Slashdot Mirror
Lessig Spins Copyright Law
ceebABC writes "In the always riveting CIO Insight magazine, tech-pundit (and professor) Lawrence Lessig examines the copyright laws and how they can be applied to e-books and other electronic forms of rights management... i.e., in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?"
I want to know! Mickey needs to be free.
Best Buy can have you arrested
It is obvious how copyright applies to ebooks.
If I write something then I own the copyright on it. If you copy it, you are in the wrong.
a micropayment each time you open the ebook file. Judging what a 'read' consists of otherwise would be too difficult, until you computer starts reading (pun) your retina for ID.
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?
The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Copyright laws spin YOU!
I certainly hope that authors in the future don't recieve royalties for public library readers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be anti-copyright here, Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Goes to show that the written word is a de-valued commodity in the information age; same goes for music (napster). If you want to make money, figure out a way to do something that a billion other people aren't doing (i.e. typing, writing, and playing musical instruments).
Arguably (and at a broad, conceptual level), having a computer read an e-book (aloud or otherwise) and having a person read a book (aloud or otherwise) both involve making copies - one in software/hardware, the other in wetware. Of course there are differences, but I can imagine that these will become less obvious over time.
a world in progress...
I'm surprised you can read yourself, given the subject of your post.
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?
Nope. This was tried with new-fangled technology - the pay-per-view DVDs. It failed because folks aren't (quite) that dumb.
If you think that folks will 'buy that' for the written word - a technology that has been around for a long time, you're a fool. Hell, folks won't even buy e-books that they can re-read.
He's got good points about if you have a book now, you can loan it to friends or borrow it from the library without any troubles.
The problem is, that before eBooks, you couldn't "loan" your copy of the book to 10,000 of your friends on Kazaa.
There are some interesting ideas in there, but I don't think his ideas are the answer. They are a good start though.
...a whole lot to say, since I basically agree with him. In fact, the very idea that anyone with a T1 can create and publish content makes me very very happy. I never like the way the original creators of material seem to get less than what they deserve. Authors less so than musicians, but hopefully (ever so hopefully) that is changing. I envision massive user-run blogs of cool content released by independent people, filtered from among the other inevitable cruft and lifted from obscurity simply by the scouring power of billions of people. It could be cool.
Everyone on slashdot has a journal.
What happens when I get my artificially enhanced memory modules in 2025? Will the DMCA dictate what kind of memories I can have? Will media distributors discriminate against me as a buyer since I can play back my memories whenever I want?
--LinuxParanoid, only somewhat tongue in cheek
copyrighting popups, and extracting a royalty for everytime someone "reads" one...
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
Do I collect money every time someone walks across my yard? I'm a big supporter of the "Pay for it once" philosophy. If I buy a book, its mine, I can loan it to whoever I want. The idea can remain the writer's or whoever came up with it and copyrigted it, but the book is mine. I'm pretty sure that a "book" , as in a collection of paper with words on it, cannot be copyrighted, so as long as I don't make money off of it, how is it violating copyright if I let someone else "see" (I'm not talking about copying the book, just one copy). As I see it anything printed on paper can be seen by anyone, and read by anyone because it exsists on prior art.
We never had to pay an author before for trading in a book, why should the model change now? Content should be paid for once. Continual payment to use it is just crap.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
if people werent so interested in just making money, maybe more people could get exposed to arts and actually learn somehting without someone making a buck off of them and heres a link to some pictures of a dead hooker in the '40's http://poetry.rotten.com/hooker-morgue/ thank you
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
The publishers are out of luck if they want to kill an author's percentage.
For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%. And the big names--those that bring in the massive ammounts of sales that keep publishers in busienss--certainly won't sell their already-done-and-anyone-can-print-it books for less than this.
Why not have a short copyright term as the standard (say life + 10 years). But if a corporate entity wants to keep that copyright past that point, it would have to pay a substantial fixed fee plus some small royalties to the government (i.e. a tax on profits).
This way, the list of long-term copyrights would be small, maintained in a single place, and thus easily searchable. There would be a financial disincentive in place to keep companies from locking up works unless they were actively making money. Companies are happy, museums are happy, the gov'ment is happy, and the internet is happy.
-- Heisenberg might have slept here.
One liners are for idiots?
that Lessig movie everybody is always playing, which is far more easy to digest. It's in Flash so it works great in Windows. Lessig is the same author as the article by the way.
Why Slashdot is under attack
Lawrence Lessig. <free culture>. Intro. Over the past three years, Lessig
has given more than 100 talks like the one captured here.
randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/ - 7k - Cached
Eldred v. Ashcroft
... 10 had a favourable piece on Lessig and the lawsuit. ... October 13, 2002 - Amy ...
Harmon of New York Times: uphill battle over copyright. more news
eldred.cc/ - 7k - Cached -
The Limits of Copyright
... it an offense to write code to interfere with this use-controlling code, regardless ...
of whether the use would be considered fair under the copyright law.
www.thestandard.com/article/display/ 0,1151,16071,00.html - 34k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -
Copyright law and roasted pig. ...
Communications Copyright law and roasted pig Lawrence Lessig on Eldred v. Ascroft
By Lawrence Lessig October 22, 2002. In 1930, 10,027 books were published.
www.redherring.com/insider/2002/10/ roast-pig-copyright-102202.html - 29k - Cached -
O'Reilly Network: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from ...
... A flash version of Lessig's presentation, including audio and other source files. ... their ...
i g.html - 27k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -
works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.
www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/less
High court weighs copyright law - Tech News - CNET.com
... Lessig and his allies are hoping not merely to overturn this law, however, but ...
to build momentum for an all-out legal assault on many recent copyright
news.com.com/2100-1023-961467.html - 28k - Cached -
Lawrence Lessig
... Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com mentions Professor Lessig in Left gets nod from ...
right on copyright law, on a speech given by Appeals Court Judge Richard
cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/ - 23k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached -
Home--Berkman Center for Internet and Society
... Also see: Digitial Copyright Law on Trial [CNet]; Google Excluding Controversial ... the Hard Questions: On October 9 Lawrence Lessig appeared before ...
Sites [CNet];
Description: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is a research program founded...
Category: Computers>Internet>Policy
cyber.law.harvard.edu/ - 13k - Cached -
Techdirt:Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His ... ...
l - 5k - Cached -
Copyright Law And Roasted Pig - Lessig Pushes His Campaign Forward.
