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Copyrights/Patents are Public Domain?
x3 sent us a link to an article running on InfoWorld that talks intelligently about intellectual property and the public domain. Its an extremely well written piece summing up what many readers of this site probably feel about the subject.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
That editorial should be mailed/e-mailed to each congressman and senator as well as to every U.S. citizen.
I think its interesting (Maybe the right word is insane?) how technology (specifically, the internet) is supposed to "bring us together", but laws such as the DMCA, and orginizations such as the RIAA and the MPAA push to limit how we can come together, as far as music (which is held by many to be the "universal language") and movies.
I dunno. Just a thought.
Nice of Steve Gillmor to give up an issue of his column for the mail-in letter.
Patents of course last something on the order of 17 years after invention to keep competition off of the idea. Copyrights last the lifetime of the creator plus about 75 years after death. Trademarks can last different periods based on what kind of trademark... Whther it is registered or simply has been in use by the company for a while...
An interesting thing to note is that a lot of institutions like universities are much more concerned over there rights to intellectual property outside of patents... Gatorade for instance has well run past a patent expire date. The trademark and the license to use it by Pepsico is worth millions every year to the University of Florida. 5 million I think...
The aurthor of the letter reprinted in the article forgot something:
The people in power wish to stay in power and they do that by bending to the will of the people that fund them (RIAA, MPAA, Disney, the like). The government does not serve the people anymore, if it ever did, It serves the businesses, the people who make the "campaign contributions," the holders of the intelectual property.
Help I'm a rock.
I'm taking a course this semester in History in Tech PErspective. One thing I found interesting is that during the 1700's in Britan - Inventors would develop something, patent it, but not get called on to make more of the machine, not leading to the riches they envisioned. Instead of collecting royalties, prospective buyers simply made their own version of the patented device.
Few examples: 1733 "flying shuttle" by John Kay, 1764 "spinning jinny" by James Hargreanes, and 1769 "water frame" by Richard Arkwright. All three (at the time) were major developments in cotton processing mills.
Similar happened with the development of the steam engine. Though the expertise required got the key players more royalties than their cotton processing counterparts.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
...lack of copyright protection for authors stifles work and leaves them poor. The same probably holds true for the musicians in a record contract. While the following article is about British authors in America who held no copyright, the result would be the same for any author in any country. (Dickens's 1842 Reading Tour: Launching the Copyright Question in Tempestuous Seas) Greatly limiting the "brief [few years] economic advantage" for authors and inventors would destroy the ability for someone to live off their work, sending brilliant, independant minds back to the doldrums of corporate America.
Trademarks can last different periods based on what kind of trademark
Trademarks last until the mark becomes a generic term (Aspirin® died in the USA as part of WW1 reparations; Kleenex® and Xerox® are on life support). This can approach perpetuity.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I will take this opportunity to ask a burning question:
If a work is created in the United States and the copyright is valid for the 75 magic years, what happens in another country where the copyright is only 10 years after the work is created?
Can it be used in that other country?
What happens if a work is created in that other country - can the US Copyright Padlock be used for the full 75 magic years (in the US) or is the originating country authoritative on the length?
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Greatly limiting the "brief [few years] economic advantage" for authors and inventors would destroy the ability for someone to live off their work
You call life plus 70 years (USA and EU copyright term) "brief"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've been talking up the problems of extended copyright for a few years now, without much success. My problem? I haven't used the argument that extending copyright law works against creativity and the authors. Copyright law, today, works for the corporation. Corporations, in turn, work hard to control congress which, in turn, controls copyright law. Is it any wonder that most of the complaints about sharing, copying, and otherwise circumventing copyright come not from authors but from corporations?
As for me, I'm a teacher. I break copyright every day. I hand out copies of poems, I photocopy sections of books, I encourage students to read books out of libraries instead of buying them. (I use libraries as an example of defeating copyright because they do what p2p does in a system that is legitimate only because it has been around for a long time.) At the end of last week I saw that kids had been downloading Kazaa and Bearshare to the school computers in order to get music. Good for them.
I like that the author likens this battle to the drug wars. The government has illegalized pot. The kids have no trouble getting it. They get in trouble when they are caught, so they do it surreptitiously. This puts them in more danger than the drug itself--by far. The over-reaching copyright laws, outrageous price-fixing by the music industry, and the control of the radio airwaves have brought about an underground system that works very well, will not likely be stopped, and will, eventually, be legitimate even if it's not legal.
Chalk this up to the short-sightedness of business, the reactionary nature of current politics, and the creative drive of people. The saying goes that information wants to be free. I'm not sure if that means that information wants to be free of charge, but I'm willing to bet that if a major music label started a Napster-style server through which we could download the new Peter Gabriel album for one dollar, there would be a line at the server for quite some time. That they have not done this means that many of us have either copied a friend's disc or downloaded the songs over GNUtella. And exactly how is the copyright law benefiting Gabriel and his label?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Many people get this confused and think, congress has the power to grant copyrights. Copyright is a limitation of congress' power, not a power unto itself. If a copyright fails to "promote the progress of science and useful art", then congress is exercising a power it was never granted.
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
The real question now is, "Can IP as a concept be salvaged to protect powerless innovators, or has it been twisted and exploited to the point where we must get rid of it entirely?"
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
This made me remember somethin Sonny Bono's wife said about what copyright and Sonny's thoughts on copyright. That they should be forever but to comply with the Constitution he would be satisfied with forever minus a day.
I hope Lessig wins for Eldrid. One small step for Eldrid, one giant smackdown for the Mouse.
...tho simple and in many minds the right thing to do, would be difficult to achieve. But, hey, what the heck?
Only single persons, not organizations can hold copyrights and patents.
Laws are designed around human beings, who die. Corporations have the potential to be immortal.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
It's amazing how the terms of public debate on this issue have shifted towards the copyright holders. When you talk to an average joe about this they usually think there is nothing wrong with extending copyrights indefinitely, "after all it's their Mickey Mouse, they own it just like I own my car". People seem to be unaware about what the consitution says on this issue. In a more rediculous example of overly long copyrights: Did you know you could get sued for singing "Happy Birthday to You". No joke, see here. It does not run out for another 20 years!
John Lennon and Janis Joplin are "happy" that a new generation is listening to their music
Nice choice of examples.
