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Consumers vs. IP Owners: The Future of Copyright
conJunk writes "The BBC has a thoughtful article about new challenges in copyright. The problem: The rights to the audio recordings of the Beatles first album will expire in 2013. While consumers stand to benefit from competing releases of the materials, the copyright owners are of course terrified. And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them."
Thats the entire point of copyright- a limited monopoly in exchange for greater incentive to produce. It is expected to eventually run out. The problem here isn't that its going to run out, the problem is that its been over 40 years and it hasn't run out already!
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's highly likely that copyright in the USA will be extended again by then. History tells me that much.
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To get the laws changed. More than enough time. Ask Disney.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Please, stop using the words "owner", owns" etc. when you're talking about copyright and similar things. For that matter, please stop talking about "intellectual property", too - there is nothing here that's property or being owned.
What copyright *is* is a time-limited monopoly granted by the state, with the expectation that you will use this incentive to create stuff that society as a whole benefits from; it's not and never was supposed to be a never-ending money making machine.
Using words like "property" and "own" to describe copyright just reinforces the (wrong) idea that copyrights should not ever run out in the minds of the general, uninformed public.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Limited copyright is an essential element to maintaining a consistent creative human spirit. By allowing works to be protected for a limited amount of time, the artist can comfortably turn some profit on their creation. But by allowing that protection to lapse, another creator can pick up the work of the original artist and manipulate it, turning it into something different. The whole of human creativity depends on building upon the works of others.
It's pretty frightening to think about the incredible lengths that IP holders are going to these days to increase the length of copyright ever further, all in the name of limited, short-term profits. They represent an immeasurable threat. Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from? There would be none, if you could indefinitely profit from one or two ideas.
Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig has some very enlightened analysis on this subject.wait ... i'm not a citizen, i'm a consumer/taxpayer
i exist to provide revenue streams for corporations and governmentsDamn you Marx !! How could you let us down like this ??!!
/rant
long week in the cubicle forest. i'll shut up and go home now ... and drown my angst with ... consumption
+1 fashionably cynical
The Constitution reserves for Congress the power to secure "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
A lot of copyright problems would obviated if this were enforced as written. The Beatles' works for instance would be controlled by Sir Paul and Ringo. Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain because his inventor and author is dead. Bands, not labels, would control their music. Inventors, not IP holding corporations, would control their inventions.
You cannot sign away your inherent legal rights--no matter how many contracts I sign with you, it does not allow you to act fraudulently or negligently toward. Imagine if copyright worked the same way--if it were illegal to sign away your copyright. A lot of bullshit would be avoided IMO.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This about those who would treat copyright as a pure property right vs. those who don't. Almost everybody who wants copyright treated as a pure property right doesn't create anything. They are a publisher or corporation who aggregates the copyrights of all its employees, or some other entity concerned with the accumulation of coprights.
Accumulating an asset that has a built in time when it becomes utterly worthless is a very unpleasant proposition. It is much nicer and more convenient to treat the asset as some sort of durable good like a box of bolts or something. In fact, copyright has the potential for being the perfect asset since it doesn't decay at all!
But, the people who do create know that being able to create relies on a rich environment of ideas to draw from. Treating copyrights as a pure asset destroys that environment and creates an environment where the only things that get created are those the primary holders of copyrights are willing to allow to be created.
It really irritates me when I see the word 'consumer' when I hear talk about copyrights. There are no 'consumers', there are people. Everybody writes things and says stuff, and many people sing or dance or make up silly lyrics or any number of things.
This isn't about 'consumers', those incredibly dumb entities that eat products and shit cash. Casting it as that kind of a fight is inane.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me
Compromise, shmompromise. Copyright is the compromise. Copyright in essence is saying "Look, we like this stuff, and we want you to make more of it. But what you produce is very very easy to copy. So, in order to keep you making enough money to make this stuff for a living, we're gonna give you a limited time to control how your work is copied."
