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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of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated.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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.