First, if you're going to argue about what the framers imagined, you're going to be stuck restricting bearable arms to muskets and such. I doubt this is your intent -- rather, your intent is to have it both ways.
Second, how about a Davy Crockett? Those are nuclear weapons that could be borne and wielded by a single individual. The user would need to be strong, and it would be less efficient than usual, but the round was a manageable 80 pounds or so and with a better designed, lighter weight folding tripod, it should be doable. Impractical but doable.
Third, I don't really care one way or the other about gun control. I have no interest in guns nor do I worry about them. But they do make violence easier and more substantial than they might otherwise be. If this is okay with you, oppose efforts at gun control including non-absolute interpretations of the 2d amendment and new amendments to the constitution. If not, then support such efforts. Just don't forget or try to hide the cost either way.
For statutory damages, this is correct. The number of infringements don't matter, only the number of works. This is set forth in the statute at 17 USC 504(c)(1).
Of course, that doesn't mean it always works out that way. I attended the Tenenbaum case, and when the attorneys were working out the jury instructions on damages with the judge, the plaintiff's attorney suggested an instruction that calculated damages per infringement, not per work. The defense counsel was pretty bad all through the trial, IMO, and failed to catch this, although a number of people in the gallery seemed to.
When the verdict was returned, it was an even multiple of the minimum damages, which makes me suspicious that the jury was trying to make a low award, but multiplied as instructed by the number of infringements that they thought had or may have occurred, or some such.
Note also that copyright plaintiffs can opt (or may be obligated to seek, depending on certain issues) the actual damages they suffered, plus the profits made by the infringer, rather than statutory damages determined by the court within a range provided in the statute.
And as HaqDiesel correctly notes, awards can skyrocket merely by the plaintiffs suing over additional works; defendants in these sorts of cases probably didn't stop at a mere handful. However, I would point out that the statute for calculating statutory damages says that works comprising a single compilation or derivative work are to be counted as just one work overall. So it's more likely different albums (or tracks from different albums), rather than merely different tracks, that is the issue. Still not much help.
There is actually a separate right of publicity, which is what you're thinking of. Depending on your jurisdiction, it may not survive our death (since harming your reputation once you've died doesn't harm you), or in places where there tend to be lobbies of famous people's relatives, it could last a lot longer.
Personally, I favor the ends-at-death side. People may have a right to their own reputations, for good or ill, but no one should control the reputation of another person.
The world might not be particularly better off after the recent "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" movie ("Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter" is clearly still the greatest vampire hunter story ever told) but we are much better off that some obscure descendant can't march in and shut it down.
Well, while it is getting cheaper and easier all the time (there is fan-made stuff on YouTube that would've been beyond the abilities and budgets of special effects houses in the recent past), the real key, IMO is in what sort of movie you want to make.
If you absolutely must have a couple of guys throwing buildings at each other, it could get pricey, that's true. OTOH, if you're careful to write the script with an eye toward the budget, and yet can still produce a good story, you could probably do well. But⦠studios want blockbusters and the genre lends itself toward mindless spectacle, so no one seems to try much.
Well, I certainly never said that Disney doesn't do merchandizing -- they're pros at it. Just that they don't seem to be dissuaded from even starting just because they'll have some competition from small fry.
Nor did I say that the substitutes were better, or even on par. GoBots sucked by the way. I even remember that at one point, they had toy robots that turned into rocks of all the stupid things.
My point is simply that absolute control isn't necessary to make money, even big money. So perhaps we could stand to have less of it over all.
Why do you think that big budget superhero movies are only economically viable if one source controls both the copyright on the characters and story used in the movie as well as for all merchandise featuring those characters, etc?
It certainly isn't true for big budget fairy tale movies. The last one Disney did was based on Rapunzel, had a budget of $260 million, and the main character and basic plot are in the public domain. And I'm sure that there were plenty of people trying to free ride on it by putting out toys and things based on the fairy tale. Yet they seem to have survived.
And also, why must we have big budget movies anyway? And if we must, why must they rely on such excessive copyrights to be made? Are there no alternatives?
Trademarks are not a functional substitute for copyrights. If a work is in the public domain, anyone can make copies of it and can make derivative works based on it. (Of course, a character is not quite the same as the first work in which it appears -- aspects of the Superman character which were introduced later, such as the ability to fly, weakness to kryptonite, changes to the costume, etc. would not be available until the works introducing those things also hit the public domain)
A trademark only functions when it indicates that a marked good or service originates from a particular source. If anyone can now create Superman comics, movies, tv shows, etc., because Action Comics #1 is in the public domain, this means that the use of the Superman name or character isn't indicating a single source. Thus, the trademark dies.
A good example of this was Kellogg v. National Buscuit. The latter had invented and patented a cereal and sold it using the mark SHREDDED WHEAT. When the patent expired, Kellogg started making it too, and also called it SHREDDED WHEAT. The Supreme Court decided that since SHREDDED WHEAT merely described the product, anyone could use the name now that the patent had run out and anyone could make the product.
There might be an argument for a surviving trademark on the title of the comic, not restricting the use of the name for the character, but it would be fairly weak, IMO. The use of the character name as a trademark for wholly unrelated goods and services would still work -- PETER PAN for bus travel services and for peanut butter doesn't interfere with, or suffer interference from, the character of Peter Pan being in the public domain in the US. But a viable SUPERMAN brand for tax preparation services or auto parts is probably small comfort to Warner Bros.
And meanwhile, if the fans want to stick to a particular canon, they can just look for the brand of the publisher, which is how it's done for other public domain works. You can go buy a copy of Shakespeare as it was printed in the First Folio, you can go buy copies of the bad quartos, you can buy the edited versions made by Bowdler, etc. No one is harmed by there being more choice, as all you have to do is ignore the ones you don't like. A trademark on Shakespeare is not necessary.
So ultimately,... mere entertainment still contributes to human learning and knowledge and should be copyrightable if we're to have copyrights.
Uh... why?
The purpose of copyright is ultimately to serve the public good by promoting the progress of science (which as has been explained, means knowledge). Are you saying that our total knowledge is not increased by new works of entertainment?
Copyrights are not "granted" through any process.
Not so. Copyrights may automatically be granted by the federal government when certain conditions are met, viz. a copyrightable work is fixed for the first time into a medium of expression, but they are nevertheless granted. In the absence of a grant by the government, there'd be no copyright. It's not as though authors create copyrights.
Registration and notice (and deposit, and domestic printing, etc.) were formalities that once upon a time were additional conditions that had to be satisfied, but dropping them as requirements doesn't change the fact of the grant.
