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U.S. Copyright Lobby Out of Touch
Ontheright writes "The BBC is featuring a story on
how the U.S. copyright lobby is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the world. The article focuses on a recent report designed to highlight the inadequacies of IP protection around the world by arguing for a global expansion of the DMCA and elimination of copyright exceptions. Michael Geist penned the article, which specifically calls out the United States for expecting the world at large to adopt its non-standard standards for copyright law."
The U.S. copyright lobby exists for one purpose: to give distributors sole custody of intellectual property "rights." In the past, pre-copyright, there was no intellectual property -- there was only marketing material that provided an artist or creator access to the market so they could sell their true product: live productions of that marketing material. Shakespeare wrote for acclaim, but it was his live performances that produced his income. He was also paid by wealthy patrons of the arts who wanted to see more from him. For centuries, this is why art was created. Those who didn't want acclaim but still wanted to produce art would do what we all do for incomes -- they got jobs in creating something for someone else.
For 200 years, copyright was considered the only way to protect your creations, but what came out of copyright is the worst-case scenario for amateur artists: instead of copyright protecting your creations, it only protected the monopoly networks of distribution, what I would call distribution cartels.
Now, 200 years later, we have a majority of opinion that believes that people wouldn't create if their intellectual property wasn't protected. But this isn't true. I created the Global Unanimocracy Network"> of blogs and forums in order to prove that you could generate an income for your talents without the need for copyright. All my writings are now public domain -- I freely encourage others to copy my writings and posts and repost them under their own name, on their own sites, for their own income. Why? Because it generates interest in the niche topics I cover, and eventually people find their way to my site. I make a decent income through advertising and individual support for my future writings. People pay me so that I will write more in the future. Even better, my network of blogs has also gotten me writing gigs for other sites that pay me to write content for them in a "ghost writing" type of deal.
If you are a musician, you have two options: record a record and use it as marketing to get people to your shows (as my brother's band Maps & Atlases has done), or go and get a job as a studio musician creating music for commercial ventures (movies, TV shows, muzak, etc). The idea that you can spend 2 weeks or 2 years creating one record and then reap 70 years of income is ridiculous. Does a plumber go to school for 2 years to learn how to fix toilets only to get paid for 70 years whenever you flush that toilet? No, they continue to work. Does an architect spend 2 years designing plans only to get paid forever by those who live or use the building that came forth from the plans? No, they keep designing. Artists are no different -- they should continue their labors in order to continue to reap incomes.
Right now, copyright has placed in the hands of powerful mercantilists the monopoly of distribution. The FCC decides who can transmit over public airwaves, and this blocks amateurs from the airwaves. Yet those days are coming to an end as the airwaves are growing less important as the Internet is available in more and more places (for example, I have a consistent WiFi connection to the net in my car at about 200kbps via T-Mobile's EDGE network). As the Internet finds its way to more parts of the country and the world, the public airwaves will be less utilized and way less efficient. The copyright lobby knows this, and they're trying hard to restrict future growth in "piracy" and non-licensed distributors. Yet for amateur artists, the non-licensed distributors are the best way to get the word out about their real product: continued labor to make new and unique art.
A friend's band, 38 Acres, now tells their audience and online visitors to freely copy their albums for friends. They make a decent income selling unique performances, and they also make an income selling their T-shirts and hats and posters. People who "pirated" t
The copyright model dates back to the guild systems which Europe coined ages ago.
It's ironic that a country built by entrepreneurs escaping the guild systems is now the central figure in locking down the one product and resource which could be shared at virtually no cost.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What's so surprising about Americans using non-standard procedures? 110 volt electricity, miles per hour speed measurement, Fahrenheit temperature scale,... should I go on? America has always distanced herself from international communities, standards, and practices.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Let's all keep in mind that the US had been changing it's copyright law to match European law for a while - for instance, the insane lengths of time and the "Life +x years" are European "innovations". Of course, the US content providers just used this as cover for their own agenda, but the rest of the world is hardly a shining beacon of copyright justice.
So now it's the US pushing a stupid agenda instead of Europe? Sounds more like the European copyright snowball they launched at the top of the hill is now an an avalanche they can't control. I'm not happy the US is in the thick of it, but it's inevitablity was insured long ago.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I created the XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX of blogs and forums in order to prove that you could generate an income for your talents without the need for copyright.
Yes, we know. And you shamelessly pimp yourself at every opportunity you get. And it's tiring. Very very tiring.
In the past, pre-copyright, there was no intellectual property
In the past publication was a privilege granted by a monarch, and strictly controlled by guilds. The actual authors of whatever works had no say in this whatsoever (other then not creating their works)
Believe it or not, but copyright was actually a liberation of sorts. This is also where the misguided belief comes from that copyright promotes creation of works of art. It definitely does when compared to the guilds system, but that is pretty meaningless when comparing it to a situation where any works can be freely used and reused.
For the rest, I definitely agree that copyright as it is is completely broken, and is not even remotely serving its stated purpose. Rather, it is only there to help the big distributors keep as much control as possible.
Copyright does not guarantee any kind of income to those who actually create works of art, and it derives them of many of their sources of inspiration (at least legally)
As the restrictions and duration of publishing monopolies are increased,
the public domain diminishes,
and demand for creative-commons, open-source, and other freely distributed works increases.
So far as I can see this is just a wish list written by American media companies, it would be very surprising indeed to see them putting anything in this report which doesn't have a direct influence on maximising their profits and protecting their market.
The problem arises if the US government, as the article suggests, simply uses this document as a blueprint when passing legislation or when making trade agreements with other countries.
I would again expect the US government to attempt to gouge the best deals for it's own industries in the international community but unlike private companies I would also expect that the US as a democratically controlled country would also take into account more factors than simply their financial bottom line, but if this what the people want then the US is in an excellent position to force there opinions on the rest of the world.
It's clear that what is suggested for other countries is also desired, and presumably being worked towards, in the US its self so I think it is in the interests of the US citizens to stand up and prevent the undiluted dreams of their entertainment industry to be dictated to the rest of the world because once the rest of world falls into line with their dreams then it will be harder for the US citizens to resist these changes being rolled back into their own country.
Ideally the rest of the world needs to stop allowing the US to dictate their commercial policies and decide these things for themselves without being threatened by the US.
Do try to keep up, Colonial chums.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
pshaw. next thing you know, they are going to say our patent system needs overhauling, too.
But the US is in touch with world domination through a combined arsenal of nuclear weapons and economic coercion :-( Now, for those of you outside the US, do what your told or else ...
Well, knowing the free advertising he's going to get gives him some incentive to spend so much time writing such a wonderful and insightful comment. :P
Yay for the free market
~= scwizard =~
Then, no one would used them because they wouldn't want to pay the royalty fees...at least until there was an "open-source" analogy to copyright.
almost sounds like an idea, doen't it?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Can anyone name me a subject where the US government is in touch with the rest of the world? And where it's not just doing whatever the hell it feels like?
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Copyright does not guarantee any kind of income to those who actually create works of art,
Copyright doesn't guarantee income to anyone -- after all, your intellectual works could be garbage. But a lot of people think that it does not help to generate income for the artists, since "the big evil record companies take it all". But this is common misconception. How much would the record companies pay the artists if they couldn't own the intellectual property at all?
Remember, artists already have the right not to claim copyright and try to make money without selling the rights to a record company. If you think you can make more money this way, go for it! But light a match before griping about the darkness.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
No. In the Roman Empire, there was a very active publishing scene, where the recitals of poets or the plays of playwrights were transcribed, copied by slaves, and sold in the marketplace. Most popular literary figures had little contact with the ruling powers in the writing and dissemination of their works. People like Plautus were relatively insignificant commoners, and do you think that Hesiod and Homer had to wait for the permission of a king for their poetry to gain acclaim? And even when some work or another ended up irking the powers that be, the result was not an end to publication (Ovid's work spread widely) by the exile of the individual writer.
As the restrictions and duration of publishing monopolies are increased,
the public domain diminishes,
So far so good...
demand for creative-commons, open-source, and other freely distributed works increases.
Ok, slow down there turbo. Most people don't choose their media based on how it is encumbered. Your formula needs to be changed to be accurate:
copyright++ = publicdomain-- = (creativecommons++/10,000,000)
Eloquently put, sir.
That's exactly what I was trying to get across with this post in another article. It's not about money per se, it's always been about control. As long as the **AA and the TV media companies have control of the means of distribution, there's an unending supply of disproportionate profit that never goes into the hands of artists, it goes into the hands of the distribution channel.
The Internet provides a way for artists to directly connect to end-users. It gives them the means to find an audience, no matter how niche their work might me.
If people gain control of how they connect with the artists, then who needs the RIAA, MPAA, the TV networks, or radio companies like ClearChannel? Money can flow from consumers to artists directly, completely bypassing all the middlemen, who today make the bulk of the money.
It's like Cisco says in their TV spots: Anyone can be famous. Welcome to the human network.
My blog
This is true, and thanks to copyleft, this is like a stronger version of the public domain. It is still an unfortunate situation, though, because there are many works that may never see the light of day as public domain or as a copylefted work.
Copyright doesn't guarantee income to anyone -- after all, your intellectual works could be garbage. But a lot of people think that it does not help to generate income for the artists, since "the big evil record companies take it all". But this is common misconception. How much would the record companies pay the artists if they couldn't own the intellectual property at all?
They would do work for hire, and get payed for the amount of work they did. This would in fact work out better for the large majority of artists.
They would also have to actually do life performances or exhibitions or whatever is proper for their works, and get some income that way.
What this will do is remove some of the lottery aspect of creating art.
Remember, artists already have the right not to claim copyright and try to make money without selling the rights to a record company. If you think you can make more money this way, go for it! But light a match before griping about the darkness.
I happen to create works for which I can claim copyright, and I happen to not assert those rights in the large majority of cases. Where I do assert those rights, it is for a very limited time.
Oh, and I do actually make some money with that as well.
Does it make me rich? definitely not, but then, when averaging the income of artists "within the system", you may find that they earn very little typically. There are some exceptions, which are just that, exceptions.
The only ones typically making quite a bit of money on copyright are distributors, and not those who actually create works of art.
Maybe the parent does do that and throws around "free market" like its going out of style, but how can you stay mad at a Hall & Oates reference?
C'mon!
After all, you can't rely on the old man's money...
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
1 mile = 1760 yard
If you are making up your own conversion factor, then it is not a mile anymore.
This is the head of the RIAA speaking, dada21 (user #163177), you owe us $1,000,000 for every hour that you violate usage of Hall and Oates's copywrited lyrics, and $1,000,000 for every hour of every reply to your message (which copies the lyrics). Comply with this friendly take-down notice or face 10 years of prison for every hour the violation persists. Our records show that your post is 13 hours old, so do the math.
We need:
- Compulsory licencing (it's not like anyone has any real choice in whether files are copied anyway).
- Some mechanism whereby creators are compensated for each copy.
- A distinction between large scale commercial copying and small scale private copying.
- Extra consumer rights for copying of pout of print works.
This is actually a pretty corporate biased set of rules, and there would be practical problems. Many people will object to paying a fee per commercial download, even if the privacy and owner identification issues are solved. But I submit this as a starting point. It does allow consumers to have large scale access to a vast collection of works, and ensure compensation for creators.Believe it or not, without copyright many works simply would not be possible today.
Although a few garage bands might be willing to create music for free, many kinds of work cost a lot of money. Say goodbye to movies for a start, as well as games. No more orchestras, all those musicians want paying.
Copyright allows everyone to profit from their work, unlike before when the aristocracy and royalty basically could say what they want creating.
And copyright doesn't mean that the artist keeps getting paid, but that he is the only one who can sell and create "copies" of his work. If people want to enjoy his work so badly, why shouldn't he receive a reward for it?
Ask your bro how he'd feel if another band took their songs, or what your friend would think if you started selling copies of their CD for a few bucks.
