Slashdot Mirror
Beyond Eldred v. Ashcroft
I thought I'd grab up some of the many commentaries and responses to the Eldred decision. If you read only one of these links, see Lessig's blog. Jack Balkin, another law professor who contributed to the case, is discussing it in his blog. The NYTimes has two distinct news stories on the decision (NYT1, NYT2), plus a biting editorial about the decision. Copyright scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has a piece in Salon. The LA Times posts one of the very few stories to present the decision in a positive light. Reason is one of several to mock the mouse.
20-Year Extension of Existing Copyrights Is Upheld
A Corporate Victory, but One That Raises Public Consciousness
The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity
Read Balkin's blog. He thinks that the Eldred case can be used to get the DMCA declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
I wish that were true.
Unfortunately, ever since the Berne Convention intellectual property rights have become enmeshed across international borders.
The signatory nations have agreed to respect the intellectual property rights granted by the member nations. That effectively makes international copyright law the sum of the most restrictive versions.
Of course, if another country strongly disagrees with something, their enforcement could be minimal. That is really all we have to hope for.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
The job of the Supreme Court is to implement and enforce the constitution. This document states that Congress has the authority to protect copyrights for a 'limited time'. Virtually any amount of time, provided it is explicitly named, can properly be called limited.
Whether this law is wise or not is another matter. If the Constitution prohibited Congress from passing unwise laws, the Supreme Court would be striking down laws as fast as Congress could pass them.
If you don't like it, the proper thing to do is complain to your representative in Congress. It these guys thought they'd lose even 1% of the vote by doing this, they'd turn around so fast you wouldn't see it.
We're talking about more money than you probably think.
According to Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, only 2% of copyrighted works between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value, but that that 2% is conservatively estimated to bring in $400 million a year in revenues to the copyright holders.
That's billions over the next 20 years.
Heh, I submitted a story about this last week, but Ed said "no way dude"
NY Times article I submitted
Non NYT article:
Copyrights Expiring in Europe
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
The current copyright term gives 99.8% of the return of a perpetual right, that is not in line with the mindset or the writings of the framers of the Constitution.
(Re)Read Breyer's opinion.
I also believe Ginsburg wholly misconstrued the 1st Amendment arguement. Read the Amicus brief filed by Burt Neuborne and the Con. Law professor. It reads like a text book on First Amendment jurisprudence. Almost every major decision in the history of Supreme Court First Amendment cases is shown to support a reversal of the Appeals Court's decision that "Copyrights are categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment."
-R
Well, at least until copyright expires. That is the entire point of the discussion. Once copyright expires I can make any sort of derivative work I like (Like Disney itself did when it made the Jungle Book 11 years after the copyright on the source material expired.
Copyright protects a specific concrete creation, not the concept. So while new Mickey works would have a new copyright start date, the old Mickey works do not. Once the copyright expires, I'm free to take a copy of "Steamboat Willie" and edit it into something, or study it carefully to learn how to draw Mickey, then draw (and sell) my own Mickey draws based on that knowledge.
This is true, and creates a fascinating new area for legal sorts to fight over. This clearly limits free speech in an area where something enters the public domain. It hasn't really come up before because prior to Mickey there hasn't been characters in copyright protected works which people wanted to reuse. One possibly defense is that you are allowed to use and reference trademarks as long as there is no possibility of someone confusing the source. This is why I can create a documentary on Disney, even using Disney's logos, even though Disney's copyright does cover the area of documentaries. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Darn shame it will be at least twenty more years before it starts playing out.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
You're overly kind to Disney with your list of their original work.
"Bambi" was taken from the Felix Salten novel of 1926, rights acquired by Disney in the late 30s and released as a movie in 1942. In true Disney fashion, Salten was bent over and fucked. His daughter inherited his rights and then when she died, her husband. When he decided that his copyright (remember, we're promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, here) should have brought him more money, Disney pointed to a short story publication of "Bambi" from 1923 lacking a copyright notice and claimed that the story was public domain from the get-go and even if it wasn't, it was _now_ because Salten's daughter didn't file for a copyright extension in time (assuming that the clock began ticking with the 1923 publication).
"101 Dalmatians" (with an 'a') was written by Dodie Smith in 1956 as an adaptation of her story "The Great Dog Robbery", published in Woman's Day magazine. Disney bought the film rights and released the animated film in 1959.
Face it, folks, even when Walt was running the company they were villainous, scurrilous, thieving bastards cashing in on adults' desire for their children to see big-eyed animals that sang.
