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The Tyranny of Copyright?
Pinky3 writes "The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a long article entitled The Tyranny of Copyright? Views of both supporters of CopyLeft (Lessig and Zittrain) and Copyright (Ginsberg and Goldstein) are laid out. The article constrasts the cultural commons to the 'permission culture" and covers the unintended consequences of various US laws passed long ago." Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.
Everyone ran out of bad jokes about copyrights.
If there were no copyrights, I would not have to register to NYT to read the article. How wonderful would that be!!! :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Does this sound like Big Brother vs. The World to anyone else? copyRIGHT - spearheaded by a guy named Goldstein? and copyLEFT? What's next, copyGREEN and COPYCOMMIE?
Can we get a link to the obligatory google chache for those of us who haven't sold out souls?
~Eric
That's because this is a NYT article. Please give everyone 30 minutes to complete their registration form.
I don't want to promise my first born to the NYT, thank you very much.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
Well everyone knows nobody actually RTFA!
If you have some moral compunction against using an affiliate link, please have the decency to inform unwitting readers that they won't get any closer to the actual article by clicking on the provided link than they would by leaving Slashdot, going to news.google.com, searching for and executing the link there.
That's because this is a NYT article. Please give everyone 30 minutes to complete their registration form.
/.-ers are reading the articles before posting. I don't think so...... :)
But then you assume
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
CopyLEFT says: We're going to Maine! and Pennsylvania! and Arkansas! and Ohio! and Michigan! and New Hampshire! aieeeeeaaaaaaaa!!!!!
CopyRIGHT says: duh...We have strategerie ha ha ha
CopyLEFT says: You might think you know where the lockbox is, and maybe you do. Or maybe that's a dummy, or a decoy lockbox. Only me and Tipper and the Secretary of Defense will know for sure.
they actually took the term "copyleft" and modified it, be thankful that they are re-distributing their "copy left" spaced variation for the benefit of the community.
"Dear NYT editors: 'Copy Left' really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks."
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
They have a space in there because they are not talking about "copyleft" as in licensing, but rather "the Copy Left" as in "the Left" as in the political category.
I'm not sure that it's accurate to lump everyone who's opposed to the current copyright schemes together as "leftists," which seems to be the implication. Indeed, one would think that a return to a 14 + 14 "founder's copyright" would be not so much radical as reactionary.
Hopefully this indicates that the media is starting to understand that there can be another way. Free software and truly open standards will never become widely adopted while the mainstream view is "how can anything with little or no copyright restrictions be any good?"
Do we think anyone but geeks really cares? The public can't be bothered to care about anything that isn't spoon fed to them on Entertainment Tonight or in People magazine. We need to make the fight against excessive corporate copyright an entertaining battle or no one will pay attention. How about getting JLo for a spokesperson?
It seems as the DMCA, the copyright extension, the butchering of the spam laws are all a results of payoffs to our "representitives".
And even when they are paid for, some companies are still usurping them to chill commentary or block competition. If you have any doubt of that, just look at actions of Lexmark, Mattel and Dibold.
Fight Spammers!
Why is it copyleft...it seems to me that government control and enforcement of information is more in tuned with the central government ideals of socialism them a free for all market with out copyrights.
Anyway just one more reason why the whole left right politicle model is a failure at representing reality.
I'm not a big fan of copyleft as an ideology, but intentionally mispelling it as "copy left" is a spin if I've ever seen one.
I was going to post the same thing, but the parent got it right first.
The owls are not what they seem
The article uses highly emotive words in the headline, "Tyranny" is almost guaranteed to get more than a casual glance, but the body is pretty factual (although sympathetic to the students, for example). Well written - articles like this are the only way that the rights-restrictions will get wider coverage. It's a good thing to have a free-from-tyranny press :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
..announce that my DNA is CopyLeft, from this day forward.I VVIIIV IIVIIIIIIVIII...
If any Geekgirl wishes to gain access to my DNA, please send a picture and an essay on the effects of GPL and the software industry and what effects this will have on humanity in whole.
B with blue eyes can skip the essay.
Thank you.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVXXIVVIIIIVVIIIXIIIIIVIIVIII
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
Hardly. Copyright protection encourages creation. Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
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George W. Bush in 2004!
They are probably trying to comprehend 'michael''s "Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.", he should have used inverted commas instead of speech marks.
/. and OSDN as a whole.
I'm not sure why, but I am beginning to understand the community feeling of hate towards 'michael' simply by his attempting to slant comments in his way of favour.
