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Harlan Ellison on Copyright Infringement
An AC sent us this: "It seems that Harlan Ellison is hopping mad about copyright infringement regarding his works. You've seen this class of beef before, but it's, well, Harlan Ellison complaining, and man is he spitting venom. Just read the dag essay." Wow. See also the site's main page, which has some responses from other authors who don't feel quite as strongly as Ellison. Update: 03/07 10:22 PM EST by michael : Some readers say they don't know who Harlan Ellison is. Haven't any of you ever seen Twilight Zone?
Problem is, this is now the most-frequently pirated Ellison story found on alt.binaries.e-books. No wonder he thinks of netizens as primarily thieves.
I remember him getting into a hissy-fit war with one of the editors of a magazine called "Amazing Heroes", I think, about 15 years ago. It's a magazine about comic books. I had picked up that issue because a buddy of mine got a job there and had left umich to go to wherever it was to be an assistant editor (not the one in the tiff.)
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Whether software is in source or binary form does not affect its fundamental nature. Is hand-coded machine language not speech?
If you create something, you have the right to tell people, "please don't distrubite this without compensating me"
Absolutely. And this is part of Mr. Ellison's argument.
The other part, the "complaint for vicarious infringement against AOL" part, is concerned with his desire to place limitations on author's rights to distribute their own works -- under copyright other otherwise.
Shhh! Harlan would .
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
OK,
So you're being cheated by the priceing and privateer-like actions of distributers and music moguls who exploit music and music lovers. Well DUH!
But it's still a crime to copy (even from one computer to another) a book, song, or any copyrighted material. Period. That's the LAW.
Now, it may not be fair, but that's the capitalist, economic, WTO, free trade, multi-national world that all these morons have created. That is, this isn't some new attack on technology or anything, it' the regular day to day defence of their markets. This is regular business. Nothing new, nothing strange. This is the very reason for the USA to exist and it's the plan to continue successfully in the future.
Now, you say it's immoral? I wonder if you fully realize that your statement is a complete rejection of capitalism in itself and the western economic anti-tariff push into the new millenium?
Tell me the truth... was that you with pepper spray on their cloths in Seattle a while ago?
______
jeff13
That's ridiculous. I'm still not sure whether Napster is "right" or "wrong", but certainly if it is wrong then you cannot justify use of it because it's there. Especially if you admit to a belief that it is stealing. That's similar to saying that you can take anything you want just because it's there and you are physically able to pick it up and walk away with it.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
NOT! Its only contradictory if u look at what he says without considering the reality of many artists. They do what the love in order to earn a living. While they could do it for free and have to, say, teach English or manage a Kinko's, the amount of work they could do would greatly suffer. Creating music or stories or most any other thing takes a lot of work. If artists were forced to work, it stands to reason that fewer people would be exposed. Why? Because it is a beyond a doubt that an artist's output over his or her lifetime would be reduced significantly.
Ellison is really very well spoke. I do not believe he could rant that wildly. It doesn't sound like him at all...
>Anyone know of a good source for 4track tapes?
Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself an 8-track.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
CD's sell many times more copies, and games involve many more people. Plus, CD's sell for decades--you may own Beatles LP's, but do you own Pong?
So, let's see:
- You're an admitted thief
- Stealing to make a "moral stand"
- On the premise that making money is immoral
Did I miss something? If you're going to take the stand that what the RIAA/MPAA does is immoral, then boycott their works totally. You're not entitled to their works because you don't like the price. Not a financial stand? Where does the "charging me a fortune" part fit into your morals? How can any of this seem right to you?The alternatives to me are either 1. a draconian system of increasingly invasive copyright enforcement as new technologies make redistribution even easier all the time, or 2. artists starve, or worse, stop making art. I'd rather pay for artists up front in my taxes (with academies as job-sites, etc.) All in all, it seems like the least oppressive, most productive solution.
This guy is on a major ego trip. He is doing the Metallica thing of saying that it is making copies of their 'art' that ticks them off. I noticed while skimming his webpage that at least he doesn't claim that these copies are causing him to lose sales. Ego is all it his.
Think about it. How many of you ever completely read a full novel on a computer? E-books bite; they never have and never will compete with real books. Nobody wants to snuggle up to their moniter to read! It hurts to stare at text on a monitor for for over 30 minutes, so no benge reading here.
My syster is a writer. Is she worried about e-books? Heck no, nobody wants e-books, they want real books.
The people who really have reason to worry about pirate copies are the ones whose works can be copied in digital form and produce the same(or similar) experience as the origional works. Games, software, and music are things that can be copied in reasonable quality, but these industries are still very profitable. Most people still buy real copies of their software, so the idea of someone copying my software illegally is not so scarry to me.
However, I do think that limiting the ease of making copies is inportant. For example, some of my asian friends tell me that in some areas it is actually much harder to get a legitimate movie than a bootlegged one, and even then it is much more expensive. I definitely dont want to see that happen with software over the web, so I can understand this guy trying to protect his copywright.
What I really dissagree with is his methadology; he is simply suing everyone in sight! Suing AOL for having newsgroups is crazy; it is a basic part of being an ISP. If he said told AOL about the situation and AOL refused to filter or drop that particular newsgroup, then I would understand. That doesnt seem to be the case, he seems to have gone straight to the courts, which tells me he is just another sue-happy nut after some easy $.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
He's somewhere between 5'2" and 5'4" inches, actually. (This is based both on what he says, and from standing next to him several times; my girlfriend is 5'2")
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
I think I have a pretty good idea how fair use works with music recordings. I have most of my CDs encoded into MP3s so I can listen to them easily while I'm working or crusing around with my laptop. This is fair, I paid for the music and I'm listening to it the way I want to.
However I also have a few books that hve been scanned with some sort of OCR system and saved as text files which I got from various web sites. For about 90% of these I also own copies of the books. It's actually really nice to pop open a text file on my laptop during a plane flight or something and not have to carry around a bunch of books. I also tried my Pilot using PlamDoc but that was just painfull to read.
I understand where Ellison is comming from, the same way I understand where Lars Ulrich is comming from but I just don't see the big threat. I just checked my HD and I've found the only "book" I don't own a copy of is 1984, that's actually one out of about 20.
I am an avid reader and tend to be an early adopter of most new networking technologies (like Napster), if anyone was going to cost these guys money it would be me but I don't. I spend money on new books every week. I find when I want a copy of a book it can take quite a while to find it.
I just don't see the threat to print publishers as clearly as something like Napster is to music publishers. (maybe, sort of)
But what you're doing isn't boycotting. A boycott is when you don't use a product for moral reasons. You are still using their product.
Well, maybe so, if his boycott target is music in general. Perhaps, instead, he is boycotting the distribution model. He has no moral problem with music in general (who does?), and that is the product that he is getting. What is being abstained from is the distribution model (or, potentially, the companies that use the model) that he gets reamed by financially.
Your Montgomery Bus Boycott analogy would work better if he had been stealing CDs from the store. However, if we take into account that he is against overpriced CDs as a form of music distribution, then the dilemma has been resolved. Well, maybe one could argue that mp3s come from CDs and that's a problem, but hey, close enough. The Montgomery Bus Boycotters effectively said "I'll use another form of transportation", and he is saying "I'll use another form of distribution".
Is he still a "thief"? Probably. But I think he's still making a statement.
It's rather well-known that he still does all his writing on a typewriter.
He's actually claimed that this is a great benefit to him becuase when he's done with a page he will yank it out of his Stone Age contraption, review it, and if needed, crumple it up and start over, but he feels that if he had a word processor the he'd never really review his stuff well. Obviously professional writers can be eccentric.:)
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I'm not sure I said that either of them were victimless crimes. I don't believe either of them are victimless. What I do believe is that it's a pointless battle.
As far as going after the users, that's what they do with drugs and it doesn't make any difference. The problem is that it's too big and difficult to track. You could get teams of people monitoring this stuff and only get ~1% of the traffic.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
The comparison to the Civil Rights movement is valid only so far. Granted, they were breaking laws that were unjust, and in so doing, managed to change things for the better. To compare their struggles to those of the Napster user is absolutely absurd.
I'm sorry, but consumers have basically two options: buy a thing, or don't. If you have some fundamental problem with the way the businesses of the MPAA/RIAA, etc., do business, fine. Express your disatisfaction by not buying the product. I'd agree totally with that. But, how then do you make the leap in logic that it's ok to steal that same product?
Do you also believe that if we come up with the idea that cars are too expensive, we can just take cars right off the dealers' lot? Are we then also living under oppressive laws that give auto makers too much, and take away from the consumer? Should we then pass laws to make cars cheaper, disregarding the cost of making the car, and slashing the profits that the auto maker is entitled to?
Don't try and sell me on the idea that I, as a business or as an individual, should do anything for the benefit of anyone other than myself. If you honestly believe that, work all week and send me your paycheck, I could use it.
Usually I convert it to a MobileDoc and stick it in my palm, but... YES! YES! YES! I do it all the time, ain't this boogie a mess
Burris
Not long, IMHO. I've got a Rocket eBook that has a backlit screen that is very easy on the eyes. I can hold it and turn the pages with one hand, and if I fall asleep reading, it goes into sleep mode. I just bought "Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje in Rocket Edition, and it's just as easy to read as a paperback.
So, does owning the electronic edition (which is digitally signed to only run on my reader) give me rights to create a paper back-up copy? Serious question, and one the only a lawyer could definitively answer, I think.
-----------------
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I remember Isaac Asimov's death. I was quite saddened by the trio of deaths at that time, all of whose work I loved.
Isaac Asimov: April 6, 1992
Sam Kinison: April 10, 1992
Benny Hill: April 20, 1992
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
To get around that horrible concept, the software industry early on adopted the idea that software would be licensed, not sold by the copy as books are. The theory is that you don't own anything but the physical media, and all your rights are subject to the license. And, the first sale doctrine doesn't apply when there isn't a sale.
Thus, software licenses can impose whatever onerous restrictions they can think of, and have at least a reasonable argument that they're enforceable.
We're now seeing the licensing concept loop back to literary works through ebooks and other digital formats. (Remember the thing a few months ago about the dental school ebooks that had horrible license terms?) The first sale doctrine is probably dead -- to the extent it ever lived -- with respect to digital media.
If you want to remember the "good old days," think back to the original Borland "no nonsense license" for Turbo Pascal that essentially said the software disks were the same as a book. That was the most sensible license for consumer software that I've ever seen.
Actually, he wrote the original draft of City on the Edge of Forever, however, Gene Roddenberry didn't like it much (there were all sorts of wacky things going on concerning drug abuse by Enterprise crewmembers, etc.), so he rewrote a lot of it and pissed Harlan off to no end (and I think Harlan still holds a grudge about it to this day). The basic ideas remain though, Roddenberry just "sanitized" it a bit. I guess in actuality, it was sort of a coproduction of the two of them rather than a work by either one of them alone.
I went to the page, but I didn't read it. Thus, I made a copy of the essay in my cache. I guess I violated his copyright.
Grow up kiddo. I have aligned myself with no monopolies. I run a small software company... I'm a small bussinessman who hires talented programmers and pays them very, very well because they are talened, work really hard and are just good folks. I also make sure that I operate my business in an ethical fashion, we pay for all commercial software we use, we pay for all shareware we use and we repect the rights of artists of all stripes who also have a right to make a living.
Your problem is obvious. You're a teenager living in your mommies house and you're a spoiled, rotten little brat.
I'll bet when (if?) you graduate from high school and have to make your own living -- perhaps by writing software -- you might get some more respect for people who work for a living.
Right now you're just a thieving little jackass.
IANAL, but if they find him(?) in any country that the U.S. has an extradition treaty with (I don't know the list of 'em), the U.S. can have their police nab and hand over said suspect, right?
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Wow, you're especially brilliant today, aren't you?
Nit picking time...
Harry Harrison wrote the Stainless Steel Rat series.
What? This is a lawsuit, not an SF story? Never mind.
__________________
FWIW, the poster above was wrong. Harlan edited "Dangerous Visions", an anthology book from the 60's. He (most likely) had nothing to do with "Dark Visions".
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
well - i can't answer how much of that 50 dollars a programmer sees when they produce a game...
however, music artists see a very SMALL percentage (pennies) of that 15 bux that we are paying for their CD, while the labels/RIAA sees the majority.
if more money went to the artist, 15 bux might not be so bad...but until then
-Jae
The biggest problem with Harlen Ellison's writing is that you can't find it. From what I understand he hasn't allowed reprinting. Library's don't have his books because he's obscure. Thus used book stores are about the only place you can find them, but it's rare. Fan's of Harlen's writing almost never give up their copies.
Harlen is a 'Hollywood' writer. Which means that he has tenacity for getting paid. It's also something he writes about. He's gone on and on for pages about "getting credit" and "getting paid." From a Hollywood point of view he has a point. Because that town is all about money and credit.
From the document, looks like Harlan hasn't learned how impolite and silly it looks shouting in all capital letters.
Perhaps he should take an HTML tutorial.
Wow, that rant was about the worst thing one could expect from a professional writer.
What happened to eloquence and subtlety?
What happened to NOT drowning out one's own point by using all caps??
What happened to having one's own lawyer review the contents of the release to assure effectiveness??
Haven't read any of his work, have you? Harlan Ellison is about as subtle as the Death Star most of the time, and his only competition for "Most Opinionated Human on the Planet" is George Carlin. Stephen King once described the forward to Harlan's book Strange Wine as making him
*Danse Macabre, 1981.I stopped taking Harlan seriously after seeing three or four his rants on an "entertainment news" show that the SciFi Channel used to have on. Don't get me wrong, he does good work -- the "City on the Edge of Forever" episode of Star Trek was frickin' brilliant, as were some of the ideas he gave JMS for Babylon 5 -- but IMHO he's kind of a loon.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
What exactly are you babbling about? The man's problem is that people are taking stuff he wrote and giving his, Harlan Ellison's, stuff away for free.
This is not about people creating their own content and giving it away by choice. This is about people taking the source of what little revenue a SF writer gets and mass publishing it via the Internet without paying the author a single dime.
He's right to take a stand like this. My favorite SF author, Roger Zelazny, died of cancer while working his tail off. He was well-known and a Hugo award winner several times over yet he still wasn't making enough money just off writing to rest on his heels and relax for awhile and focus on recovery. Writers, especially the really good ones it seems, are generally not wealthy. In fact, usually they're struggling to get by.
This is not about jealousy over better writers releasing stuff for free. This is a fight for survival against people who don't think they should have to pay for the work that writers like Ellison do to provide the money for their food and housing. If you're upset that he should demand payment for services rendered, then don't buy his stuff. Go ahead. Be a leech. I'm sure that none of your other favorite authors that are still alive would approve, though. Do you think Asimov wrote the massive numbers of nonfiction articles he did just for kicks? Harlan just has the rabid tenacity and guts to take a stand against it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Should public and school libraries also go unfunded? After all, they carry literature that is certain to offend most everyone.
Asimov never used computers either. Don't know about Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke, though, definitely yes. He does computerized videoconferencing from Ceylon, sorry, Sri Lanka.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Not to be pedantic, but assuming an average checkout time of one month, and *zero* days idle on the shelf, it would take more than 80 years to check out a single book 1000 times. IANAL (I am not a librarian), but it seems that a book would have to be replaced every 50 or so checkouts due to wear and tear.
I guess that someone else does his web site, then. Wonder what they think about all this hooraw.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Actually, FYI, theft means depriving the author of property.
(See www.m-w.com)
Theft: 1a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
So this doesn't involve theft because nobody is depriving the author of his copy of the work.
I'm not arguing your point, I just want to encourage you to use the correct words. And theft isn't correct in this context.
> I AM NOT SHOUTING AT YOU! I'M JUST TYPING WITH
> MY LITTLE FINGER ON THE SHIFT KEY. If thy eye
> offends thee, cut it out.
If thy little finger offends others, cut it off.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I still believe Harlan Ellison ripped off PKD regarding the idea that became "Terminator". Probably made a shitload of money off that too. I wish I could remember the name of the story that PKD wrote, but I remember that it was a lot closer to the movie than the story Harlan Ellison wrote, (and later claimed was used by James Cameron).
No doubt, Harlan could flame the flesh from the bones of just about anybody back in the day, I wonder if he's just getting old? I fondly remember his diatribes about "fans" who stalk and berate authors and what Harlan did to the guy who signed him up for every single Franklin Mint Collector's Plate that he could find... but all caps? Oooh, scary.
Come on Harlan, you wrote "From Alabamy, With Hate" after you marched for civil rights in the 60's, and you flamed God brilliantly in "Deathbird" (I'm edging into Christianity and I think that's still one of the best things I've ever read), and you fall back on all caps? Why not some 30 page thesis on how if copyright infringement continues we'll all be eating our children to survive? Why not a novella about the death throes of a civilization drowning in mediocrity because all the artists are shoveling shit to pay the power bill?
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I'd never touch free drugs.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
For a good breakdown of the costs of the publishing business, and a good economic argument for doing it outside of a major publishing house, look here
His point is simple, copying a book is the same whether in printed or electronic form. If someone can read it online they _may_ buy a copy, they might just print it out.
Actually, most people prefer to read stuff in book form. While folks can print it, I don't fancy feeding several hundred pages into my printer and waiting for an hour or so for it to print (not to mention that then it's not free since I'm using up paper and printer toner/ink).
Books that I have read online and not had in my possession in physical form = 2. Both of which happened to be in the public domain anyway(the first two tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs for the curious).
Number of books I have read in whole or part online = approximately 12.
We can all get high and mighty but at the end of the day he has a point: He does this for a living, how would _you_ feel if someone copied your work just before you handed it in to the client and got the cash instead of you.
This is a faulty analogy. People who publish his works online aren't getting paid. If they were then I would support Mr. Ellison's stance completely. If somebody is to be paid, then either he or his publisher deserve to be the ones receiving the payment.
However, there is no significant indication that publishing books on the net reduces sales. Any book that I have liked I desire to own from a legitimate source. Any book that I suspect that I won't like I usually check for in the library first anyway (if online versions are easily available I will often browse at least part of the book online).
I recommend visiting the Baen free library for a different, and IMO more rational, take on the issue.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
> Once we start paying for the information itself, and stop paying for the representation, information stops being free.
This is already happening. I have a couple calendars that say it is illegal to remove the pictures, put them in frames and sell them. Apparently I am paying for the information (original pictures) and not the representation (physical pictures).
- James - [IMAGE]
that will solve everything.
... for free. So the monetary impact of my reading one of Mr. Ellison's works on the Internet v/s a book is probably zero, unless libraries also stop buying his books. In fact, since I am almost always late returning books, the bigger monetary impact will be on my library and their reduced late-fee income.
Artists have always been identified as poor, disenfranchised people who struggle to eke out a living. I would question the thought processes of anyone who becomes an artist to make money.
I started writing because I enjoy it, and will continue to write even though the monetary compensation for it is meager at best, and non-existent and worst. I would be flattered at this point in my career of someone thought enough of one of my works to take the time and post them to the Internet. (Before everyone jumps in here, I have a web site under development for my work....) Until then, I will work for a living and write for my enjoyment and for those few that enjoy my work.
So, Harlan, go sit on your hat. From what I can tell from the site, the current lawsuits are frivolous and are only intended to further some grand ideal that you have. Maybe you and Garth Brooks should get together sometime and discuss copyright laws. (For those readers unaware, Garth has been waging a war against used-music stores.)
BTW -- I don't believe that I have ever purchased a book by Mr. Ellison. I only buy non-fiction books. I borrow fiction works from the library
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Re #2.
Anonymous people can communicate securely.
Take a public key from the keyservers for someone named 1337-Warez, post an encrypted message on alt.test for him. If he sees it (as millions of others will) then he can decrypt it and return the message using the private key that you included.
To accomplish the posting, use anonymous remailers.
By using anonymous remailers and drops like hotmail accounts, you could even trade files back and forth.
You could even have a comment board (completely legal because it's not providing any copyrighted materials) which lists people's opinions on the trustworthiness of various other people. Much like EBay's user ratings.
"Hmmm, seven positive comments, one negative. He looks like he's good to trade with."
