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White Paper Decries RIAA Attempts To Raise Infringement Payouts
Little Big Man writes "Public Knowledge, the CEA, and six other industry and public interest groups have issued a white paper critical of the attempts of the RIAA and other major copyright players to have statutory infringement levels raised. 'Noting that the courts can currently award massive statutory damages without rightsholders having to demonstrate that they have suffered any actual harm, the white paper calls current copyright law a "carefully designed compromise" meant to balance the interests of both parties ... The authors of the white paper paint a dreary future where "copyright trolls" file lawsuits in order to rake in massive amounts of statutory damages, where innovation is stifled, and where artists are afraid to "Recut, Reframe, and Recycle" because of the financial risks involved.'"
A hundred whitepapers wont do much good unless you can afford to lobby a few politicians and they only deal in cash.
Unless whoever wrote this white paper is prepared to bribe congresmen, presidents, and government officials at the rate at which the RIAA is doing it nothing will ever change.
Put simply, corruption and bribary are the language of American politics.
Copyright lawsuits to censor, intimidate, or extract cash are already fairly common. Also, the financial and legal burden to remixing content and culture is already so high that no independent artist can endure it, and most big-name outfits avoid it wherever possible.
Welcome to the future.
The RIAA makes perfect sense here. In response to dwindling (or flat) profits from lawsuits, they want to raise the guaranteed ROI on fewer lawsuits. Models the recording industry business practices perfectly... Rape, don't innovate.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why is it that the RIAA (and I guess the MPAA too?) are able to basically have the best of both worlds with current copyright laws. They have the reduced burden of proof that a civil court gives them, but are also allowed to basically get criminal levels of punishment. If they really want to be able to financially ruin someones life for a single infringement, shouldn't they at least have to do it in criminal court with a "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
...the white paper calls current copyright law a "carefully designed compromise" meant to balance the interests of both parties
I don't. I think copyright is WAY out of hand. Terms should be brought back to the eighteenth century's tewnty years, and no noncommercial use should be called infringing except in the case of plagairism.
P2P is advertising and MP3s are free samples of a far better commodity.
If copyright were reasonable, you wouldn't have folks on slashdot calling for its abolition like you do now.
-mcgrew
PS- I hold hundreds of copyrights, two having ISBN numbers. The two registered ones would have gone into the public domain already if I'd had my way, as they are both over 20 years old. How are you going to convince Jimi hendrix to record any more songs? That is what the US Constitution says the purpose of copyright is!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Go re-read the Constitution
White papers aren't going to et it done, Green papers are the only way to make a change in laws.
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
Think of it the other way. How many artists will stop creating because they "only" have 14 years to make money off of it.
Copyright was not originally intended to guarantee the artist a paycheck for the rest of their life. Having copyrights that last for the life of the creator isn't about "encouraging the arts" it's about locking in control and legally enforcing a profit, neither of which are what it was created for.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
No they're not. That's the incorrect assumption that keeps this stupid argument about "intellectual property" going.
"Being creative" is no different than providing any other sort of service. For most types of services, you get paid for what people think is the value of the provided service, at the time that you provide the service. Only the greedy want to get paid over and over for providing a single act of service.
You have just demonstrated that you haven't any idea why copyright was created in the first place. People are by nature creative. We do stuff all the time that is new. Not all of it (or even a majority of it) is interesting or useful to other people, but a lot of stuff is. As a society we only grow when everybody's creative ideas are out on the table. We take the best ones and build upon that.
However, ideas are an infinite good. Some people don't want to share their creative ideas unless they have some way to profit from it. Because ideas can't be controlled like a physical thing can, some people a long time ago designed copyright to give incentive to those people. In brief, copyright is the government granting a temporary monopoly on your idea (so that you can profit from it) to you in exchange for you to share that idea with society. During that copyright period, you are free to charge however much you want for the use of that copyrighted material (free use excepting). After that copyrighted period though, the public and society as a whole is now free to build upon that idea however they see fit. If you want to have another monopoly that allows you to create money off an idea, then you have to come up with something new and creative again. Thus, copyrights give incentive to create more copyrighted work from even the original author. However, with a copyright term that is guaranteed for life, what incentive do you have to create something new more than once? Sure you can create more works to make even more money, but if you are content with what you have, you have no reason to create new works. Let's take an example. If the copyright for Star Wars ran out in 1993 (14 years after 1979) then George Lucas would have been forced to come up with something new to make money. He couldn't just continue riding the Star Wars wave the rest of his life. (For those of you who didn't like the prequels, this means that after 1993 anybody could have made them). As it is, he just sits around and makes money off of a few properties he's made.
I will only be for lifetime+ copyrights once my work as a plumber guarantees me and my posterity money for all individual jobs I do. If I make a toilet and install it somewhere, then guarantee me that I can get a decent income from that work for the rest of my life and my childrens' lives as well. If I happen to want more money, then I will install a second toilet and then you have to guarantee me profits from two toilets. But it doesn't work like that in real life and it shouldn't be that way for anything else. To make a more appropriate analogy: Say you are a marketing guy and you come up with a neat way to advertise a product. Should you be guaranteed an income for you and your posterity for that one idea? No, that would be silly. You get paid a salary and if you stop coming up with ideas then you're fired and the next idea-man gets hired in your place. Same with individual authors of creative works. They should have to keep coming up with ideas if that is how they want to make a living. If they don't, then they can go work as a salaried employee somewhere.
In either case, if you want to leave your children some inheritance, that is your deal. People who don't make money off of copyrighted things have to save up and invest in order to provide for their families. Why should a person who came up with some idea before anyone else be treated any differently in that regard? We, as a society, gave them an opportunity to market their creative work and make money, now it is our turn to build on it.
I have kind of gone astray. Anyway, the purpose of copyright is to grant a temporary monopoly to give incentive for you to release your work of art into society. Society grants that (through the government) and in return we get your creative work and get to build upon it. Copyright gives incentive to people who have creative works to release it upon society for the express reason of society being able to use that
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