Slashdot Mirror
Forbes on Lessig and Eldred
scubacuda writes "In the Forbes editorial, Fact and Comment , Steve Forbes voices his support for Lessig and the Eldred case: 'Maybe Congress should just be done with it and declare that a copyright is forever....Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has proposed a sensible compromise..."[I]f Congress is listening to the frustration that the court's decision has created, [paying to maintain copyright extensions] would be a simple and effective way for the First Branch to respond." He's absolutely right.'"
Seems inherently unfair to me. Unless you are rich, you lose the rights to your work?
IANAL, but here's a suggestion. Consider what happened in the software world. Lot of people wanted to share their code, but for things really took off only due to the ease of adopting the GPL. In a similar vein, perhaps we should have a well-defined legal framework for artists to release their work into the PD after 5 years, and work towards getting it acceptance among publishers? (Essentially, the legal and technical details should be worked out and implemented by someone else instead of forcing the individual artists to deal with it). Sure the *AA can be counted out, but I can imagine several book publishers and smaller music groups being not averse to the idea. If disney wants to keep the mouse, let them, forget it. Let's do the best we can to ensure that content that is yet to be produced comes with a less draconian copyright.
I believe that charging a steadily INCREASING amount would be a better idea. That way there is increasing incentive to allow the copyright to revert to the public domain.
Recent changes to the timelines are clearly Faustian deals by politicians to sell out to copyright holders. In my mind the public clearly loses. The original idea of limiting the time one can claim intellectual property was sound and still has merit. The notion that ideas and information can permanently be surrounded by barbed wire and denied to all seems intuitively wrong. It should be clear that the institution of a fee to maintain the copyright amounts to another tax. So politicians would treat it as another endless source of funds to be milked to finance their pet projects. Perhaps you can see where this would lead.
Ultimately, I think the better idea is to put heavy pressure on congress to roll back the copyright protection period. Then we need some working campaign finance reform.
Why not make it a constantly increasing amount after 15 years. $1 the first year. $5 the second, and $25 the third. Keep up the multiples by 5 or whatever number you want and eventually everything passes into the public domain when its value is exceeded by the fees.
Well, this of it this way.
Information wants to be free, right? Allinformation, that is, except for personally identifiable information and your personal information. That information doesn't want to be free. It wants to be secret. So, some information wants to be free, but not all of it. Also, not all source code wants to be free. It wants to be free on its own terms, or free to some people and not to others. Also, some source code wants to redefine the word 'free' to mean something else. And then there's the information that just plain can't be free, because people's lives depend on it being secret(police informants, undercover cops, locations of safe houses, military secrets, and so on).
Now, try to do anything while you've got this being screamed into your ear. Of course, your other ear is getting the same treatment, but from a different point of view ("Why do I have to release everything I write into the public domain? Fuck that! I want copyrights!"). And then there's the long, long line of other people, waiting to scream their political views into your ears.
No, I wouldn't really like doing this, either. No matter what you do, someone is going to demonize you. Support abortion? You're a baby killer. Don't support abortion? You're misogynistic. Support the death penalty? You're contributing to human rights abuses in America. Don't support the death penalty? You're soft on crime.
I hate politicians, too, but making politics out to be some sort of game where you just wait for all the cash and babes to come rolling in is kind of silly. Be a DJ or pro sports athlete if you want that. It'd be a lot easier than constantly dealing with zealots screaming that you're sending the country into a downward spiral every time you make a decision.
Our politicians have become ineffective and wishy-washy because we scream at them and demonize them so much. Maybe if we all backed off a little bit, they wouldn't be scared to death of making decisions.
My cynical side says that nothing could ever make a politician honest, but my optimistic side is ever hopeful that we'll someday have a crooked policitian who has the will to stick to his guns on an issue.
Sounds great, except why allow people other than the current rightholder to extend? For that matter, why allow anyone but the original author to extend?
The first U.S. copyright laws restricted renewals to the original author. Going back to that idea would remove some of the "property" connotations that have appeared since then.
First, one of the nice things about copyright, for the little guy, is that you do not have to register to be entitled to some copyright protection. You author something, and there is some protection you are entitled to without registration. Copyright registrations are inexpensive, and can usually be done without the assistance of an attorney. Requring a registration after 5, 10, or even 20 years to have a continuing copyright could make good sense -- the author would have a fair chance to assess what needed protecting versus what was not going to be worth paying a fee.
Second, because of the Berne Convention, we cannot burden copyrights resulting from publications in foreign countries in certain ways. For example, you have to register a domestic work before you file a lawsuit in the U.S., but the foreign work does not have to file a U.S. registration prior to a lawsuit. If done in a way such that the effect were to be to force Disney and Hollywood to move to Canada or Mexico, I can't say it would be a victory.
Third, is used in a way like present fee systems, the fees would not distinguish between big money works that pay for themselves in a year, and the rest is gravy, versus the smaller circulation works that need 10 or 20 years to gather a good income. In some ways a tax would work better -- it could be proportional to the financial value.
I think that copyright should be easy and cheap for short periods, cost money to maintain for long periods (although shorter than the current limits), be consistent internationally, and have an easy way for the public to figure out what is or is not copyrighted (E.g. not having to figure out when Joe Obscure Author kicked the bucket).
The purpose of intellectual property laws should be to encourage innovation, not to protect intellectual property forever. The Mickey Mouse character has been lots of fun for a long time. Disney has earned lots of money from the character. Disney should now create something new rather than trying to protect Mickey forever.
What would happen to Disney without copyright protection continuing for Mickey? Would someone else start using a mouse character to promote a theme park? I doubt it. Would someone try to make some knock-off cartoons? Maybe, but would Disney suffer? I don't think Disney would lose much.
