Woz wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Apple II because it needed something, but he was much more of a hardware guy than a software guy, and writing the BASIC was harder for him than actually designing the computers had been. He ended up writing a BASIC interpreter that didn't have floating point routines, just to get something out the door ahead of everyone else. This was Integer BASIC, which was the first BASIC in the Apple II ROMs. One of his next projects was to work on adding the floating point routines in, but he ended up working on the floppy disk project first.
A big part of Microsoft's business back then was writing compilers and interpreters for various platforms, which they could license out. They wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Apple II, and eventually Apple decided that they needed something better than Integer BASIC. Since it was already done and available by the time Woz finished the floppy drive project, he never needed to improve Integer BASIC.
So Apple decided to get a 10 year license from Microsoft for their interpreter, which Apple put into ROM (and also made available on tape if you didn't want to upgrade your ROMs) and marketed as Applesoft BASIC. That was in 1977. As it happened, Microsoft was hurting for money back then, so they licensed it to Apple for a flat fee, rather than on a per-unit basis. Apple upgraded Applesoft BASIC from time to time, but it was still basically the same thing.
By 1985, the Mac had been introduced, and was becoming more popular, but Apple II computers were still where Apple made most of its money. And it was coming up on time to renegotiate the license. This time, Microsoft was in a much stronger position. It was able to force Apple to both abandon their own project to write a BASIC for the Mac, and to get a license for Mac UI elements. Apparently, Apple didn't have much of an option. I suppose they could have tried to get a cleanroom clone of Applesoft BASIC written in time for the license expiration, but for whatever reason, they decided it wasn't their best option. In any case, I don't think that the blame can be put entirely at Scully's feet. A lot of people screwed up over a very long period of time to end up with the situation Sculley inherited.
This was hardly the only time Microsoft got the better of Apple. Another instance is how Apple got Microsoft to agree to not ship their own mouse-based shells until a year after the Mac came out. But Apple thought that the Mac would come out in 1982, so they actually put the date in the contract. Apple blew their deadline (something Steve Jobs has a habit of) by a couple of years, allowing Microsoft the chance to announce Windows 1.0 before the Mac was announced. And again, Apple needed Microsoft to write third party software for the Mac (Word, Multiplan, Chart, etc.), so they couldn't really do much.
Commercial speech, as I sure hope you already know, is not protected by the First Amendment in the USA.
Actually, it is protected speech, so long as it 1) does not promote unlawful activities or products, and 2) is not deceptive. Otherwise, it's basically protected at the intermediate scrutiny level. And this is part of a trend that's been going on for years, so I don't think it would be terribly surprising to see the degree of protection continue to increase, just as the protection for other forms of speech have increased in the past several decades. The thought behind it is that it's important to ensure that consumers have as much non-deceptive information about products and services as possible, so that they can be better informed. You might want to look at the Central Hudson case, which is one of the leading cases on this subject.
How about 4) to have as many GOOD works, original or derivative, created and published...?
And who would judge artistic merit? The government? Artists that are already established, may be artistically conservative, and who are competitors with a clear conflict of interest? Critics, who suffer from similar faults?
I'm sorry, but it's just not viable. There is no such thing as objective artistic merit; all works are good to someone, and all works are bad to someone. A rule of thumb is that 90% of all works created are crap, but that which works fall on which side of that ratio will vary depending on who you ask. Since it's a pretty constant ratio, the only way to encourage the creation of more good works is to encourage the creation of more works period. Copyright is meant to, among other things, encourage the creation of more works period. Quality is irrelevant to copyright policy, but quantity is very important.
Besides, a copyright is not a direct financial reward, it's a temporary, limited monopoly on the profits that can be derived from a work. The profits may be great or small, but all copyright does is focus them. This means that an author who creates an unpopular work, regardless of artistic merit, will not profit from it. An artist who creates a popular work, regardless of artistic merit, will profit from it. The value of a copyright is directly tied to the market. If you wanted to specifically encourage good works, setting aside that there's no way of knowing which works are good, particularly over long periods of time, you'd have to set up rewards for them that were not connected to the market. NEA grants are similar to this. However, it's not a system that works all that well: you'd need a lot of money to fund it, you'd have all the problems in determining merit as already mentioned (some of which will result in works not getting supported due to conflicts of interest, etc.), and you'd probably find that it wasn't effective for certain artists, genres, or even classes of works, due to the lack of money involved (e.g. would it be enough to fund a "good" $200 million summer blockbuster movie?), due to difficulty in contacting the artists and getting them to participate, due to the possibility of being flooded with submissions that take time and money just to sort through, etc.
Patents are similar to copyrights in that the kinds of incentives, public policies, etc. are alike, just in different fields. This sort of thing has been tried extensively in the field of inventions, and it has never really worked all that well. Probably one of the more famous examples is the Longitude Board in England that was trying to get people to solve the longitude problem. The man who did solve it didn't get his reward until very late in his life, after long fights with the Board who deliberately made things difficult for him (since some members didn't like his solution), thanks to the personal intervention of the King.
On the whole, I'd say that the market-based solutions of copyrights and patents that ignore quality and focus on quantity, are the way to go. While you seem to say that you don't like mainstream music, it's not the fault of artists or the system that it is popular and that therefore that is where the money is.
Well, I'm willing to put anything on the table, but I think that it ought to be strictly civil.
If it is civil, then the costs of enforcement are tied to the popularity of the work and the profits that can be derived from it or the copyright holder's other works. This is better than than if it were criminal, in which case the value of the work in question would not really be a factor. Further, it's better if those costs are borne by the copyright holder than the public, as we already bear the costs of having there be a copyright to begin with.
Also, if a copyright holder is prepared to allow some laxity in enforcement of his copyright, then I'm prepared to let him. This is similar to my views on formalities, in that whatever the copyright holder doesn't expressly act to protect, I don't think should be protected. If it were important to them, they'd act differently. Since copyright is largely about getting the most incentive for the least loss of freedom, we should not assume things have an incentivizing effect on the author when the author's own actions or inactions indicate otherwise. Criminal prosecution would be pretty much detached from this.
Then there's that federal criminal investigators (such as the FBI or Secret Service) and prosecutors have much more important things they could be doing. Additionally, it's not as though copyright holders have a terribly difficult time conducting private investigations and civil suits against pirates; there are very few criminal copyright cases now, so the copyright holders already bear 99.44% of the burden. If they're well-organized, they have some private investigators and specialist attorneys working on these sorts of things, using ex parte TROs to seize evidence, etc.
Finally though, I also have a gut feeling that it's simply not worthy of being a crime. Patent infringement has never been a crime. Most copyright infringement is not a crime. In most countries it is not a crime at all. Most trademark infringement is not a crime, and what little is a crime (beyond possibly being fraud, depending on the nature of what is happening) only recently was criminalized. I just don't think that it's that serious or that much of a societal problem, rather than a purely private one.
