Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Copyright Group Seeks To License the Net
An anonymous reader writes "A new Toronto Star article from Michael Geist not only describes why Canadian Ministers of Education are pushing a copyright proposal that will harm Internet access, but also reveals how a copyright group is seeking to create a new license for Internet content. Access Copyright, a copyright collective, wants to use a new international text standard to license everything from books to blogs. Geist outlines in his blog how
Canadians can fight back against these bonehead proposals."
So now I scanned the text of the first link -- no second post! Is Slashdot empty?
Nah, its just that hell just froze over and pigs flew this morning. As a consequence the topic of copyrights wore thin and became boring so all the slasdotters went off to CowboyNeals place to oooh and aaaah over the Windows Vista Release candidate. Afterwards they plan to set up the worlds first Windows Vista user's fan club.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
FTFA:
``Moreover, it is far better than a counter-proposal from Access Copyright that seeks to develop a new licensing system for the use of Internet-based content. According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the copyright collective has asked the Ministry of Canadian Heritage for funding to become the Canadian collective for a new international standard that can be used to register any "textual work" from books to blogs. Armed with a collection of "registered" online text, Access Copyright will be positioned to create a new license for the use of Internet content.''
So, AC wants you to register your work with them, so that they can then license it to everybody? That's what the record labels do, right?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The 'tube' mentionings are getting a bit tiresome..
i ns.shtml
A series of tubes _is_ an acceptable analogy. No, it's not an _exceptionally good_ analogy (literally speaking), but it is certainly not below average. It illustrates a number of aspects about how the internet in practice functions. Yes, certainly, you can say that 'a network of tubes requires every bit of tubing to be physically connected to every other bit, but the internet can also be transmitted wirelessly!' - but that's stretching it.
FYI:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/electronicbra
Shortly after World War II, a New Zealand engineer started a sociology degree at the London School of Economics (..) He wrote an essay comparing the national economy to a machine pumping coloured water round clear plastic tubes. An older student persuaded him to build one, and it was an immediate success. More than a dozen were made eventually, with Ford buying one and another going to the Central Bank of Guatemala. Within a few years he was a professor and became one of the giants among post-war economists. He died young, but friends and colleagues recall this remarkable man. One "Phillips Machine" is still working at Cambridge University, where leading economist Brian Henry, who helped restore it, recalls seeing this "ingenious teaching device" for the first time. Although he had already studied economics for 3 years, that was the first time he actually understood what the "circular flow of money" was all about, because he could see it.
If a national economy can be modelled using tubes, I can't really see why people fall over each other in laughter over referring to the internet by 'tubes'.
Having said that, I'm pretty sure the Marxist post was ironic. In which case: hilarious! Rise up, ye proleteriat, and seize your rightful means of production! With your help we will recreate the glorious days of the Soviet Union, which only needed a few more years to shake the bugs out and acheive political perfection.
Just because something is meant to be ironic doesn't mean it can't end up being right. This is one of those cass irony backfired.
Great Intellect...
Gosh, and I thought it was part of the mechanism that allows me to charge for the stuff I write (e.g. http://www.examulator.com/tamer/ ) Nice to know that I'm a member of the ruling classes though. No, you could still easily charge for stuff without copyright. Bookstores still charge for Shakespeare books, even though there's no copyright on that. What copyright does is prevent other publishers from taking your work and selling it without your permission or giving you any money. Shakespeare, being dead, doesn't mind, but you might.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
You bring up a very good point. The democratic process was "invented" before soul-less and perpetual entities like corporations existed. Whether you are aware or not, Syndicalism is something that could/should/would make things a little fairer if they could be worked into the current "democratic" process.
Perhaps something like a 2nd vote. One for your moral values and one for your social values (through your work). Of course this would give more power to the people. Something to do with balance yada yada...
For 200 years. Most works only last 10 years. So for 190 years no one is making money because no one can sell it. That's just wrong.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
We can't force everyone to give ideas away. Some people may actually want to negotiate the compensation for their efforts if they specify the right to do so at the time of publication.
You have the wrong idea on the subject.
Abolishing copyright would not be forcing anyone to do anything.
Copyright has the intent of giving an incentive for people to give their works away (not their ideas, ideas are supposed to be free). When you release a copyrighted work, you are giving it to the public domain in that act. In exchange, you get a long monopoly on distribution from your government, but in the end, after you die, everyone should win, because the public domain will be one work wealthier.
Copyright tries to incentivate people to share, and forces everyone else to respect an artifical monopoly, in an effort to expand the public domain, and improve the pool of works available to everyone. It's just not working ok right now. Copyrights are too extended in time, right now they are virtually endless, and the public doesn't actually benefit from them.
I don't think we should be granting distribution privileges to authors anymore.
This is not the same as forcing them to give their works away, they can keep them to themselves, or ask for money in advance to release them (like the Blender project GPL release), but I don't think the public is getting anything from paying for distribution privileges to authors that are actually not giving anything back anymore to the public for their efforts in protecting their monopolies.
Even the politician at which you people are poking fun called it a "a series of tubes".
Seeing circuits as tubes, routers as pressure balance valves, firewalls as filters, certain types of DoS attacks as plugging a tube, and dropping packets as a leaky tube all are sensible enough extensions of a "fat pipe" metaphor.
Just get over yourselves, people. Just because someone knows a better metaphor for something doesn't mean he knows any more how that thing actually works. It also doesn't make him any smarter or overall any more knowledgeable about the world as a whole than the guy who doesn't know the exact right metaphor to use.
Knowing one thing more than one other person about one topic only proves that you know one more thing about one topic than one other person.
If your biggest thrill in life is to one-up the technical knowledge (on one topic!) of a guy in a non-technical field who's thirty to sixty years older than you, then go ahead and feel superior. While you're at it, donate your sexual organs to science or medicine so someone gets some use out of them. Maybe that way you can brag about something more notable than, "3y3 NOS3 MOR3 THUN THA 0LD GUY B0wT THA INTARW3B! 3y3 AM A L33T!!!1"
It seems you are not arguing against copyright per-se (which was the position of the original post) but against the length of copyright and possibly the extension of copyright after the death of the author. Seems like a very reasonable argument to me, and I agree. If the purpose of copyright is to encourage creativity by awarding a temporary monopoly on the control of reproduction, I cannot see how I will be encourage to be creative once I am dead.