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The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
helps to make the internet democratic.
Lets ask ourselves how many governments around the world don't want the Internet to be more democratic.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
By the people, for the people ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
As a lawyer working in the area, I highly recommend Boyle's book, 'The Public Domain' - available under a Creative Commons licence, as well as in dead-tree format.
A fascinating (and easy to read) discussion about the concept of 'the public domain', which is well worth reading for anyone who cares about the future of technological development / societal impact of overbearing IP regulation etc.
...so much so that places like /., which quite often provide original thinking upon a variety of subjects to anybody cunning enough to use a web crawler, should think about including "any derivative works originating from ideas or opinions expressed within the contents of this website constitute prior art and are covered by the GNU GPL" (or some such, while bearing in mind that IANAL).
One of you geniuses may unknowingly and casually toss out a feasible idea. It would burn you, to see somebody turn that into a profit-making machine, wouldn't it?
lollll....you'll know when you do it, though; a squad of lawyers will show up on your doorstep with a $1 bill, a quitclaim agreement, and a host of delightful comments upon the hazards of a lifetime spent in courtrooms - particularly when considered in light of your...unfortunate...financial circumstances and how the latter affects your ability to retain good legal representation...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development. How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar? However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
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It's not "swallowing" our culture as much as fencing it off from all sorts of people.
I'm convinced, though, that the more corporations try to limit the availability of "culture" by trying to create a false scarcity, the level of productivity among local and online artists who refuse to participate will increase, and more people will turn to them for their art, music, literature, journalism, etc.
The only way to save our culture is to change the dynamic that exists between corporations and individuals. You might be surprised to learn that corporations did not always exist just to enslave the population. And I believe it will not always remain so.
My fear though is that they will try to close those "loopholes" by making it harder for individuals to distribute their own music without a "license". There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That would be the perfect opportunity for me to show up at the other side of the door with a shotgun and an attitude.
Seriously, the more unreasonable the laws become, the greater the self-justification for breaking them, whether by shotgun, or P2P digital file sharing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Nothing short of eternal copyright and unlimited damages has any chance of satisfying the copyright cartel... and even that may not be enough as their desires are limited only by their imaginations. Like two year olds they want the moon, the stars and ... EVERYTHING. They think that they are divine.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Simple solution is copyrights work for ten years, plus another 10 if you have a full sized derivative work, 5 years if you make a smaller work. (The derivatives get 10 years from their own creation).
This pays the artists a fair amount of cash, keeps the publishers/distributors in business, yet allows people to do reasonable fair use.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
This is a little vague. The purpose of one of TFAs is to show how inaccurate the metadata on books in their database can be, and how Google is unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, when researchers use Google book search to look up information about books, rather than read the book (as the summary implies), they can be mislead.
Two examples from TFA: a search for "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results, and a book entitled "Culture and Society 1780-1950" was supposedly published in 1899.
Wait until fundamentalist religious groups realize how much culture they could remove simply by buying the copyrights to those works. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, or Muslim group realizes that by investing billions of dollars they could completely control all large media, the culture war will truly begin.
The bizaro legal system is a natural consequence of our economic policy to promote IP-based economy.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm really sick of all these attempts to make Google look bad out of something from which they rather should be made heroes, which reminds me a not-too-old / story. The copyright law was completely fucked up by the current opponents to the settlement and their predecessors, and NO, a first grant of the sort doesn't imply monopoly (really, why are these morons talking about "exclusivity", "imperialist ambitions", "monopoly"?), and on the contrary it'll be a major shift for book avaibility and affordability. If Google was another Microsoft, we would be 10 years backward, Internet features-wise.
Above all, why are these morons moaning about the "opt out" issue while they can just opt out ? Ohhh, maybe trying to protect the naive and uninformed, who does not care at all about his old works ?
The critics about OCR and metadata generation quality should really look at what the concurrence does, i.e respectively similar quality and nothing at all.
I've just read a Teleread comment which says he/she wants to bar Google from scanning books because of the OCR quality, we are in the total FUD non-sense here.
