Funny, the SC agrees with my interpretation (roughly).
That's certainly not my understanding. And I'm fairly confident I'm right, but I'm man enough to admit that I could be wrong.
And unfortunately, I don't have time to research this, but you appear to have done so already. So, could you please provide quotes and citations? I'd be very interested to see where the Court has said, as you claim, that when corporations assert Constitutionally protected civil liberties, they do so not as a legally-defined person in their own right, but as an association of natural persons, where the civil liberties in question flow from them. It's probably safe to ignore cases in which corporations have lobbied for rights on the basis of unrelated third parties, such as a right to print truthful advertisements of lawful products and services, on the basis that customers have a right to this information.
Please remember to provide contrary quotes, so that I can get an accurate picture, instead of a slanted one. Oh, and please Shepardize, to make sure that you don't cite bad law.
No. They have to be able to license other people to do things with their work. Most authors aren't capable of, for example, filming a movie based on their book all by themselves. Or even just printing and distributing copies. Likewise, an inventor usually cannot single-handedly make pharmaceuticals in mass quantities. The problem would be worse given how many works and inventions rely upon other works and inventions, such as the score to a movie, or a patented chemical and the independently invented and patented process to make that chemical.
That's not viable; there would have to be licenses by the rights holder to allow third parties to do things with the protected material, without infringing. As a result, even if the rights were not transferred per se, there would just be licenses that closely approximated the same thing. In most cases, there probably would be no material difference.
A corporation has a multitude of extra laws governing its operation no person has, and lacks many rights a person does.
Well sure. Natural persons have a number of rights that are imbued upon us by God, or nature, or whatnot. Well, corporate entities don't exist naturally; we are their creators, and we limit what rights we grant them quite a lot. It might be wise to limit them more. But they nevertheless have a distinct legal identity from other persons associated with them. A corporation could have 10 people who between them owned all the stock, occupied all the offices and seats on the board, and were all of the employees. And then they could all get crushed by a meteor and die, but the corporation, being an independent entity, would survive.
I can gather 50 of my closest friends and they will sign a contract stating they agree for the funds to be used in a commercial either for or against Proposition X, and that they agree to be bound by the decision of the group. We could then vote, and if 26 of us are for it and 24 against, guess what? We can do the add for it.
And that's a partnership amongst the friends, not a corporation.
Again, a corporation is legally treated, in some ways, as a person but it is _also_ an aggregation of people, each of whom has rights and the sum of whom have rights.
Nope. Whatever rights the corporation has, they have to be granted by the state. And the state can change its laws, and thus, the corporation, pretty much at will. The people who create the corporation, or who run it, or who work for it, may have rights, but the corporation is its own person, not an aggregate. It doesn't have any rights at all merely because people are associated with it.
There is no right to marry, it's a state granted privilege like driving.
I'm not sure the history bears that out; people have been getting married for a very long time, probably long before states cared about such things. Even today, the issue isn't technically marriage, as it is state recognition of marriage.
And there are no protections in the Constitution for homosexuality or even recognition of it.
For homosexual persons, sure there is. In the 14th Amendment there is this clause: No state shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I don't see any language in the Constitution that says that this is limited to heterosexual persons. It seems very broad. Why wouldn't it apply? Perhaps it could be argued that it would apply, but for some reason not to (though I do not think this could be argued convincingly in most cases), but I fail to see why it would be ignored right off the bat.
As for homosexual behavior, again, sure there is. The same amendment also has a clause reading: No state shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Sex sure seems like something that would fall under the heading of liberty. There could be laws against it, or against certain types of it, but the onus would be on the state to justify those laws in light of a higher law that does not look kindly upon such prohibitions.
The US Constitution has a lot of very broad, sweeping language in it. You seem to have a problem with this, and possibly with the idea as seen in the 9th Amendment that not all rights are specifically enumerated, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, or aren't protected.
A corporation is composed of people, people in aggregate have freedom of speech.
That's wrong, actually. What you're describing is a partnership. A corporation isn't an aggregation of its employees or any other people. It is a legally-created person all by itself, with its own rights, without relying on the rights of any people associated with it.
