Jobs didn't invent USB even though he put it into the iMac fruit-colored all-in-one '040 machines that ran system 7 or 8.
iMacs initially had G3 processors; everything with 68040 chips had been discontinued before he came back. (And it was MacOS 8.1 that they started out with, IIRC)
Jobs didn't invent ethernet but he created ethernet dongles for 68040-based Mac IIci machines.
The Mac IIci had a 68030, and it didn't have any built in ethernet support at all. You're probably thinking of the AAUI port on the Quadra 700. And he was long gone from Apple when that stuff came out.
And the main thing I'd object to was this:
- the first optical drive on consumer hardware (it was magneto-optical however)
Bullshit. The NeXT cube was not consumer hardware. The thing cost $6500 and was initially only sold to the higher ed market. When they finally hit the retail market, they were priced at $10,000 and were about as big a flop as the similarly priced Apple Lisa.
ASPIRIN is a special case. It became generic in the US due to the mark holder being Bayer, a German company, and us being a little upset about WWI. They also lost the HEROIN trademark that way.
The law is retarded if it doesn't segregate common and commercial use of the term.
Well, it doesn't, but I think it's better than you think. The raison d'Ãtre of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion. If you buy a bottle labeled with the COCA-COLA mark, you should be able to expect the contents to have the same quality (taste, ingredients, etc.) and same origin as every other identically marked bottle. OTOH, if you buy a bottle labeled SODA, POP, or COLA, there are a lot of different things that it could be, some of which might even be worse than the crab juice. Where there is no consistent quality, or no single origin, there's no trademark.
If the public uses a mark to refer to goods or services of differing qualities or origins though, they redefine the mark so as to make it generic. Typically this is caused by confusing the mark for the name of the underlying good or service, rather than as a trademark identifying that a good or service is interchangeable with other so-marked goods or services, which may have different origins. E.g. XEROX brand photocopiers vs. xerox machines.
The typical way to stave this off -- a trademark becoming dangerously synonymous with the marker good or service -- is advertising. Xerox has been doing it for years. My favorite ad of theirs was "You can't xerox a xerox on the xerox." But I wouldn't put a lot of money on their continued success as keeping their mark for photocopiers if it came down to a fight.
The closest thing I've ever seen to what you describe was that Thermos is entitled to use the THERMOS mark with a capital T, but everyone else who makes vacuum insulated flasks can use it without the capital T.
McCarthy didn't know that was true, and had no reason to think it was true, he just lied about it. It was total coincidence that it happened to be true. And since he had no real information, he was no good at actually ferreting them out. And it's bad counterintelligence to just publicly identify enemy agents -- you're better off feeding them disinformation, turning them, or using them to find more, all very quietly.
The man was a drunk and a lout and deserves nothing but scorn.
And that's what we need for knowledge: broad agreement that locking away knowledge is immoral, and that sharing is good, desirable, and a fundamental right. It's been too easy to confuse the public, and persuade many people that they don't have rights that they actually do have. We've had craziness such as governments using copyright to monetize access to the law! We have poor children being denied educational material, over fears that might somehow hurt publishers of textbooks. We have scientists being silenced, technically not allowed to hand out copies of their own works that the public paid for, because they were forced to turn over all copyright to a publisher, in order to get published at all. We've had embarrassing cases such as Dmitry Sklyarov. When a person is technically in violation of copyright just for being overheard while humming a copyrighted song, when people doubt that they have the right to discuss certain subjects such as the details of how to reverse engineer a product lest that somehow infringe on someone's copyright, fair use just isn't enough. George Hotz is another embarrassing case for the Land of the Free. I think that like slavery, copyrights and patents have to go. Until they do, we will continue to see these abusive attempts at extreme control of knowledge enjoy too much success.
I can think of just one way in which copyright does work, as a sort of publicly known usage and endorsement. The example I have in mind is the use of a song in a commercial. (I recall a case in which Nike used the Beatle's Revolution in a commercial, without permission. Nike was sued, and lost.) We can know beyond doubt who the authors are, and who is using the songs. Those users are not private individuals privately using knowledge for their own enjoyment, they are commercial entities seeking to sell products and services to the public, and as such must broadcast to the public. But similar to plagiarism, this need not be covered by copyright. We can enshrine a particular right to compensation in this instance to some other much more limited law. Call it "commercial use right", or "sell out right" or some such. (But, want to be careful that an organization like ASCAP can't bully restaurants into paying royalties for playing music regardless of whether they play only free music, such as music that is out of copyright.) We don't need slavery to enforce relationships between employers and employees, and we don't need copyright law for this.
