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Copyright Rumblings
dcunning writes "The Economist has a short opinion piece entitled Copyrights: A radical rethink that suggests (horror of horrors!) going so far as reverting back to the original copyright term of 14 years, renewable once. The article suggests that, in exchange for this, the 'content industries' be given 'much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies.' A worthwhile and fair tradeoff?"
Would have most of the 'classic' rock songs out in the public domain, damn skippy that'd pwn ^_^
Banaaaana!
Why would the content industries be content with a fair compromise when they can buy enough influence to have all the legal, anti-copy methods they want, and enough influence to buy 357 year copyrights?
The record companies know that, even if they were given all copy protection they wanted (barring the banning of unlicensed microphones), people would still pirate music. It only takes one person circumventing the protection to open a work to the world.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The proposed copy protections are extremely unfair and unreasonable. Why should we allow ourselves to be bribed to permit such a thing?
The question of whether copyright limits should be shorter (I sure think so!) should be independent.
Personally I think eventually we consumers will win all of these battles. There's no reason to even think of accepting bribes from a corrupt industry.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
if you really think copy protection will suddenly disappear after 28 years, or the copyright owners will configure it to do so, I have a bridge to sell you.
sulli
RTFJ.
Damn straight it is. You get twenty-eight years to milk something for all the millions it's worth, AND you get to crush utterly and punitively anyone who dares steal even a penny's worth from you? Sounds like a good deal to me.
-Mark
we'll have ever-extended copyrights, exceptions in environmental regulations written for specific corporations and the like. We need to find a way to take the money out of the equation. Campaign finance reform NOW, please.
Is there any such expiration date on open source code licenses?
word.
Further, the problems related to fair use remain. I have an affirmative right to use short segments of copyrighted material in other works. For example, if I wanted to preach a sermon demonstrating how media culture affects us, I might want to use a short clip from the truman show. I have that right under fair use - but I can't do it from a DVD legally right now because of the DMCA which prevents me from legally owning the technology that would enable it. The chilling effect is a scary thing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The copyright is the same. The difference is the licence.
The record companies are confident that they can get all that and a bag of chips (er, 95+ year copyright terms, that is.) So why settle for what's behind door number three when you can get doors number one and two at the same time?
Why do I have the feeling that this decade is going to be known as the "Mine! Mine!" decade.
The genie is out of the bottle, and no law, technology, or ad campaign is ever going to put it back in. Copyrights have been violated since the first artist in history signed their name (or stamped their mark) on their work.
(and as a descendent of one of the artists in Altamira, I would like my cut of the souvenir profits)
Why the recording industry (and others) now feel threatened enough to start raising a fuss, is because it's just become much easier. Although, overall, I don't see how it can really hurt their bottom line. They are making many times the profit on their product than they did in the 70's, 80's, and 90's (am I the only one who's noticed how $1 and $2 paperbacks are now selling for $9 - $12. Was there a sudden paper shortage that I never heard about?). Don't even get me started on CD's, do you really expect me to believe that the bottom line cost of a CD is twice as much as a cassette tape (considering the markup).
If the industry would get smart and offer their products at a decent price, it would help to insure that the run-of-the mill consumer is not tempted to use other means to acquire the product. But if they expect that a few words in a lawbook is going to stop what has already started, they are dreaming.
Dr. Wu
PS: If the music industry is so perfect themselves, then why are they settling the lawsuits against them for illegal price fixing.
Music CD Settlement
The author makes a great case. He proposes trade-offs that would be in everyone's best interest. And that's why it will never fly.
The problem is the content industries feel they "deserve" the original copyright term, and that the digital age is simply infringing on their "rights." And, quite short-sightedly, that all they need to do is get "better" laws and the next generation of technology will put it right.
Hundreds of people proposed very reasonable, in fact still too expensive, methods to make music available online. The problem with these systems was that they were reasonable. The current system of paying $15 for CD with 3 good songs 2 mediocre, and the remainder, crap is extremely profitable. No self-centered individual would endanger such a system for one that would allow a user to pay $3 each for their two favorite songs and ignore the rest. It just won't happen.
