You can place your own work into the public domain at any time you like though. Put it on your website with a message stating that it's free for others to use as they like, nothing is stopping you. I applaud people who do so, I think it's an admirable and generous thing to do. What I don't like is someone demanding that someone else do so.
And honestly, lets put the big name artists aside for a moment. If one of your photos were used in a particularly heinous "Aryan Nations" campaign somehow, your soapbox wouldn't get you very far. You'd end up being known as "that racist photographer", and nobody would likely listen when you said otherwise (people remember scandals, but it seems rarely ever corrections). I can't imagine you'd be okay with that, and I suspect it might sour you on producing any more art. End result, the masterpiece you may have been destined to create never happens, everyone loses. Copyright gives you the chance to demand that the Aryans stop using your work, to sue for damages and very publicly and clearly state that you did not condone the message your work was co-opted to send.
I don't think I came off the way I intended to in my last post. Of course you have every right to complain and argue for a "better" system. I do think though that you are better off voting with your wallet though, since by purchasing the media the only message the media companies are going to get is that they've got another "happy customer". Maybe renting instead would be a good compromise, as you'd still get to see the movie, DVD sales would go down, and you're still getting it though a legitimate channel. Hell, rent and pass it around to a few friends before it's due back, seems like fair game to me.....
I think I was aiming more at people who buy a movie or cd, rip it, and then put it on bit-torrent while shouting "The information wants to be free!", and then watch in stunned amazement as the lawsuits pile up (not to say I agree with the RIAA strategy of suing people into oblivion, personally I think it's a rotten way to do business).
I am not particularly on the side of big media conglomerates, and honestly I'm not a huge fan of rich rockstars either. I just don't think taking their work is the right way to go about it. I'd rather see the business model driven into the ground, to the point where mp3s are virtually worthless from a market standpoint, and then perhaps the media companies die off and the artists go back to playing live shows to make their money. But, if they want to ask $15 for a CD, and people want to pay it, who am I to simply walk in and say "Okay, you've made enough, now I'm giving away your work for free".
And this means copyright is an "unnatural right" exactly how? What the founding fathers were talking about is a group of rights that they believe were inalienable to all men. You've done nothing to refute my suggestion that the language used is not figurative (referring to the rights endowed on man by his creator). Your own comments of Jefferson support the idea that the language is figurative rather than literal. Why is your right to take an artist's work for free a "natural" right, and his right to control over his creation an "unnatural right"?
No, not really. Feelings and logic are two different things. The intent of the legal system is that it be based on logic and rationale evaluation of the consequences the law. That doesn't mean it isn't frequently abused by people with your attitude, but those abuses are in no way a justification to give up on the goals of the system.
Nonsense. Slavery is perfectly logical from the perspective of the enslavers, and was practiced by civilizations that lasted far longer than ours has (slavery-free) so far. We've outlawed it not because of logic, but because we find it morally repugnant, we feel it's wrong.
If you want to breath the oxygen produced by someone else's trees, then apparently you feel it has some value. If it didn't you wouldn't want to breathe it.
Can you really not see the difference here? And honestly, you're free to try to charge me for air from one of your trees. Simply place your trees into an air-tight container, feed carbon-dioxide into it, collect the oxygen they produce, and bottle it. I won't buy it of course, but you're welcome to try. I wouldn't count on getting rich on that business model though. Creative works don't simply float though the air and attach themselves to your MP3 player. You know pretty much where they came from, and who to credit with their creation. In short, your analogy == epic fail.
Elton John: I'm ok with him not allowing use of his works in ways he'd consider objectionable.
Yoko Ono: She didn't write Imagine. Why does she get a say in how it's used? Lennon is dead; his work should go to the public domain.
Jello Biafra: Same as Elton John, assuming Biafra is still alive.
Personally I'd give it to Yoko, but while I support the idea of 50 - 70 years after the author's death I still feel that you have a valid, if differing take on it.
As far as copyright terms and lengths go, here's part of what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: Copyright has been internationally standardized, lasting between fifty to a hundred years from the author's death, or a finite period for anonymous or corporate authorship; some jurisdictions have required formalities to establishing copyright, most recognize copyright in any completed work, without formal registration. Generally, copyright is enforced as a civil matter, though some jurisdictions do apply criminal sanctions. I generally agree with this, but like I said, I concede that the period following the authors death is arguable.
If Shakespeare had written after the Steamboat Willie era, there's no reason to hope its copyright would ever be allowed to lapse. The duration has continually been extended for decades now.
As I've already said in multiple places in this thread that I don't support the idea of copyright in perpetuity, I don't see why you're bothering to bring this up.
That creation is one of an unlimited number of copies of an inanimate thing. What you call "control of a creation" is actually control over the audience, which is where the ethical problem arises.
Utter crap. If you don't want to be "controlled", don't be a member of the audience. Nobody forces you to listen to Queen (although admittedly all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums). You want free music, fine. I don't agree that you have the right to demand it from the people who do the creating.
Why does a 'creative work' get extra protection than a normal one? If someone creates and builds some sort of device and then sells it, the creator (without some sort of up-front negotiated contract) has no say in how it's used, and I don't think they should.
