Slashdot Mirror
How Corporate Lobbyists Colonized the Net
You don't need to be a copyright lawyer to get the basic idea: U.S. Copyright laws begin with the premise that neither the creator of a new work nor the general public ought to be able to appropriate all the benefits that flow from the creation of a new work. If creators can't make some money off of their creations, they have no incentive to create. If distributors can't earn some money from the works they distribute, they may not bother to distribute.
But all creators -- authors, musicians, artists, individuals -- borrow raw material to build their works. Novelists, sculptors and programmers, Litman points out, incorporate ideas, language, code, building blocks and expressive details they first encountered elsewhere.
If creators were given control over every element and use of everything they made, there would be no raw material left for others. The threat of legal action and liability would enter the creative process at every level. The flow of ideas could decrease or even dry up, caught in legal struggles and bounded by economic and other costs. The idea of American copyright was to give authors enough protection so they would keep cranking out new ideas, but limit that protection so that the flow of ideas would be enhanced. In terms of the vigorous movement of ideas and opinions, the idea worked well for more than two centuries.
Thus, writes Litman in Digital Copyright, "both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of promoting learning by encouraging authors to create works and the public to consume them, copyright has always divided up the possible rights in and uses of a work, and given control over some of those rights to the creators and distributors and fix others to the general public."
It is precisely this principle that corporate lobbyists destroyed when they got Congress to pass new kinds of copyright laws specifically in response to the growth of the Net and the complex challenges to existing intellectual property conventions that it posed. Because of the pinpoint precision of software data tracking and collection, these new laws theoretically require everyone to pay for every bit of every creative work they access, use or transmit. As the Napster flap demonstrates, the end result is that corporations benefit -- not artists, whose access to ideas is severely limited, or the general public, which now has no legal right to freely control or distribute any part of the creative works they access.
Corporate lobbyists made it a federal crime to transmit any part of a copyrighted work. In addition, the DMCA held site operators liable for all the damages incurred if any part of copyrighted works were transmitted over their sites.
As a matter of policy, Litman writes, these shifts in copyright law have "horrific" implications.
Setting the basic "compensable" unit of copyright (which is also the basic infringing unit) at the level of the (ephemeral) copy in volatile memory of your desktop computer involves the fundamental operation of computers in copyright on what is essentially an "atomic" level. (Most of you reading this know this, but in case some don't -) And since a computer works by reproducing data in its volatile Random Access Memory -- RAM -- so anything that exists in volatile memory could theoretically be saved to disk -- the appearance of any portion of a work in any computer's RAM is a reproduction within the meaning of federal copyright law.)
"It means," Litman writes, "that all appearance of works in computers -- at home, on networks, at work, in the library -- needs to be effected in conformance with, and with attention to, copyright rules. That's new. Until now, copyright has regulated multiplication and distribution of works, but it hasn't regulated consumption."
It does now.
If you buy a book, or even borrow one, you can read it as many times as you like. You can lend it or rent it to a friend, sell it or give it away. You can't legally make copies of it, but you can use it as many times as you want. But if every time a work appears in RAM, you are making an "actionable copy," then for the first time copyright owners have been given almost total control over the consumption of their works. Each time you open Microsoft Word to edit a document, you could eventually need Microsoft's permission. Each time you use your computer's CD-ROM drive to listen to a CD you bought, you need a license from the record company. Every time you view a Web page with a picture of Mickey Mouse, you need permission from Disney.
That is the direction in which laws like the DMCA are taking us, Litman says, and it's not accidental. That's the agenda of corporate copyright lawyers, who are largely unopposed in Congress or Washington. Hackers and other digital enthusiasts have long viewed cyberspace as unpoliceable and governable -- too big, individualistic and complex. Corporate lobbyists disagree: They see the Net as a potentially lucrative colony, over which incalculable amounts of copyrighted information can eventually be distributed at enormous profit. And they've taken signficant steps to conquer it.
When Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, cyber-liberties organizations were in an uproar. But few groups online paid much attention to the intense lobbying underway -- mostly out of sight -- involving copyright. The public had no real sense that Congress was passing laws that would put copyright owners in a position to claim exclusive "reading", "listening," and "viewing" rights to copyrighted works.
