No, VARA only applies under very narrow circumstances indeed. For example, it only applies where the work is in a limited edition of no more than 200 copies, each consecutively numbered and signed, and does not include works made for hire. This is pretty certainly not a work which qualifies for that sort of protection in the US.
First Sales rights apply when you manage to bring the goods legally into the USA. And you can't do that against the will of the copyright holder.
I disagree. First sale applies when a copy is made within the US, and then sold, regardless of where it is sold. The 9th Cir. decided that first sale should also apply to copies made outside of the US -- despite the lack of support for this in the statute, but okay, it's also a judicial doctrine -- where the copy was imported under the authority of the copyright holder and sold here. (E.g. if a book were printed in Mexico, shipped by the publisher across the border, and sold in a store, it would be as if the book were printed in New Mexico)
But it is lawful to import copies under a few exceptions in section 602, without the authorization of the copyright holder. And in those situations, I don't see how first sale could apply, even though the goods were legally brought here.
US first sale doctrine cannot possibly apply outside the USA.
Sure it can. We could say that for any work which is copyrighted in the US, first sale applies to any copy of that work which was made and sold under the authority of the author of that work, or any person to whom the copyright of that author had been vested lawfully.
So, for example, if Alice, an author, writes a book, and keeps the US rights to the book, but sells the UK rights to Bob, a Brit, Bob can lawfully print copies in the UK, sell them to Carol, a person whose name begins with C, and Carol could bring them into the US lawfully, and treat them just like any other copies, since first sale had occurred between Bob and Carol, and Alice had given Bob the applicable rights to engage in that sale.
The purpose of regulating imports as a form of distribution for copyright is to protect authors from a situation in which their book is copyrighted here, in the public domain across the border, and they have to compete with free. Or, where there are pirates across the border. But so long as it's the same author who at least initially had the rights in both countries, they would only be competing against themselves, which sounds fine to me. And if an author sold his international rights for a pittance, to be paid in installments of a fraction of a pittance each, that's his problem. Authors doing stupid things are not what copyright should guard against. That would be offensively paternalistic.
The copyright makes sure that only the copyright holder can produce the watch.
No, it would be a pain in the ass trying to get a copyright to apply to an entire watch. Maybe you'd be able to get parts of the case or the dial. In any event, the copyrighted work in question here is a logo, apparently this.
And note that "import" has some specific meaning. Things you buy for personal use are not "imported".
Well, for the purposes of copyright law, any tangible object in which is fixed a copyrighted work, which is brought into the US from outside is imported. Whether for personal or commercial use is irrelevant. Unless the object was manufactured in the US, and exported earlier, it is illegal to import it unless the US copyright holder (who may not be at all involved with whoever made the object abroad) permits it, or unless you fall into one of a few very narrow exceptions. And while there is a personal use exception, it doesn't permit for later distribution itself, nor does it trigger first sale, so the object can never be distributed further. At least, not within the US, not while it is copyrighted. I can only imagine what this will do for estate law.
Mind you, last I checked logos and their like are the domain of trademarks. How they got a copyright for something that should, by all rights, be a trademark is something that seems to be missing from this conversation.
Trademarks and copyrights are unrelated forms of protection, involving different policies, rights, remedies, and so forth, but it is possible, from time to time, to have a single object which is protected by both -- in different ways, of course.
Consider, for example, the Beagle Bros logo since it's a fairly fancy logo, and shouldn't be totally unknown around here.
Assuming that the portraits in the logo are not old public domain clip art (fat chance), they'd clearly be copyrighted works of visual art. That they are also used as a logo doesn't cause them to lose their copyrighted status. Copyright protections would prevent people from, for example, making copies of the logo, but would not prevent people from distributing lawfully made copies further, if the first sale had already occurred. So the copyright could not be used to prevent someone from putting a copy of MS-DOS on a 5.25" floppy disk, putting that disk in a disk jacket emblazoned with the Beagle Bros logo, and claiming that it was BB-DOS.
The trademark on the logo, OTOH, could be used to prevent people from making that sort of false claim. But a trademark would not prevent someone from just making copies of the logo and printing them on stuff, so long as they didn't place those goods into commerce. Copyright would handle that side of things, though.
Copyrights can never apply to just a word or a name or even a short phrase. So the _name_ BEAGLE BROS could only be trademarked. And a very simple logo might not be able to be copyrighted either. The McDonald's M logo, all by itself, is probably not copyrightable, for example.
