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Statistical Analysis of Copyright Registrations
linuxizer writes "I've been poking around in Penn's Library for most of my Freshman year, looking up copyright statistics. What I found is basically what many suspected all along: extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline. Also included are some interesting observations about the RIAA's data. The numerous graphics should be well-enough explained that you don't need to go to the data files, but they are included if needed."
34% of statistics are false
(see header)
By $DEITY man! Get out, get drunk, get laid! There'll be plenty of time to poke around libraries when you're 40!
There's something wrong with you if most of your freshman year of college is spent looking up copyright statistics.
"I've been poking around in Penn's Library"
I thought the only one who did that was Teller.
Thank you, I'll be here until I get booed off stage.
extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation but how do you measure innovation? you can't just say that so many more CD's were sold or so many more compositions were written. The statistics are there but I believe that they don't prove the hypothesis.
you heard me.
Site contains multiple popups and spyware.
Fascinating.
I've always thought that copyrights inhibited innovation. Although, OpenSource licenses seem to help it along while still guarenteeing many of the same rights.
Punk Radio Cast has a funny copyright notice and so does CrimethInc.TK...
I clicked on the link and there were 5 popups plus a Gator install! What kind of a sadistic freak are you?
(yes, I know, don't use IE, etc. work computer, don't have much of a choice)
And everybody is surprised about this because...?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This place is going even farther into the toilet - something I didn't think was possible.
this is what i get for RTFA..
Congratualtions on directing us to one of the most ugly, popup ridden site it has ever been my displeasure to visit.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The numerous graphics should be well-enough explained that you don't need to go to the data files, but they are included if needed.
Would this be the graphics as embodied in yet another classmates.com ad ?
Michael did you even try clicking on the link?
Well you have to also analyze the quality of the those extensions. A well thought out extension to the copyright terms could certainly have a positive effect on innovation, but sadly the viewpoint of the bodies making those extensions is only to protect. Little thought is given as to how it could be used to effect innovation positively.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Isn't that about the time that the US copyright law changed so that you no longer had to register to claim copyright? I thught it was some time around the late 80's.
I must be working too hard. I thought the first line read I've been poking around Penis library. Must....have....more...caffeine....
You actually knew where the library was BEFORE your 5th year?!?!
"I found is basically what many suspected all along: extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation."
Innovation isn't always completely tied to copyright terms. Take the GNU/BSD licenses (copyright terms) of the recent decade. They're successfull and at least a part of their success comes from people being not satisfied with other copyright terms.
Indirect the innovation comes from the strengthening of other copyright terms, but you cant say it doesn't have any effect. It does, people are searching for other ways in order to not infringe other stupid copyrights (MS EULA).
Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
My understanding is that registration isn't required in order for your work to be copyrighted, and hasn't been required since at least 1976. Everything I read on this give some line about how registering a copyright makes your court case easier if you have so sue someone over infringement, but I wonder how many published works are registered.
I would venture to guess that most mainstream works are.
Maybe you should switch to Mozilla. I've been happily-popup-free for quite a while now.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Made curious by the continual claims of politicians and industry executives that stronger copyright leads to more innovation, I went to the library early Freshman year to see if there was any corroberating research. I was unable to find any, so I went to a historical index of statistics. However, that only had data until 1970, so I extracted the more recent data from the annual Statistical Abstract(s) of the United States.
.99 .
The trends are fascinating, especially in a field where a surprising amount of innumeracy and overinterpretation appears from people who should know better. For instance:
"We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free," a BPI spokeswoman said.
They are, of course, absolutely correct. But they leave it up to the reader to infer that those respondents are displacing purchases with free music. In effect, however, what is happening is price discrimination. Those who are willing to tolerate lower-quality music are paying less (nothing) for it. Those who are not pay more. Society gains, the industry loses--and then only assuming recent studies showing that downloads serve as a form of music sampling, a free preview for users that later buy music, are incorrect.
Now, on to the data. Some of this pertains directly to copyright, others directly to the RIAA.
Most interesting to me was one trend that my statistics professor, Professor Wyner, pointed out. From the early 1950's until 1991, copyright registrations rise exponentially. In fact, a simple quadratic fit shows an Rsquare of over
That a four-decade trend of such strength could reverse itself in a single year so dramatically--and without an apparent cause--is incredible. The fact that it happens across all categories of copyright suggests the effect is perhaps due to a change in the way the Copyright Office records entries. However, given that music registrations correlate well with overall registrations, it would have to have been a policy change for all copyright entries. The sheer precipitousness of the plummet belies many otherwise viable explanations. However, in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-307, making renewal automatic for works from 1964-1977. Depending on whether the Copyright Office was including renewals in its statistics, 1991 could be a break in analyzability for the data. Furthermore, if they did, indeed, include renewals, trends will be blurred and obfuscated by the lagging renewal registrations.
