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Egypt to Copyright Pyramids and Sphynx
empaler writes "We all know the usual pro-copyright arguments. Most of them hinge on the fact that the individual or company that has a copyright needs an incentive to make something that is copyrightable, and therefore ensure a revenue stream in a period after the copyright has been granted. In a never-surpassed move, Egypt is working on legislation to extend copyright well above 3000 years — they are going to start claiming royalties for using likenesses of the Sphynx and the Pyramids. It is still unclear whether the original intent of the Pyramids included 'making sure them bastards pay for a plastic copy in 3000 years' alongside 'securing a pathway to the heavens for the God King.' Speaking as a Greenlandic national, I want dibs on ice cubes." It sounds straight out of The Onion, but instead you can read another story on the BBC.
/_\
Can't stop me from making pyramids!
Ice cubes? We have prior art on that.
-- Canada
How much are the royalties going to be for each dollar bill in circulation?
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
What will they call it? The Sun God Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?
There goes my plans to get rich quickly by making copies of pyramids and sphinxes and selling them on the street for way lower than the original pyramid and sphinx.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
..and the rest of us can choose to ignore their absurdity.
I want to make a point.. But.. how the fuck can I make an mp3 of the Sphinx?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
This is how people start thinking when their old business model starts falling into pieces. Fewer and fewer people go to Egypt to see the pyramids, it is really not a surprise. Why not go to see the artificial islands in the United Arab Emirates instead? After all it should be safer and these 'wonders' are newer. It really is a more tourist friendly attraction for those going to the Middle East anyway.
But this will not work, sure Egypt can come up with whatever ideas they want but who is going to care?
You can't handle the truth.
...that they will ry and sue the Incas?
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
Regional designations. OK. So if it's egyptian, it's pyramids. If it's foreign, it's "squared-based volumes with triangular walls". Hey, it works for champagne and tequila :D
They built them perhaps, but they didn't design them. Slave labour requires no contract and technically it could be considered as Volunteer labour. So arguing whether the jews should get a piece is redundant.
I am more interested in where this might leave Extraterrestrials.
Isn't copyrighting a geometrical figure about the same as copyrighting a number? How exactly do they plan to go about doing this?
That's pretty astounding arrogance right there. Since when do one country's laws apply anywhere outside their borders? Not to mention that they have no right to try to "copyright" stuff that was made 3000 years ago, by people long-since dead.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I'm sure they could put those royalties to good use in the afterlife.
You mean royalties to the Royalties, dead or alive..
I am more interested in where this might leave Extraterrestrials.
Yeah, right. Are you going to tell a Goa'uld mothership that it can't land because it would be violating your copyright?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
a total pyramid scheme...
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Egypt doesn't have the power to enforce copyright laws in other countries, but since international copyright is enforced via international treaties, it can take the following stance: "Respect our terms of copyright or we won't respect yours".
For example, the U.S. might reject Egypt's indefinite copyright claim, but Egypt can in retaliation refuse to recognize or enforce US copyright on its territory, essentially legitimazing piracy of any US copyrighted property (including, of course, software).
"This bit of accepted wisdom, that "...the Pyramids [were] built by slaves who were Jews.." (as stated in your message of 1 September), is a canard that does not deserve repetition. First, it is anachronistic and illogical. The "Pyramids" -- presumably the three great pyramids of Gizah and perhaps the earlier pyramids to the south, including the Step Pyramid of Sakkara -- were built in the Third and Fourth Dynasties, 2650-2575 BC and 2575-2467 BC. The Jews did not exist at that time. The ancestors of the Jews, the Hebrews or "Children of Israel" -- Bene Yisra'el -- did not enter Egypt until centuries later. If one looks at the biblical narrative, Joseph, son of Jacob aka Israel, who brought the people of Israel into Egypt to settle in the land of Goshen, was driven in a chariot just behind Pharaoh's. The Egyptians did not have the wheel when the great pyramids were built. By the time the Egyptians had wheels, and horses and chariots, the great pyramids were ancient. Even if one were to determine that the migration of the Sumerian/Chaldean Abraham from the Sumerian city of Ur to the land of the Canaanites took place around the predynastic or early dynastic periods of ancient Egypt, there would still have been no Jews in Egypt at the time -- or anywhere else for that matter. Second, recent scholarship on ancient Egypt has suggested -- concluded, perhaps -- that the pyramids were built by corvees of native Egyptians and undoubtedly of slaves as well, conscripted into temporary service on the pyramids, probably during the flood season when their labor on the farm could be spared. Those who were not actually slaves through warfare or other reasons were subjects of Pharaoh who were made to give their time and effort to a great national cause. Managing these labor gangs were professional craftsmen whose villages near the pyramids have been under excavation and study". Ronald Hilton - 9/6/01
In fact, there is evidence they had nothing to do with them. This comes from the fact that there is evidence that Egyptian labor was used to build them, and it wasn't slave labor, but a decent job during the "off season".
No, he's right on. The Jews were certainly slaves for other projects, just not the pyramids. There were quite a lot of buildings going up around the time of Ramesses II (who was possibly the antagonist to Moses), but the Egyptians had long since switched to burying important people in the Valley of the Kings.
Not a typewriter
The original owners were the pharaoh era royalty. The present government does not derive directly from the royal line. Therefore to claim ownership rights on property not rightfully theirs is to deprive the original owners of their ownership.
It's stealing. Lock the bastards up. Call the PIAA (Pyramid Industry Association of Assholes).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Vatican to copyright God, film at 11.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
But you probably spelled "sphinx" correctly. It was the extra creativity of fucking it up to "sphynx" that got this one noticed. Remember, it's not accuracy that gets you on Slashdot, it's the ability to distort and misinterpret a story so it will generate the most page views that counts.
At first blush, this seems absurd, but once you think about it, it really isn't very different from what copyright (and IP in general) has become in recent decades. Disney, for example, is voting themselves eternal copyrights over their stuff, much of which is derivative. I think it's only a matter of time before each culture decides to lay claim to their corpus of work, from the beginning of time. It'd be an interesting battle, as arguably the creators of the English language contributed more to The Little Mermaid than Disney did...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It was called the DMCA, and contained provisions to extend copyright indefinitely (even though nobody seems to realize it.)
See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.
Hmm, all the regular news staff are on leave and the editors are pulling stories out of their bottom drawers to fill newsprint. We used to call it 'cucumber time' - don't know why, but it does feel like a good description for this time of year.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
[Note: this comment contains Unicode Greek characters, but they are not rendering in my browser for some reason. This takes a lot of the fun out of it. There are two Greek words in the next paragraph that you may be unable to see. Slashdot folks: bug?]
Fun fact: Sphinx is from Greek "", transliterated "sphiggo", pronounced "sphingo"—a verb meaning "to squeeze or throttle". "The Sphinx" literally means "The Throttler", which sounds like a villain from Batman. This same root figures prominently in another English word, the one derived from Greek "", transliterated "sphigktér".
One wonders if the Egyptians are perhaps taking this root meaning a little too literally.
It is entirely possible that they don't give a mummified rat's ass about preserving rightst for the pyramids outside Egypt. This might be just another way to make sure anyone cashing in on the pyramids to sell tinkets and junk to tourists gives a cut to the government.
Or, perhaps this is going to be used like a submarine patent: They let people using the images just slide by until they want to cash in or cause someone grief. I somehow imagine that the money that Egypt makes off ouf tourisim is probably a lot greater than the money that say, the Luxor makes off of being shaped like a pyramid.
Im guessing that this is a strategic move.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
A pyramid is a geometrical figure, but they are copywriting 'The Pyramids, one of the wonders of the ancient world where pharos were buried', and not the geometrical figure. This is about the same as saying you can't copywrite the Death Star, because it is basically a sphere. There is a lot more to both than just their physical shape.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That's pretty much in line with my take on the constitutional issue involved. Since without a man-made law on copyright, the original right was part of natural law, that right expired naturally the instant a person died (or became physically unable to copy). For a limited time therefore had to mean for less time than the natural law otherwise allowed, that is a natural lifetime. That's what Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin most probably meant by limited.
The U. S. Supreme Court disagrees with this theory totally, of course. One of the implications of this disagreement is that, if the government ever repeals its copyright laws, we, 'the people', still don't regain a natural right to copy but neither do the authors automatically regain a right to any other methods to control copying!. If the natural right never existed, it can't revert. If states don't get any control, it can't be accomplished by contract either. So who could control copying if the federal government decided not to manage copyrights? Prior decisions say it's not a right of the states, so if it can't revert to individuals either, no copyright control at all can exist except as the fed arbitrarily chooses.
The federal government now maintains that it created the right to copy ex nihilo (out of nothing at all), so it, not us, and not the artists, really owns all possible forms of control over that right. In other words, if the government ever repealed the existing copyright laws and then simply claimed, without even passing a new law, that all author's royalties were now property of the government, that would not be, constitutionally speaking, a taking without compensation. If SCOTUS sticks with its last few precedents, it would have to refuse to even hear a claim that the government simply taking an author's royalties was unconstitutional.
So all you authors who think the government has stood up for your rights, do you really trust them never to shorten the period again and claim the extra royalties revert to the federal coffers? Maybe shorten it again and again? They rewrote the law, so you don't have a right, you have a gift, and the law allows take-backs.
Who is John Cabal?
The reason people don't want to visit the US:
- presumption of being a criminal: get your fingerprints taken at the border, get inspected by idiots in the name of security every hour, get to take your bloody *shoes* off whenever you want to board a plane. Get real. None of that stuff stops terrorism. It does however, stop *tourism*.
- no protection by the law: as a foreigner you are not protected by any american laws. The constitution doesn't apply to you. The authorities can do with you whatever they want, for any reason they feel like. You could be sitting on a beach one moment and being beaten up in Guantanamo Bay the next, and noone would care.
- lawsuits. Get involved in any kind of accident, and american lawyers will bleed you dry. You might not even be able to go back to your own country.
Is any of this true? Well, it really doesn't matter now does it? As long as people like me perceive these risks to be true we won't visit. And there plenty of other places in the world to go to.
Things get even more interesting if you are arabic-looking, or if you have done anything that american law does not approve of (even if it was legal in the country where the act was committed!). In either case, the risk of going to the US increases considerably.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Either:
- Other countries will ignore it, or
- Other countries will enforce it -- which I doubt, or
- It will force a re-evaluation of the Berne convention.
I hope that it is the last option, the Berne convention has been abused by the likes of Disney which has bought votes in the USA senate/... to extend copyright in the USA and thus giving it the ability to milk the rest of the world for things that should have fallen out of copyright, like Steamboat WillieWon't work. India has prior art rights on the swastika
Yes, Romans are ahead of Egyptians...
In Italy we already have a law that force you to pay if you want to take a picture of any national monument (like the Colosseum) and use it for commercial use. And it's not limited in any way by the age of the creation.
The fact that the law is not strictly enforced doesn't mean it not exists. As most of italian laws, it will be there, silent, until someone decides to apply you a fine or, worst, to stop your video production, or shut down your web site (with methods similar to Chinese).
Obviously it's more easy to apply the law in the country of origin, so Italians producers of books, websites, etc, usually pay the royalties to the Italian Ministry of Arts or simply removes the pictures (like the Italian edition of Wikipedia).
Egyptians... amateurs.
"Nice beaver!"
"Thanks, I just had it stuffed"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Especially given that regional designator law is more like trademark law. In this case, Egypt could get a trademark on GIZA for pyramid reproductions in each major developed market. This confusion between trademarks and copyrights among laypeople is one of the reasons why Mr. Stallman don't like the use of "intellectual property" in the mass media.
Oh, I realized after I hit "submit" that I should have been more clear on one point. If you're taking a wide shot of a bunch of buildings and not singling out any one facility, you'd be okay without a release. And this is probably why Google would be okay doing it. But what I'm talking about above is if you make a specific building easily identifiable and the obvious focal point of your advertising photo.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.