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DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA
An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted
that "our Clinton administration
policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright
control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in
Montreal (video
at 11:00), Lehman lay much
of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to
adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
Woohoo! Way to pass the buck, but still, woo!
Limina.Log
I most certainly forgive you.
To err is human, to apologize and publicly shoot one's own demonic brainchild in the foot is divine.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Could it be possible that somebody has come out of their hole and realized that they were wrong on this whole DMCA mess?? Now, how long will it be before the RIAA comes around and changes their attitude on downloading music?
It's nice for someone to admit that it is a complete screw up. Unfortunately that is not enough for it to be struck down. Everyone on this site says Bush is the ultimate evil but a Clinton policy is one of the worst laws ever. It will be fun to read the responses to this that try to make it Bush's fault.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Dont hold your breath. I smell political maneuvering here, nothing more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We may have a long way to go, but it is worthwhile to take notes on this now, so when the FTC request for public comment regarding the DMCA happens again in 2009, we will be ready.
That's rich. The RIAA can't make law. The RIAA aren't charged with doing what's best for the USA public. That's your job, and you failed miserably at it. You can't fuck over the public because a corporation told you to, and then blame the corporation. It's your fault for listening to them instead of the public in the first place. The RIAA could "fail to adapt" a million times over and it still wouldn't make it any less your fault for pandering to them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
An open Letter to the RIAA
.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
"our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well"
Considering that Orrin Hatch (R-Idiot-Utah) wrote the damn bill.
Republicans are best at passing the buck, they take responsibility for nothing. EVER.
Well DRM has been an unmitigated failure, there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed and customer hate it. But because of the DMCA anti-circumvention people are not able to publicly challenge crappy DRM by making tools for joe sixpack to break them.
/rant
So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM turf around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!
It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.
It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.
It's given the luddites in the copyright industries a means to hold back time. It only takes one shortsighted Valenti to separate an entire industry from it's VHS profits.
It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.
Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US, even though its half the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.
Sure, they screwed this up but their deregulation of the radio industry worked out so well....for a few corporations.
And the War on Drugs (read marijuana) that they kicked into gear in the 90's and has netted 750,000 pothead arrests a year since ahs worked out well. The prison lobby, police and drug testing and rehab fields are booming.
Yup, dem dems did real well for their friends.
Now tell me the story about how both parties are somehow different and are not in the pockets of lobbyists and multinationals:
I love a good fairy tale.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Like most tools of Big Media, he just ripped off someone else's work, namely the English Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I loved the quote, " we are entering the "post-copyright" era for music"
This from the guy who is head of the International Intellectual Property Institute.
I have maintained since the late 80's that the road to the future on this issue is paying a few cents or a few dimes to verify that your copy is a good copy... and doing that direct with the labels or the bands... but some doing it with anyone they "trust."
When street "kids" can sell a terabyte of music on a corner like they used to sell crack, then my friend, copyright for this sort of thing will be dead.
There is one other "blame" besides the two headed griffen of DRM and bad Major Label Music, and that is the Sonny Bono Act and those acts that came before which have strenched out copyright protection so far into the future that let's be honest none of this stuff will ever see the light of the public domain; they killed public domain's cousin too, sweet little Fair Use (but then you knew that!!).
http://www.hawknest.com/
The DMCA was written to attack the issues that lobbyist were paid to attack. I'm sure their handlers conceived of the ways it would be abused. That's WHY it was written the way it was. But the onus should have been on the lawmakers to ALSO perceive the ways it could have been abused and to make sure that couldn't happen. Of course, all to many of them (most?) are in the same pockets as the lobbyists are.
Fair use is (was) already well established doctrine. Any new law regarding any perceivable restrictions to fair use should be framed from the perspective of the end user (of the people, by the people, for the people) rather than from the perspective of the copyright holder. I BUY a DVD and it's ILLEGAL for me to rip it and put it on a server in my own home or to compress it and put it on a laptop. That's completely absurd. It's what happens when lobbyists write laws and lawmakers pass them without reading them and understanding the consequences.
