Which is probably a good thing, because I'd probably do some creative editing on what you've written and attribute it to you, 'cos that's entirely moral innit,
I don't think that there is any connection between copyright and morality at all. It is as amoral, IMO, as zoning laws.
In fact, if there is any degree of morality around, it is on the side of infringers, who help to ensure that works survive, who create new works out of or based upon the old, and who exercise their freedom of expression in the process, and derive pleasure out of the works.
But generally, I treat the whole issue as an amoral one.
Well, it differs from, say, you hitting the Fast Forward button or Skip Chapter buttons fairly radically I'd say, unless by "self-chosen filtering system" you're refering only to those systems where you apply someone else's edits to a movie you watch
I don't see a material difference between skipping ahead to the big chase scene by finding it yourself or by someone else telling you where it is.
He ended up taking action against The Phantom Edit, but only when it became clear people were downloading the thing in favour of going out and buying copies of the real deal.
Well, this exemption only applies if you go out and buy a copy of the real deal, and then apply edits to it, so it sounds as though he wouldn't have a problem with it! Good for him.
This law doesn't allow you to sell or even record an edited version. Instead it requires you to have a copy of the original and ALSO a list of edits which the player will apply to the original.
So you a DVD and a text file that basically says something like: At time 1:23:45, skip to time 1:25:00.
Remove the text file, or play the DVD in a player into which it hasn't been loaded (or isn't supported) and you're watching the original again.
Well, my platform of copyright reform is extremely broad.
If I had my way, the non-commercial sharing by natural persons, of films that had been released in theaters anywhere in the world, would not be illegal at all.
Most of my proposal is really more moderate. I recognize that the idea of it being impossible for anything natural persons do non-commercially to be infringement is kind of like the neutron bomb of copyright reform, but I also think that societal norms should generally be respected or at least not unduly impaired. Most people IMO agree that commercially oriented infringement is bad but that noncommercial infringement is not. Certainly it's popular enough.
I think it is foolish to try to criminalize the vast populace over what is ultimately not a life or death matter. That is, copyright is more like Prohibition, than like the supporting the Civil Rights movement despite lots of popular opinion against it.
As for the commercial thing, I'd have to look through Thomas to see whether it was the Senate or the House that took it out, and when. But I actually haven't seen it in there since the last Congress. (Or Thomas is misreporting, or I'm misunderstanding what became law)
First, there are two definitions of unreleased for motion pictures. Only one needs to be satisfied, due to the presence of an a conjunctive 'or.'
And of course, each one has a couple of sub-parts.
As for this specific sub-part, it's only applicable if the motion picture was in theaters, basically. If so, then screeners will almost certainly not qualify, since they aren't for sale to the general public. They're for sale to a certain subset of video stores.
Basically, until you can purchase a copy at the Best Buy, I would assume that it is unreleased, if we're talking about mass-market videos.
And yes, this all deals with computer networks. However, there are existing criminal penalties for willful infringement for commercial gain, and selling them on the street would qualify for that now.
There is now a demonstrable, real need for networks where *all* activities are double blind encrypted transactions through an arbitrary, configurable number of intermediaries who can *prove* they dont know who is sending them data or what data they are handling.
Yes, but not for the reason you probably think.
Civilly, copyright is a strict liability statute. Thus, if you engage in infringing conduct, you have broken the law. It does not matter at all what your intent was. Even if you do not actually believe that you are engaging in prohibited conduct, and it is not even reasonable for you to believe that you are engaging in prohibited conduct, if you do it, you're an infringer.
Your mental state generally only has an affect on the damages you have to pay.
Criminally, willfulness is required, which is a fairly moderate standard. However, IMO unless you honestly have a credible, though erroneous belief in the non-infringing nature of your actions, you're likely to be considered to be a willful infringer. Most of the beliefs about what is and isn't infringement that I see around here probably fall on the non-credible side of the line. Additionally, some courts may simply decide that if the action was undertaken willfully, that is sufficient, even if there was no willful intent to infringe.
So your proposal doesn't help people to not commit crimes. If they take some infringing action even with regards to encrypted data they don't know the contents of, then they are probably still criminal infringers. After all, courts do not look favorably on the concept of willful blindness, which is basically what you propose.
What you're really doing is making it difficult to get caught at these crimes, which is a different proposition. It's sort of the difference between how one could avoid a murder conviction by either a) not murdering people, or b) making sure to not leave any evidence behind that points to oneself.
A network such as this clearly falls under the fair use statues as a way to maintain secure person to person communication and confidential file sharing (ala PGP et al), and if it is constructed in such a way that only request originators and suppliers *can* know what they are using the network for yet still cannot know *who* they are doing it with, it would more than satisfy legal concerns such as providing plausible deniability.
Like I said, plausible deniability is a really bad thing to rely on; courts simply do not like it, and if you make the attempt, you can probably rely on them to not be friendly should you need to rely on them to be voluntarily lenient.
Also, fair use is only in one statute, and it has nothing to do with what you propose. As for technology providers, they would be relying on the current formulation of contributory and vicarious liability (read the Sony and Napster cases for more on that, particularly Napster as a cautionary example) to avoid liability themselves.
