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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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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"..
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
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!
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!
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.