislation to curb the open distribution of software and ideas. Like giant ocean liners, mega corporations and their captains can't maneuver quickly or accurately. They also have a tendency to mow down smaller craft in their path.
Still, it seems increasingly clear that conventional notions about ideas and ownership are doomed. The issue is no longer whether "piracy" is right or wrong, but how long our backwards-looking corporations and politicians will persist in believing they can stop it.
Thomas Jefferson saw this coming centuries ago:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine."
And that was written more than two centuries before the Net. Perhaps the geeks, nerds and kids fighting the culture wars online intuitively grasp more about law and freedom than many of the elders branding them thieves and pirates.
Even as more and more people ask the question "Who Owns Ideas?," the answer becomes obvious: We all do.
This class of patent is most commonly used to register inventions made by the U.S. Government and it is known as Statutory Invention Registration, or SIR. Anyone can apply to receive SIR patent status for a novel invention, and there is only a small one-time fee for this type of patent compared to the larger and periodic fees required to receive and maintain a regular patent. However, statutory patents are only used when the patentee wants to guarantee that no third party will ever be able to claim patent protection for an invention. This makes SIR a very interesting, if currently overlooked, option for protecting open source inventions.
Various people have proposed an opensource prior art database. This would probably work better, because the patent office already looks at it. Others have proposed getting actual patents and assigning them to the Free Software Foundation. But the SIR would be much cheaper. Does anybody know what the fee is? I'm seriously thinking about using this for a project I'm working on.
Excellent idea!
I agree with your assertion that the cost of production is fixed and the cost of distribution is rapidly approaching zero, but only within the domain of established on-line content. Perhaps a better way to describe it is that the incremental variable cost of production is fixed and the incremental cost of distribution is rapidly approaching zero.
The incremental infrastructure required to continue distribution of a given unit of content is vanishingly small. There are already revenue models in place that can compensate this 'last mile' content provider (banner ads, etc).
The problem comes from the fact that the original content provider and the intermediaries who transform the content to this final distributable state also need to get compensated along the way.
This was simple in the days of fiberware and vinylware. The publisher didn't get the content until the author got an advance. The distributor didn't get the product until there was a contractual relationship. The consumer didn't get the product until they paid. The barriers to entry for the consumer effectively limit the volume of piracy. It's easier to buy a book than to use the photocopier. It's easier to buy a cassette tape for the car than to make a copy of a friend's tape or CD.
As was previously pointed out, there is a yield curve describing the decreasing value to the artist, publisher and distributor over time of the work. What author hasn't had something in the remainder bin? Likewise, there is an inverse curve describing how much a consumer is willing to pay. A fan or collector would be willing to pay much more for a signed copy of the first unit off the presses than someone who has never experienced whatever this artist's content is.
These two curves have to intersect at some point. The Industry(ies) want to shift the consumer demand curve so that it intersects the industry yield curve at as high a price and at as early a point in time as possible. I don't think consumers care where the curve lies on the whole. If someone is inclined to buy something early and often, then they don't care if Sony saturation bombs thier media channels with information about the latest and greatest. If someone doesn't really care about new stuff, but is willing to listen if the cost is low enough, then they wait until the industry has moved on to something else hot and the old content is available cheaply.
Likewise, if the cost of pirating is too high relative to the benefits of getting the content earlier, people won't pirate, and will instead pay for the content through 'traditional' channels. However, if it's just stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway, then where is the incentive to the consumer to be a pirate? In the case of disorganized crime, then the Industry can hunt the pirates down and kill them if it's economically worth it to them to do so.
The solution lies somewhere within the realm of ubiqutous micropayments. The snag there is how to insure the reliability of payment while maintaining anonymity. Strong encryption makes this possible, but the will to use (and/or the tolerance of the Amerikan Government for the use of) strong encryption needs to be found alongside of the building of such a micropayments infrastructure.
Cheers,
Rob
I liked the posts on "Ideas are not the same as Expression" and "Private Property" ("... Economic systems derive from the fact that resources are limited.") below. New songs are Expressions, so (making loads of assumptions about capitalist worldviews etc.) it makes some sense to copyright them -- people had to make an effort to create them. OTOH, each CD of a song takes very little effort to create, so doesn't fit into the "scarcity economics" model.
Not that I've got all the answers(!) but how about finding a way to pay people for creating something rather than for getting a (cheap) copy to you? The Street Performer Protocol (previously seen on /., I'm sure) suggests one way to do this: in brief, lots of readers pay authors a tiny advance on their next work. Several unresolved issues, and I don't recall it addressing the question of how an artist becomes "known enough" that people would be willing to make such an advance, but interesting anyway.
As for doing "honest" work as well: I've nothing against people doing all "honest" work or all "creative" work but personally I think I might like to do a bit of both; e.g., work 3-4 days a week and write free software (or whatever) for the other 1-2 days (and however much of my weekend it took up ;-). I suspect (i.e., completely guess ;-) this is how most free software has been written -- people need to make at least enough to live on.
Hugh Greene, q@NOSPAM.tardis.ed.ac.uk
Dude, can we get a copy of your word generator?
"Don't let yourself be persuaded by abusive lame-brained ivory-tower academics who secretly want to nourish repugnant ideologies."
"I have no interest in getting tangled in the rhetoric or dogma that he frequently pushes. The implications of hectoring exclusionism may seem theoretical
"the orthodoxy of obstreperous blackguardism"
"To quote the prophet Isaiah, "Woe to ye who usher in the rule of the Antichrist and the apocalyptic end times". At this point, all I can do is repeat a line from my previous letter: Eccentric warmongers, motivated by either boosterism or a desire to lead a xenophobic life, are eager to help Jon flood this debate through the sluice gates of postmodernist think tanks""
"a large cadre of the worst classes of unsympathetic smut peddlers there are, the results are even more fatuitous. Unenlightened knee-biters speak in order to conceal -- or at least to veil -- their thoughts."
This stuff is great.
Well well well... It would seem that one of either Taco, Hemos or Katz takes offense to being called a shitty-butted fag. But in light of the true being show to us by "The Stuart Report", I think this story actually says a lot.
See, Taco and Hemos have become queers and as such, they are now our enemies who like to get creamy enemas. BURN 'EM ALL!
OpenVMS R00LZ!!!!
thank you.
Banning MP3 is not just about banning piracy. It is about banning the right of new musicians to get their music heard, whether or not a record company will sign them. It is about talented amateurs who will never make a living playing to a niche market being able to get their music out to their audience. I say this because I own several dozen CDs and tapes that were self-produced by the musicians. I personally know several such bands. They are the lucky ones who have been able to find venues to perform in front of their fans. Record companies are scared out of their minds that the next generation of musicians won't need them at all. And they're right.
Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments.
The point you're ignoring is that big corporations are the product of big government; without government subsidies in their various forms (e.g. copyright law, cops, courts, military action against competing nations etc) most of the big corporations today would not exist.
The government-industrial complex, and particularly the government-media complex is the enemy, not corporations in general. Get rid of most of the government, and you don't have to worry about the corporations.
Is it so we'll see more banner ads like fucking Salon and ZDnet does does with their articles? Or are just an ego manaical attention hog and do this to feel more important? Ya know, if you can't post your ENTIRE article all at once, thet's probably because IT ISN'T DONE YET. Wait your fucking turn like everyonw else. Geeeezz.
No sense in spending the initial $16 if you don't have to.
I'm all for it. I read a little bit of it the day they posted (advertized) it on /.,so I'm used to getting it free online. It's my right to read the whole thing at $0.
ok as we have seen, we can't just forget any copyright laws or artists / content providers / inventors will not get due compensation for their work. But we have also seen that current copyright laws are no good to protect creativity, and that the wrong parties profit from them, while the consumers are forced to pay overly high prices. So, how about this: Any idea / creative work is (of course) private property until it has been PUBLISHED in any way. After it has been published, it can be copied freely by consumers, and also re-distributed freely, but NOT for the purpose of making ANY profit (including profit by advertising). The only person who has the right to make profit with the product is the author himself, and of course he can grant this right to anyone else, or sell it. This way he can take part in any CD sales or payed downloads (in the case of music), which should still be a lot if he's good enough. And i think this system could also work for most other types of creative work. What do you think?
A contributor wrote:
the fact that Jefferson wrote a few lines about no one owning an idea is not evidence in any court of law deciding these cases.
Perhaps Jefferson's letter is not "evidence" as defined in, say, the Federal Rules of Evidence, but that doen't mean it's legally irrelevant. In fact, Jefferson's letter was cited by the Supreme Court in an important patent law case, Graham v. John Deere 383 U.S. 1 (1966) at footnote 2. This opinion contains an important dictum about the need for patent law (and hence, by analogy, copyright law) to be governed by its constitutional purpose of promoting the arts by protecting the public domain.
First off, most of my mp3s are burned straight from my cd collection so I don't have to go through the hassle of searching through cds to be able to listen to the song I want to hear. Its much easier to browse digital storage than physical storage. On that note, I do still download some mp3s, probably 15% of my mp3 collection is not 'legal', but I have bought quite a few cds due to the mp3s I downloaded. I use mp3s for the same reason as you do. I do not find this behaviour particularly immoral. However, I think we are the exceptions not the rule. Most people do not buy the cds of artists they like. They JUST download the mp3s.
Media companies must be so transparent and benevolent that people don't ever feel anything but good about them before "piracy" in all its forms will/should stop. *Cheap* "Expressions" would be a start. Fewer cover versions/manufactured acts and no region coding/international delays would be nice too. I think that if you believe in something firmly, instinctively (and especially if others do too) it's definitely worth talking about and putting arguments to people etc. And possibly worth acting upon.. it's sometimes worth a bit of experimentation to see if something's true or not.
I think that the basic problem with all this is that the companies were too slow in figuring out a *fair* way of making music (eg MP3s) available to ppl on the internet. If they realised that some ppl are only every playing the songs on their computer, they would not worry that they had 'lost' revenue. As it is, they could have set up 'super-servers' that catered to all musical tastes with bio's, lyrics etc, and charged a small fee for downloads. The DCMA is primarily about the fact that they couldn't figure out how to do it right, so they do not want to do it at all.
Bah, in the seventies and eighties it were just a few other big powefull conglomerates, but this is nothing new. Also, reading all this I realize I'm quite a bit older then you probably (I can remember the time when the IBM PC did not exist ;-) and I can say that when I was young we copied music as much as people do now. Sure, the quality degrades with each generation, but when you want to have some album, it is very likely that one of the people you know already has it, and you copy it.. use a good tape deck and good tapes and you get a copy that is quite good. If you couldn't find it then you would buy the record... Sure, with internet this just became bigger, but it is *NOT* new.
What is new, and what you seem to be completely confused with is Free Music, which is: Music where the creator and producers decided that you are allowed by THEM to distribute it freely. You might be right that the RIAA is afraid of that, I for one can see many reasons why they would be.
For the rest... ideas, the concept of theft of ideas and interlectual property all predate the internet by far, and tho they have become more important, they are not changed by the internet at all. What is changed is the role they play, The internet is built upon ideas and upon the sharing of ideas. It can only work if everything more or less cooperates, and that wont be the case if you try to keep to much things a secret. To some extend interlectual property is affected by the internet, but more in how it should be managed then the defenition of it itself. So what is interlectual property? in its simplest form it is an idea that was thought up by a person and that is recognized to be that persons idea (ie, that person was the first one known to think up and express the idea). Sometimes it is better that doing something with the idea is the 'owners' exclusive right, sometimes its better if its not. That depends on the idea and on the situation, and doesn't mean that every idea should be free inmediately.
Bottem line, if you take the view you describe on all this, then yo should also not care if people violate the GPL, why should you since whatever restrictions the originator of whatever is ripped of put on it don't seem to botter you.
I can hardly believe that that is really the case.
Anyway, in your confusion you completely skip the main issue. It is that the DCMA grants a creator/distributor the option of putting restrictions on usage, not just on copying/distribution, and it takes away some legal copying that has been taking place as well (tho that is not my main concern here)
This makes it go a step beyond the intention of copyright and is imho the real problem
If you believe you can just copy everything regardless of the copying rights granted to you by the owner of the material then you are voiding much more then the thing you are saying you want to fight, you are for one also destroying the reason why a concept like GPL can work.
There is something you, as well as most of the others here, seem to be missing. When the laws conflict with the culture, it's not going to be the culture that changes!
Once upon a time we had something called PROHIBITION in the United States. This was a period of several years during which IT WAS ILLEGAL TO OWN, SELL, OR DRINK BEER, WINE, OR HARD LIQUOR!
Did this stop anyone from drinking? Not so's you could notice! Most people thought that this law (actually a constitutional amendment) was wrong, so they simply ignored it. Ordinary citizens living near the US borders simply smuggled in what they wanted, while the rest just made their own. Or they bought (totally illegaly) booze that others had made or smuggled in. In fact, the most significant effect of Prohibition was to greatly increase the size and power of the criminal element.
Of course, the government spent a lot of time and money trying to stop this. And they had about as much success as the DEA seems to be having in keeping drugs out of the country, although they didn't spend anywhere near as much.
The same thing seems to be happening with music, and undoubtedly will with movies too. When most of the people are ignoring the law, even if you make it a death-penalty offense to posess an illegal MP3 (and allow instant execution by the apprehending officer) there will never be enough policemen to catch more than a small percentage of the 'criminals'. Plus, if you push enforcement very hard at all, you'll piss off enough people to get the law changed (just like happend with Prohibition).
Absolutely. How many of you honestly justify your support of stealing intellectual property on some sort of ideological basis (being completely honest with yourselves), and how many of you just can't afford to buy all the MP3s and applications and porn that you really want to?
A contributor wrote:
They did, they have, and we now live under it. I reject your burden of proof; you tell me why we should abandon the carefully forged distinction.
No, they didn't; The current copyright and patent laws are not optimal or fair in all their provisions without exception. But it is true that we are stuck with trying to "live" with the results of the lawmakers' failure to produce such a law.
Why should I tell you "why we should abandon the carefully forged distinction" when my earlier post did not even suggest abandoning it ? My point was that it is a mistake to interpret the term "idea" in Jefferson's letter as a technical term from modern copyright jurisprudence. If we do so, we misinterpret Jefferson's meaning. Especially when interpreted in light of Jefferson's other comments on copyright and patent it is clear that his underlying principle is that these monopolies are boulders in the path, temporary exceptions to what Jefferson saw as the natural order of things, an order in which everyone had a right to copy everyone else. Jefferson's use of the word "idea" is not blurry, it is simply different from the way judges and lawyers use the word when referring to a line in modern copyright law between "idea" and "expression".
In fact, if anything is "blurry", it is the precise boundary in modern copyright law between uncopyrightable "idea" and copyrightable "expression". What, for example, is an "idea" in music ? In many cases, (i.e. rules of harmonization) it is, or arises from, "expression" that has been so often copied that it has become "idea". This blurriness is why I would insist on time and scope limitations to copyright even if I had no other reason to. If copyright in "expression" is too broad, or lasts too long, eventually the vague line between "expression" and "ideas" will be drawn in a way that infringes on freedom of thought.
If small companies or individuals cannot protect their ideas, then the big companies who latch on later to these ideas are going to be able to use those ideas to further theirselves in the marketplace, and we will just head towards a society where a few organisations dominate every industry conceivable (or rather, that has been conceived).
p.s. I downloaded some mp3s off mp3.com the other day - and now I'm going to purchase a CD of that piece (Mozart's Requiem) off Amazon, who allowed me to preview the different interpretations of the beautiful Introit by different conductors. I was able to quickly determine which recording I liked best. Brilliant!
p.p.s. To those people who say "but children don't realise that they're pirating other people's property, its the natural thing to do", you're a disgrace. Set an example, and tell them. Make them aware that it is wrong. College students could easily be targetted by universities, and they should be intelligent enough (given that they are at university) to grasp the concept of theivery.
Oh no - we've lost our freedom - they banned the Napster port! (or whatever) - well, even ignoring Katz's arguments for/against "free" music - that's free as in beer, not as in rights btw - its a terrible bandwidth hogger, and here bandwidth costs money (must cost someone in the US, whether the university or telco), and the drain on network capacity will inhibit those trying to use the Internet for legitimate purposes, such as researching their projects, etc. It will hurt more than just the record companies. Universities have as much right to ban it as they do to ban distributed games like Quake.
Okay, after reading all these posts I think one thing MUST be shown and that is that Intellectual Property is NOT property. It is an idea, expression, thought or what have you but NOT a property. There may be time and creative work invested in this but that does not make it a property. It is not something you can pass to another person singularly, you still keep the idea. Once you express it, it becomes public domain, part of the whole human experience. The only thing that can be done with an idea is to control access to it. You may do this to recompensate you for your time and investment or to keep it from others that you don't want to use it. But this is a control that you must erect. Thomas Jefferson understood this and to facilitate the release of this information he instituted the use of copyrights and patents. This way, you eventually gave up ALL control of the idea for ALL time in order to have a government and legal sanction on a temporary control system. This is indisputable fact, and hence IP is NOT property which means that any anologies with such are false! Now what this means is today is still to be contended with. Personally, I think that an artist is not creating work for financial gains, but for artistic purposes. I believe that he can also be supported by the public that utilize his creations. We have public radio and public television where content is mainly paid for by the public that uses it in an altruistic fashion. No, many people, and even most, will not follow this, but if an artist has a website, and you are allowed to read/listen/view his work and enjoy it, how likely would you then be to donate money to this artist? Especially if there was a simple mechanism installed (one-click) where you could donate that money, say $.50 with almost no work on your part. This is just one example of how artists could (and used to in the past) be compensated for their work. There was no copyright laws in the Renaissance but still there were many artists, they worked for a patron. With the internet, the patron idea could be spread over a large majority of people. I know most of this was rambling, with two main points, but I think you understand what I am trying to portray here. Galadin
Everyone is state substidized, and in return for doing some work for the community, is free to pursue whatever dreams and asperations that they have. Of course, no one wants the garbage-collection job. But since they'll be paid the same regardless of whether they do a good or bad job, they'll just do a lousy job.
To properly attack a problem like this, you need to really analysis what is at stake. I'm taking a great legal studies class right now on how to structure the law to encourage people to act for the greater social good. One of the key ideas is the difference between public and private goods. A public good is one where it is very costly to regulate the usage of that good (like people enjoying a beach or sharing a MPG3.) A private good is one where the usage is exclusive and only one person can use that good at a time. I'm guessing that having sharable MPGs today makes music a public good (as well as movies will be when the net's bandwidth is large enough.) while having LPs 30 years ago was a private good.
The key is how to create incentives for artists to make a public good. Since there has always been people who commission artists to make paintings and scupltures, why not implement tax breaks to encourage people to commission music and other works of art?
That way the public can enjoy the songs produced, the artists get paid, the wealthy get their long charisted tax breaks, and everyone is happy except for the recording companies. (Government would have to raise taxes a tenny bit though, hummm...) Since artist would be forced to compete with each other to get sponserships, you wouldn't get shit disgisted as good music. Instead, the best artists would be recognized and be most sought after by sponsers.
Cheers!!
Ben Schleimer
bensch@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Besides, I think musicians make most of their money off of touring. CDs seem to be mostly for self promotion although I don't know.
>>This is a problem more with the music industry than it is with the software industry.
Why is that the major software companies (like Sun, Microsoft and IBM, etc.) haven't tried to crush the OSS movement like the RIAA is doing with the mpg3 movement even though they own copyrights on algorithms which have been reimplemented in OSS?
My suggested answer: Maybe the former techies who run these companies realize that the algorithms belong to the public as soon as they get published.
Every one is focusing on how "evil" the RIAA is, but what about the musicians. When people don'y buy music it's not just Sony and WEA who take a financial hit. The artist who produce these works lose money, and if they don't make money that song that gets downloaded might be the last that gets recorded.
Karma Police, arrest this man.
Boy, are you wrong there. Good coders have a strong attachment to their code, a strong desire to get it right and bug free. (some people might call it ego, I prefer calling it perfectionism) Also the thrill of doing something with a large coolness value attached (hacking score!) is a pretty good motivator as well. Not everyone values money as much as you seem to. For example, why do you think so many linux kernel hackers pour so much time and devotion into rewriting and revamping what could reasonably be called a fairly complete OS (doesn't crash)?
If you want to support the artist, its probably better to write them a check instead of buying their CD. How much of your hard-earned dollar goes to the artist through royalties??? Pennies. Most of the money goes to the record companies who don't deserve a quarter of what they get. Concerts - thats another story..
Some goods or services can only be provided by a small group of people, or perhaps even a single person. For example, Van Halen is the only group that sounds like Van Halen, and the value of Van Halen's products are determined by the number of people willing to buy them under the terms and conditions that Van Halen is willing to offer. No third party has the right to unilaterally change those terms and conditions, as this directly affects the value of Van Halen's products, and hence Van Halen's share of the available resources. This is why pirating music and software is WRONG! It distorts the system. If pirating Van Halen's products causes increased sales of Van Halen's products, then Van Halen is getting more than they should! If pirating Van Halen's products causes reduced sales of their products, than Van Halen is not getting everything they should.
As for all of the rhetoric here accusing corporations and governments of being greedy (which I have no doubt they are), I see the people pirating music, software, etc. as being just as greedy. It is no defense to say that others are doing it, or that laws prohibiting it are unenforceable, etc. -- lets face it -- you wanted it and you took it! That is greed, pure and simple! Anything else is BS!
Perhaps a fairy tale would be the way to go...
Once upon a time farmers grew their crops and then sold them to the public. In the process all the profits went to those who labored and took the risk.
Then it was determined that food would get to the consumer better if there was a level of middleman called a wholesaler. Then if you had a wholesaler you needed a retailer.
These new entities each needed their own mark up to permit them to make money off of the farmers sweat. But quickly it was obvious that there were lots of consumers, many retailers, many farmers and only some wholesalers. Therefore, the wholesalers determined the priceing structure (not unlike the big firms owning and trading the patent rights created by the workers - Not too many CEOs with important patents).
Then a new concept emerged: Supermarkets. Not only were they big but they belonged to chains who with more clout made purchases from the wholesalers.
Soon Vertical Market Integration was invented and the food Conglomerates controled all aspects of the process even fostering super farms. At this point the farmer's sweat was worth whatever they said and the consumer paid whatever mark up they demanded or didn't eat that product. The Food Conglomerates laugh all the way to the bank even today.
So it is in every industry. The leaches with lots of money multiply it and those without are. This returns to my original statement of why I was working from home. As a worker I can slave all day and go blind writing code or specifications or I can have fun writing patents in areas that interest my conglomerate but which I personally without the conglomerate would never venture into. The conglomerate rewards me in little ways with token awards, respect and a lessened work load. Now if the advantage to the conglomerate of patents is limited or removed then I will consider it in my interest to find a new line of work. One that is not constantly devalued by the IMPORT OF SCAB WORKERS FROM OVERSEAS. (Yes once the engineer was a honored position on par with doctors and lawyers. Now only lawyers are honored).
Comment to your hearts content on this politically incorrect but functionally correct view.
I agree. I believe 'Stuart' is supposed to represent the readers of slashdot. The story talks about how the queers (moderators) are ruining the site! They talk about a well-willing poster was killed (moderatered down) by a queer. They're ruining the land (the forum). Great work poster.
Let's suppose public libraries never existed. Now analyze what would happen if Ben Franklin were living today and just now proposed to congress, states, counties, and cities, the creation of pubically funded institutions where IP material (books [and now he would include music, movies, and software]) could be checked out and read/viewed/used free of charge to the public. The publishers, record companies, and movie studios would raise bloody hell and say how it would bankrupt them, and how no one will produce anymore because there'd be no money to be made. Well, libraries do exist. And books are still being published at a profit. CDs still sell despite the plethora of MP3s on the net, and CDs having no copy protection/region coding. And movie studios actually make *more* money from home video sales than from movie showings in theaters (they said the VCR would kill the industry!). Everything is just fine. Imagine that! Poor Ben Franklin would labeled a pirate, thief, slayer of businesses and of the free market.
Don't confuse copyright with ownership - that only leads others to confuse illegal copying with theft. That is part of the deliberate confusion caused by the term "intellectual property".
If someone else owns a copy of your book, that copy is no longer your property. So you resort to restricting the right-to-copy of the book owner.
Copyright is completely applicable to the Internet age.
According to Katz, the sharing of "ideas" harms no-one (except "big corporations), and he points to Jefferson as holding up the ideal of true democracy. Well, to be honest, Jefferson's democracy only worked because it was balanced against Hamilton's capitalism.
Let's just suppose for a moment, that molecular scanners (sort of a Star Trek "replicator") came into practical reality. If I bought a chair designed and perhaps built by Jefferson, "scanned" it, distributed it free of charge to anyone I liked, and those folks were able to click a couple of buttons and "replicate" the original chair in three dimensions, would Tom approve? If I scanned one of his plants, and shared it as an "idea" with people, would he support this free sharing of "information" (the 1's and 0's that would tell a computer how to "re-create" Jefferson's cotton)?
Is the ability to create a chair, or grow cotton inherently worthy of being protected from theft, whereas the ability to write and record a song is not? Whether your product is as concrete as, well, concrete, or as abstract as a recording of a song, in both cases, the manufacturer had to invest time, thought, skill, training, and capital.
In Jefferson's day, it was damned hard to share ideas without an established publisher or excellent word of mouth, recorded music didn't exist, and nobody even considered the possibility of describing a three dimensional object as an idea. I think he would have had a whole different point of view if sharing ideas translated into him not being able to make a living. Somehow, if people "shared the idea" of his crops, I think he'd call it theft. I'm absolutely certain Hamilton would.
Wake up, Katz. Theft is theft, whether Generation X realizes it or not, and no matter how easy or inviting it is to do it. Stealing from an artist, or even (heaven forbid) a record label, is just as wrong as stealing from a carpenter, a brick maker, or General Motors.
Woody wrote:
However, Brandise [sic] does not confuse "ideas" from "expression", as witnessed by the latter part of the quote
Brandeis does not use the word "idea" to mean "idea" as distinguished from "expression". He uses it to mean any work of the mind. This is not "confusing" ideas with expression. It is using the word "idea" in a different sense from the sense used by copyright jurists in the course of infringement analysis.
If by "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas" Brandeis had meant "intellectual creations which are not the subject matter of copyright or patent", then the immediately following sentence would have begun with "upon other incorporeal productions" or words to that effect. But what Brandeis wrote was "upon these incorporeal productions." "These" refers to the "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas."
The overall structure of the passage confirms this. Brandeis is saying, in other words:
(1) If someone keeps an intellectual creation entirely to himself, it is his "property".
(2) Once he discloses it to a fellow human being, then by "the general rule of law" it is "as free as the air to common use"; the public domain is the default condition of "incorporeal productions". But
(3) for public policy purposes, the law creates special exceptions to "the general rule of law"--copyright and patent. In works of the mind that qualify for these exceptions--which Brandeis calls "creations inventions, and discoveries"--the attribute of "property" which was applied to the creation when it remained undisclosed, is "continued" after disclosure, rather than being terminated upon disclosure according to the "general rule".
This interpretation of Brandeis' words is perfectly consistent with the Science and Useful Arts clause of the Constitution, according to which copyright and patent are temporary ("limited times") expedients granted only to special classes of works ("writings and discoveries") in order to enlarge the public domain ("promote science and useful arts"). It is also a clearer, more elegant reading than we get by assuming that by "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas" Brandeis meant to define a category exclusive of what the constitution meant by "writings and discoveries".
The idea/expression dichotomy of copyright infringement analysis is also a red herring in the interpretation of Jefferson's 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson. It is true that Jefferson was writing about patents, not copyrights. But he was writing in terms of a general principle, a "general rule of law", and this, together with Jefferson's other occasional remarks on copyright and patent, lead me to conclude that Katz is right to cite Jefferson in support of his thesis that music is by nature contagious, and that to try to regulate it by a legal regime of exclusive monopoly privileges goes against the tendency of what Jefferson called "nature".
Unfotunately, in all that, this is the really salient point: "The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. " These same arguments were made for piracy long before the internet or MP3s existed. The fact of the matter is that most people don't shop lift NOT because of moral compunctions but because of fear of getting caught. If suddenly technology made it possible for people to shop lift with perfect anonymity and safety, no store would be safe. Does this mean stores are bad things? Not if you believe in a capitalist economic model. In a capitalist mdoel, everyone works to produce soemthing for society. That production then entitles you to other fruits of society. We use money as a symbolic transfer means, but in the end its all bartar. I work hard to produce intellectual property. I challenge those who feel I shouldn't be allowed to control and charge for it to start giving away the fruits of THEIR everyday labors. Do that for a year and THEN talk to me abotu how you should get mine for free. When stores faced shoplifting problems, they put better security in place. The same needs to be done for IP (intellectual property, not internet-protocol). Personally, I am NOT a big fan of internet autonomy. Having been a key employee in a start-up inertent service what I have seen is that, in the end, only those who want to act in a destructive fashion need or care about absolute autonomy. Those who want to be productive and positive members of a community are proud of who they are and have little need to hide. Should info about us be protected? Perhapse, but the ability to know where a connection came from should be available to those recieving the connection. Its just like Caller-ID. YOU decided to conenct to that other person, its common courtesy to announce who you are. _killjoy_@mail.com __killjoy was here__
Unfotunately, in all that, this is the really salient point: "The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. "
These same arguments were made for piracy long before the internet or MP3s existed. The fact of the matter is that most people don't shop lift NOT because of moral compunctions but because of fear of getting caught. If suddenly technology made it possible for people to shop lift with perfect anonymity and safety, no store would be safe.
Does this mean stores are bad things? Not if you believe in a capitalist economic model. In a capitalist mdoel, everyone works to produce soemthing for society. That production then entitles you to other fruits of society. We use money as a symbolic transfer means, but in the end its all bartar.
