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Congressional Budget Office Studies Copyrights
gorbachev writes "C|Net is reporting that The Congressional Budget Office has published a study on digital copyright issues. The study basically recommends not changing the copyright legislation in favor of any particular stakeholder, including consumers or lobbyists. It's refreshing to see a governmental agency coming out with a study on copyright issues that appears to take consumers' concerns into consideration." Granted, this is merely the CBO, not Congress itself, but it is one of Congress' first places to turn to for information.
...now how about looking at software patents?
uh, duh? Our government is pretty pathetic if it needs a study to tell it to be fair and balanced.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
That's not entirely accurate. The preface to the study states that the GAO, by definition, does not make any policy recommendations. Thus, the lack of recommendations in the study does not mean that the data contained in it won't be used by one side or the other to push for change.
Gotta read those source documents before submitting!
If they had pointed out that copyright terms have been extended to the point where they are ridiculous and that maybe that trend needs to be reversed.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Moe: "See anything, boys?"
Curly: "I don't see nuttin'"
Larry: "You're supposed to open your eyes."
Curly: "But if I do, I might see something that upsets me!"
Larry: "What could upset you?"
Curly: "Computer mice! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!"
Moe: "You knucklehead *smek* we're supposed to be finding anything wrong!"
Larry: "There's nothing wrong with this (holds up fold-out pin-up girl, Miss CBO 2003)"
All: *wolfwhistle* "There's nothing at all wrong with that!"
Moe: "Then it's agreed, we find nothing wrong at all wrong with anything, let's leave our findings and get back to painting this room."
Larry: "Yeah, that committee that left us in charge should be back from their lunch with all those 'good friends' any time now."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So what?
This means nothing, they change nothing and make no concrete recommendations. The merely recommended a "set of principles" with the goal of "avoiding being tied too closely to past practices"
Speaking of real change check out: On Drawing Lines in Copyright Law
about copyright, RIAA and the cirsumstances leading to 321 Studio's "Death of a 1000 Paper Cuts"
Can we get a CBO recommendation on patents too? Patents were supposed to give people an incentive to invent. Instead, they are a disincentive. Anyone who actually creates something worthwhile risks being sued for infringement of frivolous patents.
- Raise the application fee so that the patent office can do a decent job. - Shorten the length of the software / business process patents (better yet, ban them).ation fee so that the patent office can do a decent job.
- Shorten the length of the software / business process patents (better yet, ban them).
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
But I'd recommend rolling back some of the goofy stuff (especially 1201) before I'd call for maintaining the status quo. The status quo is already unbalanced by relatively recent thoughtless meddling.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Today's status quo is not good for consumers. Copyright terms are far too long.
I'd personally like to see a differentiation between corporate copyrights (short) to personal copyrights (longer, but shorter than present).
Its a sad day when just keeping the current unfavorable copyright laws are considered a "win" by the voters.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Given the choices outlined in the news article (do nothing or set government royalty schedules) the current government is going to do nothing, favoring the free market approach. I think that anyone can see that coming.
I don't think that anyone is afraid of piracy so much that they will accept government royalty schedules.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It's refreshing to see a governmental agency coming out with a study on copyright issues that appears to take consumers' concerns into consideration."
It would be more refreshing to be acknowledged by the government as a citizen and not an entity that merely spends money.
They coked you.
In the late 20th century, mankind considered getting rid of copyright, in favor of the "information age." The powers that be, introduce New Copyright (DMCA). Everyone hates it. So a little while later, they can introduce Copyright Classic and totally rake it in, thanks to the nostalgic backlash. Instead of advocating copyright reform or abolishion, you're advocating a return to the old ways. Got you.
So, after Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono have had their pokes, and the DMCA has been enacted... NOW they decide "no more changing the copyright legislation"?!
Isn't this a little LATE?!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I haven't read the entire paper-- but I did skip right to Section 4, to see the "conclusions", and read that in some detail. I love this bit (below), from section 4, describing the "Effects on Equity" in revising copyright law in favor of the copyright holder:
In the near term, copyright owners would benefit at the expense of consumers. However, if the additional revenues to copyright owners enabled creators to undertake more projects, consumers could also benefit from the greater availability of creative works in the long term.
Yes-- I'm sure the copyright holders would "undertake more projects". Oh-- and, certainly, those works are going to available in the "long term"-- or at least until they're not so profitable as to be sold anymore, at which time they'll be allowed to "fall out of print", will become unavailable to anyone, and will be "protected" for another 100 years (at which time the media they're stored on, and the compression and encryption algorithms used to encode and encrypt them will probably be vastly outdated and outmodded).
The public grants copyright as a social contract to the creators of content. It is a CONTRACT, and it "goes both ways"-- or rather, it did, in the United States, under the original terms of copyright set forth in the Constitution. The amalgamation of shit we have today bears little to no resemblence to the "founder's copyright", and is skewed heavily in favor of the copyright holders.