I disagree, artistic work can benefit the public while still under copyright. Many books published in the last 60 years whice are udner copyright have greatly influenced how we see our world. Harlan is right. If everytime someone publishes a book or story it is pirated instantly no one will ever publish anything. Why should I write a novel if I am not going to get any benifit from it? Why should publishers print books if 3 days latter its going to apear on alt.binaries.e-books for any yahoo with a palm to download for free. And lets face it folks most paperbacks cost under $10.00 and if you can't afford it go to the damn library or buy it used.
After the French revolution all copyright laws were eliminated. Within about a year the only books being published were pornography because anything else would be reprinted by the guy down the street within a few days. They had to restore copyrights after a few years because not having them was a dismal failure.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Firstly, I am sick and tired of people saying that "you can't curl up with an e-book". I am fed up with people saying "it strains your eyes", too. Want to know what strains my eyes? Reading ink on mashed trees in low light.
You just need the right hardware. I read gutenburg books on my Newton all the time - it's backlit, and the LCD is very stable and clear. Give me my even green backlit over that, please! And as for curling up with it, I can sit down with an entire library in the palm of my hand, and it will run without changing batteries, on full backlighting, for a week. I can lie in bed and read in the middle of the night without turning the light on, so not only can I curl up with my book, I can curl up with my sleeping sweetie too. The only arguments I have ever seen against e-books are "there aren't enough of them" and "it's just not the same". There aren't enough sanctioned e-books outside project gutenburg, and if one is particularly attatched to the feel of dried wood pulp then of course only that will do.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
If Harlan wants to verbally dismember someone or something he can do it. He seemed remarkably composed on this issue. Maybe he's mellowed.
I've always wished that there was a commentator who could write with equal skill about the Internet as Harlan did in his "Glass Teat" series about television. Imagine Harlan in Jon Katz's role! Harlan wipes away the bs that cover's most people's eyes with a skill that is a joy to read.
I'm afraid, however, that the traditional publishing system will soon be dead. Harlan is defending a dinosaur. A new system will arise--and it won't look like the thing that Harlan is trying to save with legal patches. I don't think writers in the future will make money off direct sales of their works. They will make money from the fame their works provide for them through speaking engagements, advertisements and movie rights.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
So you're a financially well-off, non-ignorant thief, stealing money from others for products that you could actually afford to pay for. Quite the accomplishment for 30. What's your long-term life plan -- embezzlement and tax fraud?
Point? The bottom line is... HE WANT'S MONEY TO FINANCE HIS WAR. Time to find a new business model. This one is out of date and swiftly becoming unprofitable.
Defecation occurs.
"Dangerous Visions", not "Dark Visions"... An important distinction. :-)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
It was a Bloom County. Steve Dallas was giving advice on who to sue after Sean Penn broke his back for taking his picture. Sean Penn? No, too dangerous. Opus? No money. "Never sue people with no money." Sue the camera company...
/dev/psychic: No medium found
Err... Uhhh... So nobody has to write books, movies, tv episodes, and funny bumper stickers?
Hmm... I woulda never thunk it.
I understand your overall point but that's a pretty weak argument.
You're still missing the bigger point. Gnutella has the possibility to distribute warez, etc. but it also has the ability to distribute very useful stuff. It's like trying to ban FTP or HTTP.
Now I don't really believe that was it's main purpose for being. But unlike Napster, there's no proof to that claim. If you shutdown something like gnutella, you're setting an awful precedence. I seriously doubt they can touch gnutella. If they do, it's a sad, sad day.
I think of the "war on warez" the same way I view the "war on drugs". It's not going to go away no matter how much time, energy and money you put into it. Does that mean you should stop trying? I don't know... I guess it depends on how stubborn you are.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Despite Harlan's annoying use of uppercase and general volume level, I have a lot of sympathy for his case. Posting stories without authorization _is_ piracy. And most authors are poor -- it's one of most poorly paying professions in North America.
But. I am skeptical that it can be stopped. In the United States it surely can be, with enough lawyers (which most authors cannot afford). But the internet is global, and it only takes a few sites beyond the reach of local law...
The copyright laws were created in a time when copying was physical, labor-intensive, and therefore relatively easy to regulate. It's going to be much, much harder to enforce such laws in an era when copying is trivial and very non-local. I am not convinced that the current copyright laws can survive (or at least function).
I have a library card, and I use it often, but *gosh* I'd sure hate to have the police show up and haul me off to jail.
I read some Arthur C. Clarke just last week, and with my library card, it didn't cost me anything! Auch, I feel so cheap and dirty! I hope Mr. Clarke is not to angry. I'M SORRY! ,-[
USNG: 14TPU4605
Definately not true. According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Handbook, the typical royalty rate for hardbacks is 12% of the list price, and is 8.5% for paper backs. As a well established author Ellison probably gets better rates then this. A significant amount of the money from a book you pay goes to the authors, especially the sucessful ones. They are different publishing industries, don't make the mistake of assuming that authors don't get any of your money when you buy a book.
Read the article earlier about the congressman, talking about "Fair-use". You CAN make as many copys for personal use as you want, as long as you legally own a one copy. They can't force you to buy multiple copies if you already own a license to use/listen/read it. Learn the copyright law before posting about it.
C Pungent
C Pungent
If the RIAA had made online MP3 downloads available for $1 each we all would gladly have paid. But their Borg brains are so hardwired to only accept an increase in profit margin, that they would hear nothing of this venture that would have netted them BILLIONS. Instead they fought to restrict electronic distribution until they could exert monopoly control on it. Boo! I say. If taking music for free is all that will teach them how the market works, then I will do it happily. I am tired of being stolen from without an army of crooked lawyers to protect me like the RIAA.
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Interesting. This made me wonder if anyone's ever read a whole book off of a computer screen. God knows I couldn't stand to. About as much as I can stand is a long article, but if anybody's ever read a whole book off thge screen, /.'s the place to find him.
(of course, you could print it out...)
inflammation wants to be fleas
I think you've gotten to the crux of the biscuit. The RIAA, the MPAA and Harlan are actaully right, at least as it relates to whose doing the stealing: The problem is some pimply teenage twits who doesn't understand that the products (CDs, video games, etc.) they love so much are really, really hard to create.
Nope, information is absolutely ownable. Say you invent a new type of car engine that'll do 100mpg at 200mph with zero emissions. Do you want Ford to say, "Sorry, you don't own that, so we're going to take this design and not pay you a cent"? Especially if this is your life's work, and you've spent the last 20 years perfecting it? Would you like to spend the rest of your life poor while your invention lines the pockets of the corporations?
That's why there's a patent system. It's been hugely abused over the last few years, but the theory behind it, stopping ppl with bright ideas from being ripped off, remains as relevant as ever. And it's why there's a copyright system - your life's work may not be an invention, it may be a book, or a screenplay, or a piece of music.
If the author/inventor wants what they've produced to be freely distributed, then they have the choice to release it into the public domain, but only they can decide that - it's not the right of every kid in a bedroom to scan books and give copies away for free, or to do the same with music. If you're relying on your invention/music/writing to provide you with an income in retirement, as Harlan is, you're going to be pretty pissed. Wouldn't you be unhappy if you found some kid was stealing your pension fund?
As far as I can see, the only ppl saying that information isn't ownable (or "information wants to be free") are either: (a) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them for higher motives (eg. Salk); (b) ppl who produce new concepts but distribute them free for the kudos involved (eg. much open-source, see ESR's essays); or (c) ppl who don't have the intelligence to product anything innovative themselves. And (c) far outnumbers the rest.
Grab.
A property is something that can be bought, sold, traded, transferred; that's why we, civilization, created the cash economy. A "work of art" is fundamentally no different that anything else created by any individual. The chair a woodworker crafts in his workshop is no different than a book created by an artist (that one is infinitely reproducable at economies of scale is immaterial). Would you lay the same claim that the chair too belongs to the public? If so, I hope you have a DVD player in your possesion because I sure would like one and would love to exercise my public-ownership claim to it (as a work of art created by the Sony Corp.).
/. contribute usefully to that public discourse, and don't just get lost under the mountains of publicity and FUD put out by corporate entities like the RIAA intent on preserving evil laws for the sake of their own profits.
This is certainly true. However, I think the important thing at this point in public discourse is to find a reasonable middle ground between the view that "the public owns everything" and "the public owns nothing"... While several provisions of the DMCA are patently absurd, and the >95 yr. extention to copyright law is downright criminal (a crime against humanity and the common good, and I'm not exaggerating or bullshitting with that statement), the statement that artists don't own their own work is equally criminal. As Ellison points out, artists need to make money so that they can eat and support their families, just as someone who produces more tangible goods does. However, changing copyright law so that the artist (or his/her publishing company) will still have exclusive ownership of the work 50+ years after death is also ridiculous and a huge injustice. Hopefully these sort of discussions on
I see your point. Though I think he wants to return the message using the *public* key you included (and he wants to "sign" it with his private key.) This works reasonably well, the problem is that he has no way to trust you, because you are after all anonymous.
Another problem with the system is its complexity. You'll probably get a small group of users who do this, but it's not going to be accesible to Joe Napster Luser.
I once had the pleasure and honor of hearing Ellison speak as the key note speaker at a science fiction convention. The guy is brilliant, funny and quite level-headed IMHO. Course, this was almost twenty years ago; he may have grown more opinionated over time.
Information isn't ownable. It is that simple.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Nobody is arguing that they deserve another physical copy, that the author owes them anything after the sale.
But you bought the book and the right to use the information. The book is short-lived, but there's no reason to expect that the right to use the information is linked to the paper.
That's just ridiculous. Why on earth would anyone think the author or publisher was due more money if you read your friend's book after your was ruined? And if you could go and read your friend's book, why couldn't you copy those words for yourself to read later?
What is the author/publisher doing that deserves more money? Are they sending another physical copy?
I interpret the intention of the law to be that the right to the information travels with the physical copy, OR the owner. Either I can install the software on all five of my computers and use it on either of them, OR I can lend the CD to my friends and they can use it as long as they have the CD. Either way, only one person at a time is using it. Ditto with my view of books.
Any restriction of the actual number of copies made is ridiculous. It gets into stupid issues like allowing ONE copy to be temporarily made, in RAM, to allow use/viewing. How about people with L1/L2 cache? Shall we reboot and turn off the cache just to satisfy that law? That sort of crap is ridiculous.
The only rational view of all this is that you buy the right to view the information and you can sell that right. If you do, you must turn over your copies of the work because you don't have the right to sell new rights to view, just to transfer the ones that were sold to you.
If you choose to exercise those rights by MP3ing your music, fine. If you scan and OCR your books, fine.
You may claim that the law doesn't say that, but that's irrelevant. As long as there are lawyers, the law will never definatively say anything. But as long as there are people, the law should reflect their will. The will of the people is that they aren't controlled by ridiculous laws that only help those rich enough to hire lawyers.
As long as a common sense reading of copyright law would allow backup copies and time/space shifting, those continue to be proper uses. You can't let a lawyer tell you what proper behaviour is.
That's ironic considering that Disney bases all of their stuff on public domain works, so that they don't have to pay royalties. And they yanked the "Lady and the Tramp" video off the shelves for years because they refused to pay Peggy Lee residuals. Talk about two-faced...
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Exactly. Perhaps the most disgusting thing about this debate is both sides attempts to claim the "moral high ground", when it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that neither side has a moderately legitimate claim to such a thing.
Good comment.
However, if you've not read Martin Amis, then you've missed a case of the fils outdoing the pere (Kingsley Amis).
Actually, no.
Back in the good old days of plague and suffering, artists either lived off the patronage system, where kings paid to keep the artists in their employ, or the artists died broke and alone and didn't gain fame until after their deaths.
Some artists did a combination of both, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who did for a time live in patronage, and managed to die alone in an unmarked grave.
Michelangelo managed to avoid patronage as a lifelong method of employment, but he did his share of royalty portraiture, because hey, that's where the money was. This is akin to the 30 second nike ad, or Jordan talking about his Hanes(tm).
Arguably, Michelangelo left us with things we can appreciate hundreds of years later, where Jordan probably has not, but the history is important to learn. Payment methods have only shifted from patronage to a monarchy to patronage to a corporation.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
My rights and limitations on a Papa Roach CD are precisely those rights and limitations governed by American Copyright law. Papa Roach could write anything he wants on the back of the CD -- he could say "you are only licensed to listen to this CD while naked in the precense of at least three other people." But just because he writes it down, that doesn't make it a license, and it doesn't make it legally binding.
Your use of the CD is governed by copyright law, period. There is no license. It's pretty fucking scary that a non-zero number of people believe works traditionally have been covered by a license -- you have no idea what you're giving up as modern media moves toward licensing programs and pay per use, and away from the rights traditionally conferred by copyright. Licensing information is a significant change in the way that we traditionally trade information, and it's not one that we should take lightly, and it's definately not a step we should take simply because everyone now believes it to be the case, and can't remember any time when it wasn't the case.
We were not always at war with Eurasia.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Folks, this guy's been serious about copyright for a lot longer than there's been an Internet. In that essay, he describes his campaign to recover rights to a story after the publisher violates the terms of his contract (they published his story in a paperback with cigarette ad inserts - used to be quite common, in the 50s). Harlan started off as polite as he ever is, and ended up performing various acts of terrorism - read the story for details.
The all-caps thing has to be a fluke. Unless he's temporarily crippled and using some kind of alpha-talker, he knows better.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
"I do not want paid for my already-completed works. I expect to be paid for doing work for someone else. Huge, huge difference."
Who exactly is this "someone else" that a writer works for? The readers. Writing for the reader is the writer's "work" through which they earn money.
What you seem to fail to understand is the creation of a work of art in whatever form takes many hours of work both to research and create. If the creator wants to give the work away, fine. If the creator wants to be paid for it, fine as well.
"I do not want paid for my already-completed works."
This is exactly what a writer wants and needs to be paid for! If it ain't complete, you can't effectively sell it. (Dickensian serial novels aside. But we all know how King made out in this form.) In you terms, if a program you write compiles and is ready to ship, you don't want to be paid for it....
The important word you seem to have misunderstood in your rant is artist. The artists would no longer be forced (ask George Michel if you think that this is not force) to produce the mindless rubbish the company who owns them feels will sell best. With the crazy RIAA et al systems destroyed, Music will return to an artform even to the masses instead of falling further into corporatism which aims to brainwash the populus through media expenditure. How many artists got into the business to make money and how many to make music? I would love to see the day when no-one can convince tv/radio/press that westlife/britney should be plastered all over the place because the record company is spending $x million in the pre-publicity and instead our media would focus on the true artists of our time who attempt not to maximise profits but instead produce the music they feel and show their true brilliance. Does anyone really question the fact that if all music was distributed online by the creators with a facility to pay (either voluntary or compulsory) that the wheat and chaff would be seperated by our wallets and that our wallets would ensure that many more artists would be able to be financially viable and even rich. The real threat to the music industries is not that artists can have their music dowloaded, it is that an artist now requires a fractional percentage of the money to kit out a studio (a compressor is about the only analogue gear still required and the cost of all the digital components is dropping drastically yearly. An audio artists friend of mine has just moved from a $1500 souncard, Pulsar, to a $400 soundcard, RME Digi96 I think, with improved performance). An artist who is enslaved by a recording industry whose prime desire is to use money to make money is not as free as an artist who is free to compete in an equitable market with his peers worldwide. Nuff said
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
But I do have a Viewsonic P815 21 inch monitor at 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz...
You have to admit, it was funny.
;)
Sounds like someone *cough*shiwala*cough* else might be bedding down in Mom and Dad's panelled basement..
Disclosure: I am one of the authors of the letter posted on Speculations opposing Ellison's position. I also run Speculon, an internet science fiction publication that pays authors professional rates and provides fiction to the readers without charge.
"The only difference between a writer and a con-man is the writer has better hours, works at home, and can use his real
It is just an ego trip. He gets a thrill out of the idea of his 'art' being so wonderfull that there is a small comunity of people pirating his work. He likes having the power to smash them as well.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
er.. when did Asimov die? did I miss that? I know Zelazny did, i don't remember a reference to Heinlein tho.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Do I steal music? Yes. Do I do it to get something for nothing? No. Do I do it to screw artists? No. Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha. But I am boycotting the music / literature / entertainment monopolies that are charging me a fortune just to keep their stock prices high. If an artist falls by the wayside then I feel justified in knowing that I did it to offer freedom to 10x more artists in the future.
This is a moral stand, not a financial one.
But what you're doing isn't boycotting. A boycott is when you don't use a product for moral reasons. You are still using their product. You're not taking a real stand, you're trying to take a stand, while making sure you still get what you want. In the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they didn't boycott by trying to get on the buses for free. They avoided the buses. You can't have it both ways. Either your boycotting the music industry for moral reasons (and not using their product at all) or your just avoiding paying for the product because in your opinion it's too expensive.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Do I steal music? Yes. Do I do it to get something for nothing? No. Do I do it to screw artists? No. Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha. But I am boycotting the music / literature / entertainment monopolies that are charging me a fortune just to keep their stock prices high. If an artist falls by the wayside then I feel justified in knowing that I did it to offer freedom to 10x more artists in the future.
You do realize you've claimed that by preventing 1 artist from making a living from selling his/her music you have prevented 10x that amount from doing so in the future. So if the goal of you and your cohorts is achieved and the RIAA is driven out of business leading to distributed music becoming free(which is what Napster has propagated) exactly how have you freed the artists?
Let me guess, "They are free to no longer have to worry about album sales, because there aren't any?".
When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.
I think that makes a big difference in the ability of an author to make money with respect to publishers compared to musicians and record companies.
Herb
Herb
Again, feel free to sentence me to death if my questions annoy you. I'll come back in 5 minutes anyway. -Sythi
Do you really expect gov't/corporate bodies to select art which challenges their power base?
Your suggestion will not work for the same reason that the current copyright system does not work - massive centralization. Artists would have to cow tow to whoever controls the money, just as they do with the RIAA/MPAA/Whatever publisher today.
On the other hand, a system of charities (with limits on how large they can be) could work well. Of course, there's nothing stopping us from doing that now.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
So a little theft is OK? I'm sorry if you take a story someone else wrote and put it online without the OK of the author it is theft, it does not matter if the damages are one dollar or one million dollars its still theft and its still *WRONG*. Why is this a hard concept?
I think the original poster was trying to make the point that there is no proof of harm. If somebody was reprinting his books and selling them for profit then he could demonstrate harm (in terms of profits denied to him). However, copying books online for free has the same effect as borrowing a book from a library:
1) Increases the # of people exposed to the writer's work.
2) Increases the chance that the writer's work will be recommended (assuming it's not crap)
3) Increases the chance that the reader of the work will buy a book by that writer (assuming they liked the book).
How has he been harmed by this? Online books are free publicity.
Calling reading the book online "theft" is already making the assumption that the book has been "stolen". However that assumption is debatable, and given the availability of the book from a library, complete irrelevant to the outcome.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
The problem is: what is a reasonable time? The bulk of earnings from a given creative work has already transpired by the time the heirs get their hands on it. That, as weighed against the good to society of having works in the public domain, mitigates against our absurdly over-long copyright period.
It's even worse when there is no estate and the rights are held in perpetuity by a corporation. Then we are speaking of the public good being harmed by anonymous profiteers.
Just how many family-owned or individual-founded megacorps do you think there are?
Microsoft.
Should we shut all of those down and say "tough luck, widows and orphans, you don't get any financial security based on your parent's long and hard work" because we're afraid 1 out of 100,000 of you is a megacorp?
Well, we could exclude partnerships/sole proprieters from it. Those sort of businesses don't involve the abdication of responsability that corporations do.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
You mean that depriving an artist of money is theft?
Well, have I got a lot of cans of human&animal shit to sell you. (Some have bought them as art works. Now it's your turn to pay up.)
Or, do you mean that infringing the rights (copyright) granted under the law is theft? Well, the courts disagree. Theft is stealing a tangible good. Infringement is violating rights granted to artists.
Is the public domain theft? Is the fact that Santa Clause, Uncle Sam, and all the rest are in the public domain a theft from the descendents of Thomas Nast? The government, in the guise of the public good, offers limited exclusive rights to artists with the expectation of the works entering the public domain. But, you seem to turn that around into the public domain being a place of thieves and pirates.
I love good writers too. And I will be happy to purchase electronic works from them if the price is reasonable and the file format's allow me, like paper, to read them how and where I want.