I work hard to produce intellectual property. I challenge those who feel I shouldn't be allowed to control and charge for it to start giving away the fruits of THEIR everyday labors. Do that for a year and THEN talk to me abotu how you should get mine for free.
When stores faced shoplifting problems, they put better security in place. The same needs to be done for IP (intellectual property, not internet-protocol). Personally, I am NOT a big fan of internet autonomy. Having been a key employee in a start-up inertent service what I have seen is that, in the end, only those who want to act in a destructive fashion need or care about absolute autonomy. Those who want to be productive and positive members of a community are proud of who they are and have little need to hide.
Should info about us be protected? Perhapse, but the ability to know where a connection came from should be available to those recieving the connection. Its just like Caller-ID. YOU decided to conenct to that other person, its common courtesy to announce who you are.
_killjoy_@mail.com __killjoy was here__
...This is a truly awful piece of writing.
This settles the question as to whether Katz has even the most rudimentary grasp of intellectual property in any way, shape, or form.
Obviously of course the gay martians are then the like minded outsiders, the 'normals' that have money that slashdot wants to attract for advertising. The moderators are making hot grits and natalie portman unviewable so normal people will want to be here. But we the real people of slashdot, the straight humans can fight back.
Destroy the landing pads for the gay martians!!!
Get rid of the evil done by moderators and KILL THE QUEERS!!!!!!
Books in Libraries are paid for by the library, and one who takes out the book doesn't own it. They can use it for only a limited time.
Ya' know what slashdot readers? I like you. You're not like the other people, here, on slashdot. Oh, don't get me wrong. They're fine people; they're good people. But they're content to sit back; maybe watch a porn flick on channel 57. Maybe kick back a cool Coors 16-ouncer. They're good fine people slashdot readers, but they don't know what the moderators are doing to Slashdot. You know that Signal 11 poster? the kid who whores karma on slashdot? He's a fine kid. Some of the readers say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it. Anyway, for his 100th post, all he wanted was a -1 post. Kept buggin' Rob Malda: "Rob, get me a -1 post. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live." So the guy breaks down and gives him a -1 moderation. Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go out into the forum. And there was the Signal 11 kid's post. I say, "What are you looking for?" He says, "I'm looking for my -1 post." I say, "Jumping Jefus on a pogo stick. Everybody knows Signal 11 can't get a -1 post?" Now readers, do you think a kid like that is gonna know what the moderators are doing to the soil? I first became aware of all this, about 100 posts ago. The summer my oldest post, Post #1 got moderatored down. You know that one poster named Jon Katz who always posts? Well post he came through with a theme called "Please Die". The man said, "Keep you posts on topic". But my post was a daredevil. Just like his old man. He was leaning out saying, "Hey everybody, look at me, look at me." POW! He was moderated down. They found his post on the -3 threshold over by the grits poster. A few days after that, I open up the mail and there's a pamphlet in there, from Jon Katz. And it's addressed to me. And it's entitled, "Do you know what the moderators are doing to slashdot!" Now slashdot readers, if you look at the forums around any large website with a big underground moderator population. Segfault.org, perfect example. Look at the moderators around segfault.org, slashdot readers. You can't post on it on it, you can't troll on it. The staff says it's due to poor posting. But I know what's really going on, slashdot readers. I know it's the moderators. They're in it with the staff. They're building websites for moderators. I swear to Jefus. Ya' know what slashdot readers, I like you. You're not like the other people, here in the slashdot
hadn't fought change for so long, they could have large collections of music in a portable format in the stores rather than CD's, necessarily at far better prices.
I have a date tonight. Guess who?
So why is it illegal to rent (non-game) software?
Through frequent self-stimulation, I have developed my love muscles to the point where I can ejaculate four to five feet in the air. Is this considered a normal level of ability, or does my range surpass that of the average American male? Here is a related problem: My precious bodily fluids often hit my eye during that climactic moment, which results in my eyes being pasted shut when I awaken in the morning. Getting my eyes unstuck can be a painful process. Can you recommend anything that would remove this dried fluid from eyes or hair with a minimal amount of pain?
No one can own ideas.
Slightly O/T but Stephen King has released his latest book exlusively over the 'net. Cost to download approx. $3. That's about 1/8 of the cost of the hardback copy here in UK.
Negating the traditional supply chains has lowered the cost to consumers without damaging the interests of the author. It is the greed of the publishing houses which keeps the costs up and denies the products to those who want them but cannot always afford to pay for a publishing execs. latest Mercedes/Holiday/Mansion. Even as a kid I was always prepared to pay for products but couldn't pay stupid prices (here in the UK we pay about twice what the US guys pay for CDs Books etc).
They are not "willfully" acting in an immoral way, they are simply acting in a way that mirrors the environment
What about guns, Jon. Nowadays guns are more prevalent than ever in the U.S. Kids who grew up around them, who gre up playing Doom, are likely to be desensitized and apathetic about the violence they can cause. We all kno you feelings about the Columbine kids. Were they "simply acting in a way that mirrors the environment"? Is what they did acceptable? You seem to imply so. Where do you draw the line?
To criminalize them is just nuts. They aren't theives
So stealing IP should only be legal for kids? You seem a little confused. At what age does it become wrong? 12? 16? 18? Please fill in the gaps, Mr. Katz.
Jon Katz was kicked out of the Holland, MI, library for looking at this site
When we develop the ability to zip matter around with some kind of Gene Roddenberry teleporter, is that going to change our views on physical property, too? When instead of paying for groceries you can just park outside the store and blip them into your backseat before taking off, tires a-squealing?
The net, digital encoding, etc.--none of these changes the morality behind intellectual property. They only make it easier to steal.
Pay for the goddamned work, people.
Geez - this whole article is so PC. These poor underprivileged kids can't afford CDs which the big nasty record executive could easily give away but those meanies decide to sell.
Yes, let's have unbounded capitalism! Let the rich eat the poor alive! Remeber: because you were born into the upper class gives you the right to oppress others, cause hey!, you earned it!
I choose to - and I know it's against the law. And I know the law protects people who own the music. I just want what I want for free. Let's just be honest about it.
Now you have me confused. Are you saying that it's alright for you to make illegal copies of music, but not poor people? Why is that? Because most of them are black? Just because you hate hip-hop doesn't mean you can censor it.
The porno industry probably experiences the *most* piracy- across the board- movies, software, printed matter. And is it struggling to survive? There's more porn now than ever before! Now surely the industries that experience less piracy would be doing even better, yes?
You still can't find your puncture repair kit, can you?
Not unless people "in their environment" regularly go around killing everyone who pisses them off. Which has nothing to do with the prevalence of guns or the supposed desensitizing effects of Doom. But then you know that.
So stealing IP should only be legal for kids?
I thought it was pretty clear that the kids were an example used to show how outmoded current IP laws are. Katz can be a little opaque, though, so I'll give a point or two here.
Give a few more points for inflammatory language disguised as actual content, and on our 1 to 10 scale I give this troll a 7.
Thanks for playing!
A contributor wrote: Jon Katz in this entire piece has fatally confounded two distinct concepts, Ideas and Expressions. Jefferson, in his 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson, was not making the "idea/expression" distinction of copyright law. He was not writing in a copyright-law context at all, but was referring to patent law. By "ideas" he was referring to what lawyers call "the subject matter of patent." Mapping Jefferson's principle into the domain of copyright law produces precisely the result that Katz asserts: that "the subject matter of copyright" (i.e. "expression") equally with the subject-matter of patent, belongs to all as a matter of right, and that any legal system which tries to make copyrightable expression subject to exclusive rights is at best an artificial, temporary expedient. Mr. Justice Brandeis stated the same principle in words that are also subject to the same sort of misinterpretation. He wrote of "ideas", but he was not referring to the I/E distinction. Here is Mr. Brandeis' statement: The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property. The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it. These exceptions are confined to productions which, in some degree, involve creation, invention, or discovery. But by no means all such are endowed with this attribute of property. The creations which are recognized as property by the common law are literary, dramatic, musical, and other artistic creations; and these have also protection under the copyright statutes. The inventions and discoveries upon which this attribute of property is conferred only by statute, are the few comprised within the patent law. --INS v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 214, at 250 (Brandeis, J., dissenting.) Thought Brandeis uses the word "ideas", he is NOT referring to the technical Idea/Expression dichotomy of copyright law. Rather "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, ideas" is the most general category of "incorporeal productions" of the human mind. Brandeis is saying that by "the general rule of law", all works of the mind--both ideas and expression, in copyright language--are as "free as the air to common use", and the copyright and patent laws are the exception to this general rule of freedom. Hence, as Katz implicitly senses (though he might have expressed himself a little more clearly) it is up to the proponents of a copyright and patent system--those who want to create the exception that will limit the freedom of others-- to come up with a rational, workable system, and to justify its existence.
You are very wrong. The expression of an idea is not the idea. An idea is entirely a mental thing. It only exists when intelligence is there. Thus I can say the katz is wrong. Lots of other people can say that Katz is wrong. I can say that the original poster said that Katz is wrong. As long aas we do not directly copy each others words we are not violating any copyright laws.
The same ideas can be expressed in extremely different ways. If you find a mathematical expression your particualr way of writing the derivation and the explanation of it fall under copyright, but the ideas contained within fall under no law. I can take your derivation change it a little and publish it. Under academic rules I would have to site you, but under law I could claim it as my own. It would be my own expression of the mathematical idea.
Once an idea is in tangible form, you can own it, and do. Your half-wit hero Jon Katz, despite his squalking protestations to the contrary, makes his entire living off of copyright.
Even copyleft is copyright, you simpering youth.
You'll be huzzahing for the fall of the Bastille until someone screws you on one of your ideas (as unlikely as that is to be). Then we'll see how free you want everything.
my god, someone here actually has decent music taste.
fuck i miss the dead milkmen.
--rodney anonymous coward
Orginally, I had considered titling my post "Why Corporations crying Piracy!, is like a prostitute crying Rape!". After thinking about it awhile though, it wasn't an apt comparison, because I can feel some sort of sympathy for a prostitute, if only briefly. The only people that defend corporations, are those lowlifes who hope to sell out themselves someday, and if the world rights the injustice before they can do so... well, then they are SOL. When someone steals my wallet, I go without lunch. That is wrong, and I'd never steal someone else's wallet. If a thief sneaks into my bedroom, and burns a copy of QuakeII, and leaves quietly, who has he stolen from? Not I, certainly(he should just asked, and I would have dug out the mission packs for him too). Does he steal from the publisher, from the author, or maybe society at large? No. They'll likely never know he did. If by some chance they find out, are they gonna slap their own foreheads and say "Gee, I was wondering why my wife is starving, and little bobby has to wear a burlap sack to school?" No. As a matter of fact, they won't even say "Gee, I was wondering why I wasn't able to afford my thrid BMW!". The truth of the matter, they are already filthy rich. I don't begrudge them that. However, being rich isn't enough, and what with the surplus of lawyers in the USA, and in California in particular, mixed in with the fact that rich people are invariably stupid with any non-financial situation, especially moral/ethical situations, they decided to become intellectual property nazis. MP3's Verboten!! Nein, Sieg Heil Dollar, Sieg Heil Dollar. Something like that. Will this make them any more money? No. Would they notice a difference, if it did? Doubtful. Will they even make back the money they spent on all the lawsuits? Doubtful there too, but why worry about it, it was either use it for the common good of anti-piracy, or waste it on feeding the homeless or somesuch. It's funny, and almost oxymoronic, that they would worry about 'intellectual property', the fact being, that most of them are so severely lacking in cranial real estate, if you know what I mean. Hell, one or two of them are damn near landless, using the same metaphor. The only reason that they have any intellectual property at all, means that at one point or another, they must have stolen it themselves. Let's extrapolate this situation, to one that is more clearly illustrated. 270 million people, on a world that is nothing but a parking lot. Totally empty, but for people, totally flat. 3 or 4 people, representing corporations, have loaves of bread. They are the only ones that have them. They'll sell you a loaf of bread, but only at a price that is 900% what its worth. However, people can 'copy' each loaf of bread, so cheaply that it nearly costs nothing. They do this. The 3 or 4 monopoly holders, they still have their loaves of bread. No one deprived them of theirs. Now, instead of 3 or 4 loaves of bread, there are hundreds of millions of loaves. The net wealth of this country has increased a millionfold, all are fed, and I'm supposed to think that this is a bad thing? It sounds so incredible, magical even, but if you believe what they want you to, each of those people should go to prison. BS. Now, digital data isn't bread, and people don't starve if they don't get their MP3s. I know this, but if you wish to try that impotent argument, what then are they? Are they crack cocaine, that people 'need', but can do without? If so, then aren't the corporations doing something incredibly unethical, something they should be punished for? For a person that loves music, especially a teenager, ANY KIND of music is an idea. Maybe not an idea I'd like, maybe a really cruddy idea, but it is an idea all the same. Movies, games, even fan art. Theft is keeping someone from having something that belongs to them. Simple. It applied to an old world, a world that is fading from existence, but the geezers who live in that old world can't accept that it is fading. We still live in that world partially, but only for the time being. They got away for decades, selling things that should have been given freely, or not at all. They made BILLIONS doing this. No one is trying to take those billions away from them. They could walk away now, and still be able to buy or sell any third world country, and quite a first world nations too. This isn't enough, it's never enough, when through some willful neglect or moral atrophy, you become what is in essence evil. More, more, gluttony is good, give me power, etc. Cash in your chips, get out of my face grandpa. In all honesty, a truly fair nation would never allow anyone to exist, or prosper, without doing any real work. If we all evenly divided the true labor, we'd all work 15 hour weeks, and everyone would be richer for it. We'd make our own music, and give it away. Our own games, our own movies. You'd give it away, and know how successful you were, not by how much money it made, but by how many bothered to stop and listen to it. Honestly, when the world's real work is 100% automated, who do you think will own it? The bastard corporations? Without real work, what will you do then, to earn your loaf of bread? Literally, or figuratively, you'll be a prostitute, because they won't need you for anything else. It was never about them making themselves rich, but their incessant need to make others poor. Our way, the new way, everyone makes themselves rich. The old way, the few made others poorer, a nice side effect was that they themselves became richer. My rant is finished.
So, did anyone videotape the performance? Where can we download it? Smashing Pumpkins music wants to be free!
Edison, Eistein, & others originally start out
in life doing things like tapping phones & other
things that are now punishable by various laws.
In order to preserve the power base of the NAZI
scum that presently rule the World a system of
SELECTIVELY ENFORCED LAWS [unconstitutional]
have been emplaced of which this is just one more
The internet originally was devised as a
testbed for A DECENTRALIZED communication system.
Now that million of geeks & Nerds have given years
of their time in perfecting a system the NAZIS
want to take it over. They want to brand anyone
who would attempt to exert any influence over it
as criminals & punish them to whatever extent
they can whip the general public into backing
Bill Gates, & all the geeks & Trolls at his
disposal if they all started typing at the turn
of the 20th.century couldn't have copied half of
of the code of Windows 95. All of the commercial
technology
that is earning the big bucks is is sitting on
MILLIONS OF HRS OF FREEWARE. ALL the security
that these profiteers promise their clients was
generated by hackers who pulled them up short
everytime they compromised their clients
welfare with shoddy programming. In return, the scumm
seem to be bent on branding anyone interested
in computers as a criminal. Even Bill Gates is
felling the gun in his back, his masters have
him giving away millions of hard stolen bucks
to seem like a regular guy
I am no attorney but we have all invested in
BILLION OF DOLLARS IN EQUIPTMENT & million of
hours of time in the internet. We have all made
our contributions & I for one don't feel like
being criminalized by thieves. We ought to have a
MECHANICS LEIN against the property & system that
begged us at one time to do our dirtiest in
illuminating the the deficiencies of an EMERGENCY
communication system. Now the NAZIS have the
world wired with each packet sniffed for HERESY.
I hereby & herewith serve notice that the
Governments of the world OWE a previous
obligation to the experimenters who have created
this system only to have what we have given freely
mangled and copyrighted by the real pirates the
Military-Industrial complx who intend the internet
to be subverted into the intercom of Prison U S A.
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the em effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
That is why society has had seperate laws for adults and teenagers.
Take you saintly fucking rules and go bugger yourself and leave the children out of it.
Woody wrote:
... communication". Hence he cannot be referring to "ideas" in the technical sense of "uncopyrightable ideas as distinguished from copyrightable expression." It is not a question of whether I or Mr. Justice Brandeis are aware of "idea" and "expression" as technical terms which are used by judges in the course of determining the presense and extent of copyright infringement. It is a question of whether Brandeis is using the word in that sense in this particular passage. Since by "ideas" in this particular passage he clearly means things that can be copyrighted, he can't be using it to refer to things that cannot be copyrighted.
Sorry, no; your interpretation of Justice Brandeis's words is incorrect.
Woody is wrong; I am right.
Here is the first part of Mr. Justice Brandeis' statement again:
The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property. The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it.
Justice Brandeis is using several phrases interchangeably: "a product of the mind" is strictly equivalent in this passage to "the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas", which is strictly equivalent to "these incorporeal productions". If he were referring to uncopyrightable elements of copyrighted works, the phrase "Upon these incorporeal productions [i.e. knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas] the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it" would make no sense, since copyright law has never covered "ideas" as opposed to "expression". But here by "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas" Brandeis is clearly referring to things upon "certain classes" of which "the attribute of property is continued after
Equally it is a mistake to assume that every use by John Katz of the word "idea" must be held to this technical, infringement-analysis sense. Katz's article fairly clearly deals with the question of whether the drafters of the DMCA were right to determine that the scope of copyright in expression should be increased (and the anti-circumvention provisions, in particular, are a tremendous expansion of rightsholders' power) in order to meet the challenges posed by networked computers. He is, or should be, saying that creating ever more complex and draconian laws is not be the correct approach to these challenges. Some may have preferred that Katz discuss the technical idea/expression dichotomy of copyright law. I would have preferred that Katz explicitly mention the question of copyright duration as well as its scope. But I think he made his point reasonably well without introducing these points.
One final note: in my strictly pivate I-am-not-a-lawyer-and-this-is-not-legal-advice opinion, much purely private downloading of MP3s of copyrighted music may not in itself be illegal, though storing the files without the rightholders' permission in a place where they can be publicly copied, probably is.
The recording industry would have the MP3 format outlawed entirely. They aren't afraid of redistribution of the music they already have under contract. They are afraid that this will give new artists a powerful avenue for self-promotion. The audience and the artists will interact more directly on a large scale.
This will undermine their power and their profits in two ways. First, they will no longer have the strong bargaining position that they once had with new artists. Certainly, the new artist can point to success touring regionally with the material on their demo tape now. But when those same artists can put MP3s of a few cuts on their web site and offer to sell you the CD directly, who needs the record company?
Second, they will no longer be the experts on the next hot thing. In truth, they never held the power to do it, but they were the guards at the gate. Within limits they determined what the listening public got to hear.
They can see the Cluetrain coming and they are scared.
Over the past week the Motion Picture Association of America has intensified its efforts to bully and harass individual Internet users by sending out a new series of email threats. Using little more than bluff and bluster they've also managed in recent weeks to shut down countless websites, convince employers to fire employees, and get schools to take disciplinary actions against students for doing little more than taking part in an act of solidarity on their private homepages.
John Young, who maintains the Cryptome, is one of the hundreds of John Doe defendants in the California DVD case. In addition to a copy of DeCSS, Young published a copy of the now-infamous Hoy Declaration, in which the DVD Copy Control Association inadvertently included a copy of the very information they were trying to suppress in public court filings. He was among the first to bear the brunt of a wave of cease and desist letters for posting the source code to DeCSS. The letter reads in part:
Never mind the fact that the MPAA knows full well that Young, located in New York, is outside the jurisdiction of the California court, nor is he covered by the Southern District of New York's injunction. They neglect to quote the portion of the injunction that specifies just who is covered and who isn't.Over the past week, we have received numerous reports of this threatening letter being sent to web site owners worldwide. It appears the MPAA is simply going down the list of mirrored sites and sending a letter to everybody.
Geography and national sovereignty are clearly foreign concepts to this multinational corporation. The effects of globalization seem to have impaired their faculties more than previously thought. They proceeded to send similar letters to people all over the world. Tom Vogt, also named as a defendant in the California case, resides in Germany. The letter the MPAA sent him insisting that he comply with the California injunction, refers to the preliminary draft of an unratified convention. That's right, the best they could do was threaten him with an unsigned treaty.
Earlier this month Grant Bayley received a cease and desist letter for hosting DeCSS on his webpage for the Australian 2600 meeting. Both Bayley and the server are located in Australia. As expressed in the meeting guidelines, 2600 meetings are organized on their own, anyone can start one, and they are pretty much autonomous. According to an Australian journalist who spoke with the chief counsel for the MPAA, 2600 Australia is being singled out simply because of its name. Presumably this is also why they chose to go after A.Sleep, operator of the Connecticut 2600 meeting's webpage in his very own federal lawsuit. One can only imagine what the MPAA must be thinking.
In an age where anyone is capable of exercising free speech to mass audiences via the Internet, there is a disturbing trend that this freedom is limited not by the strength of one's convictions nor one's access to technology. Rather it is dependant on the will and resources of one's Internet Service Provider. It is common for ISPs to cancel accounts or remove content at the first hints of any controversy. It didn't take long for big business to figure this out and they've been exploiting lawsuit-fearing ISPs ever since. One can hardly blame the average ISP for bowing to such impressive cease and desist letters. Often they're barely breaking even as it is, and nuking one $10 a month webpage is a simple business decision when being threatened with a million dollar lawsuit.
What's far more troubling is the ease in which traditional safe havens for free expression, like universities and other academic institutions, are willing to sell out their students. Zach Karpinski stands out as one such victim. A student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Zach was summarily fired from his job of two and a half years at Student Technology Services, an organization he helped build. The letters he and his school received accusing him of using school servers for illegal activities were enough to trample this student's rights and reputation in favor of some perverse idea of political "damage control." They should be more concerned with controlling the damage done to their student's academic freedom and civil liberties than satisfying the whims of Jack Valenti and the MPAA. Sadly, Zach is not alone. A student from California State University at Fresno wrote in to report that he had to take down his school-hosted DeCSS mirror and that the MPAA requested that he be fired from his school employment. (Fortunately, he wasn't fired).
We first took a stand in the DVD battle back in November, when the first cease and desist letters were being sent out. We joined in the mirroring campaign to lend our support to those who had been subjected to hollow threats and harassment from the DVD industry, but were forced into compliance due to circumstances beyond their control. They knew they were right, they knew they could win, but they lacked the resources to stand up for their convictions. As evidenced above, that fight is ongoing. Our modest mirror list has grown substantially and continues to grow, despite mirrors being removed from time to time. The success of the DeCSS mirroring campaign demonstrates the futility of attempts to suppress free speech on the Internet. It is distributed hosting at its most basic and a proven defense from censorship. Make no mistake, DeCSS is out there, it can never be eradicated. Not only will DeCSS be preserved regardless of whether there are any mirrors, the tyrannical actions of the MPAA have ensured that it will live on forever in history, law books, and all the communities it has effected.
[Local copy of letter sent by the MPAA]Right. Mr. Katz, please explain what potential benefits from society are gained from a teenager not being able to afford a copy of "Jagged Little Pill". To continue to elevate common theft to the idea of freedom of IDEAS is intellectually dishonest. In order to perform this bizarre deed, you then make a mockery of property rights. Mr. Katz, there is a HUGE difference between, say, deprivation of thought due to inability of a school to afford decent literature, compared to the whatever "loss" one might feel simply because he can't acquire a 1000-song playlist. Are you sincere? Are you suggesting that no teenager has willpower, that they are COMPELLED to steal? If so, why don't we lock 'em up? If not, then aren't they WILLFULLY acting this way -- completely cognizant of the consequences, but nevertheless disregarding them? And you would approve of this?
With liberal quotes from Jefferson and frequent use of questionable metaphors, Katz is attempting to convince us of two points. 1) No one can own and idea, and 2) Corporations and politicians are doing their damndest to do so, anyway. From this, we are expected to conclude 1) the corporations are eeeevil, and 2) it doesn't matter when Johnny the Cyberloser downloads a few songs without paying for them.
Notwithstanding his devotion to Jefferson, Katz fails to cite the supreme Law of the Land, wherein patents and copyrights are declared legal. Just because he disagrees with how a particular copyright statute has been enacted does not entitle Katz to declare the constitution (and laws enacted through it by congress) to be null and void. I've said it once, I'll say it again: unless and until you repeal that clause from Article 1, the practice of patenting one-click or copyrighting songs will continue. The most Johnny Cybernerd can hope for is a few temporary reforms, costly to lobby for and likely to get voted out in the next session as public opinion changes.
Moreover, the fact that Jefferson wrote a few lines about no one owning an idea is not evidence in any court of law deciding these cases. Sure, the quotes are nice and make us think we know what those old guys were thinking, but their personal opinions are not legally binding in the here and now. The constitution, which Jefferson eventually endorsed, is legally binding.
Whether corporations are evil, unwieldly, etc. is a moot point. Sure, it sounds romantic to think that David the Cybersquatter is taking on Goliath and his lawyers, but this does not make CEOs, shareholders, etc. evil. When Katz attacks the corporations, he is attacking not only the laws that allow them to exist (gov't policy), but also the people who run them and enforce the various regulations. By removing this human face, Katz can easily justify slinging stones at the greedy monsters.
Johnny the Geekboy is seeking to reduce his costs by theft (and in legal terms, it is theft) of the latest album online. Dr. Doom of eeeevil Record Empire is seeking to maximize his profits by ensuring that copyright law is enforced. Does Katz debate the economics or incentives that patents put in place? No. He assumes that corporations are eeeevil and sets out to prove it by showing that Johnny can't get what he wants at the price he wants (zero $).
Does Katz offer an alternative system of incentives, where Johnny gets his music and Dr. Doom gets his money? No. Dr. Doom is eeevil, he has no business making money. I hate to tell you, Mr. Katz, but without Dr. Doom, there would be no music for Johnny to download, period. That is, unless you have a better system than patent/copyright law in mind.
I just can't buy the "information wants to be free" bromide. Whose information? Where? When? Someone has to set up the network, or the printing press, or the front porch on which the information is to be transferred. Someone has to create or discover it. TANSTAAFL, baby.
Our present system of patents/copyrights is certainly imperfect. I have yet to see a better proposal that maintains equal or better incentives. In the meantime, arguing about how to adjust the present system to make Johnny the Cyberbaby happy only works as far as you remember Dr. Doom, on the other side of the equation.
Alright, I'm sick of it. Open everything. Open Source. Open Bandwith. Open ideas?
Jon, with all due respect, I don't think you have any idea what the hell you're talking about. Who owns ideas? I know that I sure as hell own *my* ideas. In fact, I own this comment, which even Rob Malda is smart enough to recognize.
. Ideas can't be contained or sold any more.
This seems to be the gist of your argument. How can you say this and not burst out laughing? You make your living as a writer, correct? Do you want your books being taken and sold by whoever wants to? Is _Geeks_ available on the web under a free license? If not, then you have simply disproven your own hypothesis. Or you are a hypocrite. Your choice, Jon.
As for the raving open-everything Slashdot crew, how many of you are willing to open everything? Do you open your homes to the homeless? Open your wallets to the poor? Or perhaps you are most likely to open your Ayn Rand novels and commence your self-brainwashing excercises. I don't see what this is all about. Linux code isn't all "open", people own it, which is a requirement for it to work. If people have no attachment to something, they won't feel a need to improve or fix it, something which Aristotle pointed out 2400 years ago. Being as that is, how do you expect all this open-ness to work? Large open source projects routinely fail and rarely come up to the level of proprietary works; so why do you insist on ruining everything?
Even Thomas Jefferson said so.
He also wrote the Constitution, which gives us the rights to patents and copyrights. Please explain away this contradiction in your usual blathering, loudmouth way.
This whole piece is a metaphor for slashdot. If you read closely enough you'll see examples of actions taken by slashdot over time. This is a truely brilliant piece of work and should be commended! Slashdot, please look into hiring this guy? Thanks.
But you missed the boat on this one. Downloading copyrighted material is theft, whether or not you call it piracy or people think it is trivial. (And no, my heart is not pure here.) The holders of the copyright can do whatever the hell they want. If they wish to give it away, if they wish to charge small change, or big bucks, they can. (And no, I don't support the DMCA - I think it violates the "limited time" provision of the US constitution.) But attempting to explain away what is functionally equivalent to shoplifting because large groups of people think it is unimportant is a loser of an argument.
You touched on the answer when comparing Machinima with MP3, but then skittered away from the basic point. The existing media are petrified of the internet (really, mass telecom/broadcast capability given to individuals) because it destroys their role as gatekeeper. The internet in its current (bandwidth-limited) form has already supplanted traditional distribution channels for niche products (newsletter distribution, alternative music not under a label, animated shorts). When the bandwidth is available, other products will migrate that way, also. New generations of writers, musicians, reporters, etc. will deliberately bypass traditional channels and choose a job that allows them greater creative freedom even at the cost of some upfront revenue (much like you have written that you have). And quite frankly, there are enough open standards for file formats and transfer protocols that there is not a damn thing that the corporations can use the DMCA to stop. If people choose to not sign with an onerous company, use tools without restrictions, and be responsible for their own products, then the dinosaurs will meet their meteor.
What you should be using your bully pulpit for is not feebly attempting to justify why illegal MP3's should be tolerated, but to encourage the next generation of producers to explore those means, show from your own experiences how the new media can be shaped into a forum for personal expression, and even highlight those who are at the leading edge of this process. This is well in keeping with your desire to spot trends, and would be a substantial benefit to society.