It's given extra protection because, unlike a physical work, anyone can take it and use it in any way they want without concrete consequences. For instance, before copyright, an author could find people selling his work for profit while he himself was penniless. The person selling the work in question literally contributed nothing to it, they simply procured a copy of the work and then began producing their own version of it, at times making more from it than the original writer. I don't see it necessarily as "extra" protection though, it's simply a different type. Think opt-in vs. opt-out. Your device creator can indeed place restrictions on his device by making potential buyers sign a contract stipulating those restrictions (opt-in), whereas an author can allow free and unrestricted use of his work if he wishes by stating it (opt-out). Further, your device-maker can patent his device, preventing you from setting up shop and simply copying his work and profiting from it, an avenue that is denied the author because of the nature of his creation. Now, you may say that you wouldn't sign a restrictive contract for this device, that you'd find some other device that would do the job for you, or invent a device of your own. The same holds for music or literature. If you don't like the terms imposed, don't buy it. Go make your own, or listen to/read something with less onerous terms. There are indy artists who will let you download and trade their music, with the hope that they'll make their living from doing live shows. Go support them. There's your moral position, support those who exercise their rights in a way you agree with rather than those who exercise them in a way you disapprove.
As far as emotional attachment goes, yes, I think that we should allow for the idea that a creative work carries a greater emotional attachment than, say, inventing a new type of gyroscope. I've engaged in all kinds of inventive and creative endevours (nothing great, but enough to give me a taste), and I can't imagine a situation where I would suffer the kind of distress at a device being used in a way I don't like compared with a song or story I wrote being used to (for instance) inspire hatred. Personally I feel that allowing that would be a cruel way to repay an artist for their contribution to society.
No one's saying Queen didn't do any work. But they didn't do *all* the work. As the AC says, they didn't invent the concept of Beelzebub, or the name Galileo. While they do deserve recognition and credit for how they arranged the words, our amorphous "culture" deserves credit for some of the names and concepts that Queen drew upon to create their work.
No, what I'm arguing against is that society is not an active collaborator by virtue of simply existing. Collaboration implies specific effort. Society did not take any actions to consciously assist in producing Queen's music. Society did not attend jam sessions or post-production. To get credit for something, you should probably play a more active role than simply existing, otherwise we may as well call the guitars and drumkits collaborators.
Then, sadly, you aren't really reading or comprehending what other people are saying. We're talking about *shared* credit. We could of course argue all day about how much that credit is shared -- 90/10 in favor of Queen? 80/20? 50/50? 30/70? But the fact remains that Queen's creation drew on collective culture and previous creative work. It had to; it'd be mostly meaningless otherwise.
Oh I'm comprehending it very nicely thank you. You feel that somehow credit can be assigned to "collective culture", even though that culture played no intentional role in the creative process. Since everyone shares that "collective culture" though, doesn't that mean that it has pretty much the same amount influence on everyone? If that's the case then, couldn't you establish a baseline, something like "Everything everyone does is probably about 10% attributable to our 'shared culture'"? And if that's true, is it worth even mentioning anymore? At that point, the playing field is more or less level; the only important and meaningful part is that remaining 90%, as that's the part that varies from person to person.
Queen have been paid. Over and over and over again. Society has rewarded them richly for their creation: the surviving members of the band are wealthy and famous.
No, society has not. Individual members of society have. Why should you now get a free-ride because they paid before you? What if we were talking about an amusement park instead? Lets say that Disney recouped their investment in 1980. Should they now drop the prices to only cover maintenance and overhead while foregoing any profit? After all, society rewarded the Disney family richly over the years, it's remaining members are wealthy. Why should we continue to pay $60 per ticket to get in when it only costs them $30 per guest to maintain the place?
How many times do we have to pay for a song, how much money and fame do we have to give to its creators, how many decades will pass, before you will finally acknowledge that they might just have received enough reward, and we can finally have the right to sing it ourselves in a bar without being sued?
How about until the owner of that song says you can have it for free? You're demanding they give up something that apparently has value, but you're certainly not offering to give up anything in return. If you don't like paying for creative works that other people made, then simply go without them. If you want to play music in a bar without any strings attached, write your own. If you do that, you even have the option of giving it away for free if you like. CAUTION - MINI-RANT AHEAD: Personally I think there are too damn many cover bands anyway. Most of the time there's a juke-box (turned off) within 20 feet of the band that contains all the same songs they intend to play. It's pretty much Karaoke for musicians (instead of just a singer everyone gets to play). If people were less used to cover-bands, perhaps bands would be more comfortable trying out their own material instead. Think about it, you never hear about "cover-comedians" who just stand on stage re-enacting old George Carlin routines, do you? Sure, being in a cover band is a lot of fun (I've done it myself), but doing original stuff is much more interesting and if done well much more impressive. My personal formula is one, maybe two covers per set assuming that you're doing two or three sets in a night.
You say elsewhere that you are not arguing that copyright should be perpetual. So where do you draw the line?
For example, if you happen to support the status quo, the question becomes: what exactly will happen 50-70 years after the death of Elton John that suddenly changes the morality of using one of his songs in an anti-homosexual campaign? If it is OK for Yoko Ono to have total control over the use of John Lennon's work many years after his death, why is it OK for that right to vanish overnight in a few more decades? (It's unlikely she'll still be alive, but it's possible; she's only 75, and medicine is getting pretty good these days.)
For me it's an issue of it being far enough removed from all the folks who were involved in it's creation, but I wouldn't tell you you're wrong if you favoured life-of-the-author and no more. I think anything beyond the author's lifespan is probably an arguable point, including perpetual copyrights, but I happen to favour the customary 50 - 70 years.
