Slashdot Mirror
Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain
malkavian writes "This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register's article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: 'Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.'"
What we need is for someone to create a program, open source of course, where people can create text files of public domain works, submit said works and then those who have the program, can download those works they want and forever have access to them.
There are programs available on the religous side for those works which are in the public domain (i.e. early church fathers, bibles, dictionaries, lexicons, etc), but I don't see any for the non-secular side.
Perhaps if a few started a website and elicited volunteers to help with the code so that the program - lets call it "Free Works", is available for all OS's. Then students, scholars, professors, and the general public could and would have access without having to pay such outragous fees for something that should be free.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
I requested a paper via interlibrary loan, and attached was the standard boilerplate that it is copyrighted work, a licensing fee had been paid for the copy to be used only for the purposes of scholarly research, additional copies were $1.25 each to be paid to XXXXXX, ... blah, blah blah.
The paper was written in 1869.
Idiots. To use copyright maximalist terminology: they're *stealing* from the public domain.
that is or is about to be Public Domain, needs to be a death penalty and a total revocation of any money garnered in such a manner. I am talking about the total board and attourneys involved, being killed.
To emphazize the point, their families need to be killed also. Nip this shit in the bud!!! Kill them all, Redjack, redjack !!!!!!!!!
Die, Die, Die !!!!!!!!!
Good Morning to you;
Good Morning to you;
Good Morning, dear children;
Good Morning to all!
Bring it on, Warner...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"Countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free" sounds like it's good for the economy.
However, the Parable of the Broken Window would suggest otherwise.
Has the New York University Law Review granted him permission to distribute that paper? : p
"Copyfraud" - I like it. Coining a new term is an offensive maneuver, and offense seems like a better political strategy than the defensive whining we always do on slashdot. Now we just need to start floating ridiculous proposals to counterbalance the copyright lobby's ridiculousness and re-center the discussion on what a reasonable public policy should be.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Really, do I need to have a body of text here?
The PRINCIPLE of copyright is sound - encourage the development of artistic creations by giving the artist time to make money from the work.
It's eroded by corporations who assign copyright of their artists to themselves.
It's then made a mockery of because the time period of copyright protection is so long it actively harms society and reduces the amount of artistic works made (no financial incentive to make more when they can live off the existing works).
And now the works of art that are in the public domain are being stolen back from the people.
This is it. FUCK COPYRIGHT. Until things are fair and equitable, with checks and balances, fair use, protections for creators and users, screw it.
> The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public
> domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly
> refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are
> in fact entitled to use for free.
This is because it isn't under the Act at all, nor should it be. It is ordinary fraud and should be prosecuted as such. The fact that the Act provides no penalties for it does not mean that nothing can be done.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Capitalism doesn't recognize anything that cannot be monetized. And capitalism is also averse to anything being public -- the argument being the tragedy of the commons, which is this: For any shared responsibility, the more people sharing that responsibility, the less responsible each person will be, until everyone is effectively irresponsible, thus the public utility becomes useless/abused/less valuable.
Capitalism is a fine concept for tangible items. But it's not very good at all for intangibles. Nonetheless, as we moved from a production-based economy to a service-based one, these intangibles had to be protected by businesses somehow, so as to ensure their continued relevance and profitability. The hasty modifications to trade secret, copyright, and patent law, was a poor attempt to bridge this gap, and there was little or no public input. Simply put, society didn't have the time or attention devoted to addressing the changing landscape, because most of us at that time either weren't educated about it, or struggling to put food on the table and change careers to adapt to the changing economy. We were so focused on the immediate result that we all but ignored future consequences.
Using bait terms won't solve the problem. "Copyfraud" sounds great, but it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of other terms -- "Net neutrality" comes to mind -- to the uninformed, it sounds good but isn't very descriptive. "Copy fraud" could mean "copying as a means of fraud" -- which is exactly what many businesses are calling the free sharing of digitized information.
We have three options here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy products that have an effective cost of zero to own. Put another way - stop buying anything in a purely digital format. Instead, only buy periphery products -- such as warranties, service level agreements, support, or mp3 players, televisions, etc. This will eventually starve out business models that depend on selling products that should be free, and allow business models that support this paradigm shift to free information to flourish.
2. Stay in the system. Buy out public product and design licensing that ensures they remain public, and then put those rights in a shell corporate. GNU comes to mind, with their GPL licensing, and the many derivatives thereof. By gaming the system in this fashion, GNU is ensuring that copyright enforcement actions will always be in their favor. Over a long enough time frame, they will win the "war", because companies that cannot provide alternatives to public-domain product will go out of business. Ironically, it's one of the best arguments for innovation out there. The only catch is--Placing something in the public domain or having it remain there still has a monentary cost, however low. So far, the community hasn't addressed this systemically.
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Our copyright laws are focused on making money for companies. They should be focused on making works as available as possible while still encouraging the creation of new works.
It's one of the clearest examples of how our government has been sold and does not exist primarily for the people.
The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free.
This statement is an example of the same sort of "logic" used by the public-domain squatters: It's technically true, but very misleading. It doesn't matter if the Copyright Act doesn't provide penalties; there are plenty of other laws that apply. One thing these companies are guilty of is commonly called "consumer fraud", and large penalties can apply in such cases.
The real problem is the lack of prosecution, mostly because it typically takes a class-action lawsuit to get enough money behind it to challenge a company's legal budget. Local DAs tend to take a "not my job" attitude to such things, so it requires organized community action to fight such fraud.