Ramblings Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2002
www.techdirt.com/articles/20021022/1311202.shtm
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Lessig brings up an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print. What happened to the rest of this knowledge? The rest of this creativity? It has been lost and forgotten.
We were supposed to build our society on the shoulders of giants. Instead we've institutionally forgotten everything that came before us. It seems appropriate that our attention spans are now short enough not to notice what we've lost.
Societally, we're only a step away from being the old lady in a flannel nighty that keeps wandering away from the old folks home.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
This story, which you all really should have read by now, depicts a world of copyright/DRM/Etc. laws to the extreme:
The Right to Read
The scariest line definitely comes after:
most of the specific laws and practices described above have already been proposed
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
having a computer read an e-book (aloud or otherwise) and having a person read a book (aloud or otherwise) both involve making copies - one in software/hardware, the other in wetware. Of course there are differences
The difference is that United States copyright law considers RAM to be a tangible medium in which a work can be fixed; thus, reading a file into RAM is copying. The brain is not such a medium.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I mean, if I were a red shirt, I'd certainly prefer to have my duplicate go down to be zapped, and (in the unlikely event that he's not killed), let his molecules be scattered to the winds when his lifespan is up.
Heck, they can't even reconstitute something from the buffers once someone's dead. What's up with that? The only reasonable explanation is DRM.
Clearly, we must act now to prevent this horrible future awaiting our great-grandchildren. Take up the battle cry now: Freedom to replicate!
OK, where's the funny part again?
I've always thought pay-per-use was a perfectly reasonable idea, as long as the usage fees were low enough.
;)
Imagine, you could build a vast library for free.. in fact, you wouldn't even NEED a personal library, because EVERYTHING would be available freely on the net.
Then, you pay based on what you use. So, if you listen to the latest Britney song 1000 times, you owe her some cash. And why shouldn't you?? If you listen to the song that much, obviously you're enjoying it.
If you grab a movie and only watch it once, you pay next to nothing. But if it becomes your all time favourite, and you watch it over and over again, you pay more money. It's totally fair.
I know a lot of people would be opposed to this, because they want to pay a flat OWNERSHIP fee, and get infinite usage. But in the Internet connected world, where anything digitizable can be copied infinitely for near zero cost, I posit that the concept of ownership is obsolete. We have the capacity for everyone to own everything, in other words, and just pay for what they actually use.
Speaking for myself, I have a library of hundreds of DVDs, which has cost thousands of dollars to build. If instead of purchasing copies, I could watch ANY movie I wanted for say, 50 cents, I imagine I would have seen a lot more movies, for a lot cheaper, than I would've by purchasing a personal library. And the number of times I've seen Aliens could probably fund Cameron's retirement.
Now of course, I'm not saying converting to such a system would be easy, or even possible right now. It would require universal, mandatory ID3 tags or equivalent, a ubiquitous micropayment infrastructure, and global co-operation of everyone who designs media playback mechanisms.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
...till I have to play "catch the monkey" in order to read the climax?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
I'm an author, and I don't object at all to my books ending up on library shelves. When it happens, it means I'm probably "relieved" of 97% of my royalty for each time the book is read -- given that I suppose the average library book is checked out 30 times. But I don't care that this is such a bad deal for me, since I think it's great that people are reading my book.
But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?
I'm trying to understand your point of view, but I can't make any sense of it. It seems totally selfish and poorly thought out.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
So does "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson, which predicts the unavoidable consequence of perpetual copyright: eventually, every pleasing combination of n notes is owned by somebody. Copyrights become like land in that it's possible to own them but not create new ones.
This is why Americans do not need copyright term extensions such as the Bono Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Did you know that even when you own a paper version of a book, it is illegal to download an electronic version of the book? The current copyright applies not only to the content (as it should; especially since copyright is supposed to promote advancement in arts), but also the format (which should be protected by patents, not copyright). As a consequence, under the copyright law you have to pay twice for the same book - the paper and the electronic version.
OMFG.
The story is very interesting.
Top of the third page:
The purpose of copyright law is to create incentives that "promote...Progress." But extensions of copyright for works that already exist do not promote progress.
Easily the best comment I've heard against Pro Bono for copyright terms.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I read the actual copy right law as applied to print and recordings. It seems fairly straight forward.
You buy a book. You own the book. You can sell the book. You can make copies of the book for personal use. If you sell the original, all the copies have to be destroyed, or go with the original. You can't sell copies with out the copy right holders permission. You can even loan the book, as long as the person you loan it to returns it and doesn't keep a copy.
I can't understand why software is being treated in a different manner.
Just my two cents.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Sorry, what are we talking about again?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Treasure Planet - Treasure Island (duh)
Snow White - Grim
Pinocchio - Grim
Cinderella - Grim
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty - Grimm
The Jungle Book - Kipling
The Little Mermaid - Andersen
Beauty and the Beast
Alice in Wonderland - Carrol
I may be wrong on the authors (from memory) but those are all books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.
Funny.
Everyone always bitches about the big companies saying the authors or artists get nothing so it's ok to steal from them anyways! If you buy a book, and the author gets $0.05 for each book sold, or you steal a book(Gnutella, etc) they get nothing! So the big boys take most of the money? That's a completely different problem from everyone else literally stealing from the authors!(Hey a pun! Where'd that come from?). So quit bitching about the RIAA taking all of the money or the publishers taking all of the money. Publishers generally actually pay pretty well, compare it to self-publishing and you'll see _why_ publishers take alot of the money. I know, this is off-topic because I agree completely with Lessig about copyright law, but I'm sick and tired of people bashing the big boys and saying the little guys get only 0.00000001% of anything, that's still something and if no one buys the book, they get 0.0000000000% and that's 100% less! So go out there and buy some god-damned books and CDs. We all do piracy, I'm sure, to an extent, but doing it because the authors/artists would otherwise get almost nothing is not better than them simply getting nothing! Quit changing the topic to allow yourself to pirate.
Don't mod me down because you disagree with me, mod me up and maybe get people to say something insightful.
As someone who creates a lot of material that falls under the protection of copyright law I think it's time that other writers and publishers lighten up a little.
I'm certainly not in favor of people being able to copy and republish or redistribute my work for free without my permission -- but I can't think of a single occasion when I've refused a request from someone who wished to do so.
The only condition usually associated with the granting of such rights is a clear attribution.