I made a really long-winded comment about it previously.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
Unless this professor is arrested and waterboarded immediately the terrorists will win!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Corporations began as a means to limit risk exposure to investors in adventures in trade and, thus, encourage investment. Putting aside, for the purposes of my comment, their current morals & ethics, Corporations still function to turn a profit and limit liability for investors. The world has grown small and overcrowded and everyone wants a big piece of the pie. Urbanization can be viewed as our attempts to deal with relatively high populations and scare resources. The results are often bottlenecks that force compromise and innovation. In a small, overpopulated world wherein we can't export our surplus populations or pollution, problems become even more acute. Corporations, especially where publicly held, are double binded by being forced to maximize profits and protect their investors capital. Due diligence has become a catch phrase used throughout various subcultures, but it serves as the modern day equivalent of caveat emptor. What happens in a situation wherein there's too many players all jostling for scare resources? Double binds, or, multiple ungiving constraints appear. Government is put in place to oversee market conditions, inter alia, and, ideally find ways to ease the pressures coming from too many players and too few resources. Unfortunately when there's no room to export surplus populations and home made externalities like pollution can't be exported and impinge on neighbouring sovereign states things just get worse. Investors want a good return on their investment and a reward for saving against future contingencies, corporations are forced to protect investors' capital and return a profit, Government is saddled with playing all players off one another and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. It's an ugly situation and IP rights and abuses are just a symptom of more systemic problems.
May you live long and prosper in interesting times. :)
ideopath @ play
I wonder if it is the case that if the USA's IP regime gets so oppressive it starts violent demonstrations, I wonder what our violent dystopian wasteland could be?
Will we have a future where the IP Exec's offices are stormed by mobs of angry young people wielding lethal force and murdering shareholders, board members and CEOs? What would such a future look like? Will we have the government executing citizens for IP related offenses? Will we go to war with countries over IP?
Kinda a scary thought.
Its the lawyers that are swallowing our culture.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow, copyright law really is a Black Hole!
I agree with you opinion and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I mean bitching at MS about IE and WMP is all well and good, but when the basic standard for proving you can operate a computer - the European Computer Driving Licence - is nothing more than a short training course in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, it makes you wonder whose side they're on. At least call it Office skills or something. Why are we entrenching a foreign corporation on one hand and complaining about it on the other ? It qualifies you to operate a computer in the same way operating a washing machine qualifies you as an electrical engineer. You even get points for putting your name in the right place FFS.
(The tests in that zip are last years version - the new ones mean you have to use vista and Office 2007. They also dropped the Access section completely. Those files have not touched a Windows computer since I got them from the British Computer Societys web site.)
Some jokers are charging £500 for that shit (training and test). I'd get into it myself, except I would never ever feel clean again.
There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
Go one step further, and they will even restrict what you read, its not just about music and video 'media'.
Go even one step further than that, and they will restrict who can read, listen or watch to a subset of those who are customers in good standing of specific campaign donors. Your congressman's eyes will glaze over when you talk about open standards or net neutrality. Request campaign donor-independent media formats or campaign donor-independent net access.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
drivel, but I have yet to see a comprehensive solution offered up by anyone that covers everyone fairly
Who are the people that need protecting?
How long do they deserve this protection for? 1 Year, 1000 years? And should that protection be different for content creators then content owners ( except when they are the same entity) ?
Should this protection be and estate protection, in other words, is it inheritable? Could I as a content creator / owner leave that protection in my will to my heirs? If so how long should that protection last, or should it? Would that same estate protection be enjoyed by content owners?
What agreements should be legal? Should it be legal for a person, as an employee of a company who pays them a salary to create a specific content, to be bound by an agreement of employment to assign all protection to that company? And if so, does that company fall under the definition of creator, owner or both of that content?
There are many difficult questions to be answered before a sweeping grand reform of protections granted under the term copyright can even be attempted.
I await your collective responses with curiosity.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
The Copyright and Patent laws of 1790 are, imo, is sufficient enough to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;".
14 year copyright, with a 14 year extension, and 17 years for a patent is enough. Authors and Inventors shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurals for the rest of their lives, but actually contribute to society, which is what the original copyright and patent laws provided for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790
Next WIPO meeting in Geneva will treat this topic next november (after going to the activation ceremony of this).
I run a Website for images (mostly) and text scanned from old books. When Google books started I thought at first I could just give up, but it turns out that the quality is so low for Google books that http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ and other sites like it continue to perform a valuable service.
I have had to spend a lot of time researching copyright law. I started out believing wikipedia, hah! And there are tons of Web sites with myths about copyright, e.g. that anything published before 1923 anywhere in the world is out of copyright in the US. Did you know that the UK copyright act has an exception specifically for works created in a hovercraft? Or that anonymous works have different copyright terms than ones that are credited, but e.g. if the name of a photographer becomes known (or knowable through any public means) after publication, it gets the longer term? And there's no central registry.
We're all getting screwed out of our heritage when a private corporation can control the world's library. To stop this, copyright law must be made simpler, and there must be online searchable registries. Copyright must eventually be harmonized between all countries, since digital information knows no borders. But it must be harmonized in such a way that some currently cpoyrighted works fall out of copyright, and as few as possible works that are out of copyright are placed back into cpoyright. The difficulty is that in corrupt regimes like the US, companies can pay politicians for their election campaigns, and hence special interests predominate politics. And I have idea how to end that corruption, of course.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
I still have issues with the Kindle lack of 'right of first sale'. What if I wanted to create and sell the ultimate sci-fi edition? What if I wanted to run a 'used Kindle' store? What if... not with a Kindle.
This problem has been discussed recently on Language Log, for those who are interested.
Frederic Mitterrand, the nephew of the former president, just appointed by our dumbass in chief Sarkzy, just stated that he wanted to fight "free [libre] internet fundamentalists."
I sooo wanted to cockpunch the son of a bitch. And the god damn sarkock-sucking media who didn't point out the outrageous nature of that fascist statement.
What most people are talking about when they talk about these copyright issues are the copyrighting and/or trademarking of artistic creations.
What's rarely brought up is the fact that there's a very analogous system in the world, too. For scientific creations, there's such a thing as patents. Patents are basically copyright for scientific inventions, as opposed to artistic inventions.
Now, if we compare patents to copyright, the vast disparity in protection length becomes obvious. In most countries, patents protect the exclusivity of scientific inventions for 15-25 years.
Artistic inventions are protected for *95* years. That is to say, 4-5 times longer.
Why? What makes them worth so much longer a protection than scientific inventions get?
The purpose of exclusivity expiring eventually (that is, not being forever) is to release the invented concept into the public domain so that the general public can eventually benefit from making use of the invention in whatever way society feels fit.
However, this right of the general public is by and large being denied at present when it comes to artistic inventions. Copyright terms are being extended and extended by Disney and other megacorporations because they don't want their big brands to become public property.
Imagine if Alexander Bell would have retained exclusive rights to the telephone for 95 years. The patent was issued in 1876. That means the telephone would have become public domain in 1971! The steam turbine would have become available to the general public in 1979 and barbed wire in 1982. The roller coaster and the diesel engine would have expired in 1993.
More importantly, what things would still be patented? We'd be waiting for the zipper to expire in 2012. Aerosol cans would become available in 2022, electric shavers in 2023. Radar wouldn't fall out of protection until 2030.
Imagine how much slower technology would have advanced if things like *zippers* would have to be licensed in order to be used in clothes.
Excessively long protection times directly harm the public, whether it be in the field of our scientific development or in the field of our artistic development.
As to the problem the article mentions re Google and other online book archives being a mess to find anything in, and hopeless for browsing -- what on earth would be wrong with cataloging them by the LOC system (which is *extremely* precise) or at least by Dewey Decimal (which is much fuzzier but at least you CAN find a category of interest without already knowing the titles/authors/keywords). That would bring their cataloging into alignment with libraries everywhere, and make it one helluva lot easier to find related stuff, or to just browse a general section.
I just spent a couple hours trying to browse that new hathitrust.org book archive, and that was one of the problems -- search terms tended to bring up either a lot of irrelevant crap, or to miss stuff that is what I want but doesn't happen to have quite the right keywords. (And some were from another galaxy, WTF?) But if I could cruise a list of works organized by LOC or Dewey, I could tell just from that whether a given work was likely to hit my field of interest, even if not a single search term matched.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Wanna know how much money/time/energy Google has put into ascertaining whether the rightsholders of the "orphan" works they have scanned or want to scan are actually unreachable?
None. Nada. Zippo. They don't even claim to have made an effort. The settlement agreement makes such determination the duty of the "Books Rights Registry," an entity that does not yet, and may well never, exist.
What Google _has_ done is push the idea of millions of "orphan works" pining for freedom (next to Google ads, of course).
They have decided that one of my parents' books is an "orphan," scanned it, and put it online. They are wrong, but, then again, they never even looked for me or my siblings. They did, however send me a notice about my own books being in their sights. "I opted out," of course.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
As short as possible. If 1 year will do, then 1 year. A study suggested that 14 years.
Copyright was intended to encourage creation, so it should be just long enough to do that. Too short and it's not worth bothering, too long and the creator gets to sit on their ass the rest of their life after a lucky hit, which isn't in our interest.
Copyright should definitely last significantly less than a lifetime, to encourage creation of multiple works.
Different. I'd have to think more on this, but for instance credit shouldn't be transferrable. A work should be always credited to its original authors. Author should retain the ability to use their own work.
Not inheritable. If the author wants to leave something, they could leave the profits if any, but the heirs should be heavily encouraged to produce something of their own. To avoid the temptation of killing the author, copyright shouldn't terminate upon death.
Owners IMO should never have any additional rights. Whatever deal they make with the copyright holder lasts at most as long as the copyright. Then it's in the public domain and anybody can do anything they want with the work.
It shouldn't be possible to assign all rights to somebody else. Authorship should be retained. Author should always retain the ability to use their own work. Singers shouldn't ever lose the ability to sing their own songs, book authors should never use the ability to transmit their creations to other people, programmers should retain the ability to read and use the code they wrote. All of those at least in a non-commercial manner.
Who are the people that need protecting?
From what? Their inability to convince people to give them money, or from the reality that greed is not a useful commodity?
That's why you're having so much trouble, there is nothing to protect except peoples greed. Physical property works with markets because there is one constant truth: scarcity. Take away the scarcity and the whole point of a market economy disappears. If physical property was not scarce, like shared information is not scarce, would you still insist on a market to protect it?
When teachers teach, are their teachings property? When they teach someone and that person passes on the knowledge, is the teacher richer? I would say that there is no scarcity in what is taught. The scarcity is in the people who teach. The creative industry isn't doing something special that doesn't fit into a market economy, they just don't seem to realise that it isn't the creations that are the commodity it is the creators.
The pinch of that realisation is everyone might get closer to what they deserve. People might only get to see big budget movies if they really are as desperately wonderful as hollywood thinks. Artists would be lot less likely to become rich yet more would be able to make a living. Perhaps not as much money will be spent on entertainment, perhaps more will. I would guess less. Either way you have more efficiency and (if the rest of the economy isn't being fucked up) a lower cost of living for everyone, including the artists.
Good questions. I havesome questions, too:
Why, pray tell, do my "rights" require protection for 70 years after my death? Is some bag-man from the copyright cartel going to deliver a check to my gravesite? Or, are they going to spend it on crack-whores, congress-creeps, or just pocket it.? Doh
f I recall correctly, 17 years (+ 1 optional 17yr renewal) was how US copyrights were set up. Seems plenty fair to me. The first stuff I wrote came out when I was 33, if I die at 76, it will be over 100 years from the time it was published until it enters the public domain. Why!!?? That serves no real useful public purpose. It will serve me not at all.
Why should copyright be inheritable? Can't Johnny and Janie just grow up like everyone else and become useful members of society? Is it fair to them to set them up as useless, parasitic drones, as they will in effect, be being taken care of by the rest of society? It's hardly fair to the rest of us.
Finally, if we are going to consider copyright and other forms of "IP" to be just like real property, e.g. real estate, should it not be treated just like real property, and be taxable like my home? If inheritable, should it not be subject to an estate tax?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I think a bigger problem is that Americans don't have meaningful culture in the first place. The result is that their Copyright laws are pretty much futile whichever way you look at them.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
Can you please expand on exactly what protections the "The People" require in this context?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
eom
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
"Who are the people that need protecting?"
The public domain from "content creators" (read: Greedy swill who want perpetual revenue off of a finite amount of work). The real issue is that IP is a gold mine for IP owners, this is why you have things like patent trolling and trademark issues.
Information should not be able to be "owned" by anyone and this whole cult of ownership is the problem, no "content creator" has a right to profit period, copyrights were to ENCOURAGE the production of works, not the suffocation of creativity as it is now.
All copyrights/IP for entertainment should have fixed 10 year limits, for special cases or industries (drugs, science, tech, etc) stuff would have to be worked out, but as it stands IP is increasingly authoritarian it gives monopoly and rent seeking behaviour legitmacy.
I think intellectual property is more trouble then it's worth and the economic model (profot model) is a failure when considering information is always derivative and the same archetypes and concepts will be reinvented and come up over and over again.
People inventing/discovering the same thing in different places on their own, yet copyright/IP fucks all that up enormously.
All IP works should be co-owned by society itself, none of this individual owner crap, if you create a work I buy (such as a game) I have a right as a member of society to the source code assets to be stored in a library somewhere so when it expires I can modify/update it as I will.
IP isn't IP because property is not property when someone elses buys a copy of it, the "IP owner" can tell the "IP renter" what he can and cannot do with Intellectual property he paid for but doesn't "own".
Consumers need some kind of protection and ownership rights over all IP they buy, so they can force the things they funded into public domain after a fixed period of time since right now, companies and "creators" are the most abusive mofo's on the planet.
No DRM, no disconnection laws where some third party is judge, jury and executioner in one, fair use rights, tax on blank media, etc.
Basically I see anything that puts the creator in the first place, and the rest of the people in the position where many freedoms are sacrificed for the sake of ensuring the author gets paid, as the wrong way to go.
Well, if you do that, what is the author's incentive to create anything?
What DRM et. all, is really about, is about ensuring the content creator/owner gets paid whatever the market will bare, for the content, in whatever form it is published, for the lifetime of the protection.
You can argue that the protection should be limited and the consensus seems to fall into about 16 years and after that the protection is removed ( or possibly renewable once ) and then the work moves into the public domain.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Remember: Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo.
Keep them in that order, and I have no political problem with your actions.
I agree that with crap like the RIAA is pulling in court, the time for the ammo box may not be far off, but please, keep this civil for as long as possible.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
There are two general justifications for copyright: economic and moral.
In a digital world, the public domain of IP is perfectly competitive. There are no marginal costs, so each copy should be free. Because being free would disincentive people from creating, or creating and sharing, we need to incentive IP and create a legal structure that stops perfect competition so that creativity will happen. Whatever the associated benefits are, they must outweigh the costs to justify a copyright system.
This objective is only secondary to copyright's main objective, however. The main objective is to expand knowledge. This is why facts are not copyrightable. This is why historical accounts, although copyrightable, are extremely narrow in scope.
There's also a moral incentive to grant exclusive rights, though this is probably something that more people won't see eye-to-eye on. For example, Locke's Labor Theory (I own my body, my labor, and the fruits of my labor) goes to fundamental rights that cannot be outweighed by utilitarian principles. Copyright is intrinsically valuable, yet you cannot raid the world of all its resources, nor can you keep too much for yourself. Our creations are our own, and other people don't deserve to take advantage of them.
There's more to this than greed.
Lessig is a lawyer, and the legal difference between the public domain and something licensed under a Creative Commons Zero License is interesting to him. To most of the rest of us, as far as I can tell, it's really not.
You have viewed your 30 days allowance of 2 free articles.
That sounds like a good rule for /.: only read 2 articles every 30 days. How many of us already abide by it? ;-)
I like it
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
If you're concerned about copyright and live in the UK, please take a look at my petition. Thanks!
Who are the people that need protecting?
Let's try asking an even more basic question.
In most free markets, the market price tends towards the marginal cost of production (so I hear). Typically, there are some fixed costs and some non-trivial per-unit costs.
Some areas are special, though. The areas I mean are those where the margin price is way off from the fixed costs (one, two, five orders of magnitude), and you're at the margin when i=2. That is to say, the first unit is costly to make, the rest are essentially free.
One such area is information; mathematical proofs, investigative journalism, music, movies, software, works of reference (encyclopaedias, dictionaries, ...), scientific publications, etc.
(I think pharmacy is similar: very high fixed costs in generating a useful, correct, FDA-approved chemical formula; at that point, the formula is free to copy and cheap, per unit, to put to use by making drugs using the formula.)
Since information is essentially free to copy (or at least close enough to free as to be, practically speaking, abundant), we as a society lose out if we deny anyone a copy of published information.
On the other hand, some kinds of information take financial incentives (i.e. money) to produce, or at least to produce well.
The real trick questions are these: how do you send money towards the people who are creating the no-cost-copy products? How do you make sure that they produce what the people at large most wants to consume? How do you weigh up providing big incentives versus those of making widespread use of what already exists?
Is copyright the right system at all? Is the duration right? Is the scope right? Should every different kind of right be monopolized for equally long periods of time?
Just some questions to get you thinking :)
Just to throw another leg on the pile, I am a linguist at a pretty prestigious university, and yes, that's one of the things English really has going for it. Of course, the main reason is the British/American dominance, but what really helps is that English speakers do not care if you throw in words from other languages, as long as they know what they mean. This is further aided by the fact that English is already a pidgin of Old English and Norse, from when the Vikings conquered large sections of the British Isles. Old English was highly inflected--words changed form to show grammatical function--but people found that when they were working with non-native speakers, it was easier to just settle on a subject-verb-object sentence structure and drop the whole inflection system, which means you can just plunk new words in as-is. Also, our verb forms are in a process of simplification now, as new verbs come in, we have just been adding -ed for past and past participles and calling it good. This trend is also spreading to original English verbs as well. The language is becoming grammatically easier all the time. Add to the Vikings a Norman occupation, as well as a legacy of Latin from the Roman (Catholic) Empire, and you have a language that is extremely promiscuous.
Furthermore, although many complain about English's messy spelling system, the truth is that it is actually a considerable strength. The reason that English spelling can be a little hard is that English usually doesn't re-spell words when borrowing them. It just takes the word, uses whatever is the most common romanization scheme for the language in question if it doesn't use the roman alphabet, and throws it in. That's how open it is to new words.
I think the next big international language is sure to be Mandarin, but the writing system is a major drawback. Hanzi (kanji in Japanese) is awesome when you know the character in question, but indecipherable if you don't. It's really cool to just take a single ideogram, write it down, and have an entire morphological unit, but the learning load is really, really high. Of course, Mao saw this and tried to scrap hanzi for the pinyin romanization system, but it was way too unpopular so that idea died. I hope there's something in place before our Chinese overlords are imposing it upon us. :-p
Let's do a little reducta ad absurdia...
I am a professional writer. These days, I am a "Technical Writer", which means you pay me first, or I don't write. I get to feed my kids.
Imagine I was a software vendor: you have to pay me first, or I don't make any software. I get to feed my kids.
Or a musician... You pay me first, or I don't perform. My kids have shoes to go to school.
Or a movie studio: you pay me first, or I don't make any films.
This is how the world will operate a few years from now if Google gets to suck up everyone's work and distribute it for nothing. What effect will that have?
Remember the Billy Carts we made as kids? I was very proud of mine. It's not what I drive today: I am glad there's a professional car factory to make cars for me.
I remember my attempts to be a musician. Nobody else does, thankfully. I am glad there are professionals to make music for me.
I was a performer (a radio announcer). I was not very good at it: I am glad of the ones who do it better, that I listen to every day.
My life is rich and comfortable because professionals can do for me what I don't do very well for myself. The generation after next may not have that luxury. They may have to grow their own food, make their own clothes, and sing their own songs. Because nobody could earn enough to support themselves as a professional doing these things.
Because Google gave it all away. Google would eventually have it all, and you and I would not be able to buy computers to consume it with.
This is not a discussion about "Freedom", or "Democracy". It's about finding a way for citizens to efficiently exchange their talents and abilities so we all may live. If you progress Google's strategy to its logical end-point, it is very, very, evil...
When will there be a non-violent protest of a publisher selling copies of Disney's first perpetual-copyright short to much fanfare?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Love of the art, contracts, money?
Bullshit. DRM doesn't ensure anything because it doesn't work. It never has, and never will.
And if DRM is for some reason necessary, how come there is un-DRMed music for sale?
And are you saying that none of the artists on Amazon or Amie Street manage to sell anything? If you are, then why does anybody bother to try selling anything there? And if you aren't, well, there's your incentive.
I don't care about the consensus. You asked for my opinion, and that's what you got.
Troll? I disagree with the comment; in the US, there are no rights OWNERS, since copyright constitutionally is a limited time monopoly and NOT ownership. But troll? From the slashdot FAQ:
From wikipedia:
Troll does not mean IDWTP.
Free Martian Whores!
Most of those publisher worries seem to be handled privately, through contracts, in the US. Otherwise, I think it's implied in exclusive ownership of your work as its author.
Your argument is emotional, and I am not arguing the merits of DRM, so therefor I will not engage at the level..
The point is that there are content creators/owners that do not want the content that they created distributed without the fee for that content being paid to them or their authorized agent.
In the digital age when content, even content obtained legitimately, can be distributed world wide on a mass basis within hours and in some cases minutes both against the content creator/owners wishes and in violations of the protections currently in place what recourse to content creators/owners have?
Your argument that there are content creators that sell their content without any sort of digital rights management, implies that you believe that all content creators should do so. I submit that it is the choice of the content creator/owner to make that decision for themselves and as such it is your choice to purchase or not as both of you have that fundamental right.
I also submit that we, the DMR'd ( if you will ) are the original creators of DRM since those content creators were forced to attempt to control the distribution of their content when those of us with digital means undertook to distribute their content without their agreement, to the world en-mass. In this regard we are truly hoisted on our own petard.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Thank you for that response. All of those are what I summed up as the "many many difficult questions" that will need answering before any meaningful reform can be undertaken.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
This is the difference between a *creative* work (i.e. something created out of nothing) and an *invention* (i.e. something discovered).
I think the difference is far from as clear as you make it out to be.
For example, Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" is not something created out of nothing. It is built directly on top of previous literary inventions, in this case the Bible. Many Disney movies are directly built on fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Alan Moore's comic book "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is built on many 19th century literary inventions, as is his "Lost Girls". How about "West Side Story"? "Romeo and Juliet".
It's quite easy to show that many creative works are, in fact, derivative from previous creative works, just as many scientific works are, in fact, derivative from previous scientific works.
Now, imagine if we did as you propose, and the rights to creative works were retained "forever". "Passion" couldn't have been made, Disney would have been sued by the heirs of Grimm. And I'm not even going to get into how many times Paramount would have been sued for episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where they were in violation of Shakespeare's copyrights.
Vast swaths of our cultural landscape would be eliminated if copyrights were forever.
Scientific inventions aren't made in a vacuum, and neither are creative inventions (i.e. they are not "created out of nothing").
Like scientific inventions, literary inventions also need to be freed eventually, so that the society can make derivative works.
Therefore, since there must be a limit of protected years that is between zero and infinity, why should literary inventions merit a greater number than scientific inventions?
Thanks for the clarification of "trolling"...
As to your comment. "Ownership" yes it is a hard term to get your head around when you are taking about something that is (in these days) nothing but a string of bites, which in an electronic twist of the moment can be made as ethereal as a cloud on a summer day.
I think the notion takes it's origin from parchment or perhaps papyrus or even clay tablets since those were "things" that contained the information.
In this day an age what term should then be used to describe a sequence of letters and or numbers that I string together that are unique in content, form and or function?
Do I "own" the sequence of instructions I wrote 20 years ago to handle the A-D conversion of sound waves picked of by a microphone?
Perhaps new terms need to be established, I don't know, but your comment suggest such. What are your thoughts?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
No, it isn't. It's technical: DRM doesn't work, and can't work, and as such it's pointless.
Absolutely none. And they'll never have one.
No matter how much DRM you wrap around a MP3, I'll always be possible to break it. Worst case, I can place a microphone next to my speakers. And once it's broken even once, it's trivial to create a non-DRMd file from that.
Think of any popular MP3 file or program. Look on file sharing networks. There's not a single that's not available, regardless of the amount of effort done by the author to prevent it.
In that case, you should know that I never buy DRMed content. It's a 100% guarantee I won't buy whatever you're selling.
I submit it's a pointless exercise. You can't make data not copyable any more than you can make water not wet. You may not like it, but the world doesn't adjust to your preferences just because you'd prefer it to work in some other way.
I think that if you don't like the situation, you should just give up, and earn money in some other way. You'll be happier that way; because no matter what protections you apply to your stuff, they're doomed to be broken if somebody cares enough to break them. And the stronger the protections you apply to your work, the more sales you'll lose to people who think they're too restrictive.
As I said, I'm for copyright, but present copyright terms are far too long. Art, like science and technology, is built on what came before. There was another comment that explained it very well, "what if patents lasted as long as copyrights?" The telephone would have still been under patent protection in the 1970s (and he gave a lot of other examples).
Another thing I think is that noncommercial copying should not be infringement. As someone else's commant remarked, quoting (iirc) Franklin, "lighting your candle with my candle does not diminish the quality of my flame". Cory Doctorow is on the NYT best seller list in part because he puts his work on the internet for anyone to get for free -- nobody ever went broke from noncommercial copyright infringement, but many artists have gone hungry from obscurity (case in point -- Vincent Van Gogh).
I don't believe anyone should own intellectual "property" at all, but you should have a limited time monopoly on its commercial distribution.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't believe anyone should own intellectual "property" at all, but you should have a limited time monopoly on its commercial distribution.
I think this is a tangle of words. What label should we use? You don't like the word "property" and thats fine. So what word shall we use to describe the ability to have absolute and legal control over a novel or sequence of musical notes, etc. that a person has created?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
If I don't own something forever, or until I lose or sell it or give it away, I don't own it. What's wrong with "copyright material?" That's accurate and descriptive, while "intellectual propery" is neither.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't have a problem with it at all.
Hmmm I do have a bit of a problem with the other part though
If I have a thing that I made, and I miss-place it, leave it on a park bench accidentally, does that mean that it is no longer mine? It is no longer in my physical custody, but does that make it any less mine?
I think what this comes down to is that you recognize a physical thing as property that belongs to you until you officially transfer it to someone else and yet you don't want to recognize something created that does not have a physicality as property.
So the following questions come to mind:
1. If a persons takes a raw material ( and that raw material happens to be wood, steel, ice, whatever), and makes something of it is it their property?
3. if another person take a raw material ( in this case words ) and makes something of it, how is that different from the former?
Just pondering life as I know it...
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I think what this comes down to is that you recognize a physical thing as property that belongs to you until you officially transfer it to someone else and yet you don't want to recognize something created that does not have a physicality as property.
I base it on the US Constitution, that says Congress can give artists and inventors a limited time monopoly on their writings and discoveries. Copyright and patent are more like renting than owning, and the rent paid is the creation of the work itself, which goes into the public domain after the limited time has expired.
Free Martian Whores!