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Fair Use Worth More Than Copyright To Economy
Dotnaught writes "The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report (PDF) that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy than copyright industries contribute. "Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
I wrote an article about the lack of fair use being a consumer right last week. In particular, I mentioned that even 90% Creative Commons licensed music is very restrictive for videographers -- which was a surprise to me when I found out. Unless you only use the CC-BY license (only 60 albums exist in that license), you can't "sync" audio and video legally for free for your own projects. And that's for the CC music we are talking about (and two of the Board of Directors of CC agreed with my conclusions). I don't even want to start thinking how bad it will become if RIAA starts suing the actual users on youtube who sync their HOME videos with their music. In other words, IMO, fair use should be expanded to become a consumer right, at least for personal pre-specified usage (I am not endorsing piracy here and I do believe that commercial vendors should continue licensing for professional usage).
When the MPAA and RIAA quote ridiculous figures for the damage they suffer from copyright infringement, people here react with ridicule. How much you want to bet the slashdot crowd will accept these figures uncritically because it supports their ideology?
Fair use generates some money to a lot of people.
Copyright generates a lot of money to some people.
So the real question is what does our society value? Many people getting a slice of the the pie, or a few people getting all the pie?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
...how much would you pay for your fair use rights?
Even within many companies, different business units will compete for the same cusomers and make competing products (wasting company resources in duplicated efforts). Rather than try improve the whole company's position, business unit managers will crush eachother to get ahead.
Basically it is the old story: you get what you reward. Competitors get rewarded (directly or via Wall St) by beating eachother up, not by their contribution to the economy at large.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Since without one, the other either doesn't exist or else is superfluous.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe fair use rights should be greatly expanded, and defended against incursion from DRM technologies and bad laws like the DMCA. Unfortunately, this study is a good example of using meaningless statistics to prove a point. The statistics are based on studying what are referred to as "Fair Use Industries" such as education and software, but there is no meaningful way to quantify (for instance) exactly how much the relatively lax enforcement of copyright law against educational photocopies really contributes to the economic value of the education industry. I believe that this study does demonstrate just how important the free flow of information is to many important industries, but the leap from that well-supported assertion to a statement claiming a particular dollar amount benefit from fair use rights is not justified.
My guess is "fair use exception" revenue generation is largely a result of websites using other people's content to generate ad revenue. Without fair use exceptions, 80% of the Internet "content" would disappear. When our economy gets past websites and Internet "companies" relying on a business model of profiting from the aggregation of other people's original efforts, I'm betting revenue generated from "fair use exceptions" will drop accordingly.
An economy can only sustain itself so long from re-packaging other people's work before it runs out of gas. Rewarding original creation is what is needed more.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Nothing as far as I can tell.
It isn't a "fair use" right to be able to make a derivative work.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
revenue isn't the same thing as value added... sorry for the spurious post
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I've long suspected that the congressional attempt to limit fair use, or to create draconian IP laws, was causing more damage than not to the global economy. These numbers seem to reinforce that, and hopefully the fools on the hill will pay attention.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Making backups of my CDs contributes $4.5 Trillion to the US economy? That greater than one third of the US GDP. Sorry if I'm a skeptic.
A problem that will become more and more obvious as internet multimedia pick speed, is that there will be less and less difference between "personal use" and "commercial business use".
If I host a YouTube video for my relatives with personal photos synched to some commercial track, it's supposed to be ok. But what if I have a cut from the ads since I signed a deal with YouTube.
Even worse, what if YouTube automate the process, and I get a cut if my video becomes popular automatically. Then I can wake up one day to see the video popularity rise and I'm suddenly a criminal.
I really wish the industry representatives would sit down and rethink copyright, DMCA and fair use (while following the same basic rules), but I know if they do, they'll tilt it further away from fair use rights, versus recognizing them better.
We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.
>If I host a YouTube video for my relatives with personal photos
>synced to some commercial track, it's supposed to be ok
Nope, it's not. It is copyright infringement. YouTube STILL makes money, even if you don't. And even if they weren't, you are still not licensed to use music that way.
Agreed with the rest of your points.
"While CCIA holds copyrights like the copyright protecting this study, for example,
we also benefit - along with the rest of the public - from limitations on
the reach of copyright, such as the fact that copyright does not extend
to the raw data that forms the basis of this study."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The theory behind capitalism is that people pursue their own interests. That creates the 'unseen hand' that is the feedback system that makes the economic system work for the benefit of everybody.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
This is a great start to estimating the contribution of fair use to the economy, but it misses two issues. First, fair use will only occur if original works are created and original works will only be created if people have some chance of earning a living from them. Saying that the contribution of fair use exceeds that of copyright should imply more fair use and less copyright is like saying we don't need to pay Boeing and Airbus, because flying (not making planes) contributes more to the economy. The larger point is that the value of fair use is a multiplier on the value of copyrighted material and that's what makes the analysis so hard. By this study's numbers, each dollar of copyrighted material generates another $2 or $3. So anything that leads to another $1 of paid copyright material should add even more fair use value.