I'm confident that Omega has a trademark on their logo as well, but so long as it meets the very low standards to be copyrightable, they get both kinds of protection.
There is a fun downside, however. A trademark cannot be pressed into service as a poor-man's copyright, per the Dastar case. When the copyright on the logo expires, it will enter the public domain, and Omega won't be able to use trademark law to prevent people from doing whatever they want with it. It is possible that it will still have some degree of vitality as a trademark, but it will be severely diminished. Of course, that assumes that things won't get even worse in the future.
This is basically a debate over whether the US federal government has the power to regulate this level of commerce. There's no real dispute that the several states could do it, if they wanted to. And ironically, the best argument against it would be that for the states to do so would interfere with federal regulation of interstate commerce.
The relationships and flows of power between the people, states, and federal government in the US is, AFAIK, pretty uncommon. I had been under the impression that in the UK, power basically resides with Parliament, which may then grant entities further down the chain some measure of power and independence to do things, but could just as easily withdraw it or modify it as it sees fit. That is a lot more like how one of the states in the US functions, than our federal government.
I don't think we have these kind of systems in the UK - If you want to sell anything, you're in the loop, and there are animal welfare issues too... but apart from that, you can do what you like with your land, as long as you don't annoy your neighbours.
They let you grow as much pot as you like for your personal use? Sounds good. How about mutant man-eating mobile marigolds? They won't get loose -- scout's honor!
And your reference to the preamble of the US constitution sort of shows a little ignorance on this subject. Despite it being non-binding,
Why do you think that the Preamble is not a binding part of the Constitution? It doesn't really accomplish a hell of a lot, I'd agree, but I see no reason why any part of that document would be non-binding unless made so by another part of the Constitution or an amendment. And the Constitution's own supremacy clause states that the Constitution -- not merely certain, selected parts of it -- are the supreme law of the land.
There was at least one CG effect in Star Wars: the wireframe at the pilot briefing. Of course, the state of the art progressed a lot between Star Wars and Tron.
This vaguely reminds me of how the movie studios used to own their own theater chains, and kept their films out of independent theaters at times, until they were broken apart for antitrust violations. Also, these days, the real real money is in rental and home video, not the box office, so maybe you should have Netflix make movies.
And if the block of text is insufficiently creative -- perhaps because it is just an ordinary list of ingredients and steps to cook them -- that too isn't going to be copyrightable. Or if there were only a few reasonable ways to write the recipe, it won't be copyrightable, lest the copyright effectively protect the underlying method due to a lack of alternative ways to word it.
In a cookbook, the only things you can count on probably being copyrighted are the pictures of the food.
So there is no protection for a hairstyle or a recipe being used.
Recipes are patentable, though there are various requirements that any particular recipe will have to meet.
Hairstyles would be either protectable by a design patent or a copyright, depending on the utility of hair. But IIRC, design patents still have novelty and nonobviousness requirements, so there probably haven't been patentable hairstyles since the days of Flock of Seagulls.
But there is no protection for the dish that can be prepared following the recipe.
The dish too, could be patented. The law doesn't distinguish between, food and, say, pharmaceuticals. You can patent a method for making a drug, and you can patent the drug itself. So too can you patent a method for making a dish of food, and the dish that is the result of that method. It's just not very common, likely due to the cost, minimal benefits to the inventor, and a cuisine culture that doesn't much care about patents anyway.
If you can be sued for violating a copyright (making a copy of something) then you can be sued also for making a derivative work.
No, if you copy a copyrighted work, that is not the same thing as making a derivative work, and vice versa. Making a copy of a book would be like xeroxing it. Making a derivative work of that book would be like writing a sequel to the book, or adapting it into a movie. They are very different things. The minor imperfections that might occur in the process of making a copy are not the sorts of changes that are necessary to qualify as a derivative.
Again the concept of a license only applies with a patent and copyright is completely different than patents.
Well, finally something I can agree with: Patents and copyrights are completely different. But copyrights involve licenses too. The GPL, for example, is a rather well-known copyright license. And when you write a post on Slashdot and submit it, you implicitly grant them and their readers a license to reproduce the post in order for people to simply be able to read it.
