But I'm already using it to prop up the corner of my bed, and I assure you, that's a far better use for that book than anything short of running out of firewood on a cold night.
It's been known to be done profitably, though. Dickens published his novels in serial format, before the chapters were collected and printed as a single volume, and they were hugely popular. Readers worldwide eagerly awaited each month's installment. It's a lot like weekly TV dramas.
There is no way to know what the utility of a program will be later on and such matters should not be judged subjectively based on perceived utility in the first place.
The purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science. In particular, to produce the greatest net benefit for the public. The public benefits when works that otherwise would not be created and published are created and published. The public benefits when works enter the public domain. With regard to software, the public benefits from software that is of some use, which doesn't mean whether it is a good, practical solution to a problem, as you may have misunderstood it, but merely whether or not it works at all. A copy of TOPS-10 will probably not run natively on most modern computers; it has little utility.
Given this, and the necessity of limited terms, you're stuck having to make the decision as a matter of policy up front.
The term for a software copyright should be the shortest amount of time necessary to encourage developers to create and publish the most software they otherwise wouldn't create and publish, with the software still being at least somewhat useful to people once it's in the public domain. For example, Microsoft released Windows XP in the fall of 2001, released its successor in early 2007 (rather later than usual), stopped selling it in early 2008, mostly stopped supporting it in early 2009, and plans to stop supporting it altogether in early 2014. Use of the OS seems to have topped out in 2007, and has only a few months ago fallen to second place behind Windows 7 (or a bit earlier behind the sum of Vista and 7).
Since what we're interested in is not in maximizing author's profits, but instead providing the least enticement necessary to them to get them to do what we want (develop and release the software, then develop and release the next thing), it looks to me as though a maximum term length somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 years (probably with renewals every one or two years, just in case the developer stops wanting a copyright early) would be a good fit.
A shorter term of copyright could very easily place FLOSS developers in a position which essentially contributes work to proprietors; the shorter the term of copyright, the less time proprietors need to wait to release a proprietary version of even a strongly-copylefted free software program like GNU Emacs.
So? I like the open source movement, but I don't care about it more than I care about a good, general copyright policy. I think that the public will benefit more from reasonable copyright laws than they would from the current lousy copyright laws even with the ameliorating effect of open source software.
I am not worried about the future of GNU Emacs as a result of Microsoft releasing a proprietary-but-visible-source fork of Emacs based upon v. 21.1, and from which anyone could copy the source code once it hit the public domain after several years. I think that the benefit that the open source community would gain from being able to read through and learn from everyone else's source code immediately, and from being able to directly copy it after a relatively short amount of time, would outweigh any loss.
Your proposal would go against the power of copyright as it is today by making program source code readable by anyone.
Not in the least! Copyright is a prohibition on copying original, creative expressions of ideas that compromise certain types of creative works. It is not a prohibition on reading or studying copies of legitimately obtained works, or on copying the ideas or non-creative (e.g. dictated by function) elements of works.
If you want to write a mystery novel, you are allowed to read through the entire corpus of mystery novels that already exists, including the copyrighted ones, and to mine them for ideas and other non-copyrightable elements, and to learn what makes for a good mystery by analyzing them. You j
Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Of course, in traditional publishing and copyright, only popular books make money, which means that publishers that care about money only want to publish books which will be popular. Some publishers don't care about money so much, but they're essentially like the patrons of old.
I really don't see how you would go about making a significant amount of money from a book that was not popular, unless you forced people to buy it, or forced people to pay unpopular authors via the tax system, both of which sound a lot worse than having only popular books be financially successful.
First, in most cases, authors just aren't paid all that much for the film rights to their books (or at all). It might seem like a lot to an author, but it's not very much by the standards of a movie studio. Usually they'll pay for an option to adapt the book, which is a small fraction of the full cost of the film rights; only if they decide to exercise the option is the full amount paid. And unless the book -- or at least the author -- is a huge success, the full price (which most authors won't see, since most books that are optioned are never made into movies) is usually in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
Second, the movie studios are probably more concerned with rival movie studios than with authors. The advantage of being the first to release a movie based on a particular work, and perhaps having a few years of exclusivity, are probably greater than the cost of paying for the film rights in the first place.
Thus, if copyright terms were very short, I'd expect to see that where movies are adaptations of books, that they're made much faster than now, and that studios develop closer connections with book publishers and literary agents, so that they can find popular books faster (or make better predictions about popularity before the book is even published). And I'd also expect to see more original movies, that avoid the issue of being tied to the book's copyright term.
Also, your timeline is wrong. These days movies are in first run theaters for somewhere between 4-8 weeks, I'd say, and out on DVD within about 12 weeks. Even a smash hit like Avatar was not exclusively in theaters for 1-2 years before hitting other distribution channels. I don't think that's happened since the 70's, what with home video and movie channels.
Finally, authors just don't make much money no matter what, with very rare exceptions, just like all forms of artistic endeavor, and while the few thousand dollars every few years from options is nice, there are probably better ways to help them get by than with long copyright terms, e.g. universal health care, which has the nice side effect of helping everyone, and not just authors.
I think 10 years is probably too short -- I'd rather have 1 year terms renewable up to a maximum of 5 to 20 years (depending on the class of work; a computer program or a newspaper probably doesn't need more than 5) -- but if I had to choose between a 10 year term and the current regime, I'd take the 10 year term. I bet it would produce better results than you think. (And anyway, quality is irrelevant in copyright policy; the government isn't competent to judge artistic quality, and shouldn't even if it could. Quantity is what matters)
We can debate on the length of copyright, but one thing is sure, copyright should never extend beyond the death of the author/artist/musician/etc...
