Most books don't get adapted into films. Don't try to make general rules to suit the edge cases. Otherwise you may as well rewrite the tax code to charge everyone a flat million dollars a year, which we can all easily afford since a handful of people win the lottery. (In fact your odds in the lottery are probably better than your odds as an author)
Instead consider that most books make the vast majority of the money they'll ever make within around 18 months of publication in a given medium. This is why publishers stagger the publication of hardback and paperback editions; they view the different formats as a mere excuse to justify a rerelease of the book at a new price point without upsetting their better customers who buy books earlier at higher prices.
Indeed, trademarks have nothing at all to do with innovation, but they were never supposed to, and never billed as such.
Trademarks are basically for consumer protection and fairness in the marketplace.
If a can of soda bears the COCA-COLA mark, a consumer can rely on that mark to indicate that the quality of the soda in the can is consistent with the quality of the soda in all other cans also marked that way (whether the quality is good or bad isn't relevant; just that it's consistent). It would be bad for consumers if you bought such a can expecting to get Coke, but instead you got something gross like Mello Yello.
And it would be bad for competitors in the market if they could deceitfully use the reputation of another in order to sell goods or services. E.g. selling otherwise undrinkable Mello Yello to unsuspecting rubes by putting it in Coke cans.
Trademarks are actually vastly older than patents or copyrights (IIRC some wine marks were found in the ruins of Pompeii) and while there have been abuses recently -- dilution is a rotten idea, for example, as is the use of trademark law against resellers of legitimate goods -- it has traditionally worked out okay.
I agree, and that's how copyright used to be -- you didn't hold copyright if you didn't register.
True -- for published works, anyway. And as I said, what constitutes publication for this purpose really ought to be expanded.
But why "not so trivial that it requires no thought at all"? IMO copyrights should be a easy to register as possible.
I think we're talking about two slightly different things here. I agree that it should be extremely simple to perform the task of registering a copyright and filing for a renewal term (and recording transfers, which ought to be mandatory). The Copyright Office ought to take all reasonable steps it can to help authors and copyright holders with the drudgery of nevertheless important paperwork.
However, what I was referring to was the decision by the author (or copyright holder) as to whether or not to even seek a copyright (or renewal term). Copyrights should not be handed out automatically, and should not be so trivial to get that they can effectively be had automatically (e.g. a photo app on a smartphone that automatically filed a registration for every picture taken).
Remember, the purpose of copyrights is to encourage the creation and publication of works that, if there were no copyright, would not be created and published. Most works don't qualify; you probably would have written your reply here even if copyright were totally unavailable for it, just as people would probably still take photos of cats doing funny things even if copyright were not available for that either. It's impossible to read the mind of the author at the time he created and published a work and know whether or not copyright played a role. So we have to get them to identify those works for us. If copyright is totally automatic, we can't tell which works deserve it and which don't. If copyright can be rendered automatic by authors (like the hypothetical app above), the same problem crops up.
The typical solution has been to charge a fee for copyright registrations and renewals. The fee should not be viewed as a profit center for the government -- in fact, 100% of it should really be turned around and used to fund public (uncopyrighted) art projects. And it should not be bigger than necessary, but it should be large enough that for every work, an author or copyright holder must think about whether or not he wants a copyright on the work badly enough that he is willing to pay for it. A dollar (constantly updated for inflation) might be enough -- no one is going to pay a dollar for every blog post or phone photo, and even big companies that could afford to register everything are going to pinch pennies enough that things like internal emails, memos and presentations won't get registered.
Rather than requiring yearly renewal until the time limit, which would make the process even slower (it's about six months now) and more costly to taxpayers, make it so that a year after the publication is out of print it becomes part of the public domain.
Well, the Copyright Office should be funded sufficiently to make the process a breeze. Given that a properly functioning copyright system is supposed to provide a benefit to the people -- including tax payers -- I wouldn't begrudge the financing of it. It would probably amount to pennies per tax payer, if that much, to have a really first-class, mostly automated bureaucracy for this.
