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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.
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!
http://illegal-art.org/
This was a recent show in NYC which displayed works which have almost been suppressed out of existance by Corporate culture. You can find articles on copyeahright, music, videos and other forms of expression.
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.)
The Weekly Standard has also had a number of editorials on copyright--a writer has even come out in favor of mp3 sharing! This issue is finally coming up on the radar. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the NR article this morning. I think some political thinkers are slowly starting to realize that this is a very important issue to a number of young adult professionals, and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently getting.
William F Buckley founded and runs the National Review. He is considered the senior voice of conservatives in America. He, and National Review, are strongly pro-life and also in favor of drug legalization.
It just shows that those who blithely put all Republicans into one stereotype are undereducated.
The only good weather is bad weather.
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."
1. (the principled one) Many Republicans genuinely believe in the free market, which is not the same thing as corporate statism. Corporations that live off artificial government monopolies (e.g. indefinitely extended copyrights provided by coin-operated legislators) are "rent-seekers" (a term of art meaning someone who lives off such special privileges, not a landlord trying to get a tenant to pay his bill ;-) ).
2. (the cynical one) Hollywood is a big money machine for the Democrats -- what do you think inspired Hollings (D-Disney) to introduce his ban on general-purpose computers?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
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
Whoever turned "copy right" into one word had to be a lawyer. We don't say "freespeechright" or "gunright" or "assemblyright" or "religionright."
As a result, 99 percent of the public thinks that a copyright is some kind of formal legal document. They think you have to go get it, or protect it, or defend it, or preserve it, or buy it, or hire a lawyer to make sure you have it.
Fantastic point. From now on let's refer to "copyright" as "copy right". It's an informative and accurate meme that need to be spread. Who's with me?
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
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*"
Revenue is up since September 11, 2001. See Through the Night With a Light from a Buck for details.
The Declaration of Independance speaks of "inalienable rights" -- rights which you can not surrender. The Constitution codifies some of these Rights in the Bill of Rights -- the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. Amendment 10 specifies that the previous nine are not an exclusive list of rights -- there exist rights retained by the people which are not enumerated there. The Supreme Court relied on the 10th Amendment in Griswold which ruled that there existed a right to privacy as it struck down laws outlawing contraception.
In addition there are Statutory Rights -- rights which you get by virtue of statute. You can go to court to have these rights enforced, though Congress is free to amend the terms of the rights. The right to receive a Social Security pension if you meet the qualifications is a statutory right. If an official tries to deny you your benefits, you can go to court to force them to be paid, though Congress can and does set the amounts payable. Copyright is another statutory right -- it exists by virtue of a statute.
Property rights are rights which behave like tangible property. You can sell, lease, transfer and assign these rights. You can leave them to your heirs. They are alienable (in contrast to the inalienable rights in the beginning of this reply) becuase you can transfer them to another.
Copyright is property-like in this sense -- you can sell your copyright for cash, use it as collateral for a loan and leave it to your heirs (if it hasn't expired). As such, it's appropriate to describe Copyright as a property right.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
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
Here's my stupid idea regarding copyrights:
1) No copyright should ever under any circumstance exceed 100 years. A nice round figure that's easy to compute and no one can really complain that it's too short. Personally I'd like it much shorter, but this is a figure I think everyone can agree on as an absolute maximum.
2) If a copyrighted work is ever out of publication, then a clock starts ticking: depending on the class of material, if the total time out of publication exceeds the time for that class, then the item becomes public domain. These times are cumulative to keep a company from thwarting it by offering items for 1 day every few years or so. Such categories might be 20 years for books and other printed material, 10 years for audio and video, and 3 years for computer programs. The idea here is to get abandoned stuff into public domain before it totally loses all value. (This would also have the result that Microsoft would have to keep selling Windows 98 or else 3 years later everyone could copy it for free.) After all, does anyone have any doubt that PKZIP will be totally useless in 2101 except for historical purposes?
3) If an author sells the copyright on his works, and it subsequently goes out of print, all copyrights revert to said author immediately. This will let said author possibly get some value out of it before the copyright expires due to inactivity.
There are some details that would have to be ironed out in a system like this (e.g. what's to keep a company from having something 'in print' but only sold at some exorbitant rate), but hell, it's much better than what we have now.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.