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DRM Critique Airs On National Public Radio
An anonymous reader writes to point out that a critique of Digital Rights Management made it onto the mainstream media this morning. NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a piece noting that with the demise of the VHS format we risk losing fair-use rights since we now have only digital media. From the article: "As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T. S. Eliot's famous saying. 'Good poets borrow; great poets steal.'"
RealMedia, barf. How appropriate that a commentary on the restrictive nature of digital media should be distributed in that format.
I think they are looking at the past through rose-colored glasses a bit here. The owners of copyright material have always made efforts to restrict duplication, even in the not-so-good-ol-days of analog tape. Drop a quick "VHS copy protection" into Google and you will see countless references of the restrictive nature of that media, both on the audio and video tracks. Analog audio tapes included a pleasnt high-pitched screeching boobytrap (spoiler signal) for would-be copiers.
It is not the death of the analog media that represents the end of part of our culture--and the risk of lost rights--as the commentary claims. It is the lack of spine in our leaders to stand up for what is right. It is the lack of foresight and hindsight on the part of the copyright owners and the consumers that patronize them. Make some noise about that, NPR.
I would also like to point out the self-destructive nature of the analog media they are pining over. About one third of the VHS tapes that remain in my collection are playable. The first DVD I ever bought does not skip once.
FairTax baby!
Most people don't realize that even certain VHS tapes had DRM -- or at least a basic form thereof. Many years ago, for a high school video project, I wanted to splice a little scene from "Return of the Jedi" into our project. (The scene with the Ewoks bowing and scraping to Threepio, as a metaphor for the Aztecs greeting Cortez.) But when I tried to record it onto the family VHS video camera for splicing and transfer (we were using our VCR and the camera to create a very basic editing system; this was 1996!), the camera would quit recording after a few seconds, saying something about a "protected" video or something.
I forget how I got around it, but it was a pain in the ass. All for less than thirty seconds of fair-use footage for a damn high school project!
I've still got a vhs recorder, tons of tapes, and a large library, recorded and bought. Plus I don't see any reduction in the places that I can buy tapes.
VHS isn't dead, nor will it be for a very long time. There's a big difference between DRM supporting companies wishing it would die, and it actually dying.
Incidentally, we have a record shop in town that does a brisk trade in the vinyl media that *ahem* 'died' a few years back....
The beloved J. Alfred Prufrock said it best: "And so your Constitution, your Laws. They are naught but derivatives of English Common Law."
It's an interesting point. Here in America we have laws forbidding the copying of literature and other media, to the point where innovation and creativity is stifled. Yet those laws preventing such copying and modification were, in their early forms, near duplicates of existing legislation in other nations. It's really food for thought.
Thank you, Rip Van Winkle.
Good poets borrow; great poets violate copyright, which is nothing like stealing!!!
When did NPR become part of the mainstream media?
-- Will program for bandwidth
The 'demise of VHS' is about as relevant to the erosion of "fair use" as the price of canvas was to the demise of sailing ships.
People are willing to sell away anything to get a lower initial price--they're willing to accept more restrictive use if it means saving a buck. It's not just media entertainment, but food, furniture, and almost anything that involves the exchange of money. They'll reserve the right to complain later, but the remedy of that complaint can NEVER be raising the prices to fix what consumers voluntarily sold off.
Yeah, we can sue McDonald's for making us fat, or we could stop thinking that paying $15 for a restaurant meal that won't kill you is some great injustice. We can complain all we want about outsourcing support jobs to wherever, but good god, don't charge us $20 more for our computers. We can balk at the several hundred dollar price of hardwood furniture and complain about deforestation, but IKEA still gets frowned upon for its "cheap" quality in comparison (when in fact, many of their products are surprisingly durable for being made of sawdust and paper).
Price is all-important, and anything that gets us a lower price is a good idea...until we realize that what we threw out the window to get there might actually have been important. Then we want it back, but we want someone else to eat the costs involved with bringing it back.
The sale of VHS is down to nearly nothing now. It's a complete niche market.
Do you have anything to back that up, or are you just pulling those claims out of your ass?
I don't think what you're saying is necessarily the case. I have several relatives who run a small chain of dollar stores. One of the stores is in southern California, one is in Wisconsin, and another in Georgia.
The who runs the store in Wisconsin visited us this past Thanksgiving. The topic of VHS tapes came up during dinner. She was saying that they were selling more VHS tapes now than they were in the early and mid 1990s, even though the town they're in has suffered a fairly significant economic downturn over the past decade due to industrial concerns moving production to Asia.