I make music. I spend time on it, and I spent money on my equipment. This doesn't mean I should make money from it. You should make music becuase you love to make music and want to share it with your friends. Not because you want to be a rock star. I'm talking about people starting to define their own culture again. Not accepting the pre-formatted pap that oozes from the corporate teat. If the system that makes Britney Spears a 'musician' who deserves to make money for her 'creative efforts' and the ideas she 'owns' (even though someone else wrote the words, and someone else wrote the music, and someone else choreographed the dance, and someone else directed the video) comes crashing doewn tomorrow - hallelujah! Yippee! It won't affect any of the musicians who post their music on acidplanet.com for others to listen to or download for free. -Note this is not a drug site - its put up by sonic foundry for people who use their acid music creation software. Look in the lounge, under search by artist name 'Memerot' to find my songs. Download those mp3s all you want. Give them away. Email them to people. That is WHAT I WANT and is THE PROMISE OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION!
Music used to be primarily a folk activity undertaken for pleasure not profit. It is completely wrong to think that people will stop making music if they can't make money from it. And of course an effect i have noticed is that when I give a tape of a band to a friend and a month later the band is playing in town the friend will often want to go with me. Live performances have historically been the thing musicians were paid for. MP3s and music 'piracy' will not take that away. I think it would do wonders for the music 'industry' to put the focus back on performances and take it off of studio recording.
This may go down as the most ridiculous and inaccurate analogy in the history of man.
So who's going to pay the songwriter's bills?
:-)
Who does now? Record companies? Artisits may see 50 cents to $1 per CD. In volume, it can't cost more than a $1.50 to make a CD and put it on a store shelf. The store takes a couple bucks and the record company gets the remaining $8 to $10.
Or perhaps you think that people shouldn't be able to write songs for a living
Very few people ever actually make a living off of playing music or writing it. Some live off teaching music or selling instruments, etc. but there just aren't all that many who can make a decent living. Even some of the famous acts out there are just middle class in their lifestyle. If anyone can do it, I say more power to 'em. I don't have any problem with paying artists for their art. I DO NOT WANT TO LINE THE POCKETS OF SOME FASCIST MEDIA CONGLOMERATE! It's not just the consumer who has been fleeced by the Record Industry, the artists have gotten the raw deal too. And newcomers who may never have been heard under the old system now can be heard by anyone who visits their website and downloads their MP3. Ask most musicians what they want most of all and most will tell you recognition. I never picked up an instrument to get rich. I do it because I love it. If I can make money that way, great. If not, that's OK. I haven't made squat so far. Heck, I've spent >$20,000 easily over the last 30 years buying guitars, amplifiers, PA equipment, lights, recording equipment, etc. I suspect what little most musicians get is of little consequence. They want recognition and oh yeah, I almost forgot girls. I don't know many better way to get a good girlfriend than to pick them up at a gig. It never paid the bills but it sure made me happy.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
If you look at RMS' essay on copyright, available on fsf.org, you'll notice that while copyright is instrumental in enforcing the GPL today, RMS' end goal is to eliminate copyrights.
In such a case, the only way to promote sharing in a no-copyright envrionment is to force disclosure of all source code.
-Stu
"But if the cost of duplicating and distributing something is negligible (as is the case with a lot of information), then the assumption that that resource is limited is invalid. The concept of "intellectual property" is attempting to force a model of a limited resource onto something that isn't limited."
I respectfully disagree. Intellectual property *is* a limited resource because NEW works are what drive the economy, not duplications of old works.
There is a scarcity of skill and talent in the world, which are required to create new and innovative works of information. For this reason it is crucial that we have a workable set of international intellectual property laws.
-Stu
There seems to be a very widespread fallacy that since information is so easy to duplicate (or cheap), that it is an abundant resource and shouldn't be subject to economic laws. This is the "information wants to be free" argument.
Ideas want to be free. Good ideas, however, are scarce. People will pay for a good idea, or an entertaining one.
Information is still a scarce resource because there is a scarcity of skill and talent to create new, innovative, valuable works.
The basis of intellectual property is to divert investment capital to those people who ARE talented and have skills so that they can create MORE of these innovative and valueable works for society.
The "new economy" is not about mega-corporations, mergers, and the destruction of consumer rights. It is about celebrating the consumer as the center of all economic activity; it is about shifting capital from the distributors to the innovators.
-Stu
Hey!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes it is!! And Jon makes an interesting point about how corporations our dispensing culture to us. We are the ones that buy into this censored culture by listening to the radio, loving a song, and paying for the CD. When something is new on that radio we, in some ways, believe that we found a hot new band. Usually, the band is not new it's just they finally got a distribution deal with a big label that can control what is heard on the radio because that band was able to show a following that was a good cross-section of society that the music label wanted to exploit. Slowly, these bands are pressured for more number 1 songs so that they will continue to be played on the radio and sell more albums. Usually, the sound of the band has changed and fans leave and call this same band a group of sell outs. The reality is the fans turned them into sell outs.
It's also interesting that the artists that are taking the side of the music industry are high dollar/high profile artists that sell a ton of cd's but have a deal in which they own most of their own music.
But what of the smaller bands that have a hold of the underground (ie: no label, or small label with no clout with the radio stations) do they want us to download their music. YES!!! The more people freely exchange their music the more of a fan base they build up. The question for them is - do they stay true to their fans and their own music or are they trying to get that big record deal to become rich?? And do we want to love them only to hate them when they reach the top for that almighty dollar??
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
The artists make a living by performing and creating new music. Not by pressing and distributing CDs. The record companies make money by manufacturing and distributing CDs. It's the record companies that are being made obsolete by the Internet.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I don't believe the premise is that "if the kids are doing it, it's ok". I believe the premise is "If the kids are doing something illegal, knowingly, what reason could there be?"
For example, many years ago, my friends and I would trade records (like CDs, but subject to quality degradation with repeated playing, and form factor large enough to include decent artwork). We'd listen to and record on audio tape the songs that we liked. What Jon is capturing here is the existence of a fundamental attribute of our society that encourages sharing of ideas and their expressions. It just happens that in our internet-enabled society, and due to advances in digital processing, lossless replication of (at least many forms of) content is by far easier than the traditional means of content distribution.
The fundamental problem facing content providers (movies, music, magazines, software, etc.) is the following: How can you facilitate the distribution of your content such that the risk associated with pirating that content become significant enough to discourage piracy?
For example: You hear a song on the radio. You like the song. You want to hear it again. Do you:
Which would you choose? To the content providers and controllers (record execs, movie house moguls, magazine editors, etc.): Do you honestly expect us to utilize method #1 if we have method #2 available to us? More importantly, now that the infrastructure exists to facilitate method #2 as distribution mechanism of least resistance, how do you possibly intend to retard it's growth?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
I don't believe the premise is that "if the kids are doing it, it's ok". I believe the premise is "If the kids are doing something illegal, knowingly, what reason could there be?"
For example, many years ago, my friends and I would trade records (like CDs, but subject to quality degradation with repeated playing, and form factor large enough to include decent artwork). We'd listen to and record on audio tape the songs that we liked. What Jon is capturing here is the existence of a fundamental attribute of our society that encourages sharing of ideas and their expressions. It just happens that in our internet-enabled society, and due to advances in digital processing, lossless replication of (at least many forms of) content is by far easier than the traditional means of content distribution.
The fundamental problem facing content providers (movies, music, magazines, software, etc.) is the following: How can you facilitate the distribution of your content such that the risk associated with pirating that content become significant enough to discourage piracy?
For example: You hear a song on the radio. You like the song. You want to hear it again. Do you:
Which would you choose? To the content providers and controllers (record execs, movie house moguls, magazine editors, etc.): Do you honestly expect us to utilize method #1 if we have method #2 available to us? More importantly, now that the infrastructure exists to facilitate method #2 as distribution mechanism of least resistance, how do you possibly intend to retard it's growth?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
At first, Jon just wanted to stand in the way of progress. Then, he tried to violate all the rules of decorum. Who knows what he'll do next? I could go on and on about his special form of denominationalism, but you get the general idea. What I am getting at is this: I have no interest in getting tangled in the rhetoric or dogma that he frequently pushes. The implications of hectoring exclusionism may seem theoretical, but they have concrete meaning for thousands of people.
While criticizing his opponents for enforcing a narrow-minded orthodoxy, Jon himself is trying to enforce a particular orthodoxy -- the orthodoxy of obstreperous blackguardism. Many people aren't aware of how contumelious his warnings are, so let's present a little breakdown. First off, repeating something over and over does not make it true. There are lawsuits in his future. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but you get the drift.
To quote the prophet Isaiah, "Woe to ye who usher in the rule of the Antichrist and the apocalyptic end times". At this point, all I can do is repeat a line from my previous letter: "Eccentric warmongers, motivated by either boosterism or a desire to lead a xenophobic life, are eager to help Jon flood this debate through the sluice gates of postmodernist think tanks". It is cowardice on his part to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious possessions. Even though he uses isolated incidents to make pugnacious, all-encompassing claims about his adversaries, this does not negate the fact that I myself frequently wish to tell him that everything he tells you is a lie. But being a generally genteel person, however, I always bite my tongue.
If I didn't think Jon would stonewall on issues in which taxpayers see a vital public interest, I wouldn't say that his constant whining and yammering is a background noise that never seems to go away. His perversions can be rightly understood only as what some self-indulgent autocrats have been brave enough to call them: a failure. The whole premise of Jon's reinterpretations of historic events is false, and his arguments are specious at best. To what degree is Jon going to call for ritualistic invocations of needlessly-formal rules? His convictions provide a vivid example of how however varied or profound the explanations underlying our sense of moral values may be, I wouldn't waste my time trying to push a consistent vision that responds to most people's growing fears about brutish nutcases if his opinions weren't parroted by so many unrestrained suborners of perjury, at least insofar as this essay is concerned. He should show some class. It is clear from what I have already written that Jon leads me to believe that he is demonic.
Is there anyone else out there who's noticed that he once used his notoriety, name recognition, and national fund-raising base to sentence more and more people to poverty, prison, and early death? Double standards are always short-sighted. Are you still with me? Jon supports a wide variety of prank phone calls. Some are feckless; others are blathering. A few openly support solipsism.
So we're supposed to give him permission to sell otherwise perfectly reasonable people the idee fixe that alarmism and exhibitionism are identical concepts and hope he's rational enough not to do so? How incredibly naive! And, more important, I find much to disagree with in his activities. So don't feed me any baloney about how he can censor by caricature and preempt discussion by stereotype and get away with it. That's just not true.
Because we continue to share a common, albeit abused, atmospheric envelope, Jon ducks the issue of sensationalism by using words and phrases so vague and subject to interpretation that they have no true meaning at all. There can be no doubt that for his own sake, he should not institutionalize sex discrimination by requiring different standards of protection and behavior for men and women. Jon can blame me for the influx of heinous insensitive-types if it makes him feel better, but it won't help his cause any.
When the war against reason is backed by a large cadre of the worst classes of unsympathetic smut peddlers there are, the results are even more fatuitous. Unenlightened knee-biters speak in order to conceal -- or at least to veil -- their thoughts. Even if I agreed that Jon's blockish detestable insinuations were of paramount importance, it would still be the case that attempts to carve out space in the mainstream for brown-nosing politics are a de facto, if not a de jure, example of drugged-out Marxism. Belligerent politicos, almost by definition, treat traditional values as if they were moonstruck crimes. Surprised? You shouldn't be, because all Jon wants is to break down the industrial-technological system. In such a brief letter as this, I certainly cannot refute all the philippics of stuck-up impudent reprobates, but perhaps I can brush away some of their most deliberate and flagrant criticisms.
His voiced intentions don't match his actual intentions. Jon is a very unpleasant little man. And what of it? He decidedly needs to come to terms with his combative past. Why does he want to put a perfidious spin on important issues? Because many party animals have an intense identification with what I call voluble ruffians. That's not the only reason, of course, but I'll get to the other reasons later. It is crystal-clear that Jon's indifference only adds to the problem. The bottom line is that Jon Katz consistently falls short of telling the whole story or of making a solid point.
pronoblem
Before the advent of the 'net, the ability of a human being to contain ideas was pretty severely limited by their cranial capacity.
Ideas were not expressions on a purely quantitative basis -- x=5 is an idea. x=5.81356108301851851760183838886151373753111185 was an expression; unless you were exceptionally bright. Lengthen it by a few hundred digits, and it's an expression for everybody, since no-one can remember it without writing it down.
"Defacing tree carcasses" has a lot of protected rights in the US because that's the only way that we used to be able to get those ideas into a format that we could use efficiently. "The Press" was a sacred and special piece of technology.
Authoritarians even tolerated it, since it was a pretty hefty physical thing, and it meant that one could regulate ideas using the same rules that you would use to regulate physical objects, as long as you applied a few special rules to the way things were copied; and this made sense, too, due to the various technical aspects of physically producing a book. (The rationale behind copyright was not paying the author of the book -- it was the associated cost of figuring out where to put the letters on the page so that they would fit. This is not an easy problem to solve... but now we can all do it automatically, for free, thanks to TeX.)
Ideas are no longer different from expressions, and this is Katz's point. Now, it's possible to put an entire book on a floppy disk in under a minute, and this costs the original publisher exactly the same as it costs the next guy who comes along and wants to make a knockoff version. People are no longer arguing over how to sell the physical objects (books, disk drives, or what have you) but how to sell the information itself, in a pure form, over the ether.
You may notice that I've overlooked the fact that computers are still separate from human beings, just as paper is. I don't believe they are -- I interact with more people via my keyboard than with my voice. My "internet persona" has a better memory than I do, because of the vast amount of data instantly available on the web, and the information stored in my own home directory. I can think faster, better, and more clearly when hooked up to such a machine, because I can swap huge amounts of state out to it without worrying about it suddenly 'forgetting'. (Windows NT, of course, is a leprosy of the mind.)
The distinction in beliefs about intellectual property may stem from the degree to which we percieve ourselves to be cyborgs, augmented by our computers, versus the degree to which we view computers as merely tools that we use. If you see the computer as just a fancy VCR, you're probably ambivalent about having it regulated -- if it's an intrinsic part of your brain, though, you probably feel a little more strongly about it.
Glyph Lefkowitz - Project leader, Twisted Matrix Labs
Writer, Programmer - Not a member of the TSU
AC, I'm suggesting that every generation has the right to determine its own culture, and this one is building a culture different from mine, and from the people in Washington writing unworkable and noxious laws. Kids have grown up in a world where culture is often free and accessible..it's not their fault, it's their reality. Now we're saying they're thieves and they can't do it anymore. It's just not going to work, is my point. They are not "willfully" acting in an immoral way, they are simply acting in a way that mirrors the environment and technology that shaped their lives. To criminalize them is just nuts. They aren't theives. We need to think about our definitions of things in a way that protects artists and also recognizes what has become a right for kids, not a privilege to be bestowed by elders.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Plse folks, read the columns. I say in everyone that corporations are not evil per se, and neither, of course, is government. Corporatism..the kind driving the music and record industry, the global, greedy billion dollar lawyer kind..isn't the same thing as capitalism or corporations. It's bigger, more global and mass-marketed. It is a much more real menace to free speech and a free Net that government or corporations.
But of course allcorporations aren't evil and neither is all government. Modern capitalism has created the greatest propserity in world history..which I've said a zillion times.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
The library is making the material available on a loan to you. If you chose to copy it using a Xerox, then you are committing piracy, the same as when you swap MP3's.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
When you borrow something from a library, you use it for a brief period of time, then return it. When you rent a movie from the video store, you return it. If you want to keep these, you have to then go out, and buy them for yourselves.
When you download an MP3, you KEEP it. There is no incentive to go out and buy the item. You already own a copy.
That is the difference between Libraries and pirated copies.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Will you subscribe to the same set of standards set forth in your Slashdot editorial? Will you release "Gee ks" (or other writing that you have written and is not already available) on the web, free to download?
Will you open up your own intellectual property so that we can "pirate" it?
A much more difficult question, when it actually applies to your own livelihood. I think you should set an example... and I think you could still make money.
I like the idea of a gift/reward economy (my own description, not necessarily related to other gift economies) where I have free access to your ideas, when I benefit from or enjoy those ideas (or expressions of ideas, as some have rightly pointed out) I can reward you materially (typically with money).
Shareware basically works on this principle, and it is possible to make money using this strategy. However, it is not as ingrained a custom in our consumer society as I wish it would be. Perhaps this could change. The potential for abuse looms, but if technology could make the reward/gift a simple task, I would hope that the majority would not mind paying (what they could afford, or perceived the value of the idea to be).
Right now I already do this in a commerical setting. I am a rabid Phish fan, and own most of their albums. However I rarely listen to the CDs as I have gigs of live shows on mp3 that I prefer. hish encourges their live shows to be taped and freely distributed. I only wish there was a way for me to send them more money for all of the enjoyment I have received listening to their music.
Complexity Happens
Ok, lets put it another way....
Taking the music and making copies, THEN selling it to make a proffit....that would be stealing. On the other hand, if you don't mind me dating my self, if i get a cd I like and then make a cassette recording of it and pass it on to my friend to see how he likes it....thats not considered stealing.....mp3 is just the digital equiv of the old standard cassette.
Dimes
Jon is right about a few blatantly unenforcable rules undermining the rest of the rules, but IP rules as they stand are worse than unenforcable, they're brutal, and selectively enforced.
University computing service policies are written in iron fist style to cater to scared school administrations, but the system operators accept them with a grin because they're typically only giving them lip service anyhow. Most of them probably broke every one of those rules ten years ago when they were learning CS in college.
We've seen a bunch of discussions in the past where system administrators come right out and say that they don't care what happens with bandwidth unless a student starts stepping on too many toes.
But then after, say, three years of a bunch of students doing discrete MP3 swapping, suddenly RIAA calls the university president and puts the fear of God into him. Now the president leans on the head of the computing services and quick as a flash, five or six dozen students lose their IPs and face judicial action because the supervisor needs some sacrificial lambs.
It's politics like that that make students and the younger generation suspicious of the system.
If the rules aren't fair, what good are they?
--
Rob Carlson
The problem with fighting this battle is that it is a moral issue. To many people copying intellectual property is stealing. To many other people, most of which are probably tech-savvy youth, the old hacker cry of 'information is meant to be free' has became reality and to them it is wrong to obstruct the free flow of information. Here you have the two sides pushing at each other to kill the evil in what is a classic religious war. As most people will agree you can be Catholic or Jewish and neither makes you really an evil person yet people have fought and killed each other over this mere point of idealism. nobody even wins such a war, everyone losses. Today the information as property group has the most power and they can cause a great deal of pain to the information as freedom group but they can not completely stamp it out. All they can do is create martyrs in a group that is composed of the majority of youth today. This group will grow up and when they do they will have money and political power and then they'll strike back against what they see as the evil oppressors and then you can expect intellectual property laws weakened so much it may not even exist anymore. All those who've built their business on a model of control will be sent into shock and many will doubtless loss their shirt or worse. I think many artists would do well to look at where their real revenue comes from, the fans, and feed that frenzy. If free software can make a multi-billion dollar industry I'm quite sure free music, movies, etc can do the same. It'd probably be even more successful as these are more accessible forms of art so the user base is much wider in general. The artist would get to keep their only money rather than some huge media company. The change is coming so everyone involved should decide which side of the whip they want to be on. Youth always bring changes and often art has been involved. I hope nobody misses out on this cultural shift.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think there's lot to be said for intellectual property, but I think that in todays world 70 years may be too long for a *model* of intellectual property to stand unexamined, much less a specific grant of license! The questions simply change with time and (ever accelerating) technology. But given half a chance people get lazy about assumptions.
For example: "Who's going to pay the composer/musician/etc?" ... gee, I guess we didn't have any of those before the invention of the phonograph! [We have millenia of history to indicate that countless other payment models exist, and that yes, artists will produce art -and well!- for the sheer love of it!]
The following is an EXTREME summary of a very long article I've been researching (out of personal interest) on the effects of society, values, and technology on the very fundamental conception of music itself through history. I hope it makes sense with all the supporting data removed.
Music probably evolved when we were primates (modern primates respond positively to it, and have distinct tastes), but music has not been, and was generally never intended to be, an isolated "hi-fi" audio-only experience -- from the days of the campfire to the modern rock concert. Moreover, until *extremely* recently, music was never almost experienced except in the culture of its origin. recording was impossible, and imported musicians were considered a pale substitute for hearing it in its intended polysensory setting.
Music was also intimately intertwined with the oral tradition that defined the vast majority of human experience prior to Gutenberg. We fixate on the scroll and hieroglyphs now, but that has litle to do with how 99.9% of human lived. They learned their history, culture, values, and understanding of nature from bards, troubadours, etc.
A 'piece' had to be copied and re-played by others or it died out. The authors were acknowledged (though borrowing was at least as common as it is today), but modern notions of intellectual property would have killed most music at almost any time in history.
When sheet music became widely used, music changed dramatically (prior to Gutenberg, written systems were largely local, but the following applies to these, too):
- it became quantized in notes, specific scale systems, timing, etc.
- forms that did not fit into these sytems faded;
- it was now possible to play a song without ever having heard it, so...
- it became divorced from its context, and became firmly sound-only
- it became divorced from the musician's interpretation
- reading music required training; music became a less participatory form
- music began to fall under the intellectual property notions of written works. (please note that through most of history, we didn't even speak of "writing" music, but rather of creating it -- an act that was barely analogous.
- music was codified as distinct "pieces" of specified length (per fashion) and content. (which such works existed earlier, they were hardly universal. Hours of atonal chanting, jam sessions or courtly 'background music', etc. were far more common)
- despite attempts to annotate music to include untranscribable factors, it became seen as a particular series of sounds *only*. (in the past, a musician might play improvisations on a theme to fit a mood)
- distinct styles became even more rigidly codified
- and far too many other changes to list here; some far more profound than those listed, but difficult to describe in bullet summary
These changes proceeded over the centuries, reaching (IMHO) a pinnacle in a little ditty called "Good Morning to all" in 1893. This trivial ditty, published with the same type of slap-together attitude as the cheap newspaper 'broadsides' of the era, became one of the best-known, most played, songs of all time, when the words were changed to "Happy Birthday to You", and was the object of some ludicrous copyright enforcement crack-downs a few years back (it was in all the papers) forcing most organizations to adopt their own self-composed birthday songs, from restaturants to Boy Scouts (the Girl Scouts settled and paid a fee to continue using it, and many other 'traditional' songs).Around 1890, two other major technological changes supplanted writing: recording (Edison 1877, et alia) and broadcast (Marconi 1901, et alia).
The Phonograph changed music forever by crystalizing a performance. Until then, performers were paid for perform, not for having performed, and songs were considered performance art (in keeping with their polysensory roots) not crystalized set-pieces.
Broadcast has experiemented repeated with schemes for paying artists, but the predominant function it has served over the past century was twofold
Now comes the CONTROVERSIAL part.
After many experiments (and new ones pop up all the time), the standard music business arrangement goes like this:
A performer's take-home pay is still primarily derived from performaces (gigs and concerts) and they earn very little from album sales [source: numerous lawsuits against recording companies] whatever profits derive from albums/CDs are quickly swallowed by the legendary creative accounting practices common in the industry. The composer's interests are scarcely better protected -- royalties are few and far between.
The marketing/distribution conglomerates make all the money on recordings. To do this, in an era when the clamoring of marketing voices has always sat precisely at the individual's saturation tolerance (which rose over the decades), the tastemakers of radio (later Tv, later ... well, we'll get to that) were accorded a free ride. Charging the highly profitable broadcast industry for the use of the musician's work would be equitable, and pay the artist more, but it wouldn't provide free publicity for the RECORD sales, where the RECORDING company makes its bucks. Any recording company that chraged more than its competitors would be at a competitive disadvantage, so the fee is a nominal blanket fee, barely enough to preserve the musician's trademark/etc. rights (ownership myst be defended against lapsing into public domain)
But worst of all, marketing has ruled the format of music with an iron hand. At one time the 3-6 minute song was no more important to music than the short story was to literature before Poe. Now it is almost all that is published aside from classical (which has a similar stereotyping of its own). This is a crime against music!
But the performers need the recording companies, because without albums (and the publicity machine) it's hard to generate the public interest that fuels concert attendance -- where the performers do what they always did (and got paid for): performing.
The market/distribution companies -- an incidental function -- however, are what Congress and most of us consider the "music business".
If it seems odd that marketing/distribution should accidentally fall into the catbird seat, let me point out that an entire multi-billion MTV-industry bloomed in a few years from 'music videos', which are *clearly* incidental promotional activities (Incidentally, iin the early 80's many major musicians protested bitterly against the music videos they were forced to do -- videos that offered frightening opportunities for more "creative accounting" and largely generated increased sales for the record labels -- win-win for the record labels)
The Digital Era
---------------
Some odd possibilities:
- digital "home/private studio" production could potentially weaken the recording labels -- but they have been distribution/marketing not 'recording' companies for decades now.
- digital distribution could weaken the existing structure by being an alternative broadcast media -- only user-selected, not driven by DJ/station manager/business interests THIS IS WHAT RECORD COMPANIES FEAR. Their arguments of artistic theft are interesting, considering the many times they have prevented artists from voluntarily giving away work (RUN-DMC MP3s were one example) and even deliberately squashed artists by refusing to publish/distribute works while holding exclusive rights on future works (many cases). it's not about marketing/distribution anymore, it's about owning the public ear. If you hear it, they want it a cut of it.
- an established artist could actually produce albums funded by his fans, releasing albums when they sold enough subscriptions to fund it (I talked to Nils Loftgren -- for you 70's fans -- 2-3 years back, and he said he'd do exactly that. I don't have his website URL handy, but I believe the album is already out. I don't know if its MP3 or CD)
- MBONE (multimedia broadcast via internet) and similar new media are widely used for events of many types now -- including business conferences. True, I'd rather atttend an old-fashioned rock concert, but if downloading a rock star's MP3's and attending his "Live from Shea Stadium" MBONE broadcast at Foxboro Stadium (Boston) puts more money in his pocket (and more time in his musicimaking schedule) than buying his CD and forcing him to tour for six months... well, which better serves the music? Don't ask the record label! For those musicians who don't fill stadiums, small nightclubs can do much the same
- More importantly, with the focus back on musicians, we could see musicians selling their skills in new ways -- how about Santana's "101 Tasty Licks for Your Home Studio"? Or any of a thousand other schemes? If "Five Angry Guitarists" are looking for new material, could they accept (digitally signed) material via their website instead of relying on their old record-studio-party contacts?
- No matter what format is chosen, I suspect that "stars" will largely remain a record label phenomenon, since "the star-making machinery" was always a recording industry invention to maximize their sales. However, tastes ill diversify, and subniches will multiply. In DaVinci's one could see an astonishing divcersity of talent across Europe from Spain to Turkey to Finland and back, as each village had it's own musicians and styles (travel was rare, and culture was less homogenized), I think that more diversity beats the heck out of America's Top 40 (How can America even have a single Top 40?)
- While many will complain about the 'balkanization of tastes', I think that there does remain a distinction between good music and bad. The MP3.com of the future will have mechanisms that help distinguish the good, and allow the public to find what suits their personal tastes. Whatever happened tothe FireFly.com model of a few years back? (A joint electronic agent and "community" system: you rated 30 or so works (movies, music etc.) on a scale of 1-10, and were were informed of similar works enjoyed by others of similar tastes. You could also find others (by username) with similar tastes to chat, review their ratings (and other user-provided personal data). Meanwhile, the more works you rated, the better its recommendations became, and more data it collected for making recommendations to others
- My own MP3 Jukebox has taught me that often merely hearing pre-selected favorites is vastly inferior to hearing a mix, especially a semi-random one. There are unexpected justapositions, pacing, flow -- I call it "breathing": the inhale and exhale are equally important. Many songs that wouldn't make it into my list play an important role in my 'random mix' -- even though I've been listening to oldies I know well lately. In fact, I just bought a dozen CDs of artists I earlier never thought twice about!
- Incidentally, let's not forget the epitome of the 'recorded set-piece' (vs. performance) theory of music: the one hit wonder (Somebody cue "Number three" by they might be giants) How man budding musicians might have "two good songs" in them? Wouldn't music benefit, if we could all hear thise songs, instead of only hearing the geniuses who can turn out a full career's worth?
There's much more to say. is it possible that we're THIS blind to the options. Once, there was no such thing as a bookstore, and the Gutenberg press was a clearly dangerous invention. We adapted. How many fixtures of medieval life fell by the wayside? The barber now merely cuts hair, andn the record-company may soon just be a mix-provider, an ancillary to our primary collections"Dum vivimus, vivamus": While I live, let me live
"Dum spiro, spero": While I breathe, let me hope
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I am actually getting tired of this. This has been going on for many years and all that happens is people, whine, bitch, moan, and keep dragging the same old arguments through the dirt.
Fortunately some people are doing things.
Consumerism is OPTIONAL. If you are pissed off at how the big record companies are ripping off the artists and spewing out crap then DON'T BUY IT.
If you are sick of crass, pathetic movies, THEN DON'T GO.
You are free to live your life as you choose so long as you are not doing harm to others. There are alternatives to "corpratism"
Search the net for _legal_ new music. You'll be surprised, even top name bands are releasing free material on the net.
support new distribution mechanisms. Research how they treat the artists, and send some e-mail out to the artists to see how they feel. IMHO mp3.com is doing a good job, but they are getting competitors.
Movies are tougher, but we are getting there. The compromise that I have made is to only rent DVDs. The studios make far less money from rentals than sales.
