Slashdot Mirror
Copyright Law for the Future: Control & Creativity
ablair writes: "MacSurfer is linking to a truly excellent article by Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig, on the copyright balance between Control & Creativity. A must-read for those interested in everything from the RIAA-mp3 battles to the way GPL & BSD Licenses should be."
Here's a link to the ad free version.
No-Ads
Or maybe even a few scientists at CERN...
Cheers,
Ian
I don't think so. I believe that purely voluntary, uncoerced payment could not only be adequate, but better for both the users and producers of information products. Traditionally, publishers and retailers took the lion's share of income, so considerably smaller revenue will mean equal or greater profit for the creator. In other words, if you don't make the creators force you to pay them, you can pay them a lot less and they'll be just as well-rewarded and encouraged to make more good stuff.
I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.
However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.
Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.
"Reprinted with the permission of Random House"
Ironic, huh?
In the article, Lawrence Lessig calls Richard Stallman "the philosopher of our age." Only if the majority of the community can look beyond "GNU/Linux", "GPL sucks," etc. and see the deeper issues as Professor Lessig does...
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Broke college students and an entire culture raised on broadcast radio, tv and the premise that media and entertainment is free.
.
Think about this example - think back to the days where a personal cd player cost around $150, sucked batteries etc, etc. Think of what the CD industry was before Columbia House (and scamming their ass hard). It sucked, virtually nobody had cds - why? well, because the ability to play awesome quality music / not have to ff, etc, etc wasn't worth the cost.
I have no idea how the entertainment industry can think that their attempts at DRM, etc can compete with "free" or at the very least "cheap alternative" sources like the radio or the cds burned by polly the pirate. You can't change the mindset of people who were raised to turn on the tv / radio and tune to whatever station and get a program without any hastle.
The cat is out of the bag, more people use the "illegal" services than use the legal - hell - if you use a commercial DRM supporting player - i.e. rio 600 - there is actually value lost - the interface is a fucking pain compared to how i get files to my rio volt (cd mp3 player). Not that diamond could ever make software worth a damn anyways (hw kicks ass), but still . .
Now the video industry has something that actually might save their ass - DVD special features, the fact that data speeds over the net are slow and the lack of a comercial player for DIVX on your TV - which are the only things that are preventing DIVX from being in almost every household.
Quality sure as hell isn't stopping people - the new 4.12 divx codec looks damn near dvd quality at full screen if postprocessing is set to max (needs a good box tho, about 1 GHz, damn).
What can I say, this isn't a financial war they are fighting, but one against a mindset, and they are approaching it the wrong way.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Actually, the trolls are probably the most creative /. contributors. At their best.
I think Lessig is trying to apply prior situations to current situations in a way that will not work at all. When talking about cable TV or the player piano rolls, Congress had the ability to restrict use or distribution of these products without too much difficulty. Also, both cable and piano rolls required resources to produce and distribute.
P2P sharing is a completely different idea though, in the digital world, it becomes much harder to track distribution of products, and much easier to distribute, thus making it much harder for Congress to regulate P2P. If one tried to force a P2P service to pay those industries whose products it distributes, how would one keep track of all the media and account for it with the volume that goes over each network, or even the bigger problem, how would a service stay in business when it has to pay for transactions when there will most likely be other services out there which will not comply for various reasons. It's not possible for Congress to simply legislate on the internet, any legislation enacted in the spirit which Lessig is talking about would require a complete overhaul of how we interact with the internet in some way, most likely infringing on free speech as well.
As every type of media becomes digital and easily able to be distributed, its not possible for Congress to deal with digital mediums as it did with player pianos. I'm afraid that this is one situation where we are going to have actually tread new ground instead of relying on previous cases. I'm not sure exactly how we should legislate internet distribution, or even if we should, but I know that any effective or meaningfull legislation won't be based on any previous copyright ideas.
In the US, the Law gets its authority from democratically elected government. The Government gets its authority from the people, as conveyed through the democratic process (voting). If the Government has control over the information the people have access to, then they have the ability to manipulate people's ability to make an informed voting decision. This corrupts the very democratic process from which the law gets its authority.
This article should be required reading for anybody interested in intellectual property. No black-and-white stuff here. But the people who most need to read it, and the ones that I sincerely hope will, are the seven old men and two old women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig is an excellent, intelligent writer who likely strikes a chord with many Slashdot readers. I highly recommend reading his book "The future of Ideas". I got a copy for my dad for Christmas, and he, even while being a computer novice, now sees the poignant issues Lessig introduces.
Incidentally, my dad has now given the book to me, so that I can learn to express my thoughts on the issue much more coherently. I've been discussing the issues with my dad and friends for years, but hopefully now I'll be able to explain my position with more clarity.
however, is the fact that courts must use previous cases to establish the legality of any law. Most courts, except for the Supremes, are unwilling to decide on new territory or set new precendents, simply because they are likely to be reversed on appeal. (looks bad on the resume and all).
Sure, these ideas may be highly preferable to what we have today, but how will we convince the corporations involved that we're acting in their best interest?
That's the biggest obstacle, in my mind.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Ultimately the battle expressed over copyright reduces to something more simple: a battle over change. Change always challenges the status quo, always upsets the apple cart; as such it tends to provoke strong protest amongst the reactionary elements in society.