These people will fight tooth and claw to retain total control of our culture until we wrest it from their grasping hands.
The next generation of crypto-verifying players, and per user-agreement encrypted, signed music downloads, will be a telling test. They will lower the prices enough that many people won't care. They will then usher in laws that make any tool that plays digital music a "tool of piracy." Large proprietary software corporations will step right into the meal line with their ticket in hand, and the FOSS community will be all that stands in their way. Should be exciting to watch.
DRM at restriction systems hurt their relationship with buyers like me. I buy a lot of IP, in fact IP accounts for virtually all of the non-essential things I buy. I own a hell of a lot of CDs and still buy a lot of CDs when I find something I like. I am the type of customer that they depend on, not little sally who loves her some Britney. I am to them, what the PowerMac and Powerbook owners are to Apple, the backbone of the bottomline. Not surprisingly, I own one of each as well.
Burning buyers like me by not letting me make MP3s or Oggs is a stupid move. Not only do I buy a lot, I keep in contact with my congresscritter. I let him know that it ain't piracy, but rather self-righteous greedy fucks at Sony, Columbia, Universal, et al that are killing off their own market by treating customers like criminals. They can of course do that because copyrights to the degree we have gone now are not capitalist. They are a socialist construct. If you don't like the price of a CD you cannot buy a competing product. Korn doesn't compete with Gravity Kills because they're totally different types of music and they don't play each other's songs. Why don't the copyright crusaders argue that hard drives compete with lawn mowers because if I buy 5 200GB hard drives I probably won't have the money for a new riding lawn mower.
I'd rather be buying DVD Audio, but hey, until I can rip it into very high quality data it's useless to me. My idea of a playlist is Winamp or XMMS, not a 200 DVDA changer set on shuffle.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Copyright extension should be halted because it drains the public domain of material. Period. We shouldn't have to bargain for that one. 75 years was plenty of time, we had settled into that time frame, and we had plenty of older literature and materials flowing into the public domain. Then along came the DMCA - reverse engineering, making compatible devices and software, using your own media (that you legally purchased) in other devices of your choosing - all these basic property rights and common law understandings of what people can do with things they own flew out the goddamned window.
I'm not willing to cut a deal with the devil, or the so-called content industry in this scenario, to bring back reduced timespans for copyrights. Cut copyrights back, abolish the DMCA (perhaps some parts are not unreasonable, but as I see it, everything in there is either not needed because it was covered by existing jurisprudence, or is flat out morally wrong), and THEN we can have an intelligent debate and discussion as a society about what kind of legislation should be in place to help protect content producers from unreasonable amounts of piracy, IF in fact existing laws don't provide them that protection already.
If in fact the problem is an economic one (people are pirating because it is economically sensible for them to do so) why not try modifying your business model to one that doesn't so strongly encourage such illegal copying? You're never going to eliminate it entirely. Sorry, but we don't want and won't take crippled devices. If the content industry hasn't figured that out yet, then fuck them. I'd rather have a crippled, less profitable, re-organized content industry with my rights intact, than have mandated, legally enforced DRM embedded in my hardware, and have Disney's profits secured so they keep pushing their schwag out on audiences. Oh yeah, and what do we get out of it? Copyright terms are only 14 years. Of course, that doesn't apply retroactively, it only applies to new content. Oh, so sorry about that. And in 14 years what happens? Copyrights get extended again, without public debate, once the sheep have gotten used to ubiquitous DRM.
Sorry, but I'll go down with guns blazing before I accept this "compromise". Right now, we are getting the strength of momentum behind us. The popular press is buying into it. Copyright term extensions are going down, though it may take a while. As for the DMCA - it's not going away just yet, but the debate in the public forum is just starting, and we'll get there eventually too. Once the content industry realizes how shaky the ground they are walking on is, perhaps we will hear a real compromise deal out of them, hrrmmm?
