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The Case For Perpetual Copyright
Several readers sent in a link to an op-ed in the NYTimes by novelist Mark Halprin, who lays out the argument for what amounts to perpetual copyright. He says that anything less is essentially an unfair public taking of property: "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind." This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain, words which don't appear in the op-ed. In a similar vein, reader benesch sends us to the BBC for a tale of aging pop performers (virtually) serenading Parliament in favor of extending copyright for recording artists in the UK. Some performers are likely to outlive the current protections, now fixed at a mere 50 years.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
thats the stupidest fucking thing ive heard since i started at microsoft
Let's apply this principle retroactively to nearly every animation Disney has ever made.
Not a typewriter
They *DO* have a right to paid holidays, paid weekends off, paid sick days, time-and-a-half over 45 hours weekly, free coffee, free Poland Spring Water, a dental plan, a pharmaceuticals plan, and a 401-K plan.
Don't they...?
...except for secrets. If you tell me something, it is no longer yours. Everything protection beyond that is a deliberate incentive to create, not a right. Prolonging copyright does not provide a bigger incentive. In my opinion, copyright is already extended too long to work as an incentive: If you can milk old stuff without end, why should you create new stuff?
Is this one of the ways a culture can commit suicide?
Ignore this signature. By order.
So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start, but lets try:
"Freeing" a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, "The Garden Party," while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
Has this guy heard of the internet? Where anyone can 'publish' for almost no cost.
I really don't like the idea of a perpetual copyright. Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material. That seems fair to me. It rewards their creativity and the fact that they created the material first. However, to say that for example, John Lennon and Paul McCartney "own" forever the exact combination of musical pitches played at a certain rythmn which we recognize when played as "Let it Be," is taking things too far.
In exchange for you making your creations public. Society has to benefit, but it was also recognized that without copyright there would be less incentive to work on certain things.
So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society. IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society. The article's author wants to subvert the contract completely in the favor of one side. In U.S. contract law, for contracts to be valid, both sides have to have had a clear benefit for the contract to be considered valid.
Copyright already has been subverted to the one side so often (copyright extensions) without any clear benefits given for the other side, I would have to start arguing that the contract is not valid anymore. I don't believe anybody is owed rights that place an undue burden on society unless society also benefits in some way. This is not the case here.
If you want your thing protected forever, lock it in a vault, don't let it see the light of day, and don't tell anybody about it. Let it die, along with you eventually.
Strange, in his article Helprin doesn't mention anything about HIM paying royalties to Shakespeare's descendants for his use of the title Winter's Tale for his novel (it is the name of, and a reference to a Shakespeare play). Presumably he should cough up something for the use of a similar plot device too.
No mention either of what he should be paying the descendants of every innovator in printing technology.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Why is it always authors who come down as the hardest advocates of strict copyrights? I'm not trolling, it just seems that among musicians (classical and pop), painters, photographers, etc there is way less of this mentality of locking everything down and severely punishing anyone who steps out of line. It is especially disappointing among sci-fi authors. For instance we had Harlan Ellison suing AOL for the contents of the newsgroups and dragging that out for like 5 years (it could still be going on now for all I know). Then I believe it was SM Stirling (I could have the author wrong) ranting that people who upload his novels to newsgroups deserve to be anally raped in prison. It is sad since these people are supposed to have, you know, a bit of vision. My only guess is authors are so used to getting screwed by their publishers and don't get to interact with their fan base the way a musician might they are led down this RIAA-like path where they feel the only way to protect themselves is to lock things down entirely. Either that or its just all about the money for an author.
Obviously there are exceptions, people like Neil Stephenson have certainly embraced the future (well more like the present).
question 1: What if the copyright holder dies intestate?
question 2: Won't that kill off sequels?
question 3: Who's going to find offenders?
question 4: As the body of copyright material grows and grows, doesn't that mean that creativity becomes more and more impossible?
question 5: If creativity is stifled, then won't less and less people get involved in the arts?
question 6: If perpetual motion is impossible, what makes anyone think that a perpetual copyright is?
question 7: This kind of craziness is exactly why public flogging needs to return, right?
jon
The author forgets that tangible objects are taxed at their current valuation. Copyrighted objects rarely are. Another minor fact the author missed is even property can be eminent domain'ed away, or if a govt collapses completely, the new govt will likely re-distribute the land. Ask the indians.
So, they were given this ability by technology now it becomes a right? I rather think what technology giveth, technology taketh away.
Copyright only exists because technology made it relatively simple to replicate a work and sell it many times over.
Deleted
Its not like the current system is abused at all. Why would extending it hurt any?
geesh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... so-called "intellectual property" already is far more protected than real property.
A few years ago I decided to play devil's advocate in a discussion about copyright and promoted the concept of "permanent copyright" in which the material never passed into the public domain. It was a fascinating thing to try to promote, because quite rapidly it becomes clear that the permanent copyright is simply untenable.
20 years' copyright protection is enough. I'm not an author or an artist, and like most people I get paid for today's work once rather than getting paid over and over and over for the rest of my life. The position that someone should work once and get paid perpetually for doing so is not workable.
To follow the guy's logic, if we are to treat creative works like property, the federal/state governments should be able to tax the hell out of them for the public good. Like property taxes are often used to shore up deficits, or pay for public education, we should tax copyright holders on any income or royalty they make, in addition to the income taxes they pay now.
If his reduces taxes on the rest of us, I'm all for it! Following this author's ridiculous logic to its natural conclusion, we will kill all innovation, but hey, so long as we stop this "unfair inequality" he whines about.
Out of all content creators (well, with the exception of painters), their work is least susceptible to copying. Don't release your stuff in ebook format if you don't want it to get copied. It's far more convenient to have actual physical books than to sit there and read something on your laptop, so they really shouldn't be worrying that much.
+++ATH0
Disney and the other corporations will simply buy the public domain. What was once a public resource will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and people will have to pay. Apparently, denying everyone access to something creates economic value (if you ignore the costs to the public). Sound familiar ? I wonder how long until we will have to pay for the privilege of merely existing in a particular space. All of those roads, sidewalks, and parks could be sold off, and we could implant chips in people to debit their bank accounts to the owners of that property. You already pay rent, isn't it just an extension of the same thing ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Let's charge intellectual property tax as well, and allow eminent domain of works in the public interest.
no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind
I agree entirely, there is no good reason to put physical limitations on ideas and doing so degrades them. Good ideas can be immortal, a story is retold, a song is sung, inventions are shared and implemented long after the death of the person who conceived the original. As one candle lights another, ideas flow between people and enrich all. A society that would put unreasonable restrictions on these things will extinguish them. The ultimate reward for any author is recognition and imitation.
Perpetual copyrights will be used to crush people with new stories, songs and ideas. "What is yours next to our collection, which [contains tens of thousands | spans the entire history of recorded music | includes the work of Einstein]?" they can ask before dismissing you. Every day we come closer to losing the right to read.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not a bad idea, really. If I spend my adult life creating a rich fantasy world, my heirs will not see a single cent of profit once I've been dead for seventy years and a day -- even if there's still profit to be had. If on the other hand I spend my adult life making a popular soft drink, my heirs can milk that until the end of time.
/. knows at least one counter-argument to this. Let's assume you've made those already, and move on.)
(anyone on
The correct answer to these problems is to refine copyright -- add a requirement of mandatory licensing to any copywritten work, exclude software from copyright*, eliminate copyright on "mere publication or collection" of public domain works, and push all works into the public domain after a five year period where they are not "in print."
(*: software deserves either its own IP model, or none at all.)
-BMojo
If we really want to treat copyright as "physical property" then once you sell me a CD/Book/Movie you can't claim you only sold me "limited license". We're dealing with physical thing now, so I can disassemble, sell and re-sell, rent it out, share it with anybody I want.
Because if someone tries to sell you a horse that you can ONLY ride on your lawn you call that person nuts.
Hyperom.com
"So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start"
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs. What if the maker of the house had a perpetual monopoly on building houses? Well, Mr Helprin wouldn't have a problem with the government taking his house when he died; he wouldn't have a house.
Property is the right to own what you make or buy. Monopoly rights is the right to prevent anyone else from making the same (or sufficiently similar) thing. Wether the copy is made by hand, or by machines makes no difference to the essence.
Also, this is akin to me turning round to an ex employer and saying "you're still using that script I wrote, pay me more money for doing that". It's a bullshit argument, they've had 50 years to rake it in and that should be enough.
Does this fool really think that anybody should be given right to own an idea, a sequence of letters, etc. for eternity... The idea that you can pass on the rights to make profit from the mere existence an idea you thought up to your grandchildren is laughable.
The problem is:
Author writes book.
Author becomes fabulously rich.
Author has child.
Author dies.
Descendant makes money off of parent's book, by doing zilch and being a drain on society.
Rake in cash, reproduce and repeat...
If you haven't made enough money off your IP in 50 years, it can't have been all that good can it. Furthermore, one should not envy the perpetrators of sensationalist trash, but rather admire them Are you an idiot?
American citizens, get it into your excuses for brains.
Money Isn't Everything.
There is more to life than the $dollar$.
You can only buy so much, for not doing very much...
Society as a whole benefits from a balanced distribution of resources, with mutually beneficial input from all sides.
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
If the old stuff still sells, then the market spoke: they prefer old stuff over new stuff.
I think the simplest argument against perpetual copyright runs roughly as follows: ultimately our culture is the sum total of ideas and stories that have been told and retold down through the ages; the very idea that culture is something that should be owned by individuals or companies is bizarre -- it is a recipe for cultural stagnation and failure. Ideas are of limited value when isolated, it is only with other people to understand and share ideas that they begin to take on the true value that has bootstrapped mankind to the stage we are at now. It is through language, and the ability to easily proliferate ideas, to see that they are passed down from one generation to the next and expanded upon, that mankind came to be what it is today. It seems a terribly backward step to try and isolate ideas once again.
Note that I am not proposing a complete "information wants to be free" approach, but the ultimate value of an idea is realised when it becomes freely available to a society, thus any copyright law should include provision to see that this eventually happens. Rewarding the creators of new ideas is a worthy goal, and I cna see a place for some sort of copyright law. That must always strike a balance, however, with the need for ideas to reach their full potential by being released to society to remember and expand it, or forget it completely, as they see fit.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I've never understood to legal logic behind retroactive copyright extensions. My understanding is that copyright is supposed to grant a limited monopoly to a content creator in order to encourage the creation of content. After the content has been created, extending the monopoly period retroactively does nothing to encourage new content.
On the contrary - real property can only be owned/held/used by only one person/corporation/entity at a time - it cannot be used by other people without its value getting diluted. The value of intellectual property, on the other hand, does generally not dilute with its dissemination - I can appreciate a beautiful poem, regardless of whether or not my neighbor knows it. I can make fire using the knowledge of how to do so, regardless of whether or not everyone else knows how to make fire. (there are obvious exceptions, such as national secrets, a particularly effective algorithm for trading stocks, etc., but I think that you see the point I am trying to make)
Intellectual property cannot be stolen in the same sense that real property can - if I take your real property, you don't have it any more. If I learn your idea by heart, you still have your knowledge left intact. That, in my opinion, is the fundamental difference between intellectual and real property, and also the reason that they should not be considered equal - they are, intrinsically, of two very different natures.
"If I have an apple and you have an apple, and we exchange them, we each have one apple. But if I have an idea and you have an idea, and we exchange them, we each have two ideas." --someone whose name escapes me at the moment
You have the right to anything you can defend, e.g. your person, your real property, your car, the things you carry around with you. You don't have a right to control something I own, e.g. a CD with your music on it. You have to bargain with me to get that right. In exchange for being allowed to control copying for A LIMITED TIME (that's what the Constitution says, "limited time"), we allow you to control OUR PROPERTY (a CD or book that we own).
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
there are two theories about the alphabet, and alphabets in general. There is the gradual theory, where we assume that it came about gradually, with contributions of many people and time. And there is the theory that one man suddenly made it. Chinese and Japanese Kanji are probably an example of the gradual theory (but they are not really alphabets, like Japanese Katakana/Hiragana can be argued to be).