Who are these elements? Essentially they fall into two camps:
- the folks who profit from the status quo and suspect that the change will reduce their favored status; and
- the Luddites, people who're afraid of change simply because they want things to remain the way that they are, or more likely the way that they imagine things are, and refuse to adapt to what the future might bring.
So far in human history very few societies have been successful in suppressing change. And all of these societies have eventually fallen to others who didn't repress the changes and instead used them to gain an advantage over their neighbors. In today's world, where change is coming at an ever-accelerating pace, a society that refuses to embrace change is doomed to be left behind to flounder about in the past while others move into the future.
People who accept change and attempt to use it to better the lives of themselves or others are wheat; those who refuse change, the Luddites and those like them, are chaff. In the grand scheme of things nobody misses the chaff when it's gone, because it was useless to begin with. Chaff is discarded, with nary a thought given to its fate.
We see the battle between the wheat and the chaff quite clearly in the 21st century because change is occurring at such a rapid pace. The Luddites scream loudly and long, picking this change or that to vent their fears upon, because there are so many new things that challenge their desire for life to remain stagnant. This isn't a slow process as in past centuries, eventually gaining steam over the course of lifetimes; today it happens in the space of years or months, one revolution of technology after another. The Luddites don't have a chance to die out and be replaced by newer, younger generations who aren't so invested in the status quo. They're being challenged, again and again, by the change they fear so much, changes which are increasingly alien to a mind-set that refuses to accept that the world is rushing into the future regardless of their personal whims.
What this means to those of us who do accept the future and try to make sense of it, or even to shape it in a fashion that does more good than harm, is that the Luddites represent a powerful, if minority, view backed by all the money invested in the status quo. And as money and power are always concentrated in the status quo, since those who have the power and money maintain the status quo to preserve their own privilege, this is a force to be reckoned with.
Since the Luddites don't have time to die off and be replaced, they instead try to put the brakes on the future through the passage of legislation designed to halt progress in its tracks. As a solution this is a damned silly way to do things; in today's world it's impossible to make change 'stop' in any real sense of the word. The Luddite solution is a pathetic one, in essence a retaliatory backlash of little effect or importance. Instead of offering real solutions to thorny problems posed by new technology and innovation, they instead attempt to ban innovation altogether and return society to a past where the technology didn't exist. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle is a futile effort, one that often ends up harming people in the process.
Not that the negative effects of trying to prevent change ever trouble the Luddites. By definition these folks are invested in a world view solely defined by their own ideas of how things should be; if the reality challenges the fantasy they indulge in they have no qualms about trying to force reality into a more pleasing mold regardless of who gets harmed in the process. Luddites are inherently selfish lot with little regard for others.
In today's world the Luddites are attempting to legislate their fantasies into reality; the fact that such legislation does nothing whatsoever to halt progress hasn't yet made an impact upon them. They think that if they just pass enough laws that somehow, in some mysterious way, change will stop. For the rest of us this is mostly annoying; although a few of us have been harmed by these laws the vast majority are relatively unaffected. This won't last.
Eventually the Luddites will discover that their laws aren't putting the brakes on progress and that the majority of their neighbors are happily walking into the future regardless of their efforts. When this occurs the Luddites will become violent, as pitiful reactionaries always do, although their violence will almost certainly be orchestrated through the instrument of government. When this happens, when the majority finally clue into the fact that the Luddites will use any means at their disposal to keep their fellow citizens trapped in the 20th century with them, that's when the real war will begin. This is when you'll see flagrant violations of the Constitution in the name of 'the common good', as well as government-backed efforts involving force to shut down any enterprise which challenges the status quo. It could be argued that such things are already beginning to take place in the United States as the Luddites become increasingly vocal and ever-more-willing to enforce their views at the expense of others, with a government eager to accommodate whoever has the cash.
It's possible that the Luddites might win in the U.S. They have the money and the power, and Americans are far removed from their freedom-loving ancestors. The heritage that formed a nation through blood and death is thin indeed in today's society, where so long as the people get their bread and circuses they're willing to look the other way. Most Americans today don't think freedom is worth fighting for, much less dying for, especially if they can still catch their favorite TV shows for a decent price.
But even if the Luddites win here, there are plenty of places elsewhere that'll happily seize on what the future has to offer and use it to their advantage. And then, like empires of the past, the nation of America will become chaff and left to rot in it's own backward, Luddite garbage, a second-class 20th century power in a 21st century world. As an American I'll mourn what happens my nation, but the rest of the world will treat us like the chaff we are - useless and best forgotten.
The question is: is there still enough of that revolutionary heritage left in the majority of us to embrace the future and fight the Luddites, even if it means that the fight might become violent? Or are there simply not enough of us left that care that much? By violence I don't mean armed revolution, but rather a willingness to say "that law isn't right, that law doesn't make sense in this new world, and I won't obey it even if it means that the government might hurt me and punish me for my disobedience". As someone who will someday soon be a father and wishes his daughter to grow up in a free society this question isn't at all academic.
I'm beginning to think that there aren't enough of us willing to take that risk, and that America will indeed fall by the wayside. If that's the case, if the battle is already lost before it's even picked up steam, then perhaps I'd better serve my child by moving her to a place that's still invested in the future. Letting her grow up in a country trapped in the past seems to be the worst possible disservice I could do her, especially if she's surrounded by moralistic Luddites bent on shaping her to their backwards, anachronistic point of view - or punishing her if she refuses to conform.
What do you think?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Mr. Lessig has written an interesting article, and I think it was worth reading.
Still, I think he has misses the point. He says (I paraphrase) that the internet has the possibility to fundamentally change the system, but that we are simply using it to recreate the old system on a larger/different scale.
Cable television, he also says, was the first Napster. But I think both of these are completely wrong.
As has been pointed out before, and as bears pointing out again, Napster was a file sharing service which allowed people to share files they already had on their computers. Napster itself generated no content, not even content copied from other providers. It was not a one to many medium, as cable television certainly is.
As far as I see it, Napster was really a search engine -- but one with an interesting usage agreement. "We will tell you where to find music on other people's computers, but only if you run our software and agree to share your music." And you didn't even really have to share your music, if you didn't want to! Napster worked because of the fact that a lot of people thought it was a really cool idea, not because they provided better content.
How would a compulsory licensing scheme work for something like this? It wouldn't at all. It doesn't even apply. Are you going to say that facilitating the transfer of a music file over the internet, even if that file doesn't pass through your server, and even if both parties may in fact already legitimately have license to the file makes you subject to a fee (although, apparently, this is what the courts decided)? Otherwise you're left with charging everyone who uses the service for files that are downloaded from their machines.
Furthermore, the internet has the capability to be as many things as people desire simultaneously. It is not limited to reconfigured one-to-many offerings and commercial ventures. Nor is it limited to free exchange of ideas. Internet bandwidth is not unlimited, but neither is the "bandwidth" of a person. The beauty of a computer network is that it is an on demand service, and one person can seek out whatever he or she wants.
Cable television, radio, film: all of these are bound by issues of streaming. There are a limited number of TV or radio stations, even on cable or satellite, and they all broadcast only in real time. Therefore, a decision has to be made regarding what is available. Likewise, movie theaters can only show a certain number of movies per day, and so they must choose to show those they think will make the most money.
But look at video rental! Video rental is more like a file-sharing model: you can get whatever movie you want (as long as you can find the right video store), and you can watch it when you want. Movies come from many different studios and directors, and video stores facilitate finding them. Unlike non-commercial file-sharing, there is copy protection built into the movies, however, so that when you want to watch one, you have to pay for the privilege.
I can envision a real-world/napster hybrid: "Here is a list of club members and the movies/CDs/books they own. If you are a member of the club, you have the right to request a copy of any movie/CD/book owned by a club member. If more than one member owns the work, you may choose which member to ask. Having received a copy of the work, you are now considered to own it also and may receive requests for copies." I am pretty sure that there are clubs like this for trading, especially, DVDs.
Finally, while there may be much more commericial content available electronically than before, it is also easier than ever for an individual to create his own content.
The internet is not a book, it's paper.
Phil
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
when they are either followed or capable of being enforced.
The internet is a medium where we can vote a referendum without going to the polls. No matter what the courts or congress decide, music will be shared. Napster may be dead, but we now have Gnutella.
I just realized something. You always hear that you need to "do something about it," implying voting or writing your congressman about an issue. We need to "speak up." Well, it occurred to me that we are saying something, we're lobbying in our own way All the millions of people out there sharing information freely are saying "I believe this should be available to me, in this format, at this price." We just aren't talking in the way congress, the government, and the industry wants to listen to.
This was a good piece, although shorter versions of it can be found at many places.
Content creators have it tough in this time. They are told to make money off their content, but the content sellers (time/warner, random house, etc) will help you do that only if you the content creator agree to the terms for selling content. The author has little flexibility in negotiating with the content provider if they want to make a profit.
In the early 1990's I felt that intellectual endeavors had zero economic value. I was not disparaging the pursuit of wealth or even making a cynical comment about the publishing market (I was an unpublished writer). I was merely stating what I felt to be an obvious point. The market cannot properly assess the value of artistic objects. My creative writing was (I felt) terrific, and yet no publisher would take a chance. And why would they? They had a bottom line to worry about, and I was not so naive to believe that any of my creative works would be a cash cow for a publishing company.
5 years later, the Internet was upon us, and suddenly, I no longer had to worry about getting published. Everybody and their 15 year old brother could publish a decent web page. It was a glorious time, but it threatened the livelihood of content creators (who probably weren't making a lot of dough off selling content anyway).
For me, nothing had changed. My goal was widespread distribution. Since I could accomplish that without begging a publisher to back me, I no longer needed publishers anymore. And nothing really had changed because I operated under the assumption that no economic value was to be gained from writing fiction to begin with.
Even though many artists/intellectuals are resigned to their output having no commercial value, most people still like the idea of buying the book at the bookstore or renting the video. Time Warner/Blockbuster/Random House are content facilitators. They provide easy access to art in a medium we prefer. In other words, TW/Blockbuster is offering a convenience service, not content. For that reason, content providers should not have the ability to restrict content in order to offer us the convenience of providing it for a price.
Of course, maybe what I say doesn't apply so much to the movie world, with lavish budgets and special effects. But then again, perhaps the big studio film came about only because of the aggregation of power of the Hollywood film industry. And remember, individuals now can produce special effects comparable to what studios coudl do 10 or 20 years ago.
Perhaps it is idealistic to believe that content creators should offer their content for free. After all, they have to buy their videocams, their PC's and their hosting service. And a lucky few find it immensely rewarding, so obviously they would want corporate backing. But at the moment, there are few advantages for content creators to hand over rights to a convenience/distribution service like Time/Warner/AOL. Profits are puny, and the restrictions on access are contrary to the artist's hope. One example concerns my friend's newspaper articles. His newspaper refuses him access to his own articles. And his articles remain in this database, totally inaccessible except for those willing to pay a fee to access it.
Free and commercial content have coexisted and will continue to do so. Even though we may complain about the strictness with which content providers guard the content they have bought, at least distribution companies are helping to make artistic works available (at a price) to the general public. There are thousands of music bands out there that nobody has ever heard of; MTV and Time/Warner have the power to provide the infrastructure and the publicity and distribution. Perhaps that is unnecessary, but without content providers like this, would we lose the common cultural heritage that makes us a culture?
Robert Nagle, idiotprogrammer Austin TX
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
The same solution is possible in the context of music on the Net. But here, rather than balance, the rhetoric is about "theft" and "crime." Congress should empower file sharing by recognizing a similar system of compulsory licenses. These fees should not be set by an industry set on killing this new mode of distribution. They should be set, as they have always been set, by a policy maker keen on striking a balance. If only such a policy maker were somewhere to be found.
What that last sentence means is that Congress makes laws. If we want good laws, we need good Senators and Congressmen. We seem to have a shortage of them, however, especially on this issue. Rick Boucher is the only one who comes to mind.
This cannot be said enough: In a democratic society, the people are the government. If you want good people (specifically on this issue) in Congress, vote them in! Ignore the paid advertisements by PACs supporting/slamming one candidate or another over some meaningless hot button issue. Find out where the candidates stand on the issues that matter and vote based on that. Get your friends to vote that way. Fax (mail letters are ignored now due to anthrax concerns) your Congress-critter and state your opinion, clearly and concisely. (That makes them take notice more than anything else.) Get your friends to do so as well. If you find that your representative doesn't know the first thing about this "freedom of information" thing, do your best to educate them, from the standpoint of someone who put them in office, and who can take them out.
This is your government, people. If it fails, it's because you failed it.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Rip, mix, burn.
After all, it's your music.
Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet their ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it--meaning to copy it; to "mix" it--meaning to re-form it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, to "burn" it--to publish it in a way that others can see and hear.
What this guy is defending is that everyone should have the right to "backup" their music and re-master it as they see fit.
Thats a good idea.
What the article completely misses is that that is not what people do with ripped audio. Of course groups like the RIAA shouldn't [and for the most they don't] crack down on ripping software. Its the P2P stuff they should kill and for several good reasons
1. P2P takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, specially at schools where people might actually try todo research or otherwise need bandwidth for positive goals
2. P2P sharing is illegal for the most part since what people "share" is copyrighted material.
3. P2P clients are often buggy and wreck computers or install Gator clients! evil!
Its one thing to be allowed to rip audio [which you are] and its quite another to be prohibited from "sharing" it [which you are].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Lessig is not one of my favortie legal commentators, but, with some quibbles, he has this issue just about right, particularly with regards to software.
Software copyrights are an abomination. We grant a government monopoly, albeit a much thinner monopoly than the one granted for patents, and get nothing in return.
No revelation of source code, and, given the long terms, no public domain software. For all the talk of nasty patents, at least patents expire within a lifetime and require publication of their underlying process.
One way or the other, if software is to be protected by warping the free market -- which is what a monopoly does, something must be given back to society to offset the disturbance.
The article says: The urgency in the field of patents is even greater. Here again, patents are not per se evil; they are evil only if they do no social good. They do no social good if they benefit certain companies at the expense of innovation generally. And as many have argued convincingly, that's just what many patents today do.
I'm not sure this statement of the problem corresponds with the reality.
Patents are crucial for innovation because they allow the inventor, usually a corporation, to recover his investment and make a profit. However, most inventions, typically over 80%, are not commercially successful. Therefore, patent holders must make enough money on successful inventions to pay for the total cost of a research and development and make a profit.
Because corporation cannot know in advance what innovations will by commercially successful, the only market-driven method of encouraging innovation is to increase the return on successful innovations.
The fact only a few patents are commercially successful leads to a lottery mentality in innovation. The larger the payoff in a lottery, the more people who will buy tickets even though the chance of winning becomes smaller. Similarly, in the process of innovation, the higher the return on a successful innovation, the more innovations will be devised in the hope of getting a commercially successful one.
One can imagine that in the high-risk, high reward environment, innovation would be greatest because the more innovative products one has, the greater the chance of a huge success.
The traditional criticism of how patents stifle innovation is that corporations will buy patents on new products that threaten their existing products and then suppress them. This problem suggests that patent laws should be changed so that patents should simply expire from lack use rather than have a fixed expiration date.
There's reason to think that in practice most products become obsolete before their patents expire. This behavior is what you would expect from a high rate of innovation, which a high return on patents encourages.
yes it is. there needs to be a balance between creators and the public. the creators need get money for creating, however, they should not get a free ride for more than a human life time. I agree with Lessig, 5 years renuable for 15 times, also I like how he differentiats between types of creation like personal and comercial and software, etc.
we need a good balance that is fair to all, not one that favours one side over another.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Huh? I don't know what you are talking about here and I suspect that you don't either.