But, because a corporation is a creature of the law -- they can only exist when the law permits them to, and to the extent that the law allows -- there's really no problem in regulating what rights it is granted. After all, the entire point of allowing these special unnatural entities to exist is to in some way serve the overall public interest. Unfortunately, we've been giving corporate entities way too many rights, and this has been damaging our society and our politics. It's time to rein them in a bit.
And having done so, if the natural people who are associated with the corporation would like to speak on a subject that the corporation is prohibited from speaking on, they're perfectly free to do so themselves -- using their personal resources, but not the resources of the corporation -- either individually, or as a group. The corporation is a unique sort of individual distinct from the shareholders, officers, employees, etc., and is of an artificial origin lacking natural rights, and should be kept from joining in that association of like-minded political speakers.
There's really no reason why we cannot ban corporations from engaging in politics, while still enjoying the right for "you and 50 of your friends [to] get together and decide to get a pool to pay for a commercial."
No. An activist judge is one who, for example, uses the constitution as a justification for striking down a ban on gay marriage when the US Constitution has absolutely nothing about homosexuality or even fucking marriage in it. Seriously - guh?
But the Constitution does have something about requiring due process before the federal government or the states may infringe on people's liberty. And it has something about requiring states to treat people equally under the law. So long as these very broad, very general guarantees can cover same sex marriage, such as the liberty to marry, or equal treatment of both genders, and of various sexual orientations, there's no need for a more a specific provision. And guess what: the recent decision in California is based upon these Constitutional guarantees!
Maybe you should read through the case to see the basis for the decision, rather than just assuming that the federal Constitution is toothless unless it is absurdly explicit.
That's one of the reasons countries trying to modernise their economies tend to put a focus on IP creation - it leads to a large influx of cash for a long, long time. Same goes for moving away from a primarily extraction-based economy.
Well, only so long as other countries respect it. Creation, after all, is expensive but not remunerative on its own; it is publishing that is (or at least can be) where the money is made. It's reasonable to let someone else invest the time and money in creation, and then to copy them cheaply and profitably. Convincing states to not do this is tough, especially if they don't have, and don't expect to have, much local creative effort that could be exploited elsewhere, justifying mutual respect for these rights.
Given that it seems unlikely that two countries would openly go to war over, say, DVD piracy, copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. just don't seem like a stable, long term basis for an economy. It's just too imaginary. Extraction isn't too good either, but perhaps there's some other way.
Well, did the person selling the fake skirts make it clear that they were fake (or at least, did the customers know)?
If so, then all they wanted was a skirt that looked a particular way; they didn't care who made it. Your ex's store, or the designers who supply her, can only try to compete in three ways, it seems to me.
First, quality; their skirts may be made of better materials than the fakes, or may be made with better techniques. If so, try to differentiate based on this. Of course, some people are satisfied with synthetics instead of natural materials, or poorer materials instead of finer ones, or single stitching instead of double stitching, so it won't always work, and the price difference may remain substantial. (There was an interesting article in the NY Times the other day about the Italian fashion industry and wool quality)
Second, price; how cheaply can the real skirts be made? Maybe it would be more efficient to sell skirts out of a van, instead of out of a store that is expensive to lease. It looks like the fake guys are winning on this front, but there's no reason that they necessarily have to.
Third, brand; there may be some cachet that can be used to make money out of the brand of the manufacturer or the distributor. Some people presented with identical products from different vendors at different prices may prefer the more expensive one as a form of conspicuous consumption. (You can see it elsewhere; a real Picasso is worth a lot, but a forgery, no matter how identical, is worth a lot less to people who care about this sort of thing) It can work, but it has problems. Some people don't care about brands, but just want a nice skirt. If the fake is good enough, they'll probably buy it since it costs less than the same thing from elsewhere. Some people care about brands, but are excluded due to artificially high prices set by the people controlling the brands. They'll deliberately seek out the fake skirts in order to most closely approximate the real thing.
I suspect that the ex et al have been trying to compete only on brand, and perhaps partially on materials (although usually brand justifies more of an increase in price than materials). If it's not working as well as they'd like, perhaps they ought to try a different approach?
