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."
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
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?
> 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
That's because in RIAA Amerika, DVD rips YOU!
What amazes me is the absolute whining about the "need to extend copyright beyond 50 years because people are living longer, and a writer con't be able to make (even more) money in their old age off something they created when they were young." Extended copyright discourages innovation by encouraging people to "rest on their laurels". 50 years is too much. 20 years should be more than enough.
If I bought a book, I could lend that book to my friends as much as I wanted to. I could take the pages, rip them out of the binding and scrapbook them. If I did it in such a way that the book's pages were merely decoration, I could even reproduce that scrapbook for non-profit use. I could scan that book into a computer and read it to my heart's content.
If for some reason the book had a lock on it, then I could break that lock to read it. If the company uses a special kind of binding that's supposed to allow me to read the book, but not take the pages out of it, I could circumvent that binding all I want. I could sell the book to somebody else for whatever price I wanted to. If a page of the book started fading or was scratched, I could photocopy the page so I'd have a backup.
Just because it's in a digital format doesn't nullify my rights to my copy of the work.
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.
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!!!
Maybe in your country, but in the US you're dead wrong. The US Constitution says "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
If you rent a home, you have exclusive right to that home but you don't own it. If the founding fathers meant that one could own content, it would have read "granting ownership" instead of "securing for limited times the exclusive right".
I asked in another thread why, in this light, a law school had "intellectial property" in its name and Ray Beckerman (AKA "NewYorkCountyLawyer") responded (and I'm paraphrasing here) that it was just a name, not descriptive.
The efforlessness of reproduction does not nullify the ownership of content, but the US Constitution does.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Fast-forward to today, where nearly any media can be created with low-cost (or free) tools and also distributed freely, and the argument about needing to recoup costs to distribute no longer has any meaning.
The point here is that copyright was not meant to reward having a good idea; it was meant to reward DISTRIBUTING that idea. (Similarly, patents are meant to reward PUBLICATION of ideas for others to learn from; that is, to facilitate new ideas building on old ones by making the details of the old ones explicitly public.)