As for your suggestion, I don't care for it. How is anyone other than the publisher going to know whether the work is still in print? The problem is not substantially different than having to do copyright searches now for works where the copyright holder is not known. A central registry where the burden of keeping records up to date is on the party that is in the best position to know, and who has the greatest incentive to do it -- the copyright holder -- is far more user friendly. Further, with print-on-demand services and the Internet, it might be too easy fo
Really appropriate copyright duration depends on the work, and really the author. Five years may be too short for a movie or certain books, but it is too long for a daily newspaper or game show episode. And any copyright at all is too long for the vast majority of posts on the Internet.
What copyright really needs is a return to an opt-in system: unpublished works (where publication is defined more broadly than at present) might have a minimal, relatively short-lived automatic copyright to protect authors from having their manuscripts pirated while they prepare a work for publication. Published works, especially if they're published simultaneously or nearly so, as they're created (e.g. a live broadcast), might get a short grace period to get registered. But generally, published works should have to be registered by the author to get a copyright; it should be an affirmative claim, not automatic. Thusly most works will be in the public domain straight away because the author doesn't care about a copyright enough to seek one out. (It shouldn't be hard to get one, either, though not so trivial that it requires no thought at all) Authors that do care, will get them, presumably. Then add in annual renewals up to the maximum length (which might differ per class of work) so as to assess whether the copyright holder still cares or not. Failure to care about a works copyright as evidenced by a failure to register or renew a work is a good reason to not have it be copyrighted.
I need to go through the actual opinion still, so I'm just relying on what others have said at this point -- and what sort of crazy judge issues a 350 page opinion for a fairly simple infringement case â½ --but I'm very concerned about the third factor analysis.
The fair use statute merely requires that courts consider the amount and substantiality of the use in determining if it is fair. As you say, there are no numbers in the statute; depending on the circumstances, this factor can come out on the favor of the infringer even if all of the work is used. Any attempt to add guidance in the form of a magic percentage will only come at the cost of flexibility. The latter is what's really important to fair use, though, as it is meant to cover all manner of unforeseen but fair uses. It is not just for academics.
Much worse, though, is that the court seems to find that the other factors all weigh strongly in favor of the defendant: the use is scholarly, it is of factual material, it has no material impact on the value or market for the works. Fair use isn't a matter of tallying up factors and giving the win to whoever has the most. The analysis is just supposed to help determine if the use is fair; courts can consider other evidence too, and can weight factors unevenly, or do basically anything else if it helps to decide the issue.
Even if the court finds that sometimes the third factor goes to plaintiffs, it is very strange that it should be enough for the use to not be fair. I would have thought for sure that it would be fair regardless, given the other factors favoring the defendant. Indeed, look at the Betamax case: fair use time shifting (not all time shifting is fair use, mind) loses on the first three factors, and only succeeds on the fourth, and arguably might not even do that do much in today's market, as compared with 1984's. Space shifting of music from CD to mp3 loaded on a handheld player likewise fails on most factors, yet was still fair use in the Diamond case.
I'm concerned that the court misunderstood and misapplied fair use here. The defendants really ought to consider appealing the portion of the case pertaining to the works they were found not to have fairly used.
Lacking the freedom to casually move around the world to follow jobs as easily as capital can move around, we are all compelled to seek the best situations not only for ourselves, but our neighbors and fellow citizens and residents in our polities.
So I don't bear a foreigner any ill will for trying to get work, and I wish him the best of luck, but neither do I want to see his success come only at some cost to someone in my country. If forced to choose between them, I'd choose my countryman. I don't expect anything different in return.
But I'd certainly be happier if the rules were changed so that everyone can enjoy a healthy, happy life instead of having to fight one another. Feel free to make a suggestion as to how to accomplish this.