Second, the real model needs to consider the trade-off (not the relative numbers). That is, if a given avenue of fair use is curtained by x% (e.g., add another year to copyright protection or prohibit consumer copying of music beyond device shifting) how much does the economic contribution by fair use drop and how much does the contribution of copyright increase? I'll be the first to say that I don't know the answer to that and that this study doesn't answer it.
In looking at the trade-off we need a model that reflects how added fair-use may increases the value multiplier, but may decrease the incentive to create copyrighted material and the pool of copyrighted material. This might vary according to both the nature of the work and the nature of the fair use restriction. For example, I'd argue that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft wouldn't lose much if copyright terms were extended by a hundred years -- that aspect of copyright does not effect them much. And would Microsoft lose money if music sharing were impossible? Internet companies might even make more money if all music copying involved some payment (handled by an internet company). The Fair Use multiplier would not change by much even if some types of fair use were curtailed. On the other hand, these companies would lose a great deal if strict interpretations of copyright meant that every transient copy of a piece of text (e.g., copies in RAM, server caches, and internet routers) had to be subject to some copyright fee paid to a MAFIAA-like organization.
This study is a great start, but we need a better model of the marginal effects of the change in total economic value created as a function of more or less fair use. At the very least, this study proves we need some fair use but it does not prove whether we have enough fair use or too little fair use.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If that fair use money were pumping bribes back to Congress as much as the much tinier copyright money were, we'd have a lot more fair use protection, and a lot less abusive copyright.
The copyright industry just lost its great, politically powerful champion in Jack Valenti. Valenti was completely tight with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson (who was called "Master of the Senate" before becoming Kennedy's VP, then president by assassination), handling the press for him. Until Valenti left the White House in 1966, with Johnson's endorsement, to become head of the MPAA, just as Hollywood's products got a copyright venue in the TV explosion. Valenti just died this past Spring.
This is the time for the copying industries that really "promote the progress of science and useful arts" to push back the copyright monopoly industry. Let's finally get our First Amendment rights to free expression to trump the synthetic government monopolies on content that are holding us all back.
--
make install -not war
The value of Shakespeare alone to the US economy is in the gazillions. How many school plays & textbooks, theaters, community centers, and even Hollywood studios would disappear if Shakespeare's works went into the private domain with no fair use provision.
What about the value of putting previously copyrighted works in the public domain? That's the criteria we really need to get our hands on to convince the legislators to reduce copyright terms.
The difference, is those very same 'some people' contributes a lot to the congresscritters' re-election funds while the 'a lot of people' do not. Take a wild guess which way the IP laws tilt for.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It's anti-BS, because it annihilates ordinary BS (the MPAA & RIAA's figures) on contact.
I suspect both numbers are unreasonable, but I find it interesting that using the same economics the MPAA & RIAA are using for their pie-in-the-sky estimates, Fair Use is still worth more than copyright.
I don't think it's somehow "hypocritical" to point out that the MPAA & RIAA's flawed methods can very easily be used to draw conclusions they dislike.
In a side note, I'm also disgusted by how easily people throw around charges of hypocrisy when they don't understand or bother to examine the viewpoints in question. You might *gasp* have to find real faults with the conclusions if you want to be taken seriously instead of just taking a weak swipe at some kind of alleged hypocrisy.
But that, of course, would entail critical thinking.
fair use lets people experience new things, which in turn makes people more creative, which makes them create new things, which can be sold, which makes profit!
1.) download stuff and listen to it / sample it, etc..
2.) make stuff
3.) profit!
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
They're on the right track but if anything have grossly underestimated the financial impact. Everything we say, do and even think flows from the work of our predecessors, long since peering out from the public domain. All the benefits - financial and otherwise - are profound, incalculable. Still the attempt is greatly appreciated.
- js
No problem at all. RIAA or MPAA will send DCMA take down notices and will, through the handy help of Congress, steal your content by declaring it as their own.
Welcome to America, land of political whores.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
you can use my music for free.
email me.
we'll work it out.
just cause it's under CC doesn't mean i can't relicense it to you under something else.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
There is a difference between using someones audio work in another audio work and using someones audio work in another audio-visual work?
I agree there is a difference, but don't see how one of them is necessarily "fair use" and the other isn't. If "fair use" were to allow combination of audio and video why not audio and audio? If the author wanted that they wouldn't have chosen an no derivative licence.
Nor am I sure how you could account for the difference in a generic licence without specifically mentioning particular media.
Perhaps it would involve some language about allowing "combined" rather than "derived" works where the original work is allowed to be used if it is "unmodified". How you'd define "unmodified" I don't know. It would need to allow necessary technical modifications to allow the combination while not allowing qualitative changes.
What you really need is more music produced with a less restrictive licence rather than trying to force people using the No derivative to allow derivatives. Either that or find a piece of music you like and actually ask the author if you can use it.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Sound good, thanks, I will email you later tonight.
omg, trevin, your homepage... its ... its... its... so 1994!
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
not there's anything wrong with that. :)
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
Those are some nice fair use rights you got there...Be a shame if anything happened to 'em.
Who would have thought that allowing users to ideally "share" samples of media with someone else (via youtube or the like) that someone that watches or listens might actually like it and buy the CD/DVD/Whatever. I'm sure a lot of us here use to have mix tapes that someone made up for you and thought to yourself "wow I like that song I might buy the cassette(or CD)". Really how are people supposed to get new music if all they have to go buy is the crap that is on those music television shows or on the radio where they play a very limited selection, and if you don't like Justin Tiberlake or 50 Cent too bad.
Nowhere do the authors suggest (or even intimate IMO), that copyright should be eliminated or that fair use is "better" than copyright. Their argument is that fair use *does* add significant value to the economy and should not be denigrated the way it often is lately, or worse, eliminated altogether.
I think they may also be arguing that if we merely restored the (old) status quo, where fair use was perfectly legal again, and the length of copyright was returned to a more reasonable length of time that we would all be better off economically.
At least that's the most reasonable inference to make from this study IMO.
But now patents are abused by big companies so little ones don't start.
God spoke to me.
"What about the value of putting previously copyrighted works in the public domain?"
We're working on it.
"That's the criteria we really need to get our hands on to convince the legislators to reduce copyright terms."
Well the above will certainly convince them terms are too long.
This isn't really a comment on your thesis here, but you got me thinking ... is there a CC license that basically says, "NO, you cannot distribute my work ... you may only distribute derivative works?" In other words, sure, sync my music with your video, put it up on YouTube... make a remix of it... but if folks just want an MP3 of it, they need to download it from me. Might be kinda interesting.
Breakfast served all day!
Sadly human beings are given to profound fits of primate behavior
If you've ever spent a minute watching Nova or the Science Channel when a show was on demonstrating said behavior, there is a tremendous drive for primated (most mammals) to take as much as they can possibly get away with. With a monkey, it's fill you cheek pouches with friut, cram fuit under your arms, between your legs, as much as you can carry and more!
In fact more than you can eat before it spoils. Because you're packing it away while the good times last, and you're biology tells you the good times won't. So you cram it in, into you can cram no further. That, and if another monkey tries to take what you've laid claim to... well heaven help that monkey.
It's like the Malay Monkee trap... people will actually try to control, lock up, take, and destroy if they can't use it personally, anything they can, because the very same biological imparative is calling the shots. They will actually hurt their long term profits, to have some sense of control, and to lock others out in the cold. All because they want all the goodies. They want to control all the goodies. Some is not enough, they want them all, and thay want to control them.
This is not subtle form of social insanity, and huge sectors of our population are in the grip. WAKE UP PEOPLE, you hunger to control, is being perpetrated on the world to your own detriment. STOP FIGHTING TO SURVIVE, and please begin living. The two mentalities are mutually exclusive, because the first leaves no room for the second.
Here's the real threat... some bright child will discover the inherent value of fair use, then it's going to be all over. The rest will cave in, or go the way of the Dodo bird.
Not that I know of. It would indeed create a new kind of business model... which is "advertise my work by using it any way you want in your derivative works, but to download the original you gotta pay me". Although there is a danger with this idea: that a derivative is better than the original. :D
is that our forefathers knew best. Most argued for LIMITED TIME copyrights, that would prevent building of empires and allow true capitalism to take place. It is those that push increased copyrights and try to limit fair use who have more in common with USSR and Communist China, than any other group.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If these soft-products, art, music, video are as valuable as the owners say they are, then why aren't they paying the approriate property taxes on them. I think if RIAA members were been taxed on true value of their product then a lot of this crap would be released to public domain in order to minimize tax expense. This BS with life time rights, when others just as creative are confined 12-15 year patient laws, has got to go. Heck you can't even own a home unless you pay property taxes. Its like renting house from the government. So why are artist exempted ??? I'll bet Micheal Jackson didn't pay shit for property taxes on Beetle music ownership, yet he made millions selling licenses.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
This is actually an argument in favor of copyright at least as much against it.
Seriously; this is not a troll.
Fair use is often a side-benefit of copyright. Someone creates a work, hoping to get paid directly or by a publisher or whatever. Other people benefit for free from this system, through the fair use rights.
How much do they benefit? If the study is correct, about $5 trillion in 'value added' works are created, and of that revenue only about 30% is paid to the various copyright holders. That would make copyright a pretty good deal for society--for each $1 in revenue turned over to the holder of a government-granted monopoly, $3 is turned over to the general public.
This is overly simplistic, of course, since obviously not all production ceases without copyright, and some fair use (free software, for example) is on copyrights which are unenforced (practically speaking). Not to mention numerous other caveats and speculation about behaviors within a different incentive system. Still, for anyone who claims this supports the idea that copyright is too stringent and stifling innovation--which includes me, in various circumstances--this is a fairly surprising finding.
Making a backup copy of a DVD that *I own* is very much Fair Use.
Being able to use the music that *I bought* on whatever playback device I choose is also very much Fair Use.
Great post. A few additional words of caution to those smelling blood and circling in hopes that copyright will fall of its own weight...
Fair use used to be something easy for people to do on their own, and it was a heavy burden on a publisher to show that someone was violating the copyright in a way that was unfair. It was hard to notice, legal avenues were the main way of proceeding, it cost a lot to even try. In the modern world, programmatic restrictions can keep people from making legitimate fair use, shifting the burden of proof from the publisher to the one needing the fair use. That, in itself, makes a mockery of fair use.
People's annoyance at the mechanical restrictions is certainly legitimate, but they should be careful to note that this is not an annoyance at "fair use", it's an annoyance at the way in which publishers and makers of technology are allowed to err in their own favor with no recourse. I've advocated for the creation of a legal notion of an "intellectual property easement" (by analogy with a real property easement), allowing one to sue a vendor or publisher for a way to make available a mechanism in support of fair use where the legitimate option has been mechanically forbidden. This might balance the scales without infringing copyright.
It's very easy for people to leap improperly to the notion that "big companies" own copyrights and "little people" can't use what they need, since a lot of this ends up being about published movies and TV shows and photos that people want to mark up and play with. But it works in reverse, and in the case where you're a little person who makes a movie, the firm application of copyright is all that stands between your ability to share with your friends or publish something on your site with a "look but don't copy notice" and your non-ability to keep a big magazine or portal from just lifting your work with not even a "thank you" in order to reuse it for them.
In my opinion, the value in copyright is not in protecting the big guy, who has many ways to make money, it's in protecting the little guy, just trying to make a start. So let's not be too quick to erode it.
The effect of further eroding copyright protection in favor of fair use becoming more like "unlimited free use" probably wouldn't help the free software movement either.
Of course, none of what I've written above in favor of keeping copyright protection strong should be taken to mean I think it's reasonable to have copyright terms as long as they are today. It's ridiculous, and getting worse in that regard. When I speak of copyright protection, I mean during a reasonable term of copyright, as originally designed. Perhaps even shorter for computer software, since the period of time between creation and obsolescence is probably only a few years, and even generously 14 years would be more than enough to be called conservative.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
How about a microwave steak dinner?
"Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."
This sounds very interesting until you realize that without copyright industry there's no fair use industry too.
In fact, if I blindly accept the given numbers for canonical (just for a moment), then 1.3 trillion is the money, PART of which the *content producers* will receive for creating their work.
And 2.2 trillion is then industries enabled by the *same* content, but NO PART of which content producers will receive.
So this is a study you can spin any way you want. The copyright industries will use it to claim how fair use robs content producers of their income, and pro-fairuse supporters will use it to point out how fair use creates a lot of additional value that will be otherwise lost if it copyright industry had a full lock down.
All in all, business as usual.
According to the RIAA and the MPAA the actual value of the copyright industry WITHOUT PIRACY should have been $120 trillion-ga-zillion dollars.
d
(and if you want to increase the Gross Domestic Product of the US, just copy your mp3 collection to another HD and the GDP will increase by $10k)
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
RIAA and MPAA lobby congress for stricter copyright restrictions. Representatives noted that "studies show that intellectual property thieves have deprived media producers of over $1.6 trillion in revenues through so-called 'fair use' of protected material."
We are the 198 proof..
That open things are more valuable is obvious that's why copyrights and patents expire. They exist to reward innovators with a temporary excess profit (at the cost of less gains for everyone else.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
We'll share the technical and scientific literature and leave all the Britteny Spears garbage as the exclusive domain of the RIAA.
Have gnu, will travel.
I hate to say it, but having taken a look at the article and the report, there are very serious issues with the methodology of the article. This report certainly does not indicate what the article suggests - quite frankly, the article is FUD.
But, I'm not going to just make the claim, I'm going to back it up. There are some very suspicious omissions and problems (excluding the terrible math in the article):
1. "Fair Use" industries are defined in great detail (albeit in charts that are sideways, making them unnecessarily difficult to read), with each industry used itemized. However, nowhere are "Copyright" industries defined or itemized. We simply do not have the other side of the comparison. For that matter, the report itself doesn't even make a comparison. Nowhere in the front or back matter did I find anything comparing the monetary value of fair use to the monetary value of copyright. The report makes a statement about fair use and backs it up. The article does no such thing, and does not source its statements about copyright-related industries.
2. This report lists several industries as "Fair Use" industries which are arguably dependent on copyright as well, meaning that in a comparison they must be counted on both sides. They are:
- Internet publishing and broadcasting
- Software publishers
- Radio & television broadcasting (counted twice in table 1)
- Printing and related support activities
- Newspaper publishers
- Directory, mailing list, and other publishers (for some reason, described exactly the same as "newspaper publishers" - who edited this?)
- Other publishers (apparently, these are the OTHER other publishers - yes, it makes my head hurt too)
- Motion Picture and Video Industries
- Sound Recording Industries
- Performing Arts Companies
- Agents and Managers for Artists, Athletes, Entertainers, and Other Public Figures
- Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers
Frankly, with the abuse like that which is taking place under the RIAA, and the poorly thought out sections of the DMCA, I can see how a report like this can be handy for legislators (although headache-inducing to read online), but the article is just FUD. For a comparison, copyright-dependent industries need to be defined, otherwise you're just pulling numbers out of the air.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
"The value of Shakespeare alone to the US economy is in the gazillions. How many school plays & textbooks, theaters, community centers, and even Hollywood studios would disappear if Shakespeare's works went into the private domain with no fair use provision."
Shakespeare has been in the public domain for centuries. Really. Anybody can use or publish it however they want. Fair use has nothing to do with it.
Fair use ONLY applies with works currently in copyright. It does NOT apply to the public domain.
(Right - going to get an aspirin now. My head hurts...)
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If it's a RIGHT, you jackass, you don't have to PAY ANYTHING.
Ack, sorry, I misread a word there. You said "private domain," and I thought you said "public domain."
But, in all honesty, Shakespeare has never re-entered copyright. Some editions are copyrighted, but that's because of the editing in notes and whatnot that create a new work. The actual plays themselves are public domain, and can be used however you like.
(This doesn't stop some people from trying to claim the entire thing is copyrighted, but that doesn't actually make it so. I can claim the moon is made of Lego blocks, but it won't make it true.)
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Without copyright, would "Fair use" actually have any meaning? That being said, I'm glad to see some folks with big fat checkbooks getting behind the concept. The EFF does great work, but arguably, they're somewhat limited in what they can do by the money (or lack thereof) they have to spend.
oblig.
I for one welcome our new Fair Use overlords.
The Digital Sorceress
In fact, to add to your point, Fair Use implies Copyright, as without Copyright, Fair Use is meaningless (since all uses become quite equally allowable).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
1) Yeah, the article should source that claim, but it sounds like what they value themselves at.
2) So what? You view "fair use" as the opposite of copyright. It's a right we have in spite of copyright which certain parties (MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft & that Copyright Alliance or whoever they were) want eliminated. If one set of rights is worth more than the other, doesn't that mean that we should weaken copyright and expand fair use? Or, at the very least, not eliminate fair use?
As for the "FUD" part... do you even know what that means? Where's the Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt? If you mean "spin" say it. But please don't use a term you apparently don't understand without bothering to justify it. I don't see this as a form of fear mongering, trying to scare the uncritical into supporting something they wouldn't if they thought about it. It's a study saying "hey! fair use has (monetary) value, too!"
Like piracy in China is worth more to their economy than copyright. If there wasn't piracy, people wouldn't buy DVD players, computers, blank DVDs, DVD burners, ect because they wouldn't have the money to pay for copyrighted items. Thus, piracy is an integral part in the modern Chinese economy.
Picking on the CC seems like a bad example to me. As alluded too, I think the guys that run the CC would be the first to admit that theres problems to iron out.
But it would seem the far bigger problem is getting more people generating CC (or equally fair-use friendly) content. My company does CC-BY-SA Travel information (travel guides and restaurant reviews) and truth is it sucks. We are just starting out, so I suppose its to be expected on our end, but even the biggest player is bad compared to commercially licensed content. Theres actually a great article here some guy wrote about how horrible copyleft travel information is compared to commercially generated information.
In my opinion we first need to get more people actually generating copy left style content thats inherently more fair use friendly, before we quabble about problems with the license. Even in your own example with the albums, if there were 60,000 albums licensed CC-BY instead of 60, your impression conceivably would have been much different.
Travature.com: Hello...World
Tell that to the RIAA and MPAA.
Anyone remembers an earlier story about CCIA?
Yeah, but they do expound idiocy like this:
"Copyright was created as a functional tool to promote creativity, innovation, and economic activity," said Black. "It should be measured by that standard, not by some moral rights or abstract measure of property rights."
Let's try it:
Public schools were created to homogenize immigrants and keep children out of the labor force. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about a right to an education.
Hmm, nope, that doesn't work. Let's try again:
The state secrets privilege was created to permit royalty to keep commoners from nosing in their affairs. They should be measured by that standard, not by some moral theory about separation of powers and consitutional Democracy.
Hmm, nope, that didn't work either. This argument form doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I don't know how to use it right.
...we don't need any more home-brew anime music videos on youtube.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
Not really. They go to prison for a long time, while recreational, law-abiding shooters use up a pack of bullets at the range every weekend.
Software patents delenda est.
Well, Creative Commons does have licenses for works that are to be sampled only. Commercial sampling is allowed, and verbatim redistribution is only allowed non-commercially. I'm not sure it's as general as you suggest, but legally the sampling is creating a derivative work. A problem with your suggestion is that it's very easy to create a derivative work: chop five seconds off the end, or rap "I rock" over the top of the chorus. Once people trivially change your file to creative a derivative work, they've defeated the point of your license. How would you get around that? Demand that all changes must be significant?
One way to test this is to suspend copyright and see if useful works stop being shared.
What are people's options? Keep it secret, where they make nothing. No money, no fame. Or publish and make *some* money and fame. And the fame and money can be parlayed into more.
Like everything disruptive, a lot of business models will die. But new ones will pop up and make up for them. Of cource, all those middlemen and leaches will have to find new jobs. It'll be good for them. They're way too lazy.
The cream of the crop talent-wise would then rise to the top rather than those the record companies forced to the top.
Yes, there are many issues with this approach but I'd still love to see what would happen.
That is exactly the point of the copyright regime -- promote the progress of the arts by promoting the creation of new works. The question today is whether we promote more and better new works by letting people freely copy bits of old works and incorporate them into new ones, or whether we promote them by allowing an artist to retain a monopoly on their creation and sue others for trying to use it. (this point stands whether or not the resulting work is actually "derivative" -- that's another whole debate, since sampling or quoting another work is not enough to make the new work derivative, IMHO)
"Although there is a danger with this idea: that a derivative is better than the original."
Another danger is that culture will be enriched by this derivation. We'd better not take that risk, eh?
Furthermore, in this case, the ratio is a lot more important than the figure itself. It wouldn't matter if trillion was replaced with billion or even million, the point still stands (just not to the same degree)
They the artists works (ripping off the artists if possible in the process) act as a middle man and create NOTHING.
Pretty much the same is true of the movie industry with the exception that they do, occasionally, pay to have their own scripts written. Mostly though they plagarize prior work. (Usually ripping off people like authors in the process, or using works out of copyright (===> Disney)).
So - where's the incentive in this for the creative people then ?.
Some money sure, but possibly less than there'd be without the recording industry - there is mass media distribution available nearly for free now.
So - most of the argument is a crock of it.
As far as the software industry goes, it was proven years ago that one general purpose Turing machine can do it all - so everything there is a derivative work. "" most other industries.
There's little real invention done, most work is derivative, patents cover the rest.
Yeees, because clearly the population at large makes their media purchase decision based on the quality of the product. Clearly the best product is what sells the most. C'mon now. Media is only partly about the actual product, be it music, a movie, whatever. Mostly it, like anything, is about branding and selling a lifestyle to the consumer. People buy things to show their "personality", or rather that they fit into a particular category of consumers dreamt up by marketers. That the chart-topping artists are there because the record co's put them there I don't doubt, but that is possible because consumers want such a system. They want to have clear categories of what is cool, so they can themselves become cool just by spending money on the right things. Then there's the people who are cool because they buy the wrong things, but that's just the flip side of the coin, and soon enough the wrong things become the right things... Everyone chooses media based on the enjoyment they derive from it. There are some who derive that joy purely from experiencing media regardless of the images associated with the artists, but for most consumers that enjoyment comes from the "peripheral" values attached to the media. Completely free derivative use of media would probably yield some interesting works, but I don't think it would change the commercial landscape much.
Sorry about the huge block of text, I keep forgetting I need to use BR's...
They did, that's the problem, that's how we got the DMCA in the first place.
I really wish the people's representatives would sit down and rethink copyright, DMCA and fair use. And remember while doing so whose representatives they are.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I do write some music, but I suck and can't _play_ well, plus I'm too lazy to do a "wall/layers of sound" thing on it.
So if someone takes it, and makes it much better, then hey that's a good thing to everyone else.
The world would be a worse place if we were all stuck with halfbaked crappy stuff just because to improve on them would still infringe on some copyright/patent/etc.
Sure in theory you could license stuff, but in practice you often don't even know who to license it from till 5 years later Mr Submarine Patent hits you for X million, plus the equiv of 2+2=4 is pretty stupid thing to have to license.
...but how does doing anything non-productive ADD value to an economy? Look at it this way:
Joe spends $1000 a year on media
Therefore $1000 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from
Joe spends $500 a year on media, and copies $500 "worth" of media from friends, etc
Therefore $500 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from. The $500 he WOULD have spent does not vanish from the economy - it'll be spent on somethign else instead. Joe now has $500 of disposable income that'll only be "lost" to the economy if he takes his Benjamins and burns them.
Joe spends $0 a year on media and is a prolific internet pirate. $300 dollars a year goes to his ISP for a fast internet connection, $200 a year go to hard drive and DVD-R manufacturers, and yet again we have an "extra" $500 that Joe will spend on something other than a media cartel. Perhaps he'll buy an Xbox, or enroll on a mechanics course. Perhaps he'll blow it on beer. But at no point is him not spending money on $a_product destroying his ability to spend it on $b_product instead.
The only difference between any of these scenarios is the amount of money that goes to any particular industry (Joe's pyromaniac tendencies notwithstanding). All of these arguments that $activity will [add|subtract] $dollars from the economy are specious.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Looking back at history there was a period where copyrights and patents were most enforced. It was the middle ages. Confronted with a fragmented and decaying political sistem the corporations took over.
In that period you could hardly think of free thought let alone free speech. Entertainment was not a industry and singers were the newspaper of the age travelling unpaid and at a risk between cities and feuds. Trade and manifacturing processes were enforced by penalty of death and most of the troubles come from religious clashes.
Are we just heading there?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
tags.
c++;
Even if that's the case, if the derivative acknowledges the original, people will generally want to find the original for the sake of curiosity or comparison... look at the number of people who today track down the original version of a remix track.
(Or have I inadvertantly just told a worldwide audience that I'm a music anorak?)
Quibbling over the licensing terms is an issue, however, because better licenses do make a huge difference in terms of how the content is going to be used and reused.... and over how many people will be attracted to using that particular license.
I've been involved with the software development industry for nearly 30 years now, and I will note that there were many software applications I used (and modified) that were in the public domain 30 years ago. But it wasn't until the GPL came out and perhaps even more importantly was widely used by several major players in the computer industry (most notably IBM of all companies) that open source software was perceived to have any real value.
The written word and "open source" textual projects like most wikis are still trying to find out what they can do, and to even understand what the licensing terms really ought to be about. While some projects like Wikipedia have certainly struck a chord with a large group of people, it still hasn't had a huge impact on the much larger general publishing industry yet. I believe this has to do with some of the terms and conditions of those licenses that can be absurd... such as the license republishing provisions of the GFDL and the simply raw confusion over just what is a Creative Commons license. There are so many CC licenses that to all but a hardcore fan it can be very confusing to understand what is what. I'm talking here about trying to introduce the concepts of "open content" licenses at all to people who have never heard about it before in the first place.
I will also note here that in the "marketplace of ideas" that the GPL wasn't alone in terms of license concepts for computer software, and other concepts preceeded the widespread adoption of the GPL as well. Most notably the idea of "shareware", which was a huge hit among many software developers.... even though many of those authors and software publishers rarely even wrote the software for any real intent to make money. The BSD license, in fact, was perceived to be a better license and even now has its hardcore fans that distrust some key aspects of the GPL. It was also widely in use well before the GPL was applied substantially to large numbers of computer software applications.
I wrote an article about the lack of fair use being a consumer right last week.
The lack of fair use is a consumer right? Huh?
I don't think I'll bother reading your article, as I think that sentence likely says exactly the OPPOSITE of what you intended. If not it's just plain stupid. So there's no way I can be sure what YFA is actually saying.
Perhaps you should write your articles in your own language?
As someone born only a little after the baby boomer generation, I sympathize with them. ShieldW0lf is trolling.
Say, for example, he had a large extended family and a large plot of land with resources etc so they were self sufficient.
You could then take all his money. His wealth is the resources he is able to use to continue life. And that isn't a piece of paper.
Fair use allow you to use existing content to create new and better content, which has intrinsic value.
Copyright is about making everyone is getting paid all the time for anything that is ever used. Which sounds good in theory, but in reality it's just bureaucracy with a huge overhead, making it more difficult to produce content.
I lost my sig.
Won't happen because it's impossible to define how different a derivative work must be. E.g. if I add a triangle ting onto the end of the track, that's a derivative work, but anyone hearing it wouldn't need to download your original to hear how it originally sounded.
I wish to remain anomalous
Isn't Fair Use defined as "I paid for x, I own x"? Copyright is a restriction of Fair Use, not the other way around.
The reason it is greater value than copyright is, without societies recognising ownership and possession, copyright would be unable to be affected. It is more correct to say copyright can't exist without Fair Use.
In recent times, corporations have tried to reverse this, and come up with the idea that we are "leasing" a product for personal use. {insert your own damn car analogy} I should be able to loan a book, cd, etc to a friend. As a side note: I shouldn't be able to reproduce an identical copy for them unless explicitly allowed by the creator/s regardless of how easy it is. (Sheesh, now we are getting into the messy bit...)
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Type in Kent Hovind on YouTube.
Fair use vs False copyrights, and false DMCA claims seem to be winning so far. Quite pathetic
Make SELinux enforcing again!
So fair use has a net benefit of 4.5 trillion, copyright has a net benefit of 1.3 trillion.
Maybe my basic math is off but 4.5 - 1.3 = 3.2 != 2.2
So is the other trillion for the RIAA/MPAA so they can continue to litigate?
Informative
And in other news, water is wet.
How does your sympathy counter ShieldW0lf's argument?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
``We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.''
The nice thing is that you can take action here yourself. License your own works under a license that protects users' rights (copyleft), and favor works under permissive licenses for your own usage.
One step at a time, we will move towards a freeer world. It's working for software. I believe media is next.
While on the subject, I invite everyone to reply with their favorite suppliers of permissive-licensed music.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Some things, I suppose, have existence value. I think it's a shame, for example, that vandals have removed the famous frozen leopard on Mt. Kilimanjaro, mentioned in Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro. Since I never plan to visit there, its value to me is existence value, not use value. Same for the Bosporus dolphin; or the Rosetta Stone.
Consumers of "intellectual property" are not grant makers. They don't buy the latest Dan Brown opus because it pleases them that a significant artist has bread on the table. They are users of the information therein. What has changed is that there are more kinds of copy uses possible than before. On the flip side, technology makes it possible to restrict use as never before.
So buyers of "IP" value the works for the ways they can use it; the opportunity to use works is greater than ever before, and the scope of "owner" sanctioned uses is narrower than ever before. So the share of legitimate use value a user gets from his "fair use" rights ought to grow relative to the share he gets from officially sanctioned uses.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Someone mod this person "+1 Terrifyingly accurate".
According to Apple, 30/track, unless you buy full albums.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"You appear confused. Communism is a system that uses violent aggression to negate one's right to physical property. If you tell me what I may or may not do with the data on my own hard disk, and whom I may send that data to, that's closer to Communism. A non-belief in copyright is entirely peaceful and non-violent, the very opposite of Communism."
You realize that you're not following slash-canon by equating data with property.
"Again you miss the point. Hollywood Studios have every right to keep their movies locked in a vault, instead of broadcasting them all over the place, if they don't want anything copied or shared. Ah, but they want special treatment from the government that will let them sell me a DVD, and then tell me what I can and cannot do with my own physical property -- the DVD."*
I'm going to address the whole premise of your post with some simple facts. One you're willingly living in a society and benefiting from it. In exchange society is asking that you don't do certain things. Violating copyright is one of the things you're being asked not to do. Casting comments that society is somehow being unfair in asking you to play by it's rules, tells me that you don't understand societies in general, and don't want to live in a society. Are you willing to give up all a society offers, for the sake of "not being told what to do"?
"I am grown up enough not engage in ad hominem attacks or replace logic with vulgarities."
You however aren't above twisting things to fit your worldview.
*Hollywodd studios has nothing to do with the basic premise of copyright. People were being "told what to do" with copyrighted material before there was even a Hollywood.
Ask any competent economist. We've known for over 300 years that every monopoly costs it's society more than it provides in value. That's basic economics. Whatever else it may be, IP ("intelectual property") is a limited grant of monopoly power. In fact, that may be the only thing that the various forms of IP have in common. (They are an legal limit on freedoms of speach and action of others. Without that limiting power they would be meaningless.)
For copyright, while the proponents will swear loudly that there would be no printing, music or literature without it, history is at variance with the claims.
The greatest works of literature in the english language are generally agreed to be the body of Shakespere plays. Old Will wrote it all without any copyright for himself or others. He was paid by the Globe for each play, with a portion of the box office reciepts. In non-fiction,
I'd stack up Moores Utopia, or Platos Dialogues with Socrates against anything you might find. In Science, I'm not sure you will find the equal of Principia Mathematica in anything since. So, copyright didn't help or even motivate the best we hever had.
In Music, the greatest body of works ever was that of J.S. Bach. No copyright there. He was paid entirely by patrons. Nobility, churches, towns, etc. (A similar system to bands supported by fans today.) The only one who even came close was Mozart (W.A. not Leopold). He didn't ever have a copyright either. Go further back, the best ever singer, according to the ancient sources would have been a greek named Orphius. He never had a copyright either. So, music is not the creation of copyright in modern times. It's more the prisoner of copyright.
Hang around any musicians group long enough, and you will discover that records don't make bands money. Concerts do. Even for a major hit group. The Rolling Stones are reputed to have made money from records, several million dollars worth. Even with RIAA contracts. But, they are also reported to have taken in well over a Billion dollars from just one several year long major tour. The money for Artists is clearly not from the corporations via copyright, it's from the fans.
In publishing, there are lots of examples of publishers who make money selling only non-copyrighted works. Dover for example. The problem publishers have is that anyone selling a work without paying a copyright liscense fee to (usually) another corporation, (not the Author) is that the public pays a lower price. the publishing industry lists that as a loss to the public, where it is really a gain. Money I don't have to spend on this book/movie is money I can spend on something else I want/need.
What I see really going on here is that there is a group that wants to be paid in perpetuity for thier limited labor. Infinite reward for finite work. Nice if you can get it. The guy flipping burgers at McDonalds would like to get a deal like that too. Should you have to pay for todays meal again every day for the rest of your life? How about for 70 years after you die. It could be a debt you heirs owe. Now apply that recursivly to every meal you have ever eaten.
When you try to apply copyright concepts to real things, you quickly begin to see why it is an inherently unjust proposition.
Copyrights (and Patents) may be the only surviving forms of slavery in the Western world. (Slavery is a system where one person gets the benefits of the labor of another person on the basis of a claim the the second person is the property of the first. Copyright makes the same type of claim with regard to the time or assets of the user of works claimed by the copyright holder.)
Want stronger copyrights? Well, everybody dreams they'll be the master, not the slave.
The argument is not if copyright damages society. It does. The argument is only how much the damage is.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Up until now I have always expanded IP as "imaginary property", but I think you have hit the nail on the head. Henceforth (I always wanted to use that word) all references of IP shall be expanded as "Intellectual Peonage" as a more accurate and truthier representation of the intent and effects of those laws and their primary beneficiaries. Wikipedia: "[A] system of involuntary servitude was called peonage".
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
What the US really needs is citizens who demand fair use as a right, and insist that representitives act to codify fair use as a right, rather than simply ignore politics and allow Congress to serve the needs of industry.
Apple's iTunes Ringtones and Complex World of Copyright Law
Why copyright law involves more complex issues than many seem to recognize, and why we need to start caring about it.
to EAT.
That doesn't mean that you ban the exchange of money for IP (since stores accept cash but not the latest Britney song as legal tender).
As to the pension: so? You are taxed currently on the income from annuity payments. If instead you are taxed on the pot size, as long as it is a lot lower than 25%, you could be a lot better off. And it automatically gets the tax% as anti-inflationary pressure (present value).
Devalues the money.
Printing more money devalues the money.
Wealth is how comfortably you live.
Money is a USEFUL ANALOGUE for wealth. It isn't the same as wealth. If I were to own $1trillion in the latvian bongobead I can not eat or live on it, though I have "a trillion dollars". Nobody will accept the latvian bongobead. My money is not wealth. It is worthless.
I can work for food, though. And so therefore, though my efforts are not money, they generate wealth for me and the person employing me (since they may prefer to watch telly than mow the lawn, so they are more wealthy because they are more comfortable, though no cash has changed hands).