The single-category music registrations show the same plunge.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase. This trend is not nearly as strong as the former, and is only based on a decade of data provided by the RIAA. Possible explanations for this trend include that CDs are a luxury item--unlikely, I should think--or that the economy's rise during this period (1990-2000) lead to an increase in spending.
And, in fact, it did. A classical Demand Curve. Not such a great mystery after all, as it turns out.
Since we are starting to analyze statistics provided by the RIAA at this point, I should mention that they have a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on. Consequently, analyzing becomes much more difficult and leads to kludges such as the 2002 CDs shipped data extrapolated from news of an 8.8% decline from previous years. If anyone would provide me with a complete set of Nielson SoundScan statistics this project would be much easier. If anyone disputes my figures please provide me with a better set. Many of these numbers took hours to find, here from one source, there from another. Fortunately, most of the time there was some overlap in data provided, so I was able to see that the numbers were directly comparable.
That said, the numbers are interesting. The RIAA has been shipping fewer CDs in the last few years, by all accounts. The most recent (and most contested) numbers come from SoundScan
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
May be we could have less spyware pop ups!
Friendly
Although statistics might have their place somewhere I've yet to find that place. Say you take a poll asking how many times a week a person has sex and 100% say never or less than once a month. You release these findings and give it a +/- of 3% as usual in these cases. You entitle your findings "America's deep, dark secret about rarely having sex".
Let's cut to the chase. The grouped you polled was a convent full of nuns...ok bad pun but you get the gist of what I'm saying...100% of polls are misleading and only serve the purpose or ideology of the entities invloved. If you don't believe me I suggest you research the subject yourself because in the latest poll I tracked showed this to be true in 99% of the cases give or take +/- 3%.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
So the premise remains valid. The conclusion is pretty clear as well, as seen from the decades following the passage of the 1909 and 1976 laws: the drastic expansions of copyright had little to do with increasing innovation in this country.
Like the study says, this is good grounds to stop extending copyrights as extending them would only serve to give incentive to innovate through prolonging the period of returns on said innovation. If this becomes widely accepted then it's just a matter of arguing copy rights are too long, (or too short?) as to provide enough incentive to innovate.
Note that the conclusions (and in the entire study) says nothing about copy right extensions slowing innovation.
I really would like to see some analysis on the negative effects (if at all) of copyright extensions on innovation.
Innovation is impossible to quantify. Using the number of copyright registrations as the measure of innovation is ignoring much, mostly innovation in the public domain. There's nothing wrong with puting together these statistics for analysis, but jumping to any conclusion about quantity of innovation is impossible. It's simply impossible to factually state whether innovation increased or decreased during any period of time. It's purely judgemental.
Developers: We can use your help.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The current definition of copyrights and patents are really obsolete for a world in which technology can be duplicated overnight and any idea out there is always some derivation of an earlier technology. They are used for nothing other than lawsuits these days and need to be overhauled for a better system.
Patents and copyrights alike should be granted only to original ideas which are in product form. If the idea is too vague, such as to cause problems, it shouldn't be granted. And any patents that are granted should only extend for one year after the filing of the patent; so if, for example, the patent isn't granted until a year after it was filed, it will already be expired and will prevent such idiocy as is happening between Walmart and Netflix, and SCO and IBM.
The USPTO is getting grant-happy and granting patents to anybody who asks for one. This is not right and needs to be stopped. Before long, we won't be able to say a word without having to check if someone hasn't trademarked it for their own use.
KappaStone
"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-Disareli
The editors use Mozilla or some browser with a pop-up blocker so they didn't even notice the site did have pop-ups (EVEN THOUGH MOZILLA HAS AN ICON ON THE STATUS BAR TELLING YOU ABOUT POP-UPS!). The submitter probably thought they would use a popup blocker so they wouldn't even notice the popups and post it and the submitter was right.
Prior to copyright extension private preservationists undertook the job of saving many, many obscure films that had no economic value to the former copyright holder, yet to have a cultural and historical place in the history of cinema. Now these films are totally off limits. Major studios have no interest in preserving obscure silent movies from the 1920s, yet the copyright extension has stopped private efforts to fill the gap.