20 years is a nice duration for a copyright. An author or artist could live off a creation for about 1/3 of a long adult life-span. During that time the artist could create some more copyrighted material and have a productive life.
Our country has gone overboard with copyrights and patents. Extending patents and awarding patents for software do not encourage creativity. Instead they encourage defensive copyright/patent claims and litigation. We need to create an environment which encourages creativity rather than stifling it.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
How about instead of having time limits, we have profit limits? The copyright expires once your work has turned a 1,000% profit or after 50 years, whichever is less.
You are obviously unfamiliar with accounting for motion pictures. In a nutshell, if you are ever a major motion picture star or agent for one, make sure that you get a piece of the gross and not the net. A system such as you propose would surely degenerate forthwith into something similar. "The Producers" would look innocently naive compared to the shenanigans you'd see if copyright depended upon not achieving a profit level of X%.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
In a nutshell, if you are ever a major motion picture star or agent for one, make sure that you get a piece of the gross and not the net.
Wise words. If only Stan Lee had heeded them, he would have been much richer.
It's true. the majority of movies make a loss on paper. It's an impressive feat that a film that costs $100 million to make, $100 million to market, and makes $500 million in worldwide box office sales can break even, but apparently it does.
And what kind of protection do you think you currently get for free?
If you do register and pay a small filing fee you get some additional protection, because it becomes potentially more expensive to violate your copyright. However for 'free' copyright upon creation any violation is much less expensive for the violator which must simply stop using your copyrighted material and are only liable for actual damages (ie your attorney fees are yours and you only can possibly win the infringers profits and your losses if any).
Additionally finding infringement of your copyright can be a difficult proposition unless it's being flagrantly violated in a widely read publication.
So although the small filing fee (not free) provides you with more protection (statutory damages and attorneys fees) there is still the cost of filing and the preparation costs of registering the copyright. Additionally any money you invest in hunting down violators of your copyright. Actively protecting a copyright while not prohibitively expensive does involve some costs even without a small renewal fee.
Finally the fundamental basis for copyright in the US isn't protection of the artist; it's the promotion of new works. So the pertinent question is, would the additional cost of not allowing your photo library to go to the public domain 20 years from its creation cause you not to publish it now?
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
One additional factor- just because a work isn't being commercially exploited (sold), doesn't mean no corporation has a profit motive to maintain it's copyright.
Big media companies gain by keeping the public domain poor- especially by denying it modern media like film and television. If the Eldered case had won, then PD TV shows would begin to compete with newly produced paid ones.
The new stuff will always have an advantage in FX technology and "bad language", but given how often Hollywood recycles old plots, some amount of sales cannibalization will occur (1947 Fox stealing sales from the 2003 company).
I believe that the largest reason big IP companies want long copyrights is not so that they can keep collecting sales of old works, but so that old works won't compete with their shiny new merchandise.
So, the cons of a flat tax. First of all, there's a good reason that the flat tax makes sense on paper. In fact, it would've made great sense in practice about 160 years ago, when we were still an agrarian republic. All of the problems with the flat tax are mired in the fact that the distribution of income in this country is exponential, not linear. Let me explain the difference.
A good way to think of a linear income distribution is as follows. To simplify things, let's just consider 4-person families with one working parent. Let's assume all such families have different incomes, and that the poorest makes $20,000/year. Now, if the distribution were linear, there would be a family making $20,010, one making $20,020, one making $20,030, and so in in even $10 increments, all the way up to, say, $1,000,000.
But we don't live in a society with a linear income distribtion. Instead, the distribution of income is much more like a curve -- an essentially exponential bell curve. This means that there are exponentially more people clustered around lower and middle-income levels than there are around the $1,000,000 mark. Fortunately for us, however, the biggest cluster (top of the bell) is around the middle (not the bottom), and has been steadily rising since the turn of the century (though less in recent years).
Okay, so back to the flat tax. Because of the exponential distribution of income, a flat tax places what is often called the "burden of taxation" on the middle class. This means that while the middle class might make up 60% of the population, they will pay more than 60% of total tax revenue. I won't go into the math (which is often disputed by proponents of the flat tax and constantly proven by leading economists, conservatives and liberals alike).
There's also the idea of economic hardship. Let's say there's a 10% flat tax. That 10% is much harder on a guy earning 20,000 a year than on a guy earning 1,000,000 a year. Flat taxes also do away with most tax "incentives" (in an attept to simplify the tax code). Tax incentives can either be good or bad, depending on where you stand philisophically.
In all honesty, that's primarily what it comes down to -- philosophy. The proponents of flat tax often say that a flat tax will "help the economy." Like the idea today that the tax rebate will help the economy, it simply isn't true. Anybody who has taken a basic college course in econonomics understands that -- in fact, almost all economists understand that (nearly all the ones who originally supported the Bush tax cuts have since backed off). Most economists feel the same way about the flat tax -- it doesn't really help the economy at all. The propaganda sounds good, but it's really propaganda.
The truth about the tax debate is that, from an apolitical standpoint anyway, the flat tax doesn't have any pros -- but neither does the progressive tax. It's all philosophy: where do you want the tax burden? Should the top 2% of wage earners pay more than 2% of all taxes? Is it important for the rich to contribute a greater percentage of their income than the poor?
I would be happy to answer this question in much more detail, with a run-down of the impact, on all economic classes of people, of each of the tax schemes (please respond to this post with your e-mail if you so desire). However, a good essay on it (not be me, but found through google) can be found here: http://www.wordwiz72.com/flattax.html
I will add one last thing. The progressive tax is often mislabled, because only the "aggregate" percentage -- it is important to remember that, under today's progressive tax, somebody earning 200,000 pays the same percentage of the first 25,000 of their income as somebody earning only 25,000 -- it's only higher amount of income that is taxed at a higher percentage.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.