Slashdot is not a news source, it is a news aggregator, but appending the aggregation of stories with comments by the editors with effect to bias the stories creates an unnecessary and unwelcome burden and liability. Upon me as a reader, upon other readers (what do you think?, informative comments vs. someone's opinion), and upo
--
It is not the commies, the government, the nigger, nor the corporates. It is your paranoia.
I appreciate the bitchslapping.
Though it did take you 20 seconds to react. You ought to be far more on the ball in the future.
- MCH
Here's the text of the article:
The Tyranny of Copyright?
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
Published: January 25, 2004
ast fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.
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Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.
Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.
After persistent challenges by the students -- and a considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold -- in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the Internet, the story remains a chilling one.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York University, calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual property law can now be found at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes. The most publicized development came in September, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of independent film producers went to court to fight a ban, imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual film awards.
Not long ago, the Interne
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Why do they have to lump together the people who want the DMCA repealed with those who require some state subsidized artist payment. I just want my fair use rights back, I don't need some nutty scheme that forces artists to share their music and taxes me on CD-r's.
" The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders"
I can't believe the copyleft is saying things like that. That is not a reasonable compromise for me to get my fair-use rights back.
WTF!!
When/where was this incident? Anybody?
Copyright protection encourages creation.
Lessig maintains that overbroad restrictions on preparing derivative works discourages creation.
Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
What did you draw on when creating works? Or did you claim that you created works in a vacuum?
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
The article paints this issue as horrible corporate America positioned against wonderful students. However, I see a lot of issues going on beyond publication. For example, there is the issue of open communications within a corporation. If there is no legal protection for open internal discussions about a product, then companies will have no choice but to limit open dialog within the company.
Shouldn't Diebold be commended for having an open internal communication system that allows its workers to actively criticize and tear apart their company's product? If any document stolen from a company could be published to paint the company in bad light, then we would see companies cracking down on the open internal communications needed to improve products.
Having been involved in several projects, I've written and have read extremely critical emails about different aspects of a program. The purpose of these communications is generally to improve the quality of a program. Strongly worded emails generally have a better chance of making it into a product. Often the strongly worded emails are bunk. If all of the test documentation of the Alpha and design systems got published then we could make any company look horrible.
I rue the day when each and every word written in internal communications has to be polished into marketing material.
There is a sharp difference between Copyright and Intelectual Property people should learn to know about.
First I wanted to be a chef. Then I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow ever since.
Dr. Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright. He merely wants to find some way around the draconian restrictions on derivative works. Such restrictions lead to injustices such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), which held that subconscious copying of a copyrighted work is actionable infringement.
Or do you claim that authors create works in a vacuum?
To comment on the hysterical speculation regularly written up in the lurid liberal media would lend that media a legitimacy it craves but does not deserve.
Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users -- those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software -- not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them "for their own benefit," the U.S. government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the U.S. Constitution.
Copyright in the U.S. Constitution
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the idea that authors were entitled to a copyright monopoly was proposed -- and rejected. The founders of our country adopted a different premise, that copyright is not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress. The Constitution gives permission for a copyright system with this paragraph (Article I, Section 8):
[Congress shall have the power] to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that promoting progress means benefit for the users of copyrighted works. For example, in Fox Film v. Doyal, the court said,
The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.
This fundamental decision explains why copyright is not required by the Constitution, only permitted as an option -- and why it is supposed to last for "limited times." If copyright were a natural right, something that authors have because they deserve it, nothing could justify terminating this right after a certain period of time, any more than everyone's house should become public property after a certain lapse of time from its construction.
The "copyright bargain"
The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the "copyright bargain." It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayer's money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.
But is the bargain as it exists actually a good deal for the public? Many alternative bargains are possible; which one is best? Every issue of copyright policy is part of this question. If we misunderstand the nature of the question, we will tend to decide the issues badly.
The Constitution authorizes granting copyright powers to authors. In practice, authors typically cede them to publishers; it is usually the publishers, not the authors, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, though authors may get a small portion. Thus it is usually the publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. To better reflect the reality of copyright rather than the myth, this article refers to publishers rather than authors as the holders of copyright powers. It also refers to the users of copyrighted works as "readers," even though using them does not always mean reading, because "the users" is remote and abstract.
The first error: "striking a balance"
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are qualitati
But if you weaken copyrights too much the creators will protect their works using other means
Let 'em. After opening up compulsory licenses for some types of derivative works, newly published works may continue to fall under compensation-right-by-default, but they won't be under DRM-by-default; authors will have to take affirmative steps to publish works in a Digitally Restricted Medium.
