First, thanks to the ease of putting and accessing cases on the computer, some federal courts now accept the citing of 'unpublished' opinions.
Second, all previously-decided cases establish precedents, but only some are binding precedents, which a court must follow, while most are merely persuasive, which a court may or may not follow as it sees fit. It's perfectly acceptable to cite the opinions of trial courts, if that's the best thing you've got.
Writing a book is an investment, not a job. It's taking risks, and if you don't reward those who take the risk and succeed, not very many people are going to be inclined to take that risk again.
It is an investment, but it is an abysmal one. Most authors don't get published, or if they're lucky enough that they do, can't recoup their investment. There are few professional authors, and fewer still who get rich. But they write anyway, and given that there's no dearth of authors, we're better off not guaranteeing any rewards. Why should we buy the cow, if the milk is free?
And of course, that's part of the genius of copyright. An author might get a copyright trivially, but the monetary value of that copyright depends on the whims of the market. If the readers think the book is crap, it will flop, and the author's copyright is worthless. The actual value isn't determined by the author or by the act of writing, but by the public.
I don't understand your complaint. Congress grants the monopoly to the author. Obviously it is up to the author to decide who gets it then. Plus, since copyrights were already transferable before the Constitution was written, and the first Copyright Act, passed by the first Congress, expected authors to transfer their copyrights as they saw fit, there's no reason to believe that the Constitution prohibits it. And, if it could not be assigned (despite the strong policy in the US against non-assignable property), it would just be exclusively licensed, with no difference from the end result now. I have no idea what you think you could achieve by making copyrights non-assignable. I'm sure it wouldn't work.
Does anyone seriously think that a large number of people would put up the money up front for an author to write a novel, or to create a big-budget movie, or perform and create an album, without any assurance of what the end product is going to be?
Well, the various publishing interests don't trust their authors either. They structure their dealings so that they, or trusted agents, are frequently checking up on the authors. Someone looks over rough versions of the work to make sure that it is progressing as desired. And if it's not, they'll provide notes to get it back on track, so that the final product is what the publisher wants, not what the author wants. And if the author doesn't listen, the deal may end, with the author not walking away with as much money as he could have made (maybe none at all), since payments are not made as a lump sum up front. Plus, the author gets a hit to his reputation, and may eventually lose his career, just to further discourage him from winding up at odds with his publisher.
I think that this could work fine, probably with the addition of escrow accounts to help keep people from cheating each other. Authors starting out from nothing might have to do some work for free to get their name out there well enough to start getting paying gigs, but this is not really unusual in a lot of fields.
I buy a large number of novels, for instance, but there's only a handful of authors who I would trust enough to give them money in advance based on the promise that they're going to create a good product.
Which is why you'd give them a little bit of money to see the outline, a little bit more to see various rough drafts, and so on. And some projects might make roughs publicly available to drum up investments.
Of course a work might still turn out to be crap, but that happens under the current system.
And of course, it would be to my advantage not to join in paying for it, because if there's no copyright I'll get it for free if someone else puts up the money.
Yes, that is how piracy effectively works now. But no one seems to have been driven out of business yet, and Kid Rock still hasn't starved to death. There's clearly money coming from somewhere.
In the vast majority of creative works, the works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Leaving them to one's heirs would be pointless. For a small number of works, the works have some copyright-related economic value; but for the vast majority of those works, the vast majority of the value is realized very soon after the first publication of that work in a given medium. For example, when a movie is first released in theaters, the week it does the most business is usually the first week it is out. Each week after that, it will attract a smaller and smaller audience. Eventually, it cannot attract enough of an audience to remain in a first run theater. It then goes to a second run theater, where the cycle repeats itself. Then it becomes available in other venues: Pay-Per-View, airplanes, home video sales, home video rental, premium cable, basic cable, broadcast networks, etc. Eventually the business becomes a small trickle, if there's any at all.
The timeline on which this occurs can be as long as a few years, in the case of a popular movie, or as short as a few hours, in the case of a newspaper (who buys yesterday's newspaper for the content, after all?). Something like a novel might have as much as 18-24 months in it.
Only a teeny tiny number of works defy these odds and have lasting significant popularity. Managing to produce one of these has similar odds to winning the lottery, and may even owe more to the efforts of the publishers and marketers to keep it relevant, than the actual value of the work itself.
So even for a moderately successful work, there's really nothing to leave to heirs, unless the author dies immediately. Better then to tie copyright terms to a length of time after publication of the work (with a deadline to encourage publication in the first place), than to the life of the author, plus anything. The economic vitality of the work, after all, has nothing to do with whether the author is alive or dead. (Well, maybe in the fine arts, but copyright matters little in that field; people will pay millions for an original Picasso, not a duplicate, however accurate it may be.)
