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Copyright and Copy Rights
neocon writes "Today's National Review Online has an interesting
piece from John Bloom of UPI on the origin of Copy Rights (what Copyrights really are) and the
current attacks on them in Congress and elsewhere."
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It does raise the issue that copyright is not a consequence of natural law, but of positive law (eg, there wouldn't be copyright without an act of the sovereign.
The part of it I disagree with somewhat is his characterization of copyright as not really being about property rights, but about free speech. Copyright is very explicitly a property trade off: "We will give you the following property right in return for that property eventually reverting to the public." Copyright owners often make the mistake of speaking as if copyright exists for their benefit. It doesn't. The entire point of copyright is to encourage the creation of intellectual property for the benefit of the public. The fact that the mechanism by which the creation of that intellectual property is achieved is by granting a benefit to the author is purely incidental.
If you're referring to the Republican party, then I think you're a bit off base. I'm strongly under the impression that both major parties are equally bad when it comes to issues like copyright. If the EFF were a political action committee, they would have difficulty finding any candidatees to support. The problem is that candidates are not catering to individual rights because there is no lobbying effort to back them, the are no campaign donations keyed to them, and there is no perceived voter demographic that will vote primarily on them.
...that a Republican publication is in favor of limiting the earning potential of major corporations (AOL/Disney/etc). Maybe this issue goes beyond money.
This is an excellent article and should be shown to people who have trouble grasping the idea of copyrights moving into the public domain.
I had to have a long, long discussion with my girlfriend about copyright extensions, and why they are wrong before she finally accepted. The public has become so used to large corporations controlling everything that it seems foriegn to them that intellectual property should be released into general ownership after its creator's death. SHARE THE KNOWLEDGE. Mickey Mouse should, and I would argue does, in fact belong to everyone now!
My goodness, do you want some cheese with that whine? The reason we have a Republican Nation is that Americans "do give a shit" and voted for the Republicans. Anyone that didn't vote and complains about Republicans in power has only themselves to blame.
Americans need to shit or get off the pot. Either we have rights and freedoms or we don't.
So you are saying that only Democrats care about rights and freedoms? What about the right to keep and bear arms? What about the freedom to control the fruits of your labor?
Take off your blinders...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
There's one big issue that I wish had been brought up in this article, but that simply wasn't. How long should a copyright last?
A reasonable idea has been that a copyright should last as long as the author lives, plus a period of time for his estate. No, that wasn't the original law, but it seems to make a kind of sense. As long as an author lives, he has exclusive control of his work, unless he voluntarily transfers that control to somebody else. (In which case the clock starts ticking.)
This idea breaks when you consider that corporations are legal persons, and that they can own copyrights. The copyright for the Mickey Mouse cartoons isn't owned by Walt Disney, the deceased person. They're owned by Disney, the extant corporation. And corporations have no natural lifespan. So how long should a copyright last?
I've never heard a good argument on this question. Everybody seems to propose an arbitrary number-- 28 years, 75 years, 99 years-- without giving any good reason for it.
How's this for an idea. Copyright is granted automatically for a period of 30 years. (Yeah, there's that arbitrary number I just bitched about. But in this case, I picked it because it's more-or-less one generation.) If you want to extend your copyright, you're free to do so for some sort of proportional, sliding-scale fee. The justification would be that the copyright holder is doing society a minor but nontrivial harm by holding on to his work, but that that harm could be offset by the additional revenue to the government. If Disney wants to hold on to the copyright for "Steamboat Willie" forever, they're free to do so if they can cough up the greenbacks.
It would probably take a Constitutional amendment to make an idea like that one legal, but stranger things have happened.
I write in my journal
If Disney wants to hang onto "Steamboat Willy" for perpetuity, I say let them. However, they shouldn't recreate copyright law so that the 99% of works which should be allowed to pass into the public domain are kept locked up, dispite not even being able to trace down the copyright holders.
I think we should change copyright law so that all copyrights last for 14 years, with an option by the copyright holder to extend that copyright for an additional 14 years, for a maximum of some really long period of time (say, 280 years or something silly). That way, if an entity is still around who cares about it's copyrights (such as the Disney Corporation), they can simply get an extension to their copyrights for as long as they like, without fscking up the natural expiration of copyrights on the 99% of stuff whose owners are no longer around.
That's the odd thing about the current copyright regime, by the way: it seems to me that a copyright can survive its author, and without an established estate who can oversee the copyright, the use of such copyrighted works without anyone who actually controls those copyrights is impossible. That is, instead of doing what our founding fathers wanted--to allow these works to pass into the public domain for the larger good--these works, being impossible to legally copy, will pass into oblivion.
