Escrowed release requires no changes to copyright law, since once paid for, the product is released to the public domain. If you have a few simple changes to copyright law that would suffice and are easier to implement, how about sharing?
Sorry for the delay, have to sleep sometime.
Your escrowed product would only be public domain under current copyright if law if all the people involved in its creation (author, screenwriters, set designers, musicians, etc) specifically agreed to make it so. Requiring mandatory registration to receive protection before publication would make all works default to the public domain, and requiring yearly renewal of the those registrations would force a decision by producers as to whether it is worth the cost and effort to continue that protection once a work becomes unprofitable. Mandatory registration and renewal of copyright have precedents in history and encourage sharing, yet still ensure creators have the opportunity to profit from their work accepting another human trait, greed.
Such films tend to be financed by "patrons" of one sort or another, who generally don't expect to make their money back, at least not from the proceeds. Studios are just one source of patronage and it seems to me that such funding is already pretty close to my proposal - the studios and/or other patrons don't expect to make money off the production but they put up the money anyway.
In today's market, the studio may be hoping for that 1 in 100 like the Blair Witch to make up for all the others. But that isn't so different from doing something like signing a contract such that the studio/patron gets right of first refusal to play the same roll in follow-up productions for which the escrowed amount could contain a healthy profit for the artist and initial backers.
In fact, even though we are just now entering the age of "desktop cinema" movie-making is still going to remain a capital-intensive process for quite a while. I would not be surprised if any new film artists had to go with some form of investment/patronage to get their first film made. Pretty much the way it is today with just fairly minor alterations in the details.
Most of what you are saying amounts to little more than creating a system that mirrors the one that already exists. The only real change is that the movies are pre-paid by the viewers who want them made instead of the viewers paying to see the movie after it is finished.
There are much simpler solutions to increase the available of material in the public domain while still keeping it profitable for those who produce the movies. A few simple changes in copyright law would both suffice and be far easier to implement.
And how is that different from today? I am reasonably satisfied with the current amount of creative productions today, I just don't like the nefarious infrastructure being constructed to enforce the profits of the corps that fund the creation of insanely expensive and often uncreative works today.
I certainly can't see a marketplace where past performance is a major determination of future funding producing less creative works than get produced now.
Then you aren't considering "sleepers". Admittedly most are low budget, but there are cases where studios back risky projects that wouldn't generate enough public interest to cover their production costs.
f someone wants to see a blockbuster enough, then why don't they pay ahead of time? If it is going to take $15M or $45M to make a movie, let the production studio open up an escrow account. People pay into the escrow account what they think such a movie is worth to them and when the account reaches the require level of funding, the production company begins work. If they never finish or the funding doesn't reach the required level, people get their money back.
Maybe not a bad idea on the surface but such a system would churn out even more mediocre pablum because the majority of people would only contribute to projects that would create works that they know they will like.
The concept of restricting abundance does not make sense as ideas are not finite resources--one can copy them an infinite number of times at no cost and one can create them at will. Whatsmore many people often create the same ideas independently and simultaneously.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. I have stated that the system certainly needs reform, particularly the insane time limits and the lack of need of registration, but to do away with protection all together would make works that require significant financial investment extremely rare.
Congress did Americans a great disservice when they extended the length of copyrights and dropped the registration requirment to bring US law in line with European law. It just doesn't make sense that a person could be convicted of violating someones copyright when there is no way to easily discern whether a work is still protected. A publicly searchable database and yearly registration requirments would go a long way towards balancing both the needs of authors and fulfilling the Constititional requirement of increasing the works in the public domain.
Man, there is going to be some wailing and gnashing of teeth this year if Bush wins again. No president has been hated more since Lincoln, it would seem.
The nation hasn't been this divided since the 60's. No matter who wins, the result will be 49% of the population telling the other 51% of those who bothered to vote how things are going to be (taking into account third-party voters, of course).
So, musics with million dollar productions won't exist any longer. And Hollywood movies with 500 million dollar productions won't either. Like the jeans, is this not a tragedy? Like the jeans, no. People lived before Warner Brothers and Fox and Universal and people lived before Elektra and Columbia and Universal. They will live after them as well. Just as happy as before. No movie to watch? No, Britney to listen to in the car? Maybe they'll put in that CD their friend's brother made, or turn on the radio, or nothing at all. No summer blockbuster to go see!? Maybe they'll go to some local film fest, see some indie movie, or maybe go outside instead, talk with friends, do something else, anything else, it's fucking summer. And it's fucking life in general, you don't need movies to be happy. People know this, so they'll gladly continue these "self-destructive" and "morally reprehensible" acts of IP "theft" when given the chance.
That was quite a response, obviously you have put a lot of thought into this. I hope you don't mind if I just address your last paragraph since it seems to sum up your position, and concentrate on the movie industry since I believe the music industry has dug its own grave.
Yes, certainly people can live without movies. I mostly do myself, not having stepped into theater since '98 and buying perhaps ten DVDs in the last five years. I have more, but the rest were downloaded from archive.org. Hell, I haven't even seen LOTR. Oh, and my summers are mostly spent camping.
But it is the case that people do enjoy movies, and whether or not watching them has any health benefit is really not pertinent. It is also the case that making movies, especially the "block busters" with extravegant special effects that top the charts, costs money to make.
Now I am one who believes that people should have access to what they want, not just what they need. If it movies that they want then it is movies that should be produced, and if it is money that it takes to make these movies then it is money that should be paid. Not paid forever as the creators seem to think, but still paid nonetheless.
I truly can't understand why a blockbuster Hollywood movie with the world's most famous actors, thousands of special effects created by the world's most powerful supercomputers, and a credits list that takes 5-10 minutes just to scroll by on the screen normally costs about $15, while a CD, often with already-released songs, and requiring only a singer, guitarist, drummer, etc., and a sound technician, costs the same amount. *What is up with that?!*
It's probably due more to the record industry being stuck in stupid mode more than anything else. Their marketing and distribution systems have been in place for 80 years now and no one wants to give up a piece of the pie.
So what? I can download lord of the rings for free, in high quality DVD rip, and it will never cost me. They will never catch me. I have no qualms with "pirating" movies, and I laugh out loud in a theater every time they tell me it's like stealing a car.
If everyone did that and the producers received no money to pay for the cost of making the movie what would they use to finance the sequel?
Yet still, I saw all of them in the theatre, and I buy the dvds.
Once you paid the price for something it yours to use as you as often as you like. That's included in the needed copyright reforms I mentioned above.
Same as in Russia, cost (what a person has to sacrifice) over perceived value (how a person benefits from a product). I'll lay you odds that if legal DVDs/CDs were sold there for the same price as the bootlegs few if any bootlegs would've been sold.
And the people who're in it for the music will still produce, and the people who want to see live acts, and want to support the acts they like, will still pay.
That may work fine for music, but what about movies? Even if the special effects and car crashes could be recreated on stage your looking at costs in the $100 million dollar range for each and every performance. I doubt there are very many people who could afford to shell out ten grand a head to see LOTR or Star Wars.
So no, though copyright law certainly needs to be reformed and Congress needs to remember that the ultimate goal of IP protection is to benefit the public domain, doing away with it all together is not the answer.
I agree. We do need to keep our military on the cutting edge. I'm just worried that this is prep for aggressive wars, as opposed to defense from an invading force. It seems to me that, while your example compares us to pre-WWII France, we are closer to the Germans*, preparing a new strategy so our next act of aggression goes over a little better than our last.
Defense is only for survival, it takes offense to achieve victory. Even France, an ally, had to be attacked in order to defeat Facism in WW2.
Whoever modded the parent as offtopic must have missed the article discussing the Firefox teams plans to buy a full page NY Times announcing the release of a better browser. It's not only "funny", it's downright "insightful".
The Supreme Court stated that in this case, the invention was not merely a mathematical algorithm, but was a process for molding rubber, and hence was patentable. This was true even though the only "novel" feature of this invention was the timing process controlled by the computer.
Hopefully the Supreme Court today realizes the ramafications of the decision they rendered over twenty years ago. Here's an excerpt of the courts opinion:
Although their process employs a well-known mathematical equation, they do not seek to pre-empt the use of that equation, except in conjunction with all of the other steps in their claimed process. A claim drawn to subject matter otherwise statutory does not become nonstatutory simply because it uses a mathematical formula, computer program, or digital computer.
And how the Patent Office construed that ruling as meaning that any "invention" with the word computer in it gets a rubber stamp is absolutely mind boggling.
I won't add to the list of engineering flaws of checkout lane card readers, others have already cited plenty of examples. Diebold's biggest mistake is that they didn't take into consideration that literacy is not a prerequisite to vote when they set about designing their machines.
It is an insult to humankind to deprive it from its own achievements solely on the selfish argument that "if I can't benefit from it, none shall benefit". We owe our civilization and most of its achievements to the exchange of ideas. Strangely, now that we have achieved the long-sought dream of global, instant communication we suddenly find ourselves threatened by greedy IP laws. Oh, the irony.
There's nothing strange about it, history is full of examples where despite there being an abundance of a thing the people whose power depends on its scarcity attempt to maintain a monopoly on that thing's distribution so that they can continue control those who do not have it.
Cable TV was first sold as television without the commercials.
No it wasn't, it was sold as television for people who couldn't get a decent broadcast signal. The following is an exerpt from this brief history of CATV here.
"Community antenna television (now called cable television) was started by John Walson and Margaret Walson in the spring of 1948. The Service Electric Company was formed by the Walsons in the mid 1940s to sell, install, and repair General Electric appliances in the Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania area. In 1947, the Walson also began selling television sets. However, Mahanoy City residents had problems receiving the three nearby Philadelphia network stations with local antennas because of the region's surrounding mountains. John Walson erected an antenna on a utility pole on a local mountain top that enabled him to demonstrate the televisions with good broadcasts coming from the three Philadelphia stations.
Walson connected the mountain antennae to his appliance store via a cable and modified signal boosters. In June of 1948, John Walson connected the mountain antennae to both his store and several of his customers' homes that were located along the cable path, starting the nation's first CATV system."
When was the last time an internet ad genuinely enticed you to click on it?
I'll click a Google "sponsored link" if it's clearly related to my search. I used to click banners too before they became so obtrusive that I had to block them for fear of going blind from all the flashing.
Slashdot Mirror
Escrowed release requires no changes to copyright law, since once paid for, the product is released to the public domain. If you have a few simple changes to copyright law that would suffice and are easier to implement, how about sharing?
Sorry for the delay, have to sleep sometime.
Your escrowed product would only be public domain under current copyright if law if all the people involved in its creation (author, screenwriters, set designers, musicians, etc) specifically agreed to make it so. Requiring mandatory registration to receive protection before publication would make all works default to the public domain, and requiring yearly renewal of the those registrations would force a decision by producers as to whether it is worth the cost and effort to continue that protection once a work becomes unprofitable. Mandatory registration and renewal of copyright have precedents in history and encourage sharing, yet still ensure creators have the opportunity to profit from their work accepting another human trait, greed.
Such films tend to be financed by "patrons" of one sort or another, who generally don't expect to make their money back, at least not from the proceeds. Studios are just one source of patronage and it seems to me that such funding is already pretty close to my proposal - the studios and/or other patrons don't expect to make money off the production but they put up the money anyway.
In today's market, the studio may be hoping for that 1 in 100 like the Blair Witch to make up for all the others. But that isn't so different from doing something like signing a contract such that the studio/patron gets right of first refusal to play the same roll in follow-up productions for which the escrowed amount could contain a healthy profit for the artist and initial backers.
In fact, even though we are just now entering the age of "desktop cinema" movie-making is still going to remain a capital-intensive process for quite a while. I would not be surprised if any new film artists had to go with some form of investment/patronage to get their first film made. Pretty much the way it is today with just fairly minor alterations in the details.
Most of what you are saying amounts to little more than creating a system that mirrors the one that already exists. The only real change is that the movies are pre-paid by the viewers who want them made instead of the viewers paying to see the movie after it is finished.
There are much simpler solutions to increase the available of material in the public domain while still keeping it profitable for those who produce the movies. A few simple changes in copyright law would both suffice and be far easier to implement.
If you haven't already checked it out, http://www.hammersound.net/ is good place to look for sound fonts.
Well, except for MIDI. I can't figure out why my MIDI banks won't load into the card... so I still use software rendering, which feels wrong. :-/
I'm sure it does! I have sfxload load mine automatically at the end of the boot sequence before I startx and midi works perfectly.
And how is that different from today? I am reasonably satisfied with the current amount of creative productions today, I just don't like the nefarious infrastructure being constructed to enforce the profits of the corps that fund the creation of insanely expensive and often uncreative works today.
I certainly can't see a marketplace where past performance is a major determination of future funding producing less creative works than get produced now.
Then you aren't considering "sleepers". Admittedly most are low budget, but there are cases where studios back risky projects that wouldn't generate enough public interest to cover their production costs.
Especially if "we" are living in an eastern european slum and cannot afford to buy anything but bread and water... or even less.
Eastern European copyright laws should be tailored to the needs of their people, not those of wealthier nations.
f someone wants to see a blockbuster enough, then why don't they pay ahead of time? If it is going to take $15M or $45M to make a movie, let the production studio open up an escrow account. People pay into the escrow account what they think such a movie is worth to them and when the account reaches the require level of funding, the production company begins work. If they never finish or the funding doesn't reach the required level, people get their money back.
Maybe not a bad idea on the surface but such a system would churn out even more mediocre pablum because the majority of people would only contribute to projects that would create works that they know they will like.
The concept of restricting abundance does not make sense as ideas are not finite resources--one can copy them an infinite number of times at no cost and one can create them at will. Whatsmore many people often create the same ideas independently and simultaneously.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. I have stated that the system certainly needs reform, particularly the insane time limits and the lack of need of registration, but to do away with protection all together would make works that require significant financial investment extremely rare.
Congress did Americans a great disservice when they extended the length of copyrights and dropped the registration requirment to bring US law in line with European law. It just doesn't make sense that a person could be convicted of violating someones copyright when there is no way to easily discern whether a work is still protected. A publicly searchable database and yearly registration requirments would go a long way towards balancing both the needs of authors and fulfilling the Constititional requirement of increasing the works in the public domain.
...I like those shows enough to want to contribute to their creators in hopes of seeing them make more.
And that was my point B-)
Man, there is going to be some wailing and gnashing of teeth this year if Bush wins again. No president has been hated more since Lincoln, it would seem.
The nation hasn't been this divided since the 60's. No matter who wins, the result will be 49% of the population telling the other 51% of those who bothered to vote how things are going to be (taking into account third-party voters, of course).
So, musics with million dollar productions won't exist any longer. And Hollywood movies with 500 million dollar productions won't either. Like the jeans, is this not a tragedy? Like the jeans, no. People lived before Warner Brothers and Fox and Universal and people lived before Elektra and Columbia and Universal. They will live after them as well. Just as happy as before. No movie to watch? No, Britney to listen to in the car? Maybe they'll put in that CD their friend's brother made, or turn on the radio, or nothing at all. No summer blockbuster to go see!? Maybe they'll go to some local film fest, see some indie movie, or maybe go outside instead, talk with friends, do something else, anything else, it's fucking summer. And it's fucking life in general, you don't need movies to be happy. People know this, so they'll gladly continue these "self-destructive" and "morally reprehensible" acts of IP "theft" when given the chance.
That was quite a response, obviously you have put a lot of thought into this. I hope you don't mind if I just address your last paragraph since it seems to sum up your position, and concentrate on the movie industry since I believe the music industry has dug its own grave.
Yes, certainly people can live without movies. I mostly do myself, not having stepped into theater
since '98 and buying perhaps ten DVDs in the last five years. I have more, but the rest were downloaded from archive.org. Hell, I haven't even seen LOTR. Oh, and my summers are mostly spent camping.
But it is the case that people do enjoy movies, and whether or not watching them has any health benefit is really not pertinent. It is also the case that making movies, especially the "block busters" with extravegant special effects that top the charts, costs money to make.
Now I am one who believes that people should have access to what they want, not just what they need. If it movies that they want then it is movies that should be produced, and if it is money that it takes to make these movies then it is money that should be paid. Not paid forever as the creators seem to think, but still paid nonetheless.
(which takes plenty since you're probably spend thounsands of hours working around Adobe's patents)
People living in countries that don't recognize software patents have no need to work around them.
...but as I'm sure you're aware the mainstream music industry is not exactly the most vibrantly competitive market in existence.
Up until now. Quality bootlegs that anyone can make at home and the appearance of a distribution channel they can't control has changed all that.
I truly can't understand why a blockbuster Hollywood movie with the world's most famous actors, thousands of special effects created by the world's most powerful supercomputers, and a credits list that takes 5-10 minutes just to scroll by on the screen normally costs about $15, while a CD, often with already-released songs, and requiring only a singer, guitarist, drummer, etc., and a sound technician, costs the same amount. *What is up with that?!*
It's probably due more to the record industry being stuck in stupid mode more than anything else. Their marketing and distribution systems have been in place for 80 years now and no one wants to give up a piece of the pie.
So what? I can download lord of the rings for free, in high quality DVD rip, and it will never cost me. They will never catch me. I have no qualms with "pirating" movies, and I laugh out loud in a theater every time they tell me it's like stealing a car.
If everyone did that and the producers received no money to pay for the cost of making the movie what would they use to finance the sequel?
Yet still, I saw all of them in the theatre, and I buy the dvds.
Once you paid the price for something it yours to use as you as often as you like. That's included in the needed copyright reforms I mentioned above.
what's OUR excuse in the US?
Same as in Russia, cost (what a person has to sacrifice) over perceived value (how a person benefits from a product). I'll lay you odds that if legal DVDs/CDs were sold there for the same price as the bootlegs few if any bootlegs would've been sold.
And the people who're in it for the music will still produce, and the people who want to see live acts, and want to support the acts they like, will still pay.
That may work fine for music, but what about movies? Even if the special effects and car crashes could be recreated on stage your looking at costs in the $100 million dollar range for each and every performance. I doubt there are very many people who could afford to shell out ten grand a head to see LOTR or Star Wars.
So no, though copyright law certainly needs to be reformed and Congress needs to remember that the ultimate goal of IP protection is to benefit the public domain, doing away with it all together is not the answer.
I agree. We do need to keep our military on the cutting edge. I'm just worried that this is prep for aggressive wars, as opposed to defense from an invading force. It seems to me that, while your example compares us to pre-WWII France, we are closer to the Germans*, preparing a new strategy so our next act of aggression goes over a little better than our last.
Defense is only for survival, it takes offense to achieve victory. Even France, an ally, had to be attacked in order to defeat Facism in WW2.
Stop the presses.
Whoever modded the parent as offtopic must have missed the article discussing the Firefox teams plans to buy a full page NY Times announcing the release of a better browser. It's not only "funny", it's downright "insightful".
The Supreme Court stated that in this case, the invention was not merely a mathematical algorithm, but was a process for molding rubber, and hence was patentable. This was true even though the only "novel" feature of this invention was the timing process controlled by the computer.
Hopefully the Supreme Court today realizes the ramafications of the decision they rendered over twenty years ago. Here's an excerpt of the courts opinion:
Although their process employs a well-known mathematical equation, they do not seek to pre-empt the use of that equation, except in conjunction with all of the other steps in their claimed process. A claim drawn to subject matter otherwise statutory does not become nonstatutory simply because it uses a mathematical formula, computer program, or digital computer.
And how the Patent Office construed that ruling as meaning that any "invention" with the word computer in it gets a rubber stamp is absolutely mind boggling.
I won't add to the list of engineering flaws of checkout lane card readers, others have already cited plenty of examples. Diebold's biggest mistake is that they didn't take into consideration that literacy is not a prerequisite to vote when they set about designing their machines.
Hey Spydr! Nice English, did a Martian write it for you?!
V I R U S E S !
"Virii" is not a word in any language on this planet.
Thou hast a good point made for thee knowest English was ne'er meant to change.
It is an insult to humankind to deprive it from its own achievements solely on the selfish argument that "if I can't benefit from it, none shall benefit". We owe our civilization and most of its achievements to the exchange of ideas. Strangely, now that we have achieved the long-sought dream of global, instant communication we suddenly find ourselves threatened by greedy IP laws. Oh, the irony.
There's nothing strange about it, history is full of examples where despite there being an abundance of a thing the people whose power depends on its scarcity attempt to maintain a monopoly on that thing's distribution so that they can continue control those who do not have it.
Cable TV was first sold as television without the commercials.
No it wasn't, it was sold as television for people who couldn't get a decent broadcast signal. The following is an exerpt from this brief history of CATV here.
"Community antenna television (now called cable television) was started by John Walson and Margaret Walson in the spring of 1948. The Service Electric Company was formed by the Walsons in the mid 1940s to sell, install, and repair General Electric appliances in the Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania area. In 1947, the Walson also began selling television sets. However, Mahanoy City residents had problems receiving the three nearby Philadelphia network stations with local antennas because of the region's surrounding mountains. John Walson erected an antenna on a utility pole on a local mountain top that enabled him to demonstrate the televisions with good broadcasts coming from the three Philadelphia stations.
Walson connected the mountain antennae to his appliance store via a cable and modified signal boosters. In June of 1948, John Walson connected the mountain antennae to both his store and several of his customers' homes that were located along the cable path, starting the nation's first CATV system."
When was the last time an internet ad genuinely enticed you to click on it?
I'll click a Google "sponsored link" if it's clearly related to my search. I used to click banners too before they became so obtrusive that I had to block them for fear of going blind from all the flashing.