When copyright laws were initially passed, government was trying to protect individual authors. But most copyrighted material is now distributed by giant media conglomerates. The whole context in which copyright was originally conceived has changed, yet there seems little consciousness of this new reality in Washington or among political parties and interests.
Litman's is one of the best, clearest, most cogently organized and accessible books yet written on the travesty that is the DMCA, which President Clinton blithely signed into law while the Tech Nation dozed. The DMCA is the price a culture pays for ignoring politics, and we'll be paying for this legislation for a long time to come.
Copyright owners' enforcement strategies have mostly been limited to threats, litigation and ham-handed public relations and media campaigns aimed at convincing Americans that they ought to disapprove of unauthorized use. While that strategy can work against a specific target like Napster, or intermediaries like a college or large company (since these large targets have assets to be threatened by litigation), it works far less well in deterring individuals. In fact, says Litman, a variety of new applications (Gnutella, for instance) have popped up to permit individuals to wantonly violate these new laws, and the wave of copyright lawsuits has only encouraged this trend. Napster recently topped 62 million registered users, few of whom believed they were thieves, suggesting the DMCA wasn't a law with much popular support.
Yet eventually, in order to fully enforce the rights that content owners now claim, it will be necessary to go after individual consumers. Noncompliance becoming endemic, even institutionalized, would become the single most important factor in determining the fate and future of copyright. Litman observes that people don't obey laws they don't believe in.
Litman also points out in Digital Copyright that the conflict over the scope of copyright on the Net is being fought in the usual way: "Representatives of private interests are simultaneously jockeying for advantage while offering to sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a deal that they find satisfactory. Senators and representatives make general pronouncements about the importance of the issues raised and the need to find the right answer, while assuring the various interests that their doors are open and they would be delighted to broker a negotiated solution."
Litman used to believe that bad copyright law derived from lack of congressional expertise of the issues involved -- especially complete ignorance of the Net and the Web -- or a lack of interest in the details. But she came to a different, more ominous conclusion. "More and more," she writes, "it seems likely that at least many of the legislators who seek to promote inter-industry consensus are hoping to score a substantial portion of the money being poured into copyright lobbying."
Litman's book is bleak. The only ray of hope she sees is consumers' widespread noncompliance. She points out that the battle is lopsided, to say the least. Individuals and individual rights have few lobbyists in Washington.
Look for Michael's take on this book soon as well.
From the SDMI press release
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
What the copyright industry is forgetting is that copyright has traditionally been a social contract.
In general, publishers agree to publish works, making them available to the public. The public gains two important benefits from this half of the bargain.
First, works are placed in the public domain in two ways. First off, the copyright is supposed to expire eventually, but there is another sense of the "public domain", which is "material available for public use." For instance, If you want to quote a paragraph from a copyrighted novel in your English paper, you are allowed to do so. This is fair use. It ensures that copyright serves the purpose of promoting learning and education.
If you want to sell your used book, you are allowed to. This is first sale. It ensures that works survive by placing copies of those works in private hands, and preventing the authors or publishers from reclaiming them or interfering with the public's use of them.
In exchange, citizens agree not to compete commercially with the publishers in exploiting their work.
This theme runs up and down through copyright law, with the notable exception of the DMCA. The DMCA is really anti-copyright. It is everything that copyright is not supposed to be. The DMCA was designed to allow publishers to renege on their half of the social contract.
Under the DMCA, the publisher is not obligated to place a work in the public domain in either sense of the word. Even after the copyright term expires, an encrypted work remains encrypted. There is no obligation, or provision, for an encrypted work to be unencrypted upon copyright expiration. And none of us will live long enough to see it happen. In the second sense of the "public domain", the DMCA allows publishers to use technological measures to prevent fair use. Want to quote a paragraph from an encrypted e-book by cutting and pasting? That's illegal if the publisher says so. Want to sell your copy of that e-book? That's also illegal if the publisher says so. not because it's illegal under copyright law, but because it's illegal under the DMCA, which is anti-copyright law.
There are probably three ways that the copyright crisis can resolve -- either:
1) The public learns to accept the fact that their rights to read, quote works, and own and trade copies of works has been permanently banished.
2) The courts strike down the DMCA.
3) Sensing that the publishing industry is no longer bound to the traditional obligations of the copyright social contract, the public abandons their half of the social contract. Copyright violation becomes like drinking during prohibition -- just another bad law waiting to be struck off the books.