Of course if the NY Times comes knocking on my door asking to republish something I've written then I'll probably ask a fair fee for the privilege -- but when it's another not-for-profit website or there's a measure of public good then I simply grant a non-exclusive right to republish without charge.
This usually works well for all concerned:
* The republisher gets some good free content.
* My work becomes more widely known
* The general public has more access to my writing.
In marketing terms, these free republication licenses are a loss-leader. What I lose (which is probably very little in cash terms) by giving away the content, I gain by being able to charge more for material that I write specifically for other publishers.
What those who produce material protected by copyright have to appreciate is that just because you can enforce your rights to be paid for copying doesn't mean it's always a good idea to do so.
I cringe every time I hear Microsoft, the RIAA or MPAA preach about how much money they've lost through unauthorized copying. How on earth do they know that those who copied their IP would have actually purchased it otherwise?
Making Fun of Slashdot!
Racing Against Time
By Lawrence Lessig
In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term of existing and future copyrights by 20 years--from 75 to 95 years for corporate works, and life plus 50 to 70 years for literary works by authors. This was the eleventh time in 40 years that Congress extended copyright terms. Its effect is to stop, or "toll" the passing of copyrighted work into the public domain. When it expires, the public domain will have been tolled for 39 out of 55 years, or 70 percent of the time since 1962.
These perpetual extensions of existing terms harm Internet growth. They make it harder for content to be deployed on the Internet; they increase the cost of innovation. Thus, in a constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Act, argued before the Supreme Court in October, the Internet was offered as Exhibit 1 against the statute. The Internet, the court was told, makes it critically important that copyright terms actually be, as the Constitution requires, "limited."
This is a hard argument to make. I know, because I argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court in October, on behalf of plaintiffs who depend upon the public domain for their livelihood. It is difficult for lawyers and for businesses to see how the Internet changes things--hard for lawyers because they are typically far removed from the Internet, and difficult for businesses because they often don't see just how the law really regulates. But it is crucial for the future of innovation and growth that both sides come to see why a new technology makes an original constitutional value so much more important.
Copyright law is a crucial part of the system of incentive necessary to spur creative work. But the law affects creativity differently in cyberspace than in real space. Content owners have been quick to argue that cyberspace weakens copyright protection, since digital copies are so easy to make and distribution costs are so low. That may be true. But it is also true that the Internet can strengthen the power of copyright owners far beyond anything imagined by the framers of our copyright act.
Think, for example, about the difference between a book and an e-book. When a book is published in real space, copyright law controls who may print and initially distribute the book. If you reprint John Grisham's latest novel and sell copies without permission, you will be hunted down and prosecuted--and rightfully so. Copyright properly assures that the author, or copyright holder, has an "exclusive right" to the profits from the initial sale of the book. Thieves who invade that right are punks.
But once the book is out there, ordinary uses of the book in real space are untouched by the law. If you read the book 10 times, copyright law doesn't care. If you buy a copy at a local used bookstore, or borrow it from a library, the author doesn't get a royalty (in the U.S., at least). These uses are unregulated by copyright law. They are not "fair uses" of copyrighted works; they are simply unregulated. The life of an e-book is quite different. Because of a simple technical feature of the Internet, copyright law regulates much more of the life of an e-book in cyberspace than of the life of a book in real space. As every action (on a digital network) produces a copy, and every copy (under the current regime of copyright) is presumptively within the reach of copyright law, every use of a copyrighted work in cyberspace amounts to a copyright event. Thus, to give an e-book to a friend involves a copy; it is therefore regulated by copyright law. To borrow an e-book from an Internet library involves a copy; it is therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, to have the computer read an e-book aloud involves making a copy; it, too, is therefore regulated by copyright law. All these "uses" of an e-book are within the reach of copyright's regulation, while the very same uses of a book in real space would not be.
It is this difference that creates the worry about extending copyright terms. Just at the moment that the Internet creates the opportunity for unimagined cultivation of our culture, the law is locking up yet another generation of our culture through copyright control. If a museum wants to create a Web-based exhibit about the New Deal, for example, including pictures and songs from the period, for another 20 years it must check the copyright status for all the material it might use, and get permission from copyright owners for any material still under copyright. If an archive such as Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive wants to digitize those books published in 1930 that are now out of print (all but 174 of the 10,027 books published in that year), it would have to trace the copyrights on each of these books for another generation. Or most urgently, if a film restorer wanted to digitize films from the 1930s, which, because printed on nitrate-based film, are all currently decaying, he or she would have to race against this inevitable decay to locate all the owners of the different copyrights bundled into a single film.
This additional 20 years of protection means 20 more years of licensing before content can be easily used on the Internet. And while lawyers don't often recognize the burden the law imposes on business, businesses can easily recognize the burden of 20 more years of licensing. Imagine a world where used bookstores would have to pay royalties each time a used book was sold: Would there be any used bookstores? Or imagine a world where you had to sign a contract before you were allowed to link to another site on the World Wide Web. Would there be a World Wide Web? And if you think that's bad, imagine having to deal with copyright term extensions for works created in 1923. You'd need to get the permission of unknown and effectively untraceable owners before you could put content on the Web. That is our future if copyright terms continue to grow.
The purpose of copyright law is to create incentives that "promote...Progress." But extensions of copyright for works that already exist do not promote progress. Only 2 percent of the work copyrighted during the first 20 years affected by the Sonny Bono Act have any continuing commercial life. That 2 percent is benefited by the extension, while the rest of the creative work still under copyright is thrown into a black hole of legal regulation. These extensions only harm the creative process, especially when technology makes it possible for so many more to become creators.
Shorter terms, on the other hand, would increase the lawyer-free zone that we call the public domain. They would, therefore, lower the costs to companies that want to distribute and build upon the public domain. Just as there are scores of competing editions of public domain books, there would be scores of competing content providers serving film, and eventually music, from one of the most creative periods in American history. This competition would, in turn, increase demand for bandwidth, which would fuel Internet growth.
The framers of our Constitution didn't know about the Internet. They had no clue about the opportunity for creativity it would present. But they committed our tradition to a rule that requires that copyright terms be limited. That requirement may not have mattered much for 200 years, since for most of that time, only commercial publishers could produce and distribute creative work. But now that technology has given that power to anyone with a T1, the wisdom in the framers' plan is again becoming obvious. Government-granted monopolies, as the framers called them, make sense when they create incentives. But even the United States Congress can't create incentives in the past. No matter what Congress says, George Gershwin will not create anything more. We should thank and honor him and others for their extraordinary work. But we should also honor our framers' plan--that terms be limited.
Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the author of The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. His next column will appear in March.
Fucking amtgarders. =)
Ever notice that the Trekkie philosophy of not making multiple copies of something with the transporter is just DRM in disguise?
Actually, it's Heisenberg's quantum reality. As you measure the quantum state of the object you're transporting, you also destroy that state. Think of it as God's DRM.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Everyone realizes that not everything is scalable; what works on a certain scale may not on another.
Libraries are a wonderful institution that doubtlessly cut into the income of those who produce the books. More importantly (to me) they are repositories of books that are out of print and can't easily be located. Older books doubtless stimulate interest in buying newer ones. In the very earliest days, of course, few could afford books at all.
The thing is, electonic distribution blows up the apple cart. It's just too easy. And I worry it will somehow fundamentally change a system that we have grown used to over many decades. Just because the library system is familiar and effective doesn't mean that scaling it to the Web will work. It will be wonderful for the user, but the producer? In fact, in could be a disaster, save the current reality that reading books on a computer just isn't like a real book.
from the stuff-to-read dept.
ceebABC writes "In the always riveting CIO Insight magazine, tech-pundit (and professor) Lawrence Lessig examines the copyright laws and how they can be applied to e-books and other electronic forms of rights management... i.e., in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?"
I received this information before it was slashdotted and posted it for everyone's viewing. Glad to help.
Pinocchio - Grim
The Adventures of Pinocchio is not by the Grimm Bros. but rather by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini. You can read about Collodi, or read an English translation of Pinocchio .
books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.
The Walt Disney Company does not own the rights to the novel Pinocchio or to the name "Pinocchio". DisneyCo owns only the copyright on its film adaptation[1], including the likenesses of the characters as drawn by Disney animators, and has no grounds to prevent other publishers' film adaptations of the original novel. DisneyCo most definitely does not own the rights to "Noddy", a character created by Enid Blyton that may have been inspired by Pinocchio.
The Jungle Book - Kipling
Which exemplifies . No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out. Now DisneyCo has closed the door behind itself by pushing copyright term extensions through Congress.
Peter Pan
NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORLDWIDE! The European Union recognizes a monopoly on literary works for the life of the last surviving author, plus the remainder of the calendar year, plus 70 years. Because J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, died in 1937, copyright in Peter Pan does not expire in the European Union until 2007, and DisneyCo has to pay GOSH a royalty for every Peter Pan and Return to Never Land disc sold in the EU. In fact, the United Kingdom has granted a statutory perpetual copyright on the work, with royalties going to a children's hospital.
[1] DisneyCo may lose even that if the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft happens to strike down the 1976 extension along with the Bono Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I really think copyright has been turned up side down. All the arguments are about "content owners" "intellectual property" etc.
Look at it this way for a moment (or the rest of your life):
I have a CD with nice music. I have a CD burner. I have a blank CD. All of it is my property. Why should the law limit my freedom to copy the CD and give or sell it to a friend?
All laws put restrictions on my freedom, but we need to justify these restrictions. The law says I can't hit you over the head and gives me back the security that you probably won't hit me over the head. It gives us as society the benefit that we don't need to wear helmets all the time.
The answer to my opening question "Why can't I copy?" lies in the premise that my friend will purchase the music in a way that economically will encourage the musician to productivity. But only as far as this gives something back to society can we justify the restrictions copyright places on our freedom.
[END OF RANT] (Well, preaching to the choir anyway)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I wrote a story about this topic that was first published in the early nineties. If you're interested, you can read it at:
http://www.funnysf.com/brandon.htm
****Back to your regular programming****
Sheesh! At the rate the Internet has grown over the past 5 years, Lord help us all if we didn't have term extensions acting as a brake to keep that growth manageable!
Seriously, I agree with Lessig that there is useful content that needs to be public domain. I just thought the line above was funny.
Piii-kaaa-CHUUUUUUUU!!
A fine indepth post, sir. As I said, all from memory - and that memory was being challenged by food on the table. Having someone expand on your comments and doing it well...this is why I read /. ;)
The "artist" who is such a supreme being should be paid over and over, whereas the looser carpenter doesn't get a dime when people use the house he build over and over and over....
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Lessig a good point in his article of how just about every digital use of information involves copying. Perhaps all of the craziness that we're going through is just a result of poor semantics. We've focused on "copying" because our term is "copyright". In reality, I think that what most reasonable people (MPAA & RIAA need not apply) could agree on is that we really want to protect and control the right to distribute. Is loaning a copy to a friend distribution? I think we can all agree no. Is "sharing" the file over Kazaa with 10,000 others distribution - well, I think the answer has to be yes. Copying from CD to MP3 is not distribution nor is making a backup copy or putting it on all the computers in your house.
Lessig's main point is no less valid if we begin to talk about "distributionright", however - there needs to be a time limit and it can't be continually extended.
How about the even sinmpler fact that it is a TV
show and that would spoil all the writers plots??
"God dammit, It's ficiton Jim"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The author owns the copyright initially. If he chooses a contract where he gets 0.00000001% royalty per read, he does so freely. Why are you complaining about the publisher making all the money. The contract was entereed into by both entities freely. If the publisher wasn't necessary, it wouldn't be in the equation. Obviously, the publisher plays some key role in selling books.
Vote for Pedro
Before we start talking about "fair use" and the other assorted issues of paying for use, etc, lets look at the REASON copyright laws exist in the first place.
Copyright laws are made to prevent others from publishing copyrighted material and making $$ off that copyrighted material, i.e., it's to prevent the sale of a creative work in which none of that $$ goes to the creator of that work. This isn't about money they would have made but aren't making. This isn't about "fair use" or "unlimited use" or "restricted use" at all. This is about preventing other people from stealing your work and making money off it. As far as I know, KaZaA isn't charging me to download e-books or mp3s. As far as I know, I'm not paying someone to read a book they transcribed into text and posted on their website in HTML format. A third party is not profitting from the sale of another person's intellectual property without that individual getting royalties.