On the flip side, because recipes are neither copyright-able nor patent-able, they are carefully guarded
What made you think that? Recipes are entirely patentable, so long as they meet the various criteria for a patent, such as novelty and non-obviousness. It's just that in practice cooks don't seem to bother with patents much (although IIRC there have been a few -- shredded wheat breakfast cereal was patented when it was invented, for example).
But because patents require disclosing the recipe, and because patent terms are fairly short, at which point everyone will have the right and the knowledge to make it, trade secret protection is more popular in the food industry. Also, trade secrets can apply to inventions which are not patentable due to a lack of novelty or what have you. A trade secret requires not disclosing the recipe, and lasts so long as you keep the secret.
Businesses should not be able to own copyrights, only individuals.
What's the point of that? And even if we did that, why do you think it wouldn't be trivial to get around it so that it was still, in effect, owned by a business?
Also, movies can require the creative efforts of a hell of a lot more than a small group of people.
Interesting point about natural rights. Is the concept that we own what we make a natural right or not?
Probably not. Ownership hinges on control. If you claimed to own the Brooklyn Bridge (regardless of whether you created it or not), and everyone else in the world disagrees, you really don't own it at all. People can really only own things they can personally defend from others, or things that others are willing to allow them to own (usually in exchange for your willingness to allow them to own things they claim).
I used to work in that area myself, and was also able to live comfortably. I never bothered with copyrights, however, and my customers and clients never cared about them either. There are plenty of opportunities for artists to sell their services, just as many people do (plumbers, doctors, etc.) rather than particular goods. And all the way on the other end of the spectrum are fine artists who sell specific goods, but where there's no real market for copies. (E.g. an original Picasso is worth a fortune, but a poster of one is only worth a few dollars. To collectors, the value is in a specific copy, not any old copy that happens to contain the work)
There is certainly room to reform copyright law as it exists in Berne Convention countries, but it is a necessary piece of legislation.
I hope you're not suggesting that the Berne Convention itself is necessary. It's not, as our history of staying out of Berne until 1989 proves. In fact, any meaningful reform will inevitably require us to withdraw from Berne, because the minimum standards necessary to comply with Berne are simply too excessive.
Without copyright, artists would be living in gutters like Edgar Allan Poe used to do.
Aside from the fact that Edgar Allen Poe lived in an era when he could get copyrights in the US (though I don't know whether he bothered to or not), copyrights are no guarantee of monetary success. Plenty of authors end up in gutters with copyrights. A copyright is better thought of as being like a lens; it can't cause there to be money that isn't there anyway, but it can direct much of whatever money happens to be available to the copyright holder.
The key difference in those two lists is that the second list is doesn't lose any quality in the duplication process (for the most part).
Until fairly recently, that was never the case for sound recordings, visual art, and moving pictures. But they've all been copyrightable for a pretty long time.
It's both, really. It's not just a status symbol, it's something that they can go after people for copying, so that there's no competition for that particular status symbol.
Even the best art vandal who draws a genre-appropriate mustache on every bit of art they can get their hands on is hardly displaying skill compared to someone working from scratch.
That doesn't follow at all. In the scenario you describe, my conclusion would be
Weren't you all about not drawing conclusions at all?
If it's "justified", then by definition, how is it "not good"? That seems a contradiction.
Think of it in terms of 'least bad.' If you had a gangrenous arm, it might justifiably have to be cut off, but I'm sure you wouldn't view the benefits of losing an arm to be all that good, and wouldn't like to have a perfectly healthy arm taken away.
I bolded the part to which I wanted to reply. Your statement here suggests that the only harm of considering all secret-keeping bad and applying the "cures democracy can provide" is to those who (as part of their jobs) keep secrets that'd you'd agree are justifiably kept secret if you were in the know. I'd argue that there's significantly more harm than just that -- that in fact, that's the least of the harms caused.
No, all I said there was that if I condemned someone for keeping secrets, but that they had done so for the best, that that was a result they should have expected to happen with which they need to have already come to terms. I never said that that was the worst thing that could result from not keeping secrets at all, or from exposing secrets.
I'm not suggesting a conclusion to draw -- I'm suggesting drawing no conclusion at all.
In which case you could have a rogue government that did obvious evil things, claimed to do secret good things, and was not subject to whatever cures democracy could provide, since everyone would be paralyzed by the claims -- which might very well be false, in keeping with the known evils of the government -- of good.
