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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.
Time to scrap the heap of copyright laws and start over (why not begin with what the Constitution says, as a suggestion?). When laws are being created to prevent toddlers from accidentally becoming felons, simply because they want to listen to their teddy bear read them a story, you know things have gotten out of hand.
Look, here at /. we know all about the music (hello, RIAA!), movies (hello, MPAA!) and software (hello, UCITA!) examples. But here is an example that is just absurd. Fix the problem? Please, just gut the laws and start over.
Wait a minute, what am I saying?! Any laws rewritten from scratch nowadays would be far more draconian. Maybe this time they would put in provisions to haul the 3-year-olds off to prison...
Isn't academia obsessed with credit for ideas? When is the last time a paper was published anonymously? Ideas exist outside of time. This should work against both copyright/patent and academia's obsession with "plaigarism" and keeping track of credit.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Microsoft Windows's "Network Neighborhood" feature, for example, is simply a way to swap files. Almost every software application that capitalizes on this central functionality is therefore a Kinko's of sorts, and decreeing all search-and-copy software to be illegal is simply too sweeping a move for a court to make.
Now of course, I'm not suggesting that y'all start firing up windows, but I find this point really intriguing - filesharing using the SMB protocol over port 139 a'la redmond. What (c|w)ould the RIAA do about that ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
So your pretty much for enacting a tax that would give back to the movie record and software industry to compensate them for copyright infringement? This sounds ungly who gets to decide the value of the software does MS get a huge chunk because office 2005 costs $2005 a copy with Sony recods decide it's music is worth more etc etc etc. Sure you could give a fixed rate but that ruins the small expensive custom applications like say Oracle server that wont make it up in volume (assuming that the taxes get distributed by volume?) And wouldent monoply powers just play into this anyway with the recond industry cutting deals to host there realy fast servers on prem to scew the download results of top 20's garbage if they are so much faster more people will download them.
No sir I dont like it.
" Add some sort of "fee" to our taxes (maybe just on ISPs, more like on everyone) that allows us, as individuals, to use any copyrighted material we want, as long as we don't try to sell it, without robbing the owners of the copyright - cause we are paying them."
Unfortunately, though this would be th easiest of solutions to implement, it would never pass...
-ISP's and their users would complain that it's a "tax", and would fight it to the end.
-Artists with big followings (U2, Garth Brooks, Pink Floyd, etc etc) would complain that this method shortchanges them in revenues. Bands and record companies fight it to the end.
We're not going to get rid of copyright, and we're not going to get rid of DRM at this point either. Instead of splitting our energies and efforts, we should be focusing on getting two things done...
-Lobbying Congress with all of our might to have copyright terms reduced to a reasonable exemption. Either a set term, like 20 years, or the lifetime of the artists. No extensions beyond that.
-Pressuring record companies through a campaign of public relations and a music boycott to get an Apple Store-like solution up for all copyrighted music at reasonable rates, like 99 cents a song. And this pressure should not include copyright violations. That destroys any moral credibility we may have.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This raises an interesting question. turnitin claims to detect plagiarism in essays turned in by students. But those essays are then stored by turnitin in order to detect future plagiarism (of course since we can't track the use of the essay, I have wondered if turnitin isn't feeding the essays out to one of the essay sales sites). If the essay is copyright by the author, this seems to me to be out of the realm of fair use. Perhaps a few students should go after turnitin in the courts.
So let's try that again, shall we?
Credit isn't a form of control, it's merely a from of aknowledgement of what you have contributed to the public domain.
KFG
Best to have a good grade going in. Be ready to drop the course and avoid the instructor in the future.
OK, so I admit to being a bit of a subversive. But I've also noticed that the instructors most likely to use a service like this are the ones I have the least respect for. (And the ones who'd be most likely to give me a hard time for using a preposition at the end of a sentence. Something up with which they will not put.)
Conversely, corporatization of ideas are the element that copyright law has a problem with, (often precisely because those ideas are now controlled by third parties and not the artist--i.e., recording artists almost never 'own' their works, corporate researchers sometimes have to fight for ownership of ideas they had during their contracts, etc...).
The idea of copyright isn't about 'credit' for ideas, just money for ideas.
If you want to trade music freely,
trade free music, protected by a free
license.
That's all..
All you complaining about not being able to share
commercial documents, don't understand the value
of work and the rules of business.
NOW what you could do is to build campaign against
the buying of commercial art. With competiting free art.
This is the only reasonable path. The one adopted by the people of the free software.
You can adopt it too and design free art,
that can be freely shared.
Now stop whining and act: buy, or design!
--
You shall not sell my precious intellectual property. And I mean it.
Traditional copyright only had lawsuits seizing profits from infringers and giving them to authors. No profit, no infringement.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The original post was not intended as a Troll, unfortunately it seems to have become one.
IANAL but I have had considerable experience on both sides of the fence in this particular issue, its apparent that those replying either haven't had the same level of experience or are deliberately being deceptive.
Lets take the aboves example.
The target logo. This can be trademarked as a business mark, it can be copyrighted as a visual work, it can be registered as a design patent, if it were used to calibrate optical equipment it could be considered a trade secret. The same thing can be covered by any facet of "IP" law its all a matter how its first approached. A little introspection and you can see other possibilities. Rambus instead of just patenting its memory architecture could have tried to anticipate the likely layouts and copyrighted them as visual works. There is the tried and true scheme of designing unique connectors and patenting them to prevent third party products from being made. Or you can build a brinter so it won't work without a copyrighted rom chip in the cartridge, and then patent the idea.
