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Lessig - Public Domain Dead in 35 Years
tcd004 writes "Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: 'The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.'"
Nothing has fallen into the public domain for almost a half century before I was born.
It's dead Jim.
Is this really Lessig writing or is he just regurgitating Ray Bradbury?
In any event, people simply don't care. As long as they have a cool ringtone, that is.
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Does it mean that Disney will have to actually come up with new stories instead of ripping off Grimm brothers et al?
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
This is why everything I write on Wikipedia is still released into the public domain.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
What a stupid thing to suggest.
;)
As long as people are out there sharing ideas freely, it'll survive. It may not get as much attention as it does right now (i.e. all the attention open source gets right now), but as a concept, it cannot die.
There, I had a thought and shared it. PD was just reborn
In a free society the public domain will never die. It's part of our culture. There will come a point when things get so bad that people will just stop caring about the lawyers and self-righteous extremism. Look at what a joke patents are becoming. If it's get ridiculous enough and enough people care about, it will change.
Although, things aren't so great right now, and will probably get worse before they get better.
Lessig himself teaches that, since the failing of Eldred, public domain will die due to lobbying and retroactive term extensions. That's not an anti-piracy measure, it's just big companies controlling congress.
Public domain is just on hold for a while. Hey, we only have to wait until 2019 to get our hands on that hot 1923 copyrighted material.
:(
Congress wouldn't extend copyright again, would they?
Of course, new stuff locked down by DRM won't know when it's supposed to expire, so 90+ years when it's supposed to expire, no one will know what to do with the scrambled bits.
Few people on this site dispute that the ability to automatically have your work copyrighted by default helps Sam Slashdot by making it easier to cover his stuff. However, it also means that more and more areas end up having its entire body of work covered under copyright. With the practically indefinite term of copyright being bought^W lobbied for by Disney and others, it's no wonder that Lessig talks in this kind of language...
I think the only way to save the public domain is for serious reform - be it soapbox, ballot box, or revolution - to take place sooner rather than later.
This is what happens when the motivating factor is to maximize profits. If someone can make a profit from it, it gets patented and copyrighted.
What is the incentive for people to give away things when the trend is to become wealthy as quickly as possible?
People who already are wealthy are the ones with the greatest means and free time to create more wealth...it is a mindset.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It's very likely that Lessig is right. Meanwhile, personal casual copying will continue--on a reduced level. Average consumers will have DRMed gear.
Only about one in twenty or one in a hundred will go to the effort of buying the illegally chipped merchandise that will become available in flea markets, on the Internet, and via other black-market channels. This gear will be sold like the pressed-grape-concentrate bricks of the Prohibition era, which came with detailed instructions explaining that it was totally illegal to use them to make wine and giving careful step-by-step directions on what you must not do to stay legal.
It will create more social unrest, injustice, and disrespect for the law. As with prohibition, and with current marijuana laws, a huge fraction of the population will be felons according to the law. Enforcement will be inconsistent and selective. Most people breaking the law will not be deterred because they will feel that getting caught is unlikely and totally a matter of bad luck.
My analog cassette player died last year. My old CD player is starting to become unreliable. I'm not sure what the useful life of a solid-state laser is, but I'm beginning to suspect it's less than ten years. The next one I buy will probably have DRM.
Prohibition eventually ended, the "war on drugs" will eventually end, and the war on the public domain will eventually end. Probably not in my lifetime, though, and not until a lot of damage and misery has occurred.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While it sounds catchy, it's not really as if public domain is _really_ going to die. What's going to happen is that copyright becomes stronger and lasts longer, and eventually copyrighted material might never enter the public domain again.
But plenty of people love to share their work and ideas. Some of these people are going to be putting stuff in the public domain. Also, with copyleft and similar policies, a lot of copyrighted material is going to provide similar benefits to public material (reusability).
All is not lost, and all won't be lost as long as enough people behave socially rather than trying to grab as much money and power as they can.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I RTFA, and nowhere was the term "35 years" used. However, poking around the site I see this article was one of a batch on the themes of thngs happeneng over the last 35 years (since Foreign Policy magazine began), and the next 35. So Lessig didn't choose that figure for any real reason.