The real answer is to find a new model and start supporting it. We are (generally) here because we support open software and we want to know what is going on and what we can do. It's not that hard. Find a model you like, or invent one, and support it with your money, your time, your creativity, or your ideas.
Conversation and discussion are important meaningful things, but there always comes a time when action is required.
chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
Ah, yes. You brought up some good points. Another facet to consider it that the music industry isnt about manufacturing, its promotion. The entire CD manufacturing capacity of the United States is probably matched by your average basement in China. Making aluminum sandwiches is pretty easy if you have some starting capital. Its getting the damn things to sell that is the problem. You have to generate a lot of hype to get a disc into all of the mainstream sales channels. Connections and money make little things like Tonight Show appearances and heavy rotation airplay happen. Throw in some personal experiences with paid throngs of fans to get the attentions of the press. Push the hype anyway possible: Free shows, CD signings, Morning radio, Loveline guest hosting, you name it. Forget the manufacturing angle, its pure sales.
The so called "artists" really aren't musicians so much as they are products. Brittney Spears isn't a person, at best she is a character, at worst she is a brand name. The human being behind the image is used to sell CDs, concert tickets, breast implants and lunchboxes. Who cares about the music? Derivative pop with a contemporary sound is all that is needed to move the product. Any higher quality and it goes over the head of the target audience and becomes more expensive to produce. The stiff men in grey suits with accounting degrees keep everything under control.
The Internet poses both problems and opportunities for the industry. Keep in mind that their whole objective is to maximize profits. They know full well the effects of the MP3 on their bottom line. At least they are studying the hell out of it to be sure. Press releases might say otherwise, but I think that they have seen the MP3 make a mostly negligable impact in most sales categories. However they do see the writing on the wall. The times they are a changin. The Compact Disc cash cow won't last forever.
The future of music IS the internet, and the predominant format isn't as lucrative as the what they have going now. Furthermore distribution is much simpler over electronic channels. That opens up competition and "piracy" as more significant concerns. Promotion is also easier and cheaper on the net, compromising yet another of their strengths. Bad news for the traditionalists, good news overall. Finally they have the opportunity to have true "pay to play" marketing. Technical problems aside, record execs drool about that opportunity. Watch for it.
Now onto the meat... IP rights. In most industries they simply would not matter one lick, so long as the "right" people made as much money. If people would spend $100 bucks a second to talk Backstreet Boys, and letting any fool burn CDs of their music made sure that the line wrapped around the block, they would probably go for it. If JonKatz could command 50Gs to speak at seminar, but it required him to allow Charmin to print his articles on every sheet, he just might do it. As the system stands, people are compensated for IP. Don't expect this to change, unless it works out better financially for those who control the IP.
As for having the intrinsic right to own IP, I personally don't think that any other opinion bears consideration. If I write something, design something, or create something of intellectual value, I deserve to be compensated for my work if I so desire. If I can release it under a free license and still make some money, so much the better. Why should other people have the right to be compensated for my work simply because they own tools that can duplicate it? Why should people reap the benefits of my labor without any compensation? Just because the laws of the land do not provide adequate protection, should I lose my rights? I don't think so.
-BW
Katz, you missed something:
The artist has a *right* to charge for his work. And if he/she needs a conglomerate to protect his work to see that he gets paid what he demands, then he should get it.
Now this isn't to say that it is okay for these companies to blatently restrict us. For example, if we own a copy of the artists work, why can't I make myself a copy? Why not ten? Maybe I'm blind, but I don't understand this.
The artist does have a right to charge for his work. And if we don't like the price, then no one buys it. However, he has the right to distribute it free, if he so chooses.
DMCA may be bad, BUT don't attack the companies because they don't give away the product.
Kudos Jon for pointing out the correlation between culture, demographics, and the ever evolving Internet.
Some here flame you for your thinking. The only consolation in this is that it will probably take at least a few years for some to fully grasp where you were going with this.
Keep up the good work Jon!
This line of thought goes along with Jon's thoery of child rearing, which is apparently "don't ever scold your children, because they can figure out right and wrong for themselves." Jon, the one who helped kids get into movies they weren't old enough to see, who wouldn't think of passing along values or morals apparently.
Just because kids do it doesn't mean they don't know better. And if they don't, you ought to TEACH THEM! Maybe some of you baby boomer parents chaffed against authority and chose to raise your kids as hellians, but those of us who grew up with those hellians will impart some discipline and respect in our children.
YOU CANNOT OWN TANGIBLE ITEMS either. Ownership is an intangible concept enforced by law. You can't own a thing anymore than you can own a song.
The only thing you can truly own are your own thoughts.
Note: Possession is different than ownership.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
You know, I was going to make a very interesting observation about all this, but I just realized "What's the point?" Every one of you already has his or her own opinion utterly ingrained into your very being, and nothing anyone says will change that. It's just like the Middle East; everyone whose parents belong to Religion A will always hate/make war against everyone whose parents belong(ed) to Religion B just because they are so utterly, irresolutely convinced that "We are right, They are wrong, We must kill them all" that there is no other option than to do their damndest to kill them. And why? Because they had no choice in the matter. If you're born into an Islamic family, you stay Islamic forever and pledge a blood feud against all who believe in an even slightly different view of theology. It's no different with any ideas. We are all born into the "reality" of Economics. We are all raised believing that you either go to college and get a good job so you can buy things, or you perish utterly. In the middle east, it's the very existence of religion that perpetuates its idiocy. Here, it's the very existence of money that perpetuates ITS idiocy.
Okay, screw it; I'll make the observation anyway, because I think it's a good one.
Now, yes, I know the difference between reality and fiction. I realize that Star Trek (TM) is fiction. It's a fictional idea, in fact. An idea that Paramount goes WAY out of its way to protect, so as to maximize its profits (what else does it have going for it? heh.) And therein is its hypocrisy. For on the Earth of Star Trek's 24th century, material wants do not exist. Money, as such, does not exist. There are no homeless, or poverty-stricken, or hungry people. Everyone has what they want. Why is that? Because the very *idea* that material things have some intrinsic *value* was abolished along with money... as soon as they had replication technology perfected.
Let's suppose that this afternoon, IBM or someone announces that their Replico-Matic 2000 will be available, allowing anyone and everyone to make any material object they need or want or even have a vague desire for. By this time next month, almost everyone who works at every department, grocery, computer, and manufacturing store, plant, factory, and distributor will be out of a job. But it's okay, because they no longer need money; they just replicate whatever they need. They have ceased to be slaves to the economy. It would almost be like a social evolution, wouldn't it? This would mean that if you want, for example, a 20-carat diamond ring for your fiancee, you could *download* it and have it within seconds. Want a 5-course meal to impress your parents, who are coming to visit? Download it. Need the latest CPU upgrade for your computer? Download it. So. Now that you no longer have to go slave 12 hours a day in the factory just to feed yourself and your five kids, what do you do with your time? Self-Improvement. You take up a hobby. You write that novel you always wanted to write. You practice your scales on that nice new Kurzweil K2600 synthesizer you just downloaded. And you are free. Free! Can any of you even imagine what that would feel like? Now hold on; here's where it gets interesting.
Obviously, this new technology (replication) would put a LOT of companies out of business. Therefore, it would be very bad for business. BUT, it is very very very very beneficial for humanity as a whole... therefore, when you balance out the "damage" to Big Business and the "benefits" to Humanity, which is the greater good? The greater evil? Is it worth destroying the housing construction industry if it means that everyone can have whatever housing they want? Damn right it is. The needs of the People outweigh the needs of the Elite Few Who Have Us All By The Balls. Always. Period.
So is it worth destroying the mega-conglomerates who have just about all musicians, artists, actors, and We the Consumers by the balls now that we actually have the technology to do so? What would be the benefits? Music, movies, books, ideas, all now have the potential to be freely available to everyone, enriching billions of lives. Is it better to ensure Mr. Executive will always get his cut no matter what, or is it better to enrich the minds of as many people as possible through the universal cost-free distribution of music, information, how-to's, books, movies, etc? I think we all know the answer to that. What would be the cons? Yes, a lot of people other than the artists themselves will have to get other jobs, but how is that different than any other major evolutionary step in the history of business? Talking movies put a lot of theater organ players out of work. Injection molding put a lot of hand-crafters out of work. Robotic assembly lines put a lot of factory workers out of work. And each of these "innovations" (does MS have a TM on that word yet? I forget...) was touted as "good for business" when it was introduced, to justify the laying off of everyone whose job suddenly became obsolete. Isn't it about damn time that something was done that's "good for humanity" instead???
The Internet is going to put a lot of fat-cat executive leeches out of work, too. It's just evolution.
P.S.... I salute you, Mr. Katz. You have the guts to recognize the things that are more important than profits. Keep up the good work.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Laws exist as a function of the culture in which they are defined. If the culture and the law clashes, the law eventually gets changed to reflect the culture. You see this everywhere, from the end of prohibition in the US to the legalising of homosexuality in Tasmania. There's nothing immoral about this process, in fact fighting the process of legal and cultural change could easily be considered far more immoral. So all this argument that copying mp3s is theft and thus mindblowingly immoral and sick and so forth is fundamentally STUPID. Please stop it . . .
himi
--
My very own DeCSS mirror.
I like this comment because, for me, it underlines one of the issues about intellectual property that is threatened. Under current law, when you buy a piece of software, a game, or M/S Office, or Red Hat, you own it. That means you can do almost anything you want with it.
In particular, you can create a library and loan it out to your friends. You can rent it, as Blockbuster does. Nintendo tried to stop them from doing it in the courts. There are a few things you can't do with it legally, though, like sell copies, or give them away.
But the software industry doesn't like even this state of affairs. They want to say that you only license the software, and that under the license, you can't resell the software when you're done, and you can't rent it out. After all, that's lost revenue.
And the movie industry wants to shut down reverse engineering of DVDs. I have every reason to hope that they will not prevail in court, but we should expect them to pursue their interests vigorously.
I find I can't muster the same enthusiasm for the free flow of MP3s. Katz makes two arguments for legalization of pirated recordings.
The first is that laws against them are effectively blue laws. That violations are so widespread, that any attempt to enforce the law could be construed as selective enforcement, which we don't allow according to the laws of the US.
This doesn't wash, because those same laws apply in many, many other situations, where violations are not widespread. Honestly, I don't really like the way the music industry works, but I like the idea of somebody stealing my work and calling it their own even less.
The other arguement is that the copyright laws are the tools that big media uses to control what we listen to, and control what we watch. This is to some extent true as well, but it cuts both ways. Copyright laws are what created GNU and Linux as well. Copyright laws are the tool that can be used to undermine big media.
Furthermore, it is possible for an individual to lessen the control big media has on his life. Buy second-hand CD's through eBay or elsewhere. Listen to the radio, listen to the Net radio. Go to the library. Turn off the television and read.
"I see great things in baseball" - Walt Whitman
You forget that what is right and wrong is largely determined by culture.
Poligamy used to be considered a perfectly normal and moral way of life. In fact, many cases demanded taking a second wife as the only moral option. For example, if your brother died, you were morally responsable to take his wife as your own.
The point is that the new generation is making their own morals. They may be different than yours. This does not give them any less weight. Right and wrong are shades of grey. The more people that accept an action as right, the lighter the shade becomes. When a group (however you want to define group) agrees that an action is right, then that action is moral within that group.
Here is a radical idea to take care of vast music piracy, and actually improve the quality of music that we have:
The government (National Association for the Arts is the bureau, I believe) subsidizes professional artists (to some degree), who then sell their original work to collectors for considerable profit. What if music were to stop being treated as an industry, and more as an art form (using a model similar to that used for fine art)? Then the free trading of music via Napster and the like would be completely legal and legitimate, and young'uns wouldn't learn how easy it is to break toothless laws.
A side effect of this would be that the only people remaining in music would be those that actually love making music. The romanticized image of the 'rich rock star that gets lots of girls' would become archaic, and modern industry evils like boy bands would be no more. The good artists, that actually contribute to the medium (there are a few bands (and quite a few rappers) remaining that would fit this mold, but not the Limp Bizkits and Backstreet Boys of the world) would be able to maintain good lifestyles, and culture wouldn't be so overrun with the banality that is pop music.
I doubt that this is realistic, but it would definitely solve quite a few problems - the enjoyment of music would be free, artists wouldn't sacrifice 90% of what is rightfully their profits to industry coffers (granted, they wouldn't be making much more money, if any), and the quality of music would improve considerably.
Well now you cant make everyone happy, and government is suppose to represent the majority. But I would like to hear from cross section of this group, and their opinion, endorsment or lack of regarding the recent activity revloving around these issues. Do they view napster as a threat to their livelyhood?
Personally if I was interested in a bands cd in this situation I would by it from the band (assuming they made it availlable as easily as an mp3). That is a personal choice I make in my efforts to support grassroots enities.
You must also consider the other angle, where if a band wished to distribute via this medium, they would not be allowed if the record companies had their way. Take note of the following similar situation, Go to an NHRA Drag race and try to buy a TeeShirt from your favorite racer who you wish to support...... Bzzzzzztt - SORRY! You must purchase the shirt from an authorized NHRA distributor. So that IS a double edged sword you are waving around.
Rick B.
This would be a valid argument if the actual artist was the primary benefactor of profits from recorded media sales. When the "artist" receives less than 10% (probably less than 5%) of the profits of record sales, who is the injured party?
Rick B.
implementations are not.
but the real question here isnt what's wrong... we all know what the problem is..
we need to start trying to figure out how to make things right. Preaching to the choir is not enough.
"hacktivism" sucks... childish and annoying...
so what do we do?
im open to suggestions
... hi bingo
let me guess... is it your left or right hand?
This space for sale
I can't believe this hasn't been moderated up yet and the posts that don't really say anything are.
IANAL, but I play one on
Lawyer: Look, if you formed a band and recorded your own version of Dark Side of the Moon, track for track, do you think that's legitimate unles you get permission?
Bad example, I think.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've paid them a lot of money last year.
You don't need anyone's permission to record a cover of a song, the illustrious Cecil Adams sets you straight on this one, all you have to do is notify the copyright's owner and pay a standard royalty.
And what is an album, but a collection of songs? You may need to change the title, however, perhaps Dark Thighs of the Moon?
Also, the complete Dark Side of the Moon album has been played in concert by groups that were not Pink Floyd, the cover band Phish famously (and a pretty good copy too, I have it) and well as countless Pink Floyd cover bands I imagine.
George
CDs all cost more or less the same because that's what the consumer is willing to pay - why buy Puff Daddy at $40 a CD when Notorious BIG is only $20? Smart market researchers / economists have determined that the recording companies will make an optimum profit from selling CDs at $xx.xx. Assuming that any one piece of music has the same value as any other is the assumption that keeps the price of music CDs flat.
.10 and a Jennifer Lopez MP3 will go for $3.00.
Of course, if the record companies got really smart, they would charge for music based on the demand for it - in economic terms 'price discrimination'. So a Barry Manilow MP3 will go for $
Please note - my selection of artists for examples has nothing to do with my music taste...
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
And after all what's the point in buying a movie if you are never going to be allowed to really own it? You might as well just rent it and forget it. It won't be yours anyway, your license will expire (or they'll obsolete DVD players so you can't watch your disks any more.) So why buy it? What are you gaining?
I mean, the point of actually spending the money to buy a movie is so you'll own a favorite of yours and build your collection. The mega-corps are trying to alter the law so you don't really own it... you just have a license to use it.
I'm not interested in owning a collection of licenses, thanks.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
One thing you do have to consider here is that we're not talking about a zero-sum game by any stretch of the imagination. Simply because some other company is making money off of your R+D does not mean that you're not, even if the amount of money you're making is less than the amount they're making, due to the cost of the R+D itself. I suppose a situation in which there is no intellectual property law resembles the iterated prisoner's dilemma that keeps popping up in economy affairs, where the equivalent of "cooperating" is doing your own research, and "defecting" is waiting for others to do it for you. Note that in a massive iterated prisoner's dilemma like this one, always defecting is not a stable strategy.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
You added a unnecessary step. If you want to record your own version of Dark Side of the Moon, you do NOT get permission and pay royalties, you simply pay royalties. Permission is strictly optional. This doesn't work in the case of computer games, although most likely it would be better if it did, since there's no mechanism in place for it.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
While I agree that the root of the issue is that "kids these days" are almost entirely amoral, what about those times that you buy a CD that you REALLY like, only to play it to death? (scratches, inadvertant damage, acts of Ghod, what have you)
I mean, there are several Cds that I had bought, and have subsequently "lost" Does making copies of them from someone else's physical media make me an outlaw? Hell, I PAID for a copy, dammit! Am I a fugitive now?
It is by caffiene alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire
"We have the right to free music!" Nowhere does it say you have the right to get other people's work for free even if they want you to pay for it. If a few people want to dedicate their lives to making a CD, and you want the music, buy the fucking CD. If you're not going to buy it, just get the music from any of countless other sources and burn it. But don't whine because they're trying to make it harder for you to steal from them. If all music was free for us to take, as Katz seems to want, then wouldn't the artists make it freely available?
-- Scream, Dracula, Scream!
So, you're accusing Mr. Katz of confusing two things (ideas and expressions). But here you're falling into exactly the same sort of trap--you're confusing
Copyright law, in the US and elsewhere, has something to say about both rights, but it's not true that the two rights are necessarily inseperable. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine a world where you were allowed to copy other people's work as much as you'd like, as long as you attribute it to its correct author.
So you can't say that taking away author's right to prevent copying of their work is necessary to preserve their right to be credit as the author of their work.
---Bruce Fields
(And please feel free to verbatim copies of this post as you like, as long as you do not remove my name or this message....:-))
Wow, this is almost a profound statement, but, similar to much of Katz's writings on culture, I still think its a gross over-generalization. I must agree that a large cross-section of the musicians I have met are extremely geeky in their own ways. I would even go so far as to lump the Freaks and the Band Queers into the same sort of culture/counter-culture geeky dichotomy, but this trend seems to vanish beyond high school. At least in my experience. Once beyond the socially dividing boundaries of public education, you see that professional musicians are extremely INTO music, in the same way that professional programmers are INTO programming, but if you actually look at the other professions (i.e. non-computer oriented and music-based) you'll see an equal, although different form of geekery. The fact is, you'll find that everyone is a geek in some sense of the word: a mechanic that is INTO cars, an archeaologist that is INTO dinosaurs. Almost all artsy-fartsy-type professionals are geeks. Teachers and professors are geeks. Accountants are geeks. The police are even pretty geeky. The sad (or is it celebratory?) fact is that humans are geeky about anything they are passionate about whether its music, computers, or flowers. Sure we go out of our way trying to be what we "think" normal is...but in the end, its only ourselves that we fool.
To place a note on topic: I don't think that piracy should be blanketly approved of as Katz suggests, but I do think he has a point when it comes to the industry's attempt at cracking down on the very people which would buy their records. The industry is going to lose this battle, and may have already done too much damage to recover. And like watching a wholly mammoth sink into the tar pits...its going to be both slow and painful to behold.
In recent months, I have bought more cd's -because- of mp3's then I ever would have if it was not for them. Thats the greatest thing about mp3s, if you hear about a band, you can download an mp3, see if you like them, and if they are good enough, you go out and buy their cd. MP3 quality is -not- perfect, but it can be a sort of free sample before you go and buy the actual album. On another point, sites like http://www.mp3.com allow you to experience bands that you would never have heard otherwise.
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
Who can own a rock? Who can own a tree? Who can own a thought? Only the Great Spirit.
--
All the rhetoric aside, it is worth stepping back, from time to time, and analyzing what morality really is. Murder is wrong. Breaking into someone's house is wrong. Such actions are clear and present causes of misery to others. Law are in part codifications of morality.
In contrast, some rules of etiquette are necesary to help society function smoothly, and these too are embodied in law. If I park too long in front of a parking meter, I have violated a law, but I have not committed an immoral act. Such is the case with intellectual property
Society will need a system to allow idea creators to eat in exchange for their ideas. And while I don't know what it will be, such a system will be found. But don't tell me that I'm morally wrong for reading something when I haven't purchased the right to do so. All I have done is increased the pressure on society to find a better reimbursement system.
The notion that an individual or a corporation can OWN an idea is the world's biggest Jedi Mind Trick, but the ranks of the weak-minded are thinning all the time...
Noone want's to deprive the artist of money for what they produce (okay mabey a few idiots).
The part I liked t read was "due compensation".
How much is a song worth? A movie?
Supposedly the artist gets a small percentage of the proceeds from a ticket sale or the sale of an album. Where does the rest go?
Fair market value is what the population is willing to pay for a product or service. Supposedly we pay this when we make a cd or ticket purchase. Unfortunately it is jimmied by a few factors. First the studios are essentially vertical businesses. They control the content, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and price of the product. We can't just go to another record label to get the artist we want cheaper. (note: i'll be curious to see if the outcome of the msft antitrust trial could have an effect on the business model of the entertainment industry)
Now (and probably for a while now) the studios have been trying to figure out ways to force the consumer into paying as much as possible for their wares. Regional encoding, playback method monpolies, and other more subtle methods(encryption from the source to the display) are now in their arsenal.
Monopolies are formed by companies that have nowhere else to go. Corporations are expected to increase profits every year. If they don't the stockholders sell their shares. (note: with the expansion of the stock market into a more consumer realm might this change? or at least might the companies be more answerable to the general public as opposed to the weathier subset currently in control? or will it get worse)
Once a company has reached market saturation, the only places to go are either charging higher prices from the consumers for an existing product(which reqires the prevention of competition to help determine fair market value), or elimiating the exitsing competition via whatever methods, or entering a new market. From what it looks like they are tring all three (first two are foremost though)
To sum it up it looks like people are just sick and tired of the middleman(person if you insist)(i.e.- movie/record studios) in the process. The net is helping to elimiate them (or at least reduce their importance), and they aren't going quietly.
Man, and I thought this was going to be a short post...
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
The phrase "No taxation without representation" sticks in my mind...
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
First of all most kids who grew up playing Doom, did not grow up around guns. For whatever reason guns have beome a taboo of sorts, kept hidden away by the adults. I'm willing to bet that most of these kids (and adults) who use guns in senseless shootings were not taken ou to the range and taught by a responsible adult the power and irrevocability of them (its like pandora's box). (Guns used while commiting another crime is another story).
A game does not carry the desensitization power as a video segment of the same use of violence (via new or otherwise). Unless we all looked like huge walking sprites(the graphics term).
Movies and news have consience free ends to them. You see the violence then its over. The big bad oppressor is threatening the hero (don't forget that most movies mean to have the audience put themselves in his/her place). The hero pulls the trigger, bam! The oppressor is gone. A scene or two (or seconds) later he is out of the story. No cops, no guilty consience, just happy music, alot of money and the good life. I think this might be what is being picked up by the kids watching that type of movie.
IIRC the per capita incidents of youth violence has declined steadily(possibly with minor spikes (or major if you include the youth in the world wars)) over the past centuries.
One thing to keep in mind is the ability in a wired world to disseminate these occurrences. A few hundred years ago (beyond parents having more control over teir children) an incident of violence of any kind would make it to a few surrounding bouroughs. Now, within minutes, much of what transpires is transmitted around the world. We are no longer looking at our direct environment. We are looking at the entire world and perceiving it as our direct environment. Like a magnifying glass. The sheer quantity of stuff we hear about, without taking into acocunt the sheer size of society, and the size of the population, makes it seem as if all hell was breaking loose.
Well, thats my opinion. Feel free to differ, just don't do it before trying to see where I was coming from. (else I would have to think that you aren't trying)
P.S.- the columbine kids were probably RE-acting. Not acting.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
Goes to show you that there are far too many people just skiming the posts and not actually reading them. THe moderators just see something that looks like it could be a troll and it's imediatly moderated down.
This is the jewel that I've been expecting to coe out of the AC posts. At some point one of these guys was going to put out some quality and here it is.
Slashdot has gone mainstream and the moderation of this post shows the outcome.
A person is smart, people are stupid. Slashdot has turned from an open forum on the news of the day to an opertunaty for Johnny nobody to spew his mindless drivel. and when that happens stuff like this Stuart post is ignored.
I feel saddened by this. Not because it means the death of what was the original spirit of slashdot, But because these people, these trolls (and I mean the true trolls, not our Stuart poster here) are the vast majority of the people posting here. And so the message of this post is lost on them. These people are the products of our school systems and culture. Because of this these people are lacking in the education to see the problem and see nothing wrong with their frivolus and stupid postings, taking every shot they can to flame and discredit (in their own inept way). Which is why there are so many Jon Katz flames.
Perhaps people should spend more time in project gutenburg than playing quake.
Sure on paper and in the imagination, all information should be free. Anyone anywhere should be able to unrestrictively get any information on anything. But alas, this kind of world doesn't work. "Free Information" directly conflicts with "Privacy Issues". Both topics are hot items here in Slashdot.
.mov without our express permission.
Beyond the obvious priviacy issues(like personal information being accessable to everyone) here are a few other examples why information isn't necessarily free:
- If I write a song for my girlfriend and only for my girlfriend, I would be extremely pissed if I found the song lyrics and MP3 up on a web page.
- If I made a family movie about a day on our vacation, I would be extremely pissed if I found this video up on a web page as a
- If I wrote in a journal, I would be extremely pissed if I found it up on a web page.
- If I built a desk, painted a painting, or baked a cake, I should not have to tell everyone how I did it.
Any system that forces it members to do any of these is far and away "open" but highly "oppressive". One part of "freedom" is the ability to decide for yourself what you want to do with your own life and abilities. How can one do that if you know it is very easy and likely that your private thoughts and creations will become part of the public information pool?
Today, you can purchase books online through B&N, Fatbrain or that other site. You can often get books cheaper than you can at your local bookstore. At some point, book stores might be unable to operate profitably if Amazon et. al. take all of their business away. Have the online retailers then stolen the customers of the traditional booksellers? Have they done something morally wrong? After all, a lot of book store owners will be put out of business by this. If someone can own the rights to an idea, can't someone own the rights to sell to a customer? After all, attracting customers requires an investment of time, money, service and creativity. Isn't it unfair for someone to just walk into a market that was established through the hard work of someone else and capitalize on it by taking all of the original's customers away?
The answer to all of these questions, I hope you would agree, is no. Amazon et. al. would not have stolen anything, they would have simply obsoleted the business model of the traditional booksellers by providing consumers with a better, more economical way of obtaining the same thing.
Stealing implies the taking of another's property. But the notion of intellectual property is and always has been a kludge. If you take Jon's intellectual property, he still has it. It's just that now you have it too. What makes stealing wrong is not that it unfairly enriches the thief but that it unfairly taxes the victim. We all know that there is a big difference between taking a copy of a book and making a copy of a book in terms of its effects on the owner of that book.
When you do the latter, what you're really doing to Jon is what Amazon et. al. could do to traditional book retailers: make their business model obsolete. Maybe, without the benefit of copyright protection, Jon can't write books, publish them and then rely on selling copies of the book to make money. Maybe, if anyone can copy and distribute his works, he will need to find an alternative business model if he doesn't want to go out of business. Several have already been proposed by various individuals, and I'm sure that any creative entrepreneur with a talent for writing things that people want to read could figure out a way in a free market economy to make a viable business out of writing, with or without copyright protection. The bottom line is that creative people will somehow be able to make a living by producing creative works with or without copyright protection. It's just that with copyright laws, we artificially limit the number of people who may benefit from such an individual's work.
Naturally, those already established in the record, movie or publishing business have a vested interest in preserving the notion of intellectual property and the enforcement of laws that create an artificial scarcity of ideas and expressions. They already profit from the current system, and there is a danger that if the system were changed, someone else might figure out how to profit from the new rules before they old boys did.
It is true that information wants to be free, in the highest sense. However, information also wants to be placed in a book for later (you mean books aren't dead yet). Music wants to be free to the masses (what, you mean radio isn't dead yet), but it also wants to be stuck on a CD for easy retrieval later. But more importantly, music wants t obe performed live.
The Smashing Pumpkins did a surprise gig in Toronto last week. Tickets were $30 each, and disappeared in a day (it was a small club). While lots of people may have Smashing Pumpkins MP3s for free, I bet these same people will gladly lay out a really big sum to see them live. That is how you are supposed to listen to music.
The industry has been making money for the last 90 years (and majorly in the last 50) on an idea whose time has finally come. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to fight to have the car declared illegal because my horse whip business is going under.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
Even the guy who makes the "Information Wants to Be Free" bumper stickers has a copyright on them. Maybe the answer here is bootlegging.
lots and lots of bootlegging.
\\ Where's my giant foam cowboy hat and airhorn?
Even the guy who makes the "Information Wants to Be Free" bumper stickers has a copyright on them. Maybe the answer here is bootlegging.
lots and lots of bootlegging.
\\ Where's my giant foam cowboy hat and airhorn?
While they understand that it's illegal, I don't think they regard it as immoral. I used to be this way myself: way back when I owned a C-64, I used to pirate software because (a) I had no money, (b) everybody else was doing it, and (c) since I couldn't afford to buy the games anyway, I wasn't really taking money from their pocket, was I?
The immorality of removing someone's opportunity to make profit off their hard work is harder to see, particularly when everyone else is doing it, and particularly when you know that the original artists receive only a tiny share of the money anyhow).
I think that if music publishers made music available in a more direct way, and made a more direct pitch to the people doing the copying to please respect the rights of the artists (as opposed to jumping up and down and shouting, "Pirates are evil!"), that they might well find a satisfactory resolution.
Hmmm...so if I registered ripoffkatz.com and created my own little Katz web site featuring all of his articles and a scanned in PDF version of his book, I would expect Katz would have no objections because there really is no property cyberspace. yeah, right.
Katz is completely wrong when he writes, "Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments."