There are many musicians that have expressed this sentiment, and not via Ouija board. I'm sure that John Lennon and Jani Joplin WOULD be happy to have their music swapped on people's computers, but lets not attribute to the dead what they never ever said.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
While I have problems with the current system, collectivist nonsense like this is not the answer. When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
It's just as bad when RMS complains he has a right to my source, whether or not I want to give it away. This talk does not enhance freedom.
I think it's funny how you magically moded your post to be rated interesting just based on your subject line of "interesting"...
Back to the topic, I think you're right. If you look at musical history, you'll notice a lot of borrowing going on. I mean, even now. Danny Elfman's Batman theme resembles in no small way a piece of music for piano and orchestra by Rachmoninoff. I forget which one, but I think it's the 2nd...
An interesting point of the suppression of ideas created by this: Mozart was accused and had to stand in front of the king (mebbey) when he was a younger child. His crime? He had copied the mass music at church by keeping it in his head and writing it out when he got home. So, could we give Mozart the credit for being the first person to violate some form of artistic licensing? I would've liked to see the RIAA there on that one...
Now, let's think. If artists of that time period weren't allowed to copy from each other (Mozart was commended after he demonstrated how he did it) would we have even heard of any classical European master outside of the Bach family? I'm probably exaggerating (and I'm sure anyone who thinks so will prove me wrong) but the point of the matter is: the same technology (music in their days, computer in ours) that is supposed to bring us together can either do so, or can seriously put a cramp in my style.
Target
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Yes, this is true. But consider that the argument being posed in this article (and before the Supremes with Eldred v. Ascroft) is not for the destruction of all copyright but a foreshortening of terms. After all, I won't argue against Gershwin profiting from Rhapsody in Blue but IMO his children shouldn't.
Greatly limiting the "brief [few years] economic advantage" for authors and inventors would destroy the ability for someone to live off their work...
Depends on how you define "life off their work". If you mean "write one story and use those royalties to get filthy rich" then I'm dead set against it-- would you be happy with only one Tom Clancy, Michael Chriton or Stephen King story? But if you mean "write many stories, perhaps spaced a few years apart" then why do you care if copyright on the first book exends past when you write the second or third?
Now, I'm not really arguing about forshortening copyright that drastically-- maybe down to 28 years or so-- you could have 8 or 9 books on the market across that timespan. Surely you can't argue that extending the copyright another ~80 years on top of that will "promote the progress of
Do you like Japanese imports?
What if the 'little guy' writes a cool song. Everybody already knows who metallica is; without protection the original author might end up competing with a powerful name who can just remake your song & pass it off as their idea, knowing the buttheads in metallica, likely trying to make you look like the faker.
I'm not concerned that metallica might make 100x more, because 1/100x is probably still reasonable compensation. But who wants to be known as the guy that copied metallica?
Of course if the laws weren't like they were metallica/brittany spears might not be quite so popular, but somebody would.
I think individuals ought to have some protection, but I don't see why this same protection is extended to 500lb. gorillas.
Let them fend for themselves, and let's see a hefty advertising (information pollution) tax. of like 90%.
It's been said that every organization, no matter what its original purpose, eventually ceases to pursue that purpose and becomes a vehicle to power. Our entertainment companies have long since reached that point and our liberties are falling victim to it because the organizations assigned to protect those liberties have also reached that point.
After Germany lost World War I, Bayer was forced to give up both trademarks as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in this thread, but the US Supreme Court heard arguments just this week on the issue of constantly extending copyrights.
See this and, of course, Slashdot it.
The only good weather is bad weather.
IANAExpert, but I think IP as a concept can be salvaged with two simple steps: make it ownable only by individuals and non-transferable.
First, this will keep (say) Disney from directly owning their movies. Instead, they will have all employees sign "exclusivity" contracts: the employees still own their IP, but only the contracted company can use it (or assign further users). This may sound wierd and exploitable (or to the uninitiated like a transfer of IP) but it leads directly into phase 2.
You may not transfer your IP to anybody at any time, not even as part of an estate. When you die, so does your IP. Things with multiple authors (most patents, movies, & music, collaborative books, etc) will of course stay within copyright / patent until the last author dies (or the natural term ends) because all of the authors have IP in the work. However, once all of the authors kick the bucket, the artwork instantly hits the Public Domain no matter how long the natural term is.
This method is of course the most simple as it would have put most of the items at issue in Eldred v. Ashcroft into the PD, while still allowing Disney, RIAA et. al to lobby Congress for longer & longer terms without destroying the whole precarious structure.
Do you like Japanese imports?
1. He doesn't say _why_ IP "belongs to the public and is in essence leased to authors and inventors." As a content creator, I'd like some explanation there.
./ we seem to like the laws against them. Here's a clue for you technologists and wannabes: technology doesn't affect law. Technology can affect culture, which then affects prevailing laws.
2. To say that "Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less" is just rubbish. A clue to the statement's status as rubbish lies in continuing demand. It's more likely he has noticed only the falloff of big-business marketing - kinda ironic.
3. He seems to argue against any new criminalizations at all. I don't think non-governmental monopolies were at the forefronts of the framers' mind, but at
etc., etc.
I liked the quotation "Advancing technology... " too. And I wouldn't disagree that the current IP scheme benefits big-business, ot that it's an unconscionable twisting of the original intents.
But I think this article and thread will show that the Slashdot/technical publics thinking on this issue is just as empty of reason/convolutedly self-serving as anything else.
Maybe things fall into public domain, maybe they don't - we should really care more.
In the long run patents or works 50 years old will still be useful and could probably change the lifes of most of the worlds population that are set back to even earlier technology for economic reasons.
Why aren't there a stronger movement to salvage the public domain and create a common worth sustaining.
Would it be unfair competition to the former patentholders? Nonsense, the what seems unfair is how lobbyists and patentlawyers seems to reinvent the laws and update minor sorrounding techniques to maintain the patents artificially. This is why you can't assume the public domain to drop out by itself, it has to be refined in the manners that GPL projects try to get free from patented technologies today.
We can't keep going in the second best direction forever. I hope that the best technology today will be released into the public domain in my lifetime, even though it's sad to see how much of it that's based on decisions made because someone else held the patent.
