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Copyright!
A good example is a demand letter to a Swiss university, ETH Zurich, which demands that the school immediately terminate all web pages with illegal MP3 files (illegal is of course a judicial decision; the letter presumes that all MP3s are illegal); that the school provide names and home addresses of all students with MP3 files hosted on the school's servers; that the school provide the date that those MP3 files were first hosted (for every MP3 on every server); and that the school provide the IP address for every machine anywhere on the internet which downloaded a MP3 file from the school's servers.
The letter closes with a carrot: we'll adjust our monetary demands based on how well you comply with this letter. Better hope your IP address doesn't appear too many times in those web server logs.
We can probably assume that the demands to U.S. schools are much the same - far-reaching, extortionate letters which are not specific about any particular infringement alleged to be occurring, but which are intended nonetheless to scare the universities into cracking down on their students. The terms of the compromise of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act were that the RIAA and related groups would do the policing of their copyrights - if they found a specific file that they alleged was unlawfully infringing, they have a procedure to follow, specific information to provide about the specific infringing file, and the ISP (college or whatever) is supposed to "do their part" by deleting/removing said file if the paperwork is correct. ISPs and colleges are not supposed to do the grunt work themselves - that results in the kind of overbroad crackdowns that we've seen. This was the subject of specific negotiations during the process of creating this law.
But the RIAA, of course, would prefer that schools and ISPs do their cracking down for them. So they send these general scare letters, hoping to trigger a reaction.
Scare tactics work. Universities scan through student computers, trying passwords on protected directories. The new Rio players will incorporate all of the RIAA's desired protections against copying of MP3 files - the price of settling the RIAA's lawsuit. The next target is Napster.
RIAA will now be filing suit against Napster, an application which effectively functions like a single purpose IRC server, connecting people who want to share MP3 files, whether legally or not. (There's a linux port of Napster; better download it quick.) Some schools, like Oregon State University, are so scared they're blocking all access to Napster servers from school systems. In the ideal world, Napster should probably win - the RIAA could monitor their servers and demand that infringing users be eliminated, but the service equally provides people with an avenue to share legal MP3 files, and this significant non-infringing use is all that is needed under copyright law. The article I just linked to and a nice Wired story both show Napster feebly trying to insist on their duties under the DMCA, saying that the RIAA needs to tell them in writing about specific instances of infringement - but the RIAA doesn't care about the law.
Napster, of course, has no money to fight a lawsuit. This is exactly what happened to the Rio: they won in court, but since the RIAA planned to appeal the suit and drain more money out of Diamond Multimedia, they settled by promising that future Rio's would include the RIAA's copyright protections. Like the Dentist's extortion tactics in Cryptonomicon[1], RIAA lawsuits are equally powerful whether they are on solid legal grounds or not - Napster will lose this suit, whether they win or lose, because the RIAA can afford the money to fight it and Napster cannot. So presumably Napster and RIAA will come to some agreement, settle the lawsuit, and Napster's next generation will incorporate the RIAA's demanded copyright protection system.
Just remember, RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen says she loves the idea of Napster to build communities, "but not on the backs of huge mega-corporations with billions of dollars of revenue quarterly."[2]
The RIAA is hardly the only abuser. The Business Software Alliance, essentially a front group for protecting Microsoft's copyrights, does similar things with regard to "pirated" software. (What a PR genius it was who thought of describing all copying of software as piracy! Probably the same person behind the "cyber-squatter" label for anyone who owns a domain that a company covets.) The BSA is now raiding homes of people accused of copying software.
The idea behind copyright is to expand the amount of information available to the public by creating a government-mandated monopoly on reproducing it - for a limited time (28 years maximum, at the beginning - today the maximum copyright term could be over 150 years). Copyright has always has the inherent give-back to society - the work would pass out of protection, and then anyone could copy it and use it as they saw fit. But copyright is now essentially unlimited - over the last twenty years, the length of the copyright period has increased by forty years, so that essentially no materials produced since World War I have entered the public domain. In about 15-18 years, copyright holders will again be petitioning Congress to extend the copyright term, so that entities like Mickey Mouse never enter the public domain. The extension is now being challenged as unconstitutional, but the challengers lost in District Court and it's far from certain that this suit can succeed.
In today's world, it's customary to speak of copyright as some sort of innate right. It isn't. It's there for the betterment of society, but its functioning, today, contributes nothing to society - all it is is a government-sanctioned monopoly transferring money from your pocket to others, with nothing ever given back - and no possibility of give-backs until 2019, under current law.
We need to rethink copyright. It's not a fundamental right of corporations to receive a 95-year government monopoly. Businesses plan on a five-year cycle - if something isn't forecast to make a return on investment in five years, it doesn't get done. A five-year grant of copyright to corporate authors would serve just as well in promoting the development of new material, and would bring a tremendous amount of material into the public domain, which is copyright's true intent. With a much smaller amount of material actually under copyright, enforcement of it would be far simpler and more straightforward.
But naturally this would cost certain companies a lot of money - they're used to wallowing in their government-granted monopoly. Disney has made back their costs for creating Mickey Mouse billions of times over, but they're used to the cash flow now and would be willing to buy an entire Congress to protect it. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was passed with the aid of a great deal of subterfuge, but most importantly, a great deal of campaign contributions. Now you can be a criminal not just for actually copying anything, but for making a "device" (hardware or software) which facilitates copying - we're talking five years in Federal prison. Imagine doing five years in Federal prison so that Congress can protect their campaign donations, errr, I mean, Disney's cash flow.
We're extremely close to the day when debuggers are illegal. Through threats, strategic campaign donations, and outright extortion practiced on upstart companies, copyright-holders like the RIAA are building copyright protection into the very infrastructure of computing.
Making changes in this system requires a fundamental commitment from the U.S. populace that it be changed. The commitment doesn't exist yet, but as more and more people experience the power of copyright to affect what they can and cannot publish online, and the abuses of the companies dedicated to protecting copyright beyond the terms of the increasingly-protective law, perhaps it will in the future.
Some slashdot readers will no doubt say, "Open source, you idiot!" Open source is a reaction to these problems, not a solution to them. Despite the open source phenomenon, the trend is toward more and more works being locked up, and locked up permanently, behind laws and cryptographic protocols. It shouldn't have to be a war between words, pictures and code that is always free to use and words, pictures and code that is locked up for all eternity - we should demand that the social contract envisioned in the Constitution be fulfilled by forcing copyright holders to give back to society, whether they want to or not.
-- Michael Sims
[1] Gratuitous Cryptonomicon reference provided free of charge.
[2] Quote may not reflect Rosen's exact words, but does reflect her intent.
Have any readers been affected by this? As a student at the Rochster Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, I've noticed more and more monitoring of potential warez and MP3z increase drastically over the past two years ...
I am, therefore you think.
folks would be wanting to read this very fine text on the econ. of copyright, which msakes the same points as the article on copyright-as-monopoly, in a slightly more rigourous fashion.
jsm
Unfortunately, history also teaches us that many innocent lives will be destroyed in the process, and many people whose only qualifications are a complete willingness to destroy those lives will make themselves very rich.
To bad it's not realistically possible to hold lawmakers personally responsible for passing bad laws...
NOTE: Any MP3, MP2 and GAME files not related to school and academic research will be deleted without advanced notice. If you need temporary disk space then type make_download and read the instructions.
Whether or not anyone is actively checking through accounts for MP3 files, I can't say (I haven't had any in mine.) It is tempting, as a friend suggested, to rename all files to *.MP3, just to see what happens. After a thorough backup, of course.
...that the school provide names and home addresses of all students with MP3 files hosted on the school's servers
So they're threatening that if the school doesn't furnish a list to which the RIAA isn't legally entitled, they'll have to pay money that they wouldn't otherwise have to fork over.
IANAL and my knowledge of US Law is limited to watching reruns of Night Court, but this sounds suspiciously like extortion to me. Which is illegal.
These are extremly bad colors.
From my notebook of random thoughts:
(Yes, really. These are the unedited musings of me last night.)
Or perhaps consider the individual who has been granted a patent for a software engineering method in spite the existence of prior art. Most reports indicate that those being sued for patent infringement are likely to settle rather than litigate to have the patent invalidated because the accounting cost of a settlement is less. Regardless of the outcome, an injustice has been done because resources have been wasted. If litigation is pursued, some individuals will have assumed a financial burden that benefits their competitors...(absolutely and relatively)
In fact, there is another reason for a powerful corporation to settle this suit. If no one challenges the patent, then those corporations which are best able to assume the cost of settlement will gain an advantage over any rival which is not so able. If one of those lesser competitors should pursue patent invalidation, the larger corporations still gain the same relative advantage and may even recoup the cost of settlement and perhaps damages as well.
Perhaps a class action lawsuit should be brought to settle this case?
It will also be an injustice if this individual is allowed to accumulate wealth through this 'legal fraud'.
How should this have occurred? Simply put, the USPTO should not have granted the patent. But again they have every incentive to do so. Approving the patent incurs more fees. (?) The resulting litigation can only benefit them. (They will not be held accountable, there is really no penalty in this regard that does not get passed the the tax-payers.) It is in the interest of the largest corporations to permit this injustice in the USPTO because they can use similar tactics and the cost of settlement is always a relative benefit to them.
I'm both a student and a computer tech here at Drexel, and I'm seeing both sides of the issues. Everyone is having fun sharing their files, warez, etc on our campus network. Technically, we can bust them for the sharing of copyrighted software, as the usage policy we have everyone read before getting an account states that the sharing of copyrighted material is illegal. However, I don't think we've done anything against anyone in recent time, unless their server started taking obscene amounts of bandwidth, and just asked for the attention. Should the University be responsible for regularly scrubbing their network to see if any illegal activity is going on, or is this a case where it can wait until a complaint is raised by some other authority? It's always a mess, and frankly I'm not even sure if on a University level it's even feasable to constantly monitor the network for stuff like this. Any thoughts?
Why do people assume a company holding the rights to a particular creation is "wrong" or "unfair"?
If you take that right away from corporations, you also take it away from individuals, individuals who may have spent years creating or inventing something.
It's the Many ganging up on the Few to say, "We've decided you don't have the rights to your own creation anymore."
My school's had a couple run-ins with various agencies. One guy actually had the FBI looking at him last year. But, the admins aren't freaking out over this. They peruse the network, and see if anyone has any mp3's shared, yeah. But they don't go into any password protected folders. We just have one communal password that gets you into almost anybody's shared directories, and the admins leave us alone.
Also, at least in my experience, the admins do not want to shut down ports, and kick people off the network. They would much rather ask a student who knows the network (such as myself) to leak the word that they are about to start searching for things, and to make sure that everything is passworded. There still has been some locking down of ports & such, but as far as I know, nobody has been kicked off the network since that guy last year.
The "baby diarrhea" yellow has got to go.
its, not it's. sorry. i hate that.
-k. ^-^ ^D
Each of the Slashdot sections has its own color scheme -- since this was a "Your Rights Online" article, it gets the gold-and-brown thing.
:) )
--G
(or at least, so I think... or else moderate this as "just plain wrong"
Does anyone know of any organisations campaigning for better user rights. I saw an article at the ACLU complaining about much this same issue, but they don't seem to have made much of a fight out of it. Even a voluntary code as to what consitutes a reasonable conduct by service providers would be something.
It is not a problem since it's not from the government, right?
And since this is a free market, you have a right to choose your harasser, eh.
IOW: THERE ARE RIGHTS MORE IMPORTANT TO HUMANITY THAN THE PROPERTY OF BIG CORPORATIONS. Freedom, in particular.
The ironic thing is that the big companies make CDR discs and writers, which allows some people to collect massive amount of songs or illegal programs.
Also, there is another company that has fought and won. Bleem! won against Sony, and they seem to have stabilized into allowing them to sell it. Napster is quite iffy, but why doesn't the RIAA sue AOL for its ICQ and AIM network file trafficing, which is probably ten times worse due to the huge amount of people. Or maybe freedrive?
In a college network, ICQ is the way to transfer files between each other.
I got a good laugh out of the nopiracy.com site. 109,000 jobs are lost per year to piracy. Let's see... you are just selling more copies instead of hiring more programmers, etc. So that just means more profits in reality.
I think the inflection point is the growing hatred to corporations which is actually similiar to the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages. The church started going for pure profit through its "Buy your way to Heaven" plan and the Protestant movement started a major change in how people viewed the church. But this is just rambling.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
Suppose a university was monitoring network traffic to try to weed out a potential mp3 ftp site and they found what they think to be an ftp site except all the files tranmittied are pgp encrypted. Can they legally demand that you hand over your pgp keys?
At our place we've recieved little pressure from the RIAA (granted we're not a big U. by any means.) We've gotten one letter this year targeting a specific student which we shutdown because it was a blatant violation. We're pretty forgiving here, and we tend to look the other way on some stuff as long as it doesn't affect other users by taking up bandwidth, etc.