True enough. I guess I just started thinking of non-classtime projects because it seemed pretty unlikely that a beginner CS student would be doing anything in class that hadn't been done thousands of times before by other students, which wouldn't be particularly valuable to anyone but themselves as a learning experience.
So what are you saying, Queen should make their music free because in the past people paid for their music?
What about this is so difficult? Queen created music. You want that music. Queen says you can have it, and names a price. You then choose, it's either worth the price and you buy it, or it's not worth the price and you walk away. The fact that they've made a lot of money on it in the past has no relevance. They made something, you want it. If it's really worth nothing, why do you want it so badly? Go make your own music instead. Then, you can not only "stick it to the man" by not paying for someone else's work, you can also give it away to all the people who will surely be clamoring for it. Except there probably won't be much clamoring, because making music that anyone actually wants is hard, and chances are you (like me and almost everyone else) aren't very good at it.
Hey, why don't we take it to the next step now though. You get your wish, all of Queen's library is now public domain, and you can do with it as you please. So what pleases you at the moment is to start selling "Best of Queen" albums. This would be awesome for you, because you can sell them on TV (KTel has been doing this for years, buying rights at a discount for songs that are trivially easy to download for free, so don't tell me there's no market), and the best part is, you did minimal work (assembling the CD), and you get all the benefits! Screw Queen, they made their money, now it's your turn. Just because you're (the "you" in the example, not you personally) a talentless leach shouldn't stop you from making a few bucks in the music biz, should it? Do you feel you have the right to do what I describe above? Does Queen deserve nothing for their "Best Of" album because 28 years has passed? Do you deserve the proceeds of the album, just because you were able to assemble a CD and put together some advertising? If the copyright has expired, there's not much stopping you from doing it....
Throughout this thread I've argued specifically why I don't agree with a straight 28 year term, I'm not going to repeat it again here.
They didn't invent the name Scaramouche, or Galileo. They didn't invent the fandango. They didn't invent Beelzebub, or the doctrine that he is in charge of allocating devils to sinners...
No, they didn't, but they did configure those words and composed music to go with them that people actually want. If the words themselves were all that mattered, then your post would be destined for greatness, after all, it used the same words, right? As it stands though, your post won't even be read by most (posting AC tends to get you ignored), and those who do read it will forget about it 10 seconds later as it's not particularly profound or interesting. This is also why most people would rather read a novel than a dictionary. The dictionary has all the same words as any novel, and even more, but unless someone configures those words they aren't all that interesting (unless of course you write dictionaries).
I'm noticing a theme in this thread of people who seem to think that creating a literary or musical work is somehow trivial because all these people do is take words that already exist and talk about things that happened. If it's so easy, do it yourself. It should be a piece of cake to write a bestseller, or a top-10 hit. Just get some words and kinda put them together....
Nonsense. I know plenty of bands who never play in front of an audience. They most certainly exist. Fame and money are side effects of art, they are not [typically] causes of it. If Queen had no audience, it's entirely possible they'd have noodled around on weekends creating music as a diversion from their jobs as store-clerks or whatever.
If you don't like the terms imposed on a purchase, don't make the purchase. You won't die without a copy of NiN's Downward Spiral. If enough people did this, then you'd see the terms change as the market adjusted to try to make sales. If you just buy a product though, while agreeing to whatever terms the seller wants, then you don't get much sympathy from me when you say you didn't like the terms but made the purchase anyway.
I'm not sure what "moral public domain" is either, however Queen may vary well have created "Bohemian Rhapsody" with or without copyrights. People, whether musicians, composers, or programmers will create whether they have copyrights or not.
true.
Queen has been paid handsomely for their music already.
Who are you to decide that? They created it. If they think they've made enough, they're welcome to make the material available for free, but they haven't done that. I'd also suggest that you look a few posts up for some examples I made of other things that copyright does, aside from requiring you to pay for a song for personal use (examples of artists music being used in ways that they ideologically oppose). In those examples, are the creators of the works supposed to just suck it up and smile when their work is used to promote an agenda that's opposite to what they believe?
Oh, I agree. Actually one of the things I'd change about education would be to require most kids to learn to play an instrument in school. Though it wasn't required one of the classes I took in junior high was band and I picked the clarinet to learn. Unfortunately I didn't stick with it though but I own a flute made by Nighteagle [davidnighteagle.com] I want to learn to play. Not because I want to become rich and famous for playing it, which I doubt would ever happen, but because I'd like to be able to play it.
I'd really love to see more people creating their own music. Flood the market, end the "supergroups" and the record labels and go see live music more often instead of feeding money into a jukebox. But at the moment, people want the stuff that's familiar and presented to them over the radio a million times. That's not the fault of the people creating the music, that's the fault of the people buying and listening to it.
Now, I'm not saying copyrights are bad but life + 50 or whatever is BAD. Twenty eight years is pushing it, under 10 years would be better. The reason for copyrights is to encourage creation, and shorter copyrights would encourage more to be created.
Personally I'm more concerned with an artist losing control of how their work is used, but that's pretty inseparable from being able to set a price. You should not, for instance, be able to take the work of a gay musician and use it in a PR campaign to promote an anti-gay agenda and leave him with no recourse. You should not be able to take a deeply religious artist's work and use it as the soundtrack for a porn movie without securing their permission. Copyright is how these rights are managed.