Make no mistake, copyright is in crisis. When Congress wrote the DMCA, they completely got the problem backwards. The problem isn't that a thieving public is waiting breathlessly for the opportunity to strip copyright holders of all their rights. The problem is that a thieving copyright industry has been waiting breathlessly for the opportunity -- the DMCA -- to strip the public of all their rights.
The endgame is now in motion, and I predict that it will result in either the destruction of the DMCA, the destruction of consumer rights, or the destruction and abandonment of copyright itself.
Never forget that copyright originally arose as an instrument of censorship. It was a stroke of genius to transform an instrument of censorship into an instrument to promote progress, and all it took was an ignorant Congress, and an opportunistic publishing industry, to change it back.
Unfortunately, as the war on drugs shows, massive noncompliance does not necessarily have any significant impact on the law, even in the medium term. Laws against marijuana possession and consumption have been on the books for somewhere over 50 years, and while enforcement has waned and waxed over that time, it's still mostly illegal, and the political establishment generally considers "legalization" a third rail topic.
It's all but certain that the same will very likely be true regarding all of this copyright flap as well. There will always be the underground where you can trade your MP3's and Ripped software, but the populace at large will not regain its rights in our lifetimes, and maybe not even our children's lifetimes.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The desire for privacy isn't born of fear. The desire to remove privacy from others is born of the fear of what they will do with it.
I believe quite strongly that privacy is a natural right, that I should be afforded the dignity to live my life as I choose to without being subjected to public scrutiny.
You seem to say that privacy is not a right; let me ask you a counter question: "What gives you the right to know anything about me other than that which I myself choose to tell you?"
You make a number of claims, particularly the 3 consequences of removing privacy, yet I don't see any evidence for any of them. If you want to convince people like me, you're going to have to offer us some evidence. For example, I live in the UK, but have seen no hard evidence to support claim 1. Oh, and with no privacy, we would have no personal lives, as everything would be public.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Borrowing from works is not only common as dirt, but a way of making art reach a better audience.
/. nonsense, I assure you I am not alone in this. I'll put in the relevant quotes and you can attack these artists reputation if need be.
I am a musician, and much of music relies on the listener having a cultural reference in common with the performer. From the early days of Jazz, musical jokes were introduced by comping lines from well known songs. A modern example would be playing the melody of "Light my Fire" during a solo over "Burning down the House".
As Bruce Thomas said: "You play the melody of one lick and the rhythm of another, that's where licks come from."
In painting, you still use the techniques and styles of many generations of artists. Under the DCMA, an artists could copyright something as simple as a color, or a theme. So, when an artist copyrights "Nudes" or "Still Life" or "Photo-Realism" how much "new" will be left??
All art must move in paitent steps from the known to the new. Art appeals to us only in the way it is different from what we already know. When the DCMA has rendered popular culture as a tool of the corporations, there will be little to build upon. No art, science, or prosperity is built in a vacuum, we build upon the resources of others.
Your remarks on RZA?? Sampling simply copies the work of previous artists, (other artists that have used samples, not artists they are sampling, since you have already pointed out that they mostly(?) make their own loops) they are not doing something totally new, they are doing something new in an old medium. Are they using 4/4 time? And I'm sure I could much more easily deconstuct their tracks and find at least one or two snippets that could get them sued even if they had never heard the song the the snippet matched.
(In the Van Halen vs. Tone Loc decision two notes were considered enough to prove copyright infringement. As long as they were deemed "recognizable or reminiscient" of the original.)
So, throw out all of the things you have read about art, color, paint, and canvas. As you would say, clinging to this knowledge is just "riding the coattails of others".
In addition, under the DCMA, art criticism is outlawed without the consent of the artist. Since you would be "discussing or describing the techniques used in the creation of a copyrighted work." Works well to help companies punish anyone who says anything negative about any of their products. (BTW, if the criticism did not fit the above description, it was not very good criticism.)
Finally, before this degenerates into the usual "You're an idiot"
Johhny Cash: "The Public Domain is the best place to steal songs from, no royalties!" -VH1 Storytellers
Elvis Costello: "The best part of the song is when I mention Billy-Boy Arnold and Bruce played the lick..."
~Hammy
"Happiness is a word for amateurs."