I didn't say fine artists made much, I said that they typically make money from the sale of individual pieces, rather than from exploiting copyrights.
Also I'm not sure if your choice of Van Gogh was a good one. He famously only ever sold one painting during his life for an amount equal to about $1000 in today's money. He was a colossal failure and his works really only became valuable after his death. But even now, an original Van Gogh is worth far, far more than a poster of the same thing. It's not so much the picture as it is that it was made by his hand that is considered valuable. If people only cared about the art itself, the world's great art museums would largely exhibit high quality copies to save on the expense, and collectors would do the same and not value originals too highly.
Suppose you're an artist, have trouble generating an income from your art, and see that your work is used in an ad for a large corporation without anyone paying you for its use. Would you think that's all right? I wouldn't.
That's irrelevant. Copyright isn't about what's right. In fact, morality isn't even a factor. It's about what's most useful to society. If fine artists will create and publish (where we define publish quite broadly) without copyright, because they have sufficient incentives to do so anyway, why bother to give it to them? And should copyright have an incentivizing effect after all, we should carefully tailor the grant of rights in such a way as to produce the greatest public benefit for the least public detriment. As the mere existence of copyright is harmful to the public, the benefit will need to be fairly substantial.
I think this is possible, that we should offer some sort of copyright to fine artists, and I think that copyright is a basically good idea that merely needs to be implemented better. But it's all about utility; not fuzzy-headed pathos.
You haven't addressed sinecures after retirement from public office, which seems to be popular these days. (Especially since the party providing it doesn't have to do so unless the recipient has performed)
You also didn't address corruption of non elected persons, but it happens with military officers, bureaucrats, staffers, appointed officials, etc.
Even under the current rules, copyrights are only granted to the original portions of works.
Thus, if you write, copyright, and publish a short story in 1950, no matter how many times you reprint it, the key date for the copyright is 1950; nothing you can do (other than lobbying Congress) changes anything. If you expand the short story, only the new material is covered by the new copyright; the portions that are from the previous work only ever fall under the earlier copyright.
And if you create a new compilation of works including the story, the new copyright covers the compilation, i.e. the choice of those works and the arrangement in that order, but not the pre existing works themselves, which still fall under their own, older copyrights.
What about a painter who produces just one copy of a painting? Shouldn't that retain copyright protection for a while? What if that painting hasn't been sold yet after 15 years (not unusual with artists, and it doesn't mean it won't be sold), do you want copyright to expire even before the artist has sold the work? Not everything works with the volumes and the time scales of mass produced works.
True, but in the world of the fine arts, provenance, which cannot be copied, is usually more valuable than the copyright.
For example, the Mona Lisa is worth more than a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. A Van Gogh painting of sunflowers sells for way way more than a nice poster of the same thing.
So long as there are laws against counterfeiting -- which is a type of fraud and not related to copyright at all -- fine artists will usually get along okay. They don't rely much on copyrights, which really do exist for mass-produced works, and which don't protect the value of selling original copies. Many of the greatest works of art are in the public domain but can still command a fortune when put up for sale. No one in that market cares about the t shirts and picture postcards.
And, possibly, it shouldn't apply to pure entertainment at all: it's meant to apply to the "Useful Arts".
No, that's a common mistake. Copyright is meant to promote the progress of science, while patents are supposed to promote the progress of useful arts.
In the late 18th century english in which the constitution is written, science means learning or knowledge, while arts refers to skills and applied technology. Since then the two words have come to be more associated with other things, such that they get confused easily as has happened in your post. Some vestiges remain, though: patents are meant to deal with state of the art technology, and are required to be written so as to be instructive to a person having ordinary skill in the art, but cannot be issued if previously invented or obvious after looking at pre-existing technology known as prior art.
Plus inventions usually have utility patents and must be useful for something; if they don't work, they can't be patented. This is why perpetual motion machines never get issued patents. Copyrights OTOH are sometimes not granted if the work is useful, because they're not supposed to overlap with parents. (A similar doctrine exists for trademarks)
The meanings are also clear if you look at the structure of the copyright and patent clause, which goes in order, copyrights then patents: authors, writings, science; inventors, discoveries, useful arts.
So ultimately, no, mere entertainment still contributes to human learning and knowledge and should be copyrightable if we're to have copyrights.
the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
It's not intended to cover its own costs. As I said, the point is to limit copyrights to those works where the author or other legitimate claimant actively wants a copyright enough to take some action to get it. So the fee is just a token; people will stop and think more if there's some cost involved. Actual funding of the Copyright Office should come out of general tax revenue -- after all, if copyright is meant to benefit the public interest, there's nothing wrong with the public bearing the cost of administrating it.
Neither should copyright registrations be given evidentiary weight as to the copyrightability of works, thus eliminating the need for examination. The point is that applicants have registered a claim over something. If there's a dispute, courts are in a better position to make these determinations if there is a dispute, and if no dispute arises, who cares? In fact, right now there is but the most trivial level of examination, meant to get rid of cases where a work is obviously not copyrightable, but which is given way too much respect by the courts, as if it were a real patent or trademark examination (and we all know that those are not too thorough these days either).
So it is perhaps a bit more like domain name registration. Anyone can come along and try to register coca-cola.com if it's available, but should a dispute arise, getting there first may not be of much help.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
Which is much like the patent system. Personally I'd hope that international copyright law would consist of two commonly held principles: first, national treatment -- that all countries should treat foreigners the same as their own people; second, mutual compatibility -- that whatever sort of copyright law each country decides to offer, it is not so incompatible with the law of another country that they are rendered mutually exclusive.
Of course, I'd expect that absent outside pressure, a lot of the world would abandon copyright altogether. That's fine with me. As I said, I'm interested in what the US does, and not at all interested in what other countries do. If we are going to act in our own best interest, it would be pretty hypocritical to insist that others not act in theirs.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point
No, copyright (at least in the US) already deals with this issue. If something is copyrighted in the US, importing copies or downloading from another country where the work is in the public domain is prohibited, because if it were allowed it would clearly undermine the whole system. Enforcement can be a pain in the ass, but this is already the case. And it has been known to happen in real life.
Remember the kerfuffle a couple of years ago when Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 from the Kindles of some American users? This was because those particular users had obtained it from a person in Australia (IIRC), and while that book had fallen into the public domain in Australia, it was still copyrighted in the US, where our term lengths are even more ridiculously long.
