You're being tragically shortsighted. First, backups are not necessarily a fair use, and fair uses are broader than merely making backups. Often fair use does involve distributing works without a license.
But second, copyright expires and has limits other than fair use. DRM does not. It does not evaporate at the end of the copyright term, and it doesn't respect any of the exceptions to copyright or the pre-exception limits of copyright. It's very important that we get rid of DRM for this reason too, lest it ruin our chances at a reasonable copyright system.
While I think that copyright should exist for whatever amount of time copyrighter thinks reasonable, as long as people are allowed to create similar things, it is ok.
Well, I completely disagree with that, in fact I condemn the idea.
Literal copying is important and is praiseworthy.
But mostly, let me remind you that copyright is only legitimate when it serves the public interest. Individual authors are the worst judges of the public interest I can imagine. Their interests are directly opposed to the interests of the public, since they're the ones trying to force the public to pay money to do things that they'd be free to do otherwise. You are letting the fox guard the henhouse, basically.
We have to make sure we are not mixing copyrights and patents.
There's no significant difference at the broadest levels of policy. They both exist to serve the public interest, and they both basically do so the same way, creating incentives by a trading away freedom. And they both have to balance the incentives created v. the freedom of the public so that the public not just better off in sum than they would be without copyrights or patents, but that they are the best off they can possibly be in sum.
Software patents should not even exist.
I agree, for the time being. But why do you think so? And do you think that similar reasoning could not be applied for copyrights?
Even if you did have the skills to copy writen word, it would take you approximately as long as it took the original artist to write the book in the first.
And? There is no technology for copying that pirates have that authors and publishers do not. In fact, usually the technological advantage, which can at best be a tie, is actually in the favor of the author and publisher. For example, I can burn a CD, but it takes a few minutes and the discs cost a few cents. Publishers that are making tens of thousands of CDs will just get them stamped out at a factory for a much lower cost, taking advantage of economies of scale; it would be more costly for them to burn them. Advantage: authors and publishers.
The tools that were benefitial to publishers and artists would be of no benefit at all if there was no legal right to control of the copying of a work.
Why? Before the first records, no one could sell recorded sound. Afterwards, even if there were no copyright applicable (and in fact, there wasn't for quite a while) the artist is still doing better if he can manage to sell even one record. One is better than zero. Besides, as I pointed out, they can usually take advantage of economies of scale, and can usually get to market before pirates can (since the pirates have to have a copy to copy from). This gives authors an advantage. It might be an effective copyright term measured in days rather than years, but it can still be exploited for a fair bit.
If there was no legal rights of copy protection then the copy technologies would not have received funding for coporations hoping to use it the technology to their own benefit.
And if there was no impetus toward war, we might not have invented poison gas or nuclear weapons. Should we have invented war just to keep arms manufacturers in business? No. I don't give a rat's ass about copy protection developers, and in fact, I think that the copyright system ought to discourage the use of copy protection in the strongest possible ways. Copyright, after all, is meant to serve the public interest. Copy protection is hostile to the public interest. We might not be able to ban it constitutionally, but we can discourage the hell out of it.
do receive income through commisions; commisions which are paid by people purchasing the work in the hopes of exploiting copyrights, as you put it.
No, because merely ordering a commission doesn't involve any transfer of the copyright. If I want someone to take my wedding pictures, I still lack the right to make my own prints of those pictures, unless I purchase those rights too. Further, a lot of times, no one cares about copyright exploitation. I'm not going to sell copies of my wedding pictures to people. I just don't want to have to pay through the nose every time I want to print a set. They have no economic value to anyone other than me. Frankly, this is the case for most works. Works almost never have any economic value to begin with. Lord knows that when I was an artist I created all sorts of works for clients where they could have cared less about the copyrights, so long as it didn't interfere with what they wanted to do.
Mixing archaic arts like painting, sculpture and non-recorded perfroming arts, with modern arts like audio and video recording or video games only muddies up the issue and makes people think they are all applicable to the same rules.
