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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
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.
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).
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
Speaking of Disney and copyrights, I found a nice movie about copyrights made from small parts of Disney cartoons on BoingBoing, here.
-- Cheers!
... 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.
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!
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.
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.
Lets continue the argument of perpetual copyright compared to ownership of physical objects... physical objects become damaged, obsolete and eventually disposed of. Works of art aside, physical objects have very much finite existences.
Also, even if copyrights were perpetual, it is very likely that descendants would eventually get rid or forget about their rights to their ancestors's work.
IMO, life (up to the last living actor/director/writer/etc. involved in a team production) + 25 years should be plenty sufficient... or maybe a flat 100 years from initial publications.
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.
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.
"Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material."
No, they still have unlimited time to 'commercially exploit their material'. The limit is only on the time that the ability is solely theirs.
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. Others will be able to sell CDs/MP3s of it, but they will still be completely unable to BE her and sing it live in concert.
And for her to stop making money on the CDs requires the assumption that nobody will pay for the official CD. Collectors, fans, and others who simply enjoy the music will continue to buy the original to support the artist.
What removing lengthy copyrights DOES do it remove the bullshit from the system. No more price-gouging for CDs. They can't pay the artist $.07 a song and sell them for $1.30 anymore. They'll have to actually have reasonable rates because someone else WILL sell it for a reasonable rate.
(My apologies to those of you who actually like the Bananas song. All 3 of you.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
But where are you getting those numbers from? Remember, copyright is a utilitarian system: the length and scope of copyright should be determined by the public benefit of copyright. That is, since it is beneficial to have more works created and published, but detrimental to suffer the scope of a copyright for a given length of time, copyright should be as short-lived and narrow as possible while still causing the most works to be created and published. Basically, you want to get the most bang for your buck, without either having too little copyright, and thus getting too little benefit, or having too much copyright, and end up in a world of diminishing returns at best, or a net public detriment at worst.
Your proposal is basically like saying that when you want to get someone to paint your house, you'll just pay them a million dollars, because that's "plenty sufficient." The house painters will be thrilled, but it'll be tough on you. It's better then, to pay the least amount that will still get them to paint the house. The painters are still willing to do it for the lower price (though they'd prefer the million dollars), and you're no longer being wasteful.
There have been studies done as to the value of copyrights over time, for various works. First, know that the vast majority of works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Their authors are incentivized to create the works for incentives that are outside of the copyright system (e.g. fame, commissions, selling a specific copy rather than copies as commodities, etc.). These incentives are often at work even for the authors that do respond to copyrights, and so we should try to not provide any surplus incentive if these natural incentives will suffice.
Second, of the tiny fraction of works that do have economic value, the vast majority of that value is generally realized over a period of days to months of publication in a given medium, depending on the market for that work. For example, a movie will take in most of its box office beginning on opening weekend through a few weeks. This is the reason that movies don't stay in theaters long, and get more showings initially than later: they stop being profitable enough to justify showing as compared to something else. Eventually the movie hits pay-per-view. Again, there's a flurry of viewings in the first few weeks, but the work quickly gains the majority of all the value from that form of publication it will ever get, and drops off the listings. Then copies of the movie are sold (many to rental stores, many to individuals). Again, most sales over the entire life of the movie occur within a few weeks of release. Ditto for licensing to premium cable channels, then regular cable, and broadcast tv. If the movie is really popular with enough people, it might become a lasting (if always more modest than its initial release) source of profit. This is incredibly rare, however. Given the number of movies made, it's like a lottery win. We shouldn't base public policy around statistical outliers, however.
Frankly, you could give a movie studio a five year copyright term, and while I bet they would bitch about it to no end, it would still be quite profitable for them (offhand I'd guess around 95% of what their profits are now for any given movie) and they'd still make movies. This doesn't mean that I propose a five year term, just that there's no need whatsoever to give them a century or so, as you propose! That's a vast overpayment, and it doesn't produce significantly more or better movies, it just makes them more expensive in terms of the public interest.
Various types of works have various timelines. An episode of a TV show gets most of its income in 30 to 60 minutes, in a somewhat indirect fashion (as the income hinges on the viewing numbers). If it hits DVD, treat it like a movie. An issue of a newspaper, over the course of the day, mostly in the morning. A magazine, over a few days, maybe a week, depending on the frequency of publication. A book, usually over a period of three months
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If all copyrights fell back to a BSD style license after some time frame, say 20 years, and started out by default to be a BSD style license then I agree.
Of course by BSD style, I mean you always have to give credit to the original author (Not to a university, or some RIAA that bought the rights.)
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
Why is it fair for artists to have a permanent revenue stream based on their copyrights? If copyright is extended permanently, then every year you should have to pay the architect and builders who constructed your house for their work. You should have to pay the company that built your car a fee for their work on your car. If you've ever bought anything from a fast food restaurant, you guessed it, you should have to pay.
Note too that the artist with the perpetual copyright would in fact need to pay a fee to the manufacturer of the paint he or she used. After all, the work that the paint company went through to create the paint needs to be recognized.
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."
In addition, it would be necessary for the entire world to shift toward the same system, and much of the rest of the world have had very bad experiences with dynastic styles of public policies that grant special favors to particular families. You might find that you just can't push this sort of idea through other culture's social filters.
Anyway, the killer argument against it is that in the history of ideas there have been some very powerful and important ones, and it would be too risky for society to allow a single family to control some of these ideas forever. Are you seriously suggesting that the Edison family should still hold the entire motion picture industry in their vice like grip? The Ford family? Disney?
-P
Be my friend.
If I do some work, I get paid for it once and that's that. What's so special about artistic work that means artists should get paid again and again and again for the same bit of work?No, of course not. He has the right to sell the paintings he paints, and his descendants have the right to sell any paintings he didn't sell in his lifetime. Just as an author has a right to sell the stories he writes. Just as a builder has a right to sell the houses he builds. That's all perfectly fair.
However, I don't believe a painter's descendants have a right to demand money every time someone looks at one of his paintings, and I don't believe an author has a right to demand money every time someone reads a story he wrote. They can make money by doing work and then selling it. If they then want to make more money, they can do more work, just like everybody else has to.And they manage to make a living just fine without perpetual copyrights, so what's the problem?Why? What the hell gives a child the right to earn a living from his parents' work? If you want to have a living, you should have to do your own work and earn your money, not sit back and expect money to roll into your pockets because of someone else's hard work. Why should people expect to get money from work they had nothing to do with producing? What's fair about that?
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 don't know, would you deny a plumber the right to make money every time you use your faucet or toilet, or would you want to pay an architect every time you opened your door to your house? How about "his" family after he's dead? Anyone can be an artist or writer and there is no certification or even skill required to produce it so why we would treat what would appear to be the least qualified people as though they were better than truly skilled and certified artisans is beyond me.
This seems akin to how our society is obsessed with completely defying natural selection by making sure we warn the idiots and retards of society that it's not wise to bring a plugged-in toaster into the shower with you; it's little more than making it easier for the idiots, whose only valuable contribution to society might be one single work of art, to live a long and comfortable enough life to breed and produce even more idiots. Real artists who want to make money should have to work, like the rest of us, to reap "repeating" benefits and their families can reap them IF the artist was wise enough to invest it for them. If they can't produce enough good art to survive then maybe they're not cut out to be an artist.
What such a thing would encourage would be our entire society to give up any education in hopes of making one single piece of art, visual or auditory, that will actually sell decently so they can live as though they are entitled to a comfortable living because of that single work, making our society even dumber than it already is. What we call an IQ of 80 would soon be our 120.
Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the population is even dumber than that. --George Carlin.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
There are six billion monkeys on this hunk of rock already, and most of them have access to typewriters.
If you don't want to share freely, don't do it at all. You're not a special and unique person, and you have nothing earth shattering to say that would justify participating in a system that restricts access to information and culture based on money for no justifiable reason whatsoever.
If you have so little passion for what you think and so little pride in what you create that you would prefer not to share it with the rest of us unless you are bribed to do so, then I would suggest you go get a job at MacDonalds and spend you free time on the beach working on your tan.
You're just contributing to the ever growing pile of soulless trite commercially driven crap that dulls the mind and obscures the work that has merit anyways. We won't miss you.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The argument isn't that a child has the RIGHT to earn money from their parents' work, but rather the inverse: A parent strives to provide for their children, and thus an artistic parent would strive to create more valuable art in order to provide more revenue from that art to his/her children.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with this reasoning, but when you look at it from the perspective of the parent, there is some sense to it, as a reward for the artist.
It's got nothing to do with a US copyright standard - it's the Berne Convention. Signatories are not permitted to place barriers to 'implicit' copyright on works by authors/artists from other countries - this even extends to prohibiting the old copyright notice requirement (© such-and-such 2007). Theoretically, the US could require local artists/authors to register copyright, but this proposal has not met with much support.
This sig is false.
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...
And they can do this by selling their creations and saving the money - just like the rest of us.
Or even better, they can pass a work onto their children for them to sell later, as many things get more valuable after the creator is dead. Even better, they could leave a secret cache of their second-rate work and rough drafts to enrich their descendants - imagine a new work from Picasso or Shakespeare popping up on the market today.
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.
"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
I own a car, do your honestly think I would give a crap if you made an identical copy of it and drove away in it.
I bake a pizza it represents a unique artistic expression what kind of wanker would I have to be to complain if your made an identical copy of it and ate it.
We are talking about something you can copy which has absolutely no detrimental affect upon my ownership of the original, whether I created that original or bought it. Copyright is just a token temporary monopoly which has been wrongly applied and is now an abused protection far exceeding it's original intent.
I hear by copyright my appearance and wish to apply the right to gouge the eyes out of anybody's head who looks at me without paying (after all am I not entitled to permanent protection from copyright thieves) ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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...
If only there were some way to convince people to share their good ideas, so that others might benefit from them, too. Some way which makes having and distributing them profitable, rewarding them somehow for the benefit their idea has had for others, so they'll want to do it. And have the rewards be proportionate to the number of people helped and how useful the idea is to them, to encourage people to try to have good ideas.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!