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.
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)
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.
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!
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
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.
In fact the whole point of this report is the highlight the absurdity of the claims made by the RIAA/MPAA. It deliberately uses the exact same methodology, where in the *AA case it assumes that all revenue generated by creative industries is attributable to the existence of copyright law - this report applies the same thinking to fair use.
The idea is to point out that even by the *AA's own calculations the economy benefits far more from exceptions to copyright law than it does from copyright law itself.
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
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.
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.