That's why I believe someone alive and active needs to step up and file for a copyright extension ever 14 years. (And, in the case where someone screws up the filing, give them an automatic 1 year buffer or something to get the paperwork straight, so something doesn't slip into public domain because a request gets lost in the mail.)
I think you couldn't be more wrong; copyright in no way impedes the "free exchange of ideas." Copyright doesn't protect ideas from being copied, it protects expression from being copied. You can't copyright an idea at all, period. Copyright doesn't stagnate the creation of ideas, and by any standard it certainly encourages creativity. You compare us to the Renaissance, when a few staggering works of genius were created, generally under the patronage of kings and popes. I don't have figures, but surely the number of, say, books, works of music, and graphic images being created today dwarfs the output of the Renaissance by several orders of magnitude. That says nothing about quality, of course, but I'd like to think that a genius is a genius regardless of what the government regulations are. Could Michaelangelo have painted the Sistine Chapel without money for paint? No. Copyright is one method of making sure he can fund his works.
Now, reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about the length of copyright restrictions and whether it's appropriate to extend them retroactively. I personally feel that this is moving the goalposts. But to argue that copyright is somehow completely outdated and has no use anymore is to present yourself, very firmly, as someone that has probably never created any intellectual work of significant value.
Yes, I do we have more than a prayer. I think it's pretty easy to understand copyright law, if you try (some may find the copyright FAQ useful).
Law is something that is supposed to last. Good laws -- and I think the copyright laws, as they were originally intended to apply, are good law -- take changing technology into account. "We have Linux now!" is not an adequate reason to dismiss a thoughtful analysis of property rights. Does that mean we should unquestioningly accept everything and never try to change it? No. But it does mean that we need to understand the reasons things work the way they do so that we know how to change them, instead of just saying "We're so cyber we don't need all this old stuff."
somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
The most obvious case is It's a Wonderful Life.
The movie was a dismal failure in the box office when released. It languished from that point on until it lapsed into the public domain because a copyright extention was not filed. The networks and independant channels picked it up and used it as filler during Holiday season -- not because they considered it good, or warm and Christmas-y, but because it was cheap. Real cheap. As in free.
If it weren't for this then what is now considered a Christmas classic would've probably rotted away in a vault somewhere. And while I'm sure there are people who wish it would, because they've seen it too much, most people do consider it a good movie, at least the first time or two.
Oh... and ever wondered why it isn't blasted all over the TV during the holidays now? Because it was discovered that while the movie is in the public domain, the screenplay (or maybe the soundtrack) is not. So that copyright is now being used to control the work as a whole.
There are thousands of books and hundreds of movies that were written in the early 1900s that are being lost because they're under copyright but are literally disintegrating. If they were in the public domain then groups like the Guttenburg Project could save them.
The key point is to remember that Copyright laws are there to enrich the public domain. Without copyright law then there is nothing illegal about someone stealing your work in whole. It's generally agreed that people would like recompensation for time spent, and so a limited duration copyright encourages people to publish works. The limited duration ensures that the work does eventually return to its natural state - free. Copyrights are a contrevience to encourage contribution to humanity. I think they're a necessary one as well. But I also think that copyright law has gone too far to one extreme and needs to be set aright.
From the articule..
The Constitution is quite clear on the matter. It says copyrights are to be granted for "limited times." I don't know any definition of "limited" that would mean 75 years plus a 20-year extension plus the chance of getting another extension later. The whole issue was argued three centuries ago, and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all.
Someone should send a copy of the constitution to our congressmen and senators. It's amazing that things like the Bono extension actually passed.
Anyone else starting to get that feeling that their vote, (and their right for that matter), is a waste when it comes to matters of the fed?
It reminds me of the way my Dad used to change the rules of cribbage to benefit his score counting. It didn't matter that the ruleback said he couldn't ( or shouldn't).
This idea breaks when you consider that corporations are legal persons, and that they can own copyrights.
Here's a thought, instead of trying to massage the idea around corporations being legal persons, we remove this silly fiction of corporations being legal persons.
Corporations are a collective of people. Period. They are not persons. They have no right to free speech, they have no right to bear arms, they have no right to vote. Each individual within the corporation has that right, certainly, but when they are acting "as the collective", then those rights go out the window and society can choose to regulate them as much as society wants.
This Legal Persons crap was bought and paid for by the corporations a long time ago. It's time we took it back.
People are persons. Corporations aren't.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I've been suggesting anyone who wants a real understanding of the issues of this case to turn to eldred.cc and lessig.org because until I read this article I'd yet to see a member of the mainstream press comprehend the actual argument for reversal.
Disney's trademark of the character Mickey Mouse will never expire, but the copyrights to creative works in which he is depicted most certainly should. The framers of the Constitution understood creative works to be both an input and output of the creative process, and that copyrights should only be granted for the purpose of contributing to the progress of the arts and sciences. Why should no one be allowed to do to Disney what they continue to do to authors such as Robert Lewis Stevenson (Treasure Planet?!)? This case is not about the length of time, as many misrepresent it. The petitioners agree that Congress has the right to set any length of time for copyright (save infinity), but the question is whether they can retroactively apply extensions (Walt isn't going to create more cartoons cause his copyrights suddenly got a few more years tacked on, so how does such legislation fit the purpose of promotion, which the clause explicitly outlines?), and whether that sort of legislation should be subject to appropriate intermediate first amendment analysis (which the lower courts refused to even consider).
-R
Because his point was not about issues of fair use and enforcement while a work is within the copyright protected duration (the purpose of the DMCA, for digial content only). The point of the article was about how no works are returning to the public domain, the unprotected status, as was intended by the Constitution.
I'm sure he's not crazy about the DMCA either, but the Bono Act and the DMCA are two entirely different issues within the copyright debate. To have brought the DMCA into his article would only have confused his points.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
From the "Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter - A Byte About Eldred v Ashcroft"
.....info in Public Domain 100% !!! .....info in Public Domain 50% ....info in Public Domain 25% ....info in Public Domain 12.5% ...info in Public Domain 6.25% ...info in Public Domain 3.125% ...info in Public Domain 1.5625% ..info in Public Domain 0.78125% ..info in Public Domain 0.390625% ..info in Public Domain 0.1953125% .info in Public Domain 0.09765625% .info in Public Domain 0.048828125% .info in Public Domain 0.0244140625% .info in Public Domain 0.01220703125%
.
If the New York Times' estimates of 7 years for information doubling may be considered at all correct, then this is what will happen [to information in the Public Domain] in a United States under the new copyright law, EVEN IF we considered 100 percent of current information now be entered into the Public Domain as an incentive to let this law stand:
[i (unger) modified the lines in the following chart to make them shorter. each line originally said "x years x/x of today's information in the Public Domain x%".]
0 years 1/1
7 years 1/2
14 years 1/4
21 years 1/8
28 years 1/16
35 years 1/32
42 years 1/64
49 years 1/128
56 years 1/256
63 years 1/512
70 years 1/1024
77 years 1/2048
84 years 1/4096
91 years 1/8192
98 years 1/16384 info in Public Domain 0.006103515625%
Plus a small fraction if any of this year's copyrights are allowed to
expire.
Obviously the goal is to have virtually no public domain left at all. . .
Of course, there are people who will try to make this very NOT obvious!
Michael S. Hart
[email address snipped]
Project Gutenberg
Principal Instigator
"*Internet User ~#100*"
The ammount of adherance to the Constitution is inversely proportionate to the ammount of cash donated by PACs.
Unfortunately, they have a lot more money than we have Constitution.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Exactly. Look at what Disney has cranked out in the past... Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and so many more titles that were based on ideas in the public domain. Now I'd like to see someone put on a production of a show called "Beauty and the Beast", and not get their asses sued off by Disney.
Even Hollywood is getting pissed off about the whole copyright scene. Writers are running out of things to write about. Movie ideas are so expensive because everything has been done already. That's why we're getting re-hashes like Oceans 11 (1960, 2001), and the James Bond franchise.
In another example, I know that greeting card company hired out a friend of mine to come in for a Santa Claus photo shoot. Why? Because the image we most associate with Santa Claus is owned by Coke, and they needed to have a new model to base illustrations on to meet the "original work" standard in the copyright clause to avoid lawsuits. (Or repel them if Coke would sue anyway).
It's our culture that we're pissing away when we let copyright get extended too far.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Yet another /. discussion on IP, yet another passionate rehash of IP as property vs. those who puke up a lung every time you suggest that it's "property".
It doesn't matter.
That's right. Let that sink in for a while. Let it fester. Let the rage build. Get it out. Scream. Hit your monitor. Done? No? Go ahead. Get it all out, I'll still be here. OK. Let's move on.
The real debate here is in deciding how much IP and its creators should be taxed. That's it. Whether there is a "social contract" or a "property right" is irrelevant. On one extreme are those who believe all IP should go immediately into the PD (Stallman, etc.). That's a 100% tax to the creator. On the other extreme are Disney lawyers who want to keep extending their ownership (zero tax). The answer is somewhere in the middle.
The founders knew the answer was in the middle. That's why they wrote things the way they did. Arguing about whether it's property or "property" is like arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin (15,234 by the way).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?