Although I agree with the latter positions of the infoWorld article, I did not find it particularly persuasive. I find an earlier MSBNC (admitedly a most unlikely source) arcicle to be far more enguaging and persuasive as it evaluates more even handedly the historical purposes of copyright and whether or not it has served it's purpose. The article was Copyrights and copywrongs , a historical examination of Copyright which is definately worth a read. Along the same lines you might want to read the letters between Jefferson and Maddison on the issue which are archived in various places around the net.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
If they want their property, they can come and rip it out of my brain!
Just make sure they file an Affadavit describing what brain cellls they expect to find it in, but they should expect to find a fight on their hands.
Further: "Intellectual property is owned by the public and in essence leased to authors and inventors. A temporary economic advantage for authors and inventors is created because a hopefully more valuable benefit will accrue to the public, and ultimately the lease expires and all rights return to the general public..."
Further: "Economic advantage is not in and of itself a valid purpose or justification for copyright or patent laws..."
The above quotes seem to encapsulate the author's view point. I have spent the last year trying to come to some understanding of the roots of the arguments the author is speaking out against. While I'm far from any conclusions the arguments in favour of the draconian measures criminalizing the consumer have ancient roots. Morally, the 19th c. German philosopher F. Nietzsche suggested the Christian morallity that is given to underlie the founding of America and Canada and much of Western Civilization is a slave mentality. Without looking at his arguments in detail it might serve to balance his view against the ideas of John Stuart Mill whose views on property rights were so extreme that the rights of citizenship were inextricably tied to ownership of property. Mill is the architect of modern democracy. Over and above views like those of Nietzsche and Mill there is a more pervasive and difficult argument derived, for me, from Russell's 'Theory of Types'. A Class cannot be a member of itself, but neither can a member of a class represent the class. What I'm busy trying to ferret out is whether there's a cogent argument to be drawn from the Theory of Types to intellectual property rights properly belonging to the community as the author of the article pointed out. I can't see that any argument can ultimately suggest any one individual can possibly invent in any other guise than as a member of the set represented by the community. Having said this I suspect the drive to overthrow the rights of the community comes not so much from the 'captains of industry' but rather from the lawyers who serve the legal enitity that is the modern corporation. While I'm far from ready to set out a detailed argument I think that when we gave the legal rights of individuals to legal fictions like corporations we undertook an experiment repugnant to nature akin to that of Dr. Frankenstein.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
How is this a good article? It looks to me like a very poorly thought out editorial to me, indeed.
For example the author cites the idea that most commercial value of IP is realized during the first three years. Maybe for a pop tune, or a movie, but certainly that is not the case for the vast majority of patents. New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification; the average time to market for an industrial invention in most industries is 7 years. A shorter term for patent coverage is not appropriate in most cases.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
The fact is that the history of the industrial revolution, and in particular the great lengths that were taken by companies to conceal the technologies they were using prior to the development of the patent system clearly show the value of a contract between govenrment and the inventor where public disclosure is exchanged for an exclusive right to practice the invention.
The alternative is to go back to the practices of the time where technological instrumentailities were kept as secret as possible by their inventors, to the great detriment of technological progress, and indeed society as a whole.
The article is essentially correct. The matter is made most clearly in patenting, due to the generating idea: expose your information to the public, and in return you are granted a monopoly for some time. The force of government is used to enforce the matter.
That age has passed, however. Government, owning classes and certain involved subclasses of citizenry no longer believe that patents, trademarks and copyrights are marks of exchanges of value. Instead, PT&Cs are considered to be owned assets, and as such, they are to be preserved for as long as possible, and are not to be surrenderd to the public for any reason. For instance, the trademark on Mickey Mouse (c/o the Disney Corporation) will never expire to the public domain since the corporation continually and successfully petitions the Congress to keep extending the term. We the People don't even see revenue from a (sizable) fee to renew the trademark.
Given this trend, I am now preferring to junk the USPTO. If the public receives no value for granting a patent, trademark or copyright, then why grant them?
If the previous solution is perceived to be too draconian, alternatively I propose that the USPTO can be shrunk down into a building of a couple of hundred file clerks who simply file statements and process associated fees as they come in. The system of monopoly can be kept, but all the brouhaha over preliminary evaluation can be junked. Patents are tested in court anyway, and patents are granted almost unwittingly anyway, so why bother checking the patent app? PT&C court battles will come down to two basic checks: (1) is the PT&C itself just bullshit, and (2) if not, then who filed first? The idea of public domain will be long dead, of course, but at least the government will see income from the slimmed-down USPTO, and court battles might be less costly all around.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
Generally speaking, copyrights only cover the territory where granted. If you only have a country-A copyright, people are free to copy or otherwise use the work in country-B. If you have a country-B copyright that expires after 10 years, that's it.
All of this is nearly completely irrelevant, though, since the law of granting copyrights (as distinguished from the law of the rights of copyright holders) is now virtually identical everywhere, and copyrights automatically exist wherever you need them, due to the magic of copyright treaties. The exception is the few countries that do not have "copyright relations" with, e.g., the U.S. Taliban-held Afghanistan was such a place; it is possible Iraq is today. In any such country (if there are any), people are free to violate U.S. copyrights, and Americans are free to copy works created in those places (and not published elsewhere).
IAALBNAIPL (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer), so I will defer to others' expertise, but this really is a moot point given the modern treaties.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
...anyone's freedom. The notion that I "need" to be able to make money by usurping someone else's creation is ludicrous. I say the Founding Fathers were exactly right in what they did.
What's happened though is that things are taken to excess and Congress, as usual, is way below the intellectual standard needed to make decisions like this. They think in terms of publicity, and in terms of financial contributions to their election campaigns, unfortunately. And, so the RIAA and the MPAA and all the rest are running wild and free, seemingly unfettered to crush small freedoms for the sake of the Almighty dollar.
That is what is so ludicrous about the entire position of the RIAA, etc. They seem to be suffering under the incredible delusion that every "illegitimate" copy made of their stuff is a lost sale. Why they have come to this rather idiotic conclusion is anybody's guess. It's not true that deprived of any other means people would be forced to buy this music, film, etc. Nope, most of them would exercise their remaining choice in the matter and refuse to buy it and simply live without it.
Doesn't the RIAA know that people who *want* this stuff badly enough to buy it are *already* buying it? The rest of them don't want it badly enough to pay for it, and deprived of any choice except paying for it, they'll choose not to pay for it and live without it. It's only when they perceive this stuff is "free" that it becomes worth having--it's not worth buying to the great majority of these people I'll wager.