Oh, I disagree. I'd rather have a fixed term of years, and whether the author dies before it's up, or doesn't die until after it's expired, is totally irrelevant.
So what's the difference right now? Even with long terms, proprietary developers don't usually release their source code, and while they don't booby-trap their software, it effectively is not much use after a long span of time has passed. OSS software would have its source available, but also would not be of much use after such a long span of time.
I remain in favor of short terms, particularly for software, but term length is far from the only reform to copyright law that we need. I don't even think it's the most important one. We also need reforms to the scope of copyright, and to the requirements for obtaining copyrights for works:
With regard to all published works, we should require registration as a requirement for copyright. Various formalities would be required along with the registration for it to suffice.
For software (and possibly other classes of work as the Copyright Office sees fit) we should require as part of the registration process not only the deposit formality, i.e.that a copy of the work be deposited with the Library of Congress (as is usually the case), but that any and all supplemental information required by the Copyright Office also be deposited. That could include the full source code in the language it was originally written in, copies of compilers (if not commonly available) and the comments and compilation instructions needed for a person having an ordinary skill in the art of software development would need in order to understand how the program works and make material changes to it. The source code would remain copyrighted, of course, until the end of the term, but it would in the meantime be available at the Library of Congress for people to read, just like any other work. Think of it as closed but viewable source.
And for all works we should require that they are ineligible for copyright if they are published by the copyright holder or a licensee with DRM or other such technical measures applied. The Library of Congress, meanwhile, should work to coordinate efforts to break DRM where it is found, and to freely republish the (therefore public domain) works once the DRM applied to them has been removed.
However, where software is carefully kept under lock and key, like your example of server-side software, I don't think that there's a great deal that we can do about it. Copyright can be an encouragement to publish, but we can't mandate publication. In those cases, I think you'd do better to look to general business regulations than copyright law.
The porpoise of copyright is to codify who has the right (not write) to copy.
Well, it's a negative right, so it would be more precise to say who has a right to prohibit other people from copying. And that's just what it is, not what its purpose is.
Intellectual property laws protect innovation - not deter it.
Well, that statement is overbroad and wrong anyway.
Trademark, copyright, trade secret, publicity, etc. all fall under the umbrella of 'intellectual property' but have nothing at all to do with innovation. You're really only talking about patents, and it would help matters if you'd say so more clearly. The whole term 'intellectual property' really just adds confusion; it's best avoided.
In any case, what patents are meant to encourage is the invention, disclosure, and bringing to market of useful, novel, nonobvious inventions that otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, and brought to market, whilst placing no or minimal restrictions on the public in terms of scope and duration, all in order to provide the greatest public benefit for the least harm to the public.
But make no mistake; patents can discourage innovation:
For example, patents aren't free; it costs a fair bit of money to get a patent. Thus, an inventor who comes up with numerous patentable inventions, all of which he could invent, disclose, and bring to market, might have to spend time and money seeking a patent, thus reducing the resources he has available to spend on his inventions directly. If the inventions he chooses to pursue first turn out to be duds, he could be left unable to pursue the others for a lack of resources.
Another example is that patents don't confer a right to practice the invention, or build devices embodying it, etc. Patents are a negative right, and only allow a patent holder to prohibit other people from using the invention in certain ways. Thus, if Alice invents something, and Bob invents some improvement to that thing, they can both get patents, but Alice cannot use Bob's invention without Bob's permission, and Bob can't use his own invention without Alice's permission, and neither of them is obligated to grant permission to the other. This means that an invention can exist, and be well-known, and be entirely kept off of the market for many years (perhaps longer than it's of any value, if the later invention is eclipsed by things that are better still), depriving everyone of most of its value to society.
Only in a perfect utopian world would patents have only beneficial effects. In the real world, they cause both good and ill, and it's important not to lose sight of that, lest you become unable to steer the system so as to produce the most good effects and the fewest bad effects.
And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.
Not so much as you think. Patents existed, sure, but a patent is just a piece of paper. You have to go to court in order to enforce it on someone else, and for many long stretches of American history, courts tended to find against patent holders for various reasons. From, oh, the 1930's to the creation of the Federal Circuit in 1982, a patent holder stood little chance of success when suing an infringer in the US. I wouldn't go so far as to say that patents may as well not have existed during that time, but they were vastly weaker than they are now. It certainly didn't seem to do much harm during some of our greatest years of innovation. Perhaps you'd agree that weak patents might not be such a bad idea after all?
You've misunderstood me pretty badly, I think. I'd rather stop pumping, refining, and using petroleum altogether, even if it were plentiful. And I'm all about using what cheap energy we've got left to bootstrap ourselves to something sustainable and abundant while we can, rather than waiting until later, which will be harder, and may be too late.
The bad side effects that I glossed over before?; They're actually very bad and very expansive to the point of making petrol a bad idea no matter what. Petrol is only okay other than that. (Kind of like 'Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?')
True, but we're not the ones who are putting the energy into the petrol, so other than all the bad side-effects, it's a win for us. Less so as we have to spend more and more energy getting useful petrol, though.
It's against my better judgment to go on with someone who is clearly as frothing-at-the-mouth-crazy as you appear to be, but I'll give it one last shot just for the hell of it.
Like I said, it doesn't matter whether they were asked a question, it matters whether they were asked an unavoidable question. I'm still not very interested in this case, but it sounds as though the Court could resolve it satisfactorily without bothering with each and every issue, and therefore declined to look into questions that they did not absolutely need to look into. That's just standard procedure. It's hardly the fault of the Court that the anti-Social Security party in the case did a bad job in constructing their case.