We've heard what Senator Stevens has said about technology. Can you just imagine the things that get said in those committees discussing laws like the DMCA? I can't even fathom the level of stupidity that goes on when they're discussing complex technological issues.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
So the Chinese head towards a european socialist route they still beat us.
Capitalism only works well when the competition is strong. you start creating monopolies even short term ones, and competition dries up. Patents, copyrights are federal backed monopolies for a set term.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Assuming this Bruce Lehmann is the same guy who ran the USPTO under Clinton, I seriously do not trust him. If so, he's the same guy who institutionalized software patents using a panel of self-serving lawyers, and did so in a what I consider a blatant (to me) railroad of predetermined hearings. IMO, he is pure politician, claims you can have your cake and eat it too, and uses politics not to serve the public, but to serve the legal industry. IMO, he dismisses the obvious when it matters (policy making) and now is trying to feign innocence.
If this is USPTO Lehmann, then IMO he's a total joke, and a lackey for the legal industry to create law which taxes other industries to the benefit of... the legal industry.
So, he did the DMCA too? Amazing. He is "the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties". Wow. I didn't know he also "did" the DMCA and WIPO (cast US patent law into global stone), but it makes sense. And I didn't know he was still "in business" ("who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute"). The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess Lehmann is getting his dues from the legal industry for all the "work" he did on behalf of the legal industry.
Good to know he's still out there. Amazing to know he did the DMCA, WIPO, _and_ institutionalized software patents. What a joke.
I suggest taking anything Lehmann says with a huge grain of salt, even any apologies. He has known what he has been doing for decades, and to feign ignorance now is unconscionable IMO. I do not buy it, and it's not his style. He's more of a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of policy-maker, which is to say he'll ignore the obvious to forcefeed policy despite all public interest(s), IMO. Again, I'm not buying.
You missed the part at the end in which he said he'd be happy to pay the RIAA members if they offered a product he considers worthwhile and until that time he will only procure products that do meet his criterion. IN other words, he's cheap, but he's willing to pay what he thinks something is actually worth.
Unfortunately, the RIAA thinks the items are worth far more than he does and cannot stop him from purchasing internationally.
Just goes to show you, all the good intentions in the world can't make a bad law work.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
Burning a CD of songs for my friends is fucking fair use to me.
Think about that for a minute. You've got such a convenient way to rationalize this:
but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
You sound as if you're nothing more than a spoiled child, screaming that "it's not fair" that you can't get what you want. Then you're attempting to justify it on economic (not moral or ethical) grounds. Think about how this could be abuse. Consider a philanthropist deciding that all relatives, in-laws, co-workers, and so forth are "friends" and that the entire population of Berkeley were really just extended "friends" and distributing a record to all of them, or the entire state, or perhaps even the entire country or world should be fair use. That would obviously put this person is direct competition with the labels (negating the economic affects you think you're using to justify your position) yet that person (under your ideals) has exactly zero obligation to reimburse the artists or anyone else involved in creating the work in the first place. Yet if you had your way this would be perfectly fine.
Sure, this is a "slippery slope" argument but I can only hope you'll be able to grasp the bigger picture. You're making what you see as a responsible fair use, but there's no meaningful way to codify this approach. Further, you don't know what your friends are doing with the copies you gave them. Suppose they made "fair use" copies for all their friends, and they made "fair use" copies in turn. Your morality may be offended by these scenarios, but I'm hoping to reach your rationality.
I'm guessing you'll still justify it all by saying you're "advertising" for the labels and that the lost sales are more than made up by those of your friends who actually then buy more than they would, because you exposed them to these copies.
However, the underlying problem is that you feel entitled to something for you have absolutely no rights. Fair Use never has (and never should) have anything to do with making copies for others. It has to do with satire and some academic uses. It also has to do with allowing you to make a backup (for yourself!) and arguably to time-shift, location-shift, and device-shift the content for your own personal use.