Well, the goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science (by which was meant 'knowledge') for our society. And while it dies have negative effects, if it can be tailored so that the good outweighs the bad, it seems worth having.
I'd generally agree with you, restricting copyright to only apply to uses by non-natural persons, and to commercial uses: if a company that owns a movie theater wants to perform a movie, let them have to pay for permission; if an individual just wants to download a movie to watch, why should they have to pay?
Most pirates are casual pirates that wouldn't put much effort into it.
Some are determined, and you can't stop. But to say all are that way is ignorant of the pirate ecosystem.
True, but thanks to the miracle of software, it only takes one person to crack the DRM. Then everyone just follows suit. Most people couldn't figure out how to break DeCSS on their own, but it's pretty easy to use a DVD ripping program.
this person didn't really buy the books for himself which is what the first sale doctrine is for? he had relatives buy books for the purpose of reselling them in a country where people have a lot more money
i'm surprised SCOTUS didn't find for the publisher. this is a pretty big expansion of the first sale doctrine
No, first sale has always covered used book stores, video rental stores, and other for-profit enterprises. There is no expansion here. All the doctrine ever said was that the copyright holder has no right -- under copyright, at least -- to control distribution after the first one. There are a few caveats here and there (when lobbying groups got Congress to do their bidding), but that's basically it.
Yes, the Senate became very corrupt pretty quickly, with states more or less selling seats to the highest bidder. Directly electing them was meant to get Senators into office who would look out for the interests of the nation since the old method of appointments wasn't working.
Elections around these parts aren't perfect, but let's at least try to find all new ways of screwing things up instead of reverting to the tried and true ways. At least with experimentation we might get lucky.
They also should interpret federal law. This case wasn't a constitutional question, it was basically asking what the precise meaning of a statute was. Everyone seems to agree its a constitutional statute, though.
And they have a host of other duties. In fact, ironically, judicial review for constitutionality is not one of their enumerated responsibilities, and there was much dispute early on with the two political branches claiming that power for themselves.
Omega did get up to the Supreme Court, and got tied 4-4, which allowed the Circuit decision to stand but not as national precedent. Kagan refused herself for that once since she had been involved in it earlier. (Whose bright idea was it to nominate a Solicitor General?)
Of course, Congress does have the right to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, and would be well within its rights to limit or even prohibit the existence of corporate entities as it sees fit. And if it chose to abolish those which engaged in political speech, this would not run afoul of the First Amendment.
Had the court ruled against Citizens United then the court would have been giving the government the absolute authority to prevent groups of like-minded, non-wealthy individuals from pooling their money to make a political statement.
No, they could still do that, the only difference would be that they would be liable for the group as it would likely be a partnership.
I don't see a reason why we should extend the privilege of limited liability to politically active organizations. Let them choose which is more important to them.
Oh, you could still have a free press. It would just have to be organized as a sole proprietorship or as a partnership, without limited liability. American publishers worked that way for the 18th and probably much of the 19th centuries. It's viable.
Services isn't the only option. Patronage is another option, and if you can't find one big patron, try using kickstarter to find a thousand small ones. It may be difficult to get started as a new author, but that's true now, in a system where the publishers are effectively the patrons.
Purely as a matter of what rights you inherently hold as a human being, and what rights they inherently hold (whether as a corporate entity or a collection of people makes no difference), yes, you can.
But if we add in artificial rights which we, through the mechanism of a democratically elected government which holds legitimacy because we give it the power to govern, grant to the Times, then and only then do they have some power to stop you. But we can always take their power away, or change it, as it suits us; they only have what we ultimately choose to give them.
You can see this for yourself by printing up and selling copies of Shakespeare's works (we gave no power to him or his heirs) as well. The Times may act against you but the hard never will.
I don't think you're right, what with there having been quite a lot of music made and performed before it was copyrightable. But assuming you're right, people would either be okay with it or would willingly find a different way to encourage the creation of the music they want, including, perhaps, dialing copyright back up somewhat. I think it's a worthy experiment.
