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Eldred Transcript, Bookmobile Experience
Patrick writes "The transcript of the oral arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft is now online." Such exciting lines as: "CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?". See previous stories about the oral arguments and Lessig's thoughts on them. chromatic writes "The O'Reilly Network has just published Richard Koman's Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile about his travels with Brewster Kahle to Eldred v. Ashcroft. I particularly like how he describes the universal positive reception."
This is swaying off the specifics of the case a bit, but ... As someone who is a firm lover of art and literarure, as well as a believer in an author/artists ownership of their creation, I don't understand the belief that copyright should be extended past the creater's death. I'm assuming it started as income for the survivors. However, a window washer's widow does not continue to take in income from her late husbands previously washed windows. And children ... should probably learn how to earn their own living. I don't see why being the son of an author that had to work hard their whole life suddenly makes you able to sit on your ass your whole life.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
...but my latest thoughts on-- and inspired by-- Eldred v. Ashcroft went to my journal. While I haven't finished reading the transcript, (I've only read through Lessig's first arguments) what I've read so far hasn't changed my thoughts one bit so I'm not posting them again here.
I do have to say this case has really made me see the truth behind the "kill all the lawers" jokes-- that most people don't want to live in a world of such detailed and precise thought. I, for one, will take the lawers and all the evils that go with them if it will get me away from the sloppiness of thought and/or expression that produced the DMCA and is pushing for Digital User Restriction Management in all our computers.
Do you like Japanese imports?
The real issue in this case is not whether there are limits on copyrights; all parties concede this. The issue is who decides those limits. Is is the elected Congress or the appointed Court? This is why the case will be won by the government.
However, a window washer's widow does not continue to take in income from her late husbands previously washed windows.
No, but she does inherit the window washing business, including any inventory or tools, receivables, contracts, etc.
So she inherits the window washing business, but she doesn't get paid unless she washes windows too. Giving copyrights to offpsring and then giving them money every time a work that they did not create is used is like paying the daughter of the window washer each time someone looks through windows her father washed. Property can be inherited, yes, but intellectual property cannot. The offpsring of a great author/artist does not inherit their ancestor's thoughts or revelations, merely the inclination and environment to do the same.
Olsen's argument in favor of retroactive copyright extensions is telling in terms of who's side he's on.
The justices repeatedly hammered home the point that retroactive copyright extensions do not aid in the "creation of creative works" because works from, say, 30 years ago that benefit from an extension have already been created, so the law does not incent the old author if his copyright has been retroactively extended. (in fact, just the opposite... the old author is allowed to rest on his laurels given that he has another 30 years of royalties coming in, rather than write something new)
Olsen replies that the beneficiaries are the publishers and movie-distributors who gain and incentive to make more money from publishing given the retroactive extension... he's arguing that large businesses (not individual creators/inventors) are the ones who will benefit by congress's granting of monopoly power by retroactively extending copyrights.
What I don't understand is why noone made the argument that releasing works into the public domain will _encourage_ dissemination of works that were formerly copyrighted, because there will no longer be an hurdles to dissemination. The technology argument is a strong one-- that by applying copyright extensions retroactively, we _prevent_ the wide dissemination of information in an age where anyone can publish cheaply. We no longer need to provide extensions for large publishers because anyone can publish public domain works cheaply.
that extending copyright and patent coverage doesn't do anything to increase the incentive to create. Really, count the number of books originally published in 1950, and count the number still being published 50+ years later. When you make this comparison, you'll realize that its such a tiny fraction of people being "helped" by these extensions, that they're more harm than good. How many of these people are actually companies?
For patents, what is the value of a patent on the technology used by the 8088 processor today? Other than the coolness factor of owning the patent, continuing to extend an outdated patent does nothing to further the progress of science. All the patent is good for is to make it illegal for me to build an 8088, even as part of learning to build processors, in the pursuit of making scientific progress in building better processors. (I just picked this out of my head, I don't know whether there is an existing valid patent on the 8088 or not)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
LOL, that's pretty misinformed, even for /.
For something to be copyrightable, it has to be original; and for you to copyright it, you have to either be the creator or have a contract with the creator saying you own the copyright. Neither exists in this case.
Since these words were spoken at a public trial, they are all public domain.
Putting public domain words into a new format does not suddenly make them copyrightable, nor mean that you own the copyright to it. That's absurd. It would be like me taking a Michael Crichton book and reformatting it, then claiming some kind of copyright over it. Absolute non-sense.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If it wasn't beneficial to existing creative entities to draw upon shared cultural history residing in the public domain, such creative entities wouldn't do so already.
As much as I don't want to accept that Mickey Mouse should enter the public domain, I can't help but notice that The Little Mermaid has a bit more to her than shellfish and a talking crab sidekick.
In my mind, the bottom line is that every dollar Disney has ever made mining the public domain is concrete proof that there's value to having one. One could make the argument that a creation as actively maintained as Mickey Mouse should be granted a special exemption -- and I might even buy that, based on the idea that there's no sense dragging 20th century creative works into obscurity (and make no mistake, that's where they'll go!) so that one work might keep its trademarkability.
But I don't think it's possible to argue the public domain is useless. If it was, Disney Wouldn't Keep Using It.
Pop Art didn't begin with Warhol.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
After reading the arguments, it's hard to imagine the court with rule totally in line with what the government wants...that only Congress gets to interpret what "limited times" means. In fact, it seems like they're agreeing that retroactive extensions SHOULD be wrong, but that it will upset too much existing law and cause major problems in the short term.
It's fairly obvious that Conress isn't unrestricted by the wording.. They can't simply decide that all works past and future have a copyright term of 999,999,999 years, but the government seems to be arguing that Congress does have that authority. It will be really interesting to see what the court decides on as a test to guarantee that future changes to copyright law both promote science and the creative arts and only last for a limited time.
I really get the gut feeling that in the future Congress will not have the authority to do retroactive extensions, and even this will be great news. At least we'll have unhindered access to most of our 20th century history and culture sometime in the 21st century. I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.
Well the arguments of the petitioners do not seem to be well prepared. However O'Connor is deeply wrong on making its starting argument on the fact that there were several extensions to the law. This can be seen on the History of Russian Law. While Russian and Anglo-Saxon judicial systems deeply differ in practices, on cases concerning the Constitution they are amazingly similar. The case is that if some law can be unconstitutional, but the law remains in force until someone questions it.
Frankly, there is something funny with Russian Constitution. The first one was created in 1918. It was a little clumsy and had several gaps but it was an historical difference between Imperial Russia and the new Russian state. Then came Soviet Union, its more reworked Constitution and finally the Stalin Constitution of 1936. It is a paradox but sincerly a fact - Stalin made the most perfect and complete Constitution of his time. Besides this corp of Law was so well elaborated that, for many years, it was taken as an example of how constitutions should be done.
However we all know Stalin as one of the biggest tyrants of History. Why? Because under the Constitution there were no laws supporting it. Stalin's Constitution was factually void because there was not a mechanism to check laws against it. The situation was so silly that, when Brezhnev changed the constitution, it did it by violating the old constitution and creating some piece of crap that some called American Constitution of the USSR (no offense people, but your Constitution is not useful for no one but you). Meanwhile, even this Propaganda Constitution was nearly void of action. Until 1993, Russian Constitutions were just pieces of paper. But in 1993, the Constitutional Court was formed and then many people started to give questions. And then, we started to see some cases very similar to O'Conner's arguments.
There were and still are laws that come from Soviet times. These laws were created, accepted, revised and changed many times. Some of these laws have more than 30 years life. Some of these laws are considered to be violating the Constitution. And you know what chaos is created? State organs that lived for tens of years under these laws, suddenly realize that they were violating the law and they should do things totally another way. So, sometimes we hear arguments that this law was here for so many years, everyone lived well with them and that there is no reason to change it. However the Constitutional Court is a final instance and no matter the pressure, it takes some rough resolutions.
Why I took this example? Well, for some, an outside view may make a new view to the situation. Also, I'm trying to show the possible consequences of what will happen if the system of constitutional control becomes void. Maybe the US will not have its Stalin, but something worse may happen.
Porbably the law has been broken since that nefarious year of 1790. It is possible that even the first Copyright law was voted with some violation of the Constitution. Maybe it was violated on one of these extensions. So, it is rather problematic for O'Connor to claim precedence of Law under this case. The Constitution is the Law that cannot accept precedence of any kind. A law either is constitutional or unconstitutional, no matter the acceptance, the revisions or the traditions (btw that's a position Russian Court clearly took on one matter). Frankly, that's an ideal that goes above nations and traditions, and that's the fundament for the existence of a Constitution. A Constitution can only term times in relation to itself, all other laws should go in accordance with constitutional terms no matter their lifetime, traditions or revisions. That's what some people call the dictatorship of the Fundamental Law. If it is turned void then other tiranny may substitute it.
Constitution is not the same body of law as the anglo-saxon traditional jurisprudence. If O'Connor will play with this, then either he will be burned to the stake or there will be many questions about the effectivness of the American Constitution.
Reasonable, but also against the terms of the Berne Convention. Breaking the Berne treaty could get U.S. copyrights de-recognized all over the world.
Did we sign the earlier Rome convention? I think we did, in which case we could go back to the pre-1976, 36 years + renewable for 36 years by the author and still have U.S. Copyrights recognized the world over(Clause 7). Not that it matters, WTO members must recognize each others copyrights, and IMF loans always specify such things, so that covers just about everyone except Antarctica.
The Berne convention doesn't provide the same protection for Films, only 50 years after release. Just making that reform to US law could save a lot of films from decaying before they can be saved. For other works the convention specified life of author + 50 years, or 50 years for anonymous works, but countries don't have to extend copyrights if they signed the Rome treaty, and don't have honor a foreign country's copyright if it's expired there but not in your own country. So if a copyright expired in Angola after 20 years, we wouldn't have to extend it to life+70 here like we do with copyrights claimed in the US.