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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?
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.
>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.
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
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)
Burris
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.
Wow, you're especially brilliant today, aren't you?
What? This is a lawsuit, not an SF story? Never mind.
__________________
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
---
Come on. I'm all for copyrights but what kinda mess will we get into if the ISP's start filtering everything????
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
---
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!
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.
--
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.
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
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
"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.
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.
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))
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.
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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?"
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.
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.
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.
A lot of European countries fund art analogously, and to be frank, their artistic discourse is freer, more critical of the government, and more open that ours. The private sector is considerably more censorious, tends to micromanage more, and is frankly more political. Again, if you are starting from the a priori perspective that the government should do nothing, that everything should come from the private sector, then we are operating from different premises, and we are headed to a discussion that I am not interested in rehashing.
While private charitable contributions are helpful, they have never been enough even in the best of times to support artists. Now that the era of the tycoon with an interest in arts has been replaced by corporations owned by profit-sensitive shareholders, the private-sector support for the arts has dwindled from the era of the Carnagies and the Rockefellers. The new rich have no sense of noblesse oblige.
So have I. Not short books, either, but Tolstoy.
The cake is a pie
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
(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
The annoyance at someone writing in all caps is imho a diversion from the real issue, which is the fact that someone's copyrighted material is alledgedly being pirated and the owner of said material is royally pissed off. Who cares if he is writing in caps? not every is savvy about the so-called and largely self-imposed net ettiqutte. I happen to think he has a valid point, and if in fact he and his lawyer are able to prove that the accused have pirated his works, they should push to have them proscecuted to the extent of the law. If you want to get free reading material of the net goto the Gutenburg project. I also have very little sympathy for Napster users who are sharing copyrighted music; if you want to share music, share free (as in beer and sometimes in speech) music. The record companies should go after individuals and sue them instead of Napster.
NO CARRIER
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
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...
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.
That is how great works were produced: by patronage, almost entirely from church (the income of which was essentially from a form of taxation) or the state.
Ok.. I've read it. I have no idea what made you believe that your proposed use falls under the aegis of fair use, but it's pretty clear that nothing in section 107 or 108 gives any provision for the type of copying you're proposing.
Now, since you're obviously incapable of reading the links you yourself provide, and since you're under some sort of delusion that books are "licensed" to you, I'm going to be extremely charitable and pretend like you're trolling me.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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
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.
You CAN make as many copys for personal use as you want, as long as you legally own a one copy.
That's great. Super. Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with downloading electronic copies made by someone else. Even if you own a copy of an album, what makes you think you can download a copy someone else made?
If you own a copy of a book, what makes you think you can download an electronic copy of that same book, when that electronic copy was made by someone else?
If you have a crappy old worn-out VHS copy of 'The 39 Steps', that doesn't give you the right to rip an mpeg-4 copy off a friend's DVD player.
It's a shitty set of laws, and as pb said, they don't have any basis in morality or the constitution. Tough shit. Harlan Ellison is the copyright holder -- he get's to decide who can make copies, within the set of guidelines known as fair use. You don't. Tough shit.
And, do you know what? I think Harlan Ellison is fundementally right. You dropped your paperback book in the tub? Tough shit -- buy another one. You have it in hardcover, and your friend has an electronic version, and now you want an electronic version too? Tough shit -- go buy one. Nine-tenth's of Harlan Ellison's titles are no longer in print, and not available in any used book store you can find? But some guy has scanned them all in with a decent OCR? Tough shit -- you can't have 'em. Too bad. You don't own the copyright. He does. Too bad.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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
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.
Having worked in corporation/arts intersections, I have to say I have a lot more faith in a public sector approach. I have seen too many corporate foundations and endowments dry up instantly in a weak quarter to impress Wall Street (even if the company was profitable!) The private sector is incredibly unreliable for supporting anything that isn't profitable. In fact, getting rid of copyright law will itself benefit the private sector directly, as creative teams will have full access to existing content without worrying about royalties and the like. While it would be "nice" to think that the private sector would then turn around and support the arts, they usually are only "nice" for as long as it is comfortable.
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
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.
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
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.
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''?)
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.
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 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
Be honest: aren't you protesting merely out of a dogmatic opposition to anything funded by the public sector?
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.
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.
RemarQ/Critical Path isn't an (only) ISP, it's a pay-subscription Usenet provider. It used to be free, but I imagine that their move to a pay-only service will Really help Mr. Ellison's case (no hiding behind fair use when you're making a profit by hosting infringing materials).
All that being said, I find it somewhat ironic that Harlan Ellison is including authors who have died broke as co-complainants. Memories may be short, but he went on a serious rant when I called him out on a very similar subject back in 1996 (I was the "CJ" in the IABC chat who asked him to either publish or return the stories of deceased contributors to The Last Dangerous Visions.