Right, that's how radio works now. What I found amazing is that the radio stations are not asked to keep track (or at least weren't several years ago, when I heard the following story) of what they play, so instead ASCAP & BMI send vans around the country to record radio stations and obtain a representative sample. Then all these tapes are brought home for the Name That Tune Experts to listen to on fast-forward.
Note that "composers" are the ones paid, not performers. So the experts (in rap, country, deathmetal, trucker, etc.) have to be able to recognize a song no matter how egregiously a cover band has re-envisioned it! The experts have a file of Mysteries, organized by first three notes, that someday may be identified. I wonder if it's a fun job.
Anyway, I just wanted to get across the point that the system described in the article is not a dream, it's already in place (if just in radio), and people were willing to put it in place even though the logistical aspects were quite daunting. Once you have a website counting downloads, there's so much less excuse to hold it up.
If someone copyrights some of their code, they didnt invent the language (eg c) and they didnt invent many of the functions that the program does (eg printing to the screen) and they certainly didnt invent the compiler or the CPU that the program runs under and they had nothing to do even with the storage medium their program is on (hd/cdrom/paper)! Now i can kind of understand the ownership of ideas eg a method of selecting some information which causes relevent information to be revealed, but even that is based on the idea of "information" and human thought so you cant say thats something original. So what exactly denotes something original? and why should you be able to copyright something thats not original for far longer than is needed to create incentive? (eg 70 years after your death!)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It is entirely possible that the left will someday start respecting the rights of the individual again. In ancient history (before 1900) Liberalism was concerned with expanding the rights of individuals. In the 20th century, it flipflopped and liberalism was a synonym for expanding the state to curtail the evil individual.
Today, it seems clear that the conservative movement in the US is abandonning its brief flirtation with libertarianism. Meanwhile some people calling themselves "liberal" are starting to realize the importance of individual rights. It is possible that a polar shift might occur again.
Of course for most, the situation is clear. Anything good people, like college students, do is okay. Anything bad people, like those who work for a living, do is bad. Far too few people seem to ever go beyond punishing enemies and rewarding friends and actually think about the ideas themselves.
Slashdot needs to stop linking to the NYT if only because half the comments in the thread will be from some idiot whining about registration.
If you're so opposed to registering at websites, why the fuck do you have a slashdot account?
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
but your post was just begging for a downmod. Keep the trolls subtle, don't go off on such a huge tangent like you did. The whole criminalization of the creative process was over the top.
Decriminalization of puffing the magic dragon is a completely different issue that would be better brought up on Smokedot than on Slashdot.
Oh, I get it. It appears you meant "Puff the Magic Dragon". That's this story.
And yes, I did read the article .. mostly ..
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
Without directly quoting the unpublished original sources, how could the students make their argument look like something other than a hoax? I sense an opportunity to use the "news reporting" fair use argument.
Dear Slashdot Editors: Anally Retentive *should* have a space in it. :)
Actually they were in violation of copyright
News reporting. Non-profit. Factual. Does not substitute for the work itself. Any competent lawyer could make a good fair use defense.
and I question why the DMCA was involved at all.
In this case, the DMCA merely codifies a cease-and-desist process in 17 USC 512. It has nothing to do with the DMCA that interferes with interoperability (17 USC 1201; judges have tended to ignore 1201(f)) except for having been enacted in the same bill.
every bit of damage to the English grammar system hurts them all.
Some languages have more free grammar than English. As long as it remains easy for a speaker to get a point across, how has anything "damaged" the language?
You know, it really irritates me when people criticize "the public," probably because I consider myself to be a part of it. Contrary to popular elitism, I think that most people are pretty smart, and are interested in things that don't involve Michael Jackson. I mean, where are these retarded masses I keep hearing about? Are they the ones creating wikipedia, or reading Nature, or hypothetically heating houses with a candle and aerogel? Maybe I'm missing out on a big part of modern culture here, but most of the people I know are pretty smart, and couldn't give a rat's ass about Jennifer Lopez.
Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
The original U.S. copyright act gave plenty of rewards: twenty-eight whole years. The current U.S. patent act gives plenty of rewards: twenty whole years. If you feel that such a term of monopoly does not adequately reward the investment of time and effort into a work or invention, then please explain why I haven't seen Lilly, GSK, Pfizer, and the like publicly lobbying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act.
"The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good."