Comparing your blog and a few garage bands to every other artist is just stupid.
Who was the underwriter? I bet they are rolling in the dough
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
This is a specious analogy. A plumber only gets paid once per customer because his service is only rendered once. The service rendered by the architect is to create the designs for a building which is then sold to whoever will own the building, not the people who use/work in the building. That is a single transaction.
The service that you get when you buy a record is the experience of listening to that album whenever you want. Why shouldn't the artist get paid by each person who receives this service? The consumer does not have a right to listen to someone else's private creation. If the creator chooses to sell the opportunity to listen to their work, that is their prerogative and they should continue to receive payment for as long as people continue to receive that service.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
The **AA must have forgotten to pay off the BBC. Seriously - the copyright mafiaa is out of touch (and out of control) with the rest of the US. The only reason for their success in the US is that they've been very good at buying off American politicians.
[Insert pithy quote here]
U.S. copyright lobby is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the world. This just in from the Well Duh department.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So what difference does copyright law make to you?
-You don't assert it.
-You make money without it.
-You don't infringe it.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yay for the free market :P
There is nothing free about our market. Our trade agreements are not free either. Both are loaded with protections for business in the form of restrictions in copyright, intellectual property, and patent laws.
A truly free market would have none of these protections in place. True free market agreements would also not have these protections.
In the end, we just have a normal market. And those are just normal trade agreements.
What do Slashdotters propose to protect the interests of artists in an age of digital distribution? The abolishment of intellectual property rights entirely? Better be careful since the GPL relies on intellectual property rights.
"Sufferin' succotash."
1) For the most part 99% of artists get nothing from copyright (trivial google search I've already linked a couple times but it's something like .03% who make big money)
2) Most artists are relentlessly and ruthlessly ripped off by large corporations. It's not uncommon to see a wildly popular creation deemed "unprofitable" after "promotional and accounting" expenses are accounted for. Even such stupid thinks as "breakage" from the vinyl area are still applied. Despite this outright fraud, they STILL outright LIE and state lower numbers of sales than they know occured-- they get caught at it all the time.
3) Copyright isn't about a lifelong income stream. It's explicit purpose is to induce artists to create work which will enter the public domain. The original period was 28 years. That's entirely reasonable. The author's life plus 70 years is completely rediculous. "Forever and one day" (Jack Valenti) is the ultimate goal.
4) I guess the "Star Wreck" movie didn't actually get made and I didn't laugh and enjoy it and I didn't spend 4 hours watching it (twice!) instead of consuming purchased products. Oh wait... it did and I did.
5) Entire swaths of music wouldn't exist now if copyright rules in effect now were enforced as they started. Blues for example reuses a lot of common riffs. As a result- the FIRST song would have locked up that sequence of notes and it would have been 100+ years before another song using that riff would be made- so no blues. (You see it in rock & roll now- very stifling).
6) "Happy Birthday" is still copyrighted and will be until 2030. The authors are LONG dead and don't receive a penny. Some corporation owns the "rights" (same thing with a lot of other dead people).
7) Every time micky mouse comes up for public domain they pay a lot of money and get the period extended. For who? Again- the creator is dead.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Feh. Metric, shmetric, miles, shmiles. Nothing beats metric-60.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
1 mile = 1794 yards = 5382 feet (except nautical miles, which equal 4977 feet, and air miles) = 107 rods, or maybe chains. Whichever.
1 ton = 1440 lbs = 12880 oz (or 12000 troy oz.) = 12888000 grains = 256000000 iotas
1 gallon = 64 fl.oz. = 68 oz.vol. = 2 quarts = 16 cups = 256 tsps. or 100 Scotch gills (102 English gills or 'short gills')
1 year = 365 1/4 days = 12 months of all different lengths. That one's a bit confusing, I admit.
Also there are cubits and firkins. Well when you put it like that up here in Canada our metric system just seems down right impossible!
We have this crazy idea that working with base 10 is just so much easier!
Mad things I tell you! Like:
1 meter = 0.001 kilometer
or
1 meter = 100 centimeter
I could go on but It is just way to complicated not like your easy to remember system of random values and measurement base on kings feet and who knows what else!
At the risk of being modded a troll, I want to ask a question that rattles through my head every time this subject come up. Why whine about the system?
A corporation exists to make money. The method of making money can vary, but in this case we are talking about catering to a consumer trading money for something. Ultimately, they don't particularly care about the consumer, just maximizing profits, granted, there are corporations who have found a business model where being customer friendly DOES maximize profit, but the point is still profit.
I never understand why this surprises people.
A corporation uses any method it can to garner the maximum income for the investments they make, the only real differences are how far the people controlling the corp are willing to go and what techniques they are willing to use to get there. But there is no difference between EMI, Sony, Microsoft, General Motors or anyone else.
That said, if you, as a creator, don't want to turn over your copyrights to some big corporation because you aren't interested in the way they do business, or their logo suck, or you want a bigger cut,then don't sign. You are under no obligation to market your work to them. There are other outlets that bypass that distribution system, and, with a lot of luck, you will make money on your work.
The other side of the coin is if anyone creates a work, it's theirs, not you the consumer. If you purchase a song, a book, a bit of art, or a software product, you understand you are purchasing it for your use under certain conditions of the sale. If you don't like those conditions, dont buy it. If enough people don't buy becasue of the conditions of the sale (Like they don't like the DRM restrictions, for example) the system will change. You have the right to NOT enter into an agreement with the owner of the work, simply don't purchase.
If we were talking about "Air", "Water", Medical services, Broadband, you know, the things that you HAVE to have to survive, it'd be different, you don't have a choice, but we are talking about music - you Have a choice, and frankly, the new stuff the major lables are churning out isn't worth buying anyway, if everyone would stop buying that crap, we'd fix it all in one shot, get good music and get it on the terms we want.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
That's true - as long as the someone keeps it private. Once a recording is sold to me then I have right to do whatever I want with my newly purchased object. The law of copyright is an addon that restricts my right for the sole purpose of encouraging artists (and others) to create. This violation of my property rights is supposed to be acceptable for this reason, but it is of course only temporarily granted. The idea that someone should have indefinite control over my stuff is odious. Furthermore, copyright is a legally imposed monopoly with all the bad effects of any monopoly - another reason that copryright is supposed to be temporary.
I myself favour music copyrights that last 2 years with the right to renew copyright for a fee (which increases - say doubles - every two year period). But we could argue about the details of this temporary monopoly and temporary overturning of the property rights of citizens.
This has probably been linked to on slashdot before, but this thread deserves it as well: http://negativland.com/albini.html/
Humour comes in many forms. Apologies for not measuring up to the standards of George Carlin's humour with a message and thus failed to deliver that with my attempt at a humourous message response. Of course the truth does tend weigh down the humour sometimes if the timing and delivery isn't right.
This really isn't a case of "do what I say, not what I do" -- the RIAA (for one) is actively campaigning against fair use in the US as well. They are, if nothing else, consistent.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
He was describing an actual situation where someone is making money based on "intellectual" creation without relying on the aspects of "intellectual property" law that proponents insist are absolutely required for anyone to be able to make a living off creativity. That point is quite relevant to this discussion.
Not really. The method he's described is possible with and without copyright. But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws. Then we get artists profiting through the method he's described, AND the work that requires copyright.
Right?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I fail to see how this is a violation of property rights. By this logic couldn't an apartment rental agreement be considered a violation of property rights? After all, there are certain restrictions placed on your use of and treatment of an apartment, so what makes that any different? Yet there is no such furor over rental housing. It is a fact that the agreement between the purchaser of a cd and the creator of that work does not give the purchaser unlimited rights over that content. Copyright law only has power over those who choose to participate in the system which is governed by it, so it is definitely not taking anyone's rights away, unless you consider access to unlimited free content to be a right. I do not.
Additionally, a creator exercising their ownership of their created work does not qualify as a monopoly, at least in contemporary parlance. True it is sole ownership of that commodity, but to take away the right of a creator to own something they create (unless otherwise agreed) IS a violation of property rights. After all, if a woodworker wanted to sell you the chair he made, you wouldn't complain about the monopolization of that chair, would you?
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
Your post assumes that there are no artistic works that would not be made because of copyright laws as they exist now.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
With traditional services (plumbing, garbage collection, live performances), there is a one-time service with a one-time benefit.
I think services like architecture are in the middle - along with creating commissioned work - it's a one-time service which is technically a copyable creation (such as blueprints), but which are really only useful to one person and therefore have a one-time benefit as well.
And then you enter the crazy world of bytes where you have the creation of a work being a one-time service with an arbitrarily-large benefit.
And when you're looking at a one-time service with a many-time benefit, you can look at it from two angles. You can do what the parent did and look at it from the benefitter's perspective. That is, you benefit many times, therefore the service is perpetual and deserves continual payment like a service.
The other way of looking at it is looking at it from the creator's perspective. That is, you did actually only do the creative work one time, therefore the service is a single service and deserves a single payment.
There's no real way to settle it, because when you look at it, the "entity" doing the actual perpetual work is the CD-ROM burner (or whatever is being used to copy the data) - and that is cheap/free labour. So we have this social divide, and it's just unfair that the plumber performs one service and gets paid once, while the artist performs one service and gets paid infiniditum.
Of course, traditionally things like this have balanced themselves out somewhat, because it's much cheaper to buy a CD than it is to get a plumber to fix your toilet - the reason being the artist is making cheap copies. It's great for consumers because it means that copyable things are much cheaper (as opposed to everyone who wanted to listen to music having to pay to go to the opera, for example). But pity the poor plumber.
(Am I making sense? It's 5:30 AM...)
And what's your reason for considering that assumption unreasonable? Give me a scenario.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum for a specific amount of time. This definition is NOT arbitrary, it specifically tied to something that (currently as we understand it) does not change but can be measured and reproduced accurately. It is done this way because modern science and engineering relies on consistent and reproducible measurements. Units like pounds and miles are (just barely) good enough for weighing food or building a wooden house, but if you are trying to build something like a space ship or a large hadron collider, you simply cannot do it without a physically standardized and reproducible unit of measure.
It's funny that you should mention Shakespeare. In fact, he DID try to keep his plays to himself, or rather, to the theater which hired him to produce it. Other theater troupes would try to steal them by hiring actors to make transcripts of his plays. There was no copyright law preventing them from doing so, but actors who provided copies of plays were blacklisted.
The plays would be published in print, and the printers themselves (not Shakespeare!) did own copyrights. Any other printer printing the plays would be sued.
That's one of the reasons that so many Elizabethan plays are variations on the same themes: different writers producing their own versions of the same story, to get around that problem. You couldn't use the same script (though they often stole a catchy turn of phrase from each other), but dipping into the common pool of stories was just fine.
Shakespeare wrote for money, and the guys who bought his work expected to have sole rights to it. If Shakespeare had given it away to any troupe who wanted it, or even sold it, nobody would have given him any work. (Eventually he became part owner of one of the theater troupes, and wrote exclusively for them for a while.)
Ironically, his plays are still important today partly because his copyrights are long over, but at the time he made his living off producing them under the Elizabethan equivalents of copyrights.
"Shakespeare wrote for acclaim, but it was his live performances that produced his income."
See also every recording act in the US and beyond. The money's not in the copyright or even the sales of the recorded media. Tickets and T-shirts, y'all.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
"How much would the record companies pay the artists if they couldn't own the intellectual property at all?"
As that would mean the record companies would have far less money to push 'their' material, and far less control of distribution channels, and far less financial resources to spend on payola, that would mean that non-RIAA artists got a far larger share of the radio/cd-tax/other royalty money, and a far greater exposure.
Without copyright, the total costs in the whole industry would fall, creating a much more level playing field for the long tail. More of the consumer money would remain available for spending on direct-to-artist material and concerts, as less is needed to finance marketing, videos, launches and coke snorting races for RIAA execs.