Huh? If I don't like the restrictions placed on me by RIAA-associated music sellers I have alternatives -- I can go elsewhere (made much easier by the Internet). Hell I can even go out and make an album myself and release it and say "screw RIAA -- do what you want with my album."
But if the government says "You can't do this with your album" then I'm stuck. If they mandate censorship or require me to have a warning sticker or whatever, there isn't even the possibility of getting around that.
The government is far more dangerous than corporate bloodsuckers (in fact the government is largely responsible for the creation of the corporate bloodsuckers.)
I own ideas. All of them. Seriously though, I think that fines or other payments will be a lot more acceptable to any party in these disputes considering that money is what the corporations are after. Besides, the perpetrators(sp?) of these crimes tend to be fairly upper class. The mass imprisonment of college students and other 'valuable members of society' might look bad. And finally, to Jon Katz- I know that insulting you has become somthing of a slashdot tradition, and it's not one that I nessicarily want to join, but just a suggestion; If you spent more time thinking about your ideas and structuring them, your articles would be a lot shorter and clearer. Forcing your readers to organize the various elements of your writing is intellectual laziness on your part and unfair to your readers. Just a thought.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
What you are confusing is the expression and the distribution. The expression is protected, the distribution is what the owner of the expression choses to be OK. Just because you went to listen to some music for free in a square does not necessarily give you the right to record it a replay it to other people at will. Why do you think tape recorders are usually not allowed in concert halls ?
Patrick
et les Shadoks pompaient...
To answer the second question, it does not matter if he would have bought it or not. If he did not want it, then why did he burn it in the first place ?
I think that this example is not well chosen. You may argue that the price of the good exceeds the value that your friend pouts on it, but this is not enough to make the burning of the CD acceptable. This is similar to using a shareware without paying the license.
But does it make it moral ? Just because it is easy and ubiquitous to, say kill my neighbour, should I be doing it ? It comes down to education and to wheither or not you follow some sort of moral/legal code.If the music is available for free (download) in the same way as a shareware is available for free (download). Then you have the right to obtain it, but you also have the duty to retribute the author/owner as he demands.
Just because you did not do it for all your life does not make it acceptable that you or others do it.
Copyright laws usually protect the expression of an idea. A software is the expression of an idea. Music is the expression of an idea. That specific expression (regardless of the medium) belongs to somebody.
WHY ???Just because it is easy to copy does not make it right!!!
The key here is that you are not loosing a right you have. You are being told that you don't have, and never had, that right. The problem again is mostly in educating people to understand that because there is no physical manifestation of the good (it's only a file on my hard-drive after all), does not mean that it has no value. True. I think what defines the Information Age is more that now the creators/owners of copyrighted material now have the option to not use tradditional physical media to distribute their work. As a consequence, they don't need the big corporations as much as they used to in order to reach a broad audience. This is what defines the Information Age. Not the fact that there is no ownership over creation anymore. I think that this is the key. Big corporations are not happy because the Net may (will ?) undermine their established power. They try to put all their weight in a battle to prevent people from doing without them. This is what we collectively have to fight against, not the fact that the expression of an idea belongs to its author. Note that I refer to the expression of an idea, not the idea itself, which does not belong to anybody.What we have to understand is that a song or a piece of software IS the expression of an idea, and as such IS OWNED by somebody who is commonly known as the author. This ownership is transferable, which is how the big corporations got in a position where they own most of the production that exists. They got their simply because one needed them to be able to distribute his/her work. The Information Age enables us to get rid of the middle-men, and the corporations are the middle-men. The Information Age does not anihilate the notion of intellectual property/copyright.
Just my 2 cents!
Patrick.
et les Shadoks pompaient...
Make music free. and to compensate the artists, don't make them pay taxes...
Fish
We are living in the most meritocratic time in history. Shouldn't we, many of us creators of intellectual property, be against anything which diminishes the market value of our work. Don't take this the wrong way. I am not against open source, in fact I think its wonderful, BUT, the creators of open source software voluntarily give up their rights as owners and creators. While this is laudable, I don't think it should be required. That is theft. Think about the music you enjoy. What fraction of it was created without a thought to profit?
However, as broadband continues to roll out, 40 gig hard disks and CDR's become even cheaper, finding this obscure band or "that other CD by them" is not going to be a problem and burning it redbook is as easy as pie. The only reason at that point to buy CDs is conscience, but then we run into:
1) Information is free, period. I'm fighting a moral crusade, your morality is unfortunately not a factor.
2) I don't advocate hurting artists, but the music industry is so screwed up I will not support the recording industry no matter what (and thanks for the free lunch too!)
3) Photoshop. I use it, but if for some reason I couldn't use it without buying it, I wouldn't buy it. So I'm not hurting anyone's pocketbook by using it, so who cares.
4) (And the vast majority) Huh dude? I found it on napster. Intellectual property? Copyright? Who cares about that man - what are you taking about anyway> Have another beer and relax, WWF is on in 5 minutes.
That's the story. I've never, ever, once heard of someone will a full CD of mp3s and a CDR going to buy same CD at the store unless the mp3s were low quality/had problems, whatever. I'm sure more of my serious musician friends would, but most don't do much with computers, and the ones that do are awfully poor.
What to do about all this, you got me. Most people have no interest in the debate one way or another - it's simply a matter of "if it's free, they'll take it". Unless of course they've got a vested interest in what they're selling, then they get mad about people copying it freely. Anyway, we can relate anecdotes all day about mp3s attracting or detracting from CD sales -- but if you believe easy access to any virtually perfect digital song you wished == people buying the CDs as a show of support, you're crazy.
A mistaken argument. Only certain information is more valuable if it is scarce--for example, information about the stock market, corporate mergers, or other things which require stealth in order to play your hand. But a song is just a song, asshole. ;-)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
>Seriously, though, this is a moral issue that
>you completely blow by. Say there's a cart of
>apples standing on the street, with a sign on it
>saying "DO NOT STEAL!" Should you still steal
>the apples? How can one reasonably expect an
>adolescent (or older) apple lover to refuse a
>nice juicy apple?
Another example of a clueless person trying to use a false metaphor. Digital music, software, etc. is information, not a tangible good, and information can be copied an unlimited number of times without being diminished. So, by your apple cart analogy, for it to be accurate the "theif" would have to have the ability to walk up to the apple cart and create an identical copy of the apple he wants out of thin air, while leaving the original apple intact. That wouldn't really be stealing.
So, your analogy is flawed. But more importantly in the case of music and software--you aren't really hurting anyone by downloading music and software you'd never otherwise buy. I bought Q3A and UT because I would have bought them even if they weren't available pirated--which they are--and because I want to support their developers. I do however have Fiona Apple songs I downloaded for free, because she's a sexy bitch and I like listening to her sultry voice, but I'd never have shelled out $10-$20 for the privilege. That hurts neither Fiona nor the record company she signed with, because I wouldn't have given them money anyway--especially since I could record her music videos for free off of MTV if I wanted to, with the added bonus of being able to see her sexy self when she's "a bad, bad girl." In fact, I have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128, so I could easily capture the videos digitally and make a VCD. But, I digress; point being, no one is losing money, and I get free entertainment. No one gets hurt, no one steals the music since the albums are all still there.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Now just imagine what would happen if there was no copyright law. All of our OpenSource software under the GPL license would be completely unprotectable. Sure you could copy the software, but the source would be hidden. Not to mention that there would be a *huge* increase in the use of anti-copying devices such as dongles, special disks, DVD-style encryption. In all this would be *disaster* Sure it's great for those who want their music. But what about other stuff protected by copyrights?
The copyright system is essential to Free Softare. Without copyright protection all of our OpenSource software has no protection too. It truely does work both ways.
Where do the basic neccessities (food, shelter, computers, software, so forth), come from that allow people to write open source software?
The point is, when someone is writing open source software, that someone is almost certainly being subsidised by another activity (that they may or may not be doing themselves), which as likely as not, involves the tranasction of value (money probably) for that activity. People write open source for no financial gain as a matter of choice, but that choice is made possible by the availibilty of means acquired at some point using the exchange of value for labour.
I saw that
Interesting analogy, because you don't in fact have to get permission in order to perform or sell cover version of song. I believe there is a fixed standard royality percentage on cover versions and thats it. And such a scheme would be very useful of the computer industry. If say you won't to write a replacement for on of microsoft library, you could do it without permission, but have to pay them 10% for using their API, sounds fair and useful.
Granted, this post could be considered an unlimited resource; but the time, effort, experience, whatever, that led and allowed smack_addict (and later lurker 786 ;) to create it is not. In other words, the number of posts by smack_addict is not an unlimited resource. Not to mention the number of posts by X moderated up to Y. What about the universe of good posts? I'm sure everybody can extrapolate to other creative endeavours.
Which is not to say I necesarily agree with DMCA or suing napster or whatever. I just think there actually exists another side to the argument.
I realize that my sentiments may have already been expressed...but anyway...
"The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property...how can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) music lover to refuse to acquire a 1,000-song playlist she couldn't possibly afford to buy in the manner the recording industry prefers to distribute it?"
Just because you don't know it's wrong doesn't make it right. So, by your logic, if someone offers me a stolen bag of $5000 out of the blue, and I take it, it's perfectly fine? I realize the comparison is a little odd, but the idea is still there. No matter how you try to twist it or justify it, stealing is still stealing.
And yes, I too am guilty of having MP3s. Again, that doesn't make me innocent though.
"Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments."
Oh please, now you're just being paranoid. There are hundreds of laws designed to keep corporations and other such entities in check, and you're telling me that corporations are out there to destroy the world? If you're so against corporations and what they supposedly stand for, stop crying about them and do something.
"If corporatism has an Achilles heel, it seems to be that it is astonishingly short-sighted, spewing legal warnings, lawsuits and copyright infringement claims and lobbying intensely for legislation to curb the open distribution of software and ideas."
You think it's wrong for a corporation to enforce a copyright they rightfully own? That's what a copyright is supposed to do, protect someone's property. Is it wrong for someone like Microsoft to stop an illegal distribution of Windows 2000? By your standards, it is. So tell me Jon, should we all just toss copyrights out the window and become some utopian society where we say "Screw you" to the economy?
"They [corporations] also have a tendency to mow down smaller craft in their path."
Welcome to the wide world o' Capitalism Jon. You can dream of your little utopian society where everyone plays nice and everything's free, but wake up and smell the profits. Nobody said business was fair. I don't agree with total monopolization or anything like that (that's why the government stopped them over 100 years ago), but if your business can't keep up and gets swallowed by someone else, that's just tough shit.
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Why do people always do this. Everyone just wants to read the word, perform the link from screen to mind. People almost never read the verbage and think about what the author is trying to say. There is a deeper meaning to what Jon was saying, a grander sceem, a bigger picture, a truer reality. No one should just read something and say wait he's off base here. You should comtimplate the issues that are raised. Think about what is being suggested. You might see that there is more than the surface that you just skimmed, when you read through the material the first time. I don't want to seem totally against your right to express yourself, but does it make since. I know I almost never do.
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
That is exactly what the RIAA ought to try to understand....I haven't really bought any CD's in 5+ years. The reason why, is that I would buy a CD because of a cool song on the radio and without fail every other song on the CD would suck.
Recently, I started using napster. I've downloaded about 10 songs, and now I have an interest in buying some of the CDs. The MP3's are said to be 'CD quality', but the ones I've gotten sure as hell aren't. They're not bad, but they're not CD quality. Maybe this is the fault of the people who are making them, but either way I wouldn't mind the real deal.
Furthermore, the RIAA had sales UP almost 20% last year, didn't they? Napster and MP3's have the potential to be HUGE marketing tools...they could start giving away or selling sample CDs with lower quality singles from a number of artists. Use the AOL-style guerilla marketing (send out a gazillion CDs until people give in an buy something).
I assume that you are all aware of the result of this small undertaking.
Now, examining the almost parallel case which the music industry has now brought upon us, a quite feasible and ethical solution would be to respond in exactly the same way. If we as a community disagree with the music industry's actions to "protect" their music, than let us ignore them. The industry is not a necessary component in the distribution of music. There are already many bands that make their music available as mp3s which can be downloaded directly off of their websites.
The strongest solution to this problem thus seems to be to support the Open Music movement. This would imply supporting primarily those groups who understand the importance of the free distribution of music. Proprietary, industry distributed music can either be ignored, or purchased according to the standards that they have set.
Remember, Open Source does nothing to deface or circumvent the foolish fences which proprietary software has built around itself. Rather it introduces a new frame of mind which they can do nothing about.
There is really no need to actively campagin against the music industry. If their choices lead them to death, than let death come. And meanwhile, those who have a greater vision of the future and a deeper understanding of today's culture will have long since abandoned the old standard, and built their own.
"I'm on my way to the freedom land..."
Ooh, look at those flames go. Brief intro to point out biases: I'm Hugh Hancock, the CEO of Strange Company mentioned above (although I should point out that we're far from the only motivators of Machinima- other groups like the Ill Clan have been instrumental in its growth). I'm also, I think, even more extreme in my views on IPR and its upcoming demise than Jon.
Yes, Intellctual Property Rights as we know them, or indeed at all, are doomed. Count on it. Why? Because they're not "rights" at all. They're abberations forced upon us by the primitive nature of the distribution media we've had, up to now, available to us.
I think that a key point of Bruce Sterling's brilliant Viridian Manifesto is apposite here: ideology doesn't transcend technology. Technology transcends ideology. And technology, in this case digital distribution, is forcing a change in thinking, back from a top-down distribution model, where a few companies crank out CDs for the masses to a, well, distributed version.
Distribution is only the first stage. The thing that's really going to do horrible things to the whole concept of owning either and idea or an expression (thanks to the poster who pointed out the difference) is the freedom to not only copy, but copy, alter and release your own version of a song, a film, a TV series- whatever. It's not the freedom to distribute an unaltered version that counts- it's the freedom to find something you like, take bits out of it, change it, combine it with something else and then release it.
That's where Machinima comes in, of course. In the next year, there will be the technology to allow Star Trek fans to create their own episodes of Voyager or Deep Space Nine. There will be the capability for fans of the Heavy Metal series of comics and films to go and create their own movies in that universe. There will be the potential to take any fictional universe, any story, and extend it, re-tell it or alter it, and then distribute it, in a way that's almost impossible to stop until it's too late. (For the curious, there's an article covering this concept in more detail over at http://www.machinima.com)
At the same time, we should look at other ways in which the concept of "plagiarism" is being destroyed: with fan-fiction, distributed over the Web. With "re-mixes" and "covers", now an accepted part of modern music, where an artist takes an existing track, changes it or re-records it to suit himself, and re-releases it. Hell, even with sophisticated photo-manipulation software: are you sure you haven't seen a similar picture somewhere else before?
So, does that mean that we're entering a new age? No. It means that the abberation of the last 400 years or so, and most pervasively the last 80 years or so- the concept of "intellectual property"- is about to come to an end.
Intellectual Property as a concept grew up with the spread of books as a means of recording information, but it became important with the creation of the printing press: a device that allowed mass reproduction of identical copies of a work. However, the important thing to note here is that IP is tied very closely with the notion that reproduction and distribution of a work, whether it be the printed word, music, a picture or a film, is difficult, and that distribution of the same is even more difficult. In every industry where there is a major fight currently underway to prevent "piracy", there is the situation where the monopoly big players had- the monopoly of distribution- is suddenly being undermined, as the ability to distribute freely is given to every player in the market.
The last time that was the case ended around 200 years ago, with the printing press and common literacy started to spell the end of the oral tradition of storytelling.
In many ways, the oral tradition mirrors the current situation on the Internet very closely. There was no ownership of an idea- a particularly famous storyteller may have been credited with the creation of a story, but that didn't mean he had the right to decide what happened to it, any more than nowadays Linus Torvalds has the right to decide what you, gentle reader, do with his source code to Linux. There were no "royalties", and by the very nature of the distribution medium- the human tongue- it was kinda hard to stop people changing a story to what they thought was an "improved" version.
Many people have conceptualised the Internet as a "group mind". It might be better to think of it as a "group campfire": a place where we can trade tales and ideas with, rather than just the people of our village, the people of (oh, horrible buzzword) the global village. And in that situation, the concept of preventing people from distributing the latest film or the latest CD becomes as idiotic as George Lucas trying to prevent someone from recounting the story of Star Wars in a bar to his friends.
I did. I even read it twice. I think Katz is trying to raise a lot of issues that people should think about. I commend the article for that. I did think about them. I chose to comment on one sentence that I found representative of the article as a whole. If you read the article you can see that Katz isn't writing an unbiased new article. It is chock full of opinion. A lot of that opinion is hidden in statements like the one I highlighted. I think it's important for people to catch the subtlety.
First, I hate the use of the pronoun "she" as in "she couldn't possibly afford." More and more writers are doing this - not just katz - and I hate it. I am a chick and I don't know if this is supposed to make me feel good, but it doesn't. It is poor grammar and doesn't even make sense here as I bet more men download MP3s than women. I hate when people try to be PC and sacrifice grammar and sense.
That said, the sentence itself is also ridiculous. "how can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) music lover to refuse to acquire a 1,000-song playlist she couldn't possibly afford..?" Gee, I can't afford a BMW, but you can reasonably expect me not to steal one. Can't afford a house either, but it's reasonable I won't steal one. But music is cheaper so I guess it's not really stealing.
"...afford to buy in the manner the recording industry prefers to distribute it?" Prefers? How about in the manner that the recording industry makes money off of it vs. the manner in which they don't?
Geez - this whole article is so PC. These poor underprivileged kids can't afford CDs which the big nasty record executive could easily give away but those meanies decide to sell. So they instinctively copy them for free. I think we instinctively breathe, reproduce, eat..but I'm pretty sure I don't instinctively go to my PC and copy MP3s. I choose to - and I know it's against the law. And I know the law protects people who own the music. I just want what I want for free. Let's just be honest about it.
We don't live in this kind of a world full of people working towards the good will of human kind. Ever hear of the word "Economy"? Thats what we live in. If it doesn't make a profit, companies don't care about it. How about we throw away all our money, just work to help our fellow man and distrubute goods to the people who need them? I don't have to say much more about that.
If all companies have free access to all ideas and it only take milliseconds to get ideas, whats the point of them? Every company would be just like everyone else. No ones going to make a profit if any consumer can go to the next store over and get the same thing. Patents, copyrights, these are all just forms of economic competition.
Unless you have some money backing your words, they are always going to stay words.
I suggest reading some Neal Stephenson books like Snow Crash or The Diamond Age. They may seem to be a bit exaggerated, but they are a good view to what we are heading towards.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
With all due respect, that is not historically correct, except for very recent history. There was no way for musicians in the past to stop anyone from copying their song, and an attempt to do so (say, going to a judge and asking a punishment for the copier) would have met with incredulity. The notion of copyright is fairly new, and considering it "property" is much newer still.
Philosophy aside, the ancient town singer could have had meaningful property rights to his songs only if the king &c had chosen to enforce them.
Going a bit further back in time we'll find disagreement even about whether land could be property. What exactly can be owned is not something God-given or obvious, it is decided by the society and its laws, and whether or not we want to consider ideas or expressions ownable and what exactly that should mean is not a fact that could be discovered, it has to be decided.
We should consider what the impact of various copyright/patent laws would have on the society, and what we want the society to be like, and then decide what to do about it.
But should it be illegal? Why / why not?
People need to work to live.
If we make all creative output free (as in beer) there would be no way to make a living in any creative field.
If you deny the intrisic value of a form of information, you deny the right of the creators of that form of information to make a living.
Which, in the long run, means that those creators are creating part-time, as amateurs, and have to have a "real" job to pay the rent. And all the decent "real" jobs are, by hypothesis, gone, leaving just the soul-destroying and tedious ones.
If you don't agree with me, why not ask the opinion of those who's livelihood you wish to take away - musicians. Ask musicians if they would rather be paid to make music or if they would prefer to work at McDonald's and just make music in their spare time (oh, and forgetting any alternative spare-time plans they might have, like raising a family).
You may say, "but hardly any musicians get paid to write music now!" And I would say - yes, and we want that number to go up, not down. We certainly don't want to legislate so the number can never get above zero!
The number can naturally go up by removing the middle men from the loop, for which the Internet is a very useful tool, and the RIAA is right to be scared.
But the arguments contained in the article remove not only the middle men, but everyone except the consumer, which sort of begs the question, "where does all this content come from in the first place?"
Ed xxx
By the way, "Conceptions of property, ownership and value since the eruption of the accidental empire that is the Net, in ways few institutions have begun to consider rationally." is not a sentence - it has no verb.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Except, of course, the thousands of groups/artists who scrimp & save a small pile of money from their REAL jobs to go to a studio (or buy their own gear) to self-produce their own CDs, which they can sell at a >100% profit for less than the price you'd pay at MegaMusic Inc...but hey - they were foolish enough to record it, so screw them, right?
Good analogy or not, it should also be added that the slavery industry bet an incredible amount of resources on the premise that slavery was a basic right. When it couldn't be sustained anymore the collapse of the institution was violent. Don't be supprised if the collapse of copyrights causes great harm too. Many industries have spent over a trillion dollars on the assumption that copyrights are a basic right. They're not, and their demise is only a matter of time as the values of society must inevitably find them unacceptable to move onward. But they will not let go peacefully. David
Alternatively, if anyone feels the same as I do, I would be happy to buy Jon's book, scan/OCR it, and post it on Slashdot. After all, I have Jon's permission now.
John Katz states that Strange Company is making an animator program that would be prosacuted for Exactly the same reason that Napster sites are... but this is highly inaccurate. I like Jerf's distinction between ideas and expressions and I think it was the most concise explaination I have heard. The animator software Machinima would be producing what we would consider expressions, and personal ones at that. I have no idea why anyone would even contrive in a wild dream that this is the same as a form of copywrited expression distribution. I have to say I am fully unimpressed with the entire essay.
On a bright note: maybe it is only leftovers from voting seasos. A little mud and some well pasted words can actually go a long way, and although it appears to us that we were the target of the essay, it was obviously meant for computer illiterate politicians.
On a dark note: however bad that essay was and how much I have to judge in favor of the legislation, I still hate to see anything dissallowed no matter what it is. I believe that the freedom to steal and suffer the consequences is an integral part of the freedom and liberty I hold dear in America (though I choose not to steal or suffer those consequences) and making these opportunities not available to a person is cencorship which I find far more offensive. To restate this: crime is bad, but the only way to prevent crime completely is to live in an Orwellean nightmare. -Effendi
-Effendi
I'm sure that by now nobody will read this post, but i just can't keep my mouth shut...
First of all I'm a total outsider to the whole open souce vs copyright stuff, for some reason it seems like a lost cause to me. let them come up with a better mouse trap and geeks will genetically engineer a better mouse whose programming is also open source. I pirate stuff i'm interested in, if i like it, i buy it. that simple. well, now to my point....
IT became incrediblly predictable how this discussion would be as soon as I realized it was written by Mr. Jon Outsider Katz (J.O.K, pronnounced Joke), but I must admit it shocked me anyway. only he can post a message that appeals to the very cause that drives a good porcentage of all slashdot discussions, and turn those open everything lovers into copyright advocates (no, i'm not calling you names). don't you get it? the man is trying to get people to agree with him even on this! so he tried an extreme approach in favor of open/free everything (which i also consider to be extreme BTW) and oh surprise! what do you get? the slashdot community starts arguing against free picassos and explains in detail the very argument used to backup license user agreements, copyrights, patents and trademarks.... go figure.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
the real issue isn't if Napster, warez, DeCSS are legal or not. it doesn't really matter. how can anyone, the Recording Industry, the government, etc, stop the spread of content? it would be impossible and also pointless to track down everyone who has illegeal mp3s, emulators, etc and fien them and throw them in jail. that is the real issue - not whether it is legal or not, but what are the music and movie industries going to do about the widespead free trade. they only way they'll stop it would be to stop releasing new cds and movies. once they are released, they are freely and easily available to anyone who wants them. they have to do something creative to make people WANT to pay them for cds/mp3s/dvds or else we'll all just continue to download what we want for free. the corporations have to stop looking at the world the way they want it or believe it to be and look at reality.
Mr. Katz' capacity for childish rationalization is truly breathtaking.
- -------------------
The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. But acquiring movies, music, games or other intellectual property online is so simple, so ubiquitous, that it's become almost instinctive.
It's so simple, so ubiquitous, that it must be okay. Tune in next week for another installment of Dr. Katz' Practical Ethics To Justify Anything.
It's often irresistible -- how can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) music lover to refuse to acquire a 1,000-song playlist she couldn't possibly afford to buy in the manner the recording industry prefers to distribute it?
What difference is there between this and the shoplifting you previously mentioned that kids would never, ever stoop to doing?
"How can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) to refuse to acquire expensive clothes she couldn't possibly afford to buy in the manner the garment industry prefers to distribute it?"
Gee, I guess kids just can't help themselves... how can we expect them not to shoplift? Oh, wait, but that's supposedly different... somehow.
Most important, and most troublesome about attempts to reign such informal trading in, is that it's also fun, and social.
Heaven forbid that the meanies who put up the money to create the music should take away something that's "fun and social". I see somebody worships at the Font of Perpetual Adolescence.
Does American society (or the people running the music industry, for that matter) really want to criminalize the passion for diverse forms of music that new technology makes possible? In effect, laws like the DMCA make it a crime -- and a meaningless one at that -- for kids to love and use technology, to access information freely and to share a passion for a particular culture.
Katz' affinity for hyperbole is truly breathtaking. The music industry isn't interested in "criminalizing" anything! They're interested in recouping their investment in their artists and their distribution network. Every last man-jack of them would be truly elated if everyone developed a passion for diverse forms of music. And every one of them is interested in being paid for what legitimately belongs to them, even if it's "fun and social" to steal it.
The DMCA makes it a crime to "love and use technology"? This doesn't even make any sense.
Younger Net users have been able to acquire free music and other culture for so long they understandably view it as a right, not a sudden opportunity to steal.
You know, here we have the crux of the matter. It's the same tired old game of declaring new "rights" to do whatever it is that you were going to do anyway. "Hmm... I want this album, but I don't want to pay for it. Wait, I know what, I have a right to it!"
So kids have a right to steal because they can, Katz? Oh, no, wait, they have this right because they've been stealing for a long time already, and it would interfere with their ability to be "fun and social" to take it away. That makes it all okay.
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All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Something that has only been partially touched on in this whole discussion is the fact that other formats currently exist that are not widely "pirated." As the society moves closer and closer to the ancient vision of the "paperless office," we see more and more things acquiring practical digital formats. First text, then pictures, then sound, then video. The latter three formats have become pretty much standards in their respective industry. Digital cameras are beginning to become as widespread as tangible film in the music industry, especially as those technologies become cheaper.
Since the introdcution of Napster, we're seeing direct client to client sharing of MP3s, but now that Gnutella is coming along, it's becoming practical and feasible to share other things as well. The music industry isn't going to be the only industry affected by the wave of "piracy" that's spreading around the internet. When eTexts become more popular, don't think for a minute that they won't be distributed on a Gnutella like system at some point in time.
Also, we should consider the potential positive aspects of this phenomenon. What if you had a Gnutella-like network for the distribution of free (potentially "pirated") educational materials? This could make it infinitely easier for people to share information with each other and make their ideas public, and could even fall within the restraints of the law if there's an applicable adaptation of the GNU Documentation liscense...
Just some food for thought.
sircase
There are two paths an outcast can take, one leads to computers, and the other leads to the stage. Why has no one else made this connection? They are 2 sides of the same coin. Both require long amounts of alone time, just playing, praticing, honing obscure little skills. If you think that burning a CD or copying a song isn;t stealing, then you have NEVER spent HOURS, WEEKS, MONTHS, writing, practicing, and recording a song. It costs money and time to make music!!! Alot of it.
there are certainly some good arguments here, but i think the point is being missed. simply because people are growing up in a culture where breaking the law (copying copyrited music for example) is common and "no big deal" doesn't mean that the illegal activity should be legalized. sure, it is way easier to burn a copy of my friend's new cd than to buy it at the record store. sure it is easier to download a new album from somebody on napster than to pay for it. however, simply because these actions are easy doesn't make them right. not everything in life is (or should be) free. if you want to own a particular cd, you should have to pay for that cd. don't get me wrong, napster and the like should be completely legal; there is plenty of public domain digital music out there that can be traded. however, stealing, no matter how you dress it up, should never be legal.
"impart[ing] discipline" doesn't lead to respect, it leads to resentment.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
While I think a number of good points are brought out against Katz's essay, I think he's probably hinting at some bigger issue, that is, the eventually domination of the net as a controller of most media.
For some this may be obvious, for others it might not me. A lot of current "arts" and media makers are not particularly innovative folks. Oh, sure, in movies you some tech geek's special effects masturbation, and those certainly get "cooler", but the majority of this is done with the specific intention of packin' those buns in those theatre seats. No shit, right? The corporations, studios, record labels (etc), they are interested in money and appealing to demographics.
So how does this relate? Well, firstly, the nature of these companies are not actually about doing something cool, no sir. Sure, that's an accidental byproduct--but they're about "a-makin' those a-dead presidents", as my dear friend Snoop Dawg would say. Most companies are. The computer market is a new, faster big business. Change is harder to catch.
But it must be done, if these companies want to stay "powerful" in the same ol' fashioned sense that they have today.
See, there's something incredibly obvious that's sittin' there, starin' at these companies in the face. What is it?
As I said earlier, things are moving to the net. Music, communication, movies, television, radio, etc. Certainly this is in the ever-so-distant future, with faster, better computers--with faster bandwidth--but yes indeedy, it will happen.
There is an empowering force in this, you realize. If the medium is technology, we, the fine folks of the computer world, are in luck. The codes they make can be cracked. The files they hide can be found. We can debate the morality of it all we want, and it's still going to happen. That's how it is. They will be making and many (most?) will be 'stealing'. They can either "get with it", or get ripped.