This comparison fails to be useful in any real sense when considered for even an instant. The infrastructure, engineering and complexity of the telecommunication industry probably would scale its market value, when compared to music, much more than roughly 20 / 1 factor Benkler notes here. In fact, the only force surpressing greater telecom revenue is that consumers absolutely abhor seemingly arbitrary and maddeningly discreet fees associated with their monthly tele/cell phone bills!
To think that the billing lessons from the telecom industry offer a positive model for entertainment is not only ludacris, it's insulting to consumers who increasingly feel pestered by a fee system which forces them to nickel and dime every conversation down to minutes used -- and the excitement of VOIP proves that we are ALL hungry for an way to trash our telecom fee tally sheets.
Fair use allows for quotations, especially when used for criticisms and refutations. The question about fair use is whether or not what you created is itself an original work.
A well written article with quotes and a summary of the articles would have been considered an original work, and probably would have been more damning of Diebold.
The ability of Diebold to suppress the work by threatening the ISP is freightening, as the ISP is not likely to make any judgments based on merits of the case.
I appreciate the ideas the article is trying to raise in the public consciousness and I am grateful the NYT is helping to put these issues on the political map. Apparently Boynton agrees with RMS that it's important to "spread understanding of the value of freedom" although Boynton wasn't writing with regard to free software. I hope that in the next articles we can get more into specifics about how these ideas were formed because I think people have an easier time grasping useful abstractions when they are grounded in real-world events.
Giving credit where credit is due is intellectually honest. This article and Mark Webbink's recently praised article both chime in on copyleft or ideas built on copyleft without giving any credit to the person or the organization that brought it to our attention--Richard Stallman and the FSF.
Webbink goes so far as to reinvent copyleft without calling it such, thus confirming how valuable the concept is and what the open source movement is missing out on by rejecting software freedom in favor of practical concerns centered on their chief audience--businesses. The NYT article tells us "Copy Left[sic]" (spelled with a space probably to pigeon-hole the concept on the left side of the left-right false political dichotomy) is a borrowed term:
But that would come closer to describing free software. Copyleft is a way to secure the freedoms of free software for a program and its derivative works.
Digital Citizen
Thanks....
uy weioruy oiqwer oiqwuery qoiweury oiuqwery iuweyrureu
Do we really think anyone but the public really cares? Geeks can't be bothered to care about anything that isn't spoon fed to them on Slashdot or Kuro5hin. We need to make the fight against appalling, intolerable condescension and parochialism in terms of Microsoft's track record, open-source philosophy, the plight of the Palestinians, new hand-held computers, NASA, meme theory, and science fiction, or no one will pay any attention. How about getting Eric S. Raymond or some anonymous dorm-room leftist for a spokesperson?
I don't really care if Mickey Mouse cartoons are protected for 200 years from their creation date (or indefinitely, as Disney will eventually pay off enough congressmen to get).
But, that should not drag every other piece of work along with it. To keep a copyright active, they should keep the default copyright mechanism they have today, for a short period of time, like 7-15 years. Then, require them to register the work for copyright extensions of 5-10 years. As it is now, they were gifted these huge copyright powers. They need to take some responsibility for the system needed to maintain that, and the bureaucracy to manage a legitimate copyright management system (i.e. fees for copyright renewals fund the bureaucracy, and copyright management systems).
This is a trivial task for big evil companies, like Disney, to keep copyright on their immensely valuable properties. And, it would ease the burden of copyright validation on the vast majority of other works.
From the printer friendly version:Copyright 2004
Leads to this link
How ironic?
I think the NYT has just coined a new phrase. A quick google search for "the Copy Left" finds no instances of it being used as a category for a group of people. There are a few scattered references to the "copy-left movement", usually synonomous with "open source movement". But "the Copy Left" alone is new. I like it. Sign me up.
proud new member of the Copy Left!
Mattel is not responsible for your defective-ass genes! Just because you have arthritis and carpel-tunnel syndrome from masutrbating and playing video games 24/7 doesn't mean that the great toy maker should have to pay you jack shit. Your quest for "justice" is remarkably inane and illogical. Labour laws are intended for heavy industry, not some fuck who spends his life on the computer. Should've picked a less "strenuous" profession, asswipe!
The NYT has a bunch of rules about how names are presented - like, no InterCap names, no Punctuation! in names, an allergy to acronyms (HP is typically spelled out Hewlett Packard, and then the Packard bit is dropped; I note that IBM doesn't have this problem), etc.
So, call it Copyleft and you're fine.
