Slashdot Mirror
Copyright Issues in the Mainstream
dmayle writes "Recently, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled on a momentous topic, the Grokster case (as covered on Slashdot). It turns out, however, it's not just geeks who are taking notice, and we're not the only ones who think things are getting ridiculous. The Economist has a great story on the subject, noting among other things, that if the cost of publishing had come down with the internet, perhaps the amount of protection needed to encourage publishing is less as well." From the article: "Both the entertainment and technology industries have legitimate arguments. Media firms should be able to protect their copyrights. And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up (along with much of their business). Yet tech and electronics firms are also correct that holding back new technology, merely because it interferes with media firms' established business models, stifles innovation and is an unjustified restraint of commerce."
The cost of publishing is rapidly approaching zero. The cost of creation, at least for Hollywood and game companies, is rapidly approaching infinity.
And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up...
Actually, I find that high quality content and ideas are harder to "rip" and replicate. Maybe not the best example, but Slashdot's code and ideas are out in the open, yet there aren't many competing sites for the same audience. The problem, to some extent extent, thus perhaps lies with the quality of content.
see a Text Widget
Is this meant to imply that people who read The Economist aren't geeks?
The Supreme Court held that you cannot distribute technology with the deliberate intention that it be used to violate the copyrights of another. The decision was correctly made, in my opinion. I also agree that the falling cost of publishing may (see another top-level comment regarding the cost of creation) indicate decreased need for the protections of the copyright system. However, the Supreme Court is not where you should go to make policy, and since this is not a Constitutional ruling it is comparatively easy to change: go to Congress and get them to change the copyright laws on the books.
Yes, Congress is a cesspool of corruption; and yes, Congress gets more time in bed with the entertainment industry in a year than any of us will have with our wives in our entire lifetime. But Congress is the place to fix this, not only because it's the appropriate place but also because Congress is more attune to what people want and more able to make policy decisions. After all, the Supreme Court refers to Congress and the Executive as "the popular branches" for a reason.
Do some research, determine what changes need to be made, and push them through Congress. If it's a good enough idea, then enough people will subscribe to it to convince their legislators to fix the problem. But don't bitch at the Supreme Court for telling you not to break the law. And if you want to make a point about it by breaking the law as a form of civil disobedience, remember (unlike so many current-day protesters) that the hallmark of civil disobedience is being arrested and charged with a crime.
This is a false analogy -- here's a better one: say you make a horseshoe in your workshop. I then buy it from you. Is it now wrong for me to make my own horseshoes? These horseshoes I will make will not be taken from you -- they will be entirely my creation.
Now, society benefits from a supply of horseshoes, and you might not invent the horseshoe if, once you sold me one, I would never buy another from you. Therefore, society took an unusual step: by legal fiat, we will voluntarily give you a monopoly on your invention for a limited time, even though you can't force us to do it. Since it us doing it, we'll optimize the "limited time" to maximize the benefit to us -- long enough for you to make enough of a profit to justify spending time on creating new things, short enough so that we too can make a profit by making horseshoes. In fact, we realize that if we gave you a permanent monopoly you'll simply grow fat making horseshoes. On the other hand, but limiting the time of your current monopoly we hope you might decide to go back to the shop and invent something new (the crowbar?), so you can get a new monopoly.
Copyright law is based on the same principle, except now it's about ideas rather than physical invensions. Again, we need to strike a balance between allowing the authors to get a return on their investment of time and work, and between our desire to profit from their ideas by selling them as their are (reproduction) or reworking them in new ways (making derivative works).
Justice Breyer, back before he was on the Supreme Court, wrote an interesting article on this, arguing that publishing costs were high enough that we might not need copyright. This was before technology drove publishing costs way down.
There seem to be a lot of people who think "copyright was fine when it was a pain for me to copy stuff, but now that it's easy to copy stuff, we should get rid of copyright". They seem to think that the purpose of copyright law was to tell people they couldn't do what they weren't going to do anyway.
Restricting distribution of works created a century ago where the authors are long dead won't help the author any way, and won't encourage him to create other beautiful works either (well, unless they manage to ressurrect him).
Copyright at 14 years would allow for ample opportunities for all artists and authors to get paid for their work, as most of commercial use of the work happens within those 14 years anyway. AND, it allows for other, new authors to create new creative derivative works without huge legal problems; it solves abandonware; it solves orphanware (allowing to reproduce an obscure song cannot get the author's permission because he is dead, but resolving the legal issues of ownership would cost countless thousands).
But that's not all. The consumer of {movies,music,software} will perceive it as free. As a consequence they'll consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. This will lead to escalating costs for everyone.