However, the Supreme Court is at this moment reconsidering the Sony precedent, and there is a very real possibility that the creators or providers of a network as you envision could end up being liable for its use since despite it having many possible uses, it's also practically intended for an illegal one. It doesn't help that you just underlined that with your post here in a public forum, should it be you that faces future legal action. We'll know how this shakes out in the summer, when the Grokster opinion is issued.
Not only do I like the ability to skip the raunchy stuff, but I like the fact that this promotes the idea that people can have control over the content that they pay to license.
There is no license involved in ordinary purchases of DVDs. C.f. with how prominently licenses are displayed in software, and that even then they're a hotly disputed issue as to validity.
Frankly, uploading and downloading them was pretty typically criminal already given the quantities that people do it in. But it is pretty dumb to have criminal penalties for copyright infringement (as we have since 1897) at all.
You would know that it was edited in some fashion, however, given that 1) you had to take special steps to get the edit, and 2) the edit has to have a prominent notice of the edited nature of the film, and 3) the edits might not be very clean -- they might be unusual jumps or blanks in the film.
At any rate, it's no more objectionable than any other kind of self-chosen filtering system. For example, now we can all filter out Jar-Jar from the Star Wars movies. Try and tell me that that's a bad thing.
Well, there was for a long while a set of boards that would determine the statutory royalty rates for copyrighted works.
The natural name for these would have been Copyright Royalty Arbitration Panels. Yet oddly enough, they ended up being named Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panels, which is an odd phrasing given that they were panels that arbitrated copyright royalties.
You can find out a bit about it from www.copyright.gov/carp
(3) DEFINITION- In this subsection, the term `work being prepared for commercial distribution' means--
(A) a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution--
(i) the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and
(ii) the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed; or
(B) a motion picture, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution, the motion picture--
(i) has been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility; and
(ii) has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public in the United States in a format intended to permit viewing outside a motion picture exhibition facility.'.
Thus, for a motion picture such as Battlestar Galactica, there is a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution, but it has not been commercially distributed. It has not been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility, however, since the definition for that term is: The term `motion picture exhibition facility' means a movie theater, screening room, or other venue that is being used primarily for the exhibition of a copyrighted motion picture, if such exhibition is open to the public or is made to an assembled group of viewers outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances.
So since only one or the other has to be satisfied, it is a work being prepared for commercial release. Willfully distributing it on a computer network (e.g. Bit Torrent) is a felony and can result in significant civil penalties.
Is it so hard to look at the text of the law in question?
If you make a different movie, one that an artist whose work you "based it upon" wants no part in, then why name it after the original work, and why include the artist's name? Answer: because you're still wanting to trade off those names, you want people to assume what you're producing is actually some form of the real deal.
Not necessarily. As I said, it's a fact. If I buy a car, rice it out, and sell it, the fact that it's been modified doesn't change that consumers are best informed knowing what it originally was; if I just said it was a car, then how can people make a careful buying decision not knowing if I started with a sports car or a compact? Also, trademarks are only source identifiers, never good identifiers. Usually the titles of individual works cannot be a trademark, since this a) doesn't tell buyers where it comes from, and b) would interfere in uses of the work not covered under the copyright monopoly. If I reprint a public domain work, I'm allowed to use the name of the author and the work in doing so, as long as I don't mislead people.
You made it clear in the GGP that as far as you're concerned, it's all about the money
No, as far as copyright law and policy should be concerned, it's all about the public interest, and with regards to what aspect of authors we use in incentivizing them to create, we use their greed.
Copyright is utilitarian; it's economic. It's inappropriate to entertain silly notions of some sort of romanticized kind of authorship.
This is because the objective of copyright is to slake the public's unquenchable thirst for works and freedom with respect to those works, as much as possible. That's it. It's a noble goal, but one that should be approached pragmatically. It certainly doesn't involve caring about artists, only caring about how to exploit artists just as a farmer exploits his milk cows, or whatever.
This has always been the way copyright works, and it's a good system. We're just screwing it up lately, in no small part due to people with attitudes like your own, who can't treat it rationally.
Actually, it's not clear at all. It's not clear that a derivative is being created, and it's not clear that even if one is, a preexisting exemption wouldn't cover it.
Doing so for yourself is entirely different to doing so for other people. I don't have a problem with most personal uses of copyrighted-by-other's material, but when it comes to saying "Hey everyone, do you want to watch a cleaned up version of XYZ?", and selling edits and presenting the film as a merely sanatized version of the original that's fundamentally the same only without the material-it-would-be-morally-wrong-to-even-view, then, yes, I have a big problem with it. I think it's misrepresenting the original artist to put, under their name, something that clearly they wouldn't say represents what they were trying to do and say at all.
So would you object to it, so long as it was clear that the edits were Alice's Edits of Bob's Movie? Just because Alice has made an EDL doesn't totally divorce it from Bob. Now they're both involved. So long as everyone is clear and up front about it, I don't see a big problem. Alice is not putting it forward as entirely her own work, and Bob is not having it put forward as entirely his either. Frankly, for Bob to disassociate himself from it would be misleading -- he is associated with it to some degree.