REAL pirates, people who are motivated by profit . The same mass copiers that operate in Ukraine, China and Taiwan today and who sell the pirated copies. They don't "open [works] to the world" unless the world pays them.
And people who are willing to pay will pay the record companies, if the price is reasonable.
And in the meantime, we wont' be able to make backup copies, mix cd's, a copy for the car, a digital work of criticism which incorporates a "quote" from the original, etc.
Is that worth it?
At this point, I really believe that the future of music is going to involve just completely circumventing/reinventing the middle, distribution/parasite layer of the industry, and perhaps finding ways to add value to music above just charging for the music itself.
The big studios have the money to change the rules of the game at will. If they agree to something like this, don't be surprised to see them lobbying, 28 years from now, to change the law and extend the copyright period. Then they would have both draconian technical copyright enforcement measures, backed by the full force of law, and infinitely renewable copyrights.
Of course, some would argue that we already have both.
We will have to make compromises. But don't be too ready to give in too soon. I understand that for you, this seems like it's been a long battle already. For the rest of the country, the battle's just getting started. Lessig's copyright extension tax is a fabulous idea, but let's not let them force an unreasonable state of DRM-enforced lack-of-rights on us in exchange for it. Talk about winning the battle and losing the war.
You seem to mis-understand Marxism. A Marxist would suggest that "to the victor go the spoils", not "to the share holders of the multi-national company go the spoils". Would you rather the author got the credit or the shareholders of the publisher?
Yeah, I might be willing to make that trade, if you add in one more piece: as per the Constitution, only the original author can hold a copyright. And that author must be a human, not any kind of corporation or publishing house.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
That solution is bad because
just like what happened recently with
the copyright laws. Some corporation
(Disney) will buy themselves some judges
and have the time limit changed to infinity.
The only real solution is to stop price fixing
by the recording labels and dvd resellers.
In a truly capitalist system 15$ for a CD would
NEVER have been allowed for each and every cd.
To do this we need Campaign Finance Reform in
America, I don't know who to blame in the rest
of the world but in America the people have lost
their voice.
Call me inflamatory, but we screwed up copyright the first time (Gosh... if forever was good, forever and a day is better!). Why do we have to give the content industry a lollipop (copy-protection enforcement) to get them to accept something that's sensible and in the public good?
The only copy-protection I'll settle for will consist of a Supreme Court justice in every box that tells me that what I'm doing is or isn't fair use. Unfortunately, unless the content industry and the Raelians team up, that tends to limit sales.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Marxists? Please.
The entire notion of copyright has been utterly bastardized. The philosophy behind the US Constitution's Copyright Clause is that Copyright is a grant BY THE PUBLIC to the creator to allow the creator to make a bit of cash before reverting the material -back- to the public.
There is not truly "original" content. In fact, there's only 7 basic stories, or plotlines. Unless the creator has -no- contact with anything outside of their own closed mine, the public has a direct impact on the creators, and on the content they produce.
For a -much- better explanation of this, please read Justice Stevens' dissension in the Eldred case (Ginsberg's is excellent as well).
The gist, though, is that -without- works falling into the public domain, creativity and the production of new works -SUFFERS-. Why the hell do you think we're getting sequels to all of the Classic Disney films (I mean, do we -really- need 4 101 Dalmations sequels/retakes?)
Not only that, but if we give them everything they want, that means literal enforcement of the DMCA. Which means its illegal to break, attempt to break, or describe possible methods to break Digital Rights Infringement technologies. Which, in turn, effectively gives them indefinite-term copyrights.
No thanks. We need to return to original terms and laws and reconsider what copyright should cover (for example, should it really cover software distributed without source?). No negotiation should be considered. These companies have made it clear that they want an eternal monopoly on our culture and our minds.
Digital technology has made copyright moot in not one but two important ways.
The first is that content can be replicated with perfect fidelity for little or no cost.
The second is that copyright simply is not needed. The intent was to encourage people to produce works of science and useful arts, but history has shown that that is simply not necessary. People produce such works even without the promise that the state will use violence to ensure their compensation.