I think it will create many times more problems than the single problem it might solve.Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Depending on how popular it is, they are then paid $5,00,000,000, or what ever, by a central organisation
Are you even hearing yourself? A central organization (sorry, I'm not a Brit, so I spell it with a "z") with the authority to handle purse strings, and with the authority to collect that money from someplace (taxes? from whom? do all people consume all entertainment in equal measure?) is called The Government. The crazy notion that there is some fixed-size pie out of which all entertainment funds would be paid to creators misses the entire point of creating something new in the first place. Without the prospect of being the person that brings some huge, wildly popular new creation to the audience, all you're talking about is just creating an army of mediocre pie-slice-takers.
Will people be happy being forced to fork out a few grand a year for products? They fork it out already voluntarily
But they fork it out according to their tastes and willingness to spend. "People" do not all spend the same on their entertainment. Not even counting the people who cheat and pay nothing, there are people who will actually go to the theatre and see the same movie more than once, or that actually buy DVDs for their kids... but then there are people who never go to the cinema, and have no kids. The difference in media consumption could vary by thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Do people get a say in what's produced?
They do already. If something is truly terrible, people won't pay for it. If someone has a reputation for continually producing terrible work, no one will risk investment to pay them to produce more. Or, if they do, that's their business.
How do we insure the producer is producing a quality product?
Why do we care? And, "quality" by what standard? That's the whole point. Some parts of population have a completely different sense of what "quality" is. For example, I just don't get Bollywood films. They aren't compelling to me in any way. Likewise, there are people who consider Merchant Ivory films so glacial as to be anesthetic. So, why introduce some ridiculous bureaucracy to weigh in on it? The audiences, critics, reviewers, bloggers, and word-of-mouth friends are vastly more efficient at moderating the quality and helping you decide when to spend money on entertainment.
strict auditing of the producers
Auditing by... the governemt? Auditing by some elitist guild? How about just stick with auditing by the audience? Why make everything more complex, add a compulsary component (essentially, if you don't pay your entertainment taxes, you go to jail?) and an entire additional layer of non-creative people who do not have a personal vested interest in seeing a particular film, for example, make it to the audiences...
but one which does eliminate the problem sellers we are now facing
Problem sellers? The problem is the non-buyers. If the people that claim they respect the artists actually did respect them by doing business with them in the way the artists have asked, we'd have no problem at all. Artists that go through big studios/companies have one approach, artists who use oddball indy-methods have another approach... no, the only problem here is that some people simply don't want to pay for entertainment, and know that, for now, they have a fairly good chance of not getting caught with their ripped copy of some DVD.
Regardless, I'd rather have the dull roar of back-and-forth lawsuits over pirating than have the government collect money from me, on pain of jail time, and then decide by committee which artists should get paid out of that year's creative pie fund. No thank you. I think watching the Cultural Revolution in China handle it that way was enough of a lesson for everyone, don't you?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No one has any natural right to any possession. Fundamentally, my property is defined by what I can either take and hide, or take and defend by any force I have available.
Government, via "social contract", creates and protects property rights and acts as the sanctioned force used to enforce those rights. The question then becomes, "what defines property, what defines fairness, and what limits and enpowers those rights?"
And that's why there's any argument at all. All the players in the intellectual property game have different and sometimes opposed ideas of roles, rights, and responsibilities. Fairness begins to boil down to "fair to who?", with the answer becoming "whoever can influence government to protect their interest best".
Explicitly, copyright was used to create and protect possession of the intellectual expression of a creator's ideas to allow those creators to profit for a short time by creating artificial scarcity and temporary monopoly. (Ideas and their expressed artifacts, uncaged, tend to flow around and multiply without regard to their creators' wishes to make a buck by them.) This was explicitly intended as incentive to publish, to share with culture the product of a creator's mind. The consumer's "right" to that creator's creation were deliberately circumscribed during the copyright time period. After that, the creation escapes into public domain.
Now, however, the rights of creators (or more specifically, the rights of those media corporate entities who co-opt the creators and wield their rights by proxy) have placed their profit rights well beyond the reasonable scope of incentive and, as you say, into the realm of perpetual monopoly, at the expense of the society which was intended as the primary beneficiary.
Sad, truly sad.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Absolutely true! Yet I suspect that most of the ongoing illegal distribution of media on the internet would still violate any of proposed changes to rebalance copyright suggested in the Economist article. What percentage of P2P music and video is older than 14 years? Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Artists have been creating art, sculpture and music several hundred years before copyright even existed, let alone before long (90-year) copyrights existed. There will still be art and music when copyrights cease to exist. You may have noticed that video did not in fact kill the radio star.
This metality strikes me as a sort of temporal cultural-centrism: "without the system we have now, there would not be the things we have now."
There are non-monopoly systems of distribution which provide material benefit to creators of art. Direct or indirect patronage systems, for example. My point is not to endorse these here, but rather to remind everyone that there are "other ways to run the railroad," i.e. - copyrights are not the only (or even best way) to provide art and music.
You can't add pianos and telephones.