I don't really agree with you, save for the need for reform. I feel that this may be because you're missing to some extent the purpose of copyright. You've almost got it, just not quite.
Bluntly, the purpose of copyright is not to compensate artists, nor to reward publishers, nor to facilitate censorship. (at least not copyright laws in the tradition of the Statute of Anne, such as U.S. copyright law)
The sole purpose is to benefit society. Any copyright law is fine, if society recieves a _net_ benefit. No copyright law is tolerable if society receives a net loss.
The standard for measuring benefit and loss are based upon what society's goals are.
First, remember that these goals are shared by _everyone_. Even authors are members of society first; their interests as readers and authors are promoted just as is everyone else's.
Anyway, society has an interest in being able to acquire, change, and disseminate information freely. This ranges from getting free books, to writing books based on other people's books, reprinting books verbatim, etc.
There is also a distinct goal of having that information span both a wide breadth of different subjects, and a great depth of variation and exploration of each individual topic.
Copyright is an exercise in promoting those two public interests as much as possible.
Artists benefit from being able to rely upon works of previous artists in their own works. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those that came before.
But it is generally beleived that a limited monopoly, preventing a lot of 'first interest' exercises, encourages the production of more broad books, and some deep books. And furthermore that this satisfaction of the 'second interest' is sufficient to not just make up for the harm caused to the first, but actually leave people in a better position than they were in had they not done this at all.
Going too far would cause a negative public balance though, which is unacceptable, and would impair authors, since they all are readers too, and all tend to combine breadth and depth in their works. A truly original book, original in all ways, would be gibberish, after all.
The main problem is that while we were supposed to be looking for the optimal balance point where the public is as greatly served as possible, we've wound up overshooting, and having a negative impact. Mere correction is sufficient; the underlying system is well enough.
(Incidentally, what you're talking about is compulsory licensing. You see it in music a bit; isn't all that useful. Since you'd kill off fair use and parody among other things, I can't really endorse your proposal.
Basically, yeah. No one ever said that it was safe living in a free society. We have a name for countries where there are strict security measures in place -- police states. Curiously, they're often rampant with crime and corruption too, make the people living there extremely unhappy, and are looked down upon by, well, almost everyone.
That doesn't mean to suggest that we should get rid of the police, simply that you should abandon the goal of never having future terrorist incidents by dint of foiling terrorists at every turn. Alternative methods may work better, such as not being much of a target.
Hell, Israel's just done a bang-up job of foiling terrorism by cracking down on perpetrators so far, huh. You just never hear about terrorism there, what with all of their security measures. Canada on the other hand, which is quite lax, boy, that's just a war zone.
How much security does that provide, however? Photo ID checks were in place prior to 9/11. There's nothing that stops terrorists from getting issued valid ID. The ID check procedure NOW would not have stopped a one of them.
ID checks exist -- and have existed for some time -- to prevent people from reselling plane tickets. Originally the tickets were just good for a seat, and people would sell them at will. Eventually they had markings to indicate the gender of the passenger, limiting by half the number of people one could resell them to. Now they have your name, so the resale value of tickets is zero.
For some reason this serves the purposes of airlines. It hasn't got a scintilla of value from a security perspective.
Oh yes they do. There are plenty of laws that are not codified at all, and have been created by the courts, often over hundreds of years.
A lot of the law of torts, contracts, and property is common law. A lot of criminal law also descends from the common law, although that's pretty much the only area in which we no longer allow courts to make law.
His shop in Red Bank, Jay and Bob's Secret Stash, has virtually nothing. Don't get me wrong, a cleaner, nicer comic book store never have I seen. It's got an interesting color scheme, it's not cramped, and there's a lot of neat props and such from his movies in display cases.
It's just that the selection of stuff that's not somehow related to Smith (e.g. the racks and racks of movie-based t-shirts) is quite poor.
There's not that many new comics, and most of them are from the big three, with few independents. There are hardly any back issues at all. (IIRC there were less than ten long boxes worth) The video selection is extremely small, and I don't recall that they rent. Not a hell of a lot of graphic novels either.
If I were you, I'd stick with a store that had a good selection of stuff, and was willing to deal with -- and try to promote -- anything. I'm actually in South Jersey, and while the store I shop at (Fat Jack's in Oaklyn) is, to be honest, falling apart, they've been very good with the exception of having good prices on their back issues. It's as though they've never heard of a 25-cent bin or something.
