Slashdot Mirror
Fair Use Generates $4.7 Trillion For US Economy
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill spotlights a study released by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which concludes that companies relying on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue to the US economy every year. The report claims that fair use — an exception to the copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted materials — is crucial to innovation. It adds that employment in fair use industries grew from 16.9 million in 2002 to 17.5 million in 2007 and one out of eight US workers is employed by a company benefiting from protections provided by fair use (PDF). Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) says the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved; otherwise, content owners will control access to movies, music, and art that will no longer be available for schools, research, or web browsing. Lofgren tied the copyright issue with the question of net neutrality. Without net neutrality 'content owners will completely control and lock down content. We're going to be sorry characters when we actually don't see fair use rights on the Web,' says Lofgren. 'If we allow our freedom to be taken for commercial purposes, we will have some explaining to do to our founding fathers and those who died for our freedom.'"
Fair Use Generates $4.7 Trillion For US Economy
Wrong, from the article
Companies that rely on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue, according to a study released today by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
See the difference? Fair use generates a third of our GDP? Please, I'm not stupid.
My work here is dung.
the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved
Would you care to define the boundaries of fair use for me? How much a song can I use non-commercially in one instance (not like a repeated sample) without fear of repercussion or litigation from the copyright holder? Because even though some people have established "safe harbor" and guidelines, they don't seem to be officially codified yet. I uploaded some song samples on Wikipedia for my favorite albums and the rules were 10% of the length of a song or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. And, honestly, there's no law that completely and irrefutably protects this as fair use. Then there are the people that claim a full album is a "work" and therefore 10% of that (which could be a whole song) is fair use. I don't know where it starts and stops ... with movies it seems like nothing goes while with songs it seems you can get away with a little more. So hazy and ill defined, how can you rely on something like that for income when every step is potential litigation?
I'm all for preserving it so long as you can define what exactly it is that you are preserving.
My work here is dung.
The vehemently anti-copyright stance of Slashdot is, in my view, not entirely thought through. Remember - GPL (or any other software license) is a *copyright*, protected and upheld by the same laws that protect music distributors and the like. From the point of view of the law MPAA, RIAA and FSF aren't really that different (yes, some do it for money, while others for fame, "principles" and/or a bit less money). Undermining copyright protections will not be "selective", though you may wish it were. If music or movies become trivial to copy against wishes of their authors or "copyright holders", so will the software under GPL.
Just something for you to think about.
the silly brainwashing about fair use pounded into students' heads by other well-meaning but misguided instructors.
I have students afraid to read books before writing papers because if they "get an idea from a book" and use it, it's plagiarism. The entire notion of citations has gone right past them; all they know is that everything they do has to be "original."
I routinely hear that they didn't know they could use a quote because they thought it was "stealing" and are afraid of reading relevant works first so that they don't "copy an idea" without meaning to.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
There is little sanity and a lot of craziness coming out of the discourse on IP, and we're going to see it affect us as the current generation of students enters the workforce.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Easier said than done. There are so many variables that affect fair use. Is it for commercial purposes or non-profit? Parody or satire? 10% of what? Like you alluded, 10% of a large work is a lot. An entire song, over a hundred pages in a large book. And what about new technologies? The nature of fair use makes it difficult to define.
See? We can make up numbers too!
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
The assumption is to compare against $0 revenue for unfair use. But isn't it myopic to rely on the term "revenue" instead of "value"? It implies a suboptimization of the entertainment industry, instead of optimizing the whole.
Don't you have to instead compare against the value generated for society as a whole? If it generates $10 trillion in value to society for moderate unfair use, then that changes the picture a little.
I Am Not An Economist (obviously)
You cannot draw a parallel between revenue generated by companies that manufacture products and services that *may* benefit from fair use and the total revenue that is generated by those companies.. Its as absurd as the claims made by RIAA.. The broad strokes used by the study combined with almost laughable conclusions are an embarrasement to the computre industry they claim to represent.
Yet Disney destroys the public domain?
Maybe we shouldn't let those with simply a profit centric outlook dictate how the rest of us live.
The GPL would be unnecessary if not for overzealous, unjust copyright law. Stallman created it as a response to injustice. If that injustice never existed, chances are the GPL wouldn't be nearly as important.
The whole issue of fair use has been warped quite a bit by people believing they've a good knowledge of related laws because of reading tech sites and places like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.
Too many people look at cases that are right at the legal limit of fair use and had to be argued heavily in court and be well justified. Rather than looking that at the point where fair use ends, they see that as a new baseline and then step over the mark whilst thinking the law is on their side.
Originally the length of time a Copyright was valid for was 14 years. This allowed publishing and distribution in a world of Ox carts and sailing ships. One would only reason that with instant, world wide "content" distribution, it should be much less now. Say 1 or 2 years. This would be enough to extract money from the general public before the real purpose of Copyright law which is to put all creative works into the public domain would come into effect.
Now with the post Eldridge Mickey Mouse forever life + 75 years as the term, and the whole reason of copyright law being twisted into some ownership of "content" forever which is exactly the opposite of it's intent, we need "fair use" and "net neutrality".
What really is needed though, is to fix copyright and patent law so the time limit of protection is only a year or two, and return to it's original purpose of bringing all of these works into the public domain where they belong!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Your search for a clearly defined boundary of fair use boils down to this question; would you prefer that Congress decide the issue, or would you prefer the courts decide? I would argue that the Courts are better situated, in this context, to figure out what uses out to be protected under fair use. This is so due to the significant implications of rights gained under fair use. If you accept that copyright generally is a good, productive, successful inducement scheme to yield creative works, then taking some of those rights given under copyright away shouldn't be done lightly. The more you expand fair use, the less valuable a given copyright will be to the original author. Given that Congress has to act in a uniform manner and isn't able to feel out the edges of the ramifications of fair use, I posit that courts will produce the most fair and practicable rule for both parties.
IP has nothing to do with plagiarism. If I pay someone to write a paper for me, even if I get them to sign over the copyright for me, submitting it as my own work would be plagiarism. As for learning how to quote and cite work, sounds like they just need some remedial technical writing classes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This makes me sad. I have yet to teach many undergrad courses and I am in the hard sciences but it frightens me if I am going to have to deal with people who think they can reinvent the wheel much less all of physics just to not be "thieves."
Vice-versa I was visiting an engineering school, and the students came-up with a very ingenious idea to convert tidal waves into air motion and then electricity (via windmill action). I asked where they got the idea, and they said they saw it on the internet.
Yes they copied the idea, but so what? That's how science advances. One guy has an idea and ~10,000 other guys work to perfect it and make it reality. As you said, as long as they cite it, I have no problem with it. "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There is little sanity and a lot of craziness coming out of the discourse on X, and we're going to see it affect us
Corrected. Replace X with "IP", "climate change", "economy", "healthcare", "drugs", "terrorism", "the tube network"...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You assume that all tactics favour both sides equally. The IP cartels can afford to employ professional liars, while they don't have much in the way of moral high ground. We have the moral ground, and any lies we might employ will be quickly picked apart and used to discredit us.
Better to play to our strengths and keep it clean. Not everybody regards the world as the utterly amoral zero sum game that some economists would like it to be.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Illegal drugs generates 10.8 Billion dollars for the U.S. Economy. 1 in 5 people benefit from the movement of drug money. Pulling numbers out of your ass makes for interesting articles. Lies, damn lies and statistics.
...protected for 80 years past the life of our Creator.
LRN 2 SWM
I recently assigned a paper on the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement in a class on innovation. We had to spend two weeks more discussing it after I got not a single paper that understood the difference, despite having spent time going over the topic already.
What surfaced in the course of our discussions after the paper was that they were relying on sources (articles, press, other instructors) that simply conflated the two, and whose language on the justifications for both was almost always couched simply in individualist ethics (protecting an implied right on the parts of other authors in terms of identity and status) rather than in rational policy calculations. In short, most of the sources they found sloppily interchanged words like plagiarism and copyright infringement and implied both to be a matter of protecting egos and personas as an individual rights issue.
Plagiarism = Copyright Violation = Failure to be original
It was a very tough discussion because they were very suspicious to find one single instructor (i.e. me) telling them that pure originality is not the basis of science or creative life (indeed, isn't even possible), and that plagiarism is not a legal construct and should not be imagined in that way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I am not fine with copyrights extending past the life of the creator. I also think copyrights should belong solely to the creator(s) and be non-transferable. Big content corporations can still make money without holding the copyrights themselves.
about us being enslaved by the government. I'm sure they had no qualms about us being enslaved by our corporate leaders.
Now bow down and submit to our corporate benefactors and overlords.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
The fight to truly codify what fair use is into law will be hard enough. It doesn't need the network neutrality anchor around its neck. The two are unrelated issues. It's possible to have a very non-neutral network with regard to what protocols can be used at what times and still have fair use legally protected; it's possible to have an entirely neutral network and have no legal right to fair use.
and get rid of whats left of the us economy
this is good stat now you kow what your are losing with acta for what holly.insane wants
Your comment sounds like the democrats and republicans fighting over every stinkin' piece of legislation that has gone through congress over the last 12 years. Two sides each standing as far to the extreme as possible making stupid if not totally wrong and invalid arguments on how they are right and the other side is wrong.
Sadly, I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
> I posit that courts will produce the most fair and practicable rule for both parties.
You meant "for the party which has the most money". Most of us don't have (or wouldn't bother to spend) the mega-dollars (OK, maybe I exaggerate: kilo-dollars) it takes to go unaided to Federal court, even if it was a shoe-in that we would win. Especially if we are talking about personal fair use.
So, your point depends greatly upon whether you are talking about revenue-generating fair use or personal not-for-profit fair use. For the second, it's better to have something codified in law.
Fair use is quantifiable in many cases, but it's not simple enough to always put numbers on it. It's been up to the courts to decide in many cases, because fair use also impacts cases such as libel suits.
Someone quotes a paragraph from a one page essay by someone else. Is that fair use? We could go by some simple rule, i.e. it's 1/4 or less of the whole by word count, but why did someone quote an entire paragraph in the first place? Was that much needed to establish context? Were there several ideas in the same paragraph that the second writer wished to comment on separately? Has the first writer been complaining that people were taking her remarks out of context, quoting isolated sentences in a misleading way, and yet is now complaining people are quoting too much of her works? It's the real world - deciding what's fair in general is part of fair use.
We need more actual legal codification, but it should probably be to set minima, as in using no more than this percentage of a song is absolutely allowable, higher percentages may be fair use also for various reasons. We also need to expand that list of various reasons, which now cites some examples such as satire or parody, academic use, and others, as there was no intent to make that list comprehensive when it was developed.
Who is John Cabal?
Every time I see someone from two centuries ago respond so clearly to the dumbasses that rule today, I get more convinced that the world is advancing in the wrong direction.
> If you accept that copyright generally is a good, productive, successful inducement scheme to yield creative
> works, then taking some of those rights given under copyright away shouldn't be done lightly.
Except I don't, and shouldn't believe any such thing. Copyright is not a "good thing".
Copyright is a necessary evil. It should be treated as such.
This is the only way that the least destructive path towards "encouraging creativity" will occur. Otherwise, the
copyright maximalists will run amok and try to invent rights that don't really exist in the law and then try to
penalize everyone else for violating them.
It is copyright that should be expanded with care.
It has been undergoing reckless expansion for decades now without any signs of stopping.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
I don't think it's a misguided sense of activism.
While plagiarism is almost unanimously regarded as a bad thing, what you describe is typical activism. They are pushing the boundaries, going too forward in some cases, and suffering the consequences. They might be on to something. At least, the situation can't get any worse.
This implies that there IS a hard line somewhere. There isn't. The "gray area" in which decisions are mixed is the WHOLE area in which fair use might be asserted. There have been cases where copying single sentences (out of several paragraphs) have been ruled not-fair, for instance.
You meant "for the party which has the most money". Most of us don't have (or wouldn't bother to spend) the mega-dollars (OK, maybe I exaggerate: kilo-dollars) it takes to go unaided to Federal court, even if it was a shoe-in that we would win.
While it is certainly true that going to trial in federal court is expensive, it is similarly expensive to have an effect in Congress. It is a cynical, but none the less accurate, reality that interest groups are major players in the legislative process, and those with the most money are typically the best able to hold the ear of any given legislator, let alone the many that are needed to pass a bill. I'm saying, given the choice between a multitude of legislators, each of whom is answering to their constitutents, mingling with interest groups, and plotting their next election campaign, or a federal court judge, who for all intents and purposes has a life tenure and is mostly immunized from the political system, I'll take the latter when making my arguments.
Copyright is a necessary evil. It should be treated as such.
I am always curious about comments such as this. If Copyright is "evil," what makes it necessary? And if it is really necessary, is it really evil? To argue that something is a "necessary evil," to me, belies the underlying principles that makes something necessary in the first place, and is simply a semantical device to remain indignant to an idea, but still reap its benefits.
Is this paper, digital, or fictitious capital. Where is it vanishing too?
everything we say do and think is built on the bones of our ancestors
in that respect, if you talk about anything being original, what you really mean is it "significantly expands" upon existing work
human culture science and thought are all branches on a tree. and like any tree, some tiny twigs turn into mighty trunks that in turn support their own twigs, while other twigs fail to thrive or break and fall off
the tree of memes is the same as the tree of genes: constant innovation, most of it misguided, but a spare few leading to the next big thing
nothing is ever original. all you can ever do is expand on what came before, and that is all you should ever aim to do in your life. but don't fool yourself: if it wasn't for who came before you and what they did, what you do would be impossible to do
note i am not excusing the losers who only imitate or coopt someone else's work as their own. but sometimes, good ideas are forgotten, and it takes someone to rediscover them and, on their own, discover they are important (and don't deserve to be forgotten) and to then shout about them to gain the prominence those forgotten or muted ideas deserve
and while this kind of copying is not as noble as original discovery, it is just as important and just as valid a way to contribute to the world. this applies to culture and science. is darwin less of a thinker because he reimagined and remixed the idea of evolution that was already realized but not as expounded upon by many others before him and many of his contemporaries? sometimes, who gets attributed for an idea many others have already realized is simply because they are the ones who first shouted about it the loudest, and then, because of thwm, the idea catches on like wildfire, even though they themselves weren't original in the strictest sense of the word
is gore verbinski less of a moviemaker because he reimagined the japanese "ringu" as "the ring" (which some say is superior to the original)?
is hideo nakata less of a storyteller because he only made a movie of koji suzuki's book (but he popularized it globally because he made such a scary good movie)?
and is koji suzuki just a hack writer because he took some medieval japanese folklore and a canadian film and remixed it as ringu (but of course, it was his contribution to remix like this, and add the idea of a vhs tape, modern technology, being a ghost's manifestation (which is also an idea that has also been explored by others))?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banch%C5%8D_Sarayashiki
*ring* *ring*... "seven days..."
http://www.terrortrap.com/ghostmovies/changeling/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
even if it generates the value mentioned, it's for apple and korea selling ipods. not for the artists.
The problem is that in order for a court to decide, someone must have standing to sue you over it. You can't just call a judge and ask them to make a ruling. And if you lose the case, you may lose your house, your retirement, and your children's college fund.
As an open-mic musician who gets up and plays for fun, I'm not surprised by the dollar value for businesses affected by fair use. Karaoke, open mic, folk music, classical music, 'expired' music, etc, all ends up being used in a small or large part by a huge number of companies. Who owns the copyright for Vivaldi's orchestrations? Mozart's compositions?
'Fair use' is what lets me get up and play 'Rare Old Times', 'Whiskey in the Jar', or 'Black Velvet Band' in front of a small crowd without worrying if ASCAP or the like has someone fishing for royalty violations ~ which did happen in my little 100k population city a few years back and turned a lot of businesses off from allowing live music.
Murder is cheap, at least in relative terms. Scenario: I want to make a mega-summer block buster movie out of your very popular (and still copyrighted) work of fiction. I can either pay you millions for the movie rights, or I could "wait" until an "accident" happens and pay nothing to anybody.
It's legal to break DRM for interoperability. And you can copy a DVD with the DRM and still play it. Therefore they won't go this route.
YOU murder, I get the copyright. Cool. Unless the copyrights go to the murder, in which case, this would be the easiest murder case to solve EVER.
Tell me, do you ever think this through, or just parrot it as if it is some killer argument?
That's because we no longer educate, or encourage independent thought.
We merely stuff information into brains and train them to be well-behaved workers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Every time I read asinine responses about "the good old days" I get more convinced that people are deluded. Society is better in every respect than it was two hundred years ago, get over it.
That's how they'll read it. And they'll draft legislation to get it all.
I didn't say going backwards.
In most practical respects everything is better now than before.
The thing is that one and two hundred years back most modern societies were aiming close to where we are now. I think it's no longer aiming towards a beautiful future. Luckily, lots of people are working on that, I try to be one of them.
I think it's a safe bet that Rep. Lofgren represents a Northern California district and not anything near LA...If Congress is going to be run by lobbyists, it's really time for them to do a quick check of which industries in the US actually contribute more to the GDP. It isn't the traditional media companies.
We are the 198 proof..
Why doesn't academia provide clearer guidance on where citations are appropriate, and particularly the situations where they're not needed? For instance, at what point can an established author drop the citations from their speech writing, blogging, etc. such that their own expression of ideas doesn't sound like collections of "X said XY and Y said Z"?
Just where and when are people expected to function as archaeologists of ideas, as opposed to just freely expressing themselves?
It's nice to see just how much better it is: We have better or, at least newer, technologies that are all based on the technologies that came before, oh, wait that doesn't support your claim because all of that innovation wouldn't have happened under current copyright law. Maybe... er... uh... We're certainly more productive, wait, no, that's just being able to use the newer technologies for more things, so that's out... Maybe "we're more healthy?" No, not really, we still have disease and such that were pretty much eradicated decades ago that are coming back due to all of the "better social conditions" we're acting under.
I'd actually be interested in what you base your idea of "better" on, but since you're likely to be the same kind of person who can make millions on a ten dollar investment and still claim to have lost money in the deal because someone looked at you and didn't pay you for that "privilege," I feel safe in ignoring your obviously uninformed and ill-thought-out opinions.
And yet poverty is still at the same population percentage, broken families are at an all-time high (over 70% among blacks in the U.S.), the most prominent epidemic is spread mostly by unsafe sexual contact, and I think that people living in places like Darfur might take issue with your claim that everything is hunky-dory.
Education levels in the U.S. have also declined. I invite you to locate a third-grade mathematics book written in the 1700's and take a third-grader through any of its lessons. The U.S. literacy rate is, if calculated through a common methodology using tests on Prose, Document, and Quantitative skills, actually around 60%. (Higher estimates are based on a very low requirement for literacy, and people who pass those tests may be unable to read well enough to even follow simple instructions.)
Sure, there are improvements. In the U.S., for instance, we no longer enslave people on the basis of the color of their skin. (It does still happen in other parts of the world, though.) We've also made advances in technology and medicine. However, your absolute statement that society is better "in every respect", though, is very easily disproven.
Can someone please explain to me how net neutrality is going to prohibit fair use? Has anyone ever heard of the analog hole? If a content creator/provider locked down content so that no one could even see it, would it even be subject to net neutrality?
Boundaries of Fair Use? Of an idea? All undefinable. You can't draw boundaries between ideas like you can plots of land. Trying to do so has made a big mess, set off many fights. Seemingly simple, clear standards always run into special case after special case. It's like trying to define obscenity.
Where does it end? Do musicians have to get a license to use Bo Diddley's beat, or Marshall amplifiers? George Harrison was famous for unintentionally ripping off other songs. Should he have had to surrender royalties for My Sweet Lord? "Cover versions" are allowed, no permission needed, just have to pay "mechanical royalties". Then, where's the line between parody and copying? Does MST3K cross it because they play entire movies? Terry Brooks was sued because his Shannara stuff was too similar to LOTR. (Maybe he should have argued Shannara was a parody?) I have not heard of McKiernan being sued for his much more blatant ripoff of LOTR, the Iron Tower. Far from being ashamed or trying to deny it, the author expresses his admiration for LOTR and states outright he's trying to create fantasy like it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? It's been argued that all stories are very much alike. A seemingly ordinary, usually likable person is forced to step up and be The Hero, then goes through all kinds of trials and tribulations before finally overcoming adversity (often in the form of an UBG) so everyone can live happily ever after. Yet this plot similarity, which might be unavoidable if a work is to have a chance of being popular, has been used as grounds for lawsuits. Every such case has to be decided on an individual basis, and there's been little consistency in results. The nature of the problems make it impossible to be consistent and clear, and there's no end in sight. Great for lawyers, not good for the rest of us.
A huge hindrance to clear thinking on this matter is our terminology. English (and I should imagine most languages) defines thinking in a too possessive, individualized way. We are too accustomed to thinking of an idea as belonging to someone, of letting "your thoughts" mean more than what are you thinking, it's as if we mean your head is a repository for property, as if you could own a notion like you can own something material, no matter how many others independently think of the same thing. We also have this tendency to want to single out one person for credit from a group effort. A tribe goes on a hunt. It has to be planned and organized, a part that often goes largely unrecognized. Some members scout, beat the bushes, string nets, set traps, or wait in ambush. It may take dozens of shots to bring down an animal, yet there's this peculiar desire to figure out which activity requires the most skill (probably the shooting), then figure out which one made the fatal wound, and credit the hunter who shot it as MVP, so to speak. We discover far more than we originate. We choose what seems best and most interesting among infinitely many ideas, and combine them in ways that we hope are fresh but may not be. Composing chess problems has gotten to the point that there's a good chance someone else thought of the same thing years ago. It's a narrow area, and people have been making them for centuries. They even have a term for this: "anticipation". At least we commonly ask musicians what inspired them, and often they'll cite some previous works that they like and admire. Does an idea, a concept, a law of nature not exist until someone thinks of it? We are editors more than authors. There is nothing new under the sun.
We should switch to a system that avoids all these expensive and wasteful arguments over who thought of it first, and also avoids the massive, burdensome overhead involved in obtaining permissions by the thousands to do every tiny little thing. I think we can create a system that avoids such problems and at the same time more fairly compensates contributors.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'd understand the "no longer" better if I knew of any time or culture that encouraged independent thought. As always, those people who aren't going to be restrained think for themselves, and those who can be don't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
With no copyright at all, then creative works will never be shown to the public. When the creator dies, the works can be lost, and will never be spread widely. This results in a net detriment to society. To encourage works to be released, the government decided to allow a limited monopoly (limited because there are exceptions like Fair Use) for a limited time, 14 years with one extension of another 14 years. In exchange for this monopoly, the creator agrees to release the work into the Public Domain.
It is a necessary evil because the thought is that the optimal release of information into the Public Domain is with copyright, rather than without. It doesn't exist to protect profits of a business plan, but as a bribe to get people to "sell" their works into the Public Domain in exchange for the temporary limited monopoly.
It isn't "necessary" in that society would continue to function without copyright. It isn't "evil" in that copyright won't rape children. But "necessary evil" means that it's an undesirable fix to an even less desirable problem. Though now, I think that we've gotten to where a complete repeal of all copyright would be more beneficial than the current system. So rather than being a necessary evil, it's just a good idea gone bad.
Or are you really just objecting to the English language allowing an idiom to differ from the meanings of the words that comprise it? "Necessary evil" need not be necessary, nor evil. "A necessary evil is anything which, despite being considered to have undesirable qualities, is preferable to its absence." Note, the definition contains neither the requirement that it be "necessary" nor "evil", just undesirable, but more desirable than its absence.
Learn to love Alaska
I uploaded some song samples on Wikipedia for my favorite albums and the rules were 10% of the length of a song or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. And, honestly, there's no law that completely and irrefutably protects this as fair use.
Yeah, it cannot be that simple. If I distribute the first 30 seconds and you distribute the next 30 seconds, what we would collectively distribute is not fair use. I don't think there's any solution for intangible property.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
companies like comcast, fox, and apple and viacom are trying to have extreme control over content stating that they need this control in order to be profitable and continue to exist. This study shows that companies that are more lenient may actually be heading in the right direction to be profitable in the future. Perhaps by being more open to fair use policies these companies could generate jobs and keep better public images.