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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.
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?"
That's a key point. Without copyrights (rights for the person who created the work to retain it) there would be a serious elitist imbalance of information access. Only trusted individuals would have access to various types of information and some types of information would never be disclosed, or possiblu even recorded. People are human and want recognition for their work and ideas. Copyrights (even to the extreme that they have been taken to today) are the lesser evil in this matter.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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Agreed, and we need more people like this. Too bad this kind of attribute seems to be non-existant with many fronts. For example, take medication. Can you, or anyone else, recall any type of medication that really works that wasn't protected with a patent for an ungodly length of time and being sold at an extortionist rate to the wealthy? Would making this kind of contribution accessible to the general public at a generic price better mankind? Certainly. But would this happen? Never.
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.
So if copyright were, say, only 20 years from publication, is the author hurt? The author's not the best in the world. He's no King or Rowling. If it's not great, there's a good chance it will be forgotten in 20 years, or at least not bringing in the income the author got when it was first released.
This sig intentionally left justified.
"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.
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
If there were no copyrights, there'd be no New York Times.
I doubt that. The NYT gets paid mostly by advertisers and secondarily by people who want to read today's news and commentary. I don't think lack of a copyright would change that. Wouldn't give a you a nickle for yesterday's NYT.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
In fact, it would be fine by me to have a couple of exemptions for well-known characters - with fees paid to the Treasury rather than influential congressmen. Although I'd really prefer that Mickey not have eternal protection, it would probably be better than letting everything else be dragged down with it.
But it wouldn't work out - They would just take advantage of the cheaper path, which is to give a smaller amount to elected officials than would be reasonable to charge as fees.
We're just going to have to keep agitating for the next twenty years so that the next "copyright extension to keep us competitive/in sync with Europe" is seen for the bald-faced thievery that it is.
Hee hee -- just realized that Disney was recently hoist by their own petard on Peter Pan. The story actually does have an eternal copyright in England, with the caveat that all royalties go to a London children's hospital. Disney wanted to get involved with merchandising for that movie, but had some issue with paying copyright fees. (One story suggests that their problem was "We already pay royalties to the hospital to cover our animated version, why should we pay them again?")
Maybe we should send that story to our elected officials...
TSG
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
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?
I'm not advocating more taxes, but I'm thinking of property tax.
... too low, and the shareholders will revolt, too high, and it gets taxed too much.
The taxes that you're talking about aren't related to ownership, they're translated to sales or profit/loss.
For instance, most people pay property taxes on a house or land they own.
Some states have car taxes. Others have luxury taxes.
If people really thought there was such a thing as "Intellectual Property", then it would have occured to somebody to tax it.
In fact, I can make a pitch that this tax would benefit society at large. Think of it:
1) IP that is generating revenue would have to be fairly valued
2) For IP that is not really worth anything (some old movie that isn't even available), the owner would have to either pay taxes on it, or release it to the public domain.
3) IP owners wouldn't be content to "sit" on something.
Like I said, I'm not advocating taxes, but if we're going to call a copyright, "Intellectual Property", I'm saying we should go all the way and really treat it like property. Taxes and all.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...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?
Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from building on many sources, just from basically taking something and trying to say it's yours.
:-)
It's a relative thing, sure, and I'm not trying to argue that copyright isn't a little too much in favour of the copyright holders, but if there was no protection, there would be no reason for at least 90% of the information being published to be published.
As much as we want to have a free society, you still expect to be paid for the hours you work, right? Well, you have to follow the money. Money has to flow *somewhere*, or the economy stops.
There, was that a fine leap from copyright law to the entire economy?
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
the point of copyright is to protect the rights of the artist, not the benefits to society.
No! The "point" of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Right there in the U.S. Constitution, specifically Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
However, the Berne Convention (which is utterly antithetical to natural human rights) does not contain any such reasoning as its basis, so outside the U.S. perhaps you are correct.
By preventing others from using and building on the ideas freely.
You care to point out some examples? I hardly can imagine how other people copyrights prevent me from getting ideas. Or building ideas. Or building ideas on the base of their copyrighted work. Or in distributing my ideas.
No one can prevent me in saying: ".... as Kent Recal has pointed out on
I think most "intellectual workers" aka coders, are in heavy need to get at elast some ideas of their nations basics in copy right law.
I mean, your dayly work is coverd by it
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.