Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back At Copyright Predictions
Techdirt has an interesting look back at some of the more interesting predictions on copyright. The article looks at two different pre-DMCA papers and compares them to what has happened in the world of copyright. "The second paper is by Pamela Samuelson, and it discusses (again, quite accurately) the coming power grab by "copyright maximalists" via the DMCA, entitled The Copyright Grab. It clearly saw the intention of the DMCA to remove user rights, and grant highly questionable additional rights and powers to copyright holders in an online world. Samuelson lays out many concerns about where this is headed -- including how these proposals appear to trample certain fair use rights -- and in retrospect, her fears seem to have been backed up by history. Samuelson, by the way, has just written a new paper that is also worth reading pointing out how ridiculous current copyright statutory rates are -- an issue of key importance in the ongoing Tenebaum lawsuit, which (thankfully) the judge in the case is going to consider."
I'm fine with showing companies how idiotic their rules are, how they're destroying their own business, driving away their customers and fans, etc, all out of some irrational fear of the internet. I'm also opposed to the kind of public-private partnership that has become all too common from the recording/film industry, from which we get excessive fines based on little or no evidence.
What I'd like to make clear, though, is that I fully oppose those people who would like to take it a step too far, and claim that there's no such thing as intellectual property, no property rights, that people don't have the right to the product of their own ideas, etc. It's one thing to identify and rage against politicians bought by the RIAA, and it's quite another thing to then influence politicians to pass laws that trample on everyone's rights. Take the high road and support individual rights across the board, and reject government intervention in the economy. It doesn't have to be dog-eat-dog.
Whether or not one agrees with the rights that copyright holders are granted today it is imperative that one realizes the idiocy of killing the Internet to enforce those rules.
I think that is the key question that will limit the right of copyright holders.
Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker held that "a ratio of no more than one-to-one between compensatory and punitive damages is generally appropriate in maritime cases". In other words, punitive damages cannot exceed compensatory damages. If this were applied to copyright infringement, it would mean that the most any record label could collect per infringing song would be $2.00. $1.00 since that's how much it could be bought off of iTunes, or something, and another $1.00 for punitive damages.
This is just another example of how the citizens have completely lost control of their government. Elected officials no longer see themselves as being responsible to the electorate but to the corporations that fund their campaigns and posh trips. This crap needs to end. Is there anyone outside of CEOs that really agrees with the sort of copyright policy we currently have? The laws need to reflect the people's wishes rather than the politician's corporate sponsors.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Any time there is a broad new (read that as "poorly worded") piece of law drafted people always use it to the poorly worded maximum.
No knock warrants were originally to "fight terrorism" - now they're used as a judicial shortcut to bust drug dealers. Often times with horrific results.
Forfeiture laws were originally to return the goods from a crime to their rightful owners. Now, it's a cash grab by the government. They actually find property guilty. Or sometimes not even that much. Then they find the property (not the person carrying it, mind you) guilty and keep it.
Now we have the DMCA, which is being used to stifle competition and strangle free speech.
Why is anybody surprised?
We had precedents of poorly worded laws and what happens when we pass them into law. But when it's the government that benefits, it's hard to convince them to stop.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Repeal Copyright.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Copyright was only introduced to allow authors to profit from their work for a LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME, after that their work has to go IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
I don't remember for how long the works are supposed to be protected, but 20 years seems like a good compromise to me.
Lobbying used to be illegal and was called something else. Oh right, CORRUPTION.
Let's make lobbying illegal. That's one of the major problem that's screwing up what should be a self-regulating capitalist system.
Quoth the parent:
``Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Rob Malda is a blatant homosexual cock-sucking bastard. Everybody is well pleased ...''
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Interesting. But it would be much better off without the inserted phrase(s) slamming Rob Malda. Removing said phrase(s) does show that people have been against copyright extensions for a very long time.
Since Slashdot is coming alive today with goofy hippies and their piracy justifications because of the PirateBay verdict, I thought it would be interesting to read the opinions of artists themselves. You know, the people whose works you pirate and justify as a favor in the fight against the record industry. The people you speak for but never asked an opinion from. The people you're ripping off.
It's funny how different the opinions of the artists are from the selfish leeches who pirate their works. Again, these are the artists you pirates have, for years, claimed to be fighting for (don't ask me how pirating their work accomplishes that).
Some choice quotes:
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And so on...