''I think it is good to have a price tag attached to each use because it tells producers what consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for the kinds of culture they want.'' Maybe I'm missing something, but why is "voting with your purchase" the only way of letting producers know what's popular? To go a little further, why is "what's popular" so important anyway? Artists who produce because they enjoy it don't worry about this so much and corporations pumping out thousands of identical records are what we want to get away from anyway. ~L Wood
''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''
Yep... now raise your hands... how many of you have gone down that path, purchasing iTunes and DVDs? Yeah, that's what I thought.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
If you feel that such a term of monopoly does not adequately reward the investment of time and effort into a work or invention, then please explain why I haven't seen Lilly, GSK, Pfizer, and the like publicly lobbying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act.
Please, someone, mod this post down, or delete it, or do something before the wrong people read it and start getting ideas.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Thomas Jefferson
spammers, for example?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
In the article, Yochai Benkler, law professor at Yale, exemplifies how creative interaction is more "valued" by users - even economically, than passive consumption. Benkler says:
I'm not sure, but I believe these ideas originates from Andrew Odlyzko's seminal paper "Content is Not king" (january 2001):
A good article on the whole. And I very much agree with the 'Copyleftists', that the internet and WWW has been (is) a (the) catalyst for innovation and cultural resurgence, and that copyright -- as it is currently sharpened to a lethal weapon -- is becoming increasingly perilous to the very things it was meant to foster: innovation and improvement of society/culture.
Regarding information and copyright, I would like to recommend reading Perry Barlow's (EFF) thought-provoking essay Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net, which contains a lot of stuff. Mainly dealing with the question:
What is this thing (information) that we're trying to protect (with copyright)?
668.5
which seems to be used for the new political movement for restriction of copyright, and the broadening of the intellectual commons.
I'd say the New York Times is calling those who oppose copyright law as it now stands the Copy Left because they're opposing the stance of most large, for-profit corporations. Not all the members of the Copy Left are leftist in general; but, in this particular aspect, taking a reactionary viewpoint derived from the likes of Thomas Jefferson is leftist!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Sorry - just had to do it.
Um, this is already partially implemented in Canada. We pay a levy on recordable media, and as a result downloading is legal. Supposedly, the levy is supposed to go to the artists and recording industry. The only thing missing is the "central office", otherwise it is very much like Fisher's concept. And I hardly think Canada qualifies as a second world country.
(I posted another example here, about possible original sources for the claimed economic power of interaction/communication over passive consumption.)
Thanks for the pointers, I'll be reading up on them.
668.5
All their stuff came from public domain which they then turned around and claimed ownership and that no one can do the same as they had. They still do it to this day, drawing from open sources and then hammering anyone that's even remotely drawn off of Disney. The laws work only for those with the most money.
I've never bought iTunes or DVDs, nor do I buy CDs, and many of the people I know havn't. I would guess you're thinking of yourself and assuming everyone is the same.
I don't bother with any sites that want registration. Having tried the loophole and seeing what's there, I obviously havn't been missing anything.
If you have some moral compunction against using an affiliate link, please have the decency to inform unwitting readers that they won't get any closer to the actual article by clicking on the provided link than they would by leaving Slashdot, going to news.google.com, searching for and executing the link there.
People like you are the ones that continually click on goatse.cx links. just hover your cursor over the link and the url will appear in you status bar. Or you use Windows... That could explain alot.
It's against any TOS or EULA imaginable. IANAL, but I think it's completely illegal.
OTOH, I think circunventing a procedure you're against is not a valid nor effective way to fight it. I simply don't read the article. Screw them. I also try not to comment on it (anything on-topic, at least). That's my way of letting Slashdot know what I think about their stupid NYT references - especially when there are other sources allowing me to read on the same topic, and those are sources with more credibility IMO (like possibly Lessig's own site in this case?).
That info you provided is probably useful for those not in the know about Google's basic utilities, but I think you should've mentioned somewhere it's not a legit procedure.
Source: GNU Project - Misinterpreting Copyright. Technically, I think the copyright notice was part of the "this notice" that needed to be preserved.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
But I'm intersted in the NYT story you mention; care to cite any sources?
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
How this comment be scored so low? It seems extremely insightful; interesting, and relevant. I don't believe that the information in the comment is widely known, and it demonstrates (as the comment author states) that an alternative system for compensating authors while not trampling citizens rights is not only possible and feasible, its actually in current practice in the U.S. It seems to me that a comment like this should be scored much higher.
PS - I'm not the author of the original comment. Really!