(Plus, remember that the Supreme Court usually isn't even obligated to hear cases, and in fact hears only a very small fraction of those that people try to get it to hear, and IIRC, can even pick and choose what portions of cases they're interested in. To have them pass on something really shouldn't surprise anyone at all.)
Of course this is not true. First, the way that Social Security works is clear, whereas an actual Ponzi scheme is always disguised as something else. Second, Congress can always modify Social Security so as to keep it funded, even if there are fewer people paying into the system later than at present, e.g. by raising taxes or lowering payouts. This is not really possible with a Ponzi scheme. Really, the only thing that makes it even appear to be like a Ponzi scheme is that the population of the country is variable; if it were constant, it would be clear that it is merely pay-as-you-go.
SS is absolutely clearly NOT SHOWN TO BE CONSTITUTIONAL in this judgment. At the very minimum it's a "maybe", but it's definitely not a "YES", which is what SCOTUS is SUPPOSED to show.
I'm not familiar with that case, but I do know that standard procedure for courts in the US is to decide questions of law rather narrowly. If it's possible to resolve the case without deciding on the constitutionality of a law, that's what will be done; anything further would be superfluous. Likewise, if one part of the case is contingent on another part, the court will only worry about it if it absolutely has to. E.g. if it is alleged that Alice killed Bob, and Alice claims that she did not, but that if she did, it was in self defense, and the court finds that she didn't kill Bob, the question of self defense will be ignored since it's not important anymore.
Whether or not everyone is on tenterhooks about a particular issue that the court manages to sidestep isn't really something they care about. If you really want to find out the answer, come up with a better test case that will compel them to give you an answer.
In this case the entire patent process is inconsequential and not needed. Who would try to patent a proven failure?
Very few people, but that's because usually you try to get a patent before the invention is known to be a success or a failure. In Europe, IIRC, you cannot file for a patent once information about the invention has been made public, e.g. by selling them, which is necessary to find out if it's going to be a failure. In the US, you can file as late as one year after the invention has been made public. That's a lot better, but it still may not be enough time; some inventions take longer to become successful.
So while few people would try to patent inventions which are proven to be worthless, virtually everyone who does file patents, files them on inventions where no one knows whether they're valuable or worthless.
Patents provide the incentive to continue funding R&D.
They provide an incentive, but they are not the only incentive, and may not be the most important one. There are other incentives, e.g. first mover advantage. Also, no one has to get a patent, and plenty of inventors choose instead to rely on the protections of a trade secret instead. (Where so long as you don't reveal the secret, and no one else figures it out, you can control it.)
If you spend a lot of money to develop a profitable technology knowing that it can be immediately used by your competitors, basically providing others with the results of your efforts, it would decrease the amount of money a company is willing to commit to R&D efforts from a pure profit/loss perspective.
That depends on whether or not your competitors' use of the invention would harm your profits. It's possible that it wouldn't. Coke (and presumably Pepsi) keep their syrup recipes secret, but their real money is made from branding. It wouldn't matter if Pepsi determined the exact formula for Coke (probably not too hard with some well-equipped chemists), since the standard business practice in that industry is differentiation.
If a company spent millions of dollars creating a new medicine the length of the patent protection should at least be long enough to recover those expenses.
Why? What if the invention is a flop, and is simply never successful enough to recoup the expense of developing it? (E.g. Polavision)
Patents exist to serve the public interest in having useful, novel, nonobvious inventions invented, disclosed, and brought to market, when this otherwise wouldn't happen, and in the public domain where they are the most useful.
Patents have never been a promise to the inventor that he will recover his expenses, or turn a profit. All that patents do is act like a funnel, allowing the patent holder to reap more of the possible value of the invention than he would otherwise. If the invention is valueless, or nearly so, then he gets nothing, or nearly nothing.
The market-based approach of the current patent (and copyright) systems are the right way to go. It avoids spending public money, and it ties the reward enjoyed by the inventor (or author) to what people actually think. It allows for failure, which is important to help people learn what to do and not to do. The possibility of reward is adequate incentive -- do you really think there's anyone out there who could invent but isn't, who would if we changed this? And it keeps patents (and copyrights) limited in duration and scope, which reduces the harm they cause to the public by prohibiting the free use of the invention (or work). It's really the most brilliant part of the system.
The patents awarded in the software environment should require the patent owner to actually implement the patent themselves instead of just using the patent to shakedown those who use the patented idea.
Meh. Then you'll see a piece of crappy software that barely manages to practice the patented invention, and which is deliberately priced so high that no one will ever buy it, and supporting it won't cost the patent holder anything. It'll just be part of the cost of doing business, rather than doing what you want.
Better would be to abolish software and business method patents. Remember, we grant patents to encourage inventors to invent things that they would not have done otherwise. In these specific fields, it's extremely likely that most of the inventions would be invented no matter what because of the powerful natural incentives that exist regardless of the availability of patents. I'd be willing to take a chance. And then, someday, if the pace of inventiveness in those fields should die down, we can consider granting patents to help encourage inventors again. The only thing that might be lost by not granting patents that's significant is disclosure, but it's often fairly clear to persons having ordinary skill in the art, and in the case of software, we could require disclosure as a part of the deposit requirement (not just for this, but also as good copyright policy) for copyrighted software, and probably do just fine.
And the people making the decisions on whether to grant a patent should be required to include independent subject matter experts in the decision process.
Examiners are independent subject matter experts. But the law obligates them to grant patents unless certain specific issues arise (e.g. the invention isn't novel). And they're usually pressed for time, so while the applicant may have had a team of lawyers working on the application for months, the examiner may only have a few hours to look it over.