Treating copyright as a system to help support widows and orphans is therefore grossly irresponsible. In most cases, in the vast majority of cases, it simply will not help them at all, while it will still harm the public by imposing a restriction on what we can do. For anyone to trust that their book or whatnot will support their family is as foolish as leaving them a big box of lottery tickets, on the assumption that they can win the jackpot. It is also unfair, since it only at best helps a small group of people -- authors and their families -- at the expense of everyone else.
A responsible author should get life insurance, just like everyone else does, and should work to earn actual money, not potential money, since the former is of far more help to one's family than the latter. The money should be invested wisely, just like everyone else tries to do. And in the case that this doesn't work out, a social welfare system should be set up that will aid any poor person, not just the poor families of authors.
But don't believe the royalties hype. Hardly anyone gets enough from those to actually live on, and in the rare case that they do, they were probably a gigantic success, in which case they either 1) don't need the pittance from the royalty, as they already got rich and stayed rich, or 2) squandered it all, in which case I don't think our policy should be to try to reward them further via copyright.
Nonsense. We need each country to engage in copyright reform that is appropriate for its own people. In some this may involve long terms or great amounts of protection, in others, short terms, or little protection, or perhaps even none at all. The last thing we need is more standardization; multi-national standards make reform virtually impossible. As it is, everyone who says that life+50 is too long is implicitly saying that their country needs to withdraw from the Berne Convention.
35 years may be too long. It certainly is too long for software, and may be too long for other works where some copyright is at least appropriate. Moral rights probably shouldn't exist at all; they don't seem to provide any public benefit whatsoever. And national libraries should be strengthened through copyright formalities, rather than giving yet more rights to publishers.
They created it, what better reason do you need? I enjoy benefiting from my creations, as I'm sure most do.
And I would like a pony, but that doesn't mean anyone should be obligated to give me one. Whether or not any given work deserves a copyright is ultimately up to the public, via a government that legitimately derives its power from their consent. So the questions we must consider are how does giving them a copyright benefit the rest of us, and what specific sort of copyright, in terms of what's eligible, how much protection there is, how long it lasts, etc., is best. Remember: a copyright is an infringement on the free speech right of everyone other than the copyright holder. They should not be granted lightly.
Eh... copyright law is I believe federal, so he can provide advice to anyone within the US...
No. The mere fact that copyright law in the US is overwhelmingly federal doesn't mean that attorneys practicing it can ignore the dangers of unauthorized practice. IIRC, some states are willing to allow attorneys not barred in that state to engage in a purely federal practice, but others are not.
There is, OTOH, a federal patent bar which operates more like how you're thinking.
The copyright of a brand new movie is not an evil thing. The studio spent millions to create it, they should be able to profit off of it for some reasonable amount of time (not for the current time limit of infinity+1, but reasonable).
Maybe, but there needs to be a better reason than merely that they spent money creating it.
The problem with copyright infringement with music is that the RIAA is going after the wrong people. They're going after downloaders, when it is actually the uploaders who are infringing copyright.
No, they're both infringers. Copyright isn't all about distribution. It is comprised of several exclusive rights, one of which is distribution (though there's a good argument that uploaders are really publicly performing it, not distributing it), and another of which is reproduction of a work into a copy, where a copy is defined as a material object. Since you cannot send a material object over an Internet connection, the fixation of a work into such an object has to occur entirely on the downloader's end. And since the downloader initiates the download, admittedly where an uploader has set automated machinery in place to respond to a command from a downloader, the downloader is the one responsible for the download, while the uploader is responsible for the upload.
Of course, when you're talking about offline distribution -- such as Alice burning a CD (making a copy) and giving the CD to Bob (distributing), then it would be fair to say that only Alice is liable. But this isn't what people have been getting sued for lately.
As for making copies of things for personal use, the law doesn't usually care. Making copies is infringing no matter what. There are minor exceptions here and there for fair use (which only applies if it is prima facie infringing, anyway), section 117 for software adaptations and backups, section 1008 for some sound recordings (though it is technically infringing, just non actionable, even in the rare case that 1008 is applicable), but usually it is going to be infringing. And off the top of my head, I do recall a case where a business made copies of an article for its own use, and this was found infringing.
I fully support reading the law. In particular, I'd look at sections 106 and 101, and I'd read them very carefully.
Of course, Congress ultimately amended the law so as to support them, at least if they go about it in the proper method. Check it out at 17 USC 110(11). Myself, I never found it to be problematic; while it offended me as censorship, the same end result could be accomplished by careful use of remote controls, so it's not as though any real harm was done to the copyright holders. I feel for the kids, though.
I'm opposed to that. But I'd be more tolerant of it if there were no ads of any sort, or any other means of soliciting support -- such as donations / tips, merchandise sales, or even an upload/download quota as many servers have been known to have. If we're going to condone any piracy, it certainly shouldn't be commercial in any way, shape, or form.