I was sort of surprised by this, so I called up the other relatives in Georgia and Cali. Both of them reported the same thing. The one in Georgia knew that a lot of football and basketball fans bought them to tape games that they were too busy to watch live. That makes sense to me. In smaller, blue-collar towns, many people can't afford to dump several hundred dollars on a TiVo or some other device. So they use their 15-year-old VCR if it still works.
We did not loose fair rights.
Companies have been preventing us from exercising them.
I know the difference is very subtle.
You must know this and get used to saying it bacause from a legal, and political view point, you still ahve those rights. SO when you say we 'lost our rights' it makes you look ignorant, and can be rubutted with "No we didn't you still ahve the right to do that."
Also, you can make the corporations l;ook bad and not the politicians, which is a better way of communicating with your elected officials. You have been writing to your elected officials..right?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
VHS is dead, as are cassettes, 8-track and records.
,CD's , and MP3's (and OGG ...).
The real DRM of VHS and the others, was the degrading quality.
The quality degrades with watching it, degrades with copying it, degrades with time.
DVD's now have effectively no DRM.
CD's have no DRM.
MP3's have no DRM.
So the current effectively unencumbered base of digital media is DVD's
For HD-Blue-DVD to really replace DVD, it has to be effectively unencumbered as well. Until then people will buy DVD's because they are less limited.
But no, there has been no reason to use tapes for a while.
Marketplace isn't an NPR program; the show is produced and distributed by American Public Media. Though many public radio stations air programs from both NPR and APM (as well as other orgnizations like Public Radio International), the two are distinct entities.
This isn't at all surprising, and this trend has been in the process many years. The view of 'ownership' has changed dramatically in the past two centuries or so. The most obvious example of this is plagiarism. In nearly all schools, honor codes, punishments, and many other items exist to discourage 'plagiarism'. When we look at history, many of the great works in history are based in this plagiarism, just look at Shakespeare. This trend has just continued to grow. Ownership should be disregarded, and things should be placed into the public sphere for the enjoyment of all the public. Of course, this will never occur, as capitalism destroys this. Ahh the wonders of idealism...
Yet another thing that Congress made illegal and which law enforcement makes no meaningful attempt to enforce. Which means it will go the same way as most of the rest of the US legal code: Never actually enforced until the cops (or the ones holding their leash) really, REALLY want to get someone (for reasons good or for bad); Then a careful search of the legal code is all but gauranteed to reveal something that makes you a criminal.
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
People say "steal" because it is one syllable, as opposed to the six for "violate copyright". No, it's not synonymous with armed robbery, but it is stealing. Get a dictionary and look it up! If copyright is a property, then copyright violation can indeed be stealing. If copyright isn't a property, then stop according property rights to your creative works (such as using the GPL).
Last week I went to a wedding. While there I stole a kiss from the bride. So why can I steal a kiss but I can't steal a poem?
I for one, am praising T.S. Eliot!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
Maybe that's why the underground economy in China is so great.
Wow, you are really angry at t. s. elliot - you spelled his name with Capital Letters.
Hmm, I guess the author of TFA doesn't like him very much, either.
As for the Real Media encoding from what I remember it was the only useable and widely accepted option around when NPR first started offing audio content online. Still, much better options abound these days. They should at least transition to them over a few weeks or months time if they're woried about pissing off listeners who are unaware and set in their ways. -C
I'm sorry. Using the word steal in this context is polititically charged, and reinforces the FUD that the media cartel is spreading.
So I must agree with the grandparent poster.
As for t. s. elliot, of course, he had no idea that his words would be so misused in today's world. But yes, now that quotation has become unfortunate.
Only T.S. Eliot was really allowed to spell his name using lowercase for the T, S, and E. Anyone with an English poetry and literature background knows that the proper way to refer to him is as "T.S. Eliot", unless you're reproducing a work of his where he wrote his name as such. It's considered disrespectful for others to use his lowercase name when referring to him.
The choice is simple - either continue to accept the old business model, or don't. It is up to all of us to make that choice for ourselves.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Now do you see? Now do you understand why we have to get rid of this particular evil? This simply cannot be allowed to survive, because it is standing in the way of progress.