Are you off your rocker? He "doesn't understand"? Of course he understands! If he sells a book where he's going to get royalties, do your think he "doesn't understand that its not theft" if they print and sell a million extra books that they don't give him royalties on? If he sells to a magazine with pay based on their circulation and they just hand his story over to a couple of other magazines without compensating him, do you think he "doesn't understand" that being theft of his work? There is NO DIFFERENCE between that and what we are talking about here. In both cases, he has been paid for a set number of "physical items" and all those are still there after someone produces extra items to sell without compensation.
I'm sorry, but on this issue, it is very clearly you who doesn't understand how and why proffessional writers get paid. He isn't being paid by the magazine to give them a few thousand preprinted inserts - there was no exchange of physical property to begin with. So blabbing about how the "oringinal is still there" is totally meaningless to the way he gets paid.
Now some geek is gonna start talking about how "people don't want that revenue model" and how he will just have to do something different because "he doesn't have a marketable product." Let me give you a free market clue. An unmarketable product is one that people either don't want, or don't want at the price its offered at so they don't get it. It is not a product that you don't want to pay the price, so instead you take it for free.
If you don't like the fact that H.E. expects to recieve some compensation for the distribution of his work, don't read it. Don't read any work that the author wants to be paid for. Enjoy the high caliber of work published "for the joy of it" free on the internet. And if enough people feel the same way, maybe there really will be a "revolution" in the way pubishing is done. But if you decide that you like H.E.s work and want to read it, but don't feel like accepting his terms, you are just a thief, and he understands that very well.
In the /. world, the sexual revolution must have happened because men got tired of having to marry women or pay prostitutes to have sex, so they just started raping any woman they felt like, and since women weren't getting compensation, they started offering "free love" as an alternate model because no one respected the old one. In the real world, some men and some women decided to have "free love" because it was what they individually wanted, and some men and women decided to "hold out" for more, and most importantly, no one legalized rape just because some people "Gave it away for free." And yet somehow, folks here seem to think that stealing people's work by ignoring their clearly stated contract for offering it is going to make them say "oh, well, since people want my work but refuse to pay me and just take it anyway, I might as well lie back and enjoy it and hope they bless me with lecture fees." Thats not the free market, buddy, thats mob rule.
OK, rant over. If I have some money left at the end of the month I'll send a check to the legal fund, because overall I think they are argueing an important point. In the meantime, I better sign up for the National Writers Union and hope I still have some rights to control of my work in 5 years.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
It can't be copied, since that creates a new copy. The copyright holder is the only one who has the right to allow that. But what happens to the original copy is not under control of the copyright holder.
That's why libraries, second-hand book stores, literary auction houses, etc aren't violating US Copyright laws. They don't make copies, and they work after the original First Sale.
Harlan is a professional writer. He makes his living off of his writing, the royalties he earns, etc. He has a very vested interest in strong copyright protection, and he is famously vocal in his opinion. He doesn't have a problem with used book stores or libraries -- besides being legal, they are instrumental in exposing new readers to his and other authors works, which benefits him and the industry. What he doesn't like is mass-production of his works in violation of his IP rights.
As I read it, there are two issues he disapproves of:
First, that his work is being copied to Usenet without his permission, and (more importantly) without his getting paid. This is consistant with Harlan's stance on stripped and remaindered books (both of which are books the publishers couldn't sell normally, and which are being sold at steep discounts with no royalties to the author), which he also abhors because he doesn't get paid.
Second, that his work is being posted to Usenet from poor scans without proofreading. This offends his sensibilities as a writer, because he feels his work is misrepresented, making it look bad. This is also consistant with past actions.
Just my thoughts.
No, actually, the reason people don't buy things wholesale is because the manufacturers usually won't sell to individuals at wholesale. It's not economically viable, especially for larger products like furniture.
That's the whole reason organizations like UCC exist.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Artistic works are never property. The rights granted by law to artists may be sold or transferred. The artistic work is owned by the public from it's inception.
The last sentence of your statement is patently absurd. The first two sentences of your statement are contradictory.
A property is something that can be bought, sold, traded, transferred; that's why we, civilization, created the cash economy. A "work of art" is fundamentally no different that anything else created by any individual. The chair a woodworker crafts in his workshop is no different than a book created by an artist (that one is infinitely reproducable at economies of scale is immaterial). Would you lay the same claim that the chair too belongs to the public? If so, I hope you have a DVD player in your possesion because I sure would like one and would love to exercise my public-ownership claim to it (as a work of art created by the Sony Corp.).
But it doesn't work that way. The "public" - you and I - intrinsically own nothing, and have no claim to lay to anything, that isn't provided to us by the item's creator, no matter how easy it is for you to take it without cost. To do so otherwise is simply called stealing.
I noticed this ebook copying problem a few days ago. While in alt.binaries.clocks looking for a desktop picture, I came across lots of science fiction ebooks. They don't show up in my newsreader now, but the illegal copies must be sitting in permanent storage somewhere.
The people downloading the ebooks must be the people interested in reading them and so would be the ones to buy them instead of stealing them.
What about the spamming of the clocks newsgroup? That might get the slashdotters hot under the collar.
- James - [IMAGE]
Take the time he was writing for Roddenberry on a ST Original Series. He wrote a great script for City on the Edge (IIRC), it was beautiful, emotional, masterful. And completely undoable as a television episode. Literally, it was impossible to do on a TV show in the 60's, especially on ST's limited budget. His script called for things like hundreds of extras and impossible special effects shots. So Gene asked Ellison for a rewrite, and Ellison refused. He went apeshit all over Roddenberry and flat out refused to rewrite his script so that it would be useful. Finally, they could wait no longer on him and had to drop his script and get a reworked one done up, Ellison screaming bloody murder the whole time. Then when he was honored with an award (I think it was a Hugo, not sure) for his original script, Ellison sent a big "I told you so" Roddenberry's way.
The man may have a distinct talent for the written word, but he seriously needs to grow up some. And he needs to jettison some of his attitude while he's at it. The ALLCAPS, though it's been mentioned above in this discussion, is just an indicator of his propensity for overreaction.
-Kasreyn
P.S. Harlan, I hand-copy manuscripts of your books for my friends and family. Come get me! =P
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Here is an audio recording of one of his short stories, Paladin of the Lost Hour. From his official website. You should listen to it. It's really quite good.
I don't think that's what he's saying at all. He's not trying to stop anyone writing free books. He's merely concerned about people distributing his work.
Any books in stock are considered taxable, so it is now in a publishers best interest to keep stock low. What this means is that 'mid-list' authors (like Spider Robinson, Walter Jon Williams, and others) have thier books go out of print a lot faster. Providing less time for people to notice that the book is out and therefore reducing sales.
So... if demand can be shown, the book might get republished, but most authors are not makeing a lot of money. Hence Harlan's rant; which, for those of us who are actually fans of Mr. Ellison, are not surprised by this. He has held strong opions on artists rights long before the internet came along. -pc
Funny.. maybe i don't represent any larger than the 1% of the whole, but napster is providing a service that allows me to steal music, so why not?
Yes, i think its stupid that we can't copy our cd's and dvd's to where-ever we want that that copy protection will never work, but...
If i'm walkign through the fields and see an apple fallen from the tree, will I not go pick it up? Of course I would. The music is just sitting around, music that i like it, why SHOULD i worry about paying for it. I'm not mass re-producing the stuff and selling it...
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
You got it. I am stealing and I don't feel bad at all. In the past 3 years I've spent well over $20k on video games because I am a collector. But since I don't like to open the shrink-wrap I always download a warez copy off the net.
Is it stealing? Yes. Do I feel bad? No freaking way. I pay the salaries of artists and "people like you" every day, but I'm tired of being taken advantage of. If that means you lose your free lunch because you've aligned yourself with monopolies who are cheating you out of your hard-earned money, then so be it. I don't weep for starving artists, learn to program...
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Twelve whole percent? Wow! Those greedy authors! They should know that their twelve percent is taking (really expensive) food out of the (really spoiled) mouths of (really wealthy) record companies' children's mouths! No way a stupid AUTHOR should make TWELVE WHOLE PERCENT on a work that they "wrote". Bah. They're all ignant hacks...after all, an arbitrarily large number of monkeys (given sufficient time) would be able to do THEIR jobs...
Uhhh...your figures may be right, but they still don't support your thesis. Just because book authors get fucked less roughly than musicians doesn't make it OK. The publishers are just as bad as the RIAA. Their cartel is just less well-organized.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Hey, someone has to make money off of all those elvis style weddings in Vegas, right? ;>
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Don't be stupid. If I whack you in the leg with a lead pipe, and you miss two weeks of work, I've just deprived you of income. However, it's neither theft nor fraud, it's assault and battery.
Calling something what it's not is not a cohesive argument.
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share and enjoy
a distribution monopoly is forcing me to pay unreasonable prices for music
Exactly how did they force you? By playing songs on the radio, and making it known that you could purchase the CD for a price?
Hmmm... if it's possible to force people to buy things just by letting them know that they are for sale... that gives me an idea: HEY YOU!!! I HAVE SOMETHING TO SELL. YOU MUST BUY IT.
OK, while I'm waiting for everybody on Slashdot to send me money, let's see what else we have here:
Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha
OK, so you get to name your own price. Wow! I never knew I could do that. Hey you! Yeah you, Mr. Mercedes dealer. I don't think that fully tricked out 4-door with the leather seats is worth $80,000. I'll give you $10,000 for it. What? That's not enough? Give me the keys. What? You don't want to give me the keys? Say what? SAY WHAT? You're telling me my old Buick is good enough? Who are you to tell me what I should drive? Well, I know how to pick the lock and hot-wire it. I found some cracks that let me disable the electronic ignition protection system and LoJack. Before that, stealing luxury autos was really hard, but thanks to the internet it's easy now, so I guess that makes it right. Hacked the DMV 'puter too. They'll never trace the VIN on this baby. All I gotta do is hop in and drive. Whaddaya say to that?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oops, should read "NOT making the flame freely available". I've got a lousy proofreader... :-)
Grab.
ObEngrish:
ALL MY BOOKS ARE BELONG TO ME.
Were Ellison inclined to post to Slashdot, the lameness filter would bite him every time.
Yup. Regrettably, Ellison, just like RIAA, Doesn't Get It.
I'd like to thank him for pointing out that books are now becoming widely-available online, though. I've got some downloading to do. I love my dead-tree editions of the SF classics, but I wish I could search 'em - electronic versions of the texts sounds like a great value-add for me.
My call: Legal or not, it's not wrong to download an electronic version of a dead-tree edition you've already paid for.
Of course, Ellison is objecting to much more than this - people downloading electronic versions of books for which they haven't purchased dead-tree editions. He's got a point -- artists get screwed by publishers in much the same way as musicians get screwed by RIAA.
I'm not being stupid. By makeing copies of someone else work off of the net you are depriving them if income. Call it a Banana if you want it is still wrong.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
You just summed up very succinctly what has always bugged me about his work, fiction especially. I've always gotten a kick out of his essays, but his fiction always leaves me thinking something along the lines of "well...maybe this is one of his early stories...".
Truth is, he seems never to have grown up, or grown in any way at all. Engaging Characters, fictional and real, CHANGE OVER TIME. He (and His) never do.
**>>BELCH
"Voice"? Is that how they spell "tits" these days? :)
This makes some very poetic hacker rhetoric, but no one seems to ever be able to explain exactly how people are supposed to make a living if they're always giving away the stuff they're working on.
I'm sure that while you're in school, and mommy and daddy are paying the bills, you're contributing all sorts of great stuff to the open source community. I'm sure from that perspective, it must boggle your mind to try and fathom why everyone doesn't see that your way is the only way.
Page me when you reach the real world. I'll be very curious to know how you pay the rent when mommy and daddy cut the umbilical cord.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
If he feels so strongly, perhaps he should realize the Genie is out of the bottle and contentrate on selling *extra value*.
No one I know really enjoys reading online books. They generally buy the softcover to read. Harlan should realize this, and concentrate on making sure this continues by having the *value of the work in the physical printed copy*.
It's called "Value-Added", and it's the reason most people buy stuff at stores, rather than wholesale. He should check it out.
His essays are spirited and a lot of fun, as well as his stuff about biker gangs and whatnot, but I have yet to read any of his fiction that I can truly say I liked. I personally think he writes his best when he writes *about* writing; his fiction is always flat and 2-dimensional.
Which of his fictional works can you recommend, and where can I steal a copy online?
; )
**>>BELCH
No, the fact that the vast majority of people flout the law and don't see anything wrong with that means that the law shouldn't exist.
but the law works to say "This is what is right".
That's how laws are supposed to work, yes. Laws are based in a large part on community standards. Murder, for example, is illegal because most people find it reprehensible. People don't find Napster morally wrong, which is why it flourishes. It's like Prohibition. No one felt drinking was wrong, so everyone continued to flout the law and drink. This is one case in which the legislative system let the people down. Without community support, laws will either fail or need to be enforced with draconian measures. We're nearing a point where the US needs to decide which path it will take.
An interesting question then is _why_ ppl don't find Napster morally wrong. OK, we desperately need a try-b4-you-buy system for music. OK, CDs are way too expensive. OK, the record companies make obscene profits and give too little back. Those are the usual reasons given for using Napster. But there's systems out there (the MP3.com "tip jar" for one) which allow ppl to pay for recordings they think are worth it, and these are giving so little returns, it's hardly worth it. So how are musicians supposed to make money off their recordings?
All these music places are going to subscription rates. This is quite reasonable - if you want to listen to a single song off an album, download it and pay a small fee for it. Or if you want a lot of stuff, pay a flat fee and get all you can eat. When there wasn't an alternative to Napster, maybe it made sense. But now there's alternatives coming up (eMusic, etc), should we continue with it? Will it get community support?
As a matter of interest, back on topic, there is try-b4-you-buy on books. You walk into a bookshop, pick up a book and open it. If the first few lines/pages grab you, you can buy it. If not, you put it back and walk away. The only purpose in downloading the whole story is to avoid paying for it altogether.
Grab.
PS. "Community standards" can be altered by pointing out the effects of ppl's actions. Drink-driving and safe sex are the obvious examples.
By your standards, Harlan Ellison has earned the right to complain loud and long. He does make his work available in electronic form - go look under Harlan's section at fictionwise.com - located at http://www.fictionwise.com/mindwise/authors/30.htm .
Nothing there is over $2. You can buy individual stories, or load up on the whole Ellison bundle for under $10. There are ratings on the individual stories from other readers to help reduce the risk you take when you drop a dollar on a story.
By the plain words of the Constitution, life of the author is questionable. After all, the intent is to get the author to create more. If he writes something really great and gets himself set for life, why bother to write any more? I mean, I wouldn't keep going to work if it weren't necessary for paying the bills. By Constitutional standards the original copyright was more than adequate to reward the authors. I also do not think that it falls within the rights of the author to sell their copyright - which is where the Recording companies and some publishing houses make their fortunes, buying the copyrights from the true authors or making them sell the copyrights in order to get published.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Sad he writes only for the money. Many of my freinds write because they like to do it.
For the past ten months my attorney, M. Christine Valada, and I have been hip-deep fighting a legal battle, what we think is an extremely important case:
To protect writers' creative properties.
We filed a lawsuit against the above parties to stop them from posting my works on the Internet without permission. This is copyright infringement. Rampant. Out of control. Pandemic.
AOL, Remarq/Critical Path and a host of self-serving individuals seem to think that they can allow the dissemination of writers' work on the internet without authorization, and without payment, under the banner of "fair use" or the idiot slogan "information must be free." A writer's work is not information: it is our creative property, our livelihood and our families' annuity. Why should any artist, of any kind, continue creating new work, eking out an existence in pursuit of a career, following the muse, when little internet thieves, rodents without ethic or understanding, steal and steal and steal, conveniencing themselves and "screw the author"? What we're looking at is the death of the professional writer!
This is not only my fight, I'm not the only one whose work is being pirated. Hundreds of writers' stories, entire books, the work of a lifetime, everyone from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny: their work has been thrown onto the web by these smartass vandals who find it an imposition to have to pay for the goods. (but gawd forbid you try to appropriate something of theirs...listen to 'em squeal!) The outcome of this case will affect every writer, editor, photographer, artist, musician, poet, sculptor, actor, book designer, publisher and reader. What we're looking at is the anarchy of ignorant thieves ripping off those who labor for an honest payday, because they conveniently honor the lie that everything should be theirs for the taking.
Look, this is your fight, too. If that demented, self-serving misunderstanding of the word "information" prevails, and every zero-ethic tot who wants everything for nothing, who exists in a time where e-commerce hustlers have convinced him/her that they're entitled to everything for nothing prevails, and they are permitted to believe information must be free, with no differentiation made between raw data and the creative properties that provide all artists of any kind with an annuity, to allow them to continue creating new work, then what we're looking at is the egregious inevitability of no one but amateurs getting their work exposed, while those who produce the bulk of all professional-level art find they cannot make a decent living.
Do not, for an instant, buy into the cultural mythology that all artists are rich. A few are, but most have a hard row to hoe just subsisting, holding down second jobs. Most creators practice their art because they love it. If it were only for the bucks, they'd fare better as dentists, plumbers, or steam fitters. I'm fighting for myself, of course, but I'm also doing this for Avram Davidson, who died broke; for Roger Zelazny, who had to work like a dog till the day he pitched over; and for Gerald Kersh, whose work was reprinted and pirated in sixty-five countries, while he had to borrow money from friends to fight off the cancer. This is your fight, too, gang... and now we need your help!
I'm not positive it would work, but I think it's worth a shot before resorting to increasingly intrusive copyright laws or compelling taxpayers to pay for art they have no interest in or may even find offensive.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
But this is not about forbidding anyone to "create and share software". It's about forbidding people from sharing software that someone else created. Do what you like with your own creations, but have respect for the wishes of those whose creations you use.
And somehow you totally missed the part where I explained that it should be up to the artist to release things however he wants. I agree with Ellison's main gripe (that being that people shouldn't be copying his works without his permission), but I disagree that all artists must be paid in order to create art. That was my beef. And believe it or not, I actually do create art and give it away. I'm talking about my beliefs here. My beliefs are, just like everyone else's, self-serving. It's what makes them mine. If that bothers you, perhaps you shouldn't read my comments.
------------
"I happen to think he has a valid point,"
You and he will have to shut down used book stores and music trading joints, as well as public libraries. I don't know, maybe the pirates are wrong, but I know for sure that Ellison is wrong.
Yes, and at the time he was gonna sue Desilu/Paramount (I can't remember who owned what at the time) because his precious screenplay wasn't filmed EXACTLY as he wrote it. (Like a screenplay EVER is filmed exactly like it was written? Never on any show *I* ever worked on!) This "sue someone" crap isn't new with him.
Oh, and as someone alluded to earlier, he does indeed suffer from "short man's complex". Not only that, but AFAICT from having occasionally been around the man, in his view he's the only worthwhile person in his little universe, and everyone else is out to fuck him over. Admiration from us little fen means nothing to him.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"I am a SF reader and you can be damn sure I'll NEVER buy anything from you again "
And I'll second that. Not one cent of mine will go to Harlan Ellison.
Or, we're using a hardball negotiating tactic. If we sat around waiting for the record companies to provide downloadable music, we'd be here till the Earth stops rotating. For a change, consumers have some power to make the record companies sit up and take notice, and they have. They're now scrambling to develop electronic music distribution systems. Why is that? Just one word: Napster.
Being "moral" when dealing with the record companies would be like being "polite" when dealing with Saddam Hussein. Doesn't make any sense.
Your solution would lead to only "artists" like Britany Spears being paid, while real art remains marginalized.
You seem to be overlooking that many great works were produced before copyrights, and many will continue to be produced after.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
But this is not about forbidding anyone to "create and share software". It's about forbidding people from sharing software that someone else created.
We're not talking about people war3zing Photoshop. Does the context "vicarious infringement against AOL for the development of the Gnutella file transfer protocol by its Nullsoft division" make the discussion any clearer? You may have been a little hasty in snipping it.
Wal-mart?
"...are losing their income thanks to piracy. And it's often the people who like science fiction the most who are doing the most damage to "their" authors."
Are you telling me that for 15 years of reading SF in public libraries I was hurting my favorite authors? Despite the fact that I now pay for any of their books any chance I get? I do not believe you.