But enabling their choice of business model with a particular set of laws and the power to enforce those laws is a choice that we're all ultimately involved in, not just them.
Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Meh. I don't use 'IP' either, but it contains some other things too, like trade secrets, publicity rights, hot news, and other even more obscure fields. Given that most of these have nothing at all to do with one another, and it's fairly rare for them to all arise in conversation, I suggest not trying to glom them together, and just using whichever one is appropriate at the time. Plus it saves on having to teach people a new initialism, and then get into the whole spiel. Just a suggestion.
just that they should be able to expect to be paid by people who use their products
I don't think that's very reasonable.
First, copyright does not include a right to 'use.' Making more copies, distributing copies, etc., sure, but not mere use.
Second, just as mere use isn't protected, there are plenty of exceptions that dash your supposed expectation. First Sale, for example, allows people to resell copies without paying authors, and usually permits rental and lending as well, without royalties or other payments.
Authors may have a reasonable expectation of payment when they are one of the parties to a transaction, but for transactions in which they are not personally involved, they can expect nothing other than what society, acting in its own interests through a democratic government, deigns to give them.
Hm, I suppose that is true technically, but I think you're not really on target there.
Your problem is the second use of the word 'explicitly.' That word isn't in the ninth amendment. Instead the rights reserved to the states and the people are merely those that are neither granted to the United States, and not denied to the states. This, especially in conjunction with the elastic clause, leaves the door open to implicitly granted powers, which are fairly like penumbral civil liberties that are also not expressly protected but can be understood to be present by careful reading. (E.g. the First Amendment expressly protects a right to speak freely, but not a right to listen -- since the lack of the latter would effectively gut the former, and this would be an absurd result, we must infer that the latter is also protected)
Well, this is my absolute favorite case on this subject. Scroll down to the section titled "Do those who browse the websites infringe plaintiff's copyright?" and remember to read footnote 5, which is part of that section.
Well, actually from the moment the image is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, but close enough.
Nevertheless, in order to encourage people to register, you often cannot even get into court to sue until you've registered, and certain desirable remedies, such as legal fees and statutory damages, are not available unless the work was registered in a timely fashion.
That having been said, we should really revitalize our system of formalities. Automatically granting full-fledged copyrights is the single worst thing about current US copyright law. Worse than excessively long copyright terms, in fact.
Doesn't matter; copyright infringement is almost always a strict liability offense. Even if they took all reasonable steps to avoid infringing, and any infringement was entirely accidental and unintentional, they're still on the hook for it.
Well, you can't do that for copyright infringement (only federal courts can hear copyright cases). It would have to be framed as a breach of contract case to get into state court (and state courts won't always buy into that), and in this case it doesn't really strike me as the best way to go. The damages issue stands out in particular.
Seriously, trademarks and copyright have NOTHING in common.
That's basically true, but now I want to find some commonality. Hm. Well, they both have a utility doctrine. I.e. neither copyrights nor trademarks can be used to protect an invention; that's what patents are for. They also both have doctrines called fair use, but really all they share there is the name. I could probably think of some other things they have in common.
Sort of, but not really. People usually are overly protective of marks.
Basically, a mark remains valid so long as goods or services bearing the mark, associated with the mark, etc. are all considered, by the relevant segment of the market, to originate from a common source, though it isn't necessary to know what source, in particular.
So imagine you see a can of soda with the word COCA-COLA on it. You can expect that it ultimately originates from the same place as other, similarly marked cans, and that the quality of the soda inside will be consistent amongst all of them. OTOH, a can that merely says SODA, could come from anywhere, and could contain a drink that's quite different from other things so marked.
If some third party soda bottler started to label their cans as COCA-COLA, but they were unrelated to the Coca-Cola company, and the contents were not like Coca-Cola, this would confuse customers. Trademark laws are meant, in no small part, as consumer protection, so that people can rely on labels to be truthful, and can rely on consistent levels of quality (not the same as good quality, just consistent). If Coca-Cola didn't do anything about this, the confusion could ultimately result in people no longer expecting COCA-COLA marked cans to have a common origin or consistent quality, and the trademark would be lost.
