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What If There Was No Copyright Law?
"Now, think about what this means. These countries have no protection for intellectual property, at least not for any not produced and/or registered within their borders. That means you can freely appropriate music, DVDs, commercial software, GPL'd code -- anything available is public domain, as we understand the term. This used to be of only marginal interest since the infrastructure for entrepreneurial types to capitalize on this lack of protection wasn't available, but the growing use of the Internet makes this lack of universal copyright applicability a bit more interesting.
Sooner or later, these outlying regions are going to have significant Internet connectivity. Will they all bring their intellectual property protection standards into line with the 146 Berne nations ... or not? And if not, what exactly, will happen then? Is intellectual property protection important enough to cause diplomatic isolation? Trade wars? Real war?"
I'm just wondering if you were to copyright your software '(c) Kingdom of Andorra' (for example) whether or not the country would be able to 'acquire' the copyright. And since the country has no IP laws the software would be free to copy...
Of course, it wouldn't quite work for warez etc as it'll be (c) Mickeysoft Inc, USA (example) and if you live in the US you'll still be liable for copyright theft.
Oh - don't forget that Napster was designed to be a _legal_ service, _N_ew _A_rtist _P_rogram - it wasn't made to shift copyright materials around the 'net.
Richy C.
--
For some of the poorer coutries who are not signatories this may be an oppotunity because if say, Napster went to Angola then they will get publicity and an influx of technology and knowlege. That is not to say that those coutries must become piracy centres but they could provide a little more freedom.
Copyright exists due to human pride but also human greed and jealousy. Much like communism, life without copyright is a theoretical dream that would not last in reality. If we were to start again without copyright there is no doubt in my mind that it would eventually appear again, for it is human nature to want what is your's to stay your's. Anyone agree?
"But Doctor, if they take away my head surely I'll die?"
"Fun Gums"
Imagine there's no intellectual property
It's easy if you try
No RIAA hovering over us
etc.
I'm too tired to write the rest.
Free Hans!
The reasons for a good economy are mind bogglingly vast, there is little doubt that to promote research and development under a capitalist system companies will require some sort of protection in the way of copyright. To remove it completely would discourage the for-profit folks from pouring money into new technology. I think what has been lost, particularly since the advent of 'intellectual property' is that these laws were originally intended to be temporary. Just left in place long enough to recoup any money put into R&D. Corporations have successfully convinced lawmakers and the USPTO that they need their copyrights extended beyond any reasonable period so that they can maintain their market advantages.
The best solution, in my humble opinion, is that a no loopholes time limit be placed on all copyrights beyond which they cannot be held. This would force companies to take a harder look at whether they can make enough money quickly enough to justify product development. It might harm R&D in a small way, things that wouldn't provide enough return during the copyright period just wouldn't get done, but it might also improve competition and swing a little of the power away from big business.
As an aside, was the Lettermen network switch the advent of intellectual property? I seem to remember that it was treated as a radical concept by the media.
Icebox
Difficult one to say, really.
I guess the closest example to look at is that of China, where it is well known that you can get most things counterfeited, be it clothes, watches or software or CDs or DVDs etc.
Companies complain about the piracy, and from time to time there are token raids to shut them down, but they just move on and start up elsewhere.
No government has decided to make anything formal or make any diplomatic protests about it.
However, this is probably still sufficiently different from the examples being raised by the poster, because in the new examples, access to said data is much much easier (OK, I can get a CD stuffed full of pirate software for $10 in Hong Kong, but it costs a lot to get there!).
Personally, I would expect that M$ et al would go after those whom they suspectedof downloading the pirate software etc, rather than the servers themselves in those cases?
Now, how they could work out exactly WHO was downloading is a different question, of course!
(Surely M$ wouldn't stoop to organising sustained DDoS attacks on such servers, would they?)
Anyway, just MHO, do with it as you will!
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Two, as in other CR-Free zones, I think the remaining distribution would be pretty much the same as in Thailand or other non-CR havens.
These countries for a short while will thrive on the lack of copyright laws and will be a heaven for "pirated" Music/software/Video etc, but as time will go on, they will get pressure from Western countries to tighten up their copyrihgt laws in exchange for "development" funds and other sweetners.
Some countries (especially Arab) will obviously give the US the 2 finger salute, but even so I don't think the situation will last forever.
We will have to wait and see how companies like Havenco get on...
Watch out!
You don't know of the secretly implemented self-destruct sequence, witch will destroy the program and the network it's on when a MS program is illegally distributed.
In the past the'd just send your personal data to a pi who'd hunt you down and make you disapear. Past arabic 'events' have proven this way is more effective.
Mark
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
Actually I think it would be really good if these countries got a better infrastructure when it comes to internet; after all we've taken everything from them already, so now it's time for them to exploit us a bit.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
According to the CIA world factobook, Afghanistan is also the world's largest illicit opium producer and exports large amounts of hashish, and profits from that drug trade go to continuing the perpetual civil war.
While I don't regard the issues raised by Napster as trivial, a bit of perspective might go a long way sometimes.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Does anyone believe that we would allow such a hotbed of copyright theft to exist forever? They would be bought off, isolated from the network, or failing all else they would be attacked militarily. No corporate loss of any magnitude would be tolerated by the government for any length of time.
Sigura Non Grata
Unfortunately copyright law is essential to human endeavour thanks to the fallen nature of human kind. And whilst we might all like to pretend that we're enlightened people who could exist in a state where everything is available to everyone, let's face it the fall of the USSR showed us that this state of affairs just isn't in human nature - all it takes is one person to spoil it for everyone.
Anyway, in a capitalist society it is a given that it is far cheaper, and therefore better, to steal someone else's work rather than invest the time and resources in producing your own. Theft has a far lower cost, so it's far more appealing on purely economic grounds. Without such protective measures as copyright, there's no incentive to invest in producing your own goods, especially when we're talking about something as ephermal as the things copyright covers - written works, music and art. This is why I think Libertarianism is flawed - it encourages anything that increases wealth without regard to ethics in its purest form.
Sure some people produce it for the love of it, but if they can't aren't able to be rewarded for their efforts then they won't have the time to fully concentrate on what they do - they'd have to get jobs and spend most of their time and energy trying to survive. Copyright ensures that people can profit enough from what they produce so that they can continue doing such work.
Copyright is therefore a necessary part of any capitalist socioeconomic system in which you want to encourage creativity and development. Without it, we'd have stagnation and a slip back into barbarism and the Dark Ages.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The difference is, I can have your's, without you not having it.
Human nature is to have. To have more, and finaly, have even more. It is not neccessarily to make other not to have, have less, and even less. At least, I hope so. If not, we may as well fire a good atom-bomb over all of t his place, and erase this virus from the universe!
Without theoretical dreams, we would all be killing, raping and making each other starve. Oh, waitabit - we are...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
There is a difference in copyrights and patents. The countries mentioned may or may not have patent laws as well. But "companines innovating" and "scientists inventing" are covered by patents, not copyrights.
Copyright protection is a good idea. I believe an artist or creator should be able to dictate, at least for a while (for example until their death) what is done with or to their creations. However, why these rights should semi-automatically be transferred to publishers and producers, or why they should last for 70 years past the creator's death is wrong and excessive in my opinion. All of our common heritage and culture has been created by someone, and the concept of claiming ownership to it is a fairly recent invention.
(Please deposit $12.50 in order to cover the license for us singing "Happy Birthday to You".)
The laws in these places will probably change when there is enough money to be made.
But aside from what foreign IP owners would do in cases like 'Napster in Angola', I'd like to know how this model is working inside the country. Does OSS fare better or worse when there's a more level playing field? Do the OSS communities still respect OSS/GNU licenses even though they don't have to, just out of good spirit?
Can anyone from one of these nations comment?
Before I rant, when /. was bought a year and some back I really thought that had been bought by Andorra... It goest to show that a little more attention reading is always good.
Anyway, the countries that didn't sign the WIPO agreement aren't factors in the internet or in pretty much anything else - some of them have deep political problems, others are just plain anti-american or does anyone think that WIPO isn't an american strategy to corner inginuity (sp?)? You talked about these issues in the long term, by then there's a probabilistic chance that things will change... in favor of what WIPO wants.
These poor little countries can't survive or stand alone without international trade (look at China for example). Eventually - like it or not - they will open up and they will fall in line like everyone else because the World's biggest economic titan - the USA - will set the Rule which is "You will obey me".
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
forget copyright...
counter-copyright
"The idea surrounding the counter-copyright campaign is fairly easy to understand. If you place the [cc] icon at the end of your work, you signal to others that you are allowing them to use, modify, edit, adapt and redistribute the work that you created. "
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
Copyright law was originally created to ensure a steady flow of new art. "Let's give the artist the means to earn a living, and he might go on making art", it was reasoned.
:-)
Today things are different: Many "artists" are little more than wage slaves (programmers and other engineers), others are tied hand and feet to their masters, the record companies. Who make the money? Rarely if ever it is the artist who gets to be rich.
Enter the internet with it's 0-day warez sites, Napster, Freedom, etc. Enter the open source movement (or free software, or whatever you want to call it).
The copying-stuff-is-theft concept doesn't seem to fly with many of Napster's users, even if the cops and the big companies still believe in it, they seem to be quite unsuccessful in stopping warez sites.
Maybe, if all these trends continue, our kids will live in a world with no copyrights. Many things will have to change. Who knows? Maybe every bar will have a live band in it again, maybe Windows will be GPL'ed
--------------------------------
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The man from Mars, he say urkle.
It seems that copyright is designed to promote progress - it does this by offering creators control and private ownership over their work, so they may use their intellectual work to reward themselves. Therefore, if copyright went away, the main loss would be 'revenue' from charging people money for access to the work.
What really needs to go is money, because that's how many people see reward (although that's not always the case). Money is just an advancement of bartering, because people are fickle and want to make sure 'they got the best deal' - they can't accept that whatever they do in their community is OK. Similarly, politics and people having control over others had to be invented because people were afraid of anarchy.
We have copyright and money and other materialistic concerns because we're not societally advanced enough to do without them. That's my humble opinion.
Does my bum look big in this?
I'm an American expat in Taiwan and we're not on the list, but that doesn't really matter. The fact is that most of the coutries that are not actually signatories to these agreements are more than happy to bow to pressure from any well funded foreign organization that wants to come in and blackmail the locals for selling pirated goods from software and entertainment to hand bags and watches.
You can't conclude that there is no IP enforcement just because a country isn't signed up on one of these lists. That's like assuming that a country has no role international political role because it's not in the UN. Again, Taiwan would be a good example of how that would be an absurd assumption.
Copyright laws should be removed. A controversial statement for sure. How can someone claim that such a right, should be removed?
First of all, if I produce something, I shouldn't be able to earn money on that single product my entire life. If I make something, I should be able to sell it, but then I lose control over it.
Patents *used* to be an incentive for research, and to open up formulas. Its not anymore. Either people keep it a tradesecret, or they patent it to prevent others from making "copies" for the next 20 years. Patents are no longer "so that the public gains from it in the long run". Patents are now in place to prevent people from making more efficient solutions, "for the next 20 years" - so that the creator may benefit mostly from it.
The problem is, everybody else loses from the possibility of patents. If someone else things up the same thing, he can't use it, because someone else has *patented* it. Even if the second to come up with the idea, never had seen the product the first one patented.
Back to copyright. If I made good music, I would be *glad* that people enjoyed my music so much that they shared it. I would be *glad* if people listened to my music. If I wanted money from it, i would make concerts and so forth. I should not sit with copyright on the material for the next 70 years or how long it is. After I had made it available, people should be able to share it, and enjoy it.
The same goes for software.
Of course, this removes the business oportunities to a great extent, or at least the current business oportunities. It wouldn't be possible to earn money the same way as today. Of course, you could sell CD's, "collectors editions" and so forth - which your hardcore fans would buy. You would get money from those who truly enjoyed your music, but not from those that listened to it once or twice.
Furthermore, you would get money from concerts. People would pay to watch your concerts, and that would make you money.
Oh, I could go on for ages and ages. I simply want copyright to be a thing of the past.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Ultimately anything that is stored in electronic format can be counterfeited. As bandwidth increases in the future, it will get easier and easier to get your hands on music/videos/software. Supporting producers property rights to electronic products will become a choice. Property rights underpin capitalism - but you can't enforce that on the rest of the world. Muisic/Video copyright is somewhat trivial beside the issue of genetic & medical copyright. Consider that the makers of AIDS treatment drugs can block access to most of the world that have AIDS by imposing price barriers thanks to their patents.