Nuku Nuku Dash (that is, the TV series) isn't really all that good. I wouldn't recommend picking it up unless it were extremely cheap and you'd already exhausted the supply of good anime out there.
Tokyo Kid at the Garage in Harvard Square is probably all you'll ever need for rentals. There are also a lot of good clubs in the area, particularly the MIT Anime Club.
Buying is often cheaper online however, if you shop around.
For chattels, some courts apply a discovery rule. That is, even if you took someone's gold ring, for example, and wore it every day in public, it's not necessarily reasonable to expect someone to notice. There are a lot of gold rings out there. It isn't as though this is real property, where you can drive out to the parcel of land and see if there's been someone there.
Thus, if the discovery rule is applied, the plaintiff's clock doesn't start running until, assuming they've been diligent in trying to find the item, they actually discover its whereabouts.
Not that this is legal advice, or anything; it's not.
Good point re: the stars... though Toren's origins leave open the possibility of having more advanced knowledge than mainstream Federation science. After all, he was the only one who could build the trilithium stellar probes, and certainly the Romulans never would've passed along that kind of technology to Klingon rebels if they'd known what it could be used for.
So I don't think it especially counts for much, kind of like the Tox Uthat from the 27th century (which could remotely turn off stellar nuclear fusion).
As for your other assertions, they're just crap.
Data the only non-homicidal legitimately intelligent artificial life form that's lasted more than a single episode to date. SW droid technology is commonplace. Sanity is a solved problem (no Nomads, V'Ger's, or M5's there), which counts for a lot, and they seem to be just as capable of intelligence, emotion, etc. There are different social issues -- droids are thought of as property and seem to have a slave mentality, and no one really pays much attention to them (which leads me to suspect that their technology has gotten sufficiently advanced that very few non-droids know how everything works. Witness the hyperdrive repair efforts in ESB). But they're hardly a nearly-unique product of mad science, as Data is.
Ditto for hyperdrives -- it's just a plot device, so the mechanics don't really tell us anything interesting. Just because 'precise calculations are required' doesn't mean that it's not faster. The _distances_ traveled and the time it takes are how we know its faster.
(and besides which, ST ships with warp drives can travel many many times faster than c, but still can't safely drive into/through stars, black holes, etc.)
Again of course, this is probably one of the more pathetic debates/. has ever been witness to.
The Planet Eater was an apparently automated ship in the original Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine." It looked kind of like an empty ice cream cone. It broke apart planets, and the bits went into the open end and were destroyed, probably converted into fuel.
A lot of it is, but not all of it. Their droid and computer technology seem to be pretty much on par -- though there are significantly different societal attitudes towards droids.
But the biggie is the hyperdrive. SW ships routinely cross the galaxy in very short periods of time... I'd think somewhere in the neighborhood of a few days. (there's a map floating around on the web -- it indicates that Tatooine is near the edge of the galaxy, while Coruscant is on the opposite side of the galactic core. This corresponds to the mention of Tatooine as being in 'the outer rim' and Coruscant impliedly being central, like Trantor) A journey like that for a Federation ship would take generations, which was the basis for ST Voyager.
Similarly, there are some differences in weaponry -- a Death Star superlaser has destructive potential unrivalled by anything in ST besides the Planet Eater, or possibly the Borg. The Federation might try building an antimatter bomb to achieve the same effect, but that's rather crude compared to a beam weapon.
If you go to a library and check out a book that's out of copyright, you can _definately_ copy it.
Hell, where do you think all these different editions of Shakespeare come from?
Indeed, copying is highly desirable; it is copyrights that prevent it that are not, unless they somehow promote copying in the long run. (which is the point)
Just read Martyn's post -- he's hitting all the right marks, and I don't have time for anything longer.
Fair use is more expansive than that. It permits parodies that are closely based on some other material, for example. Really it is a catch all for anything that is a socially desirable, and thus permitted infringement of copyright.
I haven't studied Australian copyright law, but I'd imagine they'd have something a little more like that. (though perhaps, as with the U.S. it's common law, and not a statute)
I've never heard of U.S. currency being called monopoly money. That's what we call foreign money, _because_ it's often vividly colored. (and silly, because it's foreign;)
Perhaps everyone calls foreign currency monopoly money -- that's the best explanation I can come up with.
