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The Copyright Crusade a Lost Cause?
A. Smith writes "Ars Technica is exploring the relationship between property rights and copyright, arguing that copyright holders are making a mistake by stressing similarities between property rights and copyright. They compare P2P users to 18th-century squatters in North America: 'Like squatters of old, many ordinary users find copyright law bewildering and are frustrated by the arbitrary restrictions it imposes. Customers wanting to rip their DVD collections to their computers, download music they can play on any device, or incorporate copyrighted works into original creative works find that there is no straightforward, legal way to do these things.' They conclude by offering that more reasonable, understandable copyright restrictions would result in a user base friendlier to publisher interests."
if they are arguing property is property no matter what, then it would seem to me it should be taxed as such.
just an idea i read about in the last week or so.
-.no
"They conclude by offering that more reasonable, understandable copyright restrictions would result in a user base friendlier to publisher interests"
If only they cared about a friendly user base...
We will now use technology to ensure that only the content producers are rewarded.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Ideas cannot be owned - 99% of them are not original, chances are that ANY idea that you've had ... has occurred to at least ONE other person in the past.
Given that ideas are not property, why can't society simply accept that people should profit from the application of ideas and not from the idea itself?
It doesn't change the fact that you don't own the content. If you bought a book, you own the paper. If you bought a cd, you own the plastic. You don't have a right to distribute that content to 100s of thousands of people. The efforlessness of reproduction does not nullify the ownership of content.
I don't believe the article mentions P2P, which can encompass a whole different set of concerns.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
These 'customers' only 'find' this out if they start making money by doing this illegal activity. As long as you make no money, there is really very little legal recourse that copyright holders have unless they go to the trouble of trying to demonstrate that you have caused them damages. That is pretty damn difficult to prove, despite the RIAA's army of litigators hard at work at it. So what happens is that while such activity may be technically illegal for everyone, the defacto situation in practice is that common people do what makes common sense, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Would it be nice if the legal technicalities matched up better with common sense? Sure. Does it really matter if they don't? For all practical purposes, nope, not really.
A-Bomb
Would that mean that unless my business is profitable, I don't have to pay property taxes on the warehouse, factory, or store?
Does that also mean that if I own an unoccupied residence I don't have to pay property taxes on that?
If you think you own your house, you don't. You are leasing it from your local government.
If you don't believe me, don't pay your property taxes for a couple of years and see if you still own it.
Just food for thought.
i don't know if anyone i've ever met has been confused by copyright law enough to prevent them from ripping a cd or dvd for their own purposes. some people might encounter feelings of paranoia or guilt by doing so, but stop them? i'd be surprised if the numbers were all that high.
That's the silliest argument ever - somehow, if a publisher lets everyone else duplicate their stuff, then, they will get more money. The whole point of modern thinking on copyright is that you don't need publishers any more. Anyone can make a million copies of something any more. While I for one tend to side with those who favor strong copyrights, you can't help but notice that the idea of a centralized publishing agent, any more, is just obsolete. You don't need a service to distribute something, because computers do it so very naturally. It sucks for those who want to write or engage in creative arts, but, hey, there's plenty of people out there that used to shovel coal by hand before steam engines came along. Technology is cruel that way. Attempting to carve out a copyright space in the digital age is just government interference in an economy whose most efficient course is to allow unmitigated copying.
This is my sig.
Well, we have appraisers (my gf is one) that can assign value to personal property based on past sales, market conditions, etc... etc... I really don't see why that cannot be done with ideas. And just like tangible properties, this value may change.
For instance, to claim a copyright over an essay you write on slashdot, may cost you $0.01, based on how much ad-based revenue can be expected from reading a web-page containing it. If you then proceed to publish this essay in a personal blog, you'd need to pay $0.10 to claim copyright. If it gets published in NY Times, you'd need to pay $100/year to keep it. (all the prices, of course, are purely arbitrary)
Guidelines can be made that would allow people who generate content, to pay for blanket copyright of similar kinds of content... while especially valuable objects would need to be individually appraised. This would work the same way that property insurance works - your insurance will cover anything in your house up to a certain value... but any objects that are over that, have to be declared individually.