The first problem is that these statutory damages are "per work". A CD with 20 songs is 20 works. I have one CD with a single song over an hour, that would be only one work. Seems unfair that the statutory damages would be twenty times higher because one artist split the music up in 20 little pieces, while another produced a single piece of music of one hour.
While that can conceivably happen, the general rule is that a compilation is a single work for the purposes of calculating statutory damages. The relevant statutory language is at the end of 17 USC 504(c)(1).
I agree with all of your reforms, except that #2 is excessive. One year is way too short a copyright term. The original 14 years, renewable, isn't that bad, but I'd go for 20 years with a single 20 year extension.
Well, you do get more than one of the one year terms. For a book, probably in the neighborhood of 15-20 years after first publication, if you renew annually.
When Asimov write the Foundation trilogy, he didn't earn a dime on it until ten years later when Doubleday obtained the rights to it. It took me five years to write The Paxil Diaries and a few more to get in publishable form (I seeded Pirate Bay with the PDF) and I staill haven't gotten it in dead tree form.
Well, publication is what would start the clock ticking for sure, and require a proper copyright. There should be some kind of protection for unpublished manuscripts to avoid people pirating them, but not so much that authors sit on them. Eventually, allowing manuscript piracy is more rewarding for society than never seeing works published at all!
I'd add a #6, that orphaned works go into the public domain. If it isn't available it shouldn't be protected by copyright.
That's what the one year terms are meant to accomplish. If we used your twenty year terms and the work was orphaned in year five, you've got us sitting around for fifteen years waiting for no good reason. Short terms get works into the public domain faster, if the author fails to renew. And if the author does renew, I'm okay with that.
Look, we aren't arguing over the meaning of an existing statute (although I am trying to follow in the example of 17 USC 1008), I'm telling you what I would like to see. Commercial use would be defined for the purposes of this law so as to accomplish the purpose I am describing to you.
So mere downloading of a work as I described would not be commercial regardless of whether you could argue it to be in the absence of a definition. Sorry if this wasn't clear before, but I didn't feel like drafting bulletproof statutory language for the purpose of a quick Slashdot post.
(3) if a person downloads a song instead of buying it then it is inherently a commercial act. perhaps there is a small niche of non-commercial infringing acts, but I can't think of any.
I just wrote a post about this, but the gist is that I seek to allow generic file sharing and other currently infringing behavior as long as no money is involved and it operates at a loss. Here's the post.
(4) I thought the author was free to publish or not publish, isn't that what you said? Surely he's free to publish in certain places, or on specific media. why cant he publish in whatever file type he chooses? This goes against your earlier argument.
Just poor wording. Authors are free to publish or not. If an author (or someone they've authorized) chooses to publish with DRM, all that happens is that they don't get a copyright. The choice of copyright without DRM or DRM without copyright is up to them, they're just mutually exclusive in much the same way (and for much the same reason) as how you cannot have a trade secret on a patented invention due to patents having disclosure requirements. (You can have trade secrets on non patented inventions or non patented parts of inventions, but there is not overlap)
(4) cont... oh goodie another gov't program. way to go liberty boy!
Well, since the DRMed works are in the public domain, surely it fits into the mission of our national library to help ensure that all Americans can freely access those works. It would cost little other than some server space and bandwidth in practice. Go to the LOC website sometime; some of their collection is online and it's pretty neat stuff. It would be nice for more of it to be available. We can probably afford to cancel one overpriced military aircraft for such massive improvements for culture.
(5) copyright treaties have nothing to do with our national laws.
I'd rather have us withdraw from them instead of violate them whilst still a party. It's nicer if nothing else. And treaty obligations are commonly used to pressure Congress, so that's a strike against them too. And lacking treaties, we would need a unilateral national treatment statute.
That would swallow the exception. Fair use is meant to consider the effect on sales of the work, but a review that quotes from a work under fair use in order to discourage people from buying the work (because it is bad) would still be okay.
Roughly, commercial use in this context means that the person using the exception is profiting in some way other than merely obtaining the work in question. So users of this exception could not use ad-supported sites, could not have tip jars or accept donations, could not ask for people to reimburse their costs, could not sell merchandise associated with the exception, could not have file sharing ratios, etc.