In the end, a whole lot of artists and creators would get a whole lot more than they're getting today.
To go beyond that, if you want more money to artists, heck, if we can have a blank cd tax, why not apply a recorded-cd-tax on the distribution channels if you're still afraid the artists would lose out? Say, artists and creators get a mandatory 50% of final sales price (which, without copyright and with competition in the sales and distribution channels, should fall to around a dollar or two for a cd)? Then we could start talking about a system that actually benefitted the artists.
Well I guess you've got it all figured out.
For music.
Get back to me when you have it figured out for every other form of non-physical creation. And just saying "oh well, no big $shitty_movie anymore" doesn't cut it, because for every $shitty_movie that doesn't get made there's likely a $great_movie that won't either.
Copyright has almost NO place in classical music.
The music itself is not copyrighted.
Copyright produces almost NO revenue stream.
Classical music lives on performance subscriptions and donations. It has far more in common with your garage band then commercial music.
> people don't choose their media based on how it is encumbered
Tell that to someone looking for royalty-free clip-art or sound clips for a new work.
Tell that to people that used old-Napster or old-mp3.com.
Why is there a demand for P2P? Are people hungry to commit sometimes questionably legal acts?
Or is there a natural demand and expectation of freely available information?
Do you look up the current owner of "Happy Birthday" to pay royalties when you sing it?
Or do you just "expect that it is or should be free to use"?
Sure, "most people" don't choose media based on how it is encumbered,..., at first.
But if the FBI came and arrested your cousin for making DJ mixes, or you sister's computer was taken as part of a RIAA raid, or your purchased music files stop working when you try to play different them somehow, or Vista goes into stupid mode when you upgrade your CPU, (or Time-Warner interrupts or concludes your birthday party to demand payment,...),
then you become more aware of media encumberment.
When you state something, you can be asked to back it up with some kind of argument or even provide some kind of proof.
Asking someone to disprove your statement is not doing the job there.
It could be, if the bands didn't let themselves get screwed by the companies.
There's nothing wrong with copyright that can't be fixed, but the malicious behavior is one of coroporate sociopathy and THAT is what must be stopped.
No. In the Roman Empire, there was a very active publishing scene, where the recitals of poets or the plays of playwrights were transcribed, copied by slaves, and sold in the marketplace. Most popular literary figures had little contact with the ruling powers in the writing and dissemination of their works. People like Plautus were relatively insignificant commoners, and do you think that Hesiod and Homer had to wait for the permission of a king for their poetry to gain acclaim? And even when some work or another ended up irking the powers that be, the result was not an end to publication (Ovid's work spread widely) by the exile of the individual writer.
And for a long time after that the situation was as I described. Both predate copyright as we know it.
So while you are right about ancient times, the "no" at the start of your post is quite wrong.
"we're better off having copyright laws."
You need to calculate the economy over the entire segment. As a segment with monopolistic competition, the revenue extraction is more or less maximized, ie, you pretty much cannot get more total money out of the consumers for the specific product segment. It's just a question of how the money is split and divided, and how it's spent. As a much larger part of the copyright-intensive megacorps revenue gets wasted on things like marketing and administration, this money does not go directly to finance more artists and composers.
This means that while we're getting those for whom the previous method works, we're only getting a fraction of the total possible for-pay or for-sustenance art that we could get with the money we're paying today. And that's even ignoring the streamlining and cultural poverty inherent in having an industry driven by a strong economic interest in a tightly controlled common-denominator pop culture.
By this logic couldn't an apartment rental agreement be considered a violation of property rights?
No. A rental agreement is a contract that both parties actually sign. Each party can bring the contract to court, show that it is signed by the other party, and seek damages if the contract was violated.
It is a fact that the agreement between the purchaser of a cd and the creator of that work does not give the purchaser unlimited rights over that content.
Every time I bought a CD, I never agreed to anything with the creator(s) of the content. I didn't even agree to anything with the distributors of that content. I just bought a product for personal enjoyment (or as a gift for another person).
I didn't use the music for any money-making ventures. I just listened to it, maybe even danced or lip-synced. Am I going to jail now?
In an era where technology makes things plentiful, the most valuable thing you can have is scarcity.
That's what Intellectual Property has evolved into, creating scarcity.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Copyright does not guarantee any kind of income to those who actually create works of art, and it DEPRIVES them of many of their sources of inspiration (at least legally)
When you state something, you can be asked to back it up with some kind of argument or even provide some kind of proof.
I appreciate the lesson in rhetoric.
However, the claim in question -- that there exist artistic works that are not produced because of copyright -- was the only unreasonable claim here that was lacking proof. (Remember, "I can't create a derivative of this copyrighted work" is not an argument -- that work only existed because of copyright.) I've covered my bases.
And I didn't even ask for proof, I just asked for an example to show why that would happen.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I also like to argue that if creators and their descendants should be able to gain income throughout the creator's life, plus for 70 years after the creator's death, then why shouldn't criminals and felons and their descendants have to pay fines for the lawbreaker's life, plus for 70 years after the lawbreaker's death?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Ah, but if he sold you the chair only after you signed an agreement not to copy the design or allow someone else to reap the benefit of that chair without some payment (someone borrowing your chair falls under this since you have still paid for it whether you're using it or not), then you wouldn't be able to do those things without breaking the law. And I'm fairly sure that if it was possible to copy chairs as easily as you can copy a cd, woodworkers would demand those kind of agreements from anyone who buys their work.
The point remains that you are making an agreement when you buy a cd, saying that you won't violate the copyright binding on the works contained therein. As far as I know, there is text announcing the copyrighted nature of any work that is copyrighted printed right on it, so it's not a hidden agreement. It's just the same as EULA's, which everyone agrees are binding, even if they come off as a bit shifty.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
"many kinds of work cost a lot of money."
Missed the digital revolution, eh? Creative endeavors have never in history been as cheap as they are now.
The fact that the megacorps works costs is because monopolies drives costs like there's no end to revenue. There are examples where platinum selling artists with a finished recording cant get their company to release the new album because they wouldnt be able to make a profit on it. Can you even imagine how you could fail to make a profit off that?
"Say goodbye to movies for a start, as well as games."
There has never been as much high-quality low to zero budget movies as there are now. Nor games (which are moving over to service structures anyway). Without copyright it would be even easier to share models and footage to create entirely new works, ushering in a new era of rapidly evolving content.
"No more orchestras, all those musicians want paying."
You're kidding, right? Orchestras, if you're looking at the classical type, _are_ playing non-copyrighted material. Somehow they appear to get paid anyway, eh?
While there's all this hype from the RIAA and MPAA about the illegal *broadcast* of their IP and how if one person plays a song that's not their's in public (under certain circumstances) they can be sued or have to pay royalty to the arist. But if you showed a painting or a drawing to the public (under the same circumstances), you can't sue the person who put it up for display nor do that person have to pay royalty. Artists and painters have had (to this day) to deal with the world "without Intectual Property rights" for ages. Think of why most of the great artists in the past died poor. If they want this standard in america to be fair, make people pay royalty for displaying their art in public and anyone seeing the art have to pay a royalty. Either that or make it so people that replay a musical piece or movie without fear of legal action. Just because one medium (art) was able to be put into solid form before another (music/film), doesn't mean they're subjected to different Intectual Property rights. After all, they are all intellectual property. Either fix the system or break it and start anew.
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
You might want to read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. (It's even downloadable for free.) In it, he gives a number of scenarios where highly restrictive copyright laws, combined with the fact that there is no central registry by which one can determine what works are copyrighted any by whom, do inhibit creators from creating content.
This is the most insightful work I've read yet on the problems of modern copyright.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Copyright is essentially a protection of property, much like having laws against theft. Without them people could "steal" (don't get into the semantics of the definition of stealing, my point here is obvious) work and claim it as their own. While 70 years seems like a long time it isn't really all that unfair. Essentially it is designed to protect the creator of the work for their lifetime. Just because people sell that right to others is no reason to say it isn't reasonable.
I don't understand your point of copyright being the worst-case scenario for amateur artists. It has no merit. An amateur artist has the right to do whatever he/she wants with their work. Copyright does protect an amateur artist just the same as a major distributor. If you register a copyrighted work it is very well protected no matter what your ability to pay legal fees is. I just don't see how anyone can say that this is bad for an amateur artist. Your example of free domain is fine, it is your decision to do so, but don't force your Marxist views on others. Almost anything I write gets a © on it if I think it is of value, whether I plan to distribute it or not. Maybe I am just a capitalist pig, but if I want to protect my work from theft I should have the right to do so. Heck, I even put it on some of the course work I do for school if I think my ideas have merit and are original. I would never claim to be an artist, but I do write some, particularly non-fiction. I have never been published and don't know if I ever care to, but I would like to think that if I do cross that line someday I have the ability to profit from it.
This is irrelevant. Fixing a toilet is a service. Content creation is an art. What does one have to do with the other? You are focusing on one business model and making the assumption that it applies to everything else. Get real... look at the razor blade market or the inkjet printer market... do these look more like the arts market? They get protection through patents on their ink cartridge design. Why should copyright be any different?
While some distributors do have significant control of distribution networks, their status is clearly not that of monopoly. The definition of a monopoly is one company controlling the entire industry, which is clearly not the case. One could argue oligopolies exist but I would not because many small distributors still exist and have carved out particular niches.
Creators of works have the choice of signing with a major distributor, a small distributor, or doing it on their own. No one forces one to sign with a big name, economics just dictate that it is much easier to make a profit when signing with them because of their broad scale of distribution. Your point seem extremely Marxist in that it is the right of the people to have access to every work out there. Capitalism doesn't work that way, each entity has the choice to do business how they see fit within the constructs of the law. Who cares what people did 200+ years ago, why not go back 1000 years? 10,000 years? Society evolves and with it our definitions of an individuals place in it, the social boundaries, norms, etc. 200 years ago the printing press was still relatively new and copying a writing was much more cost prohibitive than it is today.
While I don't agree with the way the MPAA and RIAA conduct themselves, in principle I do agree with some of their logic. The copyright holder has rights and most countries agree with that principle. If you don't want a big distributor to control your work, or want it to be passed freely you have the right to do so under the U.S. system.
...should read..."determine what works are copyrighted and by whom"...
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
There are lots of ways to pay for big movies. People still like to go to the cinema, you can sell merchandise, sell DVDs with physical extras, set up a fund (as soon as 1 million people donate $10/each you'll make a specific film) If an actual marketing firm worked on the idea I'm sure they could do better than my ideas.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Your solution would only work for performance artists. A modern author would get screwed by the system you are suggesting. Especially with digital media available, magazines and novels literally wouldn't be worth the paper they were printed on. This is the primary reason most pre-copyright works are theological. They were produced for study, not for money. I know there are exceptions, but they are a small minority of works.
If that's his point, then those appear to be problems with a) limitations on fair use, and b) the lack of a reliable way of knowing, NOT with copyright as such.
Certainly, copyright should not attach unless specifically asserted, so later artists can know, and fair use should exist. But that doesn't address the larger matter of whether some kind of copyright should exist at all.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
An artist could get people to sign agreements that they would not copy the work they were receiving on a recording. That would replace copyright. I don't recall ever buying a cd wherein I signed any agreement with anybody. The CDs do point out that "unauthorized copying is forbidden" as is their right under copyright. Funny thing is, the CD will still say that in 100 years, but it won't be true (unless copyright gets further extended, which would truly be a disaster for culture).
But say we go with your "agreement" model. Suppose I break the agreement and release a copy of some work. Then I can be prosecuted, but downstream copiers seem to be out of harm's way. Copyright prevents this abuse without invoking some bizarre legal theory of "viral licenses" propagating through downstream copying.
When I drive I don't "agree" to obey the law. When I buy a cd I don't "agree" to obey copyright. I am bound by law to obey. That's ok with me. We should be clear about the nature and purpose of copyright law however.
