The Copyright Fuss Revisited

mpawlo writes "I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw introducing a framework for the debate on how we should obtain a balance between users and authors where the author has good incentives to innovate, but where society at large is not too restricted due to the author's previous innovations. I am afraid that I personally have few practical solutions to introduce, but you might find my text useful as a quick introduction to what the copyright fuss is all about and why you should care."

Comments

Correct page width link

[Anonymous Coward]

Some troll, apparently looking for something to do after calling people to check if their refrigerator is running, threw a page widening post onto the greplaw article. Thanks for the maturity. I'm sure your family is so proud ("John is lawyer, Chris is a doctor, and Billy Bob wastes the time of hundreds of people a day.")

To read the article without the comments (thus avoiding the troll and allowing you to see the article correctly formatted), try this link.

Add one more a little closer to home...

[night_flyer]

Girls Scouts must pay to sing songs...

"Starting this summer, the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers has informed camps nationwide that they must pay license fees to use any of the four million copyrighted songs written or published by Ascap's 68,000 members. Those who sing or play but don't pay, Ascap warns, may be violating the law."

the story

Re:Art, not innovation.

[Gleef]

NineNine wrote:
No, but copyrights do protect the creators. If not for copyright, who's to say that Tolkein's books would ever have been written?

For what it's worth, in the 60's, Ace Books used loopholes in the US copyright law to legally publish the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, without concent of JRR Tolkien (or Allen & Unwin) and with no intent to pay royalties.

Tolkien had no legal stand to fight the publishing, but spread the word that the Ace edition was unauthorized, and that he was receiving no royalties. Ace was eventually pressured by the publicity backlash to pay him royalties and to cease publishing.

Ironically, a good deal of his popularity in the United States could be argued to be due to the swarms of college students buying the cheap (75 cent) unauthorized Ace Books versions.

As for whether or not the books would be written, the Hobbit was written for Tolkien's children, the decision to publish it came later. the Silmarillion seems to be written for himself, without regard to publication (he occasionally attempted to get it published, but nobody was interested until his death). The Lord of the Rings trilogy, however, was written at least partially due to the encouragement of Allen & Unwin (the publishers of the Hobbit in England), and thus copyright could easily be considered one of the motives. Likewise with his short stories.