Maybe what we should be doing is documenting cases of such fraud, and publicizing them when the topic comes up in forums like this one.
Anyone want to post a list of some of their favorite fraudulent claims of ownership of public-domain material?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I am confused, I thought you could make copies of public domain work and copyright those copies that you have made. Like copyrighting the sheet music made from classical music and such.
That assumes that the /. crowd is comprised of one group of people / one mindset, which is patently false.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
We'd probably get farther if we could sue fraudulent companies, rather than prosecute them as criminal cases. In that way we could have someone like EFF or some watchdog take these guys to court and sue them for damages as well as return of fraudulently obtained earnings due to willful abuse of copyright. That would hit them where their soft spots are and lower the burden of proof from reasonable doubt to preponderance of evidence, a much harder thing for their lawyers to weasel out of.
While it would be nice to throw people in jail for this, and that should remain on the books, the fact is that having the state prosecute for this runs into the same problems every time: the state is less interested in prosecuting people who have good lawyers and lots of special interest cash for something that Middle America doesn't really understand all that well and is divided on the implications of. There's no glory for the prosecutors, and it's expensive for the state when they could be busting somebody that will give them some juicy publicity.
Straw man arguments are lies.
The story is about fraudulent copyright claims on public domain material; if it's public domain then fair use doesn't apply.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
to ignore copyright law
no, more than that
it is your moral duty to do your utmost to circumvent, outmaneuver, and otherwise destroy copyright law and the tools that enforce it
i am not in any way joking. copyright law has nothing to do with artists rights and rewarding artists for their work. it is all about extracting cash from you for your own culture for the sake of some bottom line on some accounting sheet
copyright must be destroyed, we must outright waged war on it on all fronts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
from children's stories and then they make their own copyrighted version of it.
Snow White
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty
Beauty and the Beast
The Little Mermaid
The Lion King
The Jungle Book
Etc.
The copyright from such fair tales and children's stories have expired and they got released to the public domain. Then Disney takes them and rewrites them slightly to have a Disney twist. Then Disney copyrights them.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The expression of a work is copyrightable, even if the work itself is not copyrighted. You are always free to use the information and in most cases even the exact text of a public domain work. However the cover and illustrations of the book/text/paper and the arrangement of the symphony are the expression that a new author has added to the work and those expressions are what is copyrighted. Stop getting hung up on the copying bullshit. In order for a public domain work to be useful it must be used or expressed in an original fashion or else you have simply repeated the original author without adding anything of value and therefore stood upon the back of giants and trod them under your smelly feet. Information of a general nature such as that found in digests and almanacs are usually copyrighted works consisting of the arrangement and collection of public domain information. It is the arrangement that is copyrighted not the information. So you can have all the public domain information you want and as long as you express it yourself in your own way you do not have to license it. If you merely copy the original text and expression of a work that has fallen into the public domain and add nothing to it, I feel that you have betrayed the nature of public domain and are producing a useless piece of fluff simply because you are not required to pay anyone anything for the privilege.
Why bother
.. I'm implying OpenSourced DRM attached to PD works. We the public take this to be our license to use the work.. and wold be thieves to stay way from it. If they disable/circumvent the DRM. then they're prosecuted by *IAA like anyone else. Too early?
I am planning on releasing a lot of digital images I made to the public domain. For free. And if someone takes those and enhances them in any way or uses them to make their own art (like sampling in the music industry) they are free to make their own choice about which copyright to use.
If this enhancement process only means a bot will download them and rename them to sell them on a different website then I will have to live with that.
If people WANT to pay money for books they could download for free on project Gutenberg then this is their problem. Right now an artist in the music business makes 3-5 % from any purchase. The rest of the money goes into advertising, packaging, logistics and so on.
Where is the big leap from 3-5 to 0-5 %? Copyfraud is essentially the same. If I were to nicely layout a classic from Shakespeare, print it and buy ads for it, I want to sell books, not get some idiot in my back telling my I am committing "copyfraud".
...does anyone think it's stupidly bitchy to complain that Creative Commons came up with a 'public domain' tag?
Hey, Charles Eicher, that's because the Creative Common tag is a 'standard' for marking up ownership and licensing of documents. It's not an attempt to fucking claim ownership, it's a way to mark a document as public domain using an existing nomenclature that now has been expanded to include 'public domain'.
I can only imagine what you think about the Dewey decimal system, a system that has claimed ownership of all human knowledge. Or, at least, classified it using their nomenclature, which in your book is the same thing. (Luckily, they also own your book.)
And, um, Creative Commons isn't attempting to 'expand their licensing authority', as they have no licensing authority to start with. They wrote a bunch of template licenses for people to use. And came up with some way of marking content to use their licenses so that stuff can be found automatically. That's it. And now they've included public domain works as one of their 'licensing templates' you can mark things as under, although obviously it's not actually a license in that case.
I do love the way you blame flickr for not having public domain licensing as an option, only CC licensing, but then bitch and whine when CC adds a way to mark things 'public domain' using their tags, which would have actually solved the problem with flickr from the start if 'public domain' had been one of the choices.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have a number of reprints of old books, like The Western Avernus, memoirs of a construction worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was published in 1887, and the copyright has long since expired. The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
...laura
I can bottle rain water and sell it to stupid people. I can take communication bandwidth which costs me nothing extra and charge people every time they send a single text message over it. I can make something people can make themselves and charge 10 times the value of the components. I can send spam to millions of people and let them send me money. If people don't take the time to evaluate their purchases, capitalism dies. We should be encouraging people not to buy junk that falls apart, so the companies go out of business. If they pay for Linux but can get it for free, should Red Hat go out of business?