I'm really confused by the Slashdot ethics sometimes.
If the subject were copyright infringement of music, we'd all be in support (or at least sympathize with) the infringing party.
But it's not, it's stuff off web sites, and we identify with producing that, so we think the infringing party is the evil doer.
It doesn't seem that confusing to me. Slashdotters seem to be tolerant of individuals pirating material for their own use, and distributing it accordingly. But generally they seem to be opposed to people pirating things for commercial or for-profit purposes, or to businesses engaging in piracy. This magazine, which apparently had advertisers, was more like a business than someone merely posting recipes to their personal web page. The origins of the work may also be a factor, as you suggest.
The actual method which the instructions are a description of, is uncopyrightable. That means that anyone can, at worst, merely re-word the description and be okay.
In practice, recipe descriptions are usually not creative enough to be copyrightable. Add these together, stir that, and bake the other thing at 350 for five minutes is not adequate. It would have to be very creative, and even then, it would be tough, and still would be subject to being reworded. As a sanity check, I pulled up a recipe from the Joy of Cooking and checked it out; there is some introductory material that would be protectable, but the actual recipe pretty surely would not be. There's nothing creative about a mere list of clearly written instructions for carrying out an uncopyrightable procedure or method.
You may be interested to know that computer software often runs up against this sort of thing; parts of the actual code are copyrightable, but not all of it, and if necessary, courts will go through it carefully picking them apart, to see what had to be there, and thus isn't a creative choice, what was there, but could just as easily have not been, and thus was creative, what were standard elements that anyone might use but aren't really original, and so forth.
Copyright isn't meant to cover the functional aspects of things at all, and if the creative and useful cannot be disentangled, it all gets thrown out. Usefulness is what patents are for, and recipes can be patented (in fact, there's joke thousands of years old to the effect that patents themselves were invented for exactly that), but it rarely happens in practice.
From what I understand, a list of ingredients is NOT copyrightable, but the description of how to combine them is if it is an original work.
No; any or all of it could be copyrightable, but usually little or none of it is. Lists can be copyrightable, if they are creative, as can recipes. But the actual method of doing things is not, and it's hard to be creative in describing the method. And even if you manage to be, if there are only a few reasonable ways to be creative in the description, a copyright would effectively be like control over the underlying method, and so would not be allowed anyway.
Long story short, a recipe has to be _very_ creative to be copyrightable. A bare-bones description of the steps involved will not suffice. Usually one of the few copyrightable things in a cookbook is the picture of the food.
Increasingly, our copyright laws are being subverted for the benefit of publishers instead of authors.
That has been the case since at least the 1740s, which is pretty impressive, given that modern copyright law was only first enacted in 1710. Copyright is, ultimately, a right that is only worth anything to an author insofar as he can sell it to a publisher, and only worth anything to a publisher insofar as he can use it to attack rival publishers. And since publishers tend to be better at the business of copyright than authors, it should not be surprising that publishers will always dominate the copyright industries for their own benefit. It doesn't actually help authors much at all, but if it does produce a benefit to the public greater than if we didn't have it, it's nevertheless worth having.
You still don't get that taking something EVEN WITH THE AUTHOR'S NAME INTACT is copyright infringement
Well, that depends on what it is.
(it doesn't need an attribution or even a copyright symbol to be subject to copyright).
Which is really too bad. Copyright worked better when there were proper formalities, and any meaningful reform will need to include the return and revitalization of several formalities. There is more to reform than just dialing down the term length, after all.
The problem isn't the list -- there can be copyrightable lists -- but subject matter and creativity. You cannot copyright a method or process itself, only a description of it. But where there are few reasonable descriptions, e.g. there are only so many ways to say 'pre-heat to 350 degrees,' the description will tend to either not be creative or not be copyrightable lest it effectively result in a copyright on the method. The best protection for a recipe is a patent, but there are various issues there too.
What if we allowed natural persons, acting non-commercially, to make and distribute copies, etc., but we continued to treat it as infringement if they sought a profit, or if artificial persons (e.g. corporations, non-profit organizations, etc.) engaged in it?
There are numerous incentives for people to create and publish works. The existence of copyright doesn't diminish these in the least. Copyright is just one more incentive, and purely an economic incentive (though it isn't the only economic incentive -- artists can still make money without copyrights, and plenty of artists today make money without relying on copyrights). I didn't mean to suggest that these other incentives don't exist, I just was concentrating on copyright in particular at the time.
They got it and the world got 500 years of "classical" music and "classical" art.
Given some of the crap in the art world nowadays, I am prepared to take that chance.
After patronage ended,
It hasn't ended yet. Where the hell did you think that classical art forms still get their money? Operas, for example, can't support themselves on their box office. Donations count for a lot.
The point of piracy is to remove the revenue component from creative works.