Of course, I would remind you that a lot of things are obvious in hindsight that were really tricky to figure out in the first place; just because it makes sense once you've heard of it, that isn't enough to justify having the examiner shoot it down. It can be tricky to set hindsight aside.
But in the process, this indemnifies all his customers. The CDs they bought aren't real, they're contraband. But because the ringleader behind the whole thing was caught and punished, and restitution made to the IP owners, they get to keep their CDs and are not liable to be sued for owning contraband.
No it doesn't. The customers are still liable for their own infringements. It's not illegal, however, to merely possess unlawfully made copies of works (making copies, and distributing copies, yes, but not owning them), so unless you were to try to argue that the act of buying the unlawfully made copies is secondary infringement (with the seller's distribution being the underlying direct infringement), the customers should be fine as long as they don't distribute the copy while the work is copyrighted.
I don't know where you got this nonsense about indemnification, but it's just not true.
Again, I'm not arguing that nuclear power is unsafe from a technical perspective. I'm sure that it is entirely possible to design and build a safe, reliable, efficient, and useful nuclear power plant. Likewise procedures for mining, processing, using, and disposing of nuclear material safely, and for decommissioning, disassembling, and disposing of nuclear power plants.
My concern is that human beings -- who by your standards I'm qualified to hold an opinion about, since I am one -- will fuck it up. There are numerous ways to do so, including failures of imagination, laziness, disregard for engineering and safety requirements, failure to pay for proper and timely training and maintenance, corruption, politics, etc. They don't have to be idiots, they only have to be human. (Though you do get idiots at times, as was the case at Chernobyl, IIRC)
AFAIK most of the serious nuclear accidents that have happened to date are due to humans, and no doubt this will continue.
Because the harm that can happen in a nuclear accident is particularly serious, and since the continued involvement of humans makes it likely that there will be more accidents to come so long as we keep using nuclear power, I'm against it.
Fossil fuels have other sorts of serious bad effects and forms of accidents, and I'm against them too.
I'd rather go for renewables, which, though they will experience failures too at times, are probably not going to cause such serious harm when they do.
I can't speak for others, but while I think that nuclear power can be safe as a technology, I don't have much faith in the managers of the plants to keep them running safely, or in the politicians needed to get waste safely processed / disposed of, or in independent regulators to help keep things safe and efficient even in spite of hostile management or politicians.
In that light, the risks of unsafe nuclear power are pretty scary. If a windmill breaks, it's not too dangerous. If a reactor melts down (or an oil well starts leaking uncontrollably -- I'm no fan of fossil fuels either) the consequences are a lot worse.
Great. I'm an artist, and I'm also a copyright lawyer.
- If my work brings you something positive, it's only fair that you pay me.
Well that would be nice, but you can't always reasonably have that expectation.
For example, if I walk past a restaurant whilst eating some very bland food from somewhere else, and the pleasant smell of the food from within makes me enjoy my meal more, I'm not really obligated to pay for the smell.
Or perhaps, if I live on a parcel of land and never improve it, but my neighbors make such improvements that it raises the property value of my land just due to location, I'm not obligated to share those benefits (which are fairly easy to make liquid).
The fact that I love my job does not mean I should do it for free.
I agree. What you do is entirely up to you. Whether other people will find it worth paying you is entirely up to them, however. Not all jobs are in demand.
if I can't get the money I need by writing novels, I'll get another job.
Okay. Even under the current system of copyright, there's no guarantee of success. If you're a bad author, you won't make money writing novels, and you'll need to get a day job. Most authors don't support themselves from their writing, in fact; it's not a well-paying job at all, even for pros.
I should get to protect my intellectual property from abusive use (and I'm thinking commercial use here - I don't want people to sell my novels or use them to advertise products and thus make any profits from them, or use my novels in any other way to make money. Not now, not 100 years after they were created. I want my novels respected, it's not a matter of money for me, it's just about me being the guardian of my art and getting to decide what happens with it).
So for example, you are pissed off at the creators of West Side Story for having based it upon Romeo & Juliet without permission? (And presumably, you're equally pissed off at Shakespeare for having based his play off of earlier tellings of the same story, since he was not really much of one for doing anything original.)
Likewise, I expect you're pissed off that when Kafka requested in his will that his executor destroy all copies of his works, this wasn't done, and instead they were published, which turned out be a good thing for the rest of the world?
Get over it.
The public has an interest in seeing as many works created and published as possible, and for them to be in the public domain, where they of the most value to the public.
You don't have a right to control what happens to your works after they're published, except for what the public deigns to give you to get you to create and publish what you otherwise wouldn't; it would be foolish to give you the ability to interfere with the whole point of copyright.
Even your rights prior to publication ultimately stem from what's in the public interest, except that if the work isn't published, it's easier for you to personally ensure that the work is under your control, by e.g. keeping the only copy under lock and key.
So if control is what matters to you, I suggest you never bother to create. It's the only way to be sure, but I'd pity you for it.
However, fanfiction is bad because some people will write stories I won't necessarily approve of.
See the Shakespeare thing again. And remember: 90% of everything is crap. It doesn't matter whether it's original or derivative. It doesn't matter whether 'everything' is a lot or a little. Bad fanfic will be ignored as much as bad original fiction is. That's an acceptable price for the good stuff, which in some cases is even better than the original material.
That's what I did, that's what all great authors did
Not so much, no. Like Picasso said, 'great artists steal.' Plenty of great
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But I'm already using it to prop up the corner of my bed, and I assure you, that's a far better use for that book than anything short of running out of firewood on a cold night.
I had no idea that Frank Oglesby was an android.
You can usually trust the self-destruct countdown. Well, except for the one in Spaceballs.
It's been known to be done profitably, though. Dickens published his novels in serial format, before the chapters were collected and printed as a single volume, and they were hugely popular. Readers worldwide eagerly awaited each month's installment. It's a lot like weekly TV dramas.
There is no way to know what the utility of a program will be later on and such matters should not be judged subjectively based on perceived utility in the first place.
The purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science. In particular, to produce the greatest net benefit for the public. The public benefits when works that otherwise would not be created and published are created and published. The public benefits when works enter the public domain. With regard to software, the public benefits from software that is of some use, which doesn't mean whether it is a good, practical solution to a problem, as you may have misunderstood it, but merely whether or not it works at all. A copy of TOPS-10 will probably not run natively on most modern computers; it has little utility.
Given this, and the necessity of limited terms, you're stuck having to make the decision as a matter of policy up front.
The term for a software copyright should be the shortest amount of time necessary to encourage developers to create and publish the most software they otherwise wouldn't create and publish, with the software still being at least somewhat useful to people once it's in the public domain. For example, Microsoft released Windows XP in the fall of 2001, released its successor in early 2007 (rather later than usual), stopped selling it in early 2008, mostly stopped supporting it in early 2009, and plans to stop supporting it altogether in early 2014. Use of the OS seems to have topped out in 2007, and has only a few months ago fallen to second place behind Windows 7 (or a bit earlier behind the sum of Vista and 7).
Since what we're interested in is not in maximizing author's profits, but instead providing the least enticement necessary to them to get them to do what we want (develop and release the software, then develop and release the next thing), it looks to me as though a maximum term length somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 years (probably with renewals every one or two years, just in case the developer stops wanting a copyright early) would be a good fit.
A shorter term of copyright could very easily place FLOSS developers in a position which essentially contributes work to proprietors; the shorter the term of copyright, the less time proprietors need to wait to release a proprietary version of even a strongly-copylefted free software program like GNU Emacs.
So? I like the open source movement, but I don't care about it more than I care about a good, general copyright policy. I think that the public will benefit more from reasonable copyright laws than they would from the current lousy copyright laws even with the ameliorating effect of open source software.
I am not worried about the future of GNU Emacs as a result of Microsoft releasing a proprietary-but-visible-source fork of Emacs based upon v. 21.1, and from which anyone could copy the source code once it hit the public domain after several years. I think that the benefit that the open source community would gain from being able to read through and learn from everyone else's source code immediately, and from being able to directly copy it after a relatively short amount of time, would outweigh any loss.
Your proposal would go against the power of copyright as it is today by making program source code readable by anyone.
Not in the least! Copyright is a prohibition on copying original, creative expressions of ideas that compromise certain types of creative works. It is not a prohibition on reading or studying copies of legitimately obtained works, or on copying the ideas or non-creative (e.g. dictated by function) elements of works.
If you want to write a mystery novel, you are allowed to read through the entire corpus of mystery novels that already exists, including the copyrighted ones, and to mine them for ideas and other non-copyrightable elements, and to learn what makes for a good mystery by analyzing them. You j
Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Of course, in traditional publishing and copyright, only popular books make money, which means that publishers that care about money only want to publish books which will be popular. Some publishers don't care about money so much, but they're essentially like the patrons of old.
I really don't see how you would go about making a significant amount of money from a book that was not popular, unless you forced people to buy it, or forced people to pay unpopular authors via the tax system, both of which sound a lot worse than having only popular books be financially successful.
Feel free to offer suggestions.
I'm not sure you're right.
First, in most cases, authors just aren't paid all that much for the film rights to their books (or at all). It might seem like a lot to an author, but it's not very much by the standards of a movie studio. Usually they'll pay for an option to adapt the book, which is a small fraction of the full cost of the film rights; only if they decide to exercise the option is the full amount paid. And unless the book -- or at least the author -- is a huge success, the full price (which most authors won't see, since most books that are optioned are never made into movies) is usually in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
Second, the movie studios are probably more concerned with rival movie studios than with authors. The advantage of being the first to release a movie based on a particular work, and perhaps having a few years of exclusivity, are probably greater than the cost of paying for the film rights in the first place.
Thus, if copyright terms were very short, I'd expect to see that where movies are adaptations of books, that they're made much faster than now, and that studios develop closer connections with book publishers and literary agents, so that they can find popular books faster (or make better predictions about popularity before the book is even published). And I'd also expect to see more original movies, that avoid the issue of being tied to the book's copyright term.
Also, your timeline is wrong. These days movies are in first run theaters for somewhere between 4-8 weeks, I'd say, and out on DVD within about 12 weeks. Even a smash hit like Avatar was not exclusively in theaters for 1-2 years before hitting other distribution channels. I don't think that's happened since the 70's, what with home video and movie channels.
Finally, authors just don't make much money no matter what, with very rare exceptions, just like all forms of artistic endeavor, and while the few thousand dollars every few years from options is nice, there are probably better ways to help them get by than with long copyright terms, e.g. universal health care, which has the nice side effect of helping everyone, and not just authors.
I think 10 years is probably too short -- I'd rather have 1 year terms renewable up to a maximum of 5 to 20 years (depending on the class of work; a computer program or a newspaper probably doesn't need more than 5) -- but if I had to choose between a 10 year term and the current regime, I'd take the 10 year term. I bet it would produce better results than you think. (And anyway, quality is irrelevant in copyright policy; the government isn't competent to judge artistic quality, and shouldn't even if it could. Quantity is what matters)
We can debate on the length of copyright, but one thing is sure, copyright should never extend beyond the death of the author/artist/musician/etc...
Oh, I disagree. I'd rather have a fixed term of years, and whether the author dies before it's up, or doesn't die until after it's expired, is totally irrelevant.
So what's the difference right now? Even with long terms, proprietary developers don't usually release their source code, and while they don't booby-trap their software, it effectively is not much use after a long span of time has passed. OSS software would have its source available, but also would not be of much use after such a long span of time.
I remain in favor of short terms, particularly for software, but term length is far from the only reform to copyright law that we need. I don't even think it's the most important one. We also need reforms to the scope of copyright, and to the requirements for obtaining copyrights for works:
With regard to all published works, we should require registration as a requirement for copyright. Various formalities would be required along with the registration for it to suffice.
For software (and possibly other classes of work as the Copyright Office sees fit) we should require as part of the registration process not only the deposit formality, i.e.that a copy of the work be deposited with the Library of Congress (as is usually the case), but that any and all supplemental information required by the Copyright Office also be deposited. That could include the full source code in the language it was originally written in, copies of compilers (if not commonly available) and the comments and compilation instructions needed for a person having an ordinary skill in the art of software development would need in order to understand how the program works and make material changes to it. The source code would remain copyrighted, of course, until the end of the term, but it would in the meantime be available at the Library of Congress for people to read, just like any other work. Think of it as closed but viewable source.
And for all works we should require that they are ineligible for copyright if they are published by the copyright holder or a licensee with DRM or other such technical measures applied. The Library of Congress, meanwhile, should work to coordinate efforts to break DRM where it is found, and to freely republish the (therefore public domain) works once the DRM applied to them has been removed.
However, where software is carefully kept under lock and key, like your example of server-side software, I don't think that there's a great deal that we can do about it. Copyright can be an encouragement to publish, but we can't mandate publication. In those cases, I think you'd do better to look to general business regulations than copyright law.
The porpoise of copyright is to codify who has the right (not write) to copy.
Well, it's a negative right, so it would be more precise to say who has a right to prohibit other people from copying. And that's just what it is, not what its purpose is.
If I had to guess, I'd say it might be a member of the planning board for the town of Sandwich on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Intellectual property laws protect innovation - not deter it.
Well, that statement is overbroad and wrong anyway.
Trademark, copyright, trade secret, publicity, etc. all fall under the umbrella of 'intellectual property' but have nothing at all to do with innovation. You're really only talking about patents, and it would help matters if you'd say so more clearly. The whole term 'intellectual property' really just adds confusion; it's best avoided.
In any case, what patents are meant to encourage is the invention, disclosure, and bringing to market of useful, novel, nonobvious inventions that otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, and brought to market, whilst placing no or minimal restrictions on the public in terms of scope and duration, all in order to provide the greatest public benefit for the least harm to the public.
But make no mistake; patents can discourage innovation:
For example, patents aren't free; it costs a fair bit of money to get a patent. Thus, an inventor who comes up with numerous patentable inventions, all of which he could invent, disclose, and bring to market, might have to spend time and money seeking a patent, thus reducing the resources he has available to spend on his inventions directly. If the inventions he chooses to pursue first turn out to be duds, he could be left unable to pursue the others for a lack of resources.
Another example is that patents don't confer a right to practice the invention, or build devices embodying it, etc. Patents are a negative right, and only allow a patent holder to prohibit other people from using the invention in certain ways. Thus, if Alice invents something, and Bob invents some improvement to that thing, they can both get patents, but Alice cannot use Bob's invention without Bob's permission, and Bob can't use his own invention without Alice's permission, and neither of them is obligated to grant permission to the other. This means that an invention can exist, and be well-known, and be entirely kept off of the market for many years (perhaps longer than it's of any value, if the later invention is eclipsed by things that are better still), depriving everyone of most of its value to society.
Only in a perfect utopian world would patents have only beneficial effects. In the real world, they cause both good and ill, and it's important not to lose sight of that, lest you become unable to steer the system so as to produce the most good effects and the fewest bad effects.
And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.
Not so much as you think. Patents existed, sure, but a patent is just a piece of paper. You have to go to court in order to enforce it on someone else, and for many long stretches of American history, courts tended to find against patent holders for various reasons. From, oh, the 1930's to the creation of the Federal Circuit in 1982, a patent holder stood little chance of success when suing an infringer in the US. I wouldn't go so far as to say that patents may as well not have existed during that time, but they were vastly weaker than they are now. It certainly didn't seem to do much harm during some of our greatest years of innovation. Perhaps you'd agree that weak patents might not be such a bad idea after all?
You've misunderstood me pretty badly, I think. I'd rather stop pumping, refining, and using petroleum altogether, even if it were plentiful. And I'm all about using what cheap energy we've got left to bootstrap ourselves to something sustainable and abundant while we can, rather than waiting until later, which will be harder, and may be too late.
The bad side effects that I glossed over before?; They're actually very bad and very expansive to the point of making petrol a bad idea no matter what. Petrol is only okay other than that. (Kind of like 'Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?')
Oh? I thought that boron fuels were fairly toxic, which is one of the reasons that they never caught on for aviation in the 50's.
True, but we're not the ones who are putting the energy into the petrol, so other than all the bad side-effects, it's a win for us. Less so as we have to spend more and more energy getting useful petrol, though.
It's against my better judgment to go on with someone who is clearly as frothing-at-the-mouth-crazy as you appear to be, but I'll give it one last shot just for the hell of it.
Like I said, it doesn't matter whether they were asked a question, it matters whether they were asked an unavoidable question. I'm still not very interested in this case, but it sounds as though the Court could resolve it satisfactorily without bothering with each and every issue, and therefore declined to look into questions that they did not absolutely need to look into. That's just standard procedure. It's hardly the fault of the Court that the anti-Social Security party in the case did a bad job in constructing their case.
(Plus, remember that the Supreme Court usually isn't even obligated to hear cases, and in fact hears only a very small fraction of those that people try to get it to hear, and IIRC, can even pick and choose what portions of cases they're interested in. To have them pass on something really shouldn't surprise anyone at all.)
She'd argue it in the alternative, I suppose.
Still, you understood the point I was making, so feel free to provide a better one. It's not like I put a lot of work into it.
SS is a ponzi scheme
Of course this is not true. First, the way that Social Security works is clear, whereas an actual Ponzi scheme is always disguised as something else. Second, Congress can always modify Social Security so as to keep it funded, even if there are fewer people paying into the system later than at present, e.g. by raising taxes or lowering payouts. This is not really possible with a Ponzi scheme. Really, the only thing that makes it even appear to be like a Ponzi scheme is that the population of the country is variable; if it were constant, it would be clear that it is merely pay-as-you-go.
SS is absolutely clearly NOT SHOWN TO BE CONSTITUTIONAL in this judgment. At the very minimum it's a "maybe", but it's definitely not a "YES", which is what SCOTUS is SUPPOSED to show.
I'm not familiar with that case, but I do know that standard procedure for courts in the US is to decide questions of law rather narrowly. If it's possible to resolve the case without deciding on the constitutionality of a law, that's what will be done; anything further would be superfluous. Likewise, if one part of the case is contingent on another part, the court will only worry about it if it absolutely has to. E.g. if it is alleged that Alice killed Bob, and Alice claims that she did not, but that if she did, it was in self defense, and the court finds that she didn't kill Bob, the question of self defense will be ignored since it's not important anymore.
Whether or not everyone is on tenterhooks about a particular issue that the court manages to sidestep isn't really something they care about. If you really want to find out the answer, come up with a better test case that will compel them to give you an answer.
In this case the entire patent process is inconsequential and not needed. Who would try to patent a proven failure?
Very few people, but that's because usually you try to get a patent before the invention is known to be a success or a failure. In Europe, IIRC, you cannot file for a patent once information about the invention has been made public, e.g. by selling them, which is necessary to find out if it's going to be a failure. In the US, you can file as late as one year after the invention has been made public. That's a lot better, but it still may not be enough time; some inventions take longer to become successful.
So while few people would try to patent inventions which are proven to be worthless, virtually everyone who does file patents, files them on inventions where no one knows whether they're valuable or worthless.
Patents provide the incentive to continue funding R&D.
They provide an incentive, but they are not the only incentive, and may not be the most important one. There are other incentives, e.g. first mover advantage. Also, no one has to get a patent, and plenty of inventors choose instead to rely on the protections of a trade secret instead. (Where so long as you don't reveal the secret, and no one else figures it out, you can control it.)
If you spend a lot of money to develop a profitable technology knowing that it can be immediately used by your competitors, basically providing others with the results of your efforts, it would decrease the amount of money a company is willing to commit to R&D efforts from a pure profit/loss perspective.
That depends on whether or not your competitors' use of the invention would harm your profits. It's possible that it wouldn't. Coke (and presumably Pepsi) keep their syrup recipes secret, but their real money is made from branding. It wouldn't matter if Pepsi determined the exact formula for Coke (probably not too hard with some well-equipped chemists), since the standard business practice in that industry is differentiation.
If a company spent millions of dollars creating a new medicine the length of the patent protection should at least be long enough to recover those expenses.
Why? What if the invention is a flop, and is simply never successful enough to recoup the expense of developing it? (E.g. Polavision)
Patents exist to serve the public interest in having useful, novel, nonobvious inventions invented, disclosed, and brought to market, when this otherwise wouldn't happen, and in the public domain where they are the most useful.
Patents have never been a promise to the inventor that he will recover his expenses, or turn a profit. All that patents do is act like a funnel, allowing the patent holder to reap more of the possible value of the invention than he would otherwise. If the invention is valueless, or nearly so, then he gets nothing, or nearly nothing.
The market-based approach of the current patent (and copyright) systems are the right way to go. It avoids spending public money, and it ties the reward enjoyed by the inventor (or author) to what people actually think. It allows for failure, which is important to help people learn what to do and not to do. The possibility of reward is adequate incentive -- do you really think there's anyone out there who could invent but isn't, who would if we changed this? And it keeps patents (and copyrights) limited in duration and scope, which reduces the harm they cause to the public by prohibiting the free use of the invention (or work). It's really the most brilliant part of the system.
The patents awarded in the software environment should require the patent owner to actually implement the patent themselves instead of just using the patent to shakedown those who use the patented idea.
Meh. Then you'll see a piece of crappy software that barely manages to practice the patented invention, and which is deliberately priced so high that no one will ever buy it, and supporting it won't cost the patent holder anything. It'll just be part of the cost of doing business, rather than doing what you want.
Better would be to abolish software and business method patents. Remember, we grant patents to encourage inventors to invent things that they would not have done otherwise. In these specific fields, it's extremely likely that most of the inventions would be invented no matter what because of the powerful natural incentives that exist regardless of the availability of patents. I'd be willing to take a chance. And then, someday, if the pace of inventiveness in those fields should die down, we can consider granting patents to help encourage inventors again. The only thing that might be lost by not granting patents that's significant is disclosure, but it's often fairly clear to persons having ordinary skill in the art, and in the case of software, we could require disclosure as a part of the deposit requirement (not just for this, but also as good copyright policy) for copyrighted software, and probably do just fine.
And the people making the decisions on whether to grant a patent should be required to include independent subject matter experts in the decision process.
Examiners are independent subject matter experts. But the law obligates them to grant patents unless certain specific issues arise (e.g. the invention isn't novel). And they're usually pressed for time, so while the applicant may have had a team of lawyers working on the application for months, the examiner may only have a few hours to look it over.
Of course, I would remind you that a lot of things are obvious in hindsight that were really tricky to figure out in the first place; just because it makes sense once you've heard of it, that isn't enough to justify having the examiner shoot it down. It can be tricky to set hindsight aside.
But in the process, this indemnifies all his customers. The CDs they bought aren't real, they're contraband. But because the ringleader behind the whole thing was caught and punished, and restitution made to the IP owners, they get to keep their CDs and are not liable to be sued for owning contraband.
No it doesn't. The customers are still liable for their own infringements. It's not illegal, however, to merely possess unlawfully made copies of works (making copies, and distributing copies, yes, but not owning them), so unless you were to try to argue that the act of buying the unlawfully made copies is secondary infringement (with the seller's distribution being the underlying direct infringement), the customers should be fine as long as they don't distribute the copy while the work is copyrighted.
I don't know where you got this nonsense about indemnification, but it's just not true.
Yeah, I think there were experiments with a rogallo wing for Gemini but it never really worked.
Again, I'm not arguing that nuclear power is unsafe from a technical perspective. I'm sure that it is entirely possible to design and build a safe, reliable, efficient, and useful nuclear power plant. Likewise procedures for mining, processing, using, and disposing of nuclear material safely, and for decommissioning, disassembling, and disposing of nuclear power plants.
My concern is that human beings -- who by your standards I'm qualified to hold an opinion about, since I am one -- will fuck it up. There are numerous ways to do so, including failures of imagination, laziness, disregard for engineering and safety requirements, failure to pay for proper and timely training and maintenance, corruption, politics, etc. They don't have to be idiots, they only have to be human. (Though you do get idiots at times, as was the case at Chernobyl, IIRC)
AFAIK most of the serious nuclear accidents that have happened to date are due to humans, and no doubt this will continue.
Because the harm that can happen in a nuclear accident is particularly serious, and since the continued involvement of humans makes it likely that there will be more accidents to come so long as we keep using nuclear power, I'm against it.
Fossil fuels have other sorts of serious bad effects and forms of accidents, and I'm against them too.
I'd rather go for renewables, which, though they will experience failures too at times, are probably not going to cause such serious harm when they do.
I can't speak for others, but while I think that nuclear power can be safe as a technology, I don't have much faith in the managers of the plants to keep them running safely, or in the politicians needed to get waste safely processed / disposed of, or in independent regulators to help keep things safe and efficient even in spite of hostile management or politicians.
In that light, the risks of unsafe nuclear power are pretty scary. If a windmill breaks, it's not too dangerous. If a reactor melts down (or an oil well starts leaking uncontrollably -- I'm no fan of fossil fuels either) the consequences are a lot worse.
I'm an author.
Great. I'm an artist, and I'm also a copyright lawyer.
- If my work brings you something positive, it's only fair that you pay me.
Well that would be nice, but you can't always reasonably have that expectation.
For example, if I walk past a restaurant whilst eating some very bland food from somewhere else, and the pleasant smell of the food from within makes me enjoy my meal more, I'm not really obligated to pay for the smell.
Or perhaps, if I live on a parcel of land and never improve it, but my neighbors make such improvements that it raises the property value of my land just due to location, I'm not obligated to share those benefits (which are fairly easy to make liquid).
The fact that I love my job does not mean I should do it for free.
I agree. What you do is entirely up to you. Whether other people will find it worth paying you is entirely up to them, however. Not all jobs are in demand.
if I can't get the money I need by writing novels, I'll get another job.
Okay. Even under the current system of copyright, there's no guarantee of success. If you're a bad author, you won't make money writing novels, and you'll need to get a day job. Most authors don't support themselves from their writing, in fact; it's not a well-paying job at all, even for pros.
I should get to protect my intellectual property from abusive use (and I'm thinking commercial use here - I don't want people to sell my novels or use them to advertise products and thus make any profits from them, or use my novels in any other way to make money. Not now, not 100 years after they were created. I want my novels respected, it's not a matter of money for me, it's just about me being the guardian of my art and getting to decide what happens with it).
So for example, you are pissed off at the creators of West Side Story for having based it upon Romeo & Juliet without permission? (And presumably, you're equally pissed off at Shakespeare for having based his play off of earlier tellings of the same story, since he was not really much of one for doing anything original.)
Likewise, I expect you're pissed off that when Kafka requested in his will that his executor destroy all copies of his works, this wasn't done, and instead they were published, which turned out be a good thing for the rest of the world?
Get over it.
The public has an interest in seeing as many works created and published as possible, and for them to be in the public domain, where they of the most value to the public.
You don't have a right to control what happens to your works after they're published, except for what the public deigns to give you to get you to create and publish what you otherwise wouldn't; it would be foolish to give you the ability to interfere with the whole point of copyright.
Even your rights prior to publication ultimately stem from what's in the public interest, except that if the work isn't published, it's easier for you to personally ensure that the work is under your control, by e.g. keeping the only copy under lock and key.
So if control is what matters to you, I suggest you never bother to create. It's the only way to be sure, but I'd pity you for it.
However, fanfiction is bad because some people will write stories I won't necessarily approve of.
See the Shakespeare thing again. And remember: 90% of everything is crap. It doesn't matter whether it's original or derivative. It doesn't matter whether 'everything' is a lot or a little. Bad fanfic will be ignored as much as bad original fiction is. That's an acceptable price for the good stuff, which in some cases is even better than the original material.
That's what I did, that's what all great authors did
Not so much, no. Like Picasso said, 'great artists steal.' Plenty of great