I know, Red Hat is only putting a copyright on their additions, but how do we make this distinction clear from whatever else this whining is about?
Someone who takes an out of copyright text and prints it has provided a service and deserves to be paid for it. If they make any additions to the text, such as editorializing or checking or whatever, the updates are now copyright of the people who printed it. I can take an original Beethoven score and reproduce it, but if I take an editorialized edition produced 10 years ago, I can't distribute that for free because of the value added by the publisher. In most cases, origianl scores are written in old-style notation and must be updated to make sense to today's musicians, and that conversion is a new, protected work.
So the real complaint is the narrow bunch of stuff which is being reproduced, verbatim, with a copyright attached. And the real concern isn't even that businesses are making money - it's simply that copyright is being asserted. Yes?
My understanding is that even if you take something in the public domain, your arrangement of it can be copyrighted.
For example, a phone book. The data itself cannot be copyrighted. The presentation can. If you stick it in a photocopier and sell the copies, that's a problem. They give the phone book away, so giving away a copy is technically illegal but probably won't be enforced. If you re-type everything and get the company logos from the companies and effectively reproduce it so it looks nearly enough the same, you could get sued for copying the presentation - not the contents.
In this case of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, where the book is essentially scans of another book, there are parts of the book which are copyrighted. The cover is, any forward or editorial material is, notes included. Anything that was added is copyrighted, and copyright law has only one way of distinguishing that. You put the copyright notice on it like you do anything else. Would you rather make an author call out which parts of the book are covered and are not? On every page?
Put another way, a derivative work of something in copyright is not allowed. A derivative work of something out of copyright is essentially a new work. You can still go back to the source and copy it for free - that hasn't been changed.
So the complaint is really just about the fact that people *might not* understand how copyright law works, and *might* pay money to a company that makes it easily accessible instead of rummaging around trying to find the original. I see no problem here. People need to know how laws work in order to live other parts of their lives, so let's just consider this a place where people need to understand exactly what copyright means.
I'll ignore the overheated rhetoric about "copyfraud". I agree that claiming copyright where you do not have a claim is pernicious behavior. But I think the author goes a little far talking about people *deserving* free access to material. Everything costs something, even public domain material needs to be printed or otherwise transmitted. That costs something no matter how small. Sure, maybe it is subsidized (e.g. public libraries) or maybe your sugar daddy (university) pays for your access, but the cost is still there.
Other than that quibble, the author also seems to be confused about Creative Commons licensing. For instance:
"Creative Commons seeks to become the arbiter of public domain licensing, yet it has no governmental authority and cannot enforce its licenses. Nor is it subject to Congressional oversight like the Copyright Office."
That makes absolutely no sense. Creative Commons provides licenses that authors and creators can apply to their work, but the Creative Commons doesn't *claim* any authorship on the works that use the licenses. That would be like claiming that because you use the GPL or MIT license that the FSF or MIT now somehow has copyright claims to your works. That is simply not the case.
Furthermore, the Creative Commons public domain license is meant to provide a means to put something into the public domain while it would normally still be under copyright. Since everything published now defaults to copyright status, this license is an attempt to place something in the public domain if you don't want to wait multiple lifetimes (or perhaps much, much longer) for it to happen under current law. (Truthfully, there appears to be some debate as to whether it is even possible to place something into the public domain under US copyright law, but that's a whole other discussion.) That license is *not* meant to somehow claim authority and license existing works already in the public domain.
I haven't seen a sweeping generalisation that I didn't like. Oh, and don't use "an" before a sounded consonant.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Careful, you might be infringing on someones patent there.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
I see your patent and raise you one case of prior art. :P
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Copyright infringement is not "theft" bacause the copyright holder is not being _deprived_ of real money or real property.
By pretending to hold a copyright and taking _actual_money_ for something that is actually copyright free you are actually depriving someone of real money using fraudulent claims.
What part of that don't you understand? Or are you just trolling?
The RIAA, MPAA, etc. all claim insanely high valuations for copyrighted content; witness the latest verdic against now-convicted "pirate" Jamie Thomas-Rasset who is now on the hook for 1.92 million. Fine. Let them copyright to their heart's content.
But let's also update the tax code to capture the full monetary value of these copyrighted works. Oh, and since "intellectual property" does not deteriorate over time as would a piece of real property, the tax code should explicitly disallow depreciation.
I suggest we start collecting back taxes on all of those old "Steamboat Willie" cartoons that Disney started putting out in the early part of the 20th century, along with old music catalogs and so forth. Let's see how truly valuable these IP assets are, and how many are suddenly not worth keeping copyrighted.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
But public domain works belong to you, me and everyone. Locking them up under copyright is in a way "stealing" from us in the fact that we can't use them how we wish. The point of public domain was to allow everyone to do whatever they wanted to with the work, if they wanted to improve them, fine, if they wanted to sell them, fine, etc. However you can't do that when they effectively are under copyright again.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Remember how the movie It's a Wonderful Life used to be played in the afternoon on every single station with air time to fill leading up to Christmas? This happened because the movie bombed in the box office, and the studio didn't bother to renew the copyright.
Then Aaron Spelling bought up various IP rights relating to the movie, such as ownership of a song used in one scene. He assumed control over distribution of the movie, based on a complicated legal theory that a lot of IP lawyers consider totally bogus. But this theory has never been challenged in court, and never will be — nobody's going to start an expensive legal battle over their right to show a movie without paying a fee.
Another one that really bothers me: the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, about NYC elementary school kids learning ballroom dancing. Lots of music, of course, and that ended up costing them lots of money in "clearance fees" for the right to use it. How much? By the time it went to DVD, $140,000, almost half the cost of making the movie.
People who make this kind of movie don't have a lot of cash to throw around, so they did what they could to minimize it. At first, they only paid for the rights for a couple of weeks, so they could show the film on the festival circuit, and get some investors to cover the rest. They also dubbed over any music that they thought wasn't important to the movie, such as a scene where some kids are playing a video game.
One particular outrageous case: there's a scene where a woman is walking down the street, and her cell phone rings for 6 seconds before she answers it. The ring tone is the theme from Rocky, and the director decided she had to have that little bit of music to make the scene work. For that she needed clearance from Sprint (ring tone rights) and EMI (publishing rights). Sprint saw it as product placement and let her have clearance for free. But EMI wanted $10K! She finally bargained them down to $2K. Even so, she winces every time she see that scene, and has to tell herself that that six seconds was worth that much.
She told an interviewer that if had known what a big hassle music clearance was going to be, she probably wouldn't have made the movie.
Now, all you amateur lawyers are screaming FAIR USE! FAIR USE! . And for once you're right. Every lawyer I've heard talk about the subject agrees that music that happens to be overheard while making a documentary is fair use; only music performed for the film requires clearance. This is not just pro-electronic-free types. This includes pro-industry lawyers with a very narrow definition of fair use!
But despite the unanimity of legal opinion, this hasn't really been tested in court. Insurance companies that bond productions prefer to err on the side of caution, and the entertainment conglomerates that control facilities and distribution networks have an interest in keeping things narrow. Everybody agrees that if there's ever a test case, the documentary-use-is-fair-use doctrine will almost certainly prevail.
But will there ever be a test case? Again, money is an issue. When you're struggling to raise a hundred K or two to get your indie documentary made, an expensive court battle is just not an option.
Legal joke: "Sir, I've examined the evidence, and you have an extremely good case. The only question I have for you is this: How much justice can you afford?"
If I own some raw material and craft an object out of it, I own that object. I own it not because I created the object, but because I owned the raw material it was made from. If someone else takes some of my raw material without my permission and crafts an object, I still own the resulting object, for the same reason: the act of creation using my material doesn't change ownership.
If we accept the premise that intellectual works are property like any other, then we must recognize that virtually all works are made primarily of intellectual property owned by the public ("public domain"), and are thus still owned by the public. To claim ownership, as opposed to mere authorship, is outright fraud.
This would appear to be the primary motivation not only for the GPL, but for other open source licenses as well (ex BSD).
Were source code put directly into the public domain, not only companies use the source code without contributing their changes back to the community (which the BSD license does allow), they would be allowed to appropriate the source code and stamp their own copyright on it (copyfraud it, which even BSD-style licenses explicitly forbid). Not only could they sue anybody else that used that source code, but potentially the original author of that code as well.
I guess open source and GPL authors could see copyfraud coming a mile away.
This space left intentionally blank.
Maybe no business model does.
There are more things in the world than "business models."
I challenge you to do the following:
(1) Start a web browser
(2) Surf
I think you'll find that an incredibly vast universe of digital content has been created for free, with a very sizeable portion of that content having been created not by any particular business at all, but by individuals.
It's on.
I see a Great Need. Like Chilling Effects but for copyfraud.
I've encountered small-time copyfraud in my WP efforts. Such as someone scanning an image from a book that has expired copyright and then claiming copyright over it because of their original work of putting the book on a scanner a pressing Scan (ok, actually their argument was that they applied an auto-leveling filter, therefore they help copyright over their particular composition, but that's no less spurious).
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
"Yea, I'm sure the "stealing movies is okay" crowd here on slashdot really cares about copyright fraud of any kind."
I know I'm just feeding trolls but I'll bite.
Do you think it's acceptable for corporations to "steal" public domain works for profit but it's a crime for teenagers to download and watch the latest Hollywood crapbuster? If you're going to be so pious please direct your attacks where their more deserved and use the correct terminology.
To make it clear. A student downloading a copyright work for their own non-commercial non-profit use is not "stealing", it's copyright infringement. There has been no theft of property. The publisher still retains the copy's of the work and the exclusive monopoly to profit from that work, it cannot be argued that the student would have paid to use the work if they had no other choice.
On the other hand a publisher claiming fraudulent copyright on a work which that student needs to further their academic carrier could be said to be stealing. Their depriving that student of funds which could be used for other things, rent, food, beer, drugs dvd's, music.
So I ask you which is the greater criminal? The student downloading a dvd to kill a couple of hours or the multinational corporation lining their own pockets at the expense of the consumer.
Of course I have a final solution to the copyright problem. Abolish copyright law! Corporations will be freed to try and profit from public domain and gpl'd works and the consumer can rip them off with impunity, which is pretty much as ridiculous and one sided as the current copyright regime. Which of course has been bought by expensive industry lobbyists.
Simple solution: abolish copyright.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The tune for the Happy Birthday song was composed in 1893, and the lyrics have been around since 1912. But since the copyright was registered in 1935, we've all been paying royalties, on it, and will forever...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
This is copyright fraud, but it's so small that noone will take the time and money to the courts to fix it.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Some of this has been solved through copyright changes. Now everything is automatically copyrighted and if one can prove providence, then one can stop the theft of intellectual property. If one has the money. This still does not necessarily eliminate the threat from derivative works, which explains the GPL viral nature. Not only is this work GPL and in the public domain, but anything derived from it. This is only way to insure that the authors original intent, to have product in the public domain, is heeded. One might complain that the at some point the authors wishes should not be in play, and the work should enter the more general lawless public domain. Such issues though are not unique to the GPL. Such issues are governed by more general rules such as the leagth of copyright(essentially forever) and the applicability of the EULA. If the length of copyright were at most the lifetime of the author, and EULA were not allowed to excessively restrict free use by the user, for instant to disallow first sale doctrine and fair use, then these would not be an issue for the GPL either.
But they are issues, and the GPL does appear to provide a good protection against theft from the public domain, which is why those that make a living stealing from the public good are so against it. Of course they are. These companies seldom give anything back , at least not without a huge price tag. The one time that Bill Gates accidently gave something away, . Of course now an occasional tuppence are given to select beneficiaries to cloud the guilt, but there you are. he GPL is evil because it prevents thefts and insure the public domain. Which is, apparently, a very bad thing to do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You've painted a very black-and-white, either-or scenario. I think that the anti-copyright sentiment often expressed here on Slashdot is generally targeted against the locking up of our culture by large media organisation with deep pockets used to lobby congress and trample upon individuals with punitive lawsuits.
I believe an insistence that copyright be respected for GPL licenced software sits perfectly well with a desire for a more balanced copyright regime - one with much shorter copyright durations, and where people are free to exercise their fair-use rights without being criminalised by the DMCA.
That is so cute coming from an AC. Would you like a vi/emacs debate with that?
An argument I've read is that "Happy Birthday" starts with two pickup notes (D in the usual key of G), rather than just one, and this is sufficient to make it a different musical "work".
It didn't work for Vanilla Ice, who had to share his "Ice Ice Baby" royalties with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.
OTOH, [Warner Music Group] have said that they have no intention of suing anyone for singing it in the usual non-commercial way.
Even on YouTube?
Why the "Republicans" tag? This keeps happening. Is there some kind of tagging conspiracy going on?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
First, it's somewhat unreasonable to expect all of the loud voices from a huge group of people to have a single position on any issue. That said, I think it's much closer to that here than in many areas. Our position is simple and consistent: we decry anything that reduces the total value in the system, and at least have sympathy for whatever increases it.
Several of these are clearly in tension. The GPL restricts what people can do with a software product, but with the goal of making more works available in the long run. Copyright restricts what people can do with a creative work, but with the goal of ensuring that authors are motivated to produce. Differences in priorities and emphasis in resolving these tensions is what accounts for the diversity of opinion here, but this shared foundation and similar perspectives on a shared reality is what accounts for the patterns of voice you've observed - in particular, many feel that the laws around copyright have increasingly lost sight of the fact that there *is* a tension between the "rights" of the author (or more often publisher) and the total value a work provides to the world.
I remember at Fry's they used to sell versions of Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, etc. (under those names) in animated format. They suck. (My kids were watching one at church one day and they are really bad.) They are still for sale. Nobody is stopping them.
What Disney tends to crack down on is:
Now, this is not to say that Disney doesn't have their share of abuses. There were several companies selling a "Classic Pooh" bear that looked more like the illustrations in the book and not like the Disney character. Disney then came out and trademarked their own "Classic Pooh" and then proceeded to sue all their competitors out of business because of the likeness. That was pretty underhanded, even if the original sellers forgot to get a Trademark.
Still, for the most part, Disney doesn't really claim ownership in these works. They are still easy to find for free at Project Gutenberg. You can still create your own new version of these stories (not including Disney's character designs, songs, added characters or scripts). Go ahead, film them and put them on YouTube or sell them on Netflix or Amazon. Nobody is stopping you.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The Lion King might be a bad example. It wasn't by the Grimms, H.C. Andersen, Rudyard Kipling, Carlo Collodi, etc., like the other ones you mentioned. It was allegedly original, a loose retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but also allegedly a knockoff of Kimba the White Lion.
J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan was still copyrighted in much of the world when Disney's movie came out, and even after the expiration of the UK copyright in 1987 (and its subsequent restoration once the EU formed and re-expiration), the UK government still taxes copies of Peter Pan equivalent to the royalty that would otherwise be due and gives the proceeds to GOSH, the former owner of copyright.
What Disney copyrights is the animated features they create retelling those stories
That doesn't stop Disney from bringing flimsy accusations of copying against other publishers of animated films. Look at GoodTimes Entertainment.
and they also trademark the appearance of the characters in the features.
Why should Disney have the right to trademark such appearances when they are based closely on the original illustrations that entered the public domain along with the text?
I don't get why this person is all about hating the CC-PD license. Yes, it is technically unnecessary, but it provides a convenient framework for tagging PD works without having to add something "special". I don't think CC is trying to steal the public domain. They are just giving content providers one stop shopping for all their licensing needs.
Look up "primitive accumulation". (While you're at it, look up the Latin origin of the word "private" as in "private property".) That's what is currently happening in the area of digitally encoded content. What I find strange is that all those, to use their oxymoron, "anarchocapitalist" slashdotters seem to oppose that mechanism of stealing from the commons that is at the very core, no, that is the very core of capitalism.
This means that he also cannot be enticed to make more art
But his heirs can be enticed to restore his art that has not yet been published.
Must not feed the troll... must not feed... the... troll...
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Yup. And just as soon as the Slashdot Hive Mind Project comes online we may be able to do that. Until such time, you'd have an easier job herding the proverbial cats. We're not a political party; we don't do positions. And if we did, you can bet we'd have slashdotters speaking out against it, faster than you can say "first post!"
Umm... no. Abolishing copyright would abolish the legal mechanism enabling the GPL, it is true. On the other hand, misuse of copyright is largely evil that the GPL was created to remedy. Opposing copyright abolition on the grounds that it would destroy the GPL is rather like opposing the eradication of Malaria on the grounds that malaria vaccines save so many lives. Still, so long as Malaria exists, malaria vaccines remain a force for good. Similarly, while copyright remains on the statue books, the GPL likewise remainse a force for good. YMMV, obviously.
Another way to look at it: The GPL is a lot like buying a slave in order to set him or her free. Slavery is evil, as I think we'd all agree. On the other hand, given a society in which the law permits human slavery, it is still possible to find ethical applications for those same laws, even though the intent of the law runs entirely to the contrary
Doesn't follow. You could make a good case for "if we expect companies to respect the GPL then we should respect the copyrights of others and therefore not share or download material without permissions from the rights holders". It's just that you didn't actually say that. Call me a pedant if you will.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Your right to free speech.
After all, it's communication, you're not illegally using it and they want to stop you.
This is a direct attack on your right to free speech as enshrined in the constitution and in the human rights acts implemented world wide.
Or are the Iranians right to limit free speech as long as the government claims copyrights on anything said by bloggers/ojurnalists/etc?
Have a look in the book you read.
See all those lines saying "Copyright 1975, Copyright 1984, Copyright 1992"?
That's because when you make a new work from the uncopyrighted one, you get a new copyright on the changes you did to the work.
No need for devils advocate, just thinking.
Try it one day.
IANAL, but I think you're overestimating how much work one needs to do in order to get copyright on an edited version. I'm pretty sure if you renumber the pages and add an index to a public domain work, your edition qualifies for copyright protection. Same thing if you add some notes at the beginning, or add footnotes annotating the text, or hell, even if you create a new cover for the book. I would not be surprised if going through the old editions and fixing typos qualifies.
Note that the author in TFA was very careful to describe the product of a lot of these small presses as "facsimiles," and not "editions." That's a very crucial distinction there. A facsimile would be something like a photocopy or straight reprint of an old edition, and something that does not qualify for copyright protection.
Are you adequate?
This is essentially the business model of James Monroe at his little company Actual Technologies in Indiana. He downloads public domain database code, even stuff that's not truly in the public domain from Oracle's developer program, wraps it in a binding for OS X and SELLs it for $20 to $30 a copy. Nevermind that the authors of the public domain code just hacked their stuff together using reverse engineering techniques for a very specific purpose, never envisioned it for general use and have copyright and experimental warnings all over. So along come doctors, government or public finance people and they start doing important work with their database using their new $20 to $30 driver, totally oblivious to the danger even the slightest upgrade to their back-end or local database file might have. Meanwhile, since he doesn't have much of an R&D effort and he lives in Indiana, he's able to price 10 times lower than the other companies who do things the right way. (One of those companies keeps getting sold over and over again, laying off people who do things the right way, etc.) Eventually something Bad will happen with the customers and he'll vanish into thin air leaving a couple years of wreckage behind, but in the mean time, only the copyright holders (those long gone guys who hacked together a few lines of code to do a specific task and shared it on SF in the middle of the night) are the only ones who could legally stop him (short of a customer, who could sue for false advertising, but who is going to do that for $20 to $30?)
I will never understand Slashdot's position as a whole.
And do you honestly not understand why that is? Slashdot is not a single entity. It's a community with very diverse opinions. That's why we get such big discussions here: people disagree.
The GPL is a copyright license complete with usage restrictions under threat of law for copyright infringement. It's even stated on the FSF website that the GPL assures copyright over a piece of software so that it isn't freely usable by anyone as public domain code.
You may have noticed that people here can violently disagree on whether GPL offers the most freedom or is actually quite restrictive compared to BSD. GPL guarantees freedom to users of derrivative works, whereas BSD-style licenses guarantee freedom for developers of derrivative works.
However, if there's any position that you can pin on many (but not nearly all) slashdotters, then it's a desire for freedom. Monopolies severely restrict that freedom, which is why monopolists tend not to be very popular around here.
GPL, while very strong on copyright, doesn't monopolise anything. BSD, which is about as close to public domain as possible while still being a license, doesn't monopolise either, although it allows derrivative works to be monopolised.
This also explains why content providers who restrict and monopolise access to content are generally not too popular around here. And this particular story is about how people abuse government-sanctioned monopolies in order to monopolise content that used to be free.
And that's why the "theft" metaphor, while still technically wrong, is probably slightly more applicable to this case than to copyright infringement: you take something away from people: free access to existing content.
If we're suddenly in support of the public domain today and against copyrighting of non-copyrighted works, why can't I use GPL code any way I want?
You can, actually. As long as you don't restrict how others use it.
We need to pick a position on copyright law and stick with it.
No we don't. We need to discuss it and keep discuss it. The moment we stop doing that, we might as well replace the slashdot discussions with a simple manifesto.
The study itself gives many examples of companies that are improperly putting a blanket copyright on works already in the public domain. Some of the examples of bogus claims are: copyrights on Shakespeare's plays, copyrights on historical documents (even the Constitution, if you can believe it!), copyrights on music by classical composers, etc.
The study also highlights the (very) few firms that get it right: Lexis/Nexis (spelling?) search engine, Library of Congress, and others.
There is a very useful section on the financial incentives for making improper copyright claims, and some great examples of just how very, very lucrative it can be to add a short introduction to a body of works in the public domain, slap a copyright notice on the whole of it, then collect fees.
The study is not at all too legal/technical, and though of course this is /. and nobody reads anything, but personally, I learned a tremendous amount in just the first 50 pages. Recommended.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Really folks does it take much to find this stuff:
Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan, Vol 1:
http://www.archive.org/details/glimpsesofunfami01hearuoft
and Vol 2:
http://www.archive.org/details/glimpsesofunfami02hearuoft
Archive.org scans are generally much better Google scans.
And if a book is not available, then instead of complaining that a business is not offering you free services, why not just find the book at a library and scan it and upload to archive. Or make a request to Library of Congress (or another participating library) to scan it, or buy a copy and send to one of the Archive scan centers. Then everyone will have unmolested access to it.
And read a little bit about copyright law and issues, before writing a foolish article.
The opinion of the Harvard Prof who thinks that the huge damages awarded for copyright infringement are unconstitutional has been reported here. Is a law really necessary to sue a self-described copyright holder? Isn't there some sort of quid pro quo in effect?
For instance, if WMG gets my video banned on YouTube even though it's not using its IP, shouldn't I be able to receive the kind of damages they get if I were to download their music without paying for it? Rather than wait for the law to happen, shouldn't someone (like a moneyed individutal + EFF) take a big IP bully to court?
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
If non-defensive Copyrights and Patents are a form of property, then let's tax them. When the holder no longer expects to make money from them, they can be sold or given back to the public domain. Heinlein suggested a great way to set property taxes: Let anyone state the taxable value of their property, then that's what it can be purchased for. See his novel "Number of the Beast" for details.
_Greg
Slashdot, like GPL, is anti-profit -- and they switch sides and talk from both sides of their figurative mouths to achieve their agenda. They don't want anyone to make money off copyrighted works. How can you "steal" a public domain book? It's available to everyone to use for free or profit, to modify as you see fit -- true freedom. Now they want to add more restrictions in the name of protecting the user and the works.
Ah, but Australia has seen a cease in the extension of its public domain; the clock is stopped at 1955 for the next decade and change. As a result, we have Project Gutenberg Canada, and its associated Distributed Proofreaders Canada. Anyone who died in 1938 or earlier is eligible for inclusion there, and they'll be celebrating Public Domain Day every January 1 for the foreseeable future--hopefully, it's much harder now to pass a damned extension than it was a decade ago.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think those are very different things.
One is to download an image and pay for it to reuse it (or not, if it is public domain) changes it (as little as you may want, changing the file name is already a change, if someone for example tags a lot of images that is work he or she put into it) and then put a new copright (or public domain) on it and then sell it (or not). This is what I understand the author calls copyfraud.
The other thing is straight fraud. Pursuing me (or people who downloaded from my server )for my own images after taking my images and putting a copyright on them. Sometimes large companies do that without even knowing it. But that is still wrong. And if you do it on purpose it is no different than stealing my car and selling it back to me.
I just believe those two things are very different from each other.
©2009, Anonymous Coward, All rights reserved.
This is work is an edited reproduction of a work produced by sbeckstead (555647) posted to Slashdot on Friday, June 26, 2009.
The expression of a work is copyrightable, even if the work itself is not copyrighted.
You are always free to use the information, and in most cases, even the exact text of a public domain work. However, the cover and illustrations of the book/text/paper and the arrangement of the symphony are the expression that a new author has added to the work and those expressions are what is copyrighted. Stop getting hung up on the copying bullshit.
In order for a public domain work to be useful it must be used or expressed in an original fashion, or else you have simply repeated the original author without adding anything of value, and therefore stood upon the back of giants, and trod them under your smelly feet.
Information of a general nature such as that found in digests, and almanacs, are usually copyrighted works consisting of the arrangement, and collection of public domain information.
It is the arrangement that is copyrighted not the information.
So you can have all the public domain information you want and as long as you express it yourself in your own way you do not have to license it.
If you merely copy the original text and expression of a work that has fallen into the public domain and add nothing to it, I feel that you have betrayed the nature of public domain and are producing a useless piece of fluff simply because you are not required to pay anyone anything for the privilege.
Great idea! a public DD of copyfraud instances would be very useful.
It would give everyone something to point to to show the difference between infringement and theft. If people could add themselves to the affected list for a particular instance we'd know which instances might be vulnerable to action. If it was wikified so discussion of theft/legitimate claims was public it would be a great educational tool. It might provide a chilling effect on the fraudsters.
It would help you to understand Slashdot, and other organizations, to remember that the organization is a fiction. The actual statements are coming from, and actions are taken by, various individuals.
Collective names, like Slashdot, are purely a stylistic convenience. Call it syntactical sugar. Only a very few individuals have any actual right to speak for the collective entity...and they VERY rarely do. Usually the spokesman is either self-appointed, or someone who can be denounced as "Not really representing our organization". (Remember, I'm NOT just talking about Slashdot.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But this isn't talking about copyright infringement. I'd agree that fraud + barratry + extortion was closer that theft, but not THAT much closer. They are stealing because after they have committed their actions you no longer have access to the property that you previously had access to.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I would like to propose a Rebuttal to the absurde and non legally based argument of the author of this article.
We have a very strong and in depth debate going here where I put forth my argument as to why I believe the author of the article is not a proponent of Public Domain rights but actually an opponent who would limit our rights as well as our benefit from public domain works:
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/97577-copyfraud-removing-works-public-domain.html
It's very complex for people to know what they could take from a work like Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, at best the publishers over broad claim has a chilling effect at worst it might indeed be copyfraud.
It would be good for the public if the copyright notices called out exactly what they were claiming, a footer on every page would be fine and do-able. In the commonly claimed case of adding prefaces etc if would be very easy.
It's better for publishers to make broad vague claims. The exclusionary effect of the claims are supported by the huge penalties for infringement. Conversely the cost of over claiming seems small/unlikely to be called out - publishers can always 'clarify away' their over-claim if it comes to the crunch.
One day, one of the emerging countries (China, India, Brazil) is going to realize how many hurdles are created in innovation and progress due to the greedy nature of the IP laws that US is pushing. That country is going to rationalize their IP laws and become the world leader in knowledge based economy. Our country will huff and puff due to the idiots running the country and the influence that IP whores have in our capital but won't be able to do much. May be someone can make a sci-fi novel out of it. I claim copyright on the idea...wait, never mind :)
A trademark indicates the origin of goods or services.
If the name or appearance of a character in a Disney film is identical (or nearly so) to the name or appearance of the same character in the no-longer-copyrighted source material, why should this name or appearance indicate that Disney is the origin? Case in point: mark is PINOCCHIO; owner is Disney. But see Dastar v. Fox .
Unfortunately the conservative courts have made it a practice to strictly limit damages to the public. When you know you can only be subject to 10 times the damages in costs, as long as there's no class action suit, if you can make more in profits than you think you will lose in damages, it makes perfect sense to do so.
A reverse lottery of sorts - as long as nobody else gets a winning ticket, you make out like a bandit.
(I note for the record, liberal courts have their faults too - I tend to be calmer about them because they do their massive damage accidentally, as opposed to being deliberate attempts to help the powerful at the expense of the weak, but even so - {G})
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Australia bumped up their copyright term to life+70 in 2005, so there won't be any new PD works in Australia until 2026. However, Canada's still at life+50, so Project Gutenberg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/ potentially has works where the author died in 1958. Also, here in the US, works published up through 1963 which did not get their copyright renewed are in the public domain. PG Australia has been around longer than PG Canada so it has about 10 times the titles of PG Canada, but I think PG Canada may be more active in adding new titles, thanks to Distributed Proofreaders Canada http://www.pgdpcanada.net/.
As a contributor to Project Gutenberg by scanning PD works and proofreading them at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I'd just like to point out that this is not new. Long before the days of public domain scans on the internet, many publishers added a short copyrighted introduction or postscript to a public domain work and then included a copyright notice without indicating that the copyright only covered the original material. Furthermore, while I am not fond of Kessenger Publishing and its ilk, especially if they've used Project Gutenberg content as their source material, they are not obligated to provides free scans of their PD catalog, any more than Penguin, Dover, Barnes & Noble, or any other publisher.
...and I guess it's the same everywhere. In our (Slovakia) criminal code fraud is defined as when "somebody deceives somebody else, or uses their mistake to enrich himself". This is exactly what copyfraud is about, and it's punishable by jail time. Also, of course, since it's a criminal offense the aggrieved party is entitiled to compensation. This all has nothing to do with copyright laws, just plain criminal code...
MHB apparently has made $8million+. If they didn't want to pay EMI then they can simply not use that music.
That is not even an argument. When you take away something that belongs to somebody else, there are many factors that decide whether or not it's legal. But the wealth of the takee is just not one of them. If you don't believe me, go steal Bill Gates's watch and see what happens.
And even if your argument were logical, it wouldn't apply. Because when the producer of MHB approached EMI, she didn't have an $8 million movie. She had a lot of uncut footage and a dwindling bank account that couldn't begin to cover all the coverage fees people were trying to extort from her. In order to get the movie made, she had to bargain, dub over, and even cut scenes because they showed kids dancing to music she couldn't get rights to, and it wasn't possible to dub over it.
One of the missing scenes featured Ray Charles's all time classic, "Hit the Road Jack." If that had been in the movie, I might have gone to see it just to watch kids dancing to it. But it had to be cut. And the issue wasn't even money! You can't get clearance for this song at any price, because the people who own its publishing rights consider it overexposed and are holding it off the market.
If the music clip is being used commercially it's not fair use -
Dude, don't repeat internet folklore as if it were a serious legal authority. This bit of folklore is popular amongst people who like to believe that re-using content is OK as long as they don't make money off it. Has no basis in fact.
Here's an interview with two lawyers (one of them extremely pro-industry) who both endorse the idea that documentary use is fair use. The even cite that ring tone as a classic example:
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/05/19/07
The reason they don't do that is that the benefits are relatively small, if not negative (they lose kickbacks from the fraudsters), and the drawbacks are immense (willful copyright infringement carries a six-figure fine for each instance). This is why Project Gutenberg goes to such lengths to cover their butts, especially when dealing with Rule 6 (non-renewed American works first published between 1923 and 1963, inclusive).
Now, I've reported some of these books myself, but even when folks are pinging Google Books about speciifc items with clearly-discernable copyright statuses, they seem profoundly unconcerned with addressing the matter. So no, I don't think Google Books would be interested.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca