Fundamentally it comes down to four things, which I touched on elsewhere.
First, the US model acknowledges that there is a natural right of all people to freely copy works, to freely change works, and to freely share (distribute, perform, and display) works. All without needing anyone's permission, and without needing to pay (beyond the cost of raw materials, like paper to write on, or clay to sculpt with). Copyright is understood to be contrary to this natural order of things, but to be, perhaps, tolerable all the same.
Second, the US model is founded on utilitarian and market-based principles. Consider: 1) Everyone has the sort of natural freedoms described above; 2) Everyone wants there to be more creative works created and published (so that they can enjoy them and apply their freedoms to them by copying, altering, and sharing, as they see fit); 3) It's not a good idea for the government or any centralized authority to promote certain works over others -- people should get to choose what to create and distribute, and what to enjoy, copy, alter, and distribute; 4) It may be worthwhile, in the interest of achieving greater happiness to accept temporary restrictions.
Third, this results in a system where while we acknowledge that authors are not inherently entitled to copyrights, we can grant copyrights -- that is, rights to restrict what others can do with regard to copying, altering, and sharing works -- that even though they have negative effects on the populace, have greater positive effects down the road. The idea is, if there are no copyrights (as was the case worldwide until about 1710, and then, only in England, and later elsewhere) we know a certain number of works will still be created and published and enjoyed freely by all. Ancient authors around the world had no copyrights, Cervantes had no copyrights, Shakespeare had no copyrights, Wu Cheng'en had no copyrights, the concept just wasn't there. (Well, actually the basic idea was present in a joke that ancient Greeks told, but it was just for laughs) But the number of works created and published is somewhat limited. Hard to know how much our historical experience is tangled up in state and religious censorship, lower levels of technology revolving around things like printing and paper-making, and lower literacy rates, but probably some but not many works would be created and published.
So consider point 2 from a couple of paragraphs above: In a world with no copyrights, the common desire for lots of works is not well-satisfied, but the desire for freedom as to those works is completely satisfied. What happens if we grant a copyright -- a right to prevent others from enjoying freedom as to works -- for a brief period of time? It incentivizes people to be authors who weren't before, and it encourages the creation and publication of more works, since the authors can charge people to do what they otherwise could do for free.
Since we know that most works have a short economic lifetime (usually some months, but sometimes as little as hours and sometimes as much as a decent span of years), we know that this economically incentivizing effect of copyright will taper off fairly quickly. For example, the most popular book published in 1928 was The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is one of those rarities that has long-lasting popularity and is still often read. The second most popular book that year was Wintersmoon by Hugh Walpole. It's kind of a dramatic romance. Hugely popular at the time, now quite obscure. And yet that too was rare in that it was popular at all. Most works are just never popular at all, but we'll get back to that shortly. The point is that Wintersmoon (if it was timely renewed) is still copyrighted in the US. But for no good reason since basically no one reads it.
Thus, we know that we want to be stingy with copyright, since its existence harms and offends the public and we don't want to do that needlessly. We must carefully balance the incentivizing effect of copyright agains the freedom of people with r
Because it is a natural thing. If you buy cloth and make a shirt it is your shirt.
An amusing example, given that clothes are not natural things.
What's natural is that people constantly copy, alter, and distribute information amongst themselves. If you tell a story, there is nothing in nature that prevents me from retelling it, and nothing in nature that prevents me from changing it or adapting it as I see fit. In fact, this is basically how all creative endeavor operated in the vast majority of human history.
Copyright, OTOH, only began to appear in the 18th century, and then was very localized for a long time, not spreading widely until the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then largely due to colonization efforts by European countries, rather than due to any actual merits of the idea.
There's a fairly well-known quote from Thomas Jefferson about this. He was speaking about patents, but the same logic applies to copyright and it's been widely cited in that context too:
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
For you to tell me that after I have heard your story that I cannot retell it and cannot change it, because it "belongs" to you and you alone, for no better reason than that you originated it, is profoundly unnatural.
It might be tolerable, under the right circumstances (just as we tolerate the concept of private property to a degree and within certain limits) but it still needs to be justified.
You've utterly failed to justify it here. All that's come through is that you are overwhelmingly and uncommonly greedy. You've provided no one with any reason why they should want to cater to your base desires.
You should really think about it from the opposite position: given that you literally cannot have an enforceable copyright unless everyone else cooperates and agrees to let you do it (otherwise they just ignore you and run over you, like people would ignore someone who claims to own the moon or be king of the oceans), you need to think of a reason th
US has signed the Bern Convention, hence the European copyright rules hold for european works, even in the USA.
No. We signed it but don't take it seriously. The Berne (there's an extra 'e') Convention has no independent legal effect here. Copyright is fundamentally national law; each nation might be obligated under the treaty to pass particular laws, but they're meant to do it themselves.
In the US we even have a law that says that Berne is not a law that people can enforce. It's 17 USC 104(c), if you're curious.
We also don't comply with it. Our "moral rights" statute at 17 USC 106A is mere lip service and our infamous exceptions to copyright at 17 USC 110(5) (allowing for public performance of certain works without a license) not only violates it, but there was a lawsuit against the US at the WTO, we lost, and we still haven't done a damn thing about it because we don't care.
Sucks that so many people here talk trash who never even bothered to learnt the basics about copyright how greatly it differs in other countries from the stupid american idea of "work for hire".
I'm a lawyer, practiced copyright law for years, not only did I study it in regular law school, but also got a master's degree in it. I'm reasonably familiar with how it differs. I also know that the US has the best fundamental principles of copyright law, even if our implementation is lacking, and that the entire European copyright model is crap. Knowing more than the basics helps me talk a higher level of trash.
That's true, there is no moral difference -- property rights are just as artificial and just as utilitarian in nature.
If I say that I own the Brooklyn Bridge everyone laughs. If I have a big enough army helping me to protect the Brooklyn Bridge, no one's laughing anymore. It's how the west was won.