I dont have enough money to employ a lawyer, so you declare my entire business model a failure.
No. But if piracy is enough of a problem for you that you can't stay in business due to piracy, and you also lack the money to procure legal remedies against that piracy, then that's where the failure lies.
I dont give a toss if the people in brazil dont respect copyright, but if they host a server with pirated software for people in the UK or USA then I do care.
And what are you going to do about it? If it's a Brazilian in Brazil without so much as the first asset in the US or UK, and they're not breaking Brazilian laws, you're going to have an awfully hard time doing anything about it. And why shouldn't you? It's not the job of Brazil to comply with our laws, any more than it would be vice versa. There's nothing in the territories you're interested in that you can use for pressure. The traditional solution has been to stop pirated copies at the border, but that's impractical with the Internet. On the whole, I think that I'd rather have this overall scenario -- a free Internet, and each country getting to decide what laws are best for its own people -- than one in which your business is more successful. Sure, you might not appreciate the big picture since it's your business, but I see no reason for anyone else to side with you.
I guess the technological solution (DRM) kind of outguns the law in this case.
But since the DRM is hostile to the policies that underlie copyright, I'd still prefer to discourage you from using it by the aforementioned means. Even if this ends up meaning that you abandon this line of business, that is still preferable to having DRM in use. Your software just isn't good enough to make DRM palatable; nothing is.
The state should enforce the law. There shouldnt be a need for private companies or individuals to pay lawyers to get the existing copyright law enforced.
No. AFAIK, everywhere in the world, there are parallel civil and criminal judicial systems. Disagreements and wrongs between people are not something that the state should waste its resources on. If it's important, the parties involved will take care of it. If not, then why should anyone else care? Copyright should be purely civil so that authors will have to decide whether their copyrights are worth enforcing and so that the people don't have to suffer the costs of enforcement. This will reduce the amount of enforcement, which is a good thing, and yet certainly not reduce the incentive effect of copyright (since copyright laws are almost entirely civil everywhere anyway, and always have been, and yet are still quite an incentive). That's good, since it results in more bang for the buck as far as the public is concerned.
I really fear to think how little you must know about the law to think that everything should be enforced by the state, though. That would be crazy -- and result in a huge tax burden to pay for the legions upon legions of lawyers that would work for the government, as well as the private burden to afford the defense, unless that ought to be borne by the state too. While I wouldn't mind a cushy government job, I think that everyone is better off with lawyers in private practice for the most part.
Yes so it would seem
Yes. After all, why should I care more about you than society at large? Maybe if this had something to do with civil liberties, I could see that, but copyright is as utilitarian as it comes.
If you have that small a business then you're in the wrong business. It's a bit like being a mom and pop hardware store and having Home Depot and Lowes move in next door; you don't have the advertising budget or the cash necessary to stay in business against them so you go out of business or at least go into something else where you can still compete. You could try the DRM angle, but under a system such as I've proposed, you'd be taking a significant risk and probably still going out of business (either because the program is popular enough that someone cracks the DRM, or because it's unpopular enough that no one pirates it or even buys it for that matter) so little changes.
The fact of the matter is that most small business fail, and most authors fail. There's no magic bullet for this. It's not so much the fault of pirates; a successful business will do very well in spite of piracy or will avoid being much of a target for pirates by finding something to make money at that isn't vulnerable to piracy (e.g. Linux pirates haven't done much to the businesses that make money in relation to Linux).
What if it's hosted in a country that does not even accept the principle of copyright?
That's a valid choice for the people of that country to make. Copyright is utilitarian, and it only makes sense to have copyright laws if your country gets more of a benefit from having them than if it doesn't. Some countries will opt to not have copyright, and we should not try to pressure them into doing what we want any more than we should be pressured into doing what other countries want.
No suprise to hear a lawyer touting court cases as the answer to our problems
Actually, I don't care about your problems. I care about the big picture. The public is seriously harmed by the use of DRM. I would suggest banning it outright, except that I don't think that that would work with free speech. So instead I think that our policy should be to do what we can to discourage it and to encourage not using it. If it happens to be bad for your business, tough. I don't care about your business, I care about the public good. And I am convinced that the public is better off without DRM, even if that means it's also left without your software, than it would be if they had both. Your software is never going to be good enough as to justify the evil of DRM.
Nice gravy train for the lawyers though.
No, not really. I actually have a whole agenda of reform I'm working on, and the result would be to make copyright a pretty boring legal field without a huge amount of litigation or even transactional work. That's how it traditionally has been, and one indicator of the failure of the current laws is the rise in business in that sector. I have no problems with putting myself out of work in this field; I really am interested in what is best for society at large.
So enlighten me, how does one enforce copyright without DRM.
You sue them. You know, it's the way that everyone has enforced copyrights since they were first invented around 300 years ago. It's still practiced today, in fact. Similarly, the only way to enforce DRM anticircumvention laws is also to sue people, so pro-DRM laws don't really change things much.
The problem with your solution is that piracy is allowed to run rampant. Piracy is growing, and if left unchecked it will eat seriously into the amount of revenue that content creators can expect to get for their work. There will come a 'tipping point' where piracy is *so* rampant (as it is in some 3rd world countries) that buying legal copies will become old-fashioned and will collapse entirely. This is not vaguely desirable, unless you think that you are happy to get by purely with hobbyist content.
No, it's not. If authors opt to have copyrights without DRM, then they still have the full panoply of legal rights which they can enforce. If they opt to have DRM without copyrights, then they have no legal rights, and they're limited to whatever protection they can manage on their own; if that turns out to be more than what they can get with copyrights, then good for them. But I bet no, and so they'll probably want to go for the copyrights, which is what I would prefer them to do anyway. Frankly, your objection seems pretty wierd given that the article itself is about how DRM doesn't have anything to do with piracy.
As for hobbyist content, it doesn't bother me. Copyright has nothing to do with promoting the quality of content, only quantity and freedom with regard to that content. It is entirely possible to have a better situation with less content and more freedom than more content and less freedom.
DRM needs to be improved
DRM is incapable of being improved. It's always going to be fatally flawed and hostile to copyright, and on the whole, I'd rather have copyright.
A future where people try to make a living creating work that others can copy freely without any compensation paid to the content creator is just a pipe dream.
That's why it's the ideal that we should aim for, even if it isn't something that's realistic. DRM certainly has no place in this; it isn't part of the ideal or even a way to get there.
I've said it before, the people to blame for DRM are pirates.
I'm choosing the system that maximises the amount of high quality content that is produced.
But the value of the content is greatly diminished if you are limited as to what you can do with it. The ideal world would be one in which all artistic works that could be created, are created, and they're all in the public domain so that everyone can have gigantic free personal libraries, and anyone can create derivative works of anything. While that ideal might be unachievable, we ought to try to come as close to it as we can manage.
This means that sometimes, accepting that fewer works will be created (or fewer works that require a large investment to make, since unauthorized derivatives can help make it up on quantity), is the best option, since the quantity of works that aren't made is small enough that the most important factor is how free people are to use those works, and how soon. DRM is an attempt to permanently keep works under control, to permanently limit freedom, and so it would take an infinite amount of works to even have a go at making it worthwhile, and even then it probably wouldn't be acceptable. And we sure aren't there.
I would suggest the following solution to the DRM problem: Only allow copyrights for works that the author, his assigns, agents, and licensees, publish without DRM. If they use DRM, they don't get a copyright, or the copyright is revoked. Make it legal to break DRM, and have the government encourage it, assist in it, and help to publish non-DRMed copies of the by-definition public domain works.
This allows copyright holders to choose DRM if it is really what is important to them, but I bet that they would not. And I bet that this would have very little effect on their revenues or how many works they create, and the production values of those works (which isn't synonymous with quality, BTW -- expensive things are not necessarily better things). There's nothing that stops us from tweaking the copyright bargain and keeping it in the advantage of the public. But we can't give up and accept things as a given; we have to make an effort.
There's nothing special about the 14th Amendment that would prevent the courts from relying upon it. If someone is discriminated against, or suffers a deprivation of due process, by the government, then they can go to court arguing that the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from doing that. Just like if they are forced to quarter soldiers, they can go to court arguing that the 3d Amendment prohibits the government from doing that.
Section 5 is merely like the Necessary and Proper clause in the Constitution; it authorizes legislation to make sure that there is compliance with the 14th Amendment, but it doesn't change the fundamental structure of our government with regard to a particular bit of subject matter. That would just be stupid.
I think you need to work on understanding plain language a little more. For example, you seem to have read section 5 as saying 'Only the Congress shall...' but that's not what it actually says.
Why not give all authors almost complete control over their works?
Why should we? How do we benefit from this? There are three types of public benefits with regard to creative works: 1) to have as many as possible original works created and published; 2) to have as many as possible derivative works created and published, and; 3) to have no or as few as possible (and for as short a time) restrictions on the public with regard to those works.
If it causes more works to be created and published, then I am prepared to accept some limited, temporary restrictions, but only provided that the public benefit of the extra works outweighs the public harm of the restrictions. E.g. a million years more copyright that caused only one more work to be created and published would pretty certainly not be worth it; no matter how good that work was, we'd be better off without it.
You are suggesting that we give artists the ability to un-create and un-publish works, which would largely try to erase whatever public benefit the creation and publication of the work had resulted in. It would also amount to a permanent restriction on the public, since the work would be irrevocably lost and could never enter the public domain. So I fail to see how there is any public benefit whatsoever. Because of that, I fail to see why I shouldn't deride this as an insane idea, and you as an idiot for having come up with it. You seem to be pretty selfish and short-sighted. The utilitarian model of copyright, which I've described above, and which is the foundation and constitutional justification for the whole thing, is interested in how we can better society generally, by spreading knowledge. You seem to not care about that, even though for any individual on the planet, they will always receive more knowledge from the amassed contributions of others, than they can ever possibly hope to generate themselves. They might generate something new, but never a greater quantity. We don't stand on the shoulders of giants; we stand on the shoulders of all the other people who came before us. You want to kick that over.
Frankly, if your idea was so hot, why not use it in the patent field? Patents operate under the exact same utilitarian model as copyrights (save that it is concerned with the spread and use of inventions, rather than knowledge generally), so if your idea was good for one, then it would be good for the other, right? Well, some human being invented the wheel. Another invented walking upright. Another invented language. Another tamed fire. Why shouldn't we allow them, or their estates, to retract those inventions, turning us into crawling savage brutes, just to satisfy your moronic ideology? I wouldn't allow it, since I want to cultivate the greatest raw material (i.e. the most works, and the most inventions) to help society thrive. I don't give a crap about authors or inventors, save in how they can be exploited in furthering this cause. Since it seems the best way to exploit them is to give them rewards that are enough to encourage them to work, but not enough to outweigh the benefits of their work, that's what I do, and I do it happily, since society still gets the better part of the bargain.
The exception for professors was never good policy, and doesn't survive the plain language of the 1976 Act. I would not rely on it, and would suggest instead using the fairly strong bargaining position of the professors on this particular issue, to get something in their contracts. Of course, the policy of the school as you describe it won't hold up either; just providing a network and making a rather outrageous claim does not a work made for hire or assignment make.
It's better to go by what is best for society overall.
I agree, at least in this case.
In contrast, once the merchants started taking off in europe, it was seen that if you could make money, you could get somewhere. better house, better life, etc. So there was much more of a drive to innovate and "get ahead".
Without SOME form of copyright, etc, it takes away the drive to do that sort of thing.
There is a pretty huge leap between those two things, not least of which is that many artists don't make money from copyrights, but do make money from their artistic pursuits. A portrait painter, for example, makes money from his labor (i.e. painting services) which is basically the same way that a plumber or doctor makes money. A still life painter makes money from selling copies of his work that have the right provenance, but since a copyright really deals with mass-produced copies, it doesn't do much for him; canvases he actually painted will sell at a gallery, but a color xerox of a canvas will go for very little if anyone will bother to buy it at all (ditto known counterfeit canvases).
Certainly I support the idea of copyrights to the extent that they benefit the public, but the actual benefits the public wants has nothing to do with social mobility (which is good, just not really related to copyright), but instead are 1) having as many original works created and published as possible, 2) having as many derivative works created and published as possible, and 3) having as minimal copyrights as possible, if any at all. These are all equally important. In a public domain world, some are more satisfied than others. In a world with copyright, the amount and nature of the copyright will change how much these goals are being satisfied. The idea is to find a way to produce the greatest net increase (i.e. adding the amount of satisfaction of the three goals together, and subtracting the amount of non-satisfaction of the three goals, get the biggest number). Under the right circumstances, a minor decrease in one goal can produce a huge increase in another, yielding a net increase. That's the kind of thing we're looking for.
And remember -- appealing to peoples' profit motive is fine, but only if that's what's best for society overall. Sometimes it will be important to place other things ahead of profits (e.g. it might be profitable for Mr. Burns to dump radioactive sludge in the playground, but we shouldn't admire that or even allow it).
No, only the new material added in the new books. A copyright doesn't cover a character per se, it covers works. All the attributes of Harry Potter that originate in the first book will be in the public domain before the attributes of Harry Potter from the second book. Even when those attributes appear in the second book, since they originated from the first, they will be public domain once the first book is. At that point you can make a derivative of the first Harry Potter book, using the Harry Potter character as he was then (and changing whatever you like, so long as you don't draw upon the later books still in copyright) and you're fine. Just don't use anything from the later books yet. That's the thing about derivative works -- they're only copyrightable to the extent that they are not derivative. All the derivative material falls under the copyright of the earlier work from which it comes.
I agree. I think that part of free speech means allowing people to use DRM if they want to.
However, that doesn't mean I have to like it. And it doesn't mean I have to encourage it. So, for example, I think that if someone uses DRM, then they should not get a copyright for the DRMed work. This doesn't prohibit them from doing it, but it means that the government-provided incentive of copyright isn't given to them since we don't want to encourage the use of DRM.
Also, allowing people to use DRM doesn't mean that we have to have laws that prohibit breaking it. So the law should support breaking DRM, and the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office should work to break DRM and make the now-unDRMed works (which would be public domain works per the previous paragraph) publicly available. At the least, they should help to coordinate and encourage DRM breaking efforts.
None of this prohibits the use of DRM, but I would hope that if authors had to choose between publishing unencrypted works and getting copyrights, and publishing encrypted works and getting no copyrights, that they would find the former more attractive.
If my brother spends a year writing a unique book, and you derive pleasure from reading it then you should compensate him.
So if I spend a year landscaping my yard, and you derive pleasure from looking at it, should you compensate me? What if it increases property values in the entire neighborhood, and you're my neighbor?
I would say no. The mere fact that something you do is valuable to someone else does not entitle you to be paid for it under the law or even morally.
Additionally, since the later two books in your example are derivative works, only the portions of those books that are original and not based on the previous book are copyrightable. So if there is material in the second book which is rehashed from the first, that is covered under the copyright of the first book (which has terminated in the example), for whatever that's worth.
First, if she had no heirs at all (including parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) then her property would escheat to the State. The practical effect of which (I believe - I haven't researched it) would be to put the work in the public domain.
No. If it escheats to the state, then that means that the state owns the copyright, just like anyone else can. A state could have a policy of putting escheated copyrights into the public domain, but AFAIK, no states do that.
Spoken as someone who has likely never tried to make a living as an author.
Actually, I was a self-supporting and comfortable artist before I got so interested in copyright law that I decided to go to law school. Just because I am a strong beliver in copyright reform doesn't mean that I don't know what things are like for artists.
Let's face it, the government isn't exactly highly efficient, and having to file paperwork that can be lost with fees that could put copyright ownership out of the reach of common people is not the answer.
It worked great for nearly 200 years of our history, actually, and where fault can be laid at the feet of the Copyright Office, the author's rights would not suffer. Patents work pretty much exactly like this, by the way: you have to send patents in to be examined, and you have to pay maintenance fees (and thus indicate your continued interest in having a patent) or else it terminates earlier than the maximum of 20 years from filing. AFAIK, no one really has criticized this aspect of the system. It does require some attention on the part of the copyright holder, but so what? We expect him to file taxes regularly and correctly. We expect him to pay his bills on time. We expect him to maintain any kind of business licensing he might need. So long as the burden is minimal but sufficient to weed out people who just don't care, I'm happy with it. Renewal of a copyright should be about as difficult as renewing a pre-paid magazine subscription. You fill in your name, address, a copyright registration number, and send in a check with a basically token amount (e.g. $45 -- and if the copyright can't cover its own costs, then it's probably not worth having). It isn't mean to be hard, it's just meant to evidence interest.
We already have this kind of stupidity when it comes to trademarks, and it's just a hassle, really.
Not at all. The trademark space, like the domain name space, is effectively finite, given the constraints of what constitutes an acceptable mark (e.g. jsflnjdlnfiue-842-hn8ewnf is a bad mark since it's going to be a pain in the ass for people to remember it). So rather than give marks away permanently, registrants have to continually indicate that they still want it. It is easy as hell, and not even a hassel. You just put a reminder in your calendar in the future, and you're set.
What happens if the copyright term is 30 years and someone only wants 20 years of protection? Then they can put the work into the public domain. The worst case scenario is that we have to wait 10 years for the work to fall out of copyright in this case.
10 worthless years; 10 years that the public is unduly harmed, and 10 years that the author doesn't care about. Obviously the author will not put the work in the public domain: he doesn't care about the work. Even putting it in the public domain would require some expenditure of effort, and the author is unwilling to do so. I merely want the failure to act to be the trigger for putting works in the public domain, so that the author has the burden of getting and keeping his copyrights, and the public needn't suffer when the author fails to act at all.
Really, it seems most of us agree that this is a solution, we're just bickering over the details.
Meh. I think there is a lot of agreement around here that terms are too long. But I see little discussion as to scope, and I think that's a shame. I would like to see copyright scopes reduced too, and in fact, I think that scope is a more important issue than term length. Weirdly, it's the inverse situation with patents; many people here are upset as to scope (at least for software and business method patents) but there's little concern as to term length.
No, only the new works would only protect the new material. So if the character of Harry Potter is established in the first book, but it's not until the last book that it's revealed that he's had a third arm the whole time, and no one ever mentioned it (even though it was always there, and the reader never knew it) then Harry Potter with two arms hits the public domain before Harry Potter with three arms does.
I'm from a commonwealth. But mostly I'm not any kind of criminal lawyer; I do civil transactional work, so any discussion of entrapment from me is based on my recollection of 1L crim, and not amazingly reliable, but I think I'm roughly correct.
I may not have been clear in the earlier example, then. If the fake is not copyrightable, then it was not infringing to download it, and there is no such thing as intent to infringe. You have to infringe on something, in a copyright suit (or at least someone does in such a way that you end up being responsible for it, as happened with Napster, Grokster, etc.). But the intent doesn't go to intending to infringe on a particular work; any work will do, so long as it is copyrightable. And in fact, civil copyright law ignores intent altogether; if you infringe, you're on the hook for it, and no one cares what was in your mind at the time. So it wouldn't even matter if you thought that the work was not copyrightable and that you weren't doing anything wrong; you still infringed. There might be some sort of equitable argument (i.e. you were deliberately tricked into wrongdoing), but that won't fly if you were planning on wrongdoing anyway, which is the only way intent is even vaguely relevant to this discussion, really.
First, I was talking more about torts, since that's more relevant to this discussion. Second, if we were talking about a criminal thing, then no, murder would work. Alice had the intent to murder, which is what's required. It doesn't matter who she murders. At least if I recall my 1L crim law properly. So she gets charged with murder against Carol and attempted murder against Bob. Manslaughter would be more appropriate if she did something recklessly, like drive very badly, so that she lacks an intent to really kill anyone, but isn't acting responsibly, either.
We do have entrapment laws, but just offering an opportunity to break the law isn't enough to trigger them. You might disagree with this policy, but that would really be a matter to bring up with legislators.
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Well, there's a little more to it than that.
Woz wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Apple II because it needed something, but he was much more of a hardware guy than a software guy, and writing the BASIC was harder for him than actually designing the computers had been. He ended up writing a BASIC interpreter that didn't have floating point routines, just to get something out the door ahead of everyone else. This was Integer BASIC, which was the first BASIC in the Apple II ROMs. One of his next projects was to work on adding the floating point routines in, but he ended up working on the floppy disk project first.
A big part of Microsoft's business back then was writing compilers and interpreters for various platforms, which they could license out. They wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Apple II, and eventually Apple decided that they needed something better than Integer BASIC. Since it was already done and available by the time Woz finished the floppy drive project, he never needed to improve Integer BASIC.
So Apple decided to get a 10 year license from Microsoft for their interpreter, which Apple put into ROM (and also made available on tape if you didn't want to upgrade your ROMs) and marketed as Applesoft BASIC. That was in 1977. As it happened, Microsoft was hurting for money back then, so they licensed it to Apple for a flat fee, rather than on a per-unit basis. Apple upgraded Applesoft BASIC from time to time, but it was still basically the same thing.
By 1985, the Mac had been introduced, and was becoming more popular, but Apple II computers were still where Apple made most of its money. And it was coming up on time to renegotiate the license. This time, Microsoft was in a much stronger position. It was able to force Apple to both abandon their own project to write a BASIC for the Mac, and to get a license for Mac UI elements. Apparently, Apple didn't have much of an option. I suppose they could have tried to get a cleanroom clone of Applesoft BASIC written in time for the license expiration, but for whatever reason, they decided it wasn't their best option. In any case, I don't think that the blame can be put entirely at Scully's feet. A lot of people screwed up over a very long period of time to end up with the situation Sculley inherited.
This was hardly the only time Microsoft got the better of Apple. Another instance is how Apple got Microsoft to agree to not ship their own mouse-based shells until a year after the Mac came out. But Apple thought that the Mac would come out in 1982, so they actually put the date in the contract. Apple blew their deadline (something Steve Jobs has a habit of) by a couple of years, allowing Microsoft the chance to announce Windows 1.0 before the Mac was announced. And again, Apple needed Microsoft to write third party software for the Mac (Word, Multiplan, Chart, etc.), so they couldn't really do much.
Commercial speech, as I sure hope you already know, is not protected by the First Amendment in the USA.
Actually, it is protected speech, so long as it 1) does not promote unlawful activities or products, and 2) is not deceptive. Otherwise, it's basically protected at the intermediate scrutiny level. And this is part of a trend that's been going on for years, so I don't think it would be terribly surprising to see the degree of protection continue to increase, just as the protection for other forms of speech have increased in the past several decades. The thought behind it is that it's important to ensure that consumers have as much non-deceptive information about products and services as possible, so that they can be better informed. You might want to look at the Central Hudson case, which is one of the leading cases on this subject.
How about 4) to have as many GOOD works, original or derivative, created and published...?
And who would judge artistic merit? The government? Artists that are already established, may be artistically conservative, and who are competitors with a clear conflict of interest? Critics, who suffer from similar faults?
I'm sorry, but it's just not viable. There is no such thing as objective artistic merit; all works are good to someone, and all works are bad to someone. A rule of thumb is that 90% of all works created are crap, but that which works fall on which side of that ratio will vary depending on who you ask. Since it's a pretty constant ratio, the only way to encourage the creation of more good works is to encourage the creation of more works period. Copyright is meant to, among other things, encourage the creation of more works period. Quality is irrelevant to copyright policy, but quantity is very important.
Besides, a copyright is not a direct financial reward, it's a temporary, limited monopoly on the profits that can be derived from a work. The profits may be great or small, but all copyright does is focus them. This means that an author who creates an unpopular work, regardless of artistic merit, will not profit from it. An artist who creates a popular work, regardless of artistic merit, will profit from it. The value of a copyright is directly tied to the market. If you wanted to specifically encourage good works, setting aside that there's no way of knowing which works are good, particularly over long periods of time, you'd have to set up rewards for them that were not connected to the market. NEA grants are similar to this. However, it's not a system that works all that well: you'd need a lot of money to fund it, you'd have all the problems in determining merit as already mentioned (some of which will result in works not getting supported due to conflicts of interest, etc.), and you'd probably find that it wasn't effective for certain artists, genres, or even classes of works, due to the lack of money involved (e.g. would it be enough to fund a "good" $200 million summer blockbuster movie?), due to difficulty in contacting the artists and getting them to participate, due to the possibility of being flooded with submissions that take time and money just to sort through, etc.
Patents are similar to copyrights in that the kinds of incentives, public policies, etc. are alike, just in different fields. This sort of thing has been tried extensively in the field of inventions, and it has never really worked all that well. Probably one of the more famous examples is the Longitude Board in England that was trying to get people to solve the longitude problem. The man who did solve it didn't get his reward until very late in his life, after long fights with the Board who deliberately made things difficult for him (since some members didn't like his solution), thanks to the personal intervention of the King.
On the whole, I'd say that the market-based solutions of copyrights and patents that ignore quality and focus on quantity, are the way to go. While you seem to say that you don't like mainstream music, it's not the fault of artists or the system that it is popular and that therefore that is where the money is.
Well, I'm willing to put anything on the table, but I think that it ought to be strictly civil.
If it is civil, then the costs of enforcement are tied to the popularity of the work and the profits that can be derived from it or the copyright holder's other works. This is better than than if it were criminal, in which case the value of the work in question would not really be a factor. Further, it's better if those costs are borne by the copyright holder than the public, as we already bear the costs of having there be a copyright to begin with.
Also, if a copyright holder is prepared to allow some laxity in enforcement of his copyright, then I'm prepared to let him. This is similar to my views on formalities, in that whatever the copyright holder doesn't expressly act to protect, I don't think should be protected. If it were important to them, they'd act differently. Since copyright is largely about getting the most incentive for the least loss of freedom, we should not assume things have an incentivizing effect on the author when the author's own actions or inactions indicate otherwise. Criminal prosecution would be pretty much detached from this.
Then there's that federal criminal investigators (such as the FBI or Secret Service) and prosecutors have much more important things they could be doing. Additionally, it's not as though copyright holders have a terribly difficult time conducting private investigations and civil suits against pirates; there are very few criminal copyright cases now, so the copyright holders already bear 99.44% of the burden. If they're well-organized, they have some private investigators and specialist attorneys working on these sorts of things, using ex parte TROs to seize evidence, etc.
Finally though, I also have a gut feeling that it's simply not worthy of being a crime. Patent infringement has never been a crime. Most copyright infringement is not a crime. In most countries it is not a crime at all. Most trademark infringement is not a crime, and what little is a crime (beyond possibly being fraud, depending on the nature of what is happening) only recently was criminalized. I just don't think that it's that serious or that much of a societal problem, rather than a purely private one.
I dont have enough money to employ a lawyer, so you declare my entire business model a failure.
No. But if piracy is enough of a problem for you that you can't stay in business due to piracy, and you also lack the money to procure legal remedies against that piracy, then that's where the failure lies.
I dont give a toss if the people in brazil dont respect copyright, but if they host a server with pirated software for people in the UK or USA then I do care.
And what are you going to do about it? If it's a Brazilian in Brazil without so much as the first asset in the US or UK, and they're not breaking Brazilian laws, you're going to have an awfully hard time doing anything about it. And why shouldn't you? It's not the job of Brazil to comply with our laws, any more than it would be vice versa. There's nothing in the territories you're interested in that you can use for pressure. The traditional solution has been to stop pirated copies at the border, but that's impractical with the Internet. On the whole, I think that I'd rather have this overall scenario -- a free Internet, and each country getting to decide what laws are best for its own people -- than one in which your business is more successful. Sure, you might not appreciate the big picture since it's your business, but I see no reason for anyone else to side with you.
I guess the technological solution (DRM) kind of outguns the law in this case.
But since the DRM is hostile to the policies that underlie copyright, I'd still prefer to discourage you from using it by the aforementioned means. Even if this ends up meaning that you abandon this line of business, that is still preferable to having DRM in use. Your software just isn't good enough to make DRM palatable; nothing is.
The state should enforce the law. There shouldnt be a need for private companies or individuals to pay lawyers to get the existing copyright law enforced.
No. AFAIK, everywhere in the world, there are parallel civil and criminal judicial systems. Disagreements and wrongs between people are not something that the state should waste its resources on. If it's important, the parties involved will take care of it. If not, then why should anyone else care? Copyright should be purely civil so that authors will have to decide whether their copyrights are worth enforcing and so that the people don't have to suffer the costs of enforcement. This will reduce the amount of enforcement, which is a good thing, and yet certainly not reduce the incentive effect of copyright (since copyright laws are almost entirely civil everywhere anyway, and always have been, and yet are still quite an incentive). That's good, since it results in more bang for the buck as far as the public is concerned.
I really fear to think how little you must know about the law to think that everything should be enforced by the state, though. That would be crazy -- and result in a huge tax burden to pay for the legions upon legions of lawyers that would work for the government, as well as the private burden to afford the defense, unless that ought to be borne by the state too. While I wouldn't mind a cushy government job, I think that everyone is better off with lawyers in private practice for the most part.
Yes so it would seem
Yes. After all, why should I care more about you than society at large? Maybe if this had something to do with civil liberties, I could see that, but copyright is as utilitarian as it comes.
If you have that small a business then you're in the wrong business. It's a bit like being a mom and pop hardware store and having Home Depot and Lowes move in next door; you don't have the advertising budget or the cash necessary to stay in business against them so you go out of business or at least go into something else where you can still compete. You could try the DRM angle, but under a system such as I've proposed, you'd be taking a significant risk and probably still going out of business (either because the program is popular enough that someone cracks the DRM, or because it's unpopular enough that no one pirates it or even buys it for that matter) so little changes.
The fact of the matter is that most small business fail, and most authors fail. There's no magic bullet for this. It's not so much the fault of pirates; a successful business will do very well in spite of piracy or will avoid being much of a target for pirates by finding something to make money at that isn't vulnerable to piracy (e.g. Linux pirates haven't done much to the businesses that make money in relation to Linux).
What if it's hosted in a country that does not even accept the principle of copyright?
That's a valid choice for the people of that country to make. Copyright is utilitarian, and it only makes sense to have copyright laws if your country gets more of a benefit from having them than if it doesn't. Some countries will opt to not have copyright, and we should not try to pressure them into doing what we want any more than we should be pressured into doing what other countries want.
No suprise to hear a lawyer touting court cases as the answer to our problems
Actually, I don't care about your problems. I care about the big picture. The public is seriously harmed by the use of DRM. I would suggest banning it outright, except that I don't think that that would work with free speech. So instead I think that our policy should be to do what we can to discourage it and to encourage not using it. If it happens to be bad for your business, tough. I don't care about your business, I care about the public good. And I am convinced that the public is better off without DRM, even if that means it's also left without your software, than it would be if they had both. Your software is never going to be good enough as to justify the evil of DRM.
Nice gravy train for the lawyers though.
No, not really. I actually have a whole agenda of reform I'm working on, and the result would be to make copyright a pretty boring legal field without a huge amount of litigation or even transactional work. That's how it traditionally has been, and one indicator of the failure of the current laws is the rise in business in that sector. I have no problems with putting myself out of work in this field; I really am interested in what is best for society at large.
So enlighten me, how does one enforce copyright without DRM.
You sue them. You know, it's the way that everyone has enforced copyrights since they were first invented around 300 years ago. It's still practiced today, in fact. Similarly, the only way to enforce DRM anticircumvention laws is also to sue people, so pro-DRM laws don't really change things much.
have you ever tried?
I am a copyright lawyer, you know.
The problem with your solution is that piracy is allowed to run rampant. Piracy is growing, and if left unchecked it will eat seriously into the amount of revenue that content creators can expect to get for their work. There will come a 'tipping point' where piracy is *so* rampant (as it is in some 3rd world countries) that buying legal copies will become old-fashioned and will collapse entirely. This is not vaguely desirable, unless you think that you are happy to get by purely with hobbyist content.
No, it's not. If authors opt to have copyrights without DRM, then they still have the full panoply of legal rights which they can enforce. If they opt to have DRM without copyrights, then they have no legal rights, and they're limited to whatever protection they can manage on their own; if that turns out to be more than what they can get with copyrights, then good for them. But I bet no, and so they'll probably want to go for the copyrights, which is what I would prefer them to do anyway. Frankly, your objection seems pretty wierd given that the article itself is about how DRM doesn't have anything to do with piracy.
As for hobbyist content, it doesn't bother me. Copyright has nothing to do with promoting the quality of content, only quantity and freedom with regard to that content. It is entirely possible to have a better situation with less content and more freedom than more content and less freedom.
DRM needs to be improved
DRM is incapable of being improved. It's always going to be fatally flawed and hostile to copyright, and on the whole, I'd rather have copyright.
A future where people try to make a living creating work that others can copy freely without any compensation paid to the content creator is just a pipe dream.
That's why it's the ideal that we should aim for, even if it isn't something that's realistic. DRM certainly has no place in this; it isn't part of the ideal or even a way to get there.
I've said it before, the people to blame for DRM are pirates.
The article here seems to indicate otherwise.
I'm choosing the system that maximises the amount of high quality content that is produced.
But the value of the content is greatly diminished if you are limited as to what you can do with it. The ideal world would be one in which all artistic works that could be created, are created, and they're all in the public domain so that everyone can have gigantic free personal libraries, and anyone can create derivative works of anything. While that ideal might be unachievable, we ought to try to come as close to it as we can manage.
This means that sometimes, accepting that fewer works will be created (or fewer works that require a large investment to make, since unauthorized derivatives can help make it up on quantity), is the best option, since the quantity of works that aren't made is small enough that the most important factor is how free people are to use those works, and how soon. DRM is an attempt to permanently keep works under control, to permanently limit freedom, and so it would take an infinite amount of works to even have a go at making it worthwhile, and even then it probably wouldn't be acceptable. And we sure aren't there.
I would suggest the following solution to the DRM problem: Only allow copyrights for works that the author, his assigns, agents, and licensees, publish without DRM. If they use DRM, they don't get a copyright, or the copyright is revoked. Make it legal to break DRM, and have the government encourage it, assist in it, and help to publish non-DRMed copies of the by-definition public domain works.
This allows copyright holders to choose DRM if it is really what is important to them, but I bet that they would not. And I bet that this would have very little effect on their revenues or how many works they create, and the production values of those works (which isn't synonymous with quality, BTW -- expensive things are not necessarily better things). There's nothing that stops us from tweaking the copyright bargain and keeping it in the advantage of the public. But we can't give up and accept things as a given; we have to make an effort.
There's nothing special about the 14th Amendment that would prevent the courts from relying upon it. If someone is discriminated against, or suffers a deprivation of due process, by the government, then they can go to court arguing that the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from doing that. Just like if they are forced to quarter soldiers, they can go to court arguing that the 3d Amendment prohibits the government from doing that.
Section 5 is merely like the Necessary and Proper clause in the Constitution; it authorizes legislation to make sure that there is compliance with the 14th Amendment, but it doesn't change the fundamental structure of our government with regard to a particular bit of subject matter. That would just be stupid.
I think you need to work on understanding plain language a little more. For example, you seem to have read section 5 as saying 'Only the Congress shall...' but that's not what it actually says.
Why not give all authors almost complete control over their works?
Why should we? How do we benefit from this? There are three types of public benefits with regard to creative works: 1) to have as many as possible original works created and published; 2) to have as many as possible derivative works created and published, and; 3) to have no or as few as possible (and for as short a time) restrictions on the public with regard to those works.
If it causes more works to be created and published, then I am prepared to accept some limited, temporary restrictions, but only provided that the public benefit of the extra works outweighs the public harm of the restrictions. E.g. a million years more copyright that caused only one more work to be created and published would pretty certainly not be worth it; no matter how good that work was, we'd be better off without it.
You are suggesting that we give artists the ability to un-create and un-publish works, which would largely try to erase whatever public benefit the creation and publication of the work had resulted in. It would also amount to a permanent restriction on the public, since the work would be irrevocably lost and could never enter the public domain. So I fail to see how there is any public benefit whatsoever. Because of that, I fail to see why I shouldn't deride this as an insane idea, and you as an idiot for having come up with it. You seem to be pretty selfish and short-sighted. The utilitarian model of copyright, which I've described above, and which is the foundation and constitutional justification for the whole thing, is interested in how we can better society generally, by spreading knowledge. You seem to not care about that, even though for any individual on the planet, they will always receive more knowledge from the amassed contributions of others, than they can ever possibly hope to generate themselves. They might generate something new, but never a greater quantity. We don't stand on the shoulders of giants; we stand on the shoulders of all the other people who came before us. You want to kick that over.
Frankly, if your idea was so hot, why not use it in the patent field? Patents operate under the exact same utilitarian model as copyrights (save that it is concerned with the spread and use of inventions, rather than knowledge generally), so if your idea was good for one, then it would be good for the other, right? Well, some human being invented the wheel. Another invented walking upright. Another invented language. Another tamed fire. Why shouldn't we allow them, or their estates, to retract those inventions, turning us into crawling savage brutes, just to satisfy your moronic ideology? I wouldn't allow it, since I want to cultivate the greatest raw material (i.e. the most works, and the most inventions) to help society thrive. I don't give a crap about authors or inventors, save in how they can be exploited in furthering this cause. Since it seems the best way to exploit them is to give them rewards that are enough to encourage them to work, but not enough to outweigh the benefits of their work, that's what I do, and I do it happily, since society still gets the better part of the bargain.
Have fun living in a cave, man.
The exception for professors was never good policy, and doesn't survive the plain language of the 1976 Act. I would not rely on it, and would suggest instead using the fairly strong bargaining position of the professors on this particular issue, to get something in their contracts. Of course, the policy of the school as you describe it won't hold up either; just providing a network and making a rather outrageous claim does not a work made for hire or assignment make.
It's better to go by what is best for society overall.
I agree, at least in this case.
In contrast, once the merchants started taking off in europe, it was seen that if you could make money, you could get somewhere. better house, better life, etc. So there was much more of a drive to innovate and "get ahead".
Without SOME form of copyright, etc, it takes away the drive to do that sort of thing.
There is a pretty huge leap between those two things, not least of which is that many artists don't make money from copyrights, but do make money from their artistic pursuits. A portrait painter, for example, makes money from his labor (i.e. painting services) which is basically the same way that a plumber or doctor makes money. A still life painter makes money from selling copies of his work that have the right provenance, but since a copyright really deals with mass-produced copies, it doesn't do much for him; canvases he actually painted will sell at a gallery, but a color xerox of a canvas will go for very little if anyone will bother to buy it at all (ditto known counterfeit canvases).
Certainly I support the idea of copyrights to the extent that they benefit the public, but the actual benefits the public wants has nothing to do with social mobility (which is good, just not really related to copyright), but instead are 1) having as many original works created and published as possible, 2) having as many derivative works created and published as possible, and 3) having as minimal copyrights as possible, if any at all. These are all equally important. In a public domain world, some are more satisfied than others. In a world with copyright, the amount and nature of the copyright will change how much these goals are being satisfied. The idea is to find a way to produce the greatest net increase (i.e. adding the amount of satisfaction of the three goals together, and subtracting the amount of non-satisfaction of the three goals, get the biggest number). Under the right circumstances, a minor decrease in one goal can produce a huge increase in another, yielding a net increase. That's the kind of thing we're looking for.
And remember -- appealing to peoples' profit motive is fine, but only if that's what's best for society overall. Sometimes it will be important to place other things ahead of profits (e.g. it might be profitable for Mr. Burns to dump radioactive sludge in the playground, but we shouldn't admire that or even allow it).
No, only the new material added in the new books. A copyright doesn't cover a character per se, it covers works. All the attributes of Harry Potter that originate in the first book will be in the public domain before the attributes of Harry Potter from the second book. Even when those attributes appear in the second book, since they originated from the first, they will be public domain once the first book is. At that point you can make a derivative of the first Harry Potter book, using the Harry Potter character as he was then (and changing whatever you like, so long as you don't draw upon the later books still in copyright) and you're fine. Just don't use anything from the later books yet. That's the thing about derivative works -- they're only copyrightable to the extent that they are not derivative. All the derivative material falls under the copyright of the earlier work from which it comes.
I agree. I think that part of free speech means allowing people to use DRM if they want to.
However, that doesn't mean I have to like it. And it doesn't mean I have to encourage it. So, for example, I think that if someone uses DRM, then they should not get a copyright for the DRMed work. This doesn't prohibit them from doing it, but it means that the government-provided incentive of copyright isn't given to them since we don't want to encourage the use of DRM.
Also, allowing people to use DRM doesn't mean that we have to have laws that prohibit breaking it. So the law should support breaking DRM, and the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office should work to break DRM and make the now-unDRMed works (which would be public domain works per the previous paragraph) publicly available. At the least, they should help to coordinate and encourage DRM breaking efforts.
None of this prohibits the use of DRM, but I would hope that if authors had to choose between publishing unencrypted works and getting copyrights, and publishing encrypted works and getting no copyrights, that they would find the former more attractive.
If my brother spends a year writing a unique book, and you derive pleasure from reading it then you should compensate him.
So if I spend a year landscaping my yard, and you derive pleasure from looking at it, should you compensate me? What if it increases property values in the entire neighborhood, and you're my neighbor?
I would say no. The mere fact that something you do is valuable to someone else does not entitle you to be paid for it under the law or even morally.
Meh. DRM is always flawed in that the attacker is the same person you are showing the plaintext to.
Additionally, since the later two books in your example are derivative works, only the portions of those books that are original and not based on the previous book are copyrightable. So if there is material in the second book which is rehashed from the first, that is covered under the copyright of the first book (which has terminated in the example), for whatever that's worth.
First, if she had no heirs at all (including parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) then her property would escheat to the State. The practical effect of which (I believe - I haven't researched it) would be to put the work in the public domain.
No. If it escheats to the state, then that means that the state owns the copyright, just like anyone else can. A state could have a policy of putting escheated copyrights into the public domain, but AFAIK, no states do that.
Spoken as someone who has likely never tried to make a living as an author.
Actually, I was a self-supporting and comfortable artist before I got so interested in copyright law that I decided to go to law school. Just because I am a strong beliver in copyright reform doesn't mean that I don't know what things are like for artists.
Let's face it, the government isn't exactly highly efficient, and having to file paperwork that can be lost with fees that could put copyright ownership out of the reach of common people is not the answer.
It worked great for nearly 200 years of our history, actually, and where fault can be laid at the feet of the Copyright Office, the author's rights would not suffer. Patents work pretty much exactly like this, by the way: you have to send patents in to be examined, and you have to pay maintenance fees (and thus indicate your continued interest in having a patent) or else it terminates earlier than the maximum of 20 years from filing. AFAIK, no one really has criticized this aspect of the system. It does require some attention on the part of the copyright holder, but so what? We expect him to file taxes regularly and correctly. We expect him to pay his bills on time. We expect him to maintain any kind of business licensing he might need. So long as the burden is minimal but sufficient to weed out people who just don't care, I'm happy with it. Renewal of a copyright should be about as difficult as renewing a pre-paid magazine subscription. You fill in your name, address, a copyright registration number, and send in a check with a basically token amount (e.g. $45 -- and if the copyright can't cover its own costs, then it's probably not worth having). It isn't mean to be hard, it's just meant to evidence interest.
We already have this kind of stupidity when it comes to trademarks, and it's just a hassle, really.
Not at all. The trademark space, like the domain name space, is effectively finite, given the constraints of what constitutes an acceptable mark (e.g. jsflnjdlnfiue-842-hn8ewnf is a bad mark since it's going to be a pain in the ass for people to remember it). So rather than give marks away permanently, registrants have to continually indicate that they still want it. It is easy as hell, and not even a hassel. You just put a reminder in your calendar in the future, and you're set.
What happens if the copyright term is 30 years and someone only wants 20 years of protection? Then they can put the work into the public domain. The worst case scenario is that we have to wait 10 years for the work to fall out of copyright in this case.
10 worthless years; 10 years that the public is unduly harmed, and 10 years that the author doesn't care about. Obviously the author will not put the work in the public domain: he doesn't care about the work. Even putting it in the public domain would require some expenditure of effort, and the author is unwilling to do so. I merely want the failure to act to be the trigger for putting works in the public domain, so that the author has the burden of getting and keeping his copyrights, and the public needn't suffer when the author fails to act at all.
Really, it seems most of us agree that this is a solution, we're just bickering over the details.
Meh. I think there is a lot of agreement around here that terms are too long. But I see little discussion as to scope, and I think that's a shame. I would like to see copyright scopes reduced too, and in fact, I think that scope is a more important issue than term length. Weirdly, it's the inverse situation with patents; many people here are upset as to scope (at least for software and business method patents) but there's little concern as to term length.
No, only the new works would only protect the new material. So if the character of Harry Potter is established in the first book, but it's not until the last book that it's revealed that he's had a third arm the whole time, and no one ever mentioned it (even though it was always there, and the reader never knew it) then Harry Potter with two arms hits the public domain before Harry Potter with three arms does.
I'm from a commonwealth. But mostly I'm not any kind of criminal lawyer; I do civil transactional work, so any discussion of entrapment from me is based on my recollection of 1L crim, and not amazingly reliable, but I think I'm roughly correct.
I may not have been clear in the earlier example, then. If the fake is not copyrightable, then it was not infringing to download it, and there is no such thing as intent to infringe. You have to infringe on something, in a copyright suit (or at least someone does in such a way that you end up being responsible for it, as happened with Napster, Grokster, etc.). But the intent doesn't go to intending to infringe on a particular work; any work will do, so long as it is copyrightable. And in fact, civil copyright law ignores intent altogether; if you infringe, you're on the hook for it, and no one cares what was in your mind at the time. So it wouldn't even matter if you thought that the work was not copyrightable and that you weren't doing anything wrong; you still infringed. There might be some sort of equitable argument (i.e. you were deliberately tricked into wrongdoing), but that won't fly if you were planning on wrongdoing anyway, which is the only way intent is even vaguely relevant to this discussion, really.
First, I was talking more about torts, since that's more relevant to this discussion. Second, if we were talking about a criminal thing, then no, murder would work. Alice had the intent to murder, which is what's required. It doesn't matter who she murders. At least if I recall my 1L crim law properly. So she gets charged with murder against Carol and attempted murder against Bob. Manslaughter would be more appropriate if she did something recklessly, like drive very badly, so that she lacks an intent to really kill anyone, but isn't acting responsibly, either.
We do have entrapment laws, but just offering an opportunity to break the law isn't enough to trigger them. You might disagree with this policy, but that would really be a matter to bring up with legislators.