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Everyday Copyright Violations
Schneier has pointed out a great law review article about the problems with copyright. The author takes a look at normal daily practices and how many commonplace actions actually result in what can be considered copyright violations. "By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John's activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing."
Link in the story is a blog, here is the pdf that the blog links to: http://www.turnergreen.com/publications/Tehranian_Infringement_Nation.pdf
As an earlier poster pointed out I found the caveman tattoo bit about destruction quite funny, was also shocked to hear that "Happy birthday to you" is still under copyright, according to wiki it will expire in 2030 in the United States.
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The copyright act of 1976 basically dictates that, unlike previous copyright law, all new works are automatically covered by copyright law, and are afforded its protections. This means that all new original and derivative works are protected by copyright whether they are registered or not, and whether the owner chooses to enforce their rights or not.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I'm guessing someone will raise the point of Fair Use, so I'll repost the comment I posted on Schneier's blog as to why that doesn't really help you any. Oh, and a bonus link to USC 17 (copyright law) so you can see that I'm not making this crap up. Mind you, IANAL, but you need one to make sense of that. Any layman can figure out where and how it does NOT make sense, though, which is why I encourage you all to read it.
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You guys realize that Fair Use is something you have to *prove in court* right? By the time you're proving that your use was fair, you're already on the hook for big money in legal fees.
And how many of the copyright rules do you know? Did you know that having a TV that's too large can be copyright infringement in some cases? You can rent console games that meet very specific requirements, but you can't rent PC software (I really have to wonder where the X-Box games fall, legally speaking, given that the X-Box is just a PC, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft cares to test it and they may still meet the statutory requirements).
Honestly, read USC 17 sometime. It's positively mind-boggling. We've got everything from international treaty created super-trademarks (the Olympics & Red Cross spring to mind), loads of crap meant to serve various lobbies, and so many screwball statutes that I don't understand at all.
Granted, IANAL, but I think that the average person would be surprised by just how many rules there are. And those are just the statutes!
God help you when you find out that, while "facts" aren't copyrighted, facts about a fictional work aren't really "facts" according to at least one court! That's right, the fact that Harry Potter attends Hogwarts may not be a "fact" per the law. So I might just have infringed upon Rowling's copyrights right there.
She won't sue, you say? Actually, she IS suing someone right now over that very issue because they want to publish an unauthorized encyclopedia...
Is it really Fair Use when there are so very many confusing rules you have to follow to maybe, hopefully be protected (with that assuming the courts decline to make a new precedent or extend existing law)?
Or to sum up this entire post, isn't it bad if we each need our own personal lawyer just to be able to *OBEY* the law?
Theoretically, a copyright exists the moment a document is created, which is to say that if I have a half-written story somehwere which someone takes and finishes, I still have copyright to the original story and they have violated my copyright without including the section I wrote via attribution a.k.a. without my express consent. Now, copyright law was a lovely idea when the world was traversable in months, only a small fraction of the population could read and write, and everything was committed to paper, but the dawn on fast travel, the Internet, and digital media makes it iffy, because it requires much more effort to establish that a work is in fact yours to begin with and then the possibility a work gets onto the Internet will cause so many copies to be created that anything short of a global corporation is going to have the resources to sue everyone for infringement. The gist of the article is simple -- the old way of handling copyright (and by extension, intellectual property) is ineffectual at best.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
All of that before 9-11 of course.
You can't take the sky from me...
I respect Schneider, I am for copyright reform (but never expect to see it un the US so long as we remain a plutocracy with a more or less meaningless vote), yet I was disappointed. I should not have RTFA; I only did so because it was Schneider's blog, yet the entire post was in the slashdot summary.
I clicked on his link to the paper, and was disappionted to find a PDF. Google failed me when I made a cursory effort to find an HTML version.
The paper he links is itself incorrect in its very first page when it speaks of "the rights of owners and users of creative works." The US Constitution makes it quite clear that the "owners" of creative works are we, the people. The copyright holder is NOT the "owner". He has a "limited time" monopoly on publication, NOT "ownership".
When I've paid off my house, I will own it. I can pass it down to my decendants who can hand it down to theirs. My two registered copyrighted works, however, pass into the public domain after a rediculously long time.
When I see an inaccuracy in the very first page of a paper, especially a whopper like this, hat's as far as I read. Sorry.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Based on a cursory Westlaw search using the terms 'copyright' & 'fair use' & 'tattoo', this issue has not been litigated in the US. A personal tattoo does not fall into the listed categories of fair use such as criticism, teaching, scholarship, or research. See here.
Ordinarily, non-commercial uses that do not affect the value of the copyrighted work tend towards fair use. This limitation applies regardless of the medium of the purported infringement. In order to get some real closure to our tattoo debate, what we need is a porn star with a Mickey Mouse tattoo clearly visible in a video.
(warning: puns incoming) That would give us reproduction in a commercial context, and someone with deep pockets to sue.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
"Ordinarily, non-commercial uses that do not affect the value of the copyrighted work tend towards fair use."
Yep. More reasonably the copyright holder would sue the tattoo artist, who would be the one performing the actual copying and the main commercial beneficiary of the possible infringement. As far as I can recall, simple possession of an infringing copy has rarely been considered illegal for the purpose of copyright law.
In the mean time, see this for how to get UTF-8 characters to show up in HTML.
It's not a pretty solution, nor quick, but it will work.
well now, I love a good nitpick.
depends on where you live, and what your net income is.
http://www.trafficticketsecrets.com/speeding-ticket-news-finnish.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If the copyright is not registered you can only claim 'actual damages'. Emails typically have very little commercial value.
If the copyright is registered, you can claim actual damages + statutory damages.
IANAL but I've read the copyright myths page..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
The entire argument made in the excerpt is predicated upon completely ignoring 17 USC 1, Section 107, "Fair Use". Period.
Fair use does not, however, count as a "right" in the normal sense of the word.
It counts as a legal defense.
Which means, even if you win, you've already lost - Time, at the very least, and money (lawyer's fees) if you want any shot at all of winning the case.
Unfortunately for your hyperbole, you haven't the slightest clue what you are talking about. In addition, you were too lazy to read an extremely interesting article. I refer you to footnote 38:
See, e.g., Christopher A. Harkins, Tattoos and Copyright Infringement: Celebrities, Marketers, and Businesses Beware of the Ink, 10 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 313 (2006) (using the recent infringement suit involving NBA star Rasheed Wallace's tattoo as the starting point for analyzing the minefield of ink-related copyright issues).Obviously the point is not very heavily tested, but it sure sounds like there's some leeway for lawsuits there.
(Naturally I avoid quoting your post as I don't want to be guilty of infringing your copyright on it. Oh, hang on -- my quotation from n. 38 above might be defensible under the "fair use" defence in the US, but unfortunately there's no such thing as the fair use defence in my country, so I guess I'm an infringer after all. Dammit!)
a -
c -
e -
l -
n -
o - ó
s -
z -
z -
All those characters have been given as html entity of the form � Of them only the counterpart of "o" apears in Latin1 table, and consequently is the only one displayed. The rest of the characters disapears from the HTML source.
So, once again: no matter what your input method, if the character is latin1 plus arbitrary set of other characters, it is displayed by slashcode, otherwise, it gets filtered out from the source. Particularly, Latin2 cannot be displayed, and I suppose the same goes for Cyryllic.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
While IANAL, I have taken business law, so I needed to learn some of this stuff:
Fair Use is an affirmative defense to an accusation of copyright infringement. I'm not certain, but I think an affirmative defense is more than simply an admission of guilt with an excuse. I think that an affirmative defense implies that, though the facts of the case may support the accuation ("I did make a copy of that copyrighted work"), you are asserting, as a matter of law, that you didn't violate the statute in question ("but my copy is allowed under the doctrine of fair use"). You are, in effect, claiming that no actual crime occurred, because you actions don't fall under the specific language of the statute (or are exempted by other specific language).
In any trial there are two broad groups of things at issue: issues of fact (what things actuall happened) and issues of law (how to interpret the things that happened). Fair Use is an issue of law, not of fact. When an accusation is made against you in a court of law, you may defend yourself in several ways: you can deny the facts of the case ("I never did the thing that I am accused of doing.", "I never made any copies of the copyrighted work.") and you may deny the illegality of your actions ("I did the deed, but it is allowed under the law for this reason.", "I did make a copy of the copyrighted work, but it is allowed under fair use for this reason."). You can even defend yourself on both the facts and the law ("I never did the deed, but If I had it wouldn't have been illegal under the law for this reason.").
just a ghost in the machine.
Erh... no. Simply no. I'm fairly sure some of the greatest composers in history would have loved if it was, but simply... no.
Copyright is a fairly recent concept. Until the advent of the printing press, there was quite obviously no reason for one. Aside from a few prior examples, where kings granted their immediate artists personal exclusive rights to their art, it took until the 17th century until the first copyright acts came into existance.
International copyright took even until the Berne convention, which came into existance in 1889.
So, in computer terms, it may be old, but we're still talking about a concept that's only a bit over a century old. Or, in copyright terms, a copyright expiry period.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The bit about classical composers is a total red herring. The reason copyright didn't apply to them is because there was no technology to make copies. Composers enjoyed state protection throughout the era you dismiss. it took until the 17th century until the first copyright acts came into existance. Existence, and not strictly true. The first copyrights, if we're to accept the "monopolistic control" premise, are older than the Magna Carta. Further, Shakespeare in the 16th century battled reproductions of his Second Folio. He was not by any means the first to do so.
Copyright is an evolution of the premodern patent (before it took on the primary meaning of dealing with inventions), itself of course derived from letters patent, which have been issued for artists since before the printing press. The grant of commission was a patent granted by the sovereign to artists and performers.
The modern form is quite different, and the term copyright arose out of industrial-era technology first allowing the production of copies, no longer requiring reproduction by hand. Such protection was therefore very different in character in an era before reproductions were possible--royal protection by patent and recognition was itself sufficient. After the printing press, monopolies on printing extended that royal patent to restrictions on printing. After the phonograph, legal rights extended to protect that field. After vinyl albums and cassettes, after personal computers, after the Internet, you know the story. The protection has evolved and expanded over the course of a thousand years. It didn't just pop up one day in the 1880s.
The performer's royal commission granting monopoly rights, stretching back to Renaissance times (depending on whose research you believe, even further--there is evidence of protected scribes in ancient Egypt) was such a patent and granted certain rights and benefits to the creators of certain works of art and performances. In a time when reproduction had to be achieved by hand and staggering effort, a royal commission not only identified the author, but granted such individual(s) exclusive rights and privileges. We now recognize those rights in the forms of Contract and Property.
Ownership of 'works of the mind' in the modern sense has been part of European jurisprudence since, at the latest, the mid-16th Century. Property rights (typically, monopoly rights) in creators and producers dates back much, much further. Certainly no one can set a date for copyright's lineage after 1450 or so, since printing patents are at least that old in Western society--nearly 600 years ago in Venice (as old as Roman Typography itself)! That, of course, ignores several relevant earlier developments, but still proves the point: the concept of a copy right is not new unless you're also arguing that our othographical and punctuation system is also "new." If the popular argument on Slashdot is that copyrights are the granting of "monopoly rights" then you must follow that through to its logical origin, over a thousand years back. Of course, copyright is much more complex than that and the Slashdot argument is largely invalid, but it's a concession I'll make.
Copyright is, as previously mentioned, a derivative of the printing patent, which supplemented and in some cases replaced some RP letters patent, which have been granted going very far back indeed (at least to the Crusades, though different people interpret the evolution differently). Whether you want to draw the line at printing patents 500-some years ago or letters patents for performers and artists several centuries before that, it's certainly not a "new" idea in any practical timescale.