IP is just that right over something that doesn't exist anyway, as opposed to normal property ownership, which is a legislatively created monopoly right over something that does exist.
No, it isn't a legislatively created monopoly, it is a natural monopoly. Since only one person can be in control/possession of a phsysical object at one time it can be owned. You don't need a legal structure to prevent someone from copying your chair because physical objects can't be copied in that manner. You do need a legal structure to prevent someone from copying an idea because once you release an idea it is infinitely copyable without your knowledge of said copying and without any physical loss being incurred by anyone doing the copying.
To keep an idea to one's self goes against what I was saying. You can tell anyone you want what your idea is. Someone else can have discovered it before you, it doesn't matter, it's still your idea. Who is going to reach into your head and take it out?
Thank you for pointing out the flaw in your own assertion. Because the idea cannot be 'taken away', it fails to behave as property in the traditional sense. You're "mine" is speaking much more in an "Author's Right" sense than a "Property" sense. The fact that you can give it away and yet still have it illustrates that nicely.
all law is arbitrary. therefore, intellectual property exists on the same level as any other property, though its origins differ.
I'm afraid I disagree. Go reread the Jefferson quote that's been posted. Ideas are not the same as physical objects. Regardless of any underlying legal structure someone can own a physical thing, like say a rock. In a true anarchist state, you could own it by virtue of being strong enough to maintain control over it regardless of anyone else wanting it. And while you do maintain such control that rock cannot be used by anyone else. Ideas don't work like that. You do not lose anything by giving your idea to someone else. Neither of you lose anything by spreading the idea far and wide. Many people can posses an idea (heck, they could even come up with the same idea without even knowing about it) but only one person can ever own that rock.
As a footnote to my content-free parent post, let me just say that language only has "power" if you yield it; if you choose to give it power. If you doubt this, ask your friendly neighborhood kike, nigger or spic whether they feel any of those terms has power over them or defines them.
Those terms may not have 'power over them' but if the biggots down the street continue to use those terms to reinforce their way of thinking it can most definitly impact those peoples lives both in the attitudes others take towards them and the actions that follow. Controlling the words used to address a topic is an incredibly powerful thing to do. The language determines the underlying region of possibilities. Go read some linguistic anthropology/culture texts or Babel 17 by Delany for some examples.
Following this line of thought, a person selling a "How to Commit Murder and Get Away With It" kit, should be charged with murder, even though no 'crime' has been comitted.
Should it be a crime? Maybe. Should they be charged as if they commited the crime? Some judges apparently would say yes.
Time to start rounding up the crime novelists and the reporters then...
Maybe for you in your nice cushy job, but some of us barely make that at all much less being able to pay bills/buy food/etc after that. Think before you speak asswipe, there are people a lot worse off than you and if 500 a month is change for you there's a lot of us.
Maybe this'll make people think before they steal IP in future.
Except he didn't steal any IP, nor did he even plan to. He had plans to potentially release a device that potentially allowed others to steal access to satellite TV. Maybe we should just go ahead and declare marshal law since everyone could potentially be a murderer.
You give up all rights to complain about the deal when you agree that the deal is fair and sign off on it.
This is true, however don't forget how nasty the lables can be. Even if the A&R man just scribbles 'Lets make a deal' on a napkin and you sign it the big iron of the music industry has turned that into a binding contract that prevents you from even talking to another label. You take their contract or no contract at all. Even if you discussed no particulars or stipulations beforehand.
It is blindingly obvious that some people will buy less music if they can get the same thing free or very cheap.
True enough. However it is not the only factor involved in the sales decline. It isn't even the largest of many factors in all likelyhood. Yet the industry continually fights tooth and nail to make it look like the only possible reason under the sun this could be happening, despite the entire economy being in the shitter.
for sure there is not a counter-balancing volume of people out there who are buying more because of illegal copying.