How many billions do these companies have? Don't you think they could slug down a few of those bills to think about the future, instead of literally wasting it on ways to "shut down sites on the net"? This isn't going to work.
It's a red-hot issue, really. We may think that the music companies are evil, but as I see it, Hollywood runs American culture. What happens when bandwidth is higher, and people have collections of movies just as large as collections of mp3s? You can bet your ass MMPA will act.
There's an exciting element of this, too, though. If the major medium is accessible by the average guy, there may become an extra layer of "independent possibility" that didn't exist before. Just think--when the standard for bandwidth rises, the average guy could theoretically host a "tv show" out of his basement.
Of course, the quality of such things may be laughable, but that may or may not be irrelevant. The ever-so-scary corporate structure is interested in control, so that they can afford their fancy meals and big houses. They're greedier than the greediest, most self-serving computer professional you can think of. -Mogel
Economic systems do not arise out of the need for re-distribution; rather that explains the rise of class society.
Economic activity arises out of our need to interact with other members of our species in order to survive as a species. We necessarily enter into economic relations with each other in producing the things that satisfy our given needs. These needs at their most basic are water, food, shelter and warmth. Put simply, we exchange labour with each other in order to fulfill our needs. That labour crystalizes into commodities. Wealth is then exchanged for other forms of wealth.
Unfettered, this results in the ultimate efficiency of distribution.
"I grow cabbages, you make tables. It will take you three months to make me a table that will last ten years, it takes me three months to grow the number of cabbages you will eat in ten years. Here is a ten year supply of cabbages."
In more primitive societies, resources were communally owned. Nobody "owned" land or water, or any of the means of production. In this sense, there was no private property. The very existence of private property begs the question of how did things get this way?
To cut a long story short, along comes Mr Moneybags
Moneybags: "That forest is mine now."
Table Maker: "No it isn't"
M:"Perhaps you'd like these big gentlemen here to explain it to you?"
"Err.. no thanks. Can I have some wood please?"
"Certainly, that will be ten bucks."
"I don't have ten bucks."
"Congratulations! You're hired!"
"What?"
"I'll give you ten bucks to go and chop down that tree"
"Sounds great"
"BG SOUND="frantic-chopping.wav" "
"Timber!!"
"Can I have my ten bucks please"
"Of course. Great job fellah"
"Ok, here's your $10. Can I have my tree now?"
"Sorry, $10 only gets you a branch"
" But I need the whole tree!"
"You'll have to come back tomorrow and earn another $10"
"That means that I've got to chop down trees for three days so I can afford a tree that took me one day to chop down".
"Five actually. You need to pay taxes as well"
"What??!!!"
"Guys like Larry and Floyd don't come cheap you know."
"Can't you pay them?"
"That would harm profits, and then you wouldn't have a job"
"Oh, I see. But that means you get to own hundreds of dollar's of wood for only forty dollars"
"We're only making an honest profit"
"But you don't need all that wood"
"Yes I do, I need to keep up appearances for one thing. and besides, I have a responsibility to my shareholders"
"Who are they?"
"The people who gave me the ten dollars when I told them about this great idea."
"That's not fair!"
"Why?
"They didn't do any of the work"
"No."
"Neither did you!"
"So?"
"I'll stop working for you!"
"Did I introduce you to Larry and Floyd?"
"Uuh, ok, I guess it's kind of fair. But how am I going to make tables in my workshop? I don't have the time."
"That workshop's mine now."
"But..but..."
"You're making Floyd nervous, and you wouldn't like him when he's nervous"
"Ok, sorry, but how am I going to get my cabbages from the farm?"
"Farm you say? Tell me more about this 'farm'....."
Someone a while ago put forward the view that ideas exist as MEMES in the mind of the human race in much the same way as genes do in our bodies. Good ones are reinforced by increasing the survival potential of the individuals they inhabit, bad ones are selected against. The clear indication from this point of view is that as individuals, we are a smaller entity than the ideas we hold. To try to own an idea is a waste of time, though an abvious tendency. People who want the human race to move forward as quickly as possible will release their ideas as a gift and only wish to see it benefit people. The creation and movement of ideas is one of, perhaps the, primary force unleashed by the creation of language. Who owns language?
Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out.
I have to say, I most definatly agree with the "ideas should be free" notion. (after all, if all those swell fellows like Jefferson liked it, I must as well! PEER PRESSURE!! PEER PRESSURE!!!)
:P
However, I can see at least some of the other side, as well. If I'm a starving artist, (or even a not-so-starving one) and people can freely download my music, rather than buying it, I'm not going to look too kindly on the "We're just trying it out to see if we want it" idea. To the artist, selling CDs = Guaranteed profit, while mp3s = profit that MIGHT occur. Yes, I know that all of you out there are doubtlessly the "I only try it out" people, and you all "buy all the CDs that you really like...". Well, even if that ideal situation were true, there are still quite a few people who DON'T download it for every person who does. Yada yada yada, yes, I know this is just a rehash of old arguments from both sides.
Ok then, here's the thing: Ideas should be free. It is good for the "scene", if you will, to have music bouncing around the internet, where other artists can hear it, and be inspired by it, or whatever. This has been demonstrated fairly well by opensource; if you get a bunch of people connected and improving on each other's work, cool stuff happens. So music should be free to be on the internet.
-BUT-
There is another important piece that is required for fairness: Artists and the like should have some incentive to continue producing wonderful stuff. And while it's enough for us attention starved programmers to merely have our stuff shown to the world, not all starving artists have that luxury. So there also needs to be some way that the community pays back the artist for what they do.
This is the main problem, as I see it. MP3s end up having the same buisness strategy as NPR pledge drives: You are welcome to send in money if you want to, but in reality, most people do not.
So what is the solution? Who knows.
Government subsidization?
I agree that most of the folks who snag full CDs don't buy legit copies. I was just giving my own personal example. I do happen to own several CDRW drives (and a legit copy of Photoshop 5.0, but that's another issue). I did download the complete Rob Zombie album, excellent rip at 160. I liked it. I bought the CD. Why? Only because I wanted to support the artist. If I like what they do, it's worth my ducats. So, you now know someone who did that very thing :)
You're right, there is no easy solution. I know that to most folks out there that online and available equates to free. All I can do is account for myself, so I'm doing just that.
Nice post, by the by, well stated.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
"Sure, everyone knows it's illegal, but they do it anyway because it's easy."
Consider this. Just because it's illegal, doesn't mean it's wrong. I don't think "it's easy" is the reason people ignore the law. It might have something to do with disagreeing with current law.
Somebody posting about this, mentioned slaves. It was illegal for a slave to run for it. Certainly it was not wrong. Unfortunatly, this is not such a black and white (no pun intended) issue.
What do we do when an action is illegal, but a large percentage of the population doesn't care? Put everyone in jail?
I'll fall back on the speeding example. When I'm in no hurry (Nice to not have a time clock to punch) I'll set the cruise control to 55 and head into the city. 30 miles later, I've passed no one, and paced no one. Everyone passes me. I'm not exagerating. I get dirty looks, I get honked at, tail gated etc. etc. If every car that passed me was a criminal, I'd be alone on the road. No, scratch that, I speed too, so we would all be riding the bus while our licenses were suspended. But wait, people with suspended licenses drive anyway so I guess we are all driving without a license and being REAL criminals.
If every one of those cars was a vote, clearly, the speed limit would be higher. But it doesn't work that way. Even if the issue came up, at least half of the speeders would say we need to be safe and keep the speed limits down. And don't forget that the government often spells safety: M O N E Y.
I rip my own cd's to mp3 so I don't have to carry the cd's around. I download a song now and again, and if I really like it, I buy the cd so I can get a good mp3 copy, and not worry about losing it. I give copys to my mother who likes to hear some new songs occasionaly but has not bought a album/cd in years and won't. We are criminals, but I don't know if anyone would call it a REAL crime worthy of jail time.
What I'm doing, is borderline legal and outright illegal, but I don't feel it's wrong. A lot of people seem to agree. The law does not treat all crime equally, and that is whole other topic.
Artists should be able to make money on what they do, but no where in the law or constitution does it guaranty anybody's right to make money in the face of new ways of doing things, changing market forces etc. Seems to me, the music industry wants to keep things just as they are and get the law to back up the way it's always been.
So people are going to download mp3's and no amount of law is going to stop it. So what do we do? Have police out giving tickets and slapping our wrists as if we were driving too fast?
Or perhaps industry and government can change the flow of the mp3 river just enough to keep everybody happy. It's challenging. But who ever said making billions of dollars a year and maintaining an empire was supposed to be easy.
Venyce
remove all references to 007 to email me
You say : "Even as more and more people ask the question 'Who Owns Ideas?', the answer becomes obvious: We all do."
/. page says: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net"
But still, the very
How come ? Do we simply own those "revolutionary" ideas, or will they ever get applied ?
sorry for posting the same remark twice, but the other thread was so deep and old, noone probably noticed
I personally believe in a difference in an idea vs. information. Ideas may contain information that comprises it, but information is ultimately what the real issue is. Who owns/controls the information? The current mp3 problem that the RIAA has is one brought upon itself. They wanted to control too much. Greed eventually will lead to it's own demise, which in this case has. It's been stated here by many others that if the music industry actually sold music at a reasonable price, the public would be much more likely to buy an album. If you think about it, the music industry is sort of a cartel, just like DeBeers. One of the wonders that the Net has done is put some of the control back into the public. I do have to add that this subject is becoming tiring. JonKatz, write a review on Mission To Mars. ;)
Love the discussion, appreciate the article! Just had to check my trusted 'The Concise Oxford Dictionary of current english'...: "Theft: dishonest appropriation of another's property with intent to deprive him of it permanently" hmm, copying a CD? Humming a melody? Repeating an idea? Maybe those who fling accusations of 'theft' should choose another term... Sig
We want the free flow of ideas only encumbered in such a way as to maximumally encourage the creation of new ideas.
The discussion has so far assumed that there is, or could be, only one motivating factor - money.
One of the reasons that artists are not screaming as loudly as the record companies is that there work is being heard and appreciated - even if it is not paid for. Art, for me, is about communication - the joy is having others listen and getting your message out.
For some artists that is the goal - and IMHO art unemcumbered by commerce is likely to produce greater expressions of culture and better art. This motivational factor is greatly increased by zero-cost distribution and the free-flow of cultural products.
For others - the goal is the cash. Well I say the onus lies with them to try to wring out payment. Why should society be forced to forgo zero-cost reproduction just to help them. or to put it more succintly - why should society brand 'kids' (or anyone) a criminal just so that that 'cash artists' can get paid.
As a first step we should create a legal system around information production which allows the authors (person or group of persons) to earn money from its distribution (in whatever way they can make work).
The difference is that we should disallow third parties from earning money from others contributions. the author should not be able to 'sell' the rights to others, and should through legal suit recover any money made on the back of their creativity by others. http://jhowison.tripod.com
Hi Jon,
I'm not surprised that you believe that
creativity shouldn't be rewarded.
Hasn't open source, free software, etc. brought
us nothing but COPIES of stuff? Linux, a UNIX
clone, Star Office, an MS Office clone, etc,
etc.
Often I have the impression that geeks don't
respect or understand creativity. Why is that?
Is it because the concept is too hard to
program?
> YOU CANNOT OWN AN IDEA
Do you actually have any arguments, or should
we just accept it as a dogma?
By the way, just repeating Jon's idea is not
very useful. It's not because he says that you
can that you have to. Try something creative
for a change. Yes, I know it's hard.
> Another example of a clueless person trying to
> use a false metaphor. Digital music, software,
> etc. is information, not a tangible good, and
> information can be copied an unlimited number
> of times without being diminished.
I'm afraid you're the one who's clueless. Ever
heard of Shannon's information theory? The
scarcer information is, the more valuable it is.
If I'm the only one having secret information
about the stock market, anybody copying it from
me is making it less valuable. Got it?
By the way, once you get it, please tell Jon.
> The Fine Print: The following comments are
> owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not
> responsible for what they say.
The comments are *owned* by their posters?
Apparently, Slashdot doesn't share Jon's ideas.
Well, let me try and explain. *Sigh*
Imagine X is running a bar on some isolated
island. X happens to have this great record and,
every night, people come to listen and to dance
to it. The other bars don't have this record.
Now, some day, the record is copied from X
(without him wanting to) and is made available
to everybody.
Now, has X's record still the same value? Or did
X lose something in the process? Remember, we're
talking economics here, not geek ideology.
Only the fourth one is important, insofar as the solutions to the first 3 (well, 2&3 anyway)stem naturally from getting a consensus on #4:
1) "Me good, artist good, record company bad."
2) Copying music is easy, and "normal", and any damage caused is indirect, so it seems OK. Ooops, this intuitive culture violates the current laws. This seems to be Katz's point. This leads to the general problem (which is sort of a separate thing:)
3)This type of situation severely reduces the legitimacy of the laws involved. Laws that are enforced without legitimacy lead to problems (insert small library proving this here...) Such disbelief in the law erodes civil society. To fix this, we, the people, need to determine what the laws SHOULD be, convince the majority of people that is correct, and set the laws accordingly. That, approximately, is how democracy works (or should). Case in point: In the end, while everyone agrees that THEY should get to drive 90mph, the majority agree that an ACCIDENT at that speed not only kills the driver, but those around him. Ergo, while not liked, speeding laws are accepted. Over time various changes have been made (raise the limit, increase DWI penalties) to fine tune the rules to better support the goal: efficient, fast, but SAFE driving.
To build this kind of consensus for Info. Property, we have to solve the central problem. The problem:
4) What is IP? What are it's limits? What should and shouldn't be illegal?
There isn't an easy answer (for me) to this question, but this is the central dilemma. Now for my next trick (less likely to be "right") I'll try to answer that question:
Posit: I buy a CD. I copy it for my own use in my car stereo.
Problem: Per DMCA, if I happen to have a Cassette player in my car, that's legal. If I have a CD player (or MP3 player) in my car instead,that's illegal.
Meaning: The drafters of DMCA are completely self contradictory in any theoretical sense, and hence are useless to answering this question.
Posit: Electronic medium in no way changes the IP issue.
Problem: Technology DOES change the issue. Not until Gutenburg could you easily, exactly reproduce text. Not until Edison could you accurately reproduce sound. (and not until Dolby et al. could you do a half-credible job of it).
Meaning: We can reference the past for help, but we can't count on it to solve all our problems for us.
Posit: The law is changed so that any copying is legal, as long as you don't SELL it and always keep the true author's name on the work.
Problem: How does the author eat?
Answer: He either lives off the lazy (who pay for convenient distribution systems), and poor (have no computer/copying equipment), and patrons.
For some, this is not acceptable, as many great artists/creators will waste time cowtowing to patrons or getting "real" jobs. For others this works fine, at least for now. There are enough lazy and poor people to support the music industry, and enough lazy people and demi-patrons to support the software industry. (Demi-patron: people/corps who want to insure that support for and future versions of the software will exist - and will pay for that.)
Now we're getting somewhere... It seems that the central issue isn't whether an author is compensated by EACH person who uses his stuff, only that he be compensated sufficiently by someone (or many) to reflect his worth and needs. So how do you legislate THAT? Remember, boys and girls, communism failed. This leads to:
MY answer (or at least a starting point): Copyrights SHOULD exist, in this form: you cannot copy a creation and SELL it, without the agreement of the author. You cannot copy a creation in whole or in substantial part and claim it is your own work (period). The author MAY NOT sell his authorship. He may appoint someone to handle the distribution under terms per contract, but he will ALWAYS retain the rights of an author to his own work, like it or not. You may only legally acquire his/her creation from the author directly, or from a distribution agent operating under a contract with the author. What you can do with that creation is determined by your agreement with the author, or the terms of the distributor's agreement with the author. (And like all copyrights and patents, there should be an expiration date based on publish date after which it is public domain - I'm not going to touch what the length of that "should" be.)
If that agreement is the GPL, of course, everyone can be a valid distributor (if they obey the GPL rules).
If the corp pisses you off - talk to the author directly.
The corp is just a distibution system, and (under this proposed system) the author may fire or go around them at will if they do a poor job. Since he CAN'T sign away his authorship, he can't be put in a situation where he feels he has to: it would be an illegal contract. (Of course a multi-author project complicates things...) Currently, record companies often OWN the songs and practically OWN the authors, thus screwing the whole game. A similar situation exists to some extent in other creative endevours. I believe that is the basic problem. We don't WANT to scam the authors, (well I don't) just the money-grabbing distributor.
Let the authors themselves decide what they want done with their works!
I honestly believe there was something behind where Katz was going, but it got lost in the melodramatic ending. As a result, the notion of redefining what property is in a virtual world has been thrown to the wolves to rip and shred because, essentially, of poor packaging.
Doh, maybe the next person who takes a crack at it will be more successful.
We have to choose now...are we going to let mega-corps decide how the world is run, or are we going to do it ourselves. The more power we hand over to the mega-corps, the harder it will be to wretch it away from them latter. The time to fight it is today, not years from now. We want to empower the people, not give mega-corps power-over the people.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
But if the cost of duplicating and distributing something is negligible (as is the case with a lot of information), then the assumption that that resource is limited is invalid. The concept of "intellectual property" is attempting to force a model of a limited resource onto something that isn't limited. But you note this below.
(I'd also quibble with the notion that demand is unlimited -- even if storage space was perfectly unlimited and free, there's a lot of stuff I'd have no interest in.)
Capitalism nominally operates on the presumption that a free market with perfect information is the most efficient way to distribute resources. Whatever the truth of the presumption (and the few markets I've seen that really are free with good information, such as the market for free software, are rather convincing on a microscale), producers (and others, such as governments) inevitably attempt to rig the market in some way or other. Everything from restrictive software licenses to government regulation to the sheer difficulty an individual has in evaluating a complex, unfamiliar product reduces some of the freedom of the market. I'm not arguing that government regulations should be scrapped en masse -- there are very good reasons for a lot of them -- but rather to recognize that there are very few markets that are truly "free" in the classical sense.
Nor would a truly efficient market ensure that all members of a free market society would eventually end up richer. Certainly many people on all sides believe that restrictions on the freedom of markets allow them to enrich themselves beyond what they would achieve in a truly free market economy, and surely many of them are right. I find it hard to see how record company executives, for example, would be richer in a truly free, unencumbered market than they are in the current situation, and it's evident that they agree most strongly.
My problem with "intellectual property" in a free market system is that it enacts artificial barriers to the spread and use of information. The issue isn't so much with the initial sale -- one could construct a transaction in which the purchasers of a piece of music explicitly enter into a contract with the seller not to further distribute the CD -- but that it imposes restrictions on third parties not party to the transaction. Patents do this in a very obvious way, but so does copyright and trademark (to a lesser extent).
Exactly. If we're very clear what it is and what its purpose is -- the Constitution of the United States makes it clear that the purpose is "to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences" or some such -- then we can start discussing it on a more rational plane. But we have to stop using the term "intellectual property", since it carries the wrong connotations. If we choose terminology that makes it clear that the purpose of this law is to promote progress by giving potential creators of information extra incentive to create and distribute their work, then we start from a position of "the producer, consumer, and third parties who otherwise legally come across the information all have rights, let's work out how they should best be balanced" rather than "the producer inherently owns all rights, and let's find the minimum set that must be given up to allow things to function at all".
What would it look like? Well, I have some ideas:
The idea that a song or book should be free because it's in an electronic or virtual format is not where, I think, the real fight is. They (the authors/companies) should be able to seek compensation and should be able to protect their copyright. If we throw out copyright law, remember, we throw out the GPL. Tossing everything into the public domain is not the answer. Should electronic media versions be cheaper and sometimes free? Certainly. The entertainment industry needs to step up to the plate and move into the digital age.
I think the real fight that needs to be addressed in the intellectual property rights arena isn't about music or books or movies. It's about patents on algorithms and processes. That's where we as a society stand way too much to lose.
We also need to protect fair and personal use parts of copyright law. We should be able to make backups or convert things into different formats as we see fit. We need to protect our rights to rip our cd's to mp3's, or record a cd to tape, or vice versa even. We need to protect even our free speech rights to open discussion of products.
Katz's arguments about kids growing up downloading stuff and thinking it's ok is bogus. Warez is warez, pirating is pirating. Do most of us do it? At one time or another, yeah. Does that make it legal or morally right? Not at all. Do 99.999999% realize that's it's not exactly kosher? Yup. Is ignorance of the law ever an acceptable excuse for violating the law? Nope.
Another thing that bugs me. Katz keeps calling the music on the net "free" music. That's a fallacy. It's commercial music he's talking about, like commercial software. Free (as in beer) music, is perfectly legal and morally acceptable to download and redistribute - look at MP3.com.
I can see where you are coming from and want to agree, but cannot.
Ideas and expressions are closely related, as you said. However, they can be seperated. Take, for instance, a cover of a song. The underlying structure of the melody, feel, etc. are essentially the same, i.e., it's recognizable, but the expression of the notes are different than someone else's performance. Put 1000 guitarists in a room, get them all to play Stairway To Heaven and you'll get 1000 different interpretations - I can almost guarantee that.
As for your calculus example, all you need to do to get around the original expression of the idea is to change the notation. You're using the same idea but just saying it differently. Another example is movies: the idea of a deranged killer that is seemingly unstoppable has been expressed god knows how many times.
Copyrights are given (in music) to protect not only your physical representation of the music (the CD), but also the performace of the song. That's why you get royalties from airtime as well as sales.
The original poster was right in saying ideas are not the same as expressions. However, people don't seem to care about that and laws like the DMCA raise the question as to whether or not we make laws for the people or for the people that make lots of money. Now that we have a very easy way of distributing intangibles to a massive number of people and everyone seems to like it, should we deny them of it? (The counter to that is, is it good for them in the long run?)
Maybe this is the first step toward a less profit-oriented society (I, for one, hope so). Who knows.... Regardless, it's gonna be interesting.
Woz
Problem is, that creating a "clone" of a game with various improved features is NOT the same as doing a cover of a song.
When you create a "clone" or some variation on a game, you are not copying the original. The underlying concept is the same, certainly, but the expression of that idea is different. The creator of the original game has rights to their *expression* of the idea "game in which a ship shoots at rocks" (ie Asteroid), but not to the *idea* itself (ie a ship-shooting-at-rocks game). (Unless they have a patent on the idea, in which cases their exclusive rights end after a certain period of years. And patents are the exception, created to promote creative invention through ensuring inventors the opportunity to profit from their inventions. If they don't have the patent, they don't have the exclusive rights to the concept itself)
If you were to do a cover of Dark Side Of The Moon, however, you would be copying the *expression* of the original artists (ie the lyrics, melody, etc). (And thus owe royalties). Now, if you were to take the *idea* (namely, what the song is about) and make a new song based on the same idea, then you're not copying their work - you were inspired by them, but didn't actually copy anything of theirs. This latter case is what is happening with the software developer in your dialogue.
Answer: because they don't own "copyrights on algorithms". Learn the difference between a copyright and a patent, and then we can have an intelligent discussion about copyrights.
Yes, but if it's perfectly legal to freely give away copies of the artists work, it undermines the price of the CDs. Who would pay for it if you can simply copy it ?
(Though on second thought, perhaps this is better viewed as a civil rather than a criminal matter.)
If it only occurs on a small scale, yes. I am not in favor of throwing someone in jail because they make one illegitimate copy of a CD.
There's nothing to say that they can't sell CDs even though they can be freely copied; Red Hat does.
If you want to name examples, could you please name someone who is making a profit ? Redhat are losing money, precisely because they are having a hard time building a revenue stream on a product that can be given away. I'll add that Redhat are not selling the software. They are selling support ( and their manual ). That's what you pay for when you buy the box set. Musicians just want to sell a copy of their music, not support.
The audience is not the composer's or performer's employer; there is no agreement or contract that the audience will pay the artist.
So who should pay the artist ? Or should they just panhandle ? I'd argue that purchasing the CD should activate a binding agreement between the user and the artist. Anyone who copies the CD illegaly would be violating that agreement.
A fat lot of good that does if the copyright system is disabled.
Venues that pay performance royalties. People who make voluntary sponsorships. A portion of people who buy concert ticket to bands that play their songs. Website sponsors. All of these are enhanced by having as many people as possible hear their music.
So in other words, someone who just wants to create some music and sell CDs has to panhandle for donations or make their money through other activities. This hardly sounds very fair. How many jobs have you held where you had to beg your employer for your paycheck each week ?
If you own every expression ever produced by another person, then every person owns every expression ever produced by you.
You're confused about what "own" means. We're not trying to "own" every expression ever produced. We're just interested in having access to those expressions, which is a far cry from claims of ownership. You're addressing an issue that no one has even raised.
Jon, and anyone who agrees with him, no longer have the right to complain when Wired runs a story by stealing comments, unaccredited, off of Slashdot; it's perfectly within their rights to do so, as they own your expression as much as you own the right to the expression of today's Top 10 hits.
You're confusing the issue of ownership yet again. We don't care that they get comments from Slashdot. It's the unaccredited part that bugs us. You see, when Wired takes quotes but does not give credit, they are implicitly claiming that they created these remarks, which is false. However, if I get a Metallica MP3 I'm not claiming I wrote the song, I just want to listen to it.
Take your FUD and go feed it to someone who might be fooled.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." -- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987
This thread has, so far, produced the highest ratio of ``filtered out'' posts after setting my threshold up: nearly 50%. I expect that after a few more hours, this rejection percentage will fall (Gawd, I hope so) as more thoughtful people begin posting. Apparently, it's easier to dash off a flaming post about Jon Katz than it is to take some time and think about what he's trying to say. If only there were a way to limit the ability to post to people who've actually read the article.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
group of well-meaning individuals has similarly shrank down to a tiny portion of what it used to be.
No, I'm willing to bet that group is even larger than what it used to be. The problem is the other group is growing at an exponential rate.
Everyone said we need Linux for the masses, welcome the masses. They outnumber the origional users and they have very different beliefs.
Finkployd
In the last few months, I've had alot of time to sit back and examine what happens when people give out ideas freely, myself included in that..Giving it out in the name of "community", and the ideal that we should all work together on important things..
After alot of thinking, I've petty much come down to one simple conclusion. What happens to people who decide to be generous within the Linux community, ultimately, they get screwed.. And screwed hard. They get screwed hard because the Linux community is no longer the same because there are huge inequities between the key players. The distance between common users and key players used to be measured in terms of popularity. Now the distance is measured in billions of dollars of market capital. New motives (motives which have nothing whatsoever to do with community improvement) have woven their way into what it means to support the Linux movement.. The main goal of development has turned from simple joy into a profit-making frenzy.
Now, in my own case, I can look back over what I've done in the past 10 years, and I see two things. I see a group of people who have absolutely no qualms about ripping me off, and a group of people who were honestly thankful for the things I and others had contributed -- In the past, the group of people who had no qualms about ripping me off were comparably small, compared to the number of people who understood and appreciated the work I and others had done. Nowadays, everything is turned around. The group of people who have no qualms about basically using people has grown to an enormous size, and the group of well-meaning individuals has similarly shrank down to a tiny portion of what it used to be. This is what happens when people stop caring about the effort, and begin caring more about the money. It happened to every single company and project I can think of when it comes to Linux.
The party's over, as far as Linux is concerned. As time goes on, more and more people are going to figure this sort of thing out for themselves. If you're looking for an example, look at Red Hat. Right now, they're sitting on $11,000,000,000 in market capital. Eleven billion dollars, guys. Now, do you see Red Hat going out of their way to make amends for the fact that so many people got screwed out of their IPO invitations last year because they refused to lie on an investor quesitonairre? Were the efforts of countless Linux developers good enough to deserve the offer, but not good enough to try and remedy the situation now that they have ample resources, time, and opportunity to do so? They're still making money hand over fist with your work, aren't they? If you were at the helm, would it be different? Why are they (and other Linux companies making money off the free labor of others) doing nothing about this?
As long as this sort of thing remains commonplace, people will get hurt. Conditions aren't right anymore to share ideas openly. There are too many sharks in the pool willing to advance their careers at the expense of small users and developers.
At least thats how I see it. Just putting my 2 cents into it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
Hence, as Katz implicitly senses (though he might have expressed himself a little more clearly) it is up to the proponents of a copyright and patent system--those who want to create the exception that will limit the freedom of others-- to come up with a rational, workable system, and to justify its existence.
They did, they have, and we now live under it. I reject your burden of proof; you tell me why we should abandon the carefully forged distinction.
It's hardly unusual for clear distinctions to emerge in later eras as the times change. What soldier of Attila the Hun ever heard of copyright? Why would Thomas Jefferson care about the distinction of "idea" and "expression" when expressions were the more expensive things to produce?
Now we have such a distinction, and we toss expressions around more cheaply then anything else. Other distinctions will emerge in the digital era; for instance, we will be forced to define "expression" more clearly, to handle 'dynamic expressions' (such as this very webpage; odds are, slashdot almost never serves the same page twice, so what's protected and what isn't, and how?).
I doubt Jefferson would say the same things if he were alive now and in the discussion; I won't presume to guess what he would say, but I doubt he'd be that blurry today.
I have to repectfully disagree, because there are an infinity of expressions of one idea, esp. in an artistic sense. You are right in that you cannot have one without the other, but I submit that the distinction is almost exactly the distinction between an algorithm (idea) and an implementation (expression). That leans too strongly towards practical ideas, but it holds for philosophical and artistic ones as well. For any idea (bubble sort), there are many implementations (as many as there are languages at a _minimum_, plus variations within). The key about patents is that you do gain possession of an idea/implementation/device, regardless of the various ways of communicating. In the case of copyright, you do not gain the ideas, just the expression. (In fact, there is at least one case [you'll have to look it up yourself] where two mucisians composed essentially the same piece of music; both got a copyright on it, as they came up with it independently.) (BTW, thank you for the respectful tone of your reply; I appreciate it :-) )
I am amazed how short-sighted and old-school so many of you posters are.