I know for a fact that we have quite a few people using napter here because of nightly portscans and such. However at this point we have no plans to shut them down. We have no way to prove they are providing illegal mp3s without sniffing actual packets and getting some of the songs coming from their computers (or at least titles.)
We do delete any and all "illegal looking" mp3s on the public areas of our servers, but we tend to not look at user's home directories.
I guess our philosophy is that whatever they do, they are learning, and we don't want to interfere with that unless it is outright blatant copyright violations or it starts affecting other users on the system by hogging bandwidth.
-jay
IANAL, but my understanding is that it pretty much requires written permission of the student before the school is permitted to release anything to anybody. And since they are trying to coerce the university into breaking the law on that point, doesn't this open the door for student class-action RICO suits against the RIAA? (RICO, imnho, is an unconstitutionally strong law, itself, -- but is plenty strong to completely break up the RIAA, if if it loses!).
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
So what is the punishment? Who has the power to take away the rights? When (exactly)? What is the due process of prosecution for this violation?
As the article points out, the big corporates have been able, in practice, to make copyrights last as long as they want. They've been doing this for literally decades, and a system exists for perpetuating this process, and for silencing its critics (at least, the dangerous ones that seek legal action).
When an American is jailed, s/he often loses the right to vote (IANAL, so if someone could clarify this, please do); hence, s/he is no longer a constituent. For a politician with a strong "installed" constituency in groups not affected by this phenomenon, this is an enormous benefit -- potential naysayers are eliminated from the democratic process.
Given that political participation is higher among older age groups (most of which are ignorant of what software piracy is, let alone participate in it), it is safe to assume that a large percentage -- perhaps a majority -- of incumbents have more incentive to fill the jails with people who would either not vote, or vote against him. Hence the Drug war (which has similar demographics). Hence the defense of otherwise indefensible intellectual property laws. Hence a larger prison population per capita that many developing nations, and virtually all industrialized ones.
Of course, if the young in America were genuinely politically active, there might be politicians with their careers at stake over this. But we've forsaken them, so they'll forsake us. If there is no other incentive to elect people -- preferrably someone you believe in, no matter what their party affiliation or chance of winning -- let this be it.
phil
So let me get this straight: authors, artists, and other people with unique talents spend their lives sweating over typewriters or playing music in shitty bars, and you want to take the fruits of their labors without payment? After they sacrifice their lives to hone their skills and abilities, betting everything on the of chance that they could become successful in an unforgiving field? Bah. I guess you have never been in a situation where your next meal depends on the royalties from a novel... or a song... or a program.
A society based on your give-back principle would be a very gray society... No one would bother producing anything new. You can't say "give me" without giving back- in this case, paying the people who produce for you the things you enjoy.
Scudder
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Once interesting place - in the middle ogf all this is myplay.com - they give you 250MB of disk space to upload mp3s. The main idea is that you can access your own stuff anywhere in the world with a network connection.
But the interesting thing is their new 'Share' feature where you can make up a playlist of music you own... and let anyone hear it.....
All very nice - make your own little radio stations - 2 years ago I had to write mp3serv if I wanted to do mp3 radio.
Anyway..... you still have to follow the DMCA rules on programming. So myplay are another company who are staying within the limits they see in the legislation.
I wonder how they see the legal action against napster?
I think you're preaching to the choir here.
The problem, as I see it, is that elected officials can't afford to turn their backs on corporate campaign contributors.
What legislator (or presidential candidate) is going to oppose copyright extension? Not only are the proponents of such legislation huge campaign donors, but they also provide the very advertising space the candidates want to buy!
Such a system guarantees that the interests of the IP barons will be protected abover nearly all else. Barring a complete rework of the electoral process (including campaign finance), this will not change. (And perversely, those in power have the most to lose if the system were to change, hence they've no interest in pursuing this course.)
At this point, with elected officials completely co-opted, the only hope for sanity rests in the appointed members of the judicial system, who are the only people who can afford to turn away from the Disneys of the world (without worry of retribution at the next election when Disney/GE/whomever will throw money at an opposition candidate to oust the incumbent).
And, of course, there are limits to what the judicial system can accomplish - it is merely reactive in nature. Existing laws can be struck down, but new regulations can not be drafted in the courtroom, except where existing law authorizes this explicitly (i.e. sentencing, antitrust remedies, etc).
IANAL, of course, but I'm not optimistic.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
It strikes me that the RIAA behaves much the same way Microsoft does/did, and obviously those tactics lead to them being declared a monopoly. Is it possible for the DOJ to pursue the RIAA on anti-trust charges for the abuse of monopolistic powers?
The RIAA certainly does not act in the interest of the consumer (or the artist for that matter), and they abuse contractual, monetary, and legal barriers to keep new technologies, new recording startups, and even new artists from entering the market. Sure sounds like another monpoly.
I realize there is no single company here, but isn't there some kind of protection to stop an industrial group from abusing their powers?
Rant:
;).
I couldn't agree more that the copyright system is in need of serious modification, if not outright elimination. The rabid libertarians (and believe me, I consider myself one) will scream at me about the right of an individual to profit from their labor. Blah Blah fucking Blah. I agree in principle, but:
We're moving into a new world here, ladies and gentlemen. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, it's time to evolve ideas. The reason our cherished institutions (religion, government, intellectual property, etc.) are crumbling around us is because They Are No Longer Relevant. It's as simple as that. The ideas just don't apply any more. They're outdated. The world has changed. It's time to move on.
Unfortunately, "moving on" (at least as us idealist type geeks have envisioned it) involves radical concepts like giving things away for free. Ideas like this are dangerous. They scare the living shit out of the entrenched power structure (which tells us over and over again about how it nailed this guy to a tree about 2000 years ago for daring to suggest ideas like that) If we were to start thinking in that direction, we might do something really radical like abandon our current concept of money (just an example, don't go there
So, keep buying those $18 CDs guys. You're supporting the artist you know.
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
I don't think organizations like the EFF actively pursue the issue of drasticly reducing copyright durations. ("Drasticly" may sound extreme, but that's only because they've already been drasticly increased, with no benefit to the consumer whatsoever.)
Are there any organizations which specifically advocate copy-right term reduction?
Maybe we should start one.
If the RIAA ever REALLY wanted to police the world themselves, all they would really need to do is raid one, single college campus. The same goes with other Pirated stuff....go to a college campus. The RIAA is just too incredibly lazy to do much of anything on their own and they, just like every bully on this plante, has to use scare tactics to accomplish their goals. If they were to happen to come up against a corporation larger than themselves they would surely lose, due to lack of funding and scare tactics. They, IMHO, ar ejust a bunch of overgrown sissies that can no longer function in today's society. They have proven over and over that they're nothing more than drugged-out, acid-tripping fools that can't find a better way to do things. If you want a monopoly look here. The RIAA has it. They've got control right now over the ENTIRE music industry....well...RIAA: FUCK YOU.
Do people with a photographic memory have to buy or pay for every book they see (or image they view)? Poor buggers...
:-)
Anyone wondered about that?
And who owns the light (or image contained in it) once it leaves the projector...
We own all rights to this work and any elctromagnetic particles that are reflected or refracted through,by or from it
As I understand it - the US government claims that you can only sue it if it decides to let itself be sued. (And yes, this is a Cooper pair of bogons.)
I wasn't thinking of a class-action suit against the USPTO however. I was thinking that any smaller corporations or individuals faced with such spurious IP suits should cooperate in the invalidation of said claims of IP. This will minimize their costs and perhaps even entice the larger corporations to join in.
This is a period of major disinterest in American politics, because the general public feels it cannot affect the system. Links like these scare me, but they are not only online issues. People with no access to the internet feel the same disillusionment slashdot readers do, we are merely seeing a national trend reflected here, in discussions I have seen in the past few days, in fact the whole time I have been reading this site. Slashdot readers have no monopoly on cynicism, look at the voter turnouts in America.
Look at the comments on the Gore/Microsoft story. As long as politicians need money for campaigns, they will be, or be perceived to be, in the pockets of corporations whose pockets I can't match. They want to be reelected: they /can't/ change the laws because then they risk losing that source of money to get reelected. Each professional politician, in his hubris, believes that if only he can stay in office long enough, he can accomplish his idealistic goals. But he gets so caught up in staying in office that he never gets around to those goals.
This recursion can only be broken by term limits, finance reform, and getting the corporations out of politics. But these three things are necessary to produce these three things, and I personally have no idea where to start. I write my congressman: I get a form letter back, my letter gets listed on a statistical analysis of letters that came in that day, the man never sees it. I vote: I get caught in a twisty maze of politicians who all sound alike. I'm 20 and in college, I really can't afford the time or money to run for office myself, if there are even any open to 20-year-olds. Even if I won, I would need to stay in office long enough to cause change; spot that damn recursion? What else can I do?
Communication is only possible between equals
Simply being jailed doesn't remove your right to vote, you have to be convicted of a felony. There have been some interesting pieces on this phenomena with regard to a worsening situation where many demographics are becoming politically non-existant due to high felony rates, especially with low income, inner-city minorities where the charge is most often drug-related.
Over the past twenty years or so, most (if not all) of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books have entered the public domain.
There have been a variety of works based on the books; new books, graphic novels and comic books, even an animated movie. Those works have been unable to use certain characters from the books, until those characters' first appearances moved into the public domain.
Few works from 75-100 years ago have the staying power to maintain the public interest today, and to do so in a fashion that allows the copyright holders to continue to make a profit.
This (I believe) may not have been grandfathered into the "life plus 50" ruling, since all of the books would have entered the public domain at the same time.
Note that there have also been derivative works based on the MGM movie; that is not in the public domain, and presumably those works (including a (IMHO) fairly bad Saturday morning cartoon) have had to pay royalties.
R David Francis
Giant impersonal corporation is trying to screw you.
;) Either way, discussion forums like this are a great way for people to bring into the open and discuss/debate the relevant issues in the case.
I would say that this is a very defendable proposition. Wouldn't you? Maybe not all the time as you suggest, but my experience in the corporate sector has shown me that (for the most part) they don't give any more of a shit about you or me than they have to in order to get our money. The corporate world revolves around the bottom line. Keep that in mind at all times.
Nope, they never have a case or a legitmiate point, they are just trying to give you the bone.
I'm sure in many cases they do have legitimate points. We're just as wack as they are sometimes
Would you rather we just shut the fuck up about it? I'm sure they would.
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
According to this /. poll, only 5% of /. readers are female. (The demographics may have altered since last February, of course.) But the advertisers are probably aware that the readership here is primarily male, and make some assumptions as to what will get their attention! ;-)
/., so companies like X10 are losing a chance to get my business.) I don't think I care if /. runs the cheesecake ads ... but I won't be clicking on those ad banners!!!
Anyhow, as a chick, I ignore those ads. (ZDNet shows them all the time.) Certainly, they may be denigrating to women - but then again, how many women are going to buy from them? (I should mention I have bought from Copyleft and Thinkgeek, who have more tasteful banner ads on
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I am not talking about putting MP3's on university servers. It is illegal and they should be deleted if they are freely accessible.
A campusnetwork is a different thing alltogether. At my university in Europe, we have the following arrangement. The University acts as a Telco provider (NOT as an ISP). They have handed all control of the network over to a student foundation. This foundation is only responsible for the network and support, not for what is on somebodies pc.
Through this arrangement it is impossible for a RIAA like organisation to demand that the university take action (or the foundation) for they have no control over the pc's. Just like AT&T cannot demand that AOL takes something of their servers.
This has worked perfectly for 4 years now. Whenever a student was identified to have done something illegal, the actions had to be directed against the student and the physical location of his PC. IANA(american)L. But maybe y'all could have your uni lawyers have a look at this setup and maybe it might just make life alot easier for you MP3 sharing peoples and uni sysadmins.
Just my two cents. BTW I am not naming my uni because it is better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Use Adsense for Charity
Do copyrights still need to be renewed? I know they used to require renewal, and that even Disney and Warner Brothers allowed some old cartoons (mostly WWII-related US propaganda material) to enter the public domain. I've got some of the tapes, which were inexpensive to purchase.
The deal seemed to be that they could state that the tape contained a Daffy Duck or Donald Duck cartoon, but they had to be very careful not to look like an actual Disney/WB product.
So, are renewals still needed under current law?
R David Francis
Copyright was invented to protect the commercial interests of authors/artists, but publishers/studios like those represented by RIAA are now the only ones being protected. We are all familiar with the difficulty that artists, musicians, performers, and authors have in getting published, maintaining legal and editorial control of their works, and getting adequately compensated.
Further, the "art" we do end up with *must* have commercial value to be distributed to the masses -- which is why we are subjected to vapid "entertainment" instead of art. How much real art has been ignored, or never performed, because commercial interests would not be served? How much garbage has been disseminated because commercial interests are being served?
Developers created the idea of Free Software because they wanted to perform good work, and were willing to forgo possible monetary gain to do so. RMS et al recognized that Bill Gates is a fluke, and that we shouldn't punish ourselves by allowing proprietary software to make us unproductive developers, in hopes that we would someday hit the lottery.