In the early/mid 80s, when CDs took off, they were the most quickly and widely adopted media of all time. In 1984, I was a young 20 something guy and I got a home CD player for something like $250. I also got a good tape deck and recorded my CDs for portability to a good Sony Walkman that cost >$125. I wasn't extravagent in my music habits and I wasn't unusual among my peers. Most 20 somethings and older who had jobs in those days I knew had CD players at home. Most College kids had CD players in their dorms by the late 80s, IIRC.
I remember well it was just about 1983-84 that albums, ALL mass market albums, still came out on vinyl first and then the CD would follow for popular titles in 2-4 weeks. I recall buying the vinyl for an album I just had to have and then getting the CD after awhile when the record started sounding trashed. Then sometime around late 1984/1985, you'd see the CDs at the same time or even before vinyl was available.
The record stores changed over to carrying as many CDs as vinyl or casette tapes by 1986-1987. By the end of the 80's vinyl was marginalized. The record stores had mostly CDs, with a healthy selection of casettes.
I don't know that Columbia House had anything to do with this at all. In fact, they were trailing the curve, selling excess production of CDs a year or two after these same CDs had been in the stores.
Sure, CDs became ubiquitous in the 90s when home players plunged below $100 and portable players became more common, but the wide acceptance of CDs had nothing to do with Columbia House.
I agree with your points about DRM, etc. One of the big wins of CDs for me was the fact that I could make a fairly good tape to carry with me and still have the CD to listen to at home. I probably wouldn't have bought CDs had I not been able to make them portable. I was never into trading tapes, either. The few times that I did get a tape to listen to from someone, I would go out and buy the CD to have a clean copy. I recall distinctly listening to Paul Simon's Graceland, with permission from my office mate, on a boom box I had in my office in 1987 from a tape I'd made of the CD at home. My office mate loved it and went out and bought the CD. This was a win for the Record Industry. Sad that they can't learn from their own history.
The Home Recording Act was a boon to them, just as the VCR was a boon to the movie industry. Their greed could be their ruin. If they insist on DRM and copy protection schemes, they'll lose me as a customer for new music. Today, I listen to music a lot on computers at work. I'm not going to buy media that might require me to buy another copy in the future when I change players. Forget it, no way. I'll just buy used CDs and become an oldies freak before I buy any kind of media that makes it more difficult for me to use.
Ironically, I recall liking Microsoft software years ago because it never required dongles and I could always make backup copies. And, I never "shared" my copy with anyone. Microsoft, with their "Product Activation" seems to have forgotten this lesson.
Lessig isn't saying that all music should be free. He's saying that there needs to be a balance, and that right now the balance has shifted too far toward the copyright holder.
95 vs 75 years matters. Fine -- let's take them at their word!
Under the US Income Tax Code, expenses to make/buy long-term assets are
treated very differently from other running expenses. If you buy a 2k$
computer, a 20 k$ business car, a 10 M$ building or a 1 G$ chemical plant,
you _don't_ get to deduct against income the whole cost of these things
in the year spent. You are forced to spread the cost out [amortize] over
an estimate of the useful life of the asset. This principle should hold
true for all long-term assets, most particularly copyrights.
Now I have no idea how long the economically useful life of a copyright
is. It probably varies from weeks for a newspaper story to decades for
a novel. Our beloved IRS probably has even less of a clue. But I bet
the copyright owner has a pretty good idea. So I'd let the copyright
owner set the term of his copyright (subject to maximum), but force him
to write-off all production costs over that term!
If an owner was willing to keep the term less than a year, then they
could write-off all expenses as they do now. But if they wanted a
75 year copyright term, they could only write off 1.33% of total expenses
per year over 75 years. That's a long time to wait for the tax back,
and I very seriously doubt any businessman would go that long. Most
likely 5 or 10 years would be the economic optimum.
I like this concept because it is voluntary and making these sorts
of trade-off are very normal in business. The owner has income and
cost projections, and can chose a term to match. I also see no problem
in allowing a copyright holder to accelerate deductions by shortening
the term. Lengthening the term is obviously out of the question.
Painting a house is the work of the hands, not the mind and is therefore covered as a real-world purchase of service. You have painted a real house with real paint and if you want another house painted, you have to start over at the beginning.
But if you take a photograph of your newly painted house, you have created a piece of endlessly replicable intellectual property. Nobody needs to start at the beginning to make thousands of copies of your photograph. All they need is one copy and, without copyright, your photograph could be used commercially in thousands of places without one penny reaching you for all 'work' you put in when creating the photo. The government, through copyright, is ascertaining that no one can profit from your work without compensating you and giving you recourse to the courts if you find someone who has taken your work and used it without your permission.
By the same token, however, you don't have to go back to the beginning and retake the photo either. You can sell it over and over again on the exact same amount of work. This is where I believe the 'limited times' part of the Constitution is most important. Since you don't have to do any more work to have more copies, there needs to be a limited period during which you can collect on that work. Otherwise, you end up with people (sometimes not even related to the creator) collecting money on work that was done years and years ago. If you can't collect enough during 20 years to make the creation worthwhile, either it wasn't worth creating or you need some lessons in marketing. We don't need life +70 copyrights, and we don't need 'work for hire' copyrights at all.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
...because he clearly doesn't understand it, although it's probable that no one does, really.
Lessig proposes some rather reasonable approaches to balanced protection for various types of creative work.
I think his proposal for software is completely unworkable, although I'm very glad I read it, because the reasons *why* it's unworkable led me to some interesting ideas.
Lessig proposes a five-year term, renewable once (okay so far) with registration required. A total ten-year limit is eminently reasonable based on the short lifespan of software, in fact, ten years may arguably be too long. Where I see a problem is with Lessig's requirement that software be registered to obtain copyright protection.
Which version do you have to register? All of them? Software isn't like a painting, or a book, which you write once and never substantially modify. Sure, a second edition of a book may have some typos fixed, but I've never seen the author go back and make corrections to flaws in the plot (even if they should :-) ). Bug fixes and feature enhancements, minor and major, mean that software never really stops changing (until it stops being used). Because of this, our current system of automatic copyright protection is really important for software. It means that every time I go back and modify some of my code, the result is copyrighted just like the original. Even if I go modify some open source code, my changes are automatically copyrighted as well, which is very important for open source (although it introduces some almost intractable complexities as well, which lead to the FSF's suggestion that the copyright to GPL'd software be assigned to them).
So how would registration of software work? Would the copyright office have to run a giant CVS server? Security would be very hard. Then again, maybe that would be a good thing; copyright registration would require disclosure of source to the government and concomitant risk of public disclosure. Or maybe the CVS tree should even be public: the only way to obtain legal protection against copying would be to effectively publish the source code? The ramifications of that idea are interesting. It would certainly be a huge boon for the progress of the art and science of software engineering -- want to see how the scheduler in Windows XP compares to that in Solaris? Go look. Programmers would be able to take the best ideas from other programmers as long as they just use the insights and don't copy the code -- just like authors and musicians do.
OTOH, mandatory disclosure of code might also destroy the software industry entirely. Need an operating system? Just download a copy of the AIX source code and build it yourself. No need to pay IBM unless you get caught, and catching everyone would be very difficult.
What has become clear to me, at least, is that software is *fundamentally* different from books, movies, paintings and inventions. Maybe our real problem isn't in the ways we apply copyright and patent law to code, maybe the real problem is that we need an entirely different approach. We need to find a way to provide balanced protection that can permit individuals and companies to benefit from the cost and effort of software development. Stallman would have programmers be like bricklayers or lawyers; paid by the hour for services rendered, but IMO that also stifles some kinds of software development. Games are the common example, but who knows what other kinds of high-risk, high-reward types of software there might be, where there has to be a good chance of a massive payoff before anyone is willing to take on the challenge. Stallmans's ideal only works in situations where either (a) the software can be created piecemeal, and the pieces can be sufficiently useful to someone willing to pay for them or (b) there is some way of organizing and collecting from a large group of beneficiaries (street performer protocol maybe? I'm skeptical).
Lawrence Lessig is definitely one of the major thinkers of our day on the issues of Intellectual Property in the Internet age, and even he doesn't have any idea how to deal with software. It's a hard problem because code is so *many* different things, all at the same time. It's not like anything the law has dealt with before.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
{devils_advocate
.sig
And why exactly is it that the amount of money Joe Shmoe is entitled to is related in any way to the amount that MGM makes?
}
-- this is not a
Your fulla shit. Clearly, you don't understand the intellectual property system. An individual has no more "right" to intellectual property than (s)he would to welfare -- its a *priviledge*, alotted to people for the purposes of furthering societal progress.
Society agrees to ensure that creators get paid for the use of their creation for a *limited time*; in return, it is EXPECTED by society, which is paying taxes to support IP, that certain fair-use rights will be preserved while that protection ensues, and that after a limited time the work will transfer to the public domain.
Congress continually retroactively and proactively extending IP-terms violates this agreement.
Furthermore, the author being able to prevent certain people from using their work violates that agreement. A more resaonable system would be where the author/creator/programmer has no right to control whether or not people can use his software nor how they use it but is entitled licensing or royalty fees. This is what Lessig proposes.
Again, let me correct you in your deluded attempt to assert that people should have IP-rights in the same sense they have property-rigths. IP is NOT physical property. If I say something to my friend, I have no right to prevent him from repeating it to everyone else. Once an idea/invention/whatever leaves your mouth, you have no right to control whether or not people repeat/distribute it -- that's a violation of their free speech rights. But for a limited time [i.e., 5 years for software (as software is obsolete after that time), 10 years for music (as no one buys 10 year old music), 10 years for movies, 10-15 years for books, and 10-15 years for patents (NO patents on "business models", btw)] authors should be able to get royalties off of the use of their work, but not be allowed to control its use. The royalties should be fixed rate.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I don't mean to be rude, but Lessing is in denial. His essay showed brilliant insight on every concieveable angle accept for one: that copyright monopolies are bad to begin with.
It reminds me of those in the 80's who insisted that their is no problem with communisim, but merely the way it was applied, or those in the 1830's who insisted that the problem wasn't slavery but merely our policies on slave treatment. Their elloquent conclusions were worthless because they just didn't get it, if the premise is wrong then everything else is useless
The same is true with copyrights, they restrict freedoms and GROW to restrict more by their very nature. Back in 1776 it might have been bearable, but now in the information age it's not! We simply need to get rid of them even if that means defiance and mass civil-disobedience. Copying for my benefit, the benefit of others, or even for commercial profit is no more wrong then refusing to go to the back of the bus. I'm sorry if some people don't like that, but they are just half to going to get used to it.
The reasonable balance that Lessig seeks for digital IP, and that worked so well for cable companies (vis a vis broadcasters) is a scary proposition for the music and movie industries. This fear doesn't exist simply because these industries are greedy (although that's a major part of it), but also because there's no good way to police the balance, to ensure that the creators and distributors will even get the compulsory payments that Lessig describes. File sharing via open technologies (and the natural inapplicable model of economic scarcity) has made all digital content effectively free.
Ultimately, Lessig will have to explain how the balance he foresees will work in practical terms. As for me, I hope he wildly succeeds in doing so.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Natural copyright is more important for software than it is for a lot of other media because it is so often revised (though some code has a longer fixed life, like various versions of malloc() which have been around and unchanged forever because they need to be predictable).
It is still important for other works, too, though. As an author, you may have to show several revisions of your book to your editor ("take out the scene with the dead horse and make the lighthouse worker a spaceman") before it is accepted for publication. All of these versions need automatic copyright protection.
Natural copyright also helps deal with the issue that corporations tend to have more money to throw around than individuals. What if you are dirt poor, and truly can't afford to register your copyright? There are actually people out there in the US who cannot afford to pay anything whatsoever. They should not be denied copyright protection.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
"if it is thought that it is in the public interest to take someone's land for public purposes, the land is *bought*. It is called "eminent domain". Fair market value is paid."
Not always.
In the front of virtually every property, there is access taken for things such as sidewalk, underground water, electrcity, telephone. As a property owner, you aren't given compensation for this (in fact, in the case of water, sometimes you pay for the privledge). Everyone has decided that its a benefit for everyone to have access (including the landholder). Now this isn't 100% correct and when the government does something to decrease the value of my physical property, then the *first* owner is generally compensated. But by allowing access to the public, I can make the same argument that the value of the copyright/trademark is increased.
As to your example of "mickey mouse", no one is arguing that copyright holder shouldn't be able to exploit those rights. But its a stretch to say Disney should have perpetual copyright limitation.
Mickey Mouse as a trademark? Sure. But why should Disney keep copyrights to an 80 year old cartoon? It serves the public better if those cartoons are now public domain. Two immediately come to mind: (1) there's an incentive for Disney to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons (2) The public freely gets to see "steamboat willy" as free entertainment.
Imagine if Beethoveen's relatives had the right to prevent any public performances of the 9th symphony. Whose interests are served? Why should the creation of a book, painting, music, video be a perpetual money making machine? The concept of "Intellectual Property" forces us to torture logic as it is. Why force us into a future where everthing you do or say could potentially be the property of large corporations. We're very rapidly headed that way now, and that future isn't especially appealing for me.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Typical ignorant response from someone brainwashed by the IP system.
In response to "Software isn't obsolete in 5 years"
Of course it is. Windows 95? Garbage. Same with Windows 98. Tombraider? May still be fun, but obsolete and not a seller. Descent 3, one of the best game ever? Obsolete, not a seller anymore. As for UNIX, its original IDEA is still in USE today. The original UNIX has long been dead. Btw, had anyone tried to patent UNIX back then, like they would today, the vast vast innovation done on UNIX through IRIX, AIX, HP-TRU, OSX, BSD, Linux, etc etc, would NOT have occured. My argument isn't that "no one buys it" after 5 years -- just that the sales are drastically reduced; your examples are meaningless. Thus, its the right time to have IP wear off. Furthermore, having it wear off after 5 years allows the software in public domain to contribute to modern projects in some useful way. Remember, IP is a system designed with the PUBLIC INTEREST in mind -- to promote maximum progress, and to GIVE BACK to the public in exchange for them protecting author's IP with THEIR tax dollars.
As for your example of classic books, again, same thing. Yes, they're great books -- but not sellers. Besides, the goal of IP is NOT to allow authors (or their relatives) to profit off of ONE work indefinately, but to provide an incentive for authors to create. I suggest a 10-20 year protection on books, as they lose selling power slower than other IP...this gives the authors plenty of time to recover the cost of investment, and obtain some profit. After that time, it then falls into the public domain, and the PUBLIC is repaid for their TAX dollars being used to protect an authors Intellectual Property PRIVILEDGES. Furthermore, the fact that the book enters the public domain soon after released, means it is still very much clearly culturally relevant: in other words, of maximal utility.
Remember, original "intellectual property rights" last 14 years. Not life + 75 years. Remember, the SOLE purpose of IP is to promote progress. Progress means that the public needs to get free access to ideas after a brief and reasonable period of time.
What rubbish, especially the part about how fixed rate royalties is communism. You might as well argue in favor of information-fascism.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A poorly worded argument by a person who more than likely has unclear thoughts on the matter.
