Really? I've generally found their produce to be lousy, but everything else is fine. (Assuming that they haven't decided to cancel it, which seems to happen a lot to my favorite things)
Yeah, but if I cited the actual cases, they wouldn't have that nice "once a decade" rhythm going.
Well, earlier in the 90s, they succeeded in getting the AHRA passed in the US, which quite deliberately caused the effective death of DAT and Minidisc. And anyway, by 1999 we had the actual Diamond case, where the RIAA sued the manufacturers of a handheld mp3 player and lost, and has protected that industry since.
Unfortunately for the media companies, when the music industry accepted the levy, they enshrined our right to make backups INTO EXPLICIT LAW
Do you mean in Canada? Because that isn't the case in the US, where we got a tax on CDRs and didn't get the right to make use of them.
Pick one: artifical, government-enforced/DRM-managed scarcity + first-sale doctrine, or IP-should-be-free + no used sales. Those are your logically consistent options.
Ignoring the fact that copyright is a wholly artificial construct anyway, and be written to behave however the hell people like, regardless of logical consistency, if we abandoned copyright, why would anyone care about selling used copies of creative works with regard to the works contained within?
For example, suppose that it was legal to make copies of the Mona Lisa. (Which it is, but we'll set that aside for now) Why would anyone pay for a copy?
Well, they might pay for the convenience of getting an already-made copy, rather than having to make their own. But that's no different than the usual price difference between ready-made things and doing it yourself. The work isn't the source of value here.
They might pay for a particular copy due to some special thing about the tangible object, but that's unrelated to the work itself, which could be reproduced flawlessly in numerous copies. The original painted by DaVinci is likely worth something due to its provenance. Even if you had an atom-by-atom identical copy, the original would be more valuable for historical reasons. Likewise a copy that had been given to you by a friend or relative might mean more to you than a generic identical copy. Again, the work isn't where the value is coming from.
So the used market would probably dry up if we abolished copyright, but it would be of little importance, for an inherent property of information (such as creative works) is that it is sharable. As Jefferson noted (in reference to inventions, but it applies here), sharing knowledge is like using one person's fire to light another's -- in the end, both people have fire, and no one's fire is lessened by doing it. Copyright operates, among other ways, by trying to reign this in for a limited time. But if we abolished this check on the natural tendency of information to become widespread, you'd see sharing all over the place that was functionally identical to or superior to the used market, except that there wouldn't be so much money involved.
Doesn't matter--they have the rights to copy and they're selling that copy. Therefore, under first sale doctrine, you should have the right to resell that copy. The fact that your copy was made on-demand should be completely irrelevant. If it were an on-demand printing press or CD burner, you'd have the right to resell the book or (physical) CD, even though it was generated on-the-spot. Why would it be different for a file?
Well, be careful with your definitions. In the Copyright Act, a copy (or in this case, a phonorecord) is basically defined as a material object in which a work is fixed long and well enough to be perceptible by some means. So a mere file can't be a copy, and copies can't be uploaded or downloaded via the Internet. A copy of an mp3 is really an entire hard drive, optical disc, flash drive, etc. containing the file. (And probably other files too) To engage in first sale, you'd have to sell the material object. So I guess it's no different than reselling a book, so long as you mean the paper object, and not merely the words by themselves.
ReDigi is apparently arguing that the distribution right of copyright isn't implicated since it governs the distribution of copies (i.e. material objects) and not the copying of files. They're right, actually, though courts have in practice seemed to ignore this distinction (not that I've heard of anyone making the argument before).
Of course, it isn't of much help. To 'move' a file from one material object to another, such as a user's hard drive to a server's hard drive (via plenty of RAM, cache memory, NICs, and who knows what else) involves a hell of a lot of copying, and the reproduction right of copyright governs this.
It's not enforced in the US. The Berne Convention has no legal weight here whatsoever. The problem is that having agreed to it, the US is obligated to abide by it, and therefore Congress passed a law changing our copyright laws to comply with the requirements in Berne. Our domestic laws are what are being enforced.
Congress could abolish that law today, if they liked. It would mean we'd get into a fight with the WTO, WIPO, and the other Berne members, unless we ditched Berne (and TRIPS) altogether -- which we ought to do. It's all entirely possible, but there's no will to do it.
Copyright falls under the realm of 'science,' which at the time the Constitution was written, meant knowledge, not just natural philosophy. Patents, as you seem to understand, fell under the realm of the useful arts, a term referring to applied technology. (And still alive, as patents deal with state of the art technology not anticipated by prior art or obvious to persons having ordinary skill in the art)
This is also clear from the structure of the clause itself: Science and useful Arts, Authors and Inventors, Writings and Discoveries. Always the copyright portion of the clause (Science -- Authors -- Writings), then the patent portion (useful Arts -- Inventors -- Discoveries).