So even though I don't offer practical solutions for enforcement, which is a real problem, right now, in the real world, without changing the law at all, there's no particular need to worry about countries that an author doesn't view as a market. If the author values control mor
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1.
You've got two misconceptions here.
First, unless you're big enough to buy a lot of political influence, governments aren't going to protect your works at all. If there's some sort of dispute it will still be up to you to do something about it, such as hiring an attorney, going to court, etc. What I'm describing is a mere registry system that would be the sole way for you to show, in such a proceeding, that you claim a copyright over a particular work.
Second, copyrights have never been worldwide in nature. They're all national -- a US copyright is different from a UK copyright which is different from a Japanese copyright and so on. People think that there is an international copyright law that they can rely upon, but really all that is is a set of minimum standards that each country is expected to implement in some way, and agreements to grant national rights to foreigners if they are granted rights abroad. E.g. if someone in the UK writes a book, the UK can only grant them a British copyright, but the US would be willing to grant them an Americsn copyright.
All I'm interested in is US copyright law; I don't care much about what the rest of the world does. I'd like to see the US treat foreign authors just like it does American authors, and I'd like to see us implement a system of formalities that would be equally applicable to authors seeking US copyrights whatever their nationality. Thus, the $1 fee I've been describing would only help you in the US. If the UK had a similar law and charged £1, you'd have to pay both separately to secure rights in each place.
It's all part of getting works into the public domain as much as possible as fast as possible, while providing copyrights when sought. If an author writes and publishes a book abroad, with no intention of bringing it to the US himself, and thus doesn't bother to get a US copyright, it benefits the people of the United States to have the work in the public domain here so that anyone else can step in and do what the author has failed to do. The same logic applies elsewhere; if a US author ignores the market in Nepal or somewhere, why would it be in the best interests of that place to grant rights in the work regardless?
I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation.
Well, they wouldn't be entitled to; copyrights would still only be able to be granted to the author. This is the sort of thing we'd want to deter with strong civil and criminal enforcement methods, as it is both fraud against the government and the public. There are laws against this sort of thing now but they'll need to be strengthened.
Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Again, without harm, I don't see why. Suppose you own a plot of land that has no evident economic value -- nothing grows there, it's inconveniently located, has no known redeeming qualities at all, but you own it completely. If you sell it to someone else for the low price that it is worth, but then they promptly discover that there is a valuable vein of gold there, located just below the diamond-bearing rock and just above the plentiful oil deposits, you'll probably wind up kicking yourself. But I don't see how you could manage to undo the sale or get a share of the profits; you had your chance and you gave it up.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corpora
Well, I'd say that neither original nor derivative works are inherently better than the other; the goal should be to maximize the number of works. The artistic choices of authors and of what does well in the market will take care of the ratio; copyright policy needn't be used to discriminate.
And as for authorial benefits, there is one way that society can benefit without copyright policy benefiting authors, and that is if there is no possible copyright law that can benefit society more than having no copyright law at all, in which case, there should be no such law. The abolitionists think that this is what we should do, but I'm not convinced that copyright can never provide a greater benefit for the public than would be enjoyed without it.
There are situations where it does make sense - for example, parts of Tolkien's works are much older than the rest of the books they are published in (especially parts of the Silmarillion and History of Middle Earth, or the unfinished works), or books which were previously censored or were unpublishable at the time for some other reason.
I don't see why this would merit protection. Just because Tolkien is Tolkien doesn't justify granting copyrights, and I really don't see any other rationale here. Perhaps you'd like to expand on your post?
Yes, the theft of a manuscript (as distinct from pirating it) would clearly be some sort of tort -- conversion or trespass to chattels or unjust enrichment or something. But once the work was out there, it wouldn't be a substitute for copyright. That is, there would be an action against the person or persons who actually stole it, but not against unrelated third parties who merely republished what had been published. This presupposes though that access to the work is wrongfully gained. If such a work were shared with someone without any conditions, publishing it would not be wrongful at all.
it seems kind of strange to protect a creators rights only if they are going to publish
Well, publication is an essential part of what copyright is meant to encourage. What good are unpublished works to the public?
It pretty much says "one way or another this will be published, do you want your cut or not?"
Well, there's no obligation that the works ever get published. The vast majority will never be interesting to anyone and will likely just be lost once people stop preserving the few or only copies that exist. Did your parents really save every single drawing you ever made in elementary school? Even the ones they put on the fridge?
Meanwhile, bear in mind that we have this now. Under current US law, the copyright on unpublished works does expire eventually (for whatever that's worth) and it already expired ten years ago now on a big backlog of them that were not published within a certain time.
Things might get leaked before they are good enough for the author to want to share it with others, the story could involve personal details that they don't wish to share but just felt compelled to write about etc. Like a conversation until the person who created the ideas wants to share it, and who they chose to share it with, there should be the expectation of privacy. Granting copyright to everything that the author doesn't explicitly grant rights to seems to be a pretty good way of helping protect privacy.
No, I don't think so. We already have laws regarding privacy. But copyright requires that the work be fixed in some medium of expression. Suppose that the work leaked before it was fixed, e.g. by the author simply telling someone about what was in his head which had not yet been committed to paper. Then copyright wouldn't apply, but the loss of privacy would be exactly as severe. And likewise, copyright can cover things about which there is no privacy interest at all; an author might have decided not to publish merely due to the flip of a coin rather than any other consideration as to the quality of the work, etc.
If you're concerned about privacy, why not have a separate privacy law that doesn't interfere with copyright? Let copyright stick to the progress of science and not get misused for other purposes.
I was a professional artist for several years, before I changed professions, and I made a decent living. It's far from impossible. But don't misunderstand my position: I think copyright is a great idea, we've just got way too much of it right now.
It also benefits society to encourage people to create new works of art, and not to simple repackage currently-existing material generation after generation (derivative works).
Of course, there's nothing wrong with derivative works. Shakespeare had like one original plot idea in his life; almost all of his stuff was derivative. And it's quite good. Disney does this a lot too, with all their fairy tale movies.
Creating art is an investment. Denying a return on that investment would prevent art from being created.
Copyright is a fairly crappy investment; most works don't recoup their costs from copyright-related income. And copyrights are generally excessive, burdening the public while not benefiting the author (e.g out of print books that nevertheless are encumbered with life+70 year terms).
I'm happy to see copyright reformed to produce the greatest benefit to society, and should this happen to benefit authors, then that's great too. And yes, I think that some amount of copyright probably is better for society than having none at all. But having too much copyright can be worse than having the right amount, and in excess, can actually be worse than having no copyright whatsoever.
