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EU ACTA Doc Shows Plans For Global DMCA, 3 Strikes
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission analysis of ACTA's Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the US is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the
WIPO Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law. The
document contains detailed comments on the US secret copyright treaty
proposal, confirming the desire to promote a 'three-strikes and you're
out' policy, a Global DMCA, harmonized contributory copyright
infringement rules, and the establishment of an international
notice-and-takedown policy."
More evidence that there is a real movement afoot for a global government with the goal of undermining the freedom and liberties of U.S. citizens.
I don't think this treaty would pass in the US Senate. I would forsee the unlikely coalition of far rightists and far leftists actually collaborating to defeat this, just as they actually have on some other things.
This is my sig.
Down with the white-man based one world government!
New Economic Perspectives
In the US even? I mean I know our politicians are bought and paid for, but wouldn't 3-strikes and you're cut off violate due-process? Granted I haven't read all the details, but it's a bit hard to when it's you know, hidden away from all.
Time to fire up the printer and send off more letters to the Congress critters.
No sig for you!!
On this point I am really saddened by the Obama administration. The 3-strikes-and-out is hugely unpopular including amongst artists. It is "lobbying for special interests" at its finest and really should not belong to the 21st century. There are already some countries who recognized access to internet as an opposable right.
I thought now there were progressives in the White House and in Senate ? Does nobody want geeks' votes anymore ? How many pirate party will be necessary in order for this madness to end ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Did you see the bit about legal enforcement of DRM provisions. LAN parties might get you out of having your ISP 3 strikes you; but they won't do you much good if possessing gear that can actually rip and copy stuff is about as safe as possessing Schedule 1 substances...
Dear Rest-of-the-World:
I realize that you have already had to deal with an invasion of Iraq to eliminate imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and a world-wide financial collapse (although, to be fair, you bear some of the responsibility for that one... after all YOU believed our our uncritical rating agencies). And we're still stumbling around on that ruining-the-planetary-climate issue. So I know it's a big favor to ask, but would you please, PLEASE restrain my country's insane leaders?
Thanks...
-- A Sane American.
Silly fool:
1> once you and all your lan party buddies lose your internet connections how will you co-ordinate a large lan party?
2> this will be used to quash opposition as folks espousing unpopular opinions will hit their three strikes whenever any bureaucrat takes notice of them.
3> Going to just sign up with another ISP after you strike out? Think again as it won't take long for a legal blacklist of "repeat offenders" to show up and be maintained in order to assure that the ISPs maintain their "safe harbor" status.
Now I'd like to think that this will be an unsustainable process in the long run, but it is Monday and the week ain't getting off to a good start.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
So say you get kicked off the net - how do they enforce this? Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen ways to browse the net semi-anonymously (coffee shop, library, college, neighbors wi-fi etc etc). Not to mention having internet access at work - does that mean I'd be denied employment world-wide for messing around on the net?
versus
millions of teenagers who are
1. technologically astute
2. media hungry
3. POOR
let them pass any goddamn law they want. who fucking cares?
its nothing more than damage to route around, like the internet was designed to do
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People like you are as much a problem as Big Media's absurd power grabs. You are unashamedly breaking the law, which makes you the poster boy for Big Media when they are pushing for ever more extreme laws. And while you will deserve it if you ever get screwed by those laws, lots of people will wind up suffering through no fault of their own if these measures go through.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
By all means, let's get writing, mailing, whatever. Set up a petition, a FB group and spam our MP's silly. I'm just a little vague on who to reach. Anyone with experience got some contact info for the various member states (EU, Canada, NZ, etc etc)?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
You are unashamedly breaking the law
yes, he's laughing at a body of BAD, UNJUST LAWS.
you see a problem with that? I don't. and I'm not exactly a young kid by any stretch..
if you are not getting justice one way, get it another way. we each have that right and duty to ourselves. justice is not served at only one restaurant, fwiw..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Politicians call it "strategically avoiding success."
once you and all your lan party buddies lose your internet connections how will you co-ordinate a large lan party?
via proxy. either human or other means.
this is simply an arms race. we know from history that those never 'finish' they just keep on going. this one will, too, if put into place.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
By 2025 (at the current rate of advance sustained over the last 30 years) a TB of disk storage will cost about a penny. For $100, you will be able to buy a hard drive that will hold 2.5 *centuries* of HD video. While that might not be enough to hold all of mankind's copyrighted media, it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime.
http://brownzings.blogspot.com/2009/11/disruptive-change.html
The point is, if we copyright any and every scrap of content produced, and maintain the same sorts of restrictions on such content that we enforce at the current time plus all the restrictions of the ACTA.... We will have no legal way to use a storage card we might get as a prize in a Cracker Jack box, much less a drive we actually buy.
And if people can carry around cheap storage sufficiently large to simply clone everyone's media libraries who they might meet, to sort out what they want later, who needs the Internet to "pirate"? (Thus what would be the real use of "Three Strikes"?)
When I write a joke, it is copyrighted. But jokes are so easy to repeat, and so hard to track that there isn't any way I can be paid for each time my joke gets retold. When media becomes easier to pass along than a joke, how can anyone require a payment for each retelling? There are other ways to be compensated, and the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to live with Moore's Law just like any high tech company does. Learn to leverage the efficiencies they gain with better technology to offset the loss of revenue that occurs as technology eliminates sources of income.
Live Concerts, Movie Theaters, endorsement deals, Shirts, and other value adds (plus who-knows what value adds might arise in the future) may be where the entertainment industry will have to go. Cheap (and I don't mean $10, or $5, or even $3) downloads of non DRM movies would bring in plenty of income from those that simply don't want to bother with other services.
Life is tough as technology takes away your income. But we are not going to kill the advance of technology, as much as the entertainment industry would like us to.
I thought the whole point of ACTA as a secret agreement was that it could be implemented by merely tweaking enforcement of existing law. I know of no element of US law that supports the 3 strikes notion. If Congress won't play ball, ACTA could fall apart no matter what the various international executive branches agree to.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
From http://www.heretical.com/miscella/frbigsis.html:
We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.
It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.
Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn’t really the government’s business. Today you need a dog license, a shot card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk it only in designated places. It’s all so we don’t get rabies.
Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker, emissions test. Depending where you are, you can’t have chips in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything, usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.
Then there’s paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person, for a total of twenty-four. This doesn’t include personal property taxes for the country, business licenses, tangible business-assets forms, and so on.
Now, I’m not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid, frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is probably a good idea, and certainly is if I’m crossing the street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway, and you get arrested. Don’t replace your windows without permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government’s business.
I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely numerous rules doesn’t inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at all. By having every aspect of one’s life regulated in detail, does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is, detailed obedience?
For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it. You didn’t need a license and nobody got upset.
To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money, not a background check, waiting period, proof of age, certificate of training, and a registration form. If your tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light. If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend, the cops, all both of them, didn’t care. If you wanted to swim in the creek, you didn’t need a Coast Guard approved life jacket.
It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it, and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn’t feel as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies, thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.
Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from things I’d just as soon not be protected from. We must wear a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy
The little guy who sells bootleg dvds in order to support terrorism. Damn pirate bay have been cutting into his profits.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Just for curiosity's sake, could we ensure the following if these laws get passed?
Company A becomes convicted of copyright infringement 3 times
Company A loses permanent access to the internet
I'm sure that Time Warner, Sony, et. al. have all been convicted of copyright infringement at least 3 times. Can we have their access to the internet permanently revoked?
to point out that their INTENT is malicious and requires vocal opposition
but i am merely pointing out that regardless of their intent, they can have no real world effect
the intent of an ant might be to eat you, but who cares: its just an ant
governments do plenty of vile things in this world. however, in this specific arena, they are paper tigers: all bark and no bite. it is in fact a chance to laugh at their absurdity and make fun of their ineffectualness. of all the evils they could be fighting: corporate nepotism, for example, they instead decide to focus their energies on cutting off a common citizen's internet access for the horrid crime of downloading a movie. a download that does not represent lost business, a download that represents the future of media distribution: media free, ancillary revenue streams the only source of profits for the artist, NO DISTRIBUTOR NEEDED
these are clueless old fools distressed at the death of a cash cow who think that the pre-internet media distribution model deserves defending, or could even be propped up. the future of distribution companies is hype and promotion for pop media, a business perhaps 1/100th or 1/1,000th of their previious market capitalization. oh well, who fucking cares, good riddance dinosaurs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this is simply an arms race. we know from history that those never 'finish' they just keep on going. this one will, too, if put into place.