It's kind of like software piracy. Miscrosoft bitches and moans about piracy and puts Product Activation into XP. The central problem with the argument, however, is that Microsoft got to its present position by selling non-Product-Activated Operating Systems! The contradiction is glaring, for if Microsoft had been victimized by software piracy on an institutional scale, the company would never have survived long enough to write Product Activation into XP, let alone long enough to write XP in the first place. Therefore, despite no controls on piracy at all, history convincingly demonstrates that the vast majority of Microsoft's customers want Microsoft's products badly enough to pay for them and did exactly that. There's simply no way to argue the negative there.
So here's what I think all of this is about, whether it's Microsoft's Product Activation or the RIAA's sabre rattling: GREED. Pure, old fashioned, unadulterated, unblemished GREED.
I think the position will backfire on the RIAA in a big way if it is successful in shutting off avenues of free distribution for those who will accept it no other way--it will likely do an extreme amount of damage to the industry it proclaims it is trying to protect, because the principles behind these issues are economically flawed in the first place.
To me the litmus test for copyright ought to be profit. If a copyright is broken for profit the breaker should be prosecuted. If there is no profit involved it should be a moot issue. The trigger to invoke copyright law should be profit and profit alone being made on the copyrighted works. If no profit is being made it then becomes exceedingly difficult for the copyright holder to prove damages since no one actually paid anything to obtain the copyrighted material.
In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think the trigger of the existing copyright laws is already profit and monetary gain. It seem to me that this is the "loophole" the RIAA and others hope to plug because they are proceeding from the patently false assumption that every copy out is a sale lost--which is absolutely untrue and therefore is an impossible proposition to prove.
I'll close with a message to Microsoft:
"OK, guys, you've had your fun and put PA into an OS. Therefore, you have eliminated any piracy of it and can therefore lower the prices as you've been saying for years. So when do we see the first $49.95 copy of Windows XP?"
Heh-Heh--my guess is that if they put chains on each CD and a microbomb in them to explode in case of copyright violation--we'd still never see the prices go down.
There's a good article on Lessig and Disney in this week's Economist.
I was listening to the Monsters, Inc. commentary track recently, and there's a mention of a yodel that's heard in the background through one of the doors. They actually wanted to use a different (and supposedly funnier) one, but they couldn't find the rights holder to clear it.
So Disney's copyright extension lobbying effectively damaged one of the movies they distributed.
I take issue with the letter's statement that intellectual property belongs to the public and is, in effect, leased back to the author or inventor.
That seems to imply that, at the moment of authorship or invention, the created work or invention belongs to everyone, not just to the author or inventor. This is fundamentally untrue and unsound. Untrue because the creation would not exist absent the labor of the creator, where ownership consequently resides until it is transferred elsewhere. Unsound because the financial rewards for authoring and inventing would shrink significantly, if not disappear, prompting a parallel reduction in the creation of new works and inventions.
I don't agree with the RIAA's efforts to distort copyright into enabling the members of their industry to continue to maintain a virtual oligolopy on distribution, nor do I support the large-scale transfer of ownership of copywritten commercial music under the paper-thin guise of "sharing" with a global audience. But this letter (which asserts, rather than proves, its basic premise) makes no sense when it attempts to make the case for communal ownership of private creation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Saying that the people are empowered doesn't make it so. Being able to vote does not mean that you have any power. The vote in America is nearly as meaningless as the vote in Iraq. The very design of the vote in America ensures a plurality. (def 4a) Believing that does not make a person apathetic. But believing that, what is there to do?
And just what evil corporation is forcing people to buy all those CD's released by RIAA members?
/. poster would have us believe, CD and DVD shops would be going bankrupt by the thousands thanks to the public's refusal to buy.
Last I looked, music isn't addictive. If this issue was a important to mainstream America as it is to you, they'd do something about it. However, it isn't that important to them, for good reason.
If this issue was as important to real people as the typical
People have no more right to "free" music than they have a right to free books, free newspapers, free automobiles, or free whatever.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How about a patent copyright system based upon an intrensic value for the work.
The creation of a new musical composition is worth 1 million dollars a minute.
If you chose to sell the cd for it at $20 your copyright will expire faster than if you chose to sell it at $6.
Drug patents would benefit most, if a drug company prices a perscription prohibitly it will make it into public domain sooner,
if they sell it at a reasonable profit over production costs then they can keep their patent longer.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
Concerning patents, the author says what I think. But please remember: Without the copyright, there couldn't be a GPL. The central point of the GPL (that you have to include the source with every distribution or make it easily available) couldn't be enforced without the copyright.
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
The public needs to be reminded that the purpose of copyright is to help spread new ideas, not make money.
The purpose of copyright (and patent) laws isn't to spread new ideas--that goal would be done much easier if it was simply illegal to hide an idea.
Copyrights (and patents, but not trademarks) exist so the creators of new ideas / written works CAN make money, and thus are encouraged to keep on making new things.
Ergo, the often-quoted balance between "public good" and "private benefit" that is copyright. The private party wants to enjoy as much economic beneift as possible from their works. The public wants to just enjoy the works, as cheaply as possible and as often as possible.
Copyright is how we pay authors, artists, and computer programmers. (Let's just ignore the GPL for this ONE argument, can we?). It's not that it's main purpose isn't to make money; it's that we as a society are "hiring" IP producers to make IP, and if they don't continue to produce a re-evaluation of their agreement (copyright law) might be in order.
Information should be free, and only the service to get the information in format or speed you want the information in should be charged for. The problem comes in what we call information and what we call the process. These two things are one in the same. One holds information and the other has instructions on how to manipulate the information. For all you coders out there, (myself included), the use of reflection makes this boundry hard to clarify, and therefore points that there should not be a boundry in between the two. I guess you could say we are headed toward a time, when people prosper on actually doing the work, instead of just inventing the work. Instead of just creating and inventing, and then holding onto that invention for 100, 25 or even 1, you will have develope the service behind the invention. The problem lies here that Big Business can easily swoop down and clober and stake any invention from anyone with the current laws we have in place.
What we are seeing now is only the beginning of a huge problem to come. We simply cannot protect information the way we have protected inventions in the past. Centralized protection just is not worth the advantages it shoots for. We need to have laws that says that anyone can use the invention, but the royalty for the invention is based on formula or set cost.