What makes you think so? I'm very much in favor of reducing pollution and the use of fuel, but this is for environmental and efficiency reasons. If cars (and a car centric lifestyle) were not harmful or wasteful, I really wouldn't give a crap.
Remind me why we allow them to move jobs overseas? Free markets are fine if they produce a greater benefit to the people than any alternative, but if they don't, we shouldn't pause for a moment to intervene to ensure a more useful outcome. A variety of options present themselves, including strengthening unions (whilst keeping out corruption), limiting the freedom of movement of capital (and perhaps the accumulation of over large amounts of the same), weakening the dollar, taxing imports from countries that don't adhere to environmental / labor / civil liberties standards similar or better than our own, reforming the government to discard odious debt, etc.
Working out possible solutions and taking action strikes me as better than your policy, which seems to be to do nothing, and complain that you're all out of ideas.
Government does produce wealth, by tackling matters of public good which the private sector is unwilling or unable to handle, and by dealing with market failures, and by regulating private entities that are unwilling or unable to act in a restrained manner. However, government should not act for its own benefit, but instead for the benefit of its citizenry, residents, and others, somewhat like a non-profit organization, so this might not be apparent to you.
I suspect that has more to do with the private sector getting shittier, than with the public sector getting better. Why not raise private wages and benefits to match or exceed those in the public sector instead?
I would first argue that it's not a taking, as patents are not property. But there are some strategies besides that. Personally, I'd suggest a combination of statutory licensing and rendering certain claims for infringement non-actionable.
First, there are ethics rules as to the size of a contingency fee. Usually they top out at around 1/3d, more or less. However, if the case is lost, the client owes the attorney nothing. (Otherwise, what would be the point?)
Second, you need to be the plaintiff, which may not be the case depending on how the matter is structured.
Third, now you're just relying on the still-finite resources of the lawyers. A big enough opponent can still conduct the outspending strategy successfully. (Because while a lawyer handles a contingency case and awaits a possible big award, he still has bills to pay, and is not spending time on as many cases that can pay sooner). The book (and movie) 'A Civil Action' shows an example of plaintiff's attorneys going broke against a big opponent.
It is likely to be substantially less than that. Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. Unless he copied 300,000 different movies, some of them will be the same and not get counted twice. Had he only made 300,000 copies of the same movie (better have a lot of replay value) it would only be one infringement for the purpose of calculating statutory damages. You may want to look over 17 USC 504, which is the relevant statute.
Well, willful copyright infringement (willfulness is the actual standard; here it basically means with knowledge or recklessly without knowledge) is a very low standard (basically any direct infringement case worth suing over will qualify easily) and is only relevant with regard to statutory damages. Willful infringement merely raises the upper limit of the damages that may be awarded from $30,000 to $150,000 per eligible work. So not more than statutory damages, just potentially higher statutory damages. (Or the rightsholder could opt for actual damages and profits, but it wouldn't happen in a case like this -- only where one member of the industry sues another does that have more potential for big awards)
The first amendment explicitly excepts cases where your speech causes harm to others.
No it doesn't. Here is what it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Anything else is just a matter of interpretation or skirting around due process. A literalist would not see any limits as to what speech is protected.
Also your fire in a theater example is no longer good law. You'll want to read Brandenberg instead.
Copyright is kind of a misleading name. It's not just about making more copies; it's also about public performances, public displays, derivative works, and in this case distribution (including importation, although resale is really at the heart of the thing).
17 USC 106 covers the major rights that compromise copyright.
Oh? My understanding was that most other countries use the Berne Convention, and it has some restrictions on importation, at Art. 13 and 16. Not the same rules, but rules nevertheless.
And excepting obscene works, and matters of national security, we don't have bans. The former exception has been eroding for some time, though there's a ways to go yet; the latter, sadly, seems to be expanding. And we don't have mandatory ratings for anything. Still, anything other than absolute free speech is probably indefensible, and should certainly be treated with extreme suspicion.