That is debatable. If they can get things like "3 strikes" passed, then the next step is to push for custodial sentences for repeat infringers who find ways to dodge the third strike, or licensing just for the "privilege" of being able to use an Internet connection. I think once the news starts carrying pictures of students getting locked up for three months or fined enough to bankrupt them because by their own admission they ripped off all their media, a lot of people who casually infringe because of the low perceived risk will reevaluate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Thank god they're following baseball rules. It could have been worse. It could have been cricket.
your random grandmother or soccer mom will lose their internet access for what leachers on their insecured wifi do or what their children's friends do
and all the while the real action will move further underground, further encrypted, steganographed, obfuscated, made sparse, and otherwise evolved to be more and more resistant to any sort of inspection, interception or even tracking
thank you, governments of the "free" west, for breeding the ultimate untraceable file sharing network due to your overzealous protection of your corporate executive friends in dead media industries. fucking blind fools
it does you no good, assholes, to be the losers in the game of technological progress, and not even know it
one should know when they are defeated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a self-employed game developer, I own the copyright on all the stuff I sell. While I can recognise the need for a unified global copyright system (and unified global laws on sales and export/import tax), my sales model assumes I can sell any given product for 10 years, and I would be perfectly happy if copyright durations were reduced to that. That said, 10 years may well be optimistic, and I doubt I would have any problems if it was reduced to 5 years. Anyone in a who must make their money back quickly is in the same boat — the rest of the profits are just "keeping score".
From what I've seen, this treaty is not going to make the world a better place, it's going to make it worse, especially given how little most people know about IP law (patent != copyright != trademark != database right != industrial design right != geographical indication != trade secret). Short duration IP-monopoly-rights are non-issues for rapidly moving industries, and shorter durations make it easier to move faster.
Once something is ripped, you don't need any special tools to copy it.
That is the core of why DRM is so absurd. It only takes one guy with a cracking tool to give access to the other 6 billion of us.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There will always be places that will say "no thanks" to this kind of stupidity for several rerasons:
1) They have some sense (rare but possible) :)
2) They don't like US.
3) Their laws wouldn't allow
4) Their Constitution wouldn't allow.
5) They don't want outsiders telling them how to do things specially if they can't do themselves.
6) All of above?
Scientia est Potentia
The thing is, I don't have a problem with the basic principle of copyright, and frankly, I'm not sure most people do.
Sure, it sucks if you want the latest and greatest works but you can't afford the asking price. Life is tough. But whenever we have these discussions, no-one in the "everything should be free" camp seems to have a credible alternative system that still produces plenty of high quality works.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
So I RTFA and read the source linked in TFA and something isn't matching up. He's inferring an awful lot from an awful little. Is there a (semi-reputable leaked)copy of the orig document floating around that he is basing some of these claims on? Because the EU Summary is very vague and doesn't necessarily lead to the harshness of the provisions he's outlining. I'm not saying his interpretation is in any way not sound, but it also seems to be the extreme end of things.
Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place
Assurance contracts. The author specifies a bounty amount, fans pledge money, and if the sum of pledges meets the bounty amount, the author is contractually bound to publish the work under a free license.
You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along and current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
I seriously doubt we'll here anything negative on the mainstream media about ACTA.
I share this doubt. The only major TV news outlet that's not MAFIAA-owned is PBS. All the rest share a corporate parent with an MPAA member: NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC are with Universal Studios, ABC is with Disney, CBS is with Paramount in National Amusements, and Fox News is with 20th Century Fox in News Corp.
Not really. I'm not in the share-everything-cause-you-can boat but this has become something like destroying a persons life for jay-walking.
We rally against such laws because they become increasingly divorced from the reality of modern human existance.
When the media distribution companies decide to join us and work with the rest of the modern population maybe something less rediculous or radical will result.
If, and only if, devices continue to be built in the "default allow" mode.
Consider the xbox360 or the PS3: Unless the hardware is subverted, one unit at a time, they will refuse to execute code that hasn't been cryptographically blessed by their respective overlords. Now, because the games are pressed onto disks for retail sale, this system would still be vulnerable to bit-for-bit disk clones; but in the (very likely) future download-heavy environment, this will likely be replaced by signed unique-per-device binaries, and devices that will execute only binaries that are designated for them, and signed.
Audio and video would be harder; because of the market pressure created by the large amounts of legacy material; but that is nothing that buying the right law couldn't fix.
As long as DRM is based on trying to build uncrackable systems, it is(as you say) absurdly impossible. Any one crack means a plaintext copy circulating freely. If, however, you create a DRM scheme that is "default deny" instead of "default allow", it suddenly becomes a great deal more plausible. If a device will only interact with material signed by a trusted party, a plaintext copy is useless. If some trusted party does sign a pirated copy of something, they can simply be revoked.
Sure, there'll still be hacked devices(or built from scratch devices) floating around that can read plaintext copies of things) and people who play cat-and-mouse by stealing signing keys and signing pirated material and circulating it until those keys get burned; but it will be radically harder than it is now. Even worse, depending on how exactly you design the crypto key hierarchy, you could even use it as a means of punishment. Say, for instance, that (because of strong pressure from holders of legacy non-DRMed material) our hypothetical DRM system allows users to sign previously plaintext material themselves, in addition to automatically signing future documents they create. If material you have signed ends up circulating P2P and your key is revoked, all your documents become unreadable. Any number of unpleasant elaborations are possible.
Blame the corrupt entertainment industry that lobbies our lawmakers into betraying the very people who elected them.
One can't get elected without the exposure that the news media offers. Look at how the press buried Ron Paul, for instance. I'd blame the lack of separation of news media and fictional entertainment: NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News are all owned by MPAA members.
The Fashion Industry.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton. ...why? Hollywood comes up with maybe two worthwhile ideas a year. Before I fight you on that one, I'd like to hear your explanation of any system that will actually cause people to produce and share high-quality movies, since it sure isn't happening now.
Really, what's the problem here? Are we worried about musicians? The vast majority of popular musicians would make more money working at a 7-11 than they do during their time on the market under the major labels.
Are we worried about books? People have been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. The publishing industry is collapsing under its own weight, because of the abundance of free content out there (since the Internet appears to prove that people prefer "free" to "good").
Are we worried about movies?
Really, for someone with a sig protesting the power of the state, you seem awfully chipper about "property" that's been wholly invented by the government.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Nah, these laws are a very recent phenomena. I think if you put copyright in the context of entire world history you'll see that great works of art were also produced in times when there was no copyright. A lot of our intellectual property laws, especially those concerning patents, are descended only recently from Elizabethan English law where the monarch granted trading monopolies and guilds were formed to eliminate competition.
......
You think Homer wouldn't have written The Odyssey if they'd been no copyright? Oh wait
If it's human nature to produce great works of art (including music) people are gonna do it regardless.
It starts with RFID chips being implanted into everyone, which is then used only for convenience (like purchases) and then slowly becomes more and more integrated into everyday life.
I can think of six hundred sixty-six reasons why an implanted charagma like that won't fly. When you get millions of Christians exercising their First Amendment right not to take the mark of the beast, a parallel underground economy will flourish. The IRS does not want that.
these clowns only help us to popularize the free-as-in-freedom art. I agree: let them pass more copyright laws if they so desire. Unlike with patents, nothing of value will be lost.
It's a lot like patents. If the big music publisher can establish a coincidence between a song you wrote and a song that was on the radio in the past couple decades, the big music publisher can sue you and win. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
high quality work *is* created that is shared freely. file sharing has only increased hollywood's revenue. show me a system where anyone can copy anything without restriction *doesn't* work.
All of this the evil influence of the USA **AA lobbyists over the rest of the world.
Although the US empire is faltering they still continue their evil agenda.
We all know what the DMCA has brought to the world. Now it will be de-facto the same for the rest of the world outside the USA.
Of course this is not done through a democratic process....
problem with the basic principle of copyright
As it is an infringement of ones right to do what one wishes with ones own property, I certainly have a problem with it. Further, the economic damage caused by copyright is significant, which means that anyone objecting to what is fundamentally an extremely inefficient tax scheme would have a problem with it if it were honestly described and accounted for.
So, why don't you see if you can do better?
Considering the atrocious efficiency it's not exactly hard. In many cases creators get jack or even end up paying for the right to perform their own works, so for some, even completely abolishing copyright would be 'better'.
the sceptics like me will be interested
The simplest one I've seen suggested would basically build upon something similar to radio; mandatory licensing regardless of what medium is involved. Simply have a levy on any end-user sales revenue derived from copying works, handled by the appropriate tax agency and paid to the appropriate creators (modulo socioeconomic goals such as maximizing production, etc). That way it simply becomes a simple political issue of tweaking measurable numbers back and forth.
Of course, a non-adversarial system like that would be very bad for IP lawyers. And a general mandatory licensing scheme would undermine the value of marketing, as if something is excessively marketed anyone can cut the sales price. Which may not make marketing corps happy. In fact, as pretty much any other system would put more of the money spent in the hands of the creators, most of the current IP industry would object.
Thank you. You saved me the time it would have taken me to type all that myself.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
but media distributors have been imposing a tax on our cultural exchange between artist and consumer for a long time. before they were a necessary evil, now they are unnecessary
so the point is not that you should be despondent over the loss of certain freedoms, but you should celebrate at the vast extension of freedom of expression, of cultural exchange, that the internet creates. of course the dinosaur will fight that, and in its death throes take out many innocents with the flinging of its tail
but make no mistake: the dinosaur may be powerful, but it IS dying, most certainly
too bad it doesn't know it has been made extinct
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know of no element of US law that supports the 3 strikes notion.
Look at what 17 USC 512(j)(1) says about repeat infringers.
1. Perhaps it's true that most popular musicians would be better off working at 7-11... but if that were true they'd be spending their time working at 7-11, not making music. So that doesn't actually address the point.
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
3. With movies your argument basically boils down to 'movies suck anyway,' which is a pretty subjective statement. The 'poor quality' in your view certainly hasn't prevented Hollywood from being popular. Certainly, it produces works good enough to encourage people to break the law to view them. So again, this doesn't address the point.
The US by no means has exclusive domain over this madness, the content industry exploits corruption wherever it is. Witness the 3-strikes law, which we don't even have yet in the US.
It's not called three strikes, but see my other comment
In fact, I think the Free Software movement should write an application to detect pirated closed-source software.
GNU Genuine Advantage? Sounds like a bad joke. No wait, it is.
1. The point being, strong monetary incentives are not necessary for people to produce quality works (or whatever passes for it) in the music business.
2. So now no books were written prior to 1486? Pfft. Besides, early copyright was (1) laughably poorly enforced, and (2) primarily intended to ensure the accuracy of the text, rather than the profitability of the print shop.
3. It produces works terrible enough that people won't watch them on the terms offered by the market. "People won't pay to see your movie" is not a strong argument of the movie's quality. In any event, my point here was just that I don't care if Hollywood rots. If there's that much demand for its content, someone will fund it somewhere.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy. Why does a pizza parlor owner have to bake pizzas to make a living and an artist can sit on his hands after drawing just one painting? If you try to address this issue, you will probably say something about inability to recoup costs in case of big-budget projects like movies, but this is bullshit. You will still have to explain why a monopoly is the best way (for a consumer!) to pay for these projects, while other perfectly sound ways of raising funds are known and used today (citation on request).
Now is the time to start financing the guys who work on the TOR and Freenet protocols
No sig for the moment.
Which is in fact a large segment that this treaty is targeting. Hence the title "Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement." You may recall the hubbub earlier when Louis-Vuitton, et al, sued Ebay for hosting listings of knock-off goods.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2290973.htm
I'd disagree with your point about movies. Yes, Hollywood does put out a lot of crap, but they also put out a decent number of good moves. Of those good movies, they are usually higher-quality than indie movies. And speaking of indie movies, how many of those were released under a permissive license (without copyright)?
And video games? That's a huge gaping hole that people tend to forget (or outright ignore). After all, the quality of FOSS/non-copyrighted video games is laughable when compared to games developed under copyright. I certainly haven't seen a single free game that has managed to convince me that non-copyrighted games will be able to fill the shoes of the current industry.
And of course, we haven't even touched the real problem with your argument: that you're equating copying today with copying hundreds of years ago. The ability to easily copy books and other materials wasn't even around until the printing press, and today's computers and digital media far exceed previous copying methods in terms of cost-savings and quality. As another poster pointed out, the invention of the printing press was followed shortly by the invention of copyright. Maybe the issue isn't as simple as you'd like to make it out?
That you'd trot out the tired, "Well, people were making stuff before copyright," argument without any sort of critical thinking, gloss over the works that current industries produce, and then even leave out an entire industry worth billions of dollars... well it doesn't say much for your argument.
The Fashion Industry.
The fashion industry does not sell designs or fashion.
They sell brand names and lifestyle images.
The computer industry is much the same thing.
They no longer sell motherboards, GPUs or CPUs;
it's all "i'm a mac, i'm a pc, i have sonystyle" etc
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Homer didn't have to invest thousands or even millions of dollars in special effects or recording studios in order to "write" the Odyssey and Shakespeare wasn't worried about people showing up to his plays with video cameras. Honestly, I don't understand how pirates say artists and the entertainment industry just "doesn't get" how technology has changed the world and then use defenses like that.
It's simple, there's stealing a good or service, and there's paying for it. Pirating is stealing. People need to just be honest: They're stealing because technology makes it easy and safe.
The sole argument in favor of copyright is this:
strong monetary compensation to the artist is necessary for artistic works to be produced.
My point is not merely that people were making stuff before copyright (although they certainly were); it's that people have always been and continue in the present to produce work without expectation of considerable financial reward. You want to read books? People put plenty of them out on the Internet, and more to the point, the vast majority of published authors can count on their books to give them at best a modest additional income. Ditto for musicians. The printing press is irrelevant, because people who wrote books before it weren't expecting them to be widely read or to make a ton of money from them. They were hoping primarily for fame (and, it must be said, were typically of a class that meant they didn't need to earn a living anyway.)
Video games and movies do not fall effectively into this argument precisely because they aren't produced by individual artists. These are corporate products. Oh, sure, we talk about a film as being the work of the director, or the video game as the work of the designer, but there are literally hundreds of other people involved in the creation of these art forms, and it is not possible for a single person to coordinate all of that effort.
Thus, the real irony here is that the only situation in which the argument for copyright actually works, is the one in which no artist is involved. The real argument for copyright is not "artists must be compensated" (since that's obviously irrelevant, as they almost always *aren't*) but "corporations must be profitable." Very well; but if that's what we're talking about here, then let's be clear in our terms.
The question then becomes, "are additional measures necessary to protect the profitability of corporations in the entertainment industry"? Well, video game publishers are doing just fine, so in that case it seems the current regime is functioning. Ultimately it's the movies that are really driving this. Movie companies are profitable, but not from box office (source). Release of movies to theatres is better conceived of as "R&D" for the industry's main businesses, the secondary video market and licensing to television. In any event, the best way for the movie industry to become more profitable would be to reduce inefficiencies in movie production, cutting the costs of making those high-budget box-office bombs. But the industry would rather legislate than reduce internal waste. Very well, but you can't expect the public to be sanguine about it. And, I'd add, the effectiveness of first-run movies in providing their primary function -- R&D for current cultural tastes -- is not really affected by piracy; it's just somewhat more lossy as a result.
Television revenue is affected by the impact of new distribution channels on television, but that's separate from a piracy issue. Movie companies have much more cause to worry about Netflix streaming than they do piracy in that segment.
That brings us to direct-to-consumer video sales. A valid perspective on this market is to consider piracy as an alternate channel for goods distribution with lower (but non-zero) costs to the consumer. In other words, people pirate because the offerings from the studios are overpriced in the market. But instead of improving their offerings and finding the price point which will actually maximize sales, the industry tries to legislate. (Not a sound move from an economic perspective, but what can you expect when you're big enough to own a government.) Another important point here is that the industry would like the decision makers to conceive of pirated movies as lost sales, but this is not so; typically a movie gets pirated as a faster alternative to the rental market. Pirated movies are crowd
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few.
And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?
How many million-lines-of-code software products?
How many detailed, fact-checked, well-edited 1,000 page textbooks?
For that matter, how many good books did it produce per year, and how many people got to read them?
I've never disputed that valuable works have been or would be created without the benefit of copyright protection, but the scale matters. You can't just extrapolate from the fact that some good works were produced and some people benefited from them before copyright to the conclusion that copyright has not encouraged the creation of more or better works.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day.
Ah, the FOSS argument. How wonderfully Slashdot.
You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right? And that even the big name FOSS projects are not exempt from this? So much so, in fact, that even though the FOSS projects are free, most people still prefer to use commercial offerings.
