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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
Copyright law is in the US Constitution, but the ridiculous stuff is in the law (passed by Congress) and the regulations (enacted by 'mere' regulators.) You don't need a constitutional amendment, you need intelligent government. ... sorry ... worldwide shortage of that.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
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.
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.
They? Who is this mysterious they? Think about what you're saying. You're thinking of some specific people who you feel have abused copyright and proposing a change in the system to punish them. However, your solution would quickly screw over anyone who creates unique material and doesn't get it immediately to market. The result would likely be that the large conglomerates which you're targetting would be the only way an author, an artist, a poet, or a composer could hope to do make a living. Everyone would need a massive advertising splurge to push interest for a month, create the newest fad, and sell all that's possible in the miniscule window of two years.
And that's ignoring the fact that the GPL exists only under the auspices of copyright. You'd destroy that too. Such a proposal as you've made is completely short-sighted.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
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.
That original law was perfectly adequate to encourage authors and artists to keep creating. It was always done for the benefit of society as a whole, not a few greedy profiteers. It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed. There is similar language in the laws of many other countries. Copyright extentions have totally ruined the purpose of copyright to the point that just undoing them may not fix it any more. Perhaps copyright should simply be abolished. Yes, that would take an amendment, but overturning extentions would only take simple legislation. Too bad the greedy profiteers who oppose it own congress. We need to vote the bums out!
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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
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