Something not right is going on. If plans go ahead, and the ever-stretching boundaries of patent/copyright claims is not stopped, the world will be faced with a situation where ownership i.e. EXCLUSIVITY on THOUGHTS, WORDS, ELEMENTAL info is established. Paying for word-usage? Locked-in thoughts? Orwell's 1984 is approaching.
In the USA corporate greed and power is much, much stronger than government or the legal system. The legal system is gradually being raped by it. But heh, the citizens don't care right?
Is this suppose to be a rhetorical argument that a creator doesn't own what he creates?
I intended it as an argument that an author shouldn't own what other authors create.
the innovation is not identical to the source, I have added my own novel element.
True, you can get away with copying ideas. But what about classes of works where the "idea" and the "expression" aren't so easy to distinguish, such as musical works? Under U.S. law, if you add your novel element to a substantial portion of an existing copyrighted expression without permission of the other work's author, which is not obtainable in the vast majority of cases, the other work's author owns your novel element, even if your novel element predominates over the other author's.
The novel element is my property, for a limited time at least, and rightly so.
In terms of an author's own lifetime, how is until your children are long dead a "limited time", other than through the twisted interpretation offered by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft? Inventors, on the other hand, seem happy with 20 years; I don't recall any news report of them trying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act.
To say that society owns what a creator's brain creates is to say that society owns the creator's brain. It doesn't.
But to say that one author owns what another author creates is to say that one author owns the other author's brain. He does.
I agree with the position on derivative works and copyright term that Spider Robinson puts forth in the short story "Melancholy Elephants". Have you read it?
You can get copyright reformed or even eliminated tomorrow, if you could just get enough votes in Congress to pass a law to that effect. If you don't think that could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files over the peer-to-peer networks today than voted for George Bush in 2000.
My article goes on to suggest steps you can take to make this happen, ranging from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.
Also, in Should Copyright Even Exist? I relate Richard Stallman's ideas on software freedom to digital music files, and suggest that the public interest might actually be better served by expressly permitting the public to take advantage of the error free and nearly zero-cost nature of digital file copying. (Keep in mind that I wrote the article with p2p users in mind; for many of them this section of my article may well be their first introduction to what Free Software means.)
I think that if I can get all sixty million US p2p users to read Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads by November, copyright reform could become a hot issue in this year's elections. If you agree, see What You Can Do To Help.
Thank you for your attention.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I fail to see the opposition between the terms. Copyleft is one particular license that is enforced through copyright. If copyright ceased to exist, so would copyleft. The fact that the creators of copyleft would like copyright to stop existing doesn't change that, and many people who use copyleft probably don't care much whether copyright should or should not continue to exist. I certainly don't: I think copylefted software is succeeding no matter what other licenses people come up with under copyright because copyleft simply makes more economic sense.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
If there is such a thing as "Intellectual Property", do you think it would be fair for government to tax it?
I mean, if real property is subject to tax, and the government wants to define "Intellectual Property" as pretty much the equivalent, isn't it not fair for IP to be taxed?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I'm qualified to say how Copyleft is spelled. It's one word.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Labor laws are meant for companies that regularly abuse workers, like Mattel. Since the ADA and FMLA were passed in the 90s, it is hard to believe that is was soley for heavy labor.
Why? To shut them up?
Campaign finance reform is national security.
The New York Times style guide says that the term for a computer security system is "fire wall". Also the term for a collection of information is "data base". It makes sense that they would split the words and write "Copy Left".
No, man. These communications were happening 'under the radar' at Diebold, dude. This is not a case of free and open internal communications, as you think. As soon as it was discovered the system was shut down, and certain people were let go. This would have happened even if the memos hadn't been published.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Yup. Copyright is a privilege granted... which is a comprimise between the welfare of a society, and its creative element.
Did you know that just last year, The Party extended copyright from 17 years (which it has been since the beginning of the United States...) to 75 years past the author's lifetime!!
This radical, selfish, unprecedented move actually has the effect of creating a new class of royalty. Wrong move for a 'free society', Mujambo. Wrong move altogether.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Or how about this trademark? It appears on copies of works that the Open Source Initiative has certified by approving their licenses. Or does the mark mean "copydown"?
I will take Cowboy Neal and Dupes over Jason Blair and correct spelling any day
Help fight continental drift.
NYT calls it "the Copy Left". I think they are using this term to refer to the group of people who have concerns about where IP law is going.
They mean "the Copy Left" the way people mean "the Left" and "the Extreme Right" or "the Environmental Movement". It seems to be a label for a group of people with similiar ideas but no single organization.
I do not think they are referring to Copyleft as in GPL.