That's more of an inescapable side-effect. I doubt that most pirates have it in for the authors who are the victims of their piracy. If it were possible to pirate and the author still got paid -- just not at the pirate's expense -- I'm sure most pirates would be all too happy to do things that way. The point of piracy is to get things conveniently and cheaply; preferably instantly for free.
So Stephen King gets published but nobody else.
Well, we've had ten years of wall-to-wall music and video piracy, and it shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Yet the music, movie, and tv industries still seem to be with us. So long as there's any money at all to be had, I think they will continue to be with us. Piracy may diminish some of the money to be had, but it can't get rid of all of it.
If you prefer patronage, you need to think it through some more because masses of people will not be the judge and the patron - rich old white people will be the patrons and works will be done to their specifications.
I don't think that is inevitable. Check out the Street Performer Protocol for one method of letting masses of people engage in patronage. There are other methods floating around too.
Besides, if the worst happens, and we clearly can't manage to get significant amounts of new works created and published without copyright, we can always put it back. You seem like a stodgy old person who is unwilling to change from centuries of the same model. Try something new, and see if it works.
But how many actually got to copy Shakespeares works at the time? Perfectly, bit by bit, at extremely low cost?
Perfectly? Very few, if any. Tolerant of some errors? Plenty. There are so-called 'bad quartos' floating around, which are pirated copies of his plays that came out during his life, before there were any official copies published. Plus Shakespeare himself may have revised some of the plays between the printing of the pirated edition and the official. The theory is that they were copied perhaps by audience members writing down what they heard, or by some of the actors dictating from memory. There's a hilarious bad Hamlet that is obviously from someone dictating, where some extraneous material was taken down by mistake: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Aye all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes."
Remember that copyright became an issue with the invention of the printing press.
The press came along well before Shakespeare, and copyright well after him. It's not a matter of technology really. People always forget that technology, if it favors anyone, favors legitimate publishers. Even today, there is no magic technology that pirates use, which the record labels and movie studios couldn't use, if they were willing to do so. (Not to mention that mass-produced CDs and DVDs are much cheaper and faster to make in bulk than burning them would be, if people wanted copies on disc)
Shakespeare put up his works on his own theatre and got money from the visitors coming there.
Yes, he eventually was a partner and got a share of the receipts. That, and prudent investments, are how he got rich. He didn't need copyright, and it's a good thing: all but one of his plays is based on someone else's material. And since he didn't write that many plays that fast, he would have pirated and staged other people's plays quite often, just as other acting companies surely did to him.
But when is the last time you saw a full length motion picture created by hobbyists?
Well, I saw Born of Hope earlier this year. Assuming that 'full length' is the 40 minute minimum that the AMPAS sets for the Oscars, it's 71 minutes long, so it meets that requirement.
And when is the last time you said, after viewing such a film, "Wow, this was so good that I am going to send these guys the money equivalent of a ticket?" And have you ever done so?
I thought it was boring, personally, but apparently they were able to raise £17,000 from donations, so it clearly does happen. (Though that was based on people seeing just the trailer, rather than paying after it was completed)
How would a movie production get money this way?
Get the money up front. Create a proposal, work out a budget, and present it, possibly with a small seed investment from the team making it. If enough fans like it and are willing to contribute, it could get made. There are various methods that can be used to try to keep people from running off with the money (studios already do this) and hopefully to ensure that it is well done.
Movies are usually funded by groups of investors. All we're doing here is expanding the size of the group, shrinking the amount of the investment, and making it clear up front that there will be no real attempt to recoup the investment or turn a profit. Investors that want to make money will shy away, but fans that want a good movie may line up.
The problem is it's near impossible to fund any new and innovative books or books by new authors this way.
Well then, where did all the books in the world prior to 1710, and many more books in other countries that adopted copyright later than England, come from? They didn't just fall out of the sky.
Also the consumer has no guarantee he'll ever finish the book, half a book is not worth half the price.
Put the money into escrow and have a mutually trusted third party verify that the manuscript meets the terms that the paying customers set. If it isn't, the money is refunded. Perhaps some authors would be able to negotiate an advance or partial payment if the book is rejected but wasn't too awful. Also, remember that the customers would be filling the role of publishers in this scenario, and publishers often face the same sorts of issues. It's not a big problem.
And if the funding level is hit then there's no point in giving the author more money, so it becomes a sucker game of not being in the pool but still getting the book.
And? If people can manage to game the system, then fine. Things will work themselves out; either there will be enough funding and the book is written despite the free riders, or there won't be, and they'll ultimately have to pony up or accept that they blew it.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it.
I don't really think so. I think that a significantly reformed copyright system could still produce a net social benefit, but abolition is a valid option, and should be on the table if there really is no better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
First, thanks to the ease of putting and accessing cases on the computer, some federal courts now accept the citing of 'unpublished' opinions.