Copyright was created as a monopoly privilege, not a property right. In recent years maximalists have waged an ideological campaign to redefine copyright. The individual property rights position is radical. In the U.S., it is also well outside what the constitution allows: copyright is a regime intended to further the public interest (advancement of arts and sciences), *not* preserve or create some kind of individual rights. That individual "moral rights" approach is from the European (particularly French) tradition, and has been rejected by the United States. Lawrence Lessig (who is quite moderate) asserts that the only justification for copyright is the creation of works that would not otherwise exist.
You can talk about the foundation of copyright in moral rights in theory, but in practice it is almost never used for anything other than economic gain: and in fact promotes control and consolidation by media companies to the exclusion of all others - including artists.
It wasn't until quite recently (the 19th-20th centuries) that the idea of moral rights and individual originality even made sense. Many cultures still don't recognize it. It's a product of a particular culture at a particular moment in history. In practice, it creates all sorts of inconsistencies. It's a romantic notion that has very little to do with how creativity actually operates. It's interpretation and fleshing-out by courts has led to extremely weird and contradictory outcomes. For example, a doctor can patent your genes without your consent because he is the "creator" of his discovery. I can film people being shot in a demonstration, and *I* own the images - they have no right to them. But if those people are performing theater, all of a sudden copyright steps in. Copyright demands hard boundaries between what is "mine" and what is "yours", when no such hard boundaries really exist. Governments can create laws and call them "rights", but they are legal fictions, not reflections of some preexisting reality.
Rob Malda is a blatant homosexual cock-sucking bastard.
Did you read it?
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
Unfortunately where stuck with this intellectual property nonsense. I think business is good in general, a chronic lack of wealth has a negative effect on sociality. However large corporations (I believe this started in the eighties) now think that to protect their profits they must control a market. This is done through laws that where instituted by means of lobbying, or the extension of laws to areas where they were never meant for. Its OK if there are three or so other big players, then you cant be called a monopoly and be broken up.
These people (like banks) have a short term view of things and can harm the competitiveness of the western world.
You can see this in music, with fees for sampling music. There even a role over rate involved so if an artist has success they pay more for the samples per song, which consumes most of your profit. (the four) Big companies in music are the ones who profit while every one pays out. IP also plays a apart in IT as well, with the added negative (from our view) that companies don't even have to have a strong case, you cant afford 5 million in court fees so you must settle
Funny thing. In the U.S. at least, taking credit for someone else's work is not a copyright infringement. Fraud perhaps, dishonest yes, but copyright no. Nor, as economist David Levine argues, should there be a special law for that: private law is fully up to the task, even harsher than anything the government might do. If you are a tenured academic (his example) or a journalist and you plagiarize, you could be out of a job. If you commit fraud, there's a law for that. If you lie persistently, it reflects on your character. Sure, lies can do tremendous harm. Think of how much damage they can do in romantic relationships. But we don't have laws for that. We shouldn't. The honest truth is that copyright (all of it in the U.S., 99.9% of in jurisdictions that respect moral rights) is about money. Preventing plagiarism is a totally bogus argument for copyright.
Who is Rob Malda?
Wow. Self-righteous much?
Frankly, I don't give a fuck what the artists think. The RIAA and their ilk are small potatoes, ants, compared to the worldwide effects of intellectual property.
The real money in IP is not in copyright, but in patents. Drugs, pharmaceuticals, etc. Sadly, part of the spillover effect of all these artists clamoring for their "rights" and "property" is that IP as a whole is viewed less as a utilitarian means to an end, and more as a natural, God-given right. Then trade policy, etc., start to be affected by that attitude, and all of the sudden you get lawsuits over compulsory licensing of antiretrovirals, and seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs.
Fuck the artists. IP is bigger than music and movies. It's about people's lives, and our tendency to put the profit motive before all else.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
H.N.(erd)I.C. of Slashdot
There is a war going on for your mind.
If this were true (I don't know that it would be), how bad would that be? In other words, how important is it that our entertainment be polished?
I'm not going to make the full argument here, but I'll throw out some thoughts.
The pyramids are great works of architecture. Wonders of the world. But we don't build them anymore. The cost is not worth the benefit. (As it happens, one of those costs was slave labor.)
I love television. I prefer good TV shows to good movies. Has TV made the world a better place? Research strongly points to television as a reason for a collapse in social and political participation since the 1960s. There's no question of abolishing television, but should we step in and enforce onerous regulations in order to preserve it as it is?
What is better: listening to highly polished music, or learning to make music and playing for your friends? We used to *do* culture instead of simply observing it. Most people could sing or play an instrument. Many more played sports. Drawing was a basic skill for educated people. But we were not professional artists. We were not usually able to both compose the song *and* sing it. We drew on the culture around us, and transformed it to enrich our lives. Now our entertainment is provided to us, and for the most part we don't contribute. Copyright as it stands entrenches that passive role because wit forbids us from most forms of participation - particularly when we use the everyday digital media and technology through which we live our lives and connect with the people we care about.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech in the House of Commons, 5 February 1841 on the obscene extension of the term of copyright protections:
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
Wow, I went from nil to +5 and back to nil in no time. Thanks! :)
(Next time bring an argument and leave the emotions at the door.)
Where do you get the idea from that attribution is a property right? If I say, "I wrote that AC post on Slashdot", and you say, "No you didn't", do you really think you are violating my property rights? Indeed, what makes attribution a "right" at all? What makes lying about authorship of a creative work a violation of rights right, while lying about, say, educational attainment or marital status aren't? Or are those (property) rights also?
I know of two theories of rights. Pragmatists hold that rights are created by societies in order to achieve certain ends. So the government can create an attribution right (as it does in countries with moral rights), and that brings the right into being. But as I said, that's not the case for attribution in the U.S., so unless you're talking about another jurisdiction your claim holds no water.
The second theory holds that there are natural rights. So the right to attribution is not something human beings invented - it is already there. We can know it exists by derivation from axiomatic truths or religious doctrine. For copyright, there is the idea of the "sweat of the brow" - that by mixing her labor with the physical world to create something, the artist gains certain rights over it. (As it happens, this is awfully close to Marx's argument that capital exploits workers.) But this explanation faces tremendous obstacles. The "something" the artist mixes her labor with is other ideas by other people. For this not to be a rights violation itself, those ideas must be in a commons (the public domain). By what right, then, can she remove something from the commons and make it exclusive to herself? If the commons is owned by everyone, than she would need the permission of the community - and we're back awfully close to government-created rights. If they are owned by no-one, then the community has no business interfering. Then government cannot interfere, and those rights must be perpetual, and... uh, looks to me like there could be no public domain in the first place.
I'm afraid your claim that attribution is a *right* is just that - a claim that you have repeated with nothing to back it up.
Good point. I could suggest YouTube videos instead. My son loves Thomas the Tank Engine. We sometimes show him a bit on YouTube. He points to the clip he wants to see. Often he prefers the "fan video" to the professionally-produced one. Then he watches another kid, just like him, playing with a toy train set and telling a story.
As I see it though, the essential reason that culture is so important is not that it is good in-and-of-itself, but the social functions it performs. I recognize that Hollywood films and TV shows are not so easy for fans to produce. But the question I would ask is not, "how do we preserve them as they are" but "how do we perform their social functions." The form itself is not important - it will change. Music might well substitute for many of the functions of TV. So might sport. Narrative and stories are very important to human beings and to human societies - so important that I can't imagine how we could stop them from being told. But the way we have expressed stories changes. Epic poetry gave way to theater gave way to the invention of the novel gave way to movies made room for TV. The terrible danger with maximalist copyright is that its zeal to preserve an unchanging form (well, actually the zeal to preserve business models, but this is the argument) will hinder the human activity, participation, and engagement that really matter. I think that would be (is) a tremendous blow against human freedom.
Why the frell is this modded troll???
I'm glad the poster below brought it to light.
Wow indeed. Now it's rated as troll -1. That is unkind and unworthy of the mods. For what it's worth, while I think you are very wrong about a serious issue and have replied in no uncertain terms, I don't think you're trolling. Your point of view is legitimate. Wrong - harmful even, but legitimate. And by all indications, honestly held.
For anyone else reading this: We need to hear from guys like this. He has laid out a widely-held point of view, one that he honestly shares, and he has stayed in the conversation. If we wish to be taken seriously, we must take those we disagree with seriously also. By debating with folks like this we develop our positions, strengthen our arguments, and learn from each other so that we can debate more effectively elsewhere. Sometimes we may find out we are wrong: we certainly can't be confident that we are right if we don't take that chance. Whether they know it or not, folks like this do us a real favor. We shouldn't chase them out of town.
So instead of stabbing each other in the back, maybe a gentlemen's agreement would be reached, where they agree to respect each others work without needing the blunt instrument of law to force it.
And copyright WAS NOT written into the constitution.
What was written into the constitution was a (contested) note that congress ***MAY*** implement copyright if it enhances the public domain and the useful arts.
Now, tell me how copyright on a binary blob helps the public domain or the useful arts?
Let's start a lobby to make lobbying illegal.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.