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Is 'Fair Use' Unfair To Humans?
An anonymous reader writes "This article in Wired advances the idea that humans are losing the copyright battle against machines because the fair use laws are tilted against them. The writer wanted to include photos in his book, but the licensing fees were too high. The aggregators, though, like Google, are building their own content by scraping all of the photos they can find. If anyone complains, they just say, 'Fill out a DMCA form.' Can humans compete against the machines? Should humans be able to use the DMCA to avoid copyright fees too? Should web sites be able to shrug and say, 'Hey, we just scraped it?'"
Can we get a robots.txt for images?
If you are willing to remove the offending photos from the books in circulation!
In today's age of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated. Gone are the obstacles to distribution and duplication that existed in days gone by, and as the past decade or two has shown us, dropping copyright as a concept will do nothing to deter people from creating new works, only remove the incentive for people to create static media for a living.
I fully recognize the benefits that copyrighted works have provided for us in the past, and the incentive it provides for new creation. However, I'm not sure copyright deserves to survive in today's technological world when it does as much to deter creation and innovation as it does to foster it.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Don't want Google to scrape and index your page? I think there is an established procedure for that...
It isn't enough to DMCA something. IF you have a copyrighted work, and GOOGLE uses it for commercial purposes, then sue them, and scraping an image (or whatever) to put into a database, which they offer for free, to sell advertising IS commercial use. Sue them. DMCA is just the first step in stopping their usage. SUE THEM for commercial use of your works.
Also, using the tools built into web standards (i.e. "robots.txt") is your friend. IF you post something copyrighted on the internet, it will be "stolen" by someone, somewhere (if it is interesting enough).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Scrape them yourself in a semi-automated way, host them somewhere and provide a way to submit a DMCA take-down notice.
Done and done.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Put this in a file called robots.txt on the root of your website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Boom. Your images wont get illegally used by Google. You can send me the money your would have spent on lawyers.
Fair Use law is unfair to humans. Fair Use as a theory is 100% sound.
tough talk is easy.
reality is you'd need to be paying lawyer $275 or more an hour for about 700 to 1500 hours plus expenses. who here has that kind of income to gamble? I do not.
1) Write AI
2) Give it the ability to write a website
3) give it the ability to find content for said website
4) ????
5) Profit
6) Say "it wasn't me, it was the AI" if you get DMCA'd, threatened or sued.
This is not a case of human vs machine. It's a case of traditional book publishing, where photos cannot be auto-delted, vs. web hosting where an item can be removed rather easily.
As others have noted, this is exactly what robots.txt does - it tells agregators which part of the lawn they're not allowed to stand on
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Build a time machine, and go back and kill Hitler.
Done and done. :^)
Put the book online with integrated live search results.
No. Copyright is absurd. If copyright wasn't such a total clusterfuck, fair use would not be an issue.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The whole idea to charge money is to be inconvenient for someone has to loose something in order to gain a limited resource whether service or a product.
It exists because with finite resources those who really need it are willing to sacrifice to get it. Our brains are wired to be greedy too in order to get ahead by forcing people to give up everything for you means you make more money. Money is a form and way to keep track.
However, realistically this is not a bad thing per say as we would all starve. No farmer is going to get up at 4am and bust his butt for your egg mcmuffin you ate this morning from the goodness of his heart right? No other humans demand he sacrifice to pay his mortgage, bills, and healthcare and you too get breakfast but had to give something up for it as well.
Copyright though is artificial. Unlike food, it is created a limited resource by default so you can sacrifice more of your lives for the few who own it so they can stroke their egos by getting it in the form of money from other people.
http://saveie6.com/
Instead of hosting use an iframe linking to their site. Then they'd have to DMCA themselves since you aren't hosting a thing.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I saw what you did there. "The aggregators" that tell you to fill out a form aren't machines, they are corporations.
Nice try though.
-- MarkusQ
The DMCA protects service providers from being sued if their users post infringing content. It does not protect the user who posts it. If Google or anybody uses a copyrighted image, they are not protected. If someone posts a copyrighted image on G+, or if a copyrighted image shows up in an image search, they have to take it down upon receiving a takedown notice to have the DMCA protection.
Fair use is an entirely different legal argument. There is no clear definition, but it basically means that if you: use small snippets, create a new transformative work, or use copyrighted material in news of commentary, etc you are not liable.
The author of TFA is deeply confused - she can't distinguish between pictures used as content (what she wanted to to, and not fair use), and pictures used as links to content (a murky grey area under fair use). Because of her inability to distinguish the difference, she feels unfairly treated.
In your example, the writer is actually copying the photos into his book. That's one thing. Google, OTOH, isn't publishing a book containing copies of the photos. They're creating an index of photos that exist. To make it minimally useful, that index has to include a thumbnail or other depiction of the photo so viewers can tell whether that's the image they were looking for or not (a prerequisite for deciding whether they want to go to where that image is published or not). I'd say that if a writer wanted to do the same thing, publish an index of where all these works were with thumbnails of them, they ought to be able to do it under fair use just like Google does. But producing an art book with full-size high-quality reproductions of the photos wouldn't be producing an index.
Also, Google only creates an index of what the publisher has made publicly available. So what Google reproduces on their pages is by definition something the publisher isn't getting paid for when people just look at it. Google doesn't go behind paywalls or subscription barriers to find things, unless perhaps the publishers have explicitly coded their site to give Google that access for free and in that case IMO it's the publisher's look-out. To me it makes a difference in what's "fair" when you're handing out full-sized copies for free, no strings attached, to anybody who grabs one off the table vs. if they can only get them by coming into your shop and plopping down their money first.
Humans don't have limited liability protection, can go to jail, can't transfer their lives to another under a different name, can't claim income through a different tax jurisdiction, and aren't immortal.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The cost to produce has gotten cheaper
Not quite. The cost to REproduce has come down dramatically. The cost to PRODUCE works in the first place is higher than ever.
That is almost certainly due in part to celebrity stars and their demanding agents, at least in some creative industries. However, it is also because many of the works that are produced today have far greater production values than anything we produced as a society even a few years ago.
I think any case against copyright as a principle (as distinct from abusively distorted copyright in practice) needs to include a plausible alternative model that doesn't throw away all of those valuable works. So far, the most successful experiments in alternative business models have seen only isolated successes, and usually under highly favourable conditions that would not generalise.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This article is definitely backwards.
Commerical copyright is grossly unfair to humans.
Copyright terms are already far to long. We need to reduce copyright terms to months, instead of years, if not to abolish copyright completely.
Those who have abused copyright, to assault humanity, has made the position of copyright holders untenable. Consequently, unless their behaviour shows a substantial improvement, we will have no choice but to eliminate copyright completely.
Humans aren't losing out on content to machines. Yes, Google and others scrape content, but they aren't machines. They are corporations owned by other humans. All this article is about is small players not being able to compete against big corporations. That has almost always been the case. The fact that laws like the DMCA make it even harder for small players to compete just aggravate an already imbalanced system.
The middle ages had a feudal system, the modern world has a corporate system. In the middle ages, the king would only listen to those who filled his coffers. The same is true today with the government. Is there any wonder that small players have no voice, when an individual is only allowed to make a $2,600 campaign contribution, but with recent rulings a corporation can spend whatever it wants?
Contrary to popular belief, big corporations like government regulation because the cost to comply forces out smaller competition. Then, once the competition is gone, they lobby against the regulation and their bought and paid for representatives are all but too happy to comply.
Pope Paul VI said "If you want peace, work for justice." If he were alive today, he would probably add "If you want justice, get the money out of politics." Because, until you do, the US will continue to remain a plutocracy, where the wealthy class controls the government and the wealthiest class of all, now that the SCOTUS has determined them as persons under the law, are the mega corporations.
should we forget about copyright already? sure enough.
The commenter is confusing the actions of corporations with the productive assets they utilize. A machine may scrape a site, but it took a human - usually following the guidance of her/his employer - to set the machine in motion. A corporation, especially a corporation of > 1, can distribute the work of collecting copyrighted material, hosting it, organizing a sales effort around it, responding to the bitching and moaning, and seeing to any resulting adjudication.
A person, motivated by fun, or acting as a sole proprietor, with only so many minutes in a day, and with full exposure to her/his assets, usually can't scale to handle all of those efforts.
Luke, help me take this mask off
"copyright" itself is by definition an unfair concept (it attempts to combat one kind of unfairness with another) so it stands to reason that anything else that comes from it would also be unfair. (Ditto for patents.)
I mean, you do know that it's a totally made-up concept, right? Copying is a true human right. We have eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear, brains with which to remember and analyze, mouths with which to speak or sing, and hands with which to create. If I watch someone make a chair, I know how to make a chair and can do so myself. A thousand years ago, if you saw a nice chair in someone's house, you didn't have to ask permission to make one just like it for yourself.
If someone tells me a joke or story, or sings a song, it is in my head and I can reproduce it at will. (Allowing for memory and talent.) The idea that someone can say "Hey, I thought of that first, you can't do that thing I just did unless I say so" is a totally artificial construct.
Granted, its original purpose was to keep big businesses from "stealing" the ideas of "little guys", and encouraging little guys to make good things and not fear that they'd get nothing due to big companies instantly copying them and making things better and cheaper, but it's been abused 16 ways from Sunday. Solve one problem, create a thousand more.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Just make a machine to fill out DMCA forms. Follow that path and soon enough, we will have machines suing other machines.
already publicly available?
And this is some great injustice . . . how?
The fair use battle was lost long ago. Duh, get over it.
If it capped out at a hundred thousand dollars a year I would be fine with it. Disney and other big corps could monopolize a miniscule (insignificant, practically zero percent) fraction of all creative works, for as long as they wanted, by paying this stipend every year. The rest of us could have 10 to 15 years of protection for things we really care about, and the other 99.999% of copyrighted works would be available for remixing and free distribution within a handful of years of initial release (and certainly by the time they stopped being profitable for the copyright holder to bother with trying to sell them).
I resent your characterization of unfairness - if not for that I might have not posted what I prepared. Which is why I post this here. The remainder of the "you" references are aimed at the author of the article (that's what you see if people here would read and critically think about the page that appears after clicking). Apologies for slashdot's pasting being retarded.
Fair use is fairly clearly laid out, and things like lolcats or other image macros can be considered parody. There is an article in Ars Technica which reproduces the image to illustrate what is the subject of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was ridiculous because the plaintiff had followed proper DMCA takedown, the site complied, then the plaintiff registered the copyright formally and sued Buzzfeed for the infringement of other sites that had subsequently used the photo. In other words the lead-off of this paragraph points to a baseless suit.
This example also shoots the argument in the head. BuzzFeed might as well be a web site with a single editor, author, owner, creator, and janitor. DMCA takedown would have been just as effective, unless the janitor AKA DMCA contact was out that day.
Was BuzzFeed a machine that included the image? Or was the article written by a human? The answer is that this is an exceptional case, and it makes no difference, because the plaintiff wrote the lawsuit and filed it with no legal advice. I can be sued for farting in the state of Wisconsin, despite never having set foot there. The case will likely be thrown out as soon as I submit my response to being served, which is "I was never there, and plaintiff will have to prove that I was, so good luck with that"
Okay, support that statement.
You're writing a book? That will be published and people will maybe pay money for? DMCA offers no protection for that. Is that your point, that DMCA offers safe harbor for individuals OR machines, but not for book authors?
Oh, the book is online, and your book isn't.
Nope, not even correct. BuzzFeed claims its use is transformative, but that doesn't mean they can scrape them and call them fair use. They have a DMCA waiver, and a baseless lawsuit to defend. How much in legal fees will it cost them? More than your royalty fees of $10
I agree that society, and culture will proceed to develop new works of art and fiction, for as long as it is profitable to so. Profit being measured in both cash AND enjoyment. Most authors would be much less productive if they did not get some sort of payment from their work. I agree totally with this.
However, payment to the authors doesn't NEED to come from licensing. In fact I can cite examples in which the owners of a work dont WANT the fees (eg in Russia where the licensing fees are set forth by law, not by the author, which is why half the globe banned perfectly legal Russian MP3 sites a while ago). But lets agree that they want something.
the problem I see is greed. The distributors are protecting their investment, because they see any other source of creation as a threat to their business. However, here in my country, we have a "fair use" law, which means that when I buy a blank media, a piece of blank paper, or toner for my photocopier, I pay a tax which goes into a fund, which then distributes monies to the authors of the "presently most reproduced pieces of work"
Libraries does the same, pay royalties to the authors based on how much their books, movies or music is being used.
Admittedly, noone is getting fat of this system, and certainly the distributors are getting shafted, if I can just go grab a book or a piece of music for free at the library. but I dont see the failing of a business model as being a good reason for endorsing the status quo.
The rest of the world is adapting to global trade.... attempting to enforce a single point of view on copyright or fair use is doomed to fail. Coonsumers WILL move to where their product is, regardless.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
The problem that a progressively increasing copyright registration fee solves is the problem of orphan works. Under the current system, lots of works are still covered by copyright even though the copyright owner cannot be found and thus the works cannot be licensed. A system like the GP is suggesting would force abandoned works into the public domain where they can be preserved, while still allowing actively used works to have a longer period of copyright protection.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Except artists ARE NOT making money under copyright.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/artists-lawsuit-major-record-labels-are-the-real-pirates.ars
If you don't REproduce it, then you're not using copyright at all.
No copies does not require copyright to make happen.
The production for commercial use of a "creative work" that can be covered by copyright HAS to be done by producing COPIES of that work. Unless in a fixed medium, a creative work is not copyrightable. See live performances are not copyrightable, but the official video of the live performance is.
And the cost of producing a commercial size warehouse of copies of your creative work USED TO BE expensive. Now it's practically free.
IMHO, copyright is a manifestation of a severe misunderstanding of why a society even has any property rights at all. Property rights do not exist to help people make profit, that's a consequence property. Property exists to deal with the truth that not everybody can use everything at the same time. We create property so we can resolve disputes over scarce resources without beating the crap out of each other. While it's true that when people stop knocking the crap out of each other, society tends to be prosperous and happy. That is a consequence of property rights, not the reason for them.
Well, with content and information, everybody can use everything at the same time. Copyrights impose a restriction on use, not for the sake of resolving conflicts over scarce resources, but for the sake of controlling how people distribute information for optimum profit. They are an abomination of everything free markets, property rights, and capitalism were ever created for. They are a fraud, and likewise everything we have ever been taught about them is a fraud too.
Ever since childhood, we have all been taught that copyrights are a property right that protects creators and incentives creation. But in the real world copyrights act nothing like normal property rights, they protect cartels, and incentive lawyers. This is a fact, it is impossible to deny. The few creators who do win the copyright game are like people who win the lottery, no mention of the countless others locked out. They don't incentive creation, all they do is force the market to centrer around creation controls instead of creation services. They aid the people who control, far more than they aid the people who create.
Everyone was warned by folks like me that it was the dumbest idea of ...
all time. Now people seem to be entrammeled by the implications
[ And don't really notice that it was lawyers at
Adobe et Al that did this to them. ]
EDUCATION. What the USA lacks ... plus, the inclination
to reward monopolization and big business. Jeez.
John Eadie [JE46] http://www.c-art.com `one of these days the dogs aren't going to eat the dog food' - Bill Joy