Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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 they are arguing property is property no matter what, then it would seem to me it should be taxed as such.
Really? I have stapler on my desk that I don't pay property taxes on.
On this desk alone I also have a mouse, a telephone, a can of coke, a screwdriver, a keyboard, 2 monitors, a flashlight, a spindle of blank DVDs... all property, all completely exempt from 'property taxes'.
I'm curious what idiot convinced you that all real property is taxed.
> These 'customers' only 'find' this out if they start making money by doing this illegal activity.
Tell it to customers of 321 Studios.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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.
In Missouri you pay propertty tax on your car. In Illinois you don't.
./ journal, having a hard time topping the last one) I'd be living in a cardboard box starving to death if I had to pay tax on my copyrights.
Property tax is the most onerous of all taxes. You don't pay income tax unless you make money, you don't pay sales tax unless you have money to spend, but if you don't have money for property tax you can lose* your home.
Please don't advocate that I have to pay property tax on my imaginary property. None of it in any way brings in revinue, and one of the two works I've registered is on a software program for a computer that has been obsolete for a quarter century.
Considering all the gibberish I've spread all over the internet since 1997 (sorry guys, still no new
-mcgrew
*If you leave your door unlocked you'll loose your home.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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!!!
If you try to sell me music, but won't let me duplicate it by putting it on my iPod, then you will not get any of my money. If you let me duplicate it, then I will pay for it and you'll get money. So yes, allowing customers to duplicate stuff can get the publishers more money.
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.
Of course, this is probably deliberate. By treating copies as being as valuable as the original, the record labels (for example) get to claim that what they do (make copies) has more value than what their signed artists do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
And why should "artists" be given preferential treatment compared to "inventors"?? Patents have a term of 20 years. period. Not after death and not extendable. Why should "artists" enjoy revenue two and half times as long?
I'll tell you why. Because the world is run by looters. Patents cover things like machines, manufacturing processes and drugs. Everybody acknowledges that without these things people get sick or quality of basic life is diminished. So the looters use their majority to vote that in a short period of time they can take any practical invention they want for free.
Just take the time to look at how much better copyright protects the creators profit compared to the tons of loopholes present that can invalidate a patent.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
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.)
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
Sure, go ahead and try to argue that possesion does not mean the ability to exclude.