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Disney Wins, Eldred (and everyone else) Loses
hondo77 writes "In a 7-2 decision, The Supreme Court gave Disney what they wanted. Story just broke, no details yet." They're talking about the Eldred case, recently argued before the Supreme Court and mentioned on Slashdot many times. The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920's will ever go out of copyright. Opinions: Majority opinion, Stevens' dissent, Breyer's dissent.
Was anyone actually expecting this to turn out differently?
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920's will ever go out of copyright.
...'stealing' from those bastards is not a crime.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Well, OK, so Mickey Mouse (tm) wins and the american consumers lose. Big time.
But if enough people break the copyright, will the other courts of the land (not to mention the law enforcement agencies) really apply the law? That seems doubtful. Any thoughts on that?
Score another win for Corporate America.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Goverment of the Corp, by the Corp, for the Corp?
...just go ahead and rename the country the "United Corporations of America" and get it over with.
Well, not "ever" as it currently stands, but because they've extended the copyright several times in the past century to the point that it's pretty much beyond our lifetimes, and the Court has now said that such machinations are legal, we can expect never to see copyrights expire again.
Assumptively, the Supreme Court said "It's not unconstitutional for such a law to pass, and if you don't like it, go pass a different law." Which is entirely correct, we could always have legislation in the future to reverse this.... but don't hold your copy of Steamboat Willy at the duplicator anytime soon.
Entertainment is probably the only thing making money for exports for the US anymore. The US is rapidly becoming a country that produces little more than marketing and car chase movies. Letting those copyrights go free would destabilise corporate America. And we can't have that, now can we?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The upshot of this is that no work produced in the United States since the 1920s will ever pass out of Copyright ... in the United States. Many of these movies, books and songs are already in the public domain in other nations, even those who are party to the Berne Convention (which mandates a minimum term of 50 years for most works).
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
The average voter couldn't give a shit about copyrighted works created 120 years ago or whatever, and even if they did understand the issues involved they couldn't be pissed to write their representative or whatever.
I can see why Leasing is so pessimistic...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, ever.
The point about this judgement is that it creates a firm precedent for extending copyright. Therefore, copyright can be extended again next time it starts to run out. It will always be in the interests of Disney et al to keep their copyrights; therefore, it may well be that no copyright will ever expire again, any more.
This is *one* of the reasons that this judgement is such a setback for the Forces o'Good (tm).
Please do not assume that just because civil rights people are getting riled up, they must automatically be getting riled up about nothing.
The judiciary is certainly the least venial of the three branches of the US government. It is sad to see it going the way of the executive and legislative brances, but there ya go.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Disney has now succeeded in preventing anyone from doing to Mickey Mouse what Disney did to Quasimodo. Way to go dickheads.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Although, to be honest, even if we did create anything, we'd be RIAA/MPAA/etc whores, and the copyright wouldn't belong to us anyway.
In other words, the Court basically just said "Hey, you're free to grant eternal copyright as long as you do it 20 years at a time." This has been their position in the past, but they reiterated it here. And as long as copyrights generate money, the people receiving that money will lobby for and receive extensions. Hence, these works will never enter the public domain.
Excuse me, but when the money was invested in these movies in the 1920's, 1930's, etc., it was done with full knowledge that eventually the copyright would expire and revenue from these works would dwindle. The same thing holds true for Mickey Mouse and every other work made. Just because it still has value even today does not change that fact. The whole thing is ridiculous.
I can understand how extending the copyright on new works could be considered constitutional -- this is a case where that great document was far too vague, unfortunately -- but retroactively extending them surely is unconstitutional. When you acquire that copyright and publish your work, it is like entering into an irrevocable contract with society that you will release this to the public domain in X years (at least, that is how I see it). There should be no whining about past works that will fall out of protection. Create more works under the new, longer protection if you want, but don't extend all existing works.
Or is the rest of the world looking better and better each day in comparison to the USA? You know, 2 years ago I would have never even imagined living anywhere else. But after all the issues that have popped up since 9/11, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the destruction of fair use, the bullying of giant corporations, it's getting harder and harder to love the USA.
Last weekend my fiancee and I were randomly surfing the web after an evening of playing 'Hunter' on our GC (the couple that kills zombies together stays together, we say!), and we ran across the John's Switch to Canada parody of the Apple Switch ads. 2 years ago, it would have been good for a laugh and nothing more. But last weekend, after having ourselves a good laugh, we both found ourselves going "Hmmm... Canada...". I think this is the first time I've ever seriously considered living somewhere, anywhere else than the USA.. and it was even more surprising to me to see my girlfriend, who is not nearly as politcally active/concerned as I've become lately, giving the whole idea of leaving the country some serious consideration as well.
My slightly OT point here is, the more rights that are taken away from us, the less freedom we are given, the more control that is handed over to corporation after corporation.. the harder it gets to love this country. This is just another nail in the coffin. The USA has long stopped being the 'Land of the Free'.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
Yes, but the full clause in Article I, Section 8, states that the legislature's power is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Authors and inventors, which I interpret to mean the actual author or inventor, not the great-grandchildren of the author or inventor, or future sharholders in a corporation that descended from the author or inventor or purchased the rights from the author or inventor.
Am I misinterpreting the scope here??
Read the history of the story.
The problem was the handling of the extension. The extension is retroactive. That is the part that they ruled constitutional.
The upside to the media companies is that in another 20 years, they can lobby for another 20 year extension and it too will be constitutional. And then repeat that forever.
It means that the media companies don't have to give anything back to the public, if they lobby well enough. The Constitution says that congress can define how long the terms of copyrights are for. This basically means that they can make it a ludicrous amount of time.
