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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.
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.
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.
Excuse me, but no. Not everyone does agree with you and it's disingenuous to proclaim that they should.
Every game for the NES should now be out of copyright. 100+ copyright terms for these works is just, simply, unjust.
How we know is more important than what we know.
'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*...'
In the US justice system the burden of proof is SUPPOSED to be on the one claiming harm, not the one claiming there was no harm. I would argue that it is not unrealistic that the people purchasing from him would not have purchased from the vendor but likely.
Most of the people I know who consume pirated material have thousands of songs, hundreds of movies, dozens of games, etc. Those same people would NOT have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of content if they had to pay for it. That collection might turn into one game, two movies, a few CD's, if that.
...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?
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
Actually, as a citizen of a democracy, it is my right to decide what should be law and what should not.
Unfortunately my rights are being stomped on by people buying my political representatives.
But don't worry, sooner, not later, globalization will end these ridiculous restrictions on trade called "copyright" that the western nations are trying to push as beneficial to the rest of the world.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
You assume wrong smart arse.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
>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 *
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.