There is absolutely no argument against that. There simply isn't one that can be made. There is no logical reason we shouldn't do that.
I am aware of one reasonably good argument against it: an author should still have copyright over works that are not published, and should have the right to posthumously publish a work, without having to indicate to anyone that the work even exists, let alone specifying it enough to retain and renew copyright. Something should not become public domain because it was stolen from the writer before he felt he could publish and register it. Nor should it become public domain by accident, as Night of the Living Dead did.
This to me seems to require defining the writer's control as total (like a trade secret) until it is published, whereupon the copyright clock starts ticking, and the author can assert copyright after the fact no later than the first publication date. It's a minor change, but I feel important.
See, but I don't think that all creative people should be compensated just because they're creative. I've seen far too much modern art for that. They certainly should not be compensated equally by classification, but rather by value. Not all short stories are worth the same amount; some of them are real gems that maybe the author shouldn't let go of permanently for less than a few grand. Some of them are not worth paying anything to accelerate copyright expiry.
A private foundation - or better a series of them with different missions and expertise - would be much better at finding and buying things of value. A government agency would never get around to looking at a lot of early horror or sci-fi, let alone come up with a good price for them.
If you mean work-for-hire in jobs where they do not hold copyright over their own work, yes - they are exactly like writers-for-hire in that regard. Anyone who contracts for work deserves everything their contract specifies, usually money.
If you mean sitting at home and programming one's own projects, they are in exactly the same boat as novelists: asking society for the privilege of exclusive control of their work in exchange for having produced the work in the first place, regardless of their talent or the merit or value of the work in question. It's an excellent question to ask.
Note that I'm not saying that the answer is no. Nowhere do I even hint that the answer is no - you're attacking a straw man here, and looking quite foolish.
How about some other questions: "Should bad writers be paid for their work?" "Should jugglers be paid for their work?" "Should Slashdot commenters be paid for their work?"
While the points you made are great ones, you'll have too types of artists that respond to what you have written. One says 'I agree, and I don't really care about copyright cause my work is good enough that I'm going to get paid either way'. The other says 'I totally disagree, its my work, I controlly it, me, me, me, me, me, give me money now, me'.
Can you guess which one is likely to produce art that you would be willing to pay for?
You know, I sat and thought about this, and I'm really not sure. I've read authors in both categories who were wonderful, and writers in both categories who were... not. Ultimately, the attitude toward control over one's work seems to be mostly orthogonal to actual ability.
Putting aside the ridiculous assumption that you have a right to the product of someone else's creative efforts by virtue of being born, people gotta eat, right?
Fine. Give up your right and your childrens' rights to the work of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Handel, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Cicero, da Vinci, and all the other people who were infinitely more talented than you will ever be. Then we'll talk about who has rights to whose works and when.
I thought that the recipients of NEA grants kept the copyright to their respective works?
No, I was more thinking, a group that would approach the author (or estate) who owned a work that is already completed and published and maybe not selling well, and saying, "Hey, we'll give you a thousand bucks to release this title into the public domain." and the author either takes it or leaves it. Maybe it'd be spent a few hundred bucks at a time so that old sci-fi authors can retire. Maybe they'd save up a billion dollars to buy Star Wars so someone can fix the prequels.
That's why I like the idea of a private organization for this; I'm uncomfortable with these decisions being made by people who aren't responsible for raising the money in the first place. I think they'd make bad decisions that would ultimately doom the project. But the NEA would be free to give them a grant!
Yeah, but who does the paying, and who sets the price? Right now the idea is that most of the people who make use of a work pay a small amount to the author. Sum that up over the author's life, and that's a reasonable approximation of the price of the work, paid out by a reasonable approximation of society as a whole. In a lot of ways, that's a really crappy way to get paid for your labor.
Me, I'd like to see a Public Domain advocate -- an charitable organization with a decent bankroll that buys creative works on behalf of society, paying a lump sum in exchange for an immediate transfer into the public domain.
And yet it really does get to the heart of the matter. What IS copyright, anyway? It started off as a bargain between the people of our country and the writers and artists who entertain, enlighten, and educate us: Create these works, and we'll respect your control over them (as a way to earn a living from your work) for some number of years, but ultimately they belong and will revert to all of humanity.
As a society we've been more than generous over the last century. No creative artist living today will EVER have to lose control over his work by simply living too long. (Ill-advised contracts notwithstanding) That is a tremendous gift, and as a result we as a society have allowed vast amounts of our culture to remain under the control of individuals and corporations, for the first time in human history. Think about that. For thousands of years, if you heard a story that you liked, or a song you liked, you would have been perfectly free to retell (or rewrite!) it as you saw fit, or sing it to a friend or audience, altering as you alone saw fit. We as a society have largely given up these rights, and are giving them up for longer and longer. In exchange we think we're getting better creative works (even though almost any writer will freely admit that he's no Shakespeare, who didn't enjoy nearly the control that we give today's writers)
And so it seems to me that with society giving up more and more rights to authors, and authors doing their best to make their works less accessible and less useful to society, it's not such a bad thing to start re-asking fundamental questions like "Should writers be paid at all for their work?"
I was just about to ask that. That's like saying that Penguin Classics has a monopoly on out-of-copyright books because nobody else bothers to print them.
First of all, I am not a lawyer. I do find the law interesting, though, and flatter myself of having some understanding of it.
The only question in my mind about this is, was his initial cooperation (which produced evidence of his crime) done under coercion? I've been in these security lines before -- there is a strong pressure to just go along and get along and let a lot of crap slide. If he truly believed that his only choices were between "show the border agents what's on my laptop" or "the border agents confiscate the laptop (which may contain important personal documents unrelated to any crime) and search it anyway" then I think there would be a strong case that the initial evidence should be inadmissible because the initial "cooperation" was out of some fear of personal harm. By analogy, cops can't convince you to let them into your apartment because otherwise they'll have you evicted and just search it anyway.
Of course, this is complicated by the probability that they have pretty wide discretionary powers when it comes to allowing things into the country or not. You couldn't complain, "I only showed them the cocaine because I thought they were going to confiscate it anyway".
What makes you say that? The people who understand software and software patents well enough to understand what's going on already dislike Microsoft. Those who don't aren't going to change their mind over this.
Since CEO performance is in the news...
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"'This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!' And I said, 'What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job. That's what it's all about. We're here to make things better.""
Apparently he either really sucked at his job, or it was the job of the people who worked for him to completely ignore what he said.
And big government fans think this is rational behavior and cheer it on.
There aren't really any big government fans. Just "government by our side" fans who don't mind the government being too big. Witness the last sixteen years, where each party suddenly loved small government the instant it lost power.
Ah hah! Now add this to what we read in Safina's essay, and we have something like the truth: the Creationists keep resurrecting Darwin so that they have a point of attack that is more amenable than Evolutionary Theory as a whole.
However, it has recently been complicated a bit. Insult a population of people long enough, and they come to take that insult as a badge of honor, to claim it as their own. I could repeat any number of unpleasant words here, but "Darwinist" is becoming one of them. Biologists who a decade ago would have argued persuasively that the field has moved past Darwin, now proudly call themselves Darwinists.
Sorry, I over-generalized. While in general Microsoft has a lot of costs, for any specific potential transaction, they have only the costs of the people involved. If a salesman tries to sell me a car, he has not only his own time and commission to pay for, but the original cost of the car and the opportunity cost of having kept it on the lot. If he's about to lose a sale entirely, there comes a price point where he has to shrug and hope someone else will pay a good price for it. On the other hand, Microsoft's salespeople as a group need to sell a certain amount, but any particular sale need not be that much -- if they're about to lose the sale entirely, some money is better than none, as long as it keeps them writing checks to Redmond.
I've heard that the repeated ads are because they're having a hard time getting advertisers. I don't know if that's true, but it certainly seems that way when a fair number of the ads I got on Hulu were of the "Here's how to advertise with Hulu!" type.
The big thing that bothers me about some of the ads is that they are much louder than the show itself. If they fix that they'll be much less obnoxious. (They may have fixed it already, it's been a few months)
I was more thinking about the individual contracts Microsoft (and other vendors) negotiate on a per-customer basis, rather than their regular non-profit prices. I daresay most universities of any size have managed to wheedle MS into lower prices than most other non-profits pay. And even then, college IT departments tend to have contacts at other colleges and can get information through back channels.
Slashdot Mirror
I am aware of one reasonably good argument against it: an author should still have copyright over works that are not published, and should have the right to posthumously publish a work, without having to indicate to anyone that the work even exists, let alone specifying it enough to retain and renew copyright. Something should not become public domain because it was stolen from the writer before he felt he could publish and register it. Nor should it become public domain by accident, as Night of the Living Dead did.
This to me seems to require defining the writer's control as total (like a trade secret) until it is published, whereupon the copyright clock starts ticking, and the author can assert copyright after the fact no later than the first publication date. It's a minor change, but I feel important.
See, but I don't think that all creative people should be compensated just because they're creative. I've seen far too much modern art for that. They certainly should not be compensated equally by classification, but rather by value. Not all short stories are worth the same amount; some of them are real gems that maybe the author shouldn't let go of permanently for less than a few grand. Some of them are not worth paying anything to accelerate copyright expiry.
A private foundation - or better a series of them with different missions and expertise - would be much better at finding and buying things of value. A government agency would never get around to looking at a lot of early horror or sci-fi, let alone come up with a good price for them.
... who will one day be dead.
If you mean work-for-hire in jobs where they do not hold copyright over their own work, yes - they are exactly like writers-for-hire in that regard. Anyone who contracts for work deserves everything their contract specifies, usually money.
If you mean sitting at home and programming one's own projects, they are in exactly the same boat as novelists: asking society for the privilege of exclusive control of their work in exchange for having produced the work in the first place, regardless of their talent or the merit or value of the work in question. It's an excellent question to ask.
Note that I'm not saying that the answer is no. Nowhere do I even hint that the answer is no - you're attacking a straw man here, and looking quite foolish.
How about some other questions:
"Should bad writers be paid for their work?"
"Should jugglers be paid for their work?"
"Should Slashdot commenters be paid for their work?"
You know, I sat and thought about this, and I'm really not sure. I've read authors in both categories who were wonderful, and writers in both categories who were... not. Ultimately, the attitude toward control over one's work seems to be mostly orthogonal to actual ability.
And if the changes are only benefiting corporations and not artists, then it's definitely time to revisit the old questions.
Putting aside the ridiculous assumption that you have a right to the product of someone else's creative efforts by virtue of being born, people gotta eat, right?
Fine. Give up your right and your childrens' rights to the work of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Handel, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Cicero, da Vinci, and all the other people who were infinitely more talented than you will ever be. Then we'll talk about who has rights to whose works and when.
I thought that the recipients of NEA grants kept the copyright to their respective works?
No, I was more thinking, a group that would approach the author (or estate) who owned a work that is already completed and published and maybe not selling well, and saying, "Hey, we'll give you a thousand bucks to release this title into the public domain." and the author either takes it or leaves it. Maybe it'd be spent a few hundred bucks at a time so that old sci-fi authors can retire. Maybe they'd save up a billion dollars to buy Star Wars so someone can fix the prequels.
That's why I like the idea of a private organization for this; I'm uncomfortable with these decisions being made by people who aren't responsible for raising the money in the first place. I think they'd make bad decisions that would ultimately doom the project. But the NEA would be free to give them a grant!
Apparently TFA was simply incorrect - Google's agreement with the Author's Guild is over out of PRINT books, not out of copyright.
Yeah, but who does the paying, and who sets the price? Right now the idea is that most of the people who make use of a work pay a small amount to the author. Sum that up over the author's life, and that's a reasonable approximation of the price of the work, paid out by a reasonable approximation of society as a whole. In a lot of ways, that's a really crappy way to get paid for your labor.
Me, I'd like to see a Public Domain advocate -- an charitable organization with a decent bankroll that buys creative works on behalf of society, paying a lump sum in exchange for an immediate transfer into the public domain.
And yet it really does get to the heart of the matter. What IS copyright, anyway? It started off as a bargain between the people of our country and the writers and artists who entertain, enlighten, and educate us: Create these works, and we'll respect your control over them (as a way to earn a living from your work) for some number of years, but ultimately they belong and will revert to all of humanity.
As a society we've been more than generous over the last century. No creative artist living today will EVER have to lose control over his work by simply living too long. (Ill-advised contracts notwithstanding) That is a tremendous gift, and as a result we as a society have allowed vast amounts of our culture to remain under the control of individuals and corporations, for the first time in human history. Think about that. For thousands of years, if you heard a story that you liked, or a song you liked, you would have been perfectly free to retell (or rewrite!) it as you saw fit, or sing it to a friend or audience, altering as you alone saw fit. We as a society have largely given up these rights, and are giving them up for longer and longer. In exchange we think we're getting better creative works (even though almost any writer will freely admit that he's no Shakespeare, who didn't enjoy nearly the control that we give today's writers)
And so it seems to me that with society giving up more and more rights to authors, and authors doing their best to make their works less accessible and less useful to society, it's not such a bad thing to start re-asking fundamental questions like "Should writers be paid at all for their work?"
I was just about to ask that. That's like saying that Penguin Classics has a monopoly on out-of-copyright books because nobody else bothers to print them.
First of all, I am not a lawyer. I do find the law interesting, though, and flatter myself of having some understanding of it.
The only question in my mind about this is, was his initial cooperation (which produced evidence of his crime) done under coercion? I've been in these security lines before -- there is a strong pressure to just go along and get along and let a lot of crap slide. If he truly believed that his only choices were between "show the border agents what's on my laptop" or "the border agents confiscate the laptop (which may contain important personal documents unrelated to any crime) and search it anyway" then I think there would be a strong case that the initial evidence should be inadmissible because the initial "cooperation" was out of some fear of personal harm. By analogy, cops can't convince you to let them into your apartment because otherwise they'll have you evicted and just search it anyway.
Of course, this is complicated by the probability that they have pretty wide discretionary powers when it comes to allowing things into the country or not. You couldn't complain, "I only showed them the cocaine because I thought they were going to confiscate it anyway".
Just like all the BlackBerry owners realized the perils of patent trolls? Never underestimate the ability of the public to avoid learning lessons.
What makes you say that? The people who understand software and software patents well enough to understand what's going on already dislike Microsoft. Those who don't aren't going to change their mind over this.
"'This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!' And I said, 'What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job. That's what it's all about. We're here to make things better.""
Apparently he either really sucked at his job, or it was the job of the people who worked for him to completely ignore what he said.
And big government fans think this is rational behavior and cheer it on.
There aren't really any big government fans. Just "government by our side" fans who don't mind the government being too big. Witness the last sixteen years, where each party suddenly loved small government the instant it lost power.
Ah hah! Now add this to what we read in Safina's essay, and we have something like the truth: the Creationists keep resurrecting Darwin so that they have a point of attack that is more amenable than Evolutionary Theory as a whole.
However, it has recently been complicated a bit. Insult a population of people long enough, and they come to take that insult as a badge of honor, to claim it as their own. I could repeat any number of unpleasant words here, but "Darwinist" is becoming one of them. Biologists who a decade ago would have argued persuasively that the field has moved past Darwin, now proudly call themselves Darwinists.
I don't know! I'll come back in an hour and you can tell me.
Sorry, I over-generalized. While in general Microsoft has a lot of costs, for any specific potential transaction, they have only the costs of the people involved. If a salesman tries to sell me a car, he has not only his own time and commission to pay for, but the original cost of the car and the opportunity cost of having kept it on the lot. If he's about to lose a sale entirely, there comes a price point where he has to shrug and hope someone else will pay a good price for it. On the other hand, Microsoft's salespeople as a group need to sell a certain amount, but any particular sale need not be that much -- if they're about to lose the sale entirely, some money is better than none, as long as it keeps them writing checks to Redmond.
I've heard that the repeated ads are because they're having a hard time getting advertisers. I don't know if that's true, but it certainly seems that way when a fair number of the ads I got on Hulu were of the "Here's how to advertise with Hulu!" type.
That's a thought. It certainly behaved like beta software sometimes.
The big thing that bothers me about some of the ads is that they are much louder than the show itself. If they fix that they'll be much less obnoxious. (They may have fixed it already, it's been a few months)
Um, it's been there for over a year now. I watched the first season last spring.
I was more thinking about the individual contracts Microsoft (and other vendors) negotiate on a per-customer basis, rather than their regular non-profit prices. I daresay most universities of any size have managed to wheedle MS into lower prices than most other non-profits pay. And even then, college IT departments tend to have contacts at other colleges and can get information through back channels.