Importantly though, I don't give a crap about artistic integrity. I just don't want the audience to be confused or misled about what it is that they're buying or watching. If they're fully informed, I'm happy.
And looking through the relevant part of the law, it appears that 1) there are no federal trademark remedies against the 110 editors, 2) they do have to include a conspicious notice as to the fact that it's edited, 3) I'd still have to investigate as to state causes of action, but I think that Congress' intent is fairly clear.
The new 18 USC 2319B makes it an offense to, in pertinent part, knowingly use or attempt to use, a camera. Possession of one is a factor that can be looked at, but the statute actually says that mere possession of a camera isn't enough to support a conviction.
So if you bring one in, with the intent to use it, that's enough. But if you bring one in, and don't use or attempt to use it, that's not enough.
The trick is in how we determine your intent, if you get caught at an early stage. It's easy if you've set it up on a tripod, patched it into the sound system, and have your finger on the record button. It's harder earlier, but still possible.
Can we at least do the decent thing, and require that companies that provide such "filtering" solutions rename the films they edit, and take the makers of that film off the credits, if they so wish? This basic right would be afforded to the movie creators by a studio that forces edits upon a movie before release.
No, and IIRC, it actually takes care to avoid such a possibility arising. I'd have to poke around with the effects on federal trademark law and preemption of state laws. It hasn't been the part of the bill that I've been most concerned with, and I've been kind of busy as of late.
I'm curious to know if the editing of movies or the editing on moral grounds is the only thing allowed by the bill, or if the "right" to edit goes further.
Morality is not a factor. You can render imperceptable whatever you want. If you don't like the mushy parts of the latest star wars film, but like the fight scenes, you can make an appropriate EDL.
And no, it only applies to motion pictures (which includes TV, given the way the law is written). Not other kinds of works, like books or software, or whatever.
Although I don't see what's wrong with cutting out parts of books for one's own consumption, if that's how you get your kicks, or selling the same, if you're upfront about it. It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.
BTW, on the home movies thing, are they serious? Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations? Is this a poor write-up by the article submitter?
There's some funding for the National Film Preservation Board, or whatever it's called, but it's not as though they can march in and make you hand stuff over. They just get to buy things and preserve them. Maybe preserve deposit copies at the LoC too. You can probably calm down.
It only allows making portions of an authorized copy imperceptable, without fixing the imperceptabilities.
So you can't this exemption to create a new disc. Only to black out the screen or something, when playing an otherwise ordinary commercially released disc.
Obscenity isn't a factor. You can just filter out whatever you want, whatever you consider it to be, provided you otherwise comply with the exemption (or of course, some other exemption).
It does refer to 'limited portions' but given recent caselaw, presumably that can apply to a lot.;)
Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.
But this comes with significant new civil and criminal penalties that are just apalling.
Oh, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The new 110 exemption is a statutory exemption. It applies regardless of fairness, if the criteria it sets forth are satisfied. The title of the/. article is a huge misnomer.
Title I -- very very bad Title II -- good, but not as good as it could be. Title III -- meh Title IV -- good for rather limited uses, but also not as good as it could be
The public has three equal interests it seeks to have maximally satisfied: 1) for more original works to be created; 2) for more derivative works to be created; and 3) for all works to be in the public domain, where they can be maximally exploited, had and enjoyed for free, etc.
So all copyright law has to justify itself in terms of how well it serves the sum of these interests. A perfect copyright law would be one that maximized all of them.
Without copyright law, we know from history that there would be some satisfaction of the first, more of the second, and full satisfaction of the third. This is our baseline.
Unless a copyright law would provide a net public benefit greater than the baseline, it is unacceptable. We'd be better off without the law.
Similarly, we can compare any two copyright laws by the degree to which they increase the net satisfaction of the public interest. The more they do so, the better the law is. Additionally, where two laws produce an equal net public benefit, the least restrictive of the two is the better one.
Now, reducing the satisfaction of the public domain interest so as to increase the satisfaction of the creation interests (especially since it increases one interest a lot more than the other, and they're of equal importance) is subject to diminishing returns.
For example, let's say that we have two alternative copyright proposals: One lasts for 25 years, and one lasts for 250 years.
Clearly, the former satisfies the public domain interest much, much, much more than the latter. But also, the former probably satisfies the creation interest 90% as much as the latter.
After all, the economics of creative works is such that the vast majority of works have no economic value, and that of those that do, they'll make virtually all their money in the first few months or years of their release. Very few works produce a significant amount of money over the long term. So a copyright for a short term is just about as valuable as a copyright in the long term. For example, J. Breyer, in his Eldred dissent, pointed out that the monetary value of the additional 20 years Congress added to copyright terms was, on average, five cents. That's not a great incentive, I'm sure you'll agree.
(Of course the whole copyright system is a testament to how crazily optimistic authors are -- of those that are incentivized by the rewards of copyright, they all think they'll hit it big, when in fact they'd be better off working regular jobs. Copyright exploits this rather irrational, risk-seeking behavior.)
Now, we could optimize copyright if we could only determine precisely how much copyright-related incentive each individual author required in order for them to create their work. Then we could provide only the minimum necessary incentive to each, up to a certain maximum beyond which, as already pointed out, increasing copyright would result in decreasing public benefit (in which case less copyright would be superior, and in extreme cases, no copyright would be superior).