Artists need to make the same leap. Do you all *really* want to be the next Stephen King, or Jean-Claude Van Damme, or Milli Vanilli? Or are you interested in doing something meaningful?
For artists or developers, the lesson is the same: give up the dreams of mega-bucks, and do what makes you happy, and all the rest of us richer.
Put your works on the net. Make it clear that anyone can distribute them. Also make it clear that your authorship must be recognized, and no others can claim copyright. Your work will be enjoyed, and will be experienced by many more people than any studio or publisher could ever offer. That's what you really want.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
We'll miss you, man. Have a nice life.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I agree that articles about corportions screwing you are tiresome, if not misleading, but I have to admit that it is tough for a big company to look good with all the crap they do. Small companies tend to do a lot better at looking good without lots of PR hype.
However, I would debate that this article, at least the way I see it, is not about that. It's about copyright and how, in this day and age where copying is so easy, that the law is in need of some major revision. Copying physical entities exactly is a difficult thing to do and copyright as of now is good for that. Copying books in physical form is not worth the effort and considering the benefit I get from them, I am willing to comply with copyright on that book in the form as we now have it.
Software and the digital form of such entities, however, is much different. Copying can take place in a matter of seconds and takes little to no effort. Old laws here become pointless. Anything in digital form is not difficult to distribute. People can easily obtain copies from somewhere other than a store or a small set of distributors. Now, it is simple to get a copy from a friend. Limiting this not only annoys consumers, but it binds their hands, so to speak. People like to be able to do this. It makes things easier for them. Some artists/creators of items distributable in digital form realize this and cater to it. However, most companies cling to the notion of old rules in a new medium, thinking that it will actually work.
There is far too much tension between these viewpoints. Obviously something has to be done. Trying to enforce these old laws will only result in more tension. Articles like this hopefully get people thinking about this and saying something about it. I think you were a bit hasty to judge this article as crap.
Woz
gzw@home.com
This is not about stopping people from copying music, proprietary
code, or movies. It is about stopping people from creating, Yes I said
CREATING. These industries are making money because they control the
tracks that information flows over from creator to consumer.
Stopping copying is just the excuse and a nice side effect of the real
intent. They will of course they will say that you can still make your
own CDs and DVDs and you may be able to. But think about this:
A future DVD player (FDVD)is created that will only read incrypted
disks. The FDVD is popular because it has better sound and picture and
all the big studios have said they will only make FDVD disks from now
on. The keys to incrypt FDVD disks are licensed so that only artists
with connections to a licensed production studio can make FDVDs. These
FDVDs would have access to the market. Artists without connections
would not have access to the FDVD market. So you could still make your
own FDVDs but they don't work most if not all of the players the
public is being sold.
With a system like this control over the creative process (and the
money it generates) is maintained. If you don't think this could
happen... well I hope not too but I am having trouble thinking that
this not happening already.
IMO, the patent office is harming the public good by their actions. Maybe the 'information technology community of users' should sue them as a class.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
> As another note: Giving out student >names/ addresses without a very good reason must >be > breaching privicy policy. The state universities where I live have a online searchable index of all the students, their addresses, and their phone numbers. no shit.
Last Friday we blocked all access to the napster domain; basically, NOC freaked out when they realized that >30GB of traffic in a single day were napster sends and recieves. This is a big problem for universities b/c people don't necessarily realize that they are sharing their files, and since the connection speed is very fast, the university network in effect becomes a target.
;)
Personally, I hate to see the 'net restricted like this, but bandwidth is $$$, and the traffic to napster had nowhere to go but up. University networks *are* supposed to be available for actual work to get done once and ahwile.
~Tiroth
Let's get real here: Universities know that their students are trading MP3's and warez illegally on their dorm ethernets. Some turn a blind eye to it, others devote some meager resources to fighting it. None consider it a top priority to investigate, because it would entail devoting a lot of resources.
These letters from the RIAA are in no way a summons or a subpoena. It's just a "warning" from the RIAA that states they're going to attempt to hold the universities accountable for their student's actions unless the servers in question are put to a stop. As best as I can tell, that's all the university is obligated to try and do (if that) from these letters.
Yes, all it is is a scare tactic. Since when is this worthy of a Slashdot article? These things happen all the time, and are perfectly legal. Paraphrased, their letter reads, "We will take you to court (ask a judge whether we are right or wrong and if you should be helping us) if you fail to help us remove MP3 redistributors from your network."
that the school immediately terminate all web pages with illegal MP3 files (illegal is of course a judicial decision; the letter presumes that all MP3s are illegal);
So in order to classify something as illegal, you have to have a judge order it so in your specific case? "Why yes, judge, I killed him, but it wasn't illegal!" Come on, every one of those kids knows what they're doing breaks copyright law. Every public web site/share that contains MP3 files of known artists/songs (at least) means that user is re-distributing MP3's illegally. You don't need a court case to see that. If I had a bunch of MP3's of my own private works or items not copyrighted by others, and the university came to me and told me to shut it down, all I should have to do is let the university know this fact and everything should be fine. And before you start going off about "guilty until proven innocent" remember this is a university we're talking about, not the government.
Better hope your IP address doesn't appear too many times in those web server logs.
Yah because I'm sure the RIAA is going to go to ever IP address that has ever downloaded an MP3 and track each and every person down via their ISP.
"Umm yah, hi, this is the RIAA. We have a list of 132 IP's from your ISP over the course of 18 months. We'd like you to go into your dialup logs and give us the names and addresses of the users that had these IP's at that time."
Let's be realistic here and avoid the biased slurs when reporting "news" to us.
ISPs and colleges are not supposed to do the grunt work themselves - that results in the kind of overbroad crackdowns that we've seen. This was the subject of specific negotiations during the process of creating this law.
Correct. But if the ISP's are *willing* to do so after a simple letter like this, then the RIAA has accomplished something. Granted, it's pretty evil of the RIAA, but it's all very legal.
Most major universities have a legal staff of their own that can see these letters for what they're worth. (In other words, they're not as clueless as you seem to think every corporation/non-human legal entity is.) This legal staff will no doubt become familiar with the laws in question and be able to report *factually* to the university as to what is required on their part. (Note: Factually does not include Slashdot articles or comments by 99.5% of its users.) Reasons a university might be willing to take the initiative on their own:
- PR. If a university steps up and proudly weeds out a bunch of evil MP3/warez-trading kids from their university network, they get a reputation for it. People start to see that university as one that doesn't tolerate these types of people and one that puts scholastic achievement ahead of a waste of university network resources. Universities that choose not to comply with the conditions might be viewed as a "warez kiddie university", a haven for kiddies that like to trade MP3's and warez.
- To avoid legal hassles. Granted, their liability is limited without specific instances of copyright violation, many small universities may not have the funds/resources with which to object to the RIAA's pleas. A handful of students can probably be much more efficiently investigated than a larger university might be able to do.
- Because they don't know any better. Some universities may just not have competant legal staff (or may not have legal folks at all), nor would they be willing to spend money on any (see previous).
- Because they honestly weren't aware of the problem on their networks, and generally make a huge effort to keep their students honest and legal.
The BSA is now raiding homes of people accused of copying software.They wouldn't be allowed to do so without a search warrant, and a search warrant would require convincing a judge that it's needed. They couldn't just do this on a whim, so I hardly see how this could be construed as an "abuse" of BSA's copyright "enforcement" abilities.
all it is is a government-sanctioned monopoly transferring money from your pocket to others
OH MY GOD! PEOPLE ARE MAKING MONEY OFF OF THEIR IDEAS AND/OR HARD WORK! LET'S KILL THEM!
If you have concerns about current copyright terms, write your congressman. Don't post some foolish Slashdot note, and PLEASE try to collect your facts before you do so. I shudder to think how many letters my congressmen get that are from just plain uneducated people that have no clue about the things they are vehemently opposed to (or in favor of).
copyright-holders like the RIAA are building copyright protection into the very infrastructure of computing.
I fail to see how this is a bad thing. If you don't want there to be such a thing as copyright and/or trademarks, just come out and say it. At least then we can be sure what it is you're fighting against. I too feel that copyright terms are a bit lengthy, but I don't think we should abolish copyrights entirely.
but as more and more people experience the power of copyright to affect what they can and cannot publish online
I'm sorry, but I cannot subscribe to your interpretation of this whole MP3 fiasco. The kids were KNOWINGLY breaking the law by redistributing MP3's illegally. I mean come on, realistically, how many of these people think they're acting legally by ripping their CD's and putting them up for download?
we should demand that the social contract envisioned in the Constitution be fulfilled by forcing copyright holders to give back to society, whether they want to or not.
If they were trying to make a statement against excessive copyright, even then I fail to see how redistributing MP3's of modern works would help that cause. If anything, it seems as though you're against excessive copyright terms. I think the new Metallica CD will still fall under whatever "new" copyright laws that come about, so it seems unfair to say that this latest MP3 thing has anything to do with limiting copyright terms. The bottom line is that these people are breaking the law, and in most all cases, they knew it. If you are successful in changing copyright law more to your liking, I seriously doubt trading MP3's like this will ever be legal.
We need Congress to enact a law spelling out a list of things consumers may do with copyrighted materials they purchase (CDs, software, video games, movies, etc) that are explicitly guranteed to be legal and to bar lawsuits filed directly against the consumer for exercising these rights. These rights would also preempt and override anything vendors try to write into the license.
With this in mind, I hereby propose the following "Consumer Fair Use Bill of Rights" that among these rights shall include:
(1) The RIGHT to convert copyrighted media [*] to a different format. e.g., copy CDs to to Cassette for the car or to copy a DVD to VHS for viewing in the bedroom (where a 2nd DVD player is not present).
(2) The RIGHT to make compilations of copyrighted media [*] for their own use. e.g., combine tracks from several CDs onto one CD.
(3) The RIGHT to make a backup copy of copyrighted media [*] for archival purposes. e.g., backup that PSX game, as kids are often burtal to delicate CDs and one scratch can too easily ruin a $70USD game.
(4) The RIGHT to rent copyrighted materials [*] to others for a fee. This is allowed by well entrenched precedent for movies but needs to be explicitly allowed for all copyrighted media (video games, audio CDs, and software).
(5) The RIGHT to record unowned copyrighted broadcast material (including Satellite and cable as well as over the air) for time-shift-viewing purposes. e.g., legally record a movie from your subscribed HBO channel while you're at work for viewing later that night or on the weekend.
(6) The RIGHT to allow certain other 3rd parties to view copyrighted materials you acquired [*]. e.g., explicitly allow for all residents of the household to view the DVD Dad bought or use the software Dad bought, and explicit allowance for other relatives and friends to view/use the copyrighted material in a non-commercial manner. e.g., make it explicitly legal to invite a friend or SO over to watch your DVD.
(7) The RIGHT of consumers to modify their own equipment and for the necessary parts and optional installation service to be legally available in order to carry out the above 6 rights. Additionally, the sale of already modified devices shall be explicitly allowed. e.g., I legally bought import PSX games and import DVDs and need my playstation/DVD player to play them and grant me access to what I paid for legitimately.
Write your representative and senator and copy them this message! Raise this issue on any wide-reaching media (TV, radio) you have access to. Get people talking about it.
[*] of course this refers to copyrighted material legally acquired by the consumer.
Copyright is the US was based upon the British Statute of Anne. Through some agreement, most large countries honor each others' copyrights, but some works are registered in more than one country. Copyright is not a US invention.
What's wrong with just going through periodically and deleting all MP3 files? If the student is stupid enough to name their thesis with a .mp3 extension (for whatever twisted reason), they deserve to get the file deleted..
I would argue that the company or individual has no "right" to their creation, other than property rights to the physical instances that they create.
Please do.
I would be interested in reasonable arguments as to why if I take a piece of clay and make a pot, I have a natural right to the pot, but if I take a pen and write a story, I don't have a natural right to the story.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Enlighten us. What is their "case or legitimate point" for demanding that all MP3s be removed from campus networks without any proof that any of them infringe any copyrights? What is their case for demanding that products with legitimate, legal uses be pulled from the market or crippled because they "might" be used to illegally copy copyrighted material? What is their case for using the civil justice system as a club to get restrictions enforced that they could never get past a duly elected legislature (even one as heavily influenced by campaign contributions as ours is)? What is thier case for demanding that they be allowed to keep their copyrights for over 4 times the length of time originally envisioned by the writers of the Constitution? What is their case for continuing to own a copyright decades after the person who did the actual creative work is dead; for that matter, what is their case for being entitled to nearly a century of profits for work done by someone else? (Reality check: how many musicians sit on the board of recording companies? How many authors sit on the board of publishing companies?)
In other words, your objection would be more credible if you actually addressed the (IMO quite serious) issues the article raised, instead of just slinging names.
Corporations exist to maximize their bottom line profits. For the most part they will use every legal means at their disposal to achieve that goal. That means that we have to make sure the law really does do what we want it to, and only what we want it to. If any loophole exists, you can be sure businesses will exploit it. Don't get me wrong. I am not opposed to people making an honest profit. I am not even opposed to people getting filthy rich by making honest profit by the bushell (although I do think that as a society we place far too much emphasis on this dubious goal). However, if a law has negative consequences that outweigh its benefits, then that law can and should be changed. That some corporation depends on that law to make staggering amounts of money concerns me not in the least. I am not out to put anyone out of business, but I do not think they have a God-given right to make their executives and stockholders rich at everyone else's expense.
In this case, I think it is clear that there are some fairly negative consequences to the copyright laws as they stand; viz., they produce a chilling effect on legitimate uses of technology, and due to the long copyright terms, the copyrighted material is effectively never given back to the public domain, as was originally intended. We should be thinking about how we can fix copyrights so that these problems are mitigated or eliminated, while retaining the incentive to publish original music, manuscripts, programs and so on. We also need to end the abuse of the civil justice system and put the burden of proof back on the accuser. (Yes, I know, technically it is on the accuser, but having rights does you no good if you can't even afford to set foot in a courtroom to defend them.) If these reforms mean that record executives will wind up making only 5 times
instead of 100 times the median household income, (and don't let them fool you into thinking that they will be sent to the poorhouse by reforms; it just won't happen--people will always be willing to pay a fair price for quality entertainment) well, those are the breaks. Nobody promised you a rose garden.
-r
With no tax revenue, the government will be forced to stop controlling everything and get back to providing services that are needed.
Umm.. how do you propose the government do this without any tax revenue?
two words
"time" and "stamp"
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Limiting this not only annoys consumers, but it binds their hands, so to speak
So what's to stop somebody then from making a digital copy of some company's latest work and redistributing it to a list of free subscribers, completely bypassing their need to pay for what you've created.
I won't disagree that copyright laws need some changes, but I do disagree in the extent of those changes. A lot of people here seem to want them abolished in the case of digital works because of the "ease" of duplication. If unlimited digital reproduction were ever legalized, it would have disastrous consequences for producers of all digital works.
Everyone would start (through free and public channels) redistributing everything everyone ever released in digital form (CD's, movies, books, etc.), and the authors would never receive a dime for their efforts. For that reason, authors would cease producing and the industry would shrivel up and disappear.
Well, here we go:
Enlighten us. What is their "case or legitimate point" for demanding that all MP3s be removed from campus networks without any proof that any of them infringe any copyrights?
Well, since unsigned bands aren't represented by the RIAA, I'm sure they don't care about those MP3s. Obviously they are going after pirated music, which is their right under the law. So some kids who are stupid enough to put their music warez or whatever they call them are going to get smacked. Good. Just becuase you disagree with the concept of IP doesn't mean you can ignore the law.
What is their case for demanding that products with legitimate, legal uses be pulled from the market or crippled because they "might" be used to illegally copy copyrighted material?
Silly me, I thought private companies had the right to make whatever agreements between each other they wanted to. If a company is making products that don't fail some legal test, why shouldn't they go to court to stop those items from being distributed?
)? What is thier case for demanding that they be allowed to keep their copyrights for over 4 times the length of time originally envisioned by the writers of the Constitution?
There is no time limit for copyrights mentioned int the US Consitution.
? What is their case for continuing to own a copyright decades after the person who did the actual creative work is dead; for that matter, what is their case for being entitled to nearly a century of profits for work done by someone else?
Why shouldn't a person's estate be allowed to profit from the person's work?
I'm going to skip your middle paragraph.
In this case, I think it is clear that there are some fairly negative consequences to the copyright laws as they stand; viz., they produce a chilling effect on legitimate uses of technology, and due to the long copyright terms, the copyrighted material is effectively never given back to the public domain, as was originally intended
That's funny I see a whole bunch of stuff at say, Project Gutenberg, that is PD.
If these reforms mean that record executives will wind up making only 5 times
instead of 100 times the median household income,
Ah, I knew this would come down to this in the end. The "wah, they charge too much for music so I am going to steal it" argument. Look, you don't have the right to other peoples things, and its wrong to take things without permission. My mom taught me this when I was like, 3 years old. I guess such an idea is far to antiquated in today's soceity.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Don't have any links handy right now, so I'll do this off memory. Try Comicon.com's Splash Page had details, but a quick glance shows no info there now.
A few months ago, it came out that (due to the fact that Siegel and Shuster were not working under a work for hire contract, but had allowed what is now DC Comics to copyright their material), the family of Jerry Siegel (if memory serves; I don't think Shuster has any family left) has reclaimed the copyright on the original Superman stories.
Presumably, they and DC Comics will come to some sort of settlement on this; however, there has been speculation on what they can do based on this material, if they choose to do anything.
The general opinion is that they are limited in what they can do, in large part because DC Comics has a firmly established trademark on the Superman property. Marketing non-DC comic books, movies, etc. and labeling them as being about Superman could violate DC's trademark. That doesn't mean that it can't be done; simply that the material, while including the Superman character, couldn't be labeled using the Superman name, or the distinctive likeness of Superman.
Of course, they are also limited to the portion of the Superman history that is in the works in question. That would include Clark Kent, Lois Lane, maybe even Jimmy Olsen; but would not include, for example, kryptonite.
Anyway, my point is that trademarks are more powerful than copyrights, in that they only expire through lack of use, and that they protect the holder in a different way.
Most of the properties that corporations want to protect are source material for their trademarked characters; why doesn't that provide enough protection? No one can go out and make the Mickey Mouse Amusement Park, even if Steamboat Willie were public domain, without Disney's permission, because Mickey Mouse is their trademark. The amount of income that comes in from Steamboat Willie itself has to be neglible; the income from Mickey Mouse licensed products would not be reduced, as someone else producing anything not taken directly from Steamboat Willie would be violating Disney's trademark. Heck, I'm not sure that selling a shirt depicting a scene from Steamboat Willie wouldn't be a violation of Disney's trademark; the picture itself is in the public domain, but it still has Mickey(TM) on it....
R David Francis
i believe that if copyright gets any more unfair, people will begin to pirate just to spite the copyright holders. Eventually, enough people will simply choose not to co-operate for the laws to be enforcable. I dont belive that the RIAA will even try to enforce the laws if they know that almost every consumer out there owns pirated material and is producing pirated material. I mean, isnt it illegal to tape a movie off the TV? everyone does it and no one gets hassled.
If you take a pen and write a story, arguably you do have rights to the 'story' that you wrote. However, if I pick up a pen and write the same story, or write the same story into a computer, why should YOU have the rights instead of ME?
Because of the difference between *creation* and *copying*. Different actions, different consequences, different rights.
The notion of coyright is a reasonable approach... [snip]
I agree. However, the post to which I was replying seemed to claim that no such thing as intellectual property should ever exist because there is no "natural" right to own a non-tangible -- as opposed to a physical thing -- that you have created. That didn't and doesn't seem to be very defensible to me (and yes, I know about RMS).
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
We have gotten several emails from RIAA requesting that mp3s be removed from people's publicly available web directories. Each email gave a specific URL to a file -- nothing from them ever came asking for "find / -name \*mp3|mail riaa".
Complaints that some universities have received lately from RIAA have included specific locations of material as well.
RIAA sucks, and the Songfile/ArtPass/Harry Fox cabal that wrecked the old-school www.lyrics.ch also sucks.
I remember hearing about how the street performer protocol would be a good way of ensuring artists get paid. Why doesn't someone form a group to advocate this method? I really don't see how the industry will be able to compete with companies using this protocol any more than microsoft can compete with linux. Eventually most companies will be forced into using it, simply because their products won't be able to compete with the 'free' products that were released using the street performer protocol to reimburse the author of the intellectual property. The worst that would happen is the RIAA and the recording industry in general would be forced to lower the prices of their media. I say we just do it, rather than waiting for copyright law to be changed. I don't think that conventional copyright law will be able to compete with this protocol, and companies using it will lose.
Better not use that argument. Don't you know that it's not stealing if you don't take a physical iteam... at least that's the counter argument you're going to get.
-sw
Make up a whole bunch of files that sound like the names of copyrighted MP3s. Then encrypt them and post them on a website or FTP site. Tell people in a README that if they e-mail you privately, you'll send them the decryption key. What will really be in the files is a whole bunch of images and text that make fun of the music industry. If they sue you, make a huge stink about it, then hand over the key. Then they'll get to figure out what you really have after having spent tons of money and lawyer time.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
If no computer professional would work for companies like the RIAA, they would quickly find themselves going out of business in a digital world. How might we go about arranging that? Hmm...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's not an objection to them owning it, it's an objection to them owning it for ETERNITY.
But why? Anything else you make you own for eternity. If I build a house it doesn't revert to the state or The People upon my death. It gets transferred to my next of kin and they can do what they want with it. If they decide to sell my house to GE that's their choice -- it's their property.
Someone sold the rights to some random publisher. And that someone is the person who owned them. Are you saying we shouldn't be able to sell things we own?
When you die you don't need your money anymore. We could take all of it and divide it up among all Americans and you wouldn't bat an eye.
Well, since unsigned bands aren't represented by the RIAA, I'm sure they don't care about those MP3s. Obviously they are going after pirated music, which is their right under the law
They are going after ALL MP3s (and trying to equate MP3=Piracy), this is purposely misleading. I have tons (95%) of legal MP3s which would get flagged and I would get in trouble for. Is this what you want?
There is no time limit for copyrights mentioned int the US Consitution
from here
Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To...
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Now maybe its just my interpretation, but I don't see "limited" as meaning "life + 95 years". Nor do I see how not letting the public look at it for a lifetime "promote(s) the Progress of Science and useful Arts." (which doesn't even cover useless(MHO) Arts like pop music, music videos, most motion pictures, etc) Congress was given a power and has abused it to the delight of their financial backers. That is a fact, if you don't think it's bad thats a different story, but that is a fact.
Why shouldn't a person's estate be allowed to profit from the person's work?
They should, but there are limits to a government granted monopoly. I can think of numerous examples where something taken to one degree is fine, but taken to another becomes unpleasant (temperature, for example)
Look, you don't have the right to other peoples things, and its wrong to take things without permission.
Is it wrong if I listen to something you own, without you knowing, without you noticing, and without ANY cost to you whatsoever? It is wrong for you to cry to the police when such a thing happens because (~whiny brat voice) That's MY music!!! (/~wbv).
My mom taught me to share, and that was sharing things that I couldn't use if I shared them!
+&x
There has been copyright in English common law since before the year 1000. The economic theories describing the free market are from the 19th century. I find it odd that you are using relatively recent theoretical construct to criticize a long standing matter of law.
Natural law arguments aside (since no one knows just what is natural law) copyright is a derived property right.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Of course, this comes as no surprise. The other day I posted a rant (yes, I'll proudly admit it) about the threats of legal action against the authors of DeCSS.
This is pretty typical behaviour, unfortunately. Take the example of the OnLine Guitar Archive. Here were a bunch of musicians manually transcribing music off of records (and CDs, etc.) and sharing the tabulature with each other, so we could learn to play songs for our own, non-commercial purposes. The Harry Fox Agency decided they didn't like this, and threatened legal action. OLGA has quit distributing to their mirror sites as a result. Keep in mind that these are HAND-TRANSCRIBED BY-EAR works that HFA is claiming copyright infringement over.
The real problem, I think, is that the industry is fat, lazy, powerful, and rich. They don't like people playing instruments because it'll cut into their album sales. (Although in a pinch, they'll sell you the sheet music for a good profit.) They don't like people writing DVD code, because they don't want us to play DVDs how and where we want. They REALLY don't like MP3s, because they give artists too much control over their own music. (Even more than, say, Ani DiFranco)
This is the crux: The industry (RIAA, agencies, and production companies) has utter control over 90% of the music, books, movies, and TV shows that get made; and as a consequence, over the artists and audiences. They don't want to lose that control, and they'll fight in any dirty manner they can to keep it.
Our job is to not let them.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I started reading this article from the perspective of someone who has personally witnessed RIAA scare tactics and the damage they can do. By the time I was halfway through, I realized the article was written by one of the people who give the RIAA their excuses to abuse the powers they've been granted.
The open source philosophy is a wonderful thing. If you're reading slashdot, you know all about how it can increase colaboration, speed up development time, and contribute to creating a more functional product. But this philosophy simply doesn't apply to art. The element that makes art such a beautiful thing is its unique expression of an individual's viewpoint. In art, collaboration is unnecessary (and potenetially harmful), devel time is irrelevant, and "a more functional product" equals the Backstreet Boys.
Sure, it sucks that most recording artists only receive a few pennies for every CD they sell and that "big, evil corporations" seem to control the record industry; that's what makes online distribution such a revolutionary thing. The Artist (FKAP) can sell albums directly from his website (either as MP3, another format, or by mail) and receive all the profit in return. Is there something wrong with that? Is there some reason that you, me, or anyone else should have the right (after 5 years or any other amount of time) to take his art and modify and distribute it as we see fit? Let Disney keep Mickey as long as they want; it's by far the lesser of two evils.
Don't give the RIAA an excuse to bully people who have done nothing wrong (see what happened to the Smashing Pumpkins Audio Archive for a case study), or to force out MP3's in favor of a format they can control. Respect the rights of artists - they don't owe you anything, but if you take pleasure in what they've created, you owe them a debt you'll probably never be able to repay.
I have nothing to declare except my own genius - Oscar Wilde
> Something GIVEN has no value.
Tell that to all the teachers that GIVE their time and knowledge to all the students they teach, then tell me that has no value to the students.
Gifts DO have value.
Good post though.
It is interesting that the RIAA suit against the Napster folks is modeled on the silly legal theory behind lawsuits against gun manufacturers -- that a product manfucaturer can be held liable for the actions of those who use a legal product in an illegal way. The Napster folks, like the gun makers, argue there are legal uses for their product and they can't control the illegal activities, but that didn't make a lot of difference in the decision to allow the gun lawsuits to go forward.
Lawsuit proliferation appears to follow Moore's law as well.
Ever notice how we always seem to be getting upset with the RIAA or the MPAA when they throw their weight around? Where did they get the weight to push the MDCA into law anyway?
All the concerned parties banded together! They formed groups to persue common interests.
A group exists to protect the consumers rights under the Fair Use clause. It's the Home Recording Rights Coalition. Go join them! Do it now. As far as I know, it's the only group in Washington that is solely dedicated to preserving your right to make backups, record broadcasts, and make compilation disks.
Cheers,
Chris
(p.s. Remember your cartoons? Voltron got significantly more powerful when they united. The Wonder Twins were always combining their powers. There's a lesson in there somewhere. I'm sure of it...)
Hello, I'm Mark Twain's (Samuel Clemens) wife. My husband published "Huckleberry Finn" yesterday, and then was run over by a truck. Since he's dead and gone, you get to copy his book as much as you want now? How am I supposed to live?
(I think IP laws at least need to be revised a bit, but you're smoking crack if you think that nobody has a right to anything they've ever done. (same for their family))
. I have tons (95%) of legal MP3s which would get flagged and I would get in trouble for. Is this what you want?
No, I have tons of legal MP3s myself. But I'm not dumb enough to put them on a web server.
Now maybe its just my interpretation, but I don't see "limited" as meaning "life + 95 years".
I would suggest that life + 95 years is a perfectly legitimate definition of limited. In fact, anything less than eternity would seem to fit the definition.
Is it wrong if I listen to something you own, without you knowing, without you noticing, and without ANY cost to you whatsoever? It is wrong for you to cry to the police when such a thing happens because (~whiny brat voice) That's MY music!!! (/~wbv).
Yes, if I do not give you permission to listen to something I own, reguardless of cost to me, it is still wrong. I don't see what is so hard to understand about this. If I don't care I will put something out under GPL / or some less restricitive license. Copywriting something is saying exactly "You have no rights to this other than what I give to you". Forcing someone to share the fruits of their labors is the first step down a very slippery slope.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Any time I sit down and create something on a recorded medium, be it an audio recording, a drawing, a website, or a printed manuscript, that work is copyrighted, whether I state so within the work or not. It does not matter whether I am an individual or a corporation.
Secondly, you do NOT have to file a coyright notice with the government in the United States to be protected by copyright law. It helps if you are trying to prove when the work was created in court, but it is a common misconception that a work is not copyrighted until it a copyright is filed.
While you are right in saying that copyright is not an "natural human right", you are overlooking the fact that in the United States, it is a legislated right that is automatically granted to any creator of a copyrightable work.
A work is copyrighted the moment it is created.
http://www.ssrn.com/update/lsn/cyberspace/lesson s/copyr02.html
IANAL, but I am a creator, and have received great advice from the lawyers I work for. They are all in agreement on these points.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
umm...this is rude. granted, i appended something that was off-topic to my post (because i don't know of a forum on /. where it's on-topic, but the top of the post is perfectly legit, and poses a question i would legitimately like an answer to.
so why was i moderated down? did someone not read the post?
of course, this'll prolly get moderated down for being off-topic, too.
-k. ^-^ ^D
As a songwriter, copyright is the fulcrum upon which my lever rests. Everything stems from copyright: publishing, performance royalties, mechanicals, practically the whole revenue stream flows from the protection I get from sending $20 and Form PA (or SR for recording, TX for lyrics) to the United States Copyright Office.
/. discussion I've read on the subject of intellectual properties seems to ignore the point-of-view of the copyright owner and the work involved in creating a work of art or a patentable invention. Artists are not salaried workers; piecework in a sweatshop is closer to the truth.
How am I supposed to deal with a multi-billion dollar recording industry without this basic protection? More lawyers? No thanks.
The artist always gets screwed. Such is Life in These United States. Take away copyright protection and screwed becomes sodomized repeatedly with a cordless drill[1].
Legacy is how I describe the echoes of my life and works after I'm dead; it's what I leave my family. My copyrights and royalty stream are my estate, my rice bowl. You don't want to mess with that.
Your Rights Online are conflicting with My Rights Offline. The ham-handed enforcement techniques of the RIAA reflect poorly on the RIAA[2], not the laws that they're ineptly trying to enforce. The bottom line is that MP3 kiddies are getting a free lunch. TANSTAAFL.
Granted, $15 of the $16 retail goes to the record company. Boo hoo for them. The band/writer(s) are still screwed out of their mythical $1. Practically every
k.
[1] Though in the case of {Hanson|Spice Girls|Ricky Martin|etc.} this might be fun to watch.
[2] I'm still pissed off over the Blank Tape Tax: that babyfucker Michael Jackson gets a few pennies from every blank tape I buy for the purposes of recording my own works. If I don't at least get a bit of the Elephant Man's skeleton at the end of my career, I'm going to make Jacko eat Bubbles the Chimp. Oh wait, he's already done that. Nevermind.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
If what they wanted from the Swiss school is any indication, they're getting even more fiesty about the information required, although it would be harder to enforce, RIAA being an American organization. However, their strong-arm legal tactics are not going to be stood up to by anyone, as it's obvious that even with a strong case, the years in court and huge fees won't be worth it. It's impossible to stamp out MP3s, or even "pirate" music, but RIAA will continue to make examples of whoever it can and scare the rest out of even thinking about it.
(posting as AC because I'd rather not draw any more attention to myself from RIAA)
First, intellectual "property" is not the same as physical property. Copying someone's intellectual property does not deprive them of the use of that property the way stealing physical property would. Any argument based on that supposed analogy is immediately suspect.
Second, as copying becomes easier with the advance of technology, it becomes harder and harder to enforce copyrights without trampling on noninfringing behaviors. Business would argue that the more fundamental right is their right to protect their intellectual property; however, we must not allow that attitude to prevail. The more fundamental right is for us to be able to engage in otherwise legal activities without being molested because our tools "might be used to make illegal copies". If those same tools are outlawed in the name of enforcing intellectual property laws, the harm to society will far outweigh any good that intellectual property laws have ever produced.
I believe that we should offer intellectual property rights to encourage publication, but I disagree that those rights need to be as strong as they are today, and I certainly disagree that they need to get stronger (the latter point being the argument advanced by the recording and film industries, in particular.) I believe that the most charitable motives we can attribute to corporations that advocate expanded intellectual property rights is greed. I see no reason to encourage it, nor to knuckle under to it.
-r
we'll drop the MP3 discussion, I was arguing under the assumption that they were on locally shared drives and not 'Net accessible servers (to convince you the second is o.k. would take too long)
I would suggest that life + 95 years is a perfectly legitimate definition of limited.
Very much in disagreement here. The only measuring stick in governmental mandates should be the human life, not the half life of hydrogen. I don't consider anything "limited" that will still limit the freedom of my grandchildren.
Yes, if I do not give you permission to listen to something I own, reguardless of cost to me, it is still wrong.
Your example would work if we were talking about a personal diary, for example. However, we're not.
If you put something out in the public sector, where, if I want to spend my $18 dollars I can listen to it, and then try to say that it is *wrong* for me to listen to it without paying the $18, I'm going to call you a selfish bastard, especially since (again) there is no cost to you, no effect on you, or anything else done to you, nothing.
Forcing someone to share the fruits of their labors is the first step down a very slippery slope.
Agreed, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about limiting an infinite supply through the use of legislation to maintain artificially high prices. And to keep it in the real world, we're talking about Art, I don't know of many artists that don't want me to listen to their music. If they didn't they would never have created it or given it only to their closest friends with instructions to NEVER show it to anybody, which is how the RIAA wants you to act. I make these concession ONLY for my closest friends after they have shown the same discretion. Nameless profit driven corporations are not afforded the same courtesy, at least not until they show it to me.
+&x
We have the right to spend our money any way we see fit. If it doesn't include any RIAA-affiliated entities, well, too bad.
The best part about this is that unlike pirating MP3's, it's perfectly legal, and, with enough support, it can bring the RIAA to its knees. But as long as people keep buying, the RIAA will continue on its merry way, and NOTHING WILL CHANGE.
Random rants about our rights:
1) Its becoming increasingly clear to me that the Constitution's achilles heel is the computer. The problem lies in both the politician and the masses in general. Although a lot of adults use the computer, only a handful are aware of its true deficiencies and in particular, its security hazzards. We happily email and word process on the surface, while lucrative corporations and the organizations to protect them lurk below to create the illusion of a serene computing surface while quietly assigning us a serial number and a monitoring thread to deal with us when we get out of line.
2) Organizations such as the RIAA are particularly dangerous; an organization of small entities results in a powerful group; an organization of already powerful financial giants, however, results in a political juggernaut that cannot and will not be stopped.
3) Companies and organizations are able to do in the virtual(computing) world, what they wouldn't dream of doing in the real world. Every act or intention of monitoring net traffic is synonymous with wire tapping: someone is monitoring the passage of information from one person or persons to another. I find it utterly ridiculous that the profits of corporations has somehow twisted its way into undermining the Constitution.
4) While I'm against software piracy, I detest anti piracy organizations. Why? Because anti-piracy advocates pretend to think that software piracy is worst crime against humanity possible, when in reality...lets think about it, its really about making more money. I'm a programmer at a large company. I will simply say...we are NOT hurting for money. What about the small software company? Piracy isn't whats hurting them. Every small company struggling to reach and surpass that critical mass point to become a large company has to deal with a myriad of issues that have nothing to with piracy. Marketing, established larger competition, competent management, etc...these are the issues plaguing the small software company. Anti-piracy organizations would raid your homes, your computers, monitor your bank accounts and transactions, every web site and ftp site you connect to and prosecute you further than the full extent of the law...and all for what, to make more money??? Damn it, I wouldn't sacrifice that much wholesale constitutional rights to fight all the drug lords in China...err Columbia, much less to fill the pockets of more companies!
5) I read a political cartoon in the newspaper recently regarding Microsoft. It was about a father explaining to his son how he(the son, like Gates) could one day work hard and sacrifice to be rich and successful...only to be crushed by the government. What a pathetically uninformed cartoonist. No one questions a person's right to work hard and be successful. Its HOW Bill led his company to that success. Yes, he did some things right, like cater to the masses with brainnumbingly simple GUIs. But he also did a lot of bad things to other hard working companies to get to that success. He coerced, cajoled and often killed off any who would not cooperate. I'm not *even* going to get into the built in software "incompatibilities"...
Let me first apologize. My question is going to sound like flame-bait, but that is not my intention. I am honestly curious to know people feel about this.
Many people here have called for eliminating copyright laws. Their arguments are often based on some variant of the "information wants to be free" philosophy. My question is : How do you resolve this philosophy with your desire for privacy?
There is a great deal of concern about corporations that gather information about their customers shopping habits and preferences. Last thursday's Circuit section of the New York Times had an article on the subject. Slashdot has recently run several articles on TRUSTe. However, TRUSTe's primary purpose is to guarantee that information is not free.
Every web site we visit and every purchase we make provides information about ourselves. We broadcast that information in thousands of ways every day, both on-line and off. If you subscribe to the philosophy that information should be free, how do you criticize companies that collect that information? Why aren't they free to use the information in order to better market their products?
I really don't understand why everyone is so caught up in the twenty-year extension. It's frustrating, it's creating an insidious and pervasive feeling that all words and images are owned by someone, yes, it's bad. However, the restrictions applied are pretty much the same as ever. The more compelling threat to civil rights, in my opinion, is the addition of restrictions against devices intended to copy.
In the words of the Digital Millenium Copyright act summary linked above,
Section 1201 proscribes devices or services that fall within any of the three following categories:
- They are primarily designed or produced to circumvent.
- They have only limited commercially significant use other than to circumvent; or
- They are marketed for use in circumventing.
Am I the only one who notes the striking similarity to the British law that allowed this bullying incident so recently discussed on slashdot? Am I the only one that thought they couldn't do that to us in America?
Please note the -or- clause, and consider that only one has to be shown. If you can show that far more people will use the device to break the law than will use it legitimately, the device (like, say, the DeCSS program) will become illegal.
Libraries, non-profit organizations and educational institutions are protected from criminal, but not civil, liability in these cases, but individuals have no such protection. If I'm putting the pieces of the summary together correctly, a successful lawsuit means you could be put in prison for up to five years for contributing to the DeCSS project. Hopefully, the developers would win, but I don't think (though IANAL) that they could get the case dismissed out of hand; it would go to trial, and cost lots of money to someone.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
More and more we read about this kind of stuff. I remember back in 1984 when the news media came out with all their "comparison stories". Really what they were doing is debunking the issue when infact, we were living the image, and more, that George Orwell's book portrayed.
I'm not at all the type to actually do it but crap like this makes me wonder if it wouldn't be better just to check out now and get it done with before they can do it for me.
I imagine that the people who are abusing laws (which they created in the first place for that exact purpose) want us to feel this way. Even a rat, when given no way out, will simply lay down and die before submitting to it's attacker. and thats what is going on more and more in the computer/software/internet industry today. You cannot do anything it seems without infringing on some copyright, or trademark, or patent. and being trapped into a corner with no way out but to submit or die.
We like to tout the fat that we are free when in fact, no one is really free. Every law in this country (USA) is ultimately backed by the threat of death. Break a traffic rule? ok pay a fine. Don't pay the fine? Ok go to prison. Escape from prison? they'll shoot you trying.
Fish! LipHo
and there's nothing we can do about it. Seriously. There's no way we geeks (or the rest of the population of the world) can do about this, since in order to fight these inane laws we have to have money, and unfortunately, we (the lower 90%) only control about 33% of the wealth. So the rich can continue to beat us down, and throw us bones (like TV, minimum wage, welfare, etc.) to pacify us, while they continue to solidify their position of power.
There's no hope.
I can't resist one last shot. (Deep breath..)
First, intellectual "property" is not the same as physical property. Copying someone's intellectual property does not deprive them of the use of that property the way stealing physical property would. Any argument based on that supposed analogy is immediately suspect.
I disagree totally. The one element in determining the value of something is scarcity. In this case IP is exactly like physical property. By distributing someone else's IP without their permission you are reducing the scarcity of that item and reducing its value.
Second, as copying becomes easier with the advance of technology, it becomes harder and harder to enforce copyrights without trampling on noninfringing behaviors.
OK lets replace a few words in this sentence... try: Second, as forgery becomes easier with the advance fo technology, it becomes harder and harder to enforce contracts without trampling on noninfringing behaviors.
Sounds a little sillier, doesn't it? If murder becuase quick and easy (not that it isn't) would you no longer attempt to uphold those laws as well?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Thanks for your try on educating me, but I am plenty aware of copyright issues already. Let me try to clarify my point.
Of course copyrights are given automatic. When I write down what my chat with the supermarket cashier this evening, indeed I have a Copyrighted Work, and I don't have to register it, granted. My supermarket conversation is protected till 70 years after I die, sure. (Assuming of course, it is lengthy enough)
The original post was referring to something different: it specifically referred to the `right' for an individual person to harvest from years of hard work on copyrighted creations.
Now tell me,
(I) how many people do you know that 1. put in years work into copyrighted matter, and 2. harvest the rewards themselves?
(II) How many people do you know are make copyrighted matter (graphics, software, etc.) as an employee of a corporation that owns their creations?
Now, compare the numbers you find in (I) and (II).
I think that maintaining the rights of the people under (I) is not very important, given their small number.
"hard work of spirited artists must be protected"
is an often cited argument for maintaining copyright. This argument simply does not reflect the economic and artistic reality of copyright exploitation today.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Here's a question I've been wondering about. Libraries have been in existance since before the American Revolution. (I think Ben Franklin started one of the first in the US) Anyway, the purpose of these institutions is to allow the public to access works that are generally copyrighted.
Why are libraries not allowed to distribute this same information that their books hold digitally. I guess there must be some kind of fair use clause, but I can hardly imagine what writing a history term paper would be like if you had to purchase all of your sources.
Since the information in books and the music on Cd's is covered by basically the same laws, why are libraries not allowed to lend out copies popular CD's to the public. I've seen classical and jazz cd's available, but generally very old stuff that's probably in public domain.
So to boil it down I have two questions: Why can a library lend copyrighted works to other people and I can't? and Why can't a library distribute it's information online?
Sorry if this turned into a rant, I tried to be objective, but I feel pretty strongly on the subject.
Now I gotta upload some MP3s. My way of being civilly disobedient is to go against any shitty laws they make... check the meta tags on my index.html... notice the word "pez" a lot? :)
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
Perhaps someone should send a counter-letter out to all of these schools, letting them know what they really are required to do under the law, and what their options are.
Perhaps someone should also look into letting the powers that be (Justice Dept? Congress?) about the first appearances of abuse, if indeed these actions aren't waranted under the law.
Tweet, tweet.
When I see issues like this, I wonder why organizations like the ACLU aren't all over this. Any guess?
Tweet, tweet.
No, they are fraudulently misrepresenting the law in order to create the impression that sysdamins are required to provide them with free services -- quite a different thing than "asking for help".
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
. I have tons (95%) of legal MP3s which would get flagged and I would get in trouble for. Is this what you want?
/. is painfully one-sided, and I disagree with most of the arguments presented (IP is not physical property, etc.) However, I don't want the RIAA taking away my right to distribute my own music in MP3 format, which is exactly what they're doing by attempting to stigmatize the MP3 format as a whole.
No, I have tons of legal MP3s myself. But I'm not dumb enough to put them on a web server.
I agree that the MP3 debate on
-- Be alert. The world needs more lerts.
[What's with] the changing slashdot colors? First the FreeBSD article and now this. I hardly find it becoming.
How hard is it to figure out? "Your Rights Online" is a relatively-newly-created "section" on Slashdot. Recently, some categories of stories have been pulled off the front page into separate sections, to cut down on the volume of the front page, and some of these sections are color-coded for clarity. For example, "Ask Slashdot" is in gray, "Slashdot radio" is in black, BSD is in red, and "Your Rights Online" is in this strange orange/brown. Our beloved "#006666" green is still Slashdot's standard color.
Or is it that you understand about the color-coding and you're just disagreeing with the particular colors chosen? I commented on this before, when I first saw the new "Your Rights Online" colors. It might be partly my fault, since I had jokingly nominated orange as a possible color. Sorry.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
You're evading the issue. If a genie gave me three wishes, and I responded, "a government that obeys the Constitution, and a billion dollars, and three more wishes, and a gorgeous babe who's madly in lust with me, and a personal FTL spaceship, and three more wishes, and..." -- well, that wouldn't be at all "limited", now would it? Neither is the pattern of recent copyright-extension laws.
I am all in favor of copyright, within the scope set out in the Constitution: with limited terms, enforced by legitimate methods.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Please tell me that an individual company owns the right to "MP3" as a Copyrighted piece of IP.
What we need to do is convince these people to hammer the fuck out of the RIAA for Copyright infringement everytime one of their minions mentions the Copyrighted term "MP3".
If this is possible, one can turn the tables on this bullshit assault on consumer rights.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
...which is bull, regardless of how often that argument comes up.
Things like identity theft and plagiarism are still, frankly, theft. Things like a reputation, or the ability to be the sole provider of a new service or product, have value despite being intangible.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I would have no argument with copyrights if they protected the people that you describe. The reality is very different. Since the first copyright law, copyrights have gone from 28 years (which was essentially the mean remaining lifespan for artists at the time) to the artist's death + 70 years. In the last 50 years copyrights have been continually and retroactively extended so that works like the original Mickey Mouse movies won't ever enter the public domain.
Copyright is a compact. It balances my natural right to express myself however I please and to do anything I want with what is in my possession, including copying it, with the need to provide an incentive for art. Copyright is a good idea, but the lengths of time in use now, and the unnerving idea that copyrights may be extended indefinitely are completely beyond the original intent of what is in the Constitution.
Furthermore, artists benefit very little from extending copyrights, since the vast majority of work is popular for only a short time, so the present value of royalties is hardly effected by changes beyond a few years. The only ones who benefit are the copyright holders of older material which still happens to be profitable. Clearly, protecting this older material has no bearing on promoting creativity, in fact it stifles it, since no one else can use that material as a basis of new art.
I strongly hope that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (The Sonny Bono Copyright Act) will be declared unconstitutional and that some sense will be returned to copyright law.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
One Word: Organize
Lobbying: You alone can't affect your congressman, but if you get a group of people in your district to all sit down and write letters, to call his switchboard all day, then he'll realize he's dealing with a VOTING BLOCK.
Get yer people together and request a meeting. If you get the runaround, show up with a group of a few dozen friends and DEMAND a meeting. At first you'll probably end up talking to an aide, but stick with it until you talk to your representative face to face, express your concerns in rational terms, explain that this is important to you and why, and that if he supports your side he'll have your vote.
Media Activism: Most people actually believe what they read in the papers. But REMEMBER: the single most read page in any newspaper is the Letters to the Editor. Write eloquent (and accesible to the lay-person) letters, short enough to get printed. Try to tie it in with a recent story if you can. Get your friends to write letters. Write longer letters to let the paper know if a story or editorial covers the issue particularly well or poorly. (Editors pay attention to what their readers want)
Direct Action: Protest. I know it seems gauche, but get out in the streets and scream, wave signs, make speeches, hand out flyers. Civil disobedience works too... The key to Direct Action is to decide what course would best achieve your goals and pursue it as if there were no laws. Act as if all Copyrights expired after 20 years. Put up a website with bootleg Mickey Moose alloverit and trade MP3s like baseball cards. Break the law. Be prepared to go to jail. This will get people's attention!
Get People Involved: Where other people see Apathy, the Organizer sees Potential. People think they can't make a difference-- you must convince them otherwise.
Elected officials have NEVER been the impetus of social change... anybody who suggests otherwise is clueless. Change comes from popular movements...
And if you don't think this kind of thing actually happens any more, just watch Seattle next month.
------- St Crazy Bob (Cannonized by Wholly Ordinance of the SubGenius Church)
two words "time" and "stamp"
That may or may not be a problem. All users on a shell account have the same IP address. The moral is, never use your shell account to download warez if you're the only one on at the time. That also pre-supposes that web server logs are kept forever. I know that I don't, they take up too much space. Logrotate ages 'em for a while then trashes them.
It's easy to be upset at copyright because the big corps are using it as a weapon, and overlook the consequences of getting rid of it. ;) I do studio projects and won't gig, so for me it'd be a question of making CDs to sell, maybe posters or shirts (I have a friend who runs a T-Shirt print shop), and of course if I got known enough I'd be able to sell recording time at my studio, and that would be a kick, helping other people do what I did and getting paid for it. ;P ) Why is this suddenly okay when it's being done in cyberspace? Is data not property?
Basically, the last thing you want to do is obliterate the few protections artists and authors _do_ have: get rid of copyright and what happens? Your buddy records a great song, and in two weeks the Spice Girls are flooding the market with it, followed by Hanson, Ricky Martin and Etc., and there's no recourse and nothing to be done about it. Weakening copyright itself will _not_ help the already very weak position of the modernday artist. Varese said "The present day composer refuses to die!" but he can sure be forced to starve, with a bit of work.
The problem here is not copyright: it is abuses by large corporations, in particular it is attempts by these industries to _establish_ a monopolistic 'trust' situation. They feel very strongly that no art, music, whatever _can_ occur outside of their control, so they see nothing wrong with cracking down on all the TECHNOLOGIES that could proliferate alternative distribution channels that would compete with them.
This is worsened by the fact that they are already exploiting their artists so badly (taking a cut away from the artist for typical rates of broken SHELLAC on CDs? It was already absurd to do this to artists when records had become vinyl and not so subject to cracking, but with CDs it's beyond ludicrous, it's insulting, a slap in the face), that the artists do NOT have a financial incentive to stick with the industry. It is genuinely a better risk to try being a cottage indie CD producer and distribute your own stuff with _no_ industry support or music store presence or radio play- that's not a claim of how great indie-land is, it's a withering indictment of just how bad the industry has become.
And yet that's the reality- so the problem is this: rather than attack copyright, you have to defend the ability of artists to get their works to their customers. I don't care how many people rip songs to mp3 (I don't), I want the ability to put MY music on it and distribute it. I want mp3 walkmen, a whole proliferation of technology that I as an independent can tap into. I don't even care if only one in a thousand of my listeners buys a CD from me- that's still better than I'd be doing with the mainstream industry, at least I'd have half a chance to _get_ that thousand listeners and sell a CD.
As an artist I would _cheerfully_ put up with my stuff being widely copied. Hell, I wouldn't expect to be able to charge for mp3s in the first place. The money is just where it is in the mainstream industry- gigging, merchandising, merchandising and merchandising
I'm still doing the legwork on all this. It's slow when you don't have a budget or a team of people. However, it's still a worthy dream- and it _requires_ that people have access to the media I'd have to use. If the industries kill mp3s they kill me as an artist, because I could use that media, given the chance, and get a fair hearing with things produced the way I wanted them. On the other hand, if the world killed copyright- I'd be hosed. I have a _book_ online, I have songs that are to be online when I have the tech to master them really _well_, and if you take copyright it's an open invitation for the wealthy industry to go cherry-picking, take anything they like, and build synthetic artists with lots of distribution and promotion on the back of MY creative work, if it's good enough to steal. That's not acceptable- I can't afford to fight that, and it'd be horribly destructive.
See the issue as access to tools! And fight to make sure the technologies remain available! It's OK if they want to make stupidly encrypted DVDs as long as we have the capacity to make NON encrypted DVDs that will play on consumer players. It's okay for the idiots to invent a new encrypted CD format as long as the consumer players still play the extant CD audio format that we have access to writing. It's okay if digital walkmen play some twisted encrypted MS format as long as they still play the mp3 format that indies can afford to use! This is the key point: access to tools. Don't even try to hit the industries directly, defend! Defend against the determined attempts to remove choice for the consumer, to make the consumer incapable of consuming the 'outlaw' media. That outlaw media is the last great hope of independent artists in a corporate-controlled world. There's not much money in it- this differs from record company exploitation how? It's access to tools, access to media- it must not be lost. Already there are blank tape taxes (as ktakki mentions), basically the music industry TAXING indies as if they were a government, on the grounds that no artists other than record company clients exist. How much more is in store if we don't defend against this? What would it have been like if blank tapes were simply outlawed? Throw the internet into the equation, and they might do the equivalent of outlawing blank tapes just because 'it's Internet', it's different. These crackdowns: imagine if the record industry insisted on doing spot checks, breaking into people's rooms and confiscating all their cassettes to see if any were taped off LPs. (That'd be real popular at the Berklee College of Music!
Even if copyright is not a natural right, it can be socially beneficial for society to grant copyright as a privilege. Intellectual property still exists, but only as a matter of social policy, not as a natural right of the creator. The same ends (promotion of the arts and sciences) could be achieved by other means.
Desktop Pictures (jpg) :) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment.
Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm)
Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm)
Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there.
I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked.
All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game.
I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content.
At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs
Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....
Ok, I'll take one for the road too.
Property rights are founded on the basis that you have a right to use and dispose of your property as you see fit. Nearly everyone concedes this as a right derived from natural law (i.e. a "God-given" right). You are claiming the right to maintain the value of your property by maintaining its scarcity, which is something else entirely. I think you would find that this right is much less universally accepted. To draw an analogy similar to your analogies to forgery and murder, suppose I invented a device to transmute dirt into gold. Do you really claim as "God given" the right to prevent me from using my device in order to prevent me from reducing the scarcity of gold, thereby rendering your stockpile of the stuff worthless? I doubt you would get much sympathy from anyone who valued gold more for its practical uses than for its scarcity. The conclusion is that intellectual property laws derive their moral force solely from the net good that they produce for society. If changes in technology and/or society ever result in intellectual property becoming a net social ill, then those laws can and must be scrapped. Note, however, that I do not advocate scrapping intellectual property laws. I do feel the terms could be made shorter, but honestly I would be happy enough if restrictions on the usage of a piece of IP that one has legally purchased (e.g.DIVX and "nontransferrable licenses") were forbidden, and if there were remedies for an individual or company dragged into court on a bogus claim.
As you point out, this argument starts to sound silly if you replace "copyright violation" with "murder", but that is no flaw in the argument; rather, it is because the social consequences for allowing murder are far more dire than those of removing intellectual property rights.
But I will remind you once more, I do not advocate doing away with copyright entirely; I simply don't think you should be allowed to suppress a product by suing the manufacturer because his product might be used to copy your material, nor do I think you should be allowed to coerce, under threat of lawsuit, other people or institutions (e.g. universities and ISPs) into taking responsibility for tracking down everyone who might be using illegally some piece technology to copy copyrighted material.
The key here is that even if some copyright violators get away with it, most people will buy copyrighted material legally, whether out of honesty, or out of a fear of being one of the few who get caught and made into an example. Companies that trade in intellectual property will still make a ton of money. What they won't be able to do is impose draconian license agreements and suppress new technologies so that they can make many tons of money.
Finally, it's a bit late in the discussion to point this out (but maybe somebody is still reading), but I don't think this is really about using MP3s for piracy. Think about it; the recording industry makes big money off of musicians, and what do they actually do for that money? Answer, they provide the services of marketing and distribution. But with digital music coming on the scene musicians don't need to pay premium rates for distribution (and they haven't really needed to pay a premium for marketing for a while). Who would pay $20 for a CD, when he could pay half that for the equivalent MP3 and have the additional warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that 100% of that money went to the artist (instead of the 5% or less that is more typical now)? In other words, the recording companies are looking at a real possibility of being made obsolete, even if copyright law remains the same. On this score I have no sympathy for them whatsoever; their behavior is comparable to gaslight manufacturers suing light bulb manufacturers for destroying the gaslight business. It will be interesting, however, to see if publishing companies react the same way when "e-book" devices start coming out in a form that is actually as comfortable to read as a real book. Stay tuned to find out.
-r
Okay, so I went to download Napster to see what it's all about.
Looks like a members-only IRC server that's seriously underpowered. Takes me a long time to connect, and that's only after several tries. Searches take as long as five minutes. And while I admit I only downloaded two things, neither went above 2.3kbps.
I think, if you're gonna leech mp3s, mIRC will do a much better job for you.
P.S. Is there anybody here who's been using Napster for a while, and can tell me if they've always been like this, or if it's due to media attention? I'd appreciate it.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Correction: the artistic equivalent of OSS might well be commission or retainer. I've been commissioned for fiction writing- the story Passages was a commission for money, for which the client was well satisfied. I even got to use my own artistic judgement on how it came out and the points it made- it was a lot of work balancing that, but I did it. ;) ;) ;) )
However, with regard to music the money is in _merchandising_, not having people commission you to write songs for them. Yes, if you're amazing then maybe you might get commissioned- just as, if you're an amazing instrumentalist, you can be retained as a house musician somewhere. However, in the world of the net, where the art goes out there for free, the winning solution is to then sell posh versions, or shirts, or posters, that sort of thing. Hell, sell figurines
For example, I don't have stuff up at the moment, but my most recent mix was a long format rock instrumental with a 'live band feel' in which the low-end was absolutely phenomenal- we're talking low end authority to utterly show off any subwoofer no matter how expensive, or on the other hand to make any truck go 'boom'
Bearing that in mind, I have a definite outlet for 'audiophile' CDs (actually, I could omit the quotes- I mix _damn_ well and build my own equipment- but my point is that I'd have a big market in pure bass test stuff, which is not truly audiophile).
I have albums of pop/rock songs which I think are good songs. If I can deliver them well enough, really rock 'em and make great albums, then I'd have an extra outlet- besides selling audiophile CDs of the original sources for the mp3s (or custom mixes, for instance for more dynamic range or 'in your face' radio mix CDs), I would definitely be well advised to try and come up with a T-shirt or poster. How many techno bands would be well advised to do a _mouse_ pad? I use a fancy 3M mousepad, but even so I could easily see using a 'u4ia' mousepad if he made them (classic Amiga techno MOD artist, now goes by F8 and no he doesn't make mousepads
You've got to think merchandising, not trying to 'milk' the very music that you're trying to have _everybody_ listening to. Having it be free is a very good way to help 'everybody' be listening to it. If you can get that happening, if you're that good an artist, then other avenues begin to open up. And you won't make millions- but seriously, lots of 'industry' artists end up heavily in DEBT for their art. Bands that don't recoup royalties, artists signing away everything, pay-to-play just in order to get booked at gigs: it's an absolute snake pit, evil, if you want to make money you're better off giving away free mp3s and then trying to sell mousepads, CDs and figurines over your little website. Seriously...
It's obvious that companies are going to try to resist losing their copyrights. If it's worth enough, they will offer large amounts of money to protect them. Why not change the whole copyright thing so that it protects the author for x amount of time. Then after x time passes, it will cost the author (or the holder of the copyright) y dollars to renew the copyright for the next year. Each year the amount to renew the copyright will increase exponentially (say double the previous years cost)
An example, x = 30 yrs, y = $10,000. After 30yrs, if this copyright is worth more than $10,000 then the author will pay to have it renewed. The govt. is happy because now they begin to tap into another big pocket, and the author is happy because he gets to keep receiving royalties. The second year, the author will have to pay $20,000 to renew the copyright. After 10yrs, the author would have to pay 10,240,000. Or about 1,000 times the initial cost.
By using this process, the company will be weaned off the income it has been generating. Throughout this process, the company will look to other means of supporting itself. So new ideas will be spawned as its dependence on old ideas fades. This will also bring in a system of checks and balances since the govt. will want its portion of the profit. The only problem is that as the company is being weaned off, the govt. begins to depend on it's income, but I figure that it would be much more difficult to change the exponential increase for the renewal of the copyright compared to extending a date. If the exponential equations are changed then the government would make less money at other areas, so over all, the government's income wouldn't change much. The govt. would not push back the date it gets to begin taping companies profits. I think it would decrease the time so that it could get its hands into the pockets of the big companies. But the govt. would not let the time get too small because then the company doesn't have the time to make a profit for the govt. to leach.
Maybe we would have an easier case passing a bill like this through congress than trying to fight the big companies pockets in a court case.
Does anybody actually follow the constitution anymore, or do they just pick and choose the parts they want to pay attention to?
Sadly it looks as if people are not deserving of the freedoms that our country has fought so long for. The 2nd Amendment is totally ignored, only criminal defense attorneys give a shit about the 4th. Congress has run rough-shod over the basic tenants of this country for far too long. I agree that there should be some sort of organization to take care of this sort of thing. But why in the hell isn't the whole constitution being protected like it's supposed to be?
Sadly it seems that neither of the 2 major parties seem to give a damn about the Constitution. The closest thing right now are the Libertarian party. All we need to do is get involved. Things are not doomed, they can be un-done. At the very least I hope that everyone can respect the memory of the millions that fought and died for the freedoms that we take for granted today, and go excercise your right to vote. It is inexcusable that people can't take an hour to go vote once a year, but spend countless hours on the net ranting.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin
Oh, man, I wish more people realised how wickedly sarcastic you are being with that remark ;)
...well, then you wouldn't be as _subtle_ ;)
Of course, if you add "Except that the royalty they get on the CDs is diluted and taken away by every random charge up to and including charges for broken SHELLAC on CD pressings (I am not making this up), plus it only goes to pay back the advance which is only an advance on royalties but the artist does have to cover all promotion, recording costs etc. out of their own pocket, meaning that for most platinum sellers they are _paying_ a lot of money to be a rock and roll star, not making it, and if they're riding around in Caddys they're all the worse in debt to the record company, which will be expecting to be repaid, either in royalties recouped directly from the artist's cut, or just plain money from getting a day job..."
I bought a cd and bring it home, slam it in my cdrom to play it through winamp, and it wont play!
I look on the label, it says "enhanced cd", oh really, why is that so good?
what im doing now, if i want a cd, i buy it through a used cd shop. therefore, if i buy a $7.99 cd there, retail its $14.99. put the numbers together...
im probably going to get moderated down for babbling or something, oh well, im going back to my whatever i was doing...
icq:=22921393;
Time to benefit != lifespan of creator
Yes, this even permits corporate copyright as long as the corporation exists.
How would you deal with tranferal of ownership? What if a corporation merged with or was bought by another? Should corporations be able to sell the rights to IP, thus perpetuating those rights? I think all IP rights should be limited to a set amount of time. I would say 10 years or less for copyrights. If the information is still relevant after that time, perhaps it should be freely available so that everyone can benefit from it and use it as they see fit.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Sorry, you're _way_ out of the ballpark with that one, not that this conflicts with your opinions or anything ;) ;) ), it's more reasonable to include the actual costs of playing the game and say, "The average artist PAYS ten cents to the record company for each CD sold, due to having to cover promotion and pay their way the whole time, plus having to recoup recording expenses from advance royalties."
Virtually no artists get even that $1. You're totally overlooking the costs of recording, pay to play, and getting to the point of having the 16$ CD on sale. Being signed may well mean being given money by the record company to do these things- all that comes out of the royalty. The artist has to come up with their own money to promote, and is contractually bound to the record company.
On top of this, that 1$ is reduced to *estimate* I'd guess about 50 or 60 cents due to extensive commissions and cuts and charges every step of the way: exemplified by the 'shellac breakage' charge that artists are _still_ paying. It's a racket: this _is_ the industry busted for payola, after all. In the modern day, if there is payola, the artist has to come up with _that_ out of his remaining 50-60 cents, which also goes to paying off recording costs.
I would say if you want to average it out, and calculating only for the major labels, out of a $16 CD sale, your average artist also pays another 30 cents or so to the record company for the _privilege_ of being a rock and roll star. That's average: some will be further in debt, and some will manage to earn between ten to thirty cents on each $16 CD the record company sells. You might have the occasional superstar making $1 or more, but platinum != superstar, and some of the real chart toppers have ended up in the worst debt- it is the businessmen musicians who manage to actually earn anything, and most of them still do not recoup their recording costs and never see a royalty.
Again (with the dreaded boldface!
Read Steve Albini's rants if you want more relentless detail on all this. Yes, it's that bad. Another good resource is a man whom I took a music business course in the 80s, Peter Knickles, who is really gifted at getting this reality through musician's heads and then helping them learn how to turn enough of a profit that they can afford to survive doing music as a job (!), which involves a tremendous amount of work and the total abandonment of silly trust in record companies.
Given the abuses of lawyers covered in this and other stories, what kind of remedies exist or can we make exist by reporting them to the bar or changing it so they do not get to govern themselves?
-Robert
I would like to hear this poster's way of distinguishing between self-interest and greed. Because of the subjectivity of discussions of this nature, it can be hard to tell what the person means.
Anyway, adimarco raises some interesting points. Like a lot of people, he seems to think idealistically. I often wish that people were not so self-centered and self-interested (ahh...what subjective terms) and greedy, but human nature dictates that people will fight for themselves before others (survival of the fittest, in a way). This is what my friends and I refer to as "whoring down." The rare few who fight for the good of all should be seen in a different light, and often are. Donating one's efforts to humankind without a thought to how oneself will benefit is, in my opinion, one of the highest human achievements. It is unfortunate that more of us aren't like that (and I'm not saying that I'm not self-interested, but I make an whole-hearted effort to help others when possible).
Now, in terms of what the RIAA is doing, I would call that greed. I think we can all agree on that: twisting the truth and bending the laws for personal gain is greedy. RIAA pretends to represent every artist in the recording industry (that's my perception, although I don't know much about RIAA). In truth, they represent the executives who have, out of greed, made excessive amounts of money off of the efforts of artists.
Ideally, artists who want to get their music (and their message, if they have one) out into the world shouldn't care about the method of distribution. I agree that, to some extent, it is fair for artists to feel justified in making millions from their music. But where can we draw the line between self-interest and greed? So many artists have sold out, so to speak, so they can make more money. I call that greed.
Anyway, I'm a very idealistic person, like adimarco.
This sort of thing should be brought up with WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) as well. It is one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations system of organizations. This is exactly what WIPO is all about, and you can read this copy of the WIPO treaty which actually resides on the US Copyright Office's website.
This will allow not only the US, but other countries to be persuaded that things need to change. It sets the benchmark to follow.
Check out the treaty itself, and then check out the agreements the US made with it, and you'll see that there is still lacking by the US in what it agrees to. Note also that the treaty was created in 1996, and that things have changed dramatically in the last few years with respect to different types of media available, which now may or may not be covered by this treaty. (I haven't had the time to scour it myself).
The original idea behind 28 years as a copyright was that was a reasonable estimate of the remaining life expectancy of an artist. It was not intended to be extended beyond the artist's death and certainly not in perpetuity.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I take it your ISP doesn't accept identd requests.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
That's funny I see a whole bunch of stuff at say, Project Gutenberg, that is PD.
Yes, and it's all pre-WWI. It will be that way for many years to come. That's because those things DID have their copyright expire. Since that time, copyright has been expanded every time a certain copyrighted mouse would move into the public domain. At the rate we're going, the copyright won't run out until the language is so archaic and the culture so distant in the past that only 5 people or so will even get the jokes. That is not what copyright was EVER supposed to be.
Note also, that several corperations are working hard to secure exclusive rights to digital representations of great works of art. Apparently, if you're a copyright, you can rise from the dead.
There comes a point where the written work becomes part of a culture. No corperation can be allowed to OWN culture.
Businesses plan on a five-year cycle - if something isn't forecast to make a return on investment in five years, it doesn't get done.
Don't get me wrong; I'm very much a supporter of this. I may not know a huge amount about it, but I try, and I have my opinions anyway. :) But a question was brought up after I brought this topic up with some friends: What about the personal copyrights?
Now I know I said I don't know much about this, and the article said that copyright wasn't an innate right, and so maybe I'm missing something.. but if I were to make a comic, say (ignoring the fact that I can't draw worth a damn), and I wanted to continue to own my comic even after these five years, or the 28 years of the original copyrights -- or heck, say I wanted to own it when I was sixty, so I could keep working on it and control its progress -- where does that leave me?
Just hoping I could get some answers, cos I really do wonder about this, and I wanna get it figured out, cos it sorta pokes its head through my own little bit of cheering for this nice essay, and bothers me.
Where can we get:
:)
1. Lists of any companies/mutual funds that support the RIIA in any way
2. Funding for public service advertisements
How much money do the FSF and OSI have? Are they interested (I know RMS probably is)? Is RedHat likely to be of some help? We need money.
How can I get rich quickly, so I can undermine Microsoft while they're vulnerable, or perhaps possibly take control of them. They've got the budget and the strings to pull. Hmm...
Dwayne C. Litzenberger, CEO of Microsoft. I like it!
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
I've been trying to read this in a fairly evenhanded way, but this was just too much:
:-)
I disagree totally. The one element in determining the value of something is scarcity. In this case IP is exactly like physical property. By distributing someone else's IP without their permission you are reducing the scarcity of that item and reducing its value.
If I'm in the business of building cars, should it be illegal for anyone else to build cars because they might reduce the scarcity of cars and thus reduce their value?
Now, this is of course covered by patents. However:
1) I think that this example points out the fundamental difference between
'IP' and something I can hold;
2) Do you want patents to last for 70 years past the death of the patent holder? Please think carefully before answering
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Pretty soon, schools (and therefore taxpayers/students) are going to have to start forking out more money for hard drives, because school-related media will no longer be compressed. We'll all have to store our long lecture soundtracks as WAV instead of mp3, for fear of having it deleted. The same thing will happen to better view compression, etc.
Most of us bitch, most of us complain, but nothing seems to happen. Why? Because the average Joe who doesn't even care about tech-related issues allows the government and large companies to do whatever they want. Whether we like it or not, we're a minority, and we should really organise, already - form an international union.
Many of us work in tech positions, and our employers, and thus big companies, could not run without us. If we threatened an international, national, to regional strike, things would change quite rapidly. Boycotts are not enough; we don't make up enough of the buying population. But we do make up much of the tech population, and we could use that to our advantage, if we could pull ourselves together and form a union.
This union would be different from many unions. Elections would be conducted over the internet (via GnuPG), and membership fees would not be mandatory, as this would limit the number of people willing to participate.
It's time to act, people. Someone should start a web page, and a discussion board to get this new Internet Union together. It is possible, but it will have to be done right. If anyone is interested, I will elaborate further on some of the difficulties we must overcome.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
We need a few far-fetched demands in our proposal, so when we "compromise", the results will be adequate.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
'nuff said, huh?
--
E2 IN2 IE?
A society based on your give-back principle would be a very gray society... No one would bother producing anything new.
Why, look! There it is, in its natural habitat! The elusive econodwarf!
You can't say "give me" without giving back- in this case, paying the people who produce for you the things you enjoy.
How much of the purchase price of a new CD do you think the artist gets? And how much goes to the record company and the various middle-men?
I've been looking for a reference that long prior to the invention of the printing press, a monk copied a manuscript and the owner of the original claimed ownership of the copy. The court ruled that, like the offspring of livestock, the copy belonged to the owner of the original. I'm thinking this was around the time of Columba of Iona (6th c.). Some of my research indicates that this story may be
apocryphal.
But, on the other hand, I have found some evidence for unlimited copyright in English Common Law
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Am I the only one who thinks that the title of this article (with the exclamation point of course) would be a great name for the worlds first Broadway musical about intellectual property.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
This may seem ridiculous to some of you (given the comments I read), but I think Copyrights need to be protected. Most of you think of some big record getting upset over bootleg copies of Madonna. But what about struggling artists who need revenue from their product? What about software companies who are barely making it?
Often, highly specialized software needs protection because it is only made for a few companies--The software company has to protect its investment, or it will not be able to turn a profit.
For example, if a company make label printing software that prints bar codes, it would take forever and would cost a fortune for a small to mid-sized company to develop its own bar code software. On the other hand, the investment of development would be smart for a large business. If the software costs $1,000 per user but the development costs are $20,000, then that small company would do better buying a copy.
Now, if the small company just makes a copy of the software from a friend (or something), then the software company is out $1,000 in sales. If their development cost was $250,000 for a general-purpose system to sell, that $1,000 means a lot.
As far as threats to universities, if I were the university sysadmin, I would simply respond:
To whom it may concern,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
John Doe.
p.s. Because it is the copyright holder's responsibility to protect his/her intelectual property, not ours. Let us know if you find a potential legal infringement, and we will deal with the problem appropriately.
p.p.s.Have a nice day.
Get a job! (teehee)
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
How much of the purchase price of a new CD do you think the artist gets? And how much goes to the record company and the various middle-men?
Not nearly enough. Something like 40-50 cents... I am acutely aware of this because nearly all of my favorite bands have been royally screwed by their record companies in the past few years. If you get bored, look up what EMI records did to Marillion just in time for their 1997 US tour...
But realize I am not defending the middlemen. I am defending my ability to have the kind of music I like, made and produced by the few people who can do it. I have demanding musical tastes; perhaps a hundred virtuoso musicians in the entire world meet my rigorous standards. But since I take music so seriously, since my musical collection makes such a significant contribution to my happiness, a lot would be missing from my life if John Petrucci had not bothered to learn to play the guitar. Even if he had, I would never have heard him if 'Pull Me Under' wasn't played on KSHE-95; and I am sure that KSHE would not have played them if they hadn't recieved a free cd from the record company.
Still, I realize that the RIAA is an evil organization. My fiance' was a radio DJ for (several) Colorado rock stations, and tells stories about being forced to play only songs on the official playlists; simply an example of the RIAA misusing its powers to crush non-member recording groups by not allowing them airtime. I remember one particular instance she was literally forced to recite a list of good things about the new Green Day single, even though she hated it, so that it would sell well. If she didn't, the record company would have refused to pay "maintenance fees" to the station, and she would have lost her job. Any organization that would cause Green Day and the Spice Girls to become cultural icons obviously has serious issues.
Because I enjoy music that is not exactly popular in this country, I usually have to order CD's directly from bands I find in obscure clubs by word of mouth. If I get really lucky, CDNOW will help me. I hate this! I hate walking down the aisles at Best Buy and finding nothing of enough merit to pay for. But killing copyright laws won't solve that; instead of being filled with crap, the shelves would become empty. Or, more likely, RIAA would find starving musicians of mediocre talent and use their music anyway, thereby achieving the same dominance as today except royalty-free.
In a perfect world, every penny I spend to get my latest fix would go straight to the musicians. People who made good music would be rich then whether they sold 50,000 copies or 6 million copies... but the solution articulated in the article is comparable to industrial murder, regardless of what 'philosophical' viewpoint you take. You have to be very naive to believe that people who are forced to work day jobs because they give away their music, will make the same quality music as people who are allowed to concentrate on their art by copyrighting it, selling it and becoming as wealthy as possible.
Scudder
PS. good web page Greg- you might want to check out The Gathering, a Dutch prog metal band. Their female lead vocalist is tremendous, with strong, ethereal vocals, and the band itself is reminiscent of Rush/Yes... very powerful and deft guitar work. Start with Nighttime Birds or Mandylion.
And to the fifty people who replied to tell me that eternal copyright laws were bad: notice I never said that. My post was simply directed at the particular section of the article that discussed "giving back to society". Directed at what looked to me like a blatant appeal to get something for nothing...
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I've noticed that you don't like to keep all the issues in mind when you reply to things. For instance, the RIAA did not go to court and charge a student with having illegal MP3s on the school network. The RIAA did not call the FBI and request an investigation. The RIAA did not get a search warrant to go through the school's networked computers and check for illegal material. These are all due process of the law. The RIAA instead threatened (implied) lawsuits and scared the schools into doing police work on the students. It wasn't ever shown that many of these persons had illegal MP3s; if they were
Your comment is almost true -- but out of context again. The question was:
... which you didn't answer. There is no implied agreement here between companies. The question is whether one company or association (the RIAA) can force another "free" company (as you pointed out) such as, for instance, Diamond multimedia, to change their software because it -MIGHT- be used to pirate music. Isn't it illegal for the user of the software to use it illegally? There isn't even a clause on my hammer at home telling me to not use it to smash peoples' car windows.
It's illegal to copy commercial music and distribute it to those who have no right to that music. It doesn't matter if the tools are available; you're just not allowed to do it.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)