Seemingly intelligent, huh? This is a downright false statement. Every study done to date that wasn't sponsored by the music industry showed that in areas with high internet penetration (say, college campuses) music sales were markedly higher after the influx of music sharing than before and far healthier than elsewhere. I would probably grant you that more individual people don't buy since they have the mp3s than do buy, but there is a rift in the types that creates a very lopsidded equation. The types of 'fans' who are satisfied with mp3s and a burned copy are much less likely to buy any given album in the first place, and less likely to spend as much on music across the board. I.E. They have 50 bucks to spend this month, w/o p2p they were gonna spend 20 on cds bust since they downloaded some of the stuff they only spend 10. The other end is people like me (or how I used to be). I was gonna spend 50 bucks that month. Before p2p 30 of it was going to be music. But since I discovered 3 new bands I liked over p2p I went and spent 60 bucks and all on music.
That's the way it usually shakes down in my personally experience. Yeah, less people use it to sample and find new stuff than just rip whatever they heard on the radio and keep it. But those that do sample tend to be very into music. I was dream customer for the RIAA before all this crap hit the fan. Between myself and my wife we have well over 1200 store bought CDs (and no illegal mp3s, thank you very much). My half of this was amassed in less than a decade. That's more than a cd a week. Since this debacle started I've both steered away from RIAA affiliated music in general and p2p as a whole. I've bought 3 CDs in the past 8 months. Right or wrong legally, can you really say the RIAA is winning this battle or fighting the good fight?
[i]unless it has one of those "no copies without permission" warnings. [/i]
Those are meaningless. A companie can put any kinds of instructions on their packaging/contracts/etc. That doesn't change the law. It is pretty firmly established in fair use doctrine that you can make copies for your own personal use. This is why the DMCA has to attack the act of circumvention rahter than the copying itself.
It's only fair use if you're citing part of the lyric for a paper or an article. Copying the whole thing, for the sole purpose of having a copy of the whole thing, is simple infringement.
No, and no. I can make all the copies I like of all the books/lyrics/magazine articles/whatever and be perfectly within the bounds of the law. The part that makes it infringment is the redistribution part. Granted, that is being done in the case these discussions started with, but we have to make sure we keep the ground rules of the discussion in mind.
I mean seriously, would you give a ride to a guy who's on his way to date your girlfriend?
If you're driving a city bus at the time, you damn well better. That's closer to the situation here. The cable companies are in control of a public trust thus have to abide by some stricter rules than some random schmoo yelling from him dorm room.
How exactly is this an "Oh no our rights are being trampled!" case? It's simply PA being charged under the Slander and Libel law. I wish the editors wouldn't cheapen the usually sound and just YRO section with stories of common criminals getting what's coming to them.
A) They are not being 'charged' with anything. Read the article.
B) Even if they were, it could not be slander/libel. Nothing was said about American Greetings, it's products, or it's representatives.
What was done was a parody of one of their products. The C&D (sad that those are so common everyone will know what I mean) was about trademark infringement. The first amendment has long been interpreted in this country to protect the rights of parody and satire in almost every case. "Our rights are being trampled" because once again a giant corp. is trying to sling around their weight in clear defience of the law.
Agreed, but that's got nothing to do with this story. Reverse engineering a company's software or protocols isn't scientific nor does it advance science.
Only if you think computer science isn't really science. Also it is hugely important to a free market. Without the right to reverse engineer we wouldn't have these nice PCs were are talking on right now.
I was very disappointed with the DVD edition of "My neighbor Totoro".
That's because it was a shoddy, quick-job done by Fox so they could get it out the door just under the gun of their distribution rights expiring. You can expect Disney/Buena Vista to release a very nice 2 disc version (just like Spirited Away, Kiki, and Laputa/Castle in the Sky are getting on the 15th) at some point in the future.
Weirdest of all is hiring Neil Gaiman to "adapt" the script. God knows what that means. He didn't even make the obvious change: correcting the translators misnaming of various smoothbore weapons as "rifles".
Being a huge fan of both Gaiman and Miyazaki I can shed some light here. Much of the script for the film (and any film really) has to be changed for a dub. Jokes, word-play, historical references, and the like usually have to be either somehow explained (with added exposition) or modified to similar item in the new language. That sort of thing is what Gaiman did. They used him in particular so he could help maintain the mythic feel and tone the movie had.
So essentially what happened was a few professional translators went through the film and did the literal word-for-word translation of the whole thing. Then they sat down with Gaiman (plus Gaiman did a lot of research on his own) and walked through it all and converted that into an english script that was both comprehensible to an american and stayed true to the original vision. As for calling the muskets/blunderbusses rifles, that was Disney's call. They had final editorial control and for some reason were adamant about calling the things rifles. Gaiman actually mentioned this in particular in his blog as one of the things he was confused by/unsatisfied with, believe it or not. There's more detail to be had if you search in his archives here.
It's not so much the cultural stuff I mind (although it wouldn't kill someone to learn a little bit of someone elses culture) so much as the truly horrid voice acting. Made me want to put out me ears.
It is indeed from the 70s, or most of it is anyway. Many, many changes were made by the dubbers. This would be acceptable perhaps if the actual dub was good, but alas it is not. I'm a huge Lupin fan but I couldn't make it through more than about 15 seconds of the CN version.
As the Reason interview mentions, derivative works of Mickey Mouse would have Mickey shooting heroin, or Mickey smuggling dope [mogozuzu.com], or Mickey Mouse Porn [google.com]. I'm not saying that makes infinite copyright okay, but it is not hard to understand why the heirs (and/or company) of a creator of a "wholesome" character would not want people to use it just anywhere.
To be blunt.. tough tittie. You show someone else an idea you open that idea to interpretation. Walt knew the deal when he released the mouse in the 20s. He knew that before the turn of the century the public at large would be able to take mickey and rape his six ways from sunday. He balanced that with the possibility of money/fame/making people happy and decided it was a fair shake. What isn't fair is the people who bought his soul going back on the deal now.
In 1998 Congress was the scene of a battle over public domain, the public right of common, free and unrestricted use of artistic works whose copyright has expired. Corporations like Disney, organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, and dead artists' families wanted to extend copyright. Advocates of public domain wanted to leave copyright protection as it was, which would have allowed many early 20th-century works, including corporate creations like Mickey Mouse, to slip into the public domain. The copyright owners won, and yesterday they won again when the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, decided that Congress was within its constitutional rights when it extended copyright. The court's decision may make constitutional sense, but it does not serve the public well.
Under that 1998 act, copyright now extends for the life of an artist plus 70 years. Copyrights owned by corporations run for 95 years. Since the Constitution grants Congress the right to authorize copyright for "limited times," even the opponents of an extended term were not hopeful that the Supreme Court would rule otherwise. This decision almost certainly prepares the way for more bad copyright extension laws in the future. Congress has lengthened copyright 11 times in the past 40 years.
Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation where they can be used without paying royalties.
In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.
---
That shows exactly why this case was lost. The editorial writer was obviously trying to show how negative this decision was but his writing betrays the fact that he (or she) has already bought into the mass media's idea of how copyright works. "Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work" is false. Having control of an idea once you express that idea to another is patently non-natural by the very definition of idea. If it was a natural state we wouldn't have had to enumerate that congress had the power to grand that right. Again, completely false. The state of affairs for tens of thousands of years was that of the "public domain" even if it was not named as such. Without the power of copyright law as created a few hundred years ago everything was public domain. If you saw/read/heard something and had the ability to recreate it you were free to do so. The very notion of trying to control the spread an idea would have been laughable in civilizations past. This person, as well as our justices, have lived in a world where copyright lasted forever (from their birth to their future death) for their entire lives. They have rarely if ever had cause to consider the idea that works even can pass into the public realms much less that they should and must. Until we can overcome this basic problem that taints the field of play this is and will be a losing battle.
p.s. Yes, I'm breaking the copyright on that editorial by posting it.
So tell me then, how can extending the copyright for works created in 1930 promote the creation of more works be the dead author? Retroactive law is, essentially, always illegal law period. Even under basic contract law this wouldn't fly. The deal when the work was released can't be changed post facto.
`(h)(1) For purposes of this section, during the last 20 years of any term of copyright of a published work, a library or archives, including a nonprofit educational institution that functions as such, may reproduce, distribute, display, or perform in facsimile or digital form a copy or phonorecord of such work, or portions thereof, for purposes of preservation, scholarship, or research, if such library or archives has first determined, on the basis of a reasonable investigation, that none of the conditions set forth in subparagraphs (A), (B), and (C) of paragraph (2) apply."
Thank you for posting this! It points out the complete absurdity of this ruling. As of 1995 Steamboat Willy was in it's last 20 years. So say my library did make some copies as set forth in this section. Then in 1996 suddenly the work is now 31 years out instead of 11. Due to the insanity of _retroactive_ laws my library has now committed a felony.
This clause is completely meaningless if copyrights on already existant works can be extended.
Any work worth the money can be made public domain simply through making public witnessed statements that can be brought up in court.
I do not believe this would be enough. In Digital Copyright Litman mentions, in particular, that an entire mailing list of copyright lawyers and scholars couldn't come up with a binding legal way to release a work into the public domain. Given that, I don't think something as simple as witnessed statements would do the trick. The family/heirs could still enforce the copyright in any cases where the author himself did not grant particular permission to the offending party.
The big problem I have with it is the retroactive aspects. You cannot "promote" the creation of things that are already made. Increasing the length of copyright on previously created materials can in no way be an incentive for their creation by simple definition. If the copyright period in the 20s was good enough for Walt to make Steamboat Willy than it should go public when it was expected to by law then, period. How our legal system let that go is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
IP is just that right over something that doesn't exist anyway, as opposed to normal property ownership, which is a legislatively created monopoly right over something that does exist.
No, it isn't a legislatively created monopoly, it is a natural monopoly. Since only one person can be in control/possession of a phsysical object at one time it can be owned. You don't need a legal structure to prevent someone from copying your chair because physical objects can't be copied in that manner. You do need a legal structure to prevent someone from copying an idea because once you release an idea it is infinitely copyable without your knowledge of said copying and without any physical loss being incurred by anyone doing the copying.
To keep an idea to one's self goes against what I was saying. You can tell anyone you want what your idea is. Someone else can have discovered it before you, it doesn't matter, it's still your idea. Who is going to reach into your head and take it out?
Thank you for pointing out the flaw in your own assertion. Because the idea cannot be 'taken away', it fails to behave as property in the traditional sense. You're "mine" is speaking much more in an "Author's Right" sense than a "Property" sense. The fact that you can give it away and yet still have it illustrates that nicely.
all law is arbitrary. therefore, intellectual property exists on the same level as any other property, though its origins differ.
I'm afraid I disagree. Go reread the Jefferson quote that's been posted. Ideas are not the same as physical objects. Regardless of any underlying legal structure someone can own a physical thing, like say a rock. In a true anarchist state, you could own it by virtue of being strong enough to maintain control over it regardless of anyone else wanting it. And while you do maintain such control that rock cannot be used by anyone else. Ideas don't work like that. You do not lose anything by giving your idea to someone else. Neither of you lose anything by spreading the idea far and wide. Many people can posses an idea (heck, they could even come up with the same idea without even knowing about it) but only one person can ever own that rock.
As a footnote to my content-free parent post, let me just say that language only has "power" if you yield it; if you choose to give it power.
If you doubt this, ask your friendly neighborhood kike, nigger or spic whether they feel any of those terms has power over them or defines them.
Those terms may not have 'power over them' but if the biggots down the street continue to use those terms to reinforce their way of thinking it can most definitly impact those peoples lives both in the attitudes others take towards them and the actions that follow. Controlling the words used to address a topic is an incredibly powerful thing to do. The language determines the underlying region of possibilities. Go read some linguistic anthropology/culture texts or Babel 17 by Delany for some examples.
Following this line of thought, a person selling a "How to Commit Murder and Get Away With It" kit, should be charged with murder, even though no 'crime' has been comitted.
Should it be a crime? Maybe. Should they be charged as if they commited the crime? Some judges apparently would say yes.
Time to start rounding up the crime novelists and the reporters then...
Crippling? It's $500 a month. Chump change.
Maybe for you in your nice cushy job, but some of us barely make that at all much less being able to pay bills/buy food/etc after that. Think before you speak asswipe, there are people a lot worse off than you and if 500 a month is change for you there's a lot of us.
Maybe this'll make people think before they steal IP in future.
Except he didn't steal any IP, nor did he even plan to. He had plans to potentially release a device that potentially allowed others to steal access to satellite TV. Maybe we should just go ahead and declare marshal law since everyone could potentially be a murderer.
You give up all rights to complain about the deal when you agree that the deal is fair and sign off on it.
This is true, however don't forget how nasty the lables can be. Even if the A&R man just scribbles 'Lets make a deal' on a napkin and you sign it the big iron of the music industry has turned that into a binding contract that prevents you from even talking to another label. You take their contract or no contract at all. Even if you discussed no particulars or stipulations beforehand.
That is, a major target audience does not have the resources to purchase more music, and hence are just buying less due to the ease of downloading.
Both my personal experience and the studies I have seen contradict this. What they and I have seen would change your statement just a touch:
That is, a major target audience does not have the resources to purchase more music, and hence are just getting more due to the ease of downloading.
It is blindingly obvious that some people will buy less music if they can get the same thing free or very cheap.
True enough. However it is not the only factor involved in the sales decline. It isn't even the largest of many factors in all likelyhood. Yet the industry continually fights tooth and nail to make it look like the only possible reason under the sun this could be happening, despite the entire economy being in the shitter.
for sure there is not a counter-balancing volume of people out there who are buying more because of illegal copying.
Seemingly intelligent, huh? This is a downright false statement. Every study done to date that wasn't sponsored by the music industry showed that in areas with high internet penetration (say, college campuses) music sales were markedly higher after the influx of music sharing than before and far healthier than elsewhere. I would probably grant you that more individual people don't buy since they have the mp3s than do buy, but there is a rift in the types that creates a very lopsidded equation. The types of 'fans' who are satisfied with mp3s and a burned copy are much less likely to buy any given album in the first place, and less likely to spend as much on music across the board. I.E. They have 50 bucks to spend this month, w/o p2p they were gonna spend 20 on cds bust since they downloaded some of the stuff they only spend 10. The other end is people like me (or how I used to be). I was gonna spend 50 bucks that month. Before p2p 30 of it was going to be music. But since I discovered 3 new bands I liked over p2p I went and spent 60 bucks and all on music.
That's the way it usually shakes down in my personally experience. Yeah, less people use it to sample and find new stuff than just rip whatever they heard on the radio and keep it. But those that do sample tend to be very into music. I was dream customer for the RIAA before all this crap hit the fan. Between myself and my wife we have well over 1200 store bought CDs (and no illegal mp3s, thank you very much). My half of this was amassed in less than a decade. That's more than a cd a week. Since this debacle started I've both steered away from RIAA affiliated music in general and p2p as a whole. I've bought 3 CDs in the past 8 months. Right or wrong legally, can you really say the RIAA is winning this battle or fighting the good fight?
[i]unless it has one of those "no copies without permission" warnings.
[/i]
Those are meaningless. A companie can put any kinds of instructions on their packaging/contracts/etc. That doesn't change the law. It is pretty firmly established in fair use doctrine that you can make copies for your own personal use. This is why the DMCA has to attack the act of circumvention rahter than the copying itself.
It's only fair use if you're citing part of the lyric for a paper or an article. Copying the whole thing, for the sole purpose of having a copy of the whole thing, is simple infringement.
No, and no. I can make all the copies I like of all the books/lyrics/magazine articles/whatever and be perfectly within the bounds of the law. The part that makes it infringment is the redistribution part. Granted, that is being done in the case these discussions started with, but we have to make sure we keep the ground rules of the discussion in mind.
I mean seriously, would you give a ride to a guy who's on his way to date your girlfriend?
If you're driving a city bus at the time, you damn well better. That's closer to the situation here. The cable companies are in control of a public trust thus have to abide by some stricter rules than some random schmoo yelling from him dorm room.
How exactly is this an "Oh no our rights are being trampled!" case? It's simply PA being charged under the Slander and Libel law. I wish the editors wouldn't cheapen the usually sound and just YRO section with stories of common criminals getting what's coming to them.
A) They are not being 'charged' with anything. Read the article.
B) Even if they were, it could not be slander/libel. Nothing was said about American Greetings, it's products, or it's representatives.
What was done was a parody of one of their products. The C&D (sad that those are so common everyone will know what I mean) was about trademark infringement. The first amendment has long been interpreted in this country to protect the rights of parody and satire in almost every case. "Our rights are being trampled" because once again a giant corp. is trying to sling around their weight in clear defience of the law.
Funny.. every copyright extension in the past 30 years had been retroactive, placing existing works in the umbrella of a new law. Even that is gone.
Agreed, but that's got nothing to do with this story. Reverse engineering a company's software or protocols isn't scientific nor does it advance science.
Only if you think computer science isn't really science. Also it is hugely important to a free market. Without the right to reverse engineer we wouldn't have these nice PCs were are talking on right now.
I was very disappointed with the DVD edition of "My neighbor Totoro".
That's because it was a shoddy, quick-job done by Fox so they could get it out the door just under the gun of their distribution rights expiring. You can expect Disney/Buena Vista to release a very nice 2 disc version (just like Spirited Away, Kiki, and Laputa/Castle in the Sky are getting on the 15th) at some point in the future.
Weirdest of all is hiring Neil Gaiman to "adapt" the script. God knows what that means. He didn't even make the obvious change: correcting the translators misnaming of various smoothbore weapons as "rifles".
Being a huge fan of both Gaiman and Miyazaki I can shed some light here. Much of the script for the film (and any film really) has to be changed for a dub. Jokes, word-play, historical references, and the like usually have to be either somehow explained (with added exposition) or modified to similar item in the new language. That sort of thing is what Gaiman did. They used him in particular so he could help maintain the mythic feel and tone the movie had.
So essentially what happened was a few professional translators went through the film and did the literal word-for-word translation of the whole thing. Then they sat down with Gaiman (plus Gaiman did a lot of research on his own) and walked through it all and converted that into an english script that was both comprehensible to an american and stayed true to the original vision. As for calling the muskets/blunderbusses rifles, that was Disney's call. They had final editorial control and for some reason were adamant about calling the things rifles. Gaiman actually mentioned this in particular in his blog as one of the things he was confused by/unsatisfied with, believe it or not. There's more detail to be had if you search in his archives here.
It's not so much the cultural stuff I mind (although it wouldn't kill someone to learn a little bit of someone elses culture) so much as the truly horrid voice acting. Made me want to put out me ears.
It is indeed from the 70s, or most of it is anyway. Many, many changes were made by the dubbers. This would be acceptable perhaps if the actual dub was good, but alas it is not. I'm a huge Lupin fan but I couldn't make it through more than about 15 seconds of the CN version.
As the Reason interview mentions, derivative works of Mickey Mouse would have Mickey shooting heroin, or Mickey smuggling dope [mogozuzu.com], or Mickey Mouse Porn [google.com]. I'm not saying that makes infinite copyright okay, but it is not hard to understand why the heirs (and/or company) of a creator of a "wholesome" character would not want people to use it just anywhere.
To be blunt.. tough tittie. You show someone else an idea you open that idea to interpretation. Walt knew the deal when he released the mouse in the 20s. He knew that before the turn of the century the public at large would be able to take mickey and rape his six ways from sunday. He balanced that with the possibility of money/fame/making people happy and decided it was a fair shake. What isn't fair is the people who bought his soul going back on the deal now.
A NYT editorial on the case:
The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity
In 1998 Congress was the scene of a battle over public domain, the public right of common, free and unrestricted use of artistic works whose copyright has expired. Corporations like Disney, organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, and dead artists' families wanted to extend copyright. Advocates of public domain wanted to leave copyright protection as it was, which would have allowed many early 20th-century works, including corporate creations like Mickey Mouse, to slip into the public domain. The copyright owners won, and yesterday they won again when the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, decided that Congress was within its constitutional rights when it extended copyright. The court's decision may make constitutional sense, but it does not serve the public well.
Under that 1998 act, copyright now extends for the life of an artist plus 70 years. Copyrights owned by corporations run for 95 years. Since the Constitution grants Congress the right to authorize copyright for "limited times," even the opponents of an extended term were not hopeful that the Supreme Court would rule otherwise. This decision almost certainly prepares the way for more bad copyright extension laws in the future. Congress has lengthened copyright 11 times in the past 40 years.
Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation where they can be used without paying royalties.
In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.
---
That shows exactly why this case was lost. The editorial writer was obviously trying to show how negative this decision was but his writing betrays the fact that he (or she) has already bought into the mass media's idea of how copyright works. "Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work" is false. Having control of an idea once you express that idea to another is patently non-natural by the very definition of idea. If it was a natural state we wouldn't have had to enumerate that congress had the power to grand that right. Again, completely false. The state of affairs for tens of thousands of years was that of the "public domain" even if it was not named as such. Without the power of copyright law as created a few hundred years ago everything was public domain. If you saw/read/heard something and had the ability to recreate it you were free to do so. The very notion of trying to control the spread an idea would have been laughable in civilizations past. This person, as well as our justices, have lived in a world where copyright lasted forever (from their birth to their future death) for their entire lives. They have rarely if ever had cause to consider the idea that works even can pass into the public realms much less that they should and must. Until we can overcome this basic problem that taints the field of play this is and will be a losing battle.
p.s. Yes, I'm breaking the copyright on that editorial by posting it.
so I don't think the courts decision was bad.
So tell me then, how can extending the copyright for works created in 1930 promote the creation of more works be the dead author? Retroactive law is, essentially, always illegal law period. Even under basic contract law this wouldn't fly. The deal when the work was released can't be changed post facto.
`(h)(1) For purposes of this section, during the last 20 years of any term of copyright of a published work, a library or archives, including a nonprofit educational institution that functions as such, may reproduce, distribute, display, or perform in facsimile or digital form a copy or phonorecord of such work, or portions thereof, for purposes of preservation, scholarship, or research, if such library or archives has first determined, on the basis of a reasonable investigation, that none of the conditions set forth in subparagraphs (A), (B), and (C) of paragraph (2) apply."
Thank you for posting this! It points out the complete absurdity of this ruling. As of 1995 Steamboat Willy was in it's last 20 years. So say my library did make some copies as set forth in this section. Then in 1996 suddenly the work is now 31 years out instead of 11. Due to the insanity of _retroactive_ laws my library has now committed a felony.
This clause is completely meaningless if copyrights on already existant works can be extended.
Any work worth the money can be made public domain simply through making public witnessed statements that can be brought up in court.
I do not believe this would be enough. In Digital Copyright Litman mentions, in particular, that an entire mailing list of copyright lawyers and scholars couldn't come up with a binding legal way to release a work into the public domain. Given that, I don't think something as simple as witnessed statements would do the trick. The family/heirs could still enforce the copyright in any cases where the author himself did not grant particular permission to the offending party.
The big problem I have with it is the retroactive aspects. You cannot "promote" the creation of things that are already made. Increasing the length of copyright on previously created materials can in no way be an incentive for their creation by simple definition. If the copyright period in the 20s was good enough for Walt to make Steamboat Willy than it should go public when it was expected to by law then, period. How our legal system let that go is beyond me.