It's a lot like buying a car. You, as the car buyer, want to get the most car for the least money. It'd be ideal to know the exact prices of each car on the lot, and the exact figures as to fuel economy, increase in social standing from each model (on a scale of Yugo to Ferarri;), repair and maintenance costs over time, etc.
Unfortunately we can't really be that well informed for various reasons. But we can still adhere to the principle that giving more than the minimum required incentive is wasteful. And that we ought to very carefully consider just how much incentive we want to provide, in light of the importance of the net public benefit, even if we can't apportion it out in a highly optimal manner.
When we're on the international scene, however, each country has to respect the best interests of its own people, not others. If country A feels that it is in its best interests to have
It's not harming you, you're not entitled to their work.
Their labor, no. The fruits of their labor -- i.e. creative works -- yes, actually. I am entitled to them.
I'd argue that a better lightbulb is an innovation, too.
And? If the inventor of the first bulb has a monopoly -- which is what a patent is -- then why should he make them better. Cheaper to produce (for the same sale cost) perhaps, but not better.
Remember, patents are granted for refinements of inventions, too.
However, a patent is not a right to practice an invention, it is only a right to keep others from practicing the invention. So the original patent holder can, for the life of his patent, keep the second inventor from using the improvement.
By ideas I meant the typical intellectual properties; books, movies, music, etc.
Anyone who produces something is allowed to benefit from it.
Let me rephrase. It doesn't benefit me for the creator to exclusively benefit from his works.
So sure, if we're all on an equal footing, then it doesn't hurt me. But if I am asked to refrain from benefiting in the same manner as the creator, then I am losing out. Why should I stand for that?
If you considering paying for stuff you use harmful, then maybe you shouldn't buy anything from now on... at all.
Well, let's say that no matter what, any creative work that would be created, was created. We achieved the maximum possible level of creation. In that scenario, would you prefer to have to pay for those works, or to get them for free.
I, as a rational actor, would like to get them for free. If you offered me my very own, personal, Library of Congress, and I could have it for free, or for an ungodly amount of money, I'll take it for free, and I'd be a fool if I didn't.
So yes, paying for things is harmful, the question is whether the harm is outweighed by a benefit from that thing.
If there is no copyright, then prices drop to about marginal cost, which is the lowest it can be expected to go (because the publishers, also being rational, won't work at a loss, but will end up in commodity markets where profits are razor-thin).
That's generally pretty good. But you're basically defending monopolies in a market that should be commoditized. That's pretty bad for me. Why should I allow that to happen?
How can you be so self centered?
Easily.
I am self centered in that I want the most gain for myself at the least cost to myself. Thus I want works for free.
Authors are equally self centered in that they want the most gain for themselves at the least cost for themselves. Thus they want to get paid vast sums for making cheap works (and better yet, someone else's cheap works, e.g. not incurring the cost to write a movie by basing it off a fairy tale without paying its author).
Thus, authors oppose one another, and the public and authors oppose each other.
There is a third option, which is quite viable, but is still arrived at by catering to the self-interestedness of the parties involved. Copyright seeks to achieve it, in fact. But it isn't arrived at by only looking at what would be best for authors.
How is innovation encouraged at the expense of "everything" else?
If A invents the light bulb, and gets a patent on it, then third parties are limited in their ability to improve it since they can't make use of their improvements. They CAN'T make or sell light bulbs until the patent runs out. This can result in A sitting on his ass, and the public is not all that well off as a result. Plus, A is a rent-seeker -- if B comes up with a bulb that might not be under A's patent, A will still challenge him, and try to expand his patent to cover it after all.
Where A cannot keep his competitors out, then there is vigorous competition, and the public benefits from the resulting efficiencies.
Remember: copyrights and patents are monopolies. They're not desirable in their own right. They are at best tolerable for some greater good, but this of course requires us to find a way that they do in fact result in a greater good.
Because some innovation requires a lot of money. Without the safety of returned investments, some innovations won't occur.
But some innovations simply cost too much. The benefit they provide isn't worth the cost.
For example, if we made copyright last forever, and I could charge everyone whatever I liked, whenever they looked at it, I might be incentivized to move the stars themselves into an innovative new constellation.
But the benefit to society from my artwork is too low in comparison to the cost. So we're better off if we don't set things up so that I have an incentive to pursue it.
Plus, there is a bad fit between the amount of protection
Okay, so? If I'm the other guy -- and there are roughly 6 billion other guys to the one author -- then of course I'm happy to use it easily without facing legal recourse.
So since the other guy is the majority, and since the other guy is being asked to refrain from doing what comes naturally, and what benefits him, then by God there had better be something in it for the other guy.
So the real idea is, what's in it for me? How do you convince me that I should give you a copyright to my detriment? How do I come out ahead by doing so?
There's an answer, but what you had to date is entirely self-serving on the part of authors, and that's no good.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is probably a good thing, because I'd probably do some creative editing on what you've written and attribute it to you, 'cos that's entirely moral innit,
I don't think that there is any connection between copyright and morality at all. It is as amoral, IMO, as zoning laws.
In fact, if there is any degree of morality around, it is on the side of infringers, who help to ensure that works survive, who create new works out of or based upon the old, and who exercise their freedom of expression in the process, and derive pleasure out of the works.
But generally, I treat the whole issue as an amoral one.
Well, it differs from, say, you hitting the Fast Forward button or Skip Chapter buttons fairly radically I'd say, unless by "self-chosen filtering system" you're refering only to those systems where you apply someone else's edits to a movie you watch
I don't see a material difference between skipping ahead to the big chase scene by finding it yourself or by someone else telling you where it is.
He ended up taking action against The Phantom Edit, but only when it became clear people were downloading the thing in favour of going out and buying copies of the real deal.
Well, this exemption only applies if you go out and buy a copy of the real deal, and then apply edits to it, so it sounds as though he wouldn't have a problem with it! Good for him.
Impossible, under this law.
This law doesn't allow you to sell or even record an edited version. Instead it requires you to have a copy of the original and ALSO a list of edits which the player will apply to the original.
So you a DVD and a text file that basically says something like: At time 1:23:45, skip to time 1:25:00.
Remove the text file, or play the DVD in a player into which it hasn't been loaded (or isn't supported) and you're watching the original again.
Well, my platform of copyright reform is extremely broad.
If I had my way, the non-commercial sharing by natural persons, of films that had been released in theaters anywhere in the world, would not be illegal at all.
Most of my proposal is really more moderate. I recognize that the idea of it being impossible for anything natural persons do non-commercially to be infringement is kind of like the neutron bomb of copyright reform, but I also think that societal norms should generally be respected or at least not unduly impaired. Most people IMO agree that commercially oriented infringement is bad but that noncommercial infringement is not. Certainly it's popular enough.
I think it is foolish to try to criminalize the vast populace over what is ultimately not a life or death matter. That is, copyright is more like Prohibition, than like the supporting the Civil Rights movement despite lots of popular opinion against it.
As for the commercial thing, I'd have to look through Thomas to see whether it was the Senate or the House that took it out, and when. But I actually haven't seen it in there since the last Congress. (Or Thomas is misreporting, or I'm misunderstanding what became law)
First, there are two definitions of unreleased for motion pictures. Only one needs to be satisfied, due to the presence of an a conjunctive 'or.'
And of course, each one has a couple of sub-parts.
As for this specific sub-part, it's only applicable if the motion picture was in theaters, basically. If so, then screeners will almost certainly not qualify, since they aren't for sale to the general public. They're for sale to a certain subset of video stores.
Basically, until you can purchase a copy at the Best Buy, I would assume that it is unreleased, if we're talking about mass-market videos.
And yes, this all deals with computer networks. However, there are existing criminal penalties for willful infringement for commercial gain, and selling them on the street would qualify for that now.
There is now a demonstrable, real need for networks where *all* activities are double blind encrypted transactions through an arbitrary, configurable number of intermediaries who can *prove* they dont know who is sending them data or what data they are handling.
Yes, but not for the reason you probably think.
Civilly, copyright is a strict liability statute. Thus, if you engage in infringing conduct, you have broken the law. It does not matter at all what your intent was. Even if you do not actually believe that you are engaging in prohibited conduct, and it is not even reasonable for you to believe that you are engaging in prohibited conduct, if you do it, you're an infringer.
Your mental state generally only has an affect on the damages you have to pay.
Criminally, willfulness is required, which is a fairly moderate standard. However, IMO unless you honestly have a credible, though erroneous belief in the non-infringing nature of your actions, you're likely to be considered to be a willful infringer. Most of the beliefs about what is and isn't infringement that I see around here probably fall on the non-credible side of the line. Additionally, some courts may simply decide that if the action was undertaken willfully, that is sufficient, even if there was no willful intent to infringe.
So your proposal doesn't help people to not commit crimes. If they take some infringing action even with regards to encrypted data they don't know the contents of, then they are probably still criminal infringers. After all, courts do not look favorably on the concept of willful blindness, which is basically what you propose.
What you're really doing is making it difficult to get caught at these crimes, which is a different proposition. It's sort of the difference between how one could avoid a murder conviction by either a) not murdering people, or b) making sure to not leave any evidence behind that points to oneself.
A network such as this clearly falls under the fair use statues as a way to maintain secure person to person communication and confidential file sharing (ala PGP et al), and if it is constructed in such a way that only request originators and suppliers *can* know what they are using the network for yet still cannot know *who* they are doing it with, it would more than satisfy legal concerns such as providing plausible deniability.
Like I said, plausible deniability is a really bad thing to rely on; courts simply do not like it, and if you make the attempt, you can probably rely on them to not be friendly should you need to rely on them to be voluntarily lenient.
Also, fair use is only in one statute, and it has nothing to do with what you propose. As for technology providers, they would be relying on the current formulation of contributory and vicarious liability (read the Sony and Napster cases for more on that, particularly Napster as a cautionary example) to avoid liability themselves.
However, the Supreme Court is at this moment reconsidering the Sony precedent, and there is a very real possibility that the creators or providers of a network as you envision could end up being liable for its use since despite it having many possible uses, it's also practically intended for an illegal one. It doesn't help that you just underlined that with your post here in a public forum, should it be you that faces future legal action. We'll know how this shakes out in the summer, when the Grokster opinion is issued.
Not only do I like the ability to skip the raunchy stuff, but I like the fact that this promotes the idea that people can have control over the content that they pay to license.
There is no license involved in ordinary purchases of DVDs. C.f. with how prominently licenses are displayed in software, and that even then they're a hotly disputed issue as to validity.
No they have not -- distribution will be likely read to deal with distribution of tangible copies, not mere broadcasting.
Frankly, uploading and downloading them was pretty typically criminal already given the quantities that people do it in. But it is pretty dumb to have criminal penalties for copyright infringement (as we have since 1897) at all.
You would know that it was edited in some fashion, however, given that 1) you had to take special steps to get the edit, and 2) the edit has to have a prominent notice of the edited nature of the film, and 3) the edits might not be very clean -- they might be unusual jumps or blanks in the film.
At any rate, it's no more objectionable than any other kind of self-chosen filtering system. For example, now we can all filter out Jar-Jar from the Star Wars movies. Try and tell me that that's a bad thing.
Well, there was for a long while a set of boards that would determine the statutory royalty rates for copyrighted works.
The natural name for these would have been Copyright Royalty Arbitration Panels. Yet oddly enough, they ended up being named Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panels, which is an odd phrasing given that they were panels that arbitrated copyright royalties.
You can find out a bit about it from www.copyright.gov/carp
So you think there is a legitimate need to distribute movies before they are released?
I think the penalties are grossly excessive.
My concern with the bill is the sections regarding commercial content. You can skip things that are offensive to you but not ads?
That's not in there anymore. You didn't even read the damn thing, did you?
Thus, for a motion picture such as Battlestar Galactica, there is a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution, but it has not been commercially distributed. It has not been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility, however, since the definition for that term is: The term `motion picture exhibition facility' means a movie theater, screening room, or other venue that is being used primarily for the exhibition of a copyrighted motion picture, if such exhibition is open to the public or is made to an assembled group of viewers outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances.
So since only one or the other has to be satisfied, it is a work being prepared for commercial release. Willfully distributing it on a computer network (e.g. Bit Torrent) is a felony and can result in significant civil penalties.
Is it so hard to look at the text of the law in question?
If you make a different movie, one that an artist whose work you "based it upon" wants no part in, then why name it after the original work, and why include the artist's name? Answer: because you're still wanting to trade off those names, you want people to assume what you're producing is actually some form of the real deal.
Not necessarily. As I said, it's a fact. If I buy a car, rice it out, and sell it, the fact that it's been modified doesn't change that consumers are best informed knowing what it originally was; if I just said it was a car, then how can people make a careful buying decision not knowing if I started with a sports car or a compact? Also, trademarks are only source identifiers, never good identifiers. Usually the titles of individual works cannot be a trademark, since this a) doesn't tell buyers where it comes from, and b) would interfere in uses of the work not covered under the copyright monopoly. If I reprint a public domain work, I'm allowed to use the name of the author and the work in doing so, as long as I don't mislead people.
You made it clear in the GGP that as far as you're concerned, it's all about the money
No, as far as copyright law and policy should be concerned, it's all about the public interest, and with regards to what aspect of authors we use in incentivizing them to create, we use their greed.
Copyright is utilitarian; it's economic. It's inappropriate to entertain silly notions of some sort of romanticized kind of authorship.
This is because the objective of copyright is to slake the public's unquenchable thirst for works and freedom with respect to those works, as much as possible. That's it. It's a noble goal, but one that should be approached pragmatically. It certainly doesn't involve caring about artists, only caring about how to exploit artists just as a farmer exploits his milk cows, or whatever.
This has always been the way copyright works, and it's a good system. We're just screwing it up lately, in no small part due to people with attitudes like your own, who can't treat it rationally.
Actually, it's not clear at all. It's not clear that a derivative is being created, and it's not clear that even if one is, a preexisting exemption wouldn't cover it.
Doing so for yourself is entirely different to doing so for other people. I don't have a problem with most personal uses of copyrighted-by-other's material, but when it comes to saying "Hey everyone, do you want to watch a cleaned up version of XYZ?", and selling edits and presenting the film as a merely sanatized version of the original that's fundamentally the same only without the material-it-would-be-morally-wrong-to-even-view, then, yes, I have a big problem with it. I think it's misrepresenting the original artist to put, under their name, something that clearly they wouldn't say represents what they were trying to do and say at all.
So would you object to it, so long as it was clear that the edits were Alice's Edits of Bob's Movie? Just because Alice has made an EDL doesn't totally divorce it from Bob. Now they're both involved. So long as everyone is clear and up front about it, I don't see a big problem. Alice is not putting it forward as entirely her own work, and Bob is not having it put forward as entirely his either. Frankly, for Bob to disassociate himself from it would be misleading -- he is associated with it to some degree.
Importantly though, I don't give a crap about artistic integrity. I just don't want the audience to be confused or misled about what it is that they're buying or watching. If they're fully informed, I'm happy.
And looking through the relevant part of the law, it appears that 1) there are no federal trademark remedies against the 110 editors, 2) they do have to include a conspicious notice as to the fact that it's edited, 3) I'd still have to investigate as to state causes of action, but I think that Congress' intent is fairly clear.
No.
The new 18 USC 2319B makes it an offense to, in pertinent part, knowingly use or attempt to use, a camera. Possession of one is a factor that can be looked at, but the statute actually says that mere possession of a camera isn't enough to support a conviction.
So if you bring one in, with the intent to use it, that's enough. But if you bring one in, and don't use or attempt to use it, that's not enough.
The trick is in how we determine your intent, if you get caught at an early stage. It's easy if you've set it up on a tripod, patched it into the sound system, and have your finger on the record button. It's harder earlier, but still possible.
Can we at least do the decent thing, and require that companies that provide such "filtering" solutions rename the films they edit, and take the makers of that film off the credits, if they so wish? This basic right would be afforded to the movie creators by a studio that forces edits upon a movie before release.
No, and IIRC, it actually takes care to avoid such a possibility arising. I'd have to poke around with the effects on federal trademark law and preemption of state laws. It hasn't been the part of the bill that I've been most concerned with, and I've been kind of busy as of late.
I'm curious to know if the editing of movies or the editing on moral grounds is the only thing allowed by the bill, or if the "right" to edit goes further.
Morality is not a factor. You can render imperceptable whatever you want. If you don't like the mushy parts of the latest star wars film, but like the fight scenes, you can make an appropriate EDL.
And no, it only applies to motion pictures (which includes TV, given the way the law is written). Not other kinds of works, like books or software, or whatever.
Although I don't see what's wrong with cutting out parts of books for one's own consumption, if that's how you get your kicks, or selling the same, if you're upfront about it. It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.
BTW, on the home movies thing, are they serious? Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations? Is this a poor write-up by the article submitter?
There's some funding for the National Film Preservation Board, or whatever it's called, but it's not as though they can march in and make you hand stuff over. They just get to buy things and preserve them. Maybe preserve deposit copies at the LoC too. You can probably calm down.
No.
It only allows making portions of an authorized copy imperceptable, without fixing the imperceptabilities.
So you can't this exemption to create a new disc. Only to black out the screen or something, when playing an otherwise ordinary commercially released disc.
Obscenity isn't a factor. You can just filter out whatever you want, whatever you consider it to be, provided you otherwise comply with the exemption (or of course, some other exemption).
;)
It does refer to 'limited portions' but given recent caselaw, presumably that can apply to a lot.
Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.
/. article is a huge misnomer.
But this comes with significant new civil and criminal penalties that are just apalling.
Oh, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The new 110 exemption is a statutory exemption. It applies regardless of fairness, if the criteria it sets forth are satisfied. The title of the
You can read it here.
The breakdown is basically:
Title I -- very very bad
Title II -- good, but not as good as it could be.
Title III -- meh
Title IV -- good for rather limited uses, but also not as good as it could be
No, copyright is about the public interest, it's just being perverted out of greed and idiotic romantic notions about being an author.
I don't think that it's all that beneficial now, but I do think that it's generally possible for it to beneficial to the public if done right.
Copyright is a utilitarian construct.
;), repair and maintenance costs over time, etc.
The public has three equal interests it seeks to have maximally satisfied: 1) for more original works to be created; 2) for more derivative works to be created; and 3) for all works to be in the public domain, where they can be maximally exploited, had and enjoyed for free, etc.
So all copyright law has to justify itself in terms of how well it serves the sum of these interests. A perfect copyright law would be one that maximized all of them.
Without copyright law, we know from history that there would be some satisfaction of the first, more of the second, and full satisfaction of the third. This is our baseline.
Unless a copyright law would provide a net public benefit greater than the baseline, it is unacceptable. We'd be better off without the law.
Similarly, we can compare any two copyright laws by the degree to which they increase the net satisfaction of the public interest. The more they do so, the better the law is. Additionally, where two laws produce an equal net public benefit, the least restrictive of the two is the better one.
Now, reducing the satisfaction of the public domain interest so as to increase the satisfaction of the creation interests (especially since it increases one interest a lot more than the other, and they're of equal importance) is subject to diminishing returns.
For example, let's say that we have two alternative copyright proposals: One lasts for 25 years, and one lasts for 250 years.
Clearly, the former satisfies the public domain interest much, much, much more than the latter. But also, the former probably satisfies the creation interest 90% as much as the latter.
After all, the economics of creative works is such that the vast majority of works have no economic value, and that of those that do, they'll make virtually all their money in the first few months or years of their release. Very few works produce a significant amount of money over the long term. So a copyright for a short term is just about as valuable as a copyright in the long term. For example, J. Breyer, in his Eldred dissent, pointed out that the monetary value of the additional 20 years Congress added to copyright terms was, on average, five cents. That's not a great incentive, I'm sure you'll agree.
(Of course the whole copyright system is a testament to how crazily optimistic authors are -- of those that are incentivized by the rewards of copyright, they all think they'll hit it big, when in fact they'd be better off working regular jobs. Copyright exploits this rather irrational, risk-seeking behavior.)
Now, we could optimize copyright if we could only determine precisely how much copyright-related incentive each individual author required in order for them to create their work. Then we could provide only the minimum necessary incentive to each, up to a certain maximum beyond which, as already pointed out, increasing copyright would result in decreasing public benefit (in which case less copyright would be superior, and in extreme cases, no copyright would be superior).
It's a lot like buying a car. You, as the car buyer, want to get the most car for the least money. It'd be ideal to know the exact prices of each car on the lot, and the exact figures as to fuel economy, increase in social standing from each model (on a scale of Yugo to Ferarri
Unfortunately we can't really be that well informed for various reasons. But we can still adhere to the principle that giving more than the minimum required incentive is wasteful. And that we ought to very carefully consider just how much incentive we want to provide, in light of the importance of the net public benefit, even if we can't apportion it out in a highly optimal manner.
When we're on the international scene, however, each country has to respect the best interests of its own people, not others. If country A feels that it is in its best interests to have
It's not harming you, you're not entitled to their work.
Their labor, no. The fruits of their labor -- i.e. creative works -- yes, actually. I am entitled to them.
I'd argue that a better lightbulb is an innovation, too.
And? If the inventor of the first bulb has a monopoly -- which is what a patent is -- then why should he make them better. Cheaper to produce (for the same sale cost) perhaps, but not better.
Remember, patents are granted for refinements of inventions, too.
However, a patent is not a right to practice an invention, it is only a right to keep others from practicing the invention. So the original patent holder can, for the life of his patent, keep the second inventor from using the improvement.
By ideas I meant the typical intellectual properties; books, movies, music, etc.
None of those are ideas.
Anyone who produces something is allowed to benefit from it.
Let me rephrase. It doesn't benefit me for the creator to exclusively benefit from his works.
So sure, if we're all on an equal footing, then it doesn't hurt me. But if I am asked to refrain from benefiting in the same manner as the creator, then I am losing out. Why should I stand for that?
If you considering paying for stuff you use harmful, then maybe you shouldn't buy anything from now on... at all.
Well, let's say that no matter what, any creative work that would be created, was created. We achieved the maximum possible level of creation. In that scenario, would you prefer to have to pay for those works, or to get them for free.
I, as a rational actor, would like to get them for free. If you offered me my very own, personal, Library of Congress, and I could have it for free, or for an ungodly amount of money, I'll take it for free, and I'd be a fool if I didn't.
So yes, paying for things is harmful, the question is whether the harm is outweighed by a benefit from that thing.
If there is no copyright, then prices drop to about marginal cost, which is the lowest it can be expected to go (because the publishers, also being rational, won't work at a loss, but will end up in commodity markets where profits are razor-thin).
That's generally pretty good. But you're basically defending monopolies in a market that should be commoditized. That's pretty bad for me. Why should I allow that to happen?
How can you be so self centered?
Easily.
I am self centered in that I want the most gain for myself at the least cost to myself. Thus I want works for free.
Authors are equally self centered in that they want the most gain for themselves at the least cost for themselves. Thus they want to get paid vast sums for making cheap works (and better yet, someone else's cheap works, e.g. not incurring the cost to write a movie by basing it off a fairy tale without paying its author).
Thus, authors oppose one another, and the public and authors oppose each other.
There is a third option, which is quite viable, but is still arrived at by catering to the self-interestedness of the parties involved. Copyright seeks to achieve it, in fact. But it isn't arrived at by only looking at what would be best for authors.
How is innovation encouraged at the expense of "everything" else?
If A invents the light bulb, and gets a patent on it, then third parties are limited in their ability to improve it since they can't make use of their improvements. They CAN'T make or sell light bulbs until the patent runs out. This can result in A sitting on his ass, and the public is not all that well off as a result. Plus, A is a rent-seeker -- if B comes up with a bulb that might not be under A's patent, A will still challenge him, and try to expand his patent to cover it after all.
Where A cannot keep his competitors out, then there is vigorous competition, and the public benefits from the resulting efficiencies.
Remember: copyrights and patents are monopolies. They're not desirable in their own right. They are at best tolerable for some greater good, but this of course requires us to find a way that they do in fact result in a greater good.
Because some innovation requires a lot of money. Without the safety of returned investments, some innovations won't occur.
But some innovations simply cost too much. The benefit they provide isn't worth the cost.
For example, if we made copyright last forever, and I could charge everyone whatever I liked, whenever they looked at it, I might be incentivized to move the stars themselves into an innovative new constellation.
But the benefit to society from my artwork is too low in comparison to the cost. So we're better off if we don't set things up so that I have an incentive to pursue it.
Plus, there is a bad fit between the amount of protection
Okay, so? If I'm the other guy -- and there are roughly 6 billion other guys to the one author -- then of course I'm happy to use it easily without facing legal recourse.
So since the other guy is the majority, and since the other guy is being asked to refrain from doing what comes naturally, and what benefits him, then by God there had better be something in it for the other guy.
So the real idea is, what's in it for me? How do you convince me that I should give you a copyright to my detriment? How do I come out ahead by doing so?
There's an answer, but what you had to date is entirely self-serving on the part of authors, and that's no good.