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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?'"
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of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated.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!
This and it's backwards - humans are losing out to copyright. Copyright is the entirety of the problem not fair use.
Yes I believe people should be able to recoup their invested time/money and some form of copy protection is needed for that but the current laws are doing it to the detriment of society.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is it, in a nutshell.
Copyright as it is wielded today for *most* uses is a net loss to society. Look at book copyright, movie copyright, music copyright. The only thing that has come out of copyright from them is recycling of old media, nothing creative, nothing to promote progress of the arts, and no benefit to society. We've actually lost a ton of history due to excessive copyright - and those with a vested interest would love to keep it that way.
While I agree that some history is locked away in books that can't be copied, I think that many, many writers and artists are only able to devote time to their work because copyright allows them to charge for access to their work. All of the new books at my store-- including plenty of non-fiction-- is protected by copyright.
The only counter-example I can think of is the Wikipedia. While it is quite good, it has a strange reliance on copyrighted work. It requires all information to be based upon a citation to a real publication-- a publication that's usually protected by copyright.
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
I'd say this is a case of automation drastically changing the environment. There's a lot of things that are not technically legal but nobody worries about because it's not worth a human's time to track down and prosecute. Traffic violations (speeding, not quite coming to a complete stop), fair use activities (they're still technically infringements, it's just that the copyright holder isn't allowed to sue... or more accurately, that the suit gets dismissed once the activity is declared 'fair use'), picking up dimes off the sidewalk (found money is supposed to get turned in so the owner can claim it), lots of things. Now that machines are able to detect this stuff automatically for cheap, "not worth a human's time" is no longer a protection for activities that most people find to be normal and ethical.
The only counter-example I can think of is the Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is copyrighted. Creative Commons is not the same as public domain.
Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living). But the way it is applied and retroactively extended far beyond the lifetime of the creator is not reasonable. We should have clear rules for "fair use", and a sensible duration of, say, twenty years. One proposal I like is to have a "copyright tax". An artist would automatically get, say, a ten year copyright, and after that would have to pay an increasing annual fee to maintain the copyright. If you want the government to enforce your monopoly, then you should pay for that.
So you want extended copyright for Disney, but not for mid-tier authors? That sounds backwards to me.
I think instead we need a hard look at mandatory licensing for derivative works. If my youtube video of humorous cats using your 10+ year-old music somehow makes money for someone (me or youtube), then that someone should owe you a percentage (and require attribution), but let's end take-downs for 10+ year old works.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
should we forget about copyright already? sure enough.
The idea of the increasing annual fee to maintain copyrights goes like this: For the first year of copyright protection, the cost is $1. For each subsequent year, the cost doubles: year 2 is $2, year 3 is $4, year 4 is $8, and so on. Year 11 would be $1024. Year 21 would be $1,048,576. By year 31, it would cost over a billion dollars to maintain a copyright. Disney's only advantage is that it has deep pockets. So if the copyright maintenance fee doubled every year, they could keep the copyrights going for a couple of years more than the average Joe. On the flip side, they also have scazillions of copyrights to maintain.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Some of history WAS locked away in books that couldn't be copied, then the last copies were destroyed. Same has happened to film and audio recordings.
That doesn't necessarily mean abolishing copyright is the right answer. It should be shortened. It could have a publish or perish clause. It could have broader exceptions. It could have realistic penalties. It might even have strings attached to assure that once expired, the work does enter the public domain with DRM stripped. It could certainly stand to be clarified soi that copyright and the DMCA can't be used to lock out 3rd party ink and toner (for example) using a ROM as a flimsy excuse.
Do ALL of that and you leave artists still able to benefit from their work but do a lot less damage to society and culture in the process.
already publicly available?
And this is some great injustice . . . how?
Yes, I get it - it just seems like it's solving a problem no one has. What's needed today is a clear legal way to automatically license works still under copyright, not a way to cut off revenue to creators (especially not less popular, non-corporate creators). No one should be getting takedowns for fanfic, mashups, mixtapes, cat videos, or videos of themselves trying to play a work, even if that work is still under copyright.
It's not about making copyright shorter, it's about making it less restrictive - especially in the case where someone is making money off of the derivative work (as Youtube does from ads) , but not very much money. Make sure the original creator gets attribution; make sure he gets a cut of whatever money; put and end to takedowns.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think that many, many writers and artists are only able to devote time to their work because copyright allows them to charge for access to their work
Because deceased authors are always putting out more new works since we've extended copyright past the natural lifetime of the author and not at all for rent-seeking by the heirs/descendents/scumbags.
Right?
--
BMO
As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
Good post, but..
"Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living)"
On the surface you are right, but this sentence is loaded the wrong way. There is a false implication here - that one must have copyright in order for authors and artists to make a living. This is demonstrably false.
Copyright IS "evil" to some degree though that's not the word I would have chosen (a little more loading) it fundamentally boils down to a violation of the fundamental liberty of a person to use their own property. If you have purchased a copier, and you have purchased a book as well, and you wish to run that book through the copier, there is no one else involved here from a strict natural rights perspective, it's you disposing of your property as you see fit, period.
BUT it was nonetheless accepted as providing society with enough benefit to justify that evil, by encouraging more authors and artists to complete their works and get them printed and distributed than might otherwise do so. Our founders valued the book enough to give up fundamental rights that they risked their lives to secure, in the hopes of creating a country with more books on its shelves. I am not at all sure they were wrong.
But originally you got copyright for a limited time, fair use was interpreted pretty liberally, and it actually required you to donate a couple copies of the book to the library of congress! to make sure that after the thing went out of print it would still be available for study by future generations.
Copyright as interpreted and applied today is a far cry from that deal. A far, far cry.
And patents are even worse.
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While I agree that some history is locked away in books that can't be copied, I think that many, many writers and artists are only able to devote time to their work because copyright allows them to charge for access to their work. All of the new books at my store-- including plenty of non-fiction-- is protected by copyright...
Tolkien's work is protected by copyright, but he doesn't seem to be devoting much time to anything new.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
This makes sense to me. According to my publisher, the vast majority of the profit from any new book is made in the first three years. There are a few outliers, but these are the ones where both the publisher and author made so much money in the first three years that they'd still have a huge incentive to bring it to market even if they lost copyright after three years. If you're still making more than a token sum on any book (or piece of music or film) after 7-10 years, it was truly exceptional and you've already raked in a huge pile of cash.
There are some problems with this approach though, such as how do you deal with incremental changes? There are some FreeBSD source files that I've modified that still have original Berkeley copyrights going back to the early '80s. Would I need to pay several billion to copyright my changes, or would my changes be copyrighted separately and I'd only pay $1 (and would I pay $1 for FreeBSD, or $1 for each one of the several hundred source files I've modified)? If it's the latter, then it becomes very difficult for some third party to work out which parts of a file have lapsed copyright and which still have valid copyright.
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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.
Laborers don't license anything. They agree to work for X conditions, then they work and get paid. The product of that work is the sole property of the employer. The ditch digger has no further rights in the ditch he dug once he is paid. he cannot contest the sale of the property and he cannot demand to be paid again if the ditch is expanded upon or used for something other than rainwater.
I'm saying the artist only has limited latitude. For example, the first sale doctrine says he cannot block future re-sales. (Yes, I strenuously object to EULAS when they deny first sale). He cannot say it can't be sold to a Jew at any price. He can't say you may never eat in front of it.
You know what happens when the ditch digger stops digging? He stops being paid. He doesn't get to dig once and then collect money in perpetuity no matter how many people admire the ditch and use it daily. If he wants more pay, he'd better dig more ditches.
Once you cast something to the world, it is the worlds. It can be repeated endlessly without diminishing the original. I am willing to grant authors a special privilege over that which they cast into the world in the hopes that they'll cast more, but that is all. if they don't like the deal, they don't have to play. That is all copyright has ever been or was ever intended to be.The artist can invest the royalties he earns while the copyright lasts and pass that on to his kids all he wants. he can even do that by buying stock.