Somewhere along the line people got convinced that copyright was actually a right and not a social contract, and now we have people suggesting compromises when the system is already overfair for the copyright holder.
yes cheap and beatiful old art raises standards and not many can compete against it. but if the artist is good enough he will survive and more likely flourish. we will not get crappy music all the time. what you are saying is that in order for not-so-good artist to survive, we should keep good old art expensive and away from the hands of people.
try making similar arguments for civil engineers and bridges/buildings/roads. or any tangible physical human creation for that matter.
Artist/vendor gets a government-mandated monopoly for their created work, and it is protected in law, for a limited period of time. It is a grant from the government/people. This protects the effort that went into the work, and lets the creators of it make more money from it than they would have otherwise, giving the incentive to create more.
Once that time expires, it is time for the artist/vendor to pay up on their half of the bargain: the work passes into the public domain.
You should not be able to renegotiate the deal after the fact. The Beatles or their agents knew the terms of the deal when they made the work, distributed it, and made loads of money off it. If they did not like the terms, they should not have distributed the work. They should have kept it to themselves.
We had a deal. It's now due (well, in 2013). Suck it up and live with it, or make us (the public, to which the artists/vendors now owe) a better offer.
For example, are copyright holders going to grant the public a little broader fair use terms? Or offer us a low, flat rate for certain types of copying? SOMETHING. You can't just say, after decades of making boatloads of money from the arrangement, that you don't want to pay off your side of the contract.
Worse is the fact that, actually, many copyright holders have done everything in their power to destroy/limit/technologically eliminate "fair use" using DRM and other such techniques.
Copyrights on songs by the Beatles are about to run out but Robert Jonhsnon's lyrics are still copyrighted? Robert Johnson died during the 1930s and his works should be public domain but apparenlty aren't. And who owns the copyright anyhow? It damn well can't be his heirs because he didn't have any (legitimately that is... you know how bluesmen are). Is Robert Johnson's work relevant now? Ask Eric Clapton. And since they aren't RJ's heirs why should they have the copyrights anyway? I mean, I can understand Janie Hendrix having the copyright to Jimi's work but someone unrelated to him decades from now?
As to the Beatles copyright holder being terrified... too bad. Want to make money? Do something! I haven't been living comfortably off something someone else did for decades, why should you? Why should anyone be able to do something like write a song or a book and live off it their whole lives when the rest of us can't live off a few months of work our whole lives? That's why the entire system is completely screwed. I don't know how many times every day it's pounded into our heads "think of the artists" but if they've made plenty of money off of something already why should I care? Not only that but some corporation can apparently just take the copyright to a dead man's work and keep it out of the public domain decades after it should've passed into that as well. The original 14 years is plenty of time and no one but the heirs of someone should be able to have the copyright after their death. It may be legal but as far as I'm concerned this is just copyright theft.
Think about that the next time someone calls file-sharers thieves. Legally, a corporation can own the copyright long after the person who made the work is dead. They can legally steal from us, the people, but we can't legally steal anything back.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Not to worry :-) The usefulness of record labels is now at an end. Creation, publishing, distribution, and marketing can now be had practically for free. Check out Tunecore to see what I mean. Why would any band give up their copyright and settle for second class shelf space and loan payments when they can post their works in their pajamas? Create music with software and instruments, distribute online, done. There is no step three ;-) As more new bands go direct, more revenue streams disappear for the big labels. The big labels will eventually be unable to afford lobbyists.
No, not really.
Here is a list of bestsellers in the 20th century. I doubt that you'll recognize many works or names that aren't pretty recent. This is because the main thing authors compete with are not old books, they're new books. Everyone wants to read the new Harry Potter, rather than the old Tom Brown. Novelty tends to drive sales. And old works which were quite popular for a time tend to fade not only in the face of newer works but also because they may not have been all that great anyhow.
I mean honestly, do you think that the crowds going to see the latest Star Wars would have even possibly preferred to see Destination Moon if it had also been in theaters? No. Most audiences like whatever's new, and that's where the money is. Older works also have their fans and benefit from being culled over the years so that it's easy to know what's good, but they're really never more popular.
Also, why should the public, which vastly outnumbers artists, care what artists think? If we can get them to create just as much with less copyright (which we can be pretty sure of, given historical example), then why shouldn't we? That kind of frugality is just common sense.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Precise discussion about law uses words defined in the letter of the law. The statute in question, 17 USC 101 et seq., defines and uses the phrase "copyright owner".