Oh yawn! Go troll another one.
Any 'intellectual property physical property' comparison is a troll. IP can be copied and still exists for the original creator, physical property can't be magically duplicated. Until you adress that issue you're just adding to the N side of the S/N ratio.
Your IP is based on the collective history of the world. Where would be be if Shakespeare had the courts uphold a broad copyright on the idea of a tragedy, and his heirs sued people for creating derivative works? What if Calculus was patented and mathmeticians were sued for using it?
That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.
The *ONLY* viable alternative to limited and expiring IP protection is *NO* IP protection. If everyone's IP was treated as special just because they were the first to take it to court, there'd be nothing new done.
Accept that your precious 'IP' is really 10% yours and 90% based on the previous work of others. You're lucky to get the protection you do.
A lack of privacy won't make people tolerant of others, it'll simply enable them to persecute others for their differences.
You think we'll stop demonizing politicians for cheating when we see our own spouses cheating? Or will we take a copy of that video to court in order to win a favorable divorce settlement?
Will people be free to do what they want, or will their employers and neighbors discriminate based on what they do on their own time?
Maybe your boss will fire you for checking out a porno site on your own time. Maybe the cops won't help you because they know you visited a counter-culture site that was critical of some Rodney King-esque brutality.
Mass spying is bad enough, but automate it and let people have a computer tabulate certain events... That's a sure recipe for a totalitarian state where everyone follows the strictest people's morality for fear of being labelled a pervert or deviant and ostracized.
When AI systems can recognize faces they'll follow people from camera to camera. And then you'll have AI designed to spot behaviour, sex, eating, nose picking, etc. Whatever someone wants to make the social evil of the week will be recorded and used against their enemies.
There is *no* freedom is constant surveilance.
But most copyrighted material is now distributed by giant media conglomerates.
And very little of it is worth wasting time on. It's just entertainment. A simple diversion. Once the "giant media conglomerates" make the medium too onerous or inconvenient, it will cease to be entertaining or diverting and people will move on to other things. I think that will be a good thing.
At this point, fact are not copyrightable. As long as that remains true, our civilization is in no trouble. Who, other than his mother, really gives a shit if Ricky Martin disappears from the face of history in five years, as long as we have records of what laws have been passed?
So what if people can't download the latest track from Britney Spears for free. Maybe they'll take the time to go down the street and listen to a local band. Maybe, after a while, we'll actually see some creativity being introduced back into the music business. Maybe the public will wake up, realize that we're all artist, and that the self-centered corporatist can buy their own pablum.
The current model has been built by years of 'free' music over the radio. It was convenient and entertaining (to most). The populace has tried to continue that model through the Internet. The moguls are rebelling at this, because the music never was 'free' to begin with; the cost was simply re-distributed through higher cost on goods that were advertised. The model now requires that people pay directly instead of letting the cost be deferred.
I don't see a problem with that. It's their 'content' let them do with it what they may. Let them lock it away in a vault and only allow people willing to pay their first born to see it. Maybe people will wake up and realize that the stuff they're asking money for is crap. Maybe people will discover that a local play is more interesting that another Jean Claude VanDam 'jump-n-kick' movie. Maybe people will find that there is 'free' music at a local bar (where they drink expensive drinks.)
Maybe this whole 'copyright laws are lopsided' debate is bullshit. Disney owns Mickey Mouse. Let them own it forever. If you don't like that, ignore the mouse and all the movies that the company makes. The world will go on fine without either of them.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
That's a bit of an overgeneralisation in my opinion. I think there are lots of common points between physical property and intellectual property. Obviously not in all cases, scarcity being one aspect.
Here's a short extract of something I wrote recently, which compares IP and phyiscal property. Please read it all before you call this a troll too:
In the past property was power, even if the property type is different, has anything else changed?--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
I especially recommend it to those who only know RMS by reputation, and not from his actual writings. This one is particularly cogent, concise and undesrtandable. I consider it mandatory reading for any layperson interested in modern copyrigyt issues.
Can your IM do this?
"Corporate lobbyists made it a federal crime..."
While corporate lobbyists influences the process, they are not the ones to primarly blame. The Congress passed these laws and the President signed them. The corporate lobbyists exist only because the government has the power and willingness to use it. If you want to limit the influece of corporate, or any other kind, of lobbyists then you need to limit the power of government. So long as the government spends trillions of dollars a year and can pass laws creating a wiping out industries you will have people trying to influce them. While one can look upon those lobbyists as being in bad taste, it is in the structure and power of the Government that is spoiled.
other quotes expressing the same misplaced venum:
"corporate lobbyists, panicked by file-sharing on the Net, succesfully manipulated Congress"
"It is precisely this principle that corporate lobbyists destroyed when they got Congress to pass new kinds of copyright laws "
I believe this idea sounds good in theory, but it will never happen. Orwell's "1984" scenario where citizens have no privacy from an omnipresent government seems much more likely. Do you think wealthy corporations and government officials would be in favor of allowing CCTV cameras to video all aspects of their daily lives? I don't think so. And considering they would almost certainly be the ones to control these cameras (or at least influence those that control them), they would be able to do something about it. Meanwhile, all the average citizen will be able to do about it is complain about it.
More transparency in politics would be a good thing. If people had known about the DMCA while Congress was considering it, there probably would have been much more vocal opposition to it. Instead, the sponsors of the bill worked to say as little as possible about the DMCA's consequences until after it was signed, sealed, and delivered. Even those who do follow politics had a hard time figuring out what the bill was about until after the fact. Katz claims that the passage of the DMCA came about as a result of the American public's apathy and ignorance while the bill was being considered. I do not believe it is reasonable for people to be upset over something they don't know is coming, especially when the government is doing its best to hide it behind a smokescreen until it is too late.
However, I believe it is the government's job to understand the desires of its constituents and act accordingly. The point of having a republic as opposed to a democracy in the U.S. was to allow most people to deal with other things in life other than politics; only a relatively small number of people acting on behalf of the entire population would need to make politics a full-time occupation. Granted, people need to let their representatives know about their opinions to ensure they are voiced in Congress, but subjecting every American adult to the inner workings of politics would be unreasonable.
Some time ago (possibly even from the very beginning), some in government decided that they would not serve in the best interests of their constituents; instead they should serve in their own best interests. The only way these people can hope to remain in power is to keep as many unethical dealings as possible behind closed doors and cover up the rest using aggressive PR campaigns, often paid for by money obtained by lobbyists. These politicians tend to take a "Screw you" attitude to the public. For instance, in 1997, 11 counties in southwest PA voted on whether to increase the sales tax by 1% in order to pay for new stadiums for football's Steelers and baseball's Pirates. It was soundly defeated by about a 60-40 margin. So did those in charge accept the public's opinion and not proceed with building the stadiums? They did not, and instead came up with a devious "Plan B" that many informed citizens still don't understand, marched it through the county and state legislatures and now Pittsburgh has two new taxpayer-funded stadiums that the public had already said it did not want. This is a failure of the republic at a local level; the DMCA is a failure at the federal level.
Katz and others have said that we (the American public) should try to do something about this state of affairs. Unfortunately, a course of action at this point is not clear at all. Voting people out of office has a limited effect; I feel that the problem is with the system itself and not with those holding or seeking office. Everyone has a price, and corporations have the money to influence every representative regardless of whether they have a D or an R after their name on the ballot. Writing to Congress should be a viable solution; however there is evidence of some in Congress ignoring e-mail from their constituents as mentioned in a recent Slashdot article. If they ignore electronic communication, who's to say they are reading dead-tree correspondence either? Trying to get some sort of campaign finance legislation would be a good goal, but do you think Congress would pass something that severely limits its ability to raise funds for re-election? I don't think so. Getting a constitutional amendment passed through states calling for a constituitional convention is an extremely difficult task; I don't know if it has even been done before.
Many people feel that making government more transparent would be a good thing for society in order to make it more accountable to the its citizens. However, making this happen is going to be very difficult. Anyone have any ideas as to how we can do this?
Below is the introduction to the chapter Against intellectual property:
This should be a line of dashes to divide what I wrote from the quote. Lamness filter won't allow it though. Isn't it lame that the lameness filter is making this post more difficult to read?
Brian Martin presents the case against intellectual property, approaching the issue from a different background to most of us in the free software movement. (You'll note that Martin confuses "freeware", "free software", and "public domain", but that's my fault, since I should have picked this up in my proofreading.)