Likewise, there's no reason why we can't impose substantial inheritance taxes (both to raise revenue and to deter the societal harm of substantial inherited wealth and the class divisions and wasted human capital it generates) so that your kids and grandkids do not inherit the house unless they've made enough money by their own efforts that they can afford it.
It's just in your mind that you think that property is some sort of natural right as opposed to the product of common consensus backed up with force.
No. The writers deserve a chance. (The publishers deserve nothing, but don't worry; they'll steal the writers' chances) There's no guarantee. If your work is unpopular, you have no right to expect anything for it.
No, the copyrights are the foundations of the trademarks; once the copyrights go, many of the trademarks -- certainly the ones that stop people from creating new works -- will go too.
There have been cases that dealt with this from the similar interaction of patents and trademarks (Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938)) and there's solid caselaw that trademarks are inferior to and not substitutes or work-alikes for copyright (Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003)).
The gist of the idea is that trademarks only exist if the holder can control the quality of marked goods. If everyone else suddenly has a right to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons because the copyright expires, the holder can't control the quality of the marked goods, so the trademark goes generic. Disney knows this perfectly well.
Granted, under Silverman vs CBS, 870 F.2d 40 (2d Cir. 1989) you'd only get to use the elements of the Mickey character that were in the public domain cartoon -- so black and white, mischievous, doesn't look vaguely like a chimp with mouse ears -- but you can do a lot with that. Hell, after many years of ignoring the character, Disney itself has been making some excellent Mickey Mouse short films lately, which can be seen on YouTube.
Of course. But what has sucking me in marketing to do with your idea that you can exploit my work for free?
You've got it backwards. Why do you think you should be able to control a published work just because you created it?
In the absence of copyright, works are in the public domain immediately upon creation, and in a more practical sense once they've been shown to someone (the broadest sense of publication). Though no one has a right to compel anyone to create works, or to publish works, once a work is created, and published, everyone has an equal right to use it, including commercially. It's an application of free speech and free press.
If you want everyone else in the world to give that up, even just as to particular works, you'd better be offering something more valuable in exchange. Otherwise there's no reason why your self-interestedness as an author should outweigh everyone else's self-interestedness as readers.
Ultimately, what you should wind up with is a purely utilitarian system in which the public, via the government (which is the servant of the public, if it's legitimate) grants a copyright on the premise that giving an author a temporary, limited monopoly with regard to the work will encourage the creation of more works, which will then enter the public domain in a timely fashion. But you don't want to grant these things willy-nilly; copyrights should only be granted when necessary to cause a work to be created and published; works that would be created and published anyway don't need and don't deserve copyrights. So you put the burden on the authors to apply for a copyright; if they do, it suggests that copyright was a necessary incentive, and if not, it clearly indicates that the author didn't care about copyright, and neither should anyone else. Further, you've got to get the balance right -- you want to provide the least amount of incentive (i.e. duration and scope of copyright) that yields the most amount of public benefit (i.e. most number of works created and most public freedom soonest with regard to those works). Since different types of works will require different incentives, and one author will differ from another, a system of short renewal terms is best, capped depending on the type of work. That way, when the author who initially cared about copyright stops caring, you get the work into the public domain sooner than if you had to wait the whole term length each and every time.
Which brings us back to your question: In practice, most of the economic value a work has is realized very quickly upon publication in a given medium. For example, books sell most of the copies they'll ever sell within about 18 months of first publication. Newspapers probably have the shortest commercial lives, of just a few hours. Movies and textbooks tend to last a long time. Since copyright is a purely economic incentive -- and only offers an opportunity to make money at that, rather than guaranteed money -- that a maximum possible term of 20 years, including renewals, is more than enough of a chance to spur authors to create. Perhaps there's a few who need more, but on the whole, if their demands for incentives are too high, it's just not worth it to society to give it to them.
The united states should just switch to the german/european model.
Nonsense. The European copyright model is asinine; they should abandon it and switch to ours. Or at least the world should abandon copyright treaties with the exception of agreeing to offer national treatment and to work together to avoid conflicts where the prerequisites for copyright set up mutually exclusive systems. If Germany is foolish and wants to offer long copyrights, let them do so in Germany, to anyone who wants to get one there. Meanwhile other countries can behave more pragmatically and do what's best for their own citizens, which could even be no copyright at all.
Tolkien made nearly no money at all during his life time.
So? If he cared more about money, he probably should've wo
You can't lengthen a public domain book's copyright retroactively.
Oh yes you can. The case is Golan v. Holder, another terrible Ginsburg copyright ruling (she and her daughter, a law professor, are notorious copyright maximalists). The key language:
The Constitution states that "Congress shall have Power . . . [t]o promote the Progress of Science . . . by securing for limited Times to Authors . . . the exclusive Right to their . . . Writings." Art. I, sect. 8, cl. 8. Petitioners find in this grant of authority an impenetrable barrier to the extension of copyright protection to authors whose writings, for whatever reason, are in the public domain. We see no such barrier in the text of the Copyright Clause, historical practice, or our precedents.
The text of the Copyright Clause does not exclude application of copyright protection to works in the public domain.
No, there's no perpetual license for CDs. There doesn't need to be one, and in fact, there can't be one. A copyright holder can't grant someone a license for a right that isn't part of copyright, and the right to listen to music -- separate from copying it, distributing it, or performing it publicly -- is not part of copyright. Take a look at 17 USC 106 to see that it's not there among the major rights that are granted as copyright.
As for transferring copies, again, not part of a license. There is a statutory exception in the law such that copyright does not apply to distributing legitimately-made copies of works after their first sale under the authority of the copyright holder. It's at 17 USC 109.
As for 'hashing stuff out,' that already happened. That was the ReDigi case, and the music industry won. If you want things to improve, you need to look to Congress.
Transparent aluminum is a thing. It's aluminium oxynitride, and is a transparent ceramic used for bulletproof windows and such. There's also plain old sapphire, which is crystalline aluminum oxide, and synthetic sapphire is often used in applications where durable transparent material is needed, such as the sturdy windows of supermarket checkout scanners (which need to withstand cans banging on them and such).