This is a hard subject to dive into, mostly because it is monsterous, but I think we must start, and start now to act before we get ourselves trapped in something that we cannot get out of in our generation.
That my feelings on the subject...not so sure yet what to do with them, but they are growing!
There are individuals who can create, and those that do not. The vast majority do not, but still wish to benefit from the labor of others. In politics, this desire leads to socialism. On slashdot, it leads to whiny teenagers demanding the 'right' to steal music or books because the Internet has made it easy to do so.
Really? Given that nothing is created in a vacuum, and given the author's right under copyright law to veto derivative works, is it even possible to create anymore?
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if the 'little guy' writes a cool song.
Then some more popular songwriter will notice some sort of similarity between the "cool song" and a published musical work (inevitable given the limited vocabulary of the Western musical scale) and file a lawsuit against the "little guy". Then, because the "little guy" has no legitimate source of funding for legal representation (as public defenders in the USA handle only criminal cases), the more popular songwriter will win.
Exactly the event I described has happened. Read about Handel v. Silver.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The telephone was invented by Philipp Reis, a German science teacher in the early 1860's (he began work in 1860 at the age of 26). And he was inspired by an 1854 paper by a Frenchman named Bourseul. Reis's phones (which worked but were somewhat unreliable) were demonstrated in Europe and in Scotland in 1863, while Bell was there visiting his father. There is no proof that Bell saw it, but it's one heck of a coincidence.
In the 1870s, Bell competed with another inventor, Elisha Gray who also worked on a version of an improved telephone. Both men allegedly rushed their respective designs to the patent office the same day and Bell won the footrace.
So in truth, Bell can only be credited with improving the telephone and being the first to PATENT the telephone (and maybe with being a fast runner).
Since Bell and his dynasty (not Reis, not Bourseul) were the financial beneficiaries of the patent, it is immediately obvious that the benefits of patents are accrued to the patent holder, not necessarily the inventor.
Sigs are bad for your health.
He doesn't say _why_ IP "belongs to the public and is in essence leased to authors and inventors." As a content creator, I'd like some explanation there.
Facts: Copyright law considers "access" plus "substantial similarity" to constitute prima facie evidence of copying. Judges have considered access to FM radio to constitute prima facie evidence of "access" to a copyrighted work that has been played on the radio (Bright v. Harrisongs).
Hypothetical situation: All combinations of five notes are copyrighted. Now write an original song that infringes on no copyright.
Moral: Without a rich public domain upon which to build, how is it possible to create further works?
technology doesn't affect law. Technology can affect culture, which then affects prevailing laws.
Actually, the proper sequence is technology, then culture, then trenches, then laws. Technology affects culture. Culture may effect a revolution, which is often a war fought in trenches, and results in new laws.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If a copyright fails to "promote the progress of science and useful art", then congress is exercising a power it was never granted.
Ashcroft's position in Eldred v. Ashcroft is that the words "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" are a mere preamble that imposes no material limitation on the powers of Congress. A District Court and a Court of Appeals have agreed with the DoJ's position. Not that I agree with that position or anything; I'm waiting to see what the Supremes do with it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Anyone can live off their work indefinitely, if they invest wisely during their most productive years. I am an engineer and I don't expect my grandchildren to live off the work I'm doing now. But they may profit from what I have invested during my life and they will inherit it. Why should the creative work of writers be treated differently from the creatvie work of everyone else?
In the 1870s, Bell competed with another inventor, Elisha Gray who also worked on a version of an improved telephone. Both men allegedly rushed their respective designs to the patent office the same day and Bell won the footrace.
Being first to the patent office wasn't the only reason Bell got the patent. Alex Bell had a finished patent on a working invention, while Elisha Gray had at that time only a "caveat", an outline of the invention without a working model. (Caveat is apparently Latin for "vapourware".)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Patents are not really granted automaticaly. Also testing a patent in court is really expensive so we do need this erlier cheaper system of weeding out the bad patents ... even if it does let many bad patents slip trough.
New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification
USA patent law already grants a term extension in such cases. The current term of a U.S. patent is filing date + 20 years + whatever time is necessary to secure a required federal safety certification for a patented product.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
What useful purpose does keeping "Happy Birthday to You" or "Rhapsody in Blue" or "Steamboat Willie" still locked up serve?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In case of published works there is no ownership. There is only authorship. If no monopoly (copyright) were granted, anyone would be free to copy the works.
While some, very few, works are sought after long since their initial publishing, most works really sell for one printing and that's it. Only big-name authors sell for a long time, and very few of them even become classics sought after fifty years.
In case of "continuing demand", ie. demand for more copies of the work after the initial demand (a few years, nowadays more like "the first christmas"), the author has already generated revenue from initial demand, and should be economically well off. Most works don't have continuing demand, unless You think selling a hundred copies in the first year, ten copies a year for the next three, and total of ten in the next thirty constitutes "continuing demand"..
I do not today expect to earn residuals because my grandfather was a civil engineer who did good work. Why should the grandchildren of authors expect otherwise?
Doubt your grandfather expected to earn money from work he had done years or decades before either...
Most of the money that you will ever make from a copyrighted work is earned in the first few years.
In some cases even less than that. Consider the typical pop record or movie.
Take issue all you will but that's exactly what copyright is. Without copyright, the only way you'd be able to keep your so called intellectual "property" is to keep it to yourself. If you publish or otherwise release it, it would be "out there", outside of your control. You better get a damn good price for that first copy!
As you note, this does not occur at the "moment of authorship or invention". You're free to keep whatever you author or invent secret as long as you desire. As long as it's secret, nobody can either copy it or use it. Since nobody includes you, however, your work is useless not only to society, but to yourself.
Copyright law imposes a societal agreement. All the rest of us agree not to commercially distribute your work for a certain period of (theoretically limited) time; in other words, we agree to lease certain rights back to you (we keep "fair use" rights, for example) in exchange for you releasing the work to us.
Until the government legally takes it away from you by abusing eminent domain & the 4th amendment.
--
Power to the Peaceful
I think an issue that we tend to overlook while arguing the merits [or lack thereof] of copyright laws, is the issue of who actually holds the copyrights.
My understanding is that the origins of copyright law came from individuals looking to have a legal recourse to protect and expand their options in a business environment. As it was stated, "Economic advantage is not in and of itself a valid purpose or justification for copyright or patent laws", but it doesn't exclude the notion that an economic gain can be made from IP and thus, provides a basis for encouragement and resource for further development.