However, not every use of a competitor's trademark will confuse customers and lead to the mark being put in jeopardy. For example, if a can of a competitor's soda said something like 'Contains 10 grams more sugar than a can of Coca-Cola,' and this was a true statement, this would likely not jeopardize the COCA-COLA mark, and it would be pointless and stupid for the Coca-Cola company to sue over it.
There's no constructive point in trying to get revenge (nor is it good for the soul), that method of terrorism stopped working 3/4 of the way through that particular attack, and it didn't actually pose any sort of existential threat to us.
The real harm caused by the attack wasn't crashed planes or collapsed buildings; the real harm was that it goaded us into doing stupid, self-destructive things, like pissing away a lot of money that we really need for other projects, or systematically tearing down our own carefully built, hard won civil liberties.
Afghanistan can't really hurt us, and neither can Al Qaeda. But we can hurt ourselves, and that's just what we've been doing.
I don't know. I don't think that Afghanistan is capable of invading and conquering the United States. They pose no great threat to us. Given that, I'd really rather have the $300 billion.
And yet in your world, they don't have the rights to sell individual CDs because copies of content shouldn't count.
That's not precisely what he said: "There should be fair time limit to the holding of all content, it can not go on indefinitely this is wrong..you can not keep asking for money for CD's after the artist have been amply paid, the producers have been amply paid and the middle man."
That sounds to me as though he's just saying that after a fair length of time, the copyrights should expire, and that that time would certainly arise after the parties involved have been "amply paid" (he doesn't say whether it could occur otherwise).
Remember, copyrights are negative rights -- they rights to prohibit other people from doing something, not a right to actually do something yourself. When a musician sells a copy of a recording he's made, he's not exercising his copyright, he's exercising his free speech right. When the work falls into the public domain, all that happens is that the former copyright holder cannot stop other people from competing against him. He's still free to sell copies of the work, though. It's just that the price falls to somewhere much closer to the marginal cost per copy.
And 99 cents isn't a ridiculous price for something that I can listen to over and over again, and get repeated entertainment and value from.
That has yet to be determined, actually. IIRC, a single record (2 songs) cost about $1 in the early 60's. Adjusted for inflation that's about $7 now. I'm sure a lot of people back then felt that the equivalent of $3.50 now for one song was not a ridiculous price. Now, you seem to be saying that it's several times higher than it ought to be. Is it so strange to imagine that perhaps a lower price would be even more sensible? Perhaps in the future, songs will cost the equivalent of a 2010 penny. And people will still bitch about it, when they're not complaining about Space Obama.
And I watched all my favorite computer game shops fold citing piracy.
Interesting! I remember watching small computer shops fold citing big box computer shops... like CompUSA.
If you like something, you need to financially support it to make sure that kind of content is financially feasible in the market.
A minor nit: You really just need to financially support it, either by yourself, or in cooperation with others. It doesn't have to be capable of succeeding in the market otherwise, though. Lots of the fine arts survive on patronage, because the market isn't there so much as it once was (if ever).
Anyway, tl;dr: You're right that you can't copyright a fact, but any description, which is by definition a creative retelling of facts, can be copyrighted.
Well, not any description. There can be a few that aren't copyrightable. For example, there is the merger doctrine: if there is only one, or are only a few, reasonable descriptions possible, the description may be deemed to 'merge' with the underlying facts, since copyrights on the handful of available descriptions could in effect result in an impermissible copyright on the facts. Another is scènes à faire, which are common, basically stock descriptive elements. For example, in a non-sparkly vampire story set in Transylvania, having wolves that howl at the moon is descriptive, but is so generic to the genre that it's not particularly copyrightable (perhaps if it were unusually unique). Similarly, if part of a work is mandated for functional reasons, and not really present due to the creative choice of the author (this happens in software a lot, but I've seen it crop up in architecture as well, and there's no reason why it couldn't be possible in writing), it may not be copyrightable.
In the main, you're correct, but there are these occasional special cases to watch for.
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Funny, the SC agrees with my interpretation (roughly).
That's certainly not my understanding. And I'm fairly confident I'm right, but I'm man enough to admit that I could be wrong.