Everything my searches are finding seem to indicate the copyright belongs to the person who clicked the button that caused the image to be made.
Nearly. The copyright belongs to the person(s) who caused the photograph to be taken. Usually, that's the photographer, but not necessarily. The issue is who is making the creative choices about the picture: the lighting, composition, choice of subject, etc. If the person using the camera doesn't have creative input, he doesn't get rights to the work. The case you'll want to look at to start is Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884).
One week of copyright is not much incentive to an author.
Depends on the work. A week is more than enough time for a daily newspaper, given that each issue will make most of the money it will ever make within mere hours of publication, and then be so much birdcage liner and fish wrapper.
If you're looking for data, I would suggest taking a look at the work of Rufus Pollock, who has been looking at this. I admit that the math is over my head, but this is really the sort of thing we need to be doing (perhaps also broken up by type of work -- the ideal term for a movie may be different from the ideal term for a computer program, and there's no reason at all why we need a one-size-fits-all term length).
The true crux is the immoral and illegal decision to take something without reimbursing the owner.
Well, copyright is an artificial right to privately censor other people -- to prevent them from making their own copies, distributing copies, etc. of a work. Are you suggesting that censorship is a morally good thing? Generally I consider copyright to be an amoral thing, but if morality is considered, surely the people who preserve and spread knowledge are better than the ones who want to only let other people enjoy it for a fee.
Do you really want to compare how good the modern system is for fostering creativity compared to pre copyright/patent?
This is difficult to do, however, since you'll also have to account for differences attributable to unrelated factors such as literacy rates (it's hard to write for a mass audience if they can't read), publishing technologies (expensive scribes and expensive paper vs. cheap printing and wood pulp paper), whether there is a significant amount of leisure time (possibly with inexpensive sources of natural light so that there's something better to do during it than sleep), state censorship, etc.
So sure, modern medicine came about under a patent regime, but patents date back to 1474, while modern medicine probably dates back to, oh, Jenner, who did his groundbreaking work on vaccination in 1796. And we still had all sorts of nonsense -- patent medicines, in fact! -- well into the 20th century, and we've still got all kinds of 'nutritional supplement' snake oil out there. Again, you can't give the credit simply to the existence of a patent system. It may have helped (or not -- and note also that the strength of patents waxes and wanes as the courts see fit; for much of the 20th century, patents were not all that enforceable, and thus not all that valuable or useful) but it's only a factor, and probably not even the most important one.
With regard to creative works, I'd say that the most important factor for the flourishing of creativity in recent history has been freedom of the press.
As many times as we have to tell you that they are being deprived of sales and income.
So if I burn your house down, depriving you of it, you'd say that I was a thief, not an arsonist? Or that if I killed you, depriving you of your life, that I was a thief, not a murderer?
Besides, copyright infringement is illegal and the infringer is subject to liability and criminal punishment even if it can be demonstrated that the copyright holder was deprived of no sales and no income. So clearly loss of sales and income can't be the rationale.
Like it or not, protection of a work is needed to keep the creative process going.
That the creative process went from pre-history through to 1710, when the first copyright law was enacted in England (and nowhere else -- the US and France followed almost a century later, and much of the world didn't have copyright laws until the 19th and 20th centuries, usually due to colonial powers imposing it) suggests otherwise.
Which is not to say that copyright is necessarily a bad idea, just that it's not particularly vital. It should only be permitted to exist if, and to the extent that, it results in a better outcome for the public than if it didn't exist, or than some alternative system.
The whole thing that even allowed the culture of theft we have today is the FBI stopped prosecuting copyright crimes and left it to the music companies to try and enforce the copyright laws in the court system.
I don't think that's correct. AFAIK the FBI has generally not cared about copyright (which wasn't even a crime for over a century) until quite recently. And that change was largely the result of the publishing industry exerting pressure to have the government use its law enforcement powers to protect the industry, and to use criminal penalties against infringers to punish them, all at taxpayer expense. In fact, I don't think that they ever took more interest in copyright than they do now.
Traditionally, copyright has been a civil matter, firstly due to the commercial nature of copyright (infringements generally occur in a business environment), and secondly because if a copyright holder doesn't care enough about his rights to take any action to protect them, why should the government?
No, lower courts do not set binding precedents, which other courts are obligated to follow. However, they do set persuasive precedents, which other courts may choose to follow. They may also produce better explanations of legal doctrines than higher courts, and thus also be worth quoting even when the controlling precedent is from another case, which might merely be cited.