Basically, if you want to use the exception, you do so at a personal financial loss for the costs of the mechanism used (whether its burning optical discs or bandwidth or whatever).
I have similar views, but disagree with your first point. Suppose I take a photo and post it online in a blog post. Under your first rule, my photo wouldn't be considered to be copyrighted and thus would be free for anyone to take for any reason. In today's world of smartphone cameras and instant posting, having to file an application is a lengthy step that few would take.
That's basically the idea. Copyrights should be granted where they do actually incentivize the author to create and publish works which otherwise would not be created and published. But they should not be granted if the author would've done it anyway; to do so in that case would be unnecessary and wasteful. The best mechanism I know of to determine which is which is to let the authors opt in: if copyright is important to them, they'll act to get one, and won't if not. It doesn't work for opting out, as authors who don't care about copyright usually won't be bothered to take affirmative steps to disclaim it.
That having been said, the registration formality should be a small hurdle. I don't want to discourage authors seeking or getting copyrights, just their getting them when they don't need them. The form would surely be not much more complex than a change of address form, and the filing fee could be a token dollar (more perhaps for claimants who claim a lot and can afford it, like Disney).
I'd also argue that one year terms would be ridiculously short. Again, if you are requiring me to register all of my photos, and if I've taken 100 photos, I could be spending all of my time filling out renewal forms.
Well, first, if not doing a bit of paperwork is worth more to you than a copyright, that's the sort of thing that would make me think the copyright is not too important to you. Second, you can already, depending on the precise circumstances, have group registrations for multiple works, and I have no problem with that. It could even be online and largely automated (though it'll still be charging fees to your bank account or credit card which may give you cause to pause).
1) Unregistered copyrights would last for 14 years from publication date. (Just like they did when the Founding Fathers were around, but minus the registration requirement.)
Why 14 years? What is your rationale? Surely nostalgia isn't a good reason. The term lengths and maximum lengths with renewal should have some objective reasoning behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs didn't invent USB even though he put it into the iMac fruit-colored all-in-one '040 machines that ran system 7 or 8.
iMacs initially had G3 processors; everything with 68040 chips had been discontinued before he came back. (And it was MacOS 8.1 that they started out with, IIRC)
Jobs didn't invent ethernet but he created ethernet dongles for 68040-based Mac IIci machines.
The Mac IIci had a 68030, and it didn't have any built in ethernet support at all. You're probably thinking of the AAUI port on the Quadra 700. And he was long gone from Apple when that stuff came out.
And the main thing I'd object to was this:
- the first optical drive on consumer hardware (it was magneto-optical however)
Bullshit. The NeXT cube was not consumer hardware. The thing cost $6500 and was initially only sold to the higher ed market. When they finally hit the retail market, they were priced at $10,000 and were about as big a flop as the similarly priced Apple Lisa.
ASPIRIN is a special case. It became generic in the US due to the mark holder being Bayer, a German company, and us being a little upset about WWI. They also lost the HEROIN trademark that way.
The law is retarded if it doesn't segregate common and commercial use of the term.
Well, it doesn't, but I think it's better than you think. The raison d'Ãtre of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion. If you buy a bottle labeled with the COCA-COLA mark, you should be able to expect the contents to have the same quality (taste, ingredients, etc.) and same origin as every other identically marked bottle. OTOH, if you buy a bottle labeled SODA, POP, or COLA, there are a lot of different things that it could be, some of which might even be worse than the crab juice. Where there is no consistent quality, or no single origin, there's no trademark.
If the public uses a mark to refer to goods or services of differing qualities or origins though, they redefine the mark so as to make it generic. Typically this is caused by confusing the mark for the name of the underlying good or service, rather than as a trademark identifying that a good or service is interchangeable with other so-marked goods or services, which may have different origins. E.g. XEROX brand photocopiers vs. xerox machines.
The typical way to stave this off -- a trademark becoming dangerously synonymous with the marker good or service -- is advertising. Xerox has been doing it for years. My favorite ad of theirs was "You can't xerox a xerox on the xerox." But I wouldn't put a lot of money on their continued success as keeping their mark for photocopiers if it came down to a fight.
The closest thing I've ever seen to what you describe was that Thermos is entitled to use the THERMOS mark with a capital T, but everyone else who makes vacuum insulated flasks can use it without the capital T.
