Napster -- and others -- have been sued for just that. Basically they were sued for helping their users break the law, and that mean proving that the users broke the law. One type of lawbreaking activity is making copies of copyrighted works without permission or an applicable exception, and your garden-variety downloading is generally just that. Since downloaders are the ones who cause this to happen (the uploader isn't forcing you to download that song), they're the ones liable for it.
Anyway, I wouldn't get your hopes up much on this case. The law is pretty settled and this is a very bold and unusual argument. I don't expect it to fly.
17 USC 117 is very favorable toward backups, and lets you make all the backups (of computer software -- not anything else) you like. The problem with 117 is that it only allows owners of copies to do this, and EULAs attack the idea that ordinary users operating under a EULA are owners that qualify for 117 in the first place.
The point was, of course, that case law already exists that stipulates that the copier is the provider, not the recipient.
Would you care to cite that caselaw and quote the relevant bits? The Netcom analysis is leading, I believe, and it doesn't automatically assign liability to the party on one end of the wire or the other, but rather to the party that is most responsible for the reproduction infringement. Usually that will be the downloader, since the downloader most proximately caused the download to occur by making the request, and thus setting in action the automatic processes of the server.
Perhaps I'm misremembering this one, Ray, but I seem to recall that the court there didn't have a problem with the uploading and downloading theories of infringement, and the interesting part of the case dealt with what constitutes distribution. Would you mind quoting what it is that you're thinking of with regard to the 106(1) reproduction right that is what downloaders are generally considered to infringe?
However, if the number of copies distributed illegally cannot be determined, there is no way to compute damages, right?
Not really, no.
You're talking about actual damages. In recognition of just this type of problem, and the fact that an infringer who kept lousy records shouldn't be allowed to get away with breaking the law and harming the copyright holder, Congress created an alternative remedy to actual damages: statutory damages. These are defined in the statute and don't require looking at the number of copies involved, but rather the number of works involved, which is a lot easier to determine.
In this suit, it looks as though the defendant is going to argue that statutory damages violate due process because they are excessive when compared to actual damages (at least in this case; that's not always how the numbers play out). Personally, I don't think it's going to fly as an argument, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.
The earlier poster was saying that the law was out of date because "[i]t was written at a time when the possibility of an individual sharing several copies of hundreds of songs was inconceivable." I've shown that that isn't the case.
Whether the law is sensible, or reasonably represents the will of the people has nothing to do with whether the law is 'out of date' or not, and certainly isn't what the earlier poster was talking about. The idiom you want is 'out of touch.'
No it's not. The law increasing the amount significantly ($500 was changed to $750; $20,000 was changed to $30,000; $100,000 was changed to $150,000) was passed in 1999 when the possibility was not only conceivable it was what the law was directly aimed at.
Check the law next time, before you talk about whether it's out of date.
Copyright law has always granted songwriters the rights to performance of their art
No it hasn't.
That didn't show up in the US until 1897.
Copyright has changed significantly over time, and the earliest acts, while fundamentally similar, are still different in a lot of ways. The types of works protected, and the rights that exist with regard to those works are one of them.
If you didn't, then why would you write the music?
Possible reasons include:
For the fame
Because someone paid you to do it (as opposed to expecting to make money by exploiting the copyright)
Art for art's sake
For the money you can make unrelated to copyright (e.g. selling tickets to your own performances of the piece; selling copies of the music with your imprimatur)
etc.
Remember, people composed and published music (allowing for the relative newness of musical notation) for a long time before it was copyrightable. They necessarily had reasons to do so, and those reasons are still valid today. Often they're more important than the reason you suggest -- exploiting the copyright for money -- because so few copyrights are actually worth any money, much less more money than the best alternative investment the author could've made.
If copyright is actually an incentive and provides a public benefit that outweighs its inherent public harm, then that's great. But it is wasteful to offer copyrights where it is not a necessary incentive. I admit, it can be difficult to discern when it is actually an incentive. After all, we're not mind readers. However, a strict system of copyright formalities is probably a good way of doing this, since authors who are incentivized by copyright will certainly take steps to ensure that they can get a copyright, and authors who don't care about copyright presumably won't bother with the hassle of getting one. It's not perfect, but it's better than giving copyrights to all authors indiscriminately.
We can also consider broader issues. For example, there's really no argument that architectural works aren't incentivized by copyright at all. As a result, they should never be copyrightable.
Plus, there's an important authorship issue related to this. If there are two putative authors, then their motives might differ. For example, if you have a wedding and hire a wedding photographer, the photographer will be considered the author of the photos and will exploit the copyright for the purpose of charging an arm and a leg for extra prints, negatives, etc. since he has a very captive audience. On the other hand, the spouses probably don't care about copyright at all, and they are certainly responsible for having pictures taken in the first place. It would be appropriate then, to treat them as the authors (as the commissioning party), rather than the photographer, since the pictures will still get taken anyway, but without the public costs of a copyright that didn't provide an incentive.
Bringing us back to the topic at hand, there's nothing written in stone that this sort of performance needs to be copyrightable. We should consider whether or not it ought to be, and what sort of remedies are appropriate. Should people be arrested for infringement ever? I think not; let copyright holders enforce their copyrights civilly, rather than putting the burden and cost of enforcement onto the state and the taxpayer.
Screw them and their beliefs, we like minded people should impose our moral view onto them, because we are superior.
No, it has more to do with being more numerous. And with copyright being a burden imposed on the population at large, and so not a burden that should be shouldered unless it is worthwhile to the public, without any concern for whether the artists like it or not.
Besides, we do this already. For example, you can make modifications to GPL'ed software without being subject to the GPL, so long as you do so within the limits of the section 117 exception.
That depends on the law in question. If copyright were a civil right, I'd agree. But it is not. Copyright is an artificial monopoly, like a municipal cable tv monopoly. Since it has an inherently harmful effect on the market and on everyone living in society, except for the recipient of the monopoly, who gets rich at the expense of the public, it had damn well better yield some kind of public benefit that outweighs the public harm.
It has to do with Sonny Bono having been a Congressman, dying in a skiing accident, and his wife, Mary Bono (who now represents the same district), being a complete idiot with regard to copyright, and getting his name put on the bill to honor him.
It didn't have that much to do with him being a musician. There are other artists in Congress, you know.
Most of the media people use are produced by professionals and copyright ensures that aspring artists have a way to make a living. Sorry, I've never heard of the example you gave. You really can't be serious about universal participation thing.
The world doesn't owe anyone a living. Copyright law is meant to provide for the public interest, not to help artists. It just happens to help artists in the process. What it doesn't care about is professional artists v. amateurs; it only cares about artists that copyright provides an incentive for. Artists incentivized through other means (e.g. people who want to get famous, or who make art for art's sake) aren't generally affected by copyright, or if they are, often negatively.
As for the sculpture, it's basically the most famous piece of art from the dadaist movement, and very well known. Of course, I prefer L.H.O.O.Q., myself.
Even artists who do it for the sake of it must be supported.
No they needn't be, and in fact, they usually aren't. Furthermore, copyright is a bad way of doing that, since it rewards artists that make works that have commercial value, and only if they are careful and lucky in their business dealings so that that value can be realized and money will actually flow to them, which also usually isn't the case. If you merely wanted to support artists, I would suggest something like NEA grants.
You can't expect someone to work at McDonalds at day and write plays at night with no expectation that it would ever change.
Sure I can. It's extremely common. In fact, since most artists never make any money from their copyrights, that's how it usually works. I was an artist for several years, made a comfortable living from it, but copyrights were irrelevant to me; it was a trade. Very many artists make a living that way. I can certainly expect to let someone do that without having to subsidize them merely because of what they chose for their vocation.
I don't know how stuff worked during Shakespeare's era.
He was an actor as well as a writer, and managed to raise enough money to invest in the company so that he could get a share of the box office receipts. After that, he started investing in real estate. He did quite well, and didn't need a copyright. He pirated from other authors (nearly every one of his plays is based on history or someone else's earlier play or story, plus he would've performed plays other than his own) and other people pirated from him.
However, it Shakespeare was alive today, maybe he would write his first play, make lots of money that he could devote all his time to further writing plays only and actually end up writing more plays?
No, because while he was an excellent playwright, he really wasn't very creative, and relied heavily on being able to make derivatives of other people's works. If he were around today, and just as free to use other works, you'd see things like his version of Star Wars, or his version of WWII, or his version of The Philadelphia Story, etc. If he had to pay to get the rights, he'd never even get off the ground.
Also it's better medical treatment, easier writing technology, and less of a desire for plays in verse, that would really boost his productivity. You don't want to know how much time people ended wasting sharpening quills into pens.
It's a good point you make, but the earlier poster made a mistake. He ought to've said that copyright law is supposed to maximize the public good, but that it now fails to do so, in the name of profit. Remember of course that the public good isn't merely the creation of original works (though that is part of it), but that it is also the creation of derivative works, and freedom to use, enjoy, copy, etc. those works.
Well, there is a difference, in that your idea is basically irrelevant since it's being kept to yourself. Property is capable of being lent, returned on demand, or transferred. Since you can't do those with an unshared idea, it's not property. Patent and copyright law is concerned with what happens once sharing commences.
Well, it only prevents distribution, and passing around a single copy isn't distribution.
Actually, it is. But there's an exception that permits it -- for certain copies, to certain degrees, anyway.
Copyright law in the U.S. is actually a pretty reasonable tradeoff, at least before the Sony Bono Never Let Micky Free infinite extensions regime began, and until the DMCA criminalized things like loaning if the copyright holder didn't want you to.
No, I'd say that the last time it was good was in the 19th century, and it stopped even being decent with the 1976 Copyright Act. But it's always been worth improving.
though I also think software patents should not be allowed on the basis that they are patents on math.