I would point out though, that the portraits and pictures on the backs are quite distinguishable. There are other things to look at than the color.
The problem is that you can own the copy, and you can own the copyright, but the work itself isn't something that's ownable. So it's meaningless to say 'we own the program.'
First, because it is harmful to the users and is contrary to copyright policy goals. Second because again it doesn't make sense in light of most of the remainder of copyright law.
Video collages are a reason. Sampling the audio. Capturing excerpts for review, etc. Playing on different players (which is basically an application of space shifting). Parody, e.g. by redubbing the video with different audio as in 'What's Up Tiger Lily.'
There's a wealth of reasons to do so.
Of course the best is that when the copyright expires -- and it already has for some, if there was a copyright at all -- we can do literally anything we like with it.
I really loathe attempts to impair fair use, post-term no-holds barred copying, various types of shifting, etc.
If something is inherent in the medium, e.g. the way that you need a CD player for a CD, or that VCR tapes degrade over time, that's acceptable. Deliberately designing something like that in is merely an attempt to cheat the public.
I'm familiar with the bundles of sticks theory of property. However, note that 1) all theories of property rights today are utilitarian theories. That is, property rights, and even the very concept of property itself exist because it is more beneficial to society to do so than it would be otherwise. (c.f. the tragedy of the commons) 2) Copyright is especially utilitarian in nature, and has a public policy goal at its very core which overrides the interests of the actual copyright holder, and is also the only thing that actually justifies there being a copyright at all. Should licensure conflict with this, the policy must triumph.
No, he's about right. If you go to your lawyer to get legal advice, he can be held liable for it. His ability to speak freely is totally irrelevant. No one is saying that you cannot say whatever you want -- only that you may be held liable if it is injurious. (e.g. if your lawyer told you to do something criminal, or which harmed you in a proceeding)
Frankly, and I say this because I've been doing some work with consumer fraud recently, courts simply do not like a caveat emptor approach to business. They prefer an ethic of honesty and frankness that favors the consumer, and aren't afraid to enforce it.
There have always been limits to the breadth of free speech. It doesn't protect you in cases on treason, or libel, or slander, or incitement, or copyright infringement, or a host of other things. It's extensive, but it is not intended to shield actual wrong doers after they have done some actual harm.
Nice try, but no. A copy is the program itself, regardless of medium. Otherwise 17 USC 117 would be useless -- it would allow you to copy the medium but not the content. Since it is assumed that laws that are moot are not passed, the meaning must clearly be that it covers the actual program itself.
Ah, see, your post is so riddled with errors that it actually is offending me.
1) It is not yet determined whether, and to what extent EULAs are actually enforcable. Thus, licensing software may in fact be selling software, regardless of what the publisher says or wants.
For example, a license that is ever-lasting and is non-revokable is pretty likely just a sale; it resembles a sale too closely to be anything but.
2) Even if a piece of software were not licensed -- and there's plenty of that even if we made the big assumption that EULAs are valid -- buying a copy in no way means that you bought the copyright. Think of books: you buy a book, no one claims that this is a contractual arrangement, but you do not buy the copyright, i.e. the ability to publish that book, at the same time. This is LONG settled.
3) The GPL only applies if you want to redistribute the covered software. If you're just using it, it has no license -- it's given away without encumberances. (though there may be a disclaimer of warranty) Rejecting the GPL has no effect on your ability to use the software.
Depending on what it is you're doing, copying is entirely legal and in fact, desirable and encouraged. For example, it is beneficial to be able to rip cd tracks to mp3. This is not theft in the least.
And in fact, frankly, I object strenuously to self help measures such as these by copyright holders. They are not courts, they cannot judge what is and is not legal copying, particularly when you factor in that the copyright will ultimately expire. This is an attempt to cheat the public, to contravene the goals of the copyright laws. (i.e. solely to promote the public good)
Were it up to me, attempting to employ a base, mechanical system that didn't 100% accurately mirror the outcome under the law for any given situation, even taking into account changes over time in the statutory and case laws, would be sufficient to require that the copyright be voided. Self help and copyright would be mutually exclusive.
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I don't really agree with you, save for the need for reform. I feel that this may be because you're missing to some extent the purpose of copyright. You've almost got it, just not quite.
Bluntly, the purpose of copyright is not to compensate artists, nor to reward publishers, nor to facilitate censorship. (at least not copyright laws in the tradition of the Statute of Anne, such as U.S. copyright law)
The sole purpose is to benefit society. Any copyright law is fine, if society recieves a _net_ benefit. No copyright law is tolerable if society receives a net loss.
The standard for measuring benefit and loss are based upon what society's goals are.
First, remember that these goals are shared by _everyone_. Even authors are members of society first; their interests as readers and authors are promoted just as is everyone else's.
Anyway, society has an interest in being able to acquire, change, and disseminate information freely. This ranges from getting free books, to writing books based on other people's books, reprinting books verbatim, etc.
There is also a distinct goal of having that information span both a wide breadth of different subjects, and a great depth of variation and exploration of each individual topic.
Copyright is an exercise in promoting those two public interests as much as possible.
Artists benefit from being able to rely upon works of previous artists in their own works. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those that came before.
But it is generally beleived that a limited monopoly, preventing a lot of 'first interest' exercises, encourages the production of more broad books, and some deep books. And furthermore that this satisfaction of the 'second interest' is sufficient to not just make up for the harm caused to the first, but actually leave people in a better position than they were in had they not done this at all.
Going too far would cause a negative public balance though, which is unacceptable, and would impair authors, since they all are readers too, and all tend to combine breadth and depth in their works. A truly original book, original in all ways, would be gibberish, after all.
The main problem is that while we were supposed to be looking for the optimal balance point where the public is as greatly served as possible, we've wound up overshooting, and having a negative impact. Mere correction is sufficient; the underlying system is well enough.
(Incidentally, what you're talking about is compulsory licensing. You see it in music a bit; isn't all that useful. Since you'd kill off fair use and parody among other things, I can't really endorse your proposal.
Basically, yeah. No one ever said that it was safe living in a free society. We have a name for countries where there are strict security measures in place -- police states. Curiously, they're often rampant with crime and corruption too, make the people living there extremely unhappy, and are looked down upon by, well, almost everyone.
That doesn't mean to suggest that we should get rid of the police, simply that you should abandon the goal of never having future terrorist incidents by dint of foiling terrorists at every turn. Alternative methods may work better, such as not being much of a target.
Hell, Israel's just done a bang-up job of foiling terrorism by cracking down on perpetrators so far, huh. You just never hear about terrorism there, what with all of their security measures. Canada on the other hand, which is quite lax, boy, that's just a war zone.
How much security does that provide, however? Photo ID checks were in place prior to 9/11. There's nothing that stops terrorists from getting issued valid ID. The ID check procedure NOW would not have stopped a one of them.
ID checks exist -- and have existed for some time -- to prevent people from reselling plane tickets. Originally the tickets were just good for a seat, and people would sell them at will. Eventually they had markings to indicate the gender of the passenger, limiting by half the number of people one could resell them to. Now they have your name, so the resale value of tickets is zero.
For some reason this serves the purposes of airlines. It hasn't got a scintilla of value from a security perspective.
Oh yes they do. There are plenty of laws that are not codified at all, and have been created by the courts, often over hundreds of years.
A lot of the law of torts, contracts, and property is common law. A lot of criminal law also descends from the common law, although that's pretty much the only area in which we no longer allow courts to make law.
I bet you've never been.
His shop in Red Bank, Jay and Bob's Secret Stash, has virtually nothing. Don't get me wrong, a cleaner, nicer comic book store never have I seen. It's got an interesting color scheme, it's not cramped, and there's a lot of neat props and such from his movies in display cases.
It's just that the selection of stuff that's not somehow related to Smith (e.g. the racks and racks of movie-based t-shirts) is quite poor.
There's not that many new comics, and most of them are from the big three, with few independents. There are hardly any back issues at all. (IIRC there were less than ten long boxes worth) The video selection is extremely small, and I don't recall that they rent. Not a hell of a lot of graphic novels either.
If I were you, I'd stick with a store that had a good selection of stuff, and was willing to deal with -- and try to promote -- anything. I'm actually in South Jersey, and while the store I shop at (Fat Jack's in Oaklyn) is, to be honest, falling apart, they've been very good with the exception of having good prices on their back issues. It's as though they've never heard of a 25-cent bin or something.
Nuku Nuku Dash (that is, the TV series) isn't really all that good. I wouldn't recommend picking it up unless it were extremely cheap and you'd already exhausted the supply of good anime out there.
Too bad really, I rather liked the OAV series.
Tokyo Kid at the Garage in Harvard Square is probably all you'll ever need for rentals. There are also a lot of good clubs in the area, particularly the MIT Anime Club.
Buying is often cheaper online however, if you shop around.
Depends.
For chattels, some courts apply a discovery rule. That is, even if you took someone's gold ring, for example, and wore it every day in public, it's not necessarily reasonable to expect someone to notice. There are a lot of gold rings out there. It isn't as though this is real property, where you can drive out to the parcel of land and see if there's been someone there.
Thus, if the discovery rule is applied, the plaintiff's clock doesn't start running until, assuming they've been diligent in trying to find the item, they actually discover its whereabouts.
Not that this is legal advice, or anything; it's not.
Good point re: the stars... though Toren's origins leave open the possibility of having more advanced knowledge than mainstream Federation science. After all, he was the only one who could build the trilithium stellar probes, and certainly the Romulans never would've passed along that kind of technology to Klingon rebels if they'd known what it could be used for.
/. has ever been witness to.
So I don't think it especially counts for much, kind of like the Tox Uthat from the 27th century (which could remotely turn off stellar nuclear fusion).
As for your other assertions, they're just crap.
Data the only non-homicidal legitimately intelligent artificial life form that's lasted more than a single episode to date. SW droid technology is commonplace. Sanity is a solved problem (no Nomads, V'Ger's, or M5's there), which counts for a lot, and they seem to be just as capable of intelligence, emotion, etc. There are different social issues -- droids are thought of as property and seem to have a slave mentality, and no one really pays much attention to them (which leads me to suspect that their technology has gotten sufficiently advanced that very few non-droids know how everything works. Witness the hyperdrive repair efforts in ESB). But they're hardly a nearly-unique product of mad science, as Data is.
Ditto for hyperdrives -- it's just a plot device, so the mechanics don't really tell us anything interesting. Just because 'precise calculations are required' doesn't mean that it's not faster. The _distances_ traveled and the time it takes are how we know its faster.
(and besides which, ST ships with warp drives can travel many many times faster than c, but still can't safely drive into/through stars, black holes, etc.)
Again of course, this is probably one of the more pathetic debates
The Planet Eater was an apparently automated ship in the original Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine." It looked kind of like an empty ice cream cone. It broke apart planets, and the bits went into the open end and were destroyed, probably converted into fuel.
;)
Naturally, Kirk and co. manage to blow it up.
A lot of it is, but not all of it. Their droid and computer technology seem to be pretty much on par -- though there are significantly different societal attitudes towards droids.
;)
But the biggie is the hyperdrive. SW ships routinely cross the galaxy in very short periods of time... I'd think somewhere in the neighborhood of a few days. (there's a map floating around on the web -- it indicates that Tatooine is near the edge of the galaxy, while Coruscant is on the opposite side of the galactic core. This corresponds to the mention of Tatooine as being in 'the outer rim' and Coruscant impliedly being central, like Trantor) A journey like that for a Federation ship would take generations, which was the basis for ST Voyager.
Similarly, there are some differences in weaponry -- a Death Star superlaser has destructive potential unrivalled by anything in ST besides the Planet Eater, or possibly the Borg. The Federation might try building an antimatter bomb to achieve the same effect, but that's rather crude compared to a beam weapon.
Christ I'm a pathetic geek.
he could do both if we adopted a communication protocol that relied on I Love Lucy reruns.
If you go to a library and check out a book that's out of copyright, you can _definately_ copy it.
Hell, where do you think all these different editions of Shakespeare come from?
Indeed, copying is highly desirable; it is copyrights that prevent it that are not, unless they somehow promote copying in the long run. (which is the point)
Just read Martyn's post -- he's hitting all the right marks, and I don't have time for anything longer.
Fair use is more expansive than that. It permits parodies that are closely based on some other material, for example. Really it is a catch all for anything that is a socially desirable, and thus permitted infringement of copyright.
I haven't studied Australian copyright law, but I'd imagine they'd have something a little more like that. (though perhaps, as with the U.S. it's common law, and not a statute)
I've never heard of U.S. currency being called monopoly money. That's what we call foreign money, _because_ it's often vividly colored. (and silly, because it's foreign ;)
Perhaps everyone calls foreign currency monopoly money -- that's the best explanation I can come up with.
I would point out though, that the portraits and pictures on the backs are quite distinguishable. There are other things to look at than the color.
The problem is that you can own the copy, and you can own the copyright, but the work itself isn't something that's ownable. So it's meaningless to say 'we own the program.'
First, because it is harmful to the users and is contrary to copyright policy goals. Second because again it doesn't make sense in light of most of the remainder of copyright law.
Video collages are a reason. Sampling the audio. Capturing excerpts for review, etc. Playing on different players (which is basically an application of space shifting). Parody, e.g. by redubbing the video with different audio as in 'What's Up Tiger Lily.'
There's a wealth of reasons to do so.
Of course the best is that when the copyright expires -- and it already has for some, if there was a copyright at all -- we can do literally anything we like with it.
Who's saying that it's tolerated elsewhere?
I really loathe attempts to impair fair use, post-term no-holds barred copying, various types of shifting, etc.
If something is inherent in the medium, e.g. the way that you need a CD player for a CD, or that VCR tapes degrade over time, that's acceptable. Deliberately designing something like that in is merely an attempt to cheat the public.
I'm familiar with the bundles of sticks theory of property. However, note that 1) all theories of property rights today are utilitarian theories. That is, property rights, and even the very concept of property itself exist because it is more beneficial to society to do so than it would be otherwise. (c.f. the tragedy of the commons) 2) Copyright is especially utilitarian in nature, and has a public policy goal at its very core which overrides the interests of the actual copyright holder, and is also the only thing that actually justifies there being a copyright at all. Should licensure conflict with this, the policy must triumph.
No, he's about right. If you go to your lawyer to get legal advice, he can be held liable for it. His ability to speak freely is totally irrelevant. No one is saying that you cannot say whatever you want -- only that you may be held liable if it is injurious. (e.g. if your lawyer told you to do something criminal, or which harmed you in a proceeding)
Frankly, and I say this because I've been doing some work with consumer fraud recently, courts simply do not like a caveat emptor approach to business. They prefer an ethic of honesty and frankness that favors the consumer, and aren't afraid to enforce it.
There have always been limits to the breadth of free speech. It doesn't protect you in cases on treason, or libel, or slander, or incitement, or copyright infringement, or a host of other things. It's extensive, but it is not intended to shield actual wrong doers after they have done some actual harm.
Nice try, but no. A copy is the program itself, regardless of medium. Otherwise 17 USC 117 would be useless -- it would allow you to copy the medium but not the content. Since it is assumed that laws that are moot are not passed, the meaning must clearly be that it covers the actual program itself.
Ah, see, your post is so riddled with errors that it actually is offending me.
1) It is not yet determined whether, and to what extent EULAs are actually enforcable. Thus, licensing software may in fact be selling software, regardless of what the publisher says or wants.
For example, a license that is ever-lasting and is non-revokable is pretty likely just a sale; it resembles a sale too closely to be anything but.
2) Even if a piece of software were not licensed -- and there's plenty of that even if we made the big assumption that EULAs are valid -- buying a copy in no way means that you bought the copyright. Think of books: you buy a book, no one claims that this is a contractual arrangement, but you do not buy the copyright, i.e. the ability to publish that book, at the same time. This is LONG settled.
3) The GPL only applies if you want to redistribute the covered software. If you're just using it, it has no license -- it's given away without encumberances. (though there may be a disclaimer of warranty) Rejecting the GPL has no effect on your ability to use the software.
Who knows. I would hope so, but then, I'd hope that the DMCA generally is struck down.
It is not okay.
Depending on what it is you're doing, copying is entirely legal and in fact, desirable and encouraged. For example, it is beneficial to be able to rip cd tracks to mp3. This is not theft in the least.
And in fact, frankly, I object strenuously to self help measures such as these by copyright holders. They are not courts, they cannot judge what is and is not legal copying, particularly when you factor in that the copyright will ultimately expire. This is an attempt to cheat the public, to contravene the goals of the copyright laws. (i.e. solely to promote the public good)
Were it up to me, attempting to employ a base, mechanical system that didn't 100% accurately mirror the outcome under the law for any given situation, even taking into account changes over time in the statutory and case laws, would be sufficient to require that the copyright be voided. Self help and copyright would be mutually exclusive.
'Course there's a problem with that anyway, which is that depending on the circumstances, copying is perfectly legal too.