Since CTEA went into effect, what science and useful art has Disney progressed? Well, there was the sequel to "The Little Mermaid", which you may recall was based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There was a sequel to "Sleeping Beauty", which you may recall was based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. There was "The Tigger Movie", which you may recall was based on characters created by A.A. Milne. There was a remake of "The Parent Trap". There was a sequel to the remake of "Dalmatians". There was a sequel to "Mermaid". There was "Tarzan" and then a sequel to "Tarzan", the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a sequel to the stolen "Lion King". There was a sequel to Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame". There is "Treasure Planet", a/k/a 'Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" in Space'. There's a sequel to the musical adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". I could go on, but I can't go on, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Two editorials today get it right:
Opting Out of Hypermass
and this one, which ran in the printed edition but on the WSJ site is only for paid subscribers, but appears for free on Yahoo! (go figure)
0.2% For The Mouse
I just thought it was important to remind people that this decision is limited to the United States only. No other country in the world has abandonded the principals of the public domain, which means that in our interconnected world, there will be states that provide a safe haven for the distribution of information that should be public domain.
What?? PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK. The Sonny Bono Act extension of the copyright terms equal the WIPO World Copyright Treaty terms from the Berne Convention, which almost all of Europe follows. Thirty-five countries are party to the treaty. The EU's Information Society Directive required EU members to implement the terms of the treaty by the end of last year.
What possibly made you think that the world was any different, aside from your obvious bias against the US?
This has got to be a troll, but i'll (briefly) reply.
Your line of reasoning seems to be to compare intellectual property with normal physical property, where in a socialist society, physical property is often nationalized, versus in a capitalistic society, where property belongs to its owner in perpetuity (except in certain situations, such as the right of eminent domain, but I digress...).
The reasoning is wrong because intellectual property is _not_ analogous to physical property in several very important ways:
1) Intellectual property is non-rivalrous. That is, unlike the car in your driveway, if you share a song, or the text of a book, or any intellectual property, you do not lose your ability to use it.
2) All creativity somewhat depends on the creativity of others who have come before. Are your ideas truly ever yours alone?
It is because of these two reasons (and others, i'm being very brief) that the framers of the constitution believed that the rights to intellectual property should not be in perpetuity.
There are certainly many other cases where the greater good of society as a whole is deemed to outway the "rights" of an individual to do whatever they please, hell, that is the basis of all laws really. In the case of copyright, the benefit to society of a striking a balance between creating a financial incentive for creators to produce new works, and making it possible for others to continue the "progress of the arts and sciences" is many times greater than the benefit produced by treating IP as other property, and allowing creators of works to forever control any derivative work (and everything, everything is derivative of something.) It has nothing to do with socialism.
"When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me"
Copyfight has the best set of links I found regarding the Eldred case.
Since the problem seems mainly to be corporations being giving the same right to copyright protection as individuals, I thought a little rant on corporate personhood would be appropriate.
Many folks don't know two facts regarding corporate personhood:
1) The American revolution was in large part a revolution against the Govt. supported practices of large (British) corporations. In post-Revolutionary America, corporations were far more limited and were established primarily to serve the public good, as one can see from the various state laws regarding corps, the interests of stockholders was supposed to be secondary to the commonweal.
2) Corporate personhood was established in 1886 (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) without debate by the USSC, either by accident in an extraordinary example of judicial activism (sources differ) that has in many ways set (non-incorporated) individuals back to the position wrt to Corps. that our forefathers rebelled against.
Refs & More info
Now it's pretty obvious that the framers never intended corporations to be given the rights of personhood, and thus the ability to extend their copyright far beyond the lifetime of the author.
But so long as the little slip the 1886 court that let corporations demand the full protection granted 'all persons born or naturalized' by the 14th Amendment remains unchallenged, the domination of mere mortals by immortal corporations is likely only to get more and more extreme.
So you must not agree with Breyer's interpretation of the 1790 copyright "extention" not being retroactive at all but being necessary for the creation of US copyright? You must also not agree with the other dissenting opinion that sharply notes that copyright was designed for authors, not their hires or the rather insightful grasp of how this is a raw deal for everyone but current copyright holders?
Your primary beef here is that you think that restricting the will of congress as regards copyright is "legislating from the bench". That's pretty silly, given the long history of the court doing just that with copyright and patent law. This was a review of a law that congress passed that seems to violate the letter and spirit of the constition. It is the supreem court's duty to examine every law for consistency with the constitution as such inconsistency effectively ammends the constitution. Constitional amendments take much more effort and consent to pass than ordinary laws so no law may violate the constitution. Legislating from the bench generally involves creating whole new branches of law or prescribing specific action. This review would simply have tossed out Mickey Mouse's copyright protection. It would not have set up new offices for administrating that removal, it would not have required the raising of taxes or dictated their spending and it would not have created any kind of new laws. That's far from "legislating from the bench," and in fact it is exacly what the supreme court should do.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.