Whistle blowing and companies reactions to whistle blowing is a completely different issue outside the copyright issue brought up by the article.
The fact that companies try to find ways to twist every law in the book against whistle blowers is not an indictment of the law itself. I would not be surprised to find a company trying to use leash laws to reign in their employees. This does not mean that leash laws are evil, it just means lawyers are always looking for ways to abuse any and all written laws.
The copyright law should not control whistle blowing. It should only affect the publishing of information by a whistle blower. Other issues involved in whistle blowing and protecting whistle blowers should be handled separately.
If a whistle blower choses to publish information, then they are, in effect, trying to indict the company in the court of public opinion, and that means they need to abide by the laws regulating published information.
I would not be surprised if Diebold was a dysfunctional company with really screwed up internal communications. I do not know the company. My experience is that most companies have problems with internal communications. The actually rulings about the copyright laws should not be based on the quality of internal communications of a single company.
The state of affairs at Diebold really shouldn't matter in the eyes of copyright law as the precedents apply to both healthy and sick companies. What would happen with no copyright protection for internal communications? I suspect that ALL companies would then have to resort to obfuscated and clandestine communications.
Providing copyright protection for internal communications makes open communication possible. It does not guarantee quality communications. Without legal protections companies would resort to encrypting and other techniques to guard information. The more I think of it, a broad copyright on internal communications is a very good thing as the copyright does allow improved communications.
No, no, no. You're missing the point entirely: copyleft was designed to thwart traditional copyrights. The fact that it is enforced using copyright law is called poetic justice. It certainly doesn't validate copyright nor nullify the political point behind creating "copyleft" in the first place.
That you fail to make the distinction for whatever reason doesn't mean that the distinction is nonexistant or unimportant. That copyleft exists to thwart the perpetuation of copyright is a fundamental and inseperable quality of it, your flawed views on the matter notwithstanding.
...and the horse they rode in on. I don't want some hair-brained scheme to force creators to release their work to the public regardless of their own wishes, all in accordance with 'the greater good' - at least how it's defined by these loons.
All I want is the old copyright laws back. They're more than enough to protect any creator (including myself) without placing undue burden upon the consumer. There is no need for an enforced, legislated, dictatorial version of the Creative Commons, unless you happen to be some fucked-up totalitarian parading about in the disguise of a socialist.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Its kinda ironic that the purpose of copyright is to give incentive to create, when so many copyrighted works are so un-creative and themselves are dwarfed by the invention/idea they were created on. For example a book is just one book out of millions and unless you invented the written language, paper and the printing press your work relies on someone elses idea. The idea of your book itself however could be something independent and somewhat original but even that is based on the universe, earth, or the human race - something you certainly didnt invent. So given that no idea can be totally original, we shouldnt treat copyright holders as though they are the soul owners of some bit of the universe. Copyright law is about giving a reasonable incentive, and credit - everyone should be able to get credit were credit is due. But copyright is giving people a license to print money because if you are the only person who can legally do something for 100 years then you've pretty much got a monopoly.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What makes the Diebold case different is that this is not just some product, like a printer driver or a windowing toolkit. The product Diebold produces is:
Free elections in the United States Of America
Have you by any chance read the emails? They say things like "If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal"
The emails are not engineers writing about some flaw or bug and how it needs to be fixed. They are talking about "Let's just ignore this bug" and generally taking just a "screw it" attitude. If I saw emails from, say, MS about longhorn, I would have the same attitude as you. It is a an internal communication, flaws have to be exposed. You can't expect everything said to be positive.
Diebold produces elections. What is inside the process of those elections is the very lifeblood of our society. What Diebolds attitude towards security and bug is a matter of overwhelmingly extreme public interest. If a computer crashes, that's bad.
If Diebold rigs elections (And they could!) then our entire system of government falls on its face.
I did NOT learn everything I need to know in kindergarten.
While I explore the idea of eliminating copyright in the article, I state that I don't think it should be completely abolished. My position is that the fourteen year term of the United States' first copyright act is about right.
In posts here and elsewhere, I bring up the idea that one can eliminate copyright not so much because I really think it ought to be eliminated, but to inflame the passions of the readers, in hopes of getting them to actually go read my whole article, which is admittedly very, very long.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Their free speech rights could be retained if they simply had their own server (read: "press"). At $100/month, you "freedom of the press" is pretty damned easy to secure. They would still have the uphill legal battle to contend with, but the central problem under scrutiny is the arbitrary "veto" of any complainant.