This important distinction bolsters the grand-parent's point (well regarding the term intellectual property at least). One may own the copyright to a piece of creative work, but one does not own the idea. (Of course one may own any expression fixed in a tangible medium, because then we are talking about property.)
There is no property in expressions and ideas. The term "intellectual property" is loaded in terms of public debate.
I'm not debating your valid point that copyrights can be owned and have owners in the same sense that any monopoly may be owned and traded.
Anyhow, if we're going to go with the language of the statute we're all going to stop saying "IP holders", "IP owners" and "music owners" and start saying "copyright holders" or "monopolists" (or "exclusive, time-limited rights holders"). Well that will never happen, because the moderators of public debate are the monopolists (i.e., corporate media). YAY!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Simple. Copyright is a social contract between the artist and society.
Society provides an incentive to the artist to produce works by gauranteeing the artist can have rewards sufficient to justify his labour. In return, society gets new creative works.
The problem with having infinitely long copyright is that there is no longer the same incentive for artists (or their children for that matter) to create new works.
It would be like you getting paid forever because of the first years work you did (as say, a doctor or something). There's hardly any incentive for you to keep going to work and making more stuff/fixing problems, and that hurts society.
What if a doctor kept getting paid forever by every patient that he had cured? or a plumber got paid for every litre of water that went down your pipes? You can see that you would be paying way too much for the benefit received, which prevents you being able to afford other things.
The third problem is that works can be lost forever.
In summary, there are three problems with infinite copyright:
1) Leaves you with less cash to spend on new creative works.
2) Gives artists less incentive to make additional new creative works.
3) old works can be lost because they are not allowed to be copied, yet have gone out of print (because they are not seen as commerially viable, or the publishing company wants to promote some other product they own - perhaps one that they have the artists even more screwed over on than normal). Result: Everyone looses.
Which is a sad state of affairs. When I was a kid, people talked and wrote about the "copyright holder", not "copyright owner".
Copyright is a limitted monopoly, granted by the public. If you are given one, you get to hold it for a number of years, after which, the monopoly is disolved, and the work becomes part of the public domain.
At least, that is how I remember how things used to be. I am sure whoever sponsored changing the language from "holder" to "owner" was intentionally slanting the language in this war of perception, much like the push to stop calling things "infringement" and instead "theft".
Copyrights protect works of authorship fixed in tangible media, from unconsented reproduction, distribution and derivation FROM THE WORK and other exclusive rights, subject to a litany of limitations of those rights dedicated to the public. Patents protect novel, useful and unobvious inventions from the unconsented making, using or selling of the invention, whether or not they ever heard of the inventor or the invention, with very few limitations other than a very limited "experimental use" defense.
Copyright exists upon original creation, without respect to novelty, and requires no effort to protect. Patents do not exist until application is made and examined for compliance with statute.
The scope of copyright, which requires copying, is far far narrower than patents. This is why, for example, you can clean room a computer program to avoid copyright infringement, but clean rooming provides no protection.
Different rights to protect different things in different ways with different protections and limitations. This is why their terms are not necessarily the same.
if you dont like it, dont buy it, or better still, write your own.
It's not yours. You don't want me to copy it? Don't publish it. Copyright is not a natural right. It's a fiat monopoly granted as part of an exchange. We grant you the right to forbid me to sing a song in exchange for something. It's a trade. You don't want to negotiate? Don't enter the market.
The moment any of them write a song thats good enough to be a hit, we should punish them as much as we can and ensure they dont make any cash.
Straw man. I didn't say zero. I said five years. And I'm saying it to benefit the poor upstart musicians you claim to be defending. Cover bands without license from the original artists are illegal. Put a five year limit on copyright and those poor startup musicians you are talking about will be able to cover bands from five years ago to put food on the table and pay for studio time while they work out their first CD. It also gets the labels out of the picture - if the musician can support him/her self and pay for the studio, they don't need to get screwed by a record exec to cover their expenses.
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