Second, all previously-decided cases establish precedents, but only some are binding precedents, which a court must follow, while most are merely persuasive, which a court may or may not follow as it sees fit. It's perfectly acceptable to cite the opinions of trial courts, if that's the best thing you've got.
Yeah, I read those stories. The author never properly solved the problem; he had to invent a non-replicable material to fill the role of money.
Writing a book is an investment, not a job. It's taking risks, and if you don't reward those who take the risk and succeed, not very many people are going to be inclined to take that risk again.
It is an investment, but it is an abysmal one. Most authors don't get published, or if they're lucky enough that they do, can't recoup their investment. There are few professional authors, and fewer still who get rich. But they write anyway, and given that there's no dearth of authors, we're better off not guaranteeing any rewards. Why should we buy the cow, if the milk is free?
And of course, that's part of the genius of copyright. An author might get a copyright trivially, but the monetary value of that copyright depends on the whims of the market. If the readers think the book is crap, it will flop, and the author's copyright is worthless. The actual value isn't determined by the author or by the act of writing, but by the public.
I don't understand your complaint. Congress grants the monopoly to the author. Obviously it is up to the author to decide who gets it then. Plus, since copyrights were already transferable before the Constitution was written, and the first Copyright Act, passed by the first Congress, expected authors to transfer their copyrights as they saw fit, there's no reason to believe that the Constitution prohibits it. And, if it could not be assigned (despite the strong policy in the US against non-assignable property), it would just be exclusively licensed, with no difference from the end result now. I have no idea what you think you could achieve by making copyrights non-assignable. I'm sure it wouldn't work.
Does anyone seriously think that a large number of people would put up the money up front for an author to write a novel, or to create a big-budget movie, or perform and create an album, without any assurance of what the end product is going to be?
Well, the various publishing interests don't trust their authors either. They structure their dealings so that they, or trusted agents, are frequently checking up on the authors. Someone looks over rough versions of the work to make sure that it is progressing as desired. And if it's not, they'll provide notes to get it back on track, so that the final product is what the publisher wants, not what the author wants. And if the author doesn't listen, the deal may end, with the author not walking away with as much money as he could have made (maybe none at all), since payments are not made as a lump sum up front. Plus, the author gets a hit to his reputation, and may eventually lose his career, just to further discourage him from winding up at odds with his publisher.
I think that this could work fine, probably with the addition of escrow accounts to help keep people from cheating each other. Authors starting out from nothing might have to do some work for free to get their name out there well enough to start getting paying gigs, but this is not really unusual in a lot of fields.
I buy a large number of novels, for instance, but there's only a handful of authors who I would trust enough to give them money in advance based on the promise that they're going to create a good product.
Which is why you'd give them a little bit of money to see the outline, a little bit more to see various rough drafts, and so on. And some projects might make roughs publicly available to drum up investments.
Of course a work might still turn out to be crap, but that happens under the current system.
And of course, it would be to my advantage not to join in paying for it, because if there's no copyright I'll get it for free if someone else puts up the money.
Yes, that is how piracy effectively works now. But no one seems to have been driven out of business yet, and Kid Rock still hasn't starved to death. There's clearly money coming from somewhere.
Because it doesn't work.
In the vast majority of creative works, the works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Leaving them to one's heirs would be pointless.
For a small number of works, the works have some copyright-related economic value; but for the vast majority of those works, the vast majority of the value is realized very soon after the first publication of that work in a given medium. For example, when a movie is first released in theaters, the week it does the most business is usually the first week it is out. Each week after that, it will attract a smaller and smaller audience. Eventually, it cannot attract enough of an audience to remain in a first run theater. It then goes to a second run theater, where the cycle repeats itself. Then it becomes available in other venues: Pay-Per-View, airplanes, home video sales, home video rental, premium cable, basic cable, broadcast networks, etc. Eventually the business becomes a small trickle, if there's any at all.
The timeline on which this occurs can be as long as a few years, in the case of a popular movie, or as short as a few hours, in the case of a newspaper (who buys yesterday's newspaper for the content, after all?). Something like a novel might have as much as 18-24 months in it.
Only a teeny tiny number of works defy these odds and have lasting significant popularity. Managing to produce one of these has similar odds to winning the lottery, and may even owe more to the efforts of the publishers and marketers to keep it relevant, than the actual value of the work itself.
So even for a moderately successful work, there's really nothing to leave to heirs, unless the author dies immediately. Better then to tie copyright terms to a length of time after publication of the work (with a deadline to encourage publication in the first place), than to the life of the author, plus anything. The economic vitality of the work, after all, has nothing to do with whether the author is alive or dead. (Well, maybe in the fine arts, but copyright matters little in that field; people will pay millions for an original Picasso, not a duplicate, however accurate it may be.)
