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When Elephants Dance
One Michael Fraase has written an excellent piece on the battle between the entertainment industry and everyone else titled "When Elephants Dance." Well worth reading, and bookmarking, and referring newbies to in order to get them up to speed in the digital content wars. His solution is right on, too, IMHO.
The demand to restrict the copyright to 14 years is pretty naive.
The Copyright Act of 1790 provided for a 14-year copyright term, renewable for 14 additional years. I remember reading that life expectancy for five-year-olds (a statistic that ignores infant mortality but does include child prodigies) has not increased significantly in the 200-odd years since that act was passed.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since the link is /.-ed, you can see the page by using this link
enjoy
Hacker Media
- "when two elephants fight, and the outcome is important to you, get your ass in there and start pounding on the enemy elephant!"
BAD idea. They make elephant guns for a reason! Getting "in there" gets you squashed, as the article points out. We're supposed to be smarter than that -- we need to be encouraging lawyers (EFF, etc.), buying our own legislators, and educating other voters!!I did this experiment: I talked to some other customers in Best Buy once -- we were in front of the HDTVs.
- "Do you know they're still fighting over the broadcast standard?"
- "Do you know the broadcasters want to be able to stop you from recording HDTV programs?"
- "Do you know where you can get HDTV content?"
It turned out the person I'd chosen was the vice-president of the local (about 300 person) Cigna office. Lawyer by education, manager by profession. Neither her, nor her husband, had heard a thing about the battles we flame about on a daily basis!"Nope"
"Nope"
And...
"I think our cable system carries it."
Ouch.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
No, no, no. Retroactive means that the change doesn't cause anyone who violated the law in the past to become a guilty party or otherwise cause retroactive costs or damages.
Although it depends what you mean by retroactive. A proper retroactive ruling would say that works copyrights enacted at least X years ago have, as of this date, expired. An improper retroactive ruling would declare the copyright to be expired long ago, making existing court cases of copyright violation flop. Arguably, the ex-post facto protections should swing in both ways.
Retroactive copyright might disenfranchise someone who just published a recent album though, so as a reasonable measure, Congress might incorporate some appropriate delay on the retroactive clause.
If you read this through you will see how history repeats itself ....
During the early 1800's the rich plantation masters were so close to the rich industrialists that many people wondered how in the heck could people who had so many financial ties become so divided and eventually financed opposite sides of a civil war.
The answer is this, in order for the plantation masters to get control of their slaves - they also had to control and regulate industries that relied on a mobile and skilled work force. (the industrialists) Those who didn't see this thought that the slave states could peacefully get along with the free states - they were idiots.
Today the copyright industries, in order to get control of their copyrights, must regulate the computer and information technology industries that are carrying the economy. Some people also think that the solution is some sort of compromise, but they just don't understand that deriving value by restricting the copying practices of others is immoral and will never go away till we cut the problem off at the root - copyrights. This belief is very harmfull, because the longer we wait, the more costly it's going to be to cut the problem off at the root.
Umm, the Constitution does not specify 14 years. It gives Congress the mandate to specify the term of copyright, and Congress intially set it to 14 years. Now whether the Constitution allows them to extend the initial term is another matter....
- The right of integrity
- The right of attribution
- The right of disclosure
- The right to withdraw or retract
- The right to reply to criticism
The first two are part of the Berne Convention, which the US has signed & ratified. He also gave a link to another article with a good, detailed explanation of moral rights.