The trick is to find the right amount. IMO we've gone too far and will have to shrink it to get to that sweet spot. But there were plenty of authors working when copyright lasted for a shorter period of time, and covered fewer types of works, and had fewer types of protection. If we ditched the 1976 Act and went back to, say, the 1909 Act that saw the golden ages of movies, television, jazz, rock, and no small amount of great literature and works of fine art, I think we'd somehow survive.
(This isn't an endorsement of the 1909 Act, however, nor do I mean to merely go back to a preexisting law)
a newspaper has considerable value as a historical record.
Indeed! But not so much economic value from this that can be realized by the newspaper and used to support itself. Newspapers rely on advertising, classifieds, subscriptions, and individual sales (e.g. at newsstands, vending machines, etc.). I'm sure that they do make a bit of money from sales of bound copies (or far less preferably, microfiche) to libraries, sales of individual back issues (or reproductions of them) to individuals seeking a momento, and online access to online archives. But these are likely dregs, which amount to only a teeny tiny fraction of the copyright related economic value of the rest of the paper.
A typical book? What about the classic (i.e., well-written books)? Are we going to penalize the better writers because the books of poorer writers don't have long economic lives?
First, let me assure you that there are lots of very well-written books which aren't classics. In fact I daresay that there are more perfectly well-written books than you could read in your lifetime, which are not classics and which are largely forgotten. Whether a book is well written is basically a matter of skill on the part of the author; whether it is a classic is basically a combination of the reception the book gets by its audience (thus, a matter of taste) and how long its popularity holds out (which may eventually owe a lot to marketing, in fact).
Second, no one is penalizing anyone. This is because no one is entitled to a copyright. Society, acting through its servant, the government, may or may not choose to encourage the arts as is its whim. Copyright is a subsidy, and while it can be a good one for an important purpose, it is not obligatory. Neither is any particular configuration of copyright law obligatory. Having our copyright policy based around what is normal, rather than what is unusual and exceptional is no more punishment than the failure of your town to build you a highway from your house to your job for your private use. Granting copyrights incurs a cost to the public. It can be worthwhile, but we should nevertheless be frugal and efficient and secure the best deal possible for the public.
Don't confuse the words of the U.S. Constitution with the real reason.
Well, setting aside that the Constitution is going to be the final word on the matter in the US, that is the real reason. It shows up elsewhere too -- the Statute of Anne called itself "[a]n act for the encouragement of learning." Always copyright is an infringement on free speech, which encompasses the mere repetition of the speech of others. The great importance of this right, to which copyright is inherently antithetical, should serve to warn us that copyright had better be intended to serve some important public purpose and had better both actually fulfill that purpose as well as not go an iota farther than necessary in doing so.
Still, if you think that copyright exists for some other reason, feel free to tell us what it is. Of course, if it doesn't provide me, a member of the public, with more of a benefit than I'd enjoy otherwise, why should I tolerate it? You may want to factor that into your answer.
An author actually had to CREATE something to obtain that right.
And if he created some ham, he could have a ham sandwich if he created some bread. Creating a work is not, in itself, sufficient to justify copyright.
For example, suppose you'd like to have someone paint your house. You could hire me to do it, we'd agree on some price, and your payment to me would compensate me for my time and materials. That's a perfectly fine arrangement. And if we cant agree on a price, we each go our separate ways. Now what if instead I had just showed up on your door, and offered to paint your house for free. Now it would be wasteful for you to pay me. Generous, maybe, but unnecessary. Maybe you can afford to be generous with your
In the current legislation, if I don't claim copyright on my creation anyone can download it, edit it, change the credits screen, repost it and claim it as their own.
More accurately, assuming you're in the US, you'd have to specifically disclaim copyright and place the work in the public domain. It's an affirmative act, not a passive failure to claim a copyright (which would have no effect). That is, copyright is currently an opt-out system. You're automatically opted in even if you take no action.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control? I'm not interested in trying to wring money out from you, or in penalizing you. I just think that all works should be in the public domain unless they are both copyrightable and the author (or other legitimate claimant) wants a specific work copyrighted. The fees are basically just to prevent people from casually saying that they want everything copyrighted. I want them to think about it, and to think about whether it's worth it to them.
An other example, if I post a photograph I've taken online, without a copyright system, Hallmark could take that photo and make a christmas card out of it and sell it without any credit or other requirements.
Yes. So what? If you, the author, don't care about it enough to pay, say, a dollar, annually, why should I care if Hallmark uses it? It's better that someone uses it productively than that no one does. By all means, use it yourself, or license it to someone who will. But I absolutely don't understand the desire to not only fail to make commercial, copyright-related use of a work oneself and to deny others the right to do so. It strikes me as being very miserly. I don't see why the law should enable this behavior.
Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author. I might like to read that unpublished book but if they don't chose to publish it than I don't have a write too
I agree, but I feel no obligation to enable this behavior by giving them copyrights when they engage in such behavior. Let them do that on their own dime as it were. Copyright should encourage publication, otherwise what good is it?
I think that is the whole "patented pending" sort of thing.
Patent pending doesn't mean anything in the American patent system, AFAIK. And it's considered fraudulent if no patent application has been filed.
The grace period I was referring to comes from the novelty requirement: you can't get a patent if the invention was disclosed or patented elsewhere, or if the invention was in public use or on sale, more than one year prior to the filing date. (IIRC; I'm not a patent attorney) This includes the inventor's own actions. My understanding is that in some countries, if an invention is disclosed it is instantly unpatentable.
Once the application is filed, it may take some time for the patent to issue, but the patent term runs for 20 years from filing now, so it's of no matter. And FYI, this may start well before the product is out for sale. Check out the pharmaceutical industry for some good examples.
As for copyrights, well, we do only want to encourage works to be created and published (where publication includes public performance, etc.); unpublished works don't do anything for society. But neither do we want authors to have to be wary of people pirating their manuscripts before a work is published. And neither do we want authors sitting on manuscripts instead of publishing them in a timely fashion.
There's not any great solutions, given that you can't really determine for sure whether an author was still tinkering with the work, or whether he was sitting on it, but we ought to have a term of years for unpublished works that's not excessive, and limited remedies against infringers to help nudge them in the right direction. And ultimately, if the author still isn't releasing his work, well, then he's not really doing anything that benefits the public, while a manuscript pirate would be. Hard to side with the author in such extreme cases.