Just look at the open source revolution. Compare the quality of open source software with that of its copyrighted commercial equivalent.
Or compare the quality of literature and art before today's abuse of copyright with the pure shit that saturates our existance today.
Copyright is as archaic as slavery. It is as absurd to give ownership of a sequence of bits to an individual as it is to give ownership of an individual to another individual. And ironically, the very same Constitution originally gave sanction to both.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The other obvious problem with the solution is that all parties could agree now, with legally enforced use restrictions, then 14 years from now as the copyrights are about to expire, intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term to 20 years ... then 30 years ... and so on, without repealing the restrictions.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Let us switch to 28 years but no fair use ! Full copyright belonging to holder without permission to use it (note that I don't even say author).
25 Years later. Oh let us rise the period to 37 years. Retroactive. After all the copyright holder financed the work and has to get a return !
10 years later (35 years after the 1st work has been done under this law) Ho 37 is not enough, let us rise with a new law to say, 56. This is fair isn't it ? Oh, and it is retroactive.
10 years again later... We are abck to 74/98 years of copyright. With prolongation if the holder pay a small symbolic sum. Retroactively.
I certainly would not want such law as a consummer.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
An interesting read about the copyright bargain is found on gnu.org.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
I'm a bit disappointed in the old guard Economist for failing to make the strongest economic argument for revamping the copyright laws.
Copyrights are like tariffs. They distort the true value of goods and thereby make trade inefficient. The end result is that they decrease the amount of wealth in the world. Reducing copyright terms is like lowering tariffs. Even though some industries and segments of society will be injured, in the short term by such an action, overall, it results in greater wealth for the nation and for its trading partners.
That's speaking in terms that the businessmen who read The Economist can understand. They can relate to the benefit of lower prices for textiles and hardware, so they ought to be similarly receptive to lower prices for textbooks and software.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Any content creator (Einstein) should have final say over intelectual property ("Space and Time" by Minkowski) that is derived from their work ("Electromagnetic Phenomena in a System Moving with any velocity less than that of Light").
Of course no good can come from allowing all school children in the world to freely download "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" by Einstein. What are you some kind of communist?
Some things are more important than an animated rat
I don't argue that making illegal copies of copyrighted material is morally correct. I don't care if it is or is not. I want to know if it's worth spending my tax dollars to enforce.
As it grows easier and easier to steal copyrighted material, I think the question of what should we and should we not do to protect corporations like Time Warner is better though of after taking an example to heart. Let's suppose I ran a radio station. Let's suppose I wanted everyone to pay me $.10 a minute to listen to my radio station. I have no technology to do this any differently from a normal radio station. People can turn to my radio station and listen regardless of whether or not they have paid me. It seems likely that thousands of people (at least if my content was any good) would listen to my station without paying. This angers me, and I ask the legislators to start passing laws with long sentences, and law enforcement to invade privacy to find violators.
Clearly there would be no reason for the government to artificially create a situation where my failed business model works. There has to some damn GOOD REASON to expend the time and money to make a business work despite the ease of cheating.
So the question isn't whether or not people steal content. It's not whether or not these people are good or evil. The question is, how hard would it be to actually stop them, and what do we really get by doing so?
The preceding passage has been checked for spelling, you will find no sentence without at least one mis spelled word
The problem is such. Whenever you offer a "trade-off" to a powerfull group such as the copyright lobby, they will take the benefit but not the burden.
The copyright lobby mind you essentially control the media, and thus only few magazines like the Economist (which pride themselves on being controlled by the international investment institutions instead) even dare suggest reducing the terms of copyright.
And since they control the media they can easily spin the story and make the public forget about any trade-offs. And terms of copyright will be once again long.
There are many examples where similar trade-offs have been essentially forgotten. The most drastic example is where the US tevision networks received a monopoly on a huge and increidbly valuable piece of the spectrum in exchange to performing a public function. And nowadays that tradeoff is complketely forgotten and no television network will ever admit that it owes anything to the public nor they will ever perform a public service that hurts their profits.