At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
I've never disputed that there are serious flaws with the current implementation of copyright. Arguments about not extending terms to crazy 50+ year durations are all very reasonable. But if you look at what's being swapped on filesharing systems, is it very early Disney cartoons and back-catalogues for old bands, or is it the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters?
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not, that producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days, and that producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy.
Because through copyright, many people
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
just like saying 'people like you are as much problem as those pesky aristocrats. you are unashamedly breaking the law, which makes you the poster boy for royalists when they are pushing for ever more extreme measures' in 1789 in france, where the most important humanitarian revolution of human history was happening, in order to create the framework of the modern society we live in.
no. excuse me sir, but idiots like you are the real problem. you confer way too much importance to 'laws', and refrain from breaking them even if they are WRONG and UNJUST. even if not to give cause to the oppressors. therefore, the very oppressors who pass those laws and maintain them are able to maintain the status quo and resist justice.
well done. revel in your passivism. its as if he wasnt a poster boy, they wouldnt push for those extreme measures anyway.
Read radical news here
Just as radiohead garnered more than 1 m in just a few hours, open source projects that are actually useful and revered by the public also gets donations to fuel their progress.
its as simple is it gets. if what you do benefits me $1, i pay $1. if it benefits me $50, i may pay $32 because it is as much as i can pay. but, i pay.
the current copyright and patent systems are however, are designed to monopolize an idea or a product, and push it from any price the monopolizer wants.
there is nothing competitive or free in it. or just.
i dont respect the laws that enforce an unjust system. doing so, is my basic human right.
Read radical news here
for i have already posted in this discussion and cant use my points.
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You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along
Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.
current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
the studio that produces a movie ALREADY makes profit most of the time in just the first day of screening of the movie. in a week, they go over 25% or 50% of their costs or more depending on the movie.
why the FUCK they should be able to continually make more money on the SAME product, despite they made a product and sold it for up to 50% profits in the first week of its operation already ? why the fuck should i continue to pay to see the same movie, if its to be on dvd, online or whatever ?
are car factories allowed to keep charging you on the car you buy ? every time ? without rendering you a new service/addition with it, or without giving you a new car ?
explain me, why the FUCK should content industries should be slighted favorably in that regard. and why the fuck should production industries, who produce and sell products ONE TIME to a customer, should have to keep producing a product every time they need to make a sale ?
please now, stage is yours ....
Read radical news here
1. Perhaps it's true that most popular musicians would be better off working at 7-11... but if that were true they'd be spending their time working at 7-11, not making music. So that doesn't actually address the point.
Nothing stops them making music outside the time they are working their "day job". Not having to rely on their music as a sole income may result in their being more creative.
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
What was kept in the Library of Alexandria? How about about all the things which went on in Al-Andalus?
Darn it all !
Just moved to California, finished lining and filling the moat, ordered the laser/shark combo and already shot my first IRS suit for trepassing.
And it's only NOW you tell me ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
internet is already a basic human right. it is THE means to access information. the 'pathetic' articles you reach on wikipedia by just typing a query to google can be only composed with days of work in a local library without the internet.
more over, most of the communication, and even governmental services are increasingly being conducted over the internet. therefore, being cut from internet is no different from being banned from government offices, services, and buying newspapers and watching tv, in some european countries.
its probably also why these stupid acta law wont pass in europe. Finland already guaranteed internet access (4mbit, if you call that basic) as a basic human right. no treaty will be able to overcome it.
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the 'other side' was the side which pumped SO many executive decisions and various bills to give way more power to the president than the senate and congress has already. little short of dictatorship.
they didnt hesitate from violating the constitution. and y ou think they would care about 'democrat majority' in the senate. oh go fuck off.
if you have forgotten, it was the 'other side' which prepared and cooked acta already.
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I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Or maybe the whole world would have known about him in his lifetime. Thing is that putting on any sort of play is certainly not "near-zero cost".
There are things out there that are more dangerous than this proposed treaty.
I'm just having trouble figuring out what those things are.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if ihe lived in a age in which something like modern copyright had been enforced considering most of his works are based on the works of others.
King Lear
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090621124054133
There are others but I have to get back to work instead of googleing them for you.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works,
:). Also I can't see how any modern study could possibly consider terms of 5-20 years, which are more likely to be meaningful to people...
This kind of creativity is something intrinsic to humans.
i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request).
X years after the artist dies is unlikely to be meaningful to the artist for any value of X
and no country in the world has the power to push anything to china, due to their huge market. u.s., its even a joke - chinese government virtually is the owner of us government now, due to the huge bonds it holds. if they just let go of the amount of dollars they hold, us economy will go sooo down that it may not be able to recover in decades.
i really look forward to see those neocon dipshits take that acta to china.
Read radical news here
Though ACTA was started before Obama, Obama is the reason it is gaining momentum and preparing to engulf us.
Obama has a long record of helping huge Corporations and creating wealth for them - not just Health Insurance Companies.
Obama really believes that locking down peoples freedoms to protect Corporate profits and Business Models is right and good.
No doubt Obama was anticipating this Treaty when he hired lawyers from the RIAA to work in the Justice Department. They will be needed to sentence and imprison us when the treaty is rammed down our throats.
Enjoy yourself - we are now living in the good old days of the Internet in the US.
Before copyright came along, most composers had at least one piece that was blatant plagiarism, people reused each other's literary ideas all the fucking time.
It's not the two party system that is the problem it's something that both parties (and even hypothetical 3rd parties) have in common: greed.
Our politicians are almost all for sale to the highest bidder - typically rich Corporations with agendas that will usually harm Americans.
For a million dollars or more the politician becomes the full time servant of their new Corporate masters and stops serving the Citizens.
Note that this problem is insolvable since the politicians would have to approve of any solutions!
As far as support for the MAFIAA, it all depends on how much cash they have doesn't it?
Not-books apparently.
Guess I'll have to find something to do with my time other than playing games, listening to music or watching video.
Blar.
Most of these artists would have been killed off by copyright laws.
Most commercial software products don't reach the little toe of the big foss products, so the point it rather moot. It's amusing though to see someone lionising corporatism and complaining about the power of the state. I needed the laugh.
If internet piracy goes away, people will move to phyiscal media.
You see there isn't a respectable IT firm anywhere in a developed nation that doesn't have a bit of a 'Swap Club', sharing pirated material by USB drives, SD cards and cheap terabyte class drives around the office. Back in the day they shared stuff on CD-R because the internet was rubbish. Now these things are now ubiqutous, inexpensive and expendable. Terabyte range drives are less than 10c per gig for a while now, if you find a good deal.
What happens when these things inevitably become alot smaller and alot cheaper?
What really scares me is what might be done to try to control this form of piracy.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If only we seize it.
Don't give me hyperbole about our culture being locked away. Don't give me bullshit about how many Linux ISOs you download over bittorrent.
What's being locked away isn't our culture. What's being locked away is a bought and sold-out culture that we deluded ourselves into believing was our own. Rather than create culture, we, like our parents before us, feed like pigs at the trough on the culture sold to us by corporate conglomerates, willfully, knowingly, and happily, with shit-eating grins.
We have, and always have had, the power to define culture ourselves, and to keep that culture free, but we haven't, because most of us are sellouts, and most of us don't have the will to pass up the slop in the trough.
I dare you to stop the hypocritical bullshit. I dare you to define your own culture:
http://creativecommons.org/
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
In this scenario, it might work out that ISPs and consumers adopt a "default-deny" in the distribution of movies, music, and software due to the legal penalties and difficulties/costs involved within the regulation. Proprietary OS's and applications will likely include some form of automatic permission/license term checking. This will put a huge handicap on "free" content and software, as there will be no free inclusion of licensing/permission on the "official" authentication servers.
I can also imagine that this would be in addition to having to, in the case of FOSS, obtaining legal licensing permissions from every single developer that contributed code to the satisfaction of whatever bureaucracy is placed in charge of overseeing the system. It could effectively make the cost and complication of legally distributing FOSS and "free" content unmanageable for many, if not most.
This would also greatly benefit governments and politicians. For instance, say there's an election going on, and you've come across damning evidence against the party/politician in power/office, and you want to disseminate that information in a timely manner before the election. Oops, sorry! There's been a delay in the paperwork giving you permission to distribute. Corrupt party/politician gets re-elected, evidence is destroyed/covered up in the meantime, and you are personally smeared/discredited/destroyed.
Just something else to think about.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It's amusing though to see someone lionising corporatism and complaining about the power of the state.
It's amusing to see someone mention FOSS in one sentence and then equate copyright protection with corporatism in the next.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wait, what? You're either misreading or being intentionally obtuse, you, on the other hand, did with your comments on movies.
You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along
Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.
From wikipedia: "[The] concept of copyright originates with the Statute of Anne (short title Copyright Act 1709...)
"A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring an image. The mechanical systems involved were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440..."
It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.
It's odd that people are quick to point out that artists would stop writing/performing/drawing if copyright were abolished, yet so slow to look at similar industries that thrive despite it: dance, cooking, fashion, sculpture...
current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?
Quality is one debatable question. However the rights lost in the enforcement of that "quality" is the more important issue in my mind. As much as I love to see the great man-made monuments of the world, I don't declare that because we don't have the slave labor to build a great pyramid today that our current system is inferior and unworkable.
Personally, and this is speculative, I don't think abolishing copyright would change consumption and spending on entertainment that much. If people are willing to spend X dollars on entertainment a month they're going to spend it as long as you give them a good reason to.
Its Good Cop / Bad Cop and both have similar goals or must give in to the same masters.
Some people pick the bad cop and some pick the good cop while some realizing they are both "bad" choose neither and just get what the rest decide upon. Its TRUE that the modern GOP has been hijacked by horrible people and it SHOULD be clear that they have been the bad cop of the pair for over a generation. Unfortunately, we have many Stockholm syndrome types as well as just plain suckers who confuse the bad cop with the good cop.
The hope of those who choose the good cop is that there will be a progression over the long term for the better; but this hope I think is largely unfounded and is just that-- wishful thinking. When it comes down to it, the good cop has most of the same goals but won't most as fast or be as painful; possibly throw you a bone or two while still screwing you in the end.
I choose the lesser of two evils; but not out of some dellusion that the good one is actually good-- just slightly better. It won't change until the citizens become ACTIVE and start THINKING in majority numbers - and are willing to back it up with force since we'd soon find out just how much democracy we have when we choose to actually use it.
Join a credit union or keep taking it in the ass.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
WTF? There are books dating back to 2400 B.C. and probably before that. Just because they were hand-written doesn't mean they're not books.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
Copyright is pretty irrelevant when the act of copying takes months.
Don't be obtuse, it's not becoming. Copyright isn't relevant when the production of a single copy can take years.
...assuming you (or your company) is foolish enough to buy into a system of remote attestation for personally-created documents.
There will likely always be devices able to run "untrusted" code b/c PC manufacturers don't want to foot the bill in this (losing) fight and the support calls it entails.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
And good enough for Bach, Tchaikovsky, Homer, Chaucer, every folk take Disney copied, the Magna Carta, vast amounts of recorded History, Science, and Math, and enough more to make the libraries the city centers and their health the measure of stability of most nations.
Reflecting on that, what's the health of our nation when it's accessible information (library) goes to zero by DRM? Requiring great work or criminal effort to access shared culture or functional knowledge will make for a below-third-world nation more closely resembling slavery.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
The thing is, I don't have a problem with the basic principle of copyright
Nor do I, but just because the OP (and I) consider the current laws to be unjust, doesn't mean we are arguing that no copyright laws should exist. Note that not even the Pirate Party supports abolition of copyright, so I fear you're barking up a straw man.
The debate shouldn't be polarised between "everything should be free, no copyright laws should exist" and "everything is just fine as it is".
So in other words you're saying that "Trusted Computing" is (potentially) evil?
$ make available
-Oz
IIRC the treaty has little/nothing to do with counterfeiting; the name is a coverup for what it's really about: a global DMCA.
$ make available
You only think copyright is required. Sure, the world would look different without the culture of monopoly-grants we give out, but do you really think nobody would make anything?
The problem in discussions like this is someone, like yourself, who can't imagine a different world. You don't fully understand the rules or implications but you're sure there's no other way things could work.
Things change every day, putting some people out of business and helping others. We could pass a law requiring everyone buy unwanted property to help starving real-estate agents. Or better, grant them on-going royalties. How dare you keep living in that building without continuing to pay the person who found it? But then we'll need to cut the builder and lumberjack in...
Eventually we'll all just pay each other and we'll all be rich!
Now it seems, on top of everything else relating to copyrights and patents, many totally messed up, why now push our corrupt and broken system on to the rest of the world?
where is the correctness of this? why does the world want to have to deal with the policies, that obviously don't seem to work at all in the U.S. make the world have to deal with this junk to put it mildly, at least before this junk was created the world had more freedom in this realm of topic,
whats next some one decides to copyright the national anthem, any other thing that belonged to everyone not just to a hoarding, pigheaded person. What is the world coming to.... (bangs head on wall) Why? Why?
What will this lead to possible war in the future caused by the unrest, and troubles of the world, with all the current issues stacked on top ?
Will this lead to more civil unrest, and the world loosing more confidence, just causing everyone problems because the U.S. is now pushing more laws on the rest of the world, enforcing the rest of the world, will we loose more allies, and trust, but of course we will?
How can these government be able to enforce these new regulations? you can't its just to big of a task more money getting waisted on enforcing an impossible task of multiple countries, let me guesss, the music industry is behind it.
How many more of these regulations will they create, how far will they go before they just go to far take away more rights of the peoples of this world?
When will it come to mass civil unrest?
I see the point of this, cut down on piracy, but what is the government doing, yes its good they are cracking down on piracy but shouldn't individual countries enforce no piracy laws on a country by country basis? not by a complete coverage.
Isn't there a flaw in this great plan, enforcing this compeletly, is like just dropping money into a vast black deep hole with no bottom, money just getting poured waisted on a task no one country or countries can stop, after all there are several billion people in the world and there are only so many governments, theres no way to enforce this.
Why are we spending time on resources on a problem that will always be there, and no way to stop it.
Couldn't each country, be responsible to keep piracy under control in their own country. Multiple countries working together is a great thing yes, but when faced with a task as large as what the U.S. has in mind isn't it way way way to big a task to complete it?
A broad single method to stop piracy in the world 3 strikes and your out, I can't see it working for the rest of the world, each country is different, each country has their own government and each government work in their own way, no single plan can work with total success, The only thing that can prevent piracy, is if every country creates and uses their own method of piracy prevention, after all more ground can be covered if there are many seperate methods, as every country isn't exactly like the U.S. how could this single method work, after all you can't stop it unless every country in the world were to use this soul method, and I mean EVERY COUNTRY in the world, which would never happen
I predict this won't work at all, billions of people millions of acts of internet piracy every day, it can't be stopped, only with every country in the world, including china, among many others,
besides, our system is a failure, a joke, and companies, and people abuse the system in this country, don't bring it apon the rest of the world, let them stand a better chance and let them handle their own problems.
In Soviet Russia, Jokes get you!
Notice that this applies on many scales, whether we're talking about excellent textbooks with limited markets and relatively high prices...
Sorry to interrupt, but I have to bite on this one.
I'll give you an example, of one of the best textbooks on basic quantum mechanics ever written:
Cohen-Tannoudji's Quantum Mechanics. It was written in 1973, and was sold by relatively high prices. But that was ok, the book was new, and it was surely very hard to write.
Now we are in 1997. Even though the costs are already recouped, the book is still expensive. Then lo and behold, Cohen-Tannoudji wins the Nobel. What happens? The book's price doubles overnight.
Now you see the problem with the monopoly?
The author himself was embarrassed by this. When he visited my university, a few years ago, he autographed some copies that were photocopied.
entropy happens
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
It appears that that was copyright not-as-we-know-it. The Statute of Anne in 1710 (or 1709, depending on your interpretation) gave rights to the authors and is much closer to modern copyright (the Venice thing was specific to one work anyway). The system in place (in England) before that had given a lot of power to the publishers; the Statute of Anne is seen as the first modern copyright act.
Also, copyright was not life of the author + 70 years for the longest time and it seems we did just fine without such long-lived copyrights for ages.
$ make available
Fanfic is one example of unprotected creation. Disney stole their characters from someone, but you'd better be 100% original.
Often, as in the recent Games Workshop thread, you see examples of the unprotected work being more prolific and of higher quality.
You'd see much higher quality if not for the copyright holders trying to destroy the works and prohibit the practice.
Free is always going to trump paying. The Internet today is the best example of that - there are services to help you find the lowest price without regard for product quality, customer service, shipment policy or return policy. So you get the lowest price and find out later that it is a scam and end up paying more. But that's the Internet.
Free is going to win in the end whether or not it is "stealing". The moral outrage the creators are going to feel will quickly be swept away when they realize that if their works weren't available for free they wouldn't sell anyway. The end result will be the extreme ego-driven folks will finally have a platform that they cannot be disloged from and the rest of the creative people will be forced to find something to pay the rent with.
What this means is anyone that is addicted to their own words, their own image, their own sound is going to have an unshakable platform from which to spew their garbage. And garbage is it, as can easily be seen on the tryout shows for American Idol. Look up Darwin Reedy to remind yourself how bad these people generally are. One in a thousand is OK. We are going to see millions of them.
That's a trademark/truth-in-advertising issue. There's a difference between asking for Coke and getting Pepsi, and Pepsi simply trying to taste more like Coke.
Nearly all of the art that you are referring to having been produced without copyright was bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful. An artist would get a commission from the king or the pope and produce something wonderful. And because they were paid for this, they could continue eating.
You don't think they had any choice in the artwork do you? It was strictly pay-for-play and the king got to decide what they liked. If your work wasn't up to the king's standards, you got fired or worse. If your work showed too much creativity - i.e., not following instructions - you got fired. Read up on Michangelo and his battles with the church sometime. He showed way, way too much creativity sometimes.
So, would you like it if the radio played nothing but music that old, rich white people paid to hear?
Here in Belgium at least, there have been several raids on lan-parties
The ability to easily copy books and other materials wasn't even around until the printing press
Exactly, and yet books were written, even without a mass market audience.
As another poster pointed out, the invention of the printing press was followed shortly by the invention of copyright.
Which was mainly about governmental control at first.
gloss over the works that current industries produce, and then even leave out an entire industry worth billions of dollars... well it doesn't say much for your argument.
The same way you ignore the fashion industry, etc.
Yes, some things would change, others would not. Already, because of copying and increased user control many top-end games require you to play on authorized servers. They give away WoW and still get people to pay to use it.
That's essentially how it'd work without copyright.
And frankly, I just don't care to support this anymore. Taxes fund copyrights, and I'm not getting good value.
There is NO way you will ever see a "unified global laws on sales and export/import tax".
That would be in conflict with several constitutions and face huge national sovereignty issues without even thinking about the problems involved with adjusting for "local" needs and flexibility.
There is a reason there is no common tax rate/system in the US, European countries or any other part of the world. Different circumstances, different needs!
If you want to sell your products in the future you will [still] have to adjust your business for each geographic region of the world. There might be fewer regions to adjust for; The European Union [and European friends], the US/NAFTA, some South American block, the African Union, possibly a Gulf Union in the Middle East, maybe some Asian block(s) [if possible] and last but not least China.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright. This is the single greatest flaw in your argument, and the one you are great at ignoring. In order to justify a monopoly on production of copies, you have to show us that the market with the monopoly actually works better than the market sans the monopoly. You cannot get away by saying that the market is big. You have to show that it is bigger.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal08.pdf
from
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
But I don't think I need to cite anything here. The proponent of copyright is the one who needs to prove, using sound statistics, that artistic output is spurred by longer or non-zero copyright terms. After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries, including those where initial investment has to be recouped over many years, so why the same should be false for monopoly on ideas?
[snip]
If you think that producing a good pizza requires a few minutes and no special skill or talent, I am deeply sorry for your taste buds and your stomach.
[snip]
Your stabs at FOSS are nothing but pathetic. Anyone with a shred of expertise knows that Ubuntu dwarfs every proprietary commodity OS on technical grounds and costs less or as much to deploy and maintain.
Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator.
There are better ways to do that (see below). They accomplish the same goal while adding art to the public domain, which is what US copyright is supposed to do, and which it fails to do by design.
If you can show me evidence of even a single successful Hollywood-blockbuster-scale movie being funded through another mechanism, I will be impressed.
I can tell you how they can be done. (A more detailed view is presented in the quoted source.) One way is escrow, whereas a bunch of big-name film makers collect cash from "viewers like you" and then release the movie into the public domain. Don't tell me that it's impossible. Obviously, if people are running out to stinky theaters and later to buy an overpriced DVD, while they could about as easily download it from TPB, the demand is there. The same pop-art lovers will sign up for "Spielberg-Lucas-JarJarBinx" escrow and supply them with annual donations. Why wouldn't they? Because "they'll just wait till others pay for it"? Bullshit. If that was the attitude, then they would "just wait" till their friends got a DVD and then borrowed it... Wait a second, they are already doing it today, and the movie industry still reports record profits. Admit it: there are enough people who really love artists and are willing to pay for art, and copyright law does nothing but create artificial scarcity and make art more expensive for everyone.
If you really think that we need the copyright because it is the only way to produce $300 million movies, then your argument does not hold any water. There is no consensus on what is "good art". Even if you are right (and IMHO, you are not) and $300 movie becomes impossible to produce, this by itself means nothing, as long as there is still market for artists. May be more artists will
Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
Linux.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not
Paintings would be if you had to redo them to eat...
producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days
Taking a photo takes seconds. In fact, it can often be done multiple times in a second. With less skill. Pressing the shutter blindly can result in a copyrighted inside-of-the-lens-cap image - ala John Cage.
Bad pizzas are an abomination.
producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
And yet, even crap is protected...
The biggest reason is that we had 'pizza' before we had lawyers.
You should stick your head out into the so called real world and see if your argument makes any sense at all.
There are thousands of tracks on Jamendo, all free-as-in-freedom. I listened to them, and some of the electronic music there is quite good (I cannot speak for the rest). Here is music made by people who are hoping to be listened to, liked, and being donated to. I bet that you can get another order of magnitude of tracks out of it if you take interest in Jamendo artists and send them a few Washingtons in the mail.
And this is just Jamendo! This is only one, and probably not even the most trendy way to market free-as-in-freedom music. I hate to break it to the "back to patronage" crowd, but the Internet offers other ways to market art: ways that even the copyright cannot provide.
And it's funny that you bring up the radio: these days I turn it on when I want to hear music that maximizes revenues for a few execs in LA, and it does so by training the consumer to recognize a few key brands. Given a choice, I would much rather listen to music commissioned by a few rich white men, since at least a few of them will have good taste.
Homer didn't have to invest thousands or even millions of dollars in special effects or recording studios in order to "write" the Odyssey
Nor do most authors.
Pirating is stealing.
No, stealing removes something from the original owner's possession. Copying is abuse of government monopoly, that's it.
They're stealing because technology makes it easy and safe.
No. Because the nature of the thing makes 'protecting' it the irrational and impossible choice. Copying a book used to be hard, now it's trivial to have happen accidentally. Strange, I don't feel like a hardened criminal when my backup script grabs the ebooks, or even if I read one book on many devices.
If you saw someone wearing a cool hat/jacket and copied them you'd be doing the equivalent of using a patented technology, or copying a copyrighted look, yet nobody would say you stole (deprived the original dresser of) their clothes...
Of course, if they were an aspiring fashion designer they'd probably feel as entitled to copyright protection as some yahoo smacking a shutter, or writing a poem. All are moderately creative works.
I declare this a decleration of war against the whole internet!!!!!!
It can't be allowed
IF THIS PASSES
It will be the end of the modern age as we know it
The internet will never ever be the same
People will live in fear of loosing access to the internet
People who loose access to the internet will be done, everything they worked for will disappear
The world will never be the same
Governments will be hated more than ever
IF THIS PASSES
It can start a chain reaction leading to a nightmare possibility mass civil wars
It can start a chain reaction leading to the worst nightmare of all nightmares World War III which will be the end of humanity as we know it, YES ITS POSSIBLE!!
It will be the end to humanity as we humans have known it
Few to none are ready to handle any nightmare which this will bring when it passes
Does anyone here want their country to have no ally if one of these nightmares occurs?
Many will be unfairly, and victimized prosecuted, because they were tricked, or used, or had their identity stollen then used for nefarious purposes making them the law breaker, even though they had the identity stollen
Can you accept the fact that you may loose your access to the internet the life line to the world?
Are people ready to go back to the stone age?
IF THIS PASSES
do you want to have your identity stolen then be convicted because the person who stole your identity had infringed copyrights.
many many americans, and people of this world will loose possibly their only happieness
copyright trolls, will have a iron grip on the world
do you really want the governments of this world to spend billions enforcing this when the money could be surely used to improve life, save lives, and keep our future generations from paying the for the massive debts our current generations have created?
this will start a new worse chapter in the history of mankind
WE MUST STOP IT, ITS A DECLERATION OF WAR AGAINST THE INTERNET!!!!
TIME TO USE THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT
OUR FIRST ADMENDMENT AS AMERICANS, AND ANY OTHER RIGHTS THAT ANY OTHER CITIZEN AROUND THE WORLD HAS
People, anyone who knows, any leaders, or people who wield power and influence in the government, people who hold high positions in any of the governments of power, the time to act is now!!!!
Petitions, protests, letters, emails, speach, media, every method to halt it must be used- no violence we don't want our efforts to spiral out of control, nor inoccent people to get hurt, or others as well.
Freedom of information act, time to use.
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE MUST BE HEARD!!!!!!
DO NOT LET GOVERNMENTS TAKE AWAY ONE OF THE MOST VALUED RESOURCES ON THE PLANET!!!!!
Action is neccessary to stop the nightmare from taking our lives away.
Do not let this pass!!!!!!!!
"And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?"
Um, are you aware that Hollywood is in fact in California because the film industry moved there to avoid paying the license fees for Edison? Those great protectors of "intellectual output" have billions of dollars only because they were bloody leeches, pirates, if you like, and used someone else's "intellecual output" for free? (Not to mention that Edison himself was blatantly stealing other people's "intellectual output" and patenting it under his name...)
Are you also aware that the copyright in its first incarnation was *not* protecting the artists? It was protecting the printer houses in England and had absolutely nothing to do with the advancements of the arts.
By the way, I believe the furtherment of the arts would get a significant boost by the sheer elimination of maybe 99% of those $100M+ Hollywood blockbusters.
"Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator."
Is that so? Walt Disney created a cartoon mouse. So how does the fact that Disney, Inc. owns the copyright on the Mickey Mouse keyring exactly helps Walther Disney's rotten corpse to contribute and to make it a viable project today?
"You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right?"
Well, I believe that most of the fabric that those evil pirates use to steal the intellectual property of those starving Hollywood studios is FOSS. There are a few very high quality commercial programs and there are a few very high quality FOSS programs. Then there's an enormous amount of crap FOSS and and equal amount of equally crap commercial code. The difference is that crap FOSS remains there and the few bits that are worth using in other projects is available. Crap commercial code just dies and doesn't have a trace.
Copyright has never been intended to protect the artist or further the art. It was intended to protect the investors' investment in the artist. Most of the time copyright is not owned by the artist, it is owned by a corporate entity that has only one art in mind: the art of making money. The artist is only interesting for the corporate entity as long as they can use his/her output to make more money. If (s)he creates the greatest piece of art ever created but it's not low-brow enough to be appealing to the mass market (see Hollywood blockbusters), the artist can drop dead.
When a taxpayer funded research group wants to publish, they *pay* (from your tax dollars) the publisher of the journal for the publication of their results (that were, again, paid by your tax dollars) and then they sign the copyright over to the publisher. Thus a private entity, with nothing to do with research, obtained the exclusive right to results of a publicly founded process *and* they were paid from the public purse to do so... Clever scheme. Copyright is the way!
No wonder corporations are a helluva lot more pro copyright than artists themselves.
Quick question, though: I have a box full of old VHS tapes. Can I go to a DVD store and exchange them, for the nominal cost of the polycarbonate disc, to DVDs? After all, I have already paid the license fee on them, haven't I. For some strange reason the local DVD store looked at me when I tried it as if I was a mental retard. I don't understand it, really. I have a copy, I just want to exchange it to an other copy of better quality, offering the cost of the material. I would not believe in my wildest dream that the entertainment industry, the greatest protectors of intellectual property would try to make me pay for the same license multiple times? I mean, that would be, like, stealing, right?
In pretty much the same way that any movie character with a creepy mustache and a strong german or eastern european accent is "potentially the villain", yes.
It isn't absolutely, positively, 100% certain evil; but it wouldn't be rocket surgery to use it for evil purposes, and we show every sign of moving in that direction at a fairly decent clip.
That depends on exactly what is done to the definition of "contributory infringement".
Aside from any legal strong-arming, I suspect that most PC manufacturers would love to be able to move the vast majority(i.e. all of them that aren't willing to buy expensive enterprise support contracts, or techy enough to forgo, in writing, any use of manufacturer software support) of their customers exclusively to "trusted" code. Even with ghastly DRM headaches, supporting consoles is almost certainly cheaper than supporting full PCs runing god-knows-what.
You're AC, so you probably won't see this, but you're dead wrong. The fashion industry has absolutely no ability to copyright their designs. I can take a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans, take them apart and copy them exactly with other material and sell them without any worry of getting sued.
What I can't do is put the RL logo on anything, but that's trademark and has nothing to do with the original question or answer.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Okay, under the current copyright system, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start paying money to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result?
Under the current system, a songwriter writes a song and has a recording artist record the song. Then the label that manages the songwriter and recording artist buys ad time on radio stations to promote the song and, indirectly, the album that the song is on. (Payola is still legal in the United States as long as something like "Paid for by Warner Bros. Records" precedes the play.) Copyright prevents other recording artists from "covering" (recording and publishing their own performances of) the song without paying and prevents motion picture authors from using the song.
so it would seem that having some physical venue (e.g., theaters) where you can charge for seats and eyeballs works much better
I don't understand exactly what you mean. For one thing, it's an antitrust violation for a movie distributor to own theaters. U.S. v. Paramount, 334 U.S. 131 (1948). For another, without copyright, studios would have to rely on trade secret law to keep independent theater operators from showing telesyncs in their own cut-price theaters.
Please don't equate my support for the basic principle of copyright with supporting copyright for excessive durations, supporting wholesale transfer of rights from the authors who deserve them to middleman corporations, or any other screwed up aspect of the current implementation. I am all in favour of copyright reform. I just haven't seen any real evidence that getting rid of copyright entirely would improve anything, other than the feelings of a few people in this discussion.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright.
No it doesn't. But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work. No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion. The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily, but this seems a very dubious assumption: in the "fun" creative arts, people could do that anyway today, so I see no reason to assume that more people would do so if they didn't get paid for it than do already; and in the less "fun" but more practical arts, as in much of contemporary software development, I hardly think thousands/millions of people are going to spend basically all of their spare time after finishing other day jobs working on boring but necessary code.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
That's the best you've got? Most of the arguments in that book seem to be against patents, rather than copyright. In the case of software, the main argument against copyright seems to be that competition leads to thriving innovation as demonstrated by the OSS world, which is just funny. The big name OSS applications are almost all second-rate rip-offs of established products from the commercial or academic spheres: OpenOffice, the GIMP, Thunderbird, MySQL. Programming languages seem like a strong area for OSS, but in reality much of what it has produced in recent years is all variations on the same theme, and the serious innovation is happening in academia or industrial R&D labs at Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the like. Heck, even Linux itself is obviously based on UNIX. I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already? Maybe the allegedly superior technical grounds aren't enough, and all the usability research and user help that Microsoft and Apple can fund with their copyright-driven products actually makes a big difference to non-geek users.
After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries
That's rather a severe over-generalisation. For one thing, the basic capitalist structure advocated by plenty of economists naturally leads to monopolies in the long run, so in practice we break out of pure capitalism and introduce other mechanisms to ensure that any legal monopoly status is in the public interest. Now, there are plenty of things about today's implementation of copyright that I do not think are in the public interest, but that doesn't mean the basic principle of copyright can't be administered in such a way too.
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Dissallowing "non blessed" content has the unwanted side effect of completely disallowing user created content as well.
Any system that will allow me to play my own home videos will also allow playback of commercial material that's been stripped of it's DRM.
Restrictions of that magnitude might actually wake the proles from their slumber...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The debate shouldn't be polarised between "everything should be free, no copyright laws should exist" and "everything is just fine as it is".
I completely agree. But the OP to whom I responded initially was openly saying that he was ignoring even the basic idea behind copyright and just ripping whatever he felt like. He wasn't saying he was breaking DRM so he could use something he already paid for, or format-shifting a legit copy of something for personal convenience, or downloading music that would have fallen out of copyright but for the Disney lawyers. He just doesn't like paying for stuff, so he freeloads and rips whatever he likes, because he can.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The problem in discussions like this is someone, like yourself, who can't imagine a different world. You don't fully understand the rules or implications but you're sure there's no other way things could work.
What a horribly arrogant, patronising thing to write.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have, and the empirical evidence and economic theories supporting various possible alternatives. I have written Masters-length reports in the course of lobbying for change, participated in government reviews, and spent a fair few hours debating with folks on-line to cap it all.
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion.
IMHO, you are trolling. I did explain it, and I don't see a point in trying again.
The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily,
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already?
Do you really not get it? By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many, and the most notable ones are (1) reliance on legacy solutions that are "good enough" and would be very expensive to replace with superior ones, (2) software vendor lock-in due to a monopolist practice (guess who), (3) confused consumers making their decisions based on ads, as opposed to technical merits (which is the reason why MS and Apple will never go out of business, even though they will never again produce anything superior to FOSS).
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
Well, since we agree that the status quo in copyright is out of whack, may be our positions are not very far from each other anyway.
Books and other written matter created before printing presses are basically uncopyable anyway, since copying them would require one to sit down and copy the work by hand. Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of the population was illiterate, and you have an environment where copying a text is extremely difficult and can only be accomplished by a specialized set of people. In essence, you have an early version of DRM.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
As another commenter pointed out above, copyright only becomes necessary when it is easy and cheap to copy works. For the vast majority of the 10,000+ year timescale you mention, copying was very difficult. Before written language, poets would spend their entire lives reciting and memorizing epics. Before the printing press, monks would spend years creating a single book. After the printing press came along, and made copying text easy and (relatively cheap) copyright soon followed.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
There is abuse yes. I'm not going to deny the existence of patent trolls, and I do think the current penalties for downloading penalties are excessive. However, that's an argument for reform, not abolition. And, lets not forget that the open-source licenses that we like so much (like Creative Commons, and the GPL) only gain teeth from copyright law. If copyrights didn't exist, all work would be public domain. People could copy your effort without recourse, even when the only thing you want is attribution.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is.
The difference is exclusivity. If I have a pizza, and I give it to you, then I either go without pizza, or I have to go and buy or make one for myself. If I copy my CD and give it to you, then both you and I have, in a fundamental sense, the same CD. Lawmakers realized that intellectual property has value. If it didn't, we wouldn't want it. However, the lack of exclusivity means that intellectual property doesn't have the same level of natural protection as physical property. Therefore, copyright is a way to bring a limited form of exclusivity to intellectual property, so that creators can capture some of the value that would normally be taken by the distributors.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The ACTA initiative aims to establish international standards for enforcing intellectual property rights in order to fight more efficiently the growing problem of counterfeiting and piracy.
http://www.ustr.gov/trade-topics/intellectual-property/anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta
http://www.ustr.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/factsheets/2009/asset_upload_file917_15546.pdf
Your post is very thoughtful.
You are right about exclusivity, that is a pretty fundamental difference. But even so, it's not the one that necessitates the monopoly institution. The reason is: the first copy still commands a higher price than every subsequent copy. That is how artists can (and, imho, should) make money, and that is a sufficient incentive to create. Copyright is an unnecessary evil; not a great evil, but a somewhat major annoyance and an overhead on all art production.
In practical terms, I totally agree with you: our first priority today should be to take a moderate political position and to reduce terms to sensible levels. We can do so gradually over the next decade or two. In the end, a term of under 2 years would be great, and anything over 5 is just plain overkill. Make that retroactive (apparently, it is OK for extending the term). This will create an entire new world of free culture, while giving big players a cushion as they adjust their business process.
People like you are as much a problem as Big Media's absurd power grabs.
Uhm, people like him, the problem? What he's doing could be completely legal outside the US. For example if I'm not completely mistaken, in Finland it's still legal to make a few copies to your friends of media you legally own. I don't see how this differs? ACTA might aim to put a stop on that, but I really would like to see how the law fares in EU. I think, and hope, it will be heavily criticised by enough people to not make it pass
A system that is unhackable like that will however never become popular enough for me to want to get the content for it for free.
This may be hard to believe...
but I could live without entertainment.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
I understand that this is what you are proposing. What I honestly don't understand is how you expect it to happen in the case of relatively expensive works with large audiences, where the work is worth only a modest amount to any individual.
I would be genuinely interested if anyone has an alternative model that has proven to be effective, but to my knowledge, so far it's near enough all talk and no action. People have been suggesting pledge-based systems for years, and nothing in the current copyright system precludes taking such an approach if it is a better incentive to create and share, yet almost no-one does.
Copyright, for all its flaws, currently supports millions of people producing and distributing goodness knows how much creative content, certainly vastly more than was produced and shared so widely under any other historical system. I have no reason to believe copyright is the best system, but on the basis of this evidence, I have no problem accepting that as an incentive scheme, it works.
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
Let us say "charitably" then, for the avoidance of doubt.
The point is that those people who currently work a 9–5 job doing not particularly enjoyable but practically useful work on things like software probably do it only because it pays reasonably well. They would therefore be unlikely to continue doing it, producing at the same rate and the same quality, if they had to work a different 9–5 to pay the rent and then put in the other 8 hours on top to write the software without compensation.
By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many
...and one of them is that FORTRAN is still the best tool for some jobs.
And for other jobs, people pretty much have stopped using it.
I'm afraid while we may not be too far apart on the copyright issue, we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on FOSS. I have nothing against those who build FOSS products and are kind enough to give away the fruits of their labours, but to me the claim that OpenOffice is actually superior to MS Office, or GIMP to Photoshop, or MySQL to Oracle, is just so obviously, comprehensively wrong that it is hardly worth debating (though if you want numerous specific and detailed arguments, I have posted on these subjects at some length in previous Slashdot discussions).
In any case, the kicker for me isn't even the technical arguments, which could be debated. The point isn't that not everyone has moved to Ubuntu, it's that almost no-one has moved to Ubuntu. If you only get a 50% take-up, you can contend that there are non-technical issues blocking adoption, or cultural issues to overcome. If you only get a 0.5% take-up after years of advocacy, and you still argue that you are right and almost the entire world is wrong, you lack credibility. There's an old poker saying: if you can't tell who the weak player at the table is, then it's you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Then obviously copyright -- or even any market incentive resulting from mass distribution -- is irrelevant to people's willingness to create, produce, and distribute books.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
[Baseball is] certainly not a game very much played around the rest of the world (US, Japan... anywhere else other than on US bases in other countries?)
It's not popular in the Czech Republic or the French Republic, but it is popular in the Dominican Republic. Still, I thought strikes were a good thing for anyone throwing a ball, be it in baseball or bowling.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have
And yet in the end you still buy into the tired argument that government monopolies promote anything other than lawyers.
The huge Hollywood studios would be unlikely in a world without copyright, sure. By the standard that a copyright must promote THESE things, no alternative comes close.
But the purpose of government is to make all aspects of life better, not to tax or oppress in one area to improve another. What would the world be like? Would we be right here now but with less works being produced? No, we'd also be taxed less, free to copy anything we could see, free of EULAs, etc.
Further, the idea that less works would be produced seems unlikely, as many people create and yet don't expect monetary rewards - FOSS, YouTube, amateur porn, fiction/fanfic, howtos/faqs, etc. Few would reach the polish of a blockbuster movie, but there are fewer blockbuster movies...
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
That's what I mean. You have a bunch of unstated requirements that a copyright replacement must meet (to produce near identical results to now) and anything which doesn't is ignored.
Any rational set of guidelines (by and for the people) would say "can't be used to censor or take something out of print" (How does that help the public?). But we don't have this currently and so you place little value on it when considering options - likely not even giving it much thought.
I value simple laws and little enforcement. To be policed effectively things like copyright need an enforcement arm bigger than what we use to stop murderers and bank robbers, as well as draconian laws that would prevent you (3 strikes and you're off the net) from connection your computer to another if you've ever even been accused of unwittingly participated in the duplicating of some piece of a copyrighted work. How does that promote science and the useful arts?
You see Hollywood blockbusters, I see the BSA forcing their way into a business - with armed marshals - and performing forced audits. You see CNN/Fox news , I see CRU using copyright to fight the leaking of their emails, and Oracle leveraging EULAs into NDAs.
I can't propose anything that generates the funds that someone in your position would say is a requirement, based on matching our current situation. Rupert Murdoch, etc, make fortunes that a less powerful copyright system would not ensure. But in my scenarios we don't need armed thugs holding back the digital tide. What's better in the end depends if you're stuck paying for the thugs to collect the loot or are being given the loot.
So no, I don't think you see or fully consider/understand many of the options, such as just dropping the whole mess.