230 exists for the same reason as the Bill of Rights - not because some law gave people those rights, but as a reminder to government not to try to infringe those rights.
You are a colossal dipshit.
The safe harbor exists to get rid of porn and indecent material online. That's literally the purpose of it, that's why it was part of the Communications Decency Act.
Without the safe harbor, sites that allowed users to post and that moderated would arguably be liable for every post that wasn't removed from the site as if the site had published it themselves, under Stratton Oakmont, Inc v. Prodigy Services, Co., 1995 WL 323710 (NY Sup. Ct. 1995), a court case where Prodigy (remember them?) was liable to Stratton Oakmont (the crooked Wall Street firm from Wolf of Wall Street) for a user who posted about how they were crooked. The reason Prodigy was in trouble was that they had moderators who removed spam and porn and such from their boards, and who hadn't removed that particular post.
So no one was going to do what the prudes in Congress in the mid-90s wanted, and remove porn online, because it would expose the sites to total liability for everything else. Giving them protections so that failure to remove user posts wasn't seen as an endorsement was necessary to allow them to remove porn. As it happens, it's convenient for other reasons too and should be protected.
But never forget that the express purpose of the thing is to encourage private actors from engaging in what would be censorship if the government mandated it.
I personally agree that all of the major companies have long ago abandoned any pretense to being neutral platforms, and all should be excluded from 230 protections.
You idiot. The safe harbor of 47 USC 230 has nothing to do with being a neutral platform. In fact, the express goal was to encourage sites to remove 'unwholesome' content.
I think you need a brief history lesson:
Prior to the enactment of the safe harbor there were three applicable legal precedents. The first was the old rule that the publisher of defamatory content was responsible for it just as the author was, because they had the opportunity to review it and verify it. The second was Cubby, Inc. v Compuserve, Inc., 776 F.Supp. 135 (SDNY 1991), which held that online services that hosted defamatory content were not responsible for it if it was uploaded by the users without the knowledge or approval of the service. Basically, this gave sites protection so long as they didn't moderate. The third was Stratton Oakmont, Inc v. Prodigy Services, Co., 1995 WL 323710 (NY Sup. Ct. 1995) which held that if the online service moderated anything at all, then it was liable even for things that it approved, ignored, or had been in error about.
The result was predictable: the only two safe options were to 1) not moderate anything, which would lead to ads, spam, defamation, hate speech, etc. proliferating, or 2) not allow posting, which would prevent even benign users from having a voice.
At about the same time, Congress decided it wanted online services to take voluntary steps to remove porn from online. But none of the services were stupid enough to try, since they couldn't moderate everything perfectly, requiring them to either moderate nothing or not allow posting.
Exasperated, Congress gave the services protection -- if they moderated imperfectly it wouldn't be held against them, and as they couldn't compel moderation, it would be up to each site to determine how much or how little to do. Thus, a site could remove porn and spam and malware but allow users to talk with one another without careful policing of every single post.
Well, the Berne Convention is not the law in the US, so it really doesn't matter what it says or doesn't say. See 17 USC 104(c). All we care about here is what our own laws say (whether they are in agreement with Berne or not).
However, it is possible to have an API - or anything else - that is uncopyrightable if it is not sufficiently creative, or if the merger or scenes-a-faire doctrine kick in.
Correction, the link is https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-571_e29f.pdf and whoever runs the site now is a son of a bitch, who hasnâ(TM)t programmed it to figure out what to do with smart quotes from mobile devices and who doesnâ(TM)t offer a chance to preview the post from the mobile interface. Hopefully this works better.
To be precise, copyrights are vested upon creation, but lawsuits to enforce the copyright may not be brought until the US Copyright Office issues a registration for the copyright or denies it (in which case the suit will also have to argue that the denial was wrong).
The iPod relies on a favorable court case won by Diamond, which was making the Rio line of MP3 players (boy, that was a long time ago). There was no permission needed for the device. Itâ(TM)s the iTunes Music Store that Jobs had to negotiate for.
Another thing to watch out for are delayed failures caused by date windowing. Basically, some developers of devices using GPS-derived time were aware of the problem, and put in a pivot so that dates from before the device was made are treated as being in the future. (e.g. a device built in 2009, ten years after the last time this happened with GPS might treat dates from the 1999-2008 time period as being in 2019-2028, since that's when the device would first encounter them)
So this may be causing random failures of devices for years.
Wait - the 3 main financial statuses of creative workers are......
You forgot at least one: Selling creative labor.
I used to be a professional artist a long time ago now, and the way that I made a comfortable income was in working for an employer that directed me to create particular things that they wanted. This is actually very common and usually a decent way to make a living. Your average computer programmer probably does this, for example. So does almost everyone in the film and tv industries, and more people in the publishing industry than you'd guess.
Moreover, the forms of folk art that you list hugely exploded - to the extent that it may be said that they came about only due to - agriculture. Which created idleness which was difficult to afford during our hunter gatherer days.
I seem to recall that hunter-gatherers actually have loads of leisure time; they work between 20-40 hours per week, relax for the rest, and tend to find work quite relaxing too. And they certainly create lots of works, but they don't usually make works that last permanently because who wants to carry around anything more than they need to? We got lucky with cave paintings surviving into the present day.
Which is another argument for getting some money for creative workers - money can enable idleness, which in case of creative workers can enable better creative works.
Well, there's no reason to treat creative workers specially. If you simply want more works and will pay, offer commissions. If you want to let people live leisurely, offer that to everyone equally, and give everyone a chance to do productive things. Note however, that if you don't need money, you don't need copyrights, which are an economic incentive to create and publish works.
The countries largely populated with recent immigrants - the US and Australia are also showing enough hatred for foreigners / newer immigrants. Such a constraint is very funny.
I'm not talking about immigration. I mean that if your goal is to spur the creation and publication of more works, you shouldn't care whether an author lives in your country or lives in another country. Americans, for example, used to not grant copyrights to non-Americans. When foreign authors complained, we'd suggest that they emigrate. It's better to just offer everyone the same terms without giving preference to one's own people.
No they didn't. Why would they? The concept of copyright didn't even exist.
(Of course, if your work was seditious, or scandalous, or licentious, or heretical, you might get into trouble, but that's got nothing to do with copyright)
You didn't have to worry (as much) about people copying works when it tooks a whole monastery of scribes a long, long time to do it (or earlier, very skilled scribes who could work with papyrus).
Why not? After all, if you wanted to copy and sell books, you'd have to do it the exact same way; there's no competitive advantage for either of you.
And even once there were printing presses, it took massive industry to make a single book.
Once Gutenberg presses appeared, a modest print shop with a staff of maybe ten could easily print some 1,000 sheets per day. So a print run of, say, 1,000 copies of a 320-page octavo book, would take 20 days. The difficult part is the composition. The bookbinding isn't the publisher's problem; the bookseller or the buyer usually handles that. Publishing as a whole became a massive industry, but the individual publishers were usually pretty small.
Large rotary presses don't show up until the mid-19th century, and offset presses don't show up until the beginning of the 20th century.
And yet even in these times books were simply...unavailable to normal people without being initiated, often hidden completely.
No, anyone could go to a publisher, or by the 17th century, an actual bookseller, and get a book. Of course, literacy rates, leisure time, and artificial light all had to catch up a bit. And as more people started publishing books, the price kept dropping. More often though, shorter materials like newspapers and pamphlets were more readily available and affordable, since they were treated as being disposable items.
OF COURSE PEOPLE WOULD PRODUCE CREATIVE WORKS UNDER PATRONAGE(-REQUIRING) CONDITIONS LIKE THESE.
People still produce works under patronage and related models, and consider themselves lucky to get it. Of course instead of the patron being Lord Snottington, it's usually done through art grants and charitable foundations. In the US, PBS and NPR operate entirely on patronage, using a combination of large donations as well as aid from viewers like you. Hell, most authors today never earn out their advance money, meaning that they rely on their publisher to serve as a patron and will never collect a royalty because books usually don't sell all that well.
You might want to learn some more about publishing before commenting further.
but you'll have to agree that initially only the idle rich worked on "creative works"
I would not agree with that. There's a very low bar to what are considered creative works with regard to copyright. I think you'll find that the vast majority of creative works throughout history are folk art in various forms -- stories, pictures, songs, dances, etc. Some of the idle rich certainly created works, but plenty of them would have been more idle than that and would instead have been patrons of professional artists; it's easier to have someone skilled to do things on command than to gain that degree of competence oneself.
Then there was a phase where some creative workers needed a day job. There is a stereotype in many cultures about creative workers remaining eternally poor
That stereotype still exists, and it's still grounded in reality. I mean, how many living poets can you quickly name off the top of your head who support themselves entirely from publishing their poetry?
A much more limited copyright might be good compromise - though we will never know if it is true.
Why shouldn't we know if it's true? Let's have each country in the world independently develop their own copyright policies that they think will best serve their own populations. The only constraints should be 1) each country treats foreigners the same as it treats its own nationals; 2) countries should try to work out conflicts that might make copyright mutually exclusive between each other. Then we can experiment and start working out what works best. We can also look to the past, when various countries had different (or no) copyright laws and how well that worked.
The United States did not grant copyrights on sound recordings until 1978, literally over 100 years after Edison invented the phonograph. Yet we seem to have had a burgeoning record industry. We did not grant copyrights on architectural works until 1990 and buildings predate written history. So your argument is rather crap, I should say. Want to take another crack at it?
Theyâ(TM)re not property of any kind. "Intellectual property" is not a synonym for intangible property. It refers to the copyright itself. A creative work cannot be sold, inherited, licensed, etc. A copy of a work is a tangible item like a disc or hardcopy and is ordinary personal property like a car or a rock.
"Intellectual property" therefore must be the copyright itself, which pertains to a work but is not a work itself. And given the various constraints it is subject to, it is debatable whether it is property. On the other hand it certainly is not created by thr author of the work; copyrights are granted by the government, subject to terms and conditions in law, and do not actually have to be granted at all.
Creative works are not property. That's the whole point of creating copyright in the first place; to establish a fiction of property about them. If they were property by nature, in the way that a rock or a piece of land can be, copyright would not be needed. The key difference is that creative works are non-rivalrous; if you write a book and I copy it, you do not lose your copy in the process. Instead, we both wind up with a copy of the book. It's like what would happen to personal property if we had replicators from Star Trek.
Well, copyright didnâ(TM)t exist anywhere until 1710, and then only in England. It didnt spread elsewhere for quite a while, with most of Europe adopting it in the mid 19th century, and the rest of the world (by force through colonialism and imperialism) until the 20th.
But creative works have existed since before written history. So if your contention is correct that creative works wonâ(TM)t be created and published without copyright, please let me know how you explain the existence of works that predate copyright.
Just because I can present or sell copies of Steamboat Willie without paying Disney doesn't mean I get to sell stuffed toys of Mickey mouse or use their trademark in other ways without permission.
It likely does; trademarks are inferior to copyrights and the loss of the latter will result in the loss of the former. The two cases to look at here are: Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938) and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003).
You're absolutely correct to raise the spectre of the Dastar case. I would also suggest Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), which was an instructive patent case in which once a patent entered the public domain, the trademark on the name of the invention was invalidated due to having become generic -- without the patent, anyone could make the invention, and trademarks hinge on control of the source of the good or service.
So it is quite clear that once the copyright ends, the MICKEY MOUSE trademark will (for most purposes) cease to exist.
I have no problem with Disney's most popular characters NOT going into public domain. Disney actively exploits its brand. Good for them. They've kept Mickey Mouse alive for 90 years. They're not patent trolls sitting on copyrighted or patented stuff with the only objective of suing everyone who uses their brand or patent.
How does the world benefit from Mickey Mouse going into public domain? In no way. The world doesn't become a better place. If anything, all that happens is that Disney loses licensing money. Yes, disney IS an evil corporation, but this isn't the point here.
...
If the person or company who owns the copyright uses it, gives work to other people, and isn't being a dick about suing everyone for patent troll reasons, why take it away from them?
The world becomes a better place because now everyone can try their hand at making Mickey Mouse cartoons. Some will be crap, but they're easy to ignore and forget. Some will be good, and the world is always better off if there are more good works than fewer. And some will be better, perhaps far better, than anything Disney has ever done or ever will do. Those will be the best of all.
Plus, that was the deal. Disney was only given a copyright on the condition that the works ultimately go into the public domain. It's been far longer than it should have been already. But if the work never enters the public domain, then the copyright was never justified in the first place.
Regarding your other point, failure of the copyright holder to exploit a work merely justifies ending the copyright sooner than it otherwise would have done, and there is a time-tested means of accomplishing this. It still doesn't mean that copyrights should last forever, which is both unconstitutional and unconscionable.
Well, actually copyright does include control over importation. Itâ(TM)s a part of the distribution right at 17 USC 106(3), 602.
BUT, the distribution right is subject to (among other things) the âoefirst saleâ exception at 17 USC 109. The leading case on this is Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), in which the Supreme Court held that lawfully made copies can be imported by anyone.
First of all, many copyright holders are individuals, not corporations. Many don't have the time or money to police the internet. Sure, every copyright holder should take reasonable action to protect their copyrights, but your position isn't reasonable.
Why should it matter that theyâ(TM)re individuals? Copyright is granted in order to encourage authors to create and publish their work by giving them an economic incentive to do so. But the incentive isnâ(TM)t a straightforward grant of money; itâ(TM)s a chance to funnel whatever people will pay for the work (whether thatâ(TM)s a lot, a little, or nothing at all) to the copyright holder. Itâ(TM)s the copyright holderâ(TM)s problem to popularize the work so that it has value to be funneled. Most works have no copyright-related economic value at all.
So a copyright is worthless unless youâ(TM)re in business. You donâ(TM)t have to have a company, but you canâ(TM)t just sit back and wait for the world to beat a path to your door to pay you. You have to hustle.
Watching for infringements that actually harm whatever income stream you can hustle up is part of that. Infringements that donâ(TM)t affect it can be ignored. Such as those that just donâ(TM)t diminish your revenue or are in a market that youâ(TM)re not in. Infringements that do, you probably wonâ(TM)t have trouble finding â" whatever tools an infringerâ(TM)s customers use to find them, you can use to find them too.
Youâ(TM)re failing to look at things from other perspectives, though. First, with no central registry of copyrighted works (mandating one is actually prohibited by the Berne Convention, the international treaty on copyright that basically every country has signed onto), laws that make virtually everything in the world copyrighted (such as your comment back to me, above), and with the state of AI sorely lacking so that we could have decent automated tools to detect works and infringements (which as noted above is a very hard problem, even for humans, and relies on information that is usually known well to the copyright holder but not to the general public), itâ(TM)s a huge pain in the ass to do this, and itâ(TM)s essentially impossible to do it well. Youâ(TM)re always going to be privileging some copyright holders over others by taking down works that arenâ(TM)t infringing â" probably sacrificing the individuals that are so important to you to benefit corporations â" or youâ(TM)re not going to catch everything (in fact youâ(TM)re not going to make a dent), or more likely, both!
Second, it is costly and burdensome to do this, prohibitively so. Why should third parties suffer those costs when it doesnâ(TM)t benefit them to do so? You havenâ(TM)t answered the question. Crying about how some copyright holders are mere individuals does not itself justify shifting costs in this way. If they canâ(TM)t afford the costs that come with exploiting their copyrights, they should probably sell or license the rights to someone who can and will shoulder those costs. Itâ(TM)s like being an elderly person who inherits an office building or something; if you canâ(TM)t be an effective landlord, youâ(TM)re wasting the value of the thing. Sell it or hire a management company to operate it for a share of the rent or let it go to hell. But donâ(TM)t go commanding the superintendent of the building next door to maintain it for you for free.
Copyright holders are in business â" they donâ(TM)t deserve free rides any more than anyone else.
But if I were a copyright holder, I'd object to being put in a position where I would have to police the entire internet for my stuff and then go through the process to have it removed.
Sure, no one likes to do work. But if a copyright holder doesnâ(TM)t care enough to try to protect their own rights, why should anyone else care to protect them? And if all the benefit of enforcement of copyright inures to the copyright holder, why should other people have to suffer the cost of carrying out that enforcement?
Besides, itâ(TM)s not as simple as having a list of works. Copyright includes identical copies and near-identical copies. It includes derivative works like fanfic, sequels, adaptations into other media (e.g. art based on a book, or a play based on a song, etc.). It also includes translations. So you canâ(TM)t simply say, no, there are no copies of Marvin Gayeâ(TM)s song âoeGot to Give It Up.â You have to check for copies of Robin Thickeâ(TM)s âoeBlurred Linesâ because itâ(TM)s got a similar âfeelâ(TM) to the former.
It is flat-out impossible for a computer to do this. It is incredibly difficult for armies of lawyers going through the courts to do this. So itâ(TM)s incredibly burdensome, but the only person who will want to even do a competent job of looking is the copyright holder. Everyone else views it as a burden and wonâ(TM)t want to try.
Thereâ(TM)s a reason that litigation involves two sides fighting for themselves, rather than one side having to argue both for and against.
If a website exercises editorial control over what its users posts, then it is liable for what they post.
If a website doesn't exercise editorial control over what its users post, then it is not liable.
As it stands now, a website can exercise editorial control over what's posted, but when called out on copyrighted material, shrug their shoulders and whine that they can't control what's posted.
Sadly, your idea is not well thought out.
You cite the traditional rule for liability for user posts, but that's not the current rule. Those rules were replaced in the mid-late 90's by a statutory rule that allows sites to exercise editorial control without being exposed to liability.
The reason is simple: Under the traditional rules, sites would either have to 1) Not permit users to post, which basically wastes a lot of the point of the Internet, or 2) Not control what was posted at all, which would lead to them becoming total garbage, like what happened to Usenet. A happy medium was needed, which was allowing sites to control what their users did, but not requiring them to control their users absolutely perfectly lest they be sued for something or other. (The particular issue that arose was that Congress wanted sites to restrict users from posting porn where kids could see it, but needed to give protection to the sites lest they refuse to do anything because of the threat of not having done enough)
Roughly the same problem appears with copyright, and sites have had roughly similar protection. After all, if a site allows users to post material, it cannot perfectly police the site. It cannot know what is and is not copyrighted and what is and is not lawfully being posted. There is no registry of copyrighted works and there is no registry of people who have the right or who are licensed to use them, and how they can lawfully use them. All a site could possibly do would be to guess, and frankly, it's not their problem and should not be their problem.
If a particular copyright holder finds an infringement, there is a mechanism for notifying the site to have it removed. If they fail to do so, how can the site know whether this is due to lax enforcement by the copyright holder or whether it is due to permission having affirmatively been granted, or whether the law happens to permit it, as it does sometimes? The copyright holder is in the best position to know and to care, and so it is most appropriate for the burden to fall on them.
It's basically the cost that comes with the benefits of copyright, and it's no different offline than online.
Whenever copyright holders want other people to do this sort of thing for them, it's inevitably because either 1) the copyright holder is too lazy to put in the work to vigorously protect the work themselves to the extent that the economic value of the work justifies it, or 2) the copyright holder deliberately would like to destroy the ability of users to post content online.
Famous copyright cases are e.g.Albrecht Duerrers around 1450.
That wasn't copyright, that was trademark. Raimondi was allowed to continue making copies of Dürer's work so long as he didn't copy the signature too.
Also, prior to the Statute of Anne, copyright was typically either a Stationers' Copyright (i.e. a monopolistic restraint of trade where publishers who didn't create works would agree amongst themselves who had the right to print them so that they didn't have to compete with each other -- the authors weren't particularly important), or just a special-case patent, whereby a specific author could get a monopoly because they were friends with the King or had connections. Such patents tended to be granted for other things too -- the Elizabethan playing card patent is an infamous example that resulted in the Case of Monopolies (aka Darcy v. Allein) that is the foundation of antitrust law.
As you already pointed out: owning land is the same phantasy. So what is your point?
Thanks for conceding the point that copyright is not natural.
Although in practice there doesn't seem to be much difference
It was much more noticeable prior to the 1976 Copyright Act becoming effective in 1978.
Under the 1909 Copyright Act (still largely written by the various publishing industries, but not as bad), you saw features such as works being thrown into the public domain automatically if they were published without a copyright registration having been filed, copyright terms that were much shorter and of fixed duration, with a renewal that had to be timely applied for (and that rarely was).
The 1976 Act was designed to ape the minimum requirements of the Berne Convention, as the excuse for increased protection was that it was somehow in the interests of Americans to 'harmonize' our law with the rest of the world. Not that it had ever been a problem that we didn't before.
The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way now; the publishing industries got greedy and reached too far and brought copyright to the attention of the ordinary public who, while tolerant of the idea, are usually radically in disagreement with the implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
230 exists for the same reason as the Bill of Rights - not because some law gave people those rights, but as a reminder to government not to try to infringe those rights.
You are a colossal dipshit.
The safe harbor exists to get rid of porn and indecent material online. That's literally the purpose of it, that's why it was part of the Communications Decency Act.
Without the safe harbor, sites that allowed users to post and that moderated would arguably be liable for every post that wasn't removed from the site as if the site had published it themselves, under Stratton Oakmont, Inc v. Prodigy Services, Co., 1995 WL 323710 (NY Sup. Ct. 1995), a court case where Prodigy (remember them?) was liable to Stratton Oakmont (the crooked Wall Street firm from Wolf of Wall Street) for a user who posted about how they were crooked. The reason Prodigy was in trouble was that they had moderators who removed spam and porn and such from their boards, and who hadn't removed that particular post.
So no one was going to do what the prudes in Congress in the mid-90s wanted, and remove porn online, because it would expose the sites to total liability for everything else. Giving them protections so that failure to remove user posts wasn't seen as an endorsement was necessary to allow them to remove porn. As it happens, it's convenient for other reasons too and should be protected.
But never forget that the express purpose of the thing is to encourage private actors from engaging in what would be censorship if the government mandated it.
I personally agree that all of the major companies have long ago abandoned any pretense to being neutral platforms, and all should be excluded from 230 protections.
You idiot. The safe harbor of 47 USC 230 has nothing to do with being a neutral platform. In fact, the express goal was to encourage sites to remove 'unwholesome' content.
I think you need a brief history lesson:
Prior to the enactment of the safe harbor there were three applicable legal precedents. The first was the old rule that the publisher of defamatory content was responsible for it just as the author was, because they had the opportunity to review it and verify it. The second was Cubby, Inc. v Compuserve, Inc., 776 F.Supp. 135 (SDNY 1991), which held that online services that hosted defamatory content were not responsible for it if it was uploaded by the users without the knowledge or approval of the service. Basically, this gave sites protection so long as they didn't moderate. The third was Stratton Oakmont, Inc v. Prodigy Services, Co., 1995 WL 323710 (NY Sup. Ct. 1995) which held that if the online service moderated anything at all, then it was liable even for things that it approved, ignored, or had been in error about.
The result was predictable: the only two safe options were to 1) not moderate anything, which would lead to ads, spam, defamation, hate speech, etc. proliferating, or 2) not allow posting, which would prevent even benign users from having a voice.
At about the same time, Congress decided it wanted online services to take voluntary steps to remove porn from online. But none of the services were stupid enough to try, since they couldn't moderate everything perfectly, requiring them to either moderate nothing or not allow posting.
Exasperated, Congress gave the services protection -- if they moderated imperfectly it wouldn't be held against them, and as they couldn't compel moderation, it would be up to each site to determine how much or how little to do. Thus, a site could remove porn and spam and malware but allow users to talk with one another without careful policing of every single post.
Well, the Berne Convention is not the law in the US, so it really doesn't matter what it says or doesn't say. See 17 USC 104(c). All we care about here is what our own laws say (whether they are in agreement with Berne or not).
However, it is possible to have an API - or anything else - that is uncopyrightable if it is not sufficiently creative, or if the merger or scenes-a-faire doctrine kick in.
Correction, the link is https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-571_e29f.pdf and whoever runs the site now is a son of a bitch, who hasnâ(TM)t programmed it to figure out what to do with smart quotes from mobile devices and who doesnâ(TM)t offer a chance to preview the post from the mobile interface. Hopefully this works better.
To be precise, copyrights are vested upon creation, but lawsuits to enforce the copyright may not be brought until the US Copyright Office issues a registration for the copyright or denies it (in which case the suit will also have to argue that the denial was wrong).
The case is Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, and the link is to the unanimous opinion of the Court.
The iPod relies on a favorable court case won by Diamond, which was making the Rio line of MP3 players (boy, that was a long time ago). There was no permission needed for the device. Itâ(TM)s the iTunes Music Store that Jobs had to negotiate for.
Another thing to watch out for are delayed failures caused by date windowing. Basically, some developers of devices using GPS-derived time were aware of the problem, and put in a pivot so that dates from before the device was made are treated as being in the future. (e.g. a device built in 2009, ten years after the last time this happened with GPS might treat dates from the 1999-2008 time period as being in 2019-2028, since that's when the device would first encounter them)
So this may be causing random failures of devices for years.
The slow disk copying (at least after a decent amount of RAM was finally available) was apparently the result of a bug.
Wait - the 3 main financial statuses of creative workers are ......
You forgot at least one: Selling creative labor.
I used to be a professional artist a long time ago now, and the way that I made a comfortable income was in working for an employer that directed me to create particular things that they wanted. This is actually very common and usually a decent way to make a living. Your average computer programmer probably does this, for example. So does almost everyone in the film and tv industries, and more people in the publishing industry than you'd guess.
Moreover, the forms of folk art that you list hugely exploded - to the extent that it may be said that they came about only due to - agriculture. Which created idleness which was difficult to afford during our hunter gatherer days.
I seem to recall that hunter-gatherers actually have loads of leisure time; they work between 20-40 hours per week, relax for the rest, and tend to find work quite relaxing too. And they certainly create lots of works, but they don't usually make works that last permanently because who wants to carry around anything more than they need to? We got lucky with cave paintings surviving into the present day.
Which is another argument for getting some money for creative workers - money can enable idleness, which in case of creative workers can enable better creative works.
Well, there's no reason to treat creative workers specially. If you simply want more works and will pay, offer commissions. If you want to let people live leisurely, offer that to everyone equally, and give everyone a chance to do productive things. Note however, that if you don't need money, you don't need copyrights, which are an economic incentive to create and publish works.
The countries largely populated with recent immigrants - the US and Australia are also showing enough hatred for foreigners / newer immigrants. Such a constraint is very funny.
I'm not talking about immigration. I mean that if your goal is to spur the creation and publication of more works, you shouldn't care whether an author lives in your country or lives in another country. Americans, for example, used to not grant copyrights to non-Americans. When foreign authors complained, we'd suggest that they emigrate. It's better to just offer everyone the same terms without giving preference to one's own people.
And without it, people HID their works...
No they didn't. Why would they? The concept of copyright didn't even exist.
(Of course, if your work was seditious, or scandalous, or licentious, or heretical, you might get into trouble, but that's got nothing to do with copyright)
You didn't have to worry (as much) about people copying works when it tooks a whole monastery of scribes a long, long time to do it (or earlier, very skilled scribes who could work with papyrus).
Why not? After all, if you wanted to copy and sell books, you'd have to do it the exact same way; there's no competitive advantage for either of you.
And even once there were printing presses, it took massive industry to make a single book.
Once Gutenberg presses appeared, a modest print shop with a staff of maybe ten could easily print some 1,000 sheets per day. So a print run of, say, 1,000 copies of a 320-page octavo book, would take 20 days. The difficult part is the composition. The bookbinding isn't the publisher's problem; the bookseller or the buyer usually handles that. Publishing as a whole became a massive industry, but the individual publishers were usually pretty small.
Large rotary presses don't show up until the mid-19th century, and offset presses don't show up until the beginning of the 20th century.
And yet even in these times books were simply...unavailable to normal people without being initiated, often hidden completely.
No, anyone could go to a publisher, or by the 17th century, an actual bookseller, and get a book. Of course, literacy rates, leisure time, and artificial light all had to catch up a bit. And as more people started publishing books, the price kept dropping. More often though, shorter materials like newspapers and pamphlets were more readily available and affordable, since they were treated as being disposable items.
OF COURSE PEOPLE WOULD PRODUCE CREATIVE WORKS UNDER PATRONAGE(-REQUIRING) CONDITIONS LIKE THESE.
People still produce works under patronage and related models, and consider themselves lucky to get it. Of course instead of the patron being Lord Snottington, it's usually done through art grants and charitable foundations. In the US, PBS and NPR operate entirely on patronage, using a combination of large donations as well as aid from viewers like you. Hell, most authors today never earn out their advance money, meaning that they rely on their publisher to serve as a patron and will never collect a royalty because books usually don't sell all that well.
You might want to learn some more about publishing before commenting further.
but you'll have to agree that initially only the idle rich worked on "creative works"
I would not agree with that. There's a very low bar to what are considered creative works with regard to copyright. I think you'll find that the vast majority of creative works throughout history are folk art in various forms -- stories, pictures, songs, dances, etc. Some of the idle rich certainly created works, but plenty of them would have been more idle than that and would instead have been patrons of professional artists; it's easier to have someone skilled to do things on command than to gain that degree of competence oneself.
Then there was a phase where some creative workers needed a day job. There is a stereotype in many cultures about creative workers remaining eternally poor
That stereotype still exists, and it's still grounded in reality. I mean, how many living poets can you quickly name off the top of your head who support themselves entirely from publishing their poetry?
A much more limited copyright might be good compromise - though we will never know if it is true.
Why shouldn't we know if it's true? Let's have each country in the world independently develop their own copyright policies that they think will best serve their own populations. The only constraints should be 1) each country treats foreigners the same as it treats its own nationals; 2) countries should try to work out conflicts that might make copyright mutually exclusive between each other. Then we can experiment and start working out what works best. We can also look to the past, when various countries had different (or no) copyright laws and how well that worked.
The United States did not grant copyrights on sound recordings until 1978, literally over 100 years after Edison invented the phonograph. Yet we seem to have had a burgeoning record industry. We did not grant copyrights on architectural works until 1990 and buildings predate written history. So your argument is rather crap, I should say. Want to take another crack at it?
Theyâ(TM)re not property of any kind. "Intellectual property" is not a synonym for intangible property. It refers to the copyright itself. A creative work cannot be sold, inherited, licensed, etc. A copy of a work is a tangible item like a disc or hardcopy and is ordinary personal property like a car or a rock.
"Intellectual property" therefore must be the copyright itself, which pertains to a work but is not a work itself. And given the various constraints it is subject to, it is debatable whether it is property. On the other hand it certainly is not created by thr author of the work; copyrights are granted by the government, subject to terms and conditions in law, and do not actually have to be granted at all.
Creative works are not property. That's the whole point of creating copyright in the first place; to establish a fiction of property about them. If they were property by nature, in the way that a rock or a piece of land can be, copyright would not be needed. The key difference is that creative works are non-rivalrous; if you write a book and I copy it, you do not lose your copy in the process. Instead, we both wind up with a copy of the book. It's like what would happen to personal property if we had replicators from Star Trek.
Well, copyright didnâ(TM)t exist anywhere until 1710, and then only in England. It didnt spread elsewhere for quite a while, with most of Europe adopting it in the mid 19th century, and the rest of the world (by force through colonialism and imperialism) until the 20th.
But creative works have existed since before written history. So if your contention is correct that creative works wonâ(TM)t be created and published without copyright, please let me know how you explain the existence of works that predate copyright.
Just because I can present or sell copies of Steamboat Willie without paying Disney doesn't mean I get to sell stuffed toys of Mickey mouse or use their trademark in other ways without permission.
It likely does; trademarks are inferior to copyrights and the loss of the latter will result in the loss of the former. The two cases to look at here are: Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938) and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003).
So it is quite clear that once the copyright ends, the MICKEY MOUSE trademark will (for most purposes) cease to exist.
The world becomes a better place because now everyone can try their hand at making Mickey Mouse cartoons. Some will be crap, but they're easy to ignore and forget. Some will be good, and the world is always better off if there are more good works than fewer. And some will be better, perhaps far better, than anything Disney has ever done or ever will do. Those will be the best of all.
Plus, that was the deal. Disney was only given a copyright on the condition that the works ultimately go into the public domain. It's been far longer than it should have been already. But if the work never enters the public domain, then the copyright was never justified in the first place.
Regarding your other point, failure of the copyright holder to exploit a work merely justifies ending the copyright sooner than it otherwise would have done, and there is a time-tested means of accomplishing this. It still doesn't mean that copyrights should last forever, which is both unconstitutional and unconscionable.
Well, actually copyright does include control over importation. Itâ(TM)s a part of the distribution right at 17 USC 106(3), 602.
BUT, the distribution right is subject to (among other things) the âoefirst saleâ exception at 17 USC 109. The leading case on this is Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), in which the Supreme Court held that lawfully made copies can be imported by anyone.
Why should it matter that theyâ(TM)re individuals? Copyright is granted in order to encourage authors to create and publish their work by giving them an economic incentive to do so. But the incentive isnâ(TM)t a straightforward grant of money; itâ(TM)s a chance to funnel whatever people will pay for the work (whether thatâ(TM)s a lot, a little, or nothing at all) to the copyright holder. Itâ(TM)s the copyright holderâ(TM)s problem to popularize the work so that it has value to be funneled. Most works have no copyright-related economic value at all.
So a copyright is worthless unless youâ(TM)re in business. You donâ(TM)t have to have a company, but you canâ(TM)t just sit back and wait for the world to beat a path to your door to pay you. You have to hustle.
Watching for infringements that actually harm whatever income stream you can hustle up is part of that. Infringements that donâ(TM)t affect it can be ignored. Such as those that just donâ(TM)t diminish your revenue or are in a market that youâ(TM)re not in. Infringements that do, you probably wonâ(TM)t have trouble finding â" whatever tools an infringerâ(TM)s customers use to find them, you can use to find them too.
Youâ(TM)re failing to look at things from other perspectives, though. First, with no central registry of copyrighted works (mandating one is actually prohibited by the Berne Convention, the international treaty on copyright that basically every country has signed onto), laws that make virtually everything in the world copyrighted (such as your comment back to me, above), and with the state of AI sorely lacking so that we could have decent automated tools to detect works and infringements (which as noted above is a very hard problem, even for humans, and relies on information that is usually known well to the copyright holder but not to the general public), itâ(TM)s a huge pain in the ass to do this, and itâ(TM)s essentially impossible to do it well. Youâ(TM)re always going to be privileging some copyright holders over others by taking down works that arenâ(TM)t infringing â" probably sacrificing the individuals that are so important to you to benefit corporations â" or youâ(TM)re not going to catch everything (in fact youâ(TM)re not going to make a dent), or more likely, both!
Second, it is costly and burdensome to do this, prohibitively so. Why should third parties suffer those costs when it doesnâ(TM)t benefit them to do so? You havenâ(TM)t answered the question. Crying about how some copyright holders are mere individuals does not itself justify shifting costs in this way. If they canâ(TM)t afford the costs that come with exploiting their copyrights, they should probably sell or license the rights to someone who can and will shoulder those costs. Itâ(TM)s like being an elderly person who inherits an office building or something; if you canâ(TM)t be an effective landlord, youâ(TM)re wasting the value of the thing. Sell it or hire a management company to operate it for a share of the rent or let it go to hell. But donâ(TM)t go commanding the superintendent of the building next door to maintain it for you for free.
Copyright holders are in business â" they donâ(TM)t deserve free rides any more than anyone else.
Sure, no one likes to do work. But if a copyright holder doesnâ(TM)t care enough to try to protect their own rights, why should anyone else care to protect them? And if all the benefit of enforcement of copyright inures to the copyright holder, why should other people have to suffer the cost of carrying out that enforcement?
Besides, itâ(TM)s not as simple as having a list of works. Copyright includes identical copies and near-identical copies. It includes derivative works like fanfic, sequels, adaptations into other media (e.g. art based on a book, or a play based on a song, etc.). It also includes translations. So you canâ(TM)t simply say, no, there are no copies of Marvin Gayeâ(TM)s song âoeGot to Give It Up.â You have to check for copies of Robin Thickeâ(TM)s âoeBlurred Linesâ because itâ(TM)s got a similar âfeelâ(TM) to the former.
It is flat-out impossible for a computer to do this. It is incredibly difficult for armies of lawyers going through the courts to do this. So itâ(TM)s incredibly burdensome, but the only person who will want to even do a competent job of looking is the copyright holder. Everyone else views it as a burden and wonâ(TM)t want to try.
Thereâ(TM)s a reason that litigation involves two sides fighting for themselves, rather than one side having to argue both for and against.
Sadly, your idea is not well thought out.
You cite the traditional rule for liability for user posts, but that's not the current rule. Those rules were replaced in the mid-late 90's by a statutory rule that allows sites to exercise editorial control without being exposed to liability.
The reason is simple: Under the traditional rules, sites would either have to 1) Not permit users to post, which basically wastes a lot of the point of the Internet, or 2) Not control what was posted at all, which would lead to them becoming total garbage, like what happened to Usenet. A happy medium was needed, which was allowing sites to control what their users did, but not requiring them to control their users absolutely perfectly lest they be sued for something or other. (The particular issue that arose was that Congress wanted sites to restrict users from posting porn where kids could see it, but needed to give protection to the sites lest they refuse to do anything because of the threat of not having done enough)
Roughly the same problem appears with copyright, and sites have had roughly similar protection. After all, if a site allows users to post material, it cannot perfectly police the site. It cannot know what is and is not copyrighted and what is and is not lawfully being posted. There is no registry of copyrighted works and there is no registry of people who have the right or who are licensed to use them, and how they can lawfully use them. All a site could possibly do would be to guess, and frankly, it's not their problem and should not be their problem.
If a particular copyright holder finds an infringement, there is a mechanism for notifying the site to have it removed. If they fail to do so, how can the site know whether this is due to lax enforcement by the copyright holder or whether it is due to permission having affirmatively been granted, or whether the law happens to permit it, as it does sometimes? The copyright holder is in the best position to know and to care, and so it is most appropriate for the burden to fall on them.
It's basically the cost that comes with the benefits of copyright, and it's no different offline than online.
Whenever copyright holders want other people to do this sort of thing for them, it's inevitably because either 1) the copyright holder is too lazy to put in the work to vigorously protect the work themselves to the extent that the economic value of the work justifies it, or 2) the copyright holder deliberately would like to destroy the ability of users to post content online.
Either way, screw that.
Famous copyright cases are e.g.Albrecht Duerrers around 1450.
That wasn't copyright, that was trademark. Raimondi was allowed to continue making copies of Dürer's work so long as he didn't copy the signature too.
Also, prior to the Statute of Anne, copyright was typically either a Stationers' Copyright (i.e. a monopolistic restraint of trade where publishers who didn't create works would agree amongst themselves who had the right to print them so that they didn't have to compete with each other -- the authors weren't particularly important), or just a special-case patent, whereby a specific author could get a monopoly because they were friends with the King or had connections. Such patents tended to be granted for other things too -- the Elizabethan playing card patent is an infamous example that resulted in the Case of Monopolies (aka Darcy v. Allein) that is the foundation of antitrust law.
As you already pointed out: owning land is the same phantasy. So what is your point?
Thanks for conceding the point that copyright is not natural.
Although in practice there doesn't seem to be much difference
It was much more noticeable prior to the 1976 Copyright Act becoming effective in 1978.
Under the 1909 Copyright Act (still largely written by the various publishing industries, but not as bad), you saw features such as works being thrown into the public domain automatically if they were published without a copyright registration having been filed, copyright terms that were much shorter and of fixed duration, with a renewal that had to be timely applied for (and that rarely was).
The 1976 Act was designed to ape the minimum requirements of the Berne Convention, as the excuse for increased protection was that it was somehow in the interests of Americans to 'harmonize' our law with the rest of the world. Not that it had ever been a problem that we didn't before.
The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way now; the publishing industries got greedy and reached too far and brought copyright to the attention of the ordinary public who, while tolerant of the idea, are usually radically in disagreement with the implementation.