I started using Macs in the mid-late 80s and I never heard anyone say "app" until iPhones came along. However OSX used.app as a suffix for applications, so it might've started earlier. Not with me though; I hate those things.
The first version of the Macintosh System software had folders, just not folders within folders (due to a file system limitation that was swiftly fixed).
DAs were kind of like TSRs. But I don't remember stickies being among them until well into System 7, at which point they were ordinary applications.
Phones with gigabytes of data on them are okay, but I won't really believe it's the future until talking rings become popular. (Preferably long play talking rings, though)
O'Neill Cylinders are unstable as I recall. They tend to eventually start rotating around their short axis instead, dumping everything on the curved walls out to the end caps.
They're not. Holding a copyright on a work does not confer one with complete authority as to how that work may be used. The rights which comprise copyright are relatively few; further, they are themselves limited in a number of respects.
For example, copyright on a book does not include a right to prohibit other people from reading the book. The list of exclusive rights that together form a copyright can mostly be found at 17 USC 106. (Again, only for the purposes of US copyright law; I have no idea about foreign copyright law, and I don't care to)
And posting a picture on your website doesn't tell or demonstrate anything.
The conduct of doing so, assuming a website open to the public, is an implicit license to anyone to access and view it (and to make incidental copies in the process of doing so).
If I happen to know that the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre, there's nothing wrong with my telling people to go there to see it. And if I happen to know the URL of your picture, there's nothing wrong with my telling people to go there to see your picture; this is so whether I provide people with a link to be manually followed, or an embedded link to be automatically followed such that the picture appears in the web page. I'm not copying it onto my website or anything.
First sale is not profiting in a commercial sense.
It is absolutely that. A used book store will sell copies of works for a profit, because it is a commercial enterprise. It is totally reliant on the first sale doctrine. Ditto however many independent video stores still exist (since it's perfectly legal to rent lawfully made copies of movies that you own).
Commercial use is not fair use.
Well, where the hell were you when the Supreme Court needed your input in 1994 in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music?
There the Court not only found that a commercial use certainly could be a fair use, they even said that it is wrong to treat a commercial use as being presumptively unfair. Commerciality is just an element to be considered, and that's all:
If, indeed, commerciality carried presumptive force against a finding of fairness, the presumption would swallow nearly all of the illustrative uses listed in the preamble paragraph of  107, including news reporting, comment, criticism, teaching, scholarship, and research, since these activities "are generally conducted for profit in this country." Harper & Row, supra, at 592 (Brennan, J., dissenting). Congress could not have intended such a rule, which certainly is not inferable from the common-law cases, arising as they did from the world of letters in which Samuel Johnson could pronounce that "[n]o man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." 3 Boswell's Life of Johnson 19 (G. Hill ed. 1934).
But then I guess you already knew everything you wrong was wrong since you fell the need to try and make your point using an insult.
'Everything you wrong was wrong?' What the hell is that?
Anyway, I called you an idiot because you're clearly an idiot. It had nothing to do with my actual argument. But my advice to you is that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about, at least within the context of US copyright law, and you would do yourself, and everyone else a great service if you'd shut the fuck up and learn something from a legitimate, neutral source before you next presume to talk about it.
You still retain all rights to decide how people may use that photo.
No, you still retain whatever rights you had. You certainly don't have complete authority to decide how other people may use it. So long as other people use it in a manner which doesn't infringe on your copyright, you can't control them at all, in fact.
At no time does making something publicly available give a 3rd party ability to profit from it.
It does for first sale. It does for fair use, if the particular use happens to qualify (commercial uses are fully able to be fair uses). There's a number of other exceptions that can apply as well. For example, if you release a record, other people can record and sell cover versions of it, and the whole intent of this was to allow third parties the ability to profit without the permission of the copyright holder.
This sounds like a perfectly ordinary copyright ruling
In fact, this is an asinine ruling. The court got it right before, when it found that linking to a file which had been put up with authorization was not infringing (which the exact thing you've been claiming was infringing, idiot). Here, the difference was that the underlying files had been put up in an infringing manner. But, rather than tell the rights holder to go after the actual wrong-doer who put them up to begin with, they decided to shift liability to third parties who were not responsible for the underlying infringement. It's very reminiscent of the stupid 'right to be forgotten' cases, in that it tries to sweep things under the carpet by imposing liability on the wrong parties just because they're more convenient.
Commercial use is, and it always has been too. This isn't anything surprising to anyone who's done as much as first year of lawschool. There's a big difference between publishing content, even distributing it widely, and making a profit of the said content.
I have no idea about European copyright law, nor do I care, but in the US, there's not any significant difference.
Infringement is essentially any infringement of the rights granted to authors in section 106, which are subject to various exceptions and limitations.
Prima facie infringement makes no distinction between commercial and non-commercial use. That may be relevant in computing damages, but often isn't. A few of the exceptions to copyright may apply in certain circumstances that include non-commercial use, but others apply in any kind of use.
Since no one in the US studies copyright law in their first year of law school, I wouldn't worry too much about what some 1L thinks.
Also I think your hypo with the photograph is wrong. First, 'embedding' is not a right of the copyright holder. Copying is, but in the case of embedding, the Coca-Cola company has not engaged in copying; only you and the end user have. Distribution is, but in the case of embedding, they're not distributing anything; you are, if anyone is. Public display is your best bet, but again, they're not the ones displaying it, you are. Your problem is that you have set up your server to accept requests from users who are not viewing your site, but who may be viewing some other site that is embedding an image from you. That's your fault, and within your control. Your failure to prevent it can be viewed as an implicit license for users to view that material, which kills any argument at direct, and therefore secondary, infringement.
As for the model release, that's a whole different kettle of fish, but certainly wouldn't come back against you.
It would be fair use only if used infrequently. For example, if you want to quote someone else's article in your article, that's fair use. However, if your entire business is dependent upon making snippets from thousands of articles, that's no longer fair use, it's commercial use.
No, you're wrong.
First, fair use applies to both commercial and non-commercial uses. For example, when Mad Magazine did a movie parody, that would be fair use, even though the magazine us sold for an increasing cheap price and is a commercial venture.
Second, the previous poster didn't really explain it well. Fair use is when a copyrighted work is used without permission in a way that, but for fair use, would be infringing, but which is not infringing because it is in the general purpose of copyright to allow such a use. It's evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and is completely fact dependent. This, any particular use might be a fair use, but not just any use actually is.
There's a test for finding out whether a use is fair or not. It has four factors, though it isn't a matter of adding up how many factors go one way or another, and depending on the case, one factor might be treated as outweighing another. Plus, it's just a tool; other factors can be considered too.
The factors are: 1) the purpose and character of the use, such as whether the use is for profit or not, whether the use would advance the progress of knowledge by resulting in something new or otherwise helpful; 2) the nature of the work being used, such as whether it is fictional and therefore very creative and worth protecting, or factual, and therefore not worth protecting quite so much (how a work presents itself is also often relevant in copyright; if you claim that something is a fact, even though it's made up or is just a hypothesis, others may get to treat it as a fact) as well as whether the work being used has already been published or not; 3) the amount of the work used, and how important to the work that portion is; and 4) whether the use will have a negative effect on the value or market for the work (positive effects are not considered).
Snippets of this type -- in aggregate, mind you -- have repeatedly been found to be fair use in the US because for the first factor, although the use is commercial in nature, it provides a benefit to society in being able to search for this material (which of course requires as much material as possible to be used in constructing the index, even though the index itself, as opposed to the results of a search, is not made available), the second factor may weigh against the use depending on the material being indexed, but it is not treated as being very important, obviously the whole work must be used to make the index for the index to be useful, so the third factor doesn't matter, and for the fourth factor, it doesn't harm the market for news articles to be able to find them and to see in one or two lines why they match your search terms. It doesn't matter if that's the business model.
And if you think this is extreme, look at time shifting, which is bad on all of the first three factors, but is sufficiently successful on the fourth so as to be fair use (in a general way, since again it is highly fact dependent)
Which is the point where you've broken copyright law. Photocopying books is, well, copying them.
Unless you're engaged in a fair use (or fall under certain other exceptions), in which case the copying is perfectly legal under copyright law. Which turns out to have been the case here.
And thanks to Google clearing the trail, it'll be easier for others to do the same thing, if they're inclined.
They don't have an exclusive right to scan in books. First, because such a right could only be granted by either copyright holders, as an exclusive license (which would also necessarily mean that scanning the licensed book was not infringing) which wouldn't matter to rivals because the rivals can ignore such a license and rely on fair use per the lower court's decision. Second, because the only other way to have an exclusive would be if there were literally only one copy in existence and the library that owned the copy refused to grant access to anyone else, and that is frankly, pretty unlikely.
The reason that they may have an effective exclusive is simply that it's an expensive pain in the ass to scan all of this stuff in, and there's little money in it, so who else would want to bother. But the disinclination of third parties to compete with Google because it's hard, likely minimally profitable work, is hardly Google's fault.
The point is, they took on a project that violated copyright on a massive scale. They want to claim that it's fair use
No they didn't. Fair use is by definition not a violation of copyright. And so far this has been determined to be fair use, and with the Supreme Court refusing to take up the case, there should be nothing else to say about it.
I think it's only fair the LoC get a full copy of their book index.
That would be nice, but they're under no obligation to give a copy to the Library of Congress if they don't want to.
Frankly, I think its good that such a thing exist in society. But it's not good that a private for-profit company can take it on themselves to do that for their own gain.
Why not? Certainly the government should be doing this sort of thing; as an attorney it always bothers me that there's no public alternative to Lexis and Westlaw. But that the government could do it and should do it doesn't preclude private entities from doing it too, as a general rule.
For instance, the government builds most roads. But nothing stops a private company from building a private, for-profit highway, so long as they can get the land without government assistance and afford to build a safe roadway on it which complies with various regulations. It's just such a hassle that it's rare.
Honestly, it's strange that laws suddenly stopped applying because it was on a computer.
Copyright law applies. Google simply hasn't acted illegally is all. Google books is no different than if someone made analog xeroxes of lots of books, manually compiled a master index of everything in them, and took requests by phone to tell people what books matched various search terms (possibly with a specific sentence or passage read aloud over the phone to lend context to the result).
Suppose an author hated a book they had written earlier. It would be impossible for them to buy and destroy every copy.
Screw 'em.
Competitors who would have to reproduce the electronic archiving, as opposed to having the LoC owning the electronic copies and people competing on search algorithms.
Oh, that's just stupid. I doubt Google has an exclusive that would prevent people from surmounting the same natural barrier to entry. And if the government did scan everything in and make its scans available to third party search engines, that certainly wouldn't prohibit anyone else from doing their own scans either. It would just be a government subsidy of book searching. Perhaps that would be good, but it's not a valid criticism of Google Books.
Creative works are copyrighted by default. The author/artist does not need to take any action for their work to be protected.
Yes, and that's a colossally stupid idea. Copyrights should only be available where authors take action to get them, and only persist where authors regularly take action to maintain them.
This is probably what the earlier poster was complaining about, and I suspect you took him too literally.
something that you didn't create, thus implying it is copyrighted until you can show otherwise
That's a big part of the problem which the earlier poster was alluding to. Works should never be copyrighted unless the copyright is specifically requested by the author, through a registration process that includes placing copyright notices and registration numbers on the work to facilitate checking their copyright status.
This is no great burden for authors, who will either comply if they want copyrights, or ignore it and let their works enter the public domain immediately (indicating that they didn't care about the copyright to begin with). On the other hand, it would be greatly beneficial to the public, who would no longer have to assume that everything is copyrighted until they can prove otherwise.
A requirement to maintain up-to-date information in the registry, lest the copyright be lost, would also help with the orphan works problem you mentioned.
