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US Court Gives 15 Months' Jail, $415,900 Fine For Game Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "A Florida man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay US$415,900 in restitution for selling video game systems that were preloaded with more than 75 pirated copies of games." If that fine sounds a bit steep, note that his profits on the devices "exceeded $390,000."
It obviously wasn't for "backup purposes only or home brewing. I say serves him right. Gives everyone else a bad name.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
"Conjugal visits? Mmmm. Not that I know of. Y'know, minimum-security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right. W-Why do you ask, anyway?"
OK, so this looks like what almost everybody can agree is a proper application of copyright law -- although I'd actually be willing to argue that he got off light with this sentence. Normally, I'd expect the restitution to be a multiple of the profits. ( granted, IANAL ).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Only 15 months - He got off lightly
There is a massive difference between pirating something and selling someone else's copyrighted work. The minute you turn piracy into a for-profit operation is when criminal copyright infringement makes sense.
Okay, one of you people that claim piracy is always okay, riddle me this. If this person profited by selling a piece of software that took money, time, and labor to make, how did he not deny someone the money they should have made? And don't pretend that the people who bought these systems thought the games were so cool they had to go out and buy a copy.
This is not giving a copy to your friend, this is a direct theft of value from the software writers. Call it "copyright violation" or call it "selling someone's work without paying them for it" this was wrong.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Let's see the idiot piracy apologists defend this one.
"Copyright infringement is NOT theft. No one is being deprived of a game...blah blah blah"
or
"It's his right to sell the games! He went through all the work of putting them on the system!"
etc.
Bastards.
This includes all the movie pirates as well. I'm disappointed that the Bush administration has not put all the effort needed to shut down The Pirate Bay, for example.
The steal U.S. innovation and hard work for their own benefit...
This and child pornography are the only down sides of the internet.
I basically agree with you, however this does raise the question of length of copyright terms. If the original 14-year term (IIRC) were in effect, those games would now belong to all of us, and this fellow could sell his consoles without being accused of stealing somebody else's work.
So the discussion about this situation should at least include a debate on whether these games should still be under copyright at all.
Aside from trying to scare the ever living crap out of Joe Public, I can't see why the RIAA and MPAA bother going after the poor idiot who's sharing five songs from the new Brittany Spears album instead of going after the people like this who are actually making a profit violating someone else's copyright. Not only is it easier to track down the people who are doing it for profit, but you don't look like complete dicks when it turns out the anonymous person you tracked down through an IP address turns out to be a handicapped woman or someone who doesn't even own a computer.
I really don't mind the concept of copyright (although I do feel as though the duration should be significantly shortened to something of at most fifteen years.) and don't have a problem of not consuming any copyrighted media that has an asking price too much for my likes. I've never produced anything that I'd consider charging people to consume myself, but like the idea that if I ever did and decided to charge for it, I'd appreciate it if it wasn't spread across the internet or various other channels without my consent.
I don't really blame the casual infringers either. I understand that most of them are young and poor like I once was and usually can't afford the going rate for most works. I'd be fairly hypocritical of me to want them brought to justice when I've done exactly the same thing. I think that most people on slashdot feel the same, but there are a few people who have differing opinions. I think we should all draw the line when someone is actually taking your work and turning a profit through selling it without your permission.
I really wish the **AAs would take this kind of approach and train the killer legal dogs on the assholes that really deserve it instead of some poor college kids. I don't mind them releasing a commercial telling the casual file sharers who are distributing their copyrighted works that they suck, but the hardhanded legal action against these people is ridiculous.
In this case, I'd say the fine is a fair cop - though the jail term is a bit steep... it wasn't a minor copyright infringement - and it certainly wasn't for personal use.
As for the jail term - I'm generally uncomfortable with jailing people for anything but violent crimes (though I acknowledge it might sometimes be necessary in other cases too).
If those NES games had been songs, however, he'd be several million dollars in the hole and jailed for two-digit number of years, not months.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I don't know why you'd imprison him though. I mean, it's a "white collar" crime and there's no threat posed to society by him simply through physical contact.
I'd say enough people are in prison already without adding copyright related criminals into the mix. I agree he should be fined (since his crimes were essentially financial ones) but I don't see the point of prison.
Ahh, the wisdom of Florida's courts. This is probably the most harmless white-collar crime ever, and yet the man gets 15 months in prison. No better way to turn an ordinary citizen into a hardened criminal. If it was jail, it would be a little more understandable, but since he is going to a Florida prison (among the worst in the country), may God have mercy on him. Minimum security prisons (if DOC is nice enough to send him to one) aren't a cake-walk either.
Seriously, fine the man, put him on probation with a suspended sentence before sending him to prison for an utterly victimless crime.
This is what he sold, I think: Wikipedia reference of power player
It also seems (that's what wikipedia says, at least), that this is not the first prison term for selling power player, nor the worst (5 years in 2005).
I (would like to) believe it'll be pretty difficult to find anyone who actually thinks that infringing upon another's copyrighted work for profit is NOT wrong.
The argument from 'pirates' is extremely varied, but it usually involves no profit, in which case, it becomes less black and white. If you 'pirate' something that you wouldn't have purchased anyway and don't share it with anyone, then no one is really hurt. I can actually sympathize with that. BUT, people LOVE free stuff and 99% of the time, that just isn't the case and it is unprovable (arbitrary figure, but I'm sure it is high).
In this case though, we're talking about getting something that should have been paid for for free, intentionally profiting and wittingly depriving potential sales of the involved works. There are a couple of levels of wrong here.
One could argue though, that if none of his customers had planned to purchase the original work, then not much harm was done. But that's unrealistic and impossible to *prove*... Not to mention that profiting on another's work without compensation is pretty scummy in itself. But it is worth looking at that point of view in his defense... I guess.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I think even the most "software should be free" person out there would agree that this is proper if all of the reported facts are accurate.
But then again, I don't think it's particularly mysterious as to what the general consensus here is on the subject -- individual, not-for-profit sharing is okay. Making money from it is not. It is the very definition of "software piracy."
The article seems a little light on detail.
If they're recent games I reckon fair enough, if they're super old (like NES or even SNES) games then he's adding value by packaging them and I don't think those games should still be covered by copyright. I know they are, this is just my opinion speaking
I'm sure JT is happily dancing somewhere in Florida as well, just on his twisted principles.
Microsoft was fined $20mil in coupons that further entrenched their monopoly for a crime that made and continues to make them hundreds of billions of dollars.
I guess his profits were 390,900?
...it sounds like a neat little device. Come to think of it, I may have seen a few of these things in malls and flea markets or something similar not long ago. I believe one version of such a device offered a bunch of really old games like Atari 2600 games, and there have been others.
This man did not make these devices. He did not load the software onto the devices -- they shipped to him that way. He sold devices he imported. While for many people born and raised in the US, it would seem very obvious that such devices would be of dubious legality, to this guy it's hard to know whether or not he knew it was wrong to begin with. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" -- okay... especially if you're the President of the United States violating the nation's Constitution. But seriously, this guy just bought and sold. He may not have had a full understanding of what he was selling and that it wasn't legal in the U.S. (It this device legal in other countries? That would be interesting to know!) Supposing this guy had no knowledge that these devices were actually illegal in the U.S., and had no prior offenses, don't you think it would be more fair to simply have the profits seized?
There is a massive difference between pirating something and selling someone else's copyrighted work.
Realize you're saying "piracy" is preferable to "racketeering". You're glorifying the term pirate, when the closest positive metaphor is really Robin (Robbing) Hood. We're splitting the line thinly between stealing-for-no-personal-loss and profiting-by-stealing, which is basically a racket.
You might think that's a massive difference in your ethical universe so that you can sleep at night (and for the record, I do as well), but I don't believe that real lawmakers see it that way, never mind the creators.
I'm reminded of Anime fan-subs. "Fan-for-fan copy." If you bought it, you got cheated, and so did the creators, yadda yadda. Nonetheless, it's the fan-sub itself that's setting the wheels in motion, not the creator's lack of action by not immediately creating a subtitled copy. Those same wheels build demand and create incentive for the creator to meet the demand. The correlation with games is the same... region lockouts, ROM translations, etc.
The minute you turn piracy into a for-profit operation is when criminal copyright infringement makes sense.
Buh? I'm assuming you mean "enforcement" not infringement. Ask any real pirate/kidnapper and I'm sure they'll admit their activities are for profit.
Similar to how "hacker" has an unpleasant double entendre, I really want a word to use other than pirate.
Besides, we all know ninjas are cooler. Nobody ever accuses ninja of these things.
seriously aren't your jails over flowing with enough non violent criminals. 390,000 amounts to pocket change for the game industry, so much so i'd argue it's petty cash. it should be enough that he has this huge debt to pay, top it off with 15 months community service every weekend (cleaning the freeway verge or some shit)
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It would nearly be no effective punishment. Now that would be the crime for me :) I mean it would be like you could rob a bank and the worst that happened if you got caught was you had to give the money back, hehe.
I think the sentence is fair, the financial reward of the crime was removed and the guy deserves some time. I mean this is above and beyond lending your friend a copy of your stuff for "off site backup". He was out to make a profit and doing pirating in large scale.
No, it doesn't seem steep. Rather, it seems like a slap on the wrist. Piracy for profit isn't even comparable to what the rest of us do.
All rites reversed 2010
3 rapists are paroled due to overcrowding.
His systems had game on them like Donkey Kong Jr. Math - Released 1983.
It seems doubtful to me that Nintendo would have sold any copies of that game and others if he were not selling them packaged with his system.
14+ years? Much of the preloaded stuff he's (re)selling is well over a 24 years, and is easily older than I am. After 18 years my parents lost a lot of the legal control they had over me. Imagine if those laws were treated as copyright is... *shudders*
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
They are always right on slashdot, even when - no, especially when, they are wrong.
The cost of old product selling (at any price) has its potential in the lost sales of new product (at any price).
Many people don't recognize opportunity cost in the whole "piracy argument" when it comes to actually buying pirated goods, since that money could have gone towards anyone (those pirated from or otherwise) that is legit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Obviously, it is to terrify Mom's/Dad's/Grandma's/Grandpa's/Un-Techies. I suspect their campaigns have made millions think twice about downloading music and movies.
Rough up 100 people, make some money to pay for your lawyers--at least partially--and frighten thousands to millions into not downloading. Or, at least cause people to not sit 24x7 saturating their bandwidth archiving all music that has been made.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Good point and I do agree with it overall. However, to assume that not a single customer would have purchased the original works - even if it does fall within the spirit of the law - is equally unlikely. Well, its very much an improbability for any recent game system at least. But you know, this case deals with the Power Player... So yeah, you are probably right. :D
And again, we're dealing with old games, none of which (I'm assuming) are in production or even for sale anymore. So did this guy REALLY cut into the profits of the copyright holder(s)? Probably not. His crime was really using another's work as the cornerstone for his own product. I wonder if that's how the case was looked at, or if it was viewed as though he had deprived the copyright holder of sales also?
Really though, I think the only way to be fair about this is to ask the customers whether or not they would have purchased any of the 75 titles and which ones. Heck, some of them may have even owned them... We're talking about Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, etc.. I guess the copyright holder could pass the time/cost of collecting that information to the defendant in the final settlement. That seems like a relatively fair way of doing things, although pretty tedious.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
The point the other posters are making is that under the original US copyright law written by the Framers, 14 year old computer games abandoned by the authors would be in the public domain just like Shakespeare's plays, and that the Framers got it right in keep the length of copyright relatively short. The game authors got their recompense through 14 years of government-enforced monopoly, and that's enough.
and his name sounds Muslim. I wonder what they threatened him with, to get him to plead.
In some cases, I think a 14 year term can be a bit short. For artworks, copyright can be held for 70 years (at least in Scandinavia, where I'm from). It makes sense because artists don't get a payroll. Some artists only produce a few "hits" in their lifetime. If those few hits become public domain while the author/artist still try to make a living, it ruins the "business model" of that profession. So, if computer games can be regarded as art, it should still be about 40 years until the first ones enter the public domain under the Scandinavian model.
These games are way too old and should be in Public Domain. I hope Disney gets similar treatment for stealing/ripping off of the Brothers Grimm and Kimba: the White Lion.