Copyright is granted BY THE PEOPLE. If we don't like the current copyright system-- if we want to "trade music files", or download movies "P2P"-- if the public really belives that's the right thing, we need to CHANGE THE FUCKING LAW.
Personally, I believe it's time for the contract to be renegotiated. Public outcry is a good start. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers. Talk to them about the DMCA and the abuses we've all seen. Talk to them about the efforts, past and present, to outlaw digital versions of technologies that are "protected uses" of analog technologies. Talk about "broadcast flags", and "fair use".
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
So the report says do nothing. Ignore the fact that the public domain is slowly drying up as Corporate America constantly lengthens copyrights. Ignore the fact that we have college students getting sued by giant mega-corporations for swapping a song with some friends. Ignore the issues of concern and don't make any major decisions, right?
So in a nutshell, this report is sort of like the 9/11 Commission's report: "Nothing seriously wrong here, let's just talk about it to placate the public and then the public will go back to debating which Superbowl commercial is better..."
What the study does do is put into reasonably plain english (Or legal jargon that can be translated into reasonably plain english), the likely cause / effect consequences of various legal changes.
If we do X, then Y is likely to happen, which in turn results in Z.
Now all we need to do is come up with some sort of copyright scheme that manages to do all of the following:
1) Provides the best possible benefit for consumers.
2) Provides the most reasonable compensation for copyright holders.
3) Causes the least possible harm to copyright holder, consumers, and technology creators.
The problem with attempts to acheive the above goals, as I see it, is that 'best possible benefit for consumers' and 'least possible harm' is not guaranteed to be something that can be boiled down to a dollar value. Also, ultimately, the reasonable amount of compensation for IP is ultimately determined by the consumers who consume or not consume copyrighted works.
So while this is far from providing any answers, it does help us arrive at the correct questions.
END COMMUNICATION
Found this interesting... the RIAA is the one doing all the suing, legal nastiness, etc... but here's a quote from TFA...
[i]The gross revenues of the core copyright industries totaled $441.4 billion in 2002 and were distributed as shown in Figure 1-1. Nearly a third of that total ($143.4 billion) came from the newspaper, periodical, and book publishing industries. [b]The music industry[/b], which generated $13.9 billion in gross revenues in 2002, [b]is the smallest segment[/b]. (See Box 1-1 for details on the interpretation of data on gross revenues.) [/i]
(emphasis mine)
The "Box 1-1" referred to is here: http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/573801.gif
They noticed that copyright holders have already gotten "something for nothing" from the consumers with the expansion of copyright terms.
From the standpoint of equity, the effects of revising copyright law in favor of consumers of creative material would be to transfer control from copyright owners to consumers. However, for some incumbent copyright holders, losses suffered from diminished control over their creative works may already have been compensated, at least in part, by recent legislation that extended the duration of copyright protection.
--AC
If you read the article carefully, you'll notice how they stress that the fair use rights aren't really rights and should be decided by courts on case-by-case basis. There is a fairly illuminating analysis of legality of ripping CDs in there for instance. In general the CBO's positions is pretty radical, in my opinion, on the issue of how little is actually protected by the fair use principle (as well as their meandering around the frist sale principle). This goes along the lines of the fair use area of the copyright law being unregulated (as opposed to, say, given by a statute), and while some people think that this is good (say Lessig seems to be of that opinion), CBO, on the other hand, seems to think that this is a good basis to declare these unregulated uses as infringing.
I think the poster is a little more optimistic about this study than the content actually warrants.
norbert
You mean after extending copyright to 70 years past the creator's death, NOW we shouldn't tilt it any more toward particular stakeholders? Gee thanks.
as copyright has become now that the legal landscape has so brutally been overturned to the detriment of consumers, "The study basically recommends not changing the copyright legislation in favor of any particular stakeholder."
To put it in other words, "now that the power has been shifted solely to one side, just keep it that way forever."
Fair and equitable, reasonable and well-balanced, huh?
Certainly from a pigopolist's point of view, but I'm not so sure about how this status quo is supposed to benefit the rest of "us the people."
This totally fails to take into account transaction costs of the legal system and other copyright protections. You can create a legal system that always rules infavor of maximized efficiency--the goal of this paper--but only if you ignore the costs of that system. In reality, the costs of legal representation outweigh the both the value and cost of the vast majority of creative work transactions. If I write a book, and someone sues me for taking ideas from their book, the value of both our books is probably dwarfed by the salaries of the lawyers required to defend our claims. All this talk of "perfect price discrimination" is in economic fantasy land--a world of perfect information and costless legal systems. Indeed, one might wonder if the government economists have a vested interest in ignoring the costs of legal compliance.