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
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 *
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
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
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?
Your assumption is incorrect, Nicky. I have made my living, supported my family, as a content creator since 1989. I've been a professional since 1987, but it took me a couple of years to start making enough money to not need a day job.
Since 2006 I only use Creative Commons licenses. It has not negatively affected the profitability of my work.
It is possible, it just takes a little creativity. Content creators are supposed to be creative, so it works out.
Copyright is not only murder, but it's for the weak-minded, the one-hit wonders. It became immoral the day it became legal for creators to sell or transfer their rights, and when copyright was extended past two decades. When it was extended past the natural life of the author, it became an abomination. It's for people who fear they don't have anything more to give.
You are welcome on my lawn.