If an artist only produce a few "hits" in their lifetime, then they must have another job to pay the bill. If copyrights are here for the one-hitters, then something is wrong. Copyright is here to help creator to live from their arts not to go to in an early retirement after a few hits. If for example a singer can live from compilation of his old songs without creating new ones, then copyright doesn not promote creation and by it's own definition is not working.
Actually, 14 years is far too long. When that number was originally agreed upon, things took a lot more time. It would take years to negotiate book releases in foreign countries, for word of mouth to travel, etc. Given the increased speed of such things today, there's no need for any such lengths. Five years tops. Quite frankly, if you aren't capable of making your investment back in 5 years, then you never will.
As for artists who only produce a few hits in their lifetime- thats their problem. The point of copyright is to encourage *more* works, not to keep existing ones under lock and key. If they can't continue to produce high quality art, then they don't deserve to profit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Well, then fix copyright, I guess. There's nothing particularly wrong about this case, as far as the law is concerned. If Disney gets copyright extension after copyright extension, just so it can keep some old films hidden for PR reasons, then I guess Nintendo gets the same rules.
I mean, if we all decided (you're a democracy, right? If not, fix _that_ first) that we're ok with people making money for 50 year old works, then it seems to me it's only fair that Nintendo gets to make money with stuff that can't be older than 25 years. (The NES launched in 1983, so games for it can't be older.) What's sauce for the goose, and all that.
Honestly, the Disney case rubs me the wrong way a lot more than this. There it's used to effectively take some works out of the culture pool, which is the exact opposite of what copyright was supposed to _do_. It was supposed to offer an (indirect) monetary incentive to encourage people to publish their works, _not_ to be a way to make already published work disappear.
Nintendo, by contrast, seems to actually use copyright as it was intended. AFAIK a lot of those games are available emulated for some of their other consoles. That copyright extension effectively encouraged them to put some work into keeping some of those games available for more people. That's what copyright was supposed to _do_.
And before you go, "OMG, but you could just download an emulator from somewhere else"... well, that may be true for the NES and SNES, but look at how it takes longer and longer to emulate newer consoles. We've already had the PS3 for a while, and emulating the PS2 is still iffy. It's one thing to emulate an 8 bit CPU with just about enough instructions to count them on your fingers, and a graphics chip which barely scans the RAM as it is, and it's getting to be quite another to emulate the newer ones. For the graphics chips we don't even know the details of the architecture and the opcodes. At any rate, it's getting to be more and more to emulate them, and it's taking longer and longer. We may well soon get to appreciate it, if the vendor writes an emulator himself.
But, at any rate, it's what copyright was supposed to do.
Duly noted, they make more money in the process. Well, that's how copyright was supposed to work.
I'd rather fix the Disney loophole first.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anybody else see an imbalance here? He made $390,000 but he's getting about the same penalty as some people who downloaded a dozen songs on P2P.
Justice? Not here...
No sig today...
"If those few hits become public domain while the author/artist still try to make a living, it ruins the "business model" of that profession."
... Pardon, they're part british ... royally fucked.
... then you shouldn't get any more money because you suck.
... you wouldn't want to give that up, would you? Neither would they, but since they are not doing anything or never did anything to begin with they don't deserve to be paid for whatever their ancestor was making. That's just plain ridiculous shit that got our societies into the place we are right now. Wealthy assholes inheriting their wealthy assholeness to their kids, which in turn insist they have the right to earn money with doing nothing while everyone else is struggling to come up with the money for their lifestyle.
Sorry but that's some bullshit argument.
Look at the artists that DO in fact still perform after more than 20 years (which aren't that many) and look at how they make their cash. Take The Rolling Stones for example. They wrote a great deal of songs but only a few of them were actual "hits". If their music became public domain, like say, every kid that picks up a guitar learns how to play one or two of them, their business model should be fucked.
But instead their popularity is unbroken and people pay hundreds of dollars for concert tickets to see them live. I bet the "Running Noses" cover band doesn't make millions of dollars just because they now could legally perform any old song.
You've been braindwashed by the shit definition of what performance and "business" means for the music industry. All these guys care about is to acquire rights to something, lock it away in a drawer and let it collect money for them. That's about the whole "business model" of the industry.
Meanwhile, some people have realized that music is intrinsically connected with the person playing it, people want to see Mick fucking Jagger sing on stage in "The Mummy 4" and not to some stupid kid that knows how to play Jumpin Jack flash half way through.
If you are actually the composer of a piece of music then I would assume that you are a talented musician and that you should be able to defend your work artistically against copiers. If you are not that talented and can't keep making better music than people trying to copy your stuff
End of story, no musician needs to collect royalties for a song they wrote 70 years ago. Usually they are dead by then. Copyright lawyers and relatives on the other hand do want copyright terms to be as long as possible, of course. If you sat in one place, never doing anything but you had that slip of paper in the drawer that guaranteed you money
Bullshit I tell you, Bullshit I say. Wake up.
Good day, fine sir.
I'm pretty sure that nobody from Urban Outfitters went to jail or prison for selling these same toys at Christmas time a few years back.
Master C@rd:
* 70+ pirated video games = $60
* Lawry on retainER = $5,000
* Good criminal defense attorney = $600+ an hour
* Your freedom = PRICELESS!
____
--magus
"Then, 12 years later someone says, "Oh, sorry! Your rights to that device are up! Ours now bitch!" and hauls it away."
Physical property != to IP. Going by your analogy, that person would have had 12 years to market the product and find a place in the market for it, build units, sell them, etc. Nobody would come in and seize their current inventory.
Also as the original inventor he would retain any attached trademarks, could market new versions with improvements (instead of laying on his/her laurels for 12 years) and would be the best equipped to set up/ offer support for that product.
Same thing with the Beatles (say the copyright *had* expired) they could release *authorized* anthologies (with value added material to set their product apart from the competition). Collectors would dig this up, and heck, people would pick up the "official" version of something vs the brand x item if the price is close enough (see grocery stores for example - people still buy Kellogs brand corn flakes, Coke brand cola, Advil brand Ibuprofen, hell even Bayer brand aspirin!).
So lets say the copyright of these Nintendo games were expired? Then Nintendo could just continue selling older games for the Wii and people would pay for the convenience (granted Nintendo would be more pressured to add value by either: including a large anthology of games, delivering a higher quality product than the competition, charge a decent price (that isn't $5 per 25 year old game...), or a combination of the above.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Copyright is here to help creator to live from their arts not to go to in an early retirement after a few hits.
How, exactly, did you come up with that idea?
What if 10% of the people on the planet purchase a "unit" annually for the next hundred years? If you want to tie it to the lifetime of the artist, fine. But where do you get off deciding how much people are entitled to make from their work?
when a fine is meted out on the grounds of restitution, does the state keep the money or is the amount disbursed to the copyright owners?
How big is the hit?
Some things are worth a lot of money. I don't think any professional athlete is worth $20 million or more, but the market disagrees. If they work for five years at $5 million a year, they never need to work again if they manage their money well. Corporate executives, raking in $1-25 million each year in salary and bonuses could easily retire after a few years. Why should an artist, who spends two years crafting a sculpture from a $200,000 block of marble, or one who spends that time writing, composing, and recording an album, not be entitled to make a few million dollars from that endeavour, if that's the value the market places on it?
Their contribution can't be less valuable than the athlete or the executive.
So don't try to say that it's copyright that allows people to strike it rich and milk it forever--it's the market, and it would exist without copyright. Entertainment is big business. We build $300 million stadiums, finance dozens of $100 million movies, and spend billions on the people who make it all work. Just because you or I are not in a position to make millions in a couple years does not mean that no one should be allowed to, or that a system that preserves anyone's right to do so is somehow flawed.
If there's a flaw, it's the value that the market places on the products, irrespective of copyright. If the album were only worth $500,000, then the royalties wouldn't make anyone rich.
In Norway, the industrial designer Peter Opsvik designed a chair in 1972, http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_14046_TrippTrapp_anim&ver=6 that legally has been defined as an artwork. He receives annual royalty for this successful product, and as a consequence he has been able to establish a design workshop that does both R&D of "commercial" furniture and more experimental designs with an unknown commercial application.
Point is, Opsvik is the only Norwegian designer that has been able to invest in R&D, and consequentially the only designer that has been able to create groundbreaking new seating products, such as the Capisco http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_10997_Capisco_anim&ver=6 and the Balans http://www.opsvik.no/index.asp?page=works_11024_balans_Variable_anim&ver=6
So for this region and profession, the copyright was indeed an absolute necessity to create a sustainable environment for R&D.
[1] And work-for-hire artists benefit from shorter copyrights, since their publishers can only gain exclusivity for a short period giving them an incentive to keep paying for new works.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They seem to have given up, more or less, on bad mouthing private copyright ignorers for now and are trying to direct discussion with self-serving nonsense about commercial copyright ignorers where they think they have have a chance of controlling opinion.
In this case selling hardware with games on them that should be public domain but because of bought law (by distributers, not creators), aren't.
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Where do you get off saying that something that doesn't physically exist belongs to someone else?
The whole concept of copyright is arbitrary. It was arbitrarily decided upon that, to offset the costs of creation, a short term monopoly would be provided on duplication of said creation so that the creator could attempt to recoup the costs of creation, if not make a profit.
However, without this creative work entering the public domain, no one else gets to use it in any way other than as a consumer. Maybe you don't think this is a bad thing, but there are those who disagree with that sort of stance vehemently.
COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
copyright excuse is that it must promote the society advancement by encouraging good artist to produce more good works.
if an artist could not make enough good work paid enough to sustain himself it's unfortunate, maybe he is not good enough, not famous enough, the industry is not kind enough on him, or simply he is really not so much able to significantly improve humanity culture.
SO there are 2 possibilities:
- you make the industry pay him more (attention, the industry pay more the artist NOT the user pay more the industry)
- he simply is not good enough to sustain itself with his art so he must work like everyone else (at least part time) and make what it could during spare time.
it's unfortunate that maybe some good art piece could be missed, but the really good and driven artist had always worked even when starved and broke, if they were appreciated they somehow find a way to be paid, if they are not appreciated the future generation still has some of their pieces.
if a current artist that produce a single great hit is not paid enough to survive till his next hit (or is not really good enough to produce a next hit) there is no way that the society must pay him a lifetime pension!!!
REMEMBER: COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
So let me get this straight. The Rolling Stones write and record "Start Me up" prior to 1975. They release it three times, twice in collections, and finally in 1981. It is their misfortune that it will be in demand by Microsoft for their Windows 95 marketing campaign? What... because they didn't have the "foresight" to hold of on releasing it so less than 14 years would pass? THis song is still in demand by people. It is considered a signature piece representative of Keith Richards. It is still used to open shows. You might even say it is Quintessential Rolling Stones.
According to you, the Rolling Stones should be screwed blued and tattooed, because a company large enough to put the most recognizable portion of that song into every home three times a day (or included with the damn OS) didn't actually have a demand for the song until after you think the copyright should have run out.
No.
The Rolling Stones created it. They deserve to get paid for it. It was an investment of time and effort. Everyone deserves to get paid for their investments. Sorry, but I don't hold that after a short limit of time, your investment becomes worth nothing. I'm not talking about taking cheese and sticking it in the fridge and calling it an investment. That song is like money in the bank and should always be treated as such for the creators' (not the creators' estates). You put money in the bank, and after 20 years, it doesn't become public money. Maybe it should become public money after the investor dies, to follow the old adage "You can't take it with you".
But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular, I won't have to pay a dime for it, AND the artists who made it is still alive to see me make millions off their work." According to you, this is exactly what should have happened.
I can tell you've never worked hard at anything in your life. I can tell you've never created anything with the fruit of your own imagination. And I can tell you'd lie to try to tell me otherwise.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Wow, you seem to know a LOT about how artists should lead their lives! I'm sure you are one, huh?
>REMEMBER: COPYRIGHT MUST BE TO STIMULATE GOOD NEW WORK, NOT TO ENDLESSLY CELEBRATE PAST ONE.
Well BZZT, wrong, it's to provide at least ONE fighting chance for the artist who doesn't want FREELOADERS to MAKE A PROFIT OFF THEIR FUCKING BACK.