This is chapter three of Brian Martin's book Information Liberation, which is now online in its entirety. (Other chapters cover defamation, privacy, whistleblowing, and more.)
Against intellectual property
There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
Be able to do "what the hell you like with it" is obviously overbroad. What is in dispute, however, is:
1)the right to make copies for fair-use purposes including backup, transportation, and consumption, but not for the purposes of sale or exchange
2)the right to fair quote passages in research and criticism
3)the right to sell an originally purchased copy, provided it is sold in whole and no duplication of it has occured prior
4)the right to act as a carrier for content which you do not regulate
5)the to the use of ideas in research and science
6)the right to possess tools which facilitate the exercising of these rights, in cases where such tools could also be used to do things that are not protected by fair use.
Of these, in particular (1), (4), and (6) have come directly under attack, and as a consequence of this, technical means are being removed to exercise the others. I will adress the concerns regarding these three directly.
Now, as far as what constitutes a "right", I am going to take the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an authorative source. The most relevant passages are quoted below.
Article 27(2) is the only thing in the U.N. Declaration which grants authors control over their work. Now, right #1 stated above is protected by Article 27(1). Right 6, established in the oft-quoted Betamax case, would seem to be protected by article 28, because without it other rights could not be realized. Right 4 is similar, and falls under the same protection.
There's a crucial difference. Your *intellectual* property is things that you have made public (since we are not talking about trade secrets here), so a better analogy would be, we have the right to do what we want with cookies *you have sold*, including figuring out the recipe (reverse-engineering), and reselling. Your other examples (locks and gaurds) are similarly flawed.
------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Her book is not available for download on her homepage
http://www.law.wayne.edu/litman/
Embrace, extend, destroy. Corporations have saturated most of the ways they can make money, especially the largest ones that have utterly saturated their audience. Sales are flatening, profits flat or decreasing. What is the next logical thing to do?
Make people pay for EACH use of their product. The more dependant the person is upon the product, the better off this stratigy works. Instead of claiming 'fair use' which SHOULD be an exception to any copyright law, try explaining in terms of "you mean if a person in the hospital requires dialisys, not only do they have to pay for the use of the machine which must be maintained, the electricity, which is used each time, but also the SOFTWARE TO RUN IT, which is static and does not diminish with use. Plus, you are mandating that the software company can shut off the software at any time without prior warning, even if this is a life support machine. Is this fair?" and see how willing the legislator is to pass that particular law.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Yes you are, but for a limited amount of time. After that, material passes into the public domain. The problem with things like the DMCA and CSS is that they effectively extend the copyright on the material on a DVD indefinately.
It doens't ever become okay to break the so called copy protection (i.e. access control) on a DVD and copy the work, so the work effectively never enters the public domain.
Another problem with the control system on DVD's is the region coding. That system is in place to prevent the transfer of a material that has already been paid for. It would be akin to placing some kind of protection on a book published in the USA that made the ink go invisible when you took it overseas.
Now I can understand why they did it, and for new theatre releases they might have a good argument as to why they should be allowed to do it, but they effectively destroyed their own legitimacy when they kept the region coding even for re-releases of old films.
The problem is not that content producers tried to protect their copyrights, the problem is that they made a quick grab to extend them at the expense of the public.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Let me check about some eternal rights
You can always challenge a moral code from within because broadly accepted moral codes are almost always self-contradictory. Therefore you don't need an absolute moral code as an archimedean point. Almost all succesfull challenges start with an accepted premise and lead to a condemnantion of an accepted pactice. Other challenges work through changing the definition of a term, usually as a result of socio-economic change ( are blacks human, and therefore within the scope of human rights? Should basic human rights apply to pets, video-games? )
-- look, cheese ahoy!
It never ceases to amaze me how hypocritical our society and our government are. We extoll the virtues of a democracy and of freedom of this, freedom to do that...unless there is money to be made from it. Then we have to control it, monitor it, get lawyers and congressmen involved, and tell people what they can and can't do with it until it's been suffocated to death and no one can remember what the hell it was in that everyone got so excited about in the first place.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs."
Consider this: without fair use laws for artistic works, we would have more beautiful pieces and far less derivation in the fields of art, music and multimedia.