Maybe if Disney had to pay a few million $ per year to maintain copyright of Mickey... and BMG had to lay out a hundred thousand for every album they'd like to keep out of the public domain, we'd have a much more balanced system.
... is that the resulting documentation would have to be written by lawyers and technical writers.
Long have I said that if the BC Building Code (1400+ pages, almost 17 lbs of book) were ever written in plain, straight English, it would fit in my back pocket, and I have no doubt copyright info would be much the same way. HOWEVER, it's never going to happen, because you're never going to be able to get any sort of concrete, prescriptive documents that the lawyers could get behind.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
No. Nobody's twisting the issue.
If I buy content to consume (because that's what I'm buying, the packaging, including the disk, drive, whatever it's on is only a means to an end, nobody buys an optical disk to moon over...well, unless they're very VERY disturbed), I want to be able to consume it any damn way I please.
And NO, consumption does NOT mean "redistribution". I want to be able to make fair backups (which I won't be giving to people), or shift it off to a computer, digital video player, iPod, whatever.
Recorded media is NOT the same as a live show (as every live show is different, even if an identical set is performed). Thus there's no justification for what is, essentially, pay-per-play.
Additionally, we're not talking about public exhibition of the material either. We're talking about viewing in the privacy in the privacy of my own home, or on the street watching a screen small enough that it's only meant for me to view it anyhow.
I can, and DO, pay for the content I consume. I also comprehend the fact that the media on which this content comes is not indestructible. Thus, in addition to media shifting, I will make backups.
I refuse to be sold the same content, over and over again. And I refuse to be labeled a pirate or grouped in with pirates simply because I take care of my investment in my own entertainment.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It is hard to imagine, for example, that Hollywood studios would spend tens of millions of dollars producing a new blockbuster if the law didn't grant them exclusive rights in its commercial reproduction.
Its not that hard to imagine at all. Its hard to imagine they would spend tens of millions of dollars producing new movies if they couldn't make their money back and profit from it. But that has nothing to do with a "law that gives them exclusive rights in its commercial reproduction".
They could always find a new way of making their money back. -gasp-
Hell, "blockbuster movies" generally make their money back from theatre ticket sales, before even going to DVD. As long as you had a law in place that gave them control over public displays at theatres, in airplanes, satellite subscription services, etc they'd survive, and there would still be adequate incentive to make new movies.
And even if consumers were free to copy movies provided they did it non-commercially that wouldn't kill DVD/bluray sales anytime soon, and when the internet is fast enough that physical media is actually threatened, they can sell copies of them via itunes music store type services. A lot of people will pay a modest amount for a copy even if they can get it free legitimately, if the paid version invariably meets a high level of quality and is more convenient and is always available.
All the industry has to ask is: how do you compete with free? And the answer: better service. As long as copyright gives them the monopoly to charge for content they will always be able to compete, and profit.
If they don't want to, fine, they can get out of the business, and someone else will come along see the money on the table, and get in on this 'making movies thing'. Its not our job to ensure that something becomes increasingly lucrative as time goes on, and that's what hollywood is essentially demanding... that their profits not be allowed to fall... at all... ever.
It would be nice to see a blanket or low cost system for amateur short form video makers that post to YouTube and the likes. It would allow people who make AMVs and other short videos to use commercial music, so long as the videos are not sold directly for profit. Websites like YouTube would be allowed to host them (and make money off of advertising) in exchange for this. Perhaps a low blanket fee paid for by the ISP, or paid per individual per use. (but it would have to be very reasonable.)
Right now it is impossible for the average joe to license a Bon Jovi song for his home-made video. The industry is missing out on some cash flow and great publicity by not looking at this market.