That dude was selling thousands of roms with the systems and got burned. He's not an innocent 13-year-old kid who downloaded five britney spears songs on Kazaa. He was making money from various products he cobbled together, but never participated in their design. By what right does he get to make a living with this, and not the thousands of games' creator? "Oh, it's an old game" just doesn't cut it. "It's just a copy and nothing was lost" is wrong in this case.
Don't get me wrong, I pirate shit, and get my own paintings pirated, it's life, try before you buy, and so on. But I don't earn a living by selling pirated shit.
WTF?
You are aware that in many cases the person PLAYING the song is not the person who COMPOSED the song, right?
What you are advocating is copyright to act as social security.
I would argue that doing so is placing an undue cost to society (in the loss of public domain).
It would make more sense, and be far less expensive to let works enter the public domain, and provide social security for artists who make a few hits. This can be a special social security pool that allows basic needs to be met for people who have contributed to the arts, while they can continue to supplement that with less popular art. A fair way to decide who is eligible is a problem though. Perhaps if a certain amount is made through art you become eligible, and if you make over a certain amount you are not anymore (different thresholds for year/lifetime).
Of course the added burden of keeping track of that leads to a lot of waste to society, which may in the end outweigh the benefit of free flowing art.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You ever got actually paid for exhibiting a sculpture in a gallery? I mean, unless you're Rodin, us not-yet-eternally-renowned slobs usually have to BEG galleries for the chance to expose our shit - and often, you have to PAY a monthly fee to get inside, and hope you'll reap customers from the increased exposition.
If the gallery owner is VERY nice, and YOU have talent by the buttload, he/she'll take your shit on consignment - only gives you money once he/she's made some.
Would YOU pay to see a sculpture exhibition? Artwork from a still-alive or non-master? Didn't think so. So forget about that magical fairy money, as well.
Would YOU pay to see a sculpture exhibition? Artwork from a still-alive or non-master?
I have in the past, but around here it is more common for this kind of thing to be sponsored either by a government funding body or a private individual or company.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I mean, I do agree with you, there should be some limits, or at least companies should have to update products in order to maintain control over them. Updating things is good, that's nice to incentivise.
On the other hand, in a case like this, the properties are clearly still valuable, or he wouldn't be making lots of money from selling them. It's clearly unfair to profit from selling games you made no investment in, while denying any return to the actual creators. It would be morally fine, in my book, if outdated, abandoned games were sold for cut-price and a share of profits sent back to the owner. See 'compulsory licensing'.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
Chatterton, you ought to get something for your smart comment. Unfortunately, I'm far away from wherever you are, or I'd provide the reacharound.
You are welcome on my lawn.
which is filled with conservatives from prior decades, and hardliners, and run accordingly ? well, thats no surprise. fraud entire nation in white house and get pardoned by president, but do a little piracy and get 400 k fine and 15 months prison time. great justice understanding these conservatives have.
Read radical news here
If the industrial plant I design continues to run for 100 years, I don't get a 100-year stipend from the company. Why should anyone else get an eternal pension for a one-off work?
It's been a long time.
You forget that the music industry is nothing more than a giant, steaming pile of shit. Let's assume for a second that most of the people who perform songs are actually the ones who composed them. People want to see Mick fucking Jagger play/sing/whateverhedoes "his" songs, yes, but, more importantly, Mick fucking Jagger wants to see Mick fucking Jagger doing that.
A long time ago, when music was actually good and thought-provoking, nothing brought a composer more joy than to hear other people performing his/her works, adding their own subtleties and nuances to the interpretation of the pieces. Copyrighting with respect to music, I'm assuming, was initially supposed to help protect that intangible thing we call "creation." Now copyrighting seems to be promoting a ruthless selfishness in the music industry by discouraging even the performance of another person's works.
Obviously, this is not a cut-and-dried issue, and you'll find various exceptions to musicians' views on copyrighting, but I seem to find that performances of others' works (not so much in the performing arts, but more in the world of "bands" who play "concerts" with "tickets" involved) is viewed as some sort of infringement of copyright.
I find it hilarious, personally, because 99% of songs written in the past 40+ years are so mind-numbingly shallow -- both musically and emotionally -- that they're not worth all the trouble musicians go through to make sure that their name is definitely associated with those songs.
In the words of Ron Paul, you need to shut your whore mouth and follow the constitution.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: "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"
It's been a long time.
*should* be prosecuted. That is where i draw the line personally.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So glad I got 2 of these before the Revenuers caught on. NES on a chip has been a boon for the homebrew handheld console crowd.
So? You're free to ignore them and choose alternate sources of entertainment.
If everyone followed this logic then nothing would ever change. What about "If you don't like your government then you're free to choose another country to live in"? And "If you don't like priests molesting children you're free to convert to Islam"? Moreover this is not a debate about giving people free entertainment but amending laws which go counter to their purpose.
And copyright lawyers have exactly what interest in the length of the copyright?
I don't know either but most of them are in favor of long terms, so there must be a reason.
If you don't like it, don't buy it
GP is not in favor of abolishing copyrights but shortening the term. The argument is not about stuff that is actively marketed and available. It is about obscure stuff that you can't easily buy and "artists" making 3-4 hit songs and then sitting on them indefinitely without further activity.
It's up to them how they want to make their money.
It's not. They can make money on vintage stuff only because WE (the society) are letting them by instituting copyright laws.
Copyright was never intended to be anything less than the life of the author
First, citation needed. Second, "Life of the author" is a shitty measure because:
1. It discriminates against people who create late in their life.
2. It makes determining whether a given work is copyrighted difficult if the author is obscure. You need to know his/her death date, and that is an information that is not supplied with the work itself, while the year of creation / publication usually is.
3. What happens if an organization holds the copyright? Does it ever expire? (I don't know here but probably some aspects of cipyright are non-transferable)
4. What about works by multiple authors?
survivorship is an important issue in Western society, so the term has extended to ensure preservation of benefit.
I don't know what you mean. What preservation of benefit? Why we should preserve the benefit of authors' descendants at the expense of society when the authors are long dead? What did the descendants do to deserve special rights to protect them?
For 95% of the entitled
The discussion is not about the 95% of people but the 5% elite of "content producers" that long copyright creates.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Athletes and corporate executives are employees, so there are significant differences between their large salaries and copyright, the most important being that they need to continue showing up to work in order to get paid. It's no different than your boss making more than you, except on a different scale.
Even the sculpture example is different, since there is only one, and presumably you are giving money directly to the person responsible for the creativity, rather than to a corporation.
Best example: The birthday song my parents sung me on my 1st birthday will be copyrighted until after I'm dead. How is that just?
I may have a better example: Thanks to copyright and royalties, I have to suffer hearing shitty non-infringing happy birthday jingles at restaurants till death!
slashdotConsensusBAD: Pirate profits when people buy pirated games
slashdotConsensusBAD: Software company profits when people buy their stupid game which has stupid DRM that doesn't stop thieves anyway and is not bug free.
slashdotConsensusOK: No one profits when people download pirated games.
around $10,000. Unfortunately for him the systems had 40x drives in them.
Your argument is bogus. The Rolling Stones made a widely known song, and somebody wants to use it after it goes public domain. What problem do you have with this? It's not like the only money they can get from this song is when somebody decides to make an ad campaign.
But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular
There are two problems with your reasoning. First, the point of an ad campaign is not to benefit the creators of artwork for this campaoign but to increase profit of the advertiser. Second, what about Carl Orff and O Fortuna? By your logic his descendants should be paid every time somebody uses his piece in dishwasher commercials, because it's not his fault that he created his music before the age of large advertising campaigns, or even BEFORE COPYRIGHT! (O horror!) Ditto for all the classical composers. Copyright advocates try to fool people into thinking that copyright is some inalienable natural right that no civilized person can contest, whereas in fact this an artificial legal construct.
I can tell you've never worked hard at anything in your life.
Classic ad hominem from your camp. You people keep going emotional, and it's tiresome already.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
He didn't steal anything. It was just a bunch of bits on plastic, plastic he very well paid for !! Where is the crime ?? So he made lots of money, what does that matter ?? It's ONLY INFRINGEMENT !! Has the world gone crazy over some arrangement of magnetic and optical bits ?? I ask you, when will it end ?? Stop the INSANTITY !!
Pssst, need a cable hook up cheap?
Ok, let me get this straight. I design an industrial plant in 2000, and it gets sold for 300 million in 2010, and I don't get to see a dime? It's just not fair! I'm entitled to my slice of the pie for my creative work! I should get at least a few grand every time my plant changes hands!
It's been a long time.
Oh awesome, I been baited!
Wow, you're soooo great, you know that arcane "copy and paste" technique that allows you to dodge any discussion or relevant fact.
And you know, bolding a part of the sentence when the other one says exactly what it TRULY is for just makes you look like an even bigger idiot.
Do you even *understand* that sentence you crtl+v'ed? In short it means we who CAN and DO (not sit in our mom's basement) will keep making art, new and old, IF we have the right to defend our previous works from fucking thieving sharks.
Last, "follow the constitution"? I'm an artist, and I'm european, fuck your "constitution". I mean, what's left of it since you "elected" King George.
K, now to add a few typos so you can exclusively focus on those instead of the facts.
>But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that >formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular, I won't have to pay a dime for it, AND >the artists who made it is still alive to see me make millions off their work." According to you, this is exactly what should have happened.
So a company like Disney shouldn't have been able to say: "Jackpot, we'll use this story by Hans Christian Anderson, that one by Alexandre Dumas [etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum] to base a movie on since it's still popular and there is no more copyright on it" ?
Yet they could, and then they gained copyright on their derivative work. Now the company that has made the MOST MONEY OF ANYBODY EVER out of using public domain works is fighting like cats in a sack to keep THEIR works from ever becoming public domain in turn.
Basically, it's hipocrisy, the very same companies that MADE a fortune out of what went into the public domain before, is now using those fortunes to ensure they never contribute to it themselves. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain as large as possible - anything else has nothing to do with the conversation.
Should artists earn for years or just once off ? It doesn't matter one IOTA to the debate of what copyright should be. What matter is WHAT WILL MAKE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN THE BIGGEST. A copyrighted work benifits one person or company only, a public domain work benifits all of society now and for eternity. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain bigger.
If lifetime royalties will make it bigger over-all, then life-time royalties it is, if not, then it's once-off.
I would say the best balance may be something like partial public domain after 5 years (where only commercial uses/copying remain restricted so normal folk aren't affected) and complete public domain release after 10 for MOST types of works. I also agree with Richard Stallman that copyright should classify works and copyright terms should vary. Software should have no copyright at all, opinion pieces and editorials should have eternal copyright (since derivative works and other public domain uses make no SENSE there and can in fact REDUCE the value of the piece to society).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Because, sorry pal, there's tons of other people who can do the exact same thing. The thing with copyright is that it *supposedly* allows an artist to receive royalties for a unique, and, let's face it, nebulous object. There's a few reasons why you don't get a stipend.
1) Your creation is not unique (anyone could have made it)
2) Your creation is *not* art or a useful science, at least not in the strictest sense of the word 'art'.
3) You're a whiny bitch, and no one likes whiny bitches. Additionally, if getting a stipend is that important, negotiate it in your contract.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Where do you get off saying that something that doesn't physically exist belongs to someone else?
Because of the effort taken to produce it.
As for such an idea being arbitrary, you could make the same arguments for property ownership in general.
Lastly, I assume you're refering to things like sampling songs. Personally, I don't think that practice should constitute a violation of copyright. Nor do I think that fair use should be limited.
My main beef with the OP isn't so much a pro highly restrictive copyright stance as it is a rejection of the bullshit quasi-populist idea content creators aren't entitled to continually derive and income from a past work. Half the comments on this issue can be summed up as:
"Why should that guy still get paid for work he did once 20 years ago?"
I completely reject that view as nothing more than petty jealousy.
Yes. Europeans don't have constitutions. All they have are bitter losers without day jobs or reading comprehension.
It's been a long time.
I don't accept that copyright is an incentive mechanism to produce "good" art.
You also hit my exact problem with the OP: not the copyright issue itself, but rather this bullshit idea that content creators aren't entitled to payments on a work in perpetuity.
If you want something someone produced, unless they're willing to give it to you, you should have to pay for it.
To be perfectly clear: I'm not talkng about heavy restrictions on fair use or derived works or draconian penalties for violations. I'm not even saying that the right sholud be transferable. If you want to suggest that only the original artist is entitled to receive payment limited to their life span...ok, I'll listen.
The problem is that most of these arguments are just thinly veiled jibes at the fact that someone who produced a popular item once can live easy after that. Just because you think they shoud have to toil for a living doesn't entitle you to their product.
It seems to me that the IP haters always quote this line, but don't seem to grasp the concept. You seem to think that they are saying that the expiration of the right is what promotes progress. It is not. What is promoting progress is allowing people to profit off their discoveries, thereby giving them a motive to advance the science and useful arts. If the copyrights on the games in question had already expired, how is what this guy (or anyone else) is doing with the games advancing anything except his own profit?
A big name online computer parts and electronics gadgets vendor (who shall remain nameless here, but practically every Slashdotter who built their own PC has likely bought stuff from this place) sold me a portable MP3 8GB flash player about a month ago that came preloaded with about 1.5GB worth of songs, they were just hidden in an obscure folder name outside of the regular music files root folder. The songs were there from the factory image load, as the unit was still sealed up in all it's original plastic tamper-alerting wrappings. All I had to do was plug the unit into a usb port of my PC and use Windows file explorer to move the folder tree to underneath the main music root folder and I had hundreds of complete songs ranging from gansta rap crap to Iron Maiden to Kenny G and all genres in between, already organized by artist, album name, and song title.
Did I "be a good little citizen" and immediately delete it all? Fuck no.
Amazing, the captcha I have to type to post this as A/C is "leeches" ;-)
The whole concept of copyright is arbitrary. It was arbitrarily decided upon that, to offset the costs of creation, a short term monopoly would be provided on duplication of said creation so that the creator could attempt to recoup the costs of creation, if not make a profit.
Methinks you need to reflect on the precise meaning of "arbitrary."
If the industrial plant I design continues to run for 100 years, I don't get a 100-year stipend from the company.
It would if you put that in the design contract and they agreed.
Why should anyone else get an eternal pension for a one-off work?
Thank you for putting this is sharp relief. This was my problem with the OP. This all boils down to jealousy. A pseudo-populist idea that since you don't work in a fashion that gets royalties, then no one else should.
That sentiment doesn't even make sense in the context of your example since your talking about a presumably single-use design. Let's turn it around a bit:
You produce a design that is suitable to many plant owners. You make this design widely available. So, you don't think you should get paid by each one who uses it?
Regardless of the subject of my comment, there is a saying:
There's no greater flattery than imitation.
- this can be rephrased like so: There's no greater flattery than copying. Really, it's the same thing. But I guess there is no greater flattery than a payment.
You can't handle the truth.
In my ideal world, we shouldn't even call it "copyright," we should call it "sellright."
This guy should, IMO, get the book thrown at him. He was actively profiting from someone else's work, and keeping it all for himself.
I would like to see copyright law changed to this effect. A p2p network should be left alone...free duplication and distribution of digital works should be considered "fair use." The deliberate sale (or bundling) of such a work is what should be illegal, punishable, and enforced.
I would be more than happy with lengthy "sellright" terms if it means restoring sanity to our treatment of data. As it stands now, we get both the insanity and the ridiculously long terms. It's the worst of both worlds, really.
First, I don't hate IP, but I do hate how our culture is being stolen by lobbyists who are extending copyright to unreasonable terms.
My parents, on my first birthday, sang "Happy birthday" to me. Because of the extensions given to copyright, I won't be able to sing that song publicly on my deathbed, because it'll still be protected. I see this as unreasonable theft of our culture. It's one thing to ensure artists get paid, it's quite another to give them a stipend and monopoly in perpetuity if their work becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist.
I design control loops in a paper mill. If a bag of cement built with my paper builds a highly successful theme park, I'm not entitled to a lifetime stipend. Why should musicians or writers, who will spend no more time or effort on their craft, be entitled to such a stipend?
Back to your question, let me re-frame it for you. If you write a few popular songs and have 130 years of royalties to look forward to, why bother writing anymore songs? The limited term is required to ensure creators have an incentive to continue creating. If giving people a lifetime paycheque ensured they'd be productive artists, then there'd be thousands of incredible artists coming from the welfare system.
It's been a long time.
While this particular law may have been a little more obvious, there are plenty that aren't. In fact, there are so many weird laws out there that even the best judges/lawyers/politicians can't keep track of them. In some cases it helps the prosecutors (if they really want to nail somebody but can't get him on "crime X", find a "crime Y" that fits), and in rare cases it may help the defendant (find a weird technicality that actually lets you off).
However, the only way to have a bad law shot down seems to be to go to court over it, and fight it tooth and nail.
It's not so easy to "simply not break the law" when the law is nonsensical.
These arguments about "public domain" are all fine and good until it's YOUR creation that someone else is profiting from.
Go to the flea market and find someone selling a program you've written and making $100k a year doing it and see how you feel about it then. It doesn't matter if it's a person or a "company", it's wrong to do it without compensating the creator.
Sounds like he wasn't some random guy, he was probably the head of his own business that was making tons of money doing something that is illegal. And probably mostly wrong, regardless of legality.
Tfa said he made $490,000 profit. Then if you look up Power Player, you get a very informative wiki entry that I assume is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Player_Super_Joy_III
The Power Player Super Joy III consoles (also known as Power Games and XA-76-1E) are a line of unauthorized handheld Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom clones manufactured by NRTRADE that are sold in North America, Brazil, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The system resembles a Nintendo 64 controller and attaches to a TV set. NTSC, PAL and SÃCAM versions are available. They all use a custom "NES-on-a-chip" (NOAC) that is an implementation of the NES's hardware (Custom 6502, PPU, PAPU, etc).
Background
The consoles come with 76 built-in games, although marketing frequently claims to have 1,000+ ways of playing them. Most of the included games were originally released for the NES or Famicom, but some have been created by the manufacturer to expand their list of included games. Most of the games have had their title screen graphics removed to save space on the ROM chip, not to mention a company logo removal trick for reduced liability.
After this product gained some popularity, the Power Player 3.5, an improved model with more games, was released.[citation needed] A wireless version of Power Games was also released.[citation needed]
[edit] Legal issues
When Nintendo discovered this product, they began taking strong legal action against importers and sellers of the consoles, and have obtained a temporary injunction against the import and sale of video game systems containing counterfeit versions of Nintendo games.
As of Spring 2005, NrTrade quit selling these products, however they still retain stock by other companies. These are still in production in China by Eittek but not massively distributed. On December 16, 2005, the FBI executed search warrants at two kiosks at the Mall of America and also searched storage facilities rented by Yonathan Cohen, 27, an owner of Perfect Deal LLC of Miami, Florida.[1] The consoles, purchased wholesale at $7 to $9 each, sold for $30 to $70 each.[2] After confiscating 1,800 units of Power Player, each containing 76 copyrighted video-game titles belonging primarily to Nintendo or its licensees, Cohen was charged in Minneapolis, Minnesota in January 2005 with federal criminal infringement of copyright for selling Power Player video games at kiosks at the Mall of America and other malls across the nation.[1]
No, I don't think I should get paid for every single use of my design in perpetuity. That would be retarded.
My name is on thousands of drawings, and many of them ARE re-used quite often. One drawing I did was re-used dozens of times.
Jealousy is a bad word for it. I make way more than 99% of recording artists. The thing is, I don't have an effectively permenant monopoly on a facet of our culture.
The artistic works I do, I tend to release for free. Some of them I could profit from, and that'd be fine, but if some aspect of those works was still popular in 100 years, I wouldn't be ok with my grandkids milking my one-off work.
It's been a long time.
Were they legally imported? Is it the device that's illegal, or just the sale of them? Bags of crack won't make it through the border, hell customs will even search out volumes of pirated DVD's and seize them.
If there were signed off on during importing before the guy sold them, then perhaps he could argue that by passing customs they were given somewhat of a thumbs-up?
It seems to me that losing some merchandise at the border would have been a lot better than getting stuck in jail after selling it.
It's both.
If there aren't any new ideas to feed off of then there's less for future artists to work with.
Just contemplate how the world would be if Kurosawa decided to be an ass.
THIS possibility is why copyrights need to be for "limited times".
The geezer studio musicians that want a meagre pay day 40 years after
they did't their relevant bit of work should step aside and let the
young kids have a chance to work without worry of being litigated out
of existence.
Would be media moguls only think about a world where they are on top
and they are the ones doling out the abuse. They never consider the
far greater liklihood that the boot will infact be on their neck.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Wealthy assholes inheriting their wealthy assholeness
YES!
It's impressive to see someone taking a stance that actually costs them money; to my mind, it gives added weight to your opinion. I'm under the distinct impression that a lot of others aren't in the same position.
It sounds like your creative efforts are a bit closer to domain we're talking about then my own, but let's take a slightly different example: authors.
Should they not be entitled to a cut from each copy sold?
Wow, didn't know you could get consoles with pre-installed games. Nice to know... Thanks Slashdot!
Sure, for a time. Eventually, however, the work should pass into the hands of society.
Think about it this way: Society pays for the police who protect an artists copyright, and for the courts who enforce the copyrights. Society pays to jail people like this who violate copyrights. The artist is allowed a limited monopoly on their work for a period of time, subsidized by all society.
That being the case, it's only just that after a period of protection, society get something back, and that 'something' is access to the work itself. It's simply ceasing to protect the non-natural right to control the reproduction of a work.
My work is instrumentation, automation, and control engineering. Nearly everything I learned in college was once patented. The bourdon tube, the transducer bridge, PID control, I could go on for years. If patents were treated like copyrights, I wouldn't be able to know anything, because despite the fact that all these inventions are long outdated, they'd still be held by companies trying to milk their ancient inventions for every dime. Instead, after a time where the creator had a chance to make a profit, the inventions became the property of society, and now engineers like me can use this massive body of knowlege to solve new problems.
It's been a long time.
End of story, no musician needs to collect royalties for a song they wrote 70 years ago. Usually they are dead by then... Wealthy assholes inheriting their wealthy assholeness to their kids, which in turn insist they have the right to earn money with doing nothing while everyone else is struggling to come up with the money for their lifestyle.
Samuel Clemens wrote at length about extending Copyright laws (and tried to have them extended several times) and the basic argument boils down to this, "everyone wants a better life for themselves and their family, don't they deserve to benefit from the fruits of your labor".
I don't have a problem with your scenario. About the only caveat I would add is that I'm of the opinion that the time period should be, at least extendable to, the lifetime of the creator.
I'd also entertain arguments about severely restricting the time period if the right is transfered or even making the rights non-transferable.
I agree that lately there has been ridiculous IP efforts that will destroy innovation and eliminate consumer rights, but that wasn't my main issue.
'My main beef with the OP isn't so much a pro highly restrictive copyright stance as it is a rejection of the bullshit quasi-populist idea content creators aren't entitled to continually derive and income from a past work.'
You are ignoring the REASON we grant an ARTIFICIAL monopoly to a content creator in the first place. The purpose is not 'give them their fair share'. Copyright exists only to inspire the creation of new content. If someone is not producing new content then society would be better served by not granting them copyright. Jealousy has nothing to do with it.
On the one side we have the copyright holders. We'll call them big evil corporations. Big evil corporations that collectively employee millions of people. Millions of people who are getting paid. Millions of people who are buying food, shelter, etc. Millions of people who can donate to charity. Millions of people paying taxes. Millions of people who can buy stuff that other people make so they can also live. In addition to that, millions of other people have investments in those corporations, directly or indirectly.
On the other hand, we have the anti-copyright crowd, whose basic argument is 'we want free stuff, give it to us, whaaaaa'. What possible benefit to society is there from getting free NES games? What benefit is there from getting free Steamboat Willie movies? Yes, it might be nice to have, but certainly there is no measurable benefit.
As long as someone is willing to pay for something, or there is the potential for someone to pay for it, that thing has value. It does not matter if the thing is 'real' or 'imaginary'. Why should the value that is present in copyrights be artificially eliminated? What if that same logic was applied to other areas? You can go to school and learn a skill, but in 5 years you may no longer use that skill, by law. You may build a house with your own two hands, but in 15 years anyone who wants can move in with you, for free. As of today any currency printed before 2006 has no value. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
'If you want something someone produced, unless they're willing to give it to you, you should have to pay for it. '
I'd almost agree if they produced it in entirety. But since copyright works consist almost entirely of samplings from the public domain I'd say that public has VERY substantial claim to them. Not to mention the fact you carry a mental copy of everything you see and hear whether the person who arranged it likes it or not.
And yet, someone killing someone with a vehicle gets a small fine and no jail time.
This was way over the top.
I agree with you, and have been saying the same thing to people for years.
If there's no profit motive for the copyright infringement in question, it makes no sense to spend taxpayer dollars on a *criminal* investigation of the offense on a federal level. U.S. govt. seemed to understand this just fine until the Clinton presidency, when he signed the changes into law that caused this whole mess.
ALTHOUGH, that being said, I think there's still a case to be made for claiming the selling price of a bundled "hardware / software" product like this meant the software titles weren't being sold at a profit, after all. I don't know what his asking price was? But if I bundle 50, 100 or even 500 "pirated" vintage games on some set-top player box, and sell the whole thing with controllers for, say, $30 - couldn't I reasonably argue the buyers were paying nothing more than a reasonable asking price for the hardware alone? The included game software might have essentially been bundled for free, really.
We seem to recognize this legal situation when it comes to enforcing rules of reselling open-source things like Linux distros.
What would be the justification for making the time period the lifetime of the artist?
Society would be paying to enforce copyrights over the life of the copyright. These can be non-trivial costs. To jail this guy for 15 months, for example, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and taxpayers will pick that up. The cost of the trial, the cost of the police, all these costs are paid for by society. At the end of the copyright, the payoff for society is that the work is placed into the public domain.
It becomes a trade-off, and I don't see the benefit for society. After 20 years, the artist has made a profit or they haven't. Increasing that time period isn't going to induce the artist to create any more works, but society will pay greater and greater costs to enforce copyrights on a larger and larger body of work, most of which isn't even used anymore(How do you buy a copy of steamboat willie? You don't.)
It's been a long time.
Should their great grandkids be entitled to a cut from each copy sold?
As it stands if an author dies before his works become popular then someone who never did a tap of work on the book gets bags of money for nothing.
Why are authors/artists "special"?
If a mathamatician writes an equation which later gets used in designing cars to to make them safer- why does he not get a cheque for each car sold while a musician who writes a piece which later gets encoded on magnetic strips or optical disks and is used to make the environment in the car slightly more pleasant get a pile of money for each copy of the magnetic strip sold?
Both works are creative, both works have value, both works are used in items sold for profit.
What make artists more special than scientists?
My great grandfather helped the a friend who invented reinforced concrete by doing the math for him, why am I not being handed a check for every reinforced concrete building? What makes those math equations less special than "happy birthday"?
Or inventors even? inventors get a chance to make money off their inventions but patents expire much more quickly than copyright, why? why are inventors less special than artists? You seem to think it's right that a singer should be able to live off a single hit his whole life...and his grandkids should be able to do the same.
But why shouldn't the great great great grandkids of the inventor of the mouse trap still be getting money for every mouse trap sold?
It's not about what's fair. It's about what can be done. If you're in college, look around. Many of your classmates are cheating. Some will become doctors or engineers. Folks will die, buildings will collapse. Look at the fucking MOUSE for crying out loud. He's in copyright until the end of the universe! Just like people, some copyrights are more important than others. Remember though, fairness is it's own can of worms. Fairness brings socialism and communism and with them, a whole cast of folks who are better than everyone else because they are the planners who make sure things run smoothly. Don't forget your radical preservationists either. They won't allow you in the woods because in their minds, man is not part of nature. However, they will visit the woods because someone needs to make sure the woods are OK. Someone needs to make sure that there is no "unnatural" fire prevention taking place. They don't even care when the woods burn because they have the power, there are plenty of woods, and only a few of them to enjoy the woods. Then we have the animal lovers. These folks would rather see hoards of starving disease ridden deer than allow game management programs because under management, some of the deer might be, heaven forbid, shot by hunters! Fucking Bambi!
Enough for today...Go eat your tofu and barley breakfast.
How many times do I have to say it?
If you want to talk about restricting, or even eliminating, transferability I'll listen. But that isn't what I'm on about WRT my response to the OP.
As for the other examples you give: what's your point?
I'm all for extending the same rights those folks if that's your point.
My issue is that a lot of these arguments, and it would appear that yours falls into the same category, are really just kvetching about somebody who got rich from a one-hit-wonder.
If this guy were importing and reselling nearly any other product from China, nobody would even care.
Because this ancient Nintendo system came pre-loaded by the Chinese exporter with some games, and they can't get at anyone involved in China, this guy gets screwed over by an even more ancient copyright law.
How is it right that a product isn't sold anymore by the original creator, for years now, and yet if someone dares to try to keep that product alive by selling it on their own (Much like when you find stuff 25 years or older at FLEA MARKETS), they get over a year in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines?
Just because Nintendo didn't realize there was still a market for this product (That they WERE NOT SELLING) doesn't make it right to abuse broken copyright laws to send a guy with no priors to federal POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS prison.
I think if a creator should be allowed to profit from their works for N years, then they should also be penalized for their works for an equal amount of time. So that traffic ticket will be paid yearly by him, until he dies, and then by his family, until they die.
Towards the Singularity.
Justification beyond that I think someone should be paid for their work and that I think IP has value?
I see don't see enforcing copyright as being any more synthetic or arbitrary than not enforcing it.
Nor do I think that society enforces, or should enforce, copyright to derive benefit. It should enforce copyright just as any other property right.
No, copyright is justified by the idea that IP has value and ought to be paid for. What I'm asking is, what justifes the idea that copyright ought to last the entire lifetime of an artist?
Copyright isn't a natural property right. If it was, then it wouldn't exist. If I buy a car from you, or a banana from you, or a shiny rock from you, it's mine. I can do with it what I like. I can crash the car, set the banana on fire, or throw the shiny rock into a grinder, turning it into shiny dust. It's my property, it's my choice what to do with it.
Once I buy a book from you, however, you still have some control over what's done with it. I can't make copies of the book. I can't read the book out loud for profit. I can't do a lot of things. I'm severely limited by copyright law in unnatural, unintuitive ways(Did you know you can't read a book out loud even if you've paid for it? That's performance, and you're not licensed to do so).
All enforcements are done to derive benefit. Anyone who tells you differently hasn't thought things through enough(Why do you pay taxes to pay for police if police don't add any value?). In this case, the constitution clearly says the benefit society is to recieve in return for establishing a system of patents and copyrights is the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
It's been a long time.
Well, if you patented some new technology within that plant and another plant uses your invention, then yes, you should.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
If copyright was non transferable and limited to the lifetime of the author then sure things would be more reasonable but sadly this is not the case.
Yes I wonder why artists get this special treatment since they're the exception, not the norm.
When one group gets paid forever for a single day/weeks/month/year of work and everyone else seems to be getting paid once the question is quite legitimatly "why is this one group so special?"
Why don't you as a norm have to pay a doctor every year you live after you get cancer treatment on the basis that you're still deriving value from their work?
Why isn't the norm for builders to own the "rights" to the work of your house and for you to have to pay royalties to them as long as your live in the house and so derive benefit?
When everyone else is treated one way and one group is given special treatment under the law the question quite rightly is "why is this group different?" rather what "why isn't everyone being treated in this strange way?"
That's patents though, which is another issue. Patents are saner than copyrights because they're so much shorter. I wouldn't be ok with collecting cheques for 130 years for a plant I designed.
Patent laws short turn-around actually spurs innovation by forcing innovators to continue to innovate to keep getting a paycheque.
It's been a long time.
Because, sorry pal, there's tons of other people who can do the exact same thing.
Oh, right! On the other hand, there's very few people who have the talent to be an artist.
Hmm, I think that perhaps those positions are just a bit reversed, don't you? That is, there are probably more artists than people with the ability to design industrial plants.
There's a few reasons why you don't get a stipend.
1) Your creation is not unique (anyone could have made it)
"Anyone"? The GP was talking about designing industrial plants. So, how about *you* design an aluminum smelting facility, hey? Should be really easy. Oh, alternately we could make a wager out of it. Get 100 random people from an industrialized nation (just to bias the sample in your favour). I will bet you that over half could not design an industrial plant. Hell, even give them their pick of plants to design - auto, furniture, tires, wonder bread, etc. I'll bet you that over half the plants wouldn't even make it past a cursory review of the GP.
2) Your creation is *not* art or a useful science, at least not in the strictest sense of the word 'art'.
Ah yes, the obvious. Use the very definition that's being argued incorrect as the basis for truth. The GP is basically posing the question Why isn't "X" creative act covered!!?!. The given answer comes down to - "It doesn't fit into the definition of copyright." Classic, but wrong. Because the crux of the question is asking about the correctness of the definition itself a coherent reply cannot fall back on the definition as an a priori source information to determine correctness.
3) You're a whiny bitch, and no one likes whiny bitches. Additionally, if getting a stipend is that important, negotiate it in your contract.
Well said! Now that really proves your point, don't you think? Can't think of a reasonable argument so go for - "and your momma dresses you funny!" Kudos.
All of those analogies are predicated on the interpretation that the creation of recordings, video games, movies, books, etc is a one-time service instead of a product.
I do not accept that interpretation.
I see those items as products that the creator can offer for sale. The only reason that this is even an issue is because technology has recently developed distribution and reproduction means that make the cost of those operations effectively zero.
To my mind that doesn't reduce the intrinsic value of the product.
The probability of being caught and punished for driving drunk is a LOT higher than illegally copying a game.
Not if his name was Timbaland. He'd be feted by the RIAA instead for raising the profile of games music composers.
We seem to be at an impasse.
Basically, I will continue to assert that IP has value irrespective of its lack of physicality.
My suggestion that copyright be limited to the lifetime of the artist is more of a compromise than a real endorsement.
Technology has created a situation where, in many cases, IP has enormous value; value well beyond any physical containment, distribution, or "viewing" mechanisms. As such, I see no merit to the idea that it's arbirtrary or valueless.
I understand that you see things differently.
This is somewhat off-topic, but since you brought it up:
... go to any of the font collection websites, and you'll find all their fonts are free.
Well, no. The likes of Linotype and Adobe charge significant amounts for their fonts, and the major font collection web sites usually have deals with these big names. You can often buy the fonts cheaper through a reseller than direct, but it's still not free of charge.
These guys are in business, and as anyone who has ever tried it can testify, making a good font is a lot of hard work that a professional font designer usually expects to be paid for. On the other hand, the fonts from these sources are so much better than the cheaposoft offerings that make up the freebie font sites that serious font users are willing to pay for them. There is the occasional rare gem that someone is kind enough to give away for free, but rare is the correct word.
Actually, fonts are an interesting area in terms of IP rights. Some places, including the US, explicitly do not permit reserving certain types of rights in connection with the design of a font, on the basis that there is a risk of impairing communication if that approach is taken to its logical conclusion and that is too high a price to pay just to incentivise creation of new fonts. But copyright normally still applies to a font file itself, so if you want to create a clone of some commercial font you can do it (at least in the US) but you basically have to redo all the hard work from scratch. That seems fair enough, given the immense amount of time and effort by highly skilled people that goes into producing even a single professional grade font.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Sounds to me like a broken window fallacy.
The value (as defined by what people pay) is propped up at gunpoint.
If artificial scarcity was created for water, would it be fair to say people willingly pay 90% of their pay for water? Why is it that the value of art should intrinsically be charged, while other things get charged something much closer to matching their cost?
Copyright is a gift given to artists/corporations by the people as a thank-you for producing the work. The gift amount should be set to such a level that it maximizes artistic output while minimizing price. That will allow for the richest culture while draining the least from society.
Than the anti-copyright crowd can do all those things too.
The society benefit (value - cost) is improved as the cost for artistic works is lowered we all win (as in anyone not an artist/company producing art. This would allow the cost of art to approach the marginal cost of a copy, freeing money for more useful things.
Why is it that art should inherently cost as much as it's value, while everything else approaches marginal cost?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'd say, let's ignore technology for a second. There are ways to violate copyright that don't have anything to do with technology.
For example, I could pick up a guitar and play "happy birthday" at a kids birthday party, and I could be sued. The song is over 100 years old. It's a part of our culture. It's a part of history, but I can't publicly perform it without breaking the law. Odds are I won't be prosecuted, but the song "happy birthday" brings a record company 2 million dollars per year in revenue. I see that as leeching off of society.
I could pick up a copy of "mein kampf". It's an important historical document. The document is 60 years old. It gives a look into the genesis of one of the worst genocides in human history. I can't read it in public. I could be sued for copyright infringement.
More recently, protest songs from the '60s. You can't even buy the CDs, becuase the record companies won't release them. If you are old enough, you could pick up a guitar and play them, trying to show that 40 years ago there was just as much going on as today, but you could be sued for copyright infringement.
I think the biggest problem with calling anything a "compromise" is that it isn't. Disney in particular mined the public domain for their stories, then copyrighted the stories they mined. Diseny didn't create Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They didn't create Sleeping Beauty. They didn't create Aladin and the magic lamp. They didn't create beauty and the beast. They didn't even create the lion king(though they just blatantly plagurized that one). They built upon stories in the public domain, but now they've lobbied and gained effectively perpetual monopolies on the new resulting properties.
A compromise, in my mind, would balance the rights of content creators with the society and culture they borrowed from in order to create their works(and the society that subsidizes their works by paying to enforce unintuitive unnatural copy rights).
Remember, except possibly for Walden, no work is created in a vacuum. It draws from previous works, and from society, and from the experiences of a culture and an individual. Such a "compromise" ignores this, and makes intellectual property simply a rush to own the commons.
It's been a long time.
But actual physical products have different rules.
If you design a widget and patent it as a product, you've got about 20 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product.
If you copyright a picture of a widget, you've got over 130 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product(barring further retroactive extensions).
So I guess, your interpretation would actually scale back copyright to patent time periods. Either that or you extend patents to 130 years and destroy all innovation.
It's been a long time.
I have sometimes suggested that as a means to restore sanity to the copyright market, a copyright could exist for a relatively long time when held by the original creator of a work, but immediately be reduced to a relatively short time the moment it is transferred to any other party. Such a transfer is typically a purely commercial deal, and often with a known quantity so there is little risk involved. This leaves the original creators free to create many works in the expectation that they will have a fair chance to exploit them in an open market, which I think would be an effective incentive to produce many works of good quality. It also means that all the middlemen like book publishers and record labels can't wind up being the dominant force at the expense of both the consumer and the artist, as often happens today.
I think many of the problems with copyright in practice today basically stem from this middleman problem. There are decent ethical and economic arguments in favour of both the consumer and the artist, and while different people will favour different ones (and often produce dubious post facto arguments about the origins and "purpose" of copyright to support their position), I think most people would at least agree that the copyright can be of benefit to both these parties. Middlemen, on the other hand, are of "artistic" value only to the extent that they benefit one of the other groups, and are eminently expendable and readily replaced.
An alternative possibility would be to prohibit transfer of copyright entirely, but provide a legal framework for legally binding exclusive distribution deals with a statutory maximum period that is quite short (I'm thinking months, or maybe one or two years, at most). This way, there would still be a clear mechanism for any middleman to make a return by offering his services to artists, but a middleman who didn't get a work distributed effectively and thus make more money for the artist (and as a side effect, allow more other people to enjoy the work) would risk losing his position, and leave an artist free to seek another distributor. Also, if a work really took off in popularity, this would leave the artist with the power to renegotiate a deal with his distributor, or to seek a better deal elsewhere, rather than (as happens so much today) just making arbitrary profits for a middleman who is just a cash grabber while not benefitting the artist any further. Surely the artist-centric approach is a better incentive to produce works that are likely to fetch a higher price because of their quality or appeal to a wider audience because of their general interest, which again are in the interests of both the artist and the consumer (and the middleman who is actually earning his pay) in this scheme.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
390,000 - living expenses ...
that doesn't leave much to pay the 415,000
So like could he sell a few more to come up with the fine duckets!?
>My parents, on my first birthday, sang "Happy birthday" to me. Because of the extensions given to copyright, I won't be able to sing that song publicly on my deathbed, because it'll still be protected.
My god... My GOD... Tell me you're trollin'. Although, I thought something was off last day, when the stormtroopers arrested my nephew for singing that song...
>I design control loops in a paper mill. If a bag of cement built with my paper builds a highly successful theme park, I'm not entitled to a lifetime stipend. Why should musicians or writers, who will spend no more time or effort on their craft, be entitled to such a stipend?
You're a fookin' idiot. Can I download your cement & paper? Also... WHAT have you REALLY produced in your lifetime? If you had any merit, maybe you would be allowed to speak about royalties, copyrights and shit. Thing is, YOU DIDN'T! So shut up, worthless peon :)
It takes effort to spray paint a wall. Should I also get paid for that, rather than charged with a crime?
Just because you put effort in does NOT make something worthwhile. You should have a reasonable term to profit from your efforts, but there's no reason an artist should expect to stop working after a hit or two. Everyone else works for a living, and does not expect to get paid again tomorrow for work they do today. Artists should not be an exception to this.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
sorry i completely failed to make clear that 90% of what i told about the book industry was from erik flint (that i read about skimming the posts just before seein the post i replied to)
he was a professional writer (in the league of 30-50+ book published) and an editor for baen-univers a sci-fi on lyne magazine so it has some first person knowledge about the argument
on the argument of copyright origins, scope, problems and so on you really must read his quite regular column on
http://www.baens-universe.com/authors/Eric_Flint
about all his colums should be free reading
start from the first (in temporal order) they are a series of illuminating informations about DRM, copyright (history and actual application) and the book industry
by the way the same author think that 40 years of copyright are a good measure to keep professional writer well fed.
that same number of years does not necessarily apply to other fields (like videogames or films).
my post was not an endorsement of a criminal act, maybe an incentive to find an alternative method of feeding the author and the industry (in this order) that does not require infinite amount of years.
I'm not trolling. Even though you won't get hit for public performance of happy birthday most of the time, the song DOES bring in more than 2 million dollars per year in revenue for a record company that bought the rights. The two teachers who wrote the song in 1924 are long dead and left no heirs, however. If you ever make a documentary, you can't sing 'happy birthday' or show it being sung, or you'll be charged, and you'll be lucky to license the song for $10,000.
I'm not touching your second part with a thousand foot pole.
It's been a long time.
"We the people defend the rights of some asshole to sell pirated software" ?
Okay. I can be lenient on this one. I mean, obviously, we're all working for the greater good! Once we've made gaming, music, painting, hell, anything that can be computed and digitized worth nothing, maybe we should round up and slaughter the now-useless artists.
What's next? "Our unalienable right to download kiddie porn" ?
Will you once again use big corporations as scapegoats for your actions?
The copyright laws are supposed to be neither an inheritance nor a retirement fund. The claim is that they exist to encourage the artist to produce more works. If it were not for the little problem of evil bastards copyright would correctly expire when the artist does.
This is also why copyright should be short, if it's too long, like now, the artist loses any incentive to produce more works if the current is a hit.
So... you're saying that artists should actually have to work and have some skill to get paid, rather than just be paid simply for calling themselves artists and making something? And there are sometimes politics involved? Say it ain't so!
Yes, I would have have paid to see a sculpture exhibition. And other art exhibitions. It's not unheard of.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Actually, it ain't so.
Talent is an empty buzzword nowadays. What happened to the eye of the beholder? I know people who paint pretty ugly pictures by my standards, but whose work finds its way to some collector's home just as easily as mine do. You fall in love with a piece of art, and BAM, nobody can explain it. Rationally, I mean. If Socrates and Hippias couldn't agree on what "beauty" means, what makes you think you can use the word "talent" like that?
Anyway, I am on /.'s side when it comes to being able to download whatever you want. Who cares, really? But this whole article is a thinly-veiled endorsement for selling somebody else's copyrighted material. Without them even knowing you exist. Slap a few roms on a microSD card, sell a DS and an R4, call it an honest living? Why don't we ALL do this?
Now THAT'S a revoltin' development! (last sentence (c)(tm)(r)() Ben Grimm, Smilin' Stan & Marvel until I-don't-know-when)
Can I have the cheques then?
*hopeful look followed by a crushed look when I realize it isn't happening*
RE: Patent laws spurs innovation...
Kinda like making your own game rather than taking a bunch of old games somebody else made and resell them?
Or not taking parts of other games to make your own like Limbo of the Lost?
I don't see shortening the term of copyright spuring innovation. Instead, I see a bunch of advertisers picking up a song like "Handlebars" by Flowbots at the same time and causing my head to explode.
BTW unrelated and for the US:
Works Originally Created on or after January 1, 1978
A work that was created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the authorâ(TM)s life plus an additional 70 years after the authorâ(TM)s death. In the case of âoea joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire,âthe term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving authorâ(TM)s death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the authorâ(TM)s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. ref: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
You can say you don't see it happening, but patent law is a precident that shows one scenario. Under patent law, there's a massive incentive to create to acquire the monopoly, but with a short turn-around, people can at the end copy or improve the invention. The internal combustion engine is one of the best examples, iirc. The original was crappy, but the guy who invented it had an incentive to invent it because the monopoly was there. After the patent expired, there was an explosion of innovation as other companies took the patent and tried to make something better that they could patent.
The drug industry is an excellent parellel. If the guys who make Prozac had a 130 year patent on the stuff, there'd be no incentive to develop new drugs. Instead, new drugs are constantly under development, because cash cows of today will run out in a relatively short period of time.
It's been a long time.
If that fine sounds a bit steep, note that his profits on the devices "exceeded $390,000."
Steep?!?!
When a US corporation breaks the same exact laws, yet their profits exceed that value with a few extra zeros tacked on the end, it seems more than steep, since the company will get zero jail time for the people responsible, and not even that much in fines, if any.
I'd say this guy did not get hit with steep fines for his 'crime', but got anally raped for his 'crime'.
Guess it goes to show, if you want to break the law, spend the $25 and file for incorporation, then you are legally protected from all wrong doing /rant
I don't think there's a problem with making it illegal to sell other people's copyrighted works. What I'm annoyed with is the length of copyright. There's no reason for copyright to still apply to the games of this system. Nintendo has more than profited from it, and new products like this are actually wanted developments. But how many other products like it exist? Are there ANY that are "blessed" by the various game manufacturers that are "infringed" on?
I don't think DS games should be out of copyright yet. I think that there's still time to profit from them. But I do think that NES development is over and done with, and the creators have moved on to other things. They should NOT be paid for things that they no longer create. Copyright should not be a license to print money, as it is now. It should be a license to make new things without fear of being ripped off immediately, and that's it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Sort of, except industrial design has a different protection mechanism (like the Stressless chair from Ekornes which is protected both as a trademark and as a design). Not all IP protection can be called "copyright".
"so if I sell something I didn't create and collect 100% of the profits I'm a criminal"
You are when you're selling something that isn't your right to sell.
And what idiot wasted a modpoint on that stupidity?
What kind of ridiculous argument is that? You're comparing art to water? Here's a hint: you need water to live (literally). Yes, people would pay an almost unlimited amount for water, if it's that or die. Art, on the other hand, is something you DESIRE, not NEED to have. I am unaware of a single case where an artist (or corporation) pointed a gun at someone and said 'purchase this art or you're dead'.
The only things that approach marginal cost are commodity items that people 'need' at some level. Everything else is by value. Why does a Lexus LS cost more than a Toyota Yaris? Why does a house in a nice neighborhood cost more than one in a bad neighborhood? Why does a Mac cost more than a PC? In each case it is because of perceived value to the purchaser.
The difference I think, and where I think your argument is flawed, is that the examples you give the results can be quantified.
X algorithm is more secure than Y algorithm and should be secure for Z years. X drug has less side effects than Y drug making X drug obsolete. The impact and recognition for that contribution can be immediate and know once the discovery is made.
( Also, patent reviews can extend a patent's duration. )
Copyright covers material who's impact is subjective. The impact and recognition for that contribution can even occur after the creator's death.
I think the logic behind 70 years after the death of the individual is that recognition of the individual's achievement may not be immediate and the chances of the work having a significant impact drops in the next generation but is still possible.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Correection: ...making Y drug obsolete
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Fat fingers. My reply is here.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
All of these things that are significantly more than marginal cost are examples of products being scarce, or kept artificially so.
The extra profit in a Lexus vs Toyota is because no one but Toyota can make them,, so they can set the price and keep them scarce. The ability to do that is a gift from society in exchange for making a nice car that we want (enforced by the guns of various governments).
Governments raid mass producers of illegal copies, I can only imagine that they do so using guns. The guns are being used to keep supply low and prices artificially high.
The value argument is just as ridiculous, since everyone has a different value. The fact that there is an asymmetric value determination is what makes people purchase things, and those purchases make everybody better off. This is with or without an inflated price.
Macs cost more than PCs because nobody but Apple can make a Mac, and this is backed by guns (Try running a large operation making fake Apple products and see if you get raided or not).
I am not arguing against copyright, my initial post was against using it as Social Security (it makes far more sense to use Social Security for that), and the last one was pointing out that money sent to big corporations for stuff at an inflated price is not better than it not being sent to them.
When trying to create a system for compensating artists society as a whole must be taken into account. Society loses when prices are higher than they need to be for an item (marginal cost + some percentage), or if people cannot make any money on artistic endeavors and stop doing them (no copyright at all leads to the non-marginal cost + return on investment never being attained).
In both the Toyota/Lexus and Apple vs PC (though it could be argues Toyota/Lexus is closer to Mac Book/Mac Book pro) case the brand image and design are enforced at gunpoint (again, try making fakes and see what happens), but everybody would be better off if you could get either for a few percentage over marginal cost (except those that reap the rewards of the inflated price).
The house in the nice neighborhood truly is scarce, not artificially so, but if it is being purchased there are 2 different values at play, and the buyers is higher than the sellers.
I understand the benefits of copyright, but I also understand the damages of monopoly, which is what a copyright is. The argument that monopoly is somehow not bad when it is not stuff we need seams wrong-headed to me. A balance needs to be struck between the 2 and I don't think Social Security for artists should play into it.
We grow richer when we buy things for less than we value them (and hopefully the seller grows richer getting more than they value the item). This means that if something can be sold for $1, and 100 people value it averaging $5 and buy it we have a $400 gain there. If the seller only valued one of said item for $.50 we have another $50 gain.
If now we decide to let the seller set a price, and they choose to maximize their profit (having a monopoly) they can sell the item for $20 while still valuing it at $.50
If they make 5 sales (to people who value the item at $25 from the previous example) the created value is $122.50. The creator gets more, but society is worse off. Perhaps the creator needs to make at least $100 to keep on creating, in which case the second example is better in the long term, but if they only needed $25 to keep going the second example is worse.
We clearly need copyright to push the value of creating up some (since there will always be someone willing to sell copies at marginal cost leaving no room to inflate price to cover creation, but that is all we need from it, and anything more is damaging.
PS.
My apologies to anyone who has read this far.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If everyone followed this logic then nothing would ever change.
Nonsense. If everyone followed this logic, then the business model would be dead. Media goes where the money is--people still buy the works from these labels, which means they want them, which means they have no incentive to change.
What about "If you don't like your government then you're free to choose another country to live in"?
A colossal, but unsurprising, failure of parallelism. The issue isn't protest or disagreement--it's flagrant abusive tactics and simple, unbridled greed stemming only from a sense of childish entitlement. Music, movies, and art are not essential utilities. They're not required at all. If you don't like it, do without. Don't dare try to make this a human rights issue.
First, citation needed. Second, "Life of the author" is a shitty measure because:
First, the only citations you need are to the relevant US Copyright Acts. Look them up. It's clear you haven't, because, "life of the author" is not the exclusive measure.
It discriminates against people who create late in their life.
That's why the term is Life plus 70 *OR* 95 years.
2. It makes determining whether a given work is copyrighted difficult if the author is obscure.
You need only know the publication date or to contact the publisher or the publisher's successor. It's not that complicated.
3. What happens if an organization holds the copyright? Does it ever expire?
Yes. The term is the life of the author plus 70 years or 95 years from publication. If it's a work for hire, the term of copyright is 120 years. The fact that you don't even know this and somehow others think this is somehow insightful only further exposes Slashdot's parody-worthy bias and ignorance.
Why we should preserve the benefit of authors' descendants at the expense of society when the authors are long dead?
Because that is what survivorship is in this country. If you don't agree with it, you must change the fundamental principle, not arbitrarily rail against one of its manifestations.
The discussion is not about the 95% of people but the 5% elite of "content producers" that long copyright creates.
The rant bore no such limitation.
Not really, the creative processes are completely different.
What's not different, is that with the increase in public domain information available, artists and writers have a much healthier world in which to produce, and those that create a new and interesting product will sell, and those that create a crappy uninteresting product won't sell.
I'm thinking of all the songs that use a 2 second sample to make something new and interesting out of something old and boring.
It's been a long time.
So why should an artist be rewarded for the bulk of his work being shit?
Good-bye
Where do we get off? Well first of all copyright is a SOCIAL CONTRACT, meaning society holds one end of your copyright privlege.
Good-bye
Cant read a book that is currently under copyright aloud....
Good-bye
Since maintaining copyright beyond the initial term is about continuing to be able to profit from the copyrighted work, why not let monetary concerns control when something becomes part of the public domain?
If we give an automatic 14 year term to all copyrightable works and then require the registrant to pay an exponentially increasing amount to have the term renewed, there will come a time at which it stops being profitable to renew the term. Imagine that if after the initial 14 year term, the copyright had to be renewed every 5 years. The first renewal could be $1000, the second $2000, the third $4000, the fourth $8000 and so on.
This accounts for things like Mickey Mouse, where Disney still makes millions (if not billions) each year because it allows Disney to renew the copyright quite some time (using these made-up numbers, since Steamboat Willie was released in 1928, when it comes time for the next renewal in 4 years, it would cost Disney approximately $8m). With the exponential nature of the renewal fees, they won't be able to extend it indefinitely, but $8m is still very affordable to a company the size of Disney.
For Nintendo, they would not doubt renew their copyrights on games since they'd still cost just thousands to renew and they easily make that much money off their games. But for companies that have abandoned their games and make nothing off them now, those titles would become part of the public domain sooner rather than later.
In those samples of songs you are thinking about, some of them are still under copyright but covered under fair use and so do not break copyright.
Let me get a baseline here.
Would you defend Sony Online Entertainment if they did the same thing? e.g. CCP Games copyright expires on Eve Online but the game is still running because it's really good so SOE decides to start selling their own Eve Online copied verbatim?
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
maybe i just want to be able to play pacman on my home computer...
Pac-Man is Namco, not Nintendo, and it's legit in Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection for Windows.
If this guy had simply incorporated himself and listed himself as the CEO, he'd be exempt from criminal copyright infringement. Instead, his company would get sued by Nintendo, probably lose, get placed in receivership, and he'd be free to repeat the scheme ad nauseum.
Kind of interesting how companies like Viacom can commit copyright infringement (the use of a person's Youtube video) and get away with it, while this guy gets jail time.
Consider the Sony case - they planted a virus on a user's PC, and no one went to jail.
Just goes to show that to have rights in America, you need to be incorporated.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
It seems to me that the IP haters always quote this line, but don't seem to grasp the concept. You seem to think that they are saying that the expiration of the right is what promotes progress. It is not. What is promoting progress is allowing people to profit off their discoveries, thereby giving them a motive to advance the science and useful arts.
Except that's not "progress," that's $MEGACORP making money. The "progress" part is supposed to come after $MEGACORP has had its chance to recoup and maybe get a bit of a vig for its trouble (which, since we're talking copyrights, often happens inside of a fuckin' WEEK) and then the public gets it a few years later(14 is fine. Life + 90 is fucking insane).
A distinction without a difference. How one chooses to be paid is not a significant difference. If the value of the work is $500,000, then whether it is paid in one lump sum, a salary over five years, or through the use of a royalty system is irrelevant to the law.
being that they need to continue showing up to work in order to get paid
Whereas the artist doesn't get paid until after the work is complete, often with sizable debts facing him and questionable prospects. It's a high risk field, which is why the value of the work exceeds the sum of its parts. It must compensate for all the failures along the way.
Even the sculpture example is different, since there is only one
Again, not relevant. Whether it's a small sculpture, from which molds and replicas are made, or a giant sculpture made for exhibition or a work made for hire, the value is what the market will bear, for as long as the market will bear it.
If Eve Online was 20 years old or whatever, then yes, I don't see any problem with that. If it's still running because it's really good, and it's still making CCP Games 10 dollars a month per subscriber after 20 years, I really think it's reached a point where the investment 20 years ago has been paid for. If not, then it had a sporting chance.
A MMORPG is a good example of why copyrights don't need to be perpetual, though. Ok, let's say the copyright expires. So what? People aren't playing Eve Online to play Eve Online, they're playing it because of the community. The company is still adding value, the company is still earning the money it gets. If the company decides to release new content, then that content can all be copyrighted anew. New executable? New art? Oh my god. The old stuff is in the public domain, but the new stuff is all good for another 20 years. The law actually incentivizes creating new content!
It's not like this is a new or radical idea. Copyrights were originally designed exactly that way.
Lobbyists, special interest groups, and foreign governments have pushed us to expand our copyright law against the good advice of the founders.
It's been a long time.
Similarly, to stimulate invention, you need a single invention to not only make up for its own development cost, but also to cover a handful of your other inventions that flopped. Otherwise, attempting to live by invention would mean automatic bankruptcy, because *nobody* succeeds with every single creation. If you could only recoup development costs from each creation, then even with an unthinkable 100% success rate you'd only just be keeping your head above water.
Trying to live off sales of creative products is a risky business. Most people make more money by having normal steady jobs. :)
So, yes to copyright limits, but it's ridiculous to try and strictly limit it to cost-recovery.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
May 31, 1790 First copyright law enacted under the new U.S. Constitution. Term of 14 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years. Books, maps, and charts protected. Copyright registration made in the U.S. District Court where the author or proprietor resided.
February 3, 1831 First general revision of the copyright law. Music added to works protected against unauthorized printing and vending. First term of copyright extended to 28 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years.
ref: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html
The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47.3 years
ref: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf
Given the fact that: A: The original copyright in 1790 was for 14-28 years B: The likelihood that the person would be a least a young adult for their creative endeavor C: Just over 40 years after it's creation, one generation, copyright duration was increased to 28-42 years in the 1800's when the life expectancy was most likely under 47 years (Even less when first enacted and duration was up to 28 years)
It is apparent that the intent of copyright law in the US was, from the beginning, to protect ownership for the majority if not the entire life of the creator.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
You've got an unbelievably tenuous arguement there.
It's been a long time.
Followup:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~maphist/english/US/US32-01.html
http://www.scb.se/templates/tableOrChart____25831.asp
Given this information, we can assume that the life expectancy was 40 years or under when U.S. copyright law was first enacted. This would mean that a 12 year old would be safe to assume his creative work would be protected his entire life.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I just make the assumption that the law makers could do math.
Can you deny the fact that given a duration of 28 years and an average life span of less than 40 years would mean that the majority of copyrights would outlast their creators?
I really doubt that fact caught them by surprise and in fact reflects their intent but please, elaborate.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Lawmakers very nearly legislated pi to be equal to 3.
QED
It's been a long time.
They should NOT be paid for things that they no longer create. Copyright should not be a license to print money, as it is now. It should be a license to make new things without fear of being ripped off immediately, and that's it.
It does not and cannot work this way. Artists don't get paid until the work is created, unless they are preparing a work for hire and have negotiated advance payments.
Copyright is not a license to print money any more than your job is a license to print money. The money must come from somewhere. It does not promote the useful arts to allow others to profit from a third party's work. If there is money to be made, then it is naturally the author who should be entitled to make it. Copyright has always been intended to lapse after the work has been fully and readily disbursed, in contrast to patent terms, which lapse sooner to encourage the profit of others.
The only possible similar complaint with copyright is in the preparation of derivative works, such as someone desiring to make further Harry Potter stories while doing so is still profitable. This poses two immediate problems: it is a bald attempt to capitalize financially, not artistically, on the work of others and more fundamentally, it betrays the integrity of an artistic world--a concept less respected in America than most other IP systems.
The bottom line is that enrichment of the public domain was never meant to be immediate or timely, but rather for posterity's sake. Video games don't have that kind of lifespan, as nostalgia strikes the adults of that generation. It's certainly worth considering an abandonware exception, but it's a quirk of the medium, not of the law.
Oh snap, I guess you told me.
By the way, this group of Lawmakers you mention were part of the same government that created the patent laws your were dreaming about modeling copyright laws after right?
You made the assertion that copyright was originally more like patent law. I had to remind you that the reason why the original duration of copyright was shorter was because people didn't live as long and in all cases one could reasonably assume that the duration was to extend beyond the life of the creator.
Now you're dodging and being evasive. Shame. Up until this point you were making an intelligent argument. Go ahead, reply. Get your last "witty" remark in so you can say you've had the last word.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
See, your arguement rests on the idea that you're right. Besides a nebulous "Think about it!! It makes SENSE!!", you don't really have anything to counter.
All you have is a hypothesis that doesn't predict the further evolution of copyright. You pick two variables with two data points that have a weak correlation, and ignore the fact that the rest of the data points don't correlate. Your arguement falls apart because current copyright is 70 years AFTER the death of the creator. It certainly has been longer than the creator's lifespan as long as I've been alive, and I predate the Internet.
If the Congress was trying to make copyrights last for the life of the creator, it would be very simple to do so. Today, in fact, the law today starts a "count-down clock" to the public domain upon the creator's death. Since they didn't implement a "life of the creator" time span when copyright was first implemented, it seems reasonable to assume they chose a fixed length for a reason. They also, I suspect, chose to force copyright holders to re-register at 1/2 the full length for a reason. As massive, immortal media conglomorates with millions of dollars of lobbyists become the primary benefactors of copyright, we're going to see copyright extended again and again, not because of some new technology, but because corporations are immortal and greedy and powerful.
It's been a long time.
The two data points I picked were the first two data points in a long series of data points that consistently established that it was reasonable to expect copyright to outlast the creator. Those first data points were:
May 31, 1790 First copyright law enacted under the new U.S. Constitution.
February 3, 1831 First general revision of the copyright law.
I also provided links to multiple documents that support my premise. You have supplied only conjecture.
Your premise seems to be based on the idea that a creative person would just create one thing and never create anything again just because they know that it'll be protected under copyright past their death. That idea is absurd.
Copyright 70 years after the death of the creator does not prevent someone else from seeing that protected item, being inspired and creating their own work or derivative work. It does prevent the uninspired from simply plagiarizing and provides recourse for the original creator.
Also, Let me flip your argument about corporations. Maybe 70 years after the death of the creator is necessary because corporations are immortal, greedy and powerful. All Evil Inc. has to do for a 20 year copyright is use their wealth and power to suppress and hinder the creator until it's in the public domain. After all, the corporation is immortal. 20 years is a relatively short time frame. Simply suppress, hinder and wait and maybe do a little clandestine R&D.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
In Soviet Russia, the government guaranteed a paycheque to workers. This resulted in lackastical attitudes and poor work. Perpetual copyrights, granting artists and authors an effective permenant stipend for their work subsidized with the public dime, removes the element of 'need' from their work, reducing the quality of work. Look at bands that make it big and are set for life from royalties. I'll never have the 30 dollars I paid for Saint Anger by Metallica back, no matter how much I deserve it.
Let's actually examine the data set we're talking about: 1790 copyright(14/28 years), 1831 copyright(14/42 years), 1909 copyright(28/56 years), 1962-1974 copyright(??), 1976 copyright(75 years), 1988/Berne convention copyright(life plus 20 years), and the latest point, the sonny bono copyright copyright(life plus 70 years).
The most important thing to note about the first two data points is that it was entirely possible for an unmaintained publication to fall into the public domain well within an author's lifetime through neglect. Until 1909, after 14 years an author was required to re-register to get the full copyright term. Until 1976, it was possible for someone with an average lifespan who read a novel as a kid to use the content for himself during his or her own lifetime.
As a historian, I think I'd be ok with a copyright term that lasts as long as it does(It's still ridiculous profiteering, but welcome to 2008), if only there was mandatory registration upon publication, and if every 14 years the copyright holder was required to re-register. This would eliminate copyright lawsuits to a large degree because the library of congress could answer questions about the copyright status of a piece of work, where today historians must go to incredible lengths to determine the status of copyrighted works created by defunct companies. If all it took was a phone call to the copyright office, or a visit to the copyright office website, then it would be much easier to condone long copyright terms.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that every single major movie created by Disney builds upon works in the Public Domain. Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinochio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and Alladin. The Lion King simply plagurizes a Japanese manga from the '70s because you could do that sort of thing at the time. It's incredibly difficult to accept that the public domain isn't important to new creations in light of this fact.
It's been a long time.
Your premise is that shorter copyrights make people more inventive. According to that logic, a shorter copyright would have prevented Toni Basil from recording "Mickey". Lets assume for a moment that your premise is true. Shorter copyrights do make people more inventive. Given that copyrights are longer now, are you saying on the average all creative work now is inferior to previous works? Have you observed this to be true?
"The Lion King simply plagurizes a Japanese manga from the '70s because you could do that sort of thing at the time." How is this more creative? Seems like a lackadaisical attitude and poor work. Why write a new compelling story when we can just rehash an old one? If copyright durations are shortened wouldn't you in fact see more of this not less? Just what we need. A flood of TV shows on every network where someone just replaced character names from old scripts from "The Simpsons".
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
It's obvious you're not an engineer.
We call spending all your budget creating things from scratch "re-inventing the wheel". It's almost universally considered a bad thing. By spending all your time, effort, and money re-creating something relatively generic that has already been done, something called "Not Invented Here", you reduce the time, effort, and money you can spend innovating or paying attention to important parts.
Patents work becuase when they expire, people can expand upon them, often creating new, better works which are then patented. The internal combustion engine, as it was first patented, was a terrible thing, using oil soaked ropes as piston rings, and it was said "You need three mines to own a otto motor: One to pay for it, one to feed it, and the one you're using it in". The company was making good money and had a monopoly on the production of the motor, so they had no incentive to improve it. After the patent expired, many companies went to work creating better versions of the internal combustion engine, and today we've got an amazing, small, inexpensive, mobile engine.
Similarly, Disney took works that had already fallen into the public domain, and improved them using THEIR best innovations, which involved taking an existing story from literature and making them look and sound amazing. They didn't have to re-invent compelling stories (and when they tried with other movies, the end product was much worse for the effort), so they could focus on other elements. Those titles are all classics, and unlike "song of the south" or some of their other original movies, their works based on public domain literature are still very popular.
I have definitely observed that contemporary works which can build upon previous works tend to be better than works that come from the ether. Family Guy, for example, is owned by Fox, and as a result has a massive amount of copyrighted material it's allowed to reference without dealing with copyright lawsuits. It's constantly using that older material in new and innovative ways. The thing is, they can't just steal blatantly because it's not interesting unless there's a new innovation in there somewhere. Other TV shows need to create the same ideas from scratch, or the same ideas tweaked by lawyers to not infringe.
It's not a new idea. Newton said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
It's been a long time.
You are wrong. I'm a programmer but I understand the difference between creativity and efficiency. Engineering, programming, mathematics, etc. are based on fundamentals and once those truths are revealed, you can stand on the shoulder of a giant. Waayy back to my original point. Improvement can be quantified.
Art, is not so cut and dry. It is subjective. Obviously somebody liked Toni Basil's song "Mickey" because it reached the US top 100. Metallica drew on their previous works to create "Saint Anger" and maybe you didn't like it, but I bet I can find someone who did.
Yes, there are people who hate Family Guy for the exact same reasons you like it.
Your idea that Disney took works in the public domain and improved them is also subjective. Not everyone will agree with you that Disney improved upon Osamu Tezuka's "Kimba the White Lion". The fans of Osamu Tezuka's work in all likelihood. Nor will everyone agree with you that Disney improved upon the works of the Brothers Grimm.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Magazines that are paid to give good reviews of albums don't count. Neither are payola based "top 100" boards. Both are meaningless marketing machines.
All things artistic are subjective. That's just the nature of the beast. If you've got an idea, however, it's better to work on that idea than on the details around it. If I want to create a fantasy story, I can create a whole slew of new races, or I can go with elves, gnomes, dwarves, etc etc etc. If I've got an idea for a bunch of new races, sure I can go with it, but if I don't, and it's not that relevant to the story I want to tell, then why bother developing a whole half-assed world? It's the same as Disney creating half-assed stories for their movies. It's obvious they don't want to deal with those, they've got other things that are more interesting and they've got better ideas in those other areas.
You can argue that they didn't improve the original works(BTW, there were multiple authors they used, not just the brothers grimm) in the ways you were hoping for, but you can't argue that what they created wasn't something which became very special to a lot of people, and they obviously created something innovative for the time, despite being based off of public domain works -- which is why it flew off the shelves and made the company one of the largest media companies in the world, and the company which indirectly created manga, when Japanese people decided to emulate Disney's style.
It's been a long time.
Shh!
saying those kind of things upsets people who think they should be paid forever and ever for a days work. The fact that when selling a physical product you have to keep doing a certain ammount of work to keep making more of them to sell also shouldn't be mentioned!
So who paid Blender more Money than Rolling Stone?
And Disney does not make use of this meaningless marketing machine?
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
It's all about demographics. Having seen both magazines, it's far more likely that Blender would be targetted at the Metallica fanbase. Thus, blender will praise Saint Anger because it's part of its mission to do so, while Rolling Stone will destroy Saint Anger, becuase it's part of IT'S mission to do so.
The use or non-use of meaningless marketing is irrelevant. I'm not making any sort of judgements as to the usefulness of such marketing tools. I'm saying that when you're choosing metrics for measuring success or failure of something, it's best to choose something other than the top 50, which was so amazingly wise as to have a techno song about being blue at #1 on Christmas morning in 1999(and has been the source of constant federal lawsuits against the recording industry), or magazines, which traditionally regardless of industry are in bed with publishers.
It's been a long time.
You know, I was ready to go down the road of questioning your speculation about Rolling Stone's & Blender's mission. Then I was reminded about a friend who was fired from his job as a computer game reviewer a long time ago because a game sucked and his review stated so. The editor wanted him to be kinder with the review since they were buying ad space. He refused. Thus I can't refute this statement.
"The use or non-use of meaningless marketing is irrelevant" That statement is not entirely true. A brilliant work would mean nothing if it's creator destroys it and tells nobody. The creator has to do minimal marketing. i.e. tell somebody. But that holds true for a work where improvement & innovation can be quantified (patent) and where improvement & innovation is subjective (copyright).
Back on topic
The reason why I started showing reviews, and top X lists was to demonstrate that "All things artistic are subjective. That's just the nature of the beast." and that it's a completely different beast then the one's governed by patent law.
So completely different in fact that the laws that govern something like:
"Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu announced in February 2005 an attack which could find collisions in the SHA-0 hash function in 2^39 operations."
or it's ilk could not be used to govern:
"Did Disney's The Lion King rip off an old Japanese TV series?"
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
There are similarly subjective cases in patent law, though. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have the courts.
A very simlar case to your link there, the supreme court tried to determine whether a patent on using a potentiometer to get a signal for an electronic fuel injection system can be patented. As a control engineer, I'd say it's a stupid patent, there's total prior art there. The district court in their jurisdiction and the appeals court disagreed with me. The Supreme court at last decided it WAS a stupid patent on an obvious application of existing technologies.
That's just as difficult to determine as whether the Lion King was a rip-off.
They're both creative processes. There's a degree of artwork in either, and a degree of mathematical precision in either. Both rely on physics to work properly. Whether a copyrighted work is popular and whether a patent is useful are both very subjective.
It's been a long time.
Copyright and patent law have some fundamental differences thought. Copyright protects only the end product. Patent protects an idea behind the end product. Correct?
Going off on a tangent...
"Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, slogan, principle, or discovery."
I wonder if anyone has tried to claim that a program is nothing more than a series of procedures and while the data ( text, artwork, etc. ) manipulated by these procedures can be covered by copyright, the actual procedures cannot under current U.S. law.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull