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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."
"I was gonna clean my apartment, but then I got.. wrote a piece for Greplaw..."
No... I don't think that was it...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The evil corporates want you by the balls. Even if you're a girl.
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"I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw"
wow... when I skip cleaning my apartment, I usually end up playing a game of BF1942 or perhaps watch a bit on the tube. This guy goes out and writes a rather long essay on intellectual property that actually reads fairly well.
Is no retroactive copyright protection. The terms of copyright at the time you create something should be the same terms that apply to it forever. You only need and know what the incentive is before you create it. Changing it after the fact does nothing to increase your incentive.
Copyright does NOT protect innovation. Look at Tolkien & how just about every "innovation" he made has been swiped by the fantasy genre. Same thing for the GUI, same thing for music, etc, etc.
PATENTS protect ideas, innovations, and inventions. Copyright should be pared back by whatever means necessary so it can stop doing the job of Patents (or trademarks!).
Anyway - I believe this model makes open source the good solution for cases in which it has previously been thought not to be suitable. Such as cases where companies need to invest huge amounts of money just to get the "seed done" - I believe that the ransom model really for example enables co-operation between research companies to produce something that requires huge resources and capital - and get paid for doing it - and still eventually have the solution released under open source - developing it even further.
Copyright laws will always be messy if only beacuse there is no cut and dry options. A law that says all works are free to anyone undermines the purpose of creating those works (open source software being somewhat of a exception to this) and one that never releases information into the public domain is also a less then perfect solution. and while this is a gross simplification it's applicable to almost every aspect of copyright laws (fair use and the like). for all the ranting about these laws on slashdot very rarely do i see a realistic purposed solution to the problem, which suggests that it probably won't be solved in the near future, or maybe ever.
I don't think you can reform copyright law while treating copyright for different types of things differently. I don't, genuinely, believe that authorship of a computer program should be essentially different from authorship of a book. With all the protections that entails.
Which is not to say that copyright law in itself isn't screwed up. But the whole MS problem isn't a copyright issue, it's a monopoly issue. And the music industry will eventually either die or adjst with the times.
The real problems with copyright lie with things like the insanely long copyright period and the narrowness of 'fair use' rights for *everything*, not just music. There are middle schoolers out there getting lawsuit threats over fan art galleries. Disney's never going to have to come up with anything new, because they'll just keep getting extensions for Mickey Mouse. These are big problems, and things that seem to not be well addressed by the article.
I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw ...
I hope you also skipped cleaning the bathroom, and took the time to spell check your article.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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.
In Finland, taxi drivers are now ordered to pay royalties if they play music, even if it is on the radio, if they have passengers in the car.
two churchs were also sued on copyright infringement for singing Chistmas hymns....
the story is here.
I would have posted this as a story, but seeing as how my approval rate is 1:50 its not worth the time or effort anymore
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw
If I was this guy, I would be the most prolific contributor to Greplaw. Legal scholars would be citing my works as I am always looking for ways to put off cleaning my apartment.
Thank heavens for slovenliness, or we would have one fewer article to throw on the copyright flame-heap here.
Disney's never going to have to come up with anything new, because they'll just keep getting extensions for Mickey Mouse.
And therein lies the dilemma. Disney has made several fortunes by taking something that was already in the public domain and building on it. I don't know if the Brothers Grimm even get mentioned in the credits of the Disney films that are based on their stories. Now we see Disney purchasing politicians and legislation to extend their copyrights in perpetuity.
I wonder if anyone at Disney recognizes the irony of it all...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
if you're an 'artist' and are adamant about being paid for each and every copy, don't create anything that can be easily copied by your admiring public. That includes audio, video, writing, software, or ip in general. Face it, your just trying to cash in on the 85% profit margin of being able to produce once, make easy copies and distribute them. But now your customers have the ability to make easy copies and share them. Face it. Instead, go into sculpture, crafts, paintings, custom autos, landscaping, live performances, etc etc etc.
NO, this is not a troll, just a clear headed statement of fact. If you want to press an audio cd and sell copies, fine. Just realize there's going to be 'shrinkage' from maximum profit and you can cuss and stomp, beg for govt assistance, try to get consumer devices banned, mandate DRM in every electronic device, but the genie is already out of the bottle and everybody has one now. Artists and publishers are just going to have to adapt to the new environment or go extinct.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
>> For those of you that want to bring up Walt Disney - do you really think society would benefit greatly if the copyright on Mickey Mouse ended?
Who's to decide what 'greatly' means in your context? Will it end world hunger? No. Will it cure cancer? No. Will I be able to show my (grand)children the entertainment I grew up with, in an uneditted non-PC form, without owing anyone anything? Yes.
>> Who cares if it's going to be 120 years (or whatever the number is) before John Irving's novels fall in to the public domain? You want to read one - check one out of the library, it's free.
Well, not only are you then limited by what happens to be in the library, it won't be free for much longer. More and more books are appearing on shelves shrinkwrapped with a pretty EULA borrowed from the new 'digital' legislation. The contract of first sale is no more. As it happens more and more, without 'whining', it becomes more acceptable. Libraries will soon be museums, nothing more.
You ever seen a digital library? Where I can check out a video game, word processing app, etc for free, borrow and return it?
>> You pissed because music is more expensive than you'd like? Listen to the radio - it's free!
Not for long! Digital radio! XM Band! W00t! They can embed a digital copyrighting bit right into the stream, that'll tell you if you can record it or not, or even hear it or not. HDTV - same thing!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It is interesting to me that drug companies are allowed patents that run out relatively soon (15 or 20 years, I think) compared to copyrights, and they have to put in tons of money and research to create their products, but we'll give anyone who can throw together a few words and make a poem, song, or book, or who can draw or animate a mouse (Mickey), a 75 year copyright, and Congress the option to extend that indefinitely, when they certainly didn't have to spend billions to develop a lifesaving or life-extending product.
Things are definitely screwed up around here. But make no mistake, I am not defending the big druggies either, just pointing out the oddity.
Property, as we know it, is a legal definition set down in our tradition by John Locke. It is confined in Locke's conception as things which can be found in the common, improved by individuals, and which also become scarce when they are used. Locke's example is apples growing on trees become a man's property when he "mixes his labour" with them in the process of collection. A collection of shiny apples is surely improved over scattered apples amongst bruised and wormeaten ones. When another person happens on the collected nice apples, it would be wrong to deny the first man the benefit of his "labour" by taking apples from his pile. (maybe I remember this totally wrong.. correct me if so)
If I set some music down on digital media, I have surely improved the media, and it would be wrong to deprive me of the fruits of my labour by taking my improved media from me, but if you improve your own blank media, indistinguishable from mine, by setting music down from memory as you remember hearing it on mine, you have not deprived me of the fruits of my labour.
Intellectual property is a fabrication and an illusion. It does not perform the same as the concept of material property. There is no ethical base for an Intellectual Property Right. Maybe, in a teleological sense we can justify an Intellectual Property Privilege, but we should all just stop using "IP" and Intellectual Property terms until we are sure we all agree exactly what they mean. We should understand them at least as well as the basis for "life, Liberty, and property" which became the model philosophy for American politics.
Information does not have the property of scarcity like Locke's apples. The more you share information, the more there is! (Let's not split hairs, I can demonstrate this aside..) Good or bad, news or propaganda, sharing magnifies it. This is opposite of real property. The more you share a bowl of rice, the less there is to go around. Our laws should not gloss this fundamental difference over.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
We agree that an invention benefits the society most when it is in the public domain -- anyone can use and benefit from it. However, we agree that in order for individuals in a capitalist society to have incentive to invent, they must be able to capitalize on their invention. Hence the "limited times" in the constitution for an inventor to profit from his mind.
For the greatest benefit of the society at large, we want the "limited times" to grant just enough incentive to the inventors to invent at high rates (my idea would be to have the copyright term be a function of the average amount of time taken to invent something). One can assume rather assuredly that the length of a copyright should most certainly not be as long as a generation, otherwise entire generations would never know the free access to the idea.
As is, the terms are something like life+50 years. Life plus 50 years?? look at it like this: people who were born after Mickey Mouse was copyrighted and have died since then (there's a lot of them, 1920's-) never benefitted from any of Disney's creations in the public domain. Does this benefit society as a whole, or the corporate monopolies who own the copyright?
But nothing compared to the lots and lots of books created after the existence of copyright laws.
... indeed, they would likely benefit greatly from it. The only people who would suffer would be publishers, but with the internet, publishers should rightfully be relegated to the role of providing a paid service to artists (and competing with one another to do so), rather than the robber barrons of culture they have been allowed to become for the several centuries.
When copyright was created, the number of published books plummeted to merely a third of their former diversity. That is a clear situation where one can compare apples to apples: the current state of the artistic environment immediately before, and after, copyrights were imposed.
Anything else is extraordinarilly disingenuous, ignoring the effects of a geometric climb in population, deployment of new and more effecient publishing technologies, and so forth, which are orthogonal to the effects of copyright.
Indeed, later increases in published material have more to do with increases in human population and deployment of technology than it does with copyright, and even those increases are dwarfed by the amount of derivative 'fan fiction' and unpublished works that have been created with no desire for profit whatsoever (many of which are technically illegal under current copyright law, as is, by the way, having a few friends over to watch a movie).
There are all kinds of alternatives to the absurd situation we have now, in which cartels dominate entire artforms by leveraging a system of government entitlement monopolies designed to favor publishers over artists, and both over the rest of society. These alternatives include tax incentives, small punitive taxes on anauthorized works with some or all of the proceeds going back to the orignial creater, etc. and require neither monopoly entitlements nor wealthy patronage.
Copyrights in the digital age must be reformed. To enforce the kinds of entitlement monopolies publishers have enjoyed since the British Crown created the first publishing cartel in the 15th century will require legislation so draconian as to make the former communist eastern block appear liberal in comparison, governance equipment in every home, office, car, and every portable electronic device that both monitors and reports a user's data usage habits, and a crippling of new emergent technologies that would have made any luddite of the 19th century, and every buggy whip manufacturer of the early 20th, proud.
Indeed, that is precisely what Disney and others are advocating, to which the only sane response of anyone who values any of the freedoms our forfathers died to create and protect must answer: if the choice given is one between the artists and publisher's profitability, and everyone elses privacy and individual liberties, then the artists will have to go out and get day jobs.
Of course, that false dichotomy is one Disney et. al. presents because they do not wish to see copyright reform, and would rather trample upon our privacy and liberty rather than adjust their business models to a new technology. In truth artists could make a perfectly fine living in an environment where they were not granted exclusive monopoly entitlements
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