And unfortunately, I don't have time to research this, but you appear to have done so already. So, could you please provide quotes and citations? I'd be very interested to see where the Court has said, as you claim, that when corporations assert Constitutionally protected civil liberties, they do so not as a legally-defined person in their own right, but as an association of natural persons, where the civil liberties in question flow from them. It's probably safe to ignore cases in which corporations have lobbied for rights on the basis of unrelated third parties, such as a right to print truthful advertisements of lawful products and services, on the basis that customers have a right to this information.
Please remember to provide contrary quotes, so that I can get an accurate picture, instead of a slanted one. Oh, and please Shepardize, to make sure that you don't cite bad law.
Thanks so much!
No. They have to be able to license other people to do things with their work. Most authors aren't capable of, for example, filming a movie based on their book all by themselves. Or even just printing and distributing copies. Likewise, an inventor usually cannot single-handedly make pharmaceuticals in mass quantities. The problem would be worse given how many works and inventions rely upon other works and inventions, such as the score to a movie, or a patented chemical and the independently invented and patented process to make that chemical.
That's not viable; there would have to be licenses by the rights holder to allow third parties to do things with the protected material, without infringing. As a result, even if the rights were not transferred per se, there would just be licenses that closely approximated the same thing. In most cases, there probably would be no material difference.
A corporation has a multitude of extra laws governing its operation no person has, and lacks many rights a person does.
Well sure. Natural persons have a number of rights that are imbued upon us by God, or nature, or whatnot. Well, corporate entities don't exist naturally; we are their creators, and we limit what rights we grant them quite a lot. It might be wise to limit them more. But they nevertheless have a distinct legal identity from other persons associated with them. A corporation could have 10 people who between them owned all the stock, occupied all the offices and seats on the board, and were all of the employees. And then they could all get crushed by a meteor and die, but the corporation, being an independent entity, would survive.
I can gather 50 of my closest friends and they will sign a contract stating they agree for the funds to be used in a commercial either for or against Proposition X, and that they agree to be bound by the decision of the group. We could then vote, and if 26 of us are for it and 24 against, guess what? We can do the add for it.
And that's a partnership amongst the friends, not a corporation.
Again, a corporation is legally treated, in some ways, as a person but it is _also_ an aggregation of people, each of whom has rights and the sum of whom have rights.
Nope. Whatever rights the corporation has, they have to be granted by the state. And the state can change its laws, and thus, the corporation, pretty much at will. The people who create the corporation, or who run it, or who work for it, may have rights, but the corporation is its own person, not an aggregate. It doesn't have any rights at all merely because people are associated with it.
There is no right to marry, it's a state granted privilege like driving.
I'm not sure the history bears that out; people have been getting married for a very long time, probably long before states cared about such things. Even today, the issue isn't technically marriage, as it is state recognition of marriage.
And there are no protections in the Constitution for homosexuality or even recognition of it.
For homosexual persons, sure there is. In the 14th Amendment there is this clause: No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I don't see any language in the Constitution that says that this is limited to heterosexual persons. It seems very broad. Why wouldn't it apply? Perhaps it could be argued that it would apply, but for some reason not to (though I do not think this could be argued convincingly in most cases), but I fail to see why it would be ignored right off the bat.
As for homosexual behavior, again, sure there is. The same amendment also has a clause reading: No state shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Sex sure seems like something that would fall under the heading of liberty. There could be laws against it, or against certain types of it, but the onus would be on the state to justify those laws in light of a higher law that does not look kindly upon such prohibitions.
The US Constitution has a lot of very broad, sweeping language in it. You seem to have a problem with this, and possibly with the idea as seen in the 9th Amendment that not all rights are specifically enumerated, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, or aren't protected.
A corporation is composed of people, people in aggregate have freedom of speech.
That's wrong, actually. What you're describing is a partnership. A corporation isn't an aggregation of its employees or any other people. It is a legally-created person all by itself, with its own rights, without relying on the rights of any people associated with it.
But, because a corporation is a creature of the law -- they can only exist when the law permits them to, and to the extent that the law allows -- there's really no problem in regulating what rights it is granted. After all, the entire point of allowing these special unnatural entities to exist is to in some way serve the overall public interest. Unfortunately, we've been giving corporate entities way too many rights, and this has been damaging our society and our politics. It's time to rein them in a bit.
And having done so, if the natural people who are associated with the corporation would like to speak on a subject that the corporation is prohibited from speaking on, they're perfectly free to do so themselves -- using their personal resources, but not the resources of the corporation -- either individually, or as a group. The corporation is a unique sort of individual distinct from the shareholders, officers, employees, etc., and is of an artificial origin lacking natural rights, and should be kept from joining in that association of like-minded political speakers.
There's really no reason why we cannot ban corporations from engaging in politics, while still enjoying the right for "you and 50 of your friends [to] get together and decide to get a pool to pay for a commercial."
No. An activist judge is one who, for example, uses the constitution as a justification for striking down a ban on gay marriage when the US Constitution has absolutely nothing about homosexuality or even fucking marriage in it. Seriously - guh?
But the Constitution does have something about requiring due process before the federal government or the states may infringe on people's liberty. And it has something about requiring states to treat people equally under the law. So long as these very broad, very general guarantees can cover same sex marriage, such as the liberty to marry, or equal treatment of both genders, and of various sexual orientations, there's no need for a more a specific provision. And guess what: the recent decision in California is based upon these Constitutional guarantees!
Maybe you should read through the case to see the basis for the decision, rather than just assuming that the federal Constitution is toothless unless it is absurdly explicit.
Yeah, but they'll probably derive more enjoyment from the cardboard box the block of wood comes in.
That's one of the reasons countries trying to modernise their economies tend to put a focus on IP creation - it leads to a large influx of cash for a long, long time. Same goes for moving away from a primarily extraction-based economy.
Well, only so long as other countries respect it. Creation, after all, is expensive but not remunerative on its own; it is publishing that is (or at least can be) where the money is made. It's reasonable to let someone else invest the time and money in creation, and then to copy them cheaply and profitably. Convincing states to not do this is tough, especially if they don't have, and don't expect to have, much local creative effort that could be exploited elsewhere, justifying mutual respect for these rights.
Given that it seems unlikely that two countries would openly go to war over, say, DVD piracy, copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. just don't seem like a stable, long term basis for an economy. It's just too imaginary. Extraction isn't too good either, but perhaps there's some other way.
Well, did the person selling the fake skirts make it clear that they were fake (or at least, did the customers know)?
If so, then all they wanted was a skirt that looked a particular way; they didn't care who made it. Your ex's store, or the designers who supply her, can only try to compete in three ways, it seems to me.
First, quality; their skirts may be made of better materials than the fakes, or may be made with better techniques. If so, try to differentiate based on this. Of course, some people are satisfied with synthetics instead of natural materials, or poorer materials instead of finer ones, or single stitching instead of double stitching, so it won't always work, and the price difference may remain substantial. (There was an interesting article in the NY Times the other day about the Italian fashion industry and wool quality)
Second, price; how cheaply can the real skirts be made? Maybe it would be more efficient to sell skirts out of a van, instead of out of a store that is expensive to lease. It looks like the fake guys are winning on this front, but there's no reason that they necessarily have to.
Third, brand; there may be some cachet that can be used to make money out of the brand of the manufacturer or the distributor. Some people presented with identical products from different vendors at different prices may prefer the more expensive one as a form of conspicuous consumption. (You can see it elsewhere; a real Picasso is worth a lot, but a forgery, no matter how identical, is worth a lot less to people who care about this sort of thing) It can work, but it has problems. Some people don't care about brands, but just want a nice skirt. If the fake is good enough, they'll probably buy it since it costs less than the same thing from elsewhere. Some people care about brands, but are excluded due to artificially high prices set by the people controlling the brands. They'll deliberately seek out the fake skirts in order to most closely approximate the real thing.
I suspect that the ex et al have been trying to compete only on brand, and perhaps partially on materials (although usually brand justifies more of an increase in price than materials). If it's not working as well as they'd like, perhaps they ought to try a different approach?
But enabling their choice of business model with a particular set of laws and the power to enforce those laws is a choice that we're all ultimately involved in, not just them.
Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Meh. I don't use 'IP' either, but it contains some other things too, like trade secrets, publicity rights, hot news, and other even more obscure fields. Given that most of these have nothing at all to do with one another, and it's fairly rare for them to all arise in conversation, I suggest not trying to glom them together, and just using whichever one is appropriate at the time. Plus it saves on having to teach people a new initialism, and then get into the whole spiel. Just a suggestion.
just that they should be able to expect to be paid by people who use their products
I don't think that's very reasonable.
First, copyright does not include a right to 'use.' Making more copies, distributing copies, etc., sure, but not mere use.
Second, just as mere use isn't protected, there are plenty of exceptions that dash your supposed expectation. First Sale, for example, allows people to resell copies without paying authors, and usually permits rental and lending as well, without royalties or other payments.
Authors may have a reasonable expectation of payment when they are one of the parties to a transaction, but for transactions in which they are not personally involved, they can expect nothing other than what society, acting in its own interests through a democratic government, deigns to give them.
Hm, I suppose that is true technically, but I think you're not really on target there.
Your problem is the second use of the word 'explicitly.' That word isn't in the ninth amendment. Instead the rights reserved to the states and the people are merely those that are neither granted to the United States, and not denied to the states. This, especially in conjunction with the elastic clause, leaves the door open to implicitly granted powers, which are fairly like penumbral civil liberties that are also not expressly protected but can be understood to be present by careful reading. (E.g. the First Amendment expressly protects a right to speak freely, but not a right to listen -- since the lack of the latter would effectively gut the former, and this would be an absurd result, we must infer that the latter is also protected)
Well, this is my absolute favorite case on this subject. Scroll down to the section titled "Do those who browse the websites infringe plaintiff's copyright?" and remember to read footnote 5, which is part of that section.
Well, actually from the moment the image is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, but close enough.
Nevertheless, in order to encourage people to register, you often cannot even get into court to sue until you've registered, and certain desirable remedies, such as legal fees and statutory damages, are not available unless the work was registered in a timely fashion.
That having been said, we should really revitalize our system of formalities. Automatically granting full-fledged copyrights is the single worst thing about current US copyright law. Worse than excessively long copyright terms, in fact.
Doesn't matter; copyright infringement is almost always a strict liability offense. Even if they took all reasonable steps to avoid infringing, and any infringement was entirely accidental and unintentional, they're still on the hook for it.
Did he register the copyright in a timely fashion? If not, he can't get statutory damages.
Well, you can't do that for copyright infringement (only federal courts can hear copyright cases). It would have to be framed as a breach of contract case to get into state court (and state courts won't always buy into that), and in this case it doesn't really strike me as the best way to go. The damages issue stands out in particular.
Seriously, trademarks and copyright have NOTHING in common.
That's basically true, but now I want to find some commonality. Hm. Well, they both have a utility doctrine. I.e. neither copyrights nor trademarks can be used to protect an invention; that's what patents are for. They also both have doctrines called fair use, but really all they share there is the name. I could probably think of some other things they have in common.
Sort of, but not really. People usually are overly protective of marks.
Basically, a mark remains valid so long as goods or services bearing the mark, associated with the mark, etc. are all considered, by the relevant segment of the market, to originate from a common source, though it isn't necessary to know what source, in particular.
So imagine you see a can of soda with the word COCA-COLA on it. You can expect that it ultimately originates from the same place as other, similarly marked cans, and that the quality of the soda inside will be consistent amongst all of them. OTOH, a can that merely says SODA, could come from anywhere, and could contain a drink that's quite different from other things so marked.
If some third party soda bottler started to label their cans as COCA-COLA, but they were unrelated to the Coca-Cola company, and the contents were not like Coca-Cola, this would confuse customers. Trademark laws are meant, in no small part, as consumer protection, so that people can rely on labels to be truthful, and can rely on consistent levels of quality (not the same as good quality, just consistent). If Coca-Cola didn't do anything about this, the confusion could ultimately result in people no longer expecting COCA-COLA marked cans to have a common origin or consistent quality, and the trademark would be lost.
However, not every use of a competitor's trademark will confuse customers and lead to the mark being put in jeopardy. For example, if a can of a competitor's soda said something like 'Contains 10 grams more sugar than a can of Coca-Cola,' and this was a true statement, this would likely not jeopardize the COCA-COLA mark, and it would be pointless and stupid for the Coca-Cola company to sue over it.
And?
There's no constructive point in trying to get revenge (nor is it good for the soul), that method of terrorism stopped working 3/4 of the way through that particular attack, and it didn't actually pose any sort of existential threat to us.
The real harm caused by the attack wasn't crashed planes or collapsed buildings; the real harm was that it goaded us into doing stupid, self-destructive things, like pissing away a lot of money that we really need for other projects, or systematically tearing down our own carefully built, hard won civil liberties.
Afghanistan can't really hurt us, and neither can Al Qaeda. But we can hurt ourselves, and that's just what we've been doing.
I don't know. I don't think that Afghanistan is capable of invading and conquering the United States. They pose no great threat to us. Given that, I'd really rather have the $300 billion.
Well, don't worry; you can find copies of all of his books at /dev/random
And yet in your world, they don't have the rights to sell individual CDs because copies of content shouldn't count.
That's not precisely what he said: "There should be fair time limit to the holding of all content, it can not go on indefinitely this is wrong..you can not keep asking for money for CD's after the artist have been amply paid, the producers have been amply paid and the middle man."
That sounds to me as though he's just saying that after a fair length of time, the copyrights should expire, and that that time would certainly arise after the parties involved have been "amply paid" (he doesn't say whether it could occur otherwise).
Remember, copyrights are negative rights -- they rights to prohibit other people from doing something, not a right to actually do something yourself. When a musician sells a copy of a recording he's made, he's not exercising his copyright, he's exercising his free speech right. When the work falls into the public domain, all that happens is that the former copyright holder cannot stop other people from competing against him. He's still free to sell copies of the work, though. It's just that the price falls to somewhere much closer to the marginal cost per copy.
And 99 cents isn't a ridiculous price for something that I can listen to over and over again, and get repeated entertainment and value from.
That has yet to be determined, actually. IIRC, a single record (2 songs) cost about $1 in the early 60's. Adjusted for inflation that's about $7 now. I'm sure a lot of people back then felt that the equivalent of $3.50 now for one song was not a ridiculous price. Now, you seem to be saying that it's several times higher than it ought to be. Is it so strange to imagine that perhaps a lower price would be even more sensible? Perhaps in the future, songs will cost the equivalent of a 2010 penny. And people will still bitch about it, when they're not complaining about Space Obama.
And I watched all my favorite computer game shops fold citing piracy.
Interesting! I remember watching small computer shops fold citing big box computer shops... like CompUSA.
If you like something, you need to financially support it to make sure that kind of content is financially feasible in the market.
A minor nit: You really just need to financially support it, either by yourself, or in cooperation with others. It doesn't have to be capable of succeeding in the market otherwise, though. Lots of the fine arts survive on patronage, because the market isn't there so much as it once was (if ever).
Anyway, tl;dr: You're right that you can't copyright a fact, but any description, which is by definition a creative retelling of facts, can be copyrighted.
Well, not any description. There can be a few that aren't copyrightable. For example, there is the merger doctrine: if there is only one, or are only a few, reasonable descriptions possible, the description may be deemed to 'merge' with the underlying facts, since copyrights on the handful of available descriptions could in effect result in an impermissible copyright on the facts. Another is scènes à faire, which are common, basically stock descriptive elements. For example, in a non-sparkly vampire story set in Transylvania, having wolves that howl at the moon is descriptive, but is so generic to the genre that it's not particularly copyrightable (perhaps if it were unusually unique). Similarly, if part of a work is mandated for functional reasons, and not really present due to the creative choice of the author (this happens in software a lot, but I've seen it crop up in architecture as well, and there's no reason why it couldn't be possible in writing), it may not be copyrightable.
In the main, you're correct, but there are these occasional special cases to watch for.