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ASCAP War On Free Culture Escalates
An anonymous reader writes "After ASCAP declared war on free culture and Creative Commons responded on the incident, the war of words is escalating. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has been following this story closely. The EFF responded to the ASCAP letter, saying 'we don't think that ASCAP characterized EFF and its work accurately. We believe that artists should be compensated for their work, and one proposal we have for that is Voluntary Collective Licensing.' The response from the EFF came with a study and a letter written by one irate ASCAP member who donated to the EFF and to Public Knowledge as a result of the ASCAP letter. Public Knowledge also responded to the letter, saying, 'It's obvious that the characterization of Public Knowledge is false. Public Knowledge advocates for balanced copyright and an open Internet the empowers creators and the public. What we oppose are overreaching policies proposed by large corporate copyright holders that punish lawful users of technology and copyrighted works.' Now the National Music Publishers Association has weighed in to support ASCAP, saying that organizations like Public Knowledge and the EFF 'have an extremist radical anti-copyright agenda,' according to a transcript of a speech posted on Billboard. Public Knowledge has dismissed those allegations, saying 'anybody who has spent more than five minutes on our website or talking to our staff knows that these things are not true.'"
It gives me great pleasure when these things escalate, because the more they escalate, the higher chance the media may accidentally make these arguments mainstream, and people might actually wake up and notice how flawed the system currently is.
Disagree != mod troll.
It looks to me like it's the established music (and film as well) industry whose position on copyright is radical and extreme.
ASCAP itself is an incredibly mafia-like entity. I've known bartenders who have been shaken down by ASCAP thugs for fees that they clearly didn't owe, as bands that performed in those bars played their own, non-ASCAP compositions. The bar owners soon find out that the ASCAP fees are far cheaper than the legal fees.
And these lying, theiving sociopaths have the gall to say that the EFF is radical and extreme? I'd laugh if it weren't so pathetic. ASCAP execs belong in prison for their extortion of bar owners (and likely other establishments).
Free Martian Whores!
From the speech, item #7 on the list of reasons they hate the EFF et. alia: 'They favor the elimination of the songwriter and publisher rights for server, cache and buffer copies.'
I am actually rather shocked that ANYONE can rationalize royalty fees for 'server, buffer, and cache' copies of content. This is content that people are not seeing or hearing. These are invisible pink unicorn copies.
Once the money involved in creating that content has been paid, copyright should automatically expire.
It sounds to me like you are unfamiliar with Hollywood Accounting. Have you ever wondered how the MPAA can claim that the companies it represents keep losing money, yet somehow those companies never seem to go out of business? The movie studios never post profits, because they deliberately spend money on nonexistence services -- they have contracts with shell companies that simply hold their money and use it to fund the next movie. The purpose here is to cheat actors out of their fair share of the profits. Any copyright system that maintained monopolies on works up to the break even point would only result in even more widespread use of these tactics.
Really, copyright terms should be shortened, reined back to 20 years, maybe even less. This would be a compromise that helps establish a strong public domain without eradicating copyrights entirely. Of course, that will never happen, since the copyright lobbyists have more power in congress than the rest of the population...
Palm trees and 8
Sorry, I made an English mistake. I didn't mead edited, I meant published. Most books ever written are not published anymore and can't be bought anywhere anymore. Ok, here is one quickly-found source : http://bookstatistics.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm
That states that in Canada there are more original titles published every year than reprints. Apart from having a number of titles doubling every year, the only explanation for that is that some (most in fact) books go into oblivion after their first print (I mean, is there a single person claiming that the majority of books are reprinted several times ?)
It happened to me several time to pick old books on garage sales, and when liking it, looking for books of the same author. When the book is 50+ years old, it is incredibely difficult ! There is one author that I liken to Saint-Exupery, but with more humor, that is completely unknown and unpublished as of today. Thanks to internet, it is now possible to find used copies, but for how long ? The one I have is losing its yellow pages.
Even famous people like Henri Laborit have some of their works unfindable today. (I am willing to pay twice the normal price if you find me the book "La Nouvelle Grille"). And don't get me started on comic books and roleplaying games (Amber, Circus, Bitume, Starwars D6, very good games out of print for other reasons than lack of success). Current copyright laws may allow some authors make a living, but they are also erasing a volume of culture that should qualify as "vandalism against humanity". That is something that is important to correct.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Most books are not edited anymore, but copying them instead of letting the content die is forbidden.
I too did not understand the editing point. However, if one replaces "edited" with "published", then it makes more sense - only a fraction of the literature that has even been written is still published or sold - there are many, many works which one can no longer buy, otherwise than finding a copy in a second hand bookshop or the like.
However, despite these works not being available on the market (i.e. the knowledge within the works cannot be further disseminated to society), it remains an infringement of copyright to copy them - copying them, making their otherwise-unavailable content available once again, is forbidden, in favour of the letting the work, and its knowledge, die away (at least until the term of protection of copyright expires).
I suppose that some would look to promote a claim of "moral rights" - that the author should be permitted to allow the book to sit, unavailable, after a limited print run, although I struggle somewhat with this, if protection really is granted for the advancement of learning, society and knowledge. Were the law to provide proceeds of resale to authors, then, I could understand this more (i.e. that, by maintaining artificial scarcity, the price of the few copies available is artificially elevated above that which would be supported in a market in which the number of copies was not restricted, with the author receiving part of each onwards sale), but, it does not - otherwise than a feeling of control, does an author really benefit, if he has no plan to reissue the work? (I appreciate that this is what some do- in particular, media companies which periodically release, then withdraw, their works, so that, when re-released, a new generation buys them, having previously been unable to do so.)
(I do not necessarily support a system based on this practice, but merely could understand the claim against copying unavailable works more if it were the case.)
Calling something "extremist" is an attempt to slide the Overton Window away from that position.
A silly example of how this works:
Party A: This bill proposes that we kill 10 puppies a day, just for the fun of it!
Party B: That's horrible! Why would you ever do such a thing?
Party A: Ok, ok, we'll compromise - how about only 5 a day?
Party B: In the interests of bipartisanship, we'll go along with that.
I am officially gone from
Seriously, where the hell do people get this idea of creative artists sitting on their work like evil geniuses, expressly to prevent somebody else from using it? That's not the way it works. Hell, I challenge you to name one author who has done it, just one.
I'm sure it's not the general rule at all - I talk to authors regularly (mainly to say thank you for books I enjoy, but also as part of research), and I have yet to come across any who would sit on a work, as you suggest, to prevent publication. Disney, as you say, sounds like the exception - but a powerful one - although, since I have only spoken with a small sample of authors, I could not be sure that there were not more. That being said, many authors are keen to exploit the monopoly of control granted by copyright - relatively few authors dedicate their latest book to the public domain.
But, the system, if not the authors, does not support the making available of books once the initial rush has died down - as you say, it is a matter of economics as to what gets published. However, if it is no longer economic to publish, then the author no longer makes any money from sales (since the books are not available to buy new, once stocks are depleted), and so it strikes me that there is very little reason to maintain a restriction over the book.
However, perhaps the author is not the person capable of making the decision - that the decision for this kind of release is reserved to the publisher, either under the agreement to publish, or else by assignment of the copyright to the publisher. Perhaps if the author were to retain the rights to reissue the work under his own terms once publication ceases, we would have a far healthier system of older books and works. Or, better still, divest the work to the public domain once the book is no longer published, although this is likely to raise the not-inconsiderable hackles of those who do want to use control as a mechanism for raising price / sustainability. The strength of opposition to Google Books suggest that at least some publishers and/or authors are against making texts available.