--M
I think their conclusion is wrong because, as demonstrated repeatedly by comments on /. and other sites, users only feel copyright should be respected when it is to THEIR benefit.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You pirates are all the same. You can't justify your crimes with "I want to make backups" or any of this nonsense about transfering. You didn't buy the content of the DVD, you bought content for use in a DVD player. That means you need to pay up again if you want to watch it on a iPod because you didn't purchase content for use in an iPod. Don't you know that making backups and transfering content supports terrorism? People like you are how 9/11 happened! Making copies of movies and music costs this country more than all of the bank robberies and should justify its own federal enforcement branch.
I hope the RIAA/MPAA throw you in Gitmo with all of the other terrorists for putting America in such danger!
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
When you establish a scheme where you withhold your exclusive rights from your contemporaries for their lifetime, you will have contemporaries that will say, "Nuts to that," and disregard your rights. There's no benefit for them to wait until the work passes into the public domain if they'll be long dead before that ever happens.
As it stands now, copyright law might as well be based not on author's lifetime but rather the lifetime of the last (mortal) survivor of the year when the work was first published. Disregarding Disney, that would appear to be the goal of Lifetime + 70 years: to ensure that your work is never exploited by anyone that directly knew of your being alive.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Copyright is hard to understand because it's made up complexity at odds with our actual rights. Copyright isn't an "inalienable right" that's protected by the government. It's a made up privilege that's just called a right to make people obey it. The Constitution actually abridges the First Amendment right to freedom of the press, which would have no restrictions, to compromise with the late-1700s commercial necessity of a monopoly on copying printed matter so competitors don't have lower costs just reprinting material that cost the author more to create and print. But even then the Constitution said that copyrights are for limited times, which they are no longer, and that they are justified solely "to promote progress in science and the useful arts", which today they more often conflict with.
There is no provision for "making a killing". There is no provision for "protecting the author's heirs". Or anything else, except promoting science and useful arts.
Because the only right in question here is our right to free press. So long as the Constitution (and the law under it) just documents the actual rights we have, and creates a government to protect them, people will understand it. Those "Fair Use" rights are the real rights, which is why people understand them. Rights are familiar to us from real life. They're typically easy to understand. They shouldn't be that hard to protect.
And since science and the useful arts can progress perfectly well these days with the minimum protection from competition, everyone will understand if we roll back copyright to just very limited times, like at most 14 years for print, and as little as a week (or even a day or so) for content like news.
--
make install -not war
Your sig isn't irony. It's poetic justice.
With ideas, the value comes from the act of creation, not from the idea itself. An original idea is worth a great deal more than a copy, but attempting to use property as a metaphor hides this.
The thing of it is, we're living in a world whose economy was predicated on marking up the cost of duplicating an idea to fund its development. By unlinking the two, we cannot forget that we still have to arrive at some alternative for funding ideas, lest, we do not get them. At least with the copyright model, a free market could exist such that could participate in the funding of an idea by consuming it as a product.
Now, without IP for content, there's really no way to monetize an idea, in a free market sense, and so, they aren't going to be monetized, invested in, and so on, in the same way. If we attempt to circumvent that by creating a federal bureacracy that doles out funding for researching new things, then, what we'll have really done is sort of enslaved ourselves in order to gain free content. Everyone will be able to copy everything, but, the only stuff that will be produced will be what the Feds pay for through taxes, and that's a fairly troublesome course.
Clearly, we need a mechanism that allows IP to get funded, but, allows for unlimited copying, so as to get the best of both worlds. These goals seem at odds with each other, but maybe they do not have to be.
Once again, we need new ideas. How rare they truly are!
This is my sig.
If you believe in the Anti Copyright Crusade: Don't lose faith and keep fighting. As soon as you give in, and say 'Maybe its not so bad...' You have just given them permission to do whatever they want.
Keep crusading, or give up, but only you can make that decision for yourself.
Why is the above post moderated Flamebait? It's a valid contribution to the discussion.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Timothy Lee (the author of TFA) makes qutie a few errors. First, they claim "Critics of the practice [filesharing] analogize copyrights to property rights" -- this is flatly factually wrong. Critics of the filesharing note, correctly, that copyrights are a subset of property rights (not something merely analogous to property rights), and draw an analogy between violations of copyrights and violations of rights in tangible personal property. Mr. Lee has misidentified where the analogy is drawn.
Second, Lee counts the one argument for property rights as two different arguments, by falsely splitting it into the "scarcity argument" (which he claims doesn't apply to copyright) and the "reward" argument (which he claim does.) In fact, the scarcity argument (that property rights are beneficial because they promote a more efficient use of scarce resources) is simply an application of the reward argument (that people will be more motivated to create and preserve value when they are able to exclusively control all or some part of the value created and/or preserved by their action) to the case of management of existing resources. By falsely counting the general argument and its specific application as two independent arguments, Lee paints a picture of copyright being an area with a "weaker" argument for property rights, when in fact it has the exact same argument (at least, in terms of the basis of argument, which is what is at issue in this part of Lee's pience) for property rights.
Third, Lee miscategorizes the argument for property rights (and, therefore, for copyrights) as being about "necessity", when its not about "necessity" (which is conceptually binary -- something either is "needed" or not) but about utility (that, on balance, people are better off with property rights, even though some are denied access to that which they would otherwise have, than without property rights.) This mistake leads to him dismissing the need for copyright "for certain classes of creative work", because those forms would not completely disappear without copyright. This misses the point of the reward argument for property rights entirely, which isn't about necessity but net gain. (Note, I'm not arguing that, viewed through that lens, copyright, and particularly not especially the increasingly rigid system of copyright we have now, is justified, merely that you need to focus on the real basis of property rights argument to challenge it meaningfully.)
That being said, eventually Lee (after all the errors and unnecessary diversions) does get around to the rather simple observation that applies to all laws: that no law is effective (he narrowly applies this property rights, but it is far more generally applicable) unless the people subject to it generally accept it (either by accepting it as legitimate or at least by deciding its not worth the cost of violation), and attempting to more strictly enforce a rule that most people don't believe is right rarely produces that respect, even in the more minimal form. (It can, if the government is able to drive the combination of the cost and certainty of being caught out of compliance high enough, but that usually takes insane levels of enforcement that threaten the general perception of the legitimacy of the government, rather than just the particular law, if the prohibited act is widely accepted as something people should not be punished, or punished as harshly as is necessary to secure general compliance, for doing.)
"You don't have a right to distribute that content to 100s of thousands of people"
Sure, that's pretty clear, at least on the surface.
But do you think we have the right to take our CD's and DVD's and "rip" them to our iPods?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I didn't read your third paragraph, which I agree with, re conflict of interest.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'm sorry, but with articles like these, it's no wonder that the copyright debate is so muddled. This is a very clueless article.
It all becomes clear with this statement: "The copyright system is currently undergoing rapid changes as technology undermines old business models and enforcement regimes."
Um, no, it isn't. The only way you can think this is if you don't understand what copyright is and does. And that's because copyright's primary purpose is to provide a legal framework between a creative artist and his/her distributor in regards to his/her art. So long as there is a legally binding agreement to do it - copyright provides the protection to the artist to allow negotiations - how the distributor distributes that art is inconsequential to the actual law.
Aside from which, last time I checked, change involved something, well, CHANGING. The law has not been rewritten, the Berne convention is still the international yardstick, and the necessity for a framework to allow a creative artist to submit work to a distributor without having to worry about being shafted before a contract is even signed is still there. The RIAA trying to abuse the law and failing does not mean that the law itself has been stricken down.
Who fact checks these things?
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
The problem with the argument is that, according to Hollywood, no film ever makes money. Hollywood accounting is used to effectively deprive the actual artists and creative talent of their just compensation.
In light of this, it would seem that having extended copyright terms actually makes it impossible for Hollywood to make a profit. If they didn't enjoy a perpetual royalty on creative works, they would have to employ more creative talent in order to remain in business.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Actually, this digital age allows perfect copies to be made of content with 0 cost for the copy. Piracy, unlike counterfeiting, is not a zero-sum game like physical theft. Arguably piracy takes money away from produces, but the money does not actually go to someone else - the money merely stays with the pirate (or were you saying that everyone who pirates actually IS a terrorist, and you're doing nothing but preaching to the choir?). What this means is that there's no money in piracy to go to terrorism (or anything else, for that matter), making your claims mathematically impossible.
You'll have to pardon me if this response is needless. I'm having quite a difficult time determining whether your post was satire, and am writing with the assumption that it isn't (although I kind of suspect that it is).
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Can you think of any other property which a person can own but is forbidden from describing to another person? If not, why should we accept this restriction on books and CDs?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Terrorist sympathisers like you make me sick. The RIAA and MPAA have clearly explained how this theft supports terrorists. Additionally, they have also have clearly explained how this problem is more important than even bank robberies and murder. Their large penalty lawsuits and their reasonable attempts at settlements help keep keep those funds in the American economy and away from terrorist organizations.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
That was an amusing way of dispelling the ambiguity.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
but the fact is the big copyright holders (who are the ones we're concerned about) are generally composed of committees of rich, greedy fucks who point-blank don't care what we think.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Copyright Law, pre-1999, was just fine, and DID NOT need "fixing".
It is all these "fixes" that were pushed by corporate interest (DMCA, "automatic" copyright rather than having to assert claim, etc.) that have been CAUSING all these problems!
If anything (copyright) needs to be fixed, it would be to change the period from life + 70 back to the original 17 years.
Back in the 18th century, property lines and deeds were a bit looser than they are now. Someone who had been tilling a plot of land his whole life - land his father had tilled before him - would suddenly find himself declared a squatter because a shifty banker type had filed the documents needed to receive a deed for "previously unoccupied land."
I think comparing modern day p2p to 18th century "undocumented landowners" that were screwed by rich bankers is perfectly valid.
Trivia of the day. The English used this trick on the Irish back in the 17th century (and earlier). They'd demand to see the deeds for a piece of land that had headstones of ten generations of "O'Somethings" and kick the poor bastards off when they couldn't produce the paper. Hell, nobody in Ireland had deeds, and the English damn well knew this.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The US founding fathers as well as the originators of copyright law had intended for the original creator or inventor to profit and be protected (for a limited time) not for a richer person or organisation to profit from the works of others. It's Ironic that copyright law is now being used against the creators it sought to protect by type of organisations who were envisioned to steal* their works. Back in the days of Gutenberg not everyone could own a printing press and even today industrial scale "for profit" infringement requires a significant investment in a logistics structure while the equipment to perform the act of infringement is relatively cheap.
Infringement penalties should only be applied against industrial pirates, like they were back in 1990.
*Steal really is the right word in this case, before copyright a person with a printing press could literally (probably hire a bunch of heavies) walk up to a writer and take their work by force.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I see it as this.
When the Industrial Age came along, many changes had to be made to society to benefit the powers-that-be. Fake "laissez-faire," trusts, monopolies, compulsory education, child labor, etc. It took many years of unions, communism, and violence until many of these abuses were corrected, and many abuses continue to this day.
Now, as we transition into the Information Age, we are seeing more changes to benefit the powers-that-be. Copyrights and patents becoming property rights, DMCA, restrictions on technology that prevent Big Business from making money, infringements on privacy rights, etc.
The question is: What will it take to curb the abuses of the Information Age, and how many abuses will be allowed?
If all you want is backups then what are you complaining about? Its simple to backup files purchased from Apple. The software HELPS you back up after every purchase.
Don't confuse backups with shifting formats. Thats not a backup. Still, the average music fill can be transferred to an audio CD.
I am sorry but rebroadcasting a live even is distribution. As is bootlegging.
You never own the content. You license to use the content as the content describes as proper use.
Even applying Fair Use to digital file formats you are clearly incorrect about ownership and what you have paid for.
Fiction's inherently open-source. Aspiring authors are always helping each other out, reading books written by people they like and seeking to emulate their styles. They acknowledge that every story has already been told; the only differences are the characters, the setting, and the meta-data of who reads it and where and when it was written.
So what possible purpose could copyright serve for authors of fiction? Well, it delineates the boundary between canon and fanfiction. I could write a story based on Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III's The Ur-Quan Masters, but I cannot claim that my story is endorsed by them in any way. I also can't make any money off of it, as the copyright grants them a monopoly. But this isn't really a problem -- because fiction is open-source. How much does the original Battlestar Galactica owe to Star Wars? How much did Tolkien draw on world mythology when writing The Lord of the Rings? Heck, how much did Dungeons and Dragons copy Tolkien? To say that a work of fiction is evocative of another one you've enjoyed is one of the highest compliments you can pay to it. That's why they put such comparisons on the back covers of novels (and PC/Mac games).
It's debatable whether or not copyright should grant such a monopoly. But I think if it didn't, fiction authors would just invent their own "Seal of Quality" so you could know which works were canon and which weren't. And I think it'd be perfectly appropriate for the law to enforce such things.
As an aside, just think if someone tried to invent software patents for fiction. What if someone patented the happy ending?
I made a twister board for my friends to have fun on (*I didn't participate ofc).
I played a song by Nirvana on a friends guitar (which i didn't listen to ofc)-
I drew a cartoon depicting Microsoft's and Apple's war with "Mac vs PC".
I made a pixel perfect version of Super Mario Bros - World 1-1 in plastic beads. (oh, I really did that)
I'm pretty sure this all will be considered illegal practices shortly. (just before the awaited apocalypse, go figure)
If you don't like that, go live somewhere where they don't matter... Cuba, China maybe... go for it, and don't come back. Artists, singers, and others need to make a living too, no matter how much you don't think so.
Your comment should have been modded up. Copyright was supposed to protect authors against publishers, not the other way around.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The thing that disappoints me about this topic of debate is the assumption on so many commenters' parts that any serious student of so-called "intellectual property" actually believes that the term is anything more than a convenient fiction to describe the license granted to creators under the law, the which we refer to, variously, as "copyright", "patent", "trademark", "trade dress", and with other such terms. We all recognize that "intellectual property" is not the same thing as actual property, but because the license granted is an exclusive license, it may be treated to a certain extent similarly to actual property.
There is a very simple answer to the problems we as a society are encountering in this area. Return to the reasonable grants that the framers of the Constitution envisioned. In some cases, we should also revisit the time period of that grant to fit the nature of each specific market. Software is one such area. Software becomes obsolete so quickly that there is no real reason to offer a grant equivalent to that offered for artistic works. I will not get into specific time periods here, because such specifics aren't really relevant to the debate. What is relevant, however, is the de facto unlimited grant that has developed over time and which needs to be abolished immediately. There have been many excellent proposals for specific time grants, and they all have their advantages and drawbacks.
It is of the utmost importance that we recognize that our entire culture is stagnating because of the removal of the incentive to create new works due to this effectively unlimited grant.
The second most important action in this area is to repeal any such laws as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which effectively remove the Fair Use rights of the public, and furthermore, outlaw any such technology that would prevent the public from the reasonable exercise of those rights.
It's called property because it's traded/hired/licensed/etc. I have the right (before it's even identified as a right) to do what I please with my artistic endeavours. And it's only fair that I have some right to control what others may do with my artistic endeavours (up until first sale doctrine exhausts those rights). But... you're correct to say that the tools we have aren't suited to the task (which is often overlooked) and that reform is needed.
1: I paid for the right to view the content.
2: I don't use Apple products. It was an example.
3: I in no way confused backups with a format shift.
4: As I said, which you obviously missed, I'm not talking about public exhibition (which is what a broadcast is).
5: I covered live concerts, the attendance of which are paid for with your ticket, and are essentially single-instances and unique to the event. If I want to watch said event over and over again, I'd buy a recording of the event. Not bootleg it myself.
6: I'm aware I never own the content. I own the right to view the content.
7: As such, I was in no way incorrect. You merely misread (or didn't read) what was actually said.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!