The copyright extension removes all financial impetus for private individuals to undertake film preservation. Previously, companies such as Grapevine Video would undertake the preservation and recoup expenses by selling video tranfers to libraries and collectors. Maybe 200 or 300 sales at most. Now Grapevine Video is being forced out of business because they can no longer preserve and sell obscure films from our past.
The studios who own the copyrights are not going to fund preservation of films for which they can sell only a hundred or two videos. This is where private enterprise filled the gap through the meager financial incentive that public domain material offered. Now that incentive has completely gone, and most small companies involved in film preservation are now going out of business.
This may be way off topic, but it's a fun read.
:)
It beats the heck out of many + moderated posts...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
to bad no one has been keeping track of all the information in the last decade....conspericy?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
... so we don't have to view the annoying popups!
the guys homepage is here: http://linuxizer.virtualave.net/
fire off an angry email to the fucker here: arib@sas.upenn.edu
I set out to research x and conclude y. Surprise! I concluded y!
You and the companies that do funded research for MS, IBM, and whoever are in the same boat.
What are the statistics on the number of pop-up ad windows and attempted spyware installs on sites dedicated to Statistics?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A similar report concluded that 76% of all statists are made up.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
According to an obsolete brief, on 1993-02-16, the Copyright Reform Act of 1993 was introduced in both houses of the US Congress. If the bill passes [I assume it did?], [it will] remove the requirement for registration prior to bringing suit, and would remove the restrictions on statutory damages that are described above.
Looks like a reason why registrations would trail off...
Kent: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.
-- Effective interview responses, "Homer the Vigilante"
NMG
switch to OPERA instead, you insensitive clod! and version 7.2beta1 is out! check it out in at my.opera.com/forums
Renewal registration becaome optional on June 26th, 1992. Works copyrighted between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977, automatically renewed even if registration not made.
Playing devil's advocate, if copyright extensions have no effect, then the Bad Guys can say,
"Let's extend copyrights forever, so that people can never gain from other people's ideas. This is legitimate, since extending doesn't affect the number of copyright registrations... innovation is not hindered by copyright extensions!"
We all need to ask ourselves how much is the public domain worth anyway?
The answer is A LOT. Our artists and culture are suffering.
-- Have you read 1984?
Since 1997, clicking this link is a Jail-able offense in the US.
Now you got me started.
The newest scourge of the computer world is spyware. Spam is bad, but it's generally isolated to your inbox.
Spyware, crapware, whatever (read: Gator, Xupiter, Save4whatever, etc.) suck the life out of computers.
Spyware is the secret plague. Most people don't realize they have it, but most people do have it. It slowly sucks the life out of their machines. It pops up porn ads. It changes browser address entries. It sucks bandwidth and CPU.
Of course, the scum who create this spyware should be doomed to a life of cleaning up messes using SpyBot and AdAware.
But MS, and the IE project, should receive some of the blame, since they've done little or nothing to prevent ignorant (and I use that term politely) users from getting this stuff installed on their machines.
How many security problems have existed that take advantage of IE/ActiveX weaknesses?
Anyway, I just get personally sick of having everyone I know come to me with a story like, "I've got a new P4 computer, but it's really slow, and I get porn popups all the time, and sometimes when I'm entering a web address, my browser changes it to www.myfookingcasino.com".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I believe that before 1991 (or 1992) works had to be explicity declared and registered as copyrighted to get protection. Changes in law (or rulings, I can't remember which), made all created worked copyrighted by default so that copyright registration was no longer required.
note: this is all dredged up from memory and may be grossly inaccurate.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
All jokes about the wasting of his freshman year, and the innumerable popups (Long Live Mozilla!) aside, this was a rather interesting article.
I'd like to have seen the copyright numbers graphed next to some population numbers to see how they compare. Do the number of copyrights registered in the US correlate with the number of people in the US?
Also, the number of copyrights seems to follow a fairly linear trend until 1950, and then it suddenly becomes quadratic until 1991. Why? Was there some huge up-swing in population growth at that point, or something? (The baby-boomers wouldn't have started registering copyrighted works until much later, would they?) Did everyone suddenly discover acid and become that much more creative?
Ian
Michael did you even try clicking on the link?...
dude, are you kidding me? Of course he/all-the-rest didn't/can't/won't/don't click the links. 'the hell kind of "editing" would that be? Too status-quo yo.
Look at China.
Their most talented filmmaker cannot generate enough funds/investment to make his next movie because every release is bootlegged and for sale on the street hours after its first showing.
Yes, I know it fits in great with the Slashdot party line, but did anyone actually *read* this article and look at the graphs he presents ?
.99 ??The graph only fits in part of the graph. I can't even believe whoever was advising this dufus would suggest he TRY to fit a quadratic, since the graph he shows is clearly not suitable for a quadratic.
In one graph, he attempts to show a dramatic "reversal" in the number of copyright registrations by year, fitting a quadratic. Did anyone LOOK at the quadratic he fit ? If so, how could any such person not question his claim of an R-squared >
As for the "reversal" he sees in the last few years, it is questionable what his extrapolation from 4 decades and "finding" a subsequent dip in registrations really means - he certainly doesn't present the statistics to convince ME there's a dip, and I bet if you dropped the points from around 88-91 you'd get just as good a fit to the 1950-2003 data. That is, he has some sort of dubious fit, and he's concluding there's something deep and meaningful about the dislocation of the last 10 or so points, without question whether maybe 4 or so points that mark the supposed reversal are really themselves what is dislocated.
Then there's the myriad graphs entitled "Bivariate fit of X" and "Bivariate fit of Y", in many cases he just connected the dots. Yes, "bivariate fit" adds an air of authenticity, to everyone that is except someone who knows the slightest bit of statistics.
The whole "article" is covered with "just-so" stories, anecdotes, and supposition about what might or might not be. Where's the rigorous statistical analysis ? You can't make a statistical argument by showing graphs.
I just don't trust statistical arguments made by a guy who doesn't seem like he knows what he's talking about.
People who choose user names such as "linuxizer" don't generally have much chance of getting laid anyway. The best we can hope for is getting him drunk while he plays everquest with 14 year olds pretending to be girls.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Way to go SLT, please keep your trolls clever from now on. Thank you.
Most interesting to me was one trend that my statistics professor, Professor Wyner, pointed out. From the early 1950's until 1991, copyright registrations rise exponentially. In fact, a simple quadratic fit shows an Rsquare of over .99 .
a*exp(b*x)!=a*x^2+b*x+c
RIAA speaks on $$ terms, only.
extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline.
Does that precipitous decline correlate with copyright extensions. Were you being sarcastic when you said extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. What am I missing here?
his metric is the number registrations for copyright in a given year. This is because there isn't an easy quatifiable way to measure innovation. I think it's a pretty good metric actually.
;)
from the article you didn't read:
And now for the main question of this document: does increasing the length or protective powers of copyright has any effect on innovation as measured through the number of registrations? The choice of metric is unfortunate because it says nothing about the quality of those works produced, as well as being affected by changes in the way such things are registered. However, given that hundreds of thousands of works are produced each year, one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality. So the premise remains valid. The conclusion is pretty clear as well, as seen from the decades following the passage of the 1909 and 1976 laws: the drastic expansions of copyright had little to do with increasing innovation in this country. As such, in future years they may well be ruled unconstitutional, Eldred v. Ashcroft notwithstanding.
Part of what is said that the periods around the expansion showed little difference from the overall trend, either better or worse.
Of course, the problem with this is the 'what' question. Simple population expansion led to more papers/magazines/movies/books over the years, so the quantity increase really doesn't mean much on its own (though comparing it to population/economic indexes might be interesting). Even baseball games our copyrightted nowadays. Copyright extensions have two effects: extend the owners ability to use the material, and prevent others from using it. Neither of these conditions are measured by this data.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
better switch to OPERA!
...of course, I'm using Mozilla Firebird as my broswer however. :-)
I think the sharp decline in music compositions is more commonly refered to as "The Death of Hair Bands."
So the author wanted to find out why copyright registrations declined after 1991? Well, there was a big depression shortly after that time. The article's author was pointing out how the Great Depression and the different major wars of the last century negatively affected copyright registrations, so it makes sense. I know he/she was probably 8-10 yrs. old in the early 90's so maybe he/she never really grasped how bad times were. And look! registrations start rebounding around '95-96 when IT started taking off.
"Twas ever thus."
-Mr. Natural
You call that a mighty log?1!?
I've seen bigger pin cushions.
There are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics --- Mark Twain
Even a 10-year copyright term would be sufficient to counter the problems you are pointing to.
Since the page in question doesn't really come to a tidy conclusion, this is what I extracted from his "pretty data":
* Around 1991, the overall number of copyright registrations plummeted compared to what the data would predict.
* The number of musical compositions experienced a similar plunge, implying that fewer musical compositions led to fewer copyright registrations.
* During those years, the RIAA continued to ship certain CDs in proportion to their price, in keeping with the law of supply and demand.
* Probable conclusion: The RIAA's current financial woes are due to nothing more than an abrupt reduction in the number of recordings released.
Of course, IANAS. Did I miss anything?
The author seems to make a correlation between the number of copyright registrations and the number of musical compositions. I don't believe that a true 1:1 comparison can be made between them.
It's been my experience (as a songwriter and producer) that a single work can be covered by a number of copyrights. For example, I would regularly compile a tape of unpublished recordings, entitle it "Compositions, 19xx to 19xx", and send it in with a Form PA and $20. Once I'd published a recording of a song, I'd copyright just that work. Also, the recording (tape, single, LP, or CD) would have its own copyright (under Form SR, which covers sound recordings specifically, that (P) sign that often accompanies ©). Additionally, lyrics could be copyrighted separately (under Form TX, for written works).
Sounds anal, but I had a lawyer who specialized in entertainment law suss it all out for me.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
This is a pun:
Man 1: I say, old chap, my dog has no nose.
Man 2: No nose? How does he smell?
Man 1: Terrible!
The pun, or the "play on words" here is the change in the definition of the word "smell". Man 2 is asking how can the dog smell anything iif it has no nose. Man 1 is using the word "smell" to mean the odor of the dog. This creates a momentary logical disconnect which creates the humor of teh joke (providing, of course, that you find the joke humorous).
Whatever humorous mechanism you were attempting to emplioy was not a "pun".
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
There are popups and a Gator install?
-- Have you read 1984?
Since 1997, clicking this link is a Jail-able offense in the US.
Hi, I was wondering how come clicking the link is a jailable offence?
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
A friend of mine and I had this discussion about inventions and patents and copyrights a while ago, and we came to the shocking conclusion that there has been no innovation in the past 50 years except for the Internet. (And since this conversation was probably in 1995, it wasn't even that big then)
Now we defined our innnovation rather strictly, saying that it had to be both important and not simply an add on to a previous invention. So, for example, the invention of the jet (which was still before 1950) wouldn't count because it was simply a modification on the plane. Try and think of any real technological advances in the past 50 years under this description and you'll either find that most innovations are a) a fad and not important, or b) just an add on to someone elses work.
I don't want to quivel too much, but exponential and quadratic are two entirely different things. It looks like a great fit to a quadratic curve over that range, but this is not nearly as steep as an exponential curve would be.
To understand recursion,
you must first understand recursion.
nice plots, but correlation is *not* causation, period. causation can only be established by a controlled experiment.
my other lambda is a Y
Not to defend the troll, but he's right-- popups notwithstanding, the parent post could have reposted the article as an AC.
When your post consists of nothing more than a repost of the article, proper etiquette is to post as an AC. Otherwise, you're earning karma despite having done nothing more than cut and paste. With a couple of (+5, Informative) scores earned from just cutting and pasting, the poster gets a karma bonus without ever having contributed anything meaningful to the discussion, which then turns into a Sword +1 of Trolling.
First of all, I don't know that the number of registrations has much to do with innovation. As we see in the music industry, more CDs does not necessarily mean better. It only takes one boy band to change the industry, and 15 boy band clones to boost the registration numbers.
Second, the relationship between innovation and copyright has to do with the larger question of public domain. I think we need a measure of the intellectual value of material in the public domain and, more particularly, the intellectual material that is copyrighted. Innovation is based on prior art, so its critical that as much old stuff is available for people to create new stuff. For example, being able to understand the Trinitron display could be key to an innovation in CRT displays.
While I think this was an admirable effort to understand the effects of copyright extension, I don't think his premise connecting registrations to innovation has much merit.
To avoid being a total troll, I think it admirable that he would spend so much time trying to shed some light on an ambiguous and crucial topic. May I suggest a sophomore study into the proportion of valuable intellectual property that is increasingly locked away by the private sector.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Dude, please stop hosting on a site that deluges you with this many popups and that goddamn Gator installer. I swear IF that thing gets rammed down my throat again. I can't believe I used to be working on a competing product for that piece of crap.
... for ghod's sake get it right!
""Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
1991 was around the time Berne took effect. Registration was no longer necessary. Of course they dropped off.
I didn't see a damn thing. Firebird is a great browser by the way.
And even if I did see a Gator install, why would I care? It won't work on my machine which is running Linux.
Slashdot... pffft, what a bunch of hypocrits. Always rooting for free OS's like Linux but nobody uses it. Same with the web browser you IE lamers.
Yeah, ya, ya. Lawyers are not always good with math, but I expect better logic from you.
This study would be much more powerful it it were NORMALIZED FOR POPULATION, which also spurts in times of economic prosperity. It might make the other trends look smaller, but the 1992 turn around of registrations would look much bigger as the population has continued to grow. Really, what I expect to see is a decline in "innovation" per population with the rise of copyright power and big publisher lock in. All of us experience daily as media consolidation, the death of radio free, the death of independent movie theaters and the cumulative lack of diversity in popular culture perverse in an era of cheap communications. Kudos for all the hard work, I hope this helps.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Normalize for population. =:) We have a rising copyright registration rate. Does it keep up per capita? If not, what does that tell us about laws that are designed specifically to increase copyright restistration, if not promote art itself?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Err, so? The statistical trends are still valid. ie, assuming a constant factor of, say, three copyrights per one musical work, the two data sets will still display a correlation. Basically, what you're describing should disappear in the analysis.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase.
Did he adjust for inflation? I assume not. I don't know whether that would affect the outcome because he didn't show that data, only data derived from that data.
RIAA...has a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on...
The author knows this...how? Or the author has a strong gut feeling this way? Tendency?
If anyone disputes my figures, please give me a better set.
Uh, sorry, that's not the way science works. You're the claimant.
Constitution proscribes
Picking nits here, but proscribe means to forbid. Everybody misuses this word.
However, given that hundreds of thousands of works are produced each year, one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality. So the premise remains valid.
Here is the fatal flaw of it all: with less copyright protection, we would tend to less a lesser diminution of lower-expense copyrights (music in particular). If works are being produced irrespective of a minimal investment, copyright protection won't generally affect them, and indeed copyright may be an afterthought. So the quality of the patents is an overwhelmingly important question; if protection changes the character of the innovation, then the actual amount of it is irrelevant.
What it will affect is the willingness of creators to spend money to develop an article, since reduced copyright protection diminishes their ability to recapture those funds later. Perhaps a more pertinent question would be the correlation between R&D funds and copyright protection. That would seem to be an even more hellish proposition in getting the data.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Mistake geometric for exponential? Oh well, most hyperbole tends to infinite error. Judging the rest of the work by this error would be a non-sequitur. Try not to do that, OK? If you do, I'll sick my power functions on you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
how the fork did he claim an r^2 of 0.99 or something? That other half of the parabola looked a bit off of that. Seriously, use an exponential fit, any decent software can do it.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Indeed, a lot of people would say that requiring copyright holders to get off their asses and innovate anew every 10 years rather than squat on the nest egg of their prior creations is a good thing. I'm certainly proud of some of the things I wrote and created when I was 20, but I'd hate to justify my lifetime by peddling them no matter how great they were.
Quote: "However, given that hundreds of thousands of works are produced each year, one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality"
Though I must applaud the author's statistical work, sentences like this (though admittedly not the thrust of the publication) seem a little too coldly rational to be of comfort.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
If he had any sofware choice, he'd be running Mozilla. If you are going to get busted for adding software to your computer, a toolbar is just as big a bust as anything else. The poor devil had better get back to work before his corporate task masters notice and revoke his "internet" privs altogether.
Not having to look at M$ crap is about the only good thing about being fired. That and the 15% bonus my former peers are going to get dividing my former salary. I hope my next employer has a clue. Working for idiots sucked.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't see any. Oh wait, I'm using Mozilla 1.4...I only get the little popup icon down on the status bar asking me if I want to see the site's popups. ;)
I quote from the article:
What, is this guy crazy? Of course CDs are luxury items! When I was flush with my phat geek paycheck, I was buying CDs like there was no tomorrow. When I got laid off last year, what do you think one of the first things I stopped buying was? CDs, of course! I can live without the latest White Stripes CD, I can't live without making my mortgage payment and buying food.
Seriously, do you? Because that wasn't how you spell employ.
employ ( P ) Pronunciation Key (m-ploi)
tr.v. employed, employing, employs
To engage the services of; put to work: agreed to employ the job applicant.
To provide with gainful work: factories that employ thousands.
To put to use or service. See Synonyms at use.
To devote (time, for example) to an activity or purpose: employed several months in learning Swahili.
n.
The state of being employed: in the employ of the city.
Archaic. Occupation.
This is how to use employ and all the derivatives:
Man 1: I say, old chap, my dog is unemployed.
Man 2: No nose? How does he work if he isn't employed?