Your examples are trivial and largely irrelevant. Pointing to a few examples where software, books, movies, whatever, isn't either obsolete or a non-seller (that is, sells in trivial quantities) after 5-20 years doesn't negate the fact that most are. Sure, UNIX has been at the heart of computing for the past several decades...but its not the same UNIX that was originally released from Bell Labs. That UNIX is long dead, and there's no reason why the code from that shouldn't be public domain. Same thing with Linux -- the Linux kernel available today differs significantly from that 5 years ago. MS Windows? Win95 and WinME were separated by 5 years, and have considerable differences beyond the GUI. No reason why Win95 shouldn't be public domain now.
Sure, there are some books which sell for decades, even hundreds, of years after their release in significant numbers. But MOST DON'T. And even for those that do, an author and (after he's dead) his family shouldn't be able to profit for a hundred+ years on somewthing which only took a few years to create. No significant extra incentive is provided to authors by promising them life +75 years profit -- certainly not enough to offset the loss the public suffers from these works being controlled and unavailable to everyone.
Your arguments that the "family" deserve to profit off of an artists work is ridiculous. Holding IP is like a title, a position. If I'm a professor at a university, I have the right to that position, but not the right to pass it onto my son -- who doesn't deserve it and didn't work for it -- after I'm dead. An author's "family" did not create his work, thus they don't deserve to hold the work's IP rights. America is, aside from a democracy, largely a meritocracy.
As for "registration" for copyrights, patents, etc, who said it has to be expensive? The costs of registration could be paid for by the state. Registration IS necessary for copyrights, because copyrights are intended to cover ORIGINAL work. Under the current system, everything you say or write is automatically copyrigthed...that's obsurd. I shouldn't be able to say some quick catchy phrase like, "We are all slowly, but surely, dying," copyright it and then sue someone else who says or writes that. The idea of registration is to prevent people from trying to fraudulently copyright things which aren't original works, or which are trivial/insignificant.
As for your talk of "living off 2cents a copy from your works," you misunderstand my argument. I never said any such thing. What I said is that artists should be able to profit -- for the alotted time -- off of their works, but not to control how their works are used. Compensation without control. Authors, for example, would be compensated for people who obtained their books, or read their books on TV, but would not have the right to prevent anyone from using their work in any way, so long as they were compensated.
You should also note that while having works transfer to the public domain quicker, while not allowing artists to capture the full market value of their works, also alleviates them from expenditures they would have to make themselves. True, they wouldn't be able to profit off of books for more than 15-20 years; but they would also have free access to any book of such age. The cost to them is more than made up for by the fact that they'd have less restricted, free access to much more information. But from your arguments, it seems like you think that artists and their families "deserve" to be compensated for an infinite period of time (practically speaking, from the authors pov, as he dies) for a work which took a finite amount of time and effort to create. This is clearly nonsense. If a woodsman carves a fine chest, which is artful and beatiful, that took a finite period of time to make; like in the case of a writer, it also took some creative license. The woodsman does not get to profit off of the chair forever; he gets to sell it once and that's it. There's no reason to elevate artists above working society such that they get paid the rest of their lives for work which took perhaps a year to create.
For your clarification, let me post my suggestions for IP-protection terms for inventions, books, music, movies, and software.
1. Software. Copyright should last 5 years. This allows the developer plenty of time to make a significant profit off of his program, and also puts the program in the public domain at a time in which it still has relevance and is not an artifact useful only for "educational purposes".
2. Music. Copyright should last 10 years. This allows the muscician plenty of time to make a significant profit off of his music, and also puts the music in the public domain at a time when most people can still easily relate to it.
3. Movies. Copyright protection should last 10 years. This allows the movie-producers plenty of time to make a significant profit off of their movie, and also puts the movie in the public domain at a time when it will still be culturally relevant.
4. Books. Copyright protection should last 20 years. This allows the author plenty of time to make a significant profit off of his book, and also puts the book in public domain at a time when it will still be culturally relevant to most people.
5. Inventions. Patent protection should be afforded to individuals who actually invent something; there should not be patents on "life forms". Nor should corporate raiders in the US be able to patent something that was pioneered by indigenous peoples, but which the corporations contributed nothing to. Limited patent protection should last 15 years, and should be strict in its granting. Every trivial invention that comes along does not deserve a patent. Business methods do not deserve patents. Furthermore, patents should account for alternate and independant invention. Patents should not be awarded which give an inventor the rights over any invention whihc accomplishes a specific ends, only over his particular implementation. Patents should also recognize the rights of "second comers". Many people may be working on a particular way to do something; just because one person comes up with a solution a day before the other 9 doesn't mean the other 9 should be locked out.
6. Combination works. Any work somehow combining any combination of the aforementioned should be protected piecemiel.
7. The year by year exention plank, up to a maximum of 50% more time. If the owner of an IP work can show that they still make significant profits off of their work (i.e., perhaps 10% of the selling volume from the first year released), then they can get a yearly renewable exention.
Remember, in the beginning, intellectual property protection as established by the Founding Fathers only last 14 years. There's nothing wrong with short protection terms; nor do they decrease innovation. Rather, they increase it by reducing the cost of entry...artists/inventors have a larger public-domain pool to draw from in making their work when shorter terms exist. Furthermore, short terms force creators to create more. One-time-wonders can't make money the rest of their lives off of one book, song, whatever; they have to continue producing things, continue working for most of their lives, just like the average person does.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen