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Lessig's "In Defense of Piracy"
chromakey writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an essay from Lawrence Lessig about the fair use of copyrighted material on the Internet. He makes the case that companies who go to extreme lengths to squash minor videos, such as Universal, are stifling creativity in the modern era. Lessig makes specific reference to a YouTube video that was hit by a DMCA takedown notice, in which a 13-month-old child is dancing to a nearly inaudible soundtrack of Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy.' Lawrence Lessig is a board member for the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
They should be happy they weren't charged for child pornography because of the dancing child. Somebody didn't think of the children?
Is that this was written by Thomas Jefferson, and Lessig just republished it under his name. Yes, Thomas Jefferson knew about YouTube 200 years before it was invented.
Even though Lessig wants to change the length of copyright and ensure fair use, he still believes that the concept should be enshrined in law. That makes his status as a hero here on Slashdot odd, because many posters here have claimed that copyright is simply no longer a valid concept at all in the digital era.
Why do media companies think that any use of media should be paid for?
Suppose farmers acted like that. They grow grain to sell, but their plants create oxygen from carbon dioxide gas as a side effect. Oxygen is a valuable commodity, it's sold in bottles for many uses: hospitals, aviators, steel-cutting, etc. But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Media companies should grow up and accept the same fact for their productions. Copyrights should be enforced in movie theatres, someone sneaking into a theatre to watch a movie without paying is somewhat like someone stealing grain from a farmer. But trying to charge for every little use of their media is like a farmer trying to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere the same price industrial gas distributors charge for bottled oxygen.
It has come to the point in America that many people are in some form of rebellion. Copyright issues are but a small edge of the issues that surround us. But as things now stand in the social justice arena piracy of intellectual property is not something I'm willing to get all excited about.Perhaps when our lazy government gets off of its backside and does something about the exploitation of our citizens by outrageous fuel and power prices and mortgages designed by Satan then i'll worry about whether somebody hummed a tune he heard on the radio without permission of a record company.
The US Constitution says:
Copyright is constitutional only if it promotes the progress of science and useful arts.
Now the question is *ARE* science and useful arts being promoted by copyrights? Would you say that this work is a progress over this one? If a remake was made, is the copyright in the older film still valid? Why?
The only thing that's being promoted by copyrights is the profit of some corporations.
Copyright was never intended to prevent private copying for noncommercial uses. Please don't try to argue that "copying = not buying = commercial loss = commercial use" because it's a horribly disingenuous and intellectually dishonest argument. Stealing is depriving someone else of their property. Even if copying is depriving someone of a potential sale, there is no vested property right in potential sales. If so capitalism would not work, as competition would be equivalent to stealing. The makers of cars would be stealing from the makers of horsedrawn carriages. The makers of refrigerators would be stealing from ice manufacturers. The makers of calculators would be stealing from the makers of abacuses (abaci?). You get the point. I should be able to copy and read/watch/listen to/play in my own home, for my own use, any media in existence. The notion that without monopolies, creative people would not create has long been disproved. No monopolies are necessary to foster creativity. The best, most creative people will create regardless. The hacks are the ones who need monopoly protection. For example, without copyright, Neil Young would still be making music, but Brittney Spears would not. Because copyright has been so greatly abused, because it's been proven to be based on flawed logic, and because it only serves to hinder creativity and make money for those who do not deserve it, copright should be abolished completely. There should still be protection for attribution to prevent plaigariasm, in some form.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
According to the submitter's blurb:
According to TFA:
This concept of creative common good is going to take awhile to be accepted. .... whoever sees a benefit they are going to do what they have been doing.
1) It has to be accepted by society.
Many still do not understand the Open Source model. If you look at financial markets and talk to business people they don't understand how RedHat and Novell plan to make money selling free software.
2) Those who appreciate open source, need to reward those who produce for the open market.
Not many have gotten filthy rich from open source.
3) Lessig is correct.
Copyright and IP rights are probably going to be here for awhile and probably should stay. Those who publish and produced copyright and license information software are going to be here for awhile. They choose to participate in a different market. Until there is a detriment or significant benefit to participation in one type of market or another, there is always going to be a choice.
4) Get over it
As long as MS, Universal,
Personally, I believe this is going to bite them in the ass big time. They want an open global market and yet they want IP rights at the same time. Well guess what, you manufacture your product in Asia and you've pretty much open sourced your product. They don't like to talk about it very much, but it is a fact of what is happening.
[ubiquitous car analogy] If you make a car and you want it made cheaply, you had better have figured out a way to make a steady income from that car. What is happening is companies are requesting certain manufacturing be done, and then all of a sudden somebody else is manufacturing the same product. They start screaming "They stole our product". Guess what get over it, by the time you finish the legal international law wrangling, there is nothing left.
So as soon as a company accepts open source the quicker they will be able to adjust to the global market.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
You know, if these companies thought on a smaller scale, they could just work out a deal with individuals where if a copyrighted work is unintentionally embedded into that individual's content, that individual could pay a reasonably small fee to continue using it without harassment, so long as it remains used only that particular context.
People like to be able to share their home movies, but with crap like this going on, anyone is potentially vulnerable to similar issues with recording industry, simply because some jackass drove by their house with the radio cranked to 11 as the video was being shot.
Oh, and forget anything like weddings or birthdays being safe from such abuses, birthdays are guaranteed to be grab bags for whoever owns the rights to "the birthday song" (which really should be in the public domain by now, IMHO). I'll bet there may even be a crack team doing nothing but searching youtube for birthday clips for any infringing content including "the birthday song" to harass those who posted it unaware they did anything wrong...
8==8 Bones 8==8
The trouble is that these media companies have paid lots of money for the 'rights' to these media, for which they expect a return. The other trouble is that for every 'true' artist, like Neil Young, there will always be 100 artists who want all the riches for their 20 mins of inspiration. To my mind, the simplest approach is that all rights should be legally bound (non-transferable) to the creator. So artists *cannot* sell their souls, even if they wanted to. In this modern age, where media is cheap and distribution is easy (and traceable), there is no reason why merit & reward cannot remain with the originator. This way the big studios are reduced to their real role: marketing and PR. Which artists may choose to hire, if they have the resources. Exposure, in its fullest, most transparent sense.
We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis
It was actually Thomas McCauley in 1841.
And yes, he considered these issues and came to the same conclusions as Mr. Lessig over 150 years ago.
Maybe we should just do away with copyright. That would solve this problem permanently without consuming the precious resources of the courts.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
sorry, but a 3 dvd set isnt making top gear available to the crazy demand...3 dvd's of a few shows isnt making the entire series available to people. this is my point, there is the demand, but no supply because the cretins in charge of content are too slow to move, so slow that people just dont care that they are pirating anymore because either they are left with no choice in a lot of cases...
what is available on dvd of top gear isnt 5% of the series.
The GPL is a form of copyright licensing that attempts to enforce certain usage restrictions/requirements. I don't understand why you think the GPL would be unnecessary if we didn't have copyright. The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that changes made to something are returned to everybody, and without copyright, there would be no reason to follow the license and distribute any changes made. The GPL doesn't exist as a reaction to copyright; it requires copyright to have any power.
Perhaps when our lazy government gets off of its backside and does something about the exploitation of our citizens by outrageous fuel and power prices [...] then i'll worry about [copyright misuse]
The United States government can't just force firms in other countries to sell energy more cheaply. There are two ways to push the price of a good down: increase supply or decrease demand. A government can regulate demand for a particular form of energy down somewhat by subsidizing more energy-efficient products, and it can regulate supply up by subsidizing forms of energy that haven't yet been widely exploited, but these won't have as dramatic an effect on energy prices as some might hope.
[link to Region 2 box set of Top Gear]
Top Gear is available if you look for it.
So how does Joe Sixpack, who lives in Region 1 where DVD players sold in stores are locked to Region 1, play a Region 2 DVD?
The GPL wouldn't be necessary because those that took the code and closed it off wouldn't have any legal standing against those that continued to distribute the free versions or those that re-freed the closed off portions (by reverse engineering etc).
Like any strategy game, you have to think several moves ahead.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Alright, this election is a lost cause but a core item in the new Republican Party that must emerge is a more open stance on copyrights. Democrats and liberals are in bed with copyrights because, well, the copyright is the life blood of the liberal - books, movies, etc, all require copyrights to succeed, and Republicans should be more willing to go after this jugular by removing the artificial laws that ensnare the very masses the Democrats claim to love.
If Democrats can do windfall profits taxes and penalty taxes on Republican economic interests ranging from petroleum to corn, then it only makes sense to shorten copyright to ten years and wave all civil penalties for infringement against anyone who, to borrow a page from Obama, makes under $250,000 a year.
If, after all, America's middle class is so strapped, then, why should we be forcing them to pay for something that they are perfectly capable of copying for free? If Madonna wants to be a Democrat, she can die by their economics.
This is my sig.
...except that all falls apart once you realize what "militia" was being referred to in 1783.
That clause means that you, me and my next door neighbor should be well armed
and should be able to hit what we aim at because "the militia" is the entire
population of military age males.
It's not the cops.
It's not the national guard.
It's not the army.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I love Cold Play, but I like V8 engines too, and sometimes, we just have to give it up for Mother Earth and progress.
Since Obama is going to create 5 million new jobs making windmills, then, if we lose 350,000 jobs by getting rid of copyrights, then, clearly there's still 4,650,000 jobs left. Maybe Madonna can work in a carbon sequestration plant, dressing up mother earth with her love.
This is my sig.
It continues the myth every time someone makes the same lazy connection.
You can take my BSD licensed source code, make a binary from it, sell me the binary, then sue me for copyright infringement if I distribute your binary without your permission.
You make two points I disagree with. The first is by far the most important to address:
Woah. Since when was open source/FLOSS ever about competition? I thought it was about keeping good code open for people to improve upon!
I think the existence of myriad competing products makes that argument demonstrably false. I mean, if all products are "open," then shouldn't we just see the competition of Ubuntu and Debian as proof that even if two products are both freely distributable, one does not wipe the other out? I mean, Ubuntu is "functionally very similar to the original and a close competitor."