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." - Einstein
Basically Disney, et al are shooting themselves in the foot. Long term copyrights == higher prices. Normal people realize that the copyrights length is riduculos, and will copy stuff according to there own moral codes. For example, I am willing to copy stuff that is 40 or more years old without a second though, anything under 20 is a no-no, and in between is dependant on the ease of availability, coupled with my personal interest.
Right now, individuals are not a big deal, but when the RIAA, MPAA, etc make it so that the individuals are effected, by enforcing the laws that give jail time and/or fines to the infringers, then they will change. Why? Because everyone engages in copyright infringement, and some enterprising politition will run on that platform. At that point, Congress will listen.
Well, one can hope.
Congress passed the copyright law after heavy lobbying from companies with lucrative copyrights.
That sums up American politics pretty well.
Spider robinson has a short story based around this. When you can perpetually copyright an idea, not just a particular sequencing of words or notes, you run into trouble. FOr instance, patenting the song happy birthday, versus patenting the IDEA of singing a song for someones birthday, which is sort of what we are doing now. When that copyright is preserved in perpetuity, then no one can ever use that idea again. THe same is true of individual songs and artwork. Eventually, you will run out of non copyrighted sequences of notes and words, and then people are unable to produce art anymore, and the culture dies, stagnating. I think this is what we are facing. We are strangling our own culture and art in laws that stifle creation, and therefore, we are going to fall behind other cultures that dont have such a thing. That is what the U.S. is founded on, seeing something, coming up with a better way of doing it, improving it, and doing it again. This process of stifiling forever copyrigting is killing off innovation, and its only going to get worse. If we keep doing this, we will be destroyed from within. If the US controlls all other countries copyrights, then the entire world is going to stagnante and die.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And, just to point out, they have already done this 20 year extension over, and over, and over...
Okay, question for all the legal types out there...
Does this decision fall on the side of the "literal" or "intent of the framers" interpretation of the constitution? My reading is that its "intent" - the Supreme Court has effectively said that the "intent" of the framers is irrelevant, and that the US Government is bound only by the letter of the law. Though this has frightening implications for any "temporary" measures the Constitution might permit - as long as they're "limited" at a particular time, they're ok... Even if they're retroactively and continually extended ad infinitum.
Right. And do you actually believe that within the next 20 years, they won't pass yet another extension? If you think that, you're ignoring volumes of history (link courtesy of Jason Scott).
The point is that as long as these corporations have copyrights that are valuable to them, additional extensions will be purchased from Congress (barring a drastic shift in the temperment of Congress). So the story is correct, we will never get these copyrights into the public domain.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
I'm tired of hearing whiners (whah whah, someone created something and they won't let me use it, whah) who are decidely one sided without a hint of actually talking about the issue but instead just want to mount their podiums.
I would like the hear the opinions of those out there who create copyrighted content, and prefereably those who generate some revenue from this content. I say generate revenue because it's not to difficult to see how someone who creates works but them puts them pd might have a negative opinion. Instead, does anyone who actually makes a living (or some part of one) from creating copyrighted content think that this is a GOOD thing?
Say I live in a town / country where we have a traditional story. Kids do it as a theatre show in school, local radio companies put it on the radio, usual small town stuff. DisneyCorps comes along and realises it's a great story, makes a film out of it. Next year all the local schools are threatened with multimillion law suits if the local 7 year olds try to tell their little traditional story for their mums and dads at the end of year show....
...All Your Culture Belongs To Us...
I guess if multinational food companies can tell local farmers that their multicorp now owns the rights to the crops the locals have been farming for thousands of years, the same could happen about cultural heritage?
What happened? The end of your illusions about democracy in the US of A, nothing more.
What's disturbing to me is the way a decision made by a US court about a bill passed by a US congress affects me directly even though I don't live anywhere near the US. That's not fair.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I personally am not really concerned about whether Steamboat Willy enters the public domain. What I am concerned about is the large volume of materials that are under copyright that have disappeared from circulation because they are out of print and copyright holders have decided not to do a reprint. If these materials were in the public domain, then efforts like Project Gutenberg could make these materials available to people who might be interested in them.
Every year more money is spent on elections - and we all know where that money is coming from. I heard a lobbyist on public radio a few days ago say outright that their goal is to either make a representative feel beholden to them or else afraid of them. They didn't even bother to spin it at all or try to make it sound remotely democratic, that is how confident these people are, and why not?
And the supreme irony is that the majority of people seem oblivious to the reality that the partisan divide is one hundred percent in favor of this situation. The electorate in the USA has been divided and conquered. Libertarians are out there fighting for the Republican side, while the Republicans are busy fighting abortion on every available front to satisfy their Christian Right pro-life contingent. Drug law reform advocates back the Democrats, who have been responsible for some of the most draconian, insane, prison-filling mandatory minimum drug laws on the books -all so they could prop up a "tough on crime" image. Above all, everybody studiously ignores the fact that nearly every member of Congress is busy producing two products: payback legislation for their special interest funders and bullshit rhetoric to keep their apparently braindead supporters on the hook. And year after year after year after year the issue of campaign finance legislation gets floated - and then all but the most minimal provisions get shot down, and what's left gets busily sued to smithereens.
And still you can log onto slashdot every day of the week and watch the spectacle of Republicans bickering with Democrats, liberals having it out with conservatives. Well here's the news of the day, sheep: the people who can afford real influence are laughing all the way to the bank. Democracy is an experiment that's failing because an informed, committed, active voting public is not something you can build into a constitution - and without that people get exactly the government they deserve.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
It's interesting to note the implication of how much power the Supreme Court has... the gorts always look at the President as the most powerful entity around and fail to realize that each branch is powerful in its own unique way.
Let's just be thankful we do have some form of checks and balances.
--------
Free your mind.
I'm niether a lawyer or American, but...
I believe that companies in the U.S. (and to varying degrees elsewhere) have most of the rights of human beings. I think there are even people who consider that a 'feature', not a bug in the legal system.
Anyway, for the purposes of copyright, the author can be a company.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
And I got the shit flamed out of me when I was so "stupid" to even suggest that the supreme court might be bribed/coerced into taking the side of Media Cartels.
(Caps intentially scewed.)
Lets face it, this really is a country "Of the people, for the people, and by the people."*
* People refers to the top 1% which own %50 of the wealth, corporate trusts, and lawyers.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Let me see... Now after I write my multi-million selling super blockbuster best-sellers, I can make sure that all my heirs and assigns (and maybe even my own personal immortal corporation) can keep profiting from my works forever...and ever...and ever... My Boswell will never have to work a day in his (or her) life! We're all set!
...especially not the general public.
But wait... Suppose I don't write mega-super-uber blockbuster bestsellers, and my work (like 99% of all authors' work) remains steadily mid-list after I die. Judging by current trends, ever-lengthening copyrights mean only one thing: I languish in obscurity forever...and ever...and ever...and nobody gets rich...
(We are so many, but they are so rich.)
Hmm...immortality for the priveledged few; death and obscurity for the rest. Maybe not such good news after all.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Also at risk of expiration was protection for the version of Mickey Mouse portrayed in Disney's earliest films, such as 1928's "Steamboat Willie."
Congress passed the copyright law after heavy lobbying from companies with lucrative copyrights.
Hey, they just could not make that much money out of these so it would not cost them a lot.
BTW, as they retain the original tapes, they'd be the only ones who could be re-publishing these on DVD, no ?
And if not, I see 3 possibilities for them if this copyright were cancelled
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The companies paying him more than a million dollars have an interest in copyright. It is there main line of work. That is where conflict of interest comes in.
I believe the worlds oldest company would be Stora (From Falun, Sweden), which was founded about 1000 years ago, I also believe you'll find very few people that have reached 1000 years.
Point is, Companies/Corporations don't have a limited lifespan, they can live for nearly forever and keep trying to change legislation for a very very long time, that's one reason I think that businesses should not be considered to be individuals/humans/persons.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Look at the DMCA fiasco. It has already caused consumers much grief, and it ain't going to go away.
In fact it's probably going to get a lot worse, when similar laws will be put forward in various EU countries :(
I have turned off my cable to protest crappy programming and higher rates. Do you have the BALLS to do the same to protest the corporate takeover of this country?!
I steal music and continue to do so to recover the money that the RIAA membership STOLE from me. Do you do any form of disobediance in your life?
Until you stop going to the 5th regurgitation of "Dude Where's my Car?", and the umpteenth Rocky movie, the crap will continue. Consumers have the power, but are such ignorant sheep, that the popular opinion is controlled by the media propoganda of the day. Do 56% of this country really think Shrubya is doing a good job? I don't believe it for a minute.
Are you tired of having the news portray "Joe Millionaire" as more important than the story of a abused child, or failed dipolmacy by our government?
"Television, the drug of a Nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation." -Disposible Heroes of Hiphoprisy.
Treasure Fucking Planet.
How hypocritical can you get?
Bryer:
Stevens: Full text can be found on Lawrence Lessig his Blog.The only thing that may be able stop the slide is advancing technology that eventually acts as some sort of deus ex machina.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I am really disappointed with this decision, but not because Disney gets to keep Mickey locked up.
In the past, copyroghts had to be renewed in order to get the full term. The American people would have really benefitted from the requirement to renew copyrights.
The main advantage this would give us is that people or corporations that really want to protect their IP can protect it, but the stuff that is no longer widely marketable would end up being freed.
In my opinion, this would have given us the best of both worlds: companies or people who can make money off their property are allowed to, while the rest of us would be allowed to mine the rich layers of no longer commercially viable material.
As one poster pointed out already, what happens to the Katzenjammer Kids?
I have always been fascinated by early films and cartoons, for example, and I hate to think that we might lose many of these films because our government will not allow the the type of low-budget or even volunteer effort that would be needed to make this happen!
I think that the preservationists of "Old Time Radio" are a great example of how this would work. Radio plays were not protected by copyright until the 1960s. Because of this, there is a ton of public domain material available from the "Golden Age of Radio" that provides a lot of insight into US culture at that time. Broadcasts from the years of WWII are particularly interesting because the entertainment itself was often part of the war effort. If these works were still protected under copyright, it is likely that no one would be able to profit from them reasonably, and therefore the public probably wouldn't have access.
I'm not worried about Mickey, because Disney will take care of him, at least as long as they can keep squeezing dimes out of him. But there is a lot of stuff out there that should be protected (from decay, that is), and the copyright holders may not care enough (or be financially able) to save them! I think that's the real problem, and we might have been able to fix it if the Supreme Court had ruled differently.
Very well said. Very well said.
I think you can add The White House, and pretty much every other aspect of governement to this list.
I've been arguing for years that the government has failed to represent the public interest, or the interests of the people who are supposed give it power.
We must realize that this government doesn't work for us, but actively against us, and throw them all out.
This is what I am thinking. I guess the law only applies to 800 pound gorillas that have multiple senators, representatives and judges at their disposal.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
What, are Corporations not allowed any rights, because public opinion says they're evil?
Executive #1: Sir, Congress and the President just passed a law stripping every right corporations had. We no longer own any properties, patents, and copyrights that we used to own.
Executive #2: Well, so how do we make a profit now?
Executive #1: We can't sir, we charged money for our products. Now they're free.
Executive #2: Well, lets close down the corporation then. Inform the employees that they no longer have a job.
10,000 employees: What? We're getting laid off? Stupid system....
In this Disney case, the judicial branch said a particular law applies in Disney's favor. Its not because the Supreme Court is biased towards corporations. To claim that one Supreme Court decision means the entire US government panders to big business is ignorant and ridiculous.
" How would you feel if, after some established time period (let's say 50 years), ownership of your property passed into the public domain? Programs you wrote, houses and land you own, cars you drive."
Physical property and intellectual property are hardly the same thing. However, if, in 2043, you want my 1993 Ford Escort, I guess I won't object too strenuously, given that I will be in the market for something more recent.
" If you want to create something, create something original. Don't depend on the work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet. It's still legal to get inspiration from other works. And until they take that right away from us, use it. There are still original ideas being created every day."
You mean, for example, that Disney shouldn't have depended on works like "Beauty and the Beast" and "Snow White" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"; work somebody else did decades ago.
As naive as Jsutice Ginsburg's opinion is, it's not surprising. This is one of those cases where the Court decided to put on its legal blinders and focus on the language of the law rather than open its eyes and look at the reality of the situation.
The court's analysis goes something like this:
The Constitution provides for limited copyright and patent terms.
A term that prescribes a specific number of years (like life + 70) is a limited term.
Congress has repeatedly extended both copyright and patent terms in the past.
An extended term that is still discreetly defined is still a limited term.
Congress can extend terms all it wants, so long as there remains, at least on paper, a definite cutoff point.
The flaw isn't with the Court's logic, but with the Constitution itself. The framers never contemplated that the patent and copyright system would ever get used the way it has been. Legally, the court's decision is perfectly accurate.
As a matter of policy, it means that copyright terms last as long as large corporations can pay for them to be extended.
The Court decided that the 1790 Copyright Act extended existing copyrights. Lessig always said that this was the biggest hurdle. The Supreme Court gives special prominance to the acts of the first Congress because the people who served in it were the same ones who wrote the Constitution so, therefore, they knew what it meant better than anyone else.
Lessig tried to make the case that the 1790 Act replaced an existing State Copyright scheme with a Federal one, but that argument was not accepted by the majority.
<sigh>
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
What's not realized by most people is that not only will works end up remaining under copyright for a very long time (perhaps forever), but that many newer works will end up being LOST forever - published only on DRM protected media, not reprinted as popularity wains, and unreadable as the technology becomes obsolete.
Congress has made a mess. Congress needs to clean it up.
Not if you mean ignoring copyright law, it isn't. It's not your job to clean-up the mess Congress has made: it's your job to hold their feet to the fire until they've cleaned it up themselves. Otherwise they'll never understand the mess they've made, and never learn how to avoid making a similar mess in the future.
(Sometimes evem I'm surprised how much being a parent has taught me...)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
>>>I don't have a huge problem with Disney wanting to control a copyright on Mickey, because they're still actively using him in their business.
This is exactly the wrong thinking that got us to the place we are now. The popular opinion that the orginator of a creative work owns it, and has exclusive rights to get compensated for its worth until they no longer can think of any way to suck any more money from it is what allows the Supreme Court to make a ruling that is so obviosly counter the wording of the constitution.
The expectation that an orginator of creative work will recieve compensation from having the exclusive rights to their works for a limited time certainly motivates the creator of the work. I don't see how still owning those rights long after their death provides much additional motivation.
Contitutionaly, copyright law exsists for the sole purpose of benefiting the public, the fact that the creator of the work also benefits is just a happy coincidence.
Ever hear of Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty?
The quotation you used was taken out of context. Stories like the aforementioned two were written long before Walt Disney was a struggling Hollywood cartoonist. His point was that Disney "interpreted" stories written long ago and made millions, but if someone 80 years from now were to write a movie derived from a Disney original, then they would be sued. There is irony inherent in that idea, as you can see.
You are right about Mickey Mouse being an original idea, but HE WASN'T TALKING ABOUT MICKEY MOUSE.
Case study:
Did you see Treasure Planet? Yeah, me neither, I heard it was horrible. But either way, Treasure Island was a book written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883. 114 years from now, if my great-great grandchild wanted to write The Lion King in space (the only discernable difference between Treasure Island and Treasure Planet), Disney would NEVER give them the right to make it, and would sue the pants off them if they tried.
--- What
The Yahoo story seemed to grant the assumption that old, popular works like "Casablanca" and "The Wizard of Oz" need continued copyright protection. Now, I would normally argue even this point, but let's accept it. After all, these works are still valuable to their current owners.
The question is, how valuable?
For every work of art from the 20's and 30's that is still a major money maker, there are probably a thousand works which have already exhausted their value to the copyright holder. There's not sufficient interest to make it worthwhile to market it. But these works could still be valuable sources for new ideas and inspirations, historical research, and what not.
Is it worth locking up these thousands of works, making republication illegal even as the originals are ravaged by time, just to protect the few works which still provide a revenue stream?
Hell no. But if we have to strike a compromise in order to enrich the public domain and save the vast majority of our cultural heritage, then I propose this:
Repeal the CTEA. In its place, set up a system where the original copyright term applies to every work, but that term can be extended for any given work.
Since I believe in the importance of the public domain, extending the copyright on a work shouldn't be a trivial proposition. Copyright holders should be charged a fee that mirrors its value to the public; say, 1-2% of all profits attributable to the work in question over its lifetime. My reasoning is, if a copyright holder doesn't expect to make even that much from the work over the next twenty years, then revoking the copyright doesn't significantly hurt the copyright holder.
If an all-or-nothing approach ends up getting us nothing, then we have to find some sort of middle ground. This strikes me as a reasonable way to protect the interests of the public. Copyright holders can still hold onto those works they deem valuable, while denying them the ability to sit on works they have no interest in actively maintaining.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It seems to me that the biggest problem behind copyright extension is that it is handled in a one-size fits all system that means that if one piece of work falls into the public domain after a certain amount of time, all pieces of work fall into the public domain after a certain amount of time. It is a non-negotiable proposition, unless you happen to be Disney and can pay off the appropriate people to increase its duration.
;-)
Obviously, this is detrimental to the amount of material entering the public domain, especially when you consider quite how much material that encompasses.
Yet, the grasp of copyright is only being increased to protect certain, individual pieces of material from ever entering the public domain.
Which is really short-sighted, as I'm sure most people would agree.
If you applied a system such that all pieces of work fall into the public domain after say, 50 years, but the copyright owner is granted the ability to extend the copyright license based on a scheme of graduated taxation (or some other significant fee, for example) for a period of time on an individual property then, in my opinion, a better system emerges.
In the case of "The Mouse", Disney Corporation would pay a fee that guarantees protection beyond the standard copyright terms, but other, less high-profile (and uneconomic) works get released into the wild. As time goes on, it may become uneconomical to continue to extend the license, and so that property would enter the public domain.
I realise that in an ideal world, copyrights would expire and that would be that. But this isn't the world we live in. Any taxation raised in doing this could be fed back into restoring/preserving original work that has expired. As well as buying bombs and votes and suchlike, but I digress.
It's a compromise and a kludge, but it might just work?
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
The side effect of this ruling is that it will reduce the diversity of works over the long term. Most books and music that are published never get a lot of circulation and aren't valuable enough to be worth publishing over the long term. These works slowly degrade over time and become unavailable in the future. Will you be able to play the CD you buy today in 90+ years? No. So unless somebody makes an extroridnary effort to archive this material in the hope that EVENTUALLY it will become legal to copy it, much of it will cease to exist.
The result of this is that in the future, we will find that the historical media we have available to us will be only those things that have ongoing popularity enough to warrant their continual republication. Think about this, in 90 years, you'll still be able to buy the Beatles greatest hits, but you won't be able to buy MC Hammer's greatest hits. You might think, "well who'd want to buy that anyhow", but it's a part of our culture that will forever be lost. Nobody will be able to go back and say, "what the hell were they thinking?" because for all intents and purposes it will have never existed.
Now, granted, forgetting that MC Hammer ever existed might not be the greatest tragedy to face our culture. But think about how many books are being written about 9/11 and the coming Gulf War II (the Wrath of Bush). How many of those will be preserved for history? Historians will go back and only get a limited perspective on events and judge them differently because of that limitation. This is the process that allows the victor to write the history.
Maybe what we need to do with copyright is alter how it works slightly. Instead of it being a fixed term for all works, what about varying the term based on how recently it was actively published. So, if you publish a book and don't run new printings for 20 years, the book goes into the public domain. This way, over time the most popular and high grossing copyrighted material would be preserved for it's money making ability. The lower popularity material would be preserved through the free ability to copy amongst those with an interest in it.
The risk here isn't that we'll never get to make free copies of Mickey, but rather that a vast collection of works will simply cease to exist from publishing neglect. This extension of copyright insures that a greater volume of work will disintegrate from neglect before it can be perserved in the free copying environment of the public domain.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
A Supreme Court (that I wouldn't trust to fill out tax forms) rules for Disney.
So, we try again.
And again.
And again.
Until we win.
People for keeping copyright sane can change tactics, get more funding, find new arguments, wait for justices to change, etc. They can adapt.
Disney can't change the fact that it's basically trying to extent copyright indefinitely. They can't adapt.
So, time to gear up for the next fight.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I think It's just about time for civil disobediance. Treat all works published more than fourteen years ago as if they were in the public domain. Do so openly and publically.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yeah, I'm thankful we have 3 branches in complete agreement about how to screw us. These checks and balances things work out great. Disney convinces Congress to make a law extending copyrights, the president signs it and the Supreme Court does it's part. Making sure that Congress can continue extending copyright everytime Disney is about to lose Steamboat Willy. Wow, this system really works. Everyone pulling together.
Let's see: The Little Mermaid was initially released in 1989. H.C. Andersen died in 1875, plus 95 years this makes 1980. If the extend the copyright for another 20 years, then the heirs of Andersen should be able to sue Disney for copyright infringtion, or will the infringtion be time-barred?
I have lived outside the US for almost 12 years now. It amazes me every time I go back, that people will moan about something like this, but not really do anything about it.
1. Did you write your senators and congresspersons? How many of your friends, classmates, coworkers and relatives did?
2. Did anyone you know, or yourself, go out and get petitions signed and sent to appropriate lobby groups, senators, congresspersons?
3. Did you contribute to any anti-copyrite extention lobby groups?
4. Did you, or anyone you know, do any of the above actions with regards to the elimination of SOFT MONEY, which is really the core of the problem with US politics?
Until Soft Money policy is banned in the US, and all CORPORATE ENTITY DONATIONS to politics in general is banned, and people actually get off of their Sunday football couch and cozy lives to do something about something they believe in, nothing will change. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever will, the US will fail as a political system and create a world war destroying our race before the average American actually makes an effort to be heard, make a change, and limit corporate influence in politics.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
I wrote this just a few days ago. Looks like I spoke too soon, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. It's linked from my blog page, also (http://www.krose.org/~krose/blogs/).
Most of the public doesn't understand exactly what their rights are regarding pre-recorded media, such as DVD movies and music CD's. I suspect a large part of this stems from the fact that most people don't understand why they are given legal protection.
That legal protection stems entirely from a choice made by the Founders to protect creative works from unauthorized use. The constitution says that
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
which led to the development of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Thus, you, as one of The People, are the source of this protection; and the reason you should support that protection is that it promotes the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging innovation.
As a result, there needs to be some balance in the enforcement of copyright. As copyright was intended primarily to increase the size of the public domain---the potential to make profit is merely an incentive to this end---it must be the case that copyright be enforced in a way that does not injure the public for the benefit of a few.
This balance has, over the past century, been tipped in favor of the content producers and owners and against The People little by little. Among the most recent and egregious examples are the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which retroactively increased the term of copyrights to the lifetime of the author plus seventy years, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to bypass technological protections to view content in a way not authorized by the content owner, to provide access to the disabled, or even to access public domain content!
As a result of the slowly changing laws regarding copyright, people have begun to believe that protected works are property in the traditional sense; hence, the appearance of the phrase "intellectual property" to describe copyrighted works. This, I believe, is the most poignant reason why there has been little public outcry against the erosion of the Founders' intended protection of the public interest.
Creative works are not property. A CD (the disc itself), a car, a piece of land, a pair of socks, your toenail clippings---these are property. A band's recording of Smoke on the Water, the musical description of Smoke on the Water---these are creative works and therefore not property. The difference is a very clear and natural one: property consists of tangible things, i.e., those made of matter, which are naturally defensible since the owner would need to be deprived of their use for another to take them, while creative works are those things that have a zero marginal cost of reproduction, i.e., ideas, which are not naturally defensible since someone can take them without in any way reducing the creator's ability to continue using them.
The Founders did not intend for creative works to be "owned" in perpetuity by an individual's family or a corporation; rather, they intended for these works to pass into the public domain after a short period of time (originally 20 years), whereupon they would benefit all of The People. It is arguable (and, in fact, such a case contending so is before the federal courts) that a copyright term of lifetime plus seventy years goes far beyond Congress's constitutional ability to provide protection for creative works for "limited times" in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by their granting a copyright term that denies the public the benefit of these works for a virtually unlimited period for the sole purpose of enriching well-connected corporate interests, while simultaneously effecting no incentive for the heirs of successful individual creators to do any creating themselves.
The aforementioned corporate interests, as embodied in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), have in turn promoted a mindset that any use not explicitly authorized by the content owners is not only immoral but illegal: this includes ripping CD's you own and encoding them as MP3's to your own hard drive and copying them to your iPod or Rio to listen to while on the subway; viewing DVD's under Linux using an "unauthorized" player; and burning a mix CD for one of your friends. Despite what the RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk might tell you, such activities are clearly "fair use" as defined by the courts, and are protected rights; however, under the DMCA, these acts are likely to be de-facto illegal due to the need for users to bypass technological protections to get at the actual content (although the courts have not yet ruled on these points).
I am not arguing that giving a CD to 250,000 of your "closest friends" on Kazaa is fair use; however, I would argue that the mere act of downloading a couple of songs from the internet (no matter the source) in order to sample them before buying the CD is fair use and therefore protected.
The Congress appears to be split on this issue. While they passed the DMCA in 1998, recent attempts to pass even more restrictive business-model protection acts such as Senator Fritz Hollings' (D-Disney) CBDTPA have been stalled, due in large measure to the opposition of Rick Boucher (D-VA) and the work of groups such as DigitalConsumer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of whom are worthy of your support.
It is time that the balance was tipped back toward The People. Given the nearly unlimited power of our national government and the increasing unlikelihood that the courts and the Congress will begin to again follow the original intent of our constitution, this will take education and effort. You can begin by signalling your support to the groups above and by calling your representatives and telling them that you support fair use instead and oppose government protection of outdated business models. Yet there is no substitute for spreading the word: only when our representatives encounter widespread opposition from the public will the blood money of the content owners pale in comparison to the wrath of the voters.
Andy Grove of Intel best summed up the desires of the media giants when he asked:
Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge? Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?
[ home ]
We need libraries now more than ever, especially given that rulings like this won't cease to be more heavily weighted towards the media interests than the public. A public repository of digital and traditional media is a resource we can't let slip away, and in many places libraries just can't get the funding to keep up with new technology and maintain the collections that they currently have.
What this means is that we need to fund and support not only your local public, government, and univeristy libraries, but also representatives willing to put their neck on the line to do the same.
I think we need to make sure that your library has the technology and capability to keep up with the times. Support local and national intiatives to protect what powers of preservation our libraries have left.
Unfortunately, the majority opinion apparently threw away its rights and responsibilities to check and balance the legislature. The minority opinions dissented on two levels, one attacking this particular extension for _any_ copyrights having huge public cost with negligible public benefit, the other attacking any _retroactive_ extensions as over-reaching Congress' prerogative, despite their long history of doing it. But the precedent has been set and Big Media will run with it.
Let us ask this question about 'fairness': If I write a book and copyright it today under the existing law, and next week Congress decides to repeal the 20-year extension, is it fair to me to take those 20 years away from my copyright after I've agreed to the terms of the contract by publishing my work?
If it's wrong to reduce the term ex post facto, then it's equally wrong to increase it.
Posting as AC because I'm at work, but it isn't hard to figure out who I am...
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO
How about the AUTHOR decide how long they want to keep it copyrighted?
Your post makes absolutly no sense whatsoever. Just typical paranoid ranting. No one is being forced to keep their material in copyright forever and ever. It's only an OPTION.
If I write a book and make millions of dollars it's perfectly within my rights to tell my family to make their own fortune and put my works in the public domain upon my death or whenever I feel like it.
Oh no, we can't use Mickey Mouse. What will we ever do?
Same thing we've been doing for thousands of years, Pinky: come up with our own ideas.
The few anal retentive bastards who can't let things go when they're done with them (and Disney is far from done with Mickey Mouse so get over the fact they still have copyright) are not going to affect the world in any significant manner.
There are millions of people who are happy to let their things go to make up for the few who aren't.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
This is what I have a problem with. Just because it is ok in the EU does not mean that it is ok in the US. The US constitution reads, in part:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8)
I have been meaning to research this. I just don't see how "securing for limited times to authors" can reasonably be translated to any time period measured from the death of the author.
This was a truly bad year for the American recording industry sales were way down. They got their wish - end of Napster - what is that old saying about being careful what you wish for. The fact is that we rarely if ever see all the consequences of our actions.
What are some of the outcomes of this ruling for Disney. Many I do not know. Now Diseny will have to defend more product over more time, Will Disney be able to handle this load that holds them to the past and innovate fast enough to keep with the new competitors? Will the copyright laws become so bloated and vile that the American people will just start ignoring them?
If there are too many laws trying to do too much the effect is that soon for all practical purposes the laws become impossible to enforce. This is already happening in the US - our courts are becoming more and more over loaded. What good is a copyright law that takes 10 to 20 years to enforce, we are getting there.
Once again, it would seem that even the (supposedly) brightest among us cannot distinguish between "I won/lost" and "the system worked/failed."
Today, my side lost, but the system worked. A large majority of justices, from across the political spectrum, came together to decide that they would not second-guess Congress. Checks and balances were applied, and the court decided that Congress could pass such an extension within the Constitution. That is an example of the system working, not the system failing. Instead of trying to push a policy from the bench, the court erred on the side of caution. When campaign finance reform comes before the court, and when (I hope) the court again defers to Congress, remember that consistency is a virtue.
For those of you who commented before reading the decisions (and I suspect that would be the majority), go back and go over all the opinions. Don't read it to rip every sentence that you don't like; read it to understand the logic behind it. If you still disagree, that's fine.
Whining about corrupt judges and evil conspiracies, however, will not serve you. Constructive action, like joining the EFF, writing to your Congressmen, and voting, will serve you.
Part of the motivation of copyright expiration is to encourage people to create NEW works. All works are derivitave to some degree or another... the expiration sees to it that a derivitave work does not get an infinite placement and wind up to some degree or another obscuring the original work in the public doman.
As for a disaster... Imagine if Plato had been indefinitely copyrighted... or the Bible... or any of the other great works of history. The Pope would be able to license or dismiss ANY printing of the Bible... how would the protestants feel about that?
Disney is likely to live INFINITELY long (e.g. until there is a major change in the world order that makes the arguement moot). Why should they have more rights than an individual copyright holder? "Because they will continue to re-invest"?
It isn't about what's good for the economy in the short term... it's about what's good for society... OFTEN different things.
(Clearcutting all the forests is good for the economy... in the short term)
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
I don't think either Stevens or Breyer would agree with your assessment of their arguments. Both of them (though Stevens moreso than Breyer) consider abiding by the constitution as their primary purpose.
Breyer's argument is the weaker of the two because he gives the most strength to the "promote the progress of science" part of the statute. He argues that even the extension on copyrights for new works fails the constitutional requirements for "limited times" and promotion of the "progress of science." He makes a convincing argument that the courts have an obligation to set limits on what "limited times" means, and then spends a lot of time arguing that life of the author plus 70 years is so long as to fail the "limited times" requirement. He makes a reasonable argument that the courts do have the obligation to set limits (they're the ones who have to strike down a law that extends copyright to life of the author plus 10,000 years,) but fails to fully convince at least me that the current extension is so grossly out of balance that it crosses the line between being merely poorly conceived to being unconstitutional.
To understand Stevens' argument (which is substantially more convincing thand Breyer's) it is necessary to understand the majority opinion. The Ginsburg opinion seems to rely primarily on early patent cases and the existence of previous copyright term extensions by congress to decide that the framers did not intend the reading of the copyright clause that Eldred requests. Their argument primarily rests on three things: the Copyright Act of 1790, which established copyrights in the United States, a number of individual patent extensions passed between 1790 and 1875, and the Copyright Act of 1831, which was the first extension of copyright terms on existing works. From these, as well as continued congressional practice in extending copyrights on existing works, the court concludes that in both the framers' and in the modern legal framework, the CTEA is constitutional.
Stevens argues that the constitution, not early congressional actions must be the basis of our law, and that many of the actions that the majority uses to support retroactive extensions either don't apply or are blatantly unconstitutional. The copyright act of 1790, he argues, does not apply in this case because, while it did give copyright protection to existing works, did so in the context of establishing a national system of copyrights, and the founders were keenly aware of the difference between this establishment of copyrights and the extension of existing ones. Many of the patent extensions used as evidence of the framers intent were blatently unconstitutional extensions of patents on inventions that had already entered the public domain, and so are unconvincing as a basis for modern case law. The copyright extension act of 1831 cannot be used to derive the framers' intent because none of the original delgates were in the 1831 congress. Further, the 1831 act was based on a view of copyright judged unconstitutional in the 1834 case of Wheaton v. Peters. All of this goes to show that the historical precedent for constitutionality of the extension of copyrights is inconclusive at best.
Stevens further points out that protection against ex post facto laws should protect the interests of both the patentee and the public with respect to copyrights. Just as congress should be unable to shorten the term of existing copyrights (thus harming the patentee), they should also be unable to extend the term of existing copyrights (thus harming the public.)
The point of all this is to show that both Stevens and Breyer very much had the constitution in mind when forming their opinions, and they are based on reasonable interpretation of the text. Stevens makes it very clear that he considers congressional practice an inappropriate way of deciding constitutionality and is not uncomfortable with the possibility of this decision putting previous copyright term extensions on similar shaky ground, if they are indeed unconstitutional. Breyer's arguments are less clear on this, and he seems to go out of his way to show how the copyright term extinsions in 1976 could have served a constitutional purpose, while the current statute does not. This interchange makes me wonder whether some of the other justices' opinions were based primarily on a desire not to unravel 170 years worth of copyright term extension acts.
Your claims to "rights" are no more real than the "divine right of kings" which was once unquestioned throughout the world.
Your kids will be better, stronger people if you teach them to provide for themselves, instead of trying to provide everything for them by restricting the activities of everyone else.
Evolve. This isn't the 12th century, regardless of what John Ashcroft would have you believe.
Slashdot, in it's current form, will never be able to cohesively organize. Why? Because it's NOT a public forum. In a true public forum, people can discuss what they want. Try that here and you get immediately Offtopic'd out of anyone's sight. Slashdot is an actively enforced (via voluntary moderation) TOPIC driven site, and furthermore the topics are chosen at whim (we all know the *cough* care and precision that goes into topic selection, right?) by a select few.
This is why I've long argued for a general discussion board to exist alongside the news commentary, where anyone could start their own topic thread. We've got journals, but those simply aren't high enough visibility to promote large discussions.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Well, I'm not so sure ... usually it's a venial offense or mistake or whatever, and that's a pretty mild reproach.
... FWIW I think venal is a little harsh. This not an unjustifiable ruling, it's just a bad ruling by a fairly conservative Court. I would have been floored if they had overruled Congress on the extension of the copyright term, given precedent, and prefer that sort of thing to be decided by elected, sometimes venal legislators rather than an unelected unreviewable group of justices. We save the Court for the relatively foul measures of the legislature, not disagreement over judgment calls like the magic number of years. If the Court starts picking and choosing here, they might start getting a lot more intrusive in other areas, too. At least we can yell at Congress.
I think the writer had in mind VENAL -- as I did when I saw it, so it took a minute to figure out why the dictionary.com definition was "wrong"!
And
However, what I really dislike is the *retroactive* application of the law to existing copyright holders like Disney. It (1) makes no sense under the Copyright Clause purpose to promote creativity, (2) stomps on the freedom of speech ethic if not right, and (3) looks like outright cash quid pro quo (well, might as well say it, that's what it is).
The retroactivity portion is what the dissents focus on, though I haven't plowed through it all. Without retroactivity, groups like Disney would have much much much less incentive to push for things like the Sonny Bono Act, as there would be no benefit for decades. The Sonny Bono Act provides Disney with money right away, with (early days) Mickey otherwise "expiring" this year.
Don't forget, this thing can be repealed. The chances are slim, but it's not written in stone.
© 2003 Mickey M. Mouse, all rights reserved.
I've thought about this. I don't think you would get arrested for performing Happy Birthday by yourself and a friend.
Put it into a movie without paying and you would get sued by warner brothers (as I think they own the copyright).
I have been thinking of ways of performing civil disobedience on this, but I have a high standard that if I should get arrested it should because of a something that gets noticed and is worthwhile.
I wasn't disputing that; I was responding to the claim that there is a "clause in the Constitution" that protects the right to revolution. There is no such clause. Miranda rights have nothing to do with that. And if you think any American court is going to protect the right to overthrow the US government based on something it says in the Declaration of Independence, please share whatever you're smoking.
If you do any reading of the thoughts the founding fathers did on the subject of copyright, your notion is in fact quite a strange thought. Unfortunately, it's a thought shared by many these days. If you are an author, and you don't want people spreading your ideas around, you have a simple recourse: don't share them. Once you share them I have a fundamental freedom of speech right to do with that knowledge what I will. The founding fathers realized that in some cases it may serve the public good to infringe our personal freedoms for practical purposes (eg. I can't yell fire in a crowed theater. I can, however, yell fire in my own home.) That's why the copyright provision of the Constitution is written the way it is. We, as a society, agree to abridge our fundamental rights, to motivate authors to share thier ideas with us. The fundamental goal is to ensure that many works become available to the public. Once you share your ideas with us, you have no more fundamental right to them than I do. You have no right to profit by them. What you have is a social contract in which we collectively agree to abridge our findamental rights so that we as a society get something in return. Extending copyright alters that contract after the fact, and amounts to government welfare. It's like a used car dealer selling you a car for $300 per month for 3 years, and then lobbying congress to extend the term of all such contracts to 5 years, 7 years, 120 years. You as the buyer of that car get no more consideration, simply a higher bill. It is indeed a wildly strange thought to think that just because someone came up with an idea, that he somehow owns it.
there is really one way to enforce our constitutional right to govern, and that way is to march on Washington and the state capitals, grab up a bunch of crooked politicians and execute them. This is literally the tried and true method of grass roots political action
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
--Chairman Mao, "grass roots" activist and mass murderer
All this does is blur the line between black-market and legal imports. Many developed countries will continue to use the old 50-year limit on copyright (a very sound and fair lenght of time, IMO). So, while no other U.S. business can mass produce Disney products without paying licensing fees and royalties, any Euro, Canadian or Aussie business can. This was brought up in a Slashdot thread two weeks ago when it was announced that early Elvis recordings (and other 1950s material) would no longer fall under copyright protection in the EU because they still use the 50-year rule. It was also mentioned in that thread that the RIAA/MPAA are trying to make any resulting imports illegal in the U.S. I have to ask, when do the artists (of any art form) finally grow balls and fight for the arts, not the business, and tell the RIAA/MPAA to screw off?!