Trade secrets can and are enforced directly by federal law. I suggest you read the uniform trade secret act before making such a statement.
Back to the original point, You have 4 branches of law covering exactly the same thing. The thing they cover is the use and distribution of information. The people who wrote the laws can be excused because when they were written the nature of information was not as well understood as it currently is. Legislators currently writing the flawed extension can also be forgiven as mathematical information theory is very specialised and complex a field of study.
What is not forgiveable is maintenance of overly complex and pointless laws that do not map to reality.
"In the absence of tough copyright controls, investors may decide not to underwrite a $200 million blockbuster film because copying of the final product may unduly reduce their expected profit. But the cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed because the Internet offers such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas-a veritable Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology. "
indeed. Copyright was created to encourage innovation, fair enough..
Sadly, a great deal of the most hotly-disputed 'intellectual' property in these cases (films and hit records, above all) is at best derivative or, worse, utterly formulaic.
I wonder how much money major studios pay out for remaking foreign-language films. It would be interesting to see how it compares to the gigantic values they attach to their own drivel in DMCA cases.
Making a good film does not require 200 million dollars. Nor does making a good album. Consider how much of a big film's budget is spent on marketing it (tv adverts still aren't cheap..). Huge budgets can only do so much for a bad script, or bad actors. As a wise man once said, you cannot polish a turd. No matter how shiny, it remains a turd.
Widespread enablement of individual and collective productivity has worked marvels in software (GNU/Linux/BSD's/etc). Hopefully it is only a matter of time before we start to see genuinely great works of cinema that have grown in a distributed way from a community of individuals sharing ideas and techniques, enabled by cheap technology. Animation might be a fertile ground for this sort of thing.
It is possible that the discipline innate in coding helps to facilitate good project management even in groups separated by thousands of miles who seldom or never meet in person, and that this kind of project model might be less productive in an artistic context, but it would be interesting to see. I quite like the idea of open-source movies..
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.
Nonsense, the common law treated Copyright as intangible personal property since the adoption of the Statute of Anne, long before there was a United States or a United States Constitution. There are no significant differences between
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!
Abolishment of Copyright clearly does not require an amendment to the Constitution -- nothing in the Constitution guarantees any author the right to the monopoly described in Article I, Section 8 -- the power to grant or deny Copyright is within the sound discretion of the Congress. An interesting question of whether the abolishment would constitute a "taking," however remains -- if the Congress took Disney's rights to its films, perhaps Disney would have rights under eminent domain to the value of the asset at the time of the taking.
Such speculations are pointless, for this will never happen, and so we needn't really spend too much time counting Angels on the head of the pin.
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.
Interestingly enough, it's not people like Zittrain that think this -- it's people like Jack Valenti and others who believe we need stronger copyright protection who believe this.
People like Zittrain -- i.e., IP scholars -- believe that IP laws are here not to incentivize creativity, but to incentivize the *maximum amount of creativity versus the costs.* Everyone knows that "people will still get off their asses and make stuff" even if we don't have IP protection; I don't know of any IP scholars who would argue with that or who don't know that fact. The real question is whether we can have *more* people get off their asses and make stuff if we provide IP protection. It's about maximizing marginal benefit; i.e., providing enough IP protection such that the marginal benefit of the creation of more original work equals the marginal cost to society of stronger copyright protection. This is the prevailing view among law and econ types who are interested in IP law.
It's people like Valenti, who think of copyrights or patents as "property", that believe we should have stronger IP protection -- tantamount to the law we have that protects tangible property. You're right that calling IP "property" is a bad thing, because it fails to remind people that IP protection is really a set of rights that can and should be changed as it becomes clearer what the proper marginal cost-marginal benefit balance is. But to get rid of IP protection altogether will certainly be a net loss to society.
One good example is patents for drugs. Clearly we would have drug research even if we didn't have IP protection -- that's what universities are for. But not many pharmaceutical companies would be willing to put in the billions of dollars of research they do now if the resulting drug wouldn't be protected once they started production -- although probably some would. But would you rather have a few drugs be produced by a couple companies, or a lot of drugs produced by a lot of companies?
You might think that contracts could replace IP law, but obviously that would be onerous. Indeed, IP law can be viewed as a more efficient proxy for exclusivity contracts. (Well, just like any body of law that involves the whole of society.)
Hope the bar exam went well...
The recording industry is not going to sue the tens of thousands of Americans who engage in these practices. But it hopes to make an example of a few users to add teeth to the infringement warnings that file-swapping services send to their customers--and to pressure those services to pressure their customers to stop copying files.
hmm isnt that extortion? m-w
From the majority of posts here, everyone seems to have forgotten that copyright laws were designed to protect the authors and creators NOT the "copyright owners" or (the new oxymoron for the 21st century) "intellectual property owners."
All of the squealing on behalf of the poor creators and authors and how file sharing is hurting them is misguided drivel. If it's available on the commercial market, the author has already sold their right to the work.
The copyright should end once the author has lost control of the work -- as in virtually every recording contract existing today.
The laws were designed to protect the authors -- not the publishers. The RIAA is the publishers. The software companies are the publishers. None of the creators owns their rights any longer.
Therefore, most of this discussion is so far off base that it is all irrelevant.
I know, this will get a flamebait modifier, but I don't care. Copyright has been twisted so severely that even those who are staunchly defending it are still arguing against the basic principle upon which the copyright laws were founded.
All the legal antics miss the real point. It's the authors, dammit. In today's system, they get screwed, regardless.