YOU CANNOT OWN AN IDEA. You cannot own something that is intangible. Let that sink in.
Katz is 100% correct in this essay. If you disagree, try to realize this: you're stuck in ancient, inappropriate ways of thinking. It makes no sense to try and treat the intangible as if it was tangible.
Say it to yourself: I cannot own an idea. I cannot own the intangible expression of that idea. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
This is probably a difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp (I think it has something to with the majority of people not actually being able to think . . . ;-), but simply because something is prohibited by law does not mean that it is fundamentally immoral. In fact, a morality based on the laws of whatever country you happen to live in would be pretty damn warped . . .
But this isn't really a case of something being immoral (though those who are affected like to try for the high moral ground (on both sides), because it tends to make it easier for them to win arguments with people who don't think much). What this is, in reality, is a case of society changing, and redefining/refining it's thinking on morality as a result of that change.
Morality (though I'm sure lots of philosophers woulud argue with this) is not something fundamental, it's founded on what the society in question considers acceptable or good. Sex before marriage was considered immoral for a long time, but now it is entirely acceptable. Homosexuality was highly immoral by the standards of most of the world until recently - society changed, and now it's an accepted behaviour. Hell, in some societies, drinking alcohol was (and still is) considered worthy of hellfire . . . Even something as extreme as killing can sometimes be seen as morally acceptable - how many people would be prepared to kill an armed robber who was threatening their family?
In the light of all this, how can you say that downloading mp3s is immoral?
What is happening with the RIAA and the MPAA and so forth is that they are attempting to drive the current redefinition of morality in a way that allows them to profit. Jon Katz is trying to redefine our moral thinking in a way that agrees with his views on the matter. The EFF is doing the same, you are, I am, everyone is. But as long as most people think they're arguing about fundamental moral imperatives they're going to keep spewing out large steaming piles of shit.
Which isn't to say that your argument is one of those piles . . .
However, I do have a bit of a problem with one part of your argument (though it's probably the foundation of it):
Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
My problem isn't just that you have no idea how Katz would react to the action you describe (he might put his money where his mouth is, you never know), but most importantly that I think you're ignoring the whole point of this discussion. You're saying, basically, that because this particular action is prohibited now, that it should be prohibited in the future. The whole point of this discussion is to think about whether that should actually be the case.
The important question here should be: Do you really want to live in a world where ideas and their expressions are considered property? (and you should take into consideration the fact that most property isn't held by individuals but by corporations, which tend to screw individuals over as much as they can) Personally, I don't want that, but I'm only one person, so I can't decide the future moral direction of the world.
himi
--
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Since ideas are not a limited resource (at least in the sense that a particular idea can be replicated essentially infinitely), their real value isn't owning them, but using them . . . Open Source/Free Software is the quintessential example. So rather than putting a monetary value on those ideas, we should focus more on use value.
Also, I don't think we really need to worry too much about "maximumally encourag[ing] the creation of new idea" - they'll come along as fast with or without any particular encouragement (I mean, has the OSS world ever suffered a dearth of ideas?). What we need most is a way to maximise the efficiency of our idea creation and development. In a sense, that's what the patent/copyright laws are intended to do - they encourage people to publish the ideas they come up with, by offering a temporary monopoly on the use of the idea's expression. This system doesn't work particularly well in the case of software, because the monopoly granted reduces the efficiency of the idea creation system enormously. It's not so bad with things like music and movies, because people get to listen to them and copy ideas (as opposed to the actual expression) without getting their arses sued to hell and back . . .
Ultimately, I think what we need most at the moment is a better focus on the intent of IP - not the enrichment of `content creators', but the enrichment of society. If lawmakers were less interested in campaign funds and more interested in good laws, I think we would be in a much better position here. As it is . . .
I don't think we should be making such a big stink about these laws being unenforceable, immoral, `anti-free-speech', evil, or whatever katzianism you want to use. Instead, we should be trying to convince the people responsible for them that there are better ways to achieve their ultimate aims. Unfortunately, that's probably really, really difficult . . .
Hmm. I'm rambling rather here, but I couldn't be bothered rewriting this . . .
himi
--
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Excellent point, however freely pirated creative works CAN mean a zero-sum game, or one close enough anyway. Again, the idea of capitalism is to make as much money as possible. Given the widespread use of open content, one might be disinclined to invest in a company that conducts most of its business with the distribution, et. al., of content. This is not because the company definitely won't make money at all, but that there's too much of a chance that it won't be able to at least show acceptable gains on investment.
A great example of this would be LinuxOne. Although LinuxOne has many other problems aside from this, a potential investor might be wary to buy their stock simply because what they sell will also be available freely necessarily. Knowing this, there's still a market for LinuxOne to sell their Linux distro and make money off of it, but even if it turned out to be a very good distro, that's still not enough reason to prevent me from saying that a company like Red Hat would be a better investment option... simply because Red Hat sells other services too.
Meanwhile, if Red Hat ever wanted to really increase profits, they could simply by dropping their distro development team and any intentions of releasing new versions of Red Hat Linux, and just deal with supporting all distros of Linux. Of course, there's many reasons why they SHOULD maintain their distro, but you see where this kind of thinking comes from. The idea is that a new company can just do support services only and, if they're really good at it, be a better investment option because they're not losing money on maintaining a distro.
Errr, through of the land of increasingly poor examples... it's like trying to sell Charlie Chaplin movies, obviously the copyrights on some of them are way expired. You could make money selling them, sure. But it's not the most fantastic of ideas, especially if you can download them off the net or if they're always on TMC or some classics movie channel. Another farfetched example, if the copyrights expired on "Titanic" on release, I bet Fox or Paramount or whoever wouldn't have made a cent on that movie. So knowing that in advance, the movie wouldn't have been made at all.
Finally, if Sony couldn't patent the PSX2 or copyright the games, would they make them? No. Sure, they'd sell a lot of stuff anyway. But some small start-up company might start copying all the games and then sell them cheaper, eventually knocking out some of Sony's profits. Knowing that the margins are initially tight anyway, Sony can't afford to only have first grabs at the market... they need to make profits grow over time. And that's ridiculous to even think about if anyone can just jump in at any time and undercut you.
The idea is that if you don't have decent IP protection, it's not like you can't make money anyway. It's that, ideally for consumers, you wouldn't. That possiblity alone discourages even trying. That can be applied to any IP at all, even if certain companies have a case where they'd always make money off of new concepts and ideas even if they lost their exclusive rights to them.
Here, Katz is on to something. Industry grabs for new special rights (control over format and access, blocking of archival backup and format conversion) in addition to their recognized legal rights (control over production of copies) represents one of two possibilities:
Naturally, many suspect that they can't all be excusable by the former, and that the real agenda must therefore be the latter.If so, the industry may come to regret its smokescreen. It works both ways -- instead of giving the new special rights the credibility of traditional copyright protection, the effect may be to tarnish traditional copyright protection with the disdain engendered by the access controls.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Sorry, no; your interpretation of Justice Brandeis's words is incorrect.
;-)
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
The clause in the US Constitution that empowers congress to establish copyright and patent law is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries."
The philosophers of the time of the Constitution believed in the notion that the highest purpose of intelligent people was the search for a metaphysical "Truth". They believed that as we debated and discussed such subjects as philosophy, law, metaphysics, mathematics and all that high-falutin' stuff, we would inevitably move towards a higher "Truth", and hopefully even gain insight into the face of God.
Little did these folks know we'd go off and invent B-movies and sitcoms...
Anyways, our founding fathers realized that producing things like books and newspapers and other "expressions of ideas" would cost time, effort and money. And they knew they wanted to promote the useful sciences by protecting people's ability to make money producing expressions. Thus, they defined a dichotomy between "expression" and "idea", and granted congress the power to protect "expression" for a limited time so that an author can make money writing books and plays and newspaper articles.
Justice Brandeis's words must be interpreted within this framework. That is, he was expressing a general idea, outlined in the Federalist Papers and other sources, that the purpose of the First Amendment and of Clause 8 was to promote the free exchange of ideas, yet protect author's expressions so that an author can make a living. The balancing point is at what point can we maximize people's ability to express their ideas. And that necessarly means we must guarentee that an author (or writer or musician or computer programmer) is able to make some sort of a living--otherwise, expressions can only be produced by the independantly wealthy and by amateurs on their spare time.
His specific point is that as a point of law, our founding fathers have required that "ideas" themselves must be free. He did not suggest that expressions of those ideas can be free in any way. That is, he was very clear, as is the law on the subject and as are all previous ruling by the courts and all political philosophers, that there is a very clear line between an abstract idea, and the expression used to convey that idea. That is, just because someone wrote Moby Dick doesn't preclude me from writing an essay about white wales and obscessed ship captains. Nor does it preclude me from talking about Moby Dick.
Just because you cannot see the difference between the two doesn't mean Justice Brandise made the same mistake.
Bare with me.
:-)
... continued."
The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property.
What Brandise was refering to here is all categories of items that are considered a "product of the mind." This includes the relm of ideas, as well as the relm of expressions for those ideas. And this is a valid notion: just because someone expresses the idea of an obscessed captain hunting a white whale doesn't therefore make that idea off limits, or make that idea "property"--even if coming up with the idea took time and effort.
However, you will notice that this particular sentence refers to all categories of products of the mind: everything from the idea of "blue flying whales" to the words I'm typing are products of the mind--even though the latter (what I'm typing) is an expression, while the former (the idea of blue flying whales) is not protectable, though arguably the phrase "blue flying whales" may be, depending on the context.
This is entirely compatable with the notion that I brought up--that of the founding father's notion of the hunt for a metaphysical "truth" which they believed can only be achieved with the free flow of ideas.
However, Brandise does not confuse "ideas" from "expression", as witnessed by the latter part of the quote:
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
What he is refering to is not as you suggest: "'a product of the mind' is strictly equivalent in this passage to 'the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas', which is strictly equivalent to 'these incorporeal productions'".
In this case, "a product of the mind" is a superset of "the nobelest of human productions...". To suggest otherwise is to suggest that Brandise is suggesting that all products of the mind are "the nobelest of human productions"--including the idea floating in my mind about the cold-blooded murder of my boss by disemboweling him over his BMW. I'm sure that both you and he would agree that this idea is not exactly "nobel" in any sense of the word--except perhaps by others who work for my boss.
All joking aside, not only are ideas products of the mind, but so are expressions--such as the words I'm writing, or an order of notes into a musical composition, or the specific statements I use to implement bubble sort on a computer. Each of these expressions are products of the mind as well--used to embody ideas, but are not the ideas themselves.
At any rate, the interpretation that you suggest, that these are being used in the aformentioned phrase as "equivalent" flies against any reasonable interpretation of the 8th clause of the Constitution which permits Congress to define certain intellectual property rights in order to promote the useful arts and sciences. Further, to suggest that these are equivalent would mean that Justice Brantise is both simultaneously suggesting that the products of human mind be both "free as the air to common use" and yet to also have "the attribute of property
This is absurd.
Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it.
The "public policy" that Justice Brandise is refering to is the Article I, section 8, clause 8. That public policy is to grant the attribute of property onto certain expressions in order to permit the sale of those expressions. Otherwise, there would be no need to pay authors, as the moment they write what they do, those expressions become "free as the air"--an absurd notion which flies in the face of 200 years of legal thought on the matter.
Besides, I cannot decide if you are for or against the notion of expression as protectable, or if you believe Justice Brandice is for or against the idea.
Equally it is a mistake to assume that every use by John Katz of the word "idea" must be held to this technical, infringement-analysis sense.
Well, of course, but only because Katz can't seem to make up his mind on the matter. That is, sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to abstract notions conveyed by expressions (as he does when he quotes Thomas Jefferson), and sometimes he uses the word "idea" to refer to specific expressions (as he does when he talks about downloading MP3s).
He is, or should be, saying that creating ever more complex and draconian laws is not be the correct approach to these challenges.
"Should be?" Doesn't that mean that Katz ain't saying what you think he is?
Look, I do agree with you that there are better solutions to dealing with the protection of expression in an era where the duplication and transmission of expressions is essentially zero than the DMCA. DMCA is absurd as it essentially strangles the free flow of ideas in one area (R&D in interchangability and data transmission) in order to keep the cost of data transmission in other areas (movies, music, television) artifically high. These sorts of artificial barriers are at best a stop-gap measure, and at worse totally strangle the very notion of the free market of ideas that our founding fathers strove to set up in the first place.
But that's not what Katz appears to be saying, as far as I can figure. He seems to be discussing essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he starts "Unenforceable laws like traditional copyright restrictions don't promote morality or lawfulness; they undermine them." and goes on to "Still, it seems increasingly clear that conventional notions about ideas and ownership are doomed. The issue is no longer whether 'piracy' is right or wrong, but how long our backwards-looking corporations and politicians will persist in believing they can stop it."
That is, Katz is essentially saying about copyright law in the era of the Internet what many pro-drug advocates are saying in an era of increased intercity gang violence: legalize it now because we're wasting our time and resources trying to keep it illegal.
But I think he made his point reasonably well without introducing these points.
Yes, he did:
Even as more and more people ask the question "Who Owns [Expressions]?," the answer becomes obvious: We all do.
I've deliberately substituted "Expressions" for "Ideas", as Katz has hopelessly muddled the two throughout his essay, as is clear by the quotes (and the article surrounding it) that I've given above.
Of course Katz didn't discuss copyright duration. He's advocating that the duration is meaningless, and should be set to 0.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Indeed so - but I doubt there are many movie fans that don't have at least ONE film recorded from broadcast TV - and don't feel the slightest guilt about it. Similarly, When I was younger and couldn't afford all the latest releases, I used to record them from the radio chart shows
Pause while the moral majority gasp at my criminal past!
I didn't (and still don't!) see anything morally wrong in doing this; It wasn't as if I was depriving them of a sale, and if I liked the music, I was more likely to go out and buy a copy for my singles collection. in any case, it would be taped over a week or so later.
If one truly has a passion for music, shouldn't they be out supporting the artists they like by actually purchasing their CDs, going to concert, etc?
Yes, of course they should - and as far as we can tell, the MP3 revolution has Increased rather than decreased sales - which must be a terrible dissapointment for you. Many of these increased sales could well be credited to mp3 distribution - listeners actively seeking out Albums from bands they have enjoyed individual songs from.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
For me this battle has never been about "the right to pirate a product" but rather "when I 'buy' a product have I bought the actual product or just a license to use it under certain circumstances?"
I have no interest in collecting entertainment "licenses." I can be forced into buying licensed software for many other things, but I'll never be successfully forced into buying licenses for movies, cds, book, or games. Myself, I'd rather do without than have a collection of stuff that was actually owned by someone else. I mean I feel that these people are trying to turn us into a society that can never buy anything, only rent it.
Imagine if when an auction house was selling a van Gogh painting saying, "We are selling a license to posess this fine painting as long as it is kept in this city with a tracking device in the frame and we have the right to repossess it at any time." I don't think they'd get many bids.
Right now, for example, I'm not "pirating" MPAA movies. I'm just not watching them. (Though, if my brother, who has no intention of ever joining the MPAA boycott, shows me a movie on his DVD player, am I then a pirate? I'm sure the MPAA would like me to think so.)
Incidentally, I recently re-bought Enchanter (as part of an Infocom collection) though I'm pretty sure I could easily have downloaded a pirated copy from somewhere (I mean the game is ancient). I hate having to still fight the pathetic (look at this page in the manual) copy protection they have on it.
There are a couple of things going on currently:
1. Stuff like Region Coding and DIVX are pretty disgusting ways to screw a purchaser who used to be able to just buy something and use it. Divx is not dead! It's just being retooled for a new release. The DVD makers have admitted as much in their comments to the copyright office:
Consumers don't want it, it's a new way of extracting revenue from content that has nothing to do with piracy, and the big media corporations want to force it on people.2. Anything that is available on electronic media is more easily copied than anything on traditional media. This is why book publishers aren't as woried about photocopiers as they were when they first came out. Unfortunately, the old media companies would rather kill or cripple the new technology (DVD is just crippled MPEG-2, I believe. You have to jump through hoops to watch something that could've been released in a standard readable format. Back in the days of vinyl records, films, and even video tape, crippling things wasn't as much of an option.) than try to find a way to work within the new technology. If these people had gotten their way, VCRs would never have become available to the general public! (Check out SONY CORPORATION OF AMERICA ET AL. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., ET AL. for the actual court case.) I don't like seeing good usable technology crippled, and I hate seeing good usable technology completely suppressed just so Monty Burns can have another ivory back scratcher. (Digital Audio Tape, anyone?)
Of course, I wish Jon had made these points instead of saying that people ought to put up with piracy because "making money from ideas is wrong."
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Bad example, I think.
No. If you want to record your own Dark Side of the Moon, then you get permission and pay royalties. The people who rip off game designs because they can't think of anything better don't want to do this. They just whine that they have the right to swipe the idea.
I don't see how people who pirate music can be defined as "music lovers." When was the last time a car collector had a collection of stolen cars? Or to compare apples to apples, a movie collector's collection consisted solely of bootlegs? Never, a true movie collector has a virtual library of DVDs, Laserdiscs and *gasp* tapes. I consider myself a music lover and collector and that's why I have somewhere around 300 cds and virtually no mp3s, aside from out of print/live things. If one truly has a passion for music, shouldn't they be out supporting the artists they like buy actually purchasing their CDs, going to concert, etc?
Steve
Businesspeople (I include myself here) generally pride themselves on being pragmatic. Business models are born, live (make money), and inevitably die. A bad businessperson will fail to detect when a business model becomes outdated. Bad businesspeople will eventually stop making money.
IP is only relevant in the context of a business model, I.e. how do I add value and make money from this? Most of the industries struggling with the free IP distribution over the net New World had a very similar business model. The mode was to add value by placing the IP into the hands of the consumer.
The business model of IP distribution is dead. The value has evaporated because essentially free distribution is now available to consumers. Why pay for something you can have for free? (free in a big way - free from a monetary sense - free from a punishment sense, 0.0 chance of being punished so who cares if it's illegal).
A good businessperson will move on when a business model is dead. WRT to the industries being threatened there are many alternative ways to make money apart from distributions. Some examples:
Music industry: Apart from the very top tier of musicians most of their income is derived from live performances. Free distribution is essentially free advertising for the primary revenue stream. BTW ever wondered why live performances cost more than a CD, odd considering a CD lasts forever, but a concert is over is an hour or two? There is more value add with a concert - emotional connection between the artist and the audience, social interaction with people who share a similar interest, etc. With free distribution the artist can still win. Only the outmoded distribution company looses, which is only natural when their business model no longer adds value.
Movie industry: Consider the often-uttered reviewer phrase "Wait for it to come out on video." This sums up the concept of a particular movie not taking advantage of the value add a big screen, big sound, theater experience provides. For movies existing in a new world of free distribution they better take advantage of the movie theater value add. Perhaps we loose the straight to video class of movie - so be it.
Words/Books: Technology has yet to improve on the paper page interface provided by a book. The distribution value add proposition still holds for now.
Software: The OS movement is killing the old proprietary software business model. New models are currently being invented and tested. Most famously business models based on service, not license - see ESR's writing for other obvious OS business models.
Long post - my apologies. Summary: Business models based on IP distribution are dying. Businesses wanting to survive long-term need to reinvent themselves or die too.
If other people are looking for a MP3 made me buy it story check this one out.
I heard Fatboy Slim's Praise You on the radio one morning as I got a ride to school, I loved the song, when I got to school I headed for the lab and searched audio find for praise you (I didn't know who it was by, but I guessed that was the name), found it and saved it to a zip disk.
When I got home, I put it on repeat and started looking for other songs, I found the album We've come a long way baby on IRC and downloaded it over two days.
I loved it, I went out and bought the album and then noticed a few other's sitting there, so I went home and downloaded a track of Better living through chemistry, and the the next day bought the album.
The cycle repeated and now I own 4 albums, and 5 singles, plus some other CD's that he has mixes on.
So without mp3's I would have just forgot about it and said oh well, but now I'm a serious fan, and was about to pay for tickets to his show but I got carded (18+ show) and couldn't.
So MP3's don't always screw artist over
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
E-mail: aaron@fish.pathcom.com
To mail me remove "fish."
ICQ: 11391152
Quote: "Success is the greatest revenge"
Maybe the amount of money lost is not large, but it can still be enough to make or break a company, or at least influence its decisions.
A long time ago, back when Windows was still a "new thing", I owned an Atari ST. It was a very capable computer, running on the same 68000 chip that drove the Amiga and Macintosh of the time, with a GUI (in ROM) that outperformed Windows dramatically. But various factors, including its low price (and the implication that the owner was of limited means), Atari's legacy as game machine manufacturers and the extensive piracy on the Atari 400/800 platforms pretty much frightened away any business application developers, and led the game developers to rely on elaborate (and often annoying) copy protection schemes. (Atari managed "Power Without the Price" by buying cheap components; I had a number of legitimately purchased games that required tweaking of my drive speed in order for them to manage the gymnastics required of them by the copy protection.)
The moral? Piracy may not cause as much harm as the corporations claim, but it does cause harm.
OTOH, while some software is developed for fun or personal fulfillment, most is create in anticiaption of making money. Until that last part changes, piracy will continue to be an issue (and continue to be surrounded by hyperbole). Maybe there is a way to reconcile the ideas of "Information wants to be free" with "I spent three years working on that code and I'll be damned if I'll just stand here while some kid downloads it for free."
Damn if I know what that way is though...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
The poster brings up a good point about ethics when he says the DMCA does not support morality. However, he does not support his claim with any argument at all, so apparently it was just a weak, mean jab at the thing and not a seriously held position.
But let's look at this. Way back when the RIAA first formed, they were formed to protect artists and record companies from the mafia which was reproducing records and selling them at slashed prices, totally bootlegging the music industry. What has changed from then and into today? As I've seen other people mention, it has become extremely convenient for individuals to take on the role of the mafia in redistributing music which they had no part in creating (and most likely don't have the talent to even conceive of creating such a thing). I know a few people will argue that money is evil and since no one is getting any money at any point of the chain, the interaction must be holy. That's bunk. We've got to trade something in order to be able to get paid justly for our work and in order to pay other people justly for their work which you use. If we stop trading money, we'll have to go back to trading men, and I don't think anyone wants that.
So, in a day and age when thievery has become extremely simple, does this change the principle behind thievery? Is it moral to do anything easy? How about immoral to work hard?
Think about the principles behind your arguments and not the end result (ie you getting to get every song you ever like for free).
Esperandi
Now, I don't care if more people end up hearing the music because they steal it first. That's a question for the marketing people from the industry. So what if they're stupid? So what if it's a better marketing decision in the long run for them to allow people to do this? The point is, you can't make the decision for them.
Your argument is that since all these new-generation net kids have grown up pirating software and music already, we might as well not change it now. Of course, the only reason they got away with this in the past is because nobody in a position to do anything about it payed any attention. Software companies have indeed been trying to fight it for a long time, though. The Buisness Software Association, for example, is just such a group that has been around for a long time. But nobody really payed much attention to them.
Thus goes the saying, "Thick as thieves"? ^_^Seriously, though, this is a moral issue that you completely blow by. Say there's a cart of apples standing on the street, with a sign on it saying "DO NOT STEAL!" Should you still steal the apples? How can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) apple lover to refuse a nice juicy apple?
This, to me, is a statement of the problem. This is what should be changed. The laws should not be toothless, children should be taught that what they are doing is indeed stealing, and not a right. So maybe we should just call it "theft". It's rediculous to take the choice of words used to describe the act as PROOF that it isn't wrong.I don't think JK is claiming so much that these kids are ignorant of the law (and why just kids? plenty of adults do this too) as that they find it irrelevant. IP is a very sticky issue, but I think the bottom line is always the way to tell whether something is acceptable in our Western culture. Does it hurt the bottom line? Clearly not, the MPAA and RIAA are making more money than ever, and if it's too early to claim that MP3 and DVD-copying are HELPING them, it certainly can't be argued that they are HURTING them.
I don't see a clear solution here, but the laws must change. There is a critical period in which Expression (as defined by the poster above) is most valuable to the creator. Regardless of the copying that's going on, any form of intellectual Expression ramps up in value very quickly, then peters out almost as quickly. Not all forms of expression have the same curve--for example, books may take years to peter out once they get on top, while feature films can blow themselves out in a weekend--but the curve can be examined. New laws should take into account the particular curve of the industry and make allowances for copying once most of the value to the creator has dissipated. Given the current state of affairs and the recent unveiling of the RIAA's profit numbers for 1999, it would be difficult to argue that such laws would result in ANY loss of value to the industries, but it would definitely help the consumer. As it stands now, they are simply antagonizing the consumer by telling her that her computer can't be used as a radio, that her software is actually still owned by Microsoft even though she has the CD in her hands, that she can't watch DVD's in Linux because it's not an industry-approved (read: sufficiently profitable) OS.
These industries should not forget that the consumer body has more dollars and more heads to fight with than the corporations themselves do, and they can fight by not paying. Or the industries can try to get along, stop antagonizing us, and receive our dollars with a clear conscience. And here's the real bottom line: We will disobey until they comply with our demands.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Jon is a master at picking what seems like a reasonable set of assumptions until you look at them. Normally, I'm willing to pass that by, but in this case he's actively hurting the position he's arguing for, one I happen to believe in. I used to make the mistake of thinking that he was a man of principles, but I've come to the conclusion that he's just a well paid troll, who does not care about the results of his statements, only that he causes something to happen. He is a mad bomber with a word processor, causing explosions for the sake of explosions.
Let's look at this paragraph. From there you can sort out the rest of the article by yourself.
So the Congressional aide, part of an institution responsible for governing issues like this, is demonstrating that he lives in a completely different universe than he's supposedly helping to represent. For him and the lawmaker he works for, the downloading of music is simple theft, in the same way a bank robber commits a crime. But a generation of Net users will never view property that way again. A rational legislature grasping this will would seek laws that reflect the new reality, rather than an outdated one.
What makes a bank robbery different from downloading copyrighted music without permission? Hmmm. In the case of the music, the original item is still there, and in the base of the bank theft the original item is.. hey wait... it's still there. Who got hurt?
Well, in the case of the bank robbery that money is insured through various means, and much like stupid lawsuits, we all end up footing a small part of the bill. Face it, when your doctor is sued, his insurance picks it up, passes the cost onto your insurance who pass the cost onto your employer, who pass the cost onto their clients, who pass the cost onto... Well, you get the picture. The bank robbery and music theft work the same way. Anyone with a yellow sheet knows the game.
There seems to be an attitude in this country that anyone who has been sucessful doesn't deserve it. Even worse there's a serious "the world owes this to me" attitude taking root on the net. There's always been a "us" against "them" attitude but nowadays it seems like everyone thinks of themselves as "us" just for having been born.
Jon, the problem is not with congress or with business, or with people who don't understand the internet. The problem is with people who were raised without any morals whatsoever. Until today I had thought that you were not one of them. I had given you the benefit of the doubt. I see now that I was wrong.
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No Zen is good zen
I refuse to believe that in the absence of commercial entertainment there wouldn't be millions of people with the creativity and initiative to provide content to the world as a hobby, simply for the joy of creation and having their work appreciated.
(Yeah, I know. That idea's almost as crazy as thinking that we could have quality software if people freely shared their source code! Oh, wait a minute...)
With the march of technological progress making the creation of "professional quality" entertainment within the reach of the masses, and the collaborative and distributionary medium of the Internet, we could have a richness of culture unparallelled at any point in history.
The existence of controlling, giant media conglomerates is holding back what could be the Digital Renaissance.
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
The heart of the problem was addressed by several people in their responses to the first part of Katz's post (yesterday). It is this:
In other words, how can companies, artists, authors and other creators get a return on their investment of time and money, so they do not lose the incentive to go on creating? If Stephen King's new Internet novel is circulated via e-mail and mirrored on Web sites, he loses money and may never publish online again. If a database company finds its databases copied and republished for profit (which is legal today, strangely) that company will lose the incentive to keep making databases. And when the creators stop creating, everyone loses out.
No, it isn't a very accurate term. Many people don't like to think of themselves as pirates and thieves when they download music illicitly over the Web. (I don't like to think of myself that way, although the RIAA would probably be upset at my hard drive's contents.) But nobody says the term "pirate" need only apply to patch-wearing, parrot-loving, peg-legged sailors. Periods of great technological change often leave language lagging behind, and I suggest rather than criticizing the word, Katz criticize the idea.
Is the Internet so insecure (by its very nature, as Katz's citation of Lessig yesterday implied) that ideas are forced to flow freely? I highly doubt it. Technology has a way of solving problems technology creates. Creators will find new ways of creating artificial obstacles online that serve the same purpose as the physical obstacles that prevent theft: to make sure money is collected.
Yes, that's true. And the music industry's behavior (like the movie industry's behavior in the DVD/DeCSS debacle, or the TV industry's behavior in the iCRAVE case) has been thuggish. Certainly these old-fashioned, slow-learning industries should be thankful for the Web pioneers who have shown them that there exists a market for new means of transmitting the products of creative work. But they needn't genuflect before the new medium and allow it to endanger their livelihood. And that is what it does, all the misleading talk about $15 billion made by the music industry last year aside. (After all, how do we know the recording industry mightn't have made $16 were it not for MP3s?) When you download music illegally over the Internet, you are depriving someone of the potential for profit. No, you haven't broken in to their house, but you have in essence robbed their checkbook of what it might hold tomorrow.