As long as we continue to have media outlets that are not owned by corporations, we will continue to have reports like this that fail to toe the corporatist line. Were it not for NPR, reports like this, critical of DRM, would be relegated to the backwater of Internet blogs and college-town weeklies. We have failed to completely destroy NPRs credibility as a media outlet despite our constant efforts. We must stamp it out altogether, or face continued non-corporate-approved reporting.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
dupe!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
regards, Grandpa.
As I always say. Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
With all the talk about 'theft' and 'piracy' it's easy to lose track of who the real thieves are here. It's the global media corporations who stole the public domain by bribing the politicians to implement a permanent extension of copyright.
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
Hear hear... a voice of reason amidst a sea of peasant tyrannts.
If you live in a large city, chances are your local "public radio" station(s) offer HD broadcasts. But try using them at home with your own sound system. They've chosen the Ibiquity [rhymes with iniquity] proprietary format to prevent anything beyond "listen once" use.
The Constitution says "for limited time." That means that some sort of copyright expiration means is necessary in DRM, so that after the copyright expiration the medium becomes free and unencumbered - public domain. AFAIK there is NO expiration mechanism whatsoever in current DRM, therefore it violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
This is most likely moot, because in order to properly test this in court, we'd need DRM-protected media of material with an expired copyright. That hasn't happened, and probably never will happen. Congress has asserted their right to extend copyright as much as they wish, and the Supreme Court has agreed - 1 day less than eternity is "limited."
As long as the ??AA funnels money to Congress, and as long as Congress accepts it, copyrights will never expire, and the Public Domain is effectively DEAD.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Being that Eliot *actually* said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
In the 60's timothy leary chalenged a law called the marihuana tax act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Tax_Act which basically stated that you had to break the law to exercise your rights. in a way DRM is like this you have to break the law in order to exercise your rights to copy. i am surprised that lwyers haven t used this case to set presedent and dismantle DRM. this is the real problem with drm and sonner or later someone will do what leary did and then it will be up to the government to change the law or eliminate it.
Understood. No argument, my posts here are also with a smile.
Too bad that it's black humor, though.
The point I was making there is that the "liberal" use we on Slashdot expect as standard fare in software/music/video purchases has fallen into that same "too expensive and irrelevant for the mass market" niche as the cheapest restaurants I eat at.
We have been supplanted by the "fast food" and "Denny's/Applebee's/Friday's" consumers, who prefer the more convenient, cheaper alternatives even if it's actually worse in the long run. We stare in amazement at the mass market, but we're now the odd ones out, not everyone else.
OK, good, thanks. It's about time us geeks improve our English poetry and literature backgrounds.
You are under the mistaken assumption that the doctrine of Fair Use is a right. It is not, and never has been, a right. It is a defence to the charge of copyright infringement.
This legal distinction appears to be lost on most who contribute to the neverending copyright debate on slashdot.
Two things to note:
Records are not dead. Most DJ's still use them for ease of beat-matching, scratching, etc. I realize there is also a large number of more modern technologies out there, but for now there is still a lot of people who love vinyl.
Secondly, People will continue to buy DVD's because they're cheaper. Nearly every computer you can buy has at least a DVD player most have writers as well. In order for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to succeed they need two things:
1) Cheaper players. ~$1000 for a fancy new DVD player is outrageous.
2) Good movies.
On the whole though you do raise some good points about the current state of DRM.
You have just received the Amish virus. Since we have no electricity or computers, you are on the honor system.
Meanwhile, you can't literally be "up in arms" anymore, in many places, due to the erosion of the amendment rights.
Next, you have many restrictions on "free speech", in the form of election laws. Heaven forbid you have money to spout your viewpoint and spend some money the wrong way to do it.
Then there are property rights... Kelo anyone?
The parent is correct, To summarize; Idiot voters are giving away our rights.
First they came for the guns
and I did not speak out
because I do not like guns.
Then they came for the cigarettes
and I did not speak out
because I do not like smoke.
Then they came for fatty foods
and I did not speak out
because, um, fatty foods arent good for you.
Then they slapped DRM on all my music
and I spoke out, but no one cared.
because if I didn't care about
tangible stuff, they knew I wouldn't
do anything about about just bits
appolgies to Martin Niemöller
Sorry for poping the bubble, but thats the "LAW" we are talking about here. Who is right makes no difference until the law makers agree. Your voice counts, but not here in this forum. Go make a difference where it counts. Sad, but true.
I would also like to point out the self-destructive nature of the analog media they are pining over. About one third of the VHS tapes that remain in my collection are playable. The first DVD I ever bought does not skip once.
Unlike you I've had a number of dvds go bad on me whereas none of my tapes aren't playable. Currently my oldest tape is more than 15 years old and it still plays however I've bought brand new dvds I had to return because they wouldn't play. Now I'll admit my first dvd plays fine but others don't.
FalconShould there be a Law?
THANK YOU for pointing out these errors. Big difference between APM, MPR, NPR. I listen to Wisconsin Public Radio and they get as much as 30% of their funding directly from pledge drives.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
You're right. We didn't loosen fair use rights; however the capitalist corporations did loosen our ability to exercise such rights in the sense of making these rights less precise. Thus, we have lost (past tense of lose) a limited amount of our capacity to effectively use such rights.
Only 8% comes from government funding.
How much more (or less) expensive than the first-generation DVD player is the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player? Adjusted for inflation.
Check the prices at Amazon.com. The A-list titles begin at $20. Check sales of HDTV and the XBox 360 at your big box retailer. Fast-forward to the $200 HD add-on for the XBox and sales of the PS3 in December 2007.
The geek may place the right bet on sales of the Wii console, but he is often a poor judge of trends in the home market.
I always say that if it is property, then there should be a property tax on it. Let the copyright holder declare the value of their "intellectual property". If they set the value at $100, then they can only sue for $100. If the set the value at $100,000,000 then they can sue for $100,000,000, but they also have to pay property taxes on $100,000,000 worth of property. Of course they should be able to abdicate their ownership at any time both relieving them of copyright and tax liability.
This would limit copyright holders from hording just for the sake of hording, as they would have to pay for it. We would see large numbers of works currently under copyright, pushed out to the public domain as a tax savings. It would not prevent anyone that is currently making a profit from their works from continuing to do so as they would be encourage to declare a fair market value for their works to properly balance protection and tax liability. It would limit the outrageous lawsuits as the value of the work would be pre-determined.
This is true. There is always those that buy at the first opportunity.
My point is that the mass market, not just those that must have the latest (not always greatest), will adopt whichever platform is cheaper and has the movies they like. As you pointed out, at this point it looks like the Xbox 360 and it's HD add-on is winning.
However, it is still to early to tell who has won the format wars.
You have just received the Amish virus. Since we have no electricity or computers, you are on the honor system.
I bought Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy in Adobe ebook format from Amazon a couple of years ago (I bought each book as it came available, actually). Well, that all started 3 laptops and 2 Palm PDAs ago. I got the urge to read the trilogy again last month, and found that I could no longer activate my Adobe ebooks. Seems that I'd accessed them on too many devices. Adobe tech support basically told me to go fuck myself. So I bought the dead tree versions of the books. I then emailed Adobe copies of the Amazon invoices for the ebooks and the subsequent hardcover purchases, along with a note explaining that I'd bought my last ebook. No surprise that I haven't heard back, but I'm sure they'll get the point when more and more of their paying customers have a problem with their legally purchased books being stolen from them by Adobe. Anyway, I'm praying that things change, and the sooner the better.
I am not left-handed, either!
I mean seriously, I am glad ROT13 is only a useful text encryption format. Because with data, well, ROT13 a hex encoded byte... Doesn't decrypt too well with another ROT13 does it...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
DRM is nothing more than a bogeyman that the FSF can use to try and intimidate mainstream society into accepting positions which the FSF knows that the mainstream population would not be willing to accept otherwise. DVD copy protection has been broken, WGA in its' various incarnations has been broken and/or worked around, and the fact that no legal jurisdiction on the planet with antitrust laws would tolerate a situation where Microsoft can completely remotely control people's computers is conveniently overlooked. It is totally baseless fearmongering, plain and simple...and I utterly reject both it, and the people promoting it.
As far as evangelism is concerned, the single main problem facing Stallman and the FSF is that they are, to put it delicately, one hell of a long way off the mainstream radar. Because of this fact, they need to resort to fearmongering in order to try and coerce normal people into listening to them...they are aware that without said fearmongering, their fellow Marxist aberrations are the only group they'd be able to get airtime with.
I've said before that it isn't a coincidence that DRM only really became a serious pet topic of the FSF after the start of the War on Terror...Guess where Stallman got the idea from?
(Of course, I am anticipating that Stallman's resident enforcers here will mod me down as always. You'd better hurry up, guys; the more time this post spends above -1, the more people are likely to read it and potentially be influenced by it...and we just CAN'T have that, can we?)
T.S. Elliot was a master of words far beyond what you or I ever will be. Thus I defer to his greatness.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well I suppose about 5 or 10 people did hear it. It probably would have been more effective to shout from a streetcorner in NYC. *Nobody* who matters listens to NPR!
People are going to figure out how to make money off of stuff with non-enforced copyrights (such as someone's non-recording contract youtube.com song) or realize it is worth it to put "old stuff" out there to introduce the viewer to the new stuff (I discovered The Daily Show on the net and am now a bona fide regular viewer on Comedy Central.)
This isn't a remarkably new concept. The Grateful Dead managed to make a lot of money on the live recording swaps that promoted their music to millions of fans. (And no, I'm not a dead head but I am a student of unconventional business methods.)
There is also a lot of works being produced under the Creative Commons ideas.
IBM, Sun, and a slew of new companies managed to make money on "remixing" software found in the open source/free software movement - there will be plenty of companies who will start mixing their goods in with other's as a value add in the video, music, and print world I am sure.
Simply restrict the total body of law to n words. If the limit is reached, no new law can be passed until some other law is repealed. Reduce n by 2% annually until a reasonable minimum is reached.
The true ugliness of this DRM debate is this: (warning, DMCA example follows!)
The media companies got the DMCA pushed through and now we are prohibited, say, from snipping a portion of a DVD movie for a film class review of said movie. We can't review the movie and use portions to support our position that the plot sucks or is derivative, or the film is poorly acted. We can't use it in a review classroom to show what TO do or what NOT to do except by showing the actual work (and don't show the WHOLE thing to a classroom or you're violating the copyrights).
However, the media companies PROVIDE clips to "official" journalists/reviewers (Ebert & Roper, et al) in order to drive traffic to the movie. And they show us clips on our cable systems' "on demand" menu, or on the internet or before ANOTHER film to drive traffic to the movie.
Folks, I'm hoping that now that the Congress has changed hands, we can get this stupid law repealed or majorly revised. We're nothing but "traffic" to these media giants, we're the Eloi for them to feed on. We're nothing but cattle and they treat us with all the respect we'd give to a cow.
I'm NOT for flagrantly disregarding copyright. I AM for fair use. Would Shakespeare, John Milton, or Arthur Miller have been as popular as they were if their publishers had prohibited the study and review of their works by pointing the finger of theft at English professors and students?
Rather than gripe here, write your elected officials and let them know that you object to the provisions of the DMCA. Read the DMCA and quote specifics to your representatives. Give examples pulled from reality.
The way to fight this isn't to just gripe and then copy music or movies as you like. It's to attack this thing legally.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
If copyright isn't a property, then stop according property rights to your creative works (such as using the GPL).
While many of RMS's critics like to portray him as a zealot, he is in fact a pragmatist through and through. The whole reason for the creation of the GPL is that RMS realized that such property rights are not going to go away on their own any time soon.
So, instead of raging pointlessly against the machine, he decided to turn the machine on itself. The GPL is a hack of copyright law, that he intended it as a hack is evident in the name he gave it -- copyleft. That's not right and left as in the political simplification, it is one direction versus the other direction. The copyleft takes copyright in a direction directly opposite of where most copyright supporters want it to go.
With that background, it should be easy to understand that RMS would have no problem if all the property rights of copyright law were to be made void tomorrow. The expectation is that in a free market for software (i.e. not one artificially constrained by copyright) the benefits of Free software would completely dominate. Just as no one would ever think of buying a car with the engine-compartment completely welded shut, no one purchase software that was not Freely modifiable.
You may not believe in that vision, but that doesn't make it any less part of the reasoning behind the GPL. Thus arguments like yours that the GPL requires copyright law are technically true, but are ignorant of the actual intent of the GPL and Copyleft.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
T.S. Elliot was a master of words far beyond what you or I ever will be. Thus I defer to his greatness.
So-crates was one of the greatest philosophers ever, but I still wouldn't accept uncritically any cocktail suggestions he had.
I have to question you on this one. There are two main theories of where "intellectual property" comes from, and the debate over patent/copyright is contentious enough that law professors can't even agree on whether to refer to the Constitution's "IP Clause" or "Copyright Clause" or "Progress Clause." (I favor the latter.) Jefferson compared knowledge to a lighted taper [candle], that can be spread with no harm to the original holder; Franklin was a printer of pirated books. The actual wording that made it into the Constitution is ambiguous: patent/copyright law exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," which suggests that ownership rights in ideas are not fundamental rights, but ones established through the government as a form of subsidy for creativity. The fact that these rights are "for a limited time" supports this notion. The other theory emphasizes the wording about "securing rights" as though people did have innate rights to exclusive control over their work. In either case, it's not "God" creating the rights but a social contract/natural law.
And in either case, you apparently do not have a Constitutionally protected right to copy media even under the First Amendment, because the Progress Clause grants "the exclusive right" to the creators. So, does the First Amendment override and destroy the Progress Clause? Or did the Founders understand the First Amendment to not cover copyright (which means there was a large hole knocked in it from the beginning)? I don't know the answer here, but there's troubling ambiguity even just from trying to figure out the original intent of the Constitution.
Revive the Constitution.
Copyright infringement is not stealing. It's infringement, and it used to be a merely civil offense. That's why it wasn't criminal.
,a boat, a cd. With file sharing, that doesn't happen. That's why it's not stealing, it's infringement.
When you steal, you deprive someone of the use of their property-- a car
Unless you take the only copy of a poem, you're not stealing it. The author still has access to it.
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."
- James Madison
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Counterexample: I write stories. I make very little money at it so far, and I keep writing despite that fact, because it's something I love. In fact, I would like to devote more time to it, but so far I'm forced to earn money by doing something uncreative instead. If I were able to make a living as a writer, my time and therefore my output would be greater. So, the money does encourage creative production.
Revive the Constitution.
Oh, I'd give 'em a try. He was a hell of an experienced drinker -- that's one thing the Bruces' Philosophers' Song certainly got right. Scenario: Socrates and a bunch of friends at a party. They basically find that it's impossible to get him drunk -- he drinks them all under the table, and then wanders off on his usual daily round without even having a nap. (It's all in Plato, all in Plato. My word, what do they teach them in these schools?)
Would you say, then, that the Progress Clause (or whatever we should call it) has always been a dead letter, overridden completely by the First Amendment? It's a legally plausible position, as you'd be saying that the Amendment (which came after the Clause) eliminates and blocks all restrictions on freedom of the press, therefore canceling the authority that the Clause gives Congress to grant exclusive reproduction rights to media. But if that's so, then all copyrights are unconstitutional, and possibly even patents.
A letter by Jefferson presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.
Revive the Constitution.
Even at 8 percent taxpayer funding, I hope the Free Market Radicals and Capitalist Pigs among us remember that this important story has been TOTALLY ignored by the mainstream commercial media, demonstrating that there is some value to Socialism after all.
Now you can go back to playing with your Milton Friedman action figures.
You are welcome on my lawn.
is ONLY created to pay off some section of society.
Given the friction losses in a complex tax system, wouldn't it be better to NOT give special groups special tax breaks and reduce the cost of governance so that the overall burden is lower?
The intended effect usually doesn't appear since only some people who can apply for it will apply (because they don't hear about it, or they can't understand it applies to them or the burden of proof is more than the benefit) and the unintended consequence is that you open a tax loophole.
Here, have a cookie.
At the heart of 75% of full time activities is the economic equation of fixed Home+Auto expense, Vs variable income. You are paying a specific landlord/bank to live. What did your activities Tuesday 9-4 do towards that obligation?
The minute that someone snaps this equation open is when Web 3.0 will be here. One place to look is that someone cannot possibly consume content they have never heard of; therefore forcing a sales model also restricts the production side.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wow!
That's really cool the way "rights" and rights are different! It's almost like looking right into your brain and likely employment!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And yet providing an exclusive right to a subset of that information (creative works) for a limited time seems to benefit the whole more than it costs them.
Copyright is a good idea. It's ridiculously long and overly broad, but there are better ways to fix it than to abolish it altogether.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Clearly, these "corporations" are (8/92 * 100)% over budget.
My minor in college was English and my focus was on 20th/21st century poetry. That said, I guarantee you that (real) poets never steal. Its an homage but only so long as the phrase in question is used in such a way as to make it "their own" (which is to say, in the simplest of terms, it holds a different meaning under the new context).
If the phrase is altered slightly, it's tpyically considered an allusion to another work.
The phrase can be both an homage and an allusuion when (typical) left unaltered and the phrase in question first has it's own unique meaning in the new context and gains further meaning from the original work.
This is all to say that a 'poet' that sues another poet for copyright infringmnet is no poet at all.
Culture and knowledge should only be available to an elite few. I look forward to going back to the days before Gutenberg liberated the written word from handwritten copies and the Church lost it's intellectual monopoly on religious writings that were previously only kept in Latin.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
No slip. Copyrights given to the holder of the copyright are explicit. Fair use rights were clarified and added later. In this discussion people toss around the term "rights" when it comes to what they can do with someone else's intellectual property.
:)
Come by my office at the RIAA and I'll explain it to you.
T.S. Eliot's name was always capitalized. You're thinking of e e cummings.
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
"A few years ago, a Judge issued a catch-22 ruling: Yes, she said, we can copy commercial DVDs too. But no one can sell the software to do that."
Catch-22, indeed. Conveniently, the judge said nothing about simply giving away the software to do that. . .
Milo Minderbinder, eat your heart out.
--
"What's good for M&M enterprises is good for the country"
This is where you go wrong. In the old model the scarcity is what made the value. There was a high cost involved in getting creative works to the public. This cost required an investment that had to be recouped. To get a book published you had to find someone who was willing to take a risk on spending the money to publish, distribute and market your book. Copyright laws were designed to allow for a period of time over which the person or entity that made the investment could recoup that expense. Without copyright laws as soon as a book became popular everyone could publish it and the original investor would be unlikely to recoup those initial expenses. This would make it unlikely that anyone would make th investment to get anything published. That's the old model.
But with modern technology this model doesn't fit any more. The era of scarcity is over. It's relatively cheap and easy for anyone to create, publish, distribute and market creative works. I think this is a good thing since in the new non-scarce model creative works will become successful based on the merits of the work rather than on someone making the decision to invest in it. There should be a much larger variety of creative works available. The successful ones won't be required to make enough money to support the archaic publishing empire that the old model required. It just has to make enough to satisfy the actually creator and not support a huge publishing bureaucracy that produces nothing but sucks huge amounts out of the creative works.
The problem is everyone's trying to force the scarcity model onto a reality where scarcity no longer exists. DRM and and it's ilk are an attempt to force scarcity onto a technology that eliminated scarcity. This is being done by the old bureaucracy in an attempt to preserve their no longer needed or justified jobs. Creative artists can make money off there work without the old bureaucracy. They may not become the ultra-rich pop stars created by the old model publishing bureaucracy but a lot more of them will be able to make a decent living off their art.
Who is John Galt?
If I want to compare every combination of 2 distinct laws out of N laws, it will take me N(N-1)/2 comparisons to do so, which is O(N^2).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
The fucking clip plays for like 4 seconds and stops.
I like copyright and frankly I'm getting to the point where I'm agreeing with the DMCA more and more. I'm a small fry video producer that relies on copyright to protect the works I sell. I have had others try and pirate and use some of my works, particularly digital art preproduced on T-shirts, etc.. That is annoying because this guy made a few hundred dollars off my works and I got $0. I am in the business of creating original copyrighted materials that I use to earn a living. Whether it is from writing articles, some of which I get paid for, or selling videos I create, that is how I make my living. Six years ago I was screaming against the DMCA, also was in college at the time, but now on the other side of the tracks....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Ha, you're right! What a geek I've become!
No no no. This is the internet. We don't tolerate that kind of response around here.
This is silly, but there's a comic called Licensable Bear (tm) arguing for innate "intellectual property" rights. (The link goes to a comic from the same issue, the only one I've seen; the scene in question isn't on display there.) The character makes the devil's advocate argument: You can't own ideas! Property rights only apply to physical objects, of course, and we get the right to the raw materials by owning land, which we get either by royal charter or by conquest. At this point his audience is thinking, "Hey, how is it we can legitimately own land because our tribe conquered it, yet we can't own something we created from nothing?" It's tongue-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it. I would consider an argument for recognizing "fundamental rights" in ideas made tangible in the form of writings and inventions, rather than saying that those ideas are totally unprotected or protected only in violation of freedom of speech.
Revive the Constitution.
i like my diction when it is with your
diction. It is so quite a new thing.
Spelling better and capitals more.
i like your diction. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the shift
of your keyboard and its caps, and the trembling
-firm-uppercase ness and which i will
again and again and again
read, i like reading the T. and the S. of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking caps
of your Eliot sur name, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Shift-crumbs
and possibly i like the thrill
of upper case T S E quite so new