Would you care to explain the mechanism that these rights are granted, and what "Creator" is being referred to? Hint: Jefferson wasn't a particularly religious man. Perhaps you should take that phrase a little less literally and a little more figuratively. "Nature" does not have a conscious agenda. "Nature" is not sentient. "Nature" does not write laws. We believe that there are certain rights inherent in being human, but that is a concept we created for ourselves, along with all of our other laws.
Why don't we talk about that really great song that was written by that one guy in the early 1940s -- you know, that really deep and inspiring one, the one that got bought by that company, which went out of business before releasing it widely. Golly, why can't I remember the name, you know it's the one that the author then wanted to give a copy to his children, but wasn't allowed to. Oh well, I guess it's gone forever.
He shouldn't have *sold* his rights to the song then, should he? That happens sometimes in business, you make a deal that turns out to be a bad one. Welcome to capitalism, the best bad system we've got.
Um, okay, now as far as Elton, Yoko, and Jello are concerned -- uh, I don't have a well-formed opinion. My first thought is, yes, they might be immoral for denying the use of works created long, long ago. Really, that would come down to a matter of the term of the copyright. Would it be immoral for Shakespeare's descendants to deny the public theater the right to put on Hamlet? I'd say yes, but it's a lot more clear when it's been hundreds of years.
So far your examples have run towards things hundreds or thousands of years old. These things would not be protected by copyright. Shakespeare's works would be very comfortably in the public domain by now. The issue I'm arguing is taking control of an author's creation from him or her while that author is still alive, and for a term immediately following their death. I'm not comfortable telling the people I named above that they have no right to dictate how their work is used, and I certainly wouldn't tell them they are being immoral for not allowing their work to be used in ways that are diametrically opposed to their beliefs and views.
When you get down to it, isn't that what most laws come down to? Murder is illegal because we feel it's wrong. Same goes for robbery, rape, etc. If we lived in a different type of society, a more aggressive one, perhaps these things wouldn't be illegal. So yes, I feel it's wrong to take control of someone else's creation without their consent while they watch.
So, the first couple of hundred years of copyright law in the USA were unjust in your opinion?
I'm not sure what the original terms were, and frankly I really don't care. I find 50 years from the death of the author to be a suitable period of time.
As I've said before, if you want to use someone else's work, apparently you feel it has some value. If it didn't you wouldn't want to use it.
That is exactly how copyright laws are written today. Do you have a problem with current copyright law?
There's a world of difference between losing any semblance of control over your creations while you watch and having it happen 50 - 70 years after your death. If I write a hit song, and in 130 years your great grandchildren decide to use it as the theme to their new Holovision show, I probably won't be overly concerned since I'll most likely be long dead. Do it in 28 years while I'm still [hopefully] alive and kicking, and I'll be inclined to scream bloody murder. Write your own song if you don't want to use mine, but if mine is good enough for you to use, it's good enough for you to pay for.
The Somali warlords are partially to credit for the movie, as is the rest of humanity, and on a fading penumbra, everything in existence. Again, nothing is created in a vacuum.
I'd say this is completely wrong. The warlords deserve "credit" for what they actually did. The creative work, the novel, is creditable only to the writer. You don't credit the stone that a sculptor uses for the sculpture because it's raw material, useless to the unskilled, but the basis for a masterpiece in the hands of a master artisan. Stories are like that as well. The ideas, the raw information is useless to the average person on the street, but in the hands of a master it's the basis for an enduring work of art. If that weren't the case, there'd be millions of "Black Hawk Down"s, one for every person who was in any way involved or heard about the actual events. As an aside, I'm not suggesting that "Black Hawk Down" is an enduring work of art, it was just the first example that sprang to mind for some reason.
Yes, not having free Queen albums is morally outrageous. You said it sarcastically, and I say it seriously. Queen albums aren't really what I'm worried about today, but it's a reasonable synecdochic stand-in for all of culture: not having widespread free access to the canon of human culture is morally outrageous.
I'd say that the fact that the song is such a part of modern culture is proof in and of itself that the copyright restrictions aren't particularly onerous. If they were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because we'd be unaware of its existence. Sure, it'd be nice if pretty much everything was free, but that's not how society works. Copyright has provisions for fair-use, but to simply take someone else's work while crying "freedom" is simply a display of a sense of entitlement, that things should be free because you like them and you deserve to have them without contributing (i.e. paying).
I am curious though, what about my examples? Are you willing to argue that Elton John, Yoko Ono (as the current copyright holder to Imagine), and Jello Biafra are immoral for not allowing the scenarios I described above? If not, where does that leave your assertion that copyright beyond 28 years is immoral?
No, no, you're wrong. The public indeed did a lot to contribute to the song. Have you noticed that the song lyrics are written in English? Luckily the English language is in the public domain, or else Queen would owe William the Conqueror (or whoever) royalties. Have you noticed that the song is written in the C-major scale? (Actually I don't know what scale it's in.) Well, musical scales were invented by someone long before Queen. Have you noticed that the song sounds a lot like some other rock songs of that era?
I concede that if things were different they wouldn't be the same, but as it stands, the English language is not in fact copyrighted. Further, I don't think I ever said anything about copyright being enforced in perpetuity, so the customary 50 - 70 years after the author's death would indeed place English firmly into the public domain. Same goes for musical scales. For now, we'll ignore the fact that neither of these things were single works, and that copyright wouldn't have applied to them anyway.
Queen didn't write the song in a cultural vacuum. We give them a lot of credit for the song,
How about giving them *all* the credit for the song. They wrote, arranged and performed it. Saying that society at large deserves some credit for it is just as asinine as giving partial credit to Somali warlords for "Black Hawk Down". After all, if they hadn't torn their country to pieces, then "Black Hawk Down" would never have been written.
and we recognize that credit with a certain amount of unnatural legal rights.
As opposed to a "natural" legal right? All legal rights are "unnatural". We make them up to make our society a place worth living.
Many of us think the law is out of balance, and is immoral.
Yes, not having free Queen albums is morally outrageous. Lets consider some of the other moral outrages that current copyright perpetuates: * Prop 8 folks can't use Elton John's "Born Bad" (1979) in their campaign against gay-marriage. Elton, you know being gay and all, has the option to tell them they can't. * Westboro Baptist Church can not release a music video of John Lennon being tortured in Hell set to the song Imagine (1971) * Holiday Inn can't release a sanitized version the Dead Kennedys song "Holiday In Cambodia" (1980) as part of their advertising campaign without Jello Biafra's sign-off. Considering his apparent attitude towards corporate entities, this is pretty unlikely.
When oh when will we be freed of the tyranny of copyright?
What the public did was allow Queen to have exclusive rights to the song for a finite amount if time. If Queen was so intent on limiting others' use of the song, they should have kept it to themselves.
Oh, so the public said, "In return for you making us something we really enjoy, we will, in return, for a finite amount of time, not simply take it from you. After that time though, your work belongs to us". How magnanimous. If Queen wanted to GIVE the song away, they can. They apparently choose not to. If you don't think the song is worth what they're asking, how about just not having a copy, instead of telling them "Thanks for all your hard work, now I'm simply going to take it". As for them keeping it to themselves, I'm rather glad they didn't, and so are many other people. I have no problem paying to get a copy, and not using the song in ways the band doesn't approve of because I actually value the talent and work that went into it. I don't care if I get modded into oblivion on this, I know that I have a different opinion than a great number of Slashdotters. The truth is though that a great number of Slashdotters have never contributed a damn thing to the world at large, and have no place dictating terms to those who have.
Moral public domain? I'm not sure what this means. Queen, through talent and hard work, created Bohemian Rhapsody. "The public" did nothing to contribute to this, aside from existing, which I suspect they'd do whether Queen made music or not. Why is there some expectation that you should now get Queens work for free, just because it's getting old, and how is this an issue of morality? If you don't like paying for music, learn to play and compose your own, nobody is stopping you. If you want music that's been created by somebody else though, perhaps you should be prepared to pay them for it.
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Thanks, I needed that :)
You can place your own work into the public domain at any time you like though. Put it on your website with a message stating that it's free for others to use as they like, nothing is stopping you. I applaud people who do so, I think it's an admirable and generous thing to do. What I don't like is someone demanding that someone else do so.
And honestly, lets put the big name artists aside for a moment. If one of your photos were used in a particularly heinous "Aryan Nations" campaign somehow, your soapbox wouldn't get you very far. You'd end up being known as "that racist photographer", and nobody would likely listen when you said otherwise (people remember scandals, but it seems rarely ever corrections). I can't imagine you'd be okay with that, and I suspect it might sour you on producing any more art. End result, the masterpiece you may have been destined to create never happens, everyone loses. Copyright gives you the chance to demand that the Aryans stop using your work, to sue for damages and very publicly and clearly state that you did not condone the message your work was co-opted to send.
I don't think I came off the way I intended to in my last post. Of course you have every right to complain and argue for a "better" system. I do think though that you are better off voting with your wallet though, since by purchasing the media the only message the media companies are going to get is that they've got another "happy customer". Maybe renting instead would be a good compromise, as you'd still get to see the movie, DVD sales would go down, and you're still getting it though a legitimate channel. Hell, rent and pass it around to a few friends before it's due back, seems like fair game to me.....
I think I was aiming more at people who buy a movie or cd, rip it, and then put it on bit-torrent while shouting "The information wants to be free!", and then watch in stunned amazement as the lawsuits pile up (not to say I agree with the RIAA strategy of suing people into oblivion, personally I think it's a rotten way to do business).
I am not particularly on the side of big media conglomerates, and honestly I'm not a huge fan of rich rockstars either. I just don't think taking their work is the right way to go about it. I'd rather see the business model driven into the ground, to the point where mp3s are virtually worthless from a market standpoint, and then perhaps the media companies die off and the artists go back to playing live shows to make their money. But, if they want to ask $15 for a CD, and people want to pay it, who am I to simply walk in and say "Okay, you've made enough, now I'm giving away your work for free".
And this means copyright is an "unnatural right" exactly how? What the founding fathers were talking about is a group of rights that they believe were inalienable to all men. You've done nothing to refute my suggestion that the language used is not figurative (referring to the rights endowed on man by his creator). Your own comments of Jefferson support the idea that the language is figurative rather than literal. Why is your right to take an artist's work for free a "natural" right, and his right to control over his creation an "unnatural right"?
Nonsense. Slavery is perfectly logical from the perspective of the enslavers, and was practiced by civilizations that lasted far longer than ours has (slavery-free) so far. We've outlawed it not because of logic, but because we find it morally repugnant, we feel it's wrong.
Can you really not see the difference here? And honestly, you're free to try to charge me for air from one of your trees. Simply place your trees into an air-tight container, feed carbon-dioxide into it, collect the oxygen they produce, and bottle it. I won't buy it of course, but you're welcome to try. I wouldn't count on getting rich on that business model though. Creative works don't simply float though the air and attach themselves to your MP3 player. You know pretty much where they came from, and who to credit with their creation.
In short, your analogy == epic fail.
Personally I'd give it to Yoko, but while I support the idea of 50 - 70 years after the author's death I still feel that you have a valid, if differing take on it.
As far as copyright terms and lengths go, here's part of what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:
Copyright has been internationally standardized, lasting between fifty to a hundred years from the author's death, or a finite period for anonymous or corporate authorship; some jurisdictions have required formalities to establishing copyright, most recognize copyright in any completed work, without formal registration. Generally, copyright is enforced as a civil matter, though some jurisdictions do apply criminal sanctions.
I generally agree with this, but like I said, I concede that the period following the authors death is arguable.
As I've already said in multiple places in this thread that I don't support the idea of copyright in perpetuity, I don't see why you're bothering to bring this up.
Utter crap. If you don't want to be "controlled", don't be a member of the audience. Nobody forces you to listen to Queen (although admittedly all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums). You want free music, fine. I don't agree that you have the right to demand it from the people who do the creating.
It's given extra protection because, unlike a physical work, anyone can take it and use it in any way they want without concrete consequences. For instance, before copyright, an author could find people selling his work for profit while he himself was penniless. The person selling the work in question literally contributed nothing to it, they simply procured a copy of the work and then began producing their own version of it, at times making more from it than the original writer.
I don't see it necessarily as "extra" protection though, it's simply a different type. Think opt-in vs. opt-out. Your device creator can indeed place restrictions on his device by making potential buyers sign a contract stipulating those restrictions (opt-in), whereas an author can allow free and unrestricted use of his work if he wishes by stating it (opt-out). Further, your device-maker can patent his device, preventing you from setting up shop and simply copying his work and profiting from it, an avenue that is denied the author because of the nature of his creation.
Now, you may say that you wouldn't sign a restrictive contract for this device, that you'd find some other device that would do the job for you, or invent a device of your own. The same holds for music or literature. If you don't like the terms imposed, don't buy it. Go make your own, or listen to/read something with less onerous terms. There are indy artists who will let you download and trade their music, with the hope that they'll make their living from doing live shows. Go support them. There's your moral position, support those who exercise their rights in a way you agree with rather than those who exercise them in a way you disapprove.
As far as emotional attachment goes, yes, I think that we should allow for the idea that a creative work carries a greater emotional attachment than, say, inventing a new type of gyroscope. I've engaged in all kinds of inventive and creative endevours (nothing great, but enough to give me a taste), and I can't imagine a situation where I would suffer the kind of distress at a device being used in a way I don't like compared with a song or story I wrote being used to (for instance) inspire hatred. Personally I feel that allowing that would be a cruel way to repay an artist for their contribution to society.
No, what I'm arguing against is that society is not an active collaborator by virtue of simply existing. Collaboration implies specific effort. Society did not take any actions to consciously assist in producing Queen's music. Society did not attend jam sessions or post-production. To get credit for something, you should probably play a more active role than simply existing, otherwise we may as well call the guitars and drumkits collaborators.
Oh I'm comprehending it very nicely thank you. You feel that somehow credit can be assigned to "collective culture", even though that culture played no intentional role in the creative process. Since everyone shares that "collective culture" though, doesn't that mean that it has pretty much the same amount influence on everyone? If that's the case then, couldn't you establish a baseline, something like "Everything everyone does is probably about 10% attributable to our 'shared culture'"? And if that's true, is it worth even mentioning anymore? At that point, the playing field is more or less level; the only important and meaningful part is that remaining 90%, as that's the part that varies from person to person.
No, society has not. Individual members of society have. Why should you now get a free-ride because they paid before you? What if we were talking about an amusement park instead? Lets say that Disney recouped their investment in 1980. Should they now drop the prices to only cover maintenance and overhead while foregoing any profit? After all, society rewarded the Disney family richly over the years, it's remaining members are wealthy. Why should we continue to pay $60 per ticket to get in when it only costs them $30 per guest to maintain the place?
How about until the owner of that song says you can have it for free? You're demanding they give up something that apparently has value, but you're certainly not offering to give up anything in return. If you don't like paying for creative works that other people made, then simply go without them. If you want to play music in a bar without any strings attached, write your own. If you do that, you even have the option of giving it away for free if you like. CAUTION - MINI-RANT AHEAD: Personally I think there are too damn many cover bands anyway. Most of the time there's a juke-box (turned off) within 20 feet of the band that contains all the same songs they intend to play. It's pretty much Karaoke for musicians (instead of just a singer everyone gets to play). If people were less used to cover-bands, perhaps bands would be more comfortable trying out their own material instead. Think about it, you never hear about "cover-comedians" who just stand on stage re-enacting old George Carlin routines, do you? Sure, being in a cover band is a lot of fun (I've done it myself), but doing original stuff is much more interesting and if done well much more impressive. My personal formula is one, maybe two covers per set assuming that you're doing two or three sets in a night.
For me it's an issue of it being far enough removed from all the folks who were involved in it's creation, but I wouldn't tell you you're wrong if you favoured life-of-the-author and no more. I think anything beyond the author's lifespan is probably an arguable point, including perpetual copyrights, but I happen to favour the customary 50 - 70 years.
True enough. I guess I just started thinking of non-classtime projects because it seemed pretty unlikely that a beginner CS student would be doing anything in class that hadn't been done thousands of times before by other students, which wouldn't be particularly valuable to anyone but themselves as a learning experience.
So what are you saying, Queen should make their music free because in the past people paid for their music?
What about this is so difficult?
Queen created music.
You want that music.
Queen says you can have it, and names a price.
You then choose, it's either worth the price and you buy it, or it's not worth the price and you walk away.
The fact that they've made a lot of money on it in the past has no relevance. They made something, you want it. If it's really worth nothing, why do you want it so badly? Go make your own music instead. Then, you can not only "stick it to the man" by not paying for someone else's work, you can also give it away to all the people who will surely be clamoring for it. Except there probably won't be much clamoring, because making music that anyone actually wants is hard, and chances are you (like me and almost everyone else) aren't very good at it.
Hey, why don't we take it to the next step now though. You get your wish, all of Queen's library is now public domain, and you can do with it as you please. So what pleases you at the moment is to start selling "Best of Queen" albums. This would be awesome for you, because you can sell them on TV (KTel has been doing this for years, buying rights at a discount for songs that are trivially easy to download for free, so don't tell me there's no market), and the best part is, you did minimal work (assembling the CD), and you get all the benefits! Screw Queen, they made their money, now it's your turn. Just because you're (the "you" in the example, not you personally) a talentless leach shouldn't stop you from making a few bucks in the music biz, should it?
Do you feel you have the right to do what I describe above? Does Queen deserve nothing for their "Best Of" album because 28 years has passed? Do you deserve the proceeds of the album, just because you were able to assemble a CD and put together some advertising? If the copyright has expired, there's not much stopping you from doing it....
Throughout this thread I've argued specifically why I don't agree with a straight 28 year term, I'm not going to repeat it again here.
No, they didn't, but they did configure those words and composed music to go with them that people actually want. If the words themselves were all that mattered, then your post would be destined for greatness, after all, it used the same words, right? As it stands though, your post won't even be read by most (posting AC tends to get you ignored), and those who do read it will forget about it 10 seconds later as it's not particularly profound or interesting. This is also why most people would rather read a novel than a dictionary. The dictionary has all the same words as any novel, and even more, but unless someone configures those words they aren't all that interesting (unless of course you write dictionaries).
I'm noticing a theme in this thread of people who seem to think that creating a literary or musical work is somehow trivial because all these people do is take words that already exist and talk about things that happened. If it's so easy, do it yourself. It should be a piece of cake to write a bestseller, or a top-10 hit. Just get some words and kinda put them together....
Nonsense. I know plenty of bands who never play in front of an audience. They most certainly exist. Fame and money are side effects of art, they are not [typically] causes of it.
If Queen had no audience, it's entirely possible they'd have noodled around on weekends creating music as a diversion from their jobs as store-clerks or whatever.
Obviously I can't mod right now, but I'd give you a "+1 Funny" for that one if I could :)
If you don't like the terms imposed on a purchase, don't make the purchase. You won't die without a copy of NiN's Downward Spiral.
If enough people did this, then you'd see the terms change as the market adjusted to try to make sales. If you just buy a product though, while agreeing to whatever terms the seller wants, then you don't get much sympathy from me when you say you didn't like the terms but made the purchase anyway.
true.
Who are you to decide that? They created it. If they think they've made enough, they're welcome to make the material available for free, but they haven't done that. I'd also suggest that you look a few posts up for some examples I made of other things that copyright does, aside from requiring you to pay for a song for personal use (examples of artists music being used in ways that they ideologically oppose). In those examples, are the creators of the works supposed to just suck it up and smile when their work is used to promote an agenda that's opposite to what they believe?
I'd really love to see more people creating their own music. Flood the market, end the "supergroups" and the record labels and go see live music more often instead of feeding money into a jukebox. But at the moment, people want the stuff that's familiar and presented to them over the radio a million times. That's not the fault of the people creating the music, that's the fault of the people buying and listening to it.
Personally I'm more concerned with an artist losing control of how their work is used, but that's pretty inseparable from being able to set a price. You should not, for instance, be able to take the work of a gay musician and use it in a PR campaign to promote an anti-gay agenda and leave him with no recourse. You should not be able to take a deeply religious artist's work and use it as the soundtrack for a porn movie without securing their permission. Copyright is how these rights are managed.
Would you care to explain the mechanism that these rights are granted, and what "Creator" is being referred to? Hint: Jefferson wasn't a particularly religious man. Perhaps you should take that phrase a little less literally and a little more figuratively.
"Nature" does not have a conscious agenda. "Nature" is not sentient. "Nature" does not write laws. We believe that there are certain rights inherent in being human, but that is a concept we created for ourselves, along with all of our other laws.
He shouldn't have *sold* his rights to the song then, should he? That happens sometimes in business, you make a deal that turns out to be a bad one. Welcome to capitalism, the best bad system we've got.
So far your examples have run towards things hundreds or thousands of years old. These things would not be protected by copyright. Shakespeare's works would be very comfortably in the public domain by now. The issue I'm arguing is taking control of an author's creation from him or her while that author is still alive, and for a term immediately following their death. I'm not comfortable telling the people I named above that they have no right to dictate how their work is used, and I certainly wouldn't tell them they are being immoral for not allowing their work to be used in ways that are diametrically opposed to their beliefs and views.
When you get down to it, isn't that what most laws come down to? Murder is illegal because we feel it's wrong. Same goes for robbery, rape, etc. If we lived in a different type of society, a more aggressive one, perhaps these things wouldn't be illegal. So yes, I feel it's wrong to take control of someone else's creation without their consent while they watch.
I'm not sure what the original terms were, and frankly I really don't care. I find 50 years from the death of the author to be a suitable period of time.
As I've said before, if you want to use someone else's work, apparently you feel it has some value. If it didn't you wouldn't want to use it.
There's a world of difference between losing any semblance of control over your creations while you watch and having it happen 50 - 70 years after your death. If I write a hit song, and in 130 years your great grandchildren decide to use it as the theme to their new Holovision show, I probably won't be overly concerned since I'll most likely be long dead. Do it in 28 years while I'm still [hopefully] alive and kicking, and I'll be inclined to scream bloody murder. Write your own song if you don't want to use mine, but if mine is good enough for you to use, it's good enough for you to pay for.
I'd say this is completely wrong. The warlords deserve "credit" for what they actually did. The creative work, the novel, is creditable only to the writer. You don't credit the stone that a sculptor uses for the sculpture because it's raw material, useless to the unskilled, but the basis for a masterpiece in the hands of a master artisan. Stories are like that as well. The ideas, the raw information is useless to the average person on the street, but in the hands of a master it's the basis for an enduring work of art. If that weren't the case, there'd be millions of "Black Hawk Down"s, one for every person who was in any way involved or heard about the actual events. As an aside, I'm not suggesting that "Black Hawk Down" is an enduring work of art, it was just the first example that sprang to mind for some reason.
I'd say that the fact that the song is such a part of modern culture is proof in and of itself that the copyright restrictions aren't particularly onerous. If they were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because we'd be unaware of its existence. Sure, it'd be nice if pretty much everything was free, but that's not how society works. Copyright has provisions for fair-use, but to simply take someone else's work while crying "freedom" is simply a display of a sense of entitlement, that things should be free because you like them and you deserve to have them without contributing (i.e. paying).
I am curious though, what about my examples? Are you willing to argue that Elton John, Yoko Ono (as the current copyright holder to Imagine), and Jello Biafra are immoral for not allowing the scenarios I described above? If not, where does that leave your assertion that copyright beyond 28 years is immoral?
I concede that if things were different they wouldn't be the same, but as it stands, the English language is not in fact copyrighted. Further, I don't think I ever said anything about copyright being enforced in perpetuity, so the customary 50 - 70 years after the author's death would indeed place English firmly into the public domain. Same goes for musical scales. For now, we'll ignore the fact that neither of these things were single works, and that copyright wouldn't have applied to them anyway.
How about giving them *all* the credit for the song. They wrote, arranged and performed it. Saying that society at large deserves some credit for it is just as asinine as giving partial credit to Somali warlords for "Black Hawk Down". After all, if they hadn't torn their country to pieces, then "Black Hawk Down" would never have been written.
As opposed to a "natural" legal right? All legal rights are "unnatural". We make them up to make our society a place worth living.
Yes, not having free Queen albums is morally outrageous. Lets consider some of the other moral outrages that current copyright perpetuates:
* Prop 8 folks can't use Elton John's "Born Bad" (1979) in their campaign against gay-marriage. Elton, you know being gay and all, has the option to tell them they can't.
* Westboro Baptist Church can not release a music video of John Lennon being tortured in Hell set to the song Imagine (1971)
* Holiday Inn can't release a sanitized version the Dead Kennedys song "Holiday In Cambodia" (1980) as part of their advertising campaign without Jello Biafra's sign-off. Considering his apparent attitude towards corporate entities, this is pretty unlikely.
When oh when will we be freed of the tyranny of copyright?
You may actually be both.
Oh, so the public said, "In return for you making us something we really enjoy, we will, in return, for a finite amount of time, not simply take it from you. After that time though, your work belongs to us". How magnanimous. If Queen wanted to GIVE the song away, they can. They apparently choose not to. If you don't think the song is worth what they're asking, how about just not having a copy, instead of telling them "Thanks for all your hard work, now I'm simply going to take it".
As for them keeping it to themselves, I'm rather glad they didn't, and so are many other people. I have no problem paying to get a copy, and not using the song in ways the band doesn't approve of because I actually value the talent and work that went into it.
I don't care if I get modded into oblivion on this, I know that I have a different opinion than a great number of Slashdotters. The truth is though that a great number of Slashdotters have never contributed a damn thing to the world at large, and have no place dictating terms to those who have.
Moral public domain? I'm not sure what this means. Queen, through talent and hard work, created Bohemian Rhapsody. "The public" did nothing to contribute to this, aside from existing, which I suspect they'd do whether Queen made music or not. Why is there some expectation that you should now get Queens work for free, just because it's getting old, and how is this an issue of morality? If you don't like paying for music, learn to play and compose your own, nobody is stopping you. If you want music that's been created by somebody else though, perhaps you should be prepared to pay them for it.