I read the entire back and forth and just wanted to add my input even though my karma has somehow turned bad. I think that the saying of power corrupts is very true here. The corruption has always been around and it is done by those in power. Decadence like during the heyday of the Roman Empire or the recent dotcom bubble also lead to the corruption and the media coverage makes it more obvious.
"The fire has been burning since the world's been turning..." Like a fire it flares up from time to time and reduces to embers but its a cycle and keeps on going.
"It is not my intent to offend, but if offense is taken, the fault lies with the audience." attributed to Patrick Henry
-- SomPost
On behalf of Americans everywhere (actual people not the Recording/Movie Industry), I apologize to the rest of the world. Please ignore them.
How does allowing theft of work amount to capitalism? Intagibles are a whole different ball game than a tangible item. It is a challenging concept to tackle, but without copyright protection an entity with more market power can just force anyone else out by leveraging their distribution networks. That sounds much more monopolistic to me. I wouldn't claim that current copyright systems are perfect, but I have yet to hear of a better way.
Note that without copyright, the company that duplicates the reels could make as many copies as they want. Or the people at the theaters could have copies made. Theaters wouldn't actually have to pay the studios to show the movie, and you could be sure they wouldn't.
Without copyright, no DVD would have any value since duplicators would crank out copies for $5 a pop.
And a fund? Look at how unwilling people are to part with money now. I doubt they'd be willing to pay for something sight unseen.
If you can, take the time and read the book. Lessig does not argue that copyright should not exist at all, but his argument is that copyright has become so unbalanced in the favor of "creators" (really, corporations which dominate the content industry) that it works against its original constitutionally stated purpose of promoting progress.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The purpose of copyright is to provide a temporary monopoly on distribution of the art so that its creator can benefit from the work enough to encourage them to create further works. Copyright is NOT intended to create a source of lifetime income for the creator.
This is particularly true because the entire purpose of encouraging the creation of artistic works is so that the public itself has more art from which to benefit. The true value of art is its value to the culture that created it, because it allows us to see ourselves and reflect on our own existence. Cultures NEED art because essentially, it tells us who we are. Jefferson himself (who, by the way, wrote the Copyright clause of the US Constitution), as a child of the Enlightenment, recognized that all artistic work is inherently public domain - which is precisely why copyright monopolies should be granted for as little time as possible. We can't FORCE people to create artistic works to benefit the culture, so we ENCOURAGE them to do so with copyrights. Simple as that.
From that perspective, there is NO justification for maintaining a "death + 70 years" monopoly (not just 70 years, by the way). Those kinds of copyrights only accomplish one thing: depriving the culture that created the art of its due. We have yet to see what disastrous consequences this is going to have on expression.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Of course, it is impossible to prove that something that does not exist would exist under some other conditions. I'll even say that the opposite, the claim that a given copyrighted work would not exist except for copyright, is just as unprovable.
However, consider that Walt Disney built his empire largely upon works (Snow White and Cinderella as the most obvious examples) that were public domain at that time, but under today's more restrictive (and effectively unlimited as long as ex post facto extensions are allowable) copyright laws, these public domain works would not have been available for Disney to create his profitable derivative works.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Actually copyright has prevented this. Because individual artists control their work, they can prevent the **AA from distributing them without permission. Without copyright protections big marketing could just take the songs by your brother's band and mass distribute with their own "face," with no acknowledgement of where the song came from.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Of course, it is impossible to prove that something that does not exist would exist under some other conditions.
Hm. You make a good point. How about this: I'll simply ask for a reason why something *could* exist without copyright, but not with copyright.
Oh, wait, I already did that before you jumped in with your insights!
I'll even say that the opposite, the claim that a given copyrighted work would not exist except for copyright, is just as unprovable.
It's not provable in the mathematical sense, but given that the artists preferred not to use the non-copyright method that was available to them, and did require significant financial investment, it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Of course, they're given a choice between two extremes there. The extreme of no protection, or the extreme of copyright law as it exists today. That doesn't really prove much of anything. What if copyrights lasted only 30 years? Would artists still create? History tells us that they would. Would companies be able to own these works forever and prohibit anyone from creating anything new based on those works? No. But I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I hearby claim the rights of the parent post.
;-)
Does anyone happen to have interest in buying it?
Nice slashdot posting regarding copyrights and how outdated the music industry is, called "They aren't out of touch, they're out of time...". The posting is new and shiny and reuseable as well as resellable: Copy it for as many times as you want and I'll grant you to copy and resell it, in return for just small license fees.
We have yet to see what disastrous consequences this is going to have on expression.
I beg to differ.
*cough*Jessica Simpson*cough*
"we're better off having copyright laws."
You need to calculate the economy over the entire segment. As a segment with monopolistic competition, the revenue extraction is more or less maximized, ie, you pretty much cannot get more total money out of the consumers for the specific product segment.
You may want to be careful about offering arguments like this. The report itself offers figures to show that the intellectual property industry as a whole constituted well over 11% of the US GDP in 2005, that the figure is steadily growing, and that the added value from the IP industry is out of proportion with the size of the industry. Now, you may want to dispute the figures; I'd be happy to see that. But it really doesn't look to me like an argument based on economic benefit is going to be on the side of the general public; it seems to me that the argument has to be based on cultural benefit, general all-purpose morality.
You did know that in the US and most nations, copyright is automatic?
Yes.
What does that have to do with anything?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
And I actually provided such a reason (that most of the public domain works that Walt Disney used derivatively to build his media empire would not be PD under today's laws, which ironically were largely sponsored by Disney), which you seem to have ignored.
I would take exception to both of your "givens". Remember, copyright is automatic to all creative works; the creator need do nothing to obtain copyright protection. Using a "non-copyright method", OTOH, requires specific action on the part of the creator to release his work under some alternative licensing scheme. So to claim any artist who does not choose the latter deliberate path to the former automatic path prefers the legal default is specious. One thing Lessig notes in his book is that prior to 1976 when copyright terms were 28 years, extensible to 56 years, over 95% of registered copyrights were *not* renewed, so there is a clear indication that creators in many cases are just fine with their work going into the public domain.
Nor do all or even most copyrighted works "require significant financial investment". This post, upon creation, is a copyrighted work, but I can assure you the financial investment is minimal. So I would submit that the vast majority of copyrighted works *would* be created whether copyright protections exist or not.
That said, I will agree that there are many great works that would likely not have been created without *some* sort of protection, but you seem to be saying that this is *always* the case, which I would deem unreasonable.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Well, I suppose I should amend myself and agree with you in terms of the "contract" that you sign because there really isn't one, but at the same time we are bound by the social contract that anyone living in a civilization enters into. That is to say, we know not to copy our cd's and give them out to all in our friends in the same way that we know not to take a cd off the shelves at the music store.
But I still think your attitude is tantamount to sanctioning the violation of copyright. What good is a copyright if it only lasts two years? And even if you can renew it for a fee, what's the point of the fee unless it's rather high? Why not just make it last for the holder's lifetime? It's a mistake to try to set some arbitrary amount of time for a copyright to last. After all, many artists spend years putting out cd's before finally getting noticed and getting a lot of sales out of those old albums. The idea that you should have to continually jump through hoops in order to retain ownership of something that is your sole creation is an unreasonable one. Now, if you're talking about extending copyright past the owner's lifetime, that's a different issue. To me, the main thing is that people who create something have their rights to profit from their creation be protected.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
As that would mean the record companies would have far less money to push 'their' material, and far less control of distribution channels, and far less financial resources to spend on payola, that would mean that non-RIAA artists got a far larger share of the radio/cd-tax/other royalty money, and a far greater exposure.
Without copyright they'd get more royalties? Last I checked copyright is what allows them to collect those royalties in first place, without copyright noone would even pay those royalties, to the RIAA or independents.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Then perhaps artists should do the equivalent of voting with their wallets and just not work for those cartels? The cartels don't make their IP themselves, the artists they exploit have to agree to work with them in first place. Without artists working for them all the big copyright cartels would fall apart.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The artist reaps 70 years of income only if his product generates 70 years of sales.
Talent at that level, a single performance at that level, is extraordinarily rare. Dashiell Hammett wrote five incomparable crime novels between 1929 and 1934. There would be nothing more.
It doesn't matter if there are new works that wouldn't get made without copyright if the total available works go down due to the fact that older works keep getting locked up in a vault and no copies can be made due to those copyright laws. If we could be satisfied by currently existing works it wouldn't matter if no new works were made.
Lol.. I stand corrected.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
I guess you're making the point that potential control of distribution channels doesn't necessarily have to mean an actual monopoly over distribution channels -- that a free market in distribution without the existence of copyright can work perfectly well. Some sibling posts seem to have missed that; I guess it needs to be made explicit. However, I think you're over-simplifying: it could only work in ancient Rome because of patronage:
Most popular literary figures had little contact with the ruling powers in the writing and dissemination of their works. People like Plautus were relatively insignificant commoners, and do you think that Hesiod and Homer had to wait for the permission of a king for their poetry to gain acclaim? And even when some work or another ended up irking the powers that be, the result was not an end to publication (Ovid's work spread widely) by the exile of the individual writer.-- here is where I think you are over-simplifying. Ovid's work may have been widely distributed, but obviously he didn't want to be exiled. People like Ovid and other Augustan poets (and earlier Greek poets like Pindar and, yes, perhaps Homer) depended on their social superiors as patrons, not in an economic sense, but at the very least for PR -- and yes, of course that relationship worked both ways: both sides stood to gain in status. Some exceptional figures (like Catullus?) may have been able to gain fame and publish their work without patronage, but that can't have been a common situation. And who knows what Plautus' situation was with respect to patronage? We don't have the evidence from his period.
"many kinds of work cost a lot of money."
Missed the digital revolution, eh? Creative endeavors have never in history been as cheap as they are now.
Not really. Seen the budgets of the average Hollywood flick or EA game? These aren't the kind that three people with a camera/computer can make. Music is feasible with a small team but music isn't the only thing covered by copyright.
There has never been as much high-quality low to zero budget movies as there are now. Nor games (which are moving over to service structures anyway). Without copyright it would be even easier to share models and footage to create entirely new works, ushering in a new era of rapidly evolving content.
Have you actually looked at the market? Games changing over to services? Maybe MMORPGs but those are hardly the only games and their market doesn't look like it can hold more than WoW and one or two competitors.
All of the big budget works would go away. We'd be left with what people are willing to make for free and looking at opensource games those seem to be mostly "let's make a clone of game X!".
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
And I actually provided such a reason (that most of the public domain works that Walt Disney used derivatively to build his media empire would not be PD under today's laws, which ironically were largely sponsored by Disney), which you seem to have ignored.
I didn't ignore it; this fact simply didn't contradict any claim I made. You have shown that a public domain should exist. I don't dispute this. The only thing I was claiming was that there should be *some* copyright over *some* period.
I would take exception to both of your "givens". Remember, copyright is automatic to all creative works;
It is, currently; it is not necessarily part of copyright as such.
a "non-copyright method", OTOH, requires specific action on the part of the creator to release his work under some alternative licensing scheme. So to claim any artist who does not choose the latter deliberate path to the former automatic path prefers the legal default is specious.
No, claiming that adding "this work is in the public domain" adds non-trivial effort for the artist, is specious.
Nor do all or even most copyrighted works "require significant financial investment". This post, upon creation, is a copyrighted work, but I can assure you the financial investment is minimal. So I would submit that the vast majority of copyrighted works *would* be created whether copyright protections exist or not.
Torch that strawman all you want; it's not necessary to demonstrate that some works need no copyright incentive for copyright to be justified. All that's necessary is that there be *some* noteworthy works that wouldn't be produced without.
That said, I will agree that there are many great works that would likely not have been created without *some* sort of protection,
Oh, good. So I guess you agree in some kind of copyright but have been wasting our time?
but you seem to be saying that this is *always* the case, which I would deem unreasonable.