That's not acceptable. This is the real world, and we are going to have to draw conclusions based upon what we've got. They might be wrong, but it's hardly our fault that we lack information that could justify the continued existence of the organizations that are keeping secrets from us. In fact, I'd say that wrong conclusions are their fault; they'd be better off not resorting to secrecy as much (it is pretty clearly abused now), and not keeping secrets for as long.
Believing that the government should never, ever keep secrets? That point-of-view seems unrealistic.
Oh, I don't think that it is realistic to expect a totally transparent government. OTOH, I do think that deviation from total transparency is at least not good, when justified, and usually bad, as it isn't. If we think of the goodwill a government might accumulate in the eyes of its citizens as the sum of the good and bad things it has done, secret good things don't count, and it's generally safe to assume, based on prior experience, that there are a lot of secret bad things, a value for which could be estimated. So secrecy really doesn't benefit the goodwill a government can have, and likely diminishes it. If it drops too low, the government will become illegitimate and need to be replaced.
So I see nothing wrong with condemning a government that keeps secrets from its people, and spitting upon the officials who engage in this. If they've done something wrong, and are cowering behind the claim of secrecy, they deserve it. And if they've done something good, but are tragically forced to conceal it, and are condemned nevertheless, the Super Chicken rule applies: They knew the job was dangerous when they took it.
Or are you concluding that stuff you haven't heard about must therefore not exist?
This, chiefly. I am an American citizen. I have the right to judge how well the government that works for me is doing. And, since it only is legitimately empowered to govern if it has the consent of the governed, I have the right to grant or withdraw my consent as I see fit. All Americans have these rights.
I'm obviously not going to just trust them. The entire structure of the government is founded on distrust of power. If they keep secrets, then not only is it wholly appropriate to judge them on the basis of what information we do have, it is also fair to condemn them for keeping secrets.
So the point is to make the United States' efforts to stop terrorist attacks less effective?
I think it would be hard to make them less effective; they're pretty ineffective already. Some attacks proceeded anyway -- anthrax, the IRS guy -- some were stopped by civilians on the scene -- the fourth 9/11 plane, the shoe bomb -- and the ones that appear to have had the most government involvement are usually schmucks that never could have accomplished anything to begin with, and required help from the government to be even arguably a threat, and not just a joke.
The government clearly has no idea what it is, or should be, doing. The main thing that seems to be in our favor has been that no one with adequate resources who is competent enough to carry out an attack has wanted to do so. That or blind luck.
My complaint is the the constitution doesn't give congress the power to enable an artist to sell a copyright.
Why not? Congress is granted the power to promote the progress of science by granting exclusive rights. While if there is to be any grant at all, the initial grant is required to be to the author, the Constitution otherwise leaves the details up to Congress.
The British Statute of Anne did not apply to the American colonies, although some scholars have asserted otherwise.
True, but the Statute's influence on US copyright law cannot be ignored. Not only did we crib heavily from it, it was basically all we had to look to anyway.
There were no US copyrights before the constitution was written although some states passed copyright laws.
By some, let us be clear: all but one state passed copyright laws prior to the first federal copyright law. And part of the reason that the then-new federal government was granted a copyright power was because twelve conflicting copyright laws just made a hash of everything. Let's review them:
Connecticut enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Massachusetts enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Maryland enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New Jersey enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New Hampshire enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Rhode Island enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Pennsylvania enacted a law in 1784. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
South Carolina enacted a law in 1784. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Virginia enacted a law in 1785. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
North Carolina enacted a law in 1785. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Georgia enacted a law in 1786. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New York enacted a law in 1786. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Predictably, once the federal government was set up, it enacted a copyright law in 1790, and it permitted authors to assign their rights.
The odd state out is Delaware, which apparently didn't get around to passing a state copyright law and AFAIK, still has not done so. But if they ever did, or if they ever do, I bet I can predict one of the things that will be in there.
So given that England, from which we inherited our law, had assignable copyrights, and every state that addressed the issue, which was all but one, had assignable copyrights, and given that, IIRC, that was literally every modern copyright law on the planet (the French didn't pass their law until 1793, after their revolution), how likely do you think it is that the Constitution actually fails to grant Congress the power to grant copyrights which authors may then assign as they see fit? Just because it isn't spelled out in hundred-foot high flaming letters doesn't mean that it isn't at least implicitly there.
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No, VARA only applies under very narrow circumstances indeed. For example, it only applies where the work is in a limited edition of no more than 200 copies, each consecutively numbered and signed, and does not include works made for hire. This is pretty certainly not a work which qualifies for that sort of protection in the US.
First Sales rights apply when you manage to bring the goods legally into the USA. And you can't do that against the will of the copyright holder.
I disagree. First sale applies when a copy is made within the US, and then sold, regardless of where it is sold. The 9th Cir. decided that first sale should also apply to copies made outside of the US -- despite the lack of support for this in the statute, but okay, it's also a judicial doctrine -- where the copy was imported under the authority of the copyright holder and sold here. (E.g. if a book were printed in Mexico, shipped by the publisher across the border, and sold in a store, it would be as if the book were printed in New Mexico)
But it is lawful to import copies under a few exceptions in section 602, without the authorization of the copyright holder. And in those situations, I don't see how first sale could apply, even though the goods were legally brought here.
US first sale doctrine cannot possibly apply outside the USA.
Sure it can. We could say that for any work which is copyrighted in the US, first sale applies to any copy of that work which was made and sold under the authority of the author of that work, or any person to whom the copyright of that author had been vested lawfully.
So, for example, if Alice, an author, writes a book, and keeps the US rights to the book, but sells the UK rights to Bob, a Brit, Bob can lawfully print copies in the UK, sell them to Carol, a person whose name begins with C, and Carol could bring them into the US lawfully, and treat them just like any other copies, since first sale had occurred between Bob and Carol, and Alice had given Bob the applicable rights to engage in that sale.
The purpose of regulating imports as a form of distribution for copyright is to protect authors from a situation in which their book is copyrighted here, in the public domain across the border, and they have to compete with free. Or, where there are pirates across the border. But so long as it's the same author who at least initially had the rights in both countries, they would only be competing against themselves, which sounds fine to me. And if an author sold his international rights for a pittance, to be paid in installments of a fraction of a pittance each, that's his problem. Authors doing stupid things are not what copyright should guard against. That would be offensively paternalistic.
The copyright makes sure that only the copyright holder can produce the watch.
No, it would be a pain in the ass trying to get a copyright to apply to an entire watch. Maybe you'd be able to get parts of the case or the dial. In any event, the copyrighted work in question here is a logo, apparently this.
And note that "import" has some specific meaning. Things you buy for personal use are not "imported".
Well, for the purposes of copyright law, any tangible object in which is fixed a copyrighted work, which is brought into the US from outside is imported. Whether for personal or commercial use is irrelevant. Unless the object was manufactured in the US, and exported earlier, it is illegal to import it unless the US copyright holder (who may not be at all involved with whoever made the object abroad) permits it, or unless you fall into one of a few very narrow exceptions. And while there is a personal use exception, it doesn't permit for later distribution itself, nor does it trigger first sale, so the object can never be distributed further. At least, not within the US, not while it is copyrighted. I can only imagine what this will do for estate law.
Mind you, last I checked logos and their like are the domain of trademarks. How they got a copyright for something that should, by all rights, be a trademark is something that seems to be missing from this conversation.
Trademarks and copyrights are unrelated forms of protection, involving different policies, rights, remedies, and so forth, but it is possible, from time to time, to have a single object which is protected by both -- in different ways, of course.
Consider, for example, the Beagle Bros logo since it's a fairly fancy logo, and shouldn't be totally unknown around here.
Assuming that the portraits in the logo are not old public domain clip art (fat chance), they'd clearly be copyrighted works of visual art. That they are also used as a logo doesn't cause them to lose their copyrighted status. Copyright protections would prevent people from, for example, making copies of the logo, but would not prevent people from distributing lawfully made copies further, if the first sale had already occurred. So the copyright could not be used to prevent someone from putting a copy of MS-DOS on a 5.25" floppy disk, putting that disk in a disk jacket emblazoned with the Beagle Bros logo, and claiming that it was BB-DOS.
The trademark on the logo, OTOH, could be used to prevent people from making that sort of false claim. But a trademark would not prevent someone from just making copies of the logo and printing them on stuff, so long as they didn't place those goods into commerce. Copyright would handle that side of things, though.
Copyrights can never apply to just a word or a name or even a short phrase. So the _name_ BEAGLE BROS could only be trademarked. And a very simple logo might not be able to be copyrighted either. The McDonald's M logo, all by itself, is probably not copyrightable, for example.
I'm confident that Omega has a trademark on their logo as well, but so long as it meets the very low standards to be copyrightable, they get both kinds of protection.
There is a fun downside, however. A trademark cannot be pressed into service as a poor-man's copyright, per the Dastar case. When the copyright on the logo expires, it will enter the public domain, and Omega won't be able to use trademark law to prevent people from doing whatever they want with it. It is possible that it will still have some degree of vitality as a trademark, but it will be severely diminished. Of course, that assumes that things won't get even worse in the future.
Really? I'd think you do.
This is basically a debate over whether the US federal government has the power to regulate this level of commerce. There's no real dispute that the several states could do it, if they wanted to. And ironically, the best argument against it would be that for the states to do so would interfere with federal regulation of interstate commerce.
The relationships and flows of power between the people, states, and federal government in the US is, AFAIK, pretty uncommon. I had been under the impression that in the UK, power basically resides with Parliament, which may then grant entities further down the chain some measure of power and independence to do things, but could just as easily withdraw it or modify it as it sees fit. That is a lot more like how one of the states in the US functions, than our federal government.
I don't think we have these kind of systems in the UK - If you want to sell anything, you're in the loop, and there are animal welfare issues too... but apart from that, you can do what you like with your land, as long as you don't annoy your neighbours.
They let you grow as much pot as you like for your personal use? Sounds good. How about mutant man-eating mobile marigolds? They won't get loose -- scout's honor!
And your reference to the preamble of the US constitution sort of shows a little ignorance on this subject. Despite it being non-binding,
Why do you think that the Preamble is not a binding part of the Constitution? It doesn't really accomplish a hell of a lot, I'd agree, but I see no reason why any part of that document would be non-binding unless made so by another part of the Constitution or an amendment. And the Constitution's own supremacy clause states that the Constitution -- not merely certain, selected parts of it -- are the supreme law of the land.
Early 1999, at least; that's when I got a copy.
There was at least one CG effect in Star Wars: the wireframe at the pilot briefing. Of course, the state of the art progressed a lot between Star Wars and Tron.
This vaguely reminds me of how the movie studios used to own their own theater chains, and kept their films out of independent theaters at times, until they were broken apart for antitrust violations. Also, these days, the real real money is in rental and home video, not the box office, so maybe you should have Netflix make movies.
And if the block of text is insufficiently creative -- perhaps because it is just an ordinary list of ingredients and steps to cook them -- that too isn't going to be copyrightable. Or if there were only a few reasonable ways to write the recipe, it won't be copyrightable, lest the copyright effectively protect the underlying method due to a lack of alternative ways to word it.
In a cookbook, the only things you can count on probably being copyrighted are the pictures of the food.
So there is no protection for a hairstyle or a recipe being used.
Recipes are patentable, though there are various requirements that any particular recipe will have to meet.
Hairstyles would be either protectable by a design patent or a copyright, depending on the utility of hair. But IIRC, design patents still have novelty and nonobviousness requirements, so there probably haven't been patentable hairstyles since the days of Flock of Seagulls.
But there is no protection for the dish that can be prepared following the recipe.
The dish too, could be patented. The law doesn't distinguish between, food and, say, pharmaceuticals. You can patent a method for making a drug, and you can patent the drug itself. So too can you patent a method for making a dish of food, and the dish that is the result of that method. It's just not very common, likely due to the cost, minimal benefits to the inventor, and a cuisine culture that doesn't much care about patents anyway.
If you can be sued for violating a copyright (making a copy of something) then you can be sued also for making a derivative work.
No, if you copy a copyrighted work, that is not the same thing as making a derivative work, and vice versa. Making a copy of a book would be like xeroxing it. Making a derivative work of that book would be like writing a sequel to the book, or adapting it into a movie. They are very different things. The minor imperfections that might occur in the process of making a copy are not the sorts of changes that are necessary to qualify as a derivative.
Again the concept of a license only applies with a patent and copyright is completely different than patents.
Well, finally something I can agree with: Patents and copyrights are completely different. But copyrights involve licenses too. The GPL, for example, is a rather well-known copyright license. And when you write a post on Slashdot and submit it, you implicitly grant them and their readers a license to reproduce the post in order for people to simply be able to read it.
On the flip side, because recipes are neither copyright-able nor patent-able, they are carefully guarded
What made you think that? Recipes are entirely patentable, so long as they meet the various criteria for a patent, such as novelty and non-obviousness. It's just that in practice cooks don't seem to bother with patents much (although IIRC there have been a few -- shredded wheat breakfast cereal was patented when it was invented, for example).
But because patents require disclosing the recipe, and because patent terms are fairly short, at which point everyone will have the right and the knowledge to make it, trade secret protection is more popular in the food industry. Also, trade secrets can apply to inventions which are not patentable due to a lack of novelty or what have you. A trade secret requires not disclosing the recipe, and lasts so long as you keep the secret.
Businesses should not be able to own copyrights, only individuals.
What's the point of that? And even if we did that, why do you think it wouldn't be trivial to get around it so that it was still, in effect, owned by a business?
Also, movies can require the creative efforts of a hell of a lot more than a small group of people.
Interesting point about natural rights. Is the concept that we own what we make a natural right or not?
Probably not. Ownership hinges on control. If you claimed to own the Brooklyn Bridge (regardless of whether you created it or not), and everyone else in the world disagrees, you really don't own it at all. People can really only own things they can personally defend from others, or things that others are willing to allow them to own (usually in exchange for your willingness to allow them to own things they claim).
That's interesting.
I used to work in that area myself, and was also able to live comfortably. I never bothered with copyrights, however, and my customers and clients never cared about them either. There are plenty of opportunities for artists to sell their services, just as many people do (plumbers, doctors, etc.) rather than particular goods. And all the way on the other end of the spectrum are fine artists who sell specific goods, but where there's no real market for copies. (E.g. an original Picasso is worth a fortune, but a poster of one is only worth a few dollars. To collectors, the value is in a specific copy, not any old copy that happens to contain the work)
There is certainly room to reform copyright law as it exists in Berne Convention countries, but it is a necessary piece of legislation.
I hope you're not suggesting that the Berne Convention itself is necessary. It's not, as our history of staying out of Berne until 1989 proves. In fact, any meaningful reform will inevitably require us to withdraw from Berne, because the minimum standards necessary to comply with Berne are simply too excessive.
Without copyright, artists would be living in gutters like Edgar Allan Poe used to do.
Aside from the fact that Edgar Allen Poe lived in an era when he could get copyrights in the US (though I don't know whether he bothered to or not), copyrights are no guarantee of monetary success. Plenty of authors end up in gutters with copyrights. A copyright is better thought of as being like a lens; it can't cause there to be money that isn't there anyway, but it can direct much of whatever money happens to be available to the copyright holder.
The key difference in those two lists is that the second list is doesn't lose any quality in the duplication process (for the most part).
Until fairly recently, that was never the case for sound recordings, visual art, and moving pictures. But they've all been copyrightable for a pretty long time.
It's both, really. It's not just a status symbol, it's something that they can go after people for copying, so that there's no competition for that particular status symbol.
Even the best art vandal who draws a genre-appropriate mustache on every bit of art they can get their hands on is hardly displaying skill compared to someone working from scratch.
Which is not to say that they're necessarily untalented, or even not displaying any skills, just that they're not displaying the same skills.
That doesn't follow at all. In the scenario you describe, my conclusion would be
Weren't you all about not drawing conclusions at all?
If it's "justified", then by definition, how is it "not good"? That seems a contradiction.
Think of it in terms of 'least bad.' If you had a gangrenous arm, it might justifiably have to be cut off, but I'm sure you wouldn't view the benefits of losing an arm to be all that good, and wouldn't like to have a perfectly healthy arm taken away.
I bolded the part to which I wanted to reply. Your statement here suggests that the only harm of considering all secret-keeping bad and applying the "cures democracy can provide" is to those who (as part of their jobs) keep secrets that'd you'd agree are justifiably kept secret if you were in the know. I'd argue that there's significantly more harm than just that -- that in fact, that's the least of the harms caused.
No, all I said there was that if I condemned someone for keeping secrets, but that they had done so for the best, that that was a result they should have expected to happen with which they need to have already come to terms. I never said that that was the worst thing that could result from not keeping secrets at all, or from exposing secrets.
I'm not suggesting a conclusion to draw -- I'm suggesting drawing no conclusion at all.
In which case you could have a rogue government that did obvious evil things, claimed to do secret good things, and was not subject to whatever cures democracy could provide, since everyone would be paralyzed by the claims -- which might very well be false, in keeping with the known evils of the government -- of good.
That's not acceptable. This is the real world, and we are going to have to draw conclusions based upon what we've got. They might be wrong, but it's hardly our fault that we lack information that could justify the continued existence of the organizations that are keeping secrets from us. In fact, I'd say that wrong conclusions are their fault; they'd be better off not resorting to secrecy as much (it is pretty clearly abused now), and not keeping secrets for as long.
Believing that the government should never, ever keep secrets? That point-of-view seems unrealistic.
Oh, I don't think that it is realistic to expect a totally transparent government. OTOH, I do think that deviation from total transparency is at least not good, when justified, and usually bad, as it isn't. If we think of the goodwill a government might accumulate in the eyes of its citizens as the sum of the good and bad things it has done, secret good things don't count, and it's generally safe to assume, based on prior experience, that there are a lot of secret bad things, a value for which could be estimated. So secrecy really doesn't benefit the goodwill a government can have, and likely diminishes it. If it drops too low, the government will become illegitimate and need to be replaced.
So I see nothing wrong with condemning a government that keeps secrets from its people, and spitting upon the officials who engage in this. If they've done something wrong, and are cowering behind the claim of secrecy, they deserve it. And if they've done something good, but are tragically forced to conceal it, and are condemned nevertheless, the Super Chicken rule applies: They knew the job was dangerous when they took it.
Or are you concluding that stuff you haven't heard about must therefore not exist?
This, chiefly. I am an American citizen. I have the right to judge how well the government that works for me is doing. And, since it only is legitimately empowered to govern if it has the consent of the governed, I have the right to grant or withdraw my consent as I see fit. All Americans have these rights.
I'm obviously not going to just trust them. The entire structure of the government is founded on distrust of power. If they keep secrets, then not only is it wholly appropriate to judge them on the basis of what information we do have, it is also fair to condemn them for keeping secrets.
So the point is to make the United States' efforts to stop terrorist attacks less effective?
I think it would be hard to make them less effective; they're pretty ineffective already. Some attacks proceeded anyway -- anthrax, the IRS guy -- some were stopped by civilians on the scene -- the fourth 9/11 plane, the shoe bomb -- and the ones that appear to have had the most government involvement are usually schmucks that never could have accomplished anything to begin with, and required help from the government to be even arguably a threat, and not just a joke.
The government clearly has no idea what it is, or should be, doing. The main thing that seems to be in our favor has been that no one with adequate resources who is competent enough to carry out an attack has wanted to do so. That or blind luck.
My complaint is the the constitution doesn't give congress the power to enable an artist to sell a copyright.
Why not? Congress is granted the power to promote the progress of science by granting exclusive rights. While if there is to be any grant at all, the initial grant is required to be to the author, the Constitution otherwise leaves the details up to Congress.
The British Statute of Anne did not apply to the American colonies, although some scholars have asserted otherwise.
True, but the Statute's influence on US copyright law cannot be ignored. Not only did we crib heavily from it, it was basically all we had to look to anyway.
There were no US copyrights before the constitution was written although some states passed copyright laws.
By some, let us be clear: all but one state passed copyright laws prior to the first federal copyright law. And part of the reason that the then-new federal government was granted a copyright power was because twelve conflicting copyright laws just made a hash of everything. Let's review them:
Connecticut enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Massachusetts enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Maryland enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New Jersey enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New Hampshire enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Rhode Island enacted a law in 1783. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Pennsylvania enacted a law in 1784. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
South Carolina enacted a law in 1784. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Virginia enacted a law in 1785. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
North Carolina enacted a law in 1785. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Georgia enacted a law in 1786. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
New York enacted a law in 1786. It permitted authors to assign their rights.
Predictably, once the federal government was set up, it enacted a copyright law in 1790, and it permitted authors to assign their rights.
The odd state out is Delaware, which apparently didn't get around to passing a state copyright law and AFAIK, still has not done so. But if they ever did, or if they ever do, I bet I can predict one of the things that will be in there.
So given that England, from which we inherited our law, had assignable copyrights, and every state that addressed the issue, which was all but one, had assignable copyrights, and given that, IIRC, that was literally every modern copyright law on the planet (the French didn't pass their law until 1793, after their revolution), how likely do you think it is that the Constitution actually fails to grant Congress the power to grant copyrights which authors may then assign as they see fit? Just because it isn't spelled out in hundred-foot high flaming letters doesn't mean that it isn't at least implicitly there.
I guess it depended on whether or not he won the toss. ;)