There was a huge cry when Gutenburg invented moveable type. It put a lot of illuminating biblical scribes out of business. Now, books, music maybe movies and TV shows aren't going to be worth as much as they were in the past.
We'll either make the change, and maybe put some people out of business in the meantime, or we'll become more of a contraband society. Depending on how the laws go, we could end up with a lot of 'law breakers' and the average citizenry cowtowing to the illusion that etheric data is as real as a granite rock.
Only the unions complained about the fact that technology in the past 20 years made some occupations irrevalent. We progressed through that time and are still here! Now huge corporate media are clinging very tightly to the old ways -- and are getting a lot of government support.
Here's an old metaphisical yarn that nails it on the head:
Evil, in other words.blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Ellison's point about how book piracy on the internet has nowhere near the publicy of the Napster case mirrors an trend I've noticed for a few years now. Books overall are starting to be ignored in favor of multi-sensory experiences. (eg movies). I wouldn't expect for this ever to be as widely known or as contentious an issue. Beyond that, books have always been slightly more open to copying under traditional copyright, so people are more apt to ignore this, since I'm guessing fewer people see something illegal in copying a book than in copying music.
Yeah, pretty much right on.
Nothing like an anonymous coward to nitpick. The situation is not substantially different, musicians get less than 5%, authors get less than 10%. So Joe Author's paperback sells for $7.99 and he gets $0.80.
Assuming he accepts donations to fund his vocation, (a system where expenses approach $0/sale as sales go to infinity) and every reader is honest and chips in $2, he's made about 150% than he would with a publisher. Publishers are just as inefficient as record companies, they should wake up and figure out how to get content on the Internet ASAP.
And I think Harlan is wrong. Reading from a book is still infinitely more pleasurable (and portable, and durable) than reading off a computer screen. He has nothing to worry about.
3 1/ qid=984025534/sr=1-5/ref=sc_b_5/104-7762809-876790 4
Have you heard of "In the beginning there was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson?
Full text available electronically at:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com
Also available in soothing book format for only $8 at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03808159
If I want to curl up with a book and read it, I'm either getting a copy from the library or buying it. Since I like Neal Stephenson, I bought a copy of the book.
Speaking of which, what is effectively happening is Ellison's work is being added to an informal electronic library. If he's going to bitch about this, then why isn't he up in arms about libraries giving away his material for free?
He's tilting at windmills if you ask me.
jc
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." --George Bernard
DIDN'T YOU KNOW? JUDGESARE DEAF. YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UPIF YOU WANT TOWIN YOUR CASE.
...really, though, I've read and enjoyed a lot of his stuff, I kind of expected better from him. I don't disagree with what he's saying, its just that I know he can flame better than that.
I hate to do this but....
Fuck off and DIE. A CD is NOT hard to create if you have one or more actual artists involved, if you don't you have to spend a fortune to get that cheesy manufactured sound that sells so well! If you want to do a classical music album, you require a lot of live-room studio time and the artists for the instruments OR a nice setting and an orchestra, not difficult but potentially costly (unless the orchestra themselves make the recording in which case they can provide the artists and instruments...get where I'm going). If you want to create a pop track you need to pay an engineer to make it sound like you "singers" can actually sing and to master it to sound clean. Actually making a CD (and I don't mean physically pressing one, I mean from deciding to do it to master) is easy, the quality is just directly proportional to the artists involved and their interest in doing it, if they aren't interested you can pay them through the nose to get them to do good work, and thats where the RIAA et al come in.
Video games, though requiring more technical abilities alongside the artistic abilities (wherever you draw the line from code2art), and film are similar, just a lot more expensive (go and buy yourself two hours of film and a camera alone and you'll see why).
Is this the battle of the "pimply teenage twits" Vs the "stupid corporate suits"?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I was interested to hear an actual author debate copyright infringement, but I have the hardest time putting up with all capital letters. Apparently this was as close to how the author sent it as possible, so it seems likely that it was done intentionally.
Using all capital letters is equivalent to shouting, and I do not respect people who start off making their point by shouting.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
How ironic that he name-drops such authors as Heinlein, yet Heinlin wrote a nice anti-corporation short story way back in 1939 containing the following relevant text:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither indivudals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Life-Line, 1939, Robert A. Heinein.
Now this quote was in reference to insurance companies in the face of technology that allows people to see exactly when they'd die. I don't mean to imply that Heinlein, were he alive today, would support file-sharing like this, but it does give a good insight into the situation even from 60 years ago.
about EVERYTHING. If you've ever met the man you know his emotional state has 2 levels: full-tilt and unconscious.
> Software is ideas.
Not quite. Software is implementation of ideas. The source is speech, and could be classified as an idea, in the loosest sense.
> Forbidding someone to create and share whatever software they choose is precisely like forbidding someone to write down their own thoughts on paper and share them.
NO, there IS a difference.
That code just didn't come out of nowhere - someone had to spend time writing it.
If you create something, you have the right to tell people, "please don't distrubite this without compensating me"
Ultimately, it all comes down to ideas and numbers, but until the rest of society gets over the 2-year-old mentality of "THIS IS MINE. YOU CAN'T SHARE UNLESS I SAY" and people learn how to make a living regardless, we're "stuck" respecting other people's distrubition rights (or lack of them.) If you don't like the product, pick one that gives you the freedom to share it.
No, I'm not kidding.
Speculative Fiction? Things like the Trojan Horse Project??? Well, that most definitely explains it. I *hate* the genre.
(8-DCS)
Guess he ought to sue Microsoft and Netscape too. Chances are that these pirate websites that he is also complaining about for posting his work were either viewed with IE or Netscape. They are aiding and abetting the crime just as much as whomoever wrote Gnutella, seeing as both Gnutella and the big two browsers are just methods of viewing content that is posted by third parties, and in both cases the content is in no way related to the people that wrote the "viewer" software, the "viewer" being a browser, or Gnutella.
I'd really like to see how quickly Microsoft would use their gazillions of dollars to shut down this retarded lawsuit and make Ellison their bitch. Somehow I don't think the DMCA would last very long if Gates et al didn't like it.
While you're at it Harlan, why don't you sue the guy that wrote the http protocol too... without that the websites couldn't be viewed either.
What's next, we sue Al Gore because he "invented" the internet??? Or I know, let's sue the crap out of the descendents of Alan Turing or some other notable figure in the history of the invention of the modern computer... without computers after all, those people wouldn't be using Gnutella, would they?
Mechanik
It would be interesting to see what Philip K. Dick's reaction to these trying times of copyright infringement would be. Just from reading his essays I might imagine he would have embraced the current situation rather than spitting venom, if only because he would have wanted to do the opposite of what Harlan Ellison is doing. (come to think of it, didn't Ellison rip on PKD when he was alive over this same beef?)
Harlan Ellison is well known for spitting venom. I see why he's mad, but would understand it better if, say, people were printing copies of his books and selling them. As it is, I doubt he's being harmed any more than a music artist is harmed by bootleg tapes.
Having a searchable text is quite different from having a paper copy of the book. I massively prefer the former for quoting passages and doing research, and similarly prefer the latter for just sitting down and reading a book.
Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest. And as he doesn't offer an electronic version of his books, it isn't really competing with anything, but rather providing a service to his fans that wasn't there before.
But it's his property, and he can do with it what he wants. However, until then I'll much prefer the enlightened perspective of authors like Bruce Sterling. I first read "The Hacker Crackdown" from the library, and then I downloaded the electronic version. Later, I bought the paperback. I greatly appreciate it when an author provides a reference like that to his fans; otherwise, I have to go back home and search through my books whenever I want to find a quote, and that's really troublesome.
Similarly, I have seen a lot of Douglas Adams stuff online, but I don't know if he knows about it. However, I hope he approves. (should have asked him when Slashdot had the interview) In the future, I hope more authors embrace, or at least examine, the potentials of the new media before lambasting and taking legal action against their present fan base. Ellison, are you out there? You listening?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The Stainless Steel Rat is written by Harry Harrison
Not even similar writers.
Who says you'd print it? Maybe you'd just read it once and then move on? I've got a TON of soft cover books at home that I read once and put aside (to be either given away or thrown out). If they were available (cheaply) on an E-Book reader, a lot of trees would be saved...
Just as an observation to show how widely held the "First Sale" rule is, you can also go into your local public library and check out CD's, movies (including DVDs) and, yes, even software.
Obviously he has written some fantastic fiction ("The City on the Edge of Forever" is arguably the best Star Trek episode ever), but the man is a few DLLs short of a Windows app, if ya know what I mean.
It took him forever to write "City on the Edge". One of the Star Trek producers had to lock the guy in his office overnight to get the thing finished. Harlan proceeded to *eat* a houseplant out of the office in protest.
I was questioning whether such action could be legally considered as abandonment. Leaving money unprotected in a public place for any significant period of time certainly counts as such. The argument by IP advocates is that intellectual property can't be abandoned without an explicit action by the copyright holder; this is very different from the traditional concept of abandonment, where an owner's failure to act in certain ways causes the change in status of the property.
I'm wondering if IP in a digitial form, made available to the public without any attempt to safeguard that IP, can legally be construed as having been abandoned or placed in the public domain, because the owner of the property failed to take even the most minimal precautions needed to safeguard it from theft."Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
"Within about a year the only books being published were pornography. . ."
.
That sounds pretty good to me. .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Precisely! You've explained it exactly. And when you bought a copy of a copyright work, you didn not pay for the "right to use that information." You've paid for a copy of that information, and you have certain rights to use that information under the notion of fair use. None of those rights include having a friend make you an additional copy for your use, if your copy has become destroyed.
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve?
All of us. It is extrodinarily bad to pretend that the law that the law says something other than it says. Once we give society the right to have "implicit" laws -- laws that exist and are enforcable entirely on the whims of the people enforcing them -- then we stop being a nation governed by law, and start being a nation governed by whim.
Of course, that is the case already, and perhaps always has been the case, but like all good libertarians I have a notion of the ideal; I also realize that the ideal itself is not a goal, and we would not be served by achieving the ideal, but we are served by working towards the ideal.
Copyright law is fucked. I know that, you know that, and anyone who's spent any time thinking about it knows that. But the current alternative to to tying information to a physical representation is the notion of "license", and license are way, way, way more fucked than copyright -- if we move to a system where all information is licensed, and none of it falls under fair use, we are totally and completely fucked as a society. We must have a legal and reasonable alternative to copyright, or we will end up with a situation where all your textbooks will have EULA's on them. And ignoring copyright law because it's too lawerly doesn't get us there.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
You apparently didn't read what I said. Extending the term of copyright after the fact, and after having received adequate compensation for it, is what is stealing. The creator was given certain benefits: an admiring public willing to pay; a legal system willing to enforce rights; the ability to use the entire output of the human race leading up to the time the creator did his or her thing; in exchange, the contract called "copyright" said that the work would enter the public domain after a certain amount of time. The creator priced the work taking that into account. Then the contract was changed, extending the term (and in a way that is making a mockery of the term "for a limited time" from the Constitution).
If the creator didn't want the work to eventually enter the public domain, then it should have remained private. By making it public (as in, "published"), you exchange certain things for others in what should be a mutally beneficial transaction. Part of that transaction is not being honored.
You say that a creator has to be continually paid in order to be able to create new works. Why? Wouldn't you also find that if someone continues to be paid for what they did 20 years ago, they'd find no reason to continue producing new works? If it takes an author a year to write a book, why shouldn't a single payment for that book be sufficient (e.g. a reasonable year's worth of salary)?
Copyrights do provide incentives to create, and some form of protection is probably justified. However, there is also a price to them. Interlocking rights, especially in things like movies, can be a legal nightmare, preventing many interesting projects from being done. Adaptations and extensions of popular stories are attacked, thus preventing new creations (I hear you cry "but they should come up with original work", and I respond "it is original work, based on other work, just as everything is - that's all part of the whole marketplace of ideas that you agreed to participate in when you made your work public").
As far as patronage, you twist the idea if you think that the only reason to do something is to get a "return on investment". You summarily reject the idea of Karma Points, while ignoring all the foundations that rich people set up. Do they expect a "return on investment" from them, other than the general welfare of all people?
Hmm. If only the guy who invented the atomic bomb could control exactly when and how it could be used. THEN the world would be a better place. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Berinaidan says: So an auto mechanic or a plumber who starts a business, works hard his whole life, and then dies can pass that business on to his widow and his children, who can then continue it or sell it, but an author's work shouldn't continue to benefit his family for a reasonable time also?
That analogy would only work if the auto mechanic's family continued to work on other people's cars without being paid after he died. Imagine a conversation like this: "Hi, this is Susan Ellison with Harlan's Harleys. I must inform you that the 1983 Sportster you bought was repaired in 1995 by my husband, and until you pay for continued use of his creative works you are in violation of the Lieberman-Cheney Copyright Extension Act of 2004..." Nobody is depriving those poor widows and orphans the right to continue the family business of "speculative fiction" after the author dies, but a single written work doesn't guarantee the author's decendants a pepeptual income long after the author has been compensated for that original work. If your hypothetical mechanic's family wants to continue the family business, great! I just hope they know a cylinder from a simile, because nobody's going to pay them for work that has already been paid for. I'm not saying Harlan isn't right to go after people who give his work away for free without his permission; he can and should do so. But going after the uninvolved providers of the medium which was used to commit the crime detracts from his otherwise high moral stand, and the argument that an artist's work should generate income for that artist's descendants perpeptually is irrelevant - not to mention short-sighted, greedy, and just plain stupid. But that's also beside the point.
a) risk is in everything
b) to do anything takes time, the amount of time required to produce any piece of work is proportional to the talent creating it. If you want to get a "good" album out of Britney, you need a lot of time
c) again to do anything ultimatley takes money (if only the money needed to not have to do something else). Other than that it depends on the music you are producing but you probably only need a good mic (up to a few thousand dollars), some clean hard disk recording gear and monitors(including PC can be done for about four thousand dollars up) and an acoustically clean environment to record "instruments" (you need a concrete floored room and a few thousand dollars to put in a suspended ceiling and some damped walls). So entry cost is $10-$20k. Not insignificant but hardly massive.
d) talent. This is the crux, it is only if you are talentless that you need any of your other criteria. Many talented artists have produced great works in near no time or money.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
My point is that your interpretation is NOT the law, it's one interpretation of the law. It's the one the RIAA likes the most.
The other interpretations, which are equally valid until the supreme court rules on them, are that any identical copy of bits is the same. If my CD breaks, I can make a backup after the fact, of yours.
The 'alternative' of licensing everything won't happen without laws like the UCITA. Nobody will agree to a contract to buy a CD, especially a contract that doesn't give them any rights.
And the UCITA violates contract law and is unconstitutional. It may make it in the courts, but if it does, it'll only prove that every judge that upholds it has been bought and paid for. It's against every precedent in existing contract law and it ONLY serves the large companies.
Maybe those will end up being the interpretations of copyright law that win out in the end, but I'm not going to do them a favour and roll over and play dead in anticipation of it. I'm going to assume the law makes sense and follow that.
Copyright law is pretty twisted. Everything you're saying about music is basically correct as per the laws about it, but only because there's one line in the code that states that you only own the physical representation of that disc. (probably somewhere in Chapter 11 of Title 17)
As for what you might be able to do for backup purposes, or 'fair use', that's an entirely different nest of hornets, and everything I've read about copyright law sounds pretty twisted and contradictory. I'm glad you think it's all black and white, but let me be the first to tell you it isn't. For instance, Fair Use would let me make multiple copies for classroom use, or copies for research, which is really what an electronic copy is good for.
Also, another good question would be what constitutes a "library or archive"; I'd consider The Gutenberg Project to be an archive, but I'm guessing the law probably doesn't. However, they are non-commercial, and it'd be pretty cool if they could have copies of everything stored there for us to read. Except that, guess what, there's an expressed prohibition against distributing it in digital format unless you're on the library premises.
In fact, there are special prohibitions all through the copyright code that relate to what you can't do if something is "digital" or "a computer program" or over "a cable system"; well, isn't that nice of them. Remind me to modulate all my books onto audio tapes next time, so I can distribute them to my friends.
Another entirely different ball of wax is the moral implications of the current system, and even its constitutionality. I'd argue that today it would fail tests based in either of those criteria. But since we're just talking about the vast body of law that is Copyright, spread out amongst so many bills, many of them completely unrelated, I'll skip that.
Buying some books *does* give you a right to a copy of it in an electronic format, and I'm happy when it does. In fact, in some of those cases, even not buying the book gives you that right. That's because either the author, or the publisher, or both, is a kindly soul deserving of sainthood, like Bruce Sterling, or Bruce Eckel, or probably a few other great guys named Bruce. Not Harlan, apparently.
Also, if the book is old enough to be in the public domain, (whatever the fuck date Disney decides *that* is) then yes, you're entitled to a copy of it that way, too. That's because Bram Stoker isn't making that much off of Dracula lately, but I'm sure the movie people are. (the book is much better, guys; buy it anyhow)
Now, I don't quite understand the difference between my friend copying a book, and me copying a book. I suppose that's because it's a *legal* difference, and not an actual difference. Like, if our copies are identical, and my copy gets deleted, and I copy his, then in ACTUALITY, they're exactly the same, but LEGALLY they aren't.
Maybe that's why I went into Computer Science; they aren't about to convince me of bullshit like that, but apparently 535 old white guys were convinced by enough money and power that it's in actuality the law of the land.
However, like I mentioned, legality and actuality are two quite different things. I mean, legally, you'd get arrested for personal copyright infringement. But in actuality, almost no one cares unless someone is losing money. And that's almost impossible to track; it's like trying to track the effectiveness of advertising.
Copyright law itself stops no one from copying things; all it ensures is that no one knows if what they're doing is actually against the law. That's why the current code needs to be rewritten. Maybe if everyone knew what intellectual property was, what rights they had to it, and why, we could come to amicable solutions about these issues. But the truth is, I don't know anyone who could rationally understand how we could have this particular combination of laws in place to "promote the arts and sciences". It makes less than no sense.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
don't get me wrong, i'm not against ebooks. i like them for their grepability. i'm just playing devil's advocate.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
Damn shame then that the people who do the hard work (Clue: NOT THE GODDAMN RIAA OR MPAA) only see a minor fraction of pennies on the dollar of what their hard work has earned.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Ellison is NOT wrong
Please check your facts before you open your mouth.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
--
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want??
Around 1998.
Seriously, for the centuries when copying required a lot of effort, it was reasonable to have laws controlling it. When high-speed net access arrived and copying became easier than typing this sentence, those laws became unreasonable. They're not effectively enforcable and laws so flouted and floutable shouldn't be on the books. As a society, we might think about how to support artists and authors in an age where copying is unlimited. But trying to limit copying is futile.
---
I see what's really going on here. Harlan is trying to generate some piggy-back publicity on the coattails of the Napster-Gnutella flap. It has nothing to do with ideas, and everything to do with creating name recognition to increase sales of his books.
When the profit motive is all you have to motivate art, you get cranks like this guy.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
A library is only capable of lending out as many physical copies as they have on hand. If a library has 3 copies of the latest BritneySpiceChintzNBackstreet album, then only three patrons can have it checked out at any one time. If they want to allow for more multiple checkouts, they need to buy additional copies.
Still... what is interesting is the idea that once a work is in digital form, the effort of making an additional n+1 copies is effectively zero. I wonder if you could argue in a court of law that, knowing this, any company that knowingly and willfully puts out a digital version of a work is effectively relinquishing any idea of copyright on the work, because they have put it into a form that basically screams, "Copy me!".
It's like someone leaving a pile of money in the middle of the street, unguarded... and then screaming bloody murder when people start taking it, demanding that the cops track down and throw in jail everyone who touched their pile. In a situation like that, any sensible judge & jury would look at the loon, say "What did you expect?" and dismiss the case.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The equivalent for music would be if I could easily play, copy, or mess with the music data in any way I want. I could even post it on the net or give it to other people. However if I post it, escpecially for sale, I do risk the wrath of the RIAA, since I have obviously taken their copyrighted work and tried to profit form it. (I also think Napster is guilty of aiding this sort of illegal activity).
The GNU equivalent for what the RIAA really wants is that the government mandates that all compilers have a switch so that attempts to compile GNU code without posting it to the internet as free source would fail. Anybody trying to circumvent this switch would be caught by the thought police and thrown in jail.