Copyrights on US works are not easily enforcable in these places. But why on earth would anyone assume that simply setting up a server in such a country would completely evade US law?
I would think that something like overseas napster would certainly fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government as it affects both interstate and international commerce. How quickly do you think a law would be drafted and passed to regulate and even prevent us from accessing napster? Not that these laws by themselves would ammount to much, people would simply route around them, and might even have fun doing so. But the penalties for breaking this law might be severe for those who got caught. Ever hear of a little country called Cuba? Guess what, its illegal to trade with them. Has been for decades. I don't know exactly what the penalties are for doing so, or even if they are routinely enforced. But I do know it is illegal because it is considered "trading with the enemy." Kind of like trading with old Saddam during the Gulf War. I can't imagine the penalties are nice, even if I can't recall them being enforced recently.
This whole "I put my server in Rangoon, so now you can't touch me!" attitude smacks of juvenile cluelessness. It reminds me of some kid trying to use rules designed to govern/suppress him or her against the authority figures who created them in the first place. I'm sorry, but the rules are written for the benefit of those who create them and will be revised when they are found lacking in this regard. Ultimately they are little more than an agreed upon ritual dictating the methods which must be used in the exercise of power.
So please, don't be so naive.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Reading the posts here I think most people agree that copyright is nesscesary and won't go away.
Copyright (and patents) exist to allow peoples (and companies) to make money. In itself that's not a bad thing.
Ofcourse how long a work should profit from protection is extremely important.
If say we had a maximum of 5 years to copyright profits from sale could still be made (aplenty methinks). Giving copanies, authors whoever, time enough to come up with something new.
Of course free distrubution would be marvelous but you can't force people/artists/whoever into it. Many people rely on existing distribution sytsems. And spreading it around for free doesn't seem to be a healthy way to make a living to a lot of people for some reason :)
They deserve the choice to change the way they spread their product.
At current the "greed part" of copyright seems to be dominant, 95 years is next to infinity in human terms, the only ones who profit from such a long time are people who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the work!
Ok just my 0.02 Euro..
Well, the logical conclusion of the "Information wants to be Free" philosophy held my many OS advocates, is that copyright (and patents and trademarks) is "unnatural". I phrase it that way for a reason: in the past, many groups have claimed that some behavior, philosophy etc. is unnatural in order to attack it. The "unnatural" accusation, explicit or implicit, is a very difficult one to deal with because humans seem to have a psychological pre-disposition to believe that natural=good. We see these attacks implicit in the strategy manifested in the GPL. But that doesn't mean it isn't incorrect. One problem that I see so often is that "unnatural" is often conflated with "absolute moral standard" which is further conflated with "fundamentalism" and then is treated as a Very Bad Thing. But the fact is, that the term "unnatural" actually has a fairly useful meaning. So in the case where copyright is attacted (implicitly) as unnatural, we have to be careful that we do not ignore the possibility that copyright may actually be unnatural! As many people have said both here on Slashdot and elsewhere, information is not "naturally" a resource that suffers from economies of supply/scarcity. Since there is theoretically an infinite supply of information, the cost should be zero. As more and more types of information become detached from their physical media, we will see businesses and government struggle to understand what to do, since _all_ relevent policies are based on economics of supply and demand. I would like to make a brief aside and point out that there are quite a number of types of information that are not yet detached from their physical media: painting, sculpture, smells, emotions, and personal memories all come to mind. These types of information obviously have to some degree or another become digitized and freed. However, especially those types of information that are coupled very tightly to wetware, will likely take a very long time to become free, if they ever do. Now I will take a big leap, and point out that as the recognition of the freedom of information spreads, there will be some other things happen as well. Firstly, the fundamental unity of humanity will become harder and harder to ignore. Once this unity is recognized, new tools (systems of business, government, discovery, communication) will need to be developed. I personally think this will be an incredibly radical change - and that it isn't too far away. The recognition of the unity of humanity is a fundamental prerequisit to any lasting peace, and to any lasting solutions to our many social, economic and environmental problems. Well, that was quite a mouthful :-O
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Well said, and so very true. As usual I dont have any mod points when I need them...
/Dervak
I change the question a liltle bit..
What happened if Quran and Bible copyrighted?
Somebody geting sue by having illegal copy of it?
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
-Begin Semi-Rant-
Slashdot crew: What the hell is going on? This is a new website, correct? So, one could reason that the staff is comprised of journalists. Journalists tend to be fairly skilled in the use of grammar... Take a look at the title of the article "What if there was no copyright law?".
It makes my head hurt. It should read "What if there were no copyright law?". This is called the subjunctive. It deals with refering to something that is contrary to what is.
I find it appaling that the crew of slashdot does not take more pride in their work - mainly because I know many of the visitors to the site take much pride in viewing the site! Please, improve the quality - not only of the grammar and mistakes that should not make it to the front page, but the stories too! It seems now that every month the same three or five stories pop up under a different title. There is a general decline occuring here at slashdot, and it is truly sad... Slashdot used to be such a great place.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Poor little countries like ... : China ?! Excuse me !??
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
nt
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
However, we need something different for music and software. Shame the rest of the world hasn't realised this. The code in our books is completely free (not even GPLed in most cases). However, the text is ours and should be completely ours.
Like so much else, copyright has outlived most of its original usefulness. Until the 20th century, there were only two kinds of marketable goods: actual materials like cloth and spices; and ideas. It wasn't until our technological age that *ideas about goods* would become so common and so valuable. Until that time, new inventions were extremely rare and could be guarded as trade secrets. Much more common were fiction books and philosophical works. The first copyright laws as we know them were enacted to protect the purveyors of ideas. The printing press made it easy to steal a work, but it wasn't hard to trace the whereabouts of the thief, because printing presses were themselves novelties. Today copyright theft is so frequent and so easy that we don't even consider much of what we do theft. Unlike centuries past, when only a small percentage of the population could get, own, or read a book, today the vast majority of the developed world's population can read. When there are so many trees about, stealing leaves may be illegal, but it's not feasible to worry about it. Too, today only a few industries rely on copyright for their own protection. Paperbacks are so cheap that it's silly to steal a John Jakes novel for illegal reprinting. The music industry howls about its need for protection, but produces little evidence that such protection protects their sales. Movie studios, ditto. Pirated copies undoubtedly gouge out some profit, but given the available technologies, it's inevitable that there would be some leakage. Countries like Afghanistan hardly pose a major threat to the movie industry's profit margins. The truly ironic and painful part of intellectual property law is that if you don't fight for your rights, they'll eventually be withdrawn from you. This leads to the absurdity of a record label's lawyers informing Girl Scout troops that they can't dance to the Macarena anymore unless they pay for it. Both the lawyers and the record label executives have to cringe at doing this...it's like kicking little girls, for heaven's sake. But the law makes them do it, or risk forfeiting their rights elsewhere. Rather than a retooling of existing law, it might be wiser to consider whether the laws are workable at all, given the ease and frequency of violation. Bards didn't copyright their works throughout the Middle Ages, and Homer didn't copyright the Illiad. It would have been futile to try, considering how easy it was to listen and then take it away with you. It was only the choke point of the printing press that made copyright laws feasible, and now that's been done away with. The record and movie industries have tried to introduce new choke points, but with limited success. Time will tell if the huge investment in shaky technology will pay off with some measure of protection. But without having a choke point, there can be no enforcement, and having the law on the books will be so much wishful thinking.
The reality is that the USA will lean heavily upon these "rogue" countries with economic sanctions. This will force them to accept the "need" for copyright despite the fact the concept of copyright may not be culturally acceptable. I remember studying Nigeria at school, and their culture was based upon giving. (at least tribal culture). If you gave something, you never expected something in return. Something like copyright would be totally abhorrent to this practice.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Isn't Sealand/Havenco exactly what you are talking about? They will host your server, I don't think they enforce copyright, big pipe (and growing), no unstable govt (though yet to demonstrate a long-term viable one, they have yet to fail to do so either). Why bother with Afghanistan (no pipe, unstable/oppresive govt, etc). Put Sealand to the test!
Copyright covers plagiarism, which in the context of source code means I could be violating someone's copyright if I cut-and-paste their code and call it my own, use it for my own purposes, etc... without their permission, that is. And open source authors effectively give that permission to everyone, pending a few small details (GNU, for instance, has a number of preconditions - such as that you have to distribute the sourcecode yourself, etc.) Of course, I can read someone's code, learn from it, and write my own code that does the same thing. It may even be very similar, but that would be legal (again, there are a few caveats here, but that's basically the case). Even as a relative radical when it comes to intellectual property law, this pretty much seems fine to me.
Patents are much, much worse. Software patents enable Compuserve, for example, to patent a compression algorithm or a program that reads or writes a specific file format. Once such a patent is granted, it is illegal for me to write a program that uses that compression, or reads or writes data compatible with that format - no matter how I implement it.
The fun part is what people patent: Windows, pull down menus, command-line interfaces, GIFs (you've heard about the infamous GIF patent, of course!), one-click shopping, word processors that can right align text, you name it, the US Patent Office will grant it to you. I honestly don't think they even read them anymore. And if someone from the USPO wants to show up and self-righteously say "Oh yes we do read them" then... my God, that's even worse.
The reason you can tell the EU is going to have software patents is because their argument - that the USPO is the problem, not software patents themselves - is patently false. An obvious placation.
In a world with software patents, every programmer is likely to violate hundreds of patents throughout their career. There is no way they can know which, since they cannot read and remember the entire patent base, no matter how well-maintained. Every program is a ticking time bomb of patent litigation, as you never know when someone might turn up and say, "Hey! My grandfather patented that in 1986! That'll be 70% of your gross please, or get ready to spend $100-300 thousand defending yourself in court!"
Enough said.
I don't know who signed the Berne Convention (i don't have word), but Andorra and Angola appear on the WIPO members list (which contains 175 states) at least. So they at least grant the WIPO to "promote the protection of intellectual property" there (however vague that objective is). I can't puzzle out the legalese but i guess that WIPO members are either part of the Berne Convention or part of the Paris Convention.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Artists have also struggled throughout history unless they dedicated their working lives to their "sponsor" - witness people like Bach having to produce regular works; say a new piece for each weekly service for the Church. In doing so, a fair degree of freedom is given up. Hardly an ideal situation. Ownership via copyright is only a recent invention if you use the timescale of a thousand years or so, it goes way back to Victorian times.
"Discoveries in nature" - the great extent of historical science - are not patentable so that situation is the same now as it ever was. That individuals or companies might break the law in this regard is a matter of applying the law; it makes little sense to change it (or at least the underlying principle).
The concept of fair use covers the issue of our common heritage, while the extension of copyright past death was originally intended so that an artist could leave behind a form of estate for inheritance, as royalties provide cash flow rather than lump sums. From the artist's point of view, this gives them a far better negotiating position with a publisher than if the product they were offering to sell had only half the shelf life.
That copyrights get transferred to publisher's is a case of getting better contracts as standard practise in the arts in general.
Most copyright principles have a good basis. I would say that the law might get reviewed - the posthumous thing is strange me too - but should be kept. It gets weird when people sell and transfer their rights; but intellectual property is what an artist produces and so they should be allowed to sell it in a market economy. When someone records a song, the words, notes and techniques used to create it are freely available for anyone to do the same. If you feel it's too much effort, too difficult or too time consuming to write and record your own song, anyone who does should be allowed to profit from it.
If they choose to give it away free, that's their choice. But not yours or anyone else's.
No, dead people can't sing.
They do tend to hum, though.
-henrik
Except that Billy Boy seems to have problems with commandments seven, eight and ten.
7. Thou Shalt Not Steal
8. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness
10. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neigbours Goods
In short, Brother... Take thy holier than thou attitude, form it into a cluestick, and smite thyself upside the head with it!
Even death is a bit too long... The original fourteen-year period, with a possible additional fourteen-year renewal, was more than long enough.
-RickHunter
Ask a music artist this - Would you be happy with
__anybody__ using your work for their benefit without your permission? I would gag if any bozo could use, say, The Smashing Pumpkins music in a Levi's ad. Without copyright law, they'd have no recourse. Is this right or wrong?
Copyright law is needed. I don't buy the "information wants to be free" argument. Information should not be free for me to do with what I want. Just because I've got a copy of The Smashing Pumpkins' Gish album does not mean I have the right to distribute it and make money out of it without The Smashing Pumpkins' permission. I believe in this vehemently.
With sensible copyright laws, the only people losing out are the actual pirates and people just intrested in making money out of other people's work. I'm not arguing for the current USA copyright laws. I'm arguing for the artists right to choose. And the companys right to choose. Just because the way that IP is going is bad, in a bad, evil way, does not mean that the concept of owning information is bad. The backlash against copyright is nothing more than USA college kids being miffed at not being able to use Napster. There's little substance in the argument, imho.
I can spend 30 hours a week spare time, on top of the 45 hour workweek I have. If this project is ever a success, I would like some return of my time investments.
At this moment, I still have a choice of doing this propriaty or Open Source, yet, I still have to decide this.
When there are no copyright laws, it means my efforts are worthless, it means a different world, it means an accedemic world - everybody has the right to peek into my code, whether I want this or not. An accedemic world could mean that a new idea has to survive a generation of the elite establishment, it gets debunked on cosmetical grounds (can't search on this, button that does not work, made a grammar mistake there...) instead of being appreciated by the people who are actually going to work with the product.
With copyright laws, it is still interesting for me to develop the product. I still have a choice between propriaty and Open Source, and yes, to be honest, I'm also doing the product to gain financial benefit from.
The way all the copyright stories came into the news is not because the copyright phenomina is a bad thing, it is used as a tool to get total control. Everybody knows that it is all cheap investment and high profits what the record and movie industry are doing - you don't have to be a musician anymore to become a popstar. This all makes me sick.
In my opinion, copyright laws are okay, but they should illegalise copyright abuse!
Getting back at the story, putting up a Napster server in an 'A' country, and getting an incredible user-base, would invoke a high political lobby activity in that country by the people who care. The RIAA would sell their soul to get that darn thing shut.
Bizar technology?
The trouble with setting up a web server in Kabul is that there is no stable legal and law enforcement infrastructure; your safety depends on the whim of the ruling elite. Distributing copies of Microsofts products might work fine, but try publishing pornographic material, or perhaps free copies of Salman Rushdies works, and you would probably end up in a very dark place for a long time.
However, it is my personal belief that technology will eventually render copyright laws useless. We are starting to see that already where the internet allows for music/movies/books/software/news etc. to be transfered anywhere and replicated inifinately without degradation. This might be extended in the future to hardware as well when nano technology allows for completely automated factories to be set up anywhere using material available locally at the site. As soon as a new whizbang products blueprints have been leaked onto the internet, or someone has reverse engineered it, factories around the world could be set up very quickly to produce the product.
But on the other hand, when technology has reached this level of sophistication, people will no longer have to work for a living and will produce new products for the fun of it rather than for monetary remuneration. And those people who do not find any fun in producing anything will probably spend their lifes hooked up to virtual reality machines - perhaps banging away on virtual whores in virtual whorehouses...
If you think it's ridiculous that someone would be killed just to get free access to their work, your world-view is quite different from mine.If Bill Gates personally had the copyright on Windows, and it expired on his death, he'd have to live in a bunker.
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
This is any easy one not to see because we're already embedded in it, but the whole notion of copyright originates with printers and booksellers (17th century) who faced huge (we're talking rampant) amounts of piracy. It wasn't always true that you could assume that the book you were holding was in fact written by the author it says, or that the publisher on the cover really did publish it, or that the contents weren't stolen from somebody else. Which means some serious problems when you're a natural philosopher trying publish your ideas about laws of motion or the existence of a vacuum and there's ten unauthorized and incorrect copies of your work floating around with your name on it! By using a system of copy rights, publishers (to anachronize things for a moment) could govern the books being printed, try to prevent piracy, and create some credibility for what was being printed. Their motive was, of course, related to profit, as we are today, but that doesn't change to problem.
(This is part of Adrian Johns' argument in "The Nature of the Book", UChicago Press, 1998)
In any case, imagine what would happen if suddenly there was no copyright today: how could you be sure that you were listening to the actual London Symphony, (or Bubble-head Spears, for that matter), and that somebody didn't put that name on some junk instead. Or what if you didn't know that your copy of Linux was in fact a copy right from the kernel team, and not joe-blow loading it with a backdoor or a trojan? You can't expect everybody to read the source and make sure, so we have to expect some measure of credibility when we purchase or otherwise obtain a copy of something of creative value.
Easy- just pay the locals to blow up the building.
RMS would still be at MIT and nobody would know about him.
____________________
Ni!
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
1) The ISP's that allow people to retreive things _from_ Napster (especially @home, optonline, etc).
2) The users themselves, as a scare tactic.
The RIAA has a lot of money and they need to throw it somewhere.
I have no problem with the existence of copyrights and patents, since it is obvious that they encourage innovation. However IIRC a copyright originally extended for about 14 years, which IMO is more than enough time for an author/ publisher to recoup his investment. Now copyright persists for about 70 years or so; this is wholly unreasonable.
Moving on to Patents, patents protect development of drugs where of the 20 year patent span, perhaps 10 of those is spent seeking approval and in tests. 20 years is probably about right here too, although I'd like to hear from someone in the pharmaceutical business for his opinion.
In the fields of machinery, computer development and especially in software, I have a feeling 20 years is way too long. Quite frankly if you can't recoup your investment in 5 years for a software patent, I'd expect your idea to be out of date anyway. I think a 5 year head start in software is more than enough. Similarly mechanical progress is much more rapid nowadays, and I suspect a 10 year patent would be plenty.
IMO, all the timespans I suggested would be adequate to encourage ideas, yet would also get those ideas out into the public domain, which was I believe one of the main stated ideas behind patents and copyright.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
A tiny fraction of programmers today have jobs whose existence depends on copyright. Most programmers are payed to solve problems, i.e. creating ad-hoc solutions for their clients with no intention of resale. So the issue of "being paid for your work" is a red herring.
However, while the vast majority of the software being *created* does not depend on copyrights, the majority of software being *used* does depend on software. This is because the majority of consumers use mass produced shrink-wrapped software.
Thus, if you want to advocate copyrights, it should (ironically) not be for the sake of the creators, but for the sake of the consumers. The free software world have yet to prove that it can produce software (through other rewqrds than copyright) to fulfill the needs of the mass market, allthough it is getting closer with products like Linux, KDE, OpenOffice and Mozilla.
US didn't sign the Berne convention until recently, yet the US has always had copyright law (The US constitution grant congress the right to restrict the right of the citizens to copy written material with copyright, in order to promote the progress of art and science.)
Its a bit worse than that.
A (non-US) company that does business with Cuba may not eport to the US!
Basically, the US gov says: Pick your choise, trade with Cuba XOR trade with us.
Kind of the same attitude Bejing has towards Taiwan.
(And of course this has only strengthened the Castro regime. Without a strong external enemy, the cubans would focus on domestic issues)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Forget about the profit motive for a moment. What if someone tried to take credit for code you had written?
Wait a minute... this article was posted as a hyperbolic hit-generating intellectual sink-hole for suckers like me. Oops.
bwahahahaha
The reaction of the world that does apply IPR towards the countries that don't could be similar to the reaction that the growing offshore tax evasion has. It has been neglected for a long time because it was only easily available to few wealthy money launderers. However, the marketing and account creation mechanisms improved to the extent that the provisioning of virtual holding companies and anonymous accounts in these countries have created an industry. The target group has broadened to include even upper middle class citizens in the western world.
Now, some EU members have been discussing about forcing countries such a Liechtenstein, Andorra and others to improve regulations and their implementation, or face sanctions.
This could be the way to go with IPR as well.
Even without cocpyright law, you would still be able to restrict IP with contract law. A likely short-time outcome of removing copyright law, would be that software and music distributors would require you to sign a contract stating that you would not redistribute the software. It could work like the way you sign for a renters card in a Video shop.
If you take away the IP laws then people/companies that produce popular content will be forced to more powerful and obscure copy protection schemes and more closed technology in order to protect their works.
So be careful what you wish for.
Probably been able to hire a couple of ex South African Apartheid recces as mercenaries to *really* take out their servers.
MdeG
...weaned, as it were, on the webs of ritual... (Mervyn Peake)
Look at what happens: shamans in the Amazon are followed around by Swiss drug companies who then patent *their* (the Swiss) discoveries and sell them back to Brazil. American producers *discover* world music and then repackage shared sounds, create *stars* and sell the music back to the people who produce it. And this is only be beginning of the colonialistic spin on 'intellectual property.'
there are three views of intellectul property:
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
It was the dawn of mankind. Humans were walking on their feet, eating raw food and forming groups to defend against saber tooth tigers, tyranosaurus rex and corporate lawiers. They were enjoying a simple and very short life
...
The gods were happily cruising the skies, taking pride in their powers, and being warmed by their copyrighted fire. Silex and sticks were patente. The word 'fire' was trademarked. Life was good.
Then came the lesser god prometheus. He was fond of humans but couldn't stand the animal state they were living in.
He sneaked upon the fire guardian, and stole a copy of it. He managed to smuggle it down on earth, and to teach how to use silex and stick to a few rebel humans. But after a furious chase by winged baby like archers and multi headed dogs, prometheus was stricken down, chained to a rock and his body was used for medical research
Meanwhile, heavens went into revolution.
The stock holders were angry, and changed the management. Three gods formed a triumvirat and decided to change the business model to a monotheismcracy. A lot of the staff was fired. The other gods became saints, and the lesser gods became angels.
On his rock prometheus was boringly growing livers, which two beaked surgeons were dutifully removing without his agreement and without anesthesis.
It always occurs to me that the people who complain the most know the least. Copyrights, much like patents, were created to facilitate public disclosure of information. Imagine if an author had no protection of his book (i.e. stupid Harry Potter books for example). Most likely, the author and/or publishing company would never release the book since everyone could copy it. In other words, to get businesses to release there products you have to give them something. That something is of course money. Most economists tie all this up into the phrase"there is no free lunch." The same argument goes for software too. MP3 and Napster issues are way too detailed for me to discuss here. Also, I'll address the patent issues once another questions is presented. Cheers.
If this idea were extrapolated, it could mean that any site linking to a site which featured child pornography could be as guilty of the crime as the actual site itself. So, I am busy scanning all my sites for links to m$ in case I get called a sympathiser or get drawn into any new anti-trust cases which anybody decides to throw at them :)
------------------------------------- By the way, your minds undone -------------------------------------
And you are not exaggerating the situation enough. I went to what they call a "computer mall" and just about every vendor had boxes of cds. Games/Mp3s/Software, everything from Reader Rabbit to Oracle software. And it is any $10. More like 8RMB per cd. That equates to $1. And you get bulk discounts! Unfortunatly it would look bad for my company if i was stopped by customs with $20,000 in pirated software :).
However, I did get a really nice set up Cambridge sound works speakers for $15 .. totally legit too!
Honestly, I would have to say 90% of China if asked what copyright is they would say huh? Only difference is that China doesn't trust anyone other than China so no mass piracy hosting there.
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Actually those 2 countries trade with each other just as much if not more than anyone else. Actually half the time you buy Taiwanese computer hardware its either assembled in Taiwan with parts made in China, or its the other way arround.
This question probably has an easy answer. As soon as the info was brought into the country, someone is violating copyright law. For example, the user is the copyright violator and the foreign country source is a contributory copyright violator. Additionally, the courts of the US can probably bring the foreign company into the US for suit (ain't jurisdication a bitch! - attorney joke). So there are ways to sue foreign companies in the US even if no copyright laws exist in those countries. It only takes a creative attorney and a lot of money (much like everything else huh).
The opportunity costs of copyright include:
The lost economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing, and
The pyscho-social damage of turning the morality against sharing (as Stallman has pointed out).
Before the digital age, the economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing were smaller and there were important economies of scale in putting together the large cost of setting up printing runs.
In the digital age, which still has not fully arrived, authoring is cheaper (the desktop authoring tools that a generation ago were beyond the reach of a person are now incredibly cheap for producing text, graphics, animation, code, and soon movies, even one requiring giant "render farms" today), and digital publishing is becoming infinitesmally cheap. On the other side of the comparison, the benefits of information sharing that copyright costs us are much greater. For example, the ability to listen to fifty versions of an old song that you just learned about on Napster and to produce a modified version of your favorite one might not be something that the copyright monopoly holders would find worth their while to negotiate with you, espcially if its only worth a dollar or two to you each time, and the population of people who want to do exactly what you have in mind is relatively small and poor.