Now, this is just speculation, and kind of hypocritical -- a trip to epmf.dasmegabyte.org will show you that my "art" benefits so much from fair use that i'm pushing its legality. However, it's something to think about. How much would we *really* suffer if we couldn't use other peoples' works in reviews, collages or academic works? I mean, shit. Most of the motion video on the internet is derivative of offline media, and many pieces of art, music and motion video borrow heavily from popular entities. And these works are usually less enjoyable than the original and offer no real insight into anything. I mean, c'mon -- Park Wars was awful, not funny and not really a great parody of anything. The "all your base" craze was mildly amusing at first and tunnelled its way into cliche in less than the time it took to play all the way through zerowing. And I don't need to remind you of all the hideous flash videos out there that have taken advantage of the Budweiser "wossop" commercial, the mastercard "priceless" adverts or the plight of metallica and dr dre as seen through the eyes of us internet "subterraneans".
It's not suprising that when I visit the monthly Saint Rose JCA Poetry Slam that all I hear is rehashes of hallmark cards and Korn lyrics. This beleif that art must be built on top of other art is totally antithetical to the concept of free expression. Poetry is about combining words in a fashion that's totally different from the way anybody else would combine them to create a window into your thoughts. Art should be about expressionism -- making images the way you see them or feel they should be seen. And motion video should be about telling a unique story from a unique point of view (or, shouts my jackoff film professor of three months, it should show the truth -- which means it should show nothing but pictures from the lives of boring people). Where's the originality in constructing the same ironic mismatch of media, the same syncronicity of images on image?
Sure, copyrights are bad and I hate them (although I will kill the guy who stole my "akira" video and repackaged it with his name). But what are we really restricted from doing? Garner's Grendel was the Beowulf legend, but it was really nothing like Beowulf...it shared no words or storyflow. That was what made it a masterpiece without pulling from the respect granted to the 800 AD original. Animal Farm was made an allegory, not a scathing work of historical fiction, because allegory succeeded in illustrating the sadness far better than the original. And one could very easily argue that a hiphop track which creates a new loop rather than borrowing from a popular song can be just as good as one that borrows heavily...listen sometime to the work of the RZA, whose work on the Ghost Dog soundtrack included very few copyrighted samples.
Copyright law is an invitation; nay, a challenge, to the artisans of the world: We've blocked off one channel to create art -- art that could easily become complacent and derivative. It's your job to make something new, rather than waste your time riding the coattails of others. An artist needs paint, sure, but she doesn't necessarily need blue paint...she might not create the Giocanda, but she could easily create Guernica.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It's nice to know that it just isn't male geeks who are interested copyright. Slashdot needs more women. (No, I'm not one :P) That's one of the things I really don't like about slashdot. You never get to hear a womens view on things. I personally like the different perspective. Women are a lot more balanced. Instead of saying who cares about the law like most slashees do, Ms./Mrs. Litman has struck a balance between the authors rights and the consumers rights.
This is also one of the more enjoyable Katz articles. I don't see many of them.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
I think that western societies are heading towards this again. Imagine it is the year 2100. Cameras are absolutely everywhere, and the internet allows everyone to find out everything about everbody else. It would be, if you like, an Open Source society.
What would the consequences be? As follows:
1) Crime would greatly decrease. We can see this already in Britain with CCTV systems.
2) Greater honesty in society. People would no longer be able to lie about their personal lives.
3)Less hypocrisy. Nobody would expect our politicians, wives etc to be perfect. There would be better understanding of human nature.
A transparent, Open Source society needn't be a bad place to live. I think it would be better. The concept of what is a right and what is not would surely change, but I think that an Open Source society would be far more pleasant to live in that early 21st century America. The old must be wept away. Privacy is a function of fear - the fear of others. If that privacy is removed, the fear is too.
Many Eyes Make All Crimes Shallow. In an Open Source society, all foibles, crimes and misdeameanours would be in the open. No more hypocrisy and a much more pleasant life for all would be the result.
You can, of course, impose any terms you want on your intellectual property. Simply ask anyone who you give it to to sign a contract. Not click-through, but sign.
The "content industry" doesn't think people want to sign a contract every time they buy a CD or DVD or book. Instead, they are trying to extend copyright law to achieve the same ends.
You would be upset if you bought cookies from me, only to be subsequently told that you could only eat them with a knife and fork, and that you could only get approved cutlery from me. DMCA makes this legal, in terms of IP.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait