I'm not entirely sure how the lawyer payment thing works, but I know that the RIAA has lost money on their lawsuits despite 'winning.' I understand that some parties in the mass p2p suits have collected some money from those that settled, but that doesn't mean there's a net profit involved.
And of course, even if they were anarchist, it's not like the only difference about Somalia and say the US is the lack of government. It sucked when it had a government, and most people wouldn't prefer to live in Somalia's neighbors that also have governments.
"Why let other bands cover individual songs from your albums?"
In that particular case, at least in the US, said artists don't have a choice. Licensing for covers is compulsory and at a statutory rate, so the only way they could prevent covers is by never doing a recorded rendition themselves. I could do the worst rendition of the most beautiful song in the world, and as long as I pay the royalties and don't change the melody or lyrics, there's nothing the author in question can do about it. Floyd might be able to exploit a loophole for The Wall by claiming that it is a 'dramatic musical composition', which isn't subject to compulsory licensing, but I'd have to say those claims would be resting on The Thin Ice (sorry, I had to shoehorn at least one Floyd reference in this post)
It'd probably be movie studios getting money from movie theaters, which is already the status quo. The difference would be some logistical changes and the studios leaving the internet alone.
I'm not claiming that my plan will end corporate meddling in the arts, but it can at least limit the amount of power they have downstream. I'm just saying that we can get the same kind of movies we get now without copyright. Now, one advantage is that it would probably be less prone to consolidation than the media conglomerates we have today, which means the good things about market forces would apply to a greater extent.
I think the problem is that people aren't very creative with business models, although there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests we actually made more media and progress when we didn't have copyright and patents.
Now, to address the logistics. For most musicians, recordings are promotional tools. Their income isn't in the recordings, but rather in live shows and merchandising.
Now, for movies, I have a potential plan that I think could work well. It's not that widely known, but movie theaters don't make significant profits on people watching movies. The real money is in selling popcorn and other concessions. So, if movies are already loss leaders to get people to buy popcorn, why not take it to a more extreme version of this, and have the big movie theaters fund movies. In exchange for a larger share of funding, they get the first run of copies, with minor contributors getting later copies. I would be very interested to see how this works, especially in regards to ticket prices. I would think this would favor cheap tickets in order to sell more food, resulting in the cost of a trip to the movies to go down, as theaters aim for high volume. This would be a great benefit to consumers, and could be better overall for the film industry.
Ah, the article actually say that "The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn’t be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved."
They don't see it as something that SHOULD be illegal.
It'll be far more than dozen years. Under current US laws, Pong will remain covered by copyright until around 2067, and that's for the original arcade version. Any port of it will have some minor changes, and thus the copyright will be longer.
We do need better laws for orphan works, though, and 'life of the author' copyright terms should be exposed for the racist (and many other forms of prejudice) bullshit it is.
For starters, the government fronts a lot of the bill, with some estimates as high as 75%. Secondly, people are idiots that still buy Tylenol when generic acetaminophen is half the price (I've read that advertising is double the R&D costs on average). Other problems include the added costs of me-too drugs like Claritin and Clarinex, the latter of which hit the market just as Claritin patents were expiring, and Big Pharma pressuring docs to push new expensive drugs in what isn't far removed from payola.
Finally, exclusive rights are not the only option. Giving a statutorily capped royalty per mg of active ingredient (or something similar) for a set period with compulsory licensing like we do with recordings of musical compositions would mean that researchers can get a return on investment (possibly a better one because people with patents and copyrights tend to do stupid things with them) while drugs are guaranteed to be widely available to the public.
Overall, the US is more or less the loosest. We required registration and renewment, and took longer to switch to life of the author. I think we are more permissive about orphaned works. There are a few cases where Australia's shorter period gives us a few works that the US doesn't, but it's fairly small. Basically, it's limited to works that were registered and renewed (if needed) in the US, where the author has been dead for more than 50 years, but the work was published after 1923.
pre-1923 is in the public domain, and a lot of works weren't renewed or ever covered by copyright (especially if they were foreign works). The life+70 years didn't happen until the latest copyright law change, and copyright of works pre-1978 isn't based on the life of the author. There are also some special rules for orphaned works, which I'm not that familiar with.
Because we don't all adulate a small child for figuring out something one could reasonably expect a small child to figure out? It's a shelf, and this kid figured out a moderately creative way of hanging it. I'd probably be proud of him if I knew him, but I wouldn't expect people who didn't to really care.
Incidentally, it seems that a misleading angle on the photograph misled me into thinking it was something a big more creative than it actually was. I was thinking that it was am outlet plug cover (like the ones that protect babies from shocking themselves) that doubled as a shelf. You lose a plug in the process, but it can be moved without having to take the outlet cover off, which is behavior that hotels generally frown upon.
As far as amazing kids go, that's more or less the standard, and even that's sort of played out. It's cool that he came up with it, but it's hardly newsworthy, at least not beyond a 5 minute spot on the local news or an article in a local newspaper. The big news is that he got a patent at such a young age, and that was because his dad's apparently a patent attorney, not because he's a masterful engineer.
One could even reasonably argue that giving him a patent is the wrong way to do things. It's conditioning him to see his conceptions primarily as ways to get money, and that mindset can squash the creativity that allows a young kid to see solutions to problems in the first place.
It doesn't seem like this took any serious R&D, and that this would be something that was more or less a Eureka moment, and then a small amount of time figuring out the specifics for how to do implement it. Piano prodigies and the like are more impressive IMO.
You misunderstand what I mean by net loss. Every single case brought into court against an individual has ended up costing more in legal fees than they could get out of the defendant, because it costs a lot of money to get through a court case, especially with appeals, and the individuals being sued were moms and college students who don't have any money to speak of.
I found it worth mentioning that the obscenely high dollar judgements still resulted in the RIAA being in the red, which makes it not at all a viable action from a business perspective.
At this point, maintaining his business model requires far less work than theirs. He just sells the packets. I really hope that if they do pester him enough to quit, he uploads the info to The Pirate Bay to share with world.
All of the lawsuits against individuals have been net losses for the copyright holders, and this might be about the lost revenue for USCG, particularly the money lost from not settling. Basically, what I'm saying is that there is no logic to these suits, so don't try and apply logic to them.
No, the Statute of Anne's longer title was "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." Earlier laws on copying were essentially monopolies for those the reigning monarch favored, but the Statute of Anne was explicitly for the purposes of encouraging learning.
It wouldn't be theft, but it would be a somewhat fraudulent patent claims. The Sony rootkit using LAME was industrial scale commercial copyright infringement by one of the big four. That was a bigger offence than most anything domestic on their radar.
In regards to the differences between tangible property and patents, copyright, and trademarks, the biggest differences IMO is what is required for protection. One can reasonably defend tangible property. Involvement of the state can help in giving greater consistency in ownership, but it's largely individuals in the private sector that do the enforcing. Compare this to ideas, where the logistics are completely different. It requires active steps to stop people from copying a published idea, which means it requires a lot of government involvement, and stronger enforcement means a greater invasion of privacy. Furthermore, creating artificial scarcity is generally not a desired behavior, so you need a good reason to artificially make something scarce. In regards to US law, the purpose was to create limited term artificial scarcity of application of ideas in hopes that it will result in more ideas being and knowledge available to the public in the long run.
The two later examples you've made are fraudulent and fall into the realm of trademark, which is very different from patents and copyright. The concern there is that consumers are deceived and harmed. Monster Cables and Monster.com are not in conflict over the rights to the word "monster." These two companies have different markets, so there is limited concern over confusion between the two.
You can make a slight change or extension to an existing idea and get a patent regardless of whether or not the existing idea is patented. Because of this, you can have some things require several patents to be produced because an implementation makes use of several patents that are derivative of each other.
There's something similar with copyright. I could slightly change Hamlet and legally claim it as my own composition, but if someone uses a derivative of my derivative, they would be guilty of copyright infringement (as long as they don't fall within fair use and such).
It would seem that something similar has been done historically. There's a commandment about the usage of God's name, and one could argue that YHWH is to Yahweh (or whatever the exact pronunciation is supposed to be) as *nix is to UNIX. God's name is perhaps one of the oldest trademarks humanity has.
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I think the numbers we have regarding HADOPI had much higher false positives.
I'm not entirely sure how the lawyer payment thing works, but I know that the RIAA has lost money on their lawsuits despite 'winning.' I understand that some parties in the mass p2p suits have collected some money from those that settled, but that doesn't mean there's a net profit involved.
Has there actually been any evidence that any plaintiff has even made their lawyer's fees back? If not, calling it profitable is questionable
And of course, even if they were anarchist, it's not like the only difference about Somalia and say the US is the lack of government. It sucked when it had a government, and most people wouldn't prefer to live in Somalia's neighbors that also have governments.
"Why let other bands cover individual songs from your albums?" In that particular case, at least in the US, said artists don't have a choice. Licensing for covers is compulsory and at a statutory rate, so the only way they could prevent covers is by never doing a recorded rendition themselves. I could do the worst rendition of the most beautiful song in the world, and as long as I pay the royalties and don't change the melody or lyrics, there's nothing the author in question can do about it. Floyd might be able to exploit a loophole for The Wall by claiming that it is a 'dramatic musical composition', which isn't subject to compulsory licensing, but I'd have to say those claims would be resting on The Thin Ice (sorry, I had to shoehorn at least one Floyd reference in this post)
It'd probably be movie studios getting money from movie theaters, which is already the status quo. The difference would be some logistical changes and the studios leaving the internet alone.
I'm not claiming that my plan will end corporate meddling in the arts, but it can at least limit the amount of power they have downstream. I'm just saying that we can get the same kind of movies we get now without copyright. Now, one advantage is that it would probably be less prone to consolidation than the media conglomerates we have today, which means the good things about market forces would apply to a greater extent.
I think the problem is that people aren't very creative with business models, although there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests we actually made more media and progress when we didn't have copyright and patents.
Now, to address the logistics. For most musicians, recordings are promotional tools. Their income isn't in the recordings, but rather in live shows and merchandising.
Now, for movies, I have a potential plan that I think could work well. It's not that widely known, but movie theaters don't make significant profits on people watching movies. The real money is in selling popcorn and other concessions. So, if movies are already loss leaders to get people to buy popcorn, why not take it to a more extreme version of this, and have the big movie theaters fund movies. In exchange for a larger share of funding, they get the first run of copies, with minor contributors getting later copies. I would be very interested to see how this works, especially in regards to ticket prices. I would think this would favor cheap tickets in order to sell more food, resulting in the cost of a trip to the movies to go down, as theaters aim for high volume. This would be a great benefit to consumers, and could be better overall for the film industry.
Ah, the article actually say that "The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn’t be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved." They don't see it as something that SHOULD be illegal.
It'll be far more than dozen years. Under current US laws, Pong will remain covered by copyright until around 2067, and that's for the original arcade version. Any port of it will have some minor changes, and thus the copyright will be longer. We do need better laws for orphan works, though, and 'life of the author' copyright terms should be exposed for the racist (and many other forms of prejudice) bullshit it is.
Where are you getting the idea that they don't think it's illegal? Illegal and wrong are not one in the same.
For starters, the government fronts a lot of the bill, with some estimates as high as 75%. Secondly, people are idiots that still buy Tylenol when generic acetaminophen is half the price (I've read that advertising is double the R&D costs on average). Other problems include the added costs of me-too drugs like Claritin and Clarinex, the latter of which hit the market just as Claritin patents were expiring, and Big Pharma pressuring docs to push new expensive drugs in what isn't far removed from payola.
Finally, exclusive rights are not the only option. Giving a statutorily capped royalty per mg of active ingredient (or something similar) for a set period with compulsory licensing like we do with recordings of musical compositions would mean that researchers can get a return on investment (possibly a better one because people with patents and copyrights tend to do stupid things with them) while drugs are guaranteed to be widely available to the public.
The money is generally in shows and merch. Recorded music is for basically every artist a promotional tool
Overall, the US is more or less the loosest. We required registration and renewment, and took longer to switch to life of the author. I think we are more permissive about orphaned works. There are a few cases where Australia's shorter period gives us a few works that the US doesn't, but it's fairly small. Basically, it's limited to works that were registered and renewed (if needed) in the US, where the author has been dead for more than 50 years, but the work was published after 1923.
pre-1923 is in the public domain, and a lot of works weren't renewed or ever covered by copyright (especially if they were foreign works). The life+70 years didn't happen until the latest copyright law change, and copyright of works pre-1978 isn't based on the life of the author. There are also some special rules for orphaned works, which I'm not that familiar with.
Because we don't all adulate a small child for figuring out something one could reasonably expect a small child to figure out? It's a shelf, and this kid figured out a moderately creative way of hanging it. I'd probably be proud of him if I knew him, but I wouldn't expect people who didn't to really care.
Incidentally, it seems that a misleading angle on the photograph misled me into thinking it was something a big more creative than it actually was. I was thinking that it was am outlet plug cover (like the ones that protect babies from shocking themselves) that doubled as a shelf. You lose a plug in the process, but it can be moved without having to take the outlet cover off, which is behavior that hotels generally frown upon.
image of the basic idea is here: http://yfrog.com/emlolinventionp
As far as amazing kids go, that's more or less the standard, and even that's sort of played out. It's cool that he came up with it, but it's hardly newsworthy, at least not beyond a 5 minute spot on the local news or an article in a local newspaper. The big news is that he got a patent at such a young age, and that was because his dad's apparently a patent attorney, not because he's a masterful engineer.
One could even reasonably argue that giving him a patent is the wrong way to do things. It's conditioning him to see his conceptions primarily as ways to get money, and that mindset can squash the creativity that allows a young kid to see solutions to problems in the first place.
It doesn't seem like this took any serious R&D, and that this would be something that was more or less a Eureka moment, and then a small amount of time figuring out the specifics for how to do implement it. Piano prodigies and the like are more impressive IMO.
You misunderstand what I mean by net loss. Every single case brought into court against an individual has ended up costing more in legal fees than they could get out of the defendant, because it costs a lot of money to get through a court case, especially with appeals, and the individuals being sued were moms and college students who don't have any money to speak of. I found it worth mentioning that the obscenely high dollar judgements still resulted in the RIAA being in the red, which makes it not at all a viable action from a business perspective.
At this point, maintaining his business model requires far less work than theirs. He just sells the packets. I really hope that if they do pester him enough to quit, he uploads the info to The Pirate Bay to share with world.
All of the lawsuits against individuals have been net losses for the copyright holders, and this might be about the lost revenue for USCG, particularly the money lost from not settling. Basically, what I'm saying is that there is no logic to these suits, so don't try and apply logic to them.
No, the Statute of Anne's longer title was "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." Earlier laws on copying were essentially monopolies for those the reigning monarch favored, but the Statute of Anne was explicitly for the purposes of encouraging learning.
It wouldn't be theft, but it would be a somewhat fraudulent patent claims. The Sony rootkit using LAME was industrial scale commercial copyright infringement by one of the big four. That was a bigger offence than most anything domestic on their radar.
In regards to the differences between tangible property and patents, copyright, and trademarks, the biggest differences IMO is what is required for protection. One can reasonably defend tangible property. Involvement of the state can help in giving greater consistency in ownership, but it's largely individuals in the private sector that do the enforcing. Compare this to ideas, where the logistics are completely different. It requires active steps to stop people from copying a published idea, which means it requires a lot of government involvement, and stronger enforcement means a greater invasion of privacy. Furthermore, creating artificial scarcity is generally not a desired behavior, so you need a good reason to artificially make something scarce. In regards to US law, the purpose was to create limited term artificial scarcity of application of ideas in hopes that it will result in more ideas being and knowledge available to the public in the long run. The two later examples you've made are fraudulent and fall into the realm of trademark, which is very different from patents and copyright. The concern there is that consumers are deceived and harmed. Monster Cables and Monster.com are not in conflict over the rights to the word "monster." These two companies have different markets, so there is limited concern over confusion between the two.
You can make a slight change or extension to an existing idea and get a patent regardless of whether or not the existing idea is patented. Because of this, you can have some things require several patents to be produced because an implementation makes use of several patents that are derivative of each other. There's something similar with copyright. I could slightly change Hamlet and legally claim it as my own composition, but if someone uses a derivative of my derivative, they would be guilty of copyright infringement (as long as they don't fall within fair use and such).
It would seem that something similar has been done historically. There's a commandment about the usage of God's name, and one could argue that YHWH is to Yahweh (or whatever the exact pronunciation is supposed to be) as *nix is to UNIX. God's name is perhaps one of the oldest trademarks humanity has.