I think online publishing of material is great; it allows amateur authors, musicians, etc to get much more exposure than they would in traditional media. Additionally, it allows for many more alternative opinions and ideas to be expressed because publishing is not based on the demand for a book but rather the author's desire to publish it. In the paper book world where most publishers are looking for New York Times Bestseller books, you get very little good literature. I'm sorry, but I'd prefer to read less popular authors who I find interesting rather than the newest hackjob of a book by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, etc. Online publishing allows for a diversity of ideas you don't get when the stakes are as big as they are in paper publishing.
In other words, Adobe and the DCMA and the MPAA can take their opinions, sit on them, and rotate.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
First sale.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
How about the even sinmpler fact that it is a TV show and that would spoil all the writers plots??
The "fourth wall" refers to the separation of a fantasy world (the "earth") from the world of its creator (the "heaven"). It's generally considered bad form to break the fourth wall unless, as in The Truman Show, eXistenZ, The Matrix, and Holy Bible, the fourth wall itself is a plot point. Even bullsh*t science that explains something within the story's universe modulo suspension of disbelief is preferred to "I made it this way because it would spoil my plot otherwise." A good SF plot has to sit on a good consistent foundation of rules of the universe.
Thus, the Heisenberg copy protection on most SF universes' teleportation devices. It serves a purpose in the plot, but it makes sense.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I thought you read /. for the "In Soviet Russia" posts.
1001000 1101001
Is covered by an entire set of special restrictive laws compared to this:
**** **
and this:
Hi
When the only difference between them is *the font*?
KFG
In soviet russia, the 'in soviet russia' posts read you.
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
libraries will only be distributing pulic domain works in digital form. They aren't in the business of collecting royalties for authors, nor do they wish to be. That's kind of part of the point.
And for the most part customers of libraries *don't want ebooks.*
This is not to say they do not *pay* royalties to authors though.
What do you suppose would happen if *libraries stopped buying books*?
I guess most people aren't aware of the fact that for a comparitively huge percentage of books published library sales make up a huge percentage of *total* sales.
If libraries boycotted publishers an awful lot of publishers would simply go out of business overnight. Particularly the "specialty" houses.
What the hell kind of world are we building anyways when *public libraries* are regarded as "theives"?
KFG
and the beowulf clusters of naked petrified Natalie Portman bowls of hot grits in Soviet Russia.
But let me ask you this:
What are you paying for each time? Service? Can you call something service that involves nothing from the service provider? Surely not Ms. Spears service, she did her work in the studio. The publisher? Ditto. For the enjoyment of the music? Here we are going on very slippery slope. I sincerely hope that it never comes to that I will be charged every time when I listen to my favorite song. The very thought is giving me shivers. It is too close "The right to read" story.
J.
Yes I agree that consistency is the hallmark of good writing anywhere SF or non SF.
But I would suggest that dragging real world physics into a fictional universe to support meerly one point of a shows plot is just convenient in the least. Yes you can quote Heisenberg for teleportation limitations. But who do you quote to support various renditions of FTL travel??
You can't have it both ways.
Either fictional universes subscribe to real world physics that we know about - In which case that telportation and FTL travel don't exist
OR
They subscribe to physics that we don't know about - In which case you cannot definetively state that teleportation is limited by what we know.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
He did not re-evaluate the purpose of copyright law and the deal made to acheive that purpose. People keep mentioning the fact that you can make coppies of information cheaply and easily as if that were bad. Far from it. Copyright and patent laws exist to further the useful arts and the public domain. They do so by prohibiting others from exploiting work for a period of years, then 14 for copyright. At that time publishing was much more expensive, yet 14 years of exclusivity was seen as adequate incentive for publishers. So now that anyone can share information and publish, why do we need exclusivity? So that Disney can keep Mickey Mouse movies to themselves? Much more important works will rot in obscurity while Mickey generates cash for amusement park owners. Copyright needs to be evaluated from the perspective of it's purpose. New technology, which should and is obsoleting many large publishers, is also being perverted to artificailly make infomation imobile, as if it were confined to dead trees or vinyl that had to be trucked from central warehouses. To parphrase Bill Clinton, who signed the DMCA into law, Just because it's easy and profitable to hoard information, does not make it right.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But who do you quote to support various renditions of FTL travel??
If both our universe and the fictional universe have the law in common, they may have the physicist in common. Otherwise, quote fictional physicists and engineers. For example, in the Star Trek universe, "Zefram Cochrane invented warp drive in 2063".
You can't have it both ways. Either fictional universes subscribe to real world physics that we know about OR They subscribe to physics that we don't know about
There's no reason that a fictional universe can't take some physical laws from our universe but invent others, as long as the combination remains consistent. For instance, even if they have lots of bullsh*t physics, SF worlds still have the attraction of one mass to another, which we call "gravity" in our physics. I brought up Heisenberg because it was the first explanation that came to mind for the limitations of teleporters. Perhaps you meant: "either a fictional universe has zero BS physics, or it has at least one BS law of physics."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Instead of having a copyright that lasts for X number of years, why not one based on distribution (official publish copies) of the work?
That would benefit small companies, as they would take more time to hit the number of copies in distribution before it enters public domain.
It would also have the effect of making things last much shorter for major distributors as they would be likely to hit the limit within a reasonable ammount of time, say 5-15 years from the start date.
There would need to be rules to keep companies from skirting the issue of what is the official publication, and to keep companies from sitting on copies for years.
Say something like 7billion in print at year 5, decreasing by a set percentage of the world (or just us population) every year until the work enters the public domain.
The type of protection a creative work receives should not hinge on the notion that transmitting an e-book involves making a copy or that reading a library book does not. These are legal nitpicks. The Supreme Court could decide that reading a book constitutes copying the contents of the book into your brain. Then the very act of reading would technically be regulated by copyright law. To me it doesn't matter whether this type of regulation is achieved by ridiculously redefining the notion of "copying" or by introducing book licensing. Either tactic is government by hair-splitting.
The question of copyright shouldn't revolve around the technical interpretation of existing law. The question should be how, in real terms in today's world, copyright law can best implement the intent that is stated in the Constitution, which is simply to provide incentive to produce new works.
If e-books are to be considered a threat to creativity and invention, it should be because e-books might make it difficult for an author to recoup the cost of creating the work, thus discouraging new works. It should not be because somebody decided that transmitting an e-book is technically making a copy. The latter argument assumes that the point of copyright is to protect authors indirectly by protecting the copy-making business directly. It isn't, and it never was.
As much as I respect Lessig, I wish he and other high-profile people who are thrashing out this issue would depart from dissecting the fine points of laws that weren't written with enough resolution to cover current conditions. What they are doing amounts to adding extra zeroes after the decimal point and arguing over the accuracy of the numbers. I wish they would consider that in a very few years, when almost anybody on earth will have the capability to publish their own work to the entire world at practically zero cost. Copyright law of the future should provide an incentive for the people and institutions who PRODUCE new works, not for those who merely make and sell copies.
If the author doens't like the publishers terms, he can always put the work on a web site and sell adverts.
I'd think that already popular authors could make a killing doing this. And up and coming authors shouldn't find it too difficult to make at least some money out of the deal.
Imagine a smart guy opening storydot.org where an author can post a chapter of his story at a time. Instead of sections about apple, linux, and M$, you could have a section for each book.
I really cannot see what, exactly, publishers do these days besides exploiting 99.9% of the authors out there just to pay Oprah to reccomend 0.1% on her show.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The major issue with copyright is that instead of defining a principle (an author has the exclusive artistical and revenue rights from the produced works) it just edicts one possible *technical* (hence the word "copy" in "copyright") way to enforce the intents.
:
And that technical solution is flawed in several ways
- It is legal to prevent an auhor form getting revenue as long as no copies are made (by lending or reselling a book)
- It is illegal to make copies even if it does not hurt the author revenues (out of print works).
The notions of copies and public performance have greatly evolved during the last decade and the copyright laws are innapropriate.
These flaws were less apparent when copy and distribution were restricted to publishing companies, but now that Internet gives these possibilities to individuals, these flaws are becoming more and more evident.
See image: link
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?
Different media means different rules, especially when you are being pirated all the time.
You can't compare to paper books because the media itself is it's own form of copy protection. A paper book is more costly and more of a hassle to copy than its worth. It's cheaper in most cases to just buy another copy of the book. Also sharing the book is not a problem. Again its a bigger hassle than its worth for two people to read the book at one time. So basically only one person at a time can use/read the book. Paper books are their own form of copy and piracy protection.
I worked for Borland many years ago on BC++. Borlands license was as they called it a Paperback book" style license. They didn't worry about the software being copied, they know that would be impossible. So they said treat it like a book and as long as only one copy of the software is in use at one time you are within license.
Pay-per-read?
That means more money for publishers and hopefully authors. But do they really NEED more money?
What about other values than money? That people without so much money can borrow books from the library to better and educate themselves. That students can use the libraries to go in-depth in the lies behind our history. That we can actually use information, and not become hostages of monopolies.
Personally, I won't buy *ANY* Palladium/DRM-enabled device. When they come out, I will educate those I can about them, and tell people to stay clear away. If all comes to all, I can live without a computer, and meditate and read books. I don't NEED disney or hollywood in my life.
Since no one ever reads them.
At least from public libraries in the United Kingdom you do, and I believe that the practice is wide spread in Europe. Probably why most of my books say not for resale in the U.S.A. inside the front cover.
HA !
Pro Bono.
Thats funny.
'Cause its for free in Latin and we're talking about stuff thats not for free....
and its a double meaning...
and... he said against pro bono.. and.. its funny 'cause....
ok... I stop before the hole Im digging gets any deaper : )
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library
;-).
Well, actually, in the UK they do. See The Public Lending Right Website:
Under the United Kingdom's PLR Scheme authors receive payments from government funds for the free borrowing of their books from public libraries in the United Kingdom.
It would appear that the system works so well that most people haven't even heard of it
Music, art, science
Mankind's common heritage
Locked by DRM
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
Nevertheless, we're concerned about it. Aside from general matters of contract law (e.g. voiding unconscionable contracts), there are copyright provisions to this effect, such as the period late in term when rights automatically revert to authors.
Of authorship and publishing, copyright favors the former. Without copyright there'd be even more publishers active. We don't need it to help them. (not that it's intended to help authors either, particularly)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
While we're talking about e-books and copyright, I thought I would bring to light an error with the Microsoft ".lit" (ms reader) format. It seems, unfortunately, that converting text into this format renders it into encrypted data that is henceforth unavailable again to non-proprietary programs. I've written a small program to remedy this rather embarrasing oversight of Microsoft's. The following is in uuencoded format. If it doesn't paste correctly here on slashdot, please respond to this post with a web-based forum which will allow it to be posted, or an open news server that has access to alt.binaries.e-books. Failing those, it will be available on Freenet. I'm quite sure that Microsoft is terribly sorry for not including a feature to 'downconvert' in their application, and I know they'll be greatful to me for writing this handy utitility to do so.
4 `8VQI="YE> &555`D``\(O( Z*&'(B"]=Y!>I /D"Q`0(JV+OTW@)(46G*0Z^*B@("BH"`YL+SON_]U;GWOSMS9W X[SAG/ A_IV-=5 N%F5D`M8E"D
_=_
_=_ Part 001 of 001 of file clit.zip
_=_
begin 666 clit.zip
M4$L#!!0````(`$6UBRVKN(0@J'````!X```(`!
M^#W"+_@]57@$`.@#Z`/MO7=0TUW0/YI*$A)
M][/9LV=/SI[]SF3XVG@6`,````!RU!@,`*`1\!]D`
No, actually there is not a flat royalty for each type of book sale. Different types of publishing rights are negotiated separately. An author may make 15 percent on hardback bookstore sales, 5 percent on book clubs, and 0 percent on international sales. There is no reason why publishers and authors could not negotiate a separate royalty rate for 'pay per read.' That said, an author would have to be very stupid or very generous to settle for 0.000000001%. After all, the publisher's cost of distribution is much lower for this type of publishing. If anything, authors should negotiate higher royalties for pay-per read.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%.
Where did you read this? I spent many years working in the publishing industry, and the royalties ranged from 10 to 20 percent. A big name author like Tom Clancy could probably get an even higher rate. What kills authors is not the rate, it's the other expenses that get deducted from royalties before a penny is paid--the biggest one is permissions: the cost not only of paying for any excerpts of copyrighted material appearing in a book, but also of tracking down the rightsholders.
ScienceSeeker.org
Several countries operate a "Public Lending Right" system which pays authors based on estimated public library loans, although I'd guess this is usually small beer compared to what they'd like to get.