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First, if you're going to argue about what the framers imagined, you're going to be stuck restricting bearable arms to muskets and such. I doubt this is your intent -- rather, your intent is to have it both ways.
Second, how about a Davy Crockett? Those are nuclear weapons that could be borne and wielded by a single individual. The user would need to be strong, and it would be less efficient than usual, but the round was a manageable 80 pounds or so and with a better designed, lighter weight folding tripod, it should be doable. Impractical but doable.
Third, I don't really care one way or the other about gun control. I have no interest in guns nor do I worry about them. But they do make violence easier and more substantial than they might otherwise be. If this is okay with you, oppose efforts at gun control including non-absolute interpretations of the 2d amendment and new amendments to the constitution. If not, then support such efforts. Just don't forget or try to hide the cost either way.
For statutory damages, this is correct. The number of infringements don't matter, only the number of works. This is set forth in the statute at 17 USC 504(c)(1).
Of course, that doesn't mean it always works out that way. I attended the Tenenbaum case, and when the attorneys were working out the jury instructions on damages with the judge, the plaintiff's attorney suggested an instruction that calculated damages per infringement, not per work. The defense counsel was pretty bad all through the trial, IMO, and failed to catch this, although a number of people in the gallery seemed to.
When the verdict was returned, it was an even multiple of the minimum damages, which makes me suspicious that the jury was trying to make a low award, but multiplied as instructed by the number of infringements that they thought had or may have occurred, or some such.
Note also that copyright plaintiffs can opt (or may be obligated to seek, depending on certain issues) the actual damages they suffered, plus the profits made by the infringer, rather than statutory damages determined by the court within a range provided in the statute.
And as HaqDiesel correctly notes, awards can skyrocket merely by the plaintiffs suing over additional works; defendants in these sorts of cases probably didn't stop at a mere handful. However, I would point out that the statute for calculating statutory damages says that works comprising a single compilation or derivative work are to be counted as just one work overall. So it's more likely different albums (or tracks from different albums), rather than merely different tracks, that is the issue. Still not much help.
Superman goes commando? Well, I mean, I guess no one is going to tell him he can't, but it seems distasteful.
There is actually a separate right of publicity, which is what you're thinking of. Depending on your jurisdiction, it may not survive our death (since harming your reputation once you've died doesn't harm you), or in places where there tend to be lobbies of famous people's relatives, it could last a lot longer.
Personally, I favor the ends-at-death side. People may have a right to their own reputations, for good or ill, but no one should control the reputation of another person.
The world might not be particularly better off after the recent "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" movie ("Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter" is clearly still the greatest vampire hunter story ever told) but we are much better off that some obscure descendant can't march in and shut it down.
Well, while it is getting cheaper and easier all the time (there is fan-made stuff on YouTube that would've been beyond the abilities and budgets of special effects houses in the recent past), the real key, IMO is in what sort of movie you want to make.
If you absolutely must have a couple of guys throwing buildings at each other, it could get pricey, that's true. OTOH, if you're careful to write the script with an eye toward the budget, and yet can still produce a good story, you could probably do well. But⦠studios want blockbusters and the genre lends itself toward mindless spectacle, so no one seems to try much.
Well, I certainly never said that Disney doesn't do merchandizing -- they're pros at it. Just that they don't seem to be dissuaded from even starting just because they'll have some competition from small fry.
Nor did I say that the substitutes were better, or even on par. GoBots sucked by the way. I even remember that at one point, they had toy robots that turned into rocks of all the stupid things.
My point is simply that absolute control isn't necessary to make money, even big money. So perhaps we could stand to have less of it over all.
Why do you think that big budget superhero movies are only economically viable if one source controls both the copyright on the characters and story used in the movie as well as for all merchandise featuring those characters, etc?
It certainly isn't true for big budget fairy tale movies. The last one Disney did was based on Rapunzel, had a budget of $260 million, and the main character and basic plot are in the public domain. And I'm sure that there were plenty of people trying to free ride on it by putting out toys and things based on the fairy tale. Yet they seem to have survived.
And also, why must we have big budget movies anyway? And if we must, why must they rely on such excessive copyrights to be made? Are there no alternatives?
No, the trademark would likely suffer genericide.
Trademarks are not a functional substitute for copyrights. If a work is in the public domain, anyone can make copies of it and can make derivative works based on it. (Of course, a character is not quite the same as the first work in which it appears -- aspects of the Superman character which were introduced later, such as the ability to fly, weakness to kryptonite, changes to the costume, etc. would not be available until the works introducing those things also hit the public domain)
A trademark only functions when it indicates that a marked good or service originates from a particular source. If anyone can now create Superman comics, movies, tv shows, etc., because Action Comics #1 is in the public domain, this means that the use of the Superman name or character isn't indicating a single source. Thus, the trademark dies.
A good example of this was Kellogg v. National Buscuit. The latter had invented and patented a cereal and sold it using the mark SHREDDED WHEAT. When the patent expired, Kellogg started making it too, and also called it SHREDDED WHEAT. The Supreme Court decided that since SHREDDED WHEAT merely described the product, anyone could use the name now that the patent had run out and anyone could make the product.
There might be an argument for a surviving trademark on the title of the comic, not restricting the use of the name for the character, but it would be fairly weak, IMO. The use of the character name as a trademark for wholly unrelated goods and services would still work -- PETER PAN for bus travel services and for peanut butter doesn't interfere with, or suffer interference from, the character of Peter Pan being in the public domain in the US. But a viable SUPERMAN brand for tax preparation services or auto parts is probably small comfort to Warner Bros.
And meanwhile, if the fans want to stick to a particular canon, they can just look for the brand of the publisher, which is how it's done for other public domain works. You can go buy a copy of Shakespeare as it was printed in the First Folio, you can go buy copies of the bad quartos, you can buy the edited versions made by Bowdler, etc. No one is harmed by there being more choice, as all you have to do is ignore the ones you don't like. A trademark on Shakespeare is not necessary.
So ultimately, ... mere entertainment still contributes to human learning and knowledge and should be copyrightable if we're to have copyrights.
Uh ... why?
The purpose of copyright is ultimately to serve the public good by promoting the progress of science (which as has been explained, means knowledge). Are you saying that our total knowledge is not increased by new works of entertainment?
Copyrights are not "granted" through any process.
Not so. Copyrights may automatically be granted by the federal government when certain conditions are met, viz. a copyrightable work is fixed for the first time into a medium of expression, but they are nevertheless granted. In the absence of a grant by the government, there'd be no copyright. It's not as though authors create copyrights.
Registration and notice (and deposit, and domestic printing, etc.) were formalities that once upon a time were additional conditions that had to be satisfied, but dropping them as requirements doesn't change the fact of the grant.
I didn't say fine artists made much, I said that they typically make money from the sale of individual pieces, rather than from exploiting copyrights.
Also I'm not sure if your choice of Van Gogh was a good one. He famously only ever sold one painting during his life for an amount equal to about $1000 in today's money. He was a colossal failure and his works really only became valuable after his death. But even now, an original Van Gogh is worth far, far more than a poster of the same thing. It's not so much the picture as it is that it was made by his hand that is considered valuable. If people only cared about the art itself, the world's great art museums would largely exhibit high quality copies to save on the expense, and collectors would do the same and not value originals too highly.
Suppose you're an artist, have trouble generating an income from your art, and see that your work is used in an ad for a large corporation without anyone paying you for its use. Would you think that's all right? I wouldn't.
That's irrelevant. Copyright isn't about what's right. In fact, morality isn't even a factor. It's about what's most useful to society. If fine artists will create and publish (where we define publish quite broadly) without copyright, because they have sufficient incentives to do so anyway, why bother to give it to them? And should copyright have an incentivizing effect after all, we should carefully tailor the grant of rights in such a way as to produce the greatest public benefit for the least public detriment. As the mere existence of copyright is harmful to the public, the benefit will need to be fairly substantial.
I think this is possible, that we should offer some sort of copyright to fine artists, and I think that copyright is a basically good idea that merely needs to be implemented better. But it's all about utility; not fuzzy-headed pathos.
You haven't addressed sinecures after retirement from public office, which seems to be popular these days. (Especially since the party providing it doesn't have to do so unless the recipient has performed)
You also didn't address corruption of non elected persons, but it happens with military officers, bureaucrats, staffers, appointed officials, etc.
Even under the current rules, copyrights are only granted to the original portions of works.
Thus, if you write, copyright, and publish a short story in 1950, no matter how many times you reprint it, the key date for the copyright is 1950; nothing you can do (other than lobbying Congress) changes anything. If you expand the short story, only the new material is covered by the new copyright; the portions that are from the previous work only ever fall under the earlier copyright.
And if you create a new compilation of works including the story, the new copyright covers the compilation, i.e. the choice of those works and the arrangement in that order, but not the pre existing works themselves, which still fall under their own, older copyrights.
What about a painter who produces just one copy of a painting? Shouldn't that retain copyright protection for a while? What if that painting hasn't been sold yet after 15 years (not unusual with artists, and it doesn't mean it won't be sold), do you want copyright to expire even before the artist has sold the work? Not everything works with the volumes and the time scales of mass produced works.
True, but in the world of the fine arts, provenance, which cannot be copied, is usually more valuable than the copyright.
For example, the Mona Lisa is worth more than a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. A Van Gogh painting of sunflowers sells for way way more than a nice poster of the same thing.
So long as there are laws against counterfeiting -- which is a type of fraud and not related to copyright at all -- fine artists will usually get along okay. They don't rely much on copyrights, which really do exist for mass-produced works, and which don't protect the value of selling original copies. Many of the greatest works of art are in the public domain but can still command a fortune when put up for sale. No one in that market cares about the t shirts and picture postcards.
And, possibly, it shouldn't apply to pure entertainment at all: it's meant to apply to the "Useful Arts".
No, that's a common mistake. Copyright is meant to promote the progress of science, while patents are supposed to promote the progress of useful arts.
In the late 18th century english in which the constitution is written, science means learning or knowledge, while arts refers to skills and applied technology. Since then the two words have come to be more associated with other things, such that they get confused easily as has happened in your post. Some vestiges remain, though: patents are meant to deal with state of the art technology, and are required to be written so as to be instructive to a person having ordinary skill in the art, but cannot be issued if previously invented or obvious after looking at pre-existing technology known as prior art.
Plus inventions usually have utility patents and must be useful for something; if they don't work, they can't be patented. This is why perpetual motion machines never get issued patents. Copyrights OTOH are sometimes not granted if the work is useful, because they're not supposed to overlap with parents. (A similar doctrine exists for trademarks)
The meanings are also clear if you look at the structure of the copyright and patent clause, which goes in order, copyrights then patents: authors, writings, science; inventors, discoveries, useful arts.
So ultimately, no, mere entertainment still contributes to human learning and knowledge and should be copyrightable if we're to have copyrights.
the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
It's not intended to cover its own costs. As I said, the point is to limit copyrights to those works where the author or other legitimate claimant actively wants a copyright enough to take some action to get it. So the fee is just a token; people will stop and think more if there's some cost involved. Actual funding of the Copyright Office should come out of general tax revenue -- after all, if copyright is meant to benefit the public interest, there's nothing wrong with the public bearing the cost of administrating it.
Neither should copyright registrations be given evidentiary weight as to the copyrightability of works, thus eliminating the need for examination. The point is that applicants have registered a claim over something. If there's a dispute, courts are in a better position to make these determinations if there is a dispute, and if no dispute arises, who cares? In fact, right now there is but the most trivial level of examination, meant to get rid of cases where a work is obviously not copyrightable, but which is given way too much respect by the courts, as if it were a real patent or trademark examination (and we all know that those are not too thorough these days either).
So it is perhaps a bit more like domain name registration. Anyone can come along and try to register coca-cola.com if it's available, but should a dispute arise, getting there first may not be of much help.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
Which is much like the patent system. Personally I'd hope that international copyright law would consist of two commonly held principles: first, national treatment -- that all countries should treat foreigners the same as their own people; second, mutual compatibility -- that whatever sort of copyright law each country decides to offer, it is not so incompatible with the law of another country that they are rendered mutually exclusive.
Of course, I'd expect that absent outside pressure, a lot of the world would abandon copyright altogether. That's fine with me. As I said, I'm interested in what the US does, and not at all interested in what other countries do. If we are going to act in our own best interest, it would be pretty hypocritical to insist that others not act in theirs.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point
No, copyright (at least in the US) already deals with this issue. If something is copyrighted in the US, importing copies or downloading from another country where the work is in the public domain is prohibited, because if it were allowed it would clearly undermine the whole system. Enforcement can be a pain in the ass, but this is already the case. And it has been known to happen in real life.
Remember the kerfuffle a couple of years ago when Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 from the Kindles of some American users? This was because those particular users had obtained it from a person in Australia (IIRC), and while that book had fallen into the public domain in Australia, it was still copyrighted in the US, where our term lengths are even more ridiculously long.
So even though I don't offer practical solutions for enforcement, which is a real problem, right now, in the real world, without changing the law at all, there's no particular need to worry about countries that an author doesn't view as a market. If the author values control mor
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1.
You've got two misconceptions here.
First, unless you're big enough to buy a lot of political influence, governments aren't going to protect your works at all. If there's some sort of dispute it will still be up to you to do something about it, such as hiring an attorney, going to court, etc. What I'm describing is a mere registry system that would be the sole way for you to show, in such a proceeding, that you claim a copyright over a particular work.
Second, copyrights have never been worldwide in nature. They're all national -- a US copyright is different from a UK copyright which is different from a Japanese copyright and so on. People think that there is an international copyright law that they can rely upon, but really all that is is a set of minimum standards that each country is expected to implement in some way, and agreements to grant national rights to foreigners if they are granted rights abroad. E.g. if someone in the UK writes a book, the UK can only grant them a British copyright, but the US would be willing to grant them an Americsn copyright.
All I'm interested in is US copyright law; I don't care much about what the rest of the world does. I'd like to see the US treat foreign authors just like it does American authors, and I'd like to see us implement a system of formalities that would be equally applicable to authors seeking US copyrights whatever their nationality. Thus, the $1 fee I've been describing would only help you in the US. If the UK had a similar law and charged £1, you'd have to pay both separately to secure rights in each place.
It's all part of getting works into the public domain as much as possible as fast as possible, while providing copyrights when sought. If an author writes and publishes a book abroad, with no intention of bringing it to the US himself, and thus doesn't bother to get a US copyright, it benefits the people of the United States to have the work in the public domain here so that anyone else can step in and do what the author has failed to do. The same logic applies elsewhere; if a US author ignores the market in Nepal or somewhere, why would it be in the best interests of that place to grant rights in the work regardless?
I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation.
Well, they wouldn't be entitled to; copyrights would still only be able to be granted to the author. This is the sort of thing we'd want to deter with strong civil and criminal enforcement methods, as it is both fraud against the government and the public. There are laws against this sort of thing now but they'll need to be strengthened.
Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Again, without harm, I don't see why. Suppose you own a plot of land that has no evident economic value -- nothing grows there, it's inconveniently located, has no known redeeming qualities at all, but you own it completely. If you sell it to someone else for the low price that it is worth, but then they promptly discover that there is a valuable vein of gold there, located just below the diamond-bearing rock and just above the plentiful oil deposits, you'll probably wind up kicking yourself. But I don't see how you could manage to undo the sale or get a share of the profits; you had your chance and you gave it up.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corpora
Well, I'd say that neither original nor derivative works are inherently better than the other; the goal should be to maximize the number of works. The artistic choices of authors and of what does well in the market will take care of the ratio; copyright policy needn't be used to discriminate.
And as for authorial benefits, there is one way that society can benefit without copyright policy benefiting authors, and that is if there is no possible copyright law that can benefit society more than having no copyright law at all, in which case, there should be no such law. The abolitionists think that this is what we should do, but I'm not convinced that copyright can never provide a greater benefit for the public than would be enjoyed without it.
There are situations where it does make sense - for example, parts of Tolkien's works are much older than the rest of the books they are published in (especially parts of the Silmarillion and History of Middle Earth, or the unfinished works), or books which were previously censored or were unpublishable at the time for some other reason.
I don't see why this would merit protection. Just because Tolkien is Tolkien doesn't justify granting copyrights, and I really don't see any other rationale here. Perhaps you'd like to expand on your post?
Yes, the theft of a manuscript (as distinct from pirating it) would clearly be some sort of tort -- conversion or trespass to chattels or unjust enrichment or something. But once the work was out there, it wouldn't be a substitute for copyright. That is, there would be an action against the person or persons who actually stole it, but not against unrelated third parties who merely republished what had been published. This presupposes though that access to the work is wrongfully gained. If such a work were shared with someone without any conditions, publishing it would not be wrongful at all.
it seems kind of strange to protect a creators rights only if they are going to publish
Well, publication is an essential part of what copyright is meant to encourage. What good are unpublished works to the public?
It pretty much says "one way or another this will be published, do you want your cut or not?"
Well, there's no obligation that the works ever get published. The vast majority will never be interesting to anyone and will likely just be lost once people stop preserving the few or only copies that exist. Did your parents really save every single drawing you ever made in elementary school? Even the ones they put on the fridge?
Meanwhile, bear in mind that we have this now. Under current US law, the copyright on unpublished works does expire eventually (for whatever that's worth) and it already expired ten years ago now on a big backlog of them that were not published within a certain time.
Things might get leaked before they are good enough for the author to want to share it with others, the story could involve personal details that they don't wish to share but just felt compelled to write about etc. Like a conversation until the person who created the ideas wants to share it, and who they chose to share it with, there should be the expectation of privacy. Granting copyright to everything that the author doesn't explicitly grant rights to seems to be a pretty good way of helping protect privacy.
No, I don't think so. We already have laws regarding privacy. But copyright requires that the work be fixed in some medium of expression. Suppose that the work leaked before it was fixed, e.g. by the author simply telling someone about what was in his head which had not yet been committed to paper. Then copyright wouldn't apply, but the loss of privacy would be exactly as severe. And likewise, copyright can cover things about which there is no privacy interest at all; an author might have decided not to publish merely due to the flip of a coin rather than any other consideration as to the quality of the work, etc.
If you're concerned about privacy, why not have a separate privacy law that doesn't interfere with copyright? Let copyright stick to the progress of science and not get misused for other purposes.
I was a professional artist for several years, before I changed professions, and I made a decent living. It's far from impossible. But don't misunderstand my position: I think copyright is a great idea, we've just got way too much of it right now.
It also benefits society to encourage people to create new works of art, and not to simple repackage currently-existing material generation after generation (derivative works).
Of course, there's nothing wrong with derivative works. Shakespeare had like one original plot idea in his life; almost all of his stuff was derivative. And it's quite good. Disney does this a lot too, with all their fairy tale movies.
Creating art is an investment. Denying a return on that investment would prevent art from being created.
Copyright is a fairly crappy investment; most works don't recoup their costs from copyright-related income. And copyrights are generally excessive, burdening the public while not benefiting the author (e.g out of print books that nevertheless are encumbered with life+70 year terms).
I'm happy to see copyright reformed to produce the greatest benefit to society, and should this happen to benefit authors, then that's great too. And yes, I think that some amount of copyright probably is better for society than having none at all. But having too much copyright can be worse than having the right amount, and in excess, can actually be worse than having no copyright whatsoever.
The trick is to find the right amount. IMO we've gone too far and will have to shrink it to get to that sweet spot. But there were plenty of authors working when copyright lasted for a shorter period of time, and covered fewer types of works, and had fewer types of protection. If we ditched the 1976 Act and went back to, say, the 1909 Act that saw the golden ages of movies, television, jazz, rock, and no small amount of great literature and works of fine art, I think we'd somehow survive.
(This isn't an endorsement of the 1909 Act, however, nor do I mean to merely go back to a preexisting law)
a newspaper has considerable value as a historical record.
Indeed! But not so much economic value from this that can be realized by the newspaper and used to support itself. Newspapers rely on advertising, classifieds, subscriptions, and individual sales (e.g. at newsstands, vending machines, etc.). I'm sure that they do make a bit of money from sales of bound copies (or far less preferably, microfiche) to libraries, sales of individual back issues (or reproductions of them) to individuals seeking a momento, and online access to online archives. But these are likely dregs, which amount to only a teeny tiny fraction of the copyright related economic value of the rest of the paper.
A typical book? What about the classic (i.e., well-written books)? Are we going to penalize the better writers because the books of poorer writers don't have long economic lives?
First, let me assure you that there are lots of very well-written books which aren't classics. In fact I daresay that there are more perfectly well-written books than you could read in your lifetime, which are not classics and which are largely forgotten. Whether a book is well written is basically a matter of skill on the part of the author; whether it is a classic is basically a combination of the reception the book gets by its audience (thus, a matter of taste) and how long its popularity holds out (which may eventually owe a lot to marketing, in fact).
Second, no one is penalizing anyone. This is because no one is entitled to a copyright. Society, acting through its servant, the government, may or may not choose to encourage the arts as is its whim. Copyright is a subsidy, and while it can be a good one for an important purpose, it is not obligatory. Neither is any particular configuration of copyright law obligatory. Having our copyright policy based around what is normal, rather than what is unusual and exceptional is no more punishment than the failure of your town to build you a highway from your house to your job for your private use. Granting copyrights incurs a cost to the public. It can be worthwhile, but we should nevertheless be frugal and efficient and secure the best deal possible for the public.
Don't confuse the words of the U.S. Constitution with the real reason.
Well, setting aside that the Constitution is going to be the final word on the matter in the US, that is the real reason. It shows up elsewhere too -- the Statute of Anne called itself "[a]n act for the encouragement of learning." Always copyright is an infringement on free speech, which encompasses the mere repetition of the speech of others. The great importance of this right, to which copyright is inherently antithetical, should serve to warn us that copyright had better be intended to serve some important public purpose and had better both actually fulfill that purpose as well as not go an iota farther than necessary in doing so.
Still, if you think that copyright exists for some other reason, feel free to tell us what it is. Of course, if it doesn't provide me, a member of the public, with more of a benefit than I'd enjoy otherwise, why should I tolerate it? You may want to factor that into your answer.
An author actually had to CREATE something to obtain that right.
And if he created some ham, he could have a ham sandwich if he created some bread. Creating a work is not, in itself, sufficient to justify copyright.
For example, suppose you'd like to have someone paint your house. You could hire me to do it, we'd agree on some price, and your payment to me would compensate me for my time and materials. That's a perfectly fine arrangement. And if we cant agree on a price, we each go our separate ways. Now what if instead I had just showed up on your door, and offered to paint your house for free. Now it would be wasteful for you to pay me. Generous, maybe, but unnecessary. Maybe you can afford to be generous with your
In the current legislation, if I don't claim copyright on my creation anyone can download it, edit it, change the credits screen, repost it and claim it as their own.
More accurately, assuming you're in the US, you'd have to specifically disclaim copyright and place the work in the public domain. It's an affirmative act, not a passive failure to claim a copyright (which would have no effect). That is, copyright is currently an opt-out system. You're automatically opted in even if you take no action.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control? I'm not interested in trying to wring money out from you, or in penalizing you. I just think that all works should be in the public domain unless they are both copyrightable and the author (or other legitimate claimant) wants a specific work copyrighted. The fees are basically just to prevent people from casually saying that they want everything copyrighted. I want them to think about it, and to think about whether it's worth it to them.
An other example, if I post a photograph I've taken online, without a copyright system, Hallmark could take that photo and make a christmas card out of it and sell it without any credit or other requirements.
Yes. So what? If you, the author, don't care about it enough to pay, say, a dollar, annually, why should I care if Hallmark uses it? It's better that someone uses it productively than that no one does. By all means, use it yourself, or license it to someone who will. But I absolutely don't understand the desire to not only fail to make commercial, copyright-related use of a work oneself and to deny others the right to do so. It strikes me as being very miserly. I don't see why the law should enable this behavior.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author. I might like to read that unpublished book but if they don't chose to publish it than I don't have a write too
I agree, but I feel no obligation to enable this behavior by giving them copyrights when they engage in such behavior. Let them do that on their own dime as it were. Copyright should encourage publication, otherwise what good is it?
I think that is the whole "patented pending" sort of thing.
Patent pending doesn't mean anything in the American patent system, AFAIK. And it's considered fraudulent if no patent application has been filed.
The grace period I was referring to comes from the novelty requirement: you can't get a patent if the invention was disclosed or patented elsewhere, or if the invention was in public use or on sale, more than one year prior to the filing date. (IIRC; I'm not a patent attorney) This includes the inventor's own actions. My understanding is that in some countries, if an invention is disclosed it is instantly unpatentable.
Once the application is filed, it may take some time for the patent to issue, but the patent term runs for 20 years from filing now, so it's of no matter. And FYI, this may start well before the product is out for sale. Check out the pharmaceutical industry for some good examples.
As for copyrights, well, we do only want to encourage works to be created and published (where publication includes public performance, etc.); unpublished works don't do anything for society. But neither do we want authors to have to be wary of people pirating their manuscripts before a work is published. And neither do we want authors sitting on manuscripts instead of publishing them in a timely fashion.
There's not any great solutions, given that you can't really determine for sure whether an author was still tinkering with the work, or whether he was sitting on it, but we ought to have a term of years for unpublished works that's not excessive, and limited remedies against infringers to help nudge them in the right direction. And ultimately, if the author still isn't releasing his work, well, then he's not really doing anything that benefits the public, while a manuscript pirate would be. Hard to side with the author in such extreme cases.