Again, I have to emphasize that these laws were made to be exerciseable by the individual. If you know even a little about the process of songwriting and publishing, you know that the copyrights of these works get turned over to the corporation (non-person entity) in exchange for a split of the proceeds from a given work. Once that happens, the exerciseable rights are stripped from the person responsible for the work and handed over to a boardroom of fat cats whose only interest is to expand their bottom line.
I believe that had the rights remained with individuals, the option to return IP to a the public domain would have been exercised. I feel that its the sentiment of artists that once the financial gains have been exhausted under copyright protection of a work, they feel that there is no harm in reintroducing it "back into the wild" so to speak, so that other people might also be inspired to create.
Corporations are the copyright holders and as such they put a stranglehold on the material, making it financially unaccessible to anyone but them. If you haven't paid them for the right (or made an arrangement for them to benefit financially) to use their copyrighted material, then its hands off. Futhermore, they take it a step further and continue the exercise in inaccessibility years beyond a reasonable timeframe just so that any possibility for a few bucks to be made isn't overlooked.
With the exception of Metallica (and their situation is very different from most other artists), you don't hear the actual artists themselves coming out and raising the issue as much as you do the record companies and the RIAA because the fact of the matter is that they don't have a leg to stand on anymore. All their "IP" is under new ownership. They can only back their label's decision and even to that extent, what I've seen is far from convincing.
Copyright law may not need the reexamining as much as maybe who rights they are protecting.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
And this is what torpedoes the whole intellectual "property" charade: Real property does not expire. Intellectual "property" does. It's not real property.
At the very least, the backers of the IP regime should be honest: They don't really believe in the public domain -- they just know they can't outright abolish it because, well, people like libraries, for one thing. So they want to nibble at the edges, preserving the forms of the public domain while reducing its scope to triviality.
If they're allowed to call copyright infringement "piracy", then I think we have the right to call copyright extension "the pillage of the public domain". I like what this author says: All intellectual output belongs to the public domain; copyright is just a loan for a short time.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Nearly all patents are (and have been for a long time) developed in corporate or .edu research labs and are automatically assigned by
employment contract. The reason: very few engineers
have the funds for the research, let alone the legal
expense of defending IP.
As IP is (for the forseeable future) an asset, how is restricting transfer / assignment any different from restricting transfer of any other asset or property.
All of my (5) (medical device) patents are assigned to a (former) employer. That's ok I was well paid for the time I spent developing these inventions.
Sure Disney and RIAA are pushing the politicians into some stupid extensions, that does not render the entire concept wrong (or as easy to change as the denizens of /. seem to wish.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
I think you've missed the point; I just can't tell if that's on purpose or not. The editorial's author was arguing that there is no such thing as intellectual "property" -- that ideas cannot be owned and so it is silly to argue where or when "ownership" resides. Intellectual output belongs to the public domain because assigning an owner is, at heart, contradictory.
As for "communal ownership of private creation": No one is going after your private creation. In fact, if someone did, copyright law wouldn't help you. Copyright law applies to things "published" -- made, in principle, available to a public, wide audience. (Admittedly, the Berne Convention has fuzzed this a bit.) As long as you keep your ideas to yourself, no one can "steal" them, because they're locked in your head.
But as soon as they are communicated, they are no longer "yours". They enter meme-space and become, in essence, independent of you. Copyright attempts to secure to you, for a limited time, the right to control use of the work, but it doesn't really restore any "ownership" because you don't really have any to begin with.
It is this insistence on treating intellectual output as "property" that leads to the increasingly draconian contortions through which we are dragged by the Content Cartel. But ideas are like the genie: Vast, powerful, mysterious -- and impossible to force back into the bottle.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
2. To say that "Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less" is just rubbish. A clue to the statement's status as rubbish lies in continuing demand. It's more likely he has noticed only the falloff of big-business marketing - kinda ironic.
No, this is an accurate statement and can be empirically proven using various studies and even independently proven using basic math. As any basic economics or statistics course will teach you, the value of a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar tommorrow according to the relationship PV=FV/(1+i)^P (where PV is the present value, FV is the future value, i is the discount rate, and P is the number of periods).
Even if you expect a work to continue earning thousands of dollars a year 100 years out (highly unlikely), the future value (using a low discount rate equivalent to a low risk investment) will amount to only a few dollars. This basically tells you that if you'd like to support your grandchildren, you would be better to put a few dollars in a low term government bond today than to depend on your copyright to support them years down the road. Fifty years out, the equivalent investment might need to be a couple of hundred dollars and twenty years out a couple of thousand.
This simple analysis was performed in the amicus brief signed by all the famous economists but should be apparent to any business, stats, math, or economics undergrad. It was used to cleary demonstrate that recent copyright extensions add no further economic incentive to authors at the time of creation, even for the most valuable and timeless works. Only copyrights up to about 50 years or so have any reasonable value unless they are applied retroactively. And a work that has no value until many years down the road or until after an author's death has essentially no value today - the author would probably be better to put a few dollars in savings account if the motivation was truly economic. Regardless of their eventual decision, the court seemed to understand these facts very well.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
An argument starts with premises, uses logic and reaches a conclusion. All I see here is the conclusion.
The whole essay is like this, a bunch of flat statements of opinion without justification or support. He keeps saying that intellectual property is a bad idea, but he never says what's wrong with it! Anyone who sees this article as well-written is looking at it from a highly partisan perspective.
What really bothers me on these issues is this: where are those who are searching for truth? Those without an axe to grind, those who are looking for accurate facts and valid arguments? It seems with 90% of the people involved, the positions they take are exactly aligned with their economic interests. They are saying exactly the same things that they would say if they were total liars and only interested in fattening their own wallets, whether as consumers or producers.
Who can claim differently? Who here is objectively interested in the truth on these complex issues, irrespective of whether it helps or hurts him economically?
In the News, Webster has copyrighted the English language, from now on all news and comments on slashdot will be posted only in Pig Latin.
Isthay eallyray uckssay!
I've been a user and author of free software for a dozen years and I remember when this existed only within BSD and as the gnu tools for use in mostly proprietary OS environments. Today of course free software (in the oss, gnu and bsd senses) run in a wider variety of patforms and even have predominance in a few key areas. That's all good.
That some granted patents are flawed is not news, and these mistakes are expensive to fix and imx do not represent the average situation. In fact the various patent offices do provide consistent and valid interpretation of applied patents, and in any case are a reality which I don't see changing any time soon.
The statement "Information want's to be free" is an observation, not a valid challenge of either the constitutional or statutory basis of the IP legal framework.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Music is a luxury, especially for people with mortgages and car payments. Whether or not what you believe is "right" is beside the point. This is a political debate, not a debate about ethics. To change copyright law requires changing the way Congress votes. To change the behavior of the recording industry requires that consumers stop buying mainstream music and start buying from non-RIAA affiliated companies. Since the opponents of filesharing have successfully created the impression that the only constituency for filesharing is college students too cheap to pay for garage-band music, there's llittle chance that the votes of mainstream America or Congress will be swayed. If, by chance, Congress is swayed, it will certainly not be to abolish copyright. At best, they would alter the length of a copyright period. That would have no affect on the RIAA's behavior. If they want to chase you for copying something under copyright, they'll do that regardless of the length of that copyright.
As for your auto analogy: A CD or DVD is, as well, a physical thing. When it is copied and placed on a filesharing server accessible by anyone with Internet access, a cogent case can be made that some of the people downloading that copy would otherwise have purchased it. That deprives people of revenue they would otherwise receive. Your point that this isn't depriving people of an "idea" is not relevant. People care about money and, as we've seen, will usually act against those they believe are cutting into their profits. In addition, it is also quite easy to deprive someone of the benefits of an idea by copying it. Consider someone who has developed an idea to improve auto gas mileage by 100 percent. He publishes that idea. However, because of a total lack of copyright protection, someone else picks up that publication, re-publishes it under his own name, and strikes a deal with the auto manufacturers that brings him millions of dollars in royalties and payments. The actual originator is left high and dry.
In the end, all the analogies are moot, because no one has launched a court case to test the claim that large-scale filesharing of music is fair use. Until a successful outcome from such a challenge, the p2p fans don't have much of a case.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
An idea is just neuron firings, without consequence or value, until someone articulates it. It is the articulation of an idea -- by speaking, by writing, or otherwise recording and distributing it -- that conveys consequence and value to the idea. That articulation -- a score for a song, a published thesis -- constitutes property as much as the building in which it is housed.
That said, I agree with you that the entertainment industry has successfully distorted the political process in order to use IP and copyright law to maintain their distribution oligopoly. However, changing IP and copyright law will not afect that oligopoly. The status qou will persist until a viable and profitable alternative distribution channel is created that allows mainstream consumers to purchase mainstream entertainment.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I think what was left out of this article is the fact that there are two types of intellectual properties. Ones that can help the progress of humanity (i.e. the cure for Cancer or AIDS) and the ones used for pure self-indulgence (things like pop music and blockbuster movies, etc).
Each type has a value, but the purpose it was created for is different. The cure for cancer is something that will help the whole world. While Britney Spears singing her lungs out is all about making money off something that if people enjoy they can buy, but could easily live without. It's not something that will help the progress of the human race. I know some people create for the sake for Art, but some also create for the sake of Profit. Both should be allowed to do so.
If something has no other purpose but to entertain, why can't this be copyrighted for life? It has not been created to make the world a better place. It was created for profit. A line needs to be drawn through the differences. Because there is a difference. Capitalism is based off the idea that you can make something for $5 and sell it for $100 if you wish. But the law of supply and demand will always dictate the price.
It's morally wrong to create a drug that costs $1 to cure Cancer and sell it for more then people could afford, because this is playing with peoples' lives. But to create a CD that costs $1 and charge $20 will hurt no one. People don't have to buy this music; the law of supply and demand will always dictate the price. But what's happened is technology has gotten to the point where one person can buy a copy it and give it away for free. This is also morally wrong, as the product was created to make money and not make the world a better place.
If the music created could not be copied and only bought off the owner, then the laws of supply and demand would work correctly. Because if the price was too high, no one would buy the product and the owner would reduce the price to where it will become profitable. The sweet spot for the price is as high as possible while still getting the most sales. This way people should not think it's cheap, but are still willing to part with their money. This is Capitalism!
But because people copy the music they have broken the chain of supply and demand, because they get the music for free. Meaning the only people who buy it are the people who could not copy it (this I know is an oversimplification but still valid). Meaning no matter how cheap they make it, it will always be available for free.
People need to realise there is a difference between things that help the world and things that are just consumed for pleasure. Copyright on the first is wrong, while copyright on the second is valid, the laws on copyright need to be updated to reflect this fact.
It assumes that someone who wants to write will write... They just won't make the book available to the general public. There were plenty of painters and writers before copyright was invented, but the general public got to see their work very rarely.
Remember, one of the most artistically revolutionary periods in our history, the European Renaissance, happened centuries before copyright was invented!
That articulation -- a score for a song, a published thesis -- constitutes property as much as the building in which it is housed.
The copy in your house is your property. If you share that idea with other people the other copies of that idea are not your property. Your property is still sitting in your house.
To use Jefferson's example, "intellectual property" is like a candle flame. If you have a lit candle in your house that is your property. If I give you a dollar and you let me light my candle from your candle, you do not own the flame on my candle.
Since sharing information/ideas is a GoodThing we invented copyright to grant a limited monopoly - an insentive to share it. Calling it property is completely flawed.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The purpose of the US constitution is to protect the rights of individuals. There is no bs about public good in there. These types of philosophies are inherent in communist (individuals second to society) and fascist (indiviuals second to the nation) systems. People's inventions should be protected because it is a form of individual property. This property should be protected from theft in the same way material creations are protected from theft. Otherwise there is no incentive to invest in research/development since the risk is high and without IP protection, there is no reward. Without IP drug research and development would cease in the public sector. Software development for profit would also be severely diminished since tools like p2p would make it necessary for only a few people to buy software and share it. EDA tools currently are licensed for millions a year now because of the small market. If your favorite game makers need to charge this much per copy because they can only sell 5 copies, your favorite game makers are going to go bankrupt. Ayn Rand considers greed an admirable quality. Greed inspires people to become productive individuals. They start companies and employ millions of people. The average person owes his livelyhood to these greedy, and supposedly evil individuals. So I'd think twice about trampling all over these peoples rights.
Vote for Pedro
"But, as Lawrence Lessig says, "nobody can do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm"."
Why would anyone want to? Why make a story based on another story? The idea is to create a story, write a song, perform a play, sculpt or paint a work of art that expresses an idea in a new and unique way. Lawernce Lessig clearly can't see this or chooses not to. I see this argument as ridiculous and in no way does it reflect poorly on copyright law.
I agree 100% with what David H. Lynch says, and he certainly says it eloquently. But suppose the worst: what if the Supreme Court upholds copyright extension, the RIAA gets its hacking license, and the government embarks on a War on Piracy with the zeal of its decades-long War on Drugs. What do we do then?
I'm thinking what should happen is open defiance of copyright extension. As many people as possible should post as many pictures of Steamboat Willie as they can find, on as many webservers and p2p networks as possible. Give the courts so many cases to handle that they simply can't do it. Robert Cringely proposed this same idea , and I like it. But I wonder how many people would actually participate? The legal system's only trump card is that few people ever go all the way to the wall to defend a principle. That's a significant fact. Who wants to risk going to a real jail in order to share some music files over Kazaa?
I sure don't. I have a family to support, and if people started getting snatched out of their houses there's no way I am going to have my house seized and be the bitch for some knuckle scraping troglodyte in a cell. Even if those prospects didn't bother me, justifying my actions to my wife would be another matter. Actually, I'm not sure which would be worse. If the enforcement starts to get harsh, my p2p files are coming right down. And I bet 99% of you reading this are the same way. When the rubber meets the road, how many of you have stood your ground when you knew you were going to get your ass kicked?
That's one thing that gives me a really fatalistic feeling about all this. I sure hope the legal brains arguing Eldred vs Ashcroft are in top form, because I really believe that the fate of this issue will rest on the shoulders of a few heroes, not on the masses who will mostly run for cover if the shit hits the fan.
That's right. I own a copy. The original is still in the possession of the author or inventor, who retains ownership of the original property. My rights to duplicate or otherwise distribute the copy that I own are limited by the terms of the agreement that transferred ownership of the copy to me. My perrsonal opinion or ideologically driven beliefs about intellectual property and copyright do not bear on that circumstance.
It would be nice if people arguing against intellectual property and against copyright would use something other than irrelevant analogies and unsubstantiated assertions to make their case.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
1. No significant political constituency exists to support the kind of legislative changes needed to destroy the RIAA-affiliated companies. People will continue to buy CD's and DVD's, continue to go to movies, and continue to buy cable TV until a competitive distribution channel arises to provide the same product faster and/or cheaper. If you people won't "wake up" until it's too late, well, that's because most people don't have a reason to care.
2. Again, copying the data on a CD deprives someone of the gain and benefit due that person from the sale that may otherwise have taken place.
3. Unless they choose to place their creation in the public domain, people are entitled to derive benefits, financial and otherwise, from selling or licensing copies of their product. I have no problems with the morality of that. in fact, it seems morally superior to allowing the greater public to steal my product for their own use and benefit.
4. Yes, the copyright term is too long. But, even if it does change, it will not disappear. If you want to wai, oh, say, 50 years for recordings of this week's favorite band to enter the public domain, be my guest. Remember, copyright is only a means to an end for the entertainment industry.
5. Creators should benefit from their copywritten efforts as long as someone is willing to pay them. In a capitalistic society, that payment is how we measure how much society wants a product.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Of course the auto companies would steal the idea of there was no legislation protecting the inventor. That's the point: the absence of copyright law encourages theft.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
A CD or DVD is, as well, a physical thing. When it is copied and placed on a filesharing server accessible by anyone with Internet access,
The CD/DVD/35mm film/video tape/etc is simply a media what is being copied isn't the media it is the content.
a cogent case can be made that some of the people downloading that copy would otherwise have purchased it.
It's just as possible to make a case that the people downloading the content would never have bought an official copy or that more copies are sold when customers customers can see a preview.
It can very much depend on the movie, there are more than a few examples of people going to see a movie many times and buying a copy after that...
This assumes that they are entitled to it. And by "entitled" I'm not talking about legally, I'm talking about morally (and yes it does matter).
There is a mentality, which has come into existance fairly recently, of some kind of "entitlement" to make money. The idea that if some individual or corporation has put lots of money into making a widget they are somehow entitled to make a profit from it; if some way of doing business used to be profitable then it should be profitable for ever. Even though a little though will show that such a mindset is utterly stupid.
All works are based on other works in one form or another. To say "I can build off your efforts but you can't build off mine" is ridiculous.
Even if you could find a single person who was actually the first to come up with such and such a plot element he or she would probably be a direct ancestor of most people now living anyway.
A library contains physical objects (more or less) that can be checked out, but must be returned, and there is only one copy.
That's because of the limitations of technology around when public libraries came into existance. Having to deal with issues, returns, reservations, preventing book theft takes up a lot of library resources which could be better used.
If it had been possible for public libraries to trivially issue copies a few hundred years ago then they probably would have embraced the technology. You'd have a system where every book is always available, no problems due to it being out on loan, stolen, mis-shelved or defaced.
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
Since when? It's perfectly legitimate for corporations to hold patents, copyrights, and trademarks. If an invention is created by a dozen engineers working with their colleages, utilizing millions of dollars of equipment with all development costs and research paid for by the company that employes them, then what "individual" has a right to that patent?
Your initial premise is flawed. Copyrights and patents were designed to encourage the creation of new stuff, allow the creators to make a buck, and then have those creations slip back into the public domain after a set period of time. That's all. It never has mattered who came up with the idea, be it "powerless innovator" or those twisted and exploitative evil corporate monsters lurking under your bed.
The Hatch-Waxman act
The Cher Act?
provides a 5-year maximum extension for FDA approval.
I don't see a five-year cap on a Section 155 extension. I see both five-year and fourteen-year caps on a Section 156 extension. Can you explain those sections in more detail?
The AVERAGE length of the approval process is curently running 9 years.
I'm assuming AVERAGE == median here.
This means that 50% of medications are not even approved until 4 years after the patent clock starts ticking. Then of course, there is the lead time needed to get the product to market which is probably another 2-3 years
Which means that they still get a good solid 13+ years of monopoly rights.
Just be glad that the late patron saint of counterproductive copyright law hadn't asked for an across the board patent term extension.
Will I retire or break 10K?