I disagree. I think that the reason to disallow software patents and business method patents is because we don't need to incentivize inventors in those fields; natural incentives are already sufficient, and patents seem to be disincentivizing invention in those fields, in fact. Would Amazon have not developed one click shopping if it couldn't get a patent on it? Of course not; it would have developed it anyway. So no patent was needed. Maybe someday those fields will change, and patents will be needed, but not anytime soon.
Meh. I'm not only a copyright lawyer, but I also used to make my living as a graphic designer. I think that you don't ascribe enough value to expressions, as apart from ideas. The plot of Romeo and Juliet predates Shakespeare, but I think the world would be poorer if his particular expression had been lost. A monopoly on a given expression of an idea is better than if it were for the idea itself, but it's still not a good thing in itself, and we should avoid having monopolies on specific expressions unless there is some public good that comes from them that outweighs the harm they inherently inflict on the public.
If you believe that copyrights, patents, and so forth encourage the creation of new works, then you must also believe they serve the public good.
No. There's more to the public good than encouraging the creation of original works. There's also encouraging the creation of derivative works, and having the most freedom with regard to works, soonest. It's entirely possible, when you consider all the different kinds of public good, that merely encouraging more works to be created still harms the public more than it helps.
Still, I agree that it's entirely possible to have copyright and patent laws that place the public interest first, and that in fact, those are the only kinds of copyright and patent laws that we ought to have. While they might alter the landscape for the industries in the field, I'm sure that there will be plenty of opportunities for them still, in part because to the extent that it is in the public interest to help those industries, it makes sense to, and we should. But only to the extent that it's good for everyone, and not just some manner of subsidy that has a net harm for the public.
He didn't even say 'ideas.' He said 'speech,' and he's right. There's nothing wrong with repeating verbatim what someone else has said, and it's just as valuable to preserve and disseminate existing expressions as it is to create new ones. Copyright as a restriction on speech is acceptable if it provides a greater benefit than the harm it causes, but not otherwise.
I know all about the idea/expression dichotomy, but you forget about the rent-seeking behavior of copyright holders. They frequently try to expand their monopoly beyond appropriate bounds, and sometimes they get away with it, or at least manage a chilling effect.
Well, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting to get things for free. That's simple greed, and greed is the same motive that we appeal to authors with when we offer them a copyright. The copyright itself isn't an incentive, it's the money that can be had by exploiting the copyright that is. Furthermore, copyright is meant to satiate the public greed, rather than to aid artists at public expense. It just takes a long view of things, is all, and is meant to provide a much greater public benefit after a time than a smaller public benefit immediately.
So I wouldn't be so quick to condemn greed. It's at the heart of copyright and is shared by all the parties.
Even if Copyright went back to the 14 years plus a 14 year extension people will still flagrantly violate copyright.
I agree (assuming no changes to the law other than the term length), which tells us two things:
First, that 14+14 might still be too long of a term. We need to consider shorter terms, more than one renewal term, terms of differing lengths for different kinds of works, etc. We need to base the lengths not on historical lengths or what sounds good, but on economic studies that measure just how much of an incentivizing effect different term lengths have on authors, with an eye toward having the shortest term that yields the greatest public benefit.
Second, and more importantly, that we need to consider changing more about copyright law than just the term length. We need to consider the scope. We need to consider whether certain kinds of works should be copyrightable at all (e.g. architectural works do not need copyrights as an incentive, but currently are copyrightable for no good reason), what rights copyright should consist of, what exeptions to copyright should exist, what the process and conditions should be for getting a copyright, who should get copyrights, what sort of remedies should exist for infringement, etc.
For example, you say that even with short terms, people will still infringe a lot. What if we made some of their infringing behavior noninfringing. For example, what if noncommercial acts by natural persons were never infringing, no matter what they were? While this would reduce the amount of incentive that copyrights can provide, would the greater freedom for the public nevertheless be worth the potentially reduced amount of creation that would result. If it would be worth it -- that is, if an increase of one kind of public benefit would make up for a reduction of a different kind of public benefit -- then it is silly to not implement this, since that's the only metric for whether a copyright system is good or bad.
Hm, I haven't heard of a bar in FL that actually sits on the line, but it is certainly possible to walk from one to another and cross the line in the process. Of course, having lived in the FL panhandle, I can certainly attest to the fact that an extra hour of drinking time is about all there is to look forward to.
I can agree that copyright law was less important then the IP law at the time.
There's really no such thing as "IP law." That's a very misleading and inaccurate umbrella term for several different, unrelated bodies of law, including copyright law. Patent law may have had a role in the industrial revolution, but not a huge role, given that it had been around for quite a long while without producing the industrial revolution and also because there were plenty of successes that ran precisely counter to patent law (e.g. American industrialists copying everything they could from England without paying for it). Trademark law doesn't seem to have had a big role in causing industrialization. It was involved in mass production, but it's been around in one form or another for as long as anyone knows. And trade secret law seems like it would tend to impair the industrial revolution somewhat, and also has generally been around for a much longer time.
In any case, yes, I was talking about copyright and the industrial revolution. Copyright is quite interesting in a more general sense, though it's become terribly screwed up. I blame the French mostly, followed by Europeans generally and our own publishing industries, plus the inattention paid to it by Congress for the last century or so. We used to have a great copyright system though, and ours is still the best at the most fundamental level.
You don't think slavery in the new world help fuel the textile portion of the IR? The Americas were able to cheaply export large quantities of raw materials needed by the IR because of slave labor (for example cotton)
No. IIRC, there have actually been some economic studies indicating that slavery was basically a drag on the economy, aside from all of its other inexcusable faults. And it isn't hard to see how it would have slowed industrialization down: if you have a population of slaves to do manual labor, you have a lot of sunk investment into them, and it's harder to get you to mechanize. Especially if you're worried about keeping them down, and can't trust them to run the new equipment like you'd want. A primitive steam engine was known in classical times, but they never even entertained the idea of using it in place of human labor because they had no need to and couldn't imagine how steam technology could grow.
With regards to law, yes. This is largely because copyright law had nothing to do with the industrial revolution; that would be patent law, which has remained the same at the most fundamental level since the Venetian Patent Act of 1474. I would further argue that there were other, more basic reasons for it. For example, you need a particular mix of stability (so that people can spend time developing science, rather than trying to survive) and instability (so that people have some incentive to do so, other than idle interest), which had largely been absent from the world since the Romans. Or that the practice of slavery retards the development of industry. Or that you need people to be willing to tolerate innovation, rather than automatically stamping it out. Or that certain social conditions (e.g. literacy) are really key, and that certain developments however they're chanced upon will have lasting useful effects (e.g. the development of movable type, which could have happened any time, and did more than once, but only finally caught on with Gutenberg).
A lot of it is luck, a lot of it is owed to other causes, and none of it, really, has anything to do with mere copyright law. Copyright didn't get to be really interesting with regard to technology until computer software came along, and I think that the jury is still out as to whether copyright has helped or hurt in that specific field as opposed to other regulations we could imagine.
If you don't have to be mean, then why be mean? For a few more dollars? I don't buy that argument, which is why I buy soymilk since I know how badly dairy cows are mistreated.
Again, I'm not suggesting being mean for its own sake. I am suggesting that if being mean was profitable, then a human being who only keeps the cows around for the sake of making a profit to begin with should do it. You seem to acknowledge that many dairy farmers buy into the argument even if you don't, since their mistreatment of their herds is the sort of thing they wouldn't do for the hell of it, but only if it were more profitable to them than any other options. If they weren't interested in profit, they probably wouldn't bother having the dairy herd to begin with; cows are not popular pets. They were domesticated so that humans could exploit them, and the vast majority of them exist today so that humans can exploit them.
Members of the public who are authors tend to have a "do unto others" attitude about using others' works, because they know how they would feel if they weren't compansated for their works. You tend not to find musicians downloading large amounts of music from the Pirate Bay.
I find that fairly unlikely, particularly as copyright holders are notorious rent seekers. Not only do they try to expand their copyrights, they are perfectly willing to do so at the expense of other authors who might pose a threat.
Is your job charity, or do you expect to get paid what is fair for your work?
I expect to get paid as much as I can manage. I expect my clients to pay me as little as they can manage. This is because we both are pursuing the same goal: we want as much money as possible, partly by getting it from others and partly by avoiding spending when we can.
The same is true of authors. Authors want as much money, and therefore as much copyright, as they can get. The public wants to give them as little as possible. I don't expect artists to be charitable to the public, nor vice versa.
In neither case is fairness a factor at all. I'm not interested in getting paid a fair amount, I'm interested in getting paid as much as I can. Just like my clients are not interested in paying a fair amount, but would rather pay as little as they can. We both have a number of factors that play into how we behave. For example, if a client pays me $10,000 per hour, I'm likely to get one hour's worth of fees and no more from them, since they will think I charge too much. A client that pays $1,000 per hour, doesn't feel too overcharged, and keeps me on for over ten hours is worth more to me.
There's nothing wrong with looking at the big picture, and in fact that's the only way that copyright is capable of making sense. But fairness has nothing to do with it. Copyright has never been fair, never will be fair, and can't be measured in terms of fairness. It has no more to do with fairness than the arbitrary decision to divide the day into 24 hours.
And if not giving them something is detrimental to them, then it is in their best interests to deny us by not creating any more art, music, movies, etc for us.
That is exactly right. So it comes down to whether one iota more of art that is encumbered by copyright is worth more to you than the costs of offering that copyright. So long as the art is more valuable, it is sensible to grant more copyright. But after a certain point, you face diminishing returns. And after that you face a point where giving more copyright results in more harm to the public than good. The trick is to stop just shy of that point. And you certainly don't want to go further, and give artists copyright where it will result in less art being created, rather than more.
If Stephen King wrote the best horror book ever, that would be great. But if the only incentive big enough was giving him a monopoly on the entire horror genre forever, so that no one ever again could create a horror oriented work without the permission of King or his heirs, then it
Slashdot Mirror
Napster -- and others -- have been sued for just that. Basically they were sued for helping their users break the law, and that mean proving that the users broke the law. One type of lawbreaking activity is making copies of copyrighted works without permission or an applicable exception, and your garden-variety downloading is generally just that. Since downloaders are the ones who cause this to happen (the uploader isn't forcing you to download that song), they're the ones liable for it.
Anyway, I wouldn't get your hopes up much on this case. The law is pretty settled and this is a very bold and unusual argument. I don't expect it to fly.
What the hell are you talking about?
17 USC 117 is very favorable toward backups, and lets you make all the backups (of computer software -- not anything else) you like. The problem with 117 is that it only allows owners of copies to do this, and EULAs attack the idea that ordinary users operating under a EULA are owners that qualify for 117 in the first place.
The point was, of course, that case law already exists that stipulates that the copier is the provider, not the recipient.
Would you care to cite that caselaw and quote the relevant bits? The Netcom analysis is leading, I believe, and it doesn't automatically assign liability to the party on one end of the wire or the other, but rather to the party that is most responsible for the reproduction infringement. Usually that will be the downloader, since the downloader most proximately caused the download to occur by making the request, and thus setting in action the automatic processes of the server.
Perhaps I'm misremembering this one, Ray, but I seem to recall that the court there didn't have a problem with the uploading and downloading theories of infringement, and the interesting part of the case dealt with what constitutes distribution. Would you mind quoting what it is that you're thinking of with regard to the 106(1) reproduction right that is what downloaders are generally considered to infringe?
However, if the number of copies distributed illegally cannot be determined, there is no way to compute damages, right?
Not really, no.
You're talking about actual damages. In recognition of just this type of problem, and the fact that an infringer who kept lousy records shouldn't be allowed to get away with breaking the law and harming the copyright holder, Congress created an alternative remedy to actual damages: statutory damages. These are defined in the statute and don't require looking at the number of copies involved, but rather the number of works involved, which is a lot easier to determine.
In this suit, it looks as though the defendant is going to argue that statutory damages violate due process because they are excessive when compared to actual damages (at least in this case; that's not always how the numbers play out). Personally, I don't think it's going to fly as an argument, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.
The earlier poster was saying that the law was out of date because "[i]t was written at a time when the possibility of an individual sharing several copies of hundreds of songs was inconceivable." I've shown that that isn't the case.
Whether the law is sensible, or reasonably represents the will of the people has nothing to do with whether the law is 'out of date' or not, and certainly isn't what the earlier poster was talking about. The idiom you want is 'out of touch.'
No it's not. The law increasing the amount significantly ($500 was changed to $750; $20,000 was changed to $30,000; $100,000 was changed to $150,000) was passed in 1999 when the possibility was not only conceivable it was what the law was directly aimed at.
Check the law next time, before you talk about whether it's out of date.
Copyright law has always granted songwriters the rights to performance of their art
No it hasn't.
That didn't show up in the US until 1897.
Copyright has changed significantly over time, and the earliest acts, while fundamentally similar, are still different in a lot of ways. The types of works protected, and the rights that exist with regard to those works are one of them.
Possible reasons include:
For the fame
Because someone paid you to do it (as opposed to expecting to make money by exploiting the copyright)
Art for art's sake
For the money you can make unrelated to copyright (e.g. selling tickets to your own performances of the piece; selling copies of the music with your imprimatur)
etc.
Remember, people composed and published music (allowing for the relative newness of musical notation) for a long time before it was copyrightable. They necessarily had reasons to do so, and those reasons are still valid today. Often they're more important than the reason you suggest -- exploiting the copyright for money -- because so few copyrights are actually worth any money, much less more money than the best alternative investment the author could've made.
If copyright is actually an incentive and provides a public benefit that outweighs its inherent public harm, then that's great. But it is wasteful to offer copyrights where it is not a necessary incentive. I admit, it can be difficult to discern when it is actually an incentive. After all, we're not mind readers. However, a strict system of copyright formalities is probably a good way of doing this, since authors who are incentivized by copyright will certainly take steps to ensure that they can get a copyright, and authors who don't care about copyright presumably won't bother with the hassle of getting one. It's not perfect, but it's better than giving copyrights to all authors indiscriminately.
We can also consider broader issues. For example, there's really no argument that architectural works aren't incentivized by copyright at all. As a result, they should never be copyrightable.
Plus, there's an important authorship issue related to this. If there are two putative authors, then their motives might differ. For example, if you have a wedding and hire a wedding photographer, the photographer will be considered the author of the photos and will exploit the copyright for the purpose of charging an arm and a leg for extra prints, negatives, etc. since he has a very captive audience. On the other hand, the spouses probably don't care about copyright at all, and they are certainly responsible for having pictures taken in the first place. It would be appropriate then, to treat them as the authors (as the commissioning party), rather than the photographer, since the pictures will still get taken anyway, but without the public costs of a copyright that didn't provide an incentive.
Bringing us back to the topic at hand, there's nothing written in stone that this sort of performance needs to be copyrightable. We should consider whether or not it ought to be, and what sort of remedies are appropriate. Should people be arrested for infringement ever? I think not; let copyright holders enforce their copyrights civilly, rather than putting the burden and cost of enforcement onto the state and the taxpayer.
Screw them and their beliefs, we like minded people should impose our moral view onto them, because we are superior.
No, it has more to do with being more numerous. And with copyright being a burden imposed on the population at large, and so not a burden that should be shouldered unless it is worthwhile to the public, without any concern for whether the artists like it or not.
Besides, we do this already. For example, you can make modifications to GPL'ed software without being subject to the GPL, so long as you do so within the limits of the section 117 exception.
That depends on the law in question. If copyright were a civil right, I'd agree. But it is not. Copyright is an artificial monopoly, like a municipal cable tv monopoly. Since it has an inherently harmful effect on the market and on everyone living in society, except for the recipient of the monopoly, who gets rich at the expense of the public, it had damn well better yield some kind of public benefit that outweighs the public harm.
It has to do with Sonny Bono having been a Congressman, dying in a skiing accident, and his wife, Mary Bono (who now represents the same district), being a complete idiot with regard to copyright, and getting his name put on the bill to honor him.
It didn't have that much to do with him being a musician. There are other artists in Congress, you know.
Most of the media people use are produced by professionals and copyright ensures that aspring artists have a way to make a living. Sorry, I've never heard of the example you gave. You really can't be serious about universal participation thing.
The world doesn't owe anyone a living. Copyright law is meant to provide for the public interest, not to help artists. It just happens to help artists in the process. What it doesn't care about is professional artists v. amateurs; it only cares about artists that copyright provides an incentive for. Artists incentivized through other means (e.g. people who want to get famous, or who make art for art's sake) aren't generally affected by copyright, or if they are, often negatively.
As for the sculpture, it's basically the most famous piece of art from the dadaist movement, and very well known. Of course, I prefer L.H.O.O.Q., myself.
Even artists who do it for the sake of it must be supported.
No they needn't be, and in fact, they usually aren't. Furthermore, copyright is a bad way of doing that, since it rewards artists that make works that have commercial value, and only if they are careful and lucky in their business dealings so that that value can be realized and money will actually flow to them, which also usually isn't the case. If you merely wanted to support artists, I would suggest something like NEA grants.
You can't expect someone to work at McDonalds at day and write plays at night with no expectation that it would ever change.
Sure I can. It's extremely common. In fact, since most artists never make any money from their copyrights, that's how it usually works. I was an artist for several years, made a comfortable living from it, but copyrights were irrelevant to me; it was a trade. Very many artists make a living that way. I can certainly expect to let someone do that without having to subsidize them merely because of what they chose for their vocation.
I don't know how stuff worked during Shakespeare's era.
He was an actor as well as a writer, and managed to raise enough money to invest in the company so that he could get a share of the box office receipts. After that, he started investing in real estate. He did quite well, and didn't need a copyright. He pirated from other authors (nearly every one of his plays is based on history or someone else's earlier play or story, plus he would've performed plays other than his own) and other people pirated from him.
However, it Shakespeare was alive today, maybe he would write his first play, make lots of money that he could devote all his time to further writing plays only and actually end up writing more plays?
No, because while he was an excellent playwright, he really wasn't very creative, and relied heavily on being able to make derivatives of other people's works. If he were around today, and just as free to use other works, you'd see things like his version of Star Wars, or his version of WWII, or his version of The Philadelphia Story, etc. If he had to pay to get the rights, he'd never even get off the ground.
Also it's better medical treatment, easier writing technology, and less of a desire for plays in verse, that would really boost his productivity. You don't want to know how much time people ended wasting sharpening quills into pens.
It's a good point you make, but the earlier poster made a mistake. He ought to've said that copyright law is supposed to maximize the public good, but that it now fails to do so, in the name of profit. Remember of course that the public good isn't merely the creation of original works (though that is part of it), but that it is also the creation of derivative works, and freedom to use, enjoy, copy, etc. those works.
Ugh, no. Performing rights organizations are awful enough as it is. The last thing we need is more of them.
Well, there is a difference, in that your idea is basically irrelevant since it's being kept to yourself. Property is capable of being lent, returned on demand, or transferred. Since you can't do those with an unshared idea, it's not property. Patent and copyright law is concerned with what happens once sharing commences.
Well, it only prevents distribution, and passing around a single copy isn't distribution.
Actually, it is. But there's an exception that permits it -- for certain copies, to certain degrees, anyway.
Copyright law in the U.S. is actually a pretty reasonable tradeoff, at least before the Sony Bono Never Let Micky Free infinite extensions regime began, and until the DMCA criminalized things like loaning if the copyright holder didn't want you to.
No, I'd say that the last time it was good was in the 19th century, and it stopped even being decent with the 1976 Copyright Act. But it's always been worth improving.
though I also think software patents should not be allowed on the basis that they are patents on math.
I disagree. I think that the reason to disallow software patents and business method patents is because we don't need to incentivize inventors in those fields; natural incentives are already sufficient, and patents seem to be disincentivizing invention in those fields, in fact. Would Amazon have not developed one click shopping if it couldn't get a patent on it? Of course not; it would have developed it anyway. So no patent was needed. Maybe someday those fields will change, and patents will be needed, but not anytime soon.
Meh. I'm not only a copyright lawyer, but I also used to make my living as a graphic designer. I think that you don't ascribe enough value to expressions, as apart from ideas. The plot of Romeo and Juliet predates Shakespeare, but I think the world would be poorer if his particular expression had been lost. A monopoly on a given expression of an idea is better than if it were for the idea itself, but it's still not a good thing in itself, and we should avoid having monopolies on specific expressions unless there is some public good that comes from them that outweighs the harm they inherently inflict on the public.
If you believe that copyrights, patents, and so forth encourage the creation of new works, then you must also believe they serve the public good.
No. There's more to the public good than encouraging the creation of original works. There's also encouraging the creation of derivative works, and having the most freedom with regard to works, soonest. It's entirely possible, when you consider all the different kinds of public good, that merely encouraging more works to be created still harms the public more than it helps.
Still, I agree that it's entirely possible to have copyright and patent laws that place the public interest first, and that in fact, those are the only kinds of copyright and patent laws that we ought to have. While they might alter the landscape for the industries in the field, I'm sure that there will be plenty of opportunities for them still, in part because to the extent that it is in the public interest to help those industries, it makes sense to, and we should. But only to the extent that it's good for everyone, and not just some manner of subsidy that has a net harm for the public.
He didn't even say 'ideas.' He said 'speech,' and he's right. There's nothing wrong with repeating verbatim what someone else has said, and it's just as valuable to preserve and disseminate existing expressions as it is to create new ones. Copyright as a restriction on speech is acceptable if it provides a greater benefit than the harm it causes, but not otherwise.
I know all about the idea/expression dichotomy, but you forget about the rent-seeking behavior of copyright holders. They frequently try to expand their monopoly beyond appropriate bounds, and sometimes they get away with it, or at least manage a chilling effect.
Well, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting to get things for free. That's simple greed, and greed is the same motive that we appeal to authors with when we offer them a copyright. The copyright itself isn't an incentive, it's the money that can be had by exploiting the copyright that is. Furthermore, copyright is meant to satiate the public greed, rather than to aid artists at public expense. It just takes a long view of things, is all, and is meant to provide a much greater public benefit after a time than a smaller public benefit immediately.
So I wouldn't be so quick to condemn greed. It's at the heart of copyright and is shared by all the parties.
Even if Copyright went back to the 14 years plus a 14 year extension people will still flagrantly violate copyright.
I agree (assuming no changes to the law other than the term length), which tells us two things:
First, that 14+14 might still be too long of a term. We need to consider shorter terms, more than one renewal term, terms of differing lengths for different kinds of works, etc. We need to base the lengths not on historical lengths or what sounds good, but on economic studies that measure just how much of an incentivizing effect different term lengths have on authors, with an eye toward having the shortest term that yields the greatest public benefit.
Second, and more importantly, that we need to consider changing more about copyright law than just the term length. We need to consider the scope. We need to consider whether certain kinds of works should be copyrightable at all (e.g. architectural works do not need copyrights as an incentive, but currently are copyrightable for no good reason), what rights copyright should consist of, what exeptions to copyright should exist, what the process and conditions should be for getting a copyright, who should get copyrights, what sort of remedies should exist for infringement, etc.
For example, you say that even with short terms, people will still infringe a lot. What if we made some of their infringing behavior noninfringing. For example, what if noncommercial acts by natural persons were never infringing, no matter what they were? While this would reduce the amount of incentive that copyrights can provide, would the greater freedom for the public nevertheless be worth the potentially reduced amount of creation that would result. If it would be worth it -- that is, if an increase of one kind of public benefit would make up for a reduction of a different kind of public benefit -- then it is silly to not implement this, since that's the only metric for whether a copyright system is good or bad.
Hm, I haven't heard of a bar in FL that actually sits on the line, but it is certainly possible to walk from one to another and cross the line in the process. Of course, having lived in the FL panhandle, I can certainly attest to the fact that an extra hour of drinking time is about all there is to look forward to.
I can agree that copyright law was less important then the IP law at the time.
There's really no such thing as "IP law." That's a very misleading and inaccurate umbrella term for several different, unrelated bodies of law, including copyright law. Patent law may have had a role in the industrial revolution, but not a huge role, given that it had been around for quite a long while without producing the industrial revolution and also because there were plenty of successes that ran precisely counter to patent law (e.g. American industrialists copying everything they could from England without paying for it). Trademark law doesn't seem to have had a big role in causing industrialization. It was involved in mass production, but it's been around in one form or another for as long as anyone knows. And trade secret law seems like it would tend to impair the industrial revolution somewhat, and also has generally been around for a much longer time.
In any case, yes, I was talking about copyright and the industrial revolution. Copyright is quite interesting in a more general sense, though it's become terribly screwed up. I blame the French mostly, followed by Europeans generally and our own publishing industries, plus the inattention paid to it by Congress for the last century or so. We used to have a great copyright system though, and ours is still the best at the most fundamental level.
You don't think slavery in the new world help fuel the textile portion of the IR? The Americas were able to cheaply export large quantities of raw materials needed by the IR because of slave labor (for example cotton)
No. IIRC, there have actually been some economic studies indicating that slavery was basically a drag on the economy, aside from all of its other inexcusable faults. And it isn't hard to see how it would have slowed industrialization down: if you have a population of slaves to do manual labor, you have a lot of sunk investment into them, and it's harder to get you to mechanize. Especially if you're worried about keeping them down, and can't trust them to run the new equipment like you'd want. A primitive steam engine was known in classical times, but they never even entertained the idea of using it in place of human labor because they had no need to and couldn't imagine how steam technology could grow.
With regards to law, yes. This is largely because copyright law had nothing to do with the industrial revolution; that would be patent law, which has remained the same at the most fundamental level since the Venetian Patent Act of 1474. I would further argue that there were other, more basic reasons for it. For example, you need a particular mix of stability (so that people can spend time developing science, rather than trying to survive) and instability (so that people have some incentive to do so, other than idle interest), which had largely been absent from the world since the Romans. Or that the practice of slavery retards the development of industry. Or that you need people to be willing to tolerate innovation, rather than automatically stamping it out. Or that certain social conditions (e.g. literacy) are really key, and that certain developments however they're chanced upon will have lasting useful effects (e.g. the development of movable type, which could have happened any time, and did more than once, but only finally caught on with Gutenberg).
A lot of it is luck, a lot of it is owed to other causes, and none of it, really, has anything to do with mere copyright law. Copyright didn't get to be really interesting with regard to technology until computer software came along, and I think that the jury is still out as to whether copyright has helped or hurt in that specific field as opposed to other regulations we could imagine.
If you don't have to be mean, then why be mean? For a few more dollars? I don't buy that argument, which is why I buy soymilk since I know how badly dairy cows are mistreated.
Again, I'm not suggesting being mean for its own sake. I am suggesting that if being mean was profitable, then a human being who only keeps the cows around for the sake of making a profit to begin with should do it. You seem to acknowledge that many dairy farmers buy into the argument even if you don't, since their mistreatment of their herds is the sort of thing they wouldn't do for the hell of it, but only if it were more profitable to them than any other options. If they weren't interested in profit, they probably wouldn't bother having the dairy herd to begin with; cows are not popular pets. They were domesticated so that humans could exploit them, and the vast majority of them exist today so that humans can exploit them.
Members of the public who are authors tend to have a "do unto others" attitude about using others' works, because they know how they would feel if they weren't compansated for their works. You tend not to find musicians downloading large amounts of music from the Pirate Bay.
I find that fairly unlikely, particularly as copyright holders are notorious rent seekers. Not only do they try to expand their copyrights, they are perfectly willing to do so at the expense of other authors who might pose a threat.
Is your job charity, or do you expect to get paid what is fair for your work?
I expect to get paid as much as I can manage. I expect my clients to pay me as little as they can manage. This is because we both are pursuing the same goal: we want as much money as possible, partly by getting it from others and partly by avoiding spending when we can.
The same is true of authors. Authors want as much money, and therefore as much copyright, as they can get. The public wants to give them as little as possible. I don't expect artists to be charitable to the public, nor vice versa.
In neither case is fairness a factor at all. I'm not interested in getting paid a fair amount, I'm interested in getting paid as much as I can. Just like my clients are not interested in paying a fair amount, but would rather pay as little as they can. We both have a number of factors that play into how we behave. For example, if a client pays me $10,000 per hour, I'm likely to get one hour's worth of fees and no more from them, since they will think I charge too much. A client that pays $1,000 per hour, doesn't feel too overcharged, and keeps me on for over ten hours is worth more to me.
There's nothing wrong with looking at the big picture, and in fact that's the only way that copyright is capable of making sense. But fairness has nothing to do with it. Copyright has never been fair, never will be fair, and can't be measured in terms of fairness. It has no more to do with fairness than the arbitrary decision to divide the day into 24 hours.
And if not giving them something is detrimental to them, then it is in their best interests to deny us by not creating any more art, music, movies, etc for us.
That is exactly right. So it comes down to whether one iota more of art that is encumbered by copyright is worth more to you than the costs of offering that copyright. So long as the art is more valuable, it is sensible to grant more copyright. But after a certain point, you face diminishing returns. And after that you face a point where giving more copyright results in more harm to the public than good. The trick is to stop just shy of that point. And you certainly don't want to go further, and give artists copyright where it will result in less art being created, rather than more.
If Stephen King wrote the best horror book ever, that would be great. But if the only incentive big enough was giving him a monopoly on the entire horror genre forever, so that no one ever again could create a horror oriented work without the permission of King or his heirs, then it