I think that's very nearly right. But really, works should be the primary consideration, not authors; authors are just part of the messy business of getting works. Just as it would be ideal to have Star Trek style food replicators instead of getting food from farmers, it would be ideal to have the (true) contents of Borges' library instead of getting works from authors.
But since this isn't going to happen, we must face the reality of authors seriously. Copyright law should maximize the number of works created and published, while also minimizing the scope and duration of restrictions on the public.
If compensating authors is necessary to get them to create some works (it is known that it is not necessary to get them to create all works -- there are other motives beside money attributable to copyrights), then that's fine, but it must be an appropriate level of compensation. It shouldn't be too high, lest authors create one work and then retire. It shouldn't be too low, lest they create nothing at all. And it shouldn't be guaranteed, lest there be no incentive to create popular works. That's really part of the genius of copyright, IMO -- it acts like a lens, concentrating some (but not all) of the money to be had from a work, but having little effect on just how much money there is in sum. Unpopular works can still be flops, instead of authors being guaranteed a living for having created trash.
You may feel you'll get enough on charity, or incidental work, but I think it would take a considerable chance to produce the same degree of results.
Well, it really depends on the field. Fine artists have little need for copyrights. If you're in the market for a Picasso, you're probably not going to settle for a mass-produced poster of the same work, no matter how well it reproduces the image. And architects tend to either be commissioned to do one-off designs, or are designing cookie-cutter suburbs and industrial buildings which likely would be created regardless. (And are of little enough importance that we might well be better off not having architectural copyrights if that's the worst thing that happens) OTOH, they are probably pretty important for movies. In any event, we should under no circumstances forget that copyright is only one incentive for creating works, and that there are others, which at times, may be much more important.
It is true. The two OJ trials are a well known example. It makes sense because punishing criminals is about some combination of protecting society, rehabilitation, and retribution. It isn't about trying to cure harm caused to the actual victim; whether the victim wants to try that, and whether he'll succeed is up to him, and occurs in a civil trial, and those are all about curing harms (usually via money, for lack of better alternatives).
Hydro, geothermal, gas, solar thermal and so forth just don't have the capability to cause that much disruption, the worst possible accident being a large explosion and the resulting smoke and ash from the fire.
No, if a dam fails catastrophically, the flood downstream can be extremely destructive. And even while the dam is operational, it can have bad effects on the local environment (eg interfering with wildlife, changing the water table, harming agriculture, causing increased soil salinity, etc.).
IIRC there is a place selling the 256Mb sticks for something like 40c in bulk.
Goddammit. I remember when I used to buy 230 MB Bernoulli disks for like $100 a pop (not to mention the $500 drive to put them in), and how it was a pretty large amount of storage at the time. While I'm not upset that things are faster, better, and cheaper, must I feel old?
We have an electronic version of the older edition for sale right now and it's just a PDF with a disclaimer "Please support the author's hard work and don't illegal share this PDF!"... but they author's want more protection than just that disclaimer...
No problem. Just point them to your country's copyright law. They can enjoy all of the protections it provides, such as suing infringers for damages and injunctive relief. It doesn't even require DRM, and it protects the rights of your customers (at least so much as the law does that already).
Disneyland isn't far from a train station; it's on the other side of the freeway across the parking lot from Anaheim Stadium (also mentioned). That's about 2 miles and there's a nice straight, very wide street the whole way there. It would probably not be too difficult for them to run a monorail line over there, taking advantage of Disneyland's existing (pocket) transit system. People going to the game can probably manage the walk across the lot. If necessary add a tree-lined pedestrian mall for comfort. Easy.
I agree that we need intracity mass transit along with high speed and moderate speed (i.e. as fast as you can safely go on existing tracks and with surrounding traffic, with the addition of better signaling) rail. But why put one ahead of the other? Let's do both, right now.
In the case of the US, the copyright clause is only there because it was one of many issues where conflicting state laws were making a hash of things, and in order to have a uniform copyright law for the entire country, it had to specifically be enumerated as a power of the federal government (like running the army, navy, post office, bankruptcy law, etc.)
But the government isn't obligated to actually grant copyrights, and has relatively few rules as to what any particular copyright law can and can't do. It doesn't have to help Hollywood make blockbusters.
Thus, if copyrighted content is inhibiting the free use of property then certainly content that wouldn't exist without copyright is doing the same.
I don't know if I'd agree; I think there's a difference between the inability to make a copy of a work due to the passive non-existence of the work and the same inability due to active interference by a copyright holder. The end result may be the same, but I think that the journey is important. I assume that like all men, you are Socrates, and therefore mortal, but with your death assured no matter what, wouldn't you rather go peacefully in your sleep instead of devoured by wolves?
I.. am amused that you think Shakespeare wrote for peanuts
I said that he worked for what we'd now consider peanuts, and while I know that he achieved quite a lot of success in his career by Elizabethan standards (largely due to becoming a partner in the company; he didn't have copyrights), the greatest English language dramatist there ever was did not make money like top-notch Hollywood screenwriters, who can pull down multiple millions of dollars per script.
And yet, strangely enough, not every artist wants to starve for their art. So, making it hard to get paid for what they do means you get less of it. Some will just create less art. Some will put less effort into the art they do make. And some just won't make any at all.
I agree; back when I used to make my living as an artist, I wasn't particularly interested in starving, and lucky me, I ate well. But I never made so much as a penny by means of copyright.
For what you seem to be forgetting is that there are many incentives for authors to create works; fame, art for art's sake, as an adjunct to some other work, for money not derived from copyright, etc. For some classes of authors, copyrights aren't the main way to make a living, and may be of no particular value whatsoever. Van Gogh likely had copyrights on his work back in the day, but it didn't help him any.
And even when considering those authors for whom copyrights are important, the value of a copyright can vary wildly over time depending on the particular author and work in question, because of the simple fact that most works have no copyright-related economic value, and that of the small fraction that do, most of them have only a modest amount of copyright-related economic value over a short period of time after publication in a given medium. Since this success is determined in large part by the marketplace, there will certainly be a lot of authors who despite their best efforts will starve for their art because no one is buying; some will create less, or put less effort into it, or won't make any at all. Copyright is no solution.
If you want to maximally encourage authors, shouldn't you be advocating for abandoning copyright and just paying subsidies outright? And since it's still a bad idea for the government to make qualitative decisions, aren't you still stuck having to hand out subsidies to all comers?
I'm not sure you'd be happy with a patronage system either. Because that gives patrons an excess of leverage over the content of the artist's art.
Given the gatekeeping function of publishers, and the way that the upper levels of the art world operate, we more or less have this now. And in any case, selling copies in the market is little different, save that the author has to guess at what the people with money want, instead of being told or at least nudged in the right direction. There have been some interesting suggestions for ways that groups of people who would otherwise be buying copies to act as a collective patron in order to better obtain works that they want. Ultimately, no author is forced to accept patronage, and the only risk is that maintaining total artistic purity can imperil commercial success.
Also, thanks for making a post that is entirely orthogonal to my own post
Now, I'm not saying there wouldn't be any recordings. But you're faaaaaaaaar more likely to be listening to mediocre quality recordings of amateur musicians. and the musical quality of the amateurs will suffer, because they've gotta devote time to actual paying jobs. Writing and playing music is hard when you can't pay the bills.
That's irrelevant. Copyright is concerned with increasing the quantity of works so as to promote the progress of science, not the quality. The government isn't qualified to make such judgments as to artistic quality anyway, and I don't think we'd want it to try outside of circumstances where it is acting as a patron or buyer (eg public buildings should be beautiful, rather than being ugly, within reasonable budgetary limitations. Compare, say, San Francisco's city hall with Boston's).
Whether works are crude or refined, they get equal protection under the law. It's up to the market to determine whether works are deserving of financial reward, and even then decisions may be made on factors other than some nebulous idea of quality, or the type of quality you have in mind may be different than what someone else has in mind.
Besides, quality won't suffer so much as you think -- Shakespeare wrote for what we'd now consider peanuts, and Van Gogh was a huge flop during his life. We can probably cut copyright down to a small fraction of what it is now and see little change in quality except at the margins. (movies that cost multiple hundreds of millions of dollars to make might go, but you can make damn good movies on smaller budgets still. Better perhaps -- compare A New Hope with Phantom Menace)
No, first sale applies just fine to DVDs. I suppose there is a colorable argument that it wouldn't, but it's never been tried and might well fail.
The reason that they do deals with studios however is 1) so that they can buy at a discount, and 2) so that they can buy discs early via a distributor so as to get them all loaded in machines in time for the day they hit the public market, as opposed to having to scramble to find a retailer that has umpty million discs, buy them, bring them back to a warehouse, open them, keep the disc, attach inventory control labels, put them in new cases, ship them to local distribution points, truck them to the machines, and add them to the stock.
Of course, with a 4 week window, it ought to be doable, which suggests that the issue is wholesale v. retail prices and availability at a retailer that's willing to jeopardize it's own relationship with the studios and it's own sales to help a rental operation.
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Really? I've generally found their produce to be lousy, but everything else is fine. (Assuming that they haven't decided to cancel it, which seems to happen a lot to my favorite things)
Yeah, but if I cited the actual cases, they wouldn't have that nice "once a decade" rhythm going.
Well, earlier in the 90s, they succeeded in getting the AHRA passed in the US, which quite deliberately caused the effective death of DAT and Minidisc. And anyway, by 1999 we had the actual Diamond case, where the RIAA sued the manufacturers of a handheld mp3 player and lost, and has protected that industry since.
Unfortunately for the media companies, when the music industry accepted the levy, they enshrined our right to make backups INTO EXPLICIT LAW
Do you mean in Canada? Because that isn't the case in the US, where we got a tax on CDRs and didn't get the right to make use of them.
Pick one: artifical, government-enforced/DRM-managed scarcity + first-sale doctrine, or IP-should-be-free + no used sales. Those are your logically consistent options.
Ignoring the fact that copyright is a wholly artificial construct anyway, and be written to behave however the hell people like, regardless of logical consistency, if we abandoned copyright, why would anyone care about selling used copies of creative works with regard to the works contained within?
For example, suppose that it was legal to make copies of the Mona Lisa. (Which it is, but we'll set that aside for now) Why would anyone pay for a copy?
Well, they might pay for the convenience of getting an already-made copy, rather than having to make their own. But that's no different than the usual price difference between ready-made things and doing it yourself. The work isn't the source of value here.
They might pay for a particular copy due to some special thing about the tangible object, but that's unrelated to the work itself, which could be reproduced flawlessly in numerous copies. The original painted by DaVinci is likely worth something due to its provenance. Even if you had an atom-by-atom identical copy, the original would be more valuable for historical reasons. Likewise a copy that had been given to you by a friend or relative might mean more to you than a generic identical copy. Again, the work isn't where the value is coming from.
So the used market would probably dry up if we abolished copyright, but it would be of little importance, for an inherent property of information (such as creative works) is that it is sharable. As Jefferson noted (in reference to inventions, but it applies here), sharing knowledge is like using one person's fire to light another's -- in the end, both people have fire, and no one's fire is lessened by doing it. Copyright operates, among other ways, by trying to reign this in for a limited time. But if we abolished this check on the natural tendency of information to become widespread, you'd see sharing all over the place that was functionally identical to or superior to the used market, except that there wouldn't be so much money involved.
Doesn't matter--they have the rights to copy and they're selling that copy. Therefore, under first sale doctrine, you should have the right to resell that copy. The fact that your copy was made on-demand should be completely irrelevant. If it were an on-demand printing press or CD burner, you'd have the right to resell the book or (physical) CD, even though it was generated on-the-spot. Why would it be different for a file?
Well, be careful with your definitions. In the Copyright Act, a copy (or in this case, a phonorecord) is basically defined as a material object in which a work is fixed long and well enough to be perceptible by some means. So a mere file can't be a copy, and copies can't be uploaded or downloaded via the Internet. A copy of an mp3 is really an entire hard drive, optical disc, flash drive, etc. containing the file. (And probably other files too) To engage in first sale, you'd have to sell the material object. So I guess it's no different than reselling a book, so long as you mean the paper object, and not merely the words by themselves.
ReDigi is apparently arguing that the distribution right of copyright isn't implicated since it governs the distribution of copies (i.e. material objects) and not the copying of files. They're right, actually, though courts have in practice seemed to ignore this distinction (not that I've heard of anyone making the argument before).
Of course, it isn't of much help. To 'move' a file from one material object to another, such as a user's hard drive to a server's hard drive (via plenty of RAM, cache memory, NICs, and who knows what else) involves a hell of a lot of copying, and the reproduction right of copyright governs this.
It's not enforced in the US. The Berne Convention has no legal weight here whatsoever. The problem is that having agreed to it, the US is obligated to abide by it, and therefore Congress passed a law changing our copyright laws to comply with the requirements in Berne. Our domestic laws are what are being enforced.
Congress could abolish that law today, if they liked. It would mean we'd get into a fight with the WTO, WIPO, and the other Berne members, unless we ditched Berne (and TRIPS) altogether -- which we ought to do. It's all entirely possible, but there's no will to do it.
Well, your reading is pretty off, I'm afraid.
Copyright falls under the realm of 'science,' which at the time the Constitution was written, meant knowledge, not just natural philosophy. Patents, as you seem to understand, fell under the realm of the useful arts, a term referring to applied technology. (And still alive, as patents deal with state of the art technology not anticipated by prior art or obvious to persons having ordinary skill in the art)
This is also clear from the structure of the clause itself: Science and useful Arts, Authors and Inventors, Writings and Discoveries. Always the copyright portion of the clause (Science -- Authors -- Writings), then the patent portion (useful Arts -- Inventors -- Discoveries).
Everything my searches are finding seem to indicate the copyright belongs to the person who clicked the button that caused the image to be made.
Nearly. The copyright belongs to the person(s) who caused the photograph to be taken. Usually, that's the photographer, but not necessarily. The issue is who is making the creative choices about the picture: the lighting, composition, choice of subject, etc. If the person using the camera doesn't have creative input, he doesn't get rights to the work. The case you'll want to look at to start is Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884).
One week of copyright is not much incentive to an author.
Depends on the work. A week is more than enough time for a daily newspaper, given that each issue will make most of the money it will ever make within mere hours of publication, and then be so much birdcage liner and fish wrapper.
If you're looking for data, I would suggest taking a look at the work of Rufus Pollock, who has been looking at this. I admit that the math is over my head, but this is really the sort of thing we need to be doing (perhaps also broken up by type of work -- the ideal term for a movie may be different from the ideal term for a computer program, and there's no reason at all why we need a one-size-fits-all term length).
The true crux is the immoral and illegal decision to take something without reimbursing the owner.
Well, copyright is an artificial right to privately censor other people -- to prevent them from making their own copies, distributing copies, etc. of a work. Are you suggesting that censorship is a morally good thing? Generally I consider copyright to be an amoral thing, but if morality is considered, surely the people who preserve and spread knowledge are better than the ones who want to only let other people enjoy it for a fee.
Do you really want to compare how good the modern system is for fostering creativity compared to pre copyright/patent?
This is difficult to do, however, since you'll also have to account for differences attributable to unrelated factors such as literacy rates (it's hard to write for a mass audience if they can't read), publishing technologies (expensive scribes and expensive paper vs. cheap printing and wood pulp paper), whether there is a significant amount of leisure time (possibly with inexpensive sources of natural light so that there's something better to do during it than sleep), state censorship, etc.
So sure, modern medicine came about under a patent regime, but patents date back to 1474, while modern medicine probably dates back to, oh, Jenner, who did his groundbreaking work on vaccination in 1796. And we still had all sorts of nonsense -- patent medicines, in fact! -- well into the 20th century, and we've still got all kinds of 'nutritional supplement' snake oil out there. Again, you can't give the credit simply to the existence of a patent system. It may have helped (or not -- and note also that the strength of patents waxes and wanes as the courts see fit; for much of the 20th century, patents were not all that enforceable, and thus not all that valuable or useful) but it's only a factor, and probably not even the most important one.
With regard to creative works, I'd say that the most important factor for the flourishing of creativity in recent history has been freedom of the press.
As many times as we have to tell you that they are being deprived of sales and income.
So if I burn your house down, depriving you of it, you'd say that I was a thief, not an arsonist? Or that if I killed you, depriving you of your life, that I was a thief, not a murderer?
Besides, copyright infringement is illegal and the infringer is subject to liability and criminal punishment even if it can be demonstrated that the copyright holder was deprived of no sales and no income. So clearly loss of sales and income can't be the rationale.
Like it or not, protection of a work is needed to keep the creative process going.
That the creative process went from pre-history through to 1710, when the first copyright law was enacted in England (and nowhere else -- the US and France followed almost a century later, and much of the world didn't have copyright laws until the 19th and 20th centuries, usually due to colonial powers imposing it) suggests otherwise.
Which is not to say that copyright is necessarily a bad idea, just that it's not particularly vital. It should only be permitted to exist if, and to the extent that, it results in a better outcome for the public than if it didn't exist, or than some alternative system.
The whole thing that even allowed the culture of theft we have today is the FBI stopped prosecuting copyright crimes and left it to the music companies to try and enforce the copyright laws in the court system.
I don't think that's correct. AFAIK the FBI has generally not cared about copyright (which wasn't even a crime for over a century) until quite recently. And that change was largely the result of the publishing industry exerting pressure to have the government use its law enforcement powers to protect the industry, and to use criminal penalties against infringers to punish them, all at taxpayer expense. In fact, I don't think that they ever took more interest in copyright than they do now.
Traditionally, copyright has been a civil matter, firstly due to the commercial nature of copyright (infringements generally occur in a business environment), and secondly because if a copyright holder doesn't care enough about his rights to take any action to protect them, why should the government?
No, lower courts do not set legal precedent.
No, lower courts do not set binding precedents, which other courts are obligated to follow. However, they do set persuasive precedents, which other courts may choose to follow. They may also produce better explanations of legal doctrines than higher courts, and thus also be worth quoting even when the controlling precedent is from another case, which might merely be cited.
I think that's very nearly right. But really, works should be the primary consideration, not authors; authors are just part of the messy business of getting works. Just as it would be ideal to have Star Trek style food replicators instead of getting food from farmers, it would be ideal to have the (true) contents of Borges' library instead of getting works from authors.
But since this isn't going to happen, we must face the reality of authors seriously. Copyright law should maximize the number of works created and published, while also minimizing the scope and duration of restrictions on the public.
If compensating authors is necessary to get them to create some works (it is known that it is not necessary to get them to create all works -- there are other motives beside money attributable to copyrights), then that's fine, but it must be an appropriate level of compensation. It shouldn't be too high, lest authors create one work and then retire. It shouldn't be too low, lest they create nothing at all. And it shouldn't be guaranteed, lest there be no incentive to create popular works. That's really part of the genius of copyright, IMO -- it acts like a lens, concentrating some (but not all) of the money to be had from a work, but having little effect on just how much money there is in sum. Unpopular works can still be flops, instead of authors being guaranteed a living for having created trash.
You may feel you'll get enough on charity, or incidental work, but I think it would take a considerable chance to produce the same degree of results.
Well, it really depends on the field. Fine artists have little need for copyrights. If you're in the market for a Picasso, you're probably not going to settle for a mass-produced poster of the same work, no matter how well it reproduces the image. And architects tend to either be commissioned to do one-off designs, or are designing cookie-cutter suburbs and industrial buildings which likely would be created regardless. (And are of little enough importance that we might well be better off not having architectural copyrights if that's the worst thing that happens) OTOH, they are probably pretty important for movies. In any event, we should under no circumstances forget that copyright is only one incentive for creating works, and that there are others, which at times, may be much more important.
It is true. The two OJ trials are a well known example. It makes sense because punishing criminals is about some combination of protecting society, rehabilitation, and retribution. It isn't about trying to cure harm caused to the actual victim; whether the victim wants to try that, and whether he'll succeed is up to him, and occurs in a civil trial, and those are all about curing harms (usually via money, for lack of better alternatives).
Hydro, geothermal, gas, solar thermal and so forth just don't have the capability to cause that much disruption, the worst possible accident being a large explosion and the resulting smoke and ash from the fire.
No, if a dam fails catastrophically, the flood downstream can be extremely destructive. And even while the dam is operational, it can have bad effects on the local environment (eg interfering with wildlife, changing the water table, harming agriculture, causing increased soil salinity, etc.).
IIRC there is a place selling the 256Mb sticks for something like 40c in bulk.
Goddammit. I remember when I used to buy 230 MB Bernoulli disks for like $100 a pop (not to mention the $500 drive to put them in), and how it was a pretty large amount of storage at the time. While I'm not upset that things are faster, better, and cheaper, must I feel old?
We have an electronic version of the older edition for sale right now and it's just a PDF with a disclaimer "Please support the author's hard work and don't illegal share this PDF!"... but they author's want more protection than just that disclaimer...
No problem. Just point them to your country's copyright law. They can enjoy all of the protections it provides, such as suing infringers for damages and injunctive relief. It doesn't even require DRM, and it protects the rights of your customers (at least so much as the law does that already).
Disneyland isn't far from a train station; it's on the other side of the freeway across the parking lot from Anaheim Stadium (also mentioned). That's about 2 miles and there's a nice straight, very wide street the whole way there. It would probably not be too difficult for them to run a monorail line over there, taking advantage of Disneyland's existing (pocket) transit system. People going to the game can probably manage the walk across the lot. If necessary add a tree-lined pedestrian mall for comfort. Easy.
I agree that we need intracity mass transit along with high speed and moderate speed (i.e. as fast as you can safely go on existing tracks and with surrounding traffic, with the addition of better signaling) rail. But why put one ahead of the other? Let's do both, right now.
In the case of the US, the copyright clause is only there because it was one of many issues where conflicting state laws were making a hash of things, and in order to have a uniform copyright law for the entire country, it had to specifically be enumerated as a power of the federal government (like running the army, navy, post office, bankruptcy law, etc.)
But the government isn't obligated to actually grant copyrights, and has relatively few rules as to what any particular copyright law can and can't do. It doesn't have to help Hollywood make blockbusters.
Some people read by shape and thats why they can be provoked into a killing rage by bad typography, horrible fonts
Now, now, let's not discount a strong sense of aesthetics.
Wait, you mean that the extremely frequent bird hieroglyphs don't mean that the Egyptians talked about birds all the time?
Thus, if copyrighted content is inhibiting the free use of property then certainly content that wouldn't exist without copyright is doing the same.
I don't know if I'd agree; I think there's a difference between the inability to make a copy of a work due to the passive non-existence of the work and the same inability due to active interference by a copyright holder. The end result may be the same, but I think that the journey is important. I assume that like all men, you are Socrates, and therefore mortal, but with your death assured no matter what, wouldn't you rather go peacefully in your sleep instead of devoured by wolves?
I.. am amused that you think Shakespeare wrote for peanuts
I said that he worked for what we'd now consider peanuts, and while I know that he achieved quite a lot of success in his career by Elizabethan standards (largely due to becoming a partner in the company; he didn't have copyrights), the greatest English language dramatist there ever was did not make money like top-notch Hollywood screenwriters, who can pull down multiple millions of dollars per script.
And yet, strangely enough, not every artist wants to starve for their art. So, making it hard to get paid for what they do means you get less of it. Some will just create less art. Some will put less effort into the art they do make. And some just won't make any at all.
I agree; back when I used to make my living as an artist, I wasn't particularly interested in starving, and lucky me, I ate well. But I never made so much as a penny by means of copyright.
For what you seem to be forgetting is that there are many incentives for authors to create works; fame, art for art's sake, as an adjunct to some other work, for money not derived from copyright, etc. For some classes of authors, copyrights aren't the main way to make a living, and may be of no particular value whatsoever. Van Gogh likely had copyrights on his work back in the day, but it didn't help him any.
And even when considering those authors for whom copyrights are important, the value of a copyright can vary wildly over time depending on the particular author and work in question, because of the simple fact that most works have no copyright-related economic value, and that of the small fraction that do, most of them have only a modest amount of copyright-related economic value over a short period of time after publication in a given medium. Since this success is determined in large part by the marketplace, there will certainly be a lot of authors who despite their best efforts will starve for their art because no one is buying; some will create less, or put less effort into it, or won't make any at all. Copyright is no solution.
If you want to maximally encourage authors, shouldn't you be advocating for abandoning copyright and just paying subsidies outright? And since it's still a bad idea for the government to make qualitative decisions, aren't you still stuck having to hand out subsidies to all comers?
I'm not sure you'd be happy with a patronage system either. Because that gives patrons an excess of leverage over the content of the artist's art.
Given the gatekeeping function of publishers, and the way that the upper levels of the art world operate, we more or less have this now. And in any case, selling copies in the market is little different, save that the author has to guess at what the people with money want, instead of being told or at least nudged in the right direction. There have been some interesting suggestions for ways that groups of people who would otherwise be buying copies to act as a collective patron in order to better obtain works that they want. Ultimately, no author is forced to accept patronage, and the only risk is that maintaining total artistic purity can imperil commercial success.
Also, thanks for making a post that is entirely orthogonal to my own post
Now, I'm not saying there wouldn't be any recordings. But you're faaaaaaaaar more likely to be listening to mediocre quality recordings of amateur musicians. and the musical quality of the amateurs will suffer, because they've gotta devote time to actual paying jobs. Writing and playing music is hard when you can't pay the bills.
That's irrelevant. Copyright is concerned with increasing the quantity of works so as to promote the progress of science, not the quality. The government isn't qualified to make such judgments as to artistic quality anyway, and I don't think we'd want it to try outside of circumstances where it is acting as a patron or buyer (eg public buildings should be beautiful, rather than being ugly, within reasonable budgetary limitations. Compare, say, San Francisco's city hall with Boston's).
Whether works are crude or refined, they get equal protection under the law. It's up to the market to determine whether works are deserving of financial reward, and even then decisions may be made on factors other than some nebulous idea of quality, or the type of quality you have in mind may be different than what someone else has in mind.
Besides, quality won't suffer so much as you think -- Shakespeare wrote for what we'd now consider peanuts, and Van Gogh was a huge flop during his life. We can probably cut copyright down to a small fraction of what it is now and see little change in quality except at the margins. (movies that cost multiple hundreds of millions of dollars to make might go, but you can make damn good movies on smaller budgets still. Better perhaps -- compare A New Hope with Phantom Menace)
I'm willing to give it a shot.
No, first sale applies just fine to DVDs. I suppose there is a colorable argument that it wouldn't, but it's never been tried and might well fail.
The reason that they do deals with studios however is 1) so that they can buy at a discount, and 2) so that they can buy discs early via a distributor so as to get them all loaded in machines in time for the day they hit the public market, as opposed to having to scramble to find a retailer that has umpty million discs, buy them, bring them back to a warehouse, open them, keep the disc, attach inventory control labels, put them in new cases, ship them to local distribution points, truck them to the machines, and add them to the stock.
Of course, with a 4 week window, it ought to be doable, which suggests that the issue is wholesale v. retail prices and availability at a retailer that's willing to jeopardize it's own relationship with the studios and it's own sales to help a rental operation.