Now, the US constitution (which is one of many documents the world over that calls for copyrights, etc) calls for "limited times" which implies that part of that mechanism is ensuring content falls into the public domain.
But that's not the reason for the copyright, indeed it could be argued that putting stuff in the public domain is a part of the incentive (ie you're putting the cart before the horse): by ensuring stuff eventually gets put in the public domain, artists can build upon the works of others and, in the past when copyrights lasted a few decades, artists had an incentive to continue creating rather than relying upon a back-catalog of stuff they did in their 20s to keep them fed in their 50s and 60s.
We want content, we want it in general circulation and accessable to everyone. Whether it's public domain or not is more a matter of practicalities, not of some greater goal.
Disclaimer: this doesn't not mean I don't like the public domain, or am in favour of current copyright limits and evil absurdities like the DMCA's ACMs/CCMs.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's strange, I thought that when I didn't pay the maintenance fee on my last patent that it went into the public domain. I'd be glad to hear it's still in force.
Patents may have their problems, but at least the length of time and the requirement of maintenence fees to keep them in force are appropriate.
As an intellectual property owner, I worry when Congress goes overboard in an attempt to "protect intellectual property holders' rights". Yes, I like that what I create can benefit me. However, when other people use IP as a cudgel to abuse people, it makes me worry about the stability of the whole system. If you were an aristocrat in France in 1780, wouldn't you be a little concerned about the other aristocrats who beat and starve the peasants? They might just have a revolution.
You're assuming that in 35 years the western countries will still rule the world.
It's being done and it's called bloging.
5/17 5:11pm "My cat rolled over on it's back again today"
5/17 5:15pm "I feed my cat and he liked it"
5/17 5:23pm "That voice in my head telling me to kill my cat and eat it is getting harder to resist"
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm
I quote:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1972, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1972 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
There are, of course, exceptions to everything, and there really are some PD sound recordings. However, the federal and state laws are so tangled and complicated, it is extremely difficult to do confident sound recording PD research. There are several U.S. web sites claiming that sound recordings made in the United States prior to February 15, 1972, are in the public domain, and there are links to U.S. Copyright Office publications stating: "Sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, are not eligible for Federal copyright protection." We have had this reviewed independently by several attorneys across the U.S. Each has confidently and independently told us that between federal and state copyright protection, virtually all sound recordings are protected until the year 2067.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Don't confuse communism and totalitarian systems as those created by Lenin, Stalin & Co. that were called "communism".
Marx original comunism idea specifically called for industry workers that overthrow their governing regime on their own, not purely agricutural societies forced to change by some so-called intellectuals. Real communism never called for a one-party system, nor a quasi-dictatoric board of directors in it. Instead it relies solely on self-organizational principles and true equality (In the libertarian + social security sense, everyone paid according to his needs).
Every "communist" system so far has utterly failed to even attempt employing these principles, which lead to oppression (via the "we know better" and "not with us is against us" approaches) and inequality ("Some are more equal than others", because they bear the burden of ruling...). Followed directly by restrictions, that were only necessary, because people didn't decide to become communist in the first place and didn't want to stay communist, because their infrastructure wasn't up to it (the reason Marx wanted industry workers under all circumstances!)
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried. Systems hiding under that name have failed though. Wrong names for systems is pretty common though, consider democracy, which means "ruling by the people". Nowhere does this call for parliaments!
The parent post wasn't complaining about the price - he was complaininng about trying to enforce the division of the markets into regions. If corporations are able to take advantage of globalization to get the best possible price (eg. by outsourcing), why aren't consumers? The end result would be, of course, to level prices worldwide - which might raise the price in some markets while lowering it in others. But, it seems like the only fair way to do things.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be allowed to set different prices in different places - but that other people should not be prohibited from buying in the cheaper market, shipping to a more expensive market, and selling the product at an intermediate price. For example, why shouldn't Americans be allowed to buy cheaper drugs in Canada? The drug companies may profit less; they would have to raise Canadian prices and lower American prices. But, why should the law be set up to benefit the pharmaceutical company at the expense of the consumer, any more than it should benefit the consumer at the expense of the company? Efficient markets generally require a level playing field.