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How Corruption Is Strangling US Innovation
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting piece on how money in politics is having a deleterious effect on U.S. innovation. From the article: 'Somehow, it seems that every time that [Mickey Mouse] is about to enter the public domain, Congress has passed a bill to extend the length of copyright. Congress has paid no heed to research or calls for reform; the only thing that matters to determining the appropriate length of copyright is how old Mickey is. Rather than create an incentive to innovate and develop new characters, the present system has created the perverse situation where it makes more sense for Big Content to make campaign contributions to extend protection for their old work.if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it's clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.'"
it was nice knowing you. We'll see how well you do when the rich people stop sending their kids to "that hippy, progressive college."
captcha: enroll
(that was funny)
It's more startling that these corporate worshiper types see this as such a major revalation.
In other news, America seems to be full of people that want money for nothing.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
What a surprise ! :D
getting serious, it is really sad what is happening with society, we have come to a stage where pretty much everything we do is getting richer the rich, we see that a lot here in México, every new law is pushing for lower salaries and less benefits, and from some years ago, gov is pushing to convert universities into technicall schools so we can have even more cheap workers.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
With all else that article had to say, the entire summary was about copyright? Hot button much?
As soon as Steamboat Mickey is in the public domain I'm going to burn that shit on billions of DVDs and just sell it on the street. I will be RICH cuz everyone wnats da Steamboat Mickey
I'm not sure it's corruption. It's more like taking advantage of a system that is optimized for helping the Haves get more.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
one of the most popular halloween costumes this year was from Jake and the Neverland Pirates, a Peter Pan spin off that Disney has in its 3rd season now
disney jr has lots of new characters like Oso, Handy Manny, Little Einsteins and others
and the popularity of Mickey and its copyright protection is what fueled the children's animation revolution of the last 20 some years
lion king
shrek
all the Pixar movies
and at least a dozen other movies
with amazon making it easy to self publish i decided to try my luck with writing. almost finished with my first novella. i got the idea for the story from a meme i saw on Google Plus almost a year ago and used my wife and other people i've met for the characters.
not very hard
how is lack of copyright going to encourage people to make up new content?
This story just makes no since, innovation is not imagining up some new character for dumb shit kids to drool over, and its not like micky mouse is keeping animation in the steam boat era. If nothing else, micky is a driver in the innovation of new animation techniques and technologies.
companies like Disney rape the public domain for ideas and never give back to the public domain.
Be seeing you...
It's scary how few people in the U.S. take the corruption in their government seriously. There are jokes!
The corruption is FAR, FAR more severe than shown in the Harvard Review article. For example, read Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban.
Or read House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.
To many in the U.S. government, killing other people is a way of making money.
you get laughed at for being a tin foil hatted conspiracy theorist. The trouble is this stuff is so horrible people can't believe it's happening. It's too far removed from reality. Plus their taught from day one that America is the greatest country on earth, and it's hard to get away from a belief that's been ingrained in you since childhood.
Ever notice how little time Obama spent attacking Romney's policies? The Obama campaign did focus groups and found they couldn't attack Romney on policy because nobody believed he was going to implement them for real. The massive cuts to medicare, social security, tax cuts for the rich, etc. Maybe Romney wasn't really gonna do those things, we'll never know. But either way Obama couldn't convince anyone that he might...
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We all know the typical way of presenting news - whenever an (R) does something bad, the party affiliation is right up there, and whenever a (D) does something even more despicable, the party affiliation is omitted and both parties are said to be equally bad. We all know this already. What's interesting about this story is how Blackburn is conspicuously identified an an (R) while Khanna's party affiliation is left blank - even though Khanna is a Republican through and through. An ignorant or negligent observer might conclude that (R) are uniquely and despicably evil while (D) never seem to be attached to anything bad.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
money corrupts politics, news @ 11
Of course, but that is not the problem.
Most civilised countries throw in jail corrupt politicians. In the US bribery is legalised among other nice things such as torture and abductions (extraordinary renditions), and the penalty is zip, nothing at all. In fact the more bribes, ehm contributions you have the bigger the possibility of finding a job in the bribing industry right after leaving Congress.
HBR is correct, the US is failing not because of bribery, but because there is no mechanism in the system to thwart that threat.
this was pointed out during the recent storms (Sandy), and there were several pundits that pointed out that Democrats tended to staff FEMA with professional disaster management folks while the Republicans tended to give those positions out to friends, family and donors. That was why the disaster was as well handled as it was and didn't turn into New Orleans II: The Squeal.
The hard part about this is even though it's demonstrably true (it's easy to trace the reasons for the FEMA appointments under the two administrations) it's so outlandish to think that a man would appoint someone to such an important position for political points that people just don't believe you when you point it out. Even if you've got the evidence (google it) to back it up...
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I want to say that I'm glad the guy got fired, because he's now become a martyr and a very visible example of how corrupt everything has become.
Unfortunately, I'm just not that optimistic that it will amount to anything constructive. Things will need to get a whole lot worse before people finally start demanding real change.
The inability to copy previously copyrighted items is strangling INNOVATION? Perhaps they don't understand the word innovation.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
We haven't increased the size of the House of Representatives since the 1930s, but the size of the population has grown 3X since then. The House is supposed to grow (and shrink) with population, yet it has not for nearly 100 years. Are we to believe we have the same level of representation as our great grandparents? Just try to get your Representative on the phone, for example. You might be able to reach him if you have a campaign check, but even that's doubtful these days.
Why is this relevant to the conversation? Because $435 million is a drop in the bucket for most companies, while you'll likely never see your Representative in person, let alone sit down with him/her and voice your opinion. The corporations don't care about who or which party gets elected, just so they remember who cut them the million dollar donation.
But imagine if there were 1000 or more Representatives. Now how easy would it be for corps to buy the Congress? Yes, a lot of the activity would just switch over to the Senate, but both houses have to agree to get legislation passed.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Like Bain and the guys that did Hostess in are what's scaring me. Basically guys with money and connections come in, buy a company, and then immediately start raiding the pension funds and paying themselves huge consulting fees from the loans they take out on the business' good name. Then they blame the whole sodding mess on workers making 45k/yr and unions and shut the whole thing down and move it to Mexico where slave labor abounds.
br> These guys are what'll stop innovation. They've got it so good (because they're so damn rich) they don't care about innovation. They become intensely, frighteningly conservative. There what's moved the US so far right these days. They don't want anything to change since they're makin' out like bandits. Hell, they've made progress (as in 'progressive') a bad word...
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when you've already got a successful business. There's a reason most of Disney's stuff is retreads of old tales. It's much easier to sell something tried, true tested and familiar. Later on when you're established and you've got a steady flow of cash in payin' the bills you can get to real innovation. The thing people like to ignore is that most big innovation is built on past successes. Just about all the big guys in tech got there because their parents were well enough off to support them while they fucked around getting something off the ground. Try doing that around a 40-50 hour work schedule. Doesn't happen.
Disney et. all are monopolizing those stories. Hell, that Harry potter twat has sued people copying the framework of her stories that she herself stole.
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...have the government they deserve. Start "throwing your vote away" or sit down and shut up. (Cue Democrats talking about Republicans misdeeds while ignoring their own party's misdeeds. Rah rah sisboomba.)
All that they have to do is revoke all Copyright extensions from the last century, and revert all existing copyright expiration dates to their original dates, subject to the following:
If the copyright holder wants to extend the copyright, there will be a fee of 1 Million USD per year, per work to do so, doubling each year for that work. This dollar amount is a suggestion - but it should be punitive enough to discourage copyright extensions from being made, and keep the list from getting too big.
Create a website that lists all of the works that have had their copyright extended. All other works revert to the public domain at their normal copyright expiration dates. Back when copyrights were originally extended, this would have required a paper distribution of the list, with yearly updates. Now, thanks to the internet, the cost of distributing that list is essentially free.
This would serve two purposes: (1) allow the works to enter public domain as they were originally intended, and (2), generate tons of revenue for the federal government for each work that is restricted from the public domain. This is Win-Win.
This will allow Disney to continue to retain the copyright on Steamboat Willie indefinitely, or as long as they are willing to pay. If the copyright would have expired, it would have only affected that work, not Mickey Mouse in general (which is trademarked). All it would mean is that someone could watch and distribute Steamboat Willie without paying Disney - not that anybody could create their own Mickey Mouse cartoon. Our public domain has been robbed of millions of works because of this idiocy.
Although people are often sloppy about the distinction, strictly speaking, that's rent seeking, not corruption. The difference is important. Corruption suggests a criminal offense, and it suggests that the solution is more laws, regulation, and law enforcement. But if you try to fix rent seeking with additional laws, you're just throwing gasoline on the fire, since people will figure out how to use the new laws to their advantage as well.
Rent seeking grows with the size and power of government. The only way to reduce it is to reduce the size of government.
It's not Mickey Mouse per se. The subject is the corruption of the legal protections granted through patents & copyrights. Originally, it was argued that there should be a period of time during which a creator would have exclusive right to profit from his work. Copyrights are for creative works, and Disney is the copyright holder of all things Mickey Mouse.
The Mickey Mouse Law is a nickname for the Copyright Term Extension Act that was sponsored by then California senator Sonny Bono to increase the length of the copyright generally, but it was specifically (and some would argue corruptly) created to protect the Disney corporation's dynasty built around the Mickey Mouse brand. It was passed just in the nick of time to save Disney from losing Mickey. If the copyright lapsed, Disney would have lost the exclusive right to control the use of Mickey's image, license its use in exchange for royalties and exercise its right to control who does anything with Mickey for profit. (It is VERY lucrative.) And so yet another in a series of legal extensions to the term of all copyrights was enacted by Congress.
The patent system grants similar rights of control, licensing and discrimination to the owner of a any industrial innovation. That's been extended and amplified in ways that are questionable, like the patenting of genetic sequences which were not created at all but which can become the exclusive property of some corporation for the term of the patent none-the-less. And since the definition of what's patentable is subject broad it's been refined by the courts and Congress. And it's applied very broadly within the patent office.
The patent office and its operations have been a political battleground since the Constitution was originally constructed. Jefferson and Madison disagreed on whether such rights should be granted at all. Jefferson originally argued against such exclusive rights, and when Madison convinced him that copyright was a legitimate benefit, he argued that the term should be limited to 1/2 the average lifespan of the author, in order to ensure that subsequent generation's rights were not subordinated to the wealth built during their antecedent's tenure. Jefferson argued that the length of protection had to fair to up and coming next generation. Our current politics has lost sight of this in favor of monied interests, both as regards copyright and patents.
As technology is evermore complex because it builds incrementally on previous innovation, the patent system becomes more confused. The nature innovation is arguable, and therefore the courts are more and more the judge of what should be protected. Many argue the system itself is ripe for change.
A new Mickey Mouse is in order, if you will.
I don't see the point of this article. It seems to be based on the common conflation of copyright, trademarks, and patents.
Copyright terms have no bearing on innovation. It restricts the creation of unauthorized copies and derivative works to the domain of fair use until the term of the copyright expires. These activities are, by their very nature, not innovative. I fail to see how the continual extension of copyright duration impacts innovation in any way.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
You're missing the real "corruption" here, namely that people choose to live in areas predictably endangered by hurricanes, can't get insurance or don't bother to pay for it, and then decade after decade rely on the federal government to pay for the damage that invariably occurs.
Obama just requested $60bn of handouts to these people. Why should someone living in a safe and boring place trying to make ends meet pay so that people in The Hamptons have their beach front properties taken care of by the federal government?
There's always billions of dollars laying around to pay lawyers to sue everyone else for a few billion other dollars.
Apple Macht Frei
We are in the middle of a huge, global experiment. One the one side we have the American model of almost infinite copyright, fiercely defended by the RIAA and MPAA middlemen, who load on extra costs while a pittance goes to the artists – see http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-08-27/entertainment/bs-ae-sugarman-film-20120824_1_strydom-royalty-checks-music-industry for an example.
On the other side, we have the rest of the world, where copyright does not exist or cannot be practically enforced. Where people in the industry really have to hustle and be creative to make a dime.
Which paradigm will prevail? My bet is on the open, crowd-sourced concept. A Korean Psy going Gangnam will become the mainstream (how many DCMA takedowns has he issued?) and the locked-down Americans will fade to obscurity. Your children are going to grow up listening to world music and watching Bollywood for this reason. The Beatles will pass them by because Apple and Apple took so long to come to their senses.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Sounds like she is representing the people she is supposed to represent. If you want a candidate who supports your industry, and your industry has a geographical central location like Silicon Valley, Nashville, Hollywood, or any number of other examples, it makes sense to support the candidate who will best represent you.
As such, Rep Marsha Blackburn is a terrible example of the problems money causes.
The article lists many different industries - Automotive, Intellectual Property, Accommodation and Transport, Telecom. The summary focus only on IP, and only on an example which seems like the way things are supposed to work (in the current system, not an optimal system). The other examples are more clear abuses of the system.
We are to the point where officials spend more time campaigning than working (at times, and it's only a handful, but we've broken that barrier). And it is causing problems, but so much more than just what hype7 pointed out.
Micky Mouse isn't just copyrighted he's trademarked and trademarks are copyrights on steroids and they don't expire. Disney is one of the worst for enforcing trademarks and probably spend more on lawyers than artists. Micky Mouse and some of the iconic characters are different in that they are in a sense the company much as the Pillsbury Doughboy and Ronald McDonald represent those companies. Without trademark protection another company could create a competing business off the corporate logos and characters that could easily be mistaken for the original company. I have a problem with bottom feeders that never create anything themselves lining their pockets off other people's work. I'm just saying the situation is complicated and not all creative works are equal. I doubt this is all Disney's doing as the summary hints at as evil as their team of lawyer hitmen are. Also since Micky Mouse is largely off the market I think they are more concerned with things like Snow White going public domain. They still make a bundle off those films and characters. Ultimately it's probably why they keep pulling this buy it now before it goes into the vault BS because they know one day the clock will run out and the old cartoons will be effectively worthless.
Fact 2: Most winners will not know they are going to be winners. Most losers can see they are going to be getting the short end of the stick
Fact 3: The losing side will fight tooth and nail to avert it.
When the side that is going to lose is rich and powerful, they employ very powerful techniques to avoid it or postpone it. They will buy out the competitors, engage in collusion, pay the legislators (legally or illegally), spread misinformation, doubt and feat, anything. It is very instructive to read the book by the University of Chicago professor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
Copyright is one place where we can see the dynamics playing out very clearly and use it as an opportunity to educate the public.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
a) Democrats b) Republicans c) Neither, they both do it evenly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/food-stamps-phd-recipients-2007-2010_n_1495353.html
New Economic Perspectives
I just had this idea when I saw this story on Slashdot. These corporations that use their power and money to continuously expand copyright are in fact using our own money against us. The very same dollars that we pay Hollywood, Nashville, et al for the latest CD or DVD are being used for lobbying to increase their power and riches in the form of longer and more draconic copyrights.
What if we turned this around? What if instead of buying the latest CD, MP3, DVD, etc we put that same money into a crowdfunding campaign to start a professional lobbying effort to restore a sane level of copyrights? There have been several kickstarter campaigns now that have gone into the multiple millions of dollars. I would imagine that that would be a nice amount to at least start an organization to begin this lobbying.
It struck me that I don't know of anyone who is actually representing the general public on this fight against endless copyright. It basically seems like RIAA/MPAA/etc lobbyists against no one. Guess who wins in such a lopsided argument? If you do know of organizations that are putting up a fight for us, I would love to hear about them, and perhaps such a money bomb could be directed at them.
My old econ professor said "in the USA, you call it lobbying. In my country and in others, they call it corruption." We have this culture of just accepting it as part of politics when really it should be strictly outlawed, but obviously the only people who will outlaw it are the cunts being paid to keep it legal. Short of a revolution, we are basically fucked. Not in a catastrophic way, but in a "slow, inexorable slide to the bottom" kind of way.
The free-to-view HTML 5 YouTube video?
It's already here, courtesy Disney Animation. Walt Disney Animations Steamboat Willie
If you want to better that, you have a problem.
The expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie doesn't give you access to primary sources. It doesn't give you the money for restoration.
Steamboat Willie was released on nitrate stock using the Powers Cinephone sound-on-film system.
Maybe MoMA will lend you a print.
The expiration of the copyright doesn't give you access to the Disney archives. I remember a "Disneyland" episode recreating the original post-production recording session --- one of the first of its kind --- with the surviving crew and sound effects gear.
Extras like that make the DVD.
The expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie doesn't give you the trademarked character designs for the Mouse, Minnie, Pete and the rest. It doesn't give you the right to produce anything but recognizable derivatives of Steamboat Willie.
No Goofy. No Pluto.
No Phantom Blot from the comic strips. No Sorcerer's Apprentice from "Fantasia."
.
Enumerated powers - Founding Fathers sponsored corruption. It's still corruption, thanks
when you're a poor ass rust belt or New Orleans worker you live where you're born and you stay there because moving is expensive. I 140 miles for a job and it ended up costing me $2k. You are correct that it's awful that we bail out the rich while ignoring the poor though. Socialize the loses, privatize the profits.
Also, $60 Billion dollars really isn't a lot of money. It just seems like a lot because to one person it is. And I think my main point is that under Democratic leadership most of that $60 billion won't go to rebuilding $5+ million dollar homes. It'll go to rebuilding $50-$100k homes.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastar_Corp._v._Twentieth_Century_Fox_Film_Corp.
Fox work goes into public domain, Dastar makes use of it, Fox tried to use trademark law to go after Dastar for that, Supreme Court says you can't do that.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3303573&cid=42229893
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm confused. Are there a lot of copyright holders in the Tennessee 7th District? Because I had this silly notion that US Congressman were supposed to represent the PEOPLE in their district, and not the highest bidder.
The 109887th person to state the obvious that "Campaign contributions in America constituion legal bribery" was shot in 15.6 seconds. This is a 0.3 second improvement over the 109886th person. In the previous event, the person's collegues apparently "fumbled when reaching for their weapons". Thankfully, their daily quick-draw practice sessions seem to be paying off.
I'm not sure how much innovation is being strangled, but one thing that's certain is the damage to Mickey's popularity.
When was the last time that a Mickey Mouse cartoon was released? Do kids today even know who he is?
Can you imagine if all the old Mickey cartoons where on PBS constantly? It would probably endear kids to him all over again and send a new wave of kids to Disney parks. How is there a downside? It seems crazy to me to pass up the value that those old 'toons have - to both the culture and to Disney in the form of free brand publicity.
Instead they rot in the 'vault' and Disney parks are full of old 'IP' that fewer and fewer people recognize.
Genius!
FUNK!
they wouldn't work so hard to suppress it.
Supposed? Well, if you mean by the spirit of the law, sure, but actually, it's a bit more tricky.
You see, to run for an office you need more money than any honest person could possibly have earned during a lifetime. Well, ok, not quite, you could save up a few decades and run. Once. But who'd do that, save up 30 years worth of incomes just to run for an office once and pray they get elected?
Instead you need someone to sponsor you. Now, you could of course go door to door and collect a few bucks per person, and spend those decades begging, or you could go to where the money is at: Corporations. Because they got more money than any honest person. They even got more money than their own CEOs! That's where the money is and that's where you can get it.
Now, corporations don't just give away money. They don't donate. They buy, rent and invest.
Bottom line: Be a corporation whore or be prepared to never get elected because nobody's ever going to know that you're running.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The odd thing about it is that corporations, by their very nature, should not be able to survive in a purely capitalist society, simply due to their overhead.
Every worker has to get his employer more than he costs. By principle. Else, why employ him? If the work you do gets me 2000 but you cost me 3000, I'm better off without you.
Now consider that every person can only work as hard as they can. They don't work any better in a corporation environment. If anything, they work worse because the value they produce doesn't go into their own pockets, taking away a huge incentive to work as hard as you could: Getting anything out of working harder. Most people are paid by the hour, not by their workload, so the sensible thing to do for a worker is to invest the bare minimum of work to keep the job, not produce as hard and fast as possible (what would be sensible if they were self employed and hence more work instantly translates to higher pay).
Also consider the overhead needed to keep people productive, from whip-cracking middle management to strategical considerations at C-level. They don't produce at all, they organize and supervise. Something completely unnecessary in self employment. I'm my own superviser and I have to manage myself. And while the latter does actually cut into my productive time, it's by no means anything as expensive as the average C-Level exec, not by a longshot.
So ... how do corporations survive? They're pretty much anathema to anything capitalist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Legalized? Made it a necessity to be elected.
You cannot run for an office without a well stuffed war purse. And it's unlikely that you'll have that amount of money yourself, or get it from your voters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I disagree. I believe that most of her district's population agree with the practice, and with doing anything necessary to prop up the commercial music industry. How well this correlates to those people's actual welfare and prosperity is irrelevant; the only thing important is the voter's opinions. The voters are adults; they're responsible for themselves and voting in their own interests. If they vote against their own interests, that's their own stupid fault.
Money is the key factor there. Perhaps political funding reform is needed? Seems like whoever get the most money and support from those with the most money wins. Political parties were partly designed so Joe Schmo could run for president, but it's a popularity contest where fashion is the dollar.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
corruption in the U.S. political system, TERM LIMIT the legislators to ONE term Senate gets ONE term, 10 years, House gets ONE term, 5 years. And at the end of the term, they MUST wait 10 years to run for the other chamber, to prevent them from ending one body of congress, just to get elected to run for the other body. Also, BAN all lobbying. Put K street OUT of business. You want to talk to a congressperson? Go to their LOCAL office in their home district, not DC. Next, congress will meet M-F, from 9am to 5pm, with only the traditional holidays. NO "spring break, NO Christmas (whoops "winter holiday) break. Also, there will be a dormitory built for them to live in while in DC, at no cost to congress. All meals provided for, single rooms. Also, transportation provided by shuttle bus to and from the capital. If you want to bring your own car? That's your business but you will not be refunded for gas/mileage. By doing this, the "hardship" of having to maintain two residencies will be eliminated. Next, all healthcare will be provided to them under the OBAMACARE mandate. They will have to live within the SAME LAWS they pass for everyone else. Doing most of these, and 70% of the career politicians will just give up and leave the chamber on their own free will. What DC needs is an attitude adjustment. They are NOT "kings & queens" to be swooned over and made to think they are above the rest of us. Time for NEW BLOOD in DC, which is what the founding fathers wanted in the first place. Come to DC, stay a few years, return to your home district and let someone else with new ideas come here. What we have now is a different version of the Politburo, but without the crappy soviet ear cars.
money or votes count. the Libertarians started a few think tanks and I thought they were looking for rules for good government.
Alas, they were only looking for rules to get them into power. as soon as they discovered you _need_ government to solve the Tragedy of the Commons, They abandoned that approach. Now they are some of the folks talking about a 'free' market without actually saying they mean a market free of competition for businesses that support the Libertarian party. They do not mean a competitive market well-regulated by the government. If they did, they would vote against Monsanto trying to keep GMO announcements off the market. If Monsanto wants to sell Genetically Modified Foods, fine, just label it. Labeling means Monsanto would have to pass along some of the cost-savings to consumers. That's Adam Smith economics. Allowing Monsanto to prevent passing along low prices is now apparently 'Libertarian' economics.
I also thought it was interesting that the copyright section didn't really have anything particularly damning to say about it. They're saying that copyright keeps getting extended by companies like Disney due to lobbying, but I was waiting for them to explain how damaging that actually is to society (like they did with the rest of their items). Here's the worst thing they said: "Rather than create an incentive to innovate and develop new characters, the present system has created the perverse situation where it makes more sense for Big Content to make campaign contributions to extend protection for their old work." Oh, ok - the damage of long copyrights isn't that old works are extended; it's that Disney has a disincentive to create new stuff. But, it's pretty clear that Disney *has* been creating new characters, so that sentence was a bit of hyperbole. To name a few off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangled - "Tangled is a 2010 American computer animated musical fantasy-comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wreck-It_Ralph - "Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 American 3D computer-animated family-comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(2012_film) - "Brave is a 2012 American computer-animated adventure fantasy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures." (Pixar is now owned by Disney)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(1989_film) - "The Little Mermaid is a 1989 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_King - "The Lion King is a 1994 American animated musical drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(1992_Disney_film) - "Aladdin is a 1992 American animated musical family film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
The summary at the end of the article didn't include anything about copyright - "Netflix. Uber. Airbnb. Tesla. Fisker. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these. And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents..." Seems that even the article-writer had a hard time finding the "big damage" caused by long copyright.
I'm not arguing for long copyrights, by the way. It would be nice to have shorter copyrights - if for no other reason than to give free access to a lot of old stuff, and it seems excessive to allow companies to continue making money off of 50 year-old works. I just think it's interesting that the Slashdot summary and much of the Slashdot readership focuses on long copyrights as some horrible thing (perhaps to delegitimize copyright in general, and therefore, legitimize piracy). The damage of long copyright and the outrage it creates on Slashdot just seem disproportional, that's all.
Yes, there are. But there's even more people whose prosperity is tied to the prosperity of copyright holders.
No one wants their city to be the next Detroit which is what the politicians have been pulling out as the example for what happens if a city and it's people hold local corporations to silly things like ethics or fair business practices.
Someone waiting tables at the Waffle House doesn't care about fostering technical innovation. They're happy to vote for a politician who wants to extend copyrights forever, or wants to let the local tech company re-patent everything that has ever been thought of by adding "on a computer" or "on a phone" to it, or wants to let the local steel mill dump slag water in the river; so long as it means that $0.50 tip they get for serving someone breakfast might grow to $0.75, they couldn't care less what it means to some company somewhere else whose ability to innovate will be stifled by over reaching copyright or patent laws.
I'm confused. Are there a lot of copyright holders in the Tennessee 7th District? Because I had this silly notion that US Congressman were supposed to represent the PEOPLE in their district, and not the highest bidder.
You do realize that people hold copyrights.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.