So my belief is that in these situations we should not do any gives and takes... Because they will take without giving.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
The only way to prevent copying is to invade people's private lifes with black box security devices in every machine which can play digital media. Those have to be connected to a central server which determines when, where and what you are allowed to play. Anything short of that will be incapable of combatting copying.
... or we suffer the annihialation of any privacy in the digital realm we have left (and I mean ANY, if you believe for a second that those black boxes in your computer wont eventually be capable of a lot more than to give you the right to listen to a song you are naive).
The only way to accomplish it is by law, because noone in their right mind will voluntarily go there.
The amount of ways it can be abused are of course limitless, especially combined with the good old internal security agencies and their quest for knowledge.
In short, either we suffer the fact that copyrights are nearly unenforceable on the small scale
pay money to rent studio time to copy audio
I think you need to read the right to read by Richard Stallman.
You so totally misunderstand the world around you. I don't know a single person without a personal computer, and a hard drive. Do you think they need to "rent studio time" to make copies of data? What? Are you going to live in everyone's hard drive and control every single thing they ever do to make sure they don't "pirate" someone's work?
The DeCSS hack was perpetrated by a 16 year old kid in his spare time with a personal computer. A computer just like the one everyone has in their living room. There will always be bright people. There will always be bright kids. The idea of trying to stifle all those human beings by limiting their capabilities, just so one "approved" group can profit from their creations, is vile and disgusting.
Is there really an underground of millionaire hackers out there, digital Robin Hoods...
Yes, but they are rich in brainpower, spare time, and available knowledge. Which ones are you hoping to take away?
It's true that the DMCA was designed to prevent copyright violations, but it does this by making it illegal to work around DRM technology.
Thus, by law, it's always illegal to work around DRM technology, regardless of whether or not you're violating a copyright.
This particular compromise would be ideal for the content industry. On the one hand, the content industry would get optimal support for dealing with copyright violators, and give them perpetual control (via the DMCA) for any content they locked up with DRM technology. Sure, you could copy it when the term expired... but only if you do it without working around the DRM technology. And don't forget that under this compromise, everybody will have agreed that the content industry is justified in coming down as hard as they like, if you do try to work around the DRM tech.
The only way this compromise could be a good thing is if they rework the DMCA to allow DRM workarounds on content whose copyright has expired. Since the DMCA (as I understand it)currently doesn't parse this way, the compromise is a Bad Thing.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You get copyright protection for only as long as you use it.
Yeah, and Bachs "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" is still in use today. Why should the government forbid that I played it? What do we get from it?
Don't the same arguments apply to Steamboat Willie?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
No, giving the copyright industry what they want for even a one year copyright term is not acceptable. DRM is itself immoral, for any length of time. If I buy a DVD that is encrypted (pretend for a moment that there's no DeCSS), and the copyright expires a year later.... I still have to get a decryption system from the content provider. That means I'm still at Disney's beck and call. That still means that historians viewing this period of history will not be able to view any of our encrypted art.
Saying that what's inside the box is free and public does not work when the box is locked and the key costs $1000. That is not free (in either meaning of the word).
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Sadly, that's grossly unconstitutional. If you use it forever -- you're in violation of the term limit.
Besides which, I don't like it. I want the public domain to contain something other than crap. This means works that are still relevant to society. It also means that creators will have to REALLY create good works, since they'll have to compete with material that people enjoy as well. This only strengthens our culture. (and further strengthens, over time, the p.d.)
Personally, I'd like terms in the neighborhood of 20 years tops (less for some things if the work 'ages' more rapidly, e.g. software) so that my generation can pay for a work, but we can pass it on to our children unencumbered.
-- 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.
Ok...so they pass a law that limits copyrights to 14 years. Then they embed DRM, etc. in all of our consumer electronics.
How long does it take to change that law back, and how long would it take to completely remove the the fully implementedinfrastructure of DRM, DMCA, etc?
Answer: One vote by our 'representatives' and we're screwed.
I think the first step to allowing works in the public domain to be actually availible to the public is the establishment of some sort of cross-platform, cross-network method to identify works that are free to the public. Filesharing services have been tryin to demonstate leigtimate uses for their networks; they usually cite unsigned artists volunteering their content for distribution or incorporate pay-per-legal-download schemes into their products. Distributing older works in the public domain could provide them with another legitimate reason to exitst, I doubt the previous content owners will volunteer their bandwidth to the distribution of works they previously owned, so the peer to peer networks seem like a natural solution for free ownerless content.
It is worth noting, of course, that very little of the work in the public domain exists in digital format. The sort of leigislation suggested here in the economist provides some hope, though. One day, even though content owners have abandoned work from which they can no longer profit, each user's computer may be like a small piece of a distributed digital cultual museum.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Yes, it's correct. The DMCA, while nominally a copyright act, has a lot of (hopefully) unintended consequences. Because a DRM scheme might be used on many, many works -- and because those works would pass into public domain at different times -- work on breaking any DRM scheme is prohibited. Consider: Books A, B, and C are all protected by Frobozco Magic Digital Rights Management Technology. Book A goes into public domain in, say, 2077, but B and C enter public domain in 2082. If you're allowed to crack FMDRMT in order to read Book A, you'd also possess the technology to read B and C, even though that would be infringement.
Now, you might wonder, shouldn't it be the actual infringement that is illegal, and not the mere potential to infringe? Old school, yes. But not in the brave new world of intellectual "property".
Of course, this encourages the Content Cartel to lock up everything behind the same DRM, and to continue using it for many many years. That way, even the "public domain" works cannot be legally accessed without paying a fee. That's the way we're going to get perpetual copyright. The Sony Bono Act was -- pardon the pun -- strictly Mickey Mouse in comparison.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The article proposes a "compromise" between two unrelated issues!
Copyright term extension has been happening for far longer than digital technology. Hence the issue of copyright term extension is simply not something to be traded for digital technology restrictions! It is a different issue.
It is true that digital technology may change the feasibility of various copyright enforcement, but that does not have anything to do with the reasonableness of the term of copyrights.
If there were no internet, image scanners and printers, copyright extension would still be the same issue. Logically then, digital copyright protection schemes have no relationship to copyright extension issues.
Copyrights are too long. That is clear and should be changed.
Digital media is easily and routinely stolen. That is clear and presents us with challenges, the answers to which are not at all obvious.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Ok, so rather than assign blame to whomever leaked their unfinished content to Napster these artists chose to blame the medium that the culprit used. Am I missing something here? (Honest question, no sarcasm intended.)
Unless I'm missing some important details, your logic would have me persecuting the various telcos and makers of fax machines if someone were to steal my industrial trade secrets and fax them to a member of the press.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
The Economist's Editorial is cogent and logically thought out as an abstraction to foster the public interest but the thinking behind it collapses in the real world.
By extending copyright, the various content providers have taken images and ideas that are public icons and locked them up behind a wall that is to all intents and purposes eternal.
Generations have grown up knowing who Mickey Mouse is and there is every reason to expect that Disney, as only one of many content companies, will want to hang on to the iconic power of their rodent for as long as possible. Having an attractive idea that is to all intents and purposes self-advertising is worth a huge amount of money to them and they will want to continue to exploit it.
The real-world problem with the editorialist's proposed scenario is that even if one could realistically expect the idea to go past two PAC-fattened United States legislative bodies and an executive branch that caresses the advantaged (e.g., the Bush Administration's handling of the Microsoft Antitrust Case), there would be no reason for content providers provided with hardware protection-schemes not to pursue the same copyright extensions in the future that they have recently won--either immediately or towards the end of their first or second copyright term. Once they were provided with the ability to define all computer hardware as machinery incapable of violating copyright (however you choose to define 'violation'), their pursuit of prefabricated eternal profit-streams would be only a matter of rational self-interest.
There would in fact be even less to dissuade them in this scenario because fourteen to twenty-eight years from now, holding the keys to all machinery that could replicate content, they would have less to lose to the threat of piracy than they do now.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."