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Jonathan Zittrain On The Spiderweb of Copyright Law
Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, takes an unusual approach to critiquing copyright in this Legal Affairs article. He explains with an analogy to the bizarre patchwork of United States tax codes a reason that (in the words of one of Zittrain's colleagues) "all the cyberprofs hate copyright." It goes beyond simple indignation that current copyright laws often grant seemingly unfair monopoly powers, and into the tangled minutia of the laws themselves.
What does the government expect? Copyright laws have not been properly developed and then updated independently of the interests of those with influence (read: money) but have instead been accumulated over time by gradual accretion. Is it really any surprise then that they parallel other equally confusing works such as James Joyce's Ulysses, developed in an identical way. Copyright law started out as making some sense for the purpose of protecting an artist's rights while allowing public domain material to say public domain. Now they continuously tinker with it. Rich organisations constantly press for nonsensical and exact new stipulations, and because people try to exploit every loophole at every opportunity because of this they have to introduce even more arbitrary limits:
What bullshit! The thing that makes this even worse is that this isn't unusual: it's just a microcosm of law these days: a series of idiotic and numerically precise restrictions with no justification suffering from excessive detail with every little fucking detail having to be dictated due to the foolhardy allowance given for defence lawyers in exploiting any undefined part of each law.
Bash script for FP whores
Remember, copyright law is given in the constitution. So much like slavery (a similarly bad system), a constitutional amendment will have to occur to rid of us this scourge.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
There are too many wealthy vested interests in copyright law that change at this stage is nearly impossible. The interconnectedness of laws and elections and corporations make the changing of the law to include more logic and coherancy is impossible.
The lawyers don't want change even though they see the problems everyday since it will keep more cases out of court and decrease their job opportunities.
The monied corps don't want to change them because the ambiguity helps their cases as they can just throw money at lawyers and the courts in order to win their cases.
The politicians don't want to change them because they are paid well for opposing such changes.
Therefore, the only people who want them changed are people like you and me... The ones who are informed and see the problem. The only thing is that we are a small minority of the voting public.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Credit for ideas, yes. Laws that are microscopic in detail and miss the actual target are hated.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
How to fix it? Lots of desire..little ideas...
Here's one.
Copyright is absolute (except for fair use) for a period of 2 years. After that, non-commercial use/sharing is allowed. When the copyright holder neglects the copyright, the whole thing goes to public domain.
That is a very good balance between the rights of the copyright holder and the public for the digital era. Maybe it's a too much in favour of the public, but frankly, they've made their bed.
You have 4 ways to protect essentially the same thing.
Copyright
Trademark
Patent
Trade Secret
The rules governing them overlap, contradict and in the case of patent are usually poorly applied(prior art).
Toss in 200 years of technological progress that have reduced difficult or impossible tasks to completely trivial tasks. (Publishing books, reproducing music, etc)
Add in the fact that the laws were originally designed to deal with works that were matters of entertainment or education now deal with pedestrian business tools. (Theres not many businesses that will stop because a copyrighted book is unavailable. Theres quite a few that will stop if the copy protection on their software goes bezerk).
My point is it took a Harvard Law prof. to figure out the system is broke ? The only people its not broke for are the I.P. lawyers and for them its a license to extort money.
Plagiarism is copying work from others and publishing it als your own (i.e. pretend it is entirely your own work). It is like renaming a metallica mp3 as Sardonis\'_Hefty_Metal_Band-Roll_Now.mp3 (or whatever) and pretending I wrote the music/text and did the performance, recording, mixing, etc.
Copyright infringers copy a work without permission, but usually give lots of credit. Someone sharing mp3's from metallica is usually quite upfront about the fact that they are made by metallica.
Some (maybe all) people have to pay a small fee every time the get their cable bill which claims to be a 'copyright infringement' fee. The idea here is that some people will copy/record what they watch and therefore the producers of that material must be paid for this infringement. So this assumes that everyone that has cable is breaking the law and so they must pay. So does this mean that if I'm already guilty of the crime I might as well do it, what about innocence before guilt? Does this seam backwards to anyone else?
-Tim Louden
Good question I had wondered, so I looked.
t ml #archiving
... the use does not "materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied."
From their site.
http://www.turnitin.com/static/legal_document.h
Commercial use of a work may still be "fair use" under U.S. Copyright Law
That superficially solid, however by using it to detect plagurism decreases the marketability of the work.
One of the stated purposeses of turnitin.com is to destroy the business of "paper mills" or "digital paper mills". As such these actions likely do decrease the marketability of the work either directly or indirectly.
Plagarism at school is NOT a crime AFAIK.
Copyright infringement IS a crime. Copying works to impair the marketability of the work by the copyright holder is most certainly illegal, and morally wrong.
Oh, really? Well, you're an infringer. You see, you've made a copy of the slashdot article and probably of the main article, too. You didn't get the explicit permission of the copyright holder, either. And maybe you've covered your dirty little crime by clearing your browser's cache, but the fact remains: To have read the article at all, you had to willfully cause to be created a copy of that article.
Ludicrous? Sure. Implicit in the whole idea of how the Net and the Web work? Certainly. In contradiction of "traditional" copyright? Without a doubt.
And before you unload on me, consider that (a) Congress had to add language providing for "emphemeral" copies and (b) the Copyright Cartel fought tooth-and-nail to stop such language from being added.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
We got into this situation by copyright holders taking the rights they wanted. I fear the only way out is by taking them back.
I propose an amendment to the constitution that grants copy rights for 8 years. Holders will be allowed all their current freedoms (including the right to sue the entire U.S.) but these rights will only last 8 years.
There will be no grandfather clause. All copyrights prior to 1995 will expire immediately.
There wlil be no negotiation either. Media companies have demonstrated their unwillingness to play fair; and artist have demonstrated their preference for companies that don't play fair.
[Identity withheld for obvious reasons.]
The kneejerk reaction, however, ignores the fact that copyright law has evolved because of specific problems and exists in its current form because that is what producers believe they require to turn a profit.
Zittrain touches on this patchwork evolution of copyright with a comarison to tax law:
The original provisions for copyright law have been frequently quoted, because back when they were written they were deemed sufficient to get people to produce content. However, each time the producers (at first authors/composers and later corporations) felt they got screwed they lobbied for an extension.
Examples of this problem / solution approach to law explain many of the changes. For instance, authors in the 1800s frequently were destitute in their later years because their works went out of copyright. Nothing like Sir Walter Scott as your poster boy to get sympathy.
And what about those geniuses who die young before their works become popular (e.g. Stephen Crane). Their heirs were *really* pleased. Can anyone say life plus 50?
Skip to a modern example from the article: look at the rediculous 55 inch TV rule. That's the result of bars competing with cinemaplexes without having to pay royalties for what they showed on huge screens. The resulting (stupid) rule gives a maximum size for a TV screen that does not qualify as competiting with the movies.
Bear in mind each badly written novel generally takes at least a year to write and then several months for a team of people to edit, and each dirivitive pop CD takes about 6 months to write plus several months for a team of people to produce, and we all know about the effort put into each lousy movie. People (and corporations) don't want to see that effort go down the drain, and with profit margins being low in the various content creation industry, they'll fight like dogs for even more draconian rules unless they can be convinced relaxing the rules will help them.
The publishing ogliarchy exists, ironically enough, because people don't like to waste their time listening to garbage. The industry offers people certain (minimal) guarantees, so most people listen to them. That, not money, is what gives them their clout. If we rewrote the law, lawmakers would listen to them out of the because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Thus, without addressing producer's concerns, we'd have to write *more* draconian laws
I'd say salvation would come from addressing these concerns more then viva la revolucion style burning of the old laws. For instance, listening to my brother's downloaded music has pushed me towards buying CDs I wouldn't otherwise have known about. That is something content producers need to know before we get rational copyright law: Sharing can help them.
Of course, since I'm writting this on a Mac, I have to add that salvation will come from the Apple Music store, just to gloat.
IANAL, just an english major with an emphasis in publishing.
Zittrain proves to be yet another intelligent person who can't see past the "we must have copyright or there will be no creativity" fallacy. It's really a shame. Yes, even the founding fathers fucked up on that one, although they at least limited it to 14+14 years, which was acceptable. Had they really had foresight, they would have stuck "Congress shall make no law establishing a monopoly - temporary or permanent - on any creation, artistic or technical" in the First Amendment. Yes, no patents, no copyrights. People will still get off their asses and make stuff. We did it before the advent of intellectual "property" monopolies and we'd still do it once those monopolies are abolished. Bottom line: get rid of copyright (yes, all of it, erase Title 17) and people will still paint pictures, record music, make movies, books, television shows, and software. In fact, since the size of the public domain will increase a million-fold overnight, there will be a lot more to use in order to create such things. And jack valenti should be left asking "do you want fries with that?"
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
American Lawyers tell you with a straight face that a corporation is a person, and that a song or movie made while in the employ of a corporation was a "work for hire" and is therefore the creation of the corporation. Corporations can and do outlive any natural human. So even a lifetime copyight wouldn't work.
This way Americans might feel the copyright system is more fair than many obviously feel it is now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."