That is the difference between the two positions.
In a nutshell. Beautifully put.
From his page: "MOST CREATORS PRACTICE THEIR ART BECAUSE THEY LOVE IT"
If that is true, then wouldn't it matter the most to you to get your art seen by as many people as possible? Regardless of how they obtain it?
I can understand his arguement, but the above statement seems to contradict it a bit. He is fighting hard against free dissemination, yet he claims most artists are not rich and earn their livings via other day jobs.
Many of the part-time open source coders derive their "pay" from the pride in knowing a job well done and the feeling of contribution. Just a few thoughts.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
Where exactly did people get the idea that they were buying the information, and not a single copy of the representation of the information?
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want?"
It's called copyright law because it's a law that governs who has the right to copy the information. Buying one copy of a work doesn't give you the right to copy it -- that's the point of copyright. Owning a copy of a song on CD doesn't give you the right to download a copy of the song on Napster. Why the hell ever gave anyone the idea it would work that way? You might believe you "deserve" a copy in any format you want, as long as you've already bought one copy. There are laws that exempt you when you make copies of your own copies for personal use. But that never meant that you have the right to copy the information from anywhere in any damn format you might feel you want.
If you leave your copy of a vinyl record on the radiator and melt it, you don't get a free pass to copy someone else's CD, "since you already own the information." You're just fucked, and you have to buy a new copy. Tough shit.
Buying a copy of a book in paperback doesn't give you the right to get a copy of the book in electronic format, too. I'm glad you wish it did, because I wish it did, too. But it doesn't. If you want it in electronic format, you can buy it in electronic format, or type it in yourself for your own personal use. Too bad for you if the book is not available in electronic format; too bad for you if your friend already typed in a copy, and would be willing to give you a copy. Copyright is there to decide who has the right to copy, and you don't. Tough shit.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
If you leave your copy of a vinyl record on the radiator and melt it, you don't get a free pass to copy someone else's CD, "since you already own the information." You're just fucked, and you have to buy a new copy. Tough shit.
Let's compare apples to apples, shall we?
If it were a CD that I left lying on my dashboard in direct sunlight in Arizona in August, and it's a puddle of polycarbonate when I get back to the car, you're damned right I'll ask a friend for a copy of their original, and that I'll have no compunction about doing so.
--
While Mr. Ellison is rightfully angry about the wholesale theft of his intellectual property. But he, like so many others before him, are confusing fights.
He is fighting against the publishing of copyrighted material on the Internet without any sort of compensation to the author. Many people agree with him and feel every bit as strongly about protecting the rights of artists.
The mistake he and others are making is by lumping the pirates in with the people who merely want multiple ways to view and access creative works they have paid for, all while increasing the profit to the artist himself, and cutting out the bloodsucking middlemen.
It's too bad this distinction isn't made more often.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
At the same time, this is an interesting side to the argument - and one that it doesn't seem is concidered very often. The recording industry (and I use them because the case is fairly analagous) typically says that it's fighting copyright infringement on behalf of the artists. But book sales and book authors are people we haven't really heard from before, and authors typically don't have as rich a lifestyle as many recording artists do.
Does this make it fair to infringe the copyrights of music artists, but not fair to infringe the copyrights of book authors? Well, no, not really. That's the catch. It looks like this lawsuit of his - if he doesn't run out of money - will have some pretty big repercussions on the online music debate, fair use dialog, and general DMCA discussions as a whole.
It's always nice to get some intelligent debate going on /.
You do indeed have natural rights to free speech. In the total absence of law, you can speak freely. It can be dangerous as people also have natural rights to kill one another, but you've got it. You're confusing that people generally let many of their more destructive rights be tightly bound in order to preserve themselves and their remaining rights.
Free speech is not particularly destructive. It is certainly impossible to harm people with speech - libel and slander are the closest we come to that, and even then it's generally agreed upon that it is better to err on the side of free speech, as it has a greater impact than anyone's own repuatation.
Most restrictions on speech concern different harms - the clear and present danger test is what's meant by people invoking the hairy old 'fire/theater' thing. If you say something which will have an immediate AND direct danger to someone, that's not protected. Saying that all Jews should die, is not immediate. If I'm saying it to my cat, it's not even dangerous. Saying that they should all die starting with that one right there, get him, is. Clear and present danger is a hard standard to meet.
The purpose of this though, is not to limit speech. If there IS a fire in a crowded theater, it's your DUTY to yell about it! It is to limit the most extremely dangerous results of speech, and that's such a dangerous thing to comptemplate that we've let in the camel's nose, but we're staunchly against the rest of the damn camel getting into the tent.
Copyright as well, exists in balance with the guarantee that the government will not interfere with freedom of speech. If copyright did not have a built-in pressure valve in the progress clause, it would probably have been overridden entirely by the First Amendment, which came in later. Copyright only grants exclusive rights to authors under the circumstances that Congress sees fit to grant, and even then, those circumstances lose when they face a use that promotes progress more than denying that use does.
Certainly Congress could declare that a statutory exemption exists for peer-to-peer file sharing, but only if both peers are named 'Bob.' It's their call; vague arguments about the natural copyright of authors (hint: there is none) don't apply there.
Moving on to Jefferson, the flame is knowledge. Your knowledge can never be diminished because others have it too. The immediate benefit to you may be less, but one of the best things about free speech is that it can directly help humanity to exercise it. He's advocating that.
For example, I composed a haiku this morning, while I was waiting for the bus. Spring has come early here (Seattle) and the cherry trees around my apartment are blooming. After I finished it, I was rather happy with it. Once I got to work, I immediately sent it on to my friends. Does this mean that because now at least four other people know it that I only can be 1/5th as happy?
No, of course not. This is what Jefferson's talking about. At what point did it become good to decide that the poor have no right to knowledge - that it is better for them to never be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, the way that everyone in civilization has. That it is better for them to forever have to reinvent the wheel just to catch up than to contribute their own insights to society, and thus give _us_ a new, higher point to build upon.
How is it good to deny people knowledge? Offering a reward for creating new knowledge, or discovering something previously unseen is a great idea. To do it on the backs of the people who can benefit from that knowledge, and to make specious arguments for never letting go of that knowledge simply does not do good.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Ah, I know it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I forgot to put in the haiku I mentioned. It's hereby in the public domain (and so are all my other posts - now to change my .sig to make that clear) and here it is:
Cherry blossom time
The wind cannot chill glad hearts
Break up Microsoft
;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Or possibly much worse.
Oh wait. That was your point, wasn't it.
The criminal inanity of this whole thing is that Ellison settled with the actual perpetrator, and now is going after ISPs. Why? Deeper pockets. It's not about copyrights, it's about money -- and not about recompense from damages, but just "we've been wronged and they've got the money to make it right." So whatever moral justification Ellison might have had is long lost.
By this logic, if some guy hits me with a car, I should sue Ford.
But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
But so often that's not the case. Music copying isn't new, just somewhat more convenient than when Metallica's Lars was copying his friend's heavy metal. When a kid with a two dollar allowance has a $5,000 music collection, the music companies aren't losing out. Generally it's the wealthier, honest people who have the conscience to buy copyrighted materials, and are they going to go the Napster route? You hope not, but the more inconvenient and expensive the copyright vendors make it for them, the more you're going to turn away even the honest folk.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Regardless of current legal issues, the information itself is only in your possession for as long as you keep it in your head (or maybe your safe). Once someone else knows the same information, there is no way that you can claim to own it. You can try to control it from that point on, but it has ceased to be yours.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
"Not quite. Software is implementation of ideas. The source is speech, and could be classified as an idea, in the loosest sense."
So I have free speech, as long as I don't implement it? Real speech, if well-crafted and executed, causes effects - and the very meaning in language, according to many philosophers (following Paul Grice and John Searle) is grounded in the 'speech act,' which depends on there being a context to which it is spoken. The fact that effective speech can change the behavior of others (human, animal, machine) is essential to the very nature of speech. Computer language is precisely identical to other language performance here, unless we are to construe special legal restrictions on how we can speak to machines, or have machines modulate our speech - which would be very weird indeed, and nothing to do with the essential nature of speech, but only local social customs - the development of which in this direction should be strongly resisted, in my political and technological opinion.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Information isn't ownable.
Information is "the temperature is 60 degrees", or "your face is ugly", or 2+2=4. A novel is a creation, not mere information. A novel is interpreted idea, processed information, in you like.
It is that simple.
No, you're that simple.
Heh. This is patently untrue.
Works of art are unique - at least for the time being - in that they not only can be reproduced forever at very little or no cost, but that they must be reproduced in order to be used.
If you don't believe me, please check to see if these words are leaping off of your screen, walking across your desk, and hopping in your eyeballs. No? No: you are making a copy of them inside your own head just to read them.
And if you want to, you can remember them forever; I can't stop you. I can't exert the kind of control that needs to be exerted in order for something to be considered property. Define property. What conditions must something meet to be property? The best definition I know is that if it is ownable, the owner must be able to use it, control how and if it is used by others, and get rid of it. With words, I can do the first. The last two are not possible, unless you propose that authors lobotomize their readers and themselves at will.
Works belong to the public because that is their natural state of being. When you speak to me, anyone who can hear it has that speech. It's just like fire - that you give some to me does not diminish your own, and I can spread it to others myself. It is not property, because each copy is itself copied as it's used.
And you seem like a shortsighted person who's willing to give up the future for a little cash right now.
Tell me, what happens when some bright fellow invents a perfect nanotech assembler? If we don't all kill each other, it's almost guaranteed to happen. Then I can walk up to your chair, and almost magically cause an identical one to appear. It doesn't diminish your ability to treat the original as property; you've still got it. But now I've got the twin. And anyone else who wants one can have one too.
Given this power that could let anyone in the world have the best foods, and medicines, and clothing and homes that can be divised, your attitude would continue to enforce famine, sickness, nakedness, and homelessness. Because human inventiveness would have outpaced our social structure, and you are unwilling to change that structure.
Go on - tell me that your future would be good. Justify it. There's no fundemental difference. We have copyright NOT because words can be treated as property - which they're not anyway, if you actually examine the law - but as a carrot. The promise of some additional rewards is to encourage the creation of new works. And yet, that would be pointless if it wasn't for the small print that taketh away just as the large print giveth. That those rewards can only be guaranteed for a limited amount of time, and that the purpose is explicitly not to line the pockets of an author, but to promote the progress of the arts.
The arts advance as people can use that which has come before. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. The artists of the Renissance had to have the Romans and Greeks. The authors of the Lost Generation had to have the authors of the Victorian era. Some small reward can perhaps be justified if the unrestricted work has great effect. Owning it forever stunts the effect irrepairably. That is why we do not do it. The right to speech, and the need for human advancement are infinitely more important than the sin of averice. If a little sin can do a great good, we'll cope. But don't expect that from a big sin.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So have I. Not short books, either, but Tolstoy.
The cake is a pie
While generally I agree that talent is the only decisive factor, there are lots of talented artists that take a long time to release albums. (Pink floyd comes to mind. Or on a completely opposite note, nine inch nails. Both are extremely talented, even if you don't like what they produce..)
-Stu
Could not either of these artists have "rushed" out something quicker should money have been a sufficient demand in their lives? With the talent it's all good baby, without its all barbney dolls.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Damn, 'cause I really like the Stainless Steel Rat series. :-)
Oops...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yes, I know Virginia Heinlein assisted just like I know she was responsible for much of the collection and editing of "Grumblings From the Grave" -- published (by R.A.H.'s wishes) after her husband died.
Does no one understand the concepts of "financial management" and "life insurance"? My family doesn't get a dime from my career after I am dead, other than life insurance and what I have invested/saved.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No my viewpoint would NOT be different.
"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;"
Do you see the word "families" in there anywhere? How about "estate" or "publisher"?
* * *
The answer is "Life Insurance" like the rest of the working world has.
As a network engineer, my family doesn't get squat the minute I die other than my investments and life insurance.
Any support contracts I had aren't payable to my family. I can tell you none of my customers are going to want my 11 year old son working on his WAN switch. (Not more than once, anyway.)
* * *
Second take:
If the publishing cos had the material prior to his death (they previously published or it was public) then let them publish. Anyone could take it and redistribute on the net, etc. This would seriously cut into their profits.
Material that WASN'T public (like Heinlein's "Grumblings From The Grave") would be copyright by his WIFE, since she owned the private documents. They would then obey the same rules.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Do you actually work for a living? How do you make money to eat, live, etc...? Because in the above statement you're saying you do not want to get paid for your work. Just because it may not be fictional writing has nothing to do with it, writers earn money from their work. Do you?
It's in that place where I put that thing that time
So, you'll be sending us all a copy of the latest relaease of the CoManage software then. I can't wait. In the legal system where i live we have the thief in court before the judge, not the victim. So the judge is likely to be saying "And why do you think that the fact that a few other people were stealing the money means that you weren't stealing the money.?" We call that looting. What do you call it?
If you people would just do as you're told, everything would be OK.
>>Not quite. Software is implementation of ideas. The source is speech, and could be classified as an idea, in the loosest sense.
Instead of saying that Software is idea's I would maybe say that "Software is the expression of ideas" Even close source software is an expresion of some sort.
It may be other things as well. But those attributes are added on without taking away from the expresive nature.
>>NO, there IS a difference.
>>That code just didn't come out of nowhere - someone had to spend time writing it.
True. But books are also difficult to write and take a lot of time. I'm not sure I follow you here...
(As a professoinal writer, he should spend more time learning about the caps lock key...)
But seriously, FWIW, it looks like he's going after an actual pirate, so that makes him a good guy. But he's also going after AOL over Gnutella (a multi-user tool) so that makes him bad. If he focuses on just going after the actual pirate and forgets this bogus "vicarious copyright infringement" crap, he will get a lot more sympathy, since he'll be fighting the good fight.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Alexlit, one of the first e-lit sites, which started out with an ubercool collaborative filtering book recommendation system and added on from there.
Mind's Eye Fiction, which Alexlit subsequently bought.
Fictionwise, another e-lit publisher, which, if I'm not mistaken, actually has a contract to publish some of Harlan Ellison's works.
Peanut Press, which publishes e-books for Palms & PocketPCs--and was bought by NetLibrary.
Now, granted, most of what these sites deal in is reprints, and save for Peanut Press, they focus more toward short stories than entire books. But they seem to be doing rather well, even in the age of the dot-com crash.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't isaac dead? if so, do his works become public domain? Just a thought...
Sorry. I'm 30 years old and as I said I can afford to pay for music, literature, and software that is reasonably priced. I make very good money and have been a software developer for many years. I'm not a punk, I'm just some guy who thinks artists and publishers shouldn't arbitrarily choose prices for their product. Products should cost what they're worth, not the maximum the publisher can get away with charging.
---
... at least for me. I do support increased freedom of information (<-- preaching to the choir here, I know ;-) ), as it increases the rights I think that we all have as users of that information. Fair use is not a concept developed to deprive artists of fair revenue, but rather the fundamental concept of being able to derive reasonable benefit from an economic transaction.
Still, I think that as users of information we do have the responsibility to make sure that fair use doesn't cross the line into outright piracy, for as Mr. Ellison is saying, this hurts the creators of the information. The grey areas I think pop up when middlemen try to appeal to the powers that be for increased protections in the name of the creators, when we all know that very rarely would any increased revenue end up in the hands of said creators (e.g. how many people believe that all of the blank audio media levy goes to the little bands who can't afford a stable of lawyers?)
In an ideal world there would be a simple and reliable method of direct (micro?)payment to a creator (in effect compensating them for a "viral" net-based distribution chain). In the real world, I suspect that the "free rider" problem will be a significant roadblock for some time to come ("free rider" refers to the cost of public works that are supposed to be user-supported from voluntary contributions, not everybody pays like they should).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Out of curiousity, how long do you think that will be so? As in there are lots of projects out there (Commercial and OpenSource) that are looking at how to make writing on a computer screen more readable, presentable, comfortable, etc... From the Monitor and video card corps researching so that you can look at the screen for longer periods without getting blurry-eyed, making them more compact and lighter, greater definition on PDA's... Then there's software that nicifies the font so that it looks smooth and yet again more readable....
How long will it be until sitting down and reading a book on your PDA (or whatever) is just (if not more) comfortable than a good ol' fashioned book?
If he's going to bitch about this, then why isn't he up in arms about libraries giving away his material for free?On that, I ain't sure of it but I'd be willing to bet that each book costs more for the library than what we would pay at a bookstore, because they are an organisation that lend out individual books... Anyone want to clarify that?
It's in that place where I put that thing that time
Wow. Poor Harlan screwed up by E-publishing again.
You are implying that the Recording Industry and artists are the same, or more specifically that the recording industry owns artists. If I listen to music that I have obtained, while circumventing a corporation, I have boycotted the corporation, not the musician.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Wow, that rant was about the worst thing one could expect from a professional writer.
What happened to eloquence and subtlety?
What happened to NOT drowning out one's own point by using all caps??
What happened to having one's own lawyer review the contents of the release to assure effectiveness??
Maybe it's just me, but, not only do I NOT care too much about this, but this guy turned me off to his cause because of the crassness, arrogance, and assuming nature of his rant.
Some small timer was copying parts of his books and posting them on a NEWSGROUP? What's the big deal?? How much revenue did he really lose due to that?? Compare that to the cost of a lawyer, and you'll see my point.
Oh well, It's just as well...
Gene Simmons will consume your soul...
Yes, Harlan can be a walking, talking gallon of amonia at times, but he's right: Authors, who aren't the best paid people on the planet, extreme exceptions like Stephen King notwithstanding, are losing their income thanks to piracy. And it's often the people who like science fiction the most who are doing the most damage to "their" authors. Ironic, isn't it?
I'm a working writer. I do understand. I just ALSO understand that electronic copies don't cause as much monetary damage as Harlan Ellison thinks (likely because he doesn't use electronic copies of anything). And I'm NOT saying that uploading pirated copies of other artists' works isn't stealing. I'm saying that it isn't the end of the world if someone does it.
And I DO pay money for Harlan Ellison's work. I'd also really like electronic copies for my own personal use (since I already own print copies that I paid for, what's the problem?), such as keyword searching for academic work etc.
And I think your "rape" metaphor is a terrible way of trying to explain this issue -- especially talking to me. Then again, I'm just Interrobang, and there's no way you could know who I really am.
And don't worry about the RIGHTS to your work. These days, copyright is forever. Enforcement is another question. Monetary damages from lack of copyright enforcement from internet use is yet another issue (and, I think, the most important one). What Harlan (and you) don't seem to get is that electronic copies don't really dent the market all that much. After all, what's worse for writers' wallets -- some electronic copies (considering that books are still more portable and easier to use), or the attitudes of publishers that cause things like literary cliqueyness, the disappearance of the "mid-list", or the vicious declining sales numbers/print run cycle?
Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I have a second copy of the article without the caps. Also on my personal machine. Surprising how much easier it is to read like that.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
No, that is precisely the material point that is important. If you could reproduce his DVD player so that he lost none of the use of it, he wouldn't have any objection. Sony might, but that's the same argument.
I think most people would agree that a person who puts time and skill into creating something deserves something in return. As long as we live in a scarcity-based economy, where we need to "make a living", that return is most likely going to be in monetary terms. Thus, we grant a monopoly to turn an infinitely-reproducible item into a scarce item, to make it fit into the rest of our economy. At the same time, making that monopoly indefinite is also not fair. I've heard authors (e.g. Stephen King) say "why should you be able to make another copy without paying me?". Yet, isn't the reverse of that also true? Why should he get paid for more than the one copy he wrote? The partial answer is, of course, that the price per copy has been set to account for multiple payments. However, hasn't that price also been set to account for pirating? It is a mostly free market, after all, so it must be taking into account most of the relevant factors when determining the proper price.
However, that should mean that the longer the time span of a copyright, the lower the price per copy, as the payback time has been increased. I haven't seen any evidence of that. In fact, as the copyright term increases, an alternate effect of increasing prices because of less competition (from the public domain) seems to be more dominant.
That's not even taking into account the injustice of changing the term of copyright for existing works after the fact; if the only reason for copyright is to encourage new works, there's absolutely no reason to extend the length for works that have already been created. Those works have already received their payback, with prices set based on a shorter term. It is unfair to steal those works from us.