As for exporting laws, that's really less about our country per se, and more about businesses that are attempting to write laws for everyone, and they're manipulating our diplomats to push them on you, followed by manipulating our legislators by giving us a fait accompli treaty that they're strongly urged to ratify.
Personally, I'd be happy to abolish all copyright treaties, and replace them with a single rule of unilateral national treatment, and an informal agreement to avoid mutually exclusive copyright laws. I'm totally against minimum standards.
Being able to be plugged into a tv was one of the outstanding features of the Apple II from very early on. You'd need a Sup 'R' Mod if you didn't have a composite input on your tv, but this was no obstacle.
IIRC the guy who made the things (per an agreement with Apple, who didn't want to bother with the FCC certification for it) sold a few hundred thousand of them.
No, it is very clearly a copyright case. It was questioned as to whether or not first sale applied here, and the courts so far have determined that it does not. It's got nothing to do with import duties or the like.
Anyway, here's a link to the actual appellate opinion, so that you can read it and fully understand the situation yourself.
Exactly! There are legal copies, made in a totally legal fashion, and bought in a totally legal fashion.
No, not necessarily.
Copyright law in the US functions by granting limited monopolies to copyright holders, which allows them to charge higher-than-market prices for copies of their works. (I'll skip over the incentives and policies that go into that, but for now just accept that this is what we want to allow.) The monopoly they are granted allows them to take legal action against pirates, because pirates typically sell copies for less, and thus undercut the monopoly.
If no unlawfully made copies could be made in the US, but we freely allowed imports from countries where, say, there were no copyright laws whatsoever, then the same sort of undercutting would occur.
Thus we might want to distinguish between whether or not the imported copies are lawfully made pursuant to the laws of the place where they were manufactured, or whether they were lawfully made if US copyright law had applied at the time and place where they were manufactured.
I don't think there's much sense in allowing imports of copies of works that are copyrighted here but in the public domain elsewhere. OTOH, if the original copyright holder in both places is the same person, and any later licensing or assignments were aboveboard by our standards, then the arbitrage doesn't really bother me.
Why the heck do they call imported copyrighted goods (DVDs from another region, etc) the "grey market" when it's black-letter illegal?
Generally grey market goods are imported lawfully (depending on the exact circumstances, there may be ways to do it) but without the authorization or involvement of the proper manufacturer or rights holder; sometimes directly contrary to their wishes, in fact.
And in practice, where, as here, the goods are legitimate in provenance but the market is illegal for perhaps trivial reasons, people tend not to care about the legality so much.
So? Copyright is a strict liability statute. It doesn't matter whether you intended to infringe, or whether you reasonably did everything you could to avoid infringing, or whether you were totally unaware of the law at all.
IIRC the defendant in this case did make some informal inquiries as to whether nor not he could legally do this. I guess he didn't get any good advice (or disregarded it if he did).
If he went to Thailand. Bought the books there. Brought it back to USA.
Anything illegal yet?
Once he is done with his class, he sold the book.
If the books are copyrighted in the US, it's illegal to import them. There is an exception if it's for his own personal use and not for resale (I'm unwilling to delve too deep into the facts of the case, but it appears that he imported multiple copies of works, and was not merely selling his old books once he was done with them; feel free to point out anything to the contrary, however).
Whether it was originally his intention or not, he ultimately did resell the books, and this is also illegal unless some relevant exception to copyright applies, such as First Sale. Whether or not First Sale applied to these books was the core issue in the case, and the courts so far have concluded that it did not, due to their interpretation of some ambitious language in the statute.
Well, that's the argument. First Sale is at 17 USC 109, and the question is whether it applies to these copies.
Personally, I would say that it does, provided that had US law applied in the place and time where the copies were made, they would have been made lawfully. The court here seems to disagree, and only wants to apply First Sale to copies manufactured domestically.
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Most books don't get adapted into films. Don't try to make general rules to suit the edge cases. Otherwise you may as well rewrite the tax code to charge everyone a flat million dollars a year, which we can all easily afford since a handful of people win the lottery. (In fact your odds in the lottery are probably better than your odds as an author)
Instead consider that most books make the vast majority of the money they'll ever make within around 18 months of publication in a given medium. This is why publishers stagger the publication of hardback and paperback editions; they view the different formats as a mere excuse to justify a rerelease of the book at a new price point without upsetting their better customers who buy books earlier at higher prices.
Indeed, trademarks have nothing at all to do with innovation, but they were never supposed to, and never billed as such.
Trademarks are basically for consumer protection and fairness in the marketplace.
If a can of soda bears the COCA-COLA mark, a consumer can rely on that mark to indicate that the quality of the soda in the can is consistent with the quality of the soda in all other cans also marked that way (whether the quality is good or bad isn't relevant; just that it's consistent). It would be bad for consumers if you bought such a can expecting to get Coke, but instead you got something gross like Mello Yello.
And it would be bad for competitors in the market if they could deceitfully use the reputation of another in order to sell goods or services. E.g. selling otherwise undrinkable Mello Yello to unsuspecting rubes by putting it in Coke cans.
Trademarks are actually vastly older than patents or copyrights (IIRC some wine marks were found in the ruins of Pompeii) and while there have been abuses recently -- dilution is a rotten idea, for example, as is the use of trademark law against resellers of legitimate goods -- it has traditionally worked out okay.
I agree, and that's how copyright used to be -- you didn't hold copyright if you didn't register.
True -- for published works, anyway. And as I said, what constitutes publication for this purpose really ought to be expanded.
But why "not so trivial that it requires no thought at all"? IMO copyrights should be a easy to register as possible.
I think we're talking about two slightly different things here. I agree that it should be extremely simple to perform the task of registering a copyright and filing for a renewal term (and recording transfers, which ought to be mandatory). The Copyright Office ought to take all reasonable steps it can to help authors and copyright holders with the drudgery of nevertheless important paperwork.
However, what I was referring to was the decision by the author (or copyright holder) as to whether or not to even seek a copyright (or renewal term). Copyrights should not be handed out automatically, and should not be so trivial to get that they can effectively be had automatically (e.g. a photo app on a smartphone that automatically filed a registration for every picture taken).
Remember, the purpose of copyrights is to encourage the creation and publication of works that, if there were no copyright, would not be created and published. Most works don't qualify; you probably would have written your reply here even if copyright were totally unavailable for it, just as people would probably still take photos of cats doing funny things even if copyright were not available for that either. It's impossible to read the mind of the author at the time he created and published a work and know whether or not copyright played a role. So we have to get them to identify those works for us. If copyright is totally automatic, we can't tell which works deserve it and which don't. If copyright can be rendered automatic by authors (like the hypothetical app above), the same problem crops up.
The typical solution has been to charge a fee for copyright registrations and renewals. The fee should not be viewed as a profit center for the government -- in fact, 100% of it should really be turned around and used to fund public (uncopyrighted) art projects. And it should not be bigger than necessary, but it should be large enough that for every work, an author or copyright holder must think about whether or not he wants a copyright on the work badly enough that he is willing to pay for it. A dollar (constantly updated for inflation) might be enough -- no one is going to pay a dollar for every blog post or phone photo, and even big companies that could afford to register everything are going to pinch pennies enough that things like internal emails, memos and presentations won't get registered.
Rather than requiring yearly renewal until the time limit, which would make the process even slower (it's about six months now) and more costly to taxpayers, make it so that a year after the publication is out of print it becomes part of the public domain.
Well, the Copyright Office should be funded sufficiently to make the process a breeze. Given that a properly functioning copyright system is supposed to provide a benefit to the people -- including tax payers -- I wouldn't begrudge the financing of it. It would probably amount to pennies per tax payer, if that much, to have a really first-class, mostly automated bureaucracy for this.
As for your suggestion, I don't care for it. How is anyone other than the publisher going to know whether the work is still in print? The problem is not substantially different than having to do copyright searches now for works where the copyright holder is not known. A central registry where the burden of keeping records up to date is on the party that is in the best position to know, and who has the greatest incentive to do it -- the copyright holder -- is far more user friendly. Further, with print-on-demand services and the Internet, it might be too easy fo
Really appropriate copyright duration depends on the work, and really the author. Five years may be too short for a movie or certain books, but it is too long for a daily newspaper or game show episode. And any copyright at all is too long for the vast majority of posts on the Internet.
What copyright really needs is a return to an opt-in system: unpublished works (where publication is defined more broadly than at present) might have a minimal, relatively short-lived automatic copyright to protect authors from having their manuscripts pirated while they prepare a work for publication. Published works, especially if they're published simultaneously or nearly so, as they're created (e.g. a live broadcast), might get a short grace period to get registered. But generally, published works should have to be registered by the author to get a copyright; it should be an affirmative claim, not automatic. Thusly most works will be in the public domain straight away because the author doesn't care about a copyright enough to seek one out. (It shouldn't be hard to get one, either, though not so trivial that it requires no thought at all) Authors that do care, will get them, presumably. Then add in annual renewals up to the maximum length (which might differ per class of work) so as to assess whether the copyright holder still cares or not. Failure to care about a works copyright as evidenced by a failure to register or renew a work is a good reason to not have it be copyrighted.
I need to go through the actual opinion still, so I'm just relying on what others have said at this point -- and what sort of crazy judge issues a 350 page opinion for a fairly simple infringement case â½ --but I'm very concerned about the third factor analysis.
The fair use statute merely requires that courts consider the amount and substantiality of the use in determining if it is fair. As you say, there are no numbers in the statute; depending on the circumstances, this factor can come out on the favor of the infringer even if all of the work is used. Any attempt to add guidance in the form of a magic percentage will only come at the cost of flexibility. The latter is what's really important to fair use, though, as it is meant to cover all manner of unforeseen but fair uses. It is not just for academics.
Much worse, though, is that the court seems to find that the other factors all weigh strongly in favor of the defendant: the use is scholarly, it is of factual material, it has no material impact on the value or market for the works. Fair use isn't a matter of tallying up factors and giving the win to whoever has the most. The analysis is just supposed to help determine if the use is fair; courts can consider other evidence too, and can weight factors unevenly, or do basically anything else if it helps to decide the issue.
Even if the court finds that sometimes the third factor goes to plaintiffs, it is very strange that it should be enough for the use to not be fair. I would have thought for sure that it would be fair regardless, given the other factors favoring the defendant. Indeed, look at the Betamax case: fair use time shifting (not all time shifting is fair use, mind) loses on the first three factors, and only succeeds on the fourth, and arguably might not even do that do much in today's market, as compared with 1984's. Space shifting of music from CD to mp3 loaded on a handheld player likewise fails on most factors, yet was still fair use in the Diamond case.
I'm concerned that the court misunderstood and misapplied fair use here. The defendants really ought to consider appealing the portion of the case pertaining to the works they were found not to have fairly used.
It's not racism, it's civic nationalism.
Lacking the freedom to casually move around the world to follow jobs as easily as capital can move around, we are all compelled to seek the best situations not only for ourselves, but our neighbors and fellow citizens and residents in our polities.
So I don't bear a foreigner any ill will for trying to get work, and I wish him the best of luck, but neither do I want to see his success come only at some cost to someone in my country. If forced to choose between them, I'd choose my countryman. I don't expect anything different in return.
But I'd certainly be happier if the rules were changed so that everyone can enjoy a healthy, happy life instead of having to fight one another. Feel free to make a suggestion as to how to accomplish this.
What makes you think so? I'm very much in favor of reducing pollution and the use of fuel, but this is for environmental and efficiency reasons. If cars (and a car centric lifestyle) were not harmful or wasteful, I really wouldn't give a crap.
Remind me why we allow them to move jobs overseas? Free markets are fine if they produce a greater benefit to the people than any alternative, but if they don't, we shouldn't pause for a moment to intervene to ensure a more useful outcome. A variety of options present themselves, including strengthening unions (whilst keeping out corruption), limiting the freedom of movement of capital (and perhaps the accumulation of over large amounts of the same), weakening the dollar, taxing imports from countries that don't adhere to environmental / labor / civil liberties standards similar or better than our own, reforming the government to discard odious debt, etc.
Working out possible solutions and taking action strikes me as better than your policy, which seems to be to do nothing, and complain that you're all out of ideas.
Government does produce wealth, by tackling matters of public good which the private sector is unwilling or unable to handle, and by dealing with market failures, and by regulating private entities that are unwilling or unable to act in a restrained manner. However, government should not act for its own benefit, but instead for the benefit of its citizenry, residents, and others, somewhat like a non-profit organization, so this might not be apparent to you.
I suspect that has more to do with the private sector getting shittier, than with the public sector getting better. Why not raise private wages and benefits to match or exceed those in the public sector instead?
I would first argue that it's not a taking, as patents are not property. But there are some strategies besides that. Personally, I'd suggest a combination of statutory licensing and rendering certain claims for infringement non-actionable.
First, there are ethics rules as to the size of a contingency fee. Usually they top out at around 1/3d, more or less. However, if the case is lost, the client owes the attorney nothing. (Otherwise, what would be the point?)
Second, you need to be the plaintiff, which may not be the case depending on how the matter is structured.
Third, now you're just relying on the still-finite resources of the lawyers. A big enough opponent can still conduct the outspending strategy successfully. (Because while a lawyer handles a contingency case and awaits a possible big award, he still has bills to pay, and is not spending time on as many cases that can pay sooner). The book (and movie) 'A Civil Action' shows an example of plaintiff's attorneys going broke against a big opponent.
It is likely to be substantially less than that. Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. Unless he copied 300,000 different movies, some of them will be the same and not get counted twice. Had he only made 300,000 copies of the same movie (better have a lot of replay value) it would only be one infringement for the purpose of calculating statutory damages. You may want to look over 17 USC 504, which is the relevant statute.
Anyway, I don't recall saying it was reasonable.
Well, willful copyright infringement (willfulness is the actual standard; here it basically means with knowledge or recklessly without knowledge) is a very low standard (basically any direct infringement case worth suing over will qualify easily) and is only relevant with regard to statutory damages. Willful infringement merely raises the upper limit of the damages that may be awarded from $30,000 to $150,000 per eligible work. So not more than statutory damages, just potentially higher statutory damages. (Or the rightsholder could opt for actual damages and profits, but it wouldn't happen in a case like this -- only where one member of the industry sues another does that have more potential for big awards)
The first amendment explicitly excepts cases where your speech causes harm to others.
No it doesn't. Here is what it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Anything else is just a matter of interpretation or skirting around due process. A literalist would not see any limits as to what speech is protected.
Also your fire in a theater example is no longer good law. You'll want to read Brandenberg instead.
Copyright is kind of a misleading name. It's not just about making more copies; it's also about public performances, public displays, derivative works, and in this case distribution (including importation, although resale is really at the heart of the thing).
17 USC 106 covers the major rights that compromise copyright.
Oh? My understanding was that most other countries use the Berne Convention, and it has some restrictions on importation, at Art. 13 and 16. Not the same rules, but rules nevertheless.
And excepting obscene works, and matters of national security, we don't have bans. The former exception has been eroding for some time, though there's a ways to go yet; the latter, sadly, seems to be expanding. And we don't have mandatory ratings for anything. Still, anything other than absolute free speech is probably indefensible, and should certainly be treated with extreme suspicion.
As for exporting laws, that's really less about our country per se, and more about businesses that are attempting to write laws for everyone, and they're manipulating our diplomats to push them on you, followed by manipulating our legislators by giving us a fait accompli treaty that they're strongly urged to ratify.
Personally, I'd be happy to abolish all copyright treaties, and replace them with a single rule of unilateral national treatment, and an informal agreement to avoid mutually exclusive copyright laws. I'm totally against minimum standards.
Being able to be plugged into a tv was one of the outstanding features of the Apple II from very early on. You'd need a Sup 'R' Mod if you didn't have a composite input on your tv, but this was no obstacle.
IIRC the guy who made the things (per an agreement with Apple, who didn't want to bother with the FCC certification for it) sold a few hundred thousand of them.
Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!
No, it is very clearly a copyright case. It was questioned as to whether or not first sale applied here, and the courts so far have determined that it does not. It's got nothing to do with import duties or the like.
Anyway, here's a link to the actual appellate opinion, so that you can read it and fully understand the situation yourself.
Or possibly the tables aren't even copyrighted, if they're a wholly uncreative compilation of facts.
Exactly! There are legal copies, made in a totally legal fashion, and bought in a totally legal fashion.
No, not necessarily.
Copyright law in the US functions by granting limited monopolies to copyright holders, which allows them to charge higher-than-market prices for copies of their works. (I'll skip over the incentives and policies that go into that, but for now just accept that this is what we want to allow.) The monopoly they are granted allows them to take legal action against pirates, because pirates typically sell copies for less, and thus undercut the monopoly.
If no unlawfully made copies could be made in the US, but we freely allowed imports from countries where, say, there were no copyright laws whatsoever, then the same sort of undercutting would occur.
Thus we might want to distinguish between whether or not the imported copies are lawfully made pursuant to the laws of the place where they were manufactured, or whether they were lawfully made if US copyright law had applied at the time and place where they were manufactured.
I don't think there's much sense in allowing imports of copies of works that are copyrighted here but in the public domain elsewhere. OTOH, if the original copyright holder in both places is the same person, and any later licensing or assignments were aboveboard by our standards, then the arbitrage doesn't really bother me.
Why the heck do they call imported copyrighted goods (DVDs from another region, etc) the "grey market" when it's black-letter illegal?
Generally grey market goods are imported lawfully (depending on the exact circumstances, there may be ways to do it) but without the authorization or involvement of the proper manufacturer or rights holder; sometimes directly contrary to their wishes, in fact.
And in practice, where, as here, the goods are legitimate in provenance but the market is illegal for perhaps trivial reasons, people tend not to care about the legality so much.
So? Copyright is a strict liability statute. It doesn't matter whether you intended to infringe, or whether you reasonably did everything you could to avoid infringing, or whether you were totally unaware of the law at all.
IIRC the defendant in this case did make some informal inquiries as to whether nor not he could legally do this. I guess he didn't get any good advice (or disregarded it if he did).
If he went to Thailand. Bought the books there. Brought it back to USA.
Anything illegal yet?
Once he is done with his class, he sold the book.
If the books are copyrighted in the US, it's illegal to import them. There is an exception if it's for his own personal use and not for resale (I'm unwilling to delve too deep into the facts of the case, but it appears that he imported multiple copies of works, and was not merely selling his old books once he was done with them; feel free to point out anything to the contrary, however).
Whether it was originally his intention or not, he ultimately did resell the books, and this is also illegal unless some relevant exception to copyright applies, such as First Sale. Whether or not First Sale applied to these books was the core issue in the case, and the courts so far have concluded that it did not, due to their interpretation of some ambitious language in the statute.
Well, that's the argument. First Sale is at 17 USC 109, and the question is whether it applies to these copies.
Personally, I would say that it does, provided that had US law applied in the place and time where the copies were made, they would have been made lawfully. The court here seems to disagree, and only wants to apply First Sale to copies manufactured domestically.