Got a case cite for that? AFAIK while it doesn't infringe the 5th Amendment for governments to take land using eminent domain for private development, there is still an obligation to pay what the property is worth. And if the initial price isn't good enough for the owner (which is usually), the owner can always sue for more.
Just to clarify, Aereo's service has been found not to be illegal by federal trial and appellate courts. However, rival services that are claimed to operate similarly have lost court cases in other jurisdictions; the circuit split is part of the justification for cert.
The broadcasters get paid via advertising revenues, which are proportional to the number of viewers. Why should they object to more viewers?
The reason they're upset with Aereo is that cable TV companies pay broadcasters in order to carry the broadcast channels over cable. Alternatively, the broadcasters can compel the cable companies to carry the broadcast channels, but then they can't charge for them.
If the Aereo model is legal, it's pretty likely that the cable TV companies will all stop paying broadcasters and will just use antenna farms, like Aereo does. This will seriously reduce the profits of broadcasters more than any additional viewership being advertised to will make up for.
I think we already do this to some extent in most jurisdictions
Not to my knowledge. (Though sound recordings tended to be treated unusually for a while) And not in the US anyway, which is what I'm most concerned with, being a USian.
Here I do disagree, for the simple reason that as someone trying to run multiple small businesses, overhead is the #1 enemy, and registration of routine practices is a particularly wasteful form of overhead. We don't all have accountants, lawyers or admin staff; for some of us, any time taken to deal with the paperwork is time directly taken away from the handful of people doing actual creative work, and if we're developing work for others then presumably that overhead roughly doubles because there's going to have to be some sort of assignment executed around the time we get paid as well for any such system to work.
Well for most businesses, they simply won't care, and neither will their clients. Automatically granting copyrights results in the ridiculous situation of granting copyrights even to individual Slashdot posts, not to mention many emails, text messages, and other ephemera that do not deserve copyrights because of the simple fact that copyrights were not necessary in order to cause those works to be created and published. A registration system is the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff. If an author wants a copyright enough to timely file for it, it likely was an incentive for him to create and publish the work. If he doesn't seek one, it's safe to assume that he didn't care about copyright, that it wasn't an incentive for him, and therefore shouldn't be granted because it would be unnecessary.
I'm not interested in creating paperwork for paperwork's sake, but an opt-in registration system is the best method I know of for reducing the number of copyrights granted to only those which need to be granted. The actual registration can be quite simple, around the burden of filling out a change of address form; likewise there ought to be a fee, but only enough of a token one to get authors to seriously decide whether they want a copyright or not, as opposed to applying whether they really care or not.
The additional benefit to a registration system is the same as with our existing registration systems for land, and for certain movable property, such as cars: to identify individual items, and to identify the people who claim them, so that in the event of a dispute or a desired business transaction or if the item and the claimant are separated, they can be found.
Copyright incurs costs on the public that ultimately grants them and permit them to exist. We have copyrights to serve the public interest, and if this means that the authors and publishers who enjoy great benefits from the gift of copyright which they have been granted have to do a little paperwork, forgive me if I'm not sympathetic.
The catch here is that there are plenty of other reasons the holder might fail to act. I'm not against the idea of a renewable right in all cases, but the burden of enforcing copyright can already be prohibitive for a small business with limited legal resources. The last thing they need is for a manager who also has statutory obligations relating to everything from business registration and rent payments through to filing tax statements and signing client contracts to find they've lost all rights to their only product because of a paperwork screw-up while they were off sick or simply because they didn't understand the rules (which my accountants and lawyers tell me happens all the time for small businesses when it comes to other legal/tax regs, not least because the way the rules are written is itself not always clear).
Well, we had this in the US for nearly 200 years and it always worked fine. Most copyright holders didn't ever renew, but the sky didn't fall down. It's because only a handful of copyrights have value lasting beyond a short period. I have no
The limit should not be decided around when a work has stopped generating significant revenues, but by when it has made the creator a reasonable return on their investment [of time].
Actually, it should be based on when a work is no longer likely to generate significant copyright related revenue. You forget that the vast majority of works are flops with no significant copyright related revenue ever. Something like Gigli will never make a reasonable return, yet it's stupid to grant it a perpetual copyright as a result.
Further, there should be a distinction between copyright for the purposes of acknowledging a work's creator (which should be automatic, and not expire), and copyright for the purposes of commercialising the work (which should be opt-in, and short). (I believe EU copyright already makes this distinction to some degree.)
Why?
We don't have this in the US, and yet we have loads of authors making loads of works all the time. Other countries that do have this don't appear to be doing better than the US because of having this. Clearly it isn't necessary to incentivize authors to create and publish (which is all we want out of them) and clearly it limits what the public can do, which is inherently bad.
It sounds nice but it accomplishes nothing useful while still bogging things down in limitations and rules.
Moral rights are not useful to the public and are basically bunk anyway. Even the Europeans don't really believe in them.
Yes, I agree. The solution, though, is clearly to grant different maximum term lengths for different classes of work. A newspaper is one of the shortest lived examples, with most of its copyright related value realized in less than a day. A term of, say, two months would be thoroughly generous and sufficient. A textbook is probably one of the longer lived sorts of works. (Well, so long as it isn't for modern history or other fast-paced subjects, but I think we can live with the small bit of waste that comes from not having super granular terms tailored to each work)
The best mechanism for dealing with this, I'm convinced, is to grant very short copyright terms which must be registered for, and then to vary the number of renewal terms depending on the type of work. If a term lasts a year, periodicals might not get to renew at all, software, four times, books, nine times, movies, fourteen times, etc.
This way, if a copyright holder fails to renew, because he doesn't care enough to bother to do so (this was common when we had renewal terms) the public gets the work earlier than if the maximum term were granted from the get go.
If you created it yourself, you are the copyright holder, and therefore nobody can forbid you from distributing it (at least not using copyright law).
Copyright, as it exists today, doesn't give copyright holders a right to distribute their work; they already have this right as free speech, just like everyone else has. Rather, copyright is a system of exclusive rights, that is, rights to exclude; in this case a right to prohibit other people from using their free speech rights to, for instance, distribute a work. It is inherently a system of censorship by private people using state power. That's unavoidable. The question is whether it can be justified anyway. Personally I think that it could be, but it's perfectly reasonable to think otherwise and we should in any case be really cautious about limiting free speech no matter how little or how justified we think we are.
Having the copyright notice puts recruiters on notice that I will sue the bejsus out of them (at the salary under consideration times the number of years on average I stay with a company times triple damages for intentional copyright infringement.) I think I'd have a pretty good chance of winning that, too.
The primary purpose of copyright was to ensure that the creators could profit from their work for a reasonable length of time, then the work would enter the public domain so others can use or extend it.
No.
The primary purpose of copyright is to serve the public interest in advancing the progress of science. The means by which it functions involves giving authors a chance to profit (it's far from ensured; in fact most never make a cent from their copyrights and never will) but its a big mistake to confuse the means with the ends.
I agree that current copyright laws don't serve that purpose very well; the concept needs to be modernized to accommodate corporations which can exist for hundreds of years as well as individuals. More like trademark than copyright.
That would just make things worse. We need to seriously reduce the scope and duration of copyright. It's grown so bloated that authors would barely notice any effects of this, but the public would benefit greatly.
Without a way to flawlessly record and maintain books, music, and movies, works would inevitably be lost, or of poor quality, so people needed new works to be produced, or there would be no copyrighted works.
What the hell are you talking about?
We've always been able to flawlessly copy books. We haven't always done enough of it, but we've always been able to. And music and movies can generally be preserved and reproduced fairly well if some care is taken.
Copyright interferes with the preservation and reproduction of works by imposing additional costs on archivists and outright impeding copying and distribution.
We put up with it, to the extent that we do, because we hope that it will spur the creation and distribution of more works which will enter the public domain as fully and as quickly as possible, since it is only when works are in the public domain that they are of the greatest value to the public. Specifically, we hope it will spur the creation and publication of more works than if we didn't have copyright, with the ideal law being the one that spurs the most but impairs the public the least.
You're wrong about the market too; most works have a very brief window of copyright related commercial viability. It can be measured in hours to, at most, a few years. (A typical novel, for example, will make most of the copyright related money it will ever make within a couple of years of first being published.) This is why old works are generally available fairly cheaply. Yet people always want the new things. Even if we abolished copyright altogether, people would still want new things.
1) They won't give up the long copyrights, they're not those sorts of people;
2) Rights on derivative works, aside from being part of copyright, are extremely useful for the public and should not be bargained away so casually. Indeed, we ought to seriously consider reducing the scope of derivative works rights in copyright itself.
Isn't the purpose of copyright the rights to copy the original work, and wouldn't the characters be part of trademark? So if book publishers wanted to make new copies of the Sherlock Holmes stories, they now have all rights to do so, but any new works, would still require licensing from the owners of the trademark?
No.
The sine qua non of trademark is that it identifies all similarly marked goods as originating from some common source. If you buy a computer labeled COMPUTER, that's generic; that could be from anywhere. If it's labeled APPLE, then you know that it comes from Apple, Inc. Only Apple can use the APPLE mark for computers, but anyone can use generic or purely descriptive terms like COMPUTER or PC or PDA.
Trademarks aren't allowed to operate as a substitute for copyrights. Once a work is in the public domain, anyone can make copies of it, and can make derivative works based on it.
This means that a book with the character of Sherlock Holmes in it could be from anywhere. And if that's the case, it can't operate as a trademark.
Take a look at this for a similar thing involving patents and trademarks. And this for copyrights and trademarks.
Some places might. If that's honestly what they think will best serve their interests, I can't fault them for it. Other places will no doubt still have some sort of copyright laws on the books. Perhaps they will differ from the usual sort we have now, what with the lack of minimum standards allowing for experimentation; perhaps they'll be better. If they're worse, well, at least there are fewer obstacles to changing them for the better.
I for one would like to see the US continue to have copyright for as long as copyright can, and our laws actually do, provide an overall benefit for society. I don't see how entangling ourselves in the private affairs of other countries and listing our flexibility helps us, though.
I disagree. Each country should enact whatever copyright laws are best for its own people. There's no need for treaties at all, or uniformity. The only constant rule should be unilateral national treatment: that copyright laws won't discriminate between domestic and foreign authors, copyright holders, etc. And there should be informal international cooperation to try to avoid mutually exclusive copyright laws (eg country A only grants copyrights to works first published only in country A and nowhere else, and country B only grants copyright to works first published in country B and nowhere else, forcing authors to choose between A and B or neither but not both).
The current craptastic regime is in part the product of a desire for uniformity as a goal more important that what's actually appropriate.
It was my understanding that international treaties ratified by the USA ranked higher than any law other than the US Constitution and it's amendments. Although amendment six... would seem to be ambiguous as to whether treaties rank equal with the US Constitution or equal with federal law.
Article VI simply says that the federal constitution, federal law, and treaties are all superior to state constitutions and state law. It doesn't otherwise set priorities. But Article V provides the only possible methods for amending the federal constitution: 1) 2/3ds votes of both the US House and Senate to propose an amendment, followed by ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. Or 2) ratification conventions are called by 2/3ds of the state legislatures, followed by ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. (The latter method has been threatened but never used; if it were it would likely result in an entirely new government, just as the current constitution was meant to be an amendment to the old Articles of Confederacy but would up replacing it altogether)
If treaties were equal or superior to the federal constitution, it would effectively permit the President and 2/3ds of the Senate to change the constitution if they can but find a foreign country willing to act as an accomplice to such a treaty. That can't happen, so the Constitution must be superior to treaties.
The only ambiguity left is federal law v. treaties, and the rule has been to have them equal in priority, to attempt to reconcile them if possible, and if not, for the more recent to override the earlier.
From Reid v. Covert, 354 US 1, 16-18 (1956):
The obvious and decisive answer to this, of course, is that no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution.
Article VI, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, declares:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; . .."
There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution. Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result. These debates, as well as the history that surrounds the adoption of the treaty provision in Article VI, make it clear that the reason treaties were not limited to those made in "pursuance" of the Constitution was so that agreements made by the United States under the Articles of Confederation, including the important peace treaties which concluded the Revolutionary War, would remain in effect. It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights -- let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition -- to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government, and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined. There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. For example, in Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U. S. 258, 133 U. S. 267, it declared: "The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or o
No, according to US copyright law (17 USC 104(c)), the Berne Convention has no effect in the US.
And this isn't odd; copyright treaties are typically not self-executing. They obligate the various treaty states to enact domestic legislation that brings them into compliance with the treaty, but do not serve as copyright laws themselves. In addition, in the US, all treaties stand at an equal level with ordinary federal legislation, and a last-in-time rule dictates which trumps in the event of an irreconcilable conflict. This means that Congress is not bound to adhere to treaties, and can refuse to pass laws that treaties require, and can even pass laws that directly contradict the treaty. This may embarrass the executive branch, and may cause problems for the US in its foreign relations, but sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles.
A fun example is WTO Dispute 160, the gist of which is that certain copyright exceptions in US copyright law violate our treaty obligations, a complaint was brought against the US by the Irish, the US lost the case, and we've never bothered to comply by changing our laws in the decade-plus since we lost.
Obviously, government need not "slavishly enforce" conditions which are against the law.
Well, the entire point of the discussion has been about changing what the law is. There isn't a fixed, universal law of contracts, remember; it's whatever arbitrary things we want it to be. If the law is changed so that ratios concerning pay must be adhered to for the contract to be enforceable, then that's how it is.
It is morally wrong because it requires intervention to prevent two parties from engaging in what both deem is a mutually-beneficial contract.
And yet, we do this all the time.. Plus, you forget that there is a difference between an agreement and a contract. Two parties can agree to something all they like. Contracts only become relevant when they disagree and need a third party to resolve the dispute. If two contracting parties are going to rely on the government to handle disputes, the government now has a perfectly legitimate opportunity to set the rules which will govern the agreement. It need not slavishly enforce whatever happens to have been put on a signed piece of paper.
It is cited in the opinion as the Clancy declaration, with the specific paragraph noted. You can probably dig it up yourself. This would've been available not only to the judge, but also to the opposing side, and they had the opportunity to present evidence to the contrary. Apparently they either didn't or didn't provide anything more convincing than what Google had. Part of what courts do is settle disputed questions of fact. If this was disputed, it is now settled so far as this case goes: the links are not ads. And as this is a generally applicable precedent, other companies are free to do the same ad Google and expect to also be protected.
How do you know that it generates revenue for Google? Further, how do you know that the links always generate revenue for Google (as opposed to it depending on the book displayed on the page, the book's copyright status, and any pertinent license agreements between Google and the book's copyright holder)?
You may not be able to get the full text of the copyrighted work, but Google can and has. Google are profiting from an unauthorised copy made of a copyrighted work. If google are allowed to do it, why can't I? I only want to make one copy of each book from the library. I don't intended to sell that unauthorised copy to anyone, heck I don't even intend to let anyone else see even snippets of it. What's the difference? Why are Google allowed to make copies for their own purposes but I am not? Is it because they are a rich company who can afford lawyers to override copyright laws?
You can. Provided that it's a fair use. Any use can be fair, but not every use is; it depends on the circumstances. There's a four factor analysis that's usually done in order to determine whether a use is fair or not, though sometimes one factor can outweigh the others, and it's a good idea not to lose sight of the big picture.
If you copy books for your own use as a substitute for buying them, my guess is that this is not a fair use. OTOH what Google does is copy books not in order to use them itself, but to aid others in searching them, and when it presents information unauthorizedly copied from copyrighted books to users, it only provides a tiny amount, not the entire thing. This makes the search a useful adjunct to the books, but not a substitute.
When the book in question was written in year 1776 the situation isn't quite that simple. If I buy their scanned copy, and then OCR it can I then sell it or make it available for free? The copyright isn't there anymore, I'm only dealing with the data in the book, I believe I could legally print and sell it, right?
Well, the book might be copyrighted anyway; it depends largely on when it was originally published, not just on when it was written. But assuming that it is in the public domain, and that you haven't agreed to some contract to not make and sell copies of it (as a prerequisite to get access to it, for example), then yes, you can make more copies and distribute them as you like.
Slashdot Mirror
And being paid fair market value? No, sorry.
Got a case cite for that? AFAIK while it doesn't infringe the 5th Amendment for governments to take land using eminent domain for private development, there is still an obligation to pay what the property is worth. And if the initial price isn't good enough for the owner (which is usually), the owner can always sue for more.
Just to clarify, Aereo's service has been found not to be illegal by federal trial and appellate courts. However, rival services that are claimed to operate similarly have lost court cases in other jurisdictions; the circuit split is part of the justification for cert.
The broadcasters get paid via advertising revenues, which are proportional to the number of viewers. Why should they object to more viewers?
The reason they're upset with Aereo is that cable TV companies pay broadcasters in order to carry the broadcast channels over cable. Alternatively, the broadcasters can compel the cable companies to carry the broadcast channels, but then they can't charge for them.
If the Aereo model is legal, it's pretty likely that the cable TV companies will all stop paying broadcasters and will just use antenna farms, like Aereo does. This will seriously reduce the profits of broadcasters more than any additional viewership being advertised to will make up for.
I think we already do this to some extent in most jurisdictions
Not to my knowledge. (Though sound recordings tended to be treated unusually for a while) And not in the US anyway, which is what I'm most concerned with, being a USian.
Here I do disagree, for the simple reason that as someone trying to run multiple small businesses, overhead is the #1 enemy, and registration of routine practices is a particularly wasteful form of overhead. We don't all have accountants, lawyers or admin staff; for some of us, any time taken to deal with the paperwork is time directly taken away from the handful of people doing actual creative work, and if we're developing work for others then presumably that overhead roughly doubles because there's going to have to be some sort of assignment executed around the time we get paid as well for any such system to work.
Well for most businesses, they simply won't care, and neither will their clients. Automatically granting copyrights results in the ridiculous situation of granting copyrights even to individual Slashdot posts, not to mention many emails, text messages, and other ephemera that do not deserve copyrights because of the simple fact that copyrights were not necessary in order to cause those works to be created and published. A registration system is the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff. If an author wants a copyright enough to timely file for it, it likely was an incentive for him to create and publish the work. If he doesn't seek one, it's safe to assume that he didn't care about copyright, that it wasn't an incentive for him, and therefore shouldn't be granted because it would be unnecessary.
I'm not interested in creating paperwork for paperwork's sake, but an opt-in registration system is the best method I know of for reducing the number of copyrights granted to only those which need to be granted. The actual registration can be quite simple, around the burden of filling out a change of address form; likewise there ought to be a fee, but only enough of a token one to get authors to seriously decide whether they want a copyright or not, as opposed to applying whether they really care or not.
The additional benefit to a registration system is the same as with our existing registration systems for land, and for certain movable property, such as cars: to identify individual items, and to identify the people who claim them, so that in the event of a dispute or a desired business transaction or if the item and the claimant are separated, they can be found.
Copyright incurs costs on the public that ultimately grants them and permit them to exist. We have copyrights to serve the public interest, and if this means that the authors and publishers who enjoy great benefits from the gift of copyright which they have been granted have to do a little paperwork, forgive me if I'm not sympathetic.
The catch here is that there are plenty of other reasons the holder might fail to act. I'm not against the idea of a renewable right in all cases, but the burden of enforcing copyright can already be prohibitive for a small business with limited legal resources. The last thing they need is for a manager who also has statutory obligations relating to everything from business registration and rent payments through to filing tax statements and signing client contracts to find they've lost all rights to their only product because of a paperwork screw-up while they were off sick or simply because they didn't understand the rules (which my accountants and lawyers tell me happens all the time for small businesses when it comes to other legal/tax regs, not least because the way the rules are written is itself not always clear).
Well, we had this in the US for nearly 200 years and it always worked fine. Most copyright holders didn't ever renew, but the sky didn't fall down. It's because only a handful of copyrights have value lasting beyond a short period. I have no
The limit should not be decided around when a work has stopped generating significant revenues, but by when it has made the creator a reasonable return on their investment [of time].
Actually, it should be based on when a work is no longer likely to generate significant copyright related revenue. You forget that the vast majority of works are flops with no significant copyright related revenue ever. Something like Gigli will never make a reasonable return, yet it's stupid to grant it a perpetual copyright as a result.
Further, there should be a distinction between copyright for the purposes of acknowledging a work's creator (which should be automatic, and not expire), and copyright for the purposes of commercialising the work (which should be opt-in, and short). (I believe EU copyright already makes this distinction to some degree.)
Why?
We don't have this in the US, and yet we have loads of authors making loads of works all the time. Other countries that do have this don't appear to be doing better than the US because of having this. Clearly it isn't necessary to incentivize authors to create and publish (which is all we want out of them) and clearly it limits what the public can do, which is inherently bad.
It sounds nice but it accomplishes nothing useful while still bogging things down in limitations and rules.
Moral rights are not useful to the public and are basically bunk anyway. Even the Europeans don't really believe in them.
Yes, I agree. The solution, though, is clearly to grant different maximum term lengths for different classes of work. A newspaper is one of the shortest lived examples, with most of its copyright related value realized in less than a day. A term of, say, two months would be thoroughly generous and sufficient. A textbook is probably one of the longer lived sorts of works. (Well, so long as it isn't for modern history or other fast-paced subjects, but I think we can live with the small bit of waste that comes from not having super granular terms tailored to each work)
The best mechanism for dealing with this, I'm convinced, is to grant very short copyright terms which must be registered for, and then to vary the number of renewal terms depending on the type of work. If a term lasts a year, periodicals might not get to renew at all, software, four times, books, nine times, movies, fourteen times, etc.
This way, if a copyright holder fails to renew, because he doesn't care enough to bother to do so (this was common when we had renewal terms) the public gets the work earlier than if the maximum term were granted from the get go.
If you created it yourself, you are the copyright holder, and therefore nobody can forbid you from distributing it (at least not using copyright law).
Copyright, as it exists today, doesn't give copyright holders a right to distribute their work; they already have this right as free speech, just like everyone else has. Rather, copyright is a system of exclusive rights, that is, rights to exclude; in this case a right to prohibit other people from using their free speech rights to, for instance, distribute a work. It is inherently a system of censorship by private people using state power. That's unavoidable. The question is whether it can be justified anyway. Personally I think that it could be, but it's perfectly reasonable to think otherwise and we should in any case be really cautious about limiting free speech no matter how little or how justified we think we are.
Having the copyright notice puts recruiters on notice that I will sue the bejsus out of them (at the salary under consideration times the number of years on average I stay with a company times triple damages for intentional copyright infringement.) I think I'd have a pretty good chance of winning that, too.
Huh. I wonder what jurisdiction you're in that permits you to do that, because it isn't the US. Over here, notice is good, but it isn't enough by itself to qualify for statutory damages. And statutory damages max out at $150,000 per work, which unless you are looking at fairly low salaried jobs for short durations, isn't the kind of money you're talking about. And you likely wouldn't get the maximum anyway, since you can only be awarded an amount which is just, up to the maximum, and I have a hard time seeing unauthorized résumé sharing justifying that sort of money. Alternatively, we also have actual damages and profits (attributable to the infringement) but there are no multipliers, and poor odds indeed that the possibility of getting a high paying job for many years would be actual enough to be actual damages. And the profits of the headhunter attributable to just the one résumé are likely minimal (unless you get the job, in which case, why are you suing?).
I think your suggestions for reform are pretty much on the right track, though.
The primary purpose of copyright was to ensure that the creators could profit from their work for a reasonable length of time, then the work would enter the public domain so others can use or extend it.
No.
The primary purpose of copyright is to serve the public interest in advancing the progress of science. The means by which it functions involves giving authors a chance to profit (it's far from ensured; in fact most never make a cent from their copyrights and never will) but its a big mistake to confuse the means with the ends.
I agree that current copyright laws don't serve that purpose very well; the concept needs to be modernized to accommodate corporations which can exist for hundreds of years as well as individuals. More like trademark than copyright.
That would just make things worse. We need to seriously reduce the scope and duration of copyright. It's grown so bloated that authors would barely notice any effects of this, but the public would benefit greatly.
Without a way to flawlessly record and maintain books, music, and movies, works would inevitably be lost, or of poor quality, so people needed new works to be produced, or there would be no copyrighted works.
What the hell are you talking about?
We've always been able to flawlessly copy books. We haven't always done enough of it, but we've always been able to. And music and movies can generally be preserved and reproduced fairly well if some care is taken.
Copyright interferes with the preservation and reproduction of works by imposing additional costs on archivists and outright impeding copying and distribution.
We put up with it, to the extent that we do, because we hope that it will spur the creation and distribution of more works which will enter the public domain as fully and as quickly as possible, since it is only when works are in the public domain that they are of the greatest value to the public. Specifically, we hope it will spur the creation and publication of more works than if we didn't have copyright, with the ideal law being the one that spurs the most but impairs the public the least.
You're wrong about the market too; most works have a very brief window of copyright related commercial viability. It can be measured in hours to, at most, a few years. (A typical novel, for example, will make most of the copyright related money it will ever make within a couple of years of first being published.) This is why old works are generally available fairly cheaply. Yet people always want the new things. Even if we abolished copyright altogether, people would still want new things.
1) They won't give up the long copyrights, they're not those sorts of people;
2) Rights on derivative works, aside from being part of copyright, are extremely useful for the public and should not be bargained away so casually. Indeed, we ought to seriously consider reducing the scope of derivative works rights in copyright itself.
Isn't the purpose of copyright the rights to copy the original work, and wouldn't the characters be part of trademark? So if book publishers wanted to make new copies of the Sherlock Holmes stories, they now have all rights to do so, but any new works, would still require licensing from the owners of the trademark?
No.
The sine qua non of trademark is that it identifies all similarly marked goods as originating from some common source. If you buy a computer labeled COMPUTER, that's generic; that could be from anywhere. If it's labeled APPLE, then you know that it comes from Apple, Inc. Only Apple can use the APPLE mark for computers, but anyone can use generic or purely descriptive terms like COMPUTER or PC or PDA.
Trademarks aren't allowed to operate as a substitute for copyrights. Once a work is in the public domain, anyone can make copies of it, and can make derivative works based on it.
This means that a book with the character of Sherlock Holmes in it could be from anywhere. And if that's the case, it can't operate as a trademark.
Take a look at this for a similar thing involving patents and trademarks. And this for copyrights and trademarks.
Some places might. If that's honestly what they think will best serve their interests, I can't fault them for it. Other places will no doubt still have some sort of copyright laws on the books. Perhaps they will differ from the usual sort we have now, what with the lack of minimum standards allowing for experimentation; perhaps they'll be better. If they're worse, well, at least there are fewer obstacles to changing them for the better.
I for one would like to see the US continue to have copyright for as long as copyright can, and our laws actually do, provide an overall benefit for society. I don't see how entangling ourselves in the private affairs of other countries and listing our flexibility helps us, though.
I disagree. Each country should enact whatever copyright laws are best for its own people. There's no need for treaties at all, or uniformity. The only constant rule should be unilateral national treatment: that copyright laws won't discriminate between domestic and foreign authors, copyright holders, etc. And there should be informal international cooperation to try to avoid mutually exclusive copyright laws (eg country A only grants copyrights to works first published only in country A and nowhere else, and country B only grants copyright to works first published in country B and nowhere else, forcing authors to choose between A and B or neither but not both).
The current craptastic regime is in part the product of a desire for uniformity as a goal more important that what's actually appropriate.
It was my understanding that international treaties ratified by the USA ranked higher than any law other than the US Constitution and it's amendments. ... would seem to be ambiguous as to whether treaties rank equal with the US Constitution or equal with federal law.
Although amendment six
Article VI simply says that the federal constitution, federal law, and treaties are all superior to state constitutions and state law. It doesn't otherwise set priorities. But Article V provides the only possible methods for amending the federal constitution: 1) 2/3ds votes of both the US House and Senate to propose an amendment, followed by ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. Or 2) ratification conventions are called by 2/3ds of the state legislatures, followed by ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. (The latter method has been threatened but never used; if it were it would likely result in an entirely new government, just as the current constitution was meant to be an amendment to the old Articles of Confederacy but would up replacing it altogether)
If treaties were equal or superior to the federal constitution, it would effectively permit the President and 2/3ds of the Senate to change the constitution if they can but find a foreign country willing to act as an accomplice to such a treaty. That can't happen, so the Constitution must be superior to treaties.
The only ambiguity left is federal law v. treaties, and the rule has been to have them equal in priority, to attempt to reconcile them if possible, and if not, for the more recent to override the earlier.
From Reid v. Covert, 354 US 1, 16-18 (1956):
The obvious and decisive answer to this, of course, is that no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution.
Article VI, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, declares:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; . . ."
There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution. Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result. These debates, as well as the history that surrounds the adoption of the treaty provision in Article VI, make it clear that the reason treaties were not limited to those made in "pursuance" of the Constitution was so that agreements made by the United States under the Articles of Confederation, including the important peace treaties which concluded the Revolutionary War, would remain in effect. It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights -- let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition -- to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government, and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.
There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. For example, in Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U. S. 258, 133 U. S. 267, it declared:
"The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or o
No, according to US copyright law (17 USC 104(c)), the Berne Convention has no effect in the US.
And this isn't odd; copyright treaties are typically not self-executing. They obligate the various treaty states to enact domestic legislation that brings them into compliance with the treaty, but do not serve as copyright laws themselves. In addition, in the US, all treaties stand at an equal level with ordinary federal legislation, and a last-in-time rule dictates which trumps in the event of an irreconcilable conflict. This means that Congress is not bound to adhere to treaties, and can refuse to pass laws that treaties require, and can even pass laws that directly contradict the treaty. This may embarrass the executive branch, and may cause problems for the US in its foreign relations, but sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles.
A fun example is WTO Dispute 160, the gist of which is that certain copyright exceptions in US copyright law violate our treaty obligations, a complaint was brought against the US by the Irish, the US lost the case, and we've never bothered to comply by changing our laws in the decade-plus since we lost.
Have you got one where it's Paul, Ringo, and dogs filling in for John and George? If it's halfway decent, they could get the band back together.
God bless those Satanists
Well, we don't know that Mr. Fusion was available in 2015. Doc Brown might have traveled further into the future, after all.
Obviously, government need not "slavishly enforce" conditions which are against the law.
Well, the entire point of the discussion has been about changing what the law is. There isn't a fixed, universal law of contracts, remember; it's whatever arbitrary things we want it to be. If the law is changed so that ratios concerning pay must be adhered to for the contract to be enforceable, then that's how it is.
It is morally wrong because it requires intervention to prevent two parties from engaging in what both deem is a mutually-beneficial contract.
And yet, we do this all the time.. Plus, you forget that there is a difference between an agreement and a contract. Two parties can agree to something all they like. Contracts only become relevant when they disagree and need a third party to resolve the dispute. If two contracting parties are going to rely on the government to handle disputes, the government now has a perfectly legitimate opportunity to set the rules which will govern the agreement. It need not slavishly enforce whatever happens to have been put on a signed piece of paper.
It is cited in the opinion as the Clancy declaration, with the specific paragraph noted. You can probably dig it up yourself. This would've been available not only to the judge, but also to the opposing side, and they had the opportunity to present evidence to the contrary. Apparently they either didn't or didn't provide anything more convincing than what Google had. Part of what courts do is settle disputed questions of fact. If this was disputed, it is now settled so far as this case goes: the links are not ads. And as this is a generally applicable precedent, other companies are free to do the same ad Google and expect to also be protected.
How do you know that it generates revenue for Google? Further, how do you know that the links always generate revenue for Google (as opposed to it depending on the book displayed on the page, the book's copyright status, and any pertinent license agreements between Google and the book's copyright holder)?
You may not be able to get the full text of the copyrighted work, but Google can and has. Google are profiting from an unauthorised copy made of a copyrighted work. If google are allowed to do it, why can't I? I only want to make one copy of each book from the library. I don't intended to sell that unauthorised copy to anyone, heck I don't even intend to let anyone else see even snippets of it. What's the difference? Why are Google allowed to make copies for their own purposes but I am not? Is it because they are a rich company who can afford lawyers to override copyright laws?
You can. Provided that it's a fair use. Any use can be fair, but not every use is; it depends on the circumstances. There's a four factor analysis that's usually done in order to determine whether a use is fair or not, though sometimes one factor can outweigh the others, and it's a good idea not to lose sight of the big picture.
If you copy books for your own use as a substitute for buying them, my guess is that this is not a fair use. OTOH what Google does is copy books not in order to use them itself, but to aid others in searching them, and when it presents information unauthorizedly copied from copyrighted books to users, it only provides a tiny amount, not the entire thing. This makes the search a useful adjunct to the books, but not a substitute.
When the book in question was written in year 1776 the situation isn't quite that simple. If I buy their scanned copy, and then OCR it can I then sell it or make it available for free? The copyright isn't there anymore, I'm only dealing with the data in the book, I believe I could legally print and sell it, right?
Well, the book might be copyrighted anyway; it depends largely on when it was originally published, not just on when it was written. But assuming that it is in the public domain, and that you haven't agreed to some contract to not make and sell copies of it (as a prerequisite to get access to it, for example), then yes, you can make more copies and distribute them as you like.