The benefits of authorship in the absence of copyright can be either economic and non-economic, including such things as selling concert tickets, merchandise branding, feeling good, being famous, increasing market demand for you as a developer or performer. The question is: are these remaining benefits becoming sufficient to ensure that the quality works are produced?. I think the answer is becoming yes, and it would be a much more pleasant society in which to live.
All of our common heritage and culture has been created by someone, and the concept of claiming ownership to it is a fairly recent invention.
I'd say that things can also be viewed fairly correctly like this:
There is so much common knowledge in this world that an invention/creation a person makes is, besides being in part, or maybe even majority, their own work, a collaboration of many things they know that they have learned as a result of long years of many other people learning through first-hand and handed-down experience. So one certaintly can't claim that anything they've ever done was done solely with their own power and resourses (intellectual and otherwise), and so therefore, on a fundamental level, copyrights violate themselves. They're protecting other people from something they, in essence, already have. And to simplify it even further, it goes back to the infinite monkeys idea: given infinite people and reusable (infinite) resources, they'll create something... and it will be duplicated.
So, unfortunately for copyright holders, all copyrights are hereby voided.
Insert mind here.
I honestly cannot understand how anyone could be so selfish as to say that it is not one's right to decide for themselves how the information they create is to be used.
If any one of you anti-copyright people has not spent at least several months of your free time working on something which you are giving away for free, then you have NO RIGHT to even argue about this. I expect anyone who responds to this post to start out by saying what it is that they have created.
Me? I've spent over a year working on a 3D game engine which is licensed under the LGPL.
All I can say is, if you don't like the way someone has licensed something, then just don't use their product. It just isn't right to say "I should be able to do whatever I want with this thing on which this person has spend months working." If it were not for them, the thing would not exist, and you certainly would not have it. So, if you want whatever it is that they have created, then give them your respect, damnit.
------
it seems that Chinese proverb about the 3 generations is pretty accurate. You know know the one where the 1st generation makes the fortune, the 2nd generation establishs it & the 3rd generation wastes it. You don't have to look far to find examples of it, look at me I was forced to go on welfare to help pay for my last European holiday last year. Yet I have a grandfather who was a Danish Duke & a Grandmother who 'networked' with the Czars mum.
I read these threads and wonder how intelligent people can be so fucking dense.Just because some artists and engineers are foolish enough to sign away their rights to a company doesn't make copyrights a bad thing.People and companies are entitled to make a profit off of original works they create and have every right to have these protected.Of course,what am I thinking this is the same place that railed against Metallica when they dared to make a stand for their rights.If we got rid of copyrights today,there really wouldn't be much incentive to produce much of anything.Why would someone devote vast amounts of time to anything without a profit.Would we go by the honor system? That would make it fun to be an author or artist for about five seconds when you realise you need to get a real job. Wake up simians.We're not that evolved yet.We're just chimps with tailors.
Great minds think alike,but,fools seldom differ.
"The assertion that a strong Christian belief system is fundamental to a sound economy is just plain nonsense."
True. Although the argument has been made that protestantism played an important role in the historical development of capitalism (especially by Max Weber), there is clearly no relationship between christianity and a thriving capitalist economy. One only need look at Japan, possibly the worlds largest creditor nation (i.e., the most money has been borrowed from them by other nations) for a clear counter example. The US runs a consistent multi-billion dollar annual trade defecit with Japan. Some of the most market savy, and immensely profitable companies in the world are Japanese firms.
I add, for those who don't know this, that Japan is overwhelmingly buddhist and shinto, and christians make up only a tiny minority of japanese. Clearly, a nation doesn't need to be christian to have a thriving economy.
We in this country are famous for our short memories. Until the 20th Century, here in the US we had little regard for copyright. Ever wonder why Champagne, France has such a similar name to the bubbly we drink here? Ever wonder why it's called sparkling wine there?
...pause...wait for audience....
Because we decided that we were going to ignore selective international copyrights when they did not suit us. Not to mention decades of tariffs, trade deals, most favorite nation status, etc.
My point (I assure you I have one) is that why should we expect other countries to uphold copyright laws that aid only those countries producing now when we have a history of selecting which international regs to listen to (and I know there are a multitude of other regs we ignore, Land Mine Ban and such, but let's just stick to one complaint at a time).
Akula
Copyright is dead, long live Copyright!
The problem with having the copyright expire immediately after the artist's death is that it gives incentive to... ahem... encourage that person's death by a large corporation that would like to use his/her work. Just think, Microsoft wants to desperately use the Linux kernel in Windows2001, but Linus has the copyright for hit... A few ex-KGB members later, Linus is dead and the Linux source code is completely public domain. Windows2001 actually CAN handle tcp/ip, and we all lose out.
Creators of work would be paid by commisson, patrons, or service charges. There would be no selling of "copies", which was never a good idea to begin with.
There is really no need to guarantee a publisher money. However, there are plenty of reasons to pay authors. Getting rid of copyright cuts out the middleman.
There simply is no realistic basis for either copyright or patent law. Everything tangible can be reverse engineered or replicated with minor variation to circumvent patent. Ideas or concepts, "business processes" (one-click anyone?) are NOT logically protectable. What, are we supposed to prevent anyone but Ford from using assembly lines because Henry "thought up the business process"? Give me a freakin' break.
Additonally, regarding the peripheral concept of copyright law, anyone who has not shifted their "business process" from one of collecting royalties on copyrighted materials to simply collecting royalties on particular forms or approved high quality copies of particular media or images is living in Fairytale land. Everyone will rapidly have the power to replicate and store a virtually infinite library of books, films and music. Get used to it. You will only be making money on the printed forms, the live performances of music, or the theatrical presentation of films. Sorry, companies, but you damn well better get used to it.
Paying corporations through the nose for a book someone wrote or a widget someone invented 70 to 90 years ago is insane.
Later, when a sembalance of copyright enforcement came about, people started actually making better software, as they could spend more effort on the software project and less on anti-piracy measures. I think that without those high-level changes, Thailand would never have had localised versions of windows or office (but that might not have been a bad thing in the long run!)
Without copyright laws, perhaps we'd still have 64K 4.77MHz 8088 cpus with instructions on how to write our own programs in BASIC and a tape drive to boot (or 160k floppy if we're lucky). For without the will to innovate (the premsis here is that programmers spend more on copy protection than on innovation) there would be little room for "pushing the envelope", but this is admittedly a rather farfetched leap of logic.
To get back to the point, it's not copyright laws that are wrong in themselves. I think it's perfectly alright to copyright a certain piece of work to repay the author for his "creative imput" (a term I got from a friend at the University of Manchester - better acknowledge this!) if he so chooses. It's also perfectly alright to create from the ground up the same software for free if someone so chooses to spend his time on such a project. But it's the abuse of this system for financial (or political) purposes that isn't nice. To paraphrase a comment on microsoft that having a monopoly isn't illegal, but abusing it is, one might say that having a software copyright system is not the cause of our woes, it's the abuse of that system that is.
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Would be very different. Software would probably be customized to the point of the being unique to a particular application. I do not think the computer revolution would have happened. Remember, hardware accounted only for half of it. The more important half in terms of the way we function now as opposed to twenty years ago--geez am I really that old?--is the development of software that anyone could take out of a box and use. From the first killer app, the spread sheet, to the the most modern mathcad, software has increasingly been developed to solve universal problems. Prior to the PC revolution, most computer programs were written for a very specific purpose and for a very small audience. The company comptroller for instance. As a side note, I am not this old, but one of my first computer jobs at the end of college dealt with legacy code written in FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77. Such software was not portable, not maintainable, and was not usable by the world at large. My older colleagues told me that all software was written that way. In the end, we had to scrap the code and rewrite it all based on specifications. What caused the software revolution that gave us real world software? That somethig was the copyright. Copyrights give the developer the incentive to develop universal--I use the term for want of a better one--software that anyone can use. With a copyright the developer recoups the cost and effort of developing complex software and can even make a profit. The open source movement in contrast is rebellion against abusive copyright enforcement, and monopolistic copyright holders. Amazingly the movement has gained momentum to the point that people are figuring out how to make money on code they essentially give away. But, without the ablity to copyright and charge users for the commodity of software, I think software would still be where it was twenty and more years ago.
The picture would be even more divergent for artists. Authors of the fiction we love to read, musicians, and others who create consumable works rely on copyrights to make a living. Without a copyright, an artist would have to rely on patrons or performances. While musicians can, and do make their living mainly off of performances, an author has not such option. The only way an author can make a living writing is to sell their works, or to acquire a patron. Since a it gives the artist a legal right to exclusive sell his or her work, a world without copyright in some sense would take us back a couple hundred years. At least I think it would. I honestly don't know how long the notion of a legal copyright has been with us. While big publishing and music companies have abused copyrights, copyrights are also what makes it possible for a person to be a full time author, make it easier to be a full time musician, or a full time film maker.
First and foremost, there'd be somewhat less incentive to invent and innovate, but more competition to compete over cost-effective quality. Copyright, afterall, is an incentive for the furtherance of the sciences and arts, despite the fact that it is currently exploited by distributors. Branding would change, as trademarks would be harder to enforce, and conterfeitting would be the rule rather than the exception.
Second, there would be a greater glut of self-published works without credit to "original authors." On one hand, the signal-to-noise ratio would become utterly absurd. But on the other hand, that self-publishing is the very thing that made the web so popular.
Finally, there would be backlash against this 'great idea,' and people would compensate against the lack of genuineness by developing means of authentication. It would probably end up looking like some antique road show, with "experts" doing everything from reviewing music videos to examining cell phones.
Now THERE's a What-if question leading to some serious sci-fi!
It's perfectly natural for a human being to own the product of his (or her) effort -- even copies of the product.
./'ers believe that copy right is evil. They would tell an artist: "you have no right to tell me or anyone else how your work can be used or disseminated. You created it, thanks, but don't expect to get anything for your trouble. Excuse me while I use your work to promote my own agenda..." Essentially: the product of one's mind belongs to the mob, not the person who did the thinking, regardless of the fact that there would be no product if *someone* hadn't been creating.
This is a matter of property rights. Whether property is a person's own body, some piece of land they develop to live on, some crops they grow and sell at a market, stories they tell their children or music they write.
In order to debunk copy rights, one has to first debunk property rights -- and that involves placing an individual human being in a position of slavery to some tribe or state. It is a matter of recognizing that people belong to no one but themselves -- or not.
I'm not so anxious to become a BORG drone. I'll suffer through actually having to BUY music, books or non-free software in a society where my peers respect my right to live my life as I see fit.
Who is right by nature: the person who defends their life against someone violently threatening it, or the agressor? The person who tries to keep the food they grow to feed their family, or somoene trying to steal it? Is it less right for a person to defend their property because they produced more than they need for the next minute? For the next hour? For the next day or week? Whatever it is someone tries to kill, steal or pirate, there would be no one to kill, no product to steal, and no idea to pirate without someone first living, working or creating.
Our nature is to live, and live by a very specific mode -- thinking, choosing, then acting on our own best judgement. What is unnatural is circumventing the ability to freely think, freely choose, and reap the rewards (or penalties) of our choices, which is why civilized people agree not to kill and steal from each other. This is the foundation for laws recognizing a human right to their own property.
So, a lot of
Without copy right (or property rights in general) a person cannot produce for themselves *by right*, but merely by permission of the community -- they become communal property because the decision of how they can live their life is no longer theirs to make.
Jimi Hendrix said it best
" I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die."
Half the english language would be under copyright- the other half patented. Even the most trivial and basic science (such as math) would be owed by some company.
Copyright and patents are a bad incentive mechanism. It serves to impede progress- not to encourage it. Our economy would suffer a temporary setback- when large publishers and studios (that produce nothing but overhead) fold, but in the long run we would all gain from it.
Well something important to consider is that most countries that do not sign the treatie do not do it because they dont believe in IP They do it cause they have more to worry about than policing intellectual matters. So consider this you may be able to legally transmit the warez and illegal hats with bugs bunny on them but whos to keep the company you offend from hiring a few thugs to go into that country and make you and your equipment disappear? You can't say decency cause you obviously didn't have the decency to respect their IP I think Napsters plans the whole time was to strike a deal like this(bmg)with their engine. They just needed a way to get the engines potential noticed by the big boys. It would of hurt them to go to a country where what they did was legal. One last comment, I don't think Copyrights and Patents are a bad idea. It is all in how we govern the laws. Disney for example tries to lobby to make all their characters their IP when they are proffiting off of public domain characters such as Pinnochio, Aladdin, and Poccohauntas. They think that even though they did not pay a dime for their stories that other people should have to pay them tons. That is an example of Copyright gone mad. Tons of people work hard to make cds so why not buy them for a reasonable price and if you dont like it dont buy it. Using it without paying for it though is never justified. however If you do use it without paying for it though more power to you but never lie to yourself about what your doing. Please understand I am not arguing the side of the big companies I am just saying that copyright is a good thing and since its conception has been a big factor in motivating commerce. It does need to be changed to prevent those that would rape its intentions but that is up to us to vote for people who would change the laws or if it seems like no one listens to our wishes to force the changes.
Oh sure anybody could try to make derivative works based upon mine. If the story is simple and formulaic then then really dont need me. However should they really want to make a good flick for their audience, then they may well want my help.
And since they have the same set of issues I have- namely that I could write a "book" based upon one of their movies- the playing field is still fair.
Now I could easily image a writer's guild if you will- which is basically a clearing house of authors. It would make money by selling subscriptions and services. It would accept donations and support. It could charge say $5 to participate in a vote to decide which authors to keep on the tab and which to let move on.
Such a guild would only work with either GPL'd books or with no copyright laws around.
And trademarks are a law I support- that way you can easily distinguish a brand you like. However copyrights and patents hurt us more than they help us. In the long run- even the bug patent owners would benefit greatly. The only people who would be negatively affected are those who really dont do anything.
All about me
What if I just duplicated the entire Slashdot site and posted it without ads? Does that answer your question? Idiots.
Ranting against copyright while not posting as an Anonymous Coward is hypocrisy.
Let us imagine a world without copyright:
Copyright dangles a carrot in front of you: "If I write this really good program that people like I will get praise and acceptance and money for my work." Do away with copyright and the only other motivation is a stick; produce this or else. This is a Yin and Yang world. There is an element of a stick under a copyright system: if I try to plagiarize something I get punished, and there is an element of a carrot in a non copyright system: "if the master likes me perhaps I'll get to eat"
In a world without copyright whoever is biggest and strongest gets to beat you into letting them put their name on any writing you produce. If you think corporations are abusive today wait until Guido and Company take over in the no copyright world.
Copyright is one of the cornerstones of modern technological society remove that cornerstone and everything collapses back to a pre capitalist feudal state. If you find the power that government and corporations wield against you oppressive in modern society imagine what they would be like in the stick motivating world with no copyright.
At least in today's world you have a right to any writing which you create. In a non copyright world you would have nothing of value to trade for sustenance other than your physical labor . Copyright is one of the things that lifted us out of the feudal world - get rid of it and we go right back to that era.
We've already tried a world without copyright - we rejected it because it didn't work worth a damn.
Perspective? Get a grip.
The post is about countries who haven't signed international copyright treaties, not Afghanistan. Pick another of those -A- countries, or even, (gasp), a -B- one and get to the point.
No laws or as few as possible is the answer. If you can't do it in the US then you can go somewhere else to do it. A lot of environmentalistic call this "the race to the bottom"
Now, come on, is Amazon's one-click shopping an original idea? Not really!
I believe that patents and copyright has the opposite effect then what they are intended for. They are there to encourage people to be creative and inventive. However, they have put a strangle hold on invotation. We should be evolving on what people have already come up with, instead of figuring out a slightly different way to do it or reverse engineering it.
We'll continue to demand new releases from our music artists. It is all about supply and demand. If there is a demand, people will pay for it.
Another example, I can download any of the current releases that are in the theater. I occasionally check them out. However, watching Star War at home is lame compared to watching it on the big screen.
I'm surprized that the open-source community hasn't embraced Harry Browne and the Libertarain party.
It's really simple in at least terms of electronic media. Authors would take whatever means needed to protect their inventions from copying. All software would become heavily copy protected with dongles etc. In this age of the internet you would have to connect to a license server run by the software publisher. All music would be heavily encrypted using mechanisms like those in the now defunct DVD rental player. This of course would drive up the costs of software considerably. Software would be sold under strict contracts that make current licenses look like child's play.
In terms of books and so forth the situation would be very grim. The main reason copyright laws were estabilished was to protect authors works from being pirated by publishers. Without this mechanism we would have no commercial authors - people who write for a living. There would still be books published for academic and similar reasons, but you would not find the Neal Stephenson's and Steven King's on the bookshelf.
Should you live here- well then you are about to become a legal chew-toy.
Now popular defiance of copyright is prevelant here- but I dont know if its going to result in more draconian laws or a submission to reality. And our economy is so heavily copyright based, that its going to be a really hard knot to untangle fairly.
An excelltent first step would be to limit copyright to its original 14 years for any and all types of information regardless. I would even agree to let it begin Today, so that any current copyright holders would have 14 years to prepare.
Main problem is that I doesnt sound like one of those issues you can whip up a frenzy on. The main force in copyright opinion is the steady heavy hand of those who make their livings by it. They are fine with it, so they want no change.
For now we will have to settle for GPL-like licenses. Eventually the GPL may spread out from software to encompass other types of information. Maybe we will realize the copyrightless world despite the law of copyright.
I could imagine a rich philanthropist doing the world an amazing favor: Buying a content company, then exclusivly relicensing all its works as GPL-like. This would create a large initial body of work that could spawn an new economy of freedom.
Ground war in Asia? Civil unrest in USA? Vietnam2 (or china1)?
FACT: Microsoft is now the fourth biggest soft money contributor in the USA.
yahoo article
Observation: With these close election politicians will be running scared for contributons to win the next round. Especially the next commander and chief.
Observation: People have knee jerk reactions and are offended at the idea that IP law is to slanted toward companies.
It's not hard to see where this could go.
I believe copyrite term should be shortened and contract law reformed. And I have written an editorial on the subject.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
I strongly believe that patents are still a good thing, but that the laws need to change to be relevant to modern times. Maybe a patent should last for 3 to 5 years - certainly enough time to get a competitive advantage. Also, if a patent holder does not use the patent constructively within one year (or show that the patent is part of an ongoing development within that year) then the holder must be forced to license the patent to one or more other parties, at a reasonable price.
For many truly unique ideas, 3 to 5 years just isn't enough to implement the idea and see a reasonable return on the investment. Some things are invented before the infrastructure is there for them to become viable products. The invention of the television is a good example. The man who invented TV never did make any noticable amount of money off of it, because his patent expired before it became a real product.
Drug research is another example of an area where 3 to 5 years just isn't enough. The drug has to be developed and tested internally. It then needs to go through clinical trials and FDA approval. This process can often take longer than 3 to 5 years.
How about all these new storage technologies we hear about from time to time. There's always some new non-volatile digital storage medium that I'm hearing about, and it always seems like someone is saying that it's about 5 years from becomming a product, and that's often after years have gone into the development.
There's been some good arguments that software is different, and that a software patent would only need to last for a few years. I'm sure that there are many cases where that are true, but for ideas that are implemented in software, that are truely ahead of their time, is a few years really enough to bring them to market?
There's another issue with software patents that I never see addressed on Slashdot. What about VHDL code. The VHDL describes how the hardware will work, but is it really just software? We make products where I work that you can change the VHDL, recompile it, load it into the FPGA over the PCI bus, and significantly change the function of that PCI card. How is that different than recompiling a software program? The layout of the PCI card, and the parts used aren't that unique. But the operations the VHDL performs are unique. The problem is that the product is for a imature market. The company I work for will likely break even on it within 3 years of the invention, it doesn't make much sense to invest millions of dolars over three years to develop a product and bring it to market just to break even.
Who wants to invest in developing new products, when there's more money to be made by stealing three year old designs that are just becomming profitable. Whoever has the cheapest production and marketing costs wins. That doesn't sound like a good environment for technological innovation.
Many people on Slashdot seem to want to beleive that all it takes for innovation is the sharing of ideas. The problem is that the economic aspects of creating products that people can use just can't be ignored, and saying that everything can be brought to market in 3 to 5 years isn't close to being realistic.
Copyright came into being as a creation of royalty; kings and queens who were trying to control the spread of information. Select few individuals or companies would be given the "right to copy", that is, to print books at all.
The ones who wrote the Constituion viewed things like patents and copyrights not as goods in themselves, but as useful evils. If people are allowed to profit personally from their intellectual effort, then they will be able to spend more time involved in intellectual effort, rather than having to work some menial job in order to finance their work (or be already wealthy, as was the case with most scientists of the Renaissance).
They were well aware, as we should be today, that freedom of speech is fundamentally more important than copyright. Where the two conflict, freedom of speech should triumph.
As a side note, it may well be possible to prevent fraud without the use of copyright or patents. If I publish a book with Albert Einstein's name on it that describes physics as being magic provided by demons in terms of fundamentalist religious doctrine, it could be argued that I was committing fraud upon my consumers -- unless, of course, my name really was Albert Einstein...
HJ
-- A New World, Unordered http://www.anwu.org/
The problem is that while the utter freedom of intellectual property is the goal, you have to drag the rest of the economies to it as well.
The reality is that economic interests concerned have to be convinced that it is in their best interests otherwise you end up with the authorities (who, infact, author nothing but author-ize instead,) in country F rushing some kids bedroom and seizing property for a possible offense in country U.
The economic interests concerned are only concerned with their economic interests.
If you can come up with an economic argument (and screw everything and everybody else,) that can convince one of them to take a limited chance to see if there's a buck profit to be made on ten cents investment, you're in.
If you can't, it'll be settled the way it has traditionally settled right up to the end of last century.
Nineteenth century and prior wars were purely economic. From the Nepoleonic wars to the minor skirmishes of the Boxer rebellion and the Opium wars in the far east. The Boer, Zulu and a depressing litany of wholesale slaughter to encroach on marketing or resource territory.
The First World War was fought over the German Junker's marketing of their pigs to central and southern Europe. (Read The History of the Great War by Winston Churchill.)
The Second World War was fought over Axis econo-political control over an expanding territory. Since the planet wasn't expanding, we fought back.
Stalin's wholesale slaughter of the Ukranian Kulaks was committed in the name of agrarian reform.
The only purely idealogical war was the killing fields of Cambodia where almost a quarter of the population was murdered by their own children.
Fighting for piece is like fucking for chastity. Find another way. A concensual way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Oh- and besides thats a real great refutement of what I said. You can scuttle back under your rock now.
Extinguishing copyright doesnt mean there couldnt be laws to make people give proper credit to the original inventor/writter.
Copyright laws are obviously needed to insure that currency is provided to the author of a work as an incentive to create that work in the first place.
;). This is where Open Source is.
Of course in any society there will be exceptions who would not require this incentive if they could count on a stream of revenue from some other source (you have to eat
Doing away with copyright laws will not be viable until the successful creation and widespread implementation of replicators is completed. When we can pick and choose what we want for dinner, what we want to wear, etc., without having to worry about paying for it.
load "linux",8,1
We COULD simply alter the law to make it unlawful to make a copy of someone else's work for 1) your own comercial benefit and 2) without properly crediting the originator, and noting properly any changed or alterations to the original works. Big Corp will never let this simple act of logic occur, but it could theoretically happen, and would solve the problem you pose without hindering the spread of information in its various forms.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Regardless of which principality chooses to enforce copyrights, large corporate copyright holders have taken the initiative by employing "coded-in" architecture. Hence, traditional allowances that have kept the privelages of the copyright holder balanced with the public interest -- i.e. Fair Use-- may be hardwired out of the copyrighted product.
Take, for example, several MPEG layers currently in design. MPEG 21 (and I believe 4) comes with a nifty "Intellectual Property Management Layer" for "digital rights management."
Guess who's been busy championing this brand of fine-tuned copyright control?
Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative and a leader in the MPEG group, has been a main proponent of the MPEG-21 concept. SDMI is developing a generic architecture to handle security and digital rights management for Internet audio.
(from Electronic Engineering Times article)
I think Lawrence Lessig's book Code (link to O'Reily review) clearly explains the consequences of allowing powerful, corporate copyright holders to create their own copyright policy through soft/hardware architecture.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Copyright law is there to protect businesses from each other. How much does it hurt if one person doesn't pay for something? Especially if you only consider the intelectual property costs (i.e. we're not talking about someone stealing CD's, we're talking about someone "stealing" music). The cost is actually not that great especially if the "thief" had no intention of actually buying the product. However, imagine for a moment what would happen if someone could re-brand a product and sell it for themselves, legally? Without copyright law someone could start printing copies of the latest book by (insert your favorite author here) and sell them for whatever price they chose without ever giving a dime back to the author.
Copyright law is intended to protect the interests of the "artist", but the most serious concern is organized "theft", not individual theft. If you look at the biggest concerns currently in terms of software piracy and copyright violation, it's not individuals duping copies for their friends, it's organized re-selling of copyrighted materials, things like counterfeit software (complete with fake registration cards), pre-release black market movies, etc. This is of the most concern because A) by laying down cash for these items we know that the buyers of these items are exactly the people who would potentially pay for the real product (assuming the price differential is not too great), so this represents money that should have gone to the "artists" but did not, and B) sometimes people do not know that these products are "phony" (this is especially the case with counterfeit software). Without copyright law, this kind of thing would be legal. Even more worrisome is that someone could manufacture packaging and product that looked identical to the "true" product and buyers would have no way to tell which purchase would result in money going back to the original developers / artists.
I think we do need copyright protection. The question is how it is used and how it is enforced. After all, both Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds protect their software under copyright law (Bill Gates to make sure people pay for his software, Linus to make sure people don't pretend his software is their's and charge too much money for it).
In other words, this isn't going to happen overnight. People are starvingly poor and others are gluttonously rich. Those caught in the middle have a decent quality of life but don't want to work for the rest of their lives for an asshole (boss). IP is what empowers those in any one of these groups to just come up with an idea and "own" it. In owning such an idea, they can have financial freedom. Get out of poverty. Stop working for someone else. Make yourselves richer, whatever. The chances of this actually happening are quite slim, but the fact that it's possible will make many unwilling to give it up.
I wouldn't be surpised if people who contribute to open source are people who are either financially secure (ie, don't have to work anymore), or people who like their jobs enough that they don't feel that they need to spend their efforts making themselves financially secure (since their job might guarantee it). There are of course exceptions, but if we were all poor and miserable, open source would largely not exist.
This isn't just source code. Artists who are financially secure have so much less of a problem with Napster than those who are trying to make their living with their music. There are exceptions like Metallica, but you really don't care about trying to enrich society with your music if you need to eat.
So, this finally brings me to the stated point: Intellectual property won't go away unless we significantly improve the quality of life. Like on Star Trek. :)
In fact copyright law is not based only on international treaty, but is outlined in our consitution Art. 1 Sec 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 fact of a INTERNATIONAL copyright is a seperate issue. I belive we (the US) did not even belong to the bern convention untill the 1980's.
I must wonder about that: My country is a small island of 700000 people. In spite the fact that a large percentage of the population has Internet access, our international Internet connections for the whole country sum up to a few hundreds of Mbps and the largest local ISP has a total of (i think) 30 Mbps of international connections.
This is enough for the local needs - so it's definitely not going to grow very much - but it is hardly enough to host the large "free information" server farms that are imagined in this document.
Conclusion: Given the fact that most of the countries that haven't signed the international copyright treaties are small, I wonder if they will ever have any "significant Internet connectivity" at all.
Since GNU relies on Copyright law,
with no copyright, the GPL license become meaningless.
Microsoft would be free to use GPL and change code and sell binaries only with built in copy protection and automatic expiration.
I don't know at what point, but somebody decided that the whole issue was actually making copies, not protecting IP. Which is interesting because I do not see how actually copying a work causes any infringement upon IP rights. If you make a duplicate, that duplicate still bears all of the branding of hte original creator - and makes it even less likely for you to be able to say "I invented/created this".
Or at least that's what I thought until I read Webster's definition of the word copyright. Hmmm... I guess They got to Webster first. :-) But the definition is kind of interesting...
copyright \Cop"y*right\, n. The right of an author or his assignee, under statute, to print and publish his literary or artistic work, exclusively of all other persons. This right may be had in maps, charts, engravings, plays, and musical compositions, as well as in books.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
How could this definition apply back in the days before it was even possible to "distribute" a piece of work like we can today? Can this still be interpreted such that distribution rights matter when it comes to people trying to literally steal and redistribute for the purpose of some sort of personal gain?
Call me crazy, but if my interpretation is correct, MP3's don't do not currently do this. Neither does DeCSS. Hmmm... Just my thoughts.
I work my day job so I can afford food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. I work at night on things that interest me (mostly code and theory) to further the knowledge base of the human race. You know, the one we all belong to. The things I do are freely given to any who wish to use them and improve them. All ideas and products belong to the human domain. There is no ownership of ideas/processes/phrases/etc. We're all on the same team. When are we going to start acting like it? ps - Greedy control freaks are counter-productive. Please remove yourselves.
If business A doesn't want you copying software, then they should present you with an agreement to sign in order to purchase use of it.
Trademarks? They were never inteded to protect intellectual property. They're meant to prevent misrepresentation.
Moderator: That was meant to be _funny_
You may not like my sense of humor, but that moderation was plain hostile!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I feel compelled to respond to that statement. I suppose it would be easy to assume that anyone who sells a Bible is surely a represenatative example of Christianity, but that is not the case. Anywhere there is a dollar to be made, there is someone who is willing to make it. As the post before noted, there is no copyright on the KJV Bible, which means anyone with the resources can publish and sell a KJV. Some companies in the business of enlightening people with God's word do just that and sell the products at close to cost.
Now, while trying to avoid the which translation is better argument (which is so closely tied to the economics of the situation as to be almost impossible), it is easy to see that it would be difficult to make a wild fortune selling KJV bibles, barring special expensive leather bound 2000th anniversary editions. But as I said, if there is money to be made, there are people willing to do what they must to make it. By making a new translation and copyrighting it, they have cornered the market on the new and improved word of God. Then all they have to do is convince people that their version is the best, most up-to-date version available. If someone else comes up with a newer, better, more-up-to-date-er version, they just release the Revised Best Most etc...
All the different versions that are sold at such a premium are published by large corporations, and these corporations are every bit as greedy as the recording industry. In some cases they are the recording industry... They have to keep up appearances, because most Christians would not be comfortable giving their money directly to Satan, but don't look to them for an example of Christianity in action.
OK, I'm done.
Gives a whole new field for terrorism actions for Mr. Usama Bin Laden.
Setting some nice pirate sites, what a disruption for US and world economy. Publishing serial numbers, registered passwords and other.
I wonder if US would go and bomb then Afghanistan or Sudan internet connection...
-- "If you had fallen into a shit pit during a battle, lick yourself off and move on." - Jaroslav Hasek
BUT....
If you, living in a country with copyright laws, downloads anything from that web site, you are in violation of YOUR countries law and can be prosecuted in YOUR country. YOU are the law breaker, not the person running the site.
Also, folks, I used to work in telecom and my MSCS thesis research was paid for from a grant by the CIA. Believe me, if a US Federal judge ordered it, all traffic flowing from or to another country can be blocked. It isn't even that hard to tell routers not to pass packets with certain IP address ranges. A court order could simply block all access from the US (or any other country) to all IP address assigned to anyone in a country that contained servers that were in violation of the local laws. It's just too easy!
Never underestimate the power of a US Federal judge!
So, what if there were no patents or copyright?
Well, a few historians point at the US patent system as the root of all technical development during the last 200 years. The concept is that the inventor is granted a limited monopoly on the use of an invention in exchange for allowing everyone else to see how it works. This way we all can learn from the invention and one invention leads to another. Without patents people rely on keeping everything secret. If everything is secret the over all knowledge base doesn't grow. This actually works a lot like open source works. To get a patent you have to open the source for your invention. The difference is that you get to make money off of it for ~17 years before it become public domain.
The idea behind copyright is different. It was intended as a way to allow performers, writers, and artists to benefit from what they do just as patents allow inventors to benefit from what they do. But, now it is being applied to software in combination with patents and the actual invention (the source code) is being held as a secret. This goes against the very CONCEPT of patents and copyrights. Something is very wrong and it needs to be fixed.
I wish I had a solution, but I don't.
I can say that the solution to the problem won't come from complaining about it. It will only come when we organize and bring the same pressure on world governements that the large corporations currently do. And don't tell me this can't be done. Just look at the history of the labor movement if you want to see how a bunch of ordinary people brought big corporations and even governements to their knees.
Of course, you might want to visit the Ludlow monument to understand the risks. http://www.umwa.org/history/ludlow2.shtml
stonewolf
However, in Taiwan, Son May is a licensed local business. They employ people, pay taxes, pay business license fees, sponsor local kids sports groups, etc. From a local point of view, they are not illegitimate at all. Copyright law is a Western invention and then we have the gall to decree our invented concept "morally correct" and call names at Taiwan? Many other nations consider the US attitude on guns or wealth accumulation a far worse behavior. Our women don't cover their faces like in many Arab nations. Should we change and conform to meet ideals of other people in other nations?
I see no difference here.
And you know what, the world seems to be getting along just fine, and Son May sells its products all over the world without "authorities" seeming to care at all. Walk into any asian video/music store, or a comic shop that deals in japanese anime. At least half will stock Son May products. And this is in the US.
Does the US seem to care? Nope. Who's getting hurt? Answer, no one. What's our response? Hey! Taiwan is one of out "most favored nations".
Your offspring should start out the same way as everybody else.
Which everybody else are you talking about? Are you only going to give your kid one meal a day four times a week so he can be just like the average kid? Are you not going to teach him to read since most everybody else is illiterate, too?
I'd wager not. You'll probably give your kid nice clothes so they don't freeze in the winter and good food so they aren't malnourished and you'll send them to school. So obviously you aren't comparing them to the world population at large, but rather to some smaller, more select group of "peers". But why is are the peer criteria you selected the correct ones?
If I know how to make a certain algorithm, I should be able to use it in my software...
But the only reason you know about this algorithm is because of someone else. How is that different from monetary inheritance? If you figure out the algorithm all on your own then, sure, you can use it. But you haven't. You just "inherited" the knowledge of the algorithm. Why do you make a distinction between monetary inheritance and intellectual inheritance? If I have to start at ground zero to gain my money why don't you have to start at ground zero to gain knowledge?
I ask any of you this: Would you like to live in a world where products and services are all minor variants of each other? Where everyone copies everyone else?
This is how the music industry works, last year a band had a Top 40 hit that used a voice modulator (the thoroughly annoying "Blue" song for instance), soon all the pop bands were using it for no other reason than one band made a hit single with it. No one innovated, no new sounds were created to compete with this song, the pop stations were essentially playing several different versions of the same song. Was anything innovated? No. Did music change for the better? Hell No.
The point to all this is, the copyright system while "archaic" and "outdated" made the USA into the financial juggarnaut it is today by creating a market where the status quo makes no money and innovation is rewarded!
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
If the powers that be in the USA don't like it, they can always legislate that the country be unreachable from any USA network. It's technically and politically possible. It's the high and mighty USA after all, no big deal to force US ISPs to put in a few packet filtering rules, or to route those packets to null. Then they can ask their good ol friends (Canada, UK, Australia, NZ) to do the same.
Anyway, there's still a need for copyright law. But since the software industry claims that they are doing so much "innovation" at such a rapid pace, then I'm sure that they don't need 50 year long copyright laws. I suppose 7 years should do.
That way companies would have to come up with real innovation. Just because the annoying paper clip now comes zooming over on a bike doesn't count as innovation.
And these stuff should not be renewable. None of this stupid "little tweak and it's good as new" stuff.
Cheerio,
Link.
I think a lot of the old pre-copyright artists/composers were comissioned to produce works, so that would throw self employment out the window right there - any IP creator would become a beggar (the old 'starving artist') looking for wealthy benefactors; e.g., Metallica would need some businessman to suckup to to pay the bills, and that would suck worse that what we've got as far as individual freedom of expression goes.
Researching Leonardo's source of income....
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Then i could still be downloading Dr. Dre and Metallica to my little heart's desire--oh wait my college blocked napster. Thomas
Friedman quotes a new book by Hernando de Soto, which concludes that "good political institutiions and property law" are the ingredients that have consistently enabled entrepreneurs in the West to succeed, and their absence elsewhere explains why others fail.
If there is no incentive for hard work then nothing will be created. Please, don't raise the canard of "give the content away to create a market for the server" or other schemes which have been disproven in the marketplace.
Well, it seems to me like this could be solved by having a default duration for patents, and then allowing the patent to be renewed if the holder could clearly demonstrate that they had been working on the patented technology, but that it would take longer for a return on his/her investment.
This is easy with "friend countries" like the western world. E.g. the US managed to forbid that gene food can be labeled as such in Germany.
It is still relatively easy in countries of the 3rd world that depend on international help. Refuse to send them food and money and very quickly they will comply as far as they can.
It is pretty difficult with "enemy countries" or countries that just don't give a shit like Libya or China. But then, these are usually countries, where there are other (usually human rights) problems that you wouldn't want to support.
Basically the US will engage anything that their world power arsenal contains to protect/save/support their industry.
The bottomline: if you want to do something against copyright, then do it in your own country. In the US. The rest of the world (including us Europeans) is pretty helpless when the US play with their muscles to support their economy.
It is not the fault of the fortunate that your ancestors were either too stupid to make a fortune or not strong enough to keep others from taking it from them. No one can be blamed for the potential stupidity of anothers parents. And in the event your ancestors riches were taken from them, then it is not everyone's fault that it happened. Only the people who took it are responsible. Copyright or Patents are meant to be a guarantee that Mental Labor has an intrinsic value, even if it is not as tangible as Physical Labor. Those purposes are not evil. That the laws can be abused is simply the fault of the law makers. Not everyone is going to be motivated to benefit the entire human race, and I am not exactly sure that it should. I dont think it is right for someone with the inteligence and creativity of a pile of fecal matter to be able to benefit by taking someone elses work and selling it as their own. END COMMUNICATION
They don't smoke it -- to do so would likely mean death -- they merely sell it overseas to raise war making revenue. Try getting your outdated stereotypes straight.
---
Trademarks, copyrights, etc.. all the children of capitalism. I think copyrights and trademarks should only be subject to America and any free trade countries. Otherwise we are pushing (forcing?) capitalist rules on not necessessarily capitalist countries. In a global marketplace where capitalism seems to be the general economical protocol, things like two peices of software that have similarities shouldn't be basis for litigation. It's called competition, and without it capitalism would be dead for monopolies are price controlling and inefficient. Just imagine if Ford would have friverously protected his invention (and perhaps even the idea of assembly lines), what would cars be like today? Where have we gone wrong? May be we should rework the copyright system to allow copyrights to companies who put in time and money for R&D and produce something that would otherwise not exist completely (windows in this case would be exempt, but all music and literature would be protected). The copyright laws have been so convoluted lately with BS that it's near time to draw a distinct yet flexable line. Without competition, we have monopolies, and then there is no more innovation because the monopolies are too busy fighting off smaller businesses or chasing down would be innovators (hackers). Without innovation we have nothing.
The main problem with copyright is not so much that people are getting recognition for their work, that's good as far as I'm concerned. The problem with copyright is that, if you want to make serious money off of your work, you have to utilize your power to restrict others from editing and copying your work, which is what many artists do. Now, the Founding Fathers realized that, after the artist has made some money off of their work, the public's best interest is served if the work becomes freely copiable and editable. Hence, the "limited time" clause in the constitution. Unfortunately, the heirs of certain authors (Disney and others) have managed to convince the US government to extend the copyright to longer and longer "limited" times. This is exactly opposite of what it should be, because as time goes on and technology speeds things up, it becomes more and more in the public's best interest that books, software, etc. be freely copiable/editible sooner rather than later. Yet it would be unconstitutional for the copyright term to be shortened because it could be regarded "ex post facto". I feel a solution would be to simply, after a certain number of years, take away the authority of an author to restrict others from copying and editing a given work. Thus, if Windows 2005 were to go out, the copyright holder would still "own" it for 100 years or so, but not the ability to restrict others from copying and editing it. Another solution would be to limit the amount of money an author/CR holder can get off of royalties.
...they must have some kind of copyright law, right?
Why must they? What makes it such a brilliant notion, so inherent to human conciousness, that every country in the world has a copyright law? While I do, I admit, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of my own country (the US) as being a good representation of the rest of the world, it's not. Don't try to use it as one.
I know this is way off topic, but, the title to this story should really be "What if there were no copyright law?" In English, you should use the subjunctive tense of the verb "be" when you make a statement that is contrary to fact. See The American Heritage Book of English Usage for an explanation.
People always look at this issue as though the problem is that the corporations are holding onto a bunch of IP tightly, and that without copyright this IP would be free.
They fail to realize that without copyright law, if you produced IP, a corporation would be free to sell this without royalty payments whatsoever. They just wouldn't be able to do it exclusively.
If Brian Wilson wrote a great new song called "Good Vibrations", Sunkist would be able to use it to advertise their product for free.
If you wrote "Hunt for Red October", Random House could sell a million copies and not pay you a penny.
You can argue that you are free to sell these things yourself, but you don't have the resources that a large corporation does. They will always be able to outproduce, outpromote, and undercut you.
Ralph
If sounds like a good idea in principle, but I'm skeptical that it would work well in practice. I expect the process of trying to get a patent renewed would make a lot of Lawyers rich, and screw the small time inventor who can't afford to keep paying lawyers while their money is tied up in getting their product out.
Having ships that could do trade all over the world was hi-tech circa 1720 and precipitated two famous bubbles (overvalued equities/bond markets).
The South Seas company had a patent, i.e. royal monopoly, to conduct business with South America. Of course the Spanish and Portugese were there first, but that was no more a problem than profits are today to many dot-com startups.
This wasn't IP, but was the same kind of thing - a license for a monopoly in a given trade. Geographical instead of intellectual.
The US Citizens may have heard of the Boston Tea Party. That was another government in bed with business. The East India company had a monopoly on Tea, and HRH taxed it. And there were many things which it was illegal to do, make, or grow here "in the colonies" since mercantilism was in vogue as economic policy - Ma England needed to be the industrial producer (value added in today's lingo).
This might all sound silly today. Having to get a license to trade in an area? A monopoly grant at that? My point is that Copyright and Patent are like these things were 250 years ago. And may go the same way.
But I would also note we still have a lot of similar trade laws today. Taxi "badges" are a way of limiting the number of taxis creating an oligopoly if not a monopoly - it isn't safety or they woudn't restrict the number. Same with things like Barbers, many states have complex and irrelevant requirements simply to reduce the number going into the profession. Then there are Doctors and Lawyers.
One final note. What happens when the Library of Congress goes fully online and anyone can view any work on the web? When there aren't a finite number of physical books to check out? Copyright then becomes moot.
Though I think the IP supporters will hate this, a Copyright (and Patent) tax (percentage of licensing fees) might be best. Don't pay, and your work is effectively in the Public Domain. You pay for access and governement gets a cut.
But there is still the problem of more than one person looking at a screen.
I don't know anything except that the situation is unstable, and the DMCA to the MPAA now is what the King was to the East India company then. It is more like a last gasp at protecting something economically untenable. Laws that throw people in jail for doing something easy and simple are economically inefficient.
Other than a few exceptions, software licenses do NOT derive from copyright law. They derive from *contract* law. Why do you think they're called license agreements?
Tossing out copyright law will do nothing to change the MS EULA or other proprietary licenses. The problem is that the general public thinks all of this stuff is operating under copyright law, while the industry is operating under a mutant contract law. What needs to be done is either A) base licenses on copyright law, or B) make these licenses explicit contracts instead of a unilateral declaration that the user has entered an agreement.
My personal view is that copyright law should be eliminated *concurrently* with a fix in contract law. A consumer needs to explicitly agree to a software license and convey this acceptance to the licensor in all cases that would remove a legal right of the consumer. In all other forms of contracts, this is done by means of a signature. Although this seems unworkable, it is not. It protects the consumer from entering into binding contracts of which they are not aware. It also forces the industry into using means of IP protection that do not rely upon gun-toting police (DeCSS).
For most consumer software packages, encryption and/or registration keys will work. For larger commercial works, the sales force may need to get customer signatures, just as they do when selling support contracts.
At the same time, to play my own adversary, I do recognize that "classic" copyright law adequately performed the role of an abbreviated and standard implicit contract for two centuries. But at the minimum the DMCA and UCITA have to go.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Copyright Law, in a nutshell, states the following:
It is abstract and arbitrary to the point of absurdity, and has fuck all to do with being a human being.
The only original, valuable thing is the idea. If I create a reproduction of the Mona Lisa identical to the atomic level and shuffle it with the original, which one is worth more? Only the idea is worth something, and you can't own or control ideas. They are intangible.
I am not saying I have a solution to the problem given the current state of human economics, politics and technology.
I am saying that copyright law is an indicator of how badly humans have fucked up in attempting to impose order on their reality.
'Confidence is what you have when you haven't fully understood the situation'
If you abolish copyright, you abolish copyleft, too.
Why are people so anxious to have systems like Napster that don't let authors choose copyleft or copyright? Answer: selfishness and the limitless human capacity for rationalization and hypocrisy.
--
Find free books.
copywrite law exists to ensure that there's an incentive for development. It costs millions to develop an OS, or a drug, or the design for a new car. If there was no protection for these, and therefore less return on their investment, there would be millions lost, and there would be *much* less incentive to innovate.
If you think that a company's product is useless or overpriced, then don't buy it. Nothing lost; without the copyright law, that option probably wouldn't even exist.
And if you think you can develop this thing and that it shouldn't cost money, go ahead and GPL it. Once again, nothing lost.
The only disadvantage is that if something is already copyrighted, and you develop it yourself not realizing that it already existed, you cannot sell it or even GPL it. Can anyone think of a way around this?
-----------
Agree with this? It'd pay to check out
http://www.lp.org/, the libertarian party.
Since copyright, in my opinion deprives us from the natural right we have to use information in any way we please, I think that a tax levied on the profits made from a copyrighted material make sense. :). Also, you'd have to pay some minimum to hold the copyright, even if you didn't make anything from it. The minimum would start very small, but go up based on the total amount of money that copyright had made for you since its inception. (this is a virtual measure of its popularity). This would create a time limit for any copyright (after some point, it becomes impossible to pay for the minimum). It also would free works which have become unpopular, but were once popular.
Basically, you would have to pay some percentage of the profits you made from the copyrighted work (ideally, to fund open works
This system would reimburse the people for the deprivation of their natural information rights, if the levied tax went into funding open (common) works. (for example, paying for public art shows, paying artists/musicians/programmers salaries who generate public domain works). At the same time, it would allow people and businesses to profit off of copyrights, and create a system by which copyrights would be retired at appropriate times.
Erik Hill
Tomorrow, I'll think of a better
Software patents enable Compuserve, for example, to patent a compression algorithm or a program that reads or writes a specific file format.
[href:Why there are no GIF files on GNU web pages] Both Unisys and IBM have the LZW patent. CS didn't do their homework, and Unisys didn't bother anyone until 1995 (8 years after the creation of the GIF format) when it was thoroughly entrenched. This is Patenting Done Wrong: the _end result_ was patented.
Then there's PKZIP: the actual implementation was patented. Other software can't use PKWare source code, but they (WinZip, WinRar, others) can create the ZIP file format without infringing on the PK patent. Patenting Done Right: the _implementation_ was patented.
There's always another way to do something (ask Rube Goldberg)... end-result patents are the only bad ones. Copyrights, well... I'm commenting on patents.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
I would be *glad* if people listened to my music. If I wanted money from it, i would make concerts and so forth.
So what's to prevent big concert promoters from making millions off of your music, while your own MP3.com sales earn you only enough to rent out the VFW hall? Some people would call this exploitation, while others would say it's what you get for abandoning your work.
I can think of several solutions. One of them is: shop your music around to producers or agents under a NDA. When a sale is made, specify in the contract that the producer will book only concerts that gain you a percentage.
If copyright went away, the producers would create a standard contract (probably several) that all producers would be party to. If one of these industry agreements would be to give the author a 10% take on concerts, then any concert promoter that had signed off on that contract could not stiff you. And a shady concert promoter who did not sign up with any standard industry agreement would soon be blackballed (as Shoreline Ampitheatre will only accept concerts under the ASCAP agreement, for instance). This is a form of blackballing, and as such it will be very controversial. But its no different than Free Software users and developers universally ostracising LinuxOne.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I don't know what you consider art, and that could be debated all day. I just thought I'd point out, however, that many artists must have side jobs even within the current system. It is fairly impossible to be a poet or write literary fiction in America without teaching at a university.
So the idea that copyright protects the economic value of an artists production only matters if the artist has mass appeal. In other words, Phil Levine or Rita Dove probably wouldn't notice a difference if copyrights went away, but Brittany and U2 would be forced to make *serious* lifestyle adjustments.
Whether that is a good thing or not is another matter altogether.
I also happen to think the price of a DVD is usually reasonable also.
You think USD$600 is reasonable? Because the DVD people do not support alternative operating systems, the price of a DVD includes the price of VMware (USD$300) plus the price of a halfway decent version of Windows (another USD$300). Anything else either provides shit resolution (DVD players with television outputs) or will get your butt in jail and your equipment confiscated under 17 USC 1201 where applicable (BSD- and Linux-based DVD efforts).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Our firm has found you to be producing a play, "Romeo and Juliet". This clearly a blatant violation of the intellectual property rights of our client's play "Romeus and Juliet". You will immediately cease and desist all production and performance of this play, and turn over to us all scripts, notes, and any other items relating to "Romeo and Juliet". Likewise, our client Mr Boccacio has written a large volume of work which you seem to have drawn from liberally over the past several years. You will immediately turn over all profits and assets gleaned from these plays and your interest in the World Theater London. Failure to do so will result in severe reprisals and litigation. Sincerely yours, Shylock Law Firm
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Wait a minute. I don't reply to ACs. Forget I posted this.... <g>
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
...but for a different reason to that of most people. It seems to me that there ought to be a fundamental human right for two consenting adults to do whatever they like with each other in private. I believe that these rights should cover everything from sharing DNA to sharing data. Copyright gives other people the right to interfere with the private actions of individuals. Whatever the benefits that copyright may bring to society (and I do not deny that they exist) it seems fundamentally wrong that a third party is allowed to interfere in the privacy of my own home if I decide to share something with a friend. The powers that are required to enforce copyright rules seem to me to be too great to allow governments to wield them. So while I can sympathise with all those authors out there who feel they have a right to control their creations I don't think that the solution is to grant them the right to tell me what I can do in my own home. Having said this I must add that I have paid for almost every (maybe even every) item of intellectual property in my home that the law currently requires us to pay for because I think it is good to recompense creators for their work. If a way can be found to make people pay for IP without what I see as human rights violations then I'll be all for it. But otherwise I think the price is too much to pay.
--
-- SIGFPE
this is like the article that was in wired a while back about that old artificial island in the north seas.
--
Cognosco: (Latin) To examine, enquire, learn
Cognosco: To examine, enquire, learn
http://cognosco©datablocks©net
The CIA should know all about the character of the crazies, because they largely gave them this character, enthusiastically arming and supporting them during the USSR's 'Vietnam' war in Afghanistan. It can also hardly have escaped their intention that the Mujahaddin (as the crazies were known when they were the good guys) were using drug money to finance themselves, but of course this wasn't the first time nor the last that the CIA turned a blind eye to the source of the funding for their exploits.
A bit of perspective: the White House has long preferred to install berserk fundamentalist dictatorships, because in return for the arms to keep them in power they are generally happy to service the demands of US-based capital with little or no regard for the the welfare of their own citizens. Now to hop on-topic for a moment, what would happen if Afghanistan's position on intellectual property were considered important?
Well, the ruling party would have two options, follow the US line, and be suitably rewarded, or don't, and find that their human rights abuses (which arguably they wouldn't be in a position to commit without US assistance) are suddenly grounds for 'humanitarian intervention', meaning cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium, wholesale slaughter of the defenceless civilian population, and years of economic strangulation, in conformity with the US government's definition of what it is to be a 'humanitarian'.
It is more likely however, that Afghanistan will continue to be regarded as insignificant, serving mainly as fuel for the "Clash of Civilisations" doctrine, which holds that all strife and misery in the world is a result of culture and religion, and not a consequence of unprincipled and powerful agents persuing more wealth and power.
I think the patent system has served its purpose. It did promote competition when it was first implemented, however, in todays world there is already fierce competition, which does not need any encouragement. The competition today mostly battle on court grounds with their casualties being money and lots of it. Small companies can not compete. So in order to continue promoting competition we should create a new bill that will phase out the patent system.
We need to significantly reduce the length of time patents will be valid. Perhaps this needs to be split between the various markets: technology / electronics, arts and music, industrial tech, etc. But patents should last no more than 2 or 3 generations of products, after that point they severely hinder competition if no alternative solutions can be found, such as in graphics technology, it can set competition back so far they could never catch up.
In an area of technological growth that moves as fast as graphics technology, where performance doubles every 6 months, patents should last no more than 2 years. As the rate at which technology is developed increases the length of patents should decrease, inversely proportional, until a time comes (10 years?) that we can just phase out the patent system altogether and cooperate to promote technology and information instead of money.
Do any of you honestly think that day will ever come? Or has capitalism poisonned the water forever?
Judging from this, it's not clear that Congress is even authorized to grant copyright protection to music or other fine arts.
As the mystic said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything"
The point and purpsoe of the Copyright law is to promote the creation of intelelctual proeprty for the good of society at large.
Ask yourself if yo uwant to live in a world without movies like The Matrix, books like Snow Crash, software like your web browser. (Yes, I know Mosaic was written by the government-- how many of you use Mosaic or want to go back to it?)
All of which were created either directly or indirectly to make money. Their creators couldn't afford to do otherwise.
Unless you want to tear down all of capitalism, taking the profit potential out of art just ensures not much art will be created.
Is everyone forgetting the big College Campus Napster problem? If te Napster Server was outside the US, their server would simply be blocked by American ISPs. Lets not forget that most ISPs bent over and grabbed their ankles when the FBI introduced a little thing called Carnivore. What makes the USA any different than UCLA?
The depths that Slashdot's journalism have sunk to are disgusting.
Would be copyright gone wild.
If we live in a world where copyright never ends any sought after work becomes so "valuable" that only the rich and powerful can afford it. Then the creators of those works will have less control than if copyright didn't exist at all.
They'll be busy trying to make money to become educated, and at the same time put food on the table so they won't have time to create new and amazing works.
Why do you think Ben Franklin was so big on libraries? In his day you couldn't just go out and read what you wanted. You had to pay for each and every work. That's why he cajoled and scrimped and saved to get a little cash to buy books as an apprentice newsman.
Powerful intellectual monopolies mean many people going without valuable knowledge that can help them in nearly every aspect of their lives.
In an ideal world it might be that everyone would contribute a little to create what he or she is interested in/good at. But perhaps in the real world not enough material will be created without some form of compensation.
Of course, I've never seen this particular ideal attempted. The closest I've seen is the information on the web. How easy is it to keep people from using the content in your web pages? But yet, there is great diversity and amazing creativity going on in this realm. If anything commercialization seems to have stifled the creativity, though not necessarily the volume.
I've heard complaints about the many "leeches" in this free realm. But even 0.1% of 7 billion is a lot. And creative exposure begets creativity.
Perhaps the "Ideal" is not so far fetched?
As for wildness, the DMCA has me running scared.
Suppose (c) remains always with the author(s) and the legislation forbade distribution contracts of more than, say, 2 to 5 years and contracts preventing the author(s) from contracting with others for other works?
This would break the effective monopolies of today without revoking author's desires for control. Likewise with patents. much of the abuses prevalent today stem from non-authors having (and keeping) control over IP.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
What would Microsoft be able to do about ftp.freewindows.af in Kabul?"
They'd hire taliban mujahadeen to kill them.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
copywrite law exists to ensure that there's an incentive for development. It costs millions to develop an OS, or a drug, or the design for a new car. If there was no protection for these, and therefore less return on their investment, there would be millions lost, and there would be *much* less incentive to innovate.
This goes into "Mythical Man Month" territory. Basically you cannot simply throw money at someone an expect "innovation", it's simply something people come up with on the spur of the moment.
Where it might take lots of money is in creating a product from an inovative idea. Maybe copyright should then be tied to the terms investors consider reasonable. AFAIK none would want to tie up their money for nearly a century.
There is an important distinction to be drawn between copyright and intellectual property. The difference is certainly semantic to some extent, but the one of the problems is that the term copyright carries so much baggage nowdays that there is a real risk of doing the baby and bathwater thing.
I agree whole heartedly that Intellectual Property is bunk. The reasons for this belief are deep and complex, I shall not go into it here. However copyright is OK insofar as copyright means authorship.
I wonder as to the etymology of the phrase copyright. Is it the rights regarding the copying of the work in question or is it the rights in the copy? (as in advertising copy) I checked a number of online dictionaries as well as the paper Concise Oxford and it seems the consensus is that copyright means the right to copy. As such it must go. The problem I have is that a way of proving copyright is to mail oneself a copy of the item in question (thus getting it stamped by the post office) and leaving it unopened as evidence of the date when you had a version of the "item" in question. So copyright there is intrinsicly tied to authorship.
For want of a better phrase (although strictly speaking authorship is a better phrase) copyright would do to describe the right to claim authorship of a particular work, and authorship is a good thing since under the IPless paradigm that I endorse, authorship is the key to creating reputation, and reputation is way to measure the value of a persons potential contribution and hence the compensation you would part with to garner their contribution to your "project".
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
The majority of innovations are not brought about by some guy sitting on his couch suddenly yelling "eureka!". And copyright law does not inhibit these, anyways.
Innovations like a cure for cancer or aids, or a new type of metal, are brought about by millions of dollars of research, which narrow down possibilities and lead to the actual innovation. If the companies did not have rights to what they innovated/invented, then they would have no reason/incentive to spend the millions in research.
Where it might take lots of money is in creating a product from an inovative idea.
Yes, this takes a lot of money, but getting to the idea can also cost a lot of money.
Maybe copyright should then be tied to the terms investors consider reasonable.
Although this is not totally out of the question, it would probably not work. Few investors would voluntarily want their copyrights or patents to be taken away after a certain amount of time. The rules must be defined before money is invested.
AFAIK none would want to tie up their money for nearly a century.
What?
The problem with copyright is that the copyright holder can continue to hold the copyright even after they have stopped producing the copyrighted material.
I think the copyright law should change to basically say (without any loopholes of any kind) that if a copyright holder has previously actively produced goods or services based on that copyright, but then halts production of goods or services based on that copyright for a period of over 400 days, that the copyright is lost and the idea that was copyrighted is then public domain from that point forward. The same should be true of patents.
This would permit initial R&D time to get a product off the ground, and would permit for roughly annual releases of new versions or incarnations of products based on the same idea, but when that one company stops supplying products based on the copyrighted idea then anyone else can pick up the idea and run with it. This fosters innovation without stifling it in any way.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
If say we had a maximum of 5 years to copyright profits from sale could still be made (aplenty methinks). Giving copanies, authors whoever, time enough to come up with something new.
I think the most effective thing might be to limit the lifetimes of copyrights that are sold. IOW, if an artist never sells his copyright, it lasts until he dies. If someone buys it, it winds up in the public domain after X years; no renewals (yeah, like that would ever happen, *sigh*)
The only problem I have with this is that once its in the public domain, does an artist really want to see GM, MS, NBC, political parties, etc. using it in ads/propaganda (since they presumably don't need permission)? They already do this with Van Gogh, Mozart, etc. It kinda makes me sick, personally.
SHOULD be: "People want free information". That IS natural; people always want something for free. That's why we needed to make laws to discourage stealing.
You guys aren't even talking about copyrights. What you're trying to discuss sounds like some kind of artistic patent or trademark. That ain't what this article is about.
Isn't that the essence of the GPL? Using copyright law to defeat a part of copyright law which we/they/FSF/GNU/RMS doesn't like?
Then you write...
I agree completely. Wonder what that means for the GPL...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
What a cleverly constructed argument. "Intellectual propert is bunk therefore Copyright is OK." What a marvelous argument and conclusion. It is so easy to follow this brilliant line of reasoning.
Bunk!
If you really are sharing with immediate freinds and family then this is clearly allowed by law. Explicitly. However, 'sharing' with millions of strangers is considered to violate the law.
ideut win ideut
ideut wen ideut
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I agree that no "rights" are being trampled, in the same sense that no rights are being trampled by the mobster who asks a witness how his nice kids are doing.
The rights that are of interest here are the rights of the peole in Cuba to choose their way regardless of what their big neighbor thinks.
Some decades ago they threw one dictator out. Now unfortunately they got another one instead.
* This is none of the US business! *
If it was a democratic government overthrown by a dictator, there would at least be a moral ground to stand on, but it would still be a domestic Cuban affair.
The US has no more rights deciding who governs a country in latin america, than the USSR had, deciding who ran Poland or Hungary.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I didn't mean they smoked it themselves, I just pointed out that smoking dope in the west is eventually financed by exporting weapons.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.