You should certainly be allowed to play these songs for your friends, and because of the shifting you can do this at your place, their place, or anywhere else. You can let them borrow the songs for a while, or even sell (or give) them to your friends. However, you can't keep your copies as well. If your friend borrows a few songs for a weekend, you have no place listening to those same songs that weekend. You've temporarily assigned your rights to another, so you can't have your cake and eat it (the backup) too.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use. I just want at least the same rights for music that I have with physical content (think books)--plus the various shifting concepts noted above--and nothing more. Note that shifting is conceptually a "move" not a "copy" even though the practicality of convenience means you make an actual copy.
But your position is absolutely untenable, not just to the industry, but to people like me! I had DRM as much as anybody else, and perhaps more, but I would call you out as bastardizing the very concept of "fair use" (and yes, that's even if it didn't affect me at all). It's definitely not within the spirit or letter of any related laws, yet you flaunt your disregard as if waving the flag in the name of justice for all. Most of the pre-DMCA laws and doctrines (such as that of first sale) were working perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, so many of us can't make a stand for extending reasonable rights because of extremists like you (sound familiar?). I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfu
I was complaining to my congresspeople about the potential abuses of this law, long before it was signed into law. This jackass ignored a multitude of experts and bought the corporate line. To your hell with this guy, he's an even bigger bitch for trying to skate on his responsibility.
Blar.
Don't forget the No Electronic Theft Act. Another Clinton Era monstrosity. But before you go and blame the Democrats, it was the Republicans who slipped in the worst part of the NET Act at the last minute in an amendment. The part I'm referring to is where the definition of "commercial exchange" is re-defined from meaning the exchange of copyrighted material in exchange for money, ie traditional piracy, to be replaced by the absurd definition where commercial exchange now means the exchange of copyrighted material for anything of any value. This language was targeted specifically at free peer-to-peer file sharing networks which had prior to that point arguably been exempt due to their lack of commercial exchange.
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Mod SlayerDave++!
There are so many whiny people here and elsewhere who want their music/software "at a reasonable price". What a lark. First of all, being that these pirates are NOT in the music industry proper, how do they know exactly what expenses and financial risks are involved in signing a band and recording them? Secondly, "reasonable" is completely relative: $9/CD today "should be $6/CD" 5 years from now, "should be $4/CD" 10 more years from now... It wouldn't stop; each generation would naturally want it cheaper. Further, what pirate is going to pay ANYTHING for something they can have for free? Should their ethics be trusted: "I'm sure the pirates will start paying for the music again once we lower the price enough." Yeah, right.
(PS-What would a reasonable price BE for someone who makes 6-figs?)
Have you given them back their filthy lucre?
Do you have ESP?
FTFA: "While he says that teens have lost respect for copyright, he lays much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
This is the entire RIAA problem in a nutshell and I completely agree that *this* is the root of their problem *and* our problem.
They made a choice. They made this choice when Napster (the old Napster, not the castrated one) showed the world how to share, point, click, and download.
The choice was to hold on to their legacy distrobution cash cow and go screaming, kicking and clawing their way into the internet age instead of seeing the digital tsunami heading their direction.
Their problem now is that theyre loosing their brick and mortar base *and* the digital distrobution war and the only way the can maintain any semblance of their arcane business model is to sue the masses into submission, which of course will never work.
The entire DRM/DMCA/RIAA battle was lost before it began. Those who cant evolve become irrelavent and extinct sooner or later...
Note that he never actually said that he thought that the goals or methods of the DMCA were a bad idea and never apologized to the public for passing it - he simply pointed out that it failed to achieve those goals. In other words, his repeated attempts to pander to the RIAA failed because the RIAA members refused to help themselves.
Information control *is* thought control.
Thought control is a crime against humanity.
The PATRIOT act is horrible, but perhaps slightly less so because the contradictions that it presents with the Constitution and with American values are more obvious, thus making the act easier to challenge.
The DMCA takes information control and packages it up as if it were an exemplar of American values. It, too, presents slavery as if it were freedom, but it does it in a more subtle way.
The PATRIOT act takes an obvious frontal assault to our freedoms, whereas the DMCA sneaks in through the back door. The PATRIOT act attacks our ability to speak and act freely, whereas the DMCA attacks our ability to gain knowledge. An aware mind may find ways to operate within the chains that bind him (and even to escape them), whereas a mind starved of knowledge cannot act at all.
This would apply not only to knowledge of one's culture (necessary for one to have a sense of self which empowers him to interact effectively with his peers), but also to knowledge of how to make his computer do useful things (that is to say, software copyrights), knowledge of how to create useful items (design copyrights of all forms), and so on.
Until information is free, the human soul cannot be free.
Well, while some of Lehman's comments are interesting (and promising), and I certainly believe that a lot of this current situation is very much the fault of the RIAA, I'm seeing a pendulum effect here. Having failed to control copyright using extreme measures on one end, he's now talking about the end of copyright, which is basically the extreme on the other end. The truth, like so many truths, is somewhere inbetween.
I'm speaking as a published and agented author here - I need to know what copyright is, and how it works. My livelihood depends on it, partly when dealing with publishers (knowing what rights I'm signing away) and partly when it comes to dealing with agents (making sure that they know what rights of my work to keep from being signed away). A bad contract can nail an author to the wall, and there are very bad contracts out there. So I am very much aware of what copyright is, what it does, and how it works.
And here is the problem - most people in the grass-roots movement don't. And the fault for this lies very firmly in the hands of the RIAA. Frankly, our society needs copyright - it is the single most important tool our culture and society has to advance itself. And, I'll explain why (even though it will take a while, and probably put a few readers to sleep).
We have a society that is very unique in many ways. First of all, literacy is the norm, not the exception. Secondly, we have the technology (and have had it since about the 15th century) to efficiently reproduce the work of creative artists (first literature and visual art, now music and film). Third, we have a capitalist system where the success of an artist is based on the sales of his/her work (rather than a system of patronage). It is, broadly put, a literate meritocracy.
What this means is that there are a lot of creative people out there, and they are able to distribute what they create through a variety of means. We are drowning in content, which is good - the more content there is, the healthier our culture is, and we have a very healthy culture, make no mistake. But, how is this content to be dealt with? Many of these creative artists want to do different things with their creations. Some want to sell it, others want to share it. Some want to keep their characters to themselves, and others want to create shared worlds that anybody can write in. Even in software development, there is a disparity. And there needs to be protection for all of these creative artists, so that they can do what they need to. And that is where copyright comes in.
Copyright is the broad tool that allows the various creative artists to do what they want with their work. It really is amazing in its simplicity - if you don't believe me, look at the Berne Convention. The creative artist owns the copyright to their work until such time as they die and it runs out, or they sign it away. And that copyright simply allows them to say "this work and what is in it will be copied in X way." It provides protection for the specific implementation of an idea, but not for the idea itself. And, it requires reasonability from the creators - hence fair use and the public domain. It's this tool that allows the Creative Commons to exist, that allows the Open Source movement to fight against SCO, and that allows an author to receive royalties on his work from a publisher for copies sold. And the success of the created work is determined by the market, and nothing else.
And this is where the RIAA is so troublesome - they have spent quite a long time abusing both the letter and the spirit of copyright law, and doing it very publicly. So, while I've just described the literal truth of what copyright is, there are a lot of people who just won't believe what I've written. Why won't they? Because while copyright law is about balanced rights of the creator, the RIAA is using it to sue dead grandmothers, students, and welfare moms for copying insignificant amounts of music. And actions do speak louder than words. The irony is
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Ummm, slavery ?
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
Hooooray! Someone gets it right for a change!
Remember who got it wrong. From the artice, the DMCA is from the Clinton Administration. Let's not do that again.
The truth shall set you free!
If we can just temper your penchant for high-brow verbiage, I think there may be a future for you in the US government.
The original intent of patents and copyrights were to encourage more invention and artistic creation. The "limited term" monopolies were simply means to that end. If an inventor invents something, has invested significant time, money, and effort into it, and as he brings it to market, someone else simply copies it and markets it without royalties, that inventor may not have the wherewithal to invent again. He needs to recoup his costs, in order to keep inventing. To that extent the "limited term monopoly" is good, and the same applies to the artist.
But it's important to remember that the "limited term monopoly" is there to encourage continued invention and artistic creation. It's equally important to remember that "old" inventions and artistic works are supposed to go into the public domain as fodder for the future. The "limited term monopolies" are not supposed to be a revenue model, and these things are where we've lost it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
He just doesn't want to admit he got snowed when the RIAA lobbying helped him craft their own law.
Now he looks like an idiot for not paying attention to his job.
and slowly back away from the computer.
Lehman lay much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s.
Not to defend the likes of the RIAA, but big business has always tried to influence government at all levels. That's nothing new, it happens all the time, in every nation on the planet. Much of the blame (well, all of it really) can be laid at the feet of Congress for permitting the recording industry to exert undue influence upon them. Once, just once, I'd like to see a Congressperson call the cops and have a lobbyist hauled off to jail for trying to buy a law or other favor.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Critereon", single.
"Criteria", plural.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Patents need anti-anti-competitive measures built in. In other words, patents need to be used to make things not to prevent others from making things. That is, forced licensing to allow others to use the patent (at a reasonable market rate). No more patent trolls or prevention of the usefulness of the next great invention because the predecessor invention necessary to make use of the next great invention is not being licensed by its owner.
And of course the Supreme Court could help a lot if its next ruling prevents obvious things from being patented as they are today.
Copyright needs to expire dead stop at 40 years. This may need a Constitutional amendment. To prevent being left in a form that becomes unusable over time or copies disappearing altogether, once a work is no longer published, a short period afterwards (4 years max) it needs to be explicitly legal to make unlimited non-profit, non-commercial copies. This applies especially to software but also to that music on an 8-track tape or DAT or that video on reel-to-reel that needs to be put into another form to insure future playability.
Also remember which grand old party controlled Congress and the Senate at the time. Both parties are complicit, denying that shows either ignorance or partisan foolishness.
This poo is cold.
trouble is: patents were thought and accredited to individuals, the idea of protection is sold and accepted as a means for the individual to protect itself from abuse. But: corporations are individuals, socipathic, powerful and determined legal individuals and all they want is to maximise investments at all costs.
So the critter sobbed you into buying patents to protect the hero and the lawyer took your word and spun it to help the board screw you... nail you down...
the road to hell is paved of good intentions...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
It kills me that the guy who came up with the whole DMCA idea thought that the recording industry would continue to adapt after they modified their environment to keep from having to do so in the first place! Why would any organism continue to adapt when it could guarantee the environment wouldn't change?
Not yet, guys!
We still need to use the DMCA to crush the author of WoW!Glider and the associated goldfarmers! Once we've done that, then by all means have the DMCA declared as much a failure as you want...but don't ruin Blizzard's chances in court!
IMHO, the problem can be focused into 3 of your words, "corporations are individuals," after some rather nasty Supreme Court rulings early in the 20th century.
Also IMHO, had the Framers of the Constitution fully understood the threat that would be posed by corporations, they would have carefully delineated the rights of "assemblies of people" and how they related to individuals, the states, and the federal government. The Framers were clearly concerned about abuse of power, but to them that meant the State and the Church, and they were very careful about them. Theoretically individuals were supposed to have the greatest liberty and power, surrendering only what was necessary to the states, then to the federal government. Corporations were then let in on that level of highest power. As state and federal government have grown power has moved away from individuals, but corporations have been better at keeping their hold on it.
Money is Power. Power is Money. It's about that simple.
Furthermore IMHO, had the Framers known about the future potential for surveillance, they would have enumerated and explicit Right to Privacy. There'd be none of this "No right to privacy enumerated in the Constitution" CRAP coming out of our courts. In the Constitution it reserves all rights not explicitly stated otherwise to the people, and in the Bill of Rights it explicitly states that "this list is not complete."
I still stand that patents as provided for in the Constitution are good.
What we've done with them is frequently (usually?) bad.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The "reasonable market rate" is what they would have paid in the absence of the patent -- i.e., probably nothing. Market prices are determined, by definition, solely by unrestricted and unforced trade between individuals; there is no other context in which the term "market rate" has any meaning. What you are proposing is that we do away with patents altogether in favor of tax-funded subsidies. (You might not call it a "tax", but that's what the compulsory license fees are nonetheless.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
People just bitch about slavery because of the disproportional racial distrobution factor.
Slavery should be what happens to kids when parents get divorced. Who needs orphanages when you can have plantations? I'm thinking slavery is going to be making a come back in a big big way. It's how we're going to make a come back against the chinese.
I kid, I kid. We don't need slaves anymore: We have minimum wage laws and public schooling.
Now, the uneducated get a choice between masters.
Now, the uneducated have the option of learning if they're lucky enough to have teachers capable of helping them.
Now, the employer and the landlord have to be different people. Oh and you can't shoot them. I hear unemployment is GREAT for your health. Welfare is at least enough for a couple cheeseburgers if you deal drugs on the side and don't get shot or arrested long enough to go grab some food.
The employee might even have some money left over after food and rent. Not likely though. When people sell their lives for cheaper than whores because they've been beaten down since childhood, inflation tends to make spending money a priveledge of the competitively educated.
Slavery isn't gone, now they can choose employers like the children of the divorced can choose parents. Lots of equally shitty choices.
The injustice of slavery was that they weren't even allowed the illusion of choice to pacify them, or the option of education. We've come so far. Step 1 is to kill the old and end social security. Step 2 is to kill excessive breeders and their children.
Hail discord!
Seriously. You can't peddle digital media in a scarcity-based model. It's fucking stupid - like using leaves as currency, and then having to launch a massive deforestation campaign to curb inflation.
Yes, SecondLife, I'm looking at you.
Why the hell doesn't the music industry switch to a service-based model?
I don't like having to stuff up my hard drive with all my music files, and I certainly don't like relying on removable media. I don't like having to back up all my music and generally worry about losing it. I don't like having to buy CDs and rip them, or to jump through hoops to download sort and catalogue them, index them and arrange them into playlists.
I do like finding new stuff that I didn't realise I'd like. I do like having a feel for what the world is listening to (especially on a per-subculture basis). I do like the idea of the huge amount of music metadata that could be generated by a global audience, which could allow browsing on any combination of tags and parameters you could think of - even including the subculture identity of the people rating it. (just think: music universally hated by 14yos would have to rock...) I do like the idea of never having to transfer my music collection from machine to machine.
Give me on-demand streaming audio of any song at all, with search and playlists creatable from all related data, including tags, ratings and parameters. Give me smart mix generation (by mood/feel/genre) and consensus-vote group stations. Give me access to social and shared-taste data, and suggest new music for me based on my tastes.
I'll subscribe to your service, and pay by the second. (Not a whole LOT per second, but still.) Pay a fair percentage to the artists that I play, and skim the rest for yourselves.
If I want to record the stream, store it somewhere, and deal with it, that's my problem. It's dead now, no longer hooked into the global hivemind. I don't put my stamp on the zeitgeist by listening to it, nor do I get access to it myself.
And hell, think of the possibilities for live music. Cyber busking. If you're good, people stick around and listen - getting you 0.N cents a minute per person straight into your account. And when people see crowds forming, they'll wander over to see what's going on. The company gets a cut, so they'll happily encourage you. It's just more eardrum/seconds for them. If you're popular, it'd be worth their storage costs to record it for people to play later.
The consumers are happy, the artists are happy, the labels are happy. And not a jackboot in sight.
Win/win/win.
Erm, patents are already tax-funded subsidies. It is time the law is changed to prevent patents from being used to stifle innovation, much like the endless extension of copyright needs to stop.
In addition, it's pretty easy to include the copyright or trademark registration numbers. The few times I've had send DMCA takedown notices I've sent a letter that includes this information. If the ISP wants to verify it, they can contact the appropriate government agency.
Even if they don't there is a system for contesting the takedown. The recent Slashdot story about the EFF lawyer and the NFL shows that this system works, even if some copyright owners are overzealous. The NFL should get smacked down for this so that they take a bit more care. But, really, the DMCA system works well enough without swamping the court system over every small dispute and making lawyers even richer. As a small business owner with valuable intellectual property, I actually like the DMCA because it means I haven't gone out of business paying a lawyer every time some kid posts software stolen from me up on a site.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Aha, so a conservative administration wouldn't do the same thing? Don't forget that Clinton had some pretty conservative streaks in him, and this was one of them - protecting the rights of corporations over the rights of people, and framing the whole thing as intellectual property.
The Clintons, both of them, are a part of the Democratic party that thinks that voters like conservatism, and the way for a Democrat to get elected is to be Republican-lite. So, let's not forget indeed. Clinton gave us the DMCA in a misguided attempt to be like a conservative in order to gain favor with corporate backers. If you don't get that, then you don't understand the very definitions of either conservative or liberal.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Call me a cynic, but considering the lobby, what did he expect would happen?
I propose he knew full well what the likely outcome(s) of this legislation would be. I would suspect that this 'apology' is a result to the public opinion to the DMCA (correct opinions or not) based on the recent behavior of the music industry.
he's apologizing for this travesty that robbed us of a completely new era of freedom (or at least turned the netizens into unwitting rebels against a virtual police state), which HE WROTE, and is expecting forgiveness when it's still there!
if i walk up and start punching you.. then start saying im sorry while taking a few more swings, i doubt you'd forgive me.
repeal section 1201 of the DMCA and THEN i, and those like me, may forgive you you schill.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A lot of people ignored the fact that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and still supported the Iraq invasion. The polls suggest that we are now overwhelmingly sorry that we did that. I'm one of those people. Please don't get into a snit about this, because it's not just me. It's the majority of Americans now who think we really fscked up getting into that mess.
Let's see, a guy masterminded the iron rule of DRM, versus America's citizens who gave the societal nod for the quagmire that's Iraq that has resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis and 3000 of our troops... yeah, stones and glass houses indeed.
Nope, I don't see why I shouldn't forgive this guy. Sorry.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You must use Linux..
Think about the last time you heard anything new. I remember the first time I heard The Beatles, back in 1964. I was a junior in high school at the time. That music knocked me back into my chair! The next band to do this was Rolling Stones. The next was Led Zeppelin. The common thread? Every time was a new experience for my senses. Even though the Stones and Led Zeppelin were throwing American Blues back at us, the sound was new to me and many other people at the time.
Contemporary pop stars have no real talent, they only have production values. Utter Crap!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
"Hungarian subtitles"
I bet your wife is hot. There are, I think, only 4 or 5 Hungarian women who are not hot, and I've never seen any of them.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It's a fine distinction, but I disagree. Under the present system a patent holder has the option of refusing to license, in which case case they wouldn't technically be paid a subsidy (unless you consider exclusive franchise agreements and the like to be subsidies -- I don't). Under the proposed system they wouldn't have the option of a true monopoly; instead their competitors would be taxed a specific, limited amount (the compulsory license fee) to subsidize the patent holder. It would probably be better than the current system, on the whole, but I don't care much for either approach.
You won't get any argument from me.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Our allies the British have a report indicating that 655,000 Iraqis have died so far. It's been checked and considered accurate.
I hope someone you know suffers as a result of this evil war of choice.
Blar.