But the English Alphabet, or the direct ancestors, there is an argument which theory applies.
Anyway, I was wondering how the article's author would react if he took his argument to heart, and had to pay royalties are every letter he writes and for every word he utters. Regardless of theory, SOMEONE had to create them before him, no? And their hard work isn't being compensated, apparently.
In his article he states that physical properties are permanent while intellectual properties eventually disappears. This is not true. Consider a house worth X dollars. If the government collects Y dollars in taxes, eventually the total amount collected would be greater than X. Thus, intellectual property is not being discriminated against.
Disney gets to raid the public domain for material, but nothing ever returns to the public domain?
And it's not all Disney with Pinnochio. Every author does this. Think: Love Triangle. Fish out of Water. Coming of Age. Ticking Time Bomb. Quest.
Creativity is not something that springs, like Athena, from the brows of authors. It's more like a conversation they have with the public imagination.
People who want a strong grounding on these issues should read Macaulay's Second Speech on Copyright Extension to Parliament, dated 29 January 1841. In it he lays out the basic theoretical framework for modern copyright, which is purely utilitarian. A purely deontological argument would argue against copyrights altogether.
People who borrow from the literary lumber room stocked by past generations have no right to lock that room to future generations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Real property right only lasts until your ruler succumb to the new overlord so you *will* loose your real property.
The King of England once owned the land now called the US of A.
Intellectual property is harder to protect and defend, and stand to be lost easier.
What body should protect the copyright of Publius Vergilius Maro? The roman empire?
No law can change this.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
If writing is such an unfair job, why don't you just find another one? I bet culture will survive just fine without your input.
If he really wants to find out what copyright is all about, why we have it, what it was intended to accomplish, and why the current incarnation no longer serves that purpose, he should read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings on the subject. If that is too difficult for him, a quick review of the Constitution might grant him a clue.
The guy is either ignorant or self-serving (or both), and frankly I don't like either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Greed, however dispicable, is unsurprising.
The copyright is already too long by about 50 years (in the US). I can imagine detailed arguments over the fine details, but 10-20 years is the right range. And corporations should not be allowed to own copyrights, only to license them from the owners for a limited period of time. Also copyrights should die immediately when the owner of the copyright dies. Families don't have any respect for the artistic integrity of the works of authors, so why should they be allowed to control it. (Sometimes I don't like what an author does, and prefer an earlier version of his work, but I respect his right to alter it. I don't respect the grant of that right to the works of dead authors for people who don't bother to read and understand the original. Here I'm thinking of Eric Flint and the incongruous prequels to the Dune series. E.E. Smith, OTOH, did have the right to write "Skylark DuQuesne", however much it mutilated the world of the previous Skylark books.)
I will grant that this will mean that families won't be able to protect the integrity of the works of their ancestors. They don't anyway. They usually don't appear to even understand them. (Christopher Tolkien may understand, but he's not the writer his father was.)
Also, neither Cinderella nor "The Beauty and the Beast" were Walt Disney originals. Finding the original sources, however, has become a challenge. Or try a somewhat tougher one: What were the traditional words and tune to "Geordie" (not the Joan Baez version). The indefinitely extended copyright has caused it to be VERY dangerous to attempt to create music on a traditional basis. Somebody is likely to have copyrighted a part of any variation of it that you can make (which also sounds good). Actually, they're quite likely to have copyrighted the traditional version as their own. Proving this, however, is difficult. A copyright that expires in a reasonable amount of time minimizes this problem (and it's quite reasonable that ressurecting a traditional favorite DOES deserve SOME reward...but not an unending copyright.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Besides the numerous reasons why a permanent copyright is completely untenable, counterproductive and idiotic, I'm always curious why some artists think that they deserve to be paid forever for something they did once. Write Happy Birthday? Get paid forever. Yes, yes, it's a nifty little dilly. But why should that piece of work allow someone to sit on his/her fat ass for the rest of their lives? The reason that everybody else works is that physical stuff is either consumed or breaks down. As a result, if you create some bread, you need to make more, and since it is an arduous process, you're actually doing something that has value. Just copying an idea involves very little work and very little cost these days. Not only that, but the original creator generally is not involved in the copy process.
So again - why do some artists think they ought to do work once, then collect checks in perpetuity? I have an answer for that, but I would love to hear from someone who thinks it doesn't involve "cheap lazy selfish narcissistic assholes who don't understand that their work is not nearly as original as they think it is."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
... providing that entitlement to payment for something you did more than 50 years ago is applied equally. So, for example, I expect that Jane Waddle who worked for a 30 day period in a Disney Store back in 2001, will be entitled to a month's salary every month for the rest of her life from the Disney corporation. That's fair, isn't it?
He has a valid point. Whilst those of us in the "know" could obtain materials for free legally under a short-term copyright system, most of the average-joe consumption of public domain material would be in the form of dodgy chinese pirate copies sold from the back of a van, and for books, publishers like "penguin classics" no longer paying license fees. Make no mistake, many companies would spring up to exploit the hell out of materials people want, which could now be legally bootlegged.
I had a discussion about this a few nights ago - I know we all have this magic utopia of lack of copyright in our heads, but let's be pragmatic. Consider copyright that expires only when a book/movie/game is out of print, such that anyone who wants to try and buy a copy could only do so second-hand. The lifespan of a created work usually ends with it being sold for a flat fee into some "classics" collection, a la sold-out software. Let's replace that phase of a work's life with public domain. This also has the advantage of not treading on disney's toes.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
When you transfer assets to your heirs you have to pay a fairly hefty tax, usually in the 10% magnitude. Same for other forms of property tax. And note that these taxes are on the value of the property, not on the revenue you generate with it.
It could be that equating copyright with property might benefit the IRS the most, and make that perpetual copyright might not be worthwhile because of tax pressure except for the 0.001% of all-time classics.
It has come to my attention that you people are all using so-called "words." Words you did not invent, but which are the imaginary property of me and my ancestors. Every word you did not coin yourself is the embodiment of someone else's idea. Every word defined in terms of other words or explained in terms of other words is a derived work. Whether spoken or written, they do not belong to you.
As such, please quit writing them, using them and thinking them. If you must communicate, please talk to the inventors of languages like Esperanto or Taki Poni and get a license to think from them. But make damn sure you don't use the Latin alphabet (or Cyrillic, or any of the others you didn't invent), or you're taking other people's thoughts without compensation!
Damn pirates. Get off of my lawn!
Go ahead and skip paying the property taxes (unless you're a church) and see how long it takes the government to take those away.
If you want to treat "intellectual property" the same as physical property, then let's start with taxing it. Even if it doesn't make a profit for you. If you've released it, it goes into Public Domain unless you keep paying the taxes on it.
I actually believe that this would be the best "middle ground" between the the two sides. 99.999% of the stuff published would NOT be valuable enough to keep paying taxes on, year after year after year. Say $5 per item (single song, single story, single program, etc).
The items that ARE that valuable are so valuable that the owners (not necessarily the original producers of the work) can BUY legislation that extends copyright indefinitely for EVERYTHING. Even the 99.999% of stuff that isn't worth it.
They say elephants never forget... and have you ever seen an elephant who looked happy?
In Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants," he points out a huge problem with perpetual (or even lengthy) copyright, coupled with perpetual storage (memory). It stifles innovation, and worse, leads to stagnation in the arts.
There are a finite number of aesthetically pleasing ways to arrange a finite number of notes, a finite number of colored pigments, or a finite number of words. Remember the monkeys and Shakespeare? Without intending to -- without ever having been exposed to an earlier work -- it is quite possible that portions of a new creative work will substantially resemble portions of an earlier work. And that's enough to qualify as plagiarism.
Shakespeare's work was "substantially similar" to other, already-existing creative works... suppose he'd been subject to litigation for that?
We need to be able to forget.
I find this suggestion outrageous. My earliest [technical-professional] articles etc came out in 1980, when I was 30. As things stand now, if I die when I'm 70 (i.e. 2020, the copyright won't expire until 2090, 110 years after they were written! That in itself is preposterous. The original term was 17 years with an optional 17 year extension. I have no problem with that stuff being in the public domain now. the purpose of writing it was to communicate information in the first place. If it's not, why bother? Doh.
I'm inclined to suspect that this is a trial balloon floated by the big publishers & Disney-oids to complete the rape of the pubic domain. How long before things like Shakespeare, the Illiad, the Bible, Darwin's work are auctioned off to big money (in return for big campaign contributions) and stolen from the public. Hey Halprin, if you don't like finite copyright, DON'T PUBLISH! Shove it up your ass, instead. That'll fix us. Who are you, anyway, your stuff seems to be almost invisible to Google. One unrated listing on Amazon. Not the next Shakespeare or Toynbee.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Why is 'real' property protected? By saying that you cannot a piece of land because I 'own' it, am I not infringing on your freedom?
The justification is that if I let you share my land, I lose the use of the land. Both of us cannot use the same piece of land at the same time.
Now, if I plant crop A on my land and you decide to copy me, I have no right to stop you. Your planting of A does not take away anything from me, except potential profits that I could've made if I had a monopoly. And that is exactly what intellectual property is.
If you are worried that someone might steal the drug that you invested a billion dollars in, or the new song you came up with, thereby causing loss of profits, then distribute your product only to those people who will sign a contract where they agree not to copy your invention. The potential purchaser can then decide if signing the contract is worth the benefits he gets from the product.
The practicalities of such arrangements are *your* problem as an inventor/artist/distributor - it should not be the responsibility of society to solve these issues to make your life easier.
The current mess is because some people overestimated the ability of the state to make decisions that it cannot make :
- what is novel and what is obvious,
- whether 'invention A' is worthy of more protection than B, etc.
Perptual copyright is daft. The whole copyright thing is merely an agreement for a government to give your good IP an exclusive protected period. During this you are meant to make your money on it, etc. But in return for government upholding your right to your copyright (because on your own you could not do it) at the end the IP then becomes public.
If anything, extending copyright indefinately robs people of the chance to improve a design or extend it. Since many inventions are built upon others this would just stop inovation.
I need to travel back in time and file the following patents:
"Abstract: A method for generating heat by rubbing two small pieces of wood against one another"
"Abstract: A method for gathering food by growing it in a field"
"Abstract: A method for easily transporting goods by means of a rounded rock"
All kidding aside, what would have happened to human society if such key advances as fire, agriculture, and the wheel had become jealously and perpetually guarded properties? I see no problem with allowing a limited monopoly on an idea as our copyright and patent systems do, but an idea is too powerful a thing to keep it bound up for eternity.
I'm so sorry that he feels he doesn't owe society anything for his "great" works. That without a stable society with culture and intelligence, people wouldn't be buying books or listening to music. Does he gather inspiration for his works of the "spirit and mind" from nothingness? What role does society play in the creative arts?
If you can't stand the thought of society getting something after you are dead, after you so clearly benefited from society. then you are simply an arrogant spoiled human being. Being selfish and having an obsession with ownership are not exactly redeeming qualities.
Profit from your toil while you are alive, then pass that profit on to your children if you wish. But a baker cannot make a loaf of bread and sell it many times over on into many generations. But she can certainly create wealth around baking and establish a business that can sustain her children into old age as long as her children can be smart enough and work hard enough to maintain this means of production.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
He seems to believe that product of his labor is property to own forever, but how can that be if he wishes to profit from it by selling it? How does one intend to sell something, yet at the same time still own it? If I am a craftsman, and I made beautiful coffee tables, how exactly can I cash in on the whole copyright thing? I would most certainty like to make only one coffee table and sell it to multiply buyers and still enjoy having it sit in my living room. But, alas, I am a mere craftsman; only my moral and intellectual superior, the writer, can enjoy that privilege. Right! Excuse me sir! Right, I meant RIGHT. Forgive me, I am lowly wretch; a mere craftsman.
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs.
Most likely the Wood Workers Association of America would be insisting that everyone paid a fee everytime they sat on a chair. Probably also cursing pet owners who's dogs and cats sat on chairs.
Not to mention the virtual impossibility of tracking whose property is in whose in perpetuity. Can you imagine the maker of the chair owning the "intellectual property" for chairs forever? Imagine the legal minefield absolutely everything would become if the estate of the guy who made the first chair started suing eachother. Imagine how ingenuity would grind to a halt as everything become wrapped up in the barbed wire of protection.
This is why I'm in favour of the public domain, and in favour of it sooner rather than later. When your idea, or you implementation, or your song, or your algorithm, or your sheet music go into the public domain, it fosters innovation. The short-term monopoly you are given fosters the actual creation, but when it enters the public domain the real innovation hits. Look, for instance, how hiphop artists are sampling old public domain records. Look at code that's free to be changed. The examples are endless.
But at the end of the day the real challenge is not people extending copyright and treating patents like warheads and trademarking the "Apple". The real challenge is, instead, educating the masses why what you create isn't yours naturally. It's ours. It's the way it's always been: what humanity creates belongs to humanity. You can try to stop it, of course. But you'll fail.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Maybe the copyright should expire 70 years after the date of publication or the author's death, whichever comes later.
Although authors such as Halprin undoubtedly want to provide the best for their children and grandchildren, the fact is that heirs are often spoiled by excessive inherited wealth (a certain hotel heiress is just one of many examples). If a book is so good that it is destined to remain in print for 100 years or more, then surely the author should realize a handsome return from it during his lifetime, some of which can be passed on to his heirs as an ordinary monetary inheritance.
The science-fiction author Spider Robinson wrote a short story a while back (it won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story) that dealt with this topic. His argument is essentially that perpetual copyright ends up cutting off future artists at the knees. He recently posted this short story to his website. Here's his introduction and a link to the story:
. html
Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free...or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago--a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational--two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!--in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and I hope you'll still find it illuminating today.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants
Irony or precience?
His argument is basically a rehash of Mark Twain's http://www.bpmlegal.com/twain.html. It's ideas are nearly as antiquated. It's insistence that the removal of copyright only benefits the publishers, and Booksamillions of the world belays a fundamental misunderstanding of the ease in which Intellectual property can be reproduced in the digital age. If I want to read a book in the public domain, I don't buy it marked up from some corporation. I download it legally for free. If the book industry ever figured out digital distribution the value of public domain works would fall completely for the public and would not benefit publishers. Which is one of the many reasons digital book distribution is rare and underdeveloped.
A complicated error is indistinguishable from a feature.
A lot of the comments here presume that the intent of copyright was to provide people the incentive to be creative. Copyright is nothing of the sort. Copyright was intended as a means to prevent monopolies on publication and distribution. Look it up. The presumption has always been that there will always be artists and creativity and that it's not necessary to provide incentives for creativity.
In fact, in light of the original goals of copyright, it's hard to argue that copyright is even necessasry anymore. Thanks to technology, everyone has the means to publish and distribute their works.
Personally, what I'd like to see is not longer copyrights, but shorter ones that may extended for a period through a for-fee registration process. If you really believed copyrights are intended to provide incentive to create, then they ought to expire quickly so that people need to create more often to reap the benefits. In a practical sense, it's quite rare that a copyrighted work yields profit. Of those that do, most realize their commercial value within 10 years.
I'd also like to see copyrights made non-transferrable rights granted to the author(s). "Works for hire" would cease to transfer copyright away from the author, but rather represent a limited-term exclusive license arrangement (for example, a record company would never own an artist's work, they would just receive a limited term exclusive right to marketing and distribution). Group authorship should be treated as each individual as an original author and a licensee of the work (like a work for hire).
>> question 4: As the body of copyright material grows and grows, doesn't that mean that creativity becomes more and more impossible?
> What? Are you saying that the only way to be "creative" is to blatantly plagiarize existing works?
In short: yes. First off, suppose this had always existed. You know those words you're using? Those are other people's ideas. They were all coined by people we may not remember (although OED does list the first known use for many of them) and, by that theory, belong to them. Whenever I write, I cannot help but see the sources which inspired me. I remember reading the GNU philosophy section over these arguments. I remember developing the argument I just used about words while reading Wikipedia.
Originality is overrated. If you break it down, you'll just see that it's a combination of familiar things which, for whatever reason, turned out to be unexpected. Google's search engine was a very original idea, no one else had thought of ranking web pages like that, but it was drawn from the scholarly practice of citing sources that had been around for ages, as well as the scientific and legal practice of figuring out importance in terms of which works are most cited.
Einstein's theories were very original. But the physics and the math were developed by others, he just put all the pieces no one could explain together. Other people made the pieces for him. He filled in the rest and assembled them. Genius, yes. Original, yes. But also built on the work of others. And again I see an inspiration: it was Newton who said that if he'd seen further than other men, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Of course, he was trying to say that he didn't rip off the idea of calculus from Liebnitz, who was very short (and who came up with the same idea independently... how does copyright law handle THAT one?). So we give Newton credit for being first, and we use something akin to Liebnitz' notation.
Oh math. Maybe that's why I'm so keen to see inspiration everywhere. You may think it's original, but the entire framework of mathematics is a vast, complex, layered framework of ideas, abstractions and techniques which have been built and refined by more people than I could possibly keep track of. You see, you CAN'T do math without using someone else's ideas. You may think it's all 1+1 = 2, but there's a damn good reason why you start hearing ancient Greek names by the time you get to algebra. And there's a good reason you don't start hearing the names of people who are actually still alive until you're in graduate school, or close to it.
So tell me, why don't you think of something totally, completely and utterly original to prove me wrong? Oh, wait. You may say it's original, but it's all based on things you were taught, things you've experienced, etc. The only original thing anyone can bring out is that which they alone have experienced, and you'd be surprised at how few such things there are (I can reference XKCD now; I thought I was the only one who'd ever done something silly like make up rules for walking across a tiled floor).
Maybe that's not "blatantly plagiarizing" but you'd have to be totally, utterly and completely oblivious to all the things you've been influenced by not to realize that your thoughts did not all originate with you.
My guess, and it's only a guess, because I cannot read your mind, is that you heard some bad argument over "it's not theft, it's copyright infringement" (hey, the Supreme Court says so, too, so...) and fell in with the people arguing that because you don't like the idea of doing anything illegal or else have libertarian tendencies that trigger a knee jerk whenever it comes to "property rights" and such (now, with the abuse of Eminent Domain a while back, that was wrong, but that was also actual, tangible property).
Of course, I don't like doing illegal things either. That's why I want to see the law changed.
BTW, I give any and everyone a world-wide, fully p
Like many others, I found the piece to be biased and its arguments weak. Seeing as the (Sunday) New York Times is widely read, can we publish well-written letter to the editor to respond to the author's arguments? I don't understand copyright law well enough to articulate my points well (or maybe I'm just a little hypocritical and lazy). Better yet, we could try and get a notable author/celebrity to write an op-ed and hopefully have it published the following Sunday. Any suggestions?
Take a block of wood and start whittling it down and soon you'll have something other than a block of wood.
Be careful of the whittlers.
The human race advances by building upon and/or with what those before us have done. And those who contribute are not left out in the overall benefit.
Sure those who contribute should get extra credit. But the problem is one of a system of value exchange.
Or to put it another way, Why cannot both society and the individuals benefit without false limits?
Its not uncommon for a great work to lack marketing/exposure that brings its value to a maximum in both society and for the individual using the value exchange system we have today.
Of course this copyright move will be extended to other intellectual properties, like software.
Now suppose all copyrighted property of productivity value was delayed from public use for 10 years, where it then be applied to improve society at large. Upon the application of such IP in society at large, these tools then allow more IP that would advance society even further, but it two is delayed for ten years.
After 100 years of this going on, how much has society been handicapped in advancement in terms of years?
Hint the effect can be exponential.
Rewarding creators is right. Handicapping society advancement is wrong.
Its the value exchange system of IP that needs improvement.
The "American Dream" (or American Nightmare) of the propertied individual
with a shotgun to protect his property, is not, when taken to its limit, an effective
way for people to live.
If people don't contribute some of their energy (whether in the form of
taxes, kindness to strangers, or contributions to the commonwealth) to
their surrounding organizational groups, then life is nasty, brutish, and
short.
That's just basic emergent systems thermodynamics. Ok, maybe
it's not considered basic yet, but it will be.
So hoarding all your goods is very myopic, and, ultimately, ineffective
for all of us. Please remember that copyright is a legal privilege GRANTED
by the society as a whole to individuals.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Apart from the other arguments raised here, that author ignores the problem of "orphan works" -- there are a lot of works, especially old movies, which has no clearly ascertainable owner. As a result, these works are deteriorating because nobody is willing to put the effort into exploiting them. The last thing anybody wants is to restore a great 60-year-old movie, only to have some long-lost step-cousin of the original producer sue your for copyright infringement.
In order to be valid, a transfer of real property has to be recorded with the government. Among other things, this allows the current owner to be known. This is generally also true with patents and trademarks. Why not copyright?
(The answer is that the U.S. is party to the Boerne convention, which forbids disvestment of copyright for failure to follow formalities, and the US has encoded that prohibition into its law.)
...for the artists. Unfortunately, most copyrights aren't owned by artists, they're owned by huge corporations that simply buy the rights. I also don't support the notion of guarantees of children being born into wealth. It usually just results in the children being assholes.
Space, unlike information, is limited. There is only so much living space, so many parks (and so much space in them), so many roads and so much parking space. My town actually started taxing parking, you have to buy a parking ticket to park your car on the side of the road in town.
Information always had value. But by limiting its availability, it also gets a price.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mr. Helprin makes many pithy comparisons with intellectual and real property. Both are taxed. Both are inherited. If one can be owned forever, why shouldn't the other?
The reality is that they are very different types of "property". If I think about an idea, my thoughts are no less impoverished if 100 or 1,000,000,000 people think the same idea. If I own a chair, only one person can sit in it at a time. Ideas are fundamentally different from physical things.
If Mr. Helprin does write the Great American novel (which, I would say, is exceedingly doubtful, if his sample of jumbled prose is any indication), he will be protected in two ways. First, the valuable first edition of his novel will be protected by laws. That physical book (and his notes, signiture, etc) can be handed down through generation after generation, and will never be "stolen" by the government. But he also wants far more protection. He wants to be protected from people who literally copy his work, word for word. He also wants the thematic elements of his work protected, and his characters. Finally, he wants these controls to be a complete monopoly. No one can copy his work without his permission, and probably hefty licensing fee.
It's these other protections he wants are onerous to society. Creating any sort of monopoly creates a huge power shift in the monopolists favor. Anyone now writing any book has to be careful to avoid his plot and his characters. Anyone who wants to extend, enhance, or debase his work, for good or bad purposes, is effectively stopped. Especially if the person wants to do something the author would consider debasing, whether it is or not.
So I ask you, Mr. Helprin, would you like to live in a world where intellectual property lasts forever? Where authors and descendants are granted a complete monopoly over their ideas forever? Where everything you write may infringe on others monopolies? And the monopolies can be enforced capriciously and unfairly? Is the small stream of revenue which starts 70 years after your death worth it to tie up all the works of Shakespeare (on which many plays and movies have been based), all the songs of Mozart (which much music was and is based on), and all the novels of Dickens (which continue to be source material for novels and movies). Do you want to live in a society where rights are more important than new creative works? If so, sir, you should have become a lawyer and not a writer.
Intellectual and physical property are different. And I for one am glad I live in a society that acknowledges that, even though the boundaries are pushed longer and longer each year.
Actually, property does serve the public good: to ensure that scarce land is used efficiently, we allow people to own parts of it. By making ownership perpetual, we give owners an incentive to use their land sustainably. We call this notion "property."
Ideas are not property: any number of people can use the same idea without diminishing it, forever. An idea can grow from another idea. An idea is most valuable to society when it is widely and freely disseminated so that the greatest number can benefit from it.
Copyright is supposed to be a bargain between creators and society, not a way of turning ideas into property. Insanely long copyright terms are a bad bargain for society because ideas become less useful forever, while the all-but-eternal protection terms do not encourage people to create more than short ones would. Does anyone really believe that Sylvia Plath would have written more if her work would have been encumbered for a thousand years instead of 20?
Of course, he's actually putting the cart before the horse - there is no such thing as "intellectual property", and therefore, there is no discrepancy in the treatment of "intellectual property" vs. actual property. The fact that copyrights are not perpetual is precisely WHY they aren't (one form of) "intellectual property", so you cannot argue for perpetual copyright by claiming that they already are.
butter the donkey
Personally, I'd love to get my share of back royalty payments on my Great Uncle Moses' Five Books. For being the best seller in the Western world for the last 3,500 years, the royalties should really add up!
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
I think it was Spider Robinson in his short story "Melacholy Elephants" that said authors don't create anything they discover. All an author or composer does is write down one possible combination of words/ musical notes ( I am in no way trying to diminish what they do, I certainly don't have the patientce for it, but the same result could be arrived at, after a somewhat longer interval, with a computer spilling out non-repeating random combinations.) Since there are a finite number of both things then there is also a finite, if very large, number of combinations of those things. If we give people a perpetual right to exploit their discoveries then we will eventually run out of combinations and it would probably be sooner than we think too.
if your idea is better than my idea, I lose.
In the worst of cases you now have a better idea in your head. In the best of cases, you have two ideas in your head. 1 + n > 1, so long as n>0. It is only when people put controls on ideas that value is lost in the transaction. That, or your brain can only hold one idea at a time, which is something you should see the doctor about.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... the comments here prove that the average Slashdot reader is not only illiterate, but also a mindless imbecile. About half the comments confuse copyrights with other forms of intellectual property. A ton of other posters simply fail to make a rational argument either way. All of the comments fail to consider the framework in which such a system would be implemented, and the ways in which it could benefit society at-large.
Idiots! You don't have to agree, but at least try to THINK critically!
Its pretty simple actually. Let us say that Newton's Principia is still copyright to his surviving family or college. What happens then? It rapidly happens that different expressions of the same idea start to proliferate, and so the value of the copyright falls to zero. Now the owners start to agitate for protection of the ideas. At that point, the society which permits it, freezes and ceases to innovate. We have the equivalent of the medieval guilds. At that point we see a brilliant illustration of the thoughts of the late great Mancur Olson.
Particular small groups in society will always find it to their advantage to impose costs many hundred or thousands or even millions of times what they themselves gain from measures which benefit them. if it costs America trillions, as long as I am better off with it than without it, what do I care? Even if my own gain is a few hundred.
So we will always have people agitating to impose restrictions on how others use what they conceive to be their ideas. They want rent. Its quite understandable, but the reply is, no thanks, its not in our interests. Yes, its in yours. Ours and yours are not the same.
The same basic thing applies to software patents, or patents or protection of methods. What society needs is for there to be innovation in method, but protection for any particular method. That way you get competition. Society needs the idea of the steam engine to be free, but for Watt or Newcomen to be protected in their particular implementation. Because it positively wants competition in steam engine design. But, it wants Watt or Newcomen to be incented to develop a new design, being sure they will profit from it.
So the correct reply to Mr Halperin is, we do not care about you. We are not trying to please you or be fair to you. We are trying to give you just enough protection to make you work harder.
What you are telling us is, we are doing OK. You still want more, you are still complaining.
When we will worry is when you stop complaining.
Best wishes,
Society
We have an economy to allow us to pursue art and new ideas; they are part of what make life worth living. Copyright should allow artists to earn a (perhaps nice) living while pursuing their primary purpose- the creation of art. This article turns that on its head by claiming art and ideas are just property. They then become means, with money being the end. I think this article supports sacrificing the soul of art to economics.
Copyright: 20 years, renewable once for an additional 20
Physical Patents: 20 years, and full specs are a requirement
Software Patents: Shouldn't be allowed to exist, but if they were: 1 year. Full example source code must be available under a BSD license. FOSS is exempt from having to comply with patent restrictions.
Once we've worked out how copyright enforcement won't infringe on my fair use rights, then I'll be happy to talk about protecting your rights.
most of the average-joe consumption of public domain material would be in the form of dodgy chinese pirate copies sold from the back of a van,
If a DVD is public domain, why not just sell copies of it? No reason to pirate something that's available for free. Hell, you can even sell them for $5.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
IMHO, copyright should never, under any circumstance, extend back further than the oldest person alive at any given time. Currently that goes back to Yone Minagawa's birthday on January 4, 1893. The oldest verifiable death was at age 122, by Jeanne Calment (1875-1997).
If I create something today and die tomorrow and leave my copyrights to my infant child, it's reasonable to assume that when I wrote the work I had my child's financial future in mind. Therefore, it may be reasonable to allow that child to benefit for his entire life. However, if I invent something today and have children a year from now it's not the same thing.
Personally, I'd like to see full copyright scaled back to about half of the average human lifespan, call it 40 years for convenience, with expiration after 20 years if the work isn't registered or the registration renewed. I could see an additional 20-40 years under a mandatory-licensing system. This would prevent material from being "locked up" after the first 40 years while affording additional revenue for the rights-holders.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually, a good economic argument does exist for perpetual copyright ... but that same argument would require copyright owners to perpetually pay fees to re-register their works so that the "deadwood" -- works with worthless copyrights -- would fall into the public domain within very short amounts of time, sometimes within 10 years of creation. Thus, the 0.01% of works that are actually worth money 100 years after their creation would continue to be subject to copyright laws, while the 99.99% that isn't making any amount of money would fall into the public domain.
For a full economic analysis see this article (for which I'm copying the abstract):
William Landes & Richard Posner, Indefinitely Renewable Copyright
"Abstract:
In this paper we raise questions concerning the widely accepted proposition that economic efficiency requires that copyright protection be limited in its duration (often shorter than the current term). We show that just as an absence of property rights in tangible property would lead to inefficiencies, so intangible works that fall into the public domain may be inefficiently used because of congestion externalities and impaired incentives to invest in maintaining and exploiting these works. Although a system of indefinite renewals could lead to perpetual copyrights or very long terms, this is unlikely. Our empirical analysis indicates that (1) fewer than 11 percent of the copyrights registered between 1883 and 1964 were renewed at the end of their 28-year term, even though the cost of renewal was small; (2) copyrights are subject to significant depreciation and have an expected or average life of only about 15 years; and (3) copyright registration and renewals are highly responsive to economic incentives for the shorter the expected life of a copyright and the higher the registration and renewal fees, the less likely are both registration and renewal. This in turn suggests that a system of modestly higher registration and renewal fees than at present, a relatively short initial term (20 years or so), and a right of indefinite renewal (possibly subject to an overall maximum term of protection of say 100 years) would cause a large number of copyrighted works to be returned to the public domain quite soon after they were created. A further benefit of indefinite renewal is that it would largely eliminate the rent-seeking problem that is created by the fact that owners (and users) of valuable copyrights that are soon to expire will expend real resources on trying to persuade (dissuade) Congress to extend the term."
There is a wiki on Lawrence Lessig's blog (author of Free Culture and creator of Creative Commons) here. He is proposing that we craft our reply there.
I write technical books; my last one is obsolete because it is 5 years old. Clearly I dont give a fuck about extending copyright after my death.
But literar authors seem different, maybe because they think their work is somehow more valuable. The NYT writer even had the audacity to cite Sylvia Plath, who so cruelly brought the 70 years after death deadline forward by killing herself, so depriving her offspring of their rightful revenue.
whenever its music copyright, they bring up the musicians and their widows, because talking about depriving record companies of a big fraction of their cocaine budget doesnt build up sympathy.
-steve loughran,
author, Ant in Action.
The parent has put his fingetr on exactly what is wrong with infinate copyright. It costs nothing to produce new copies, and therefore, new suppliers in the market for information have a hard time getting off the ground.
The problem with this author is that he misunderstands what his writing is. He thinks he is writing books that he then owns and wants to own forever. But that isn't the case and a lot of wise minds over the couple of centuries we've had copyright bear out that it is only narrow, greedy, or misinformed minds who consider intellectual labor to become a form of property. It isn't. Simply put, it is only labor that the government has given the author the right to collect on for a set period of time as a return on his work. In fact, the very existence of 'Work For Hire' in copyright bears out that creativity is something that can be hired. Most workers do not have the option to get a return on their labor beyond the paycheck they receive at the end of the week. It is the nature of the labor that results in a paycheck covering a number of years worth of exclusive rights as opposed to other forms of recompense. The original term of 14 years renewable for another 14 should have been more than adequate to pay the author for a job well done, or show the author that maybe he needs some improvement on his work.
Speaking of SciFi, I remember a short story from quite a while back. Set in a near future, it was essentially a tale of a musical intellectual-property dystopia in which no new melody could be created without infringing on an earlier work because it was nearly impossible to create a work that could completely avoid combinations of notes appearing somewhere else. Writers were getting sued because some sequence of 6 (or however many it was in the story) notes showed up in The Beatle's "My Sweet Lord" or whatever. I don't remember if this world was the result of the eternalization of copyright, but the solution in the story was to "forget" (i.e. expire) the copy protection accorded music after some period of time.
All works should have the exact same copyright. If a collective work enters the public domain, I should be able to take any piece of that work and reuse as I see fit. I should not have to dig through the library of congress to figure out if some small portion is still protected by copyright.
I'm so sorry that he feels he doesn't owe society anything for his "great" works. That without a stable society with culture and intelligence, people wouldn't be buying books or listening to music. Does he gather inspiration for his works of the "spirit and mind" from nothingness? What role does society play in the creative arts? If you can't stand the thought of society getting something after you are dead, after you so clearly benefited from society. then you are simply an arrogant spoiled human being. Being selfish and having an obsession with ownership are not exactly redeeming qualities. Profit from your toil while you are alive, then pass that profit on to your children if you wish. But a baker cannot make a loaf of bread and sell it many times over on into many generations. But she can certainly create wealth around baking and establish a business that can sustain her children into old age as long as her children can be smart enough and work hard enough to maintain this means of production.
I'm reminded of the statement from Fogerty v. Fantasy, recently quoted at page 4 of the April 23, 2007, decision of Judge West in Capitol v. Foster:
copyright law ultimately serves the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative works
In Fogerty it was held:
The primary objective of the Copyright Act is to encourage the production of original literary, artistic, and musical expression for the good of the public.... In the copyright context, it has been noted that "[e]ntities which sue for copyright infringement as plaintiffs can run the gamut from corporate behemoths to starving artists; the same is true of prospective copyright infringement defendants." Cohen, supra, at 622-623.
The Fogerty court went on to say:
While it is true that one of the goals of the Copyright Act is to discourage infringement, it is by no means the only goal of that Act. In the first place, it is by no means always the case that the plaintiff in an infringement action is the only holder of a copyright; often times, defendants hold copyrights too.....
More importantly, the policies served by the Copyright Act are more complex, more measured, than simply maximizing the number of meritorious suits for copyright infringement. The Constitution grants to Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." U. S. Const., Art. I, 8, cl. 8. We have often recognized the monopoly privileges that Congress has authorized, while "intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward," are limited in nature and must ultimately serve the public good. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 429 (1984). For example, in Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975), we discussed the policies underlying the 1909 Copyright Act as follows:
"The limited scope of the copyright holder's statutory monopoly . . . reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an `author's' creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." .....
We reiterated this theme in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340, 349-350 (1991), where we said:
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but `[t]o promote the Progress of Scienc
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Property taxes are usually a percentage of the value if the item were to be sold.
So then Microsoft would be taxed a percentage of the value of their entire IP portfolio (sold individually!) on the open market. That should net a few governments a healthy sum for starters.
Writers, such as the journalist proposer, would be charged for articles that they didn't even release - it's still property even if you don't sell it. Unreleased articles would presumably be valued at the same as released ones (why not?). So write 10 articles, release one, pay all your profit in taxes.
Sounds fine to me!
PS: Nominal value of this post is zero, released in public domain. CC with attribution.
How about we do this:
Copyright has a cost correct? So lets fix the perpetual part and make it easy for anyone to get copyright. How? Simple. $2^N With N being the year of copyright.
Copyright for year one costs $2.
For year 2 it is 2^2 == $4.
Eventually this will flush out works that are not worth the amount they are at. Even Walt Disney would have to look twice after the 26th year.
This also gets things into the public domain on a timely basis. And hopefully compels people to create new things. Not sit on one thing forever. That is what copyright is for, not to forever be a property of the author.
There is an inherent difference in IP and other property. IP can be coppied at no cost to the author. Other property can only be gained by taking it from someone else. In a soceity governed by natural law, IP does not exist - anyone can write, copy, or try anything. Other property belongs to an individual.
The contitution of the USA created the concept of IP, by allowing anyone who created IP to have exclusive use of it for a limited time. This allowed creators of new IP to profit from it, and created what is probably the geatest technological boom ever.
Before the US Constitution allowed the creaters of IP to own their IP, kings had traditionally granted monopolies, so that (for example) only the King's brother-in-law's friend could produce textiles. This practice held back technology for centuries. This practice, incidentally, was amazingly similar to allowing the RIAA to collect royalties on all songs played over Internet radio stations regardless of who creates them.
Imagine if the works of Shakespeare were still copyrighted, and if the works of the greatest english poet could only be printed in textbooks if $10 per page were paid to the original authors.
Finally, given that the author will not be alive to collect royalites, who will profit? Answer: big corporations! Who will suffer? Answer: Students!
Andy Out!
Let's hear some good rationales for ripping people off. I'm finding it really hard to think for myself and come up with novel ideas.
As for file sharing and infringement, I think this is more a lack of respect -- sometimes for the artist, and sometimes for the money grubbing record companies that claim they're only in it for the artists, and known liars for saying so.
If you respect an artist -- and I respect Paul McCartney, for example -- so if I like his new CD "Memory Almost Full", I'll buy it. From all reviews, it's likely worth it.
But try and sell me an entire CD for one or two good songs, or resell stuff from the middle of the last century yet again, long after copyright should have expired, or sue people for file sharing when they never stole a single CD from you, and claim bogusly that every download is a lost sale, and I have no respect for you at all.
And try to go back to the famously non-working system of two and a half centuries ago that stifled creativity since no one could build on anyone else's work without permissions, lots of money changing hands, and copyrights owned by publishing houses rather than authors, and I have less than no respect for you.
And what might be less than no respect? Active opposition!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The author may be confusing monopoly with property, but you're confusing copyright with other forms of intellectual property -- namely patents. You cannot copyright an invention, you can only copyright a creative work. You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc., but you cannot copyright the general ideas of such works, and you certainly cannot copyright an invention like a chair.
#include ".signature"
You're right. We don't sell out stadiums for authors reading their works the way we do for rock concerts. But let an author put his e-mail on the Internet (I've done exactly that) and you do have a way for your fans to interact with you. Book signings too are far more common than CD cover signings, although authors are more reclusive than musical performers on the whole. If you want to see an SF author, you pretty much have to go to an SF convention that has them as a guest. There's just a difference here in how public the person wishes to be.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's what I mean. It would be exactly the same outfit and mode of operation, except not illegal so less reason to hide it and patrol the warehouse with gats :)
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
If you want to own your work forever, don't copyright it, don't publish it, and don't sell it. Put it on a shelf and enjoy the fact that only you and those you permit will ever see it.
If you sell any rights to it, you no longer exclusively own it. You can't have it both ways.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why do we keep letting people call it "intellectual property"!? It just furthers faulty metaphors. People used to think of property as something physical. Property could be stolen from you and then you no longer have it...it's tangible. Ideas and other things of the mind protected by copyright and patents are different then real or personal property -- things protected are (1) intangible and (2) manifestations of human creativity. You still have your idea even if I take them for myself - note I said 'take' not 'steal' - you still have it -- that is not true for your cup or your piece of land. You have absolute right over property but the constitution only give you limited rights for limited times over "property". If continue calling these intangible things intellectual "property" then they become an extension of property. What is the benefit one gives society by extending monopoly powers we grant landowners or cupholders? That makes intellectual "property" different from the tangible property. If we stop calling it "property" and maybe call it "IRR - idea royality rights' or 'IP - intellectual pwnage' instead then we can stop comparing apples to "thoughts about apples" and come up with a financial reward system that works by putting incentives in the places where society needs them -- Mozart and Beethoven didn't need strong international harmonized "IP" law to write their great works...why do we?
2. ??? = Sell Car
3. Profit!
Step 1: Write a program to mash all possible series of words together.
Step 2: Extend copyright to infinity
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
In the US, copyright was intended as a temporary exception to the first amendment. You can say or write anything you want, except for copyrighted works. This was intended to encourage the arts and enable authors and artists to earn a living. For anyone who's not a RIAA / MPAA executive or paid shill, it's obvious that current law extending copyright ad infinitum is an abuse, and clearly violates the intent of the founding fathers.
[Insert pithy quote here]
He'd be paid $X for writing that article, and he'd probably owe $X+1 to the originators of many of the ideas he expresses in it that aren't original (e.g., he'd owe money to Shakespeare's family for using the title "Winter's Tale", Disney would owe billions in royalties to the writers of the fairy tales they used, etc.). Either that, or he'd have to go through dozens of versions to try to expunge things that happened to infringe on other people's ideas.
What he describes isn't a recipe for the protection of artist's rights, it is a recipe for indefinite serfdom to the fat cats that first get the (bogus) property rights he wants, and the legions of lawyers employed to as royalty collectors (maybe he's hoping to be on the right side of that equation?).
This has nothing to do with the state repossessing your property. If you don't want your idea "out there", then don't publicize it -- keep it secret. You don't have to worry about someone stealing it then -- it will be yours forever. Claiming you have some kind of inalienable right to the idea after you share it would be like claiming you own the air you exhale.
Copyright has to do with the state and the broader puplic offering a useful bargain: monopoly protection of your work for a fixed period of time after its public release, with all the (public) resources of law to back that up. But eventually you have to pay all that back somehow by having the monopoly expire into the public domain. It's a fair, lifetime-plus deal.
Not only does this Helprin guy not understand the bargain inherent in copyright, he's insane if he thinks the world would work out better if it was the way he wants. It's especially ironic that the Claremont Institute at which he works purports "to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life". And "To recover the founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life, and maintains a strong defense."
The solution, if he really does want the government to respect his "private property" like this is obvious: if it is such a bad deal, abolish copyright and let him protect his "property" himself, entirely at his own expense, without any government interference.
And if somebody tries to steal his idea, the accused can point out that Helprin can still use the idea all he likes, so they haven't really stolen anything ("Your car is still in your parking space where you left it, so how could I have stolen it?").
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
If I were Mick or Keith, and considerably more open-minded about the nature of creative derivative, I'd be ecstatic about my music being reworked by a world-audience. The truth is that most all works of art have their roots in past work. Rarely do true, unique forms emerge from the traditional, like the Modern Art movement.
I'm sure that unique art will always continue to be created. However, when people have access to manipulating prior-art faster, not only does the art stay relevant longer, the original artist stays relevant longer, too. There is positive economic reason for original artists to allow derivative work faster. Trent Reznor takes it a step further by giving the Hoi polli all the individual audio tracks to a single song allowing deeper manipulation (although, I'm not sure what restrictions exist for using his works.)
One thing that definitely helps is when people give credit to the original artist(s). It's being polite and humbling at the same time.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
Actually, there are privatization people who are fanatic enough to think everything should be up for grabs in the 'free' market, including the water and air we breath! I've seen a man seriously argue for privatization of the air. The zealots are better used as a strawman against the IP supporters (hey, you try winning an argument when the audience doesn't know logic.)
What we need is something basic like email being stopped for a little while so people can realize how stupid the system is; nobody cares unless it impacts them directly.
Its "The Century of the Self"
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
the only reason for the inequity between intellectual and real property is that real property cannot be copied and intellectual property can never be stolen.
this is a very real and fundamental difference and the man making the argument in the article needs to be boycotted by everybody forever. if you have intellectual property and want to have control over it forever then never ever release it publicly. if you want the public to experience it then you must give up control of it in some way at some point.
copyright law exists to give incentive to artists to create socially and culturally significant works. perpetual copyright gives no such incentive, instead it provides incentive to create works intended to do nothing but generate profit.
there is no good case for perpetual copyright.
software for some magical reason can be both copyrighted and also *patented*-and even then no warranty is applied to it if it is sold! It's the caveat emptor snakeoil of modern business!
Quote? Billed. Old saying? Billed. Someone *must* have created the English language? Billed.
We could create our own version of the MPAA/RIAA and simply start collecting revenue on behalf of the presumed owners, children of presumed owners or children's children's children of presumed owners.
Do you think he'd see the humor in the true perpetual copyright? We op-ed and submit his bill for the opinion piece. Would he put his money where his mouth is? (:
Quack, quack.
Dear Mark,
Nice article. Here is an invoice for the Intellectual Property fees you owe to the descendents of the many works of art you appropriated.
- The descendents of James Madison, for your quotation of the Constitution
- The descendents of Thomas Jefferson, for the quotation attributed to him.
- The descendents of William Shakespeare, for using the title of his play "Winter's Tale"
- The descendents of Moses, for the phrase "Does not then the government's giveth support its taketh," which is clearly alluding to the book of Job in the bible ("the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away", Job 1:21).
- The Chicago University Press, which has appropriated the rights to the ellipsis, a glyph that has remained in Copyright since it was first introduced in 200BC.
We hope you will be able to secure agreeable licensing terms for all these works. In the case that you cannot, you will naturally need to remove the reference. We look forward to seeing more of your work, and thank you for helping to support a thriving intellectual property market.
--Intellectual Property Association, Inc.
I think we really need to start killing these people. What they're arguing for would destroy civilization in the long run. You all owe me 99999999 Trillion dollars, see my ancestor Axeblood Hengist, invented the english language shortly after the saxons invaded england, so you all have been using english without the permission of the Hengist Estate.
One of the best fictional depictions of perpetual copyrights is Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants".
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Insanity? Oh, yes.
For a starter Mansfield had no descendants so any copyrights would probably go to her husband, John Middleton Murry. He had a son, John Middleton Murry Jr., by his second wife and presumably the son would then have inherited these copyrights. Descendants of Mansfield? I think not.
Second, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer living in England. Not American.
His example is badly flawed.
This confusion about tangible and intellectual property is typical among apologists for intellectual monopoly. The claim that intellectual property is like real property is spurious, since property rights concern the right of the owner to exclusive use, and intellectual property is a government grant to create a legal monopoly over all copies of an idea.
For a careful critique of the conventional notion of intellectual property, see Against Intellectual Monopoly by economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
No.
It's more like game theory, combined with energy-use efficiency optimization
as the major utility function.
This may be partly in the domain of economic theory, but also has
applicability to understanding the functioning and likely trajectories and
destinies of all kinds of part-whole systems
comprised of semi-autonomous parts co-operating and competing.
That includes multi-cellular organisms (co-operating cells), and all kinds
of group-organizing memes in human and animal societies, such as
families, dominance hierarchies, mutual protection societies, organized religious groups,
street gangs, corporations, governments, ethnic groups, and nation-states.
It's not just economics.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
As a direct descendant of Enkidu I hereby demand that humanity as a whole pay up 170 Quadrillion gold spheres the size of the earth for using the concept of language and all western glyphs that descended from the sumerian culture as licence fee for copyrighted glyphs. ...
What an idiot.
If this comes around I'm so inventing my own language and set of glyphs and forbidding anybody from using them who thinks perpetual copyright and thought patents (aka software patents) are a good thing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Reading through other comments, the one issue I didn't see represented is the social impacts.
The framers of the constitution did not want to unfairly penalize artists. While the perception of the time that art, in its variety, was a act of benevolence to society, this was not the intent of limiting copyrights. There is a payment due for innovation, but exactly how does one make a fair price for it? When urban development encroaches on residential neighborhoods, the government often makes a claim of immanent domain to be able to suit the needs of society as a whole. (I know I am leaving out the significant portion of corruption problems with the use of immanent domain, but work with me here)
In effect, the limitation for copyright prevents the means of development and production from being "owned" by only a few people in a form of aristocracy. For a democracy, this would be inherently troubling. Yet, how does one distinguish legally between a work which is purely literary, and a work which is entirely functional. Looking back at the works of da Vinci, the tie between pure artistry and technical development is well documented.
What if the great works of pure artistry were perpetually copyrighted? What if only a few people were allowed to think and interact with the masterpieces of spirituality, expression, and aesthetics? How quickly we forget that before the Gutenberg press, knowledge was the domain of the church, as they had the only "real" means of production. How can one fight against censorship of thoughts in a society, when you don't know the censor?
In the end, copyright is not a property to be owned, it is a form of license. Socially, We never actually surrender our volition of liberty. Instead, we accept making a payment of sorts to recognize the excellence of a useful development or work. We can quickly see how such ownership, compounded over many generations of development, would closely resemble a lordship of the monarchy model or even worse class stratification.
Its less about abridging the rights of innovators and artists, but preventing innovators and artists from abridging each others and everyone else's liberty.
If the wave of the future for "intellectual" works of art is to protect it via DRM and such, then I think copyright protections have outlasted their usefulness.
Here's what I'd like to see:
Either rely on existing copyright protections that allow for fair use; or use technological measures to lock up your content from all use you don't authorize, but don't expect copyright protection from the law.
In other words, let DRM be an estoppel against claiming copyright protection, because DRM is circumvention of the social contract provided by copyright protections.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Intellectual property doesn't even exist. It's a myth that was created in the hope that people will confuse things like this author did.
Some special interest groups call Copyright, Trademarks and Patents "Intellectual property". It's a big lie that's been told so many times that now people just take it for granted.
Copyright is merely a concession. It shouldn't even be called copyright, it should be called "temporary authorship privilege".
Calling copyright "intellectual property" and even going as far as trying to compare it with other kinds of property is the big crime being done here.
Not only do I think copyright isn't property rights, I also think there should be another differentiator: authors should be prohibited from transferring copyrights. Authors should be allowed two options: either assert or deny your rights (public domain). No transfers or assignments.
Difference between physical and intellectual property? Mark Halperin is known for making ridiculous claims based on naive and overly simplistic logic in order to create attention. In this case, his basic premise seems to be that my intellectual property is treated differently than my physical property and that is not right. His secondary premise is that the Constitution uses the word "times" which allows for perpetual copyright.
As to the second:
Everyone knows that our system is not formed based on what the framers of the Constitution intended; it is based on the volume of precedent accumulated as INTERPRETATION over the years. He cannot argue with the semantics of the wording. It is only the interpretive rulings that matter.
As to the first:
The forms of property are treated differently and they should not be. Currently property of substantial value, particularly business value (Mr Author) is taxed. Copyrights are held indefinitely and are tax-free.
Physical property may be seized at anytime if it is seen to be in the public interest. In, fact the supreme court recently ruled that your property can be siezed and turned over to someone else who can make better use of it for the public interest. This sounds a great deal like the Supreme Court has realized not that property should not held in perpetuity, but that it should always be used for the public good. This make it sound like physical property should be treated more like the original copyright law rather than vice versa.
Physical property is taxed. Copyrights are tax-free. Perhaps we could revert to the equivalent to the original copyright system AND satisfy the simplistic logic of Mr. Halperin if we simply taxed all copyrights and patents according to their market value. If you fail to pay your taxes then the copyright would be siezed and entered into the public domain (just like physical property). This system would meet the original intent of the copyright system in that either your patent is contributing tax money or societal value. One could get a tax deductioin for entering valuable works into the public domain. Of course value determination would be an issue, but it has been solved before. This system would also make it undesirable to sit on unused intellecutal property.
Intellecutal property is more widely (though not necessarily immediately) valuable to the public. So why should it not be siezed more regulary than physical property (which is already regulary siezed under eminent domain).
It is much more efficient to simply make copyrights expire and further the public good than creating a liberal taxation system to effectively accomplish the same thing. Be simple, be minimal, accomplish your goal without expanding government.
... a bunch of aging rock and roll stars out there who burned up their royalties in a big cloud of splief instead of investing it and now they're getting scared.
Have gnu, will travel.
Calling all executives and stockholders!
Please rock up and transfer the intellectual wealth from this transcription of Mansfield's aforementioned literary work into your own heads.
(Transcription paid for and given away by the library of Victoria University of Wellington)
This gives me an idea: let the author declare what they consider the value of the work to be. If they estimate a really high value, they pay lots and lots of tax on that property. If they estimate a low value, the work could be "bought" into the public domain at that value.
Going on so long and using so many big words, it's a pity this argument, like most of the others in this thread, is based on a misunderstanding of copyright.
Copyright does not apply to ideas but to expression. No amount of copyright would have stopped West Side Story from replaying Romeo and Juliette; or, for that matter any of the other few hundred novels, movies and TV series based on the idea (which itself was a replay of the millenial Tristan and Isult folk tale). Copyrights don't provide monopolies over ideas—that's what patents do. It's best not to get them confused.
When an author publishes a novel they spent a few years writing, they don't get a few years' income on the day it hits the stores. They hope to get a decent return dribbling in over the shelf life of the book. Copyright makes that possible. It would be nice to be on salary and get paid up front for the market value of the work, but the market value of the work is not known until well after it's published—sometimes not until after the author dies. If it were a sculpture rather than a story, the author's estate would benefit. Why not a story as well?
Halprin's main point has not been answered anywhere in any of the posts I've waded through so far: Publishers continue to profit from a work after the copyright has run out. To argue against perpetual copyright you need to explain why publishers should profit in perpetuity but not the authors or their estates.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Buddy, you never authored anything worth buying let alone stealing, and probably never will. (I'm talking about marketable for mass consumption, not shell scripts and web pages that might be useful internally for your employer). On the other hand, you've likely stolen hundreds of dollars worth of copyrighted materials and find that easy and convenient.
Why don't you swipe stuff from the mall and come up with excuses about how the "real workers" in China or Malaysia are making peanuts while the "fat cats" and investors make all the profits (pretty much true, BTW). Reason: you don't have the guts. The prospect of being arrested on the spot and being hauled off the police station is very real, and therefore this is "not ethical". OTOH the odds of even the RIAA suing over any individual act of file sharing is statistically remote, and when that happens an entire community of file sharers will raise holy hell on sites like this one.
This is called situational ethics.
I ascribe to the concept.
Now you can stop asking why the '65 Rambler Classic 770 is up on blocks in the driveway.
Now explain to me why Massasoit doesn't come and kick me off his land. Or better yet, count coup on an idiot like TFAs author.
(a) In our Pork-o-centric times, real property *is* taken unfairly, all the time; it's called taxation.
l og-ip
(b) The problem with fantasy property[1] - other than the fact that it is a cynical and fraudulent manipulation of the law in the name of "social utility" in order to secure unjust profits from an arbitrary government monopoly grant, of course - is that, even if its existence were incontrovertible in the first place (which it is not; see the general response of most citizens of non-Anglo non-Euro countries to the tableau of some jackass pinstripe junior lawyer running up, out of breath, puffed up with the Power of the Peephole and wielding a C&D letter, demanding payment from the more-or-less honest merchant in the street market selling DVD copies of Western television dramas, i.e. "Fuck you, asshole" and rightly so), the assertion of that right directly contradicts long-established *real* property rights.[2] For example, it is indisputable that I may use, say, blank CDs that I have lawfully purchased. I may likewise use a lawfully-acquired CD burner in the same way. If I use these items together to copy a piece of fantasy property protected by the RIAA, I've suddenly become a felon, despite my indisputable rights to use what is indisputably all my own actual, physical property. We can't satisfy both rights. I prefer real rights, not fantasy rights, myself; they are far easier to adjudicate, and far more conducive to prosperity. Enough of fantasy property.
[1] A better contrast to "real property" than "intellectual property", to my mind.
[2] Good links here:
http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications.php#b
It is Odd the way they approach this.
My local DVD store now rents overnighters for $2.50. Thats cheap enough for me that its not worth the effort of downloading. I can browse the whole selection, grab it and watch it. (Ok and maybe H264 it a little if its good).
The economy will readjust - it just takes time.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
It's brought to you by the letters F and U and the number 2
What?
If I create something, it's naturally mine up until I show it to you or tell you about it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A better metaphor: http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/bountyhunt ers.htm. html
and an apropos short story: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants
Were that I say, pancakes?
Umm, you need to choose one or the other. Creative Commons is copyright. It's copyleft, to be sure, but it's not public domain. (Note that I am aware that CC offers a public domain icon, but that doesn't make it a license.)
This whole argument is only possible because people forget how things really work in the natural world.
In the natural world, you don't even get to keep your own skin - it's taken from you when you die and returns to the earth. In truth, you own absolutely nothing. It's not even possible for you to own anything, not really.
Ownership, and more specifically the notion of individual property ownership of any kind (be it real property or even "intellectual property"), is merely a useful myth created in law so that people have certain kinds of incentives to create and work. To another way of thinking the idea of ownership is a cultural construct - an idea to which certain human societies do not adhere.
So the question is not whether "intellectual property" rights should be the legal equivalent of real property rights - the question is why do have real property rights in the first place.
These foundational questions that form our society and its laws will become increasingly relevant as the world becomes more overpopulated, work more automated, and money less evenly distributed. When people get hungry and the elite want to argue about property rights, they will find that a stone to the head trumps a finely crafted legal argument.
Good catch.
One needs to look only as far at the French revolution to understand how society deals with extreme inequity or resource distribution.
Strangely, if you treat companies now (as they are in the courts) as "persons" with similar rights - the degree of resource inequity is an order of magnitude more pronounced today than in the late 1700's. In those times it was only royaly who aggregated the wealth. Most people just have not realized that it doesn't have to be this way.
I'm afraid /. and the entire copyright reform movement have fallen for a trap today.
We all know that the current copyright term is too long. An author writes an opinion piece saying that copyright should be perpetual.
And we fall straight into the trap. Instead of arguing that copyright terms should be shortened, now we are arguing that they shouldn't be lengthened.
If we continue down this path, we have already lost.
http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/05/20/the-cas e-against-perpetual-copyrights/
Mathematical theorems are important, but imagine Holywood functioning without mentioning words "one", "two", "three" and "love". Or they should pay me, since it is my ancestors that have invented them. Probably more, but other words are in Russian, while these four are definetely derived from a common ancestor... Same as "brother", "sister", "milk", "cow"...
Mod parent up. That book is amazing. Download it. Give copies to all your friends and enemies. Also, David K Levine's rebuttal is here.
Obviously, the author could continue to work in the crappy day job, whatever. It's their duty to the world to produce works of art, no matter how little they get paid. The important thing is that moochers can continue to get stuff for free, justified by modern technology and bad comparisons.
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ..."
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Yes, and that's a perfectly good argument that estates in land should exist for a limited time, too.
Anything arguing in favor of increasing the ability of the minority to extract fees for the use of an idea (ideas being sacred on /.) and allowing that minority to limit how and where anyone can use those ideas is bound to do one thing, start flame-wars.
How about this as a counterproposal: we eliminate the idea of intellectual property (I had this thought first therefor if you want to think it too you have to pay me) altogether, and deem only that which is tangible to be protectable as property. How about that as an idea? You can use it, by the way, free of charge. The idea of branding an idea is silly, and promotes illicit appeals to authority. (This idea is better because it's Jim's, or that idea sucks because it is Bob's... without regard to the merrits of the idea.)
Some might ask, 'wouldn't this discourage innovation?' No, on the contrary, it will only discourage innovation motivated by GREED. As for innovations which require lots of money, but aren't motivated by greed, like... "How about we find a cure for cancer?" they will have to be funded by the public, which is as it should be anyway, as all will potentially benefit.
As for what kind of damage this will do to the burgeoning music and film industries... fsck 'em. Maybe music megastar whacko's will go away, and we'll see a resurgence of local performing talent. Same for the stage... live stage performances are better than celluloid anyway, they require a certain amount of imagination on the part of the viewer, instead of deadening it.
Like I said, you may use these ideas, as they are (as all ideas should be) free.
~Hal
Mark Helprin has written some of my favorite books. Both "A Winter's Tale" and "A Soldier of the Great War" are some of the best novels IMHO written in the last century. Unfortunately his politics do not in any way align with my own.
Sorry to nit-pick but
"When the copyright expires on Madonna's stupid Bananas song, she doesn't lose the ability to make money from it. She can still sing in it concerts, sell CDs/MP3s/whatever, and anything else she wants." she will have been dead for 70 years. Thus unable to make money on the Bananas songYour ad here. Ask me how!
There are multiple reasons for having a legal structure along the lines of 'copyright'.
If works are purely seen as economic objects, then a permanent copyright serves to make them more 'object-like'. However, as many people point out, there are philosophical problems with treating artistic works in this way: many cost virtually nothing to replicate (which makes the demand/supply curve meaningless unless there is a copyright enforced monopoly); and their value can be lost almost accidentally (because the copyright holder is no longer willing to supply copies for whatever reasons). In a capitalist system, copyright law is highly interventionist, which just demonstrates that the marketing corporations and their supporters are not as laissez-faire as they like to believe.
However, there are other reasons for copyright, such as preserving the attribution of works. Unfortunately this is not the intention of copyright law; so in (for example) the academic world, plagiarism is primarily countered by public opinion rather than legal process. So called 'copyleft' (eg GPL) attempts to subvert the copyright system to force attribution of code (and to break the artificial monopolisation of code); unfortunately copyright is a blunt instrument here (though I applaud the attempt). If this were the prime purpose of copyright, it would be reasonable to argue for indefinite copyright.
Sadly we think primarily in terms of economics rather than in terms of the social value of the copyrighted work. Sometimes copyright works (for example, reference works with only short-term currency), when people will only pay what the work is worth to them, and the income just happens to correlate well with what the work cost to research and produce. But all too often, there is a clash between public interest and corporate economics, and it can only get worse if copyright periods are extended. There are too many cases where either the author receives insufficient recompense for their effort, or the publisher receives too much recompense (for any reasonable definition of 'insufficient' and 'too much'); sometimes even both!
I do not know the solution to this, but I don't think it lies in increasing copyright periods. This will break the clumsy structure altogether. But perhaps that is a good thing...
"because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind."
... and retailers who will distribut their work ... and the education of generations to come.
I can think of one very good case for ending copyright. The creator of any work did not invent the language, nor the medium, nor the memes and character of their art, nor the advertising and distribution channels, nor the education of their audience. All of these things made the creator's success possible. By contributing their work to the public domain, they make possible the success of new generations of artists
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I've posted an open letter to Mark Helprin on my (admittedly crappy) blog. Tomorrow morning when I go into work, I will print it out and mail it to him. In the mean time, is there anything I should add or take away?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Wow, that essay was the worst thing I've read since the second half of "Winter's Tale."
Expiration of copyright can't possibly be an unfair public taking of property because intellectual works never are and never have been property. Rather copyright protection creates a monopoly, not a property right. Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of copyright law knows this. The monopoly granted to the author motivates the author to create work, but monopolies are generally bad, so this monopoly has an expiration. This is so obvious... this guy needs to read Copyright for Dummies. It's hard to take any of his arguments seriously because he has no idea what he's talking about.
To expand further, this monopoly exists to motivate creation of new work. Extending it infinitely does not create any additional motivation to create new works because copyright terms already extend beyond the author's life. Is someone going to sit there and work that much harder because he knows that his great great grand children will still collect royalty checks? No, that's absurd.
Also, creating infinite extension of copyright harms creative work. Where would Disney be if copyright protection had extended to such long terms? There would be no Snow White, no Jungle Book, etc. If we extend copyrights any further we are going to squelch the Disneys of the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
First, if I write a book or a piece of software, I should enjoy that copyright for the duration of my natural life. I should also be able to let my wife inherit it and enjoy a profit from it for HER natural life. Similarly, my children should inherit something from my work, so they can have an advantage over the other kids and get a good head start on creating new work themselves. If my work is so good everyone wants a piece of it, then I've earned the right for my family to enjoy this protection.
The current copyright laws protect copyright through the duration of an author's life and 75 years past his death, by which point all his kids should be dead anyway. This is more than fair enough for any artist or author. It protects him, his wife, and all his children, ensuring them some income from his labor.
It's very simple.
Society benefits when people are given encouragement to produce interesting, worthwhile, original work. It benefits when, once such people are identified, they are taken care of, so they can raise their families without having to worry about working some bullshit dead-end job.
NO CARRIER
he is a pompous ass.
A smart man, but pompous, and does not know much outside his areas of expertise - writing, and military history and analysis. I would not call him an expert on copyright, though he may bloviate.
Without a source of income or the necessities of life, artists will truly 'starve' like any other human being will.
Why should artists create and share the art they create if they get NO tangible reward out of it?
In the old days, artists had patrons who paid/supported their endeavors -- both parties benefitted from such arrangements.
Nowadays, the patrons willing to pay for art are big 'soulless' corporations who will only back artists who can generate the most money for them -- NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!
Artists not willing to 'sell out' to earn their keep will have a tough time building a large enough audience willing to support them with more than just words of encouragement.
for this. His Answer won the Hugo for best short-short story in 1983. It is three pages long and worth the read. He makes it available "for free" on his website. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants. html.
Spider Robinson is the author of the "Calahan's Crosstime Saloon" series which inspired the "alt.callahan's" usenet newsgroup.
The Hugo, as most slashdotters are probably well aware is a major fan-voted award for excellence in science fiction and fantasy related literature and art. The Hugo is awarded in several categories each year at the Wold Science Fiction Convention.http://www.worldcon.org/
Note that I am Not Mr. Robinson!
(just a fan)
Dear Mr Helprin,
:)
In light of a rumored bill before Congress to retroactively extend the limited copyright in the US to 25000 years after the death of the author (or the destruction of the last copy of the work, whichever comes last), we are investigating several potential copyright infringements in your last op-ed entitled "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?".
Descendants of James Madison request to be compensated for any citation, partial or full, of any of his works. Descendants of Hammurabi (currently estimated at about 127 million) claim copyright on any western law text and discussion thereof, as they are all derivative works of Hammurabi's Code of Law. Finally, there have been claims by descendants of Evander, son of the Sybil, that all Roman letters fall under their copyright, and that therefore any text using them needs to pay them a fair share of proceeds.
Preliminary calculations put the projected statutory infringement fines at 4.2 trillion dollars. This number may change as more claimants come forward. As it is unknown how much more the US Congress is going to extend copyrights, we suggest to settle sooner rather than later.
Sincerely,
Howard Howe,
Dewey, Chetham & Howe, LLP
Please reprint and distribute freely.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I tried to read TFA, really. But by the bottom of page one I just couldn't bear any more of the author's arrogant superiority. "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property ..."
How about when you steal someone's car, they have lost a car. When you 'steal' their (for example) music by downloading it online, they have lost... Um.. Well... Someone help me out here. Nothing?
If this is the case for perpetual copyright, it should be a short argument.
"Hello, this is God. Heaven hereby asserts copyright on the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, etc, including text, plot elements, characters, etc. We expect the traditional tithe of 10% for the use of all of our intellectual property, including exclamations such as 'My God!' or 'Jesus Christ' whenever such expressions appear in published works, including the novels of Mr. Halprin. Copyright tithes should be made to the religious institution of choice. We will prosecute, those who violate our perpetual copyright can expect Eternal Damnation, as well as prosecution in more mundane/profane jurisdictions."
dave
This shows how easy it is to lose land. But I don't recall any of the above losing IP when they lost their territory? Also I've never heard of a mugger stealing your copyrights along with your wallet.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
But when you create something once, why should everyone else not be permitted to access it freely for eternity? It's one thing to ask for being paid for a couple decades and entirely another to declare that no one may ever access the work(s) without paying. Doesn't matter that the work was created 250 years ago, you still have to pay for it, thus much of the reuse that makes up for much of our culture doesn't happen.
Most of popular culture would not be possible if we had perpetual copyright sooner - for example about 50% of Disney's movie lineup. Or any movies about Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz. Or the Bible, for that matter. Or many tunes commonly heard as stereotypical BGM in movies (e.g. Ode to Joy). Probably no D&D either, given how much stuff was recycled there.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
See what happened to It's A Wonderful Life. Fell out of copyright, became worth something and then put right back in to copyright, despite the law having said it is PD.
but on "value". It is valued by assessors and you are taxed merely for keeping the property. Since this tit wants to treat "IP" as "P", tax it as "P". And since the MPAA/RIAA lose "trillions" due to a reduction (not removal) of the market for their goods, this sounds like a lot of tax is due.
NOTE: with real property, if you realise money from it, you will pay tax on that realisation ABOVE what you pay in property tax. And if you abandon it and/or let someone improve it, you lose some or all rights to the property.
Thou shall not kill (unless it is to protect the life of a loved one).
Thou shall not covet thy neighbours wife (where'd that law go to?).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In the old days, artists had patrons who paid/supported their endeavors -- both parties benefitted from such arrangements.
In the old days concepts like vacation, spare time and such were unheard of.
Many people in todays world have enough spare time besides their job to ceate art without having to "starve". What is more, there are many who do, and the quality of their art is not seldom above the quality of commercial "art".
Many artists make use of the works of those who came before them, either as source of inspiration, or by deriving from it.
Many modern stories are created that way, which could not have happened if the original works were still covered by copyright.
Since the purpose of copyright is to promote art, perpertual copyright directly conflicts with the one single part of the US constitution that allows for it, and it conflicts with the entire reason for copyright to exist.
This doesn't mean I think copyright itself is a bad idea, rather not. I do however think it serves its purpose best when giving the artist time to gain something while not lasting so long that the work is not going to be part of the public domain.
Just imagine having to find back the current heirs of the person who wrote something 500 years ago that you want to derive from.
First of all, this is impossible in many cases
Second, those heris did not create the work and do not deserve compensation for anything. They already inherited whatever 'fortune' the original artist might have made with the work.
14 Years. If it is good enough for patents, it is good enough for copyright.
I think that Mr. Halprin is a strong contender to win the Douglas Feith award for 2007.
Government created the copyright/patent monopolies -- and the citizens fund and enforce them through taxes. The original intent of Copyrights and Patents was a give and take relationship between those enforcers and the copyright/patent holders.
No, copyright holders do not have a right to my taxes to fund their artificial monopoly in perpetuity. bleah.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Just like I have the right to make a living by setting off firecrackers in my backyard.
Just because you really like to do it - even if you happen to be good at it - doesn't mean that you have a right to earn a living doing it. Supply and demand, baby.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've been saying basically that, but boringly, for years now.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"Nowadays, the patrons willing to pay for art are big 'soulless' corporations who will only back artists who can generate the most money for them -- NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!"
This is false. I know it to be false because I am willing to back artists and pay for art, and I'm not a soulless corporation. There are, I think, approximately a billion people like me. So you're describing maybe 1% of the patrons willing to pay for art.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I would suggest that you draw inspiration from the patronage system that you refer to in such glowing terms.
Create a name for yourself by creating and sharing until you are in demand, then start hostage selling your work.
Figure out how much money you think you deserve for your time and skill, then indicate that you won't release your newest work until the price has been met by the public at large, at which point you'll release your high-res scans to the world to be shared far and wide copyright free.
There's a business opportunity for you.
Set up a system where the artists can submit their works and prices, while "patrons", large and small, are able to make charitable tax deductible donations towards meeting the cost and donating the work to the public domain.
Establish a relationship with a non-profit group that already has funding for hosting, libraries and national galleries perhaps, or one of the numerous groups that will offer free hosting for copyleft and public domain works, externalizing long term hosting costs.
Make a profit by selling prints and compilation discs to libraries, art galleries, schools, print houses, private sector, etc.
There you go. Free art, paid artists. Build it and get rich, before I do.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
When J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she not only gained copyright over her particular expression of her ideas, in book form. She also gained copyright over movie versions (even if they were not an exact implementation of her original book). She also gained copyright over her characters. I can't write a book about Hagrid without getting sued. Finally, she copyrighted her plot. In fact, thought it wasn't a US court case, J.K. Rowling sued and blocked publication of a Russian book called "Tanya Grotter and The Magic Double Bass." Although the author argued that his work was parody, the court found: Clearly copyright protects much more than just a particular expression of ideas (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). It applies to the ideas themselves (Orphan has magical powers, has strange mark on face, and battles evil). As to how powerful the copyright protection is, and how close something has to be to be a derivative, that is up to courts and lawyers. But given that the media giants and publisher have a lot of resources, fair use usually suffers.
Because there is a high cost to the public associated with allowing copyright: court costs, use of public airways, use of public lands for transit of broadcast fiber, excise of valuable shared resources to generate paper or electricity, etc.
Jefferson is right. As right now as he was then. Ideas cannot be treated as property. If I take your car, you lose something. That's property. If I "take" your idea, you still have it. Jefferson's thinking applies quite well to today though he could never have imagined the computer nor the Internet. Ideas obviously not the same thing as property. If you copy a program, the owner doesn't "lose" anything. She or he still has their copy.
Ideas are plainly not property. They are something wholly other. The Founders did not acknowledge a "property right" in ideas. They allowed for limited monopolies to be granted to encourage "the useful arts and sciences." Their entire point was an exchange that would be in the public good. Create short term monopolies to people who create and allow them to exclusively market their ideas for a limited time. But only a limited time.
Copyright and patent are monopoly grants and Jefferson was actually quite ambivalent about having them at all. His later commentary on the new Constitution was that he believed the term of the monopoly grant given by the Federal government be specified explicitly. And that the grants be narrowed by language in the section in question. He conceded that the public good would likely benefit from the limited monopoly grants but wanted to ensure that the grants were, indeed, strictly limited in term and scope.
It's unfortunate his suggestion wasn't included in the Constitution.
But with limited grants and with a constant flow of ideas into the public domain (the first copyright law, for example, granted a total of 14 years and that was all), we went from horse drawn buggies to me sitting here, bouncing packets off a geosync satellite to communicate over a global network.
If the Founders were so off base as Helprin seems to believe, why are we living in the most technically advanced society in all of human history? How did we go from an agrarian society to lunar landings in two centuries?
More, why does he want to return to the glory days of feudalism? That was the last period "perpetual copyright" existed (along with other perpetual grants by the monarch of things we'd now call "patents"). Which system advanced more quickly? Feudalism with perpetual grants or the democracy created by the Founders who insisted on limited grants aimed at a balance that would benefit the public good?
Hm...
Are you talking about the rock that washed onto the bank in the last big storm, or (let's say) the monolithic tombstone of my ancestor who farmed the land, cut that very stone from a mountain, carted it a thousand miles back to the river, carved it into a beautiful statue, and had it placed over the final resting place of his bones? Would you have as much entitlement to that rock as I?
Jesus_666 wrote:
The above shows one of the biggest problems I see with perpetual copyright: it will eventually make it impossible to create a new work because it will be too close to something that already exists.
For me, I think a copyright of 100 years (not renewable) from the date the work was released is reasonable. By that time all individuals who had a direct hand in the creation of a work will have passed away. In my opinion, a work's direct creators are the ones who should most receive the benefits from their work. Also, by that time the work itself will have become part of the national/world culture.
"if I can copy it I should be able to" is just a description of fact in regards to the phisical world.
Something that can't be copyied is only artificially stopped to being copied by social conventions.
An inventor, writer, musician, or whatever has no natural right to stop other people copying what he does. In many societies, in many different historical situations, copying has been the norm.
It is most unwise to base social conventions based in a completely unworkable assumption, namely that knowledge can somehow be controlled by means of legal or social cohercion.
It is the year 2007, we have seen multiple examples of why this does not work, but here we are, disucssing this again because the people that have benefitted for a couple hundred yers from an historical anomaly want to continu milking the systme for all what it it worth.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You can't copyright general, hazy ideas (as plots for books).
Copyright protects stuff being copyed verbatim, not being referred to, or used as a base for something else (Western Literature and Classical Music would be dead if that was the case).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have never seen books cheaper or more expensive depending on the length of time the author invest on writting them.
A book value's is determined by the market, does not matter if the writer swated blood in order to get the book done (what about if the book is without any merit?).
It is easy to be cavallier about making money touring becuase that is a real job.
Recording in a studio and then sitting in your fat ass waiting fo the money to roll for years to come is not a job, and people should not be compensated for that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is a very good question, and it deserves an answer from an actual author. The short answer is that it may seem as though we authors are the hardest advocates of strict copyright, we're actually not.
There are two things to consider in this answer. The first, and least important, is that unlike the music or film industries, authors for the most part are able to retain the copyrights for their work. So, when there is a dispute, the author speaks for themself, rather than having an industry organization speak for them. (Compare, for example, the numerous RIAA lawsuits versus the handful of author copyright disputes - the RIAA alone produces far more than the entire literary community combined.) So, when Harlan Ellison goes after AOL and some newsgroup pirates, it is Harlan Ellison himself involved, not an author union of some sort.
And this brings me to the second point - part of being an author is learning how copyright law works, and what it does. We need to, or else we get screwed over by the first bad contract that comes along. So, when we speak out, or take legal action, we don't do it frivolously. Looking at the Harlan Ellison case, for example, it is important to note that he went after two groups - the first was the people uploading the work, and the second was the organizations allowing the uploads to happen. The downloaders weren't even touched. And, as I recall, he won. Compare that to the RIAA, which launches suits without proper grounds to terrify.
So, there is a perception there, between the fact that the authors are speaking for themselves, and the fact that when authors do take action, they tend to be successful. But you really don't see authors taking action often at all.
There is one last thing that works into this perception, and that is that a lot of the copyright reform movement just doesn't know what they're talking about (hell, a lot of the vocal abolitionists wouldn't know copyright law if it hit them in the face), and so when an author (like myself) keeps pointing out that the issue of ideas is unimportant (as an example), they take it as a monopolistic move, rather than a recognition that copyright law doesn't allow an author to copyright an idea, or plotline, for that matter, which WAS brought up as an objection in the rebuttal, in the first place.
Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, being informed and telling people who are spouting bullshit that they are spouting bullshit, is taken as being hard-nosed rather than knowledgeable.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Since property is simply an exclusive right to something, or the thing in which such a right exists, that's not a confusion, its exactly correct.
Well, no, since the "owner" is receiving no income from the item in question, there is no tax to levy.
See, there you do it again. Property is the ownership of a thing, monopoly is the right to prevent anyone else from creating the thing.
"but you're confusing copyright with other forms"
I'm not confusing them, it's intentional. For the purpose of this particular discussion, all the various forms have sliding scales of application, and are, in their monopolistic essense, the same, it's just a question of degree of similarity.
"You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc."
And when someone else does the same song with different instruments. Or when some other author writes books about wizards in school. Etc. The application of copyright law these days is far wider than just specific instances.
A chair cannot be copyrighted as 'a chair', but various designs could be protected with design rights (or, actually, if you claim enough creative input, you might even try to run a copyright case on your chair color and design pattern), and specific constructions could definitely be patented. With enough design patterns permanently protected, you'd end up just there; you couldnt actually build a chair without being exposed to IP violation threats.
The essense remains the same; it's not about protecting property, it's about infringing everyone elses freedoms and denying them right to make a chair, a piece of music, a novel, wether all on their own or just like the one they bought. With permanent protection it would be impossible to ever make anything.
"Property", "ownership", and "monopoly" are all terms for exclusive rights with regard to a subject, including the right to do something(s) with respect to the subject and the simultaneous right to exclude others from doing so. They all can apply regardless of what the particular exclusive rights are.
Creation is part of the scope of the exclusive rights that exist in copyright, but having creation as one of the exclusive rights does not make something into "monopoly" but not "ownership" or "property". Yes, the exclusive rights that exist in intellectual property are different than the exclusive rights that exist in tangible personal property, which are themselves different from the exclusive rights that exist in real property, and all of those are different than the exclusive rights that exist in other classes of intangible personal
property aside from intellectual property (and the exclusive rights that exist in various classes of intellectual property differ among eachother.)
You can reasonably argue over whether intellectual property in general, or particular arrangements of exclusive rights in IP, is or are desirable. But trying to argue that they are not property is just ignorant of what property is.
Let's see... This is the same Mark Helprin who wrote the book "Winter's Tale," which is loosely based on the Shakespearean work by the same name. Thus, if copyrights really did last forever, Helprin would owe a metric ass-ton of money to the Bard's descendants.
BTW, it generates an optimal solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem. Now everyone who needs to have the best solution to this NP-hard problem (in fact, *all* NP-hard problems) will have to come to me! I'm looking at you, Mr. Internet -- you and your lame routing algorithms...
4) Profit! Lots and lots of profit!! Someday I'll pwn the world!!! Thanks, perpetual copyright -- you're all right by me!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
...for me to poop on!
--Triumph the comic dog
> Why should artists create and share the art they create if they get NO tangible reward out of it?
The joy of creating art. That's why I do it. And why I posted this anonymously (link to my website in my sig).
I think the best argument against perpetual copyright are the silent movies. Quite a few of these movies are simply lost, some have reels missing, others in poor condition. Basically, movie companies owned the copyright to these, but were not interested enough in preserving them or making sure a working copy existed; since they were celluloid, many burned... they weren't kept climate controlled so others were moisture damaged. And of course simple aging wouldn't help. Since they were under copyright, the people that did own reels in servicable condition either were unable to copy them for archival purposes, or said "screw it" and essentially made a pirate copy. So, now that they are public domain, many simply are unavailable, and many others wouldn't have been except the reel owners bent the rules and made a copy before the reel finished disintegrating.
With perpetual copyright this would be far worse.. quite simply "popular" stories, music, and movies would be archived, while the rest would be left to rot. Now, as a practical matter this historically has happened anyway, but now near-perfect storage is available; if some historian 100+ years from now wanted to look at, say, the arts of 2007, with perpetual copyright I bet most of it would be lost by then, whereas without copyright quite a lot could be available.
I know the lawsmakers have been manipulated into calling it property, but it isn't. And a job done once shouldn't be something you get paid for for the rest of our life. Do the job, and then do something else - like everybody else - slacker.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Good idea.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I used to write software for a living.
My employer was my patron.
Now I am unemployed and want to earn money writing software again.
In another thread, it is convincingly argued that software SHOULD cost $0.00!
If nobody is willing to pay even a small token amount to me to access the download link to software I spend time writing that may help them earn money, save money, or is a self-improvement tool (the ONLY 3 reasons people pay hard earned money to buy ANYTHING over and above the necessities of life), why should I bother to write software for the public at large if I won't get any money for it? It's a waste of time for me if I don't get any tangible benefit out of it.
The Internet is FLOODED with software written by people of various skill levels.
How much of that software is good enough to run a business on? I used to co-write proprietary software businesses depended on for their day-to-day operations -- and did it by understanding the problem at hand, thinking up code or adapting other freely available code found on the net, and typing it in.
Linus Torvalds was 'lucky' to give the world a viable alterative to Microsoft's software and became world-famous as a result--along with a (cushy?) job at Transmeta.
I'm just tired of being underpaid and empty handed because nobody wants to pay 'good money' for the services/software of a 'good programmer' like myself.
You need CASH or the charity of others to live within the law in the 'first world' like I do....
Find someone who needs custom work and do it for them, or use your skills to build yourself tools to make yourself more useful at something than the next guy.
If you can't do either of these things, there's no justification in you getting money to be a full time programmer. Sorry. Go get another job.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What's the shortest text that can be copyrighted? 5 words? 6 words? I will call each phrase/sentence a form of strong art.
I will construct sentences based on each word combination. There are probably millions of english words so it will take some time. But soon every phrase of text will be copyrighted in english.
Any form of english language communication will therefore be violation of my copyright(s).
I urge people who speak other languages to perform the same duties.
Soon all language will be violation of copyright.
Then, we can proceed to either
a) release all phrases into free-use within the public domain, but prevent any profit taking from our work
b) eradicate all forms of communication on the planet.
I'm serious. That's really what copyright allows for. Let's do it.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
The tax is irrelevant. Something in the public domain can't be released under a copyright license.