Man 1: Terrible, terrible, employer!
To spell employ, or employed go here Employ
Whatever word mechanism you were attempting to spell was not employ.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
google.com/ie
I went to Northeastern and it was so lame. I guess I partied hard enough in high school that college seemed stupid.
I didn't end up staying long and I have to say that part of the reason was that I felt like I was herded with a bunch of idiots who knew how to play school, whereas I was smart but didn't care for academia. All the 'go party! get laid!' was bullshit, it was easier to get drunk and have deviant sex when I was in high school, and all the girls at university seemed either really dirty or really bitchy. The parties had no class, the booze was always of the cheapest variety, and dorm life was mind-numbing.
I'd rather be stuck playing pong for eternity than go back to living at school.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Another possiblity for the increasing copyright registrations is that people will copyright anything these days. My cousin had an internship at the Library of Congress last week and he said that this one guy called in to check and make sure his CD was copyrighted. He was so happy he wanted to hear it over the phone to check it - it turned out to be....this guy...um...imitating barnyard animal sounds. Very strange stuff.
As a side note, the Library of Congress isn't as organized as you'd think when it comes to books and CD's. Apparently only about 1/3 of the copyrighted CD's are entered into their computer system, and the rest are just in huge unorganized stacks in the basement. The same goes for the books.
I belong to the ______ generation.
I retract my statement about the upward trend...I didn't fully read the article (slaps forehead). Oh well. It's a humorous anecdote nonetheless.
I belong to the ______ generation.
I clicked on the link and there were 5 popups plus a Gator install! What kind of a sadistic freak are you?
(yes, I know, don't use IE, etc. work computer, don't have much of a choice)
Extra/Options/Security/Disable Java Script
And, yes, you can leave it on for the Intranet Zone.
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
I'd like to see a term of 25 years or the life of the author, whichever comes last, or a straight 25 years for corporate copyrights.
OK, class, repeat after me: "Quadratic" is not an example of "exponential".
But, teacher, isn't a quadratic a curve with an exponent of two?
Yes, but that is not an exponential curve. It is a polynomial curve -- a curve wherein the function depends only on integer powers of the variable. So x^2, x^3, or x^15-x^7 are polynomial. An exponential curve is one wherein the variable appears in the exponent. Examples are e^x, (1/2)^(x/3), and so on.
I have to admit, fair or not, once I hit that mistake I stopped paying attention...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Walter Library at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, was a big old, unrenovated building with a huge "stacks" area in the back where many of the books were. These stacks were a series of floors of about 7' in height filled with bookshelves and small, out-of-the-way study areas.
The stacks weren't well-traveled and you could get yourself into some nooks and crannies where you could hang out and not see a soul for hours (or even days I'd wager).
Well, needless to say, it was trivial to bring booze into the stacks for a little post-study cocktail, and since the windows actually opened, even a few pulls from a pinch-hitter was pretty easily done as well. My girlfriend and I even discovered that even a quickie wasn't out of the question they were so abandoned.
So not only can you enjoy the library, you can enjoy some of college life's distractions *in* the library!
Sure there is - assume that copyrights per capita is roughly constant, and the population grows exponentially. Thus, any model chosen should be a combination of an exponential and *something.* And whatever model you choose should definitely be monatonic overall.
I think there is greater burden on justifying the two endpoints. To throw data before 1950 was arbitrary. Why not 1949? Why not 1951?
I'll tell you why - because 1949 was about when the quadratic most similar to the actual exponential growth had its minimum. Once that thing hit its turning point his ability to fit tanks.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Creative people can retire as well as anyone else, as long as they put money away for retirement.
As copyright terms become longer, innovation
becomes irrelevant as companies continue
to try and wring every last cent out of existing
copyright material.
Absolute statements are never true
Also, perhaps this is not true in your culture, but in many European and American cultures (even Japanese) partying and getting drunk with other people is a valuable tool for interpersonal networking. Although it seems childish and ineffective, you bond with the people you drink with, and thus when you're looking for a job and your old drinking buddy's company needs somene, you will have a good word put in for you. This is similar to the idea of family in Southeast Asia, wherein if your company is hiring, you will recommend your relative.
I will fight for my right to party!
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Or try Google's new toolbar for IE which has pop-up blocking.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Looks like you need to spend a little more time in the math section of the library.
See, that's even worse. This dork finally gets to poke around in Ms. Penn's "library," and he's thinking of statistics and the freaking RIAA. Unbelievable.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
" And any patents that are granted should only extend for one year after the filing of the patent; so if, for example, the patent isn't granted until a year after it was filed, it will already be expired and will prevent such idiocy as is happening between Walmart and Netflix, and SCO and IBM."