As someone else said, this is just Google being greedy - they could have come up with some sort of agreement with the authors that allowed them to do it via a subscription service, or such. Instead, they decided to give away someone else's work for free.
Actually, no, they couldn't. The transactional costs would be so great that neither Google, nor anyone else, would be willing to bother. Plus there would be authors who would refuse to participate, or who would balkanize the market with exclusive arrangements, much as we're seeing with music and video.
It's too knotty a problem to solve, other than by cutting right through.
Slashdot Mirror
Fundamentally it comes down to four things, which I touched on elsewhere.
First, the US model acknowledges that there is a natural right of all people to freely copy works, to freely change works, and to freely share (distribute, perform, and display) works. All without needing anyone's permission, and without needing to pay (beyond the cost of raw materials, like paper to write on, or clay to sculpt with). Copyright is understood to be contrary to this natural order of things, but to be, perhaps, tolerable all the same.
Second, the US model is founded on utilitarian and market-based principles. Consider: 1) Everyone has the sort of natural freedoms described above; 2) Everyone wants there to be more creative works created and published (so that they can enjoy them and apply their freedoms to them by copying, altering, and sharing, as they see fit); 3) It's not a good idea for the government or any centralized authority to promote certain works over others -- people should get to choose what to create and distribute, and what to enjoy, copy, alter, and distribute; 4) It may be worthwhile, in the interest of achieving greater happiness to accept temporary restrictions.
Third, this results in a system where while we acknowledge that authors are not inherently entitled to copyrights, we can grant copyrights -- that is, rights to restrict what others can do with regard to copying, altering, and sharing works -- that even though they have negative effects on the populace, have greater positive effects down the road. The idea is, if there are no copyrights (as was the case worldwide until about 1710, and then, only in England, and later elsewhere) we know a certain number of works will still be created and published and enjoyed freely by all. Ancient authors around the world had no copyrights, Cervantes had no copyrights, Shakespeare had no copyrights, Wu Cheng'en had no copyrights, the concept just wasn't there. (Well, actually the basic idea was present in a joke that ancient Greeks told, but it was just for laughs) But the number of works created and published is somewhat limited. Hard to know how much our historical experience is tangled up in state and religious censorship, lower levels of technology revolving around things like printing and paper-making, and lower literacy rates, but probably some but not many works would be created and published.
So consider point 2 from a couple of paragraphs above: In a world with no copyrights, the common desire for lots of works is not well-satisfied, but the desire for freedom as to those works is completely satisfied. What happens if we grant a copyright -- a right to prevent others from enjoying freedom as to works -- for a brief period of time? It incentivizes people to be authors who weren't before, and it encourages the creation and publication of more works, since the authors can charge people to do what they otherwise could do for free.
Since we know that most works have a short economic lifetime (usually some months, but sometimes as little as hours and sometimes as much as a decent span of years), we know that this economically incentivizing effect of copyright will taper off fairly quickly. For example, the most popular book published in 1928 was The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is one of those rarities that has long-lasting popularity and is still often read. The second most popular book that year was Wintersmoon by Hugh Walpole. It's kind of a dramatic romance. Hugely popular at the time, now quite obscure. And yet that too was rare in that it was popular at all. Most works are just never popular at all, but we'll get back to that shortly. The point is that Wintersmoon (if it was timely renewed) is still copyrighted in the US. But for no good reason since basically no one reads it.
Thus, we know that we want to be stingy with copyright, since its existence harms and offends the public and we don't want to do that needlessly. We must carefully balance the incentivizing effect of copyright agains the freedom of people with r
Because it is a natural thing. If you buy cloth and make a shirt it is your shirt.
An amusing example, given that clothes are not natural things.
What's natural is that people constantly copy, alter, and distribute information amongst themselves. If you tell a story, there is nothing in nature that prevents me from retelling it, and nothing in nature that prevents me from changing it or adapting it as I see fit. In fact, this is basically how all creative endeavor operated in the vast majority of human history.
Copyright, OTOH, only began to appear in the 18th century, and then was very localized for a long time, not spreading widely until the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then largely due to colonization efforts by European countries, rather than due to any actual merits of the idea.
There's a fairly well-known quote from Thomas Jefferson about this. He was speaking about patents, but the same logic applies to copyright and it's been widely cited in that context too:
For you to tell me that after I have heard your story that I cannot retell it and cannot change it, because it "belongs" to you and you alone, for no better reason than that you originated it, is profoundly unnatural.
It might be tolerable, under the right circumstances (just as we tolerate the concept of private property to a degree and within certain limits) but it still needs to be justified.
You've utterly failed to justify it here. All that's come through is that you are overwhelmingly and uncommonly greedy. You've provided no one with any reason why they should want to cater to your base desires.
You should really think about it from the opposite position: given that you literally cannot have an enforceable copyright unless everyone else cooperates and agrees to let you do it (otherwise they just ignore you and run over you, like people would ignore someone who claims to own the moon or be king of the oceans), you need to think of a reason th
US has signed the Bern Convention, hence the European copyright rules hold for european works, even in the USA.
No. We signed it but don't take it seriously. The Berne (there's an extra 'e') Convention has no independent legal effect here. Copyright is fundamentally national law; each nation might be obligated under the treaty to pass particular laws, but they're meant to do it themselves.
In the US we even have a law that says that Berne is not a law that people can enforce. It's 17 USC 104(c), if you're curious.
We also don't comply with it. Our "moral rights" statute at 17 USC 106A is mere lip service and our infamous exceptions to copyright at 17 USC 110(5) (allowing for public performance of certain works without a license) not only violates it, but there was a lawsuit against the US at the WTO, we lost, and we still haven't done a damn thing about it because we don't care.
Sucks that so many people here talk trash who never even bothered to learnt the basics about copyright how greatly it differs in other countries from the stupid american idea of "work for hire".
I'm a lawyer, practiced copyright law for years, not only did I study it in regular law school, but also got a master's degree in it. I'm reasonably familiar with how it differs. I also know that the US has the best fundamental principles of copyright law, even if our implementation is lacking, and that the entire European copyright model is crap. Knowing more than the basics helps me talk a higher level of trash.
That's true, there is no moral difference -- property rights are just as artificial and just as utilitarian in nature.
If I say that I own the Brooklyn Bridge everyone laughs. If I have a big enough army helping me to protect the Brooklyn Bridge, no one's laughing anymore. It's how the west was won.
Likewise, there's no reason why we can't impose substantial inheritance taxes (both to raise revenue and to deter the societal harm of substantial inherited wealth and the class divisions and wasted human capital it generates) so that your kids and grandkids do not inherit the house unless they've made enough money by their own efforts that they can afford it.
It's just in your mind that you think that property is some sort of natural right as opposed to the product of common consensus backed up with force.
No. The writers deserve a chance. (The publishers deserve nothing, but don't worry; they'll steal the writers' chances) There's no guarantee. If your work is unpopular, you have no right to expect anything for it.
No, the copyrights are the foundations of the trademarks; once the copyrights go, many of the trademarks -- certainly the ones that stop people from creating new works -- will go too.
There have been cases that dealt with this from the similar interaction of patents and trademarks (Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938)) and there's solid caselaw that trademarks are inferior to and not substitutes or work-alikes for copyright (Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003)).
The gist of the idea is that trademarks only exist if the holder can control the quality of marked goods. If everyone else suddenly has a right to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons because the copyright expires, the holder can't control the quality of the marked goods, so the trademark goes generic. Disney knows this perfectly well.
Granted, under Silverman vs CBS, 870 F.2d 40 (2d Cir. 1989) you'd only get to use the elements of the Mickey character that were in the public domain cartoon -- so black and white, mischievous, doesn't look vaguely like a chimp with mouse ears -- but you can do a lot with that. Hell, after many years of ignoring the character, Disney itself has been making some excellent Mickey Mouse short films lately, which can be seen on YouTube.
Of course. But what has sucking me in marketing to do with your idea that you can exploit my work for free?
You've got it backwards. Why do you think you should be able to control a published work just because you created it?
In the absence of copyright, works are in the public domain immediately upon creation, and in a more practical sense once they've been shown to someone (the broadest sense of publication). Though no one has a right to compel anyone to create works, or to publish works, once a work is created, and published, everyone has an equal right to use it, including commercially. It's an application of free speech and free press.
If you want everyone else in the world to give that up, even just as to particular works, you'd better be offering something more valuable in exchange. Otherwise there's no reason why your self-interestedness as an author should outweigh everyone else's self-interestedness as readers.
Ultimately, what you should wind up with is a purely utilitarian system in which the public, via the government (which is the servant of the public, if it's legitimate) grants a copyright on the premise that giving an author a temporary, limited monopoly with regard to the work will encourage the creation of more works, which will then enter the public domain in a timely fashion. But you don't want to grant these things willy-nilly; copyrights should only be granted when necessary to cause a work to be created and published; works that would be created and published anyway don't need and don't deserve copyrights. So you put the burden on the authors to apply for a copyright; if they do, it suggests that copyright was a necessary incentive, and if not, it clearly indicates that the author didn't care about copyright, and neither should anyone else. Further, you've got to get the balance right -- you want to provide the least amount of incentive (i.e. duration and scope of copyright) that yields the most amount of public benefit (i.e. most number of works created and most public freedom soonest with regard to those works). Since different types of works will require different incentives, and one author will differ from another, a system of short renewal terms is best, capped depending on the type of work. That way, when the author who initially cared about copyright stops caring, you get the work into the public domain sooner than if you had to wait the whole term length each and every time.
Which brings us back to your question: In practice, most of the economic value a work has is realized very quickly upon publication in a given medium. For example, books sell most of the copies they'll ever sell within about 18 months of first publication. Newspapers probably have the shortest commercial lives, of just a few hours. Movies and textbooks tend to last a long time. Since copyright is a purely economic incentive -- and only offers an opportunity to make money at that, rather than guaranteed money -- that a maximum possible term of 20 years, including renewals, is more than enough of a chance to spur authors to create. Perhaps there's a few who need more, but on the whole, if their demands for incentives are too high, it's just not worth it to society to give it to them.
The united states should just switch to the german/european model.
Nonsense. The European copyright model is asinine; they should abandon it and switch to ours. Or at least the world should abandon copyright treaties with the exception of agreeing to offer national treatment and to work together to avoid conflicts where the prerequisites for copyright set up mutually exclusive systems. If Germany is foolish and wants to offer long copyrights, let them do so in Germany, to anyone who wants to get one there. Meanwhile other countries can behave more pragmatically and do what's best for their own citizens, which could even be no copyright at all.
Tolkien made nearly no money at all during his life time.
So? If he cared more about money, he probably should've wo
You can't lengthen a public domain book's copyright retroactively.
Oh yes you can. The case is Golan v. Holder, another terrible Ginsburg copyright ruling (she and her daughter, a law professor, are notorious copyright maximalists). The key language:
No, there's no perpetual license for CDs. There doesn't need to be one, and in fact, there can't be one. A copyright holder can't grant someone a license for a right that isn't part of copyright, and the right to listen to music -- separate from copying it, distributing it, or performing it publicly -- is not part of copyright. Take a look at 17 USC 106 to see that it's not there among the major rights that are granted as copyright.
As for transferring copies, again, not part of a license. There is a statutory exception in the law such that copyright does not apply to distributing legitimately-made copies of works after their first sale under the authority of the copyright holder. It's at 17 USC 109.
As for 'hashing stuff out,' that already happened. That was the ReDigi case, and the music industry won. If you want things to improve, you need to look to Congress.
Transparent aluminum is a thing. It's aluminium oxynitride, and is a transparent ceramic used for bulletproof windows and such. There's also plain old sapphire, which is crystalline aluminum oxide, and synthetic sapphire is often used in applications where durable transparent material is needed, such as the sturdy windows of supermarket checkout scanners (which need to withstand cans banging on them and such).
I started using Macs in the mid-late 80s and I never heard anyone say "app" until iPhones came along. However OSX used .app as a suffix for applications, so it might've started earlier. Not with me though; I hate those things.
Usually people just called them programs.
The first version of the Macintosh System software had folders, just not folders within folders (due to a file system limitation that was swiftly fixed).
DAs were kind of like TSRs. But I don't remember stickies being among them until well into System 7, at which point they were ordinary applications.
Phones with gigabytes of data on them are okay, but I won't really believe it's the future until talking rings become popular. (Preferably long play talking rings, though)
Khan?
O'Neill Cylinders are unstable as I recall. They tend to eventually start rotating around their short axis instead, dumping everything on the curved walls out to the end caps.
Stanford Toruses are better.
Your two statements are contradictory.
They're not. Holding a copyright on a work does not confer one with complete authority as to how that work may be used. The rights which comprise copyright are relatively few; further, they are themselves limited in a number of respects.
For example, copyright on a book does not include a right to prohibit other people from reading the book. The list of exclusive rights that together form a copyright can mostly be found at 17 USC 106. (Again, only for the purposes of US copyright law; I have no idea about foreign copyright law, and I don't care to)
And posting a picture on your website doesn't tell or demonstrate anything.
The conduct of doing so, assuming a website open to the public, is an implicit license to anyone to access and view it (and to make incidental copies in the process of doing so).
If I happen to know that the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre, there's nothing wrong with my telling people to go there to see it. And if I happen to know the URL of your picture, there's nothing wrong with my telling people to go there to see your picture; this is so whether I provide people with a link to be manually followed, or an embedded link to be automatically followed such that the picture appears in the web page. I'm not copying it onto my website or anything.
First sale is not profiting in a commercial sense.
It is absolutely that. A used book store will sell copies of works for a profit, because it is a commercial enterprise. It is totally reliant on the first sale doctrine. Ditto however many independent video stores still exist (since it's perfectly legal to rent lawfully made copies of movies that you own).
Commercial use is not fair use.
Well, where the hell were you when the Supreme Court needed your input in 1994 in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music?
There the Court not only found that a commercial use certainly could be a fair use, they even said that it is wrong to treat a commercial use as being presumptively unfair. Commerciality is just an element to be considered, and that's all:
But then I guess you already knew everything you wrong was wrong since you fell the need to try and make your point using an insult.
'Everything you wrong was wrong?' What the hell is that?
Anyway, I called you an idiot because you're clearly an idiot. It had nothing to do with my actual argument. But my advice to you is that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about, at least within the context of US copyright law, and you would do yourself, and everyone else a great service if you'd shut the fuck up and learn something from a legitimate, neutral source before you next presume to talk about it.
You still retain all rights to decide how people may use that photo.
No, you still retain whatever rights you had. You certainly don't have complete authority to decide how other people may use it. So long as other people use it in a manner which doesn't infringe on your copyright, you can't control them at all, in fact.
At no time does making something publicly available give a 3rd party ability to profit from it.
It does for first sale. It does for fair use, if the particular use happens to qualify (commercial uses are fully able to be fair uses). There's a number of other exceptions that can apply as well. For example, if you release a record, other people can record and sell cover versions of it, and the whole intent of this was to allow third parties the ability to profit without the permission of the copyright holder.
This sounds like a perfectly ordinary copyright ruling
In fact, this is an asinine ruling. The court got it right before, when it found that linking to a file which had been put up with authorization was not infringing (which the exact thing you've been claiming was infringing, idiot). Here, the difference was that the underlying files had been put up in an infringing manner. But, rather than tell the rights holder to go after the actual wrong-doer who put them up to begin with, they decided to shift liability to third parties who were not responsible for the underlying infringement. It's very reminiscent of the stupid 'right to be forgotten' cases, in that it tries to sweep things under the carpet by imposing liability on the wrong parties just because they're more convenient.
Commercial use is, and it always has been too. This isn't anything surprising to anyone who's done as much as first year of lawschool. There's a big difference between publishing content, even distributing it widely, and making a profit of the said content.
I have no idea about European copyright law, nor do I care, but in the US, there's not any significant difference.
Infringement is essentially any infringement of the rights granted to authors in section 106, which are subject to various exceptions and limitations.
Prima facie infringement makes no distinction between commercial and non-commercial use. That may be relevant in computing damages, but often isn't. A few of the exceptions to copyright may apply in certain circumstances that include non-commercial use, but others apply in any kind of use.
Since no one in the US studies copyright law in their first year of law school, I wouldn't worry too much about what some 1L thinks.
Also I think your hypo with the photograph is wrong. First, 'embedding' is not a right of the copyright holder. Copying is, but in the case of embedding, the Coca-Cola company has not engaged in copying; only you and the end user have. Distribution is, but in the case of embedding, they're not distributing anything; you are, if anyone is. Public display is your best bet, but again, they're not the ones displaying it, you are. Your problem is that you have set up your server to accept requests from users who are not viewing your site, but who may be viewing some other site that is embedding an image from you. That's your fault, and within your control. Your failure to prevent it can be viewed as an implicit license for users to view that material, which kills any argument at direct, and therefore secondary, infringement.
As for the model release, that's a whole different kettle of fish, but certainly wouldn't come back against you.
It would be fair use only if used infrequently. For example, if you want to quote someone else's article in your article, that's fair use. However, if your entire business is dependent upon making snippets from thousands of articles, that's no longer fair use, it's commercial use.
No, you're wrong.
First, fair use applies to both commercial and non-commercial uses. For example, when Mad Magazine did a movie parody, that would be fair use, even though the magazine us sold for an increasing cheap price and is a commercial venture.
Second, the previous poster didn't really explain it well. Fair use is when a copyrighted work is used without permission in a way that, but for fair use, would be infringing, but which is not infringing because it is in the general purpose of copyright to allow such a use. It's evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and is completely fact dependent. This, any particular use might be a fair use, but not just any use actually is.
There's a test for finding out whether a use is fair or not. It has four factors, though it isn't a matter of adding up how many factors go one way or another, and depending on the case, one factor might be treated as outweighing another. Plus, it's just a tool; other factors can be considered too.
The factors are: 1) the purpose and character of the use, such as whether the use is for profit or not, whether the use would advance the progress of knowledge by resulting in something new or otherwise helpful; 2) the nature of the work being used, such as whether it is fictional and therefore very creative and worth protecting, or factual, and therefore not worth protecting quite so much (how a work presents itself is also often relevant in copyright; if you claim that something is a fact, even though it's made up or is just a hypothesis, others may get to treat it as a fact) as well as whether the work being used has already been published or not; 3) the amount of the work used, and how important to the work that portion is; and 4) whether the use will have a negative effect on the value or market for the work (positive effects are not considered).
Snippets of this type -- in aggregate, mind you -- have repeatedly been found to be fair use in the US because for the first factor, although the use is commercial in nature, it provides a benefit to society in being able to search for this material (which of course requires as much material as possible to be used in constructing the index, even though the index itself, as opposed to the results of a search, is not made available), the second factor may weigh against the use depending on the material being indexed, but it is not treated as being very important, obviously the whole work must be used to make the index for the index to be useful, so the third factor doesn't matter, and for the fourth factor, it doesn't harm the market for news articles to be able to find them and to see in one or two lines why they match your search terms. It doesn't matter if that's the business model.
And if you think this is extreme, look at time shifting, which is bad on all of the first three factors, but is sufficiently successful on the fourth so as to be fair use (in a general way, since again it is highly fact dependent)
Which is the point where you've broken copyright law. Photocopying books is, well, copying them.
Unless you're engaged in a fair use (or fall under certain other exceptions), in which case the copying is perfectly legal under copyright law. Which turns out to have been the case here.
And thanks to Google clearing the trail, it'll be easier for others to do the same thing, if they're inclined.
They don't have an exclusive right to scan in books. First, because such a right could only be granted by either copyright holders, as an exclusive license (which would also necessarily mean that scanning the licensed book was not infringing) which wouldn't matter to rivals because the rivals can ignore such a license and rely on fair use per the lower court's decision. Second, because the only other way to have an exclusive would be if there were literally only one copy in existence and the library that owned the copy refused to grant access to anyone else, and that is frankly, pretty unlikely.
The reason that they may have an effective exclusive is simply that it's an expensive pain in the ass to scan all of this stuff in, and there's little money in it, so who else would want to bother. But the disinclination of third parties to compete with Google because it's hard, likely minimally profitable work, is hardly Google's fault.
The point is, they took on a project that violated copyright on a massive scale. They want to claim that it's fair use
No they didn't. Fair use is by definition not a violation of copyright. And so far this has been determined to be fair use, and with the Supreme Court refusing to take up the case, there should be nothing else to say about it.
I think it's only fair the LoC get a full copy of their book index.
That would be nice, but they're under no obligation to give a copy to the Library of Congress if they don't want to.
Frankly, I think its good that such a thing exist in society. But it's not good that a private for-profit company can take it on themselves to do that for their own gain.
Why not? Certainly the government should be doing this sort of thing; as an attorney it always bothers me that there's no public alternative to Lexis and Westlaw. But that the government could do it and should do it doesn't preclude private entities from doing it too, as a general rule.
For instance, the government builds most roads. But nothing stops a private company from building a private, for-profit highway, so long as they can get the land without government assistance and afford to build a safe roadway on it which complies with various regulations. It's just such a hassle that it's rare.
Honestly, it's strange that laws suddenly stopped applying because it was on a computer.
Copyright law applies. Google simply hasn't acted illegally is all. Google books is no different than if someone made analog xeroxes of lots of books, manually compiled a master index of everything in them, and took requests by phone to tell people what books matched various search terms (possibly with a specific sentence or passage read aloud over the phone to lend context to the result).
Computers make this practical, not legal.
Suppose an author hated a book they had written earlier. It would be impossible for them to buy and destroy every copy.
Screw 'em.
Competitors who would have to reproduce the electronic archiving, as opposed to having the LoC owning the electronic copies and people competing on search algorithms.
Oh, that's just stupid. I doubt Google has an exclusive that would prevent people from surmounting the same natural barrier to entry. And if the government did scan everything in and make its scans available to third party search engines, that certainly wouldn't prohibit anyone else from doing their own scans either. It would just be a government subsidy of book searching. Perhaps that would be good, but it's not a valid criticism of Google Books.
Creative works are copyrighted by default. The author/artist does not need to take any action for their work to be protected.
Yes, and that's a colossally stupid idea. Copyrights should only be available where authors take action to get them, and only persist where authors regularly take action to maintain them.
This is probably what the earlier poster was complaining about, and I suspect you took him too literally.
something that you didn't create, thus implying it is copyrighted until you can show otherwise
That's a big part of the problem which the earlier poster was alluding to. Works should never be copyrighted unless the copyright is specifically requested by the author, through a registration process that includes placing copyright notices and registration numbers on the work to facilitate checking their copyright status.
This is no great burden for authors, who will either comply if they want copyrights, or ignore it and let their works enter the public domain immediately (indicating that they didn't care about the copyright to begin with). On the other hand, it would be greatly beneficial to the public, who would no longer have to assume that everything is copyrighted until they can prove otherwise.
A requirement to maintain up-to-date information in the registry, lest the copyright be lost, would also help with the orphan works problem you mentioned.
As someone else said, this is just Google being greedy - they could have come up with some sort of agreement with the authors that allowed them to do it via a subscription service, or such. Instead, they decided to give away someone else's work for free.
Actually, no, they couldn't. The transactional costs would be so great that neither Google, nor anyone else, would be willing to bother. Plus there would be authors who would refuse to participate, or who would balkanize the market with exclusive arrangements, much as we're seeing with music and video.
It's too knotty a problem to solve, other than by cutting right through.