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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.
but they did it too. I was reading an article for my silent film class at lunch today, and it described a court case where for the first time filmmakers were forced to pay an author of a book for putting it on screen (apparently a film company had made an adaptation of 'Ben Hur' without crediting or paying the author of the book). This quote from the article struck me: "There was no copyright law to protect authors and I could, and did, infringe on everything", that was Gene Gauntier, who wrote the unauthorized adaptation of Ben Hur. talk about the pot calling the kettle black in this whole distribution-of-content mess. as soon as the technology shows up, people will infringe on copyrights. it happened in 1912, and it'll happen now.
OK, but the article starts off "when elephants dance, get out of the way". That's an amusing phrase, but is it supposed to mean anything for us?
"Look out the elephants are dancing, hide behind the trees and see who comes out the winner!"
This is advocating the wrong solution, IMO. The real saying should be "when two elephants fight, and the outcome is important to you, get your ass in there and start pounding on the enemy elephant!"
Really? Well, then, I guess the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is illegal. Of course, that doesn't stop it from being upheld, used, etc. Just thought I'd toss that little tidbit in for you.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Probibiting corporations from owning a copyright is interesting. I don't know if it's practical, but it is interesting.
Corporations may be legal entities, but they are not human beings. Neither are they citizens of any nation. A single one paragraph bill stating that copyrights will only be issued to citizens of the United States would do it. We would still have to recognize the Berne convention, and honor copyrights granted to corporations from other nations, but we don't have to perpetuate this myth that corporations are people.
Corporations do not create works. Their employees do. Give the copyright to the employee that created the work. As part of the "standard" employee agreement, a work created by an employee on company time would be automatically licensed to the company free of charge for any use, but copyright still belongs to the employee.
At the minimum, there is a seed for thought here.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Theater owners have film projectors now which will work for 20 years and cost 1/50th the amount to maintain. Or they can shell out millions for technology that will cost 1/10th the current price in 3 years.
Any theater chain or owner buying digital today instead of 2005 is obviously floating in money.
End result - don't expect any growth in digital movie technology.
Exception - film company owned theaters who can save the money on film production and get a chance to give "their" theaters the film 10 days before everyone else.
[caveat - I'm a lifetime member of Cinema Seattle and have relatives and friends in the film industry]
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
the ban on ex post facto laws (per the const.) was designed with one particular idea in mind: you can't get punished for doing something 20 years ago that was only made illegal 10 years ago.
This is still the case - the last big time it came into play, however, was when the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 by the states. I knew several teachers who used to talk about how they could buy beer at 19 but their friends couldn't simply because their birthday fell on the day that the law came into effect.
Congress is (to the best of my knowledge) still afforded the right to make laws that do not *punish* crimes or the like that are retroactive.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
His solution is the whole problem. It does not see copyrights as the seed of a vine who'se growth will never stop nickeling and diming freedoms to death untill it is cut off at the root. That's what got us here to begin with. As long as our society accepts that it's morally OK to derive value by restricting the copying practices of others we have doomed ourselves to follow a flawed concept that will always threaten freedom - corporations or not.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the copyright period as 14 years, with the opportunity to renew for 14 years if the author was still alive. Since the people that passed this law were essentially the same ones that wrote the Constitution, with its limited time for copyrights, I think this law was in line with the framers original intent.
Like the article said, the 14 year period lasted for 100 years. Then it was extended 11 times in the the next 100 years! These extensions have absolutely nothing to do with the works' authors and inventors and everything to do with corporate subsidies.
The solutions he presents are exactly what needs to happen.
The problem with this is easly explaned by going to www.cnn.com and doing a search for CBDTPA, guess what this "Big News" or as something that effects the world around you, get a "no matches found". and of course if you look up SSSCA you find one article and it's about Dmitry Sklyarov "ARRESTED HACKER". As you can clearly see the "Conetnt Owners" i.e. the "Big Media" don't want the average joe to find out what is going on... add to your mailing list of congress persons and senators ANY AND ALL media outlets that are not owned by AOL/TW or Disney.. some one has to let the masses know and you can bet your ass it's not going to be them....
Just Limin' Mon
In the case of a film the aggregate copyright should go to the producer. In most cases the studios are not the producer they are more like the bank.
Additionally, each individual involved, where creative expression is required should hold some form of copyright or moral authority over their performance.
That's a different story. It may seem like just semantics. However, in the first case, that of a corporation creating something the assumption is that the corporation is the copyright holder. Which is not entirely in line with the idea of a copyright. A corporation is not an author or an inventor, but this assumption grants them that status. If you look at it from the other angle, the actual creator of the work is the owner of the copyright and by participating in a work for hire they are bound by their contract to grant exclusive rights to the company that is paying them, but they still own the rights they should only legally be able to grant that exclusive license. This is more in line with the spirit of this country which should, as I'm sure most will agree, be protecting the individual against the corporations not the other way around.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I also think it is possible to mount a more general constitutional attack on the Bono act - for once the ultraright faction of the Supreme Court might do some good in the world. It could be argued that the extension of copyright power to the Congress must be interpreted according to the understanding of authorship rights prevalent at the time the "framers" wrote the Constitution. I believe such rights were generally thought to be limited to the life of the author. So if I'm right, arguably Congress exceeded its constitutional powers by adopting the Bono Act, and the Act goes.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.