And a stopped clock is right twice a day.
McCarthy didn't know that was true, and had no reason to think it was true, he just lied about it. It was total coincidence that it happened to be true. And since he had no real information, he was no good at actually ferreting them out. And it's bad counterintelligence to just publicly identify enemy agents -- you're better off feeding them disinformation, turning them, or using them to find more, all very quietly.
The man was a drunk and a lout and deserves nothing but scorn.
Sorry, I meant breaking CSS. In my defense, it's been a long day.
And that's what we need for knowledge: broad agreement that locking away knowledge is immoral, and that sharing is good, desirable, and a fundamental right. It's been too easy to confuse the public, and persuade many people that they don't have rights that they actually do have. We've had craziness such as governments using copyright to monetize access to the law! We have poor children being denied educational material, over fears that might somehow hurt publishers of textbooks. We have scientists being silenced, technically not allowed to hand out copies of their own works that the public paid for, because they were forced to turn over all copyright to a publisher, in order to get published at all. We've had embarrassing cases such as Dmitry Sklyarov. When a person is technically in violation of copyright just for being overheard while humming a copyrighted song, when people doubt that they have the right to discuss certain subjects such as the details of how to reverse engineer a product lest that somehow infringe on someone's copyright, fair use just isn't enough. George Hotz is another embarrassing case for the Land of the Free. I think that like slavery, copyrights and patents have to go. Until they do, we will continue to see these abusive attempts at extreme control of knowledge enjoy too much success.
I can think of just one way in which copyright does work, as a sort of publicly known usage and endorsement. The example I have in mind is the use of a song in a commercial. (I recall a case in which Nike used the Beatle's Revolution in a commercial, without permission. Nike was sued, and lost.) We can know beyond doubt who the authors are, and who is using the songs. Those users are not private individuals privately using knowledge for their own enjoyment, they are commercial entities seeking to sell products and services to the public, and as such must broadcast to the public. But similar to plagiarism, this need not be covered by copyright. We can enshrine a particular right to compensation in this instance to some other much more limited law. Call it "commercial use right", or "sell out right" or some such. (But, want to be careful that an organization like ASCAP can't bully restaurants into paying royalties for playing music regardless of whether they play only free music, such as music that is out of copyright.) We don't need slavery to enforce relationships between employers and employees, and we don't need copyright law for this.
Well, the goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science (by which was meant 'knowledge') for our society. And while it dies have negative effects, if it can be tailored so that the good outweighs the bad, it seems worth having.
I'd generally agree with you, restricting copyright to only apply to uses by non-natural persons, and to commercial uses: if a company that owns a movie theater wants to perform a movie, let them have to pay for permission; if an individual just wants to download a movie to watch, why should they have to pay?
Most pirates are casual pirates that wouldn't put much effort into it.
Some are determined, and you can't stop. But to say all are that way is ignorant of the pirate ecosystem.
True, but thanks to the miracle of software, it only takes one person to crack the DRM. Then everyone just follows suit. Most people couldn't figure out how to break DeCSS on their own, but it's pretty easy to use a DVD ripping program.
this person didn't really buy the books for himself which is what the first sale doctrine is for? he had relatives buy books for the purpose of reselling them in a country where people have a lot more money
i'm surprised SCOTUS didn't find for the publisher. this is a pretty big expansion of the first sale doctrine
No, first sale has always covered used book stores, video rental stores, and other for-profit enterprises. There is no expansion here. All the doctrine ever said was that the copyright holder has no right -- under copyright, at least -- to control distribution after the first one. There are a few caveats here and there (when lobbying groups got Congress to do their bidding), but that's basically it.
It's not a liberal / conservative split. Ginsburg is a fairly well known copyright maximalist. She wrote the majority opinion in Eldred too.
Speech is the right at issue. It includes both the right to say original things and to repeat verbatim things other people said first.
Yes, the Senate became very corrupt pretty quickly, with states more or less selling seats to the highest bidder. Directly electing them was meant to get Senators into office who would look out for the interests of the nation since the old method of appointments wasn't working.
Elections around these parts aren't perfect, but let's at least try to find all new ways of screwing things up instead of reverting to the tried and true ways. At least with experimentation we might get lucky.
They also should interpret federal law. This case wasn't a constitutional question, it was basically asking what the precise meaning of a statute was. Everyone seems to agree its a constitutional statute, though.
And they have a host of other duties. In fact, ironically, judicial review for constitutionality is not one of their enumerated responsibilities, and there was much dispute early on with the two political branches claiming that power for themselves.
Omega did get up to the Supreme Court, and got tied 4-4, which allowed the Circuit decision to stand but not as national precedent. Kagan refused herself for that once since she had been involved in it earlier. (Whose bright idea was it to nominate a Solicitor General?)
Of course, Congress does have the right to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, and would be well within its rights to limit or even prohibit the existence of corporate entities as it sees fit. And if it chose to abolish those which engaged in political speech, this would not run afoul of the First Amendment.
Had the court ruled against Citizens United then the court would have been giving the government the absolute authority to prevent groups of like-minded, non-wealthy individuals from pooling their money to make a political statement.
No, they could still do that, the only difference would be that they would be liable for the group as it would likely be a partnership.
I don't see a reason why we should extend the privilege of limited liability to politically active organizations. Let them choose which is more important to them.
Oh, you could still have a free press. It would just have to be organized as a sole proprietorship or as a partnership, without limited liability. American publishers worked that way for the 18th and probably much of the 19th centuries. It's viable.
Services isn't the only option. Patronage is another option, and if you can't find one big patron, try using kickstarter to find a thousand small ones. It may be difficult to get started as a new author, but that's true now, in a system where the publishers are effectively the patrons.
Purely as a matter of what rights you inherently hold as a human being, and what rights they inherently hold (whether as a corporate entity or a collection of people makes no difference), yes, you can.
But if we add in artificial rights which we, through the mechanism of a democratically elected government which holds legitimacy because we give it the power to govern, grant to the Times, then and only then do they have some power to stop you. But we can always take their power away, or change it, as it suits us; they only have what we ultimately choose to give them.
You can see this for yourself by printing up and selling copies of Shakespeare's works (we gave no power to him or his heirs) as well. The Times may act against you but the hard never will.
Well, copyright does value quantity over quality.
I don't think you're right, what with there having been quite a lot of music made and performed before it was copyrightable. But assuming you're right, people would either be okay with it or would willingly find a different way to encourage the creation of the music they want, including, perhaps, dialing copyright back up somewhat. I think it's a worthy experiment.
The first problem is that these statutory damages are "per work". A CD with 20 songs is 20 works. I have one CD with a single song over an hour, that would be only one work. Seems unfair that the statutory damages would be twenty times higher because one artist split the music up in 20 little pieces, while another produced a single piece of music of one hour.
While that can conceivably happen, the general rule is that a compilation is a single work for the purposes of calculating statutory damages. The relevant statutory language is at the end of 17 USC 504(c)(1).
I agree with all of your reforms, except that #2 is excessive. One year is way too short a copyright term. The original 14 years, renewable, isn't that bad, but I'd go for 20 years with a single 20 year extension.
Well, you do get more than one of the one year terms. For a book, probably in the neighborhood of 15-20 years after first publication, if you renew annually.
When Asimov write the Foundation trilogy, he didn't earn a dime on it until ten years later when Doubleday obtained the rights to it. It took me five years to write The Paxil Diaries and a few more to get in publishable form (I seeded Pirate Bay with the PDF) and I staill haven't gotten it in dead tree form.
Well, publication is what would start the clock ticking for sure, and require a proper copyright. There should be some kind of protection for unpublished manuscripts to avoid people pirating them, but not so much that authors sit on them. Eventually, allowing manuscript piracy is more rewarding for society than never seeing works published at all!
I'd add a #6, that orphaned works go into the public domain. If it isn't available it shouldn't be protected by copyright.
That's what the one year terms are meant to accomplish. If we used your twenty year terms and the work was orphaned in year five, you've got us sitting around for fifteen years waiting for no good reason. Short terms get works into the public domain faster, if the author fails to renew. And if the author does renew, I'm okay with that.
Look, we aren't arguing over the meaning of an existing statute (although I am trying to follow in the example of 17 USC 1008), I'm telling you what I would like to see. Commercial use would be defined for the purposes of this law so as to accomplish the purpose I am describing to you.
So mere downloading of a work as I described would not be commercial regardless of whether you could argue it to be in the absence of a definition. Sorry if this wasn't clear before, but I didn't feel like drafting bulletproof statutory language for the purpose of a quick Slashdot post.
(3) if a person downloads a song instead of buying it then it is inherently a commercial act. perhaps there is a small niche of non-commercial infringing acts, but I can't think of any.
I just wrote a post about this, but the gist is that I seek to allow generic file sharing and other currently infringing behavior as long as no money is involved and it operates at a loss. Here's the post.
(4) I thought the author was free to publish or not publish, isn't that what you said? Surely he's free to publish in certain places, or on specific media. why cant he publish in whatever file type he chooses? This goes against your earlier argument.
Just poor wording. Authors are free to publish or not. If an author (or someone they've authorized) chooses to publish with DRM, all that happens is that they don't get a copyright. The choice of copyright without DRM or DRM without copyright is up to them, they're just mutually exclusive in much the same way (and for much the same reason) as how you cannot have a trade secret on a patented invention due to patents having disclosure requirements. (You can have trade secrets on non patented inventions or non patented parts of inventions, but there is not overlap)
(4) cont... oh goodie another gov't program. way to go liberty boy!
Well, since the DRMed works are in the public domain, surely it fits into the mission of our national library to help ensure that all Americans can freely access those works. It would cost little other than some server space and bandwidth in practice. Go to the LOC website sometime; some of their collection is online and it's pretty neat stuff. It would be nice for more of it to be available. We can probably afford to cancel one overpriced military aircraft for such massive improvements for culture.
(5) copyright treaties have nothing to do with our national laws.
I'd rather have us withdraw from them instead of violate them whilst still a party. It's nicer if nothing else. And treaty obligations are commonly used to pressure Congress, so that's a strike against them too. And lacking treaties, we would need a unilateral national treatment statute.
That would swallow the exception. Fair use is meant to consider the effect on sales of the work, but a review that quotes from a work under fair use in order to discourage people from buying the work (because it is bad) would still be okay.
Roughly, commercial use in this context means that the person using the exception is profiting in some way other than merely obtaining the work in question. So users of this exception could not use ad-supported sites, could not have tip jars or accept donations, could not ask for people to reimburse their costs, could not sell merchandise associated with the exception, could not have file sharing ratios, etc.
Basically, if you want to use the exception, you do so at a personal financial loss for the costs of the mechanism used (whether its burning optical discs or bandwidth or whatever).
I have similar views, but disagree with your first point. Suppose I take a photo and post it online in a blog post. Under your first rule, my photo wouldn't be considered to be copyrighted and thus would be free for anyone to take for any reason. In today's world of smartphone cameras and instant posting, having to file an application is a lengthy step that few would take.
That's basically the idea. Copyrights should be granted where they do actually incentivize the author to create and publish works which otherwise would not be created and published. But they should not be granted if the author would've done it anyway; to do so in that case would be unnecessary and wasteful. The best mechanism I know of to determine which is which is to let the authors opt in: if copyright is important to them, they'll act to get one, and won't if not. It doesn't work for opting out, as authors who don't care about copyright usually won't be bothered to take affirmative steps to disclaim it.
That having been said, the registration formality should be a small hurdle. I don't want to discourage authors seeking or getting copyrights, just their getting them when they don't need them. The form would surely be not much more complex than a change of address form, and the filing fee could be a token dollar (more perhaps for claimants who claim a lot and can afford it, like Disney).
I'd also argue that one year terms would be ridiculously short. Again, if you are requiring me to register all of my photos, and if I've taken 100 photos, I could be spending all of my time filling out renewal forms.
Well, first, if not doing a bit of paperwork is worth more to you than a copyright, that's the sort of thing that would make me think the copyright is not too important to you. Second, you can already, depending on the precise circumstances, have group registrations for multiple works, and I have no problem with that. It could even be online and largely automated (though it'll still be charging fees to your bank account or credit card which may give you cause to pause).
1) Unregistered copyrights would last for 14 years from publication date. (Just like they did when the Founding Fathers were around, but minus the registration requirement.)
Why 14 years? What is your rationale? Surely nostalgia isn't a good reason. The term lengths and maximum lengths with renewal should have some objective reasoning behind them.