The Best of The Worst Hollow Copyright Claims (medium.com)

tiltowait writes: Slashdot readers should be familiar with most if not all of these, but the list of 20 Hollow Copyright Claims is a somber reminder of the current sorry state of intellectual property laws in the United States--as anyone who's encountered a paywall or a takedown notice (or remembers Slashdot's run-in with Scientology) can attest. It serves as a call to arms that we not lose sight of the benefits to sharing knowledge.

Comments

Missed one

[PvtVoid]

One of the most disgusting recent copyright stunts was the Anne Frank Foundation extending the copyright on her diary by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author.

If anything ought to be considered owned by the world as a whole, it's Anne Frank's diary.

The mouse will soon push to make them last longer

[Joe_Dragon]

The mouse will soon push to make them last longer and they also want the right to move stuff in to the vault and take off the market just to have them come back out years later.

Paywalls not like the others!

[JoshuaZ]

Paywalls are not like the other issues here. Paywalls are legitimate although often futile attempt for people to make a profit off their labor. The problem is precisely the long-term copyright issues that the article actually discusses where the people claiming copyright are either claiming it on highly derivative works or on works made fifty or more years ago. Putting in paywalls into the summary distracts from the serious issues here. Focus on the real problem.

The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[penguinoid]

"Author's lifetime plus 70 years"

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[JoshuaZ]

Would you actually not produce things if people would eventually in some sane amount of time get access to do what they want with your works? More to the point, how do you think things would be if Shakespeare was still copyrighted, or Jane Austen, or Shelley's Frankenstein? The point of copyright is to have a long enough period to encourage people to make their own works. If you really aren't comfortable with people maybe playing with your ideas 70 years after you've died, then that shows if anything that you've absorbed too many of the ideas of very long copyright times, and I daresay you are the exception rather than the rule even given that.

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[Culture20]

I'm an author, and I have no problem with this. In fact, I encourage it. Why should a generation find a means to profit off my work, changing it, manipulating it, doing whatever they want with it, soon after I pass? What a disgrace that could be.

Parent is totally right. After all, the copyright clause does read:

To promote the Agrandizement of Creative Egos, by securing for extreme Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[Atomic Fro]

The point of copyright is to have a long enough period to encourage people to make their own works.

I'm going to nit pick this, but don't take it personally because I think you get it, but the overwhelming majority don't. Whenever people say/write this I think they believe its the exclusivity itself that is the motivator for artists to create works. I totally reject this idea. Read this sampling of how musicians feel about online "piracy."

My take away from it are that the artists either don't care or are encouraged by it. To them, their art is an experience. It's either the experience of going to a show to witness a live performance, or like Jack Black's comment, holding the vinyl and seeing the album art in its bigger than life glory and reading all the extras in the album notes. No amount of copying is going to stop people from going to live shows, and no amount of copying can hurt real album sales. The recording industry got cheap and lazy and shot themselves on the foot when they reduced themselves to being the packagers of only 1s and 0s.

Its the old guys that are attempting to live off the residuals and the royalties of stuff they did 20, 30, 40 years ago that dislike it so much. I took Prince's comment as "Shit, if I can't make my % on sales, I am going to have to get off my ass and work again."

And now, to my point, I argue that it's "for limited Times" which serves as the motivator for artists to create. That copyright expires is the most important part in the copyright clause. If I write a book or two, win success roulette, and maybe get a movie deal which nets me enough money for me to be more than comfortable for the rest of my life, my children's lives, and most of my children's children's lives, why would me or my children work? Pure greed, more money? Greed doesn't make for good art.

I'm getting off the path now, but its the same story with healthcare in America. The people were tricked by the leeches to believe that the cause of excessively high healthcare costs (insurance) is the solution . The problem with copyright / being able to create new works is that copyright lasts too long.

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[youngone]

I'm an author, and I have no problem with this. In fact, I encourage it. Why should a generation find a means to profit off my work, changing it, manipulating it, doing whatever they want with it, soon after I pass? What a disgrace that could be. Have you seen how far removed these new Alice and Wonderland movies are? Gawd, completely off the point. Now people think of Lewis Carrol as an author and cartoonist, not the brilliant methmetician he was. There's also the drug/hippie flower-power relationship that was never intended.

Why would you even care? You'll be dead.

Also, if you don't like the current Alice movies you're probably not a child, which is the intended audience, as far as I can see.

I resent the fact that Mick Jagger's children will be living off continued royalties for their entire lives.

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[AmiMoJo]

I know, it's outrageous that my employer stops paying ME after I die, let alone not paying my children! I mean, I worked hard today, surely that continuing deserves payment to my descendants long after I'm dead. Why would I bother working tomorrow if I know I'm only going to get paid for 1 DAY!

If you're opposed to our current IP law

[rsilvergun]

you've already lost by calling it "Intellectual Property". It's always nice to pick the terms in a debate...

Re:What about the infection nature of the GPL?

[Dcnjoe60]

You are trolling, of course, but the GPL is a license to use the code that somebody else created. One is free to use is as long as they abide by the terms. That is no different than using BSD, MIT or even proprietary code. In short, if you don't want to abide by the copyright owners terms, then don't use their code.

Re:The mouse will soon push to make them last long

[FatdogHaiku]

The mouse will soon push to make them last longer and they also want the right to move stuff in to the vault and take off the market just to have them come back out years later.

... and now they have The Force on their side...
Dum dum dum da dumdum da dumdum d-
Possible Intellectual Property Violation Detected
no carrier

Don't forget the comic book movies...

[__aaclcg7560]

The movies studios refusing to return the license back to the comic book companies and made more bad sequels to Superman and Spiderman.

Disney

[IHateGrapes]

Disney will be pushing for copyright extension in 5-6 years. It's obscene that the time between the Grimm Brother's original Snow White, and Disney's retelling, will soon be less than the time Disney's owned the copyright to their version of the Grimm fairytale.

Access to original

[Michael Woodhams]

This raises an interesting issue:
If I edit Anne Frank's diary, I have copyright on the edited version. If I carefully set things up and take a high quality photo of the Mona Lisa, I have copyright over that photo. If a monkey takes a selfie with my camera and then I do a bunch of post-processing to "improve" it and publish the improved picture, I have copyright due to the improvements.

In each case, somebody else could read the diaries and publish their own edition, take their own photo of the Mona Lisa, or freely distribute the original unimproved monkey selfie - but only if they have access to the diaries (or facsimile), to the Mona Lisa without plate glass in the way, or the unimproved selfie. When access to the original is restricted, reproductions can effectively exert copyright over the original when the original is out of copyright. (The monkey selfie camera owner missed this trick.)