I went to TESS, looked up word mark PINOCCHIO, and found the following live trademark registrations (links are to TARR because TESS expires URLs):
Pinocchio's Pizza Inc. owns trademark on PINOCCHIOS PIZZA REAL PIZZA, REAL CHEESE, REAL FAST for pizza restaurants and PINOCCHIOS for pizza restaurants outside of Maryland.
Sandra Inc. owns trademark on PINOCCHIO'S for pizza restaurants in Maryland.
ACR Shoeland Inc. owns trademark on PINOCCHIO for children's shoes.
Hermstedt GmbH owns trademark on PINOCCHIO for modem cards.
Escalon Packers Inc. owns trademark on PINOCCHIO for canned tomato products and more canned tomato products.
DisneyCo owns trademark on WALT DISNEY'S PINOCCHIO for cosmetics. DisneyCo owns trademark on PINOCCHIO only for dolls. Thus, the only thing DisneyCo can use trademark law to stop competing film publishers from doing is "moichandizing", as Yogurt put it in Spaceballs.
Also look up some of the other books, I believe Disney has trademarks on their names as well--like Alice in Wonderland.
More likely on WALT DISNEY'S ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Of course, they have no grounds to prevent the sale of AMERICAN MCGEE'S ALICE brand video games based on the QUAKE III ARENA brand graphics engine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Fonts can be copyrighted too
In the European Union, font designs can be copyrighted. In the United States, only the programs (.ttf, etc) that generate those programs can be copyrighted, but the designs themselves can be patented.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will you be required to wear a helmet that tracks your eye movement that zaps you when your eyes try to wander back on a paragaph you should have been reading rather than thinking about the Juggies jumping on trampolines?
Was that a run-on-sentence did it lack appropriate puncuation or did it just try to fit too much into one sentence?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
"The life of an e-book is quite different. Because of a simple technical feature of the Internet, copyright law regulates much more of the life of an e-book in cyberspace than of the life of a book in real space. As every action (on a digital network) produces a copy, and every copy (under the current regime of copyright) is presumptively within the reach of copyright law, every use of a copyrighted work in cyberspace amounts to a copyright event. Thus, to give an e-book to a friend involves a copy; it is therefore regulated by copyright law. To borrow an e-book from an Internet library involves a copy; it is therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, to have the computer read an e-book aloud involves making a copy; it, too, is therefore regulated by copyright law. All these "uses" of an e-book are within the reach of copyright's regulation, while the very same uses of a book in real space would not be."
I suspect too much ganja was involved with this article. Whether the copy is digital or a book passed from friend to friend, the copy right is the same. If an author of an ebook or hard copy novel can convince millions of people to purchase the work, more power to them. If no one thinks the work is worth the money, tough luck bucko! It is the nature of copy right. If I author the definitive book of Belly Button Lint Colors...and zillions of folks purchase it for a dollar a shot, I get my percentage. Woohoo! If I spend 30 years of my life writing the book, and no one cares about the book, tough shit. Them are the breaks. Congress keeps changing the law regarding the actual duration of copy right. Congress is one of those enimies they speak about in the Oath they take when entering office...to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States agaisnt all enimies, foreigh and domestiv. They are the domestic variety.
No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out.
Apparently you mean "less than one year" or "no more than one year".
However that may be these are relevant facts:
The date of Disney's animated film Jungle Book was 1967.
There were no exirations of renewed copyrights in the U.S. from late 1962 until sometime in the early 1980s. In particular, no renewed U.S. copyrights expired in 1966.
No less than one year
Oops... I meant "About one year on the nose".
In particular, no renewed U.S. copyrights expired in 1966.
I referred to "a major market" existing in several European countries, not the United States.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'd think that already popular authors could make a killing doing this. And up and coming authors shouldn't find it too difficult to make at least some money out of the deal.
In this ad market? HAH!
Imagine a smart guy opening storydot.org where an author can post a chapter of his story at a time. Instead of sections about apple, linux, and M$, you could have a section for each book.
A blog style is wrong. What's needed, instead, is a rights-management system done properly--where you either buy the right to use the media (and get as many copies as you want but can't give them to anyone) or one copy of the media (that you can transfer and that automatically deletes itself.)
I really cannot see what, exactly, publishers do these days besides exploiting 99.9% of the authors out there just to pay Oprah to reccomend 0.1% on her show.
There's these three little things called Distribution, Marketing, and Printing. Not every book winds up on Oprah, but just about every book I've seen has ads on the extra paper in the last signature & new releases tend to have promotional web sites, flyers, cardboard displays, etc. etc.
There will be lots of wrangling over the definition of "sale in any form", "revenue", etc, but the IP distribution industry (read: books, movies, music) has some of the most terrifyingly effective lawyers ever left unkilled.
This is not my sandwich.
And I will bet you a nickel those contracts say nothing about rental fees on pay-per-view e-books.
I'm sure that they do--either as "all other sales are at x%" or "all other sales must be negotiated seperately."
(For the record, I can't stand the idea of pay-per-view books. The only equitable electronic systems are "as many nontransferable copies as you want" or "one transferable copy.")
All of the above was copyrighted. All were my orginal work of authorship. The point was that in the *US* an entirely different set of copyright protections apply to the first example than to the last two, even though all three simply spell "hi."
KFG
Except that I hate the idea of pay-per-view books. Bluntly, I think it will ultimately result in the creation of an illiterate subclass that will be illiterate and poor forever, because they can't afford to read, let alone read the information they need in order to "break out".
This is not my sandwich.
See This thread for my take on a better system.
Instead of a view-based model, I think that the future of copyright is a permanently-licensed right model, with expenses paid catagorically for by the author (for libraries and distribution) and the reader (for extra copies.)
Oh, and we HAVE an illiterate subclass that can't afford to learn to read--oh, wait, there are schools for that, even if you're an adult...
The marketplace falls apart when a key component is run by a cartel.
There are a limited number of publishers/distributors - sell your book to them and you must take what they give, or spend the money and time to self-publish and promote. The good news is that technology is making this easier to do, and the better news may be that those in the cartel are not "getting it".
But Lessig is spot on underscoring that copyright is limited by constitutional law (my interpretation: copyright is a priviledge extended in order to help foster innovation, it is not a right!), and that the framers understood that the common good eventually returns all ideas to the public for common use.
Extending copyright terms benefits only the publishers/distributors (who pay the legislators that extend them), while hurting all the rest of us by keeping the 98% of everything that is discontinued out of the public domain.
I'm tempted to say "Go Communism!".
Tangent: Disney hypocritically borrowing from the public domain but closing the door behind it with the Bono Act, to Disney's use of trademark law to close the door, to trademarks on "Pinocchio" owned by Disney, to the validity of trademark on "Pinocchio" brand dolls.
[Dolls are] one of the more lucrative markets for merchandise based upon the book.
That worried me too when I read it. I see a possible attack against this trademark: make the USPTO realize that there is more to Pinocchio than Disney's film, just as there is more to windows than Microsoft's operating system. In practice, Disney may have allowed the mark to become generic by not pursuing Woodard's Wood Products, William Van Dorin, Beatrice Perini, Luigi Tacchi, or Madame Alexander, who all sell their "Pinocchio" dolls in the United States.
Eat it Eisner.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most ClearChannel Stations in my area are crap, but there is one I listen to regularly and have never heard Britney on it ever. Yes it is a rock station. I have heard Sheryl Crow, the Beatles, Genesis, and Guns n Roses. But not Britney.
The only ClearChannel Radio Station I like.
no big sig
I was not arguing the case for ebooks. I made no comment about whether or not I read them.
I'm only pointing out that "convenience" takes price into account. It's hardly convenient if it's not affordable.
The POINT is that, in order for it to take off, it has to be perceived as more conveneint to them than books. Whether that means "cheaper" or "more portable" or WHATEVER, doesn't matter. When people percieve it as a better option, they will use it. If they don't, they won't.
Not sure what you are arguing about.
The marketplace falls apart when a key component is run by a cartel.
The publishing world is hardly a cartel. There is no part of the market that cannot be replaced by a completely independing company.
It might be DOMINATED by a cartel, but it's entirely possible to work in the publishing industry without ever going near that cartel.
I'm tempted to say "Go Communism!".
That, oddly enough, would make the whole darn thing much easier. Rather than creating an artifical good in copyright, we can simply award artists a more priviledged life / excuse them from other work once they get a certain number of readers.
It's really a shame that Communism tried to win via military rather than economy. The mix-up of the cold war is going to forver taint what might very well have been a viable economic system.
(And tying the Red's militant atheism into the mix is just a whole different ball of wax... if Communism was better in any way, it seems clear that God wanted it to fail.)
(I realise I'm drifting a tad OT here, but it's the same general area, so I crave your indulgence).
Just wait a while. How different is that to patenting the human genome? How different is that to pharmaceutical companies going into the jungle, finding out about the plants the indigenous people use, and then patenting the active ingredients in the plants and then charging the poor bloody Indians for doing as their ancestors have done since year dot?
I see the problem as this; somewhere along the line, someone panicked because the Japanese were producing more patents than the US. Clever people produce patents, so lots of patents is a Good Thing. But the Management-by-Objectives gurus have got hold of this, and made the same slip that leads to SLOC/day being such a good measure of programmer productivity.
Seems logical, huh? Unfortunately, there are two laws these diploma festooned goons don't tell. They don't tell beacause, firstly, it might require some deep thinking, and secondly because it would mess up their neat little meal ticket, namely charging 40k dollars for a methodology which consists of a spreadsheet with a pretty graph that always - Wooh hooh! - goes up.
You see patents are really only a proxy for inventiveness. Judges & lawmakers do their patriotic duty by allowing more of them, but the patents are increasingly spurious, predatory or plain against the public interest; as quantity rises, quality plummets. Patents used to reflect the ingenuity of scientists & engineers; now they reflect that of lawyers.
In the UK (and I think the rest of EU), patent law is more sensible; you cannot patent a discovery (as distict from an invention) and you can't - shock - patent something that previously existed.
I advise you all to sink a few pints, get laid, and type the letter "E" a lot. Do it now, before someone decides to patent beer, genitalia, and the alphabet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Of authorship and publishing, copyright favors the former. Without copyright there'd be even more publishers active. We don't need it to help them. (not that it's intended to help authors either, particularly)"
Without copyright, publishers couldn't risk moeny on printing books, because if a book was successful, other publishers would jump in and sell cheaply, since then the risk is low. This causes the publisher who introduced the book to lose money. The end result, less books are published. I don't think this is good for publishers.
Vote for Pedro
So what you're saying is, that publishers want copyrights, since otherwise other publishers will succeed.
That doesn't really make a hell of a lot of sense. There's no particular difference between the first publisher and the later ones.
Besides which, you underestimate the importance of a first mover advantage. It'll take those other publishers time to catch up.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The 1st publisher has to pay all the advertising and promotion costs, plus take all the risk in printing copies, plus any up front money guaranteed to the author. If another publisher can print the same book (looks identical), and not pay these costs, he cAn sell the book cheaper. Same thing in the music industry. Otherwise cds would cost about $2 each.
Vote for Pedro
Yeah, but the 1st guy can adopt one of two strategies:
1) Burn a lot of money in this, try to obtain first mover advantages, and make a lot of money before others move in.
2) Expend relatively little money, making this a less attractive prospect for free riders, thus tending to keep modest profits to oneself. Additionally, pirates who do move in here are also prone to spend some money on promotion of their copies of the work to try to boost sales, and the 1st guy can benefit from this just as much.
Personally I think that there are good reasons to have copyrights, but it's not for the sake of publishers or authors.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Who's going to pay the author? You can't make money if you need to pay the author, and the freeloaders are not copying the author. Getting in early gives you maybe a week with today's technology
Vote for Pedro
You'd be surprised how far you can get in a week.
At any rate, we're back on the point I made quite a bit earlier: that of authors and publishers, copyright favors the former insofar as it favors either.
Why, after all, should the first publisher pay the author either? Ultimately they'll either gain the work through one means or another (Shakespeare's sonnets were literally stolen in order to be printed, IIRC; Kafka's writings were ordered to be burned upon his death, but were published anyway; Dickenson's poems were largely only discovered after she died), or from the author as self-publisher, since an author who never reveals his work is dead in the water.
Publishers will always do fine, particularly when you recall that anyone can be a publisher if they merely distribute copies they have made of a work. Big or small, we don't need to worry about them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It is not that polar co-ordinates are complicated, it is simply
that cartesian co-ordinates are simpler than they have a right to be.
-- Kleppner & Kolenhow, "An Introduction to Mechanics"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...