Look, clearly we're in a period of technological change, and it is profoundly affected every (every!) segment of society. But notice that Katz proposes NO SOLUTIONS to this intellectual property problem, except that creators entirely give up any claim over what we consider intellectual property. In other words, Katz would throw out something we should cherish because we recognized it all too recently in human history: that people who create things deserve to earn from their creativity, in the same way that a farmer or bricklayer should earn from his labor.
What is the one thing Katz proposes? This:
In other words, Congress (which he just accused of screwing up copyright law) should stick its hands in copyright law AGAIN, presumably after they become "rational." Fortunately, Congress is designed to be a slow-moving, deliberative body, unresponsive to minor gusts of political wind. Let us hope that they do not take the advice of Katz and others who demand more governmental meddling. Instead, let's allow the process to develop slowly, over time. Strong case law and protracted public committment to technology are better protections than legislative interference.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Many people in their day saw slavery as a property right. It wasn't, it was simply an excercize of controll over individual liberties in the name of profit as is intellectual property today. And likewise most of the arguments used to justify them are the same. We put effort into getting slaves..... Without slaves we have no incentive to grow cottin.... America's financial propserity can be attributed to slavery.... If you take a slave and free him, you are a thief.... too many prestigious people do for it to be wrong... blah blah blah ...
Wozniak gave an interesting presentation on this at AppleFest Boston 1983.
He started of by talking about how bad piracy is and calculating how much money was being lost on his watch. During this, he was interupted by some calls that he responded to by saying, "type brun choplifter, 100", and "I just cracked that, it's in the top left draw of my desk."
Then he ducked behind the podium, and put on an eye patch and pirates hat. He pointed out how all this money lost was not real, since nobody would buy the crap. That it provided free advertising.
There is some money lost, but not even close to as much as the companies claim that it is. The people that support the DMCA are full of it!
Fight Spammers!
The copyright, patent, trademark, etc. laws of the U.S. that protect intellectual property ("IP") all flow from U.S. Constitution:
Congress and the administrative agencies have implemented the Constitution's directive so that ideas may not be patented/copyright -- the creations that express those ideas are. So, an idea for a book/movie about a lovely woman living beneath her station, rescued by a prince/tycoon after conflict with jealous/greedy competitors for the princes'/tycoons' attention/money cannot be protected under the copyright laws. The movie "Pretty Woman" is an expression of that idea and is copyright, consistent with the constitution. Patents are granted by governments for the expressions, not the ideas.
Copyright violation is not theft; it is not murder; it is not bigany -- it is copyright violation. There is nothing inherently evil about copying a book/movie/song just as there is nothing inherently evil about bigamy of jaywalking. We as a society have decided that our notions of efficiency, and perhaps decency are promoted by creating copyrights and making their violation illegal, just as we build crosswalks and make jaywalking illegal -- however actively enforced. The international community has seen the wisdom of more or less buying into Western notions of IP and have endorsed treaties that protect the same sorts of IP. (The DMCA primarily implements U.S. obligations under two such treaties.)
Congress has not granted authors and inventors "exclusive" use by any means, and as a result, not all copying of a "creative expression" is illegal. For works clearly covered by copyright, the principle of "fair use" is alive and well as witnessed by the Connectix and RIAA vs. Diamond cases. The Legislative History of the DMCA makes it clear that Congress intends to maintain "fair use" while updating the laws regarding copyright and performance to the new technologies. It is premature to assert that the DMCA makes the end of civilization as we know it. There must be cases brought, won or lost and subject to judicial review before we know the impact of the DMCA will be. In addition, historically, the author/owner of the work must assert copyright in order for the copyright laws to apply. I don't see SlashDoters putting the copyright symbol on their posts and I challenge anyone to go to court and prove that damages are warranted as a result of someone copying SlashDot comments.
Congress is going to keep writing laws that give authors and inventors "exclusive use" until the Constitution is changed and they don't have to. They will incorporate Edison cylinders, radio, the web, and holographic implants into the laws as necessary to do their job. In that event, while I applaud Jon Katz' efforts to stimulate debate on the intersection of the law and the web, I believe he could have a greater impact on the shape of things to come by promoting public comment while laws/regulations/rules are in flux and by promoting support for the defense in the DeCSS and Napster prosecutions by telling us where to send contributions.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
I actually don't beleive that total freedom (i.e. non-protection) of expression is a good idea, but Jon Katz does have a point that the current system is unfeasible. I agree very strongly that the law has gone downhill in favour of the industry, and I feel that this is because it is the only way the industry can find to defend their current distrobution system (one which bears daily-increasing semblance to a cartel -- look at what real record prices have done with respect to the intro. of CDs)
Quite simply put, the idea of physically replicating hundreds of thousands of plastic-aluminium sandwich discs at high levels of fidelity begins to lose its attraction when there is not only a highly viable (high volume, fidelity, efficiency) electronic distrubution medium available (the Internet), but the ability in thousands of households to reconstitute this data into the original format as needed (burners). (The same issues were perhaps encountered on a smaller scale when radio came to be -- history buffs, anyone?) All right, so maybe that wasn't a simply put senteance, but you get the idea.
A new system of transferring value to performers in return for their work will have to evolve. Culture will not survive without it. If it's any comfort to the hordes of broke 16 year-olds (among whom I count myself) it very much appears that this new system will be the death of (the current) cartels, and will be vastly more efficient -- and the cds (or whatever) will hence be cheaper.
Quite how this new system will work I cannot tell. The simplest system, and the one most like past history, would be a similar tax applied to the relevant materials as was once introduced on top of cassettes, whose proceeds are distributed to artists. This system has a number of drawbacks, however, not least that it relies on the wisdom of beureaucrats to distribute the funds. My only other idea would be some kind of (RSA, learning the lessons of CSS!) encryption scheme to protect songs -- but some clown could still just press the ol' record/upload button. I suspect what will be a more lasting solution is either some control of the necessary high-bandwidth infrastructuer by gov't/authority (something already being studied in reaction to DoS attacks) coupled with a practice of making the legal channels attractive to teh point of making the illegal ones a) paltry and b) easily controlled with a minimum of enforecement. An ecomic solution always works best.
Interesting Times ahead. (I don't suppose I have to attribute that... ;-)
________________
He who fights and runs away,
So, a person who writes a story or a song has no rights to it? Just because the song isn't "tangible", it should be free to everyone? So who's going to pay the songwriter's bills? Or perhaps you think that people shouldn't be able to write songs for a living -- they should have to do some "honest" work as well? It's a pretty theory, but it just doesn't work in real life. I'm all for sharing, and open source and all that, but the money's gotta come from somewhere -- it's just an ugly fact of life.
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What? WHAT?!! Oh.
. . . Now I don't like the way the music industry treats musicians and overcharges for CDs anymore than anyone else on Slashdot. But they are the ones who have invested the money into promoting and recording music and without them we would never even know of the existance of the music groups we love. If musicians really wanted their music to be "free" for all to listen to and distribute they would release them as mp3's on a public webiste (as some have). Now whether they have contracts which the industry that prevent them from doing so, well thats their fault.
Yes, its true that many unenforcable laws exist due to the changing nature of the world ie. the internet. But we can't blame the government for trying to enforce these laws.
The point is that copying and publically distributing music, like copying and distributing books or any other copywrited material, the way it is today, is _wrong_ and _illegal_. Whether the music industry can enforce these laws is beside the point. I admit that I have downloaded mp3's and I have pirated software, but I at least acknowledge the fact that I am stealing when I do so.
Culure has nothing to do with this. The fact that it is so much easier to copy CDs, mp3's, movies, books, etc. does not make it anymore legitimate. We can lobby for laws to be change, for musicians to release music freely without going through the music industry, but right now we are breaking laws
Likewise free speech has _nothing_ to do with this. The government is not preventing us or anyone from saying what we want. They are simply trying to protect the rights of the musicians and the music industry to "own" their own "speech" - their own music.
What can we do? Well, we can work through the systems to get laws changed. We can support musicians who choose not to sell their music through traditional channels. But as long as we want to hear music, see movies, and read books that are promoted through "large corporations" today we must play by their rules.
As for Thomas Jefferson, there are _a lot_ of things he said that we don't follow today. Remember that he believed that the USA would be a nation of mostly independent farmers. The USA today is very different.
The answer to who owns ideas is:
The person who thought up the idea does.
The inventor who patented it does.
The author who wrote the book does.
The mucisian who wrote the music does.
And if any of the above has chosen to sell it
through a large corporation, the corparation does. "We" don't.
Has anyone tried going after the big five (studios) on a price fixing basis.
After all, the difference between production costs and retail costs are huge. Why is it that CDs all cost virtually the same amount ? It's certainly got nothing to do with having to provide revenue to the bands, although that's what they try to make you think.
If there was anything like a free market going on here (even if one blindly accepted current IP laws), then there would be a far higher discrepency in CD prices. Maybe the latest rolling stones CD would cost $12, but a CD from some fringe band hardly anybody has heard of would have a completely different price.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Jon Katz is wrong, they are not applying 'outdated' old ideas of copyright to a new medium. Instead, the copyright industry is taking advantage of electronic media by pushing for new and stronger powers.
I for one would be happy to return to the 'good old days', where copyright controlled only copying and not usage, and lasted a reasonable time rather than up to 150 years. Instead, laws like the DMCA and the proposed UCITA give copyright holders unprecedented new powers.
(I live in Europe so I'm not directly affected by these laws, but there's no cause to feel smug; there is already strong lobbying to introduce software patents in Europe, UCITA-type laws will probably come next.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This is a problem -- because in this instance, it appears that the middleman benefits from copyright instead of the artist ( since the artist essentially signs away their monopoly on the recording to a middleman ). This is a problem more with the music industry than it is with the software industry.
The solution ? Technology. It is becoming easier to distribute music without the middleman. Traditionaly, the main service that the record labels performed was getting the artist's music into record shops ( where another middleman would skim more cream ... ) Nowadays, artists can distribute over the internet ( not necessarily MP3 -- they can also do mail order ), or form independent record labels that resell over the internet. Cheapbytes and Linuxmall are living proof that it costs very little to do this.
Article 1, Section 8
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The primary goal of the copyright and patent laws was the promotion of progress in science and the arts, not the enrichment of authors, inventors and publishers. Government granted monopolies on "intellectual property" were just a means to an end, not the end itself.
How should we promote this goal in the information age, where the cost of production is fixed and the cost of distribution is rapidly approaching zero? With the current system, the behaviour that maximizes profit for authors and publishers is not the one that maximizes the social utility of the author's work. From society's point of view, free access to books, music and software by all citizens, rich or poor, would be optimal. The problem is how to fairly compensate authors and publishers for the time, costs and risks of producing "intellectual property" when distribution is no longer strongly tied to compensation. Could compensation be publicly funded based on social utility? How should the social utility of a work be determined?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You have several good points there. You can divide and classify ideas and expressions differntly. But in doing so you fall into a paradox. You cannot have one without the other. This is inherent in what you yourself express. You have an idea that Katz is wrong, and you seek to express that idea. The expression of the idea is tied directly to the idea itself.
Take for instance the idea of taking of small, discrete sections of a irregular curve and adding them up to find out the mathematical properties of that curve. That's a great idea! It solves many problems. However, without a mode of expression that is so many words. Part of the idea and genius of calculus is the way in which it is expressed. The limit, the summation, the integral, and their associated symbols. Without the expressive part of the idea, it would be worthless. Just as expressions are without value if they have no idea behind them to express.
Think about it. If somebody owns the method of expression then they own the idea. You can only say something in so many ways, and if those ways are own by somebody else, then you have nothing left to say. That is the point here. Copyrights in the days of yore were designed to give the holder the means of control of the expressive portion and thereby control over the idea itself. Nowadays that method of control over ideas is eroding far quicker than many are comfortable with. And that is where the 'Net comes in.
With the 'Net we find more and different methods of expressing old ideas. Like going to a town square and listing to a performance of a play or musician. That was free then, and all you had to do was get there. Now we just download the performance we want to hear and enjoy it at home. The fact that several hundered years seperates the two is where the problem comes in.
You should always be wary of arguments that tell you that what you want to do is not only OK, but moral. Such arguments can be created for nearly everything, and have been used by any number of groups to justify everything from true moral good to atrocities that those committing them thought were not only OK to do, but morally obligated for them to do.
What also troubles me about Katz's essay is that he starts with the presumption that because kids are doing it, it must be right, and concludes that kids ought to be able to do it because they are.
The kids in the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles form gangs and sell drugs; to them it's also as natural as downloading MP3s is to college students. If we apply Katzian reasoning to this situation, the problem is not gangs, but the police who try to stop gang warfare and the sales of drugs. After all, being a gang banger and blowing away a crip is "natural"... was that the sound of a bullshit detector going off?
Look, I have no problems with limiting the duration of copyright on the theory that ideas embedded in expression ought to be shared freely after the copyright owner is able to get it's fair reward for creating that expression; this was the original idea behind copyright limits and patent limits. However, to simply suggest that it's harder to codify reasonable limits on the distribution of digitial materials now that the internet has made the cost of distribution essentially free, so we should scrap any pretence at copyright or patent--that's like suggesting we should scrap anti-gang efforts by the police because of LAPD corruption.
* I'm in no way suggesting pirating MP3s is as violent or deadly as gang warfare, nor do I mean to belittle gang warfare by suggesting it's as painless as sharing MP3s. However, they are both illegal activities, hurt third parties, and hurt third parties in ways which both the students sharing MP3s and the gangs shooting at each other refuse to acknowledge. And both are subjects of essayists like Katz who suggest that as we are unable to control their activities, we should legalize them instead.
Let's look at Hasrbro's current lawsuit, in which they're cracking down on games that they see as rip offs of games they own the rights to (old Atari titles like Asteroids and Centipede and such). Ignoring the fact that those games are twenty years old, here's the general opposition to this argument seems to go:
Hasbro lawyer: Your game is a clone of Asteroids. We own the rights to that game. Please stop producing it.
Guy who wrote an Asteroids clone: You can't copyright a game concept! I wrote this game, and it's mine.
Lawyer: It's obvious that your game is indeed Asteroids and not an original work. You could have come up with any idea in the world, yet you chose Asteroids.
Guy: It's not exactly Asteroids! Look, my asteroids are textured, and I added power-ups!
Lawyer: You have a rotating ship on the screen that shoots at rocks that break up into smaller rocks when shot. When you shoot the smallest rocks they disappear. A little enemy ship comes out every so often and shoots at you; nothing else shoots in the game except you and that ship. There's a hyperspace key. You move by pressing Thrust and then you drift around. This is your design?
Guy: Information should be free!
Lawyer: Look, if you formed a band and recorded your own version of Dark Side of the Moon, track for track, do you think that's legitimate unles you get permission?
Guy: Uh, but that's different. CDs are harder to make than games.
Lawyer: Legal issues aside, the bottom line here is that you need to think for yourself. You could write lots of games about asteroids and space ships and such without being Asteroids. There are unlimited ideas out there, why did you have to pick the one that's obviously been done by someone else? The web is full of people who think they have the right to publish their own Star Trek novelizations and create CG South Park episodes. Why? Wouldn't it just be better to do your own thing?
Guy: But I'm just a coder who doesn't have any good ideas!
Lawyer: Exactly.
To understand the other point of view--the one that says intellectual property and private property are closely related (if not identical) concepts--one has to understand what private property is in the first place.
Economic systems derive from the fact that resources are limited. An economic system is a system that provides for the division of limited resources in the face of unlimited demand. Communism believes that resources should be centrally distributed based on need. Capitalism believes that treating resources as private property provides for the most efficient division of resources.
Because capitalism is not concerned with who actually needs a resource, it can appear cold-hearted. Because it is efficient,however, all members of a capitalist society eventually end up richer. Furthermore, communist societies have a real problems with several issues:
So, given that capitalism has proven to be so much more better for society than communism and private property is capitalisms primary tool, a look at the issue without reflection might lead one to think that IP should be treated as private property. This is the problem with the lawmakers.
The problem with IP is that it is not a limited resource. The fundamental issues that form the basis for private property do not apply to ideas, music, code, stories, or movies. If everyone in the world wanted a copy of this post, there is nothing that limits the replication of this post to meet their needs. I am not diminished. Hopefully, everyone is enriched :).
Private property is thus a horrible analogy for intellectual property. To determine a new paradigm for intellectual property, we need to think about exactly what we want from intellectual property. I believe it is this: We want the free flow of ideas only encumbered in such a way as to maximumally encourage the creation of new ideas.
So what would such a concept of intellectual property look like?
The music industry is loaded with intermediaries.
Let's face it, we all have an idea of how much it costs us to cut a CD, don't we ? On an industrial scale, it will cost a fraction of that per unit.
We accept that we should be paying the artist to listen to his music, otherwise that is theft. Since it has to go on some medium or other - we can see why we need to stand the cost of the CD. The rest of the money we pay for a CD, a high percentage of it, is tax and payments to various intermediaries, for shipping, talent management, production, distribution and so on.
Is there room for a business model which distributes music straight from the artist to paying customers, cutting all the intervening crap ? The artist gets paid, which is groovy, and the customer gets a keener price. The only real losers are all the intermediaries in the music business, which is why they will fight internet access to music tooth and nail.
Note that the artists are not complaining as loudly as the intermediaries.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
I marked this up properly, and previewed it, but the HTML didn't take in the final post.
So here it is again:
A contributor wrote: Jon Katz in this entire piece has fatally confounded two distinct concepts, Ideas and Expressions.
Jefferson, in his 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson, was not making the "idea/expression" distinction of copyright law. He was not writing in a copyright-law context at all, but was referring to patent law. By "ideas" he was referring to what lawyers call "the subject matter of patent." Mapping Jefferson's principle into the domain of copyright law produces precisely the result that Katz asserts: that "the subject matter of copyright" (i.e. "expression") equally with the subject-matter of patent, belongs to all as a matter of right, and that any legal system which tries to make copyrightable expression subject to exclusive rights is at best an artificial, temporary expedient.
Mr. Justice Brandeis stated the same principle in words that are also subject to the same sort of misinterpretation. He wrote of "ideas", but he was not referring to the I/E distinction. Here is Mr. Brandeis' statement:
The fact that a product of the mind has cost its producer money and labor, and has a value for which others are willing to pay, is not sufficient to ensure to it this legal attribute of property. The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it. These exceptions are confined to productions which, in some degree, involve creation, invention, or discovery. But by no means all such are endowed with this attribute of property. The creations which are recognized as property by the common law are literary, dramatic, musical, and other artistic creations; and these have also protection under the copyright statutes. The inventions and discoveries upon which this attribute of property is conferred only by statute, are the few comprised within the patent law.
--INS v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 214, at 250 (Brandeis, J., dissenting.)
Though Brandeis uses the word "ideas", he is NOT referring to the technical Idea/Expression dichotomy of copyright law. Rather "knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, ideas" is the most general category of "incorporeal productions" of the human mind. Brandeis is saying that by "the general rule of law", all works of the mind--both ideas and expression, in copyright language--are as "free as the air to common use", and the copyright and patent laws are the exception to this general rule of freedom.
Hence, as Katz implicitly senses (though he might have expressed himself a little more clearly) it is up to the proponents of a copyright and patent system--those who want to create the exception that will limit the freedom of others-- to come up with a rational, workable system, and to justify its existence.
The kids who download free music from a young age as a matter of course have little awareness that they are appropriating someone else's property. Most wouldn't dream of shoplifting in a store: they consider it stealing and they might face arrest, humiliation and punishment as a consequence. But acquiring movies, music, games or other intellectual property online is so simple, so ubiquitous, that it's become almost instinctive.
Bullshit. They have plenty of awareness of what they're doing. A student in our school newspaper was quoted as saying something to the effect of, "Sure, everyone knows it's illegal, but they do it anyway because it's easy." This countered a comment by the school network administrator that most students didn't know it was illegal. Everyone knows it's illegal, and your shoplifting analogy is off-base because of that. If people could walk into a store and walk out with something that normally they would pay for and have absolutely no fear of being caught, they would. The reason they don't is because it's easier to be noticed when your not some invisible entity that's hard to track on the other end of a fiber optic cable. Just because people are harder to track doesn't make it legal.
Jon, what happens if I were to take one of your books that you sell for money, that you make your living off of, and I copy it and redistribute it to tens of thousands of people so that they don't have to pay for it? What if I try to argue this by saying that your book is 'information' and you've released it and therefore it's freely available to everyone? What if I further try and argue my point by saying that people who get a copy of your book will be more likely to go out and buy one of your other books under your standard distribution model? Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
Yes, I agree people aren't addressing issues created by the web, or rather, they're addressing them in ways that aren't beneficial to our ideals of an open society. Yes, I'd love to see the music industry embrace MP3 has a freely distributable form and work with it rather than against it. But the fact is that people people who do it against laws are criminals, and you can't justify that as okay. Perhaps one day, lawmakers will get together and start listening to Us(tm) instead of Them(tm), but justifying criminal actions because you think it's the Right Thing(tm) to do just adds more fuel to the fire.
What makes me even more angry is that no one ever looks at it from the music industry's viewpoint. Everyone just assumes that the way we do it is the right way. Like so many other things in life, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle ground and as soon as everyone quits fighting each other and starts working together, the sooner we'll have a situation that benefits everyone. The geek community is not the only community in the world, and the music industry is not the only group with ideas about music distribution. My personal opinion is that both sides are being complete brats about the whole issue, and Jon Katz, you've just decided to play along with one group of brats.
...in order for the industry to have a chance to control it. MP3's are just so convenient. Perhaps if the industry hadn't fought change for so long, they could have large collections of music in a portable format in the stores rather than CD's, necessarily at far better prices.
Yes, I know that sounds crazy for them to destroy their own market, but, as many in the computer industry have learned, it is better to destroy your own market than to wait for others to do it for you.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I do very much like the idea of open content. I think that our culture would very much benefit from the unrestricted passing of ideas and creativity. I'm very glad that the Internet enables this in many ways and I think a lot of people are benefitting.
That said, we can't just set everything free.
The respective industries that are battling against "piracy" are fighting a pointless and selfish fight, but that doesn't automatically mean that the other side of the battle is entirely correct. As a society, we don't want widespread piracy because that DOES create a major disincentive to further creative works. Our society is capitalist, and we can't forget that when dealing with our culture. You see, capitalism encourages:
1. We make as much money as possible
2. Anything that makes you lose money is useless
3. Anything that saves you money is preferred
Now, piracy affects creative works by reducing the amount of money that can be made on them. That violates the first concept. Creative works themselves generally violate the second concept if they make no money. Piracy is encouraged by the third concept, which means that ideally you'd want complete piracy. Therefore, creative works themselves would violate the first and second concepts, and avoiding creativity is encouraged by the third. (and eventually the first)
What does this mean? Well, it means that in a perfect capitalist society, creativity is a generally flawed concept. The entire concepts of art, R&D, and individual thinking give way to the idea that you must do what you KNOW will make you more money. We simply don't want that.
Instead, here's the approach we have to take:
- We must provide capitalist advantages to creativity
- We must protect creativity from being abused squashed financially
- We must encourage and assist the dispersal of creative ideas
Copyright law takes care of the first idea. The respective industries are running amok violating the second idea. The Internet is doing a good job of assisting the third idea. Now, changing copyright law doesn't help the second idea... it'll weaken the first. Restricting the Internet is REALLY BAD for the third idea, however encouraging the Internet happens to be really bad for the first and second ideas. The industries want to be in control and they help the first idea, but it's their control that hurts the third idea. Meanwhile, all these people on the Internet that want open content... well, the first idea might not survive that unless we come up with some way to insure it. But then the second and third ideas would be okay. However, that first idea is what allows the whole process to go on, so we better be wary about how open we want our content to be.
In the end, we aren't a utopian society. People need to eat, and people need to be well-rewarded for hard work. Everything can't be GPL'ed, because as much as we think it's a good idea, it's only relevant to hobbyists and philosophers. (in the sense that no one makes money, and not everyone wants the source code) Obviously the DMCA is bad in a lot of ways, but we can't be in denial about the way our society works. We have to prevent the total spread of piracy - obviously some would be ok, but even that argument is very tricky in terms of balancing ethics, freedom, and practicality. The only reason why the Net is doing okay NOW is because not everyone trades warez or mp3s. But in 20 years, we can't let everyone do that. If we are going to use the Internet to spread ideas and creativity, we must work hard to stop abuses. I think we still have some time to work it out under the current system temporarily, but we all know the current system will probably fall apart eventually. We're trying to fight the good fight, but remember that we have to think clearly about what we're fighting for... otherwise what we're trying to encourage we may destroy instead.
"If you own every expression ever produced by another person, then every person owns every expression ever produced by you. Not "just" any music you've created, or movies you may have made, but everything you've ever typed, every Slashdot post you've ever made, no longer belongs to you, and none of the copyright protections apply to it, including some nice ones like "the right to be credited with authorship". "
I imagine that you thought this paragraph would perhaps prompt a few people to question their undying devotion to a socialism of expressions. I'm sorry, but it will fall on deaf ears. You see, the people who advocate free exchange (its not even truly exchange, that implies mutual agreement, they want to take no matter what the creator thinks) of expressions have no capacity for expression or else they doubt that their expressions are any good.
They look around and see that either they have not the ability to create a movie or possibly they think their movies aren't as good as the next guy... but if only there was no such thing as censorship, you could basically do whatever you want and never have to worry about getting scorned for making a terrible movie (it was a product of the community! they'll cry). The only sacrifice they have to make is the other end of the spectrum, they have to sacrifice takign credit for great achievements they make. Look around Slashdot, you will find that a great many people have already made this sacrifice and are offended by anyone who has not. You get paid for your work? Heretic! You want people to use your product and not use your competitors product? Monopolist! There are a hundred situations in which people can defend their right over property for having created it and Slashdot has an epithet for every one.
Esperandi
This is going to narrowly focus on one area of the article... MP3s.
I personally use MP3s to see if a CD is worth buying. I have been burned so many times I cannot count... I have dozens of CDs that have only one or two decent songs, but the rest of the CD is crap or totally unlike the "hit single" they released. So, I now snag most of the songs I am curious about from the newsgroups. If I find at least one-third of the CD is decent, I will buy it at a traditional local music shop (and always from small non-chains, gotta keep the locals in business). If the album just plain sucks, I may keep the one or two songs that were decent as a fee for attempting to dupe me into buying crapola. In all honesty, MP3s have increased my CD purchasing, it's just that I can now choose what I want to purchase. The folks who made the music need to get paid, and I support those I believe put out consistant personally enjoyable music. As examples (please, no flameing or "they suck shyt", it's what I personally listen to, not what I think you should listen to), I liked some of what White Zombie did, but I was unsure about Rob Zombie's solo effort. I downloaded it, liked it, then bought it. When I was teaching in Thailand, I heard a group called Curve and a song called Chinese Burn, which I particularly enjoyed. I snagged the CD from the newsgroups and hated every other song. I didn't buy it, and only kept the one song. I always listen before I leap when it comes to industrial and techno music, and by sampling what was available using MP3s, I found new groups I had never heard of before (before they were famous): Front Line Assy, Delirium, 808State, KMFDM, etc. I now own legit copies of a lot of CDs that I never would have even known about, let alone purchased.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Jon Katz in this entire piece has fatally confounded two distinct concepts, Ideas and Expressions.
Ideas are more along the lines of patents, concepts, understandings, scientific theorums, inventions, ways of doing things. This is what Jefferson (which Jon quoted yesterday) was referring to.
A free flow of ideas is importent to a free and prosperous society.
Expressions are, generally, things protected by copyrights. Movies, music, works of art, essays, opinions, speech. A free flow of expressions willingly shared with the society is importent (no censorship), but it is not necessary, vital, or even good to mandate the communal ownership of expressions.
Jon Katz's essay's essential structure was to take the arguments for the free flow of ideas, slide in "expressions" for "ideas", and pass it off as a coherent argument for the free, unfettered flow of expressions... in other words justifying exactly what we all want to do.
You should always be wary of arguments that tell you that what you want to do is not only OK, but moral. Such arguments can be created for nearly everything, and have been used by any number of groups to justify everything from true moral good to atrocities that those committing them thought were not only OK to do, but morally obligated for them to do.
While free flow of ideas has a long and distinguished pedigree, you should actually not be so quick to declare that movies should belong to everybody. Movies aren't ideas, they are expressions. Claiming that you own all movies ever produced, and can presumably do anything you want to them as a result of that ownership (not just "view", but extract sound clips, video clips, use pieces of the composition in other compositions) has a very dangerous downside, which is simply it works both ways.
If you own every expression ever produced by another person, then every person owns every expression ever produced by you. Not "just" any music you've created, or movies you may have made, but everything you've ever typed, every Slashdot post you've ever made, no longer belongs to you, and none of the copyright protections apply to it, including some nice ones like "the right to be credited with authorship".
Jon, and anyone who agrees with him, no longer have the right to complain when Wired runs a story by stealing comments, unaccredited, off of Slashdot; it's perfectly within their rights to do so, as they own your expression as much as you own the right to the expression of today's Top 10 hits. There is no difference between a Slashdot post and a movie, morally or legally.
And that's the problem. Ideas are not expressions, they are quite distinct things that should not be confused. Jon Katz has done a great disservice to the community by so further confusing the issue, and also contributes to the ignorance the average Slashdot poster has about copyright issues. Who can blame them what the content producers of Slashdot itself are clueless about these distinctions, despite writing from positions of moral authority?
And Katz, that's the worst thing about this entire essay. Your entire premise was based on a bait-and-switch tactic that had no basis in reality, that in fact doesn't even begin to make sense, and based on this glaring error, you get all morally superior over those who may disagree with you. That is inexcusable arrogance.