They are. Differing classes of works are basically interchangable for copyright policy purposes. Sometimes you have to treat things a little differently, but for the most part, there's no material difference. And painting et al are hardly archaic. Lots of people paint. We even teach little kids in school to paint.
When you buy a brick, let's say, you own it. You can do anything you want with it. You're not allowed to break the law by using it (e.g. by hitting someone with it), but this doesn't diminish your ownership of the brick.
Ditto for a car. If you own a car you can drive it, break it down for parts, alter the car, etc. But you still can't go over the speed limit on public roads.
With a DVD, some of those laws are copyright laws. They say that for a term of years you can't make copies of the work on the DVD (except under certain conditions). Eventually though, those laws stop applying to the DVD, and you're no longer restricted by them. You don't suddenly gain more rights in the DVD. Rather, it's like the speed limit no longer applying. You're just more free to exercise the ownership you've always had.
And note that whether a transaction by which you gain possession of a DVD is a sale or a license will depend on what happens in that transaction. If it is a similar transaction to an outright sale, then that's what it is. For it to be otherwise, there needs to be ideally an express agreement that it's not, plus material differences (since courts are likely to apply the duck test regardless of what the parties said at the time). The differences in the nature of the transaction are what mainly carry the day; for example if you had the DVD but had to return it after a period of time, or were required to be audited by the owner with regard to it, etc. then I'd imagine that the disc was still owned by the previous guy. (n.b. that there is a difference between the copyright, the copyrighted work, and the copy -- the first two are intangible, the first is owned by the copyright holder, the second is unownable and basically the same in every copy, and the third is tangible and sold to you and contains an instance of the work, but probably not the only one) Frankly, if DVDs were licensed, there would at a minimum have to be a really obvious attempt -- like full-bore EULAs, which are pages long. And even those haven't held up all the time for software.
In sum, when you get a DVD at the Best Buy, you're just buying it. The law says whether or not you can copy it, just as it says whether or not you can slice someone's head off with it, OddJob style.But that has nothing to do with ownership.
Really? My DVD player is pretty old... it's one of the infamous Apex AD600A's. I guess I haven't noticed that DVDA support has become that common. Of course, I don't know how many people are willing to spend over a hundred dollars on a DVD player these days either. More, sure, but not too many more; even a $50 player has a good set of features now.
Well, that's merely an argument as to how long copyright terms should be. If you think terms should be very short, then that opens up all sorts of works. Personally, I think that terms should be no more than 25 years long, and only 5 in the case of software. If I had my way, it would be perfectly fine to copy and distribute anything from before 1981, and software from before 2001.
And this is not an unreasonable position. If the purpose of copyright is to promote the public good, and this is in part done by encouraging authors to create with the possibility of making money from their works, then the fact that works on average make the vast majority of all the money they'll ever make within no more than 15 years (and certainly less for software, which 'ages' much more rapidly) would mean that longer terms don't particularly serve as an incentive, and are not needed. I'd err a little on the side of caution, but I'm open to rational discussions as to how long terms should be while still being as short as possible.
Copyright, wether it be by institutional law or other form of enforcement (limitation of knowledge, or force for example) has been around as long as the ability to copy or forge artistic works has been easily accesible to the everyday citizen.
No. People have had pens and paper for a really long time, and that's all you need in order to copy books, which is what copyright originally covered. You don't even need to be literate, though it helps (and illerate people don't care much about books anyway, even if printed under the authorization of the copyright holder). Fine art wasn't copyrightable until much later, but still well before the invention of photography.
Incremental improvements in technology (e.g. the jump from CDs to home CD burners) really hasn't been a big deal in the copyright world. The big jumps (e.g. the jump from nothing to the first sound recordings) were, but they were just as important for publishers and artists as anyone else.
Once artistic work does not supply the resource to keep a person living (read that very carefully because it is worded that way specifically), then mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past.
I disagree. Almost no artists ever make a living from their copyrights. The vast, vast majority of them have to make money in other ways, ranging from taking commissions (which involves performing a service, rather than exploiting copyrights) to just having a day job.
OTOH, hardly anyone buys DVDA. I don't even know anyone with a player for it. CDs remain the standard for buying recorded music in tangible form. The lack of success in completely cracking it might stem from a lack of interest and lack of popularity.
No. I don't believe in so-called moral rights at all. Copyright is utilitarian. It makes no sense for it to be any other way. If you want to protect your reputation, that's fine, but we have other bodies of law that not only are better at doing that, but which are available to everyone, and not just to authors. And frankly, there are limits to how far we should go to protecting reputations anyway.
Yes, of course it is a novel. However, it was also an exposé of the actual conditions at the time.
And I would also point out that not everything in a novel is necessarily made up; I read Johnny Tremain as a kid, and that book deals with a lot of the factual people events in Boston leading up to the Revolution.
Currently, all it requires is either a) waiting for the term to expire, or b) having the copyright holder place the work into the public domain, which can be as simple as the statement in my.sig here on Slashdot.
If we revitalized formalities, works would be in the public domain if they were not copyrighted by a certain point in time, e.g. upon publication. Or we could set a short span of time, e.g. 5 years after creation or 1 year after publication, whichever comes first. (Something similar already exists for patents)
With a formalized registration system, it would remove a lot of the uncertainty about whether or not works are copyrighted, since all the copyrighted works would be listed and it would not be terribly difficult to determine whether a work was in the registry or not.
No, it's 'is,' not 'are.' Since 'issue' is singular, you need to use 'is.' If you said that there were many issues here, then you'd use 'are,' because 'issues' is plural.
Ability to create content and distribute it , exclusively, for profit, for a period of time.
Supposing I write a significantly different story, using existing concepts in only a vague way, and develop (or discover) a market for that story, I should be able to tap into that market, exclusively, for a given period of time. The idea is "mine" (humanly speaking), and supposing the content isn't prurient (e.g. child porn), or a damn lie (e.g. telling you that the Olsen Twins are morbidly obese) or some other nasty damnable shite ("I murdered Bob's wife! Here's how & all the details"), I have every right to profit from it.
First, n.b. that copyright doesn't protect ideas. Second, you haven't provided any support for your assertion that you should have an exclusive right merely because you came up with the idea. Remember, if you want exclusivity, you are essentially asking everyone else in the world to refrain, and to create laws (which you could not create on your own) that establish that exclusivity. While I am not averse to doing so, I won't unless you can show me that I am better off being excluded than I would be if there was no exclusive right. Of course, you have every right to profit from your creation, but exclusivity is another matter altogether.
Ability to maintain the integrity of content.
Joe's brother, Ed, cannot copy my book, change all of the "I have"'s to "I have not"'s or change the meaning in some other way and republish it under my name.
Meh. That's more a trademark or publicity right issue than a copyright issue.
Mixing / excerpting Joe can copy small excerpts of my book when writing a review, or larger portions with my permission. Were this music, he would be legally more restricted in rebroadcasting because of the medium. Print has its own restrictions, because it's a physical medium.
Why the different treatment? I don't see any material differences. If I can make collage out of photos, say, why shouldn't I be able to make collage out of music, or text?
I also support registration, along with a few other formalities, but I wouldn't worry about them much. Remember that they are traditional in the US; we didn't stop requiring registration until very recently, and it's still required if you want to enforce your copyright in court or be able to take advantage of some remedies. It's not a big deal, and artists, being people who are capable of filing their taxes or registering to vote, or getting a drivers' license, can surely also manage to fill out a form where the hard part is your name and address, and including $30 as a processing fee.
I'm well aware of Sinclair's politics (it's hard to not be if you read it) and his opinion to the public response to his book.
However, I've never heard of anyone claiming that the incidents in the book were completely made up. A claim like that requires support if anyone is to believe it. So far you still haven't provided any.
Also, I haven't used an ad hominem argument against you. It was merely an insult.
To be a little pedantic here, the purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science. The useful arts are promoted by patents. Also, it's perfectly ordinary to create rights in the law. Just because something is a right doesn't mean it is a natural right.
If you're an employee for copyright law purposes, then your work is automatically a work made for hire unless there's an express, written, signed agreement to the contrary. But if you're not an employee, then your work is never a work made for hire, unless the work falls within one of several very narrow categories (e.g. answers for a test) and there is an express, written, signed agreement to that effect. Check out 17 USC 101 and 201(b) for more on this.
Personally though, I would not have a problem with allowing parties more freedom in this matter. If someone is contracted to make a work, and is willing to sign an express, written agreement that it is a work made for hire, then I don't see a problem with that. After all, they have the option to not agree.
When you buy a CD, you are purchasing a licence which grants you the right to listen to the music contained on that CD, nothing more.
In the US, at least, that's quite wrong.
Copyright does not encompass the right to listen to the music. Rather, the person who has the right to listen to the CD is the owner of the CD, who typically bought it in a store. The relevant copyright holder can control public performances of the CD, or the making of copies of the CD, but not just anything to do with the CD. Furthermore, the nature of the transaction is a factor. If the transaction is basically the same, whether you're buying a CD or buying a piece of bubble gum, why would they be treated differently down the road? Both are outright purchases. A license in this situation would typically be express, written, and quite noticable, like a EULA on software. An implied license is possible, based upon the conduct of the parties, but if that conduct is the same as in a normal sale transaction, then there's no special conduct giving rise to a license.
Personally, I suspect you're mistaken about how it works in your country as well, but I'm only familiar with US law, so I can't say.
Judges have to back up their decisions based on facts relevent to the case at hand (in this case, did a copyright violatoon occur), not on the name of the entity, or a logo.
And as I've pointed out, in the US at least, the name and logo are relevant facts under the inducement theory of copyright infringement. Perhaps things are different in Sweden, but certainly it's not correct to say that names or logos would never be relevant.
... and the overarching principle in international law is the sovereignty of nations to govern their own internal affairs, set their own laws, etc.
Sure, and I'd like to see the various copyright treaties abolished so that we could return to the time when countries set up their own laws to suit themselves. I would hope only that they would unilaterally offer national treatment and avoid conflicts whereby an author couldn't have a copyright in two countries at once.
Nevertheless, there are common areas of agreement in western legal traditions, and the original poster was more or less on target.
There is a specific definition for what constitutes a derivative work:
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".
So a torrent clearly isn't a translation, musical arrangement, etc. through condensation. The examples don't apply. Nor has the work been recast, transformed, or adapted. Nor is it editorial revisions, etc. And a derivative work has to be one of those things.
Also, all works, whether derivative or not, have to be original works of authorship. A torrent is not, since the data in the torrent is AFAIK only factual, and facts are not copyrightable. Nor is the collection of facts in the torrent an original collection.
The torrent might have metadata relating to the work, such as a hash, filename, etc. but it lacks the work itself or anything the work can be reconstructed from, and is not an original work of authorship. To get that, you have to download the work.
So no, a torrent is not a derivative work -- at least not any normal torrent -- and probably couldn't be a work of any kind in fact.
Lots of people mistakenly think that there are more derivatives then there really are. For example, if you rip an mp3 from a CD, you have not made a derivative, you have just made a lower quality reproduction. But if you use text to speech to make an audiobook of a written book, then you've likely made a derivative.
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You're being tragically shortsighted. First, backups are not necessarily a fair use, and fair uses are broader than merely making backups. Often fair use does involve distributing works without a license.
But second, copyright expires and has limits other than fair use. DRM does not. It does not evaporate at the end of the copyright term, and it doesn't respect any of the exceptions to copyright or the pre-exception limits of copyright. It's very important that we get rid of DRM for this reason too, lest it ruin our chances at a reasonable copyright system.
While I think that copyright should exist for whatever amount of time copyrighter thinks reasonable, as long as people are allowed to create similar things, it is ok.
Well, I completely disagree with that, in fact I condemn the idea.
Literal copying is important and is praiseworthy.
But mostly, let me remind you that copyright is only legitimate when it serves the public interest. Individual authors are the worst judges of the public interest I can imagine. Their interests are directly opposed to the interests of the public, since they're the ones trying to force the public to pay money to do things that they'd be free to do otherwise. You are letting the fox guard the henhouse, basically.
We have to make sure we are not mixing copyrights and patents.
There's no significant difference at the broadest levels of policy. They both exist to serve the public interest, and they both basically do so the same way, creating incentives by a trading away freedom. And they both have to balance the incentives created v. the freedom of the public so that the public not just better off in sum than they would be without copyrights or patents, but that they are the best off they can possibly be in sum.
Software patents should not even exist.
I agree, for the time being. But why do you think so? And do you think that similar reasoning could not be applied for copyrights?
Even if you did have the skills to copy writen word, it would take you approximately as long as it took the original artist to write the book in the first.
And? There is no technology for copying that pirates have that authors and publishers do not. In fact, usually the technological advantage, which can at best be a tie, is actually in the favor of the author and publisher. For example, I can burn a CD, but it takes a few minutes and the discs cost a few cents. Publishers that are making tens of thousands of CDs will just get them stamped out at a factory for a much lower cost, taking advantage of economies of scale; it would be more costly for them to burn them. Advantage: authors and publishers.
The tools that were benefitial to publishers and artists would be of no benefit at all if there was no legal right to control of the copying of a work.
Why? Before the first records, no one could sell recorded sound. Afterwards, even if there were no copyright applicable (and in fact, there wasn't for quite a while) the artist is still doing better if he can manage to sell even one record. One is better than zero. Besides, as I pointed out, they can usually take advantage of economies of scale, and can usually get to market before pirates can (since the pirates have to have a copy to copy from). This gives authors an advantage. It might be an effective copyright term measured in days rather than years, but it can still be exploited for a fair bit.
If there was no legal rights of copy protection then the copy technologies would not have received funding for coporations hoping to use it the technology to their own benefit.
And if there was no impetus toward war, we might not have invented poison gas or nuclear weapons. Should we have invented war just to keep arms manufacturers in business? No. I don't give a rat's ass about copy protection developers, and in fact, I think that the copyright system ought to discourage the use of copy protection in the strongest possible ways. Copyright, after all, is meant to serve the public interest. Copy protection is hostile to the public interest. We might not be able to ban it constitutionally, but we can discourage the hell out of it.
do receive income through commisions; commisions which are paid by people purchasing the work in the hopes of exploiting copyrights, as you put it.
No, because merely ordering a commission doesn't involve any transfer of the copyright. If I want someone to take my wedding pictures, I still lack the right to make my own prints of those pictures, unless I purchase those rights too. Further, a lot of times, no one cares about copyright exploitation. I'm not going to sell copies of my wedding pictures to people. I just don't want to have to pay through the nose every time I want to print a set. They have no economic value to anyone other than me. Frankly, this is the case for most works. Works almost never have any economic value to begin with. Lord knows that when I was an artist I created all sorts of works for clients where they could have cared less about the copyrights, so long as it didn't interfere with what they wanted to do.
Mixing archaic arts like painting, sculpture and non-recorded perfroming arts, with modern arts like audio and video recording or video games only muddies up the issue and makes people think they are all applicable to the same rules.
They are. Differing classes of works are basically interchangable for copyright policy purposes. Sometimes you have to treat things a little differently, but for the most part, there's no material difference. And painting et al are hardly archaic. Lots of people paint. We even teach little kids in school to paint.
When you buy a brick, let's say, you own it. You can do anything you want with it. You're not allowed to break the law by using it (e.g. by hitting someone with it), but this doesn't diminish your ownership of the brick.
Ditto for a car. If you own a car you can drive it, break it down for parts, alter the car, etc. But you still can't go over the speed limit on public roads.
With a DVD, some of those laws are copyright laws. They say that for a term of years you can't make copies of the work on the DVD (except under certain conditions). Eventually though, those laws stop applying to the DVD, and you're no longer restricted by them. You don't suddenly gain more rights in the DVD. Rather, it's like the speed limit no longer applying. You're just more free to exercise the ownership you've always had.
And note that whether a transaction by which you gain possession of a DVD is a sale or a license will depend on what happens in that transaction. If it is a similar transaction to an outright sale, then that's what it is. For it to be otherwise, there needs to be ideally an express agreement that it's not, plus material differences (since courts are likely to apply the duck test regardless of what the parties said at the time). The differences in the nature of the transaction are what mainly carry the day; for example if you had the DVD but had to return it after a period of time, or were required to be audited by the owner with regard to it, etc. then I'd imagine that the disc was still owned by the previous guy. (n.b. that there is a difference between the copyright, the copyrighted work, and the copy -- the first two are intangible, the first is owned by the copyright holder, the second is unownable and basically the same in every copy, and the third is tangible and sold to you and contains an instance of the work, but probably not the only one) Frankly, if DVDs were licensed, there would at a minimum have to be a really obvious attempt -- like full-bore EULAs, which are pages long. And even those haven't held up all the time for software.
In sum, when you get a DVD at the Best Buy, you're just buying it. The law says whether or not you can copy it, just as it says whether or not you can slice someone's head off with it, OddJob style.But that has nothing to do with ownership.
Really? My DVD player is pretty old... it's one of the infamous Apex AD600A's. I guess I haven't noticed that DVDA support has become that common. Of course, I don't know how many people are willing to spend over a hundred dollars on a DVD player these days either. More, sure, but not too many more; even a $50 player has a good set of features now.
Well, that's merely an argument as to how long copyright terms should be. If you think terms should be very short, then that opens up all sorts of works. Personally, I think that terms should be no more than 25 years long, and only 5 in the case of software. If I had my way, it would be perfectly fine to copy and distribute anything from before 1981, and software from before 2001.
And this is not an unreasonable position. If the purpose of copyright is to promote the public good, and this is in part done by encouraging authors to create with the possibility of making money from their works, then the fact that works on average make the vast majority of all the money they'll ever make within no more than 15 years (and certainly less for software, which 'ages' much more rapidly) would mean that longer terms don't particularly serve as an incentive, and are not needed. I'd err a little on the side of caution, but I'm open to rational discussions as to how long terms should be while still being as short as possible.
Copyright, wether it be by institutional law or other form of enforcement (limitation of knowledge, or force for example) has been around as long as the ability to copy or forge artistic works has been easily accesible to the everyday citizen.
No. People have had pens and paper for a really long time, and that's all you need in order to copy books, which is what copyright originally covered. You don't even need to be literate, though it helps (and illerate people don't care much about books anyway, even if printed under the authorization of the copyright holder). Fine art wasn't copyrightable until much later, but still well before the invention of photography.
Incremental improvements in technology (e.g. the jump from CDs to home CD burners) really hasn't been a big deal in the copyright world. The big jumps (e.g. the jump from nothing to the first sound recordings) were, but they were just as important for publishers and artists as anyone else.
Once artistic work does not supply the resource to keep a person living (read that very carefully because it is worded that way specifically), then mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past.
I disagree. Almost no artists ever make a living from their copyrights. The vast, vast majority of them have to make money in other ways, ranging from taking commissions (which involves performing a service, rather than exploiting copyrights) to just having a day job.
No, not all of it is copyrighted or patented. Probably rather little, in fact. And you're wrong about ownership of both cars and DVDs.
OTOH, hardly anyone buys DVDA. I don't even know anyone with a player for it. CDs remain the standard for buying recorded music in tangible form. The lack of success in completely cracking it might stem from a lack of interest and lack of popularity.
No. I don't believe in so-called moral rights at all. Copyright is utilitarian. It makes no sense for it to be any other way. If you want to protect your reputation, that's fine, but we have other bodies of law that not only are better at doing that, but which are available to everyone, and not just to authors. And frankly, there are limits to how far we should go to protecting reputations anyway.
Yes, of course it is a novel. However, it was also an exposé of the actual conditions at the time.
And I would also point out that not everything in a novel is necessarily made up; I read Johnny Tremain as a kid, and that book deals with a lot of the factual people events in Boston leading up to the Revolution.
No.
.sig here on Slashdot.
Currently, all it requires is either a) waiting for the term to expire, or b) having the copyright holder place the work into the public domain, which can be as simple as the statement in my
If we revitalized formalities, works would be in the public domain if they were not copyrighted by a certain point in time, e.g. upon publication. Or we could set a short span of time, e.g. 5 years after creation or 1 year after publication, whichever comes first. (Something similar already exists for patents)
With a formalized registration system, it would remove a lot of the uncertainty about whether or not works are copyrighted, since all the copyrighted works would be listed and it would not be terribly difficult to determine whether a work was in the registry or not.
Free bear? Wasn't that a Lynyrd Skynyrd song?
There are more than one issue here:
No, it's 'is,' not 'are.' Since 'issue' is singular, you need to use 'is.' If you said that there were many issues here, then you'd use 'are,' because 'issues' is plural.
Ability to create content and distribute it , exclusively, for profit, for a period of time.
Supposing I write a significantly different story, using existing concepts in only a vague way, and develop (or discover) a market for that story, I should be able to tap into that market, exclusively, for a given period of time. The idea is "mine" (humanly speaking), and supposing the content isn't prurient (e.g. child porn), or a damn lie (e.g. telling you that the Olsen Twins are morbidly obese) or some other nasty damnable shite ("I murdered Bob's wife! Here's how & all the details"), I have every right to profit from it.
First, n.b. that copyright doesn't protect ideas. Second, you haven't provided any support for your assertion that you should have an exclusive right merely because you came up with the idea. Remember, if you want exclusivity, you are essentially asking everyone else in the world to refrain, and to create laws (which you could not create on your own) that establish that exclusivity. While I am not averse to doing so, I won't unless you can show me that I am better off being excluded than I would be if there was no exclusive right. Of course, you have every right to profit from your creation, but exclusivity is another matter altogether.
Ability to maintain the integrity of content.
Joe's brother, Ed, cannot copy my book, change all of the "I have"'s to "I have not"'s or change the meaning in some other way and republish it under my name.
Meh. That's more a trademark or publicity right issue than a copyright issue.
Mixing / excerpting Joe can copy small excerpts of my book when writing a review, or larger portions with my permission. Were this music, he would be legally more restricted in rebroadcasting because of the medium. Print has its own restrictions, because it's a physical medium.
Why the different treatment? I don't see any material differences. If I can make collage out of photos, say, why shouldn't I be able to make collage out of music, or text?
I also support registration, along with a few other formalities, but I wouldn't worry about them much. Remember that they are traditional in the US; we didn't stop requiring registration until very recently, and it's still required if you want to enforce your copyright in court or be able to take advantage of some remedies. It's not a big deal, and artists, being people who are capable of filing their taxes or registering to vote, or getting a drivers' license, can surely also manage to fill out a form where the hard part is your name and address, and including $30 as a processing fee.
I'm well aware of Sinclair's politics (it's hard to not be if you read it) and his opinion to the public response to his book.
However, I've never heard of anyone claiming that the incidents in the book were completely made up. A claim like that requires support if anyone is to believe it. So far you still haven't provided any.
Also, I haven't used an ad hominem argument against you. It was merely an insult.
Sinclair's "The Jungle" was pure fiction -- not based on facts at all. ... Years later, Sinclair admitted that the book was a fabrication
That's quite a unusual, possibly unique claim. Maybe you should support it somehow, or cite where you're getting this from.
So far all I'm getting is that you're a gigantic rube.
Wow, are you dumb. Go read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Try chapter 9, at around halfway through.
To be a little pedantic here, the purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science. The useful arts are promoted by patents. Also, it's perfectly ordinary to create rights in the law. Just because something is a right doesn't mean it is a natural right.
No, that's incorrect.
If you're an employee for copyright law purposes, then your work is automatically a work made for hire unless there's an express, written, signed agreement to the contrary. But if you're not an employee, then your work is never a work made for hire, unless the work falls within one of several very narrow categories (e.g. answers for a test) and there is an express, written, signed agreement to that effect. Check out 17 USC 101 and 201(b) for more on this.
Personally though, I would not have a problem with allowing parties more freedom in this matter. If someone is contracted to make a work, and is willing to sign an express, written agreement that it is a work made for hire, then I don't see a problem with that. After all, they have the option to not agree.
When you buy a CD, you are purchasing a licence which grants you the right to listen to the music contained on that CD, nothing more.
In the US, at least, that's quite wrong.
Copyright does not encompass the right to listen to the music. Rather, the person who has the right to listen to the CD is the owner of the CD, who typically bought it in a store. The relevant copyright holder can control public performances of the CD, or the making of copies of the CD, but not just anything to do with the CD. Furthermore, the nature of the transaction is a factor. If the transaction is basically the same, whether you're buying a CD or buying a piece of bubble gum, why would they be treated differently down the road? Both are outright purchases. A license in this situation would typically be express, written, and quite noticable, like a EULA on software. An implied license is possible, based upon the conduct of the parties, but if that conduct is the same as in a normal sale transaction, then there's no special conduct giving rise to a license.
Personally, I suspect you're mistaken about how it works in your country as well, but I'm only familiar with US law, so I can't say.
Judges have to back up their decisions based on facts relevent to the case at hand (in this case, did a copyright violatoon occur), not on the name of the entity, or a logo.
And as I've pointed out, in the US at least, the name and logo are relevant facts under the inducement theory of copyright infringement. Perhaps things are different in Sweden, but certainly it's not correct to say that names or logos would never be relevant.
... and the overarching principle in international law is the sovereignty of nations to govern their own internal affairs, set their own laws, etc.
Sure, and I'd like to see the various copyright treaties abolished so that we could return to the time when countries set up their own laws to suit themselves. I would hope only that they would unilaterally offer national treatment and avoid conflicts whereby an author couldn't have a copyright in two countries at once.
Nevertheless, there are common areas of agreement in western legal traditions, and the original poster was more or less on target.
the choice of "The Police" as an example
That just wouldn't count against them. But it wouldn't count for them, either.
There is a specific definition for what constitutes a derivative work:
So a torrent clearly isn't a translation, musical arrangement, etc. through condensation. The examples don't apply. Nor has the work been recast, transformed, or adapted. Nor is it editorial revisions, etc. And a derivative work has to be one of those things.
Also, all works, whether derivative or not, have to be original works of authorship. A torrent is not, since the data in the torrent is AFAIK only factual, and facts are not copyrightable. Nor is the collection of facts in the torrent an original collection.
The torrent might have metadata relating to the work, such as a hash, filename, etc. but it lacks the work itself or anything the work can be reconstructed from, and is not an original work of authorship. To get that, you have to download the work.
So no, a torrent is not a derivative work -- at least not any normal torrent -- and probably couldn't be a work of any kind in fact.
Lots of people mistakenly think that there are more derivatives then there really are. For example, if you rip an mp3 from a CD, you have not made a derivative, you have just made a lower quality reproduction. But if you use text to speech to make an audiobook of a written book, then you've likely made a derivative.