Considering that contradicts everything I believe and every claim I've ever made here, please show me exactly where you got the idea I thought this.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
You didn't agree to anything because there was no need to, the law already put those limitations in place so a contract restating them would be redundant.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
They don't necessarily have to produce things for free. If we, for instance, went back to a patronage-style system, there wouldn't be any need for copyright. People would have a harder time becoming super-mega-stars, but that isn't something that concerns me.
I think services like architecture are in the middle - along with creating commissioned work - it's a one-time service which is technically a copyable creation (such as blueprints), but which are really only useful to one person and therefore have a one-time benefit as well.
Actually blueprints can get licensed to many people. Not everyone needs a specifically designed house, licensing a prebuilt plan is most likely cheaper because the architect can split his fees over a larger number of customers.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The studios don't let masters out of their touch. They make copies and ship them under guard to theaters. Theaters aren't willing to make duplicates since they'd stop getting new films when caught. The current system is already paranoid enough to work without copyright.
For DVDs, that's why I said physical extras. A nice cloth map of middle earth, for example. Or a t-shirt, or a free ticket to a special early showing of the sequel. A limited-run action figure, a unique case, an animation gel, the list is endless. I think studios should be doing this already.
The fund idea I think is brilliant, and could work without changing anything. Once people figured out it was real and possible it would allow a lot of movies to be made that are currently dismissed as unfeasable. If farscape or firefly or something had a fan-financed movie the whole thing could take off. I'd pay $20 apiece for dozens of film ideas, if the right people were on board. I'd pay $50 for some if it included 2 passes to the theatrical release and the dvd. It'd be a slam dunk to make once enough people paid in, studios would kill for actual proof of an interested audience. If it is a no-go for whatever reason, everyone could get their investment back, plus interest. Maybe if the film is a hit the investors could get a kickback.
Anyway, I think copyright is OK and would be happy with a short term copyright. It isn't necessary, though, and the current system is unacceptable. The current system also has perverse incentives that harm the film industry. You see lots of formulaic unoriginal "blockbusters" and there is no experimentation to draw an audience. I think it'd be great for consumers and the film industry if they had to really compete to stay solvent. Imagine all the cool things they could come up with - actors/directors at screenings, exhibits of props, raffles to view a shoot...
Man, you really need that seminar!
Considering that this thread started on a point pertaining to "copyright laws as they exist now", not necessarily whether copyright laws should exist at all, who's wasting whose time?
Perhaps you should heed your own sig.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Considering that this thread started on a point pertaining to "copyright laws as they exist now", not necessarily whether copyright laws should exist at all, who's wasting whose time?
The point I responded to in the original parent's post, applied to all copyright, not just some idiosyncracy of the current law, as did most of the points in the original responses.
And I'd really an answer to the question at the end of my post; I want to learn how to avoid making people think I believe the opposite of what I say.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
You young'uns and your Roman Empires. In the old days, we published on cave walls at the pleasure of the chief, uphill both ways, and we liked it!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Hm. You make a good point. How about this: I'll simply ask for a reason why something *could* exist without copyright, but not with copyright.
Oh, wait, I already did that before you jumped in with your insights!
And your question was already answered.
If the works that Disney derived from would have been protected by copyright, he could not have derived from them in the way he did. Hence, the fact that those works were not protected by copyright anymore made that he could do what he did. That those works were at some earlier time protected by copyright does not change that at all.
I'll even say that the opposite, the claim that a given copyrighted work would not exist except for copyright, is just as unprovable.
It's not provable in the mathematical sense, but given that the artists preferred not to use the non-copyright method that was available to them, and did require significant financial investment, it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
Please explain why that is unreasonable. It may SEEM unreasonable to you because of the envvironment you are living in, the things you are used to, the experience you have, what others have been telling you for a long time and such.. but reasonable requires an explanation that is based on well, reason. Your statement shows no such reason, rather, I believe it shows lack of imagination because you seem to not be able to imagine any other way then the current way.
Really, getting payed by the hour is a much better deal for the large majority of artists, but for many it is not a real option yet because of how distribution channels are controlled. It is quite reasonable to say that most artists would prefer the certainty of a steady income over the lottery that the current system provides.
Actually, this is part of the reason why our desire to punish is only modestly effective in reducing crime. Changes in law give small changes in behaviour. Maybe, anarchism wouldn't be much worse than what we have now, and in some ways, be considerably better?
Wikileaks, no DNS
You may want to be careful about offering arguments like this. The report itself offers figures to show that the intellectual property industry as a whole constituted well over 11% of the US GDP in 2005,
An industry built in part on rehashing old, no longer protected works, and in part on the lax copyright regime in the USA in earlier times.
If copyright had been anywhere near what it is now for the past 200 years, that entire industry would most likely not have existed at all, or at least be much much smaller then it is now.
Your solution would only work for performance artists. A modern author would get screwed by the system you are suggesting. Especially with digital media available, magazines and novels literally wouldn't be worth the paper they were printed on. This is the primary reason most pre-copyright works are theological. They were produced for study, not for money. I know there are exceptions, but they are a small minority of works.
Uh, I would not call the works from many of the great authors of ancient (Greek, Roman) times 'theological', yet copyright did not exist back then.
Then, part of my income comes from writing articles and computer software. Both are in theory protected by copyright, and I earn money from both without asserting that copyright. I am not a performing artist, so in my own experience at least, your statement seems wrong.
Not to mention that an author could 'perform' by reading from his/her own work, and many do, and many get payed for that, so authors can in fact perform.
However, the claim in question -- that there exist artistic works that are not produced because of copyright -- was the only unreasonable claim here that was lacking proof. (Remember, "I can't create a derivative of this copyrighted work" is not an argument -- that work only existed because of copyright.) I've covered my bases.
First problem with your statement is that that work only existed because of copyright. There is no proof for that whatsoever, and there is a lot of historical proof that artistic works are produced regardless of lack of copyright. A couple of centuries of Greek and Roman culture prodced a lot of such works without any copyright existing. Hence the basic assertion that your statement is based on fails.
What does that have to do with anything?
That any created work is copyrighted, regardless of the intentions of the author. In other words, the fact that something is copyrighted does in no way mean that copyright made that creation possible, or encouraged it or any such thing.
We'd never see a movie with the scope of Lord of the Rings again though. There is too much upfront cost for no guaranteed return. Now, you might not like movies but Joe Public does, and watching the latest video blog on youtube probably won't satisfy them.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
We'd never see a movie with the scope of Lord of the Rings again though. There is too much upfront cost for no guaranteed return. Now, you might not like movies but Joe Public does, and watching the latest video blog on youtube probably won't satisfy them.
If enough people want to pay for it, we'd still see something like that, payment would be arranged in a different way of course.
What about DJ mix tapes? Hip-hop artists who depend on manipulating samples? Most people would consider those kinds of activities legimate creative expression (although I'm sure they'd argue about the "quality").
How about products which are found to conflict with patents (and the ideas weren't "stolen"), and the company can't afford the licensing fees (perhaps because the patent holder was being anticompetitive)? That's a fairly direct & easy-to-imagine scenario of a product which won't make it into the marketplace where the patent law did nothing to help the innovation of that product, and instead prevented that product from reaching the marketplace.
_By definition_, all of these intellectual property laws as currently implemented are suppressive - i.e., they try to restrict the free usage of ideas. Frankly, I find this to be an anti-common sense way of encouraging "innovation", which is supposedly the oft-stated motivation behind these laws.
Give a corporation monopoly rights on the act of breathing, and soon you'll notice that 90% of the US GDP will come through this corporation. What's missing in the equation is opportunity costs: what amount of money would be made if people could spend their money elsewhere? A tricky question, but one that needs to be addressed.
No, that is the purpose of a patent. A copyright is to protect the creator from theft of his/her unique ideas or expressions. That is why the USPTO has nothing to do with copyrights. They are two seperate issue and were created for different reasons.
But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws.
Why ?
Then we get artists profiting through the method he's described, AND the work that requires copyright.
Ostensibly, the purpose of copyright - the reason such extraordinary protectionism is granted - is not so individual artists can profit, but so society as a whole benefits.
You need to justify your implications that a) only better works are created due to the existence of copyright; and b) those better works, on the whole, outweigh the negative impact of copyright.
Before even that, it wsa controlled by the cost of hand-copying documents. The Gutenberg press, and similar printiing technologies, changed this and made duplication cheap. This led to the first copyrights, granted on the Christian Bible, to prevent its publication except with the permission of the Church and to appropriate personnel. This was because, if non-priests read the Bible, they could more easily argue with established doctrine and even create new churches and heresies, causing endless difficulties for both the major churches and the governments who were heavily tied to those churches. Also, if printing were general and too uncontrolled, lots of heavily modified versions of the Bible could also have been printed, causing even more schisms. Keeping the Bible uniform was a major goal of early publishers of it, for many excellent reasons as well as purely political ones.
So the history of copyright begins, not with aiding publishers and rewarding creativity, but with controlling access to already existing information. Keep this in mind when you discuss copyright law: controlling access is its primary purpose. There can be benefits to this, to protect trade secrets and to reward authors, but its fundamental nature is to prevent access to information.
happy birthday is the worst scenario, it started as a public domain folk song, the saga on how it became one record company's sole property is a travesty upon our society.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
As the copyright publishing monopoly length exceeds the lifespan of humans, only two purposes are possible. 1. Hereditary privilege. 2. Corporate privilege. ...
(2) is the common case.
The new Guild is RIAA or MPAA or Microsoft
If enough people want to pay for it, we'd still see something like that, payment would be arranged in a different way of course. These movies require up-front capital. Very few people are going to put up a few hundred million dollars in the hope that people will pay for things they could download off the internet for free (legally).
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Those kinds of copyrights only accomplish one thing: depriving the culture that created the art of its due.
I see. So, Stephen Spielberg should be paying you! After all, you're part of the culture, and the culture created his movies, right? He was just along for the ride. It all makes sense now! I'm so glad the slashdotters are here to explain these things to me.
I'll say, Maps & Atlases are pretty tight.
Did you blink? They have been. Bands that were never signed to anyone and whose only exposure was YouTube are winning awards and gaining fame and glory that garage bands could once only dream of. Fan-made videos with hundreds of thousands of views, etc.
Getting away from the cartel while it controlled everything was a chicken-and-egg problem: if you didn't sign with a label, whose studio were you going to record in? Who would press your CDs? Now, there are independent recording studios, home recording equipment continues to get better and/or cheaper, and anyone can burn a stack of CDs, or heck, just take one burned CD over to a replication house and ask them to slip it on the stack at the end of the night for a few thousand runs, probably at less than a buck each if you shop around, and have plenty for a year's worth of shows. Or partner online with any of a number of competing independent music sellers who will do the above for you and sell digital copies to boot.
Now that the eggs are hatching and the new chicks are getting away from the roost, expect to see the *AA start cracking down hard. The Zune already keeps you from sharing your own music on your own terms, expect the *AA to demand that Microsoft (or the government) require that all recorded media be flagged as "unshareable" unless its professionally recorded at an RIAA-label-controlled studio that happens to have the signing certificate to sign it as "shareable"... and then only on the label's terms.
How about reading back to where I came into the thread, where I answered all of that?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
> it started as a public domain folk song
Snow White, Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty were all in the public domain before they became a possession of a company.
Corporations have protection against the public in this regard, but not the other way around.
( If the public derives from a corporate work, the public has to pay some negotiated amount, to use the derived work )
( If a corporation derives from a public domain work, then the corporation owes nothing, and can resell the derived work with no regard for the public )
Yes, we know. And you shamelessly pimp yourself at every opportunity you get. And it's tiring. Very very tiring.
I see pride, not greed. Shameless pimping it is not. One of the seven deadly sins, it remains.
But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws.
No, that's not true. It's halfway there, but you left out some essential bits.
You're failing to look at the entire issue. While it is certainly good to have more works created than fewer, it is also good to have fewer restrictions as to works than more. If we must shoulder the burden of more restrictions (a detriment) in order to have more works created (a benefit) then the issue is which is greater: the benefit or the detriment?
So long as the benefit of more works, which were caused to have been created by the incentive of copyright, outweighs the detriment of having that copyright, then having that copyright is good. But if the detriment of copyright outweighs the benefit of having more works created, then we're better off not having that copyright. Note also that the incentivizing effect of more copyright is not constant; a copyright that had a duration of one year has more of an incentivizing effect than the last year of a copyright that lasts one hundred years; this is because the economic value of a work tends to be realized sooner than later. Detrimental effects of copyright don't tend to die off so quickly, however. Further, it is actually possible for copyright to disincentivize the creation of works if it becomes expansive enough to enable significant rent-seeking behavior by existing copyright holders who don't appreciate competition.
So if you want to be accurate, you ought to instead say:
But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, and the benefit of having those works is greater than the detriment of the copyright that it took to get them created, we're better off having that much copyright, no more, no less.
-- 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.
Are you familiar with the Street Performer Protocol? It would be a good mechanism for doing this.
-- 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.
.. for making a hundred million dollar movie? I'm not familiar, but I'm willing to listen!
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Basically, you propose a budget for a work. Then you solicit investment from individuals, which goes to a third party. If the amount of money you want is raised, it'll be doled out to you by the third party, which monitors your progress so that you deliver what you promised to create. Once you're done, the work is released to the investors and isn't copyrighted. If there are few, united investors, they can then charge admission to see it, etc. in order to recoup their investment. If there are many, disunited investors, then hopefully their investment was about the price of a DVD or movie ticket, since the work is effectively out there for everyone now.
Remember, that ultimately, movies make their money from box office, DVD, and PPV receipts, in a matter of weeks after release in each medium. The SPP is a method for cutting out the middleman of the studios, who want to make as much money as possible, for the middleman of a third party that just wants things to run efficiently but isn't due to make a gigantic profit either.
-- 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.
How about reading back to where I came into the thread, where I answered all of that?
I did. You didn't.
Can't be a real American. That was just too humble.
I don't therefore I'm not.
*sigh*
me: But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws.
you: Why ?
my answer from a post that you didn't read: The method he's described is possible with and without copyright. But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws. Then we get artists profiting through the method he's described, AND the work that requires copyright.
Incidentally, I said the same thing the following sentence of the post you originally responded to, but you didn't realize it was related to the answer.
you: You need to justify your implications that a) only better works are created due to the existence of copyright
This is justified above in the previous argument that with OR without copyright, people will do the things that don't need copyright to encourage them to do, but with copyright, we get the things that don't, and those that do -- strictly more.
you: [that] b) those better works, on the whole, outweigh the negative impact of copyright.
*What* negative impact of copyright? It is your obligation to list one. Before you freak about this question, try to read the whole discussion this time so I don't have to hold your hand through it again. I pointed out how all examples were either a) poor implementaion of copyright (extremely excessive terms, no fair use) or b) ultimately a form of "I couldn't infringe on work that required copyrgith to exist".
I'd appreciate not having to repeat myself to the undeserving again.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The U.S. copyright lobby exists for one purpose: to give distributors sole custody of intellectual property "rights."
The term "intellectual property" needs to die as it is most often used in an inherently meaningless and contradictory way. Copyright, Trademarks and Patents all exist for different reasons and empower producers and consumers in different ways. Co-opting the emotional rhetoric of the civil/black/womens rights movements 'Give us our rights, our intellectual property rights!!' is a means of obfucation and extortion as it intentionally clouds the issue with hysteria which obstructs reasoned analysis.
Looking at the demands of the media cartels in the cold light of day, one can only conclude they are demanding enslavement and mandatory serfdom. They demand a fascist, feudal world where the all property is owned by a single entity ( the media companies ), and people own nothing - not the devices they buy ( thanks to the DMCA 'circumvention technology' agenda ), nor the original content they produce ( thanks to the guilty-till-proven-innocent part of the DMCA that allows any website/content to be taken down, how can an independent artist afford to prove they own their content in court when facing down the MPAA/RIAA/BSA? ).
The current copyright regime in the US is illegal and unconstitutional - how does 'for limited times' mesh with DMCA/DRM that makes 'copy-protected' content illegal to access forever? ).
The current patent regime in the US is so riddled with blatant fraud that it is also broken. Patents taken out when prior art clearly exists, or when 'obviousness' of the invention is unquestionable is common fraud.
The current trademark regime in the US is also pretty busted. In a court of law we have seen the 'Lindash' trademark ruled to be 'confusingly similar' to the 'Microsoft Windows' trademark. Its subject to all the bribes and corruption of patents and copyright, and is broken for the same reasons by the same groups of felons - Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and others.
Its a state of anarchy, looting and pillaging by corporates & conglomerates who will not follow the law.
Even before the internet you could press your CDs and record without going to a major label. However, the major labels keep getting new slaves. I've heard an indie musician attribute that to a get-rich-quick mentality, people want fame, they want everything done for them. A label will do publishing, marketing and more for them but in return leave them with almost no money. I suppose it comes down to everyone's favourite P.T. Barnum quote.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Obviously I already posted in this discussion. Too bad, I also have mod points, and your post definitely deserve some modding up.
Often forgotten, but quite true. As a matter of fact, free publication (of the bible) was one of the underlyng issues of a 80 years war of independence between the Netherlands (where I happen to live) and Spain in the 1600s.
Yes, quite.
...". OK. Hands up if you've heard of Maps & Atlases? No? Thought not...
1. Insert anti-copyright rant,
2. Include sweeping assertions that copyright is evil/obsolete/unnecessarily for absolutely everybody in any creative field whatsoever, based on some small number of unrepresentative examples,
3. Get modded up to +5 with quality groupthink, despite the fact post is enormous oversimplification
4. ???
5. Profit!
As part of this wonderful lecture on why copyright is 100% redundant and you can be phenomenally successful without it, we learn "as my brother's band Maps & Atlases
poor implementaion of copyright (extremely excessive terms, no fair use)
We were discussing current implementation of copyright. Having a theoretical discussion on how copyright could be implemented such that those disadvantages are less of a problem is interesting of course, but is just that, theoretical.
or b) ultimately a form of "I couldn't infringe on work that required copyrgith to exist".
You never demonstrated that those works required copyright to exist, whereas I demonstrated it is quite possible to produce works without needing copyright.
I didn't say there aren't faults in the current system, but that copyright is necessary to support the amount of creative content produced today.
Simply put, instead of receiving a small share of the profits, the artists would receive nothing. At least they can produce content and make a living from it. How would they feel if they were told "FU, we're going to sell your work, and if you want money, get a job"
There are certainly ways to fix the system, but saying that copyright is bad for content production is simply wrong.
Not all films would see amount of fan following that "Star Wreck" did, and god help us if that's the only kind of content we can expect in the future.
Yeah, because we all know that all the musicians do is sell sheet music that's over 70 years old.>/sarcasm>
Seriously, if you think that orchestras play exclusively public-domain music, and no new content is produced, then stay out of the discussion.
Even for public-domain content, the rights to a certain recording are the only things keeping independent orchestras afloat.
Everything else I'd want to say was said in the comment above me.
Free games? High quality? My ass.
Yeah so, you'd like to listen to what your Boss, George Bush or Bill Gates tells you is good, because they're the ones who can choose?
No thanks, I'd rather people choose themselves which kind of content is worth producing.
my answer from a post that you didn't read: The method he's described is possible with and without copyright. But as long as there exist artistic works that would not be made but for some kind of copyright, we're better off having copyright laws.
You have still not justified your assumptions that any artistic works actually exist because of copyright and that those works provide a benefit to society great enough to outweight their reliance on copyright. Hence, your conclusion that the existence of those works provides enough benefit to society to justify the burden and negative effects of copyright law remain unsupported.
*What* negative impact of copyright? It is your obligation to list one.
Here, I'll list three:
* Copyright is a monopoly. Worse, it's a monopoly *created and enforced* by the State. Monopolies are economic bad news.
* Copyright discourages the creation of new works from artists who create successful works.
* Copyright requires non-trivial amounts of bureaucratic and legal infrastructure.
I pointed out how all examples were either a) poor implementaion of copyright (extremely excessive terms, no fair use) [...]
In a discussion of how copyright _actually_ causes problems, arguments about how it wouldn't cause problems, "but only if it's done right", are irrelevant (not to mention unsupportable).
I have theorised about a "copyright" system in the past that I consider fair, reasonable and beneficial to everyone deserving - although distributors wouldn't like it. But without any actual data I don't make any _assertions_ as to what the results would be.
[...] b) ultimately a form of "I couldn't infringe on work that required copyrgith to exist".
You have not supported your implication of a causal link between copyright and works that have delivered an overall benefit to society.
Even if you did, your argument runs up against the problem that copyright stops derivatives of works that would have existed even in the absence of copyright.
I'd appreciate not having to repeat myself to the undeserving again.
I'd appreciate it if the world wasn't full of pompous, conceited twats like you, but it's not going to happen.
For someone whose sig says to "read my post", you engage in quite a bit of selective reading yourself. I explained in my previous post what that has to do with anything. I don't see a need to do so again.
> many kinds of work cost a lot of money.
> Say goodbye to movies for a start,
> as well as games....
To make these things possible and profitable there's no need for automatic copyright on anything that lasts lifetime+70.
Three years copyright for preregistered works only would be enough to justify huge budget movies.
I think a very good compromise between no copyrights at all and the current crazy laws that makes it formally illegal to copy any post on the web because everything is automatically copyrighted is to have a copyright system that is very limited in time but has an option for almost perpetual copyright by extension of the copyright term.
What I think of reserves moral rights (a quote should mention the original author) automatically, but not property rights. Then an author (or a authorised representative) can register the work and have temporary monopoly for a short time (say 3 or 5 years). This would cost nothing or only a small handling fee. Then periodically the copyright term can be renewed, for an exponentially increasing fee. Theoreticaly a copyright could be extended forever but not practically. THis kind of system would enable Disney to keep the copyrights for old Mickey Mouse films for a very long time if it's profitable for them (I think they don't really have a problem with people using the Mickey Mouse trademark in nesw works because trademarks do not expire). On the other hand every work that's not profitable would end pretty soon in the public domain and those that are somewhat profitable would last longer but not forever under copyright.
Let's say an initial $10 fee to renew copyright on a work after 5 years, and then every 5 years the fee doubles: then it's:
$20 after 10 years
$80 after 20 years
$320 after 30 years
$1280 after 40 years
$5120 after 50 years
$20480 after 60 years
$81920 after 70 years
$327680 after 80 years
$1310720 after 90 years
$5242880 after 100 years
So if I were Disney making millions on Micky Mosue after 70 years I would certainly pay the fee, but after 100 years perhaps not.
I think the main barrier to sensible copyright laws is the Berne convention treaty that requires all members not to require copyright holders to register works as a condition to copyright protection, and applies this logic to anything produced regardless of financial value. This should be changed. A system of protections that differentiates more profitable from less profitable works would be beneficial to everyone: it could offer much better protection to those that require it without draining the public domain.
And your question was already answered.
... like, you know, I just said?
...
And that answer was already refuted.
If the works that Disney derived from would have been protected by copyright,
The works Disney derived from *could not* have been protected by copyright, especially a reasonable system. He was making works based on folk tales that had long been passed down with no definable owner, and only vaguely borrowed from them.
me: It's not provable in the mathematical sense, but given that the artists preferred not to use the non-copyright method that was available to them, and did require significant financial investment, it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
you: Please explain why that is unreasonable.
Um, maybe because "given that the artists preferred not to use the non-copyright method that was available to them, and did require significant financial investment"
And, as I detailed back toward where I came in, having copyright does not interfere with those who don't want to use it, so by having copyright, we get strictly more.
It may SEEM unreasonable to you because of the envvironment you are living in, the things you are used to
Oh, give me a break! I'm the last person this objection is warranted for. I accept that there are innovative ideas that will appear in the future and change everything, that we can't anticipate today. I'm the one always lecturing people on the dangers of static thinking and the possibility of unforseen new methods. I'm the one who actually hates the terms "paycheck" and "paystub" since they assume an obsolete item. (e.g., You can get direct deposit rather than having to go to a bank yourself to depsit a checkable note. I prefer "pay" or "payment" and "pay record" respectively.) I'm the one currently compiling a paper that details new, as-of-yet unused ways to profit from intellectual works without IP (and have much better ideas for inventions than artistic works.)
However, the "current way" has long incorporated alternate, copyright-free revenue models, and none has been powerful enough to make copyright models obsolete. No one, including you, describe, even in the most general terms, how such a method would work. I can of course understand why you can't tell me *exactly* how it would work, but not even at an abstract level? Give me something to contradict my claim, anything. But remember as long as copyright can provide better compensation, that means it will lead to some works that wouldn't have existed otherwise and that people would volutarily part with their own money to see.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"Seen the budgets of the average Hollywood flick or EA game?"
When you have a monopoly you will never decrease costs. Hollywood flicks and EA games cost much to produce _because_ of copyright, not the other way around.
"All of the big budget works would go away."
All the big budget works will get cheaper. That's the entire point of competition in free market capitalism.
I mean, even Lucas pointed that out recently when he said TV series were much better to produce than movies, largely because they can reuse much more.
Waste is not a benefit to the economy, and if there is anything monopoly rights are good at protecting it's waste.
"that the figure is steadily growing"
Monopoly revenue will steadily grow as it absorbs any excess wealth. IE, if other things become cheaper, the monopoly segments will grab the extra disposable income by simply raising prices. So over a longer term and with variations in disposable income you can get changes (which, coincidentally, is also why region coding and price discrimination is desireable for the industry).
And like someone else said, this is a matter of opportunity costs; those 11% of GDP is 11% of GDP not spent elsewhere, so if the IP industries are excessively inefficient and the same products could be produced cheaper, the economy could contain _both_ the consumer value of the IP _and_ whatever else the consumer would buy for that money. IE, supporting waste becomes a net loss to the actual wealth of the economy as a whole.
"doesn't look to me like an argument based on economic benefit"
Really, in the end, I'm entirely convinced it does. In the end, what it comes down to is that production with free competition will simply create more wealth than monopolies for the same amount of resources. I have yet to see any serious arguments manage to dispute that, and successfully disputing it would pretty much invalidate the entire foundation of free market capitalism.
Serious objections tend to be based around the financing side, but they tend to miss alternative financing methods (socialized financing is really an entirely separate issue from competetive production, altho the IP industries like to pretend, for marketing purposes, that their system isnt actually a social financing system).
Less serious objections tend to involve straight out lies or at the very least misdirections around, like you noted, misapplied concepts of value (essentially, a more correct labelling of the money flow would be to say that the sector equals a taxation effect of 11% of GDP, for which we get very a very low employment or social value). And as I said earlier, they tend to miss the fact that those 11% tax-equivalents would otherwise be employed in other areas of the economy.
So in the end, the cultural and moral benefits are one thing, but even the economic interest is better served by allowing free competition in the IP areas.
The various per-play fees are usually separate from the essential 'copyright'. You can skip the reproduction monopoly rights without removing per-play fees; ie, even if you can freely make copies one could structure fees around the public performance of works.
You've got it backwards. Copy.. right. The right to make copies. A PATENT is what is intended to protect the creator from theft of his or her unique creations, because it provides a means of proving who came up with the idea first (and thus who has the right to create marketable products based on it) - e.g., who invented it.
While patents are as screwed up as copyrights, the intent of patents is to protect people from others who would copy their idea and sell it as their own (not the work itself, the idea - one of the defining differences between a copyright and a patent).
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Seriously, what pointless hyperbole. Attempt to understand my argument or simply be quiet.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Um. No. I know I said "patronage-style", but I meant, you know, the usable parts of the system; not the retarded parts you have so kindly mentioned. There is no formal aristocracy here in the US so they can't run around dictating what everyone listens to (in principle anyway). Since you can't seem to wrap your mind around it without an explicit explanation, here's how it works: you pay artists to produce music before they make it, and then everyone gets total access to it.
Who pays artists? Whoever wants to. You want another Britney album? Pay her for it up front. Now, I don't expect that you personally have enough money to make Brit happy, but that's what the intarwebs are for! There's actually a website that collects money for indie artists under this model (in fact, that's where I got the idea). But I can't find it. I don't if that's because I suck at searching, or if it's because the business model sucks and they went out of business. If it helps, I actually found out about the place from a post here on slashdot a long time ago.
The fees are because copyright also covers public performance and broadcasting. And you just know that Slashdotters would sill complain if they could make copies freely but not broadcast ("share with my friends on Bittorrent").
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The works Disney derived from *could not* have been protected by copyright, especially a reasonable system. He was making works based on folk tales that had long been passed down with no definable owner, and only vaguely borrowed from them.
Check for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan
What you say is true for some stories that Disney derived from, but not for all.
From the link: "There are several Disney animated adaptations based very loosely on the Mowgli stories. (Adaptations of The Jungle Book tend to concentrate on Mowgli's adventures.) It has also been filmed several times with varying degrees of authenticity. Disney's 1967 animated film version, based loosely on the Mowgli stories, was extremely popular, though it took great liberties with the plot, characters and the pronunciation of the characters' names. " (bold added)
Having the same general story as someone else would not be protected under copyright. In fact, it was made at a time of "bad" copyright laws, and yet it still managed to get made.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
From the link: "There are several Disney animated adaptations based very loosely on the Mowgli stories. (Adaptations of The Jungle Book tend to concentrate on Mowgli's adventures.) It has also been filmed several times with varying degrees of authenticity. Disney's 1967 animated film version, based loosely on the Mowgli stories, was extremely popular, though it took great liberties with the plot, characters and the pronunciation of the characters' names. " (bold added)
Having the same general story as someone else would not be protected under copyright. In fact, it was made at a time of "bad" copyright laws, and yet it still managed to get made.
But having the same names in similar roles and having a clearly similar story would definitely be protected under modern copyright. Try writing and publishing a Harry Potter movie today that only vaguely follows one of the published books and see how well you fare.
What matters is not if copyright law was bad when Disney made the movie, but if the stories he derived from were covered by copyright at the time he derived from them.
Some things I didn't address in my previous posts..
And, as I detailed back toward where I came in, having copyright does not interfere with those who don't want to use it, so by having copyright, we get strictly more.
Nope. Copyright is automatic, and unless you take the efford of putting something in the public domain explicitly, it applies to your work. You can choose to not enforce it, but that provides no guarantee whatsoever that your heirs for example won't enforce it.
The situation becomes problematic when it is not known anymore who the author of a work is, in which case we end up with a work that cannot be used untill copyright expires (currently 70 years after the death of the author in case of the USA, but since the author is unknown, this cannot be determined)
Oh, give me a break! I'm the last person this objection is warranted for. I accept that there are innovative ideas that will appear in the future and change everything, that we can't anticipate today. I'm the one always lecturing people on the dangers of static thinking and the possibility of unforseen new methods. I'm the one who actually hates the terms "paycheck" and "paystub" since they assume an obsolete item. (e.g., You can get direct deposit rather than having to go to a bank yourself to depsit a checkable note. I prefer "pay" or "payment" and "pay record" respectively.) I'm the one currently compiling a paper that details new, as-of-yet unused ways to profit from intellectual works without IP (and have much better ideas for inventions than artistic works.)
However, the "current way" has long incorporated alternate, copyright-free revenue models, and none has been powerful enough to make copyright models obsolete. No one, including you, describe, even in the most general terms, how such a method would work. I can of course understand why you can't tell me *exactly* how it would work, but not even at an abstract level? Give me something to contradict my claim, anything. But remember as long as copyright can provide better compensation, that means it will lead to some works that wouldn't have existed otherwise and that people would volutarily part with their own money to see.
I gave an example of how this can work early on in the discussion, please do what your signature suggests others should be doing.
Is it better then copyright? There is no easy way to determine that, just like there is no easy way to determine if copyright does better then the alternatives. This is because they do interfer with eachother even if they can coexist. The existnce of copyright does limit the alternatives first due to what I stated at the top of this post, and second because copyright gives a level of control to distributors that they desire, making it the preferable way for them.
This however has little to do with what would serve the author of a work better.
You have still not justified your assumptions that any artistic works actually exist because of copyright
My claim is that there exist *some* works that would not have been made but for copyright, and every honest person already accepts this. Take any 20th century Hollywood movie. (The time, not the studio.)
that those works provide a benefit to society great enough to outweight their reliance on copyright.
I justify this on the claim that copyright as such does not hurt any copyright-free revenue method. See the several times I have demonstrated this.
me:*What* negative impact of copyright? It is your obligation to list one.
you:Here, I'll list three:
Copyright is a monopoly. Worse, it's a monopoly *created and enforced* by the State. Monopolies are economic bad news.
Correction: monopolies are economic bad news iff they induce an economic inefficiency. That clearly does not apply to goods that only exist because of an act of the monopolist. That would imply that a monopoly on your own labor (i.e. prohibition of slavery) is "economic bad news".
As for whether copyright is "created and enforced by the State", that's only true to the extent that any property right, including that in your labor is created and enforced by the State. If one requires/doesn't require the state, the other requires/doesn't require the State.
Copyright discourages the creation of new works from artists who create successful works.
So, it discourages work beyond the work that they only created because of copyright? Well, without copyright, you don't get the first one.
Copyright requires non-trivial amounts of bureaucratic and legal infrastructure.
Only to the extent that it fails to shift the cost onto violators, which all laws should be expected to do in the first place.
So, you still haven't listed one.
In a discussion of how copyright _actually_ causes problems, arguments about how it wouldn't cause problems, "but only if it's done right", are irrelevant (not to mention unsupportable).
They're entirely relevant. The original claim I addressed as that copyright *as such* "hurts artists". It doesn't.
I have theorised about a "copyright" system in the past that I consider fair, reasonable and beneficial to everyone deserving - although distributors wouldn't like it.
Sure, because -- let me guess -- you removed the alienability of copyright bundle. ("All the revenues should go to the artist, man, not the distributor!") Why you think removing the utility of the rights an artist have under copyright would make the rights more valuable is beyond me.
But without any actual data I don't make any _assertions_ as to what the results would be.
My intellectual opponents here go beyond lacking data; they don't describe a scenario in which favorable data would exist.
You have not supported your implication of a causal link between copyright and works that have delivered an overall benefit to society.
Yes, I have, see above, and every post leading up to it.
Even if you did, your argument runs up against the problem that copyright stops derivatives of works that would have existed even in the absence of copyright.
No, it doesn't, unless you want to keep hanging your hat on the claim that adding "This work is public domain" is a non-trivial burden.
I'd appreciate it if the world wasn't full of pompous, conceited twats like you, but it's not going to happen.
People who are right in way that upsets you will *always* look that way. Overcoming that instinct is the hard part.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
How about virtually every reference to Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster?
My claim is that there exist *some* works that would not have been made but for copyright, and every honest person already accepts this.
A claim you haven't even produced a sound argument to support, let alone actual evidence.
Take any 20th century Hollywood movie. (The time, not the studio.)
Are you seriously trying to argue the sole reason people go to the cinemas to watch movies and buy DVDs is because of _copyright law_ ? That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I justify this on the claim that copyright as such does not hurt any copyright-free revenue method. See the several times I have demonstrated this.
Your have _not_ justified this claim. You have waved your hands and proclaimed "because I say so", but that's not evidence.
Correction: monopolies are economic bad news iff they induce an economic inefficiency. That clearly does not apply to goods that only exist because of an act of the monopolist.
You have yet to offer proof of such works and, more importantly, that such works' value outweights the negative impacts of copyright.
That would imply that a monopoly on your own labor (i.e. prohibition of slavery) is "economic bad news".
You're trying to equate the criminalisation of slavery with monopoly-related laws ? Now you're just trolling.
As for whether copyright is "created and enforced by the State", that's only true to the extent that any property right, including that in your labor is created and enforced by the State. If one requires/doesn't require the state, the other requires/doesn't require the State.
Except copyright is wholely and solely a legal fiction. Physical property law at least has a grounding in the real world (or "natural law", if you prefer).
So, it discourages work beyond the work that they only created because of copyright? Well, without copyright, you don't get the first one.
Again with the unproved assumption. You can't use an unproven assumption to support a subsequent argument.
Only to the extent that it fails to shift the cost onto violators, which all laws should be expected to do in the first place.
No, it generates such overheads because of the inherent aspects of trying to use the law to artificially impose scarcity on a good with infinite supply. You could loosely compare it to, say, the overheads of anti-prostitution laws, or the overheads endured by various tariffs and/or subsidies that are used to artificially manipulate market forces.
So, you still haven't listed one.
I've listed three.
They're entirely relevant.
No, they're not. Or are you trying to argue that "copyright" has no problems because of implementation flaws, despite every implementation exhibiting the same problems ?
Sure, because -- let me guess -- you removed the alienability of copyright bundle. ("All the revenues should go to the artist, man, not the distributor!") Why you think removing the utility of the rights an artist have under copyright would make the rights more valuable is beyond me.
No, because I tied the copyright term to both the popularity of a work (more popular works exit copyright protection sooner) and - more crudely - the time take to create it (the longer it takes, the longer the work is in copyright).
(I also made copyright an opt-in, rather than automatic, protection - but that's not really relevant to this aspect.)
My system means popular, highly profitable works leave the copyright system - and its protections - quickly, so content creators are compelled to continue producing works. Ie: they actually have to _continually be productive_ like basically every other class of worker to survive.
My intellectual opponents here go beyond lacking data; they don't describe a scenario in which favorable data would exist.
The irony here is nearly suffocating.
Yes, I have, see above, and every post leading up to
That system would be begging for abuse. Do I get money back if it turns out crap? How likely is it that out of hundreds of thousand of musicians, good ones will be picked out before they actually create any content?
Doesn't this system make more sense: Artists can create whatever they like. Good stuff and crappy stuff. They can devote their own effort to it, or pay people to write their lyrics etc. If people like it, they can buy a copy of their work off them. The better their work is, the more people are interested, and the more they make.
I'm not saying they should have such long rights to their work as they currently do, but that the basic idea is great.
"copyright also covers"
Yes, extensions do, but the fundamental aspect (the copy, in copyright), is the most damaging part.
"And you just know that Slashdotters would sill complain if they could make copies freely but not broadcast"
Probably, yeah. That can be structurally dealt with tho; you could simply apply a percentage fee to revenue generating activities (which is essentially how it's done today). Ie, torrent trackers would have to pay from advertising revenue (not to mention that you could get vastly improved for-pay or commercialized trackers that would generate more revenue).
The key is, you dont have to prevent copying to gather economic incentives off those who actually generate a revenue stream off the music.
Once you separate the _copy_ right from revenue rights to IP, you're free from all the painful micromanagement of individual copies, and you can get back to the actual issue; what level of incentive do we need to promote creativity, what are we willing to pay for it, where is it most equitable to collect the funding and how do we divide the funding to maximize creative production?
I believe that requiring registeration of a work to obtain copyright protection is good for the litle guy. Without this requirement most works are automatically copyrighted and to use them in any way (quoting, derived work etc.) licensing is required, and a deep pocket is a huge advantage in securing licensing. The big guys also have an advantage in locating infringement and in suing. The little guy has no legal department.
...)
In practice right now the little guys are the ones opting for a sort of voluntary registration, called "Creative Commons". It is a mistake to think of CC as "Free open source non-software". It is not. Creative Commons is really about one thing: having creators of copyrighted works explicitly state what they allow and what they don't allow.
I can see how requiring registration was a burden for authors in the 19th century (requiring them to ride a few days to the capital city, stay several days to deal with the beaurocrats only to end up with something that is filed in a cabinet somewhere in government archives and a piece of paper as prrof of registration, and then no tools to discover infringement). But in the 21st century there is an internet connecting the whole world, data is is accessible from everywhre, an author in a distant village in Andes can access a registry and register a work for copyright just as an author in NYC can (well.. perhaps after riding a lama to the nearest Internet caffee), and registrration doesn't necessarily mean government or UN beaurocracy. It can be done by private companies or volunteer organizations. The MPAA or RIAA can run one. Creaive Commons can too. (But some of the exponentially increasing fees would have to go elsewhere
I give up. You can't possibly expect me to take your post seriously.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The system I mentioned isn't going to work for mainstream stuff. For things that are going to sell a ton of recordings anyway, it makes more sense to try to get money for every copy.
That said, I don't see how the current system is any different in terms of "abuse". If I buy a CD and find out that it sucks only after I've actually listened to it, do I get my money back? No.
I am assuming here that
And in case you think this is an issue, it's a simple matter to keep the artist from just running off with a bag-o-money (ever heard of escrow?). There is the issue that viable "scams" (i.e., shitty albums) aren't punished until the next album, but it's a trick that will only work once, so it's not something I'm particularly worried about. One's ability to predict future success/quality is not any different regardless of whether you use the current model or the one I proposed. The biggest "problem" with this "patronage-like" system is that it's quite similar to the current system (e.g., popular artists would still have more supporters, and therefore more money than less popular artists). The only things that really change are the facts that music is free (as in speech) after it's produced, and artists need to keep making music to keep making money.
The thing is that for a lot of people, registering for a copyright wouldn't necessarily be the first thing to come to mind, wheras the real pros will just do it for anything they make (just look at the way Microsoft applies for patents)
What if an author wrote a manuscript, but couldn't get it published, and later found out somebody copied his work and registered it? He has evidence that he created the work, but without the registering it isn't worth a thing.
Or a band writes a song, plays it a few times, and then hears that somebody has copyrighted it, meaning they can no longer play it.
The problem with requiring to register is the shear amount of content produced, and it would have no advantage whatsoever, only create unnecessary work. Anything worth using will have been registered anyway, which means you still have the same problem with the licensing.
Fair use deals with the problems you mentioned. Quoting is explicitly allowed. Parodies are also possible, wheras direct derivatives do infringe on copyright. Hence, you can't sell a Harry Potter book that reads as a sequel to the existing ones, but the parody "Barry Trotter" is possible without any licensing.
Also, if you were to require a fee, that would mean an end to the open-source model (all the stuff is copyrighted), and that the "little guys" wouldn't register their content, so that it could be seized by big corporations.
The advantage popular artists have would only get worse though. With the current system, anybody can publish their own CD, or have an Indy label do it, get their CD sitting in store shelves, along with the big labels, have their songs on iTunes, and make some money from it. If they're good, they might become successful and well-known, or simply satisfy a small niche.
With a patronage system, they would have to build up significant mindshare before they can make anything at all.
And generally, people will be bad at giving money for something they would get for free later anyway.
You can ask to sample the CD before you buy it, or you might hear the song on the radio. Basically, it shouldn't have to be a complete gamble when you decide to buy a CD.
Those are very interesting points you raise.
You say that requiring a fee to register for copyright protection would undermine free open source. So I would expect supporters of of the FOSS and Creative Commons "share alike" model to be supporters of "no registration required", but the Lawrence Lessig writes exactly the opposite in his book "Free Culture" (http://www.free-culture.cc/). In the "Afterword" in this book he favourably describes Richard Stallman's motivation in creating Gnu and the GPL, and then advocates mandatory registration of copyrights and periodical extensions of them (He suggests that registration can be done through registrars just like domain registration).
Is requiring a fee really contraditory to open source? I don't know. The GPL requires making the sources and the license available which also creates some costs. Anyway, the GPL doesn't necessarily means that a programmer cannot release her own contributed code separately under other licences, including releasing it to the public domain. It just requires that the code that is published together with the original code is made available under the GPL (and of course the original code cannot be republished under any license not allowed by the original license). So in a "registration required" environment modification to GPLed code that is protected be copyright can be released under the GPL and the original copyright would still apply to portions of the modified code. Other portions might not be protected by copyright (they would be public domain unless they are registered, and provided they can exist independently).
In the same chapter he discusses the requirment of marking a copyrighted work (that was dropped about 30 years ago in the US) and suggests that failing to provide required marking on some copies doesn't necessarily have to mean that copyright protection is lost entirely. This is something that I think can also apply to registration of a work in a legal environment that requires registration: If an author realizes she actualy wants to register for copyright protection, she should be able to do so within a reasonable time from when the work was first published (or created) and then publishing the work after the time of registration would be subject to copyright. This would also provide as a side effect some rotection to unregistered works that are registerable but this should only be so for a very limited time.
Now there's a possibility of someone taking someone else's copyrighted work and publishing it as her own work. That is criminal whether registration is required or not. When someone copies without permision they can have all sorts of explanations: they believed they had permission, they believed it's in the public domain etc. These excuses don't apply to registering someone else's work as your own.
I mean "free as in speech". The artist has already been paid, and so the works should be free for use. That's sort of the whole point with this idea. Using other people's work to create your own art is a very important part of ... well, art, and copyright gets in the way of this in a very serious way. I imagine something like the creative commons would be used. I don't expect the work to be put into the public domain, but there are already a variety of (in some cases) highly restrictive free-as-in-speech licenses.
I should listen to stuff before I buy it. Nonetheless, I have many albums that I didn't listen to more than once, and many games I didn't play for more than half an hour. I'm something of an audiophile, and so it's nice to know whether something was well-mastered or not, and typically that means I need to know someone with the CD, or I need to pirate an mp3 (radio isn't good enough, and neither are most of the streaming samples from online stores, but 128kb/s mp3s are generally good enough to figure this stuff out).
I don't know if I mentioned it already, but I (and most people I've talked about this stuff with) see nothing wrong with rock stars making the same kind of money as other artists. I can see why a pop idol wouldn't see things my way, which is why I say that it'd mostly be a way for indie artists to get more exposure. I'm not saying that any particular way of licensing music should be outlawed, but as a consumer, there are certain systems I would like to promote/support. In the end, I don't think it can work because
No it isn't, and that's the point. Copyright is the only thing that prevents people from "stealing" other peoples work. If something isn't copyrighted, they have no such protection, and nobody can stop anyone from claiming it's theirs.
Are you claiming that since registration of a work is not required to obtain copyright I cannot claim that I wrote "Tom Sawyer" but if it were required and the author failed to register then I would be able to claim that I'm the author?
I think that "Tom Sawyer" is in the public domain and is not protected by copyright but I still cannot claim I am the author, and even though registration was required at the time it was first published, had the author forgot to register for copyright at the time it might have meant that Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) would perhaps have lost some income but I don't think it would have made it possible for me to legally claim I wrote it. At least not if I were to try and profit from this lie. Lying perhaps is legal, but making money by lying is not. And if it is absolutely legal for me to take a work out of the public domain and claim that I wrote it now and therefore I can obtain copyright for the work for the next zillion years then something's absolutely wrong.
Anyway, I don't understand how an unknown author that sends a manuscript to a publisher is protected if the manuscript is subject to abstract copyright. If the work is "stolen" how does she prove she was the copyright owner? Being able to register the work for something like the price of domain registration can provide proof (nowadays one might pay notary much more for the this kind of service).