So, we need the RIAA to teach everyone what is and what is not fair use, so that everyone has some idea of it and most consider it reasonable.
We both know the problem with leaving it to the RIAA. What if they try to teach that there is no such thing as "fair use"? (We know that some people in the RIAA don't believe in it.) Or teach a far narrower scope of fair use than most people here would accept?
I know that public awareness campaigns can work. But PSAs sometimes teach things that aren't 100% accurate, or at least things we hope aren't. I've seen "If you buy marijuana, you are funding terrorists" on a PSA.
Imagine RIAA PSAs--I mean other than the one they've already run about illegal downloading ending the creation of all music. "For just $18 a month, you can help feed a starving artist!"
The makers of Sony rootkit CDs and other irresponsible methods of controlling Sony content, while successful in the marketplace, have pressure put upon them to be somewhat less irresponsible and are shunned. They are seen as scoundrels.
But, as long as they are successful in the marketplace, they aren't worried about being called scoundrels. They have been called scoundrels for decades, after all.
They hang out with each other and the artists who have signed with them. They check the zillions they have stuffed under the mattress, to make sure it's all there. They are content to continue to control content.
When is the last time you've gone to church during a service and found the door locked? I imagine that the doors are open during service times for Mormon tabernacles and Jehovah's Witness Halls. You can go and pester them inside--assuming you can get a word in edgewise...
And the next time someone tries to bomb a large public space with people, and Richard Jewell hears about it--well, perhaps he'll do absolutely nothing.
He saved many people (though unfortunately not all of them) from the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Then he was accused of arranging the bombing. He lost his job as security guard, and he wasn't cleared until Eric Rudolph bombed an abortion clinic somewhere else. I can imagine how the employee interviews went that year.
He lost his faith in humanity because of what happened to him. Remember: when no one has faith in humanity, nor even pretends to, bad things happen to humanity.
Beware of publicly punishing Good Samaritans...
Many of the British CCTV cameras are run by the British government in hopes of catching criminals. This has many aware Slashdotters feeling like Big Brother is watching them. The sentiments against those cameras spread to all the other CCTV cameras in the UK.
On the other hand, in America, most of the CCTV cameras are in the hands of businesses of various sizes. They also hope to catch criminals, but there is an intermediate step. Americans rarely object to them: we just note the "Smile! You're being watched!" signs and go about our biz...
Unfortunately, the Jehovah's Witnesses are covered under the First Amendment. But in communities where all door-to-door activity is banned (hey, that may be a predator working the doors!), they can posted and shamed right along with the Amway reps, Avon ladies, and Girl Scouts.
Disclaimer: I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses. I do like Avon ladies and Girl Scouts.
"...the real problem is invasion and the best thing we could do to stop it would be to control borders to the point that we have a *complete* background of anybody we allow into the country and tracking devices attached to visitors."
Check out the Your Rights Online section: America is taking steps in that direction.
It might make international terrorism impossible, or it might just make it difficult for the casual terrorist. One thing is sure--the restrictions that America has already made cut legit travel, and further regs. along those lines would cut it further.
Some of us think that moves like that would also make government totalitarianism a lot easier.
In short, what you propose isn't much better for Americans than the invasion.
America's a long way from the market you speak of.
Right now, despite our farmers operating in the red, we export food all over the world. It should be possible for America to reduce the food supply and make farming more profitable inside the country without ceasing to export food, let alone ceasing to grow food. If it is possible, it would be less disruptive, especially since we exported some of our manufacturing to some of the countries we sell food to.
Or maybe it's because some of us don't want to have to leave the country to get important surgery. It's bad enough that many of us have to leave our home state to get certain surgeries done.
If an HMO is trying to save costs by offshoring surgery, that is transferring the costs from their insurance plan to our own travel budgets. Or are they covering the cost of going to Thailand or South Korea?
If HMOs allow surgery to be sent offshore, American surgeons won't be allowed to compete for HMO-paid surgeries. The HMO can always say that either you do the surgery in South Korea, on your own travel expenses, or you don't get surgery at all.
Of course, if they do cover the cost of travel, maybe it'll be no more humiliating for us than our charitably importing people from Africa or the Middle East here for surgery is for those people.
America is not afraid of Mexico invading because we have liberal border policies with them and because we are inconsistent about enforcing the restrictions we do have.
Vincente Fox once released a pamphlet on how to undocumentedly immigrate into the USA. Why would Mexico invade us by force and risk our closing the border and kicking out their undocumented workers? That would be economically disastrous for them.
You are getting carried away.
Okay. The American copyright extension act of 1998 did turn life+50 into life+70, and extended existing corporate copyrights in a similar fashion. It did unilaterally rewrite contracts that way, and I'm annoyed by it, too. Unfortunately, it doesn't say everything hits public domain in 2067; we'll have to wait until the 2100s for some work.
But America did not force anything already in the public domain back into copyright. We certainly didn't force everything in the public domain back into copyright. It can look like it sometimes because format-shifted works get treated like derivative works: the recording copyright on most Beatles CDs is 1988 instead of whatever year the album first came out, for instance. But anyone can make a new CD of a musician's works in the public domain as long as he's willing to go back to the original vinyl, original shellac, original audiotape bootleg, or original wax cylinder.
Of course it would.
Let's suppose that there is a great but little-known sci-fi trilogy. The first book hit the public domain in 1987. The other two were caught in the 1989 copyright expansion act (the life+50 rule) and therefore are still under copyright.
Let us now suppose that the entire trilogy somehow gets rediscovered and popular.
Suppose you want to write fanfic about this series. If your work uses details from the entire trilogy, you'll have to publish it as an amateur through the standard underground venues. But if you write as if only the first book happened--say, you veer sharply away from canon at the end of book one and write a "book two" going in a completely different direction--then it could be published professionally. The owner of the copyright of books two and three can't stop that book.
Let me add that alternate-universe fanfic is not unpopular.
You are suggesting that America should not participate in agriculture?
Maybe agriculture could be reformed so that it could be profitable. Maybe it could even be reduced. But don't ask to outsource it altogether. We don't want to outsource all the food and then find later that no one wants to sell it to us anymore.
It's risky enough if we lose all manufacturing. If we lose all agriculture, we could end up like North Korea.
Most of the unions are gone, for various reasons. Many of the 40-hour workweeks are such in name only because of unpaid overtime. And yet, corporations keep outsourcing.
No, Comcast won't just take your cable box away.
This sort of thing happened with telephones a while back; when they broke up the original AT&T, they also allowed anyone with the means and desire to make and sell phones. Customers no longer had to rent the phone from the phone company--but many people still did rent phones. I think it's possible to rent phones from phone companies even today; some of them seem to encourage it.
As it was with phones back then, so it will be with cable boxes if this ruling holds. Perhaps someone will soon make an independent cable box that you can buy outright and use with any cable provider anywhere. (Yes, even one with a DVR.) But you'll still have the option of renting the cable box from Comcast, and it's almost certain that Comcast will encourage people to continue renting their boxes.
Sure! The label will love that!
Unflattering songs about record labels have been written for ages. Think of "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles, "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger, "This Note's for You" by Neil Young, "Cover of the Rolling Stone" by Dr. Hook... It's a subgenre. The RIAA might not be crazy about that type of song, but if the songs sell RIAA records, the RIAA label will be happy to promote your album.
Especially if creative freedom is all you ask for.
What did we do when we believed that It's a Wonderful Life was in the public domain? If I'm not mistaken, that film didn't become popular until its copyright expired after its first 28, in '73. Then over the next 20 years, it became wildly popular.
Pity someone at Universal realized that the soundtrack was still in copyright--since the soundtrack goes with the film. (I'll presume that the soundtrack was renewed because someone wanted parts of it for trailers.) I'm enough of a philistine to like the colorized vs. of the film and wish it was possible to get DVDs of it.
I don't trust Paypal further than I can throw them, and I am not a lawyer, but may I advise you?
You say you are not running a charity. You want donations, but you want them for a service: you want your visitors to help pay for some of your websites.
Set up a commercial account. Inform your visitors yourself that payment is desired but not optional. If Paypal won't give the disclaimers, tell them what you are and what you ask yourself. You should have some control over where their click-box goes on your site, and you can put your warnings nearby.
It's better to pay a little more to Paypal and to the IRS if it lessens the odds of a shut-down like this, IMO.
But I'm not a lawyer. If a lawyer reads this, please correct me!
According to the second fine blog, they did try to work it out with Paypal. Obviously, they failed horribly.
On the other hand, if the founders of the Adam Knox fund were going to spend the money on anything other than the cause that they said they were going to spend the money on, just because of a personal fund shortage, then PayPal should refund all those who donated to that fund right now!
Scary Movie is a parody film. Only parodies have the freedom to make references, and that only to things they are parodying. Anything else making references to work under copyright has to be okayed by the owner of the original copyright or risk trouble.
Think about it. Rappers have had to pay copyright owners to use samples ever since "U Can't Touch This" borrowed too much from "Under Pressure." Samples in rap are just references to the original work. Therefore, if references always got free passes, then sampling in rap would be unrestricted and Dangermouse's Grey Album would be in a record store near you.
There are a few people who buy music online but really like having a shiny plastic disc with the music on it. You tend to get better results from importing the music on a professional shiny plastic disc into your favorite computer's music manager than from burning a digital track onto your own CD-R. Therefore--depending on whom you're marketing to--selling CDs might be a money-making proposition...
The RIAA has saved the world from starving of music, believe it or not.
It's not the musicians who hold copyrights on recorded music--it's the record companies. Since record companies are corporations, they'll always want more money. They'll never stop milking artists when they have enough, because they never can have enough.
Some of the musicians may be starving. Much of the music is junk music. But, as long as there are musicians begging to make music and signing to RIAA labels, there will always be plenty of music of some sort.
Hey, don't get carried away!
The Beatles were 3/4ths together when Parlaphone/EMI signed them. They didn't have to look hard to find Ringo.
True, without a record label, they could not have made Revolver or Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Magical Mystery Tour. We might not even know how they sounded. We can thank EMI for that much: until recently, only record labels could arrange that sort of thing, and not all of them would have back then.
But I am told that, before they were signed, they were a great live band. Of course, this is hard to prove--there is at most one live recording of them before they were signed, and it's bad recording quality. But if you listen to Please Please Me, you should get a hint of what they were like before.
Oh--and EMI did gouge the Beatles all it could: more than usual, in fact, since neither the group nor their manager had business experience when they were signed. If the Beatles had not been one of the most successful bands of all time, the record deal would've turned disastrous for them...
Slashdot Mirror
So, we need the RIAA to teach everyone what is and what is not fair use, so that everyone has some idea of it and most consider it reasonable.
We both know the problem with leaving it to the RIAA. What if they try to teach that there is no such thing as "fair use"? (We know that some people in the RIAA don't believe in it.) Or teach a far narrower scope of fair use than most people here would accept?
I know that public awareness campaigns can work. But PSAs sometimes teach things that aren't 100% accurate, or at least things we hope aren't. I've seen "If you buy marijuana, you are funding terrorists" on a PSA.
Imagine RIAA PSAs--I mean other than the one they've already run about illegal downloading ending the creation of all music. "For just $18 a month, you can help feed a starving artist!"
The makers of Sony rootkit CDs and other irresponsible methods of controlling Sony content, while successful in the marketplace, have pressure put upon them to be somewhat less irresponsible and are shunned. They are seen as scoundrels.
But, as long as they are successful in the marketplace, they aren't worried about being called scoundrels. They have been called scoundrels for decades, after all.
They hang out with each other and the artists who have signed with them. They check the zillions they have stuffed under the mattress, to make sure it's all there. They are content to continue to control content.
When is the last time you've gone to church during a service and found the door locked? I imagine that the doors are open during service times for Mormon tabernacles and Jehovah's Witness Halls. You can go and pester them inside--assuming you can get a word in edgewise...
And the next time someone tries to bomb a large public space with people, and Richard Jewell hears about it--well, perhaps he'll do absolutely nothing.
He saved many people (though unfortunately not all of them) from the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Then he was accused of arranging the bombing. He lost his job as security guard, and he wasn't cleared until Eric Rudolph bombed an abortion clinic somewhere else. I can imagine how the employee interviews went that year.
He lost his faith in humanity because of what happened to him. Remember: when no one has faith in humanity, nor even pretends to, bad things happen to humanity.
Beware of publicly punishing Good Samaritans...
Many of the British CCTV cameras are run by the British government in hopes of catching criminals. This has many aware Slashdotters feeling like Big Brother is watching them. The sentiments against those cameras spread to all the other CCTV cameras in the UK.
On the other hand, in America, most of the CCTV cameras are in the hands of businesses of various sizes. They also hope to catch criminals, but there is an intermediate step. Americans rarely object to them: we just note the "Smile! You're being watched!" signs and go about our biz...
Unfortunately, the Jehovah's Witnesses are covered under the First Amendment. But in communities where all door-to-door activity is banned (hey, that may be a predator working the doors!), they can posted and shamed right along with the Amway reps, Avon ladies, and Girl Scouts.
Disclaimer: I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses. I do like Avon ladies and Girl Scouts.
"...the real problem is invasion and the best thing we could do to stop it would be to control borders to the point that we have a *complete* background of anybody we allow into the country and tracking devices attached to visitors."
Check out the Your Rights Online section: America is taking steps in that direction.
It might make international terrorism impossible, or it might just make it difficult for the casual terrorist. One thing is sure--the restrictions that America has already made cut legit travel, and further regs. along those lines would cut it further.
Some of us think that moves like that would also make government totalitarianism a lot easier.
In short, what you propose isn't much better for Americans than the invasion.
America's a long way from the market you speak of.
Right now, despite our farmers operating in the red, we export food all over the world. It should be possible for America to reduce the food supply and make farming more profitable inside the country without ceasing to export food, let alone ceasing to grow food. If it is possible, it would be less disruptive, especially since we exported some of our manufacturing to some of the countries we sell food to.
Or maybe it's because some of us don't want to have to leave the country to get important surgery. It's bad enough that many of us have to leave our home state to get certain surgeries done.
If an HMO is trying to save costs by offshoring surgery, that is transferring the costs from their insurance plan to our own travel budgets. Or are they covering the cost of going to Thailand or South Korea?
If HMOs allow surgery to be sent offshore, American surgeons won't be allowed to compete for HMO-paid surgeries. The HMO can always say that either you do the surgery in South Korea, on your own travel expenses, or you don't get surgery at all.
Of course, if they do cover the cost of travel, maybe it'll be no more humiliating for us than our charitably importing people from Africa or the Middle East here for surgery is for those people.
America is not afraid of Mexico invading because we have liberal border policies with them and because we are inconsistent about enforcing the restrictions we do have.
Vincente Fox once released a pamphlet on how to undocumentedly immigrate into the USA. Why would Mexico invade us by force and risk our closing the border and kicking out their undocumented workers? That would be economically disastrous for them.
You are getting carried away.
Okay. The American copyright extension act of 1998 did turn life+50 into life+70, and extended existing corporate copyrights in a similar fashion. It did unilaterally rewrite contracts that way, and I'm annoyed by it, too. Unfortunately, it doesn't say everything hits public domain in 2067; we'll have to wait until the 2100s for some work.
But America did not force anything already in the public domain back into copyright. We certainly didn't force everything in the public domain back into copyright. It can look like it sometimes because format-shifted works get treated like derivative works: the recording copyright on most Beatles CDs is 1988 instead of whatever year the album first came out, for instance. But anyone can make a new CD of a musician's works in the public domain as long as he's willing to go back to the original vinyl, original shellac, original audiotape bootleg, or original wax cylinder.
Of course it would.
Let's suppose that there is a great but little-known sci-fi trilogy. The first book hit the public domain in 1987. The other two were caught in the 1989 copyright expansion act (the life+50 rule) and therefore are still under copyright.
Let us now suppose that the entire trilogy somehow gets rediscovered and popular.
Suppose you want to write fanfic about this series. If your work uses details from the entire trilogy, you'll have to publish it as an amateur through the standard underground venues. But if you write as if only the first book happened--say, you veer sharply away from canon at the end of book one and write a "book two" going in a completely different direction--then it could be published professionally. The owner of the copyright of books two and three can't stop that book.
Let me add that alternate-universe fanfic is not unpopular.
You are suggesting that America should not participate in agriculture?
Maybe agriculture could be reformed so that it could be profitable. Maybe it could even be reduced. But don't ask to outsource it altogether. We don't want to outsource all the food and then find later that no one wants to sell it to us anymore.
It's risky enough if we lose all manufacturing. If we lose all agriculture, we could end up like North Korea.
Most of the unions are gone, for various reasons. Many of the 40-hour workweeks are such in name only because of unpaid overtime. And yet, corporations keep outsourcing.
Here's a link I dug up:
http://www.slashphone.com/70/5360.html
An extreme case...
No, Comcast won't just take your cable box away.
This sort of thing happened with telephones a while back; when they broke up the original AT&T, they also allowed anyone with the means and desire to make and sell phones. Customers no longer had to rent the phone from the phone company--but many people still did rent phones. I think it's possible to rent phones from phone companies even today; some of them seem to encourage it.
As it was with phones back then, so it will be with cable boxes if this ruling holds. Perhaps someone will soon make an independent cable box that you can buy outright and use with any cable provider anywhere. (Yes, even one with a DVR.) But you'll still have the option of renting the cable box from Comcast, and it's almost certain that Comcast will encourage people to continue renting their boxes.
Sure! The label will love that!
Unflattering songs about record labels have been written for ages. Think of "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles, "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger, "This Note's for You" by Neil Young, "Cover of the Rolling Stone" by Dr. Hook... It's a subgenre. The RIAA might not be crazy about that type of song, but if the songs sell RIAA records, the RIAA label will be happy to promote your album.
Especially if creative freedom is all you ask for.
What did we do when we believed that It's a Wonderful Life was in the public domain? If I'm not mistaken, that film didn't become popular until its copyright expired after its first 28, in '73. Then over the next 20 years, it became wildly popular.
Pity someone at Universal realized that the soundtrack was still in copyright--since the soundtrack goes with the film. (I'll presume that the soundtrack was renewed because someone wanted parts of it for trailers.) I'm enough of a philistine to like the colorized vs. of the film and wish it was possible to get DVDs of it.
I meant "payment was desired but optional." I hate making serious typos!
I don't trust Paypal further than I can throw them, and I am not a lawyer, but may I advise you?
You say you are not running a charity. You want donations, but you want them for a service: you want your visitors to help pay for some of your websites.
Set up a commercial account. Inform your visitors yourself that payment is desired but not optional. If Paypal won't give the disclaimers, tell them what you are and what you ask yourself. You should have some control over where their click-box goes on your site, and you can put your warnings nearby.
It's better to pay a little more to Paypal and to the IRS if it lessens the odds of a shut-down like this, IMO.
But I'm not a lawyer. If a lawyer reads this, please correct me!
According to the second fine blog, they did try to work it out with Paypal. Obviously, they failed horribly.
On the other hand, if the founders of the Adam Knox fund were going to spend the money on anything other than the cause that they said they were going to spend the money on, just because of a personal fund shortage, then PayPal should refund all those who donated to that fund right now!
Scary Movie is a parody film. Only parodies have the freedom to make references, and that only to things they are parodying. Anything else making references to work under copyright has to be okayed by the owner of the original copyright or risk trouble.
Think about it. Rappers have had to pay copyright owners to use samples ever since "U Can't Touch This" borrowed too much from "Under Pressure." Samples in rap are just references to the original work. Therefore, if references always got free passes, then sampling in rap would be unrestricted and Dangermouse's Grey Album would be in a record store near you.
There are a few people who buy music online but really like having a shiny plastic disc with the music on it. You tend to get better results from importing the music on a professional shiny plastic disc into your favorite computer's music manager than from burning a digital track onto your own CD-R. Therefore--depending on whom you're marketing to--selling CDs might be a money-making proposition...
The RIAA has saved the world from starving of music, believe it or not.
It's not the musicians who hold copyrights on recorded music--it's the record companies. Since record companies are corporations, they'll always want more money. They'll never stop milking artists when they have enough, because they never can have enough.
Some of the musicians may be starving. Much of the music is junk music. But, as long as there are musicians begging to make music and signing to RIAA labels, there will always be plenty of music of some sort.
Hey, don't get carried away!
The Beatles were 3/4ths together when Parlaphone/EMI signed them. They didn't have to look hard to find Ringo.
True, without a record label, they could not have made Revolver or Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Magical Mystery Tour. We might not even know how they sounded. We can thank EMI for that much: until recently, only record labels could arrange that sort of thing, and not all of them would have back then.
But I am told that, before they were signed, they were a great live band. Of course, this is hard to prove--there is at most one live recording of them before they were signed, and it's bad recording quality. But if you listen to Please Please Me, you should get a hint of what they were like before.
Oh--and EMI did gouge the Beatles all it could: more than usual, in fact, since neither the group nor their manager had business experience when they were signed. If the Beatles had not been one of the most successful bands of all time, the record deal would've turned disastrous for them...