What about medical patents? How are we going to have any innovation when companies can't profit from their products because the patent has expired before the requred clinical trials?
-m
What, like Gator? If something does not work with Mozilla, I don't need it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm glas you guys like my sig
Index = price * volume * alchol_percent
But you get sick of drinking port wine pretty quickly.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The word "terms" when applied to copyright refers not to which exclusive rights go to the author but rather to how long those exclusive rights last. They have expanded from an average 32-year copyright term in the early 1960s (28+28, but few copyrights were valuable enough to be bookkept and renewed) to a 95+-year copyright term in the 2000s (renewal is automatic since 1992, affecting works in 1964 and later, and the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft recognized a power of Congress to enact an unlimited number of copyright term "harmonizations").
Will I retire or break 10K?
it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
How does any self-employed person retire? Why would an IRA or 401(k) be different for an author than for anybody else?
I'd like to see 14+14 years, the same copyright term provided by the Copyright Act of 1790. If it worked in 1803, I don't see what's wrong with it in 2003.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think there's a bit of general wisdom to be learned from this. Over the course of the past few years, the level of punishment for copyright infringement has increased - but this has had no apparent effect on the industry nor on people breaking the copyright. I would go so far as to suggest that once the punishment is unequivocably greater than the benefit of the crime it has reached its limit of deterrence. Beyond that, focus should be on enforcment. I believe that those who would commit a crime unconsciously compute how bad the potential punishment is by how liekly they are to meet that punishment. In the case of copyright infringment, most people conclude that The punishment is bad - in some cases disastrous - but that they are so unlikely to have to face that punishment that it doesn't matter.
nice work! thank you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Prior to 1989 it was necessary to register a work in the United States in order to gain copyright protection for the work. This was the case despite the fact that the US had been a signatory to the Berne Convention for some 100 years, and the Berne Convention stated that qualifying works should automatically gain copyright protection (if they satisfy the qualifying criteria - originality, ownership, etc). For some 100 years, the US did not amend its copyright law to comply with the Berne Convention - this was a bone of contention for copyright holders. Effectively, it favours the more economically mighty (i.e. the time/cost required for registration) rather than the individual or those with less resources.
In 1989 the US amended its copyright law so that registration was not necessary to gain copyright protection. However, in disputes before the court over copyright, registration holds very strong weight in determining originality of a work, so it is usually advised that works should continue to be registered for this purpose, though it is likely that over time this will not be important as in the rest of the world, registration is not required.
The above may be slightly off - but I have recently (in europe) taken a class on copyright law, and we were informed of this when looking at international aspects of copyright law.
Indeed, a lot of people would say that requiring copyright holders to get off their asses and innovate anew every 10 years.
With such a situation you might well find that very few copyrights were renewed at all.
I'm certainly proud of some of the things I wrote and created when I was 20, but I'd hate to justify my lifetime by peddling them no matter how great they were.
Just because you may think they are great does not mean that anyone else agrees or is prepared to ooffer you money for them.
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
What's to stop them taking out a pension, like everyone else. Anyway plenty of creative people have a "day job" as well as there being retired people who write books, music, programs, etc.
An idea is not a chair, despite many people's attempts to make it so. You can't steal an idea like you would a chair, if I take the chair then you're denied use of it. Ideas are more fundamental to humans than even food, or else we'd be little more than animals. They belong best to everyone.
The major motivation to someone write book it's not the money, unless the ones that write best sellers and live of writing those books.
...).
But for most of the scientifical books, the reason is because someone knows the subject very well.
And why do they know the subject very well? Because they had access to knowledge (books).
So, more access to books, more people evolve that subject and generate more knowledge. That's what copyright industry is trying do hide behind "more copyright (restrictons to access) more books".
Books are very expensive, specially if you live in a development country, earning 10 times less than an american, and have to pay sometimes twice the price of the book (shipping, resellers, no used books access,
If the copyright law was more relaxed, like less years of duration or allowed non-profit copying, i bet it would exist much more (knowlege and inovation) -> books in the world.
The current copyright law is a shame, someone take a year or two to write a book and (other one) and has copyright for it for 70 years or so.
An exponalial rise is (a lot) FASTER than a quadratic rise ! Example:
2^n for n=5 is 32768 2^n for n=16 is 65536
n^2 for n=15 is 225 n^2 for n=16 is 256