Perhaps a patronage system would work better. Someone with means pays the artist, author, programmer a salary, giving that person the freedom to create without the pressure of producing something that is financially lucrative. Release the results to the public. Results: the patron gets Karma Points, and a popular creator gets more patrons and/or can get a higher salary.
There are two connected reasons this is not a cost-effective solution:
1) There are too many users.
2) They will adopt new techniques like anonymity and encryption.
So you see, whatever force you strain this system with will ultimately just make it stronger. Sure you may break a little havoc at first, deter some poor individuals and crush a few scapegoats. However, at the end of the day you will will just have made the situation harder to contain in the future.
Violence and FUD has never solved any problem completely.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well, all things being equal I doubt anyone would_print_ out a book instead of buying one. Check your paper and toner prices recently?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I found the CAP and SHOUTING too annoying to read the rest of the article.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
To be as pedantic as you are being:
Read your own definition of boycotting as many times as it takes for you to realise that it says that it means to not interact with someone. So when I (as I do) refuse to buy an audio cd, dvd, vhs, cinema ticket or film rental I am boycotting numerous people in the hope that the addition of my revenue to any others who employ the same tack will coerce the interested parties. When I copy the audio via the net or friends OR watch a video in my friends house or on TV I am not in any way compromising my boycott unless I coerced another party into providing contact with the copyright owners (telling someone I would watch a video with them, which I don't, or that I would like an album). Now where in your definition did it say abstain from using?
I will not deny that I am stealing, but afaic so are the MPAA by trying to prevent me from watching dvds how and where I want and are the RIAA by trying to prevent any form of use of their works other than stright playing of original media. When these idiots stop trying to limit fair use and stop trying to extend the law to protect their positions I will return to spending thousands to tens of thousands per annum on their goods. Until then they can get stuffed and I'll miss out on the popular culture until then (I saw the Matrix one week ago when in my friends house where his brother had purchased it, is that stealing? How long before the MPAA start sellign Client access licenses for DVDs to allow me to join in the viewing legally?)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
For conventional books, there is a system in place that will let you try-before-you-buy and check him out. But it isn't online. Basically, you have to go out into the big room with the high blue ceiling, and look for something called "public library."
One thing Harlan fails to acknowledge is that we're not all thieves, and we're not all boycotting artists. I use Napster, not because I'm not perfectly willing (and able) to pay for music, but because a distribution monopoly is forcing me to pay unreasonable prices for music and is restricting access to alternate, more economical distribution channels.
Do I steal music? Yes. Do I do it to get something for nothing? No. Do I do it to screw artists? No. Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha. But I am boycotting the music / literature / entertainment monopolies that are charging me a fortune just to keep their stock prices high. If an artist falls by the wayside then I feel justified in knowing that I did it to offer freedom to 10x more artists in the future.
This is a moral stand, not a financial one.
---
Incidentally, I know several European countries have systems analogous to this one. It seems to do a much better job of supporting artists.
For a few years in the 60's he wrote a TV colunm for the LA FreePress, later collected as The Glass Teat c. and The Other Glass Teat c. Together, the best media analysis of the era.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Seriously, I never heard of him before. What did he write for anyone to give a damn about what he says?
(8-DCS)
A better analogy would be to desolve the business when the founder dies.
This would have the added benifit of preventing megacorps from lasting too long.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
"how would _you_ feel if someone copied your work just before you handed it in to the client and got the cash instead of you."
I fail to see the parallel. Harlan Ellison is not losing money, nor is anyone else taking credit for his works, or selling his manuscripts to publishers. What is happening is books that he wrote are being copied without his permission. No more, no less.
And to answer the question I think you meant to ask: Personally, my work would be Free for anyone to copy, read, translate, or sell. I would be flattered that they thought I was worth the attention.
For those who may not be old enough to have heard the stories of science fiction conventions gone by (let alone witnessed them firsthand), Harlan Ellison, doubtless one of the most talent writers of the 20th Century, is well known for getting, well, worked up about things.
That he has a right to be paid for his unique genius goes without saying. Just try to read the Dark Visions anthology and you will never be the same.
However, I'm not sure that authors should get that worked up about having their works put on the web. I'm not saying it isn't copyright infringement if it's done without the author's permission. But, really, when was the last time you curled up with a laptop?
Gotta have the dead tree edition; otherwise it's not a book. Put it online if you want to. If I read bits of it and I like it or think I can use it, I'll buy the book.
Around the time of Sony V. Universal, the classic "Time Shifting" copyright case. This was reinforced by the RIAA v. Diamond. Learn some history.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
But you bought the book and the right to use the information. The book is short-lived, but there's no reason to expect that the right to use the information is linked to the paper.
That's just ridiculous. Why on earth would anyone think the author or publisher was due more money if you read your friend's book after your was ruined? And if you could go and read your friend's book, why couldn't you copy those words for yourself to read later?
Your right to read your friend's copy has nothing to do with the fact that you previously bought a copy. He's lending you his book. An underlying assumption of the system that makes that acceptable is that while you've got his copy, he doesn't have his copy, and so the amount of unpaid reading is limited -- or, looking at it another way, the pass-along readership is included in the price you paid for the original.
But the fact that you already bought the book once is a red herring.
> but no one seems to ever be able to explain exactly how people are supposed to make a living if they're always giving away the stuff they're working on.
That is what I said: "and people learn how to make a living regardless"
It would be nice for the betterment of society, if everyone could just give their ideas away, AND make a living at the same time, but it just isn't [economically] feasible at this time.
Guess that part wasn't clear enough.
> I'll be very curious to know how you pay the rent when mommy and daddy cut the umbilical cord.
The same way everyone else does. Waive your rights to own whatever your create, since you are getting paid by someone to create something for them.
Information is not ownable. It never has been. It never will or can be.
Let's consider: for something to be owned it must be property. What makes something property? The best definition I know - the one that's not recursive, and is used in the law - is this: For something to be property, the owner must be able to use, control if and how others use, and dispose of it.
When I read a good book, I remember it. And the words on the page don't vanish when read, copies are made, with or without the permission of the author, in my memory. Even the author can't get rid of the original in his own mind. What he wrote, he did so from his internal copy. The author has no control on if and how others use the work, and cannot dispose of it.
That is what makes it not property. If you have a better way to determine what property is, and how information can be considered to be property, I'd like to hear it. But recursive definitions: it's property because it's owned, it's owned because it's property; are not useful.
Furthermore, you're ignorant of even the most fundemental copyright law. In that there isn't one. Human beings have a right to free speech - this includes saying what the other fellow just said. It's a right granted to us by God, and you can be forced not to use it, but you've still got it. There is another God-given right that we all have - the right to shut up - and again, while you might be tortured into speaking, no one can actually make you if you're determined. Authors who don't want to share their works don't have to, but they should not act surprised when people share them too.
If this were not so, shouldn't you be paying the writers who invented words like 'information.' They have a natural right to own it, you said. I doubt that they explicitly gave it up. Better pay up, buddy.
In the US at any rate, which is where H.E. and AOL are both based, copyrights are limited even as they're granted. The clearly stated purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of the arts. (patents are covered by precisely the same clause, btw) Nowhere is there a statement indicating that the purpose is to serve as an author's pension fund, and the original, decent term of 14 years would serve to ram that point home.
Copyrights do not exist by default. They may be granted, if the Congress so chooses (it doesn't have to - there's no natural right to them) but if so, it MUST promote the progress of the arts, it MUST only be granted to the author, and it MUST last for a limited time.
The second clause means that H.E.'s suit is probably going to cause copyright infringement. What right do musicians who don't want their works distributed on Napster have to prevent those who do want their works distributed on Napster from doing so? Well, none.
The third clause makes it very clear that the best state for information to be in, and that its natural state is that of freedom. Free speech is the right to freely tell people anything, no matter from what source it derives. Jefferson wrote that ideas are like fire; when he has one, and is illuminated by it, it does not help others. But if it is shared, it does not diminish the original flame. More light is created - and those people can further illuminate others.
This is not a bad thing.
Yes, it's good that you're rewarded for inventing that engine. (although copyright laws protect publishers more than authors - authors have ALWAYS been shafted. Only now, ironically, with the net, can authors meet the economies of scale that publishers enjoy) But that doesn't mean that you, your heirs, and your entire line through the end of the world should be rewared for your effort. Let them be rewarded for _their_ efforts instead.
And let total strangers with ideas like your own make their own improvements. It's just as bad that Disney doesn't let people make their own Mickey Mouse films as it would be if the Grimm family didn't let Disney make fairy tale movies.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I don't know about you, but generally my behavior is predicated on what is right and wrong, not the law, and the law doesn't define this for me. In the case of copyright, right and wrong are defined by the social bargain we make, creating licensing rights in order to encourage content creation. And if I've paid for a license for X, I should be able to use X in a fairly general way; I don't feel it's wrong for me to ignore restrictions you try to place as long as they don't generally violate the bargain. So, if I purchase a book from you and then someone makes an electronic version available, you're not hurt if I possess the electronic version as well. I've already bought the license, and whether I scanned it or someone else did is really irrelevant to you.
In this situation, we have someone making scans generally available, even to people who haven't licensed the content. It's wrong, but in this case it should be noted that this has little influence on the license sales in general. (None of this "death of copyright" melodrama nonsense.) Once e-books are practical devices, Harlan's publishers should make electronic versions available; only at that point is someone making free versions going to matter. In my 15 years of net access, I've never read a book online, so I doubt it's a particularly widespread phenomenon.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
K. W. Jeter? Author of Noir, Dr. Adder, Blade Runner 2 and 3, etc. -- one of the finest and most unsung SF writers alive. Noir is indeed an incredibly dystopian novel with intellectual property rights as the central theme, and his treatment of the subject is far superior to any whining by Ellison will ever be. Additionally, the punishment is far worse than merely 'death'.
There'll be less users when they dish out the fines, just like less people speed less often when they have speeding tickets and enforcement. Of course, the problem doesn't go away completely, but you don't get everybody doing 60 in a 40 zone either. The fact that a law is widely broken is not good cause to remove it. However, it is good cause to consider a penalty that is effective, without being overly punitive.
2) They will adopt new techniques like anonymity and encryption.
Not very effective. The problem is that encryption excludes anonymity (authentication boils down to proving that you're a person who can be trusted) -- if you want to make the material unavailable to certain parties, you can no longer make it publically available. Moreover, the majority of users will not go to such extreme lengths. Since the effectiveness of the service depends on its size, it's sufficient to diminish its user base.
Violence and FUD has never solved any problem completely.
Well, tell that to the napsterites. THey're the ones proposing some kind of neo-Marxist revolution, where the mob make a "grab" at resources by depriving others of their livelihood. All I'm proposing is fines for those who break the law and deprive others of their livelihood for short term economic gain.
The real assumption is that the person downloading the IP would actually have gone out and plunked hard-earned money down for it. Just b/c I read his story off of usenet in no way translates to my keeping my money out of his pocket. Only if I had intended to by the book but downloaded it for free instead am I "stealing" from Ellison.
I think one of the first things that will have to go in the post-internet IP age is fixed pricing. One Ellison story isn't worth $24.95 to me in an anthology. So I would never go out and buy the book. $0? Absolutely! But the question is would I pay $2 for that single story? Sure, to be in the right (ethically) and to ensure that Ellison gets something for his effort I would pay $2 even if it was free. The problem is that until it is available as cheaply as that and attainable as easily as getting it from usenet, Napster, or Scour Exchange people will still choose free over fixed price.
There is also a second dilemma - if I think the work is a steaming pile of shit, I cannot very well return the story for a refund, as I could a physical book. And until I plunk down the money, I have no idea if I am getting a diamond or a cubic zirconia. This is one reason I feel a business model centered on tipping will ultimately work the best for media online.
Unfortunately, until the artists themselves start changing the way the art is priced (negiotiable instead of fixed) and distributed, people will keep pirating and people like Ellison will keep screaming.
-------
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Hope they are ready for some massive spam. I know at least a dozen people I'm going to fink on. None of them have actually done anything, but when does that ever stop the legal system?
I'd never consider downloading illegal copies of Harlan's work. His stuff isn't worth the trouble.
Cool, its time for Scooby Doo!
I have a mirror taken from another mirror. Someone please mod up the article that announced the original mirror.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
> At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want?"
Fair use - time/space shifting. This part, at least, the US courts have upheld as legal.
Libraries buy books, they don't steal them.
So if 10,000 libraries buy a copy the author gets some money.
If one person puts the book on the web and everyone copies it the author gets not very much at all.
If you people would just do as you're told, everything would be OK.
Penguins love lifetime. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
Harlan Ellison Will never, *never*, give up a lawsuit. This is a man who has mailed dead gophers, and squid third class to people who have pissed him off. He has a very good ability to make people think that he is completely nuts. Harlan Ellison has sued many people over many years and has never, ever lost. Grab a collection of his essays. As an added bonus, you will never see the world the same again.
The only problem will be if you develop software which a juristiction will find illegal AND subject yourself to that legal system. Just watch more and more open source projects become anonymous or created in an appropriate legal environment. If AOL are successfully sued for this I would imagine they would leave the U.S. the next day as Netscape/Mozilla is also commonly used to distribute copyrighted material (as does Windows and IE). Long die the dmca
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
> You seem to believe that an author has the right to restrict what is done with what he writes.
;-) but at the same time, a person has to eat.
;-(
...
Correct. If I write a book, I wouldn't want another company to start printing and selling the book, without paying me a dime. So I agree with the spirit of copyright.
Now, if I was a true artist I would be happy that more people are reading my work
Note: I'm not a writer. I'm a programmer. But exchange book for commercial software, and same argument.
> Copyright has been becoming more and more powerful over the past decades,
I agree. Someone seems to be skipping over that key phrase "for a limited time." Isn't copyright length extended 70+ years from the author's death? So much for "fair use"
> If, despite the expansions of copyright, writers still cannot support themselves with only the money from their publishers, perhaps the "professional writer" as such should not exist.
That's an interesting assertion! Other professions already do that. Such as ministers.
> Of course, we should still respect the wishes of the author out of plain politeness, but the author shouldn't be able to exert complete control over his "creative property."
Yes, thats the crux of the matter! Just where do we draw the line?
e.g.
Extreme freedom: On one hand, restricting people from distributing a certain combination of words seems extreme. If I can copyright a certain combination of words, then what is the minimal # of words that I can "own"?
Extreme license: On the other, people spend time coming up with new ideas (code/books/movies) They need to be be compensated for their time, so they can pay their bills. But it seems a little anal-retentative if I need "permission" to make a parody.
A balance must be reached: in utopia, people would be free to exchange info/bits as much as they want, and the author would be compensated.
The problem is we are no-where close to even achieving something like that. There's a little thing called "greed". Why do companies lobby the government to extend copyright for as long as possible? Because there is money to be made !
One compromise is to have copyright extend 5 to 10 years MAX. If you can't make money off your ideas in that time, then the ideas should "belong" to the public. It becomes "free" as in freedom.
Maybe some day
If you read the article you would see he's suing AOL, which is not even tangentally involved in the copyright infringements he's so upset about, just because people could read, through AOL, the newsgroup where the copyright infringment happened. That makes me wonder what he's really talking about. I conclude that he just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and hes just an all-caps raving jerk.
Either that, or, as I said before, its a brilliant way of getting people to sample his work for free and then buy printed copies.
And hey, while we're at it, did Roger Zelazny die poor because people were pirating his work? You and Harlan should realize that artists have bigger enemies than their fans trading copies of their works (that goes for most of the artists upset about Napster, too).
I don't think so.
Your justification is quite wrong. Radio and TV can be recorded onto a medium and preserved and replayed personally forever. This is not because they are streaming. It is because they are already paid for. Advertisers pay for broadcast TV and radio. Listeners and viewers recieve it for free, just as though they had bought a copy themselves.
Similarly, space shifting of music from CDs to mp3 players has been upheld in court, without coming under the AHRA. (computers don't apply, as they're not specifically recording devices, but copies are still legal)
There's certainly no law that requires that the little copyright statement in a book be truthful. They can say that the sky is green for all I care - it's irrelevant, and it's not the law.
Software licensing is also moot these days. EULAs came about because software didn't qualify for copyright at all. After it did it turned out that Congress had done a literally half-assed job. While there was a copyright on software, there was not the necessary exlcusion on the copies that computers have to make in order to work. (e.g. copying programs into RAM)
That has been corrected. And the same bit of law (17 USC 117) states that backup copies are legal. EULAs can claim to grant that right, but they don't. EULAs are full of beans, and there's no purpose in having them that is not probably illegal or detrimental to users. Check out the law - you'll be surprised how out of date your assumptions are.
Fair use also means that you can copy excerpts from the CD. Or play it for your friends and family. Or use it in teaching. Or space shift it to other media. (which is effectively the same as making a backup copy...)
That IS what the courts and the law have said. You say different? Fine - show me rulings to that effect that have not been voided by changes in law, or overturned by other rulings. Put your money where your mouth is.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
> Forbidding someone to create and share whatever software they choose is precisely like forbidding someone to write down their own thoughts on paper and share them.
Ack! When I initially read that, I took it to mean "forbidding you to share whatever they choose, when someone else created it"
That would not be respecting the rights of the creator of the item, and hence why I said there was a difference.
I see now that both sentences are meant to be the same.
>> It's like trying to ban FTP or HTTP.
I agree. Banning tools doesn't make the problem go away, as much as Rosie O'Dumbell would think so.
>> I think of the "war on warez" the same way I view the "war on drugs".
NOW these ARE different!
If someone wants to take drugs, that should be THIER choice. It is a victimless crime.
But when someone pirates, that is a "potential" lost sale. Potential, meaning
a) some people might not of paid for it anyways, so no lost sale.
b) Sometimes using a package you haven't paid for, gets you a job where you can use the package. If you tell the company to buy the software, was there a "lost sale" in this scenario?
Note: I am NOT justifying piracy, since it is copying something against the author's wishes.
But this is getting off-topic.
Interesting tidbit. If companies are required to list all sources of income and expenses, then why don't they list "piracy" as lost income? Instead of the SPCA pulling numbers out of it's @$$.
I agree on these "wars" - the money could be better spend elsewhere.
I agree. Britney Spears IS art...she doesn't have to sing.
You answered your own question. Art isn't property. Instances of that art may be.
In the case of the Mona Lisa, the tangible THING that was painted by DaVinci is worth more than I'll ever see. In the case of the picture on the Mona Lisa, it's not worth anything fungible. Great cultural value sure, but it won't get you a cup of coffee.
The picture on paintings, the words in a novel, the shape of a statue - that is what is so heavily debated. No one's claimed that the tangible medium doesn't have ordinary, respectable property value.
Me, I'm an artist and sometimes-writer (not a good writer, I'm afraid) and I agree with the earlier poster. I'd rather get paid up front and let anyone who wants to enjoy or improve upon, or copy it to others to enjoy my work do so. It's an old system - patronage works like that, as do a lot of comissions.
I think that there are greater benefits for me personally by myself building on the work done by others on my own works. Linux is a decent example of that, but there are others.
I could certainly tolerate copyright laws of more limited term and scope though. People just need to remember that we only have them in order to accomplish societal goods - if that's accomplished through personal rewards, fine, but don't be blinded by them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Some people don't whore out their gifts, hence the Open Source movement. Some people just don't respect IP. I have very little respect for it. If someone steals my work and says it's theirs, that angers me, if someone steals and alters my work, but gives me credit for inspiration, that delights me.
It all smacks of publicity. His career has been in the toilet ever since his game based on "I have no mouth but I must scream" got panned for being inappropriate. He's been labeled as racist and ant-semitic and he wants us to feel bad because his bizarre little stories that lack the creativity of Ray Bradbury are being posted somewhere. He can't sell his derivitave works, so I say he may as well give them away for free.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
I guess Harlan's getting pissy in his dotage.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
I understand why Harlan is pissed but I really don't think this is costing him anything (other than what it's costing him to sue). He'd do better to try to offer the service himself in some way, and not at ridiculous prices.
People have gotten money for canning human (or animal) shit and calling it art.
So, if art is to be government funded... DAMN.. Talk about a reason for starting a HIGH-fiber diet!
(No, I doubt government-funded art would work.. Besides, what business DOES the government have deciding what is art and what isn't.... And why is the solution to any problem ``government funding''?)
Nope. It's exactly the same books we buy in stores. In fact, they get them cheaper because they work out bulk deals with publishers. It's the same with movie rental places, BTW, except the movie companies have managed to scam the rental places into buying a few weeks before everyone else, and having the prices way up during those weeks. It's kinda funny. If I ran a movie rental place I'd stop this kinda crap. Maybe I'd be two weeks behind everyone else, but I wouldn't pay a 10 dollar extra charge on all my movies. ;)
This basically comes down to something I believe is called 'right of first sale'. Once you are sold something copyrighted, you can do anything with it, except copy it. (At least with a book. There are cases where actually showing a movie to a group of people can be illegal, and you have to pay to perform a play (On the other hand, you don't have to pay to make copies of the scripts, IIRC.), etc. But you can rent, loan, destroy, use as an erotic sex toy, hand out to homeless people, etc, the physical media, as long as you don't copy it.)
Oddly enough, reading books outloud to people is still technically illegal.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Of course, some Baen authors aren't altogether happy with the idea of their books being posted cheaply with no copy protection . . .
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
WTF is Harlan Ellison? The site doesn't say anything, just some rant in capital letters full of question marks.
/. just to turn into a dumb 'ol portal site that has hot grits, that's fine. But if you want us to be actually interested in the stuff you decide to put on the front page, how about giving us some background? It's not a lot to ask for. Or is it?
The article immediately before this one: Bad News from Yahoo. Hello? What's the news?
If you all want
There is a fine line between art, bullshit, and bulldada. Yoko Ono had an art exhibit recently where one of her pieces was a phone that Ono would call up occasionally and call the people in the museum and talk. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. AND TO THINK THAT SOMEONE GAVE HER MUSEUM SPACE FOR THIS. So in a sense, if Yoko can get herself in museums longer than you and I have probably lived, then I am saying that Spears can get her SWEET, sweet shapely ass in a red leather catsuit and sing her damn "Ooops song" off key until her silicone falls out. Its all good in my books. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS IS NOT AN ARTLESS TIME. May I present exhibit A: Barbarella.
"WHY SHOULD ANY ARTIST, OF ANY KIND, CONTINUE CREATING NEW WORK, EKING OUT AN EXISTENCE IN PURSUIT OF A CAREER, FOLLOWING THE MUSE, WHEN LITTLE INTERNET THIEVES, RODENTS WITHOUT ETHIC OR UNDERSTANDING, STEAL AND STEAL AND STEAL, CONVENIENCING THEMSELVES AND "SCREW THE AUTHOR"?"
Why should any artist create new work? Because real artists aren't in it for the money. We create because it's what we do. It's our passion.
As a "creator" myself, it doesn't bother me in the least if my "art" is spread around so long as MY name stays on it. I was never in it for the money or the recognition, and I could care less if no one ever knows my name or buys anything I create. I create for MYSELF and the people who love what I love. Creating is my passion, not copyright squabbles and royalty checks.
I haven't finished reading the rest of this article, but from the tone, I'm guessing Mr. Ellison is a media writer(See: opportunist/media whore)? If that's the case, then I'm not surprised he's whining like a bitch about this. But hey, like any other owner of copyrighted works, that's his right.
"The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Copyright is a set of limited rights..
What would be be saying if Ellison was bitching about how he doesn't have the right to stop parody's or criticisms of my work.
``Goddamned it! I have the right to stop people from parodying or criticizing my work. I made it. It's all mine!''
or
``Goddamned it! I worked hard on that book. By what right does a library have to LOAN it out to people.''
Copyright is, regardless, a limited right, intended to benefit the public. It's duty is not to insure the maximum rate of return to the copyright holder. (And, in the beginning, when the maximum term was 28 years, it actually fulfilled that duty.) The public is benefitted most by having the public domain be as large as possible. Santa Clause, Uncle Sam, etc. [Thomas Nast] None of which would have left copyright until the last decade, had they been created under the current laws.
PS: I have not read his rant. THe webserver 503's on me for maximum-bandwidth.
I read a lot of e-books on my Visor, too. It's a perfect e-book reading machine, and a lot of the time, I'd rather have it than a "real" book. You can't put a dozen "real" books in your pocket.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'll ask a friend for a copy of their original, and that I'll have no compunction about doing so.
What, exactly, makes you believe you're allowed to make another copy of a CD, when your first one wears out or is destroyed? At what point did we start to believe that we owned a copy of the information on the CD, instead of owning a copy of the representation of the information?
I'm not kidding here, either; what makes you think you bought the bits for perpetuity, instead of one copy of the representation of those bits, and only for as long as that representation lasts? At what point did copyright law stop being about the copies of the representation of the information, and start to be about the information itself?
The thing that you have to remember is that once you begin to believe that you've bought a copy of the information, instead of a copy of the representation of the information, we're suddenly much closer to the dark future warned of by Stallman. We suddenly find ourself in a situation where you pay for the information itself, instead paying for a representation of the information. We're suddenly talking about the information itself no longer being free.
The copyright law is totally f*cked, but it does do one thing -- information, today, is free -- it's the representation of the information that's not free. Once we start paying for the information itself, and stop paying for the representation, information stops being free.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I have no sympathy for anyone who would sue a UseNet provider. The responsibility lies almost entirely with the individual poster.
People who rock the boat a lot don't tend to get tenure. This is bad for academia, but it would be fatal for art.
You still have the problem of a concentration of power, it doesn't really matter if its the RIAA or the gov't. However, at least with the RIAA I can refuse to do business with them. Gov'ts are a lot less forgiving of that.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
I was kind of expecting someone to bring up Ellison's nice little vindictive anti-Roddenberry take... you beat me to the punch on the response though. =)
Glad to see Harlan can't get away with obscuring the truth too far... Gene didn't ever deserve the way Ellison treated him. =/
Of course, I only defend Roddenberry so much because he's my hero. =)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Unfortunately, doubtless ppl said "In my 10 years of net access, I've never played a song on my computer". By the time it's damaging authors' incomes to the point where it's more cost-effective for them to work at McD's instead of writing, at which point we're all losing out, then it's a bit too late. After years of ripping free music off message boards, and lately off Napster (it's not swapping - no-one I know maintains a server to distribute their music, they just take), everyone's convinced that it's right and fair, just bcos "everyone else does it, so it must be".
Sure, if you own the book and you get a copy of it for your own personal use, that's fine. But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
Grab.
Depends on what you need to trust them for. For an MP3? Trivial. For anything expensive, probably not.
And this communication doesn't need to be tedious, like using PGP, posting to usenet, monitoring for a message, etc.
It could be automated, made to appear something like Napster (depending on the function.)
Encryption and anonynimity would both add complexity to the situation but most would be hidden in the networking, to the user it'd just take an extra second or two...
I think we need to work on freenet type solutions. I personally don't feel the *need* to pirate everything in existance, but we're not truly free until we can, because laws that forbid piracy and a police force that can track us down for doing it can also forbid and track other usage.
Well, one difference is the rights of the victims involved. There is a right to life; this is fundamental to modern morality, ethics, and law. Violation of this right to life should always be a criminal act.
Copyright, however, is a utilitarian social contract. We (the public) accept restrictions on our right to disseminate information and we accept the responsibility to punish those who violate this compact. By doing this, we compensate the author for the time spent in coming up with an artistic work. The author doesn't have a RIGHT to copyright protection, it's a contract between the author and society. If, due to technological advances, the cost to society of enforcing the contract becomes greater than the benefit society gains from artistic works, then it's time to scrap copyright.
Me, I don't think that's true yet. I doubt it ever will be. However, I do think that the obscene copyright laws the media industry have bought are definitely too expensive and should be scrapped.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Why is it a red herring? The fact that you paid for the right to use that information is the only relevant fact!
Maybe a lawyerly reading of the law says otherwise, but who does that really serve? Why should we let broken interpretations of the law dictate how we act?
The law is supposed to reflect the will of the people. All of the people, not just the rich ones.
It makes no sense that your right to use information is tied to a physical media. That's not information, that's paper. If it makes no sense, ignore it.
Good post man.
;-) Sure, there's no inherent copyright law built into the universe, just as there's no natural law to stop us killing each other. It's all an artificial construct to formalise "fair play", ie. ppl get rewarded for what they've done, and don't get screwed over. Similarly, the right to "free speech" is an artificial construction to try to prevent the powerful from abusing their power. You do not actually have a right to "free speech" under law; there are very definite limits to what you are allowed to say, so it's only free _so_long_as_ you don't say certain things. And penalising ppl who infringe copyright is one of those limits.
:-) But if there's only so many sci-fi readers out there, and some of them read free copies of the book off the web instead of buying their own, that's a loss for the author. Sure, the author often gets screwed by the publisher, but that's no reason to screw him over still further.
/.) or you can relinquish it if you want, but by default, every writer, musician and website designer gets copyright protection. I'd agree that the duration allowed is too long, but that there is a time during which you have absolute rights to your work, I think is essential for ppl to continue investing time in inventing, making music or writing books. Don't forget that book-writing is a business for many - it's something they're good at, so they work at it. Maybe they'd do it in their free time if they didn't get paid, but they damn sure wouldn't be producing as much, and some of the most prolific and famous writers (eg. Asimov and King) turned out their stuff more to meet bills than to produce timeless fiction. That they did produce real quality under those pressures remains astounding.
:-)
OK, let's fight my corner.
And this comes on to Jefferson. Maybe making the flame freely available doesn't help others, but it damn sure keeps you warm. And if you've sweated blood for years whilst those around you have looked down on you, are you to be deprived of the rewards? Can you charge for rental on your flame, or are your neighbours allowed to make any number of copies of your flame, so that the one you spent that time working on becomes worthless now everyone's got one? Stretching the analogy, I know.
Copyright does NOT work as you say. Currently, anyone who writes _anything_ in a tangible form (including computer formats as a tangible form) gets copyright on it under US law. Automatically. You can sign copyright over (as we all do with our posts on
H.E. isn't asking for other authors' rights to be infringed - if they've granted public domain rights to their work, then so be it. If Courtney Love wants to release her songs on Napster, fine, but Metallica have the absolute right to refuse to allow their songs to be made public domain without their approval. It's the rights of existing authors not to be ripped off that H.E. is concerned with.
Grab.
PS. If you invent a word then you are allowed to trademark it, and by god you can sue anyone who uses it without your approval!
This is the "fantasy propaganda" of Patents. The idea that a "little guy" can invent something, take out a patent, and become a millionaire by licensing the patent. In reality, it hardly EVER works out that way. Instead, patents are expensive legal tools used by corporations with VERY deep pockets to go to war against other corporations with VERY deep pockets.
I just saw a fascinating news segment about one of those "inventors assistance" companies. The idea behind those companies is that if you, an ordinary person, invent something useful, you then take your invention to the company. The company employs patent lawyers, who will, at your expense, write up and submit a patent application for your idea, and give you a "list" of businesses that you can then try and sell your patent to. The show was amazing. My favorite was a little old lady who come up with a clever and useful invention, spent her life savings on getting it patented, then tried to find a company to license her patent. They all laughed in her face. One of them told her, "If we wanted your idea, we'd just steal it." And they probably would have. She had no means to defend the patent. She would have had to sell her house before the case even got out of discovery. The costs of suing someone for patent infringement START at about $100,000 and go up. The idea of an independent inventor inventing such a car engine, getting a patent, and successfully defending it against the auto industry is simply preposterous. If you had an invention like that, you'd spend the next 20 years of your life and all your money defending it, and then the patent would expire. Ask Philo Farnsworth. He invented television, got a patent, and RCA spent the next 20 years bleeding him dry.
No, patents are corporate tools that require enormous amounts of money to put to use. A patent is useless outside of a courtroom, and unless you have six figures to spend, it's useless inside a courtroom as well.
Let's revisit your hypothetical inventor. Call him Joe Inventor.
Joe would be unable to build and market his engine himself, because there are tens of thousands of patents covering every aspect of automobile engine design. It is simply inconcievable that he could design a complete engine without infringing on some big automaker's patent.
Let's say he designs manufacturers, and starts selling his 100MPG, zero emission engine.
A week later, Ford brings an infringment suit against him, listing 400 Ford engine design patents that he's infringing on.
Either Joe:
1) Stops making engines, in which case his patent is worthless.
2) Enters a "cross-licensing" agreement with Ford where, in exchange for being allowed to use Ford's patents, he allows Ford to use his patent. If he does this, Joe is screwed. Sure, he has the right to use Ford's patents, but he isn't an automobile manufacturer, and even if he did try and start up a company, he'd have to deal with a visit from Chevrolet's patent lawyers.
3) Sells his patent to Ford. In which case, Joe will get a small amount of money, and Ford will make millions and millions of dollars because they do have the resources to effectively enforce patents, and they have the cross-licensing agreements in place that allow them to produce engines without being sued left and right.
The idea that patents help the "little guy" is sheer propaganda. Patents are what keep the "little guys" out of the running.
It will just go back to the pay system in the 1700s where the medium had nothing to do with the pay scale. Artists exsisted back then, and didn't get seven-figure salaries for it. SOME WOULD ARGUE THAT SOME OF OUR COLLECTIVE HISTORIES BEST WORK WAS DONE THEN. Michelangelo never had a Reebok ad or rode in the back of a Mercedes for a 30 second spot to make money, he just got famous off of being great at art. They will make do if they are artists, but you are talking about a group of whiny celebrities, and that is a different matter.
Your right to throw a punch ends when it hit's my face.
This is true for literal punches, and for metaphorical punches. The punch from artists and organized media to extend copyrights from 28 to >95 years (not to mention the DMCA) is a horrible punch toward the public. Toward the first amendment. A horrible punch which they have no right to throw and to hit.
Artistic works in the public domain benefit the public. Artistic works not in the public domain do not.
Imagine a world like only a centrury ago where copyrights had only been extended to 42 years. Star Trek (ToS) would be barely a decade from leaving copyright.. I Love Lucy would be coming up soon. Mickey Mouse would finally join his peers Santa Clause and Uncle Sam... Rudolph could join the other 8 reindeer in the public domain. (Rudolph was created about 40 years ago)
By assuming that artists have natural rights to artistic works, as compared to rights explicitly granted them under law, you do us a disservice.
Artistic works are never property. The rights granted by law to artists may be sold or transferred. The artistic work is owned by the public from it's inception.
I want to see the day where I can buy directly from the creators so that they are rewarded instead of the crime syndicates that currently take all the money. Books are a little difficult - it's easy for me to publish and sell my own music, but printing books is quite expensive. Hopefully e-books and quality, cheap readers will change that.
Quick, name a successfull e-book publisher.
Couldn't think of one in five seconds? Didn't think so.
Face it, even legit, commercial publishers aren't having much success. Nobody wants to read a book on a computer screen: you can't curl up with it and it strains your eyes. I doubt he's losing revenues to people who are reading it on the computer screen. That's why publishers are so far less active than the RIAA w.r.t. attacking online sharing. Of course they're running scared; that's where half of the doomed etext companies come from in the first place. But they aren't nearly at the stage yet where they're losing revenues.
(/me grumbles that there's no politically safe center between "piracy" and "sharing")
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
"Not very effective. The problem is that encryption excludes anonymity (authentication boils down to proving that you're a person who can be trusted) -- if you want to make the material unavailable to certain parties, you can no longer make it publically available. Moreover, the majority of users will not go to such extreme lengths. Since the effectiveness of the service depends on its size, it's sufficient to diminish its user base."
;-).
I believe it should be possible to create an encrypted karma-based peer-to-peer network faciliating anonymity, without having authentication being an obstacle. However, it would still be pretty promiscous. In such a network, you could potentially deal with an undercover agent, but so could your RL friend be. It'll be East-Berlin all over again. So, I'm not proposing a solution that will "nuke" the battleground, only that the game will harden. Just take a look at FreeNet for ideas.
"Well, tell that to the napsterites. THey're the ones proposing some kind of neo-Marxist revolution, where the mob make a "grab" at resources by depriving others of their livelihood. All I'm proposing is fines for those who break the law and deprive others of their livelihood for short term economic gain."
Congratulations. You have discovered that in every conflict there are no good-guys, and no bad-guys. That's just a manipulative tool to spur the situation further. The truly wise guys stay out of it (too bad I'm not one of them
I have no belief in vandalism or depriving others' livelihood. Likewise, I have no belief in control or use of violence, threats or undercover agents to further goals of a few powerful people.
Real-life scenario, one of these really annoying things:
However, buying games that cease to work because the CD-player/OS becomes/is defective, has taught me one thing: Either I'm not gonna buy another copyprotected game again, or I'll install a crack so that I can play my legally bought games! Basically, people will not tolerate crap for too long.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I just happened to notice a few particular things after reading his rant (I HATE ALL UPPERCASE):
1) He will never ever notice any sort of impact until ebooks are better than regular books. Maybe ten years from now, who knows..
2) It has never been the intent when pirating media to hurt the artists themselves, but instead the middleman distribution control who are pimping the artists' works.. I'm sure it's different with books and publishers than with the RIAA, but I've never heard any numbers of what kind of cut from book sales do popular writers get? How much more/less do writers get from unit sales compared with musicians?
3) Advertising the fact that people are getting free stuff 'illegally' will only increase the number of people getting free stuff. "I can download Ellison from the newsgroups? Sweet!" or something...
My new catch phrase is: "I NEED A NEW CATCH PHRASE, BABY!"
He cannot be fighting for the theft of any of his artistic works... For he has none. There can be no theft of any artistic work.
He has exclusive rights granted by him under law which may be infringed. He may be angry about the widespread infringement of those exclusive rights.
Artistic works under copyright are owned by the public upon creation. The government gives artists explicit and exclusive rights under law. Those rights may be sold or transferred.
By calling it theft, you do us a disservice.
I think banning gnutella (or for that matter, Naopster) is a stupid idea. There's nothing wrong with the software, however the software can be abused and abusers should be dealt with. I agreed with his sentiments, but I thought he should have gone after the users and sued them into bankruptcy. (I only skimmed it, the all-caps was hard to read but I get the impression he went after AOL which just seems wrong.)
I think of the "war on warez" the same way I view the "war on drugs".
Except using warez isn't really a victimless crime. IMO they should take a different approach -- go after the users, but don't use criminal sanctions. Fine them instead. If you're not locking them up or imposing criminal records, you can fine everyone (but you can't lock everyone up). Fines also would be an effecive deterrent, since the users are only motivated by saving money (whereas criminals often have compulsive traits that render deterrents ineffective)
Most brilliant writers struggle to make a living, but remain mired in annonimity. The internet has opened up new avenues for promotion of good writing. Readers promulgate in online forums to recommend works to each other, and trade samples.
When the advent of a good electronic text reading system arrives, then the creative will finally be freed from the tyranny of the publishing indrustry.
"We learned that "Shaker" was actually Stephen Robertson, a 40-year-old living with his parents in Red Bluff, California."
I'm sorry, but to me that just sounds like they're making fun of the guy. That information serves no purpose in the lawsuit.
If "Citizen 513" uses a Canadian E-mail addess, kept his files on a Russian server, and they "aren't sure of anything or even if he is male (assumably meaning they also do not know what country 'he' is a citizen of)," can he be included as a defendent in an American lawsuit? It would seem like the individual would be out of US jurisdiction, at least until citizenship is established.
first respect the rights of *other* authors before complaining about people infringing on his rights. Do a search on his "Last Dangerous Visions" project if you don't know about what is probably the most infamous scandal in SF. Nobody is without sin but this is just too ironic for words.
I think Mr. Ellison is a very smart guy, and I've always had a lot of respect for him. But this is sad and disappointing.
Software is ideas. Harlan Ellison is stepping beyond the issue of copyright infringement and is now arguing that we should restrict people's ability to create and share their own ideas.
Forbidding someone to create and share whatever software they choose, is precisely like forbidding someone to write down their own thoughts on paper and share them. He is attacking the very concept of free speech. As an author, he should be ashamed.
Thanks for the clarification... But however I did find out that libraries and archives have particular restrictions and mentions in law or so I took to understand it, now not being a lawyer (and going brain-numb when reading legal docs), I didn't understand it fully, but essentially the legal rights of a library are different from the legal rights of an individual when it comes to copyright...
Anyone know where that line is? Can I just build up a collection of books/cd's and call it an archive/library (under law)?
It's in that place where I put that thing that time
So would you think that the availability of a way to obtain electronic books and read them quite comfortably has impacted on you purchasing actual paper based books?
Because if so, it suddenly makes the claim of "it isn't effecting book sales" null and void, at the moment it may not be much of an impact, but it's already starting...
It's in that place where I put that thing that time
Still for the Harlan Ellison thing as well as for the film makers, at least one copy was bought. Also, this process is fairly agreed upon by now, where we are just now working out the net stuff....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Yes, he's an award-winning writer. Unfortunately, he does have a habit of getting worked-up and freaking out about things he doesn't know enough about to get freaked out about. I actually rather suspect the ALL CAPS was a result of lousy transcription by the website people.
First of all, Harlan is not an AOL user; he's a NON-user. He's probably used a computer maybe 5 times in his entire life. He still writes using a manual typewriter, AFAIK. So he probably doesn't understand that internet copyright infringement not as big a deal as it sounds...or that downloading isn't precisely theft, because the "original" isn't gone; it's just been duplicated.
Secondly, since he's a non-user, he has no idea how useful a keyword-searchable copy of his work could be (I did my senior undergrad thesis on Harlan Ellison in 1997; I sure could have used it then) -- OR how much of a pain in the @$$ reading off of a screen for long periods of time can be. Or that books still work in bed, in the bathroom, on public transit, out camping, or anywhere else much better than hand-held reader appliances.
So if you think you might have something cogent and (above all) POLITE to say to him about this, write him at:
Attn: Harlan Ellison
c/o HERC
P.O. Box 55548
Sherman Oaks, California (USA)
91413-0548
Please be sure to include your name, address, and phone number in your letter. He prefers to reply, if necessary, by telephone, because it saves time. I wrote him once, and he called me. We chatted. In person, he's a really nice guy. He just has a nasty public persona, which is why it's so important to be polite. He'll be nice if you be nice. No nasty flame-mail to Uncle Harlan on my account, please, guys. If you are rude to him, he'll just go to town on your @$$...and he's far more nasty at his worst than you could ever hope to be. So be nice, ok?
Interrobang, Ellison Fan since 1988!
PS--The "acronym" thing was just an Ellison joke. He knows what "acronym" means...it's just funnier that way.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
That's actually really funny.
.MP3 that I got from a friend, and I've never managed to pay attention to it long enough to listen to it. I've seen the movie a couple of times, and I bought the first few books (and read the first two a few times; I lose interest in the middle of book 3) but I'm not a big fan of the whole "books on tape" concept, and generally can't pay attention to it for long enough.
:)
I bought a copy of "Bureaucracy" years ago, because I love Infocom games, and I never knew that was his until now. It's great, but I never did finish it, because it's hard, like HHGTTG (the Infocom game) is hard.
I also have a copy of those tapes as
So if I ever manage to listen to the radio show for a substantial amount of time, (like, more than 5 minutes) I'll buy a copy, now that I know that I can.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
IF you are talking about art stopping alltogehter because of copy issues. GIMME A F'N BREAK. Humans will always express themselves. Please use some historical perspective here. You are talking about a celebs rights to get stinking rich off of the chokehold on a medium and calling it ART. Artists will always be around. Van Gogh was nutty and never got rich, but everyone loved his work. Warhol never made N'SYNC money. Who are we protecting here? Celebs or artists who will become a symbol for their times? Come to think about it, today Warhol's originals would have got slapped with a lawsuit by Campbell's the moment a lawyer set eyes on his work.
"you're saying you do not want to get paid for your work."
I do not want paid for my already-completed works. I expect to be paid for doing work for someone else. Huge, huge difference.
We were talking about intellectual works - why the sudden change of subject?
Presumably, you earn money from your work, and so do I. Trading hours for dollars is not what I object to. Treating copies of information/art as property is not what I object to. Treating information/art itself as property is what I object to.
The copyright on a written work stays active for something like 70 (or was it 120?) years after the author's death. The revenues go the author's family, and they can re-up the copyright IIRC. So for all practical purposes, under the current rules, copyright may as well never expire.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
OK... some of my other responses in this thread were clear abuses of the +1 bonus -- go mod down my nasty replys to that troll pb, if you want to use some points.
But the above is certainly not a troll. When I say that the erosion of copyright law, so often touted as making information free, is paradoxically doing exactly the opposite, I'm being very serious.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Somewhere along the line someone paid for it else it wouldbn't be on the net. One thing he forgets is that any publicity is good publicity, and after last checking research says online reading will not replace a good old book.
Well a link or two for reference would have been nice.
Such high expectations. Personally I doubt it would affect anyone other than himself when the sh## hits the fan. See others (even Stephen King) know the risks associated with the Internet, and again I will restate studies show people will eventually buy it if they like it enough. Its the same rants about Napster ya know.
This sounds like a dramatical emmy award winning rant. How much can someone profit by posting a link to a book. Lets take the prior Yahoo article, shit they aren't even making money anymore, so where does this "e-tard" come off thinking he's missing a million bucks from his pocket
This is some funny stuff before I go through the whole thing a solution for the author would be as simple as not using his work on the net.
Art imitates life
360 degrees of Karma
His editors probably usually fix such things.
"Harlan's having one of his spells again. He sent in a manuscript printed backwards."
"Well, get a mirror or something."
Welcome to your new futuristic dystopia. Just for the record, I've read some of your books, but never bought them. I borrowed them from friends, or from the library. Li-bra-ry. Look it up, foamy-face. So I've read your works, but you don't have a red cent of my money. And all this happened before the internet. In-ter-net. Why don't you put down the keyboard or dict-a-phone or quill or whatever it is you're using, call your publisher and say "Hey, dipshits, why aren't you publishing my books in ebook format? I've found a market for it."
Yeah, on the face of it, someone's publishing your works without your permission. That's wrong. Bla bla bla. But do you sue the post office when they deliver junk mail? Say that I were to whip out my line-O-type machine and set myself a few galleys of your work, print it up, and mail it to my friends. Who's at fault? Me, my friends, or the post office that delivered a piece of mail that had printed on the envelope "Copies of Harlan Ellison's Novel"? You'd say "Well, you, of course, you rat-faced jackass." and you'd be right. I printed it and used a public utility to distribute it. And, while ISPs and web sites that accept unmonitored content may be private companies, they have the status, for better or worse, of public utilities. Like the Post Office.
So, yes, we all want to read your books for free. And we do. At the library. Because nobody but 40-year-old bachelors who live with their parents read e-books. And if you shut down the libraries, I'm going to beat you over the head with Ray Bradbury.
--A pissed off fan
Admittedly, once Microsoft made their evil changes to Linux and closed their version of the source under such a scheme, they would have no legal recourse if everyone started distributing the binaries online. But the source would still be closed, and that would make many people who support the free IP position very unhappy. Cans someone who is more clear on the philosophical viewpoint of guys like Richard Stallman explain to me how this is all supposed to come together?
And you're absolutely right - by my standards, I would say Ellison does have the right to bitch. His stories are available digitally, for a very fair price. Perhaps instead of bitching and suing, he could help foster awareness of these types of sites and how they actually empower artists while being fair to consumers.
Thanks for the heads-up on a very cool site. Just from quick walk-through I can already see quite a few stories I would love to have in digital format.
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We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Is it ironic that a copyright argument is couched in that style?
Nope.
Time/space shifting applies to streaming media - basically, radio and TV can be recorded on some medium and replayed. Recording tapes off a CD is illegal, although everyone does it. In the front cover of every book is the copyright agreement for the book. It says very clearly that it may not be reproduced by any means, INCLUDING ELECTRONIC. Same for CDs.
"Fair use" means you can use your CD in any CD-player anywhere you like, and you're free to sell it on second-hand. Same applies to books. You do NOT get a free license to copy it, EVER. No court has ever said this - it's completely in violation of copyright law. And if your original copy wears out, you have to buy a new one. Software licensing usually makes an exception to this, allowing you to make a backup for recovery purposes. Copyright on books and music has no such exception.
Grab.
I'm sorry, but the library PAID for those copies of books. Exactly who are YOU paying when you copy a book and put it up for everyone to read?
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I could go into any small out-of-the-way town in the US with a couple of heavy machine-guns mounted on a truck, kill everyone, and leave undetected. Come to that, Bill Bryson quotes a figure of a dozen or so serial killers wandering around America, killing at random - no-on knows who they are, their victims never survive, and they're careful, so they're unlikely to be caught. So should we dump laws against murder?
Sorry to take it to extremes like that, but the law works to say "This is what is right". If it becomes easy to do something illegal, there's no magic that suddenly makes something illegal become all right, it just means that it's easier for ppl to do stuff that's wrong. Adults are presumed to know the difference between right and wrong - it's only kids who are assumed to need someone standing over them all the time to keep them from doing stuff they shouldn't. Maybe this illustrates the intellectual level of those engaged in copying over newsgroups...
Grab.
This isn't the first time Harlan has complained about author's rights. See these two examples from the IMDB...
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I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
What, exactly, makes you believe you're allowed to make another copy of a CD, when your first one wears out or is destroyed?
Er, how about that purchasing the CD buys you a limited license to play the tracks? Look at the "resale" clause on your CD sleeves (or in a book, DVD...). Understand that the license is a separate asset. It's tied to the ownership of the medium, but not its existence. Your purchased license doesn't evaporate if your CD does.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We are at a period in history where rights have gone out the window. What we've got is a mishmash of utilitarianism, and "everyman fo himself". It's the philosophy of Global Megacorp, and it's the philosopy of John Q. Warezer. Get over it. If your way of making a living is based on restricting the flow of information, like Ellison, then you had better start looking for a new line of work.
Welcome to the future!
At least in the music business. Here's an interesting analysis by, of all people, Courtney Love, on how even the most successful musicians make almost nothing off of their sales - RIAA members pocket well over 95% of the cost.
Let's assume this holds for books too (may or may not). If Harlan Ellison will let me give him 7.5% of the cover price of his stuff at his website, I'd be happy to - he'll get more money that way. I will gladly pay a buck or two direct to the artists for an album - that's more several times more than they get now. But I'm rapidly losing interest in giving a single fucking dime to publishers and recording companies which are trying to eradicate people's fair use rights while paying their artists less than 35c on an $18 CD. If their business model requires that kind of markup, they deserve to die a revenue-hemorraghing death.
When he screams remember he can produce something like this against motherhood and apple pie -- and I think he did do one against the flag in the 70s.
Reading something into Ellison's writings is like saying Stephen King writing about the government being spooky is any more than Ellison.
Ellison is the proverbial little guy, by that I do mean short, with a chip on his shoulder. His first famous public confrontation was with Asimov at a Worldcon where Asimov suggested he stand on a chair so he could be seen.
This guy is a pro at the polemic of outrage. That said, lets look at the content.
No new content in this on the current issue. Ellison has been raving about this sort of thing since I first met him at a Worldcon in DC in the 70s -- he spoke to me for reasons I attribute to a liquid lunch. There he interrupted a panel discussion by several minor pulp magazine publishers with a speech on how they were delaying and even not paying their writers they published. I also remember a similar diatribe published in the early 80s.
This could be a rehash of that speech with the context updated. It is old material for him. At times I suspect his mother died because the publisher of his writer father didn't pay on time to buy the medicine or some equally formative childhood event.
Regardless, it wasn't Harlan's dumb idea to put something on the web in all caps.
You foolish idiot. Go ahead, tell all your friends that you are a thief using napster. Then watch them watch you when you visit. You thief. Let everyone know that this is what you are. You use Napster. You are a thief. You destroy peoples lives.
Society uses markets to distribute that which is scarce. A market is a means to distribute resources to those that create or meet the needs of the public.
In information goods, where the cost of reproduction of is negligible (i.e. digital music, software, e-books), the scarcity now turns to the talent, creativity and knowledge required to build those goods. Resources should flow to those individuals that are successful at fulfilling the needs of the market at large.
To allocate these resources, there needs to be a control of some sort as to how they get remunerated. That is why we need some form of intellectual property. One can only ensure remuneration if there's control involved -- whether in law or technology.
This only works in a world where there are still scarce physical resources that can be distributed. Of course, in the world of the nano-assembler, the market is only necessary to prevent people from consuming too much of certain things (to protect rights, the environment, etc.). However, In such a world, the need for property rights more or less goes away.
-Stu
(score -1 Bullshit)
A high quality album, or piece of software is quite hard to create. "HARD" means
A) risk
B) time
C) money
D) talent
Anyone can whip together a piece of shit easily. A good work requires tremendous effort.
-Stu
As some point, are you going to answer the question about what rights you think you have when you buy a CD? I know you keep saying "Copyright law", but what do you think that covers?
For example, have you ever organised a public event involving playing music over a PA? I'd be interested to know how US or state copyright laws deal with that. In England, we have to buy a per-event public performance license which entitles us to play any music (I don't know if we also have to own the associated media or whether that covers an MP3 ripped from Napster). The money raised goes into a fund (along with broadcast license money) which then gets distributed to the recording industry pro rata on sales i.e. it goes into execs and major artist pockets, regardless of what gets played.
Do you believe that your purchase of a CD means that you can play it to several thousand people at a pay event? If not, why not? It's your CD, right? What's the difference whether you play it alone, with a few friends, or for a few thousand friends?
(As an aside, what's "American Copyright law"? Does that cover the USA, Canada and Mexico?)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I am definitely no expert in US copyright law, but have a fair knowledg of continental European copyright law. Thanks to the Berne convention these copyright laws aren't that much different all over the world. And according to copyright law, it governs the so-called corpus mysticum, which in modern English are the bits of information themselves.
This is exactly why copyright law cannot prevent you from selling a book you have bought legally, but can prevent you from copying the book. It protects the ownership of the information, not the representation. The representation is a physical object, which is subject to property law, not copyright law.
So if I buy a book, make a hundred copies of it for my own use, burn the original, I am still perfectly entitled to the ownership of the hundred copies. As soon as I am lending out one of these copies to a friend and keep reading on of the other copies, I will be in violation of copyright law. We are already paying for the information and its distribution costs. The representation are part of those distribution costs. Not to mention the hefty profits made by those who specialise in information distribution. It is inherent to copyright law that information isn't free and will only be free if the author sets it free. If you want information to be free from its creation, you have to abolish copyright law.
The GPL is a clever hack of copyright law, turning its purpose of enabling copyright owners to restrict the free flow information into a restriction to the extent you can restrict the free flow of information.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Um Harlan knew Heinlein and Asamov and a lot of the other of the first generation SF authors. And had been a SF writer for more than 40 years. Folks selling books and stories is how Harlan Elison pays his bills. THIS IS HIS SOURCE OF INCOME. By downloading his works of the net instead of buying to book you are taking money out of his pocket. This is theft pure and simple.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Can you give any references to this idea that I get a "license" with a book or CD? Can you point to where such a thing exists in law or practice?
My understanding is that the only things that are "licensed" are copyright materials that require a "license" to copy, where copying is a prerequisite for use -- the idea apparently being that buying a copy of some software such as Microsoft Windows is not sufficient in itself to run the software, because to run it must be copied into memory, and the copyright owner only provides you limited rights to copy the software into memory, and only under the terms of the license agreement for the software. Naturally, many people are disturbed by such license. I have no idea how they stand up in court.
I also believe that periodically some publisher will try to put a license in a book, but those license almost always have no legal standing -- they're of the same level of validity as the following license:i.e., they're very pretty, very official looking, and entirely baseless.
As it currently stands, I understand that the body of copyright law provides me with certain fair use rights to copyright works, regardless of any resale or license clause the copyright holders may wish to impose. I do not believe that this these fair use rights are some type of separate asset tied to the ownership of the medium, but not its existence. I have no idea what it means to own a vaporized CD, and I have no idea why ownership of such a thing would provide you the right to copy someone else's CD.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I don't think there was a change in subject, work is work, whether intellectual or physical in nature, some people work either for free or for a low wage in the understanding that they will possibly get paid for their work in the future, usually in basis of royalties. Others work for a wage, with sufficient immediate reward for the work they are doing.
Treating information/art itself as property is what I object to.Both have done the work, both should be rewarded for the work, the only difference is time-frame.
On this point I partly agree with you, but the distinction I make is that the person who created/discovered that art/information should in some form be compensated/rewarded for it. Currently that seems to be through royalties/copyrights etc.. Not an ideal method (witness the excessive profits of RIAA members), but the currently proposed replacement seems to basically be: screw the creator I want it for free!
As to "Trading hours for dollars is not what I object to." as to strict I get paid for the hours I work, that I don't think will work in a capitalist environment, because of demand. For myself I would qualify it with "Trading risk and hours worked for dollars" because if I'm going to be risking my life-savings, career, not getting paid for it (etc..) by doing a project, be that writing a book, working on new technology, researching ... I think I deserve at least a little more than the money I would of earnt by the hour. But thats just me.
It's in that place where I put that thing that time
Besides, how many of the so-called artists being "stolen" from are actual artists. The songwriters and producers make most of the money off of people like Britney. They developed a product and they sold it.
Do you have a problem with this? Any pretty girl with a good voice can do Britney Spears' job but very few people can write or produce hit records. The people who deserve the money are the song writers and producers not the dime-a-dozen poptart teen idols.
Now take a look at a band like Fugazi. During the 80's and 90's major labels offered them millions of dollars to sign with them but they never did. Instead, they produced their own albums and sold their own product through distributors, catalogs and at shows. For $8 when most CD's cost 14.99. And you know what, they sold millions of albums and there are a lot of other artists out there doing the same thing. I'm looking forward to the day when more artists ditch the labels and sell their product over the internet. It's happening for some and hopefully more real artists will follow suit.
What I don't understand is why people keep thinking that Napster == money to the artist. Napster is about getting music for free. It isn't about buying music online, paying artists directly or supporting independent artists. Napster screws the RIAA and the artists even if they are independent or not. Slashdot recently had an article where an independent group with a strong web presence (TMBG) that supports online music expressed reservations about Napster for circumventing the connection between the band and the artist.
As for your friends who signed ballbreaker deals with the RIAA labels, they should have gone independent instead. Most of the music I listen to is from independent groups that were too hardcore for the RIAA labels or didn't fit their expectations, yet these artists are now richer than most RIAA artists who sell twice or thrice as much as they do because they didn't sign any ballbreaker deals, massive advertising nor having to sellout.
NOTE: I am not against independent artists (I listen mostly to non-RIAA groups) nor am I against paying artists directly (i.e. Fairtunes). I am against people obtaining free music then claiming that using Napster somehow benefits the artists.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Milinar
Software is speach.
Everyone should have the right to think about whatever they want to. And when they figure something out they should be able to tell people.
That's why laws against thinking about encryption technologies are wrong. And why people should be able to program and distribute file sharing utils like gnutella.
Sure, some programs may threaten big business. But as long as they don't threaten anyone's life they should be allowed under the first amendment.
I did read the article, but my point is simple. Having text in an electronic form can be far more useful than having it trapped in a book.
Just because I have the book doesn't grant me an electronic copy; either the author would have to make it available, or someone would have to type it in.
Now, I agree, if someone doesn't pay you for it at some time in the first place, that's wrong, and I'm against that too. But it's much nicer if an author can make it available in more than one form, and most stuff by Ellison I can find in used bookstores--do you know how much money he gets for *that*?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
His point is simple, copying a book is the same whether in printed or electronic form. If someone can read it online they _may_ buy a copy, they might just print it out.
We can all get high and mighty but at the end of the day he has a point: He does this for a living, how would _you_ feel if someone copied your work just before you handed it in to the client and got the cash instead of you.
It is the same issue, just because it happens to someone else doesn't mean its right.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...is this the opposite of a "MAKE MONEY FAST" letter?
I think you may be confusing some things here. HE wrote a story about a DOD computer that starts a war to kill off humanity ("I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream") and another about a soldier from the future that goes back in time to prevent a war (IIRC, "Soldier"). After "Terminator" came out, HE said that it was a great movie, but wanted to have some credit for 'inspiring' the story - a soldier goes back in time to prevent a war caused by a DOD computer to kill off humanity.
PKD wrote a story called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" which was turned into "Total Recall", which probably had little to do with PKD by the time Arnie and Verhoeven got through with it. I've never heard anything about HE accusing PKD of ripping him off, and since HE doesn't tend to bottle up his feelings (obviously), HE probably wasn't too miffed...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks