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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."
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?
An online newspaper publishes articles which include copyrighted images (company logos for example) under fair use. So they chalk up the entire revenue of the newspaper at "profiting from fair use". Seems just as shady to me as the RIAA's outrageous claims of piracy damages (which are modest compared with the staggering $trillions figure here).
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.
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
Hey man, every time some yahoo walks down the street singing "Free Bird, our national value is improved by $0.10. Don't knock it!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
People that (for example) buy computers and DVD burners and software and tons of blank media to copy movies and music. People that buy iPods to play tracks from the CDs they buy. Etc etc.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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.
It isn't a "fair use" right to be able to make a derivative work.
I think in part that is what the GP was unhappy about. Derivative work should really only apply to commercial ventures. If I want to make a slide show DVD of my cousin's wedding pictures and set it to their favorite love song and give it to them for an anniversary present, is that really a "derivative work" or is it just something that has added value to some of my family and doesn't mean jackshit to the rest of the world? Or to make it more public, if I sync clips of The Muppet Show with a Snoop Dog song and post it to YouTube, am I somehow depriving Snoop Dog and Jim Henson of income they would have otherwise had or am I simply freely contributing some humor into the world and adding slightly to the value of YouTube? If a work would not exist if I were required to pay someone for the right to make it, then copyright is depriving the world of the value of that work.
We are all just people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
i'm totally with you.
:) )
but regarding snoopdog/henson. there's also the idea that it could degrade their IP... having muppets associated with snoopdog may not be what henson wants (nor may it be what snoop wants, think about it
otherwise, you're totally right. there's certain cases where each side may be opposed to such things though... but, i could see a situation where, for fair use, if you use copyright stuff, you must use attribution, AND, state that you are doing this on your own - so it is very clear that it is some kind of "fan fiction"... or whatever...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
While that's what
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.
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!
'So they chalk up the entire revenue of the newspaper at "profiting from fair use".'
That is easily offset by the fact that profits from copyrighted materials are credited across the board despite the fact that copyright may not be responsible for those materials existing. After all, there were songs, plays, books, and works of art before copyright and there likely would be movies, books, albums, plays, and works of art if copyright didn't exist today.
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
The first thing is, money means nothing.
Money is not wealth, it's just a way to figure out how to split the pie.
Don't agree? Check out some footage of elderly people paying for food with wheelbarrows of money when the USSR fell.
Expect to watch the baby boomers frantically waving money and deeds around in the coming years, desperate for some young person to care for them, only to be confronted by the fact that they traded those who might have been able and willing in exchange for birth control, a desk job and an extra zero on their bank statement long ago.
Anyways.
When life improves because plenty is created, whatever there is plenty of becomes worthless.
Oxygen is worthless for this reason.
However, it would be difficult to argue that we'd be better off with less oxygen.
It would be hard to argue that we'd be better off if we found a way to hoard it and make people pay for it.
But that's the argument being put forth by those who defend copyrights.
They feel that when people are kept away from art, music, etc, and only allowed to enjoy it if they pay, then wealth is created.
This is nonsense.
The truth is, leverage is created. Which is really what money represents.
And in a world where everything you might possibly need or want has been stamped with a "Property of so and so" marking, and police with guns will show up if you touch it without permission, leverage can seem pretty important.
Thing is, stupid, ignorant and desperate neighbors make bad neighbors, they make poor allies, and they make problems for everyone.
At this point, if we wanted to, we could put every book ever written on earth, every song ever sang, every play ever performed, every newscast, every scientific paper, the lot, we could put it on one little cube of holographic storage and distribute it far and wide across the earth. The tech was new two years ago.
So, aside from the collective "Intellectual Property" laws, which are intended to promote the creation and distribution of works of art and science for the common good, there is nothing stopping us from giving every human on earth a copy of the Library of Alexandria.
Wouldn't you think that the reward of having 6 billion and counting educated, informed neighbors to be your peers, partners and friends would be worth the price of finding a better system to fund creative works that doesn't require them to be locked away in order to properly operate?
Seriously. These intellectual property laws time has passed, and when you look at it in this fashion, it's pretty fucking glaringly obvious.
Lets get talking with open minds about alternatives economic structures that don't leave the creators out in the cold and don't require the poor people to flounder in ignorance any longer than they already have, hey?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
'An online newspaper publishes articles which include copyrighted images (company logos for example) under fair use. So they chalk up the entire revenue of the newspaper at "profiting from fair use".'
I realize I already replied to this once with another point but something else has just occurred to me. That is a fairly terrible example. Newspapers couldn't exist without fair use. A fairly huge portion of any given newspaper is spent quoting people interviewed and excerpts of outside sources of information. In fact, if a reporter has done their job, a news article won't really contain any original material of note, just a collection of facts included from outside sources under fair use.
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.
and tomorrow's headline:
"Copyright groups claim study shows unlicensed usage of copyright materials is costing US $2.2 trillion."
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
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.
Too bad that system only works (and the theory explicitly STATES this) when no particular entity has too much control over it. Then, that entity becomes a parasite. Much of what we call free market capitalism today is in reality that sort of parasitic relationship.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
The point is not about the currency fluctuating compared to external markers.
The point is that when there is less available, there is less available, and if no one is selling, you're not getting.
You can have situations where no one is paying for anything and everyone stops doing anything and suddenly there is abject poverty everywhere where only a short time ago there was plenty. But it's not because the money went away, it's because the people stopped having an organizational system, so they just stopped doing anything. Turns out money doesn't mean shit if no one is being industrious.
I think it's important to make the distinction that money isn't wealth, it's leverage. People like to confound the issue by talking about money going away from the artists, writers, musicians, technologists etc and depict scenarios where creativity disappears because no one is paying for it.
It's put forth as an inevitable consequence, but it isn't. The wealth that was putting food in those peoples stomaches, roofs over their heads, and the small little pleasures that make life worth living within their reach didn't just disappear. We don't suddenly not have the capacity to provide for them where before we did.
That's the most important point that needs to be addressed. If you can't break people out of the money-is-wealth mindset, you've already lost, because you really are destroying wealth in the terms a typical economist would use to describe it.
If we don't give them leverage the old-fashioned way, what system will we put in its place to see to it that these people are still cared for by our society.
If we answer that question, and do it well, there is no longer any reason why you, "The One And Only", cannot have a personal copy of the Library of Alexandria for yourself. Seriously, would you like one? I really, really want you to have one dude, that's why I mouth off and try to get people to think outside the box.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
It is strange how people don't understand money. Money is nothing more than a representation of wealth, it is not wealth itself. All forms of wealth on this planet are merely placeholders for work, which is a product of energy and distance (or energy and time, in the humanistic non-scientific term). In a nutshell it equals real, measurable value to humans. If we didn't tacitly agree on whatever currency we held onto as this representation, then the currency ceases to be meaningful. Ergo money is not wealth. Energy/Work represented by such currency *is* wealth.
Get rid of currency and people have no problem going back to what money represents. That's why there'll always be bartering, as people use their own work / energy as relative currency to another's. As an aside, the reason gold was originally the first most valuable and widely used 'currency' everywhere is because it is, in an of itself, a very useful material. It has heft, which humans like, it is colorful (lustre) and aesthetically pleasing, it does not rust or break down, it is easily made into many things, and it is scarce. So you could make a case for gold being intrinsically valuable, but currently "money" (paper and electronic numbers in a bank's database) have no value at all. Coins are the vestigial holdout, and seem to be nearly extinct in the U.S. anyway. People don't bother to pick up a dropped quarter on the ground anymore! So much for the Almight Dollar...
Vox et praetera nihil
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?
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.
Well written and well argued.
Believers in copyright often tell me that artists, lawyers, and telephone book editors need to punish us for copying their precious data and ideas, otherwise all this cultural wealth will evaporate and disappear. I suggest that if these "artists" need society's support so much, put them on government welfare to do what they do and give the rest of us back our freedom to share ideas and culture with whomever we like, however we like.
Of course, copyright believers are aghast at the idea. Britney Spears might look like a failure if she discovered her singing was economically devoid of value and had to accept hand-outs or work for a living.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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)
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.
It would be hard to argue that we'd be better off if we found a way to hoard [oxygen] and make people pay for it.
But, you're ignoring the fact that human beings did not create or produce oxygen; we just found oxygen all around us. Books, movies, etc. are completely different, because people created those works.
Morality is concerned with human action, not just the current state of things. So, yes, creative works became plentiful after they were created. But that tells us nothing about whether or not it is moral to copy those works.
A similar argument would be, "Terrorist attacks and earthquakes are similar, because in both cases, a lot of people die. But we don't punish anyone for an earthquake, so why should we punish anyone for a terrorist attack?" The argument notes the final state of things (i.e. people died), but fails to ask the relevant moral question (i.e. How did people die?). In the same way, you note the final state of things (i.e. a certain type of good is plentiful), but fail to ask the relevant moral question (Why is that type of good plentiful?). And so, you draw no moral distinction between breathing oxygen and copying creative works.
...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
He's talking about the ageing population of Western nations. The reduced birth rates and increased longevity means that an increasing fraction of the population are at an age where they are retired from work and thus no longer contributing to the economy. Worse still (from an economic viewpoint) this segment also costs the economy large amounts of welfare.
While automation is a wonderful thing, there are some things that are still the province of humans. Personal care is one of those things. But with a reduced number of young people participating in the economy, there are a reduced number of potential carers. With a reduced amount of production, there is less real wealth to provide for this care. A pension fund doesn't mean squat - it's just money. Without actual production, money is worthless.
Japan is well aware of this problem and is trying to compensate with things like robotic beds for the elderly.
Would you disagree that there are those that sincerely believe we should pay to read them? Baby Boomers and those preceding got that information is power, but they associated it with gold, the need to control and pay per use. Why can't information be associated with a credit system, rather than a debit system like most (all?) economies? I think this is what the OP was arguing with his references to oxygen and German/Russian currencies. If the poorest of the poor is already rich, then the only inequalities in societies would be a result of the inequalities of equals. (apologies W. Churchill)
If the library of Alexandria had been spread around a little more, we may still have a lot of those texts with us today. How many more texts that may or may not be of value to future generations will be lost because we continue to restrict access and availabilities?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
The only problem with this line of thinking is this fundamental question:
When exactly was the last time a copyright on anything recently under copyright expired?
It has been several years.... and not since the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. There is little reason to believe that anything else will be available into the public domain for decades if not simply perpetual copyright.
In terms of patents, I have seen some patents expire. But I've also seen incredible abuse of the patent system to the point I'm a hardcore advocate of its abolition. I see very little financial incentive for a small business or individual innovator to go through the process of seeking a patent beyond just an ego boost, as any patentable idea will likely be stolen by a larger company anyway and you won't really make any sort of substantial sums of money from such a device or concept even if you have something truly unique and original.
Basically, the patent system is only a way for big businesses to protect themselves against other large businesses, and to snuff out the smaller competition that can't compete with the same rate of patent submissions. Oh, and that USPTO is a modest revenue raising mechanism for the U.S. Federal Government, so there is little reason for congressmen to try and kill what is a cash cow for themselves.
WTF, did you go to the GWBush school of discussion? If you're going to try and seem all cool by attacking the GP with your hip and fresh attitude, at least try and figure out what the GP is saying.
Using your logic anybody that's ever used the omnipresent (or do I have to use the word ubiquitous with someone so hip and edgy?) slashdot car analogy is just stupid and wrong because computers don't have transmission fluid.
You're being a shit while completely avoiding the point the GP is making, it kinda makes you look like -YOU- don't know what you're talking about, but are too cool (or afraid, yeah, probably afraid) to say so.
I was going to use my time to explain it to you, but after a quick review of your posts, I can see that you don't WANT it explained to you, you want to be derisive and seem (that's an important word, seem) knowledgeable while saying nothing of value.
This is really one of the unfair practices of newspapers which I'd like to see pursued further. If I am caught up in a newsworthy event, say a huge fire and if I, staggering from the burning building, tell a journalist what I saw in there and he then just goes off and prints what I've told him then where is my cut of that wealth ?
It's me whos done all the hard work and the journalist has just stolen it and even worse he's then sold it on for profit. I'd like to see the copyright laws strengthened in this area so anything which I have seen is protected and can't be relayed or re-imaged without my say so.
Whoever creates those works doesn't really do so for the money, but for the wealth. Now due to the organization of our society, more money usually means more wealth. However that's not a law of nature, as e.g. inflation shows. Therefore the correct question to ask is not: How would the creator get the money he deserves for his work, but: How does the creator get the wealth he deserves for his work.
Or in short: If I understand him correctly, he means that capitalism (i.e. usig money as way to represent your share of wealth) isn't really a good fit for information. And it's not a good fit because information can easily be copied, i.e. as soon as a certain information exists, there's plenty of that. Which means information, once created, doesn't really have any economic value. The economic value it gets in our society comes from making it an artificially scarce resource through applying copyright. Now those copyright schemes get harder to defend due to copying getting easier, which is why all those technical and legal measures are created (DRM, DMCA). All this harms society as a whole.
Now what the OP suggests is basically that instead of trying to "fix" the plentiness of information in order to get capitalism work right on information, instead economy should change to accomodate the real economics of information, that is, find ways to give the creators the wealth they deserve through other means than capitalism.
Now I don't know what a good alternative could be, of if it really exists, but as long as capitalism is treated as a dogma rather than as the tool it actually is, we will not find out.
The current situation in a nutshell (a note: when I speak of new information in the following, I actually mean valuable new information, not just some crap anybody could produce):
"if I sit down and program a new photo editing program, what fucking 'natural freedoms' am I denying you if I tell you that you cant have the fruits of my labour for free? "
There's no need to be offensive. What you tell me I can and cannot do with my own computer and Internet connection is irrelevant.
"To insist that you do is communism, you realise that right?"
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.
"What natural freedom do you have to get free Hollywood movies?"
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.
"grow up."
I am grown up enough not engage in ad hominem attacks or replace logic with vulgarities. How about you?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
'If I am caught up in a newsworthy event, say a huge fire and if I, staggering from the burning building, tell a journalist what I saw in there and he then just goes off and prints what I've told him then where is my cut of that wealth ?'
You do realize it isn't a big enough pie to go around? If you wanted a cut you shouldn't have told the reporter, you should have advised them that someone will have to pay for your story.
The house itself is an asset. The mortgage is the liability.
A mortgaged house you rent where the rent is greater than the mortgage is an asset with positive cash flow on your financial report.Yes, and a house whose mortgage is paid off is an asset with zero cash flow and no offsetting liabilities.
Money in hand is a liability because it loses value over time.Cash money maybe, but invested money gains value over time. And it still isn't a liability--it's an asset, albeit one that changes in value. Please don't use technical terms without knowing what they mean. I think your main mistake is confusing assets with equity--equity is the difference between assets and liabilities, and represents net wealth in a way. So unless you're one of those trendy morons who gets an "interest-only" mortgage (or whatever they call that scam), even paying off your mortgage builds equity and grows your wealth, albeit not as effectively as buying the house cash money.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
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.