The DMCA was based on giving the United States compliance with the WIPO treaties, and these treaties have finally been ratified by having the 30th country sign on.
It's a wonder the rest of the world still even bothers to count the US when it comes to treaties.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA (or changing it to get rid of the really yuchy parts) will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
How would this be news? In the last few years the US has ignored the Hague convention on child abduction, pulled out of the ABM treaty, pulled out of the Kyoto treaty, probably a few more I have missed. If anything these are far more important than something to help over rich publishing companies rake in more money. All that is needed is to find a way to convince the US government that reforming copyright is in their best interests and the WIPO treaty will be no more.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA (or changing it to get rid of the really yuchy parts) will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
When was the last time US copyright law was even nominally in accordance with what's written in the US constitution? (Or even in which century 20th or 19th...)
You are right, you can't impose a 200 year old law on a new technological freedom that has been around for 1 year.
Such a happening is very unusual. Most of the time all a new technology does is allow people to do things they have done for a long time (quite possibly thousands of years) in a way which is different, cheaper, better, etc. Which whilst it may make something previously uncommon commonplace does not make it "new". Only in a very few cases does advancing technology actually create some ability which has never existed before. Attempting to legislate technology has some of the same problems at patenting it. You end up with nonsense such as the DMCA which attempts to treat things differently based on irrelevent technical details.
This sidesteps the fact that the president is not elected by popular vote. It is up to the state legislators to determine the means of electing the electoral college representative. For now all have chosen to use a popular vote, but the exact means of selection and the rules for counting votes are a local matter.
Except that this didn't happen, since the US supreme court became involved...
Over here, postal votes have to arrive on or before polling day, while a normal vote is made by making a large cross in a box on a piece of paper. No problem with hanging chads or unclear ballots, while candidates are listed alphabetically.
Just about everywhere outside the US conducts elections in this kind of way. Also one thing which certainly could be done in the US would be "one election one ballot paper". One of the complications in Florida was multiple elections on the same physical ballot form.When it comes to counting, all the votes from a particular constituency are taken to a central location, sorted according to answer and counted manually. If the margin of victory when every vote has been counted is within a certain limit (can't remember it, sorry) the votes are recounted. Again and again, until they're certain. Elections have been won by as few as two votes. When all that is finished and everyone is satisfied the result is correct, it's announced. Nothing until then bar exit polls.
You missed off a few rather critical bits. The people performing the count are as much disinterested parties as possible (though this might be difficult in the US with domination by two political parties); the counters are watched by people including candidates representatives and in some cases journalists; once the count starts no-one else may enter (or re-enter).
Nice theory, but I watched the recounts on CNN, and what would happen is someone would hold up a disputed ballot, and the election commission always voted on straight party line who is was a vote for. Every one. The woman democrat in broward hardly bothered to look at them...it was a simple glance and a "Gore
What this shows is that the whole thing was fundermentally corrupt anyway. Such partisan people should probably not even have been there, let alone actually doing the recount. This isn't an election it's a sick joke.
It's been the United States of America Inc for a long time. Wouldn't be the first time that policy (foreign and domestic) has been used to advance corporate objectives *cough* Gulf War *cough*.
No, the first example would be the Spanish/American war at the end of the 19th century.
Americans need to wake up to the fact that they can never Bill Gates without being rich to start with. He is not the American dream, but a generation of a legacy.
That he is actually called "William H. Gates the third" just might be a tiny clue that he isn't exactly "rags to riches"...
There should be different copyright schemes depending on the type of "work" that is copyright. Art and literature have no shelf life--they can be enjoyed thousands of years after the author has passed away. It is reasonable for the author to retain copyright to their work until at least the day they die.
Quite often literature does have a "shelf life". Authors do not gain any royalties on out of print books. Similarly performing arts such as movies and music recordings can have "shelf lives" in practice.
However, technology has a finite lifecycle of a much shorter period than the average person's life. Software is constantly being re-coded and the old code discarded.
Much the same happens with popular music, maybe not quite so fast. But it certainly is the case...
As we saw recently with the MySQL AB vs NuSphere suit [slashdot.org] [ slashdot.org ] the lawmakers frequently don't have enough of an understanding to deal with technology.
Rather they lack understanding. In this case enough understanding to see that the "technology aspect" of the case simply isn't relevent at all. The dispute here is over trademarks and copyright infringement.
How do new laws help? There are already a dozen different ways to murder someone, with a dozen times that of "circumstances", each representing different statutes. And that is just one single type of crime among thousands.
One thing which certainly dosn't help is "supercriminization" passing a statute against something which was already illegal in the first place. Typically done purely for political kudos...
How does this NOT apply to "new technology"? Was public showing for profit somehow "legal" when using a VCR instead of a film projector?
A decently written statute defines something simply by what is done, rather than how it is done (including what tools might or might not be used.)
Is copying by hand illegal, but machine copying legal?
Why should one machine be considered differently from another machine?
As long as I use the latest and greatest technology and the laws haven't specifically covered it yet, may I reprint your books with my name on them and be safe from prosecution?
Only if the legislators and judges are utter fools... Unfortunatly quite a few of those around at the moment appear to be. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together would realise that the above example is copyright infringment and fraud. No matter if you use a paper and pencil or a replicator from Star Trek.
The call for new laws is a cry for someone else to solve your problems for you. Every way for a person to injure or trespass on someone else has been "illegal" for thousands of years.
If anything in many parts of the world what's needed is more a case of tidying up the old laws: why have 20 laws when one will do, get rid of cases where laws are mutually exclusive or refer to entities which no longer exist.
That is the biggest problems in our laws today, the laws are slowly being updated to meet the changes in technology. So what we wind up trying to do is to apply ancient laws to new "crimes".
Where the laws were properly written in the first place there is little or no need to do much in the way of updating. Using a new technology to perform a criminal act does not necessarily make a "new crime". (The US Patent Office has the same logic problem here.) e.g. if someone invented a teleporting machine why would you need a special law to cover misusing that machine for stealing things or hurting people? You'd only need new laws if the new technology makes a criminal act possible which was completly impossible before.
20 years *total* is more than enough. None of this lifetime+time until december 31+320 years+6 full moons crap. 20 years. If you haven't made your money by then, I don't think another century is going to help.
In some cases you replace 20 years with 20 months... Plenty of cases where if publishers don't make money PDQ they loose all interest in bothering...
US Law went from registration date, not authors death, up until '78. Unlike in Europe, copyright here was not supposed to be an entitlement - you didn't get it automatically, you had to register and put a copy of the work in trust so it would survive, and you had to renew it regularly or it would expire.
The other difference was with the treatment of "derived works" under US law they have always been copyright the original author. Under other copyright laws the original author might have had little claim on anyone using their works as source material.
The General Public License (GPL) is based on the concept of CopyLeft, and rides on the back of the current Copyright system as establised.
Actually the GPL dosn't look that different from copyright as described in the US constitution anyway
If the copyright radicals have their way and, say, copyrighted works become Public Domain in seven years or suchlike, does that mean the GPL'd works fall into the public domain at that time too?
Only 7 year old versions of the relevent programs...
It boils my blood to see the argument framed using terms that were designed to bias the debate toward one side. It especially boils my blood to see the opposing side accept that stupid definition of terms.
Unfortunatly copyright is hardly the only issue where this goes on. Plenty of issues where this kind of blood boiling is completly justifiable:)
Not true. Copyright is a property that can be bought, sold, traded. It's a commodity, and as such, can be passed via the will; you know, that thing you pass your private property down to.
You miss the point. That is that, at least in the US (Disney, the RIAA and MPAA, etc are based in the US), using copyright in this was appears to be outside of the US constitution and thus completly bogus.
I will admit that I'm not sure that copyrights, initially, were considered to be private property that could be bought or sold. It would be interesting to know...
You cannot simply ammend a written constitution by passing a law with is in conflict with it. Otherwise there would be little point in having such a constitution in the first place.
Note that it doesn't say Inventor's heirs, just Inventors. It seems that a very strict constructionist should simply throw out the '+70' part of the 'life + 70' clauses of the current law - there is no constitutional power for that (of course, how this would apply to corporations is a bit of a conundrum).
A strict interpretation would probably toss "remainder of the inventors/authors life" too. Since this pushes the definition of "limited time". Most likely it was intended to mean "limited time" as viewed by an average person who had no interest in redefining "limited" as "as large as possible without being unlimited". Problem is that AFAIK no-one has bothered to ask regular people how long they consider "limited time" to be. Maybe such a question should be part of any future census carried out in the US.
Laws as arbitrary as copyright laws must be bad.Why not 40 years or 27 years? Five years should be enough.
The length of terms is something which can be debated ad infinitum. Maybe what's needed is some formula like "3 times the mean anount of time a typical publisher will attempt to make money from this kind of work."
copyrights are typically the main thing keeping works out of distribution.
Rather the (ab)use of copyrights, by publishers. Including Disney's policy of keeping their material unavailable for long periods of time, in order to stimulate demand...
(The companies will surely argue in friend of the court briefs that giving them additional copyright time will cause them to keep old works in distribution, which is a public benefit. We'll have to see how this plays out).
So what it isn't the "public benefit" in the US constitution. If they want an ammendment then that's what they should ask for.
Companies like Disney don't need gov't subsidies. The Gershwin heirs should go get jobs.
Do you think for one second the writers of the US constitution would approve of copyrights effectivly acting as pensions not only for authors but their children and grandchildren? They'd be the first to say that simply having a talented ancestor does not excuse their need to do honest work.
Authors already had life+50 years protection before the new law.
Which was already rather questionable. If the idea is to encourage people to produce new works then at the latest death of the author should place the work into the public domain. Since there is no way they can produce any new works... What's needed is something like "copyright lasts X years (where X might be somewhere between 5 and 20, subject to debate and probably different depending on the specific catagory.) However if the author retires or dies all their current work goes immediatly into the public domain (if they decide to come out of retirment only something they produce subsequently is subject to copyright.)"
What if I produce that one brilliant work, and then crap.
Then you are a "one hit wonder". (There are artists who have relased albums which consist entirely of reworkings of one song.) All copyright was intended to do was encourage production and publication of new works. Not provide a pension for people who's work happened to be popular. Nor can it magically create talent.
Yeah, but I'm talking in terms of decades here. 10, 20, maybe even 30 years. I don't think record labels give too much thought to how much dough a CD is going to bring in 20 years from now, but I could be wrong.
In many cases they might well be looking at timescales of months even weeks to either make money on a piece of music or consign to the "miss" vault for a century. Whilst copyright terms have been getting longer the timescales which publishers consider have been getting shorter.
Something else to consider, given the mentality of most record labels -- if copyrights expired after a shorter period, how many labels would just sit on material waiting for the rights to expire before exploiting it so they didn't have to share any royalties?
Once the rights expire the material is in the public domain so anyone can then make use of it. Also we have a big problem with publishers sitting on material right now. With a much shorter copyright term this becomes less of a problem. Also a short copyright term adds an air of urgency to make the most of their exclusive rights...
No, what's pathetic is when someone attempts to make an analogy between cutthroat business practices and terrorism. When's the last time you saw a Microsoftie plow an airliner into a skyscraper, torch a research facility, or form a mob to take to the streets during a meeting?
They don't need to, their methods work so much better...
Only if the courts are willing to prosecute - you can't remove someone from elected office at any time just because you don't like their policies; you have to wait for an election.
Of the US executive only the president (and at a pinch the vice president) is elected. The rest, including Ascroft are appointed.
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The DMCA was based on giving the United States compliance with the WIPO treaties, and these treaties have finally been ratified by having the 30th country sign on.
It's a wonder the rest of the world still even bothers to count the US when it comes to treaties.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA (or changing it to get rid of the really yuchy parts) will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
How would this be news? In the last few years the US has ignored the Hague convention on child abduction, pulled out of the ABM treaty, pulled out of the Kyoto treaty, probably a few more I have missed. If anything these are far more important than something to help over rich publishing companies rake in more money. All that is needed is to find a way to convince the US government that reforming copyright is in their best interests and the WIPO treaty will be no more.
Getting rid of this is now going to be seriously difficult. Repealing the DMCA (or changing it to get rid of the really yuchy parts) will equal the US pulling out of a ratified international agreement.
When was the last time US copyright law was even nominally in accordance with what's written in the US constitution? (Or even in which century 20th or 19th...)
You are right, you can't impose a 200 year old law on a new technological freedom that has been around for 1 year.
Such a happening is very unusual. Most of the time all a new technology does is allow people to do things they have done for a long time (quite possibly thousands of years) in a way which is different, cheaper, better, etc. Which whilst it may make something previously uncommon commonplace does not make it "new". Only in a very few cases does advancing technology actually create some ability which has never existed before.
Attempting to legislate technology has some of the same problems at patenting it. You end up with nonsense such as the DMCA which attempts to treat things differently based on irrelevent technical details.
This sidesteps the fact that the president is not elected by popular vote. It is up to the state legislators to determine the means of electing the electoral college representative. For now all have chosen to use a popular vote, but the exact means of selection and the rules for counting votes are a local matter.
Except that this didn't happen, since the US supreme court became involved...
Over here, postal votes have to arrive on or before polling day, while a normal vote is made by making a large cross in a box on a piece of paper. No problem with hanging chads or unclear ballots, while candidates are listed alphabetically.
Just about everywhere outside the US conducts elections in this kind of way. Also one thing which certainly could be done in the US would be "one election one ballot paper". One of the complications in Florida was multiple elections on the same physical ballot form.When it comes to counting, all the votes from a particular constituency are taken to a central location, sorted according to answer and counted manually. If the margin of victory when every vote has been counted is within a certain limit (can't remember it, sorry) the votes are recounted. Again and again, until they're certain. Elections have been won by as few as two votes. When all that is finished and everyone is satisfied the result is correct, it's announced. Nothing until then bar exit polls.
You missed off a few rather critical bits. The people performing the count are as much disinterested parties as possible (though this might be difficult in the US with domination by two political parties); the counters are watched by people including candidates representatives and in some cases journalists; once the count starts no-one else may enter (or re-enter).
Nice theory, but I watched the recounts on CNN, and what would happen is someone would hold up a disputed ballot, and the election commission always voted on straight party line who is was a vote for. Every one. The woman democrat in broward hardly bothered to look at them...it was a simple glance and a "Gore
What this shows is that the whole thing was fundermentally corrupt anyway. Such partisan people should probably not even have been there, let alone actually doing the recount. This isn't an election it's a sick joke.
It's been the United States of America Inc for a long time. Wouldn't be the first time that policy (foreign and domestic) has been used to advance corporate objectives *cough* Gulf War *cough*.
No, the first example would be the Spanish/American war at the end of the 19th century.
Americans need to wake up to the fact that they can never Bill Gates without being rich to start with. He is not the American dream, but a generation of a legacy.
That he is actually called "William H. Gates the third" just might be a tiny clue that he isn't exactly "rags to riches"...
There should be different copyright schemes depending on the type of "work" that is copyright. Art and literature have no shelf life--they can be enjoyed thousands of years after the author has passed away. It is reasonable for the author to retain copyright to their work until at least the day they die.
Quite often literature does have a "shelf life". Authors do not gain any royalties on out of print books. Similarly performing arts such as movies and music recordings can have "shelf lives" in practice.
However, technology has a finite lifecycle of a much shorter period than the average person's life. Software is constantly being re-coded and the old code discarded.
Much the same happens with popular music, maybe not quite so fast. But it certainly is the case...
As we saw recently with the MySQL AB vs NuSphere suit [slashdot.org] [ slashdot.org ] the lawmakers frequently don't have enough of an understanding to deal with technology.
Rather they lack understanding. In this case enough understanding to see that the "technology aspect" of the case simply isn't relevent at all. The dispute here is over trademarks and copyright infringement.
How do new laws help? There are already a dozen different ways to murder someone, with a dozen times that of "circumstances", each representing different statutes. And that is just one single type of crime among thousands.
One thing which certainly dosn't help is "supercriminization" passing a statute against something which was already illegal in the first place. Typically done purely for political kudos...
How does this NOT apply to "new technology"? Was public showing for profit somehow "legal" when using a VCR instead of a film projector?
A decently written statute defines something simply by what is done, rather than how it is done (including what tools might or might not be used.)
Is copying by hand illegal, but machine copying legal?
Why should one machine be considered differently from another machine?
As long as I use the latest and greatest technology and the laws haven't specifically covered it yet, may I reprint your books with my name on them and be safe from prosecution?
Only if the legislators and judges are utter fools... Unfortunatly quite a few of those around at the moment appear to be. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together would realise that the above example is copyright infringment and fraud. No matter if you use a paper and pencil or a replicator from Star Trek.
The call for new laws is a cry for someone else to solve your problems for you. Every way for a person to injure or trespass on someone else has been "illegal" for thousands of years.
If anything in many parts of the world what's needed is more a case of tidying up the old laws: why have 20 laws when one will do, get rid of cases where laws are mutually exclusive or refer to entities which no longer exist.
That is the biggest problems in our laws today, the laws are slowly being updated to meet the changes in technology. So what we wind up trying to do is to apply ancient laws to new "crimes".
Where the laws were properly written in the first place there is little or no need to do much in the way of updating. Using a new technology to perform a criminal act does not necessarily make a "new crime". (The US Patent Office has the same logic problem here.)
e.g. if someone invented a teleporting machine why would you need a special law to cover misusing that machine for stealing things or hurting people? You'd only need new laws if the new technology makes a criminal act possible which was completly impossible before.
20 years *total* is more than enough. None of this lifetime+time until december 31+320 years+6 full moons crap. 20 years. If you haven't made your money by then, I don't think another century is going to help.
In some cases you replace 20 years with 20 months...
Plenty of cases where if publishers don't make money PDQ they loose all interest in bothering...
US Law went from registration date, not authors death, up until '78. Unlike in Europe, copyright here was not supposed to be an entitlement - you didn't get it automatically, you had to register and put a copy of the work in trust so it would survive, and you had to renew it regularly or it would expire.
The other difference was with the treatment of "derived works" under US law they have always been copyright the original author. Under other copyright laws the original author might have had little claim on anyone using their works as source material.
The General Public License (GPL) is based on the concept of CopyLeft, and rides on the back of the current Copyright system as establised.
Actually the GPL dosn't look that different from copyright as described in the US constitution anyway
If the copyright radicals have their way and, say, copyrighted works become Public Domain in seven years or suchlike, does that mean the GPL'd works fall into the public domain at that time too?
Only 7 year old versions of the relevent programs...
It boils my blood to see the argument framed using terms that were designed to bias the debate toward one side. It especially boils my blood to see the opposing side accept that stupid definition of terms.
:)
Unfortunatly copyright is hardly the only issue where this goes on. Plenty of issues where this kind of blood boiling is completly justifiable
Not true. Copyright is a property that can be bought, sold, traded. It's a commodity, and as such, can be passed via the will; you know, that thing you pass your private property down to.
...
You miss the point. That is that, at least in the US (Disney, the RIAA and MPAA, etc are based in the US), using copyright in this was appears to be outside of the US constitution and thus completly bogus.
I will admit that I'm not sure that copyrights, initially, were considered to be private property that could be bought or sold. It would be interesting to know
You cannot simply ammend a written constitution by passing a law with is in conflict with it. Otherwise there would be little point in having such a constitution in the first place.
Note that it doesn't say Inventor's heirs, just Inventors. It seems that a very strict constructionist should simply throw out the '+70' part of the 'life + 70' clauses of the current law - there is no constitutional power for that (of course, how this would apply to corporations is a bit of a conundrum).
A strict interpretation would probably toss "remainder of the inventors/authors life" too. Since this pushes the definition of "limited time". Most likely it was intended to mean "limited time" as viewed by an average person who had no interest in redefining "limited" as "as large as possible without being unlimited".
Problem is that AFAIK no-one has bothered to ask regular people how long they consider "limited time" to be. Maybe such a question should be part of any future census carried out in the US.
Laws as arbitrary as copyright laws must be bad.Why not 40 years or 27 years? Five years should be enough.
The length of terms is something which can be debated ad infinitum. Maybe what's needed is some formula like "3 times the mean anount of time a typical publisher will attempt to make money from this kind of work."
copyrights are typically the main thing keeping works out of distribution.
Rather the (ab)use of copyrights, by publishers. Including Disney's policy of keeping their material unavailable for long periods of time, in order to stimulate demand...
(The companies will surely argue in friend of the court briefs that giving them additional copyright time will cause them to keep old works in distribution, which is a public benefit. We'll have to see how this plays out).
So what it isn't the "public benefit" in the US constitution. If they want an ammendment then that's what they should ask for.
Companies like Disney don't need gov't subsidies. The Gershwin heirs should go get jobs.
Do you think for one second the writers of the US constitution would approve of copyrights effectivly acting as pensions not only for authors but their children and grandchildren? They'd be the first to say that simply having a talented ancestor does not excuse their need to do honest work.
Authors already had life+50 years protection before the new law.
Which was already rather questionable. If the idea is to encourage people to produce new works then at the latest death of the author should place the work into the public domain. Since there is no way they can produce any new works...
What's needed is something like "copyright lasts X years (where X might be somewhere between 5 and 20, subject to debate and probably different depending on the specific catagory.) However if the author retires or dies all their current work goes immediatly into the public domain (if they decide to come out of retirment only something they produce subsequently is subject to copyright.)"
What if I produce that one brilliant work, and then crap.
Then you are a "one hit wonder". (There are artists who have relased albums which consist entirely of reworkings of one song.) All copyright was intended to do was encourage production and publication of new works. Not provide a pension for people who's work happened to be popular. Nor can it magically create talent.
Yeah, but I'm talking in terms of decades here. 10, 20, maybe even 30 years. I don't think record labels give too much thought to how much dough a CD is going to bring in 20 years from now, but I could be wrong.
In many cases they might well be looking at timescales of months even weeks to either make money on a piece of music or consign to the "miss" vault for a century.
Whilst copyright terms have been getting longer the timescales which publishers consider have been getting shorter.
Something else to consider, given the mentality of most record labels -- if copyrights expired after a shorter period, how many labels would just sit on material waiting for the rights to expire before exploiting it so they didn't have to share any royalties?
Once the rights expire the material is in the public domain so anyone can then make use of it. Also we have a big problem with publishers sitting on material right now. With a much shorter copyright term this becomes less of a problem. Also a short copyright term adds an air of urgency to make the most of their exclusive rights...
No, what's pathetic is when someone attempts to make an analogy between cutthroat business practices and terrorism. When's the last time you saw a Microsoftie plow an airliner into a skyscraper, torch a research facility, or form a mob to take to the streets during a meeting?
They don't need to, their methods work so much better...
Only if the courts are willing to prosecute - you can't remove someone from elected office at any time just because you don't like their policies; you have to wait for an election.
Of the US executive only the president (and at a pinch the vice president) is elected. The rest, including Ascroft are appointed.