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.
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")
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
They can't force you to buy multiple copies if you already own a license to use/listen/read it.
When I buy a book, I don't get a "license" for that book. I buy a copy of the book. I imagine that someday, I will get a license, but it hasn't happened yet, thank god. I sure as fuck don't look forward to the day when I do get a license, and I can only hope that my "book license" doesn't resemble the bull-shit that are software license today.
Book license -- what a fucking dumb ass.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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.
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.
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.
Surely you jest, right? He's one of the most prolific authors of speculative fiction there is. He's won Nebula awards, Emmys -- ever see "The City on the Edge of Forever" -- in the original Star Trek series? He's written commentary on media ("The Glass Teat"/"The Other Glass Teat"). He's written television and movie screenplays. And don't EVER call him a science fiction author, if you thought that article had a lot of venom in it!
The really sad part about all of this is the current dialog is pitting the audience against the authors where the real criminals are the middle-men; RIAA, MPAA, and, yes, even some of the technology companies (Napster and MP3.com aren't completely guiltless in all of this).
I think most people are willing to pay for their entertainment, but we don't like feeling like we are being screwed in every transaction (especially when we know the money isn't going to Ellison, Phillip K. Dick's estate, or the muscician's that the RIAA supposedly represents).
The mention of some of the other authors listed in Ellison's rant (Azimov and Heinlein) as well as your mention of PKD reminds me that, until the latest corporate inspired rewrites of the copyright law, many of these work's would be nearing enterence into the public domain. Didn't it used to be life + 20 years, I guess PKD's work would be in the public domain already if not for Disney's rewrite of the laws.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
"Bullshit, Mr. Han-man".
A library buys copies of the books. The original owner of a book sold in a used book store bought the book. What happens after that is moot, but the author has at least got some money off it.
Say 100 ppl can read a $5 paperback b4 it falls apart (and that's quite a high estimate - I used to work in a library, paperbacks are fairly flimsy and ppl don't treat them well). Then every person who downloads a copy instead of going to the library or going to a second-hand bookshop is costing 5 cents. Now if someone's uploading 1000 stories, and multiply _that_ up by the number of downloads of each story, that's a serious number of 5 cents.
His problem is that (a) after alerting ISPs that their users are doing something illegal, they're not shutting down accounts, and (b) that the ppl maintaining newsgroups aren't removing the infringing content after being told it's on there. If they won't fulfill those responsibilities, he has the right to sue them for losses caused by them not doing their jobs. Sure, there may be a delay while they check the facts, but that's it - if they don't do anything about it, they're at fault.
As for all caps, it's likely been transcribed from Ellison's original hardcopy. And don't presume he knows netiquette - lots of ppl still don't. He may even type that way bcos he finds it easier to read. Basically, don't disregard the contents bcos of the user interface...
Grab.
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
Is it ironic that a copyright argument is couched in that style?
Of course, it may become necessary to fill books with ads to cover the cost of publishing them if people are going to scan 'em and post 'em. Either that or discontinue physical publishing altogether and go to some copy-proof (or highly copy-resistant) electronic method.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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."
... just lending two points!
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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.
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.
Milinar
The closest I could figure out before I shrugged my shoulders in apathy is that some guy was posting Ellison's short stories to a newsgroup, and when his ISP was notified of the copyright infringements they cut off his account. So now Ellison is suing AOL and the owners of this guy's ISP? AOL wasn't even the poster's ISP as far as I can tell? Ellison seems to be upset about the fact that people were able to read these postings on AOL, as well as for his stuff being traded on Gnutella, and since an AOL subsidiary developed the Gnutella protocol he seems to blame them for that too. Thats as close as I can figure, anyhow.
Too bad Ellison didn't use any of his award-winning writing skills in making his arguement. Seeing this sure doesn't give me any interest in buying his works OR pirating them.
Maybe thats the ploy: Ellison raises a stink about his works being pirated, which then alerts people that they can get his stuff for free, people then download and sample his work, and finally (this is the brilliant part) buy a book so they can read it away from their computer.
And another thing, whats his deal with dragging dead authors like Asimov and Heinlein into this? I don't know what their opinions would have been on this matter, maybe they would have agreed with him, but they definately had a tendency to look at things in an unconventional way, so I think they might have embraced their works being distributed on the web, via the technology that they found so fascinating.
And then theres the whole
"WELL, WHAT IS KICK AN ACRONYM FOR?" WE RESPOND, "IT'S FOR KICK 'EM IN THE ASS!"
Great, thanks Harlan. Hey, how 'bout you look up 'acronym' in your dictionary, or just stop capitalizing the word 'Kick' in your group's name, eh?
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