Treating copyright as a system to help support widows and orphans is therefore grossly irresponsible. In most cases, in the vast majority of cases, it simply will not help them at all, while it will still harm the public by imposing a restriction on what we can do. For anyone to trust that their book or whatnot will support their family is as foolish as leaving them a big box of lottery tickets, on the assumption that they can win the jackpot. It is also unfair, since it only at best helps a small group of people -- authors and their families -- at the expense of everyone else.
A responsible author should get life insurance, just like everyone else does, and should work to earn actual money, not potential money, since the former is of far more help to one's family than the latter. The money should be invested wisely, just like everyone else tries to do. And in the case that this doesn't work out, a social welfare system should be set up that will aid any poor person, not just the poor families of authors.
But don't believe the royalties hype. Hardly anyone gets enough from those to actually live on, and in the rare case that they do, they were probably a gigantic success, in which case they either 1) don't need the pittance from the royalty, as they already got rich and stayed rich, or 2) squandered it all, in which case I don't think our policy should be to try to reward them further via copyright.
Nonsense. We need each country to engage in copyright reform that is appropriate for its own people. In some this may involve long terms or great amounts of protection, in others, short terms, or little protection, or perhaps even none at all. The last thing we need is more standardization; multi-national standards make reform virtually impossible. As it is, everyone who says that life+50 is too long is implicitly saying that their country needs to withdraw from the Berne Convention.
35 years may be too long. It certainly is too long for software, and may be too long for other works where some copyright is at least appropriate. Moral rights probably shouldn't exist at all; they don't seem to provide any public benefit whatsoever. And national libraries should be strengthened through copyright formalities, rather than giving yet more rights to publishers.
They created it, what better reason do you need? I enjoy benefiting from my creations, as I'm sure most do.
And I would like a pony, but that doesn't mean anyone should be obligated to give me one. Whether or not any given work deserves a copyright is ultimately up to the public, via a government that legitimately derives its power from their consent. So the questions we must consider are how does giving them a copyright benefit the rest of us, and what specific sort of copyright, in terms of what's eligible, how much protection there is, how long it lasts, etc., is best. Remember: a copyright is an infringement on the free speech right of everyone other than the copyright holder. They should not be granted lightly.
Eh... copyright law is I believe federal, so he can provide advice to anyone within the US...
No. The mere fact that copyright law in the US is overwhelmingly federal doesn't mean that attorneys practicing it can ignore the dangers of unauthorized practice. IIRC, some states are willing to allow attorneys not barred in that state to engage in a purely federal practice, but others are not.
There is, OTOH, a federal patent bar which operates more like how you're thinking.
The copyright of a brand new movie is not an evil thing. The studio spent millions to create it, they should be able to profit off of it for some reasonable amount of time (not for the current time limit of infinity+1, but reasonable).
Maybe, but there needs to be a better reason than merely that they spent money creating it.
The problem with copyright infringement with music is that the RIAA is going after the wrong people. They're going after downloaders, when it is actually the uploaders who are infringing copyright.
No, they're both infringers. Copyright isn't all about distribution. It is comprised of several exclusive rights, one of which is distribution (though there's a good argument that uploaders are really publicly performing it, not distributing it), and another of which is reproduction of a work into a copy, where a copy is defined as a material object. Since you cannot send a material object over an Internet connection, the fixation of a work into such an object has to occur entirely on the downloader's end. And since the downloader initiates the download, admittedly where an uploader has set automated machinery in place to respond to a command from a downloader, the downloader is the one responsible for the download, while the uploader is responsible for the upload.
Of course, when you're talking about offline distribution -- such as Alice burning a CD (making a copy) and giving the CD to Bob (distributing), then it would be fair to say that only Alice is liable. But this isn't what people have been getting sued for lately.
As for making copies of things for personal use, the law doesn't usually care. Making copies is infringing no matter what. There are minor exceptions here and there for fair use (which only applies if it is prima facie infringing, anyway), section 117 for software adaptations and backups, section 1008 for some sound recordings (though it is technically infringing, just non actionable, even in the rare case that 1008 is applicable), but usually it is going to be infringing. And off the top of my head, I do recall a case where a business made copies of an article for its own use, and this was found infringing.
I fully support reading the law. In particular, I'd look at sections 106 and 101, and I'd read them very carefully.
Of course, Congress ultimately amended the law so as to support them, at least if they go about it in the proper method. Check it out at 17 USC 110(11). Myself, I never found it to be problematic; while it offended me as censorship, the same end result could be accomplished by careful use of remote controls, so it's not as though any real harm was done to the copyright holders. I feel for the kids, though.
I'm opposed to that. But I'd be more tolerant of it if there were no ads of any sort, or any other means of soliciting support -- such as donations / tips, merchandise sales, or even an upload/download quota as many servers have been known to have. If we're going to condone any piracy, it certainly shouldn't be commercial in any way, shape, or form.
I'm really confused by the Slashdot ethics sometimes.
If the subject were copyright infringement of music, we'd all be in support (or at least sympathize with) the infringing party.
But it's not, it's stuff off web sites, and we identify with producing that, so we think the infringing party is the evil doer.
It doesn't seem that confusing to me. Slashdotters seem to be tolerant of individuals pirating material for their own use, and distributing it accordingly. But generally they seem to be opposed to people pirating things for commercial or for-profit purposes, or to businesses engaging in piracy. This magazine, which apparently had advertisers, was more like a business than someone merely posting recipes to their personal web page. The origins of the work may also be a factor, as you suggest.
The actual method which the instructions are a description of, is uncopyrightable. That means that anyone can, at worst, merely re-word the description and be okay.
In practice, recipe descriptions are usually not creative enough to be copyrightable. Add these together, stir that, and bake the other thing at 350 for five minutes is not adequate. It would have to be very creative, and even then, it would be tough, and still would be subject to being reworded. As a sanity check, I pulled up a recipe from the Joy of Cooking and checked it out; there is some introductory material that would be protectable, but the actual recipe pretty surely would not be. There's nothing creative about a mere list of clearly written instructions for carrying out an uncopyrightable procedure or method.
You may be interested to know that computer software often runs up against this sort of thing; parts of the actual code are copyrightable, but not all of it, and if necessary, courts will go through it carefully picking them apart, to see what had to be there, and thus isn't a creative choice, what was there, but could just as easily have not been, and thus was creative, what were standard elements that anyone might use but aren't really original, and so forth.
Copyright isn't meant to cover the functional aspects of things at all, and if the creative and useful cannot be disentangled, it all gets thrown out. Usefulness is what patents are for, and recipes can be patented (in fact, there's joke thousands of years old to the effect that patents themselves were invented for exactly that), but it rarely happens in practice.
You mean the opposite.
From what I understand, a list of ingredients is NOT copyrightable, but the description of how to combine them is if it is an original work.
No; any or all of it could be copyrightable, but usually little or none of it is. Lists can be copyrightable, if they are creative, as can recipes. But the actual method of doing things is not, and it's hard to be creative in describing the method. And even if you manage to be, if there are only a few reasonable ways to be creative in the description, a copyright would effectively be like control over the underlying method, and so would not be allowed anyway.
Long story short, a recipe has to be _very_ creative to be copyrightable. A bare-bones description of the steps involved will not suffice. Usually one of the few copyrightable things in a cookbook is the picture of the food.
Increasingly, our copyright laws are being subverted for the benefit of publishers instead of authors.
That has been the case since at least the 1740s, which is pretty impressive, given that modern copyright law was only first enacted in 1710. Copyright is, ultimately, a right that is only worth anything to an author insofar as he can sell it to a publisher, and only worth anything to a publisher insofar as he can use it to attack rival publishers. And since publishers tend to be better at the business of copyright than authors, it should not be surprising that publishers will always dominate the copyright industries for their own benefit. It doesn't actually help authors much at all, but if it does produce a benefit to the public greater than if we didn't have it, it's nevertheless worth having.
You still don't get that taking something EVEN WITH THE AUTHOR'S NAME INTACT is copyright infringement
Well, that depends on what it is.
(it doesn't need an attribution or even a copyright symbol to be subject to copyright).
Which is really too bad. Copyright worked better when there were proper formalities, and any meaningful reform will need to include the return and revitalization of several formalities. There is more to reform than just dialing down the term length, after all.
The problem isn't the list -- there can be copyrightable lists -- but subject matter and creativity. You cannot copyright a method or process itself, only a description of it. But where there are few reasonable descriptions, e.g. there are only so many ways to say 'pre-heat to 350 degrees,' the description will tend to either not be creative or not be copyrightable lest it effectively result in a copyright on the method. The best protection for a recipe is a patent, but there are various issues there too.
What if we allowed natural persons, acting non-commercially, to make and distribute copies, etc., but we continued to treat it as infringement if they sought a profit, or if artificial persons (e.g. corporations, non-profit organizations, etc.) engaged in it?
There are numerous incentives for people to create and publish works. The existence of copyright doesn't diminish these in the least. Copyright is just one more incentive, and purely an economic incentive (though it isn't the only economic incentive -- artists can still make money without copyrights, and plenty of artists today make money without relying on copyrights). I didn't mean to suggest that these other incentives don't exist, I just was concentrating on copyright in particular at the time.
They got it and the world got 500 years of "classical" music and "classical" art.
Given some of the crap in the art world nowadays, I am prepared to take that chance.
After patronage ended,
It hasn't ended yet. Where the hell did you think that classical art forms still get their money? Operas, for example, can't support themselves on their box office. Donations count for a lot.
The point of piracy is to remove the revenue component from creative works.
That's more of an inescapable side-effect. I doubt that most pirates have it in for the authors who are the victims of their piracy. If it were possible to pirate and the author still got paid -- just not at the pirate's expense -- I'm sure most pirates would be all too happy to do things that way. The point of piracy is to get things conveniently and cheaply; preferably instantly for free.
So Stephen King gets published but nobody else.
Well, we've had ten years of wall-to-wall music and video piracy, and it shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Yet the music, movie, and tv industries still seem to be with us. So long as there's any money at all to be had, I think they will continue to be with us. Piracy may diminish some of the money to be had, but it can't get rid of all of it.
If you prefer patronage, you need to think it through some more because masses of people will not be the judge and the patron - rich old white people will be the patrons and works will be done to their specifications.
I don't think that is inevitable. Check out the Street Performer Protocol for one method of letting masses of people engage in patronage. There are other methods floating around too.
Besides, if the worst happens, and we clearly can't manage to get significant amounts of new works created and published without copyright, we can always put it back. You seem like a stodgy old person who is unwilling to change from centuries of the same model. Try something new, and see if it works.
But how many actually got to copy Shakespeares works at the time? Perfectly, bit by bit, at extremely low cost?
Perfectly? Very few, if any. Tolerant of some errors? Plenty. There are so-called 'bad quartos' floating around, which are pirated copies of his plays that came out during his life, before there were any official copies published. Plus Shakespeare himself may have revised some of the plays between the printing of the pirated edition and the official. The theory is that they were copied perhaps by audience members writing down what they heard, or by some of the actors dictating from memory. There's a hilarious bad Hamlet that is obviously from someone dictating, where some extraneous material was taken down by mistake: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Aye all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes."
Remember that copyright became an issue with the invention of the printing press.
The press came along well before Shakespeare, and copyright well after him. It's not a matter of technology really. People always forget that technology, if it favors anyone, favors legitimate publishers. Even today, there is no magic technology that pirates use, which the record labels and movie studios couldn't use, if they were willing to do so. (Not to mention that mass-produced CDs and DVDs are much cheaper and faster to make in bulk than burning them would be, if people wanted copies on disc)
Shakespeare put up his works on his own theatre and got money from the visitors coming there.
Yes, he eventually was a partner and got a share of the receipts. That, and prudent investments, are how he got rich. He didn't need copyright, and it's a good thing: all but one of his plays is based on someone else's material. And since he didn't write that many plays that fast, he would have pirated and staged other people's plays quite often, just as other acting companies surely did to him.
But when is the last time you saw a full length motion picture created by hobbyists?
Well, I saw Born of Hope earlier this year. Assuming that 'full length' is the 40 minute minimum that the AMPAS sets for the Oscars, it's 71 minutes long, so it meets that requirement.
And when is the last time you said, after viewing such a film, "Wow, this was so good that I am going to send these guys the money equivalent of a ticket?" And have you ever done so?
I thought it was boring, personally, but apparently they were able to raise £17,000 from donations, so it clearly does happen. (Though that was based on people seeing just the trailer, rather than paying after it was completed)
How would a movie production get money this way?
Get the money up front. Create a proposal, work out a budget, and present it, possibly with a small seed investment from the team making it. If enough fans like it and are willing to contribute, it could get made. There are various methods that can be used to try to keep people from running off with the money (studios already do this) and hopefully to ensure that it is well done.
Movies are usually funded by groups of investors. All we're doing here is expanding the size of the group, shrinking the amount of the investment, and making it clear up front that there will be no real attempt to recoup the investment or turn a profit. Investors that want to make money will shy away, but fans that want a good movie may line up.
The problem is it's near impossible to fund any new and innovative books or books by new authors this way.
Well then, where did all the books in the world prior to 1710, and many more books in other countries that adopted copyright later than England, come from? They didn't just fall out of the sky.
Also the consumer has no guarantee he'll ever finish the book, half a book is not worth half the price.
Put the money into escrow and have a mutually trusted third party verify that the manuscript meets the terms that the paying customers set. If it isn't, the money is refunded. Perhaps some authors would be able to negotiate an advance or partial payment if the book is rejected but wasn't too awful. Also, remember that the customers would be filling the role of publishers in this scenario, and publishers often face the same sorts of issues. It's not a big problem.
And if the funding level is hit then there's no point in giving the author more money, so it becomes a sucker game of not being in the pool but still getting the book.
And? If people can manage to game the system, then fine. Things will work themselves out; either there will be enough funding and the book is written despite the free riders, or there won't be, and they'll ultimately have to pony up or accept that they blew it.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it.
I don't really think so. I think that a significantly reformed copyright system could still produce a net social benefit, but abolition is a valid option, and should be on the table if there really is no better choice.