This "my free speech should come for free at the expense of others" idea is just silly. You want freedom of the press? Get your own press. $100/month is pretty cheap insurance for that right. If that truly was beyond their means (which it might have been, since the university in question costs $36,090 per year), why not just forward on the information to Internalmemos.com?
So do you actually have some real complaints, or are they all made up?
I can't work up interest in Spider Robinson's story; care to paraphrase his position?
There exist a limited number of perceivable works. As copyright terms become longer, the likelihood of accidentally making an unauthorized derivative work becomes greater. A perpetual copyright would make this probability 1, and copyright law would resemble real estate law in that for each work, there would exist a person with the power to deny use of it.
nooooooooooooooo text
Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from building on many sources, just from basically taking something and trying to say it's yours.
I don't "take" copyrighted musical works as much as they are forced on me through radio, for example, as I walk into places of business to work or to shop. Still, if I unwittingly incorporate a few notes from one of those works into one of my own, I'm guilty, because subconscious copying is still actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).
if there was no protection, there would be no reason for at least 90% of the information being published to be published.
If I want to make a derivative work, would it benefit society more if I paid the author or if the author just denied me the rights? See, copyright leans too much on "you may not" rather than "you may as long as you pay"; there's not enough provision for compulsory license.
As a writer I'd like to get *paid* for my work from time to time
Under current copyright law, you can deny others the right to make and publish fan fiction at any price. This lack of compulsory license prevents perfectly good works of fan fiction from reaching society. How does this "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
It may be different for commercial stations, but every year, WMBC has to submit 3 day's worth of playlists (from a time period selected by BMI). (We do AM as well as Internet broadcasting, but I don't think it makes much of a difference).
Now, I agree that the tracking requirements for Internet radio originally proposed by the RIAA were onerous (track how many listeners heard each song, as well as a lot of personal information about listeners that seemed unnecessary). However, tracking what is actually played is the only way to avoid a "give half of it to Britney" situation.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Sooner or later somebody will decide that I'm a troll, but until then... Read the Diebold e-mail archives and decide the merits of the case for yourself! There is a reason that we did not post the e-mails piecemeal or "paraphrasing". That is because we had no way of knowing what would prove to be important. For instance, Diebold ran into trouble in California because the memos seem to show that they were using uncertified software in elections. The Californians were tipped off to this by some incorrect version numbers in the Diebold memos: version numbers newer than anything that had been approved by the gov't. We would never have imagined that these seemingly mundane e-mails which happened to mention versions would prove to be so vital.
Free Speech, Free Software, Free Culture
You are a shill for Diebold and perhaps even The Man!
Go away and we silence you and will mod yuO DOWN@!@!!
]
You forgot one other point; namely, you can just lie!
Essentially you give up nothing, but a small amount of time.
Blogging because I can...
That's a bad example. Researching drugs takes a *lot* of money, and you can't say "In three years we'll have the cure for $DISEASE". They need to make money off of the things they *do* have now, in order to fund this probabilistic research. If they know they can't make money with an anti-HIV drug, they'll pour that funding into weight-loss pills, because otherwise they would *cease to exist*.
It's a good thing that they *can* get money from important drugs, because that means that both from a continued existance and a marketing POV, it's more beneficial to pour money into that than it is to con obese people out of their money.
(n/t)
Haven't seen any flying pigs lately, have you?
This won't happen for a hundred years at least, but hey, keep your hopes up. It would be a good thing.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
If this should ever become a practical possibility, don't you think that the stupidity of current copyright-laws would be obvious enough for people in general to react?
I think that when things get this bad, revisions will be made, or have been made allready.
Unless a global, hellish corporate goverment has arised as the new feudal overlords. But I kinda don't like the thought of that...
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
What struck me was the way he glossed over the tax on recordable media.
So you pay a tax (that goes straight to RIAA) on a blank CD
and you pay a 2nd time to Apple (or whoever) to download a tune.
--or you download the tune from P2P and RIAA bitches that they didn't get paid.
gewg_
In the article the autor writes about a way to remedy the situation:The central office would then monitor how frequently a work is used and compensate the creators on that basis. The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders.
I don't burn CDs or DVDs of others work, just my own. Why should I have to pay for other peoples uses by having a tax on my blank media if it is paying for uses I don't partake in? Again, say hello to the Soviet Republic of the Internet.
Of course Slashdot has an obligation to ensure that its editorial comments meet the objective ISO "nerd" standard, to ensure that it always, and only, "matters". That's why we read Slashdot, because it exalts the uncontested legacy of "objective" journalism so often found in other news sources.
--
make install -not war