Notice the rationale for copyright, given in the first clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Whatever copyright law has subsequently become, it traditionally has absolutely nothing to do with artistic "creativity." It's main purpose is to advance society by promoting scientific and useful creative endeavors. (I should note that the word "Arts" in the 18th century had slightly different connotations than today; it still had a lot to do with skilled crafts.)
Fashion is actually not "useful" in that sense, and therefore should not be protected by copyright.
Sorry, no, but you were so close.
The copyright and patent clause empowers Congress to grant copyrights and patents, surprisingly enough. And it is written in that order: copyrights, then patents. Copyrights are to be granted to promote the progress of science, by protecting for a limited time, an author's writings; Patents are to be granted to promote the progress of the useful arts, by protecting for a limited time, an inventor's discoveries. The framers knew their grammar, and didn't mix up the two parts of the clause.
The trick is just that the English language changes a lot -- which is why Shakespeare can be tricky to read, and Chaucer very difficult -- and in this case, since the Constitution was written in the late 18th century, the meanings have virtually flip-flopped. For example, the original liberal arts (the trivium and quadrivium) used to also be called the liberal sciences -- science just meant knowledge that was learned by study. The arts, meanwhile, were applied skills, often undertaken by skilled craftsmen, i.e. artificers. Remnants of this meaning of art, as applied to the subject of patents, still exist: after all, a patent concerns state-of-the-art technology, but can be invalidated by the demonstration of prior art, and must be written so as to be understandable to a person having ordinary skill in the art which the patent relates to. Further, most patents -- the sort that most people think of, when they think of a patent, are utility patents, only granted for useful inventions. Lack of utility is the reason why perpetual motion machines can't be patented, as an example, because they don't actually work.
Copyrights don't apply to fashion precisely because fashion is useful. Fashion would be considered a sculptural work, but the law specifically prohibits useful sculptural works from being copyrighted (lest copyrights overlap with patents), and where the useful and non-useful portions of such a work cannot be separated, the whole thing is rendered uncopyrightable. That's why a picture printed on a shirt might be copyrighted, even though the shirt itself is not, but a creatively designed shirt is not copyrightable at all.
Likewise, while the utility doctrine doesn't apply to software, copyright also cannot cover ideas, processes, methods, etc., and where a work includes those things, e.g. a book describing a system of accounting, the useful portions are uncopyrightable, e.g. the description of the system might be protected, but not the system itself. When a part of a work exists because non-creative factors dictate that it be there, it is apt to be uncopyrightable. When a part of a work describes a non-copyrightable idea, and where there is only one, or are only a few ways of describing it reasonably, it is apt to be uncopyrightable lest the copyright effectively operate as a patent. Doctrines such as merger, scenes a faire, abstraction-filtration-comparison, etc. are often applied to software. While some parts of programs may be copyrightable, functional considerations tend to render other parts unprotectable, at least as a matter of copyright.
A novel, on the other hand, might be completely creative, and useful for nothing more than to prop up a piece of furniture on an uneven floor. Its lack of utility, but its creativity, is what puts it in the realm of the copyrightable.
Fashion is an interesting case because it's exempted from copyright laws, and the legal reasoning for that exemption is specious. Think about it: fashion is too utilitarian to be copyrighted, but *software* is not?
Well, it's more that the legal reasoning has not kept up with events. The utility doctrine only applies to pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works because the subject matter of copyrights (creative works) should not overlap with the subject matter of patents (functional items), and where both are inextricably entangled in a single object, there can't be a copyright. (E.g. a fork with a design on the handle is separable, as the overall shape of the fork is not copyrightable, but the design standing alone is; an artistic fork, however, is not separable, as the shape might be both useful and decorative at the same time) Check out the Brandir Ribbon bicycle rack for an example of a sculptural work that is uncopyrightable due to its utility.
Unfortunately, the drafters of the law didn't understand that software is similarly functional, and the issue has never really been readdressed.
Copyright protection in the fashion industry would probably result in many, many more fashion houses springing up.
That's pretty likely wrong. Look at architecture: Prior to 1990, architectural works (i.e. buildings) were not copyrightable in the US. Since 1990, they have been. Now, have you noticed "many, many" more creative architectural works getting made that otherwise would not have been made, where you cannot attribute the creation of those works to non-copyright-related factors, such as a housing boom, or CAD, or general trends in architecture? Was the US almost totally bereft of good architecture prior to 1990?
No, it's been a total waste, with no benefit to the public, but which does cause harm to the public. Fashion is thriving; it does not need the subsidy of copyrights, or the anticompetitive effects, e.g. rent-seeking, that come with the wholesale granting of monopolies.
Likewise, something that would seriously benefit the software industry would be shorter copyright terms for software (since not all classes of work need the same amount of subsidy -- ideally we'd be able to grant the minimum necessary for each work on an individual basis, but probably the closest we could practically manage would be to require registration in order to get copyrights, and to require very frequent renewals to maintain them), and to require that the authors of software works deposit both full and complete copies of the binaries and source code with the Library of Congress, with such commenting and additional information as is deemed appropriate, so that even though rival developers could not copy the software while the term lasted, they could at least learn from it, in much the same way that a film student can learn techniques by seeing them used in movies, and authors can learn literary techniques by reading books employing them, and so on. Binaries obscure works, and there's no reason why we have to put up with that. This wouldn't be open source, but you might think of it as inspectable source.
Some people are, but not very many. It's sort of like a 95/5 rule: 95% of the lifetime profits will be generated in the first 5% of the term; the remaining 5% of the profits will be generated over the remaining 95% of the term.
We could probably chop the term length down to just the 5%, and it wouldn't materially reduce the number of works created and published (which is all the public wants badly enough to grant copyrights for), since the long tail amounts to rather little.
Clothing is a physical good. If you can make one instance of it, you still need to repeat the whole manufacturing process to make more. This is not true of digital information.
I don't agree with what I take as your general point that clothing is different from, say, software, because clothing cannot be copied with a single click.
Duplication technologies are neutral, and there's not a single one that pirates can use that legitimate publishers cannot. In the age of hand-copied books, a scribe would have to write out each page, but so would a pirate; there's no piratical advantage. With hand-set type, a printer could print each page using the same sort of press as a pirate; again, no piratical advantage. And this continues with either both sides having parity, or the legitimate publisher having the advantage over at least some pirates (e.g. a legitimate record publisher can make CDs at a far lower cost per unit, and with far greater speed, than a pirate using a mere CD burner in his parents' basement can). Publishers can even use BitTorrent or RapidShare or other technologies much beloved of pirates -- it isn't like someone is stopping them from enjoying the gains of modern technology -- they just don't want to.
A clothing pirate has to laboriously make or acquire cloth, cut it, sew it, ship the finished clothing, etc., but this is no different from what the legitimate clothing manufacturer does. Both get to use the same silkscreen technology, the same sewing machines, etc. This is not appreciably different from the videogame developer and the videogame pirate both having to use the same Internet and the same protocols to distribute a game as efficiently as possible. One of them might choose to operate at a disadvantage, by pressing discs, shipping them to stores, etc., but that's hardly someone else's fault.
This is not true of software, movies, music, etc. A lot of IP retains its value for decades or longer.
Not entirely. In the majority of cases, the bulk of the economic value of a work is realized upon the publication of the work in a given medium. For example, a movie usually has its biggest ticket sales on its opening weekend. Each weekend thereafter, sales will tend to decline. Eventually the movie no longer sells enough tickets to justify being shown in a first run theater, and is kicked out. The reels are then shipped to the second run theater, but again will make most of the money it will ever make in that venue up front, with steadily diminishing returns. Soon the movie ends up on pay-per-view, on home video (for rental or for sale), on premium cable channels, on basic cable channels, on network TV, etc. but for each release, most of the money that will ever be made will be made immediately, with less money for the work in a given medium afterwards. So while a work might retain some value for a long span of time (although not all works will: yesterday's newspaper is never going to outsell today's), the bulk of its value is usually realized very quickly. After that, you're just collecting the dregs.
This is why copyrights should be short. It benefits the public by having works in the public domain sooner, while not significantly harming authors or publishers, since they've already made the vast majority of money that they will ever make from the work, and thus aren't apt to lose out on anything significant. We could safely reduce term lengths to, say, 15 years and it probably wouldn't be more than a blip on the spreadsheets of the copyright holders.
Now I'll admit that in a few very, very rare cases, there are works that have surprisingly long-lasting value. But outliers are really not what we want to design our policy around. This is particularly so if the value isn't really related to the copyright, but to something else. For example, Disney wants long-lasting copyrights because if they lost their copyrights that relate to Mickey Mouse, this would imperil their trademarks (in much the same way that losing a patent on a good can imperil the trademark for the same good -- see e.g. the Shredded Wheat case). Frankly, I don't see that as a good enough reason to put up with awful copyright policy.
This is not true, at least in the US. Everything that is written is automatically copyrighted by the author, including this statement.
No, you're confusing whether or not works are inherently copyrighted -- they're not -- with when copyrights are granted for those works, at the whim of the government. Congress doesn't have to grant copyrights, and has broad discretion as to whether particular works or types of works are eligible, what must be done for copyrights to issue, when those copyrights are granted, etc.
At the moment it is a very simple procedure, but it doesn't change that authors do not control whether or not they get copyrights; the government has to actually issue them. The natural state of a work, therefore, if the government doesn't step in and grant a copyright, is to be in the public domain.
You can't just say something is public domain
I'll take that bet. I say that my works are in the public domain. This isn't a license; I say that my works lack a copyright altogether.
For instance, if someone doesn't register a work ever (like most internet posts) then why doesn't it pass more quickly in to the public domain?
Better still, why should anything be copyrighted at all, if an author doesn't take affirmative steps to get a copyright? If the author can't be bothered to indicate that he wants protection for a particular work, I don't see why protection should be given.
And I don't mean, me personally. The government has plenty of agents with guns and badges and, even tanks, that can do it on my behalf.
No, not on your behalf so much as everyone's. The government only exists, and has the right to act, and the ability to act, because people agree that it ought to. They don't agree on that to help _you_. You're nothing special. They agree on it to help themselves. The only reason that you have a right to property that you cannot defend yourself, personally, is because people want that right for themselves, and by acting cooperatively (i.e. if you will recognize and defend my right to my house, which is what I want, then I'll do the same for you, even though I don't otherwise care), they get it.
We have copyright because it serves the public interest more than not having it, and we have a specific implementation of copyright because it serves the public interest more than any other implementation. The problem is, what if that's no longer true? What if our copyright laws do not serve the public interest better than any alternative laws? Or if any possible law would be worse for the public than none at all? In that case, we'd have to reform copyright, or abolish it altogether. That might not be good for you, personally, but if it's good for everyone, generally, then that's good enough.
The law is pretty clear. I'm sure everyone has heard about the Hurt Locker pirates being sued. All it will take to reduce piracy to virtually nothing; is a 50% change of getting sued for 10k every time you download a movie.
Or we could change the law -- it's not as though it is immutable -- and make it completely lawful for individuals to download movies, so long as no party involved acted in a commercial fashion (e.g. no exchange of money, no file sharing ratios, no protocols that require uploads in order to download, no charge for costs of blank media or accounts, no advertising, etc.). This might increase piracy, but it would decrease illegal activity.
Unless you think the law is perfect right now, which AFAIK no one believes, then it's clear that we need to go in one of two directions; yours, which makes copyright stronger, or mine, which makes it weaker. One of these will produce a greater benefit for society as a whole, and not just for one small portion of it.
I'm open to any suggestions, but my suspicion is that even taking into account all of the effects, and the effects of the effects, and so on, that we'd all be better off lessening copyright.
No, that's entirely wrong. Works are inherently in the public domain (although as a practical matter the right to copy something doesn't amount to much unless you have a copy to make more copies of). Copyright temporarily takes them out of it, to a limited extent, but in time they revert back to the public domain.
It's as if a piece of land held in common by the people of a town, and administered by the government of that town, which the people have called into being and legitimize by consenting to it governing them, were rented out for a term of years. When the term expires, it goes back to being available for everyone. If the rental were just so that a few people could profit, we'd call that a bad deal, and call the government that agreed to it either foolish or corrupt. If it benefited everyone more than not doing it, only then would it be acceptable.
Your local cable tv utility is probably an example of this.
And like, how can a person *own* the land, right? It's like, the land man....and it's old and you can't own it!
Same question, actually!
If you claim to own the Brooklyn Bridge, that's fine. But your ability to exercise control over the bridge -- by prohibiting any traffic of any kind to cross it, for example -- either has to be founded on your personal ability to defend the bridge from those who want to dislodge you from it, or other people's willingness to accept your claim of ownership.
If you can't defend it, and no one respects your claim, you're likely to just get arrested, because you're outnumbered.
That is how property works.
Copyright is the same, except that once information has been made known to someone else, it is impossible to defend it (unless you kill them before they can spread it). So it is much more dependent on the consent of others.
And why should others consent to claims of exclusivity? Only if it somehow is in their own best interests, surely.
If you having a copyright on your work, that keeps me from doing things that I might want to do with that work, nevertheless benefits me more than it harms me, I could agree to abide by it. Now you need only convince me -- and not just to the basic idea, but to the specific details as well, e.g. the number of years the copyright lasts, the specific things I'd be prohibited from doing, etc.
An opinion that seems very prolific on Slashdot is that consumers have a right to consume anything that has been created. They don't. The right to consume is not recognized by law, nor should it be.
Why?
I suppose that people should not be obligated to share things; if you write something in your diary, for example, you should not have to let other people read it, nor should other people be able to compel you to let them read it. And if you wanted to destroy that only copy of the work, which was in your possession, you could, though it would be nice if you wouldn't. However, if you have granted other people access to a work, then they do have a well-recognized right of free speech which would permit them to copy it. Since they'd own those copies, instead of you, they could grant others access as they liked, and things being what they are, sooner or later someone would grant access to the whole world.
A justification that I see fairly often is that if someone couldn't possibly buy a product then piracy of that product is ethically neutral because you can't be causing a loss of sales. I disagree with that because it is still a violation of the right that the copyright owner has to control the distribution of copies
Copyright is utilitarian, through and through; it is amoral, as are the creators, copyright holders, and infringers who interact with copyright.
Though if morality were a factor, surely it would be on the side of the pirates who put information to productive use, who spread it to anyone who is interested, and who preserve it (if only by there being so many copies floating around that at least a few will survive a calamity -- which is how classical works survived the Dark Ages, and how works that the BBC destroyed its own archival copies of show up from time to time, to name but two examples). Surely it's not actively moral to try to keep a stranglehold on creative works just to turn a profit. Maintaining the privacy of oneself or others might be moral, but we are talking about works that are intended for publication to anyone with enough cash, so privacy just isn't relevant.
Why should a right to consume trump a right to control the distribution of your ideas.
Because it is impossible to control distribution without controlling the exercise of the right of free speech by others. Censorship, whether by the state, to prohibit dissent, or by a business, to prohibit copying, is offensive and inherently unacceptable. It might be tolerable under the right circumstances -- concealing troop movements in a time of war, or granting copyrights where they produce a greater benefit to the public, even taking into account the costs, than doing otherwise -- but the onus is on he who would censor to prove his case, and even then he might find that no one is willing to tolerate it. In a legitimate government, where the right to govern stems from the consent of the governed, that's an entirely acceptable outcome.
No one has the right to tell me what I may or may not say, even if I merely repeat verbatim the words of someone else. All that they can do is either not tell me those words to begin with (in which case I can't compel them), or convince me to respect their wishes, either personally, or through a government that I am willing to be governed by. It's entirely possible to do this (in fact, I think that copyright is a good idea, and is capable of being good in practice, though it might not be any good in its current implementation), but it is up to those who want copyright to do so. They don't magically deserve it just by being authors. Authorship doesn't transform someone into a superior human being, with veto powers over the human rights of someone else.
And the people who design cars wouldn't have money to keep designing cars.
What would they need the money for? Not food, or clothing, or parts, or equipment, or furniture, or other things. Probably not to pay rent -- if you had that sort of technology, it be a lot easier for people to move out into space. Raw materials? Between recycling (just throw last week's car into the hopper) and space again, not a big deal. Energy? Solar panels would be easy to make, and it would take a while before an entire Dyson shell was built; by then people would probably be going to other star systems. Services? Sometimes people would need the cooperation of other people to do things, but I don't think it would arise often enough (especially if the service is labor to make something once, which can then be replicated, and the service never needs to be repeated -- there's only so many of these things that would be necessary) to matter much after a while.
Star Trek style replicators solve a _lot_ of problems. They almost completely destroy the economy, but when resources are no longer really scarce, there's not so much of a need for one.
Inventions and creative works already work this way, the problem is simply that people still need to eat, be clothed, live somewhere, etc., and it's not yet as easy to make another copy of a turkey as it is to make another copy of a movie.
In any case, if no one had to work to fulfill their needs, because their needs would be fulfilled anyway, this gives people more time to pursue an education they might otherwise not be able to manage, and more time to pursue hobbies. Surely some of those people will want to design cars just for the fun of it, in which case innovation will continue.
A copyright monopoly is not the only possible way to compensate and encourage authors beyond what no system at all could do. There is patronage.
Well, there are actually plenty of ways to incentivize authors to create and publish their works. (Compensation is a red herring, though. Plenty of authors with copyrights go uncompensated because their works are flops. Copyright doesn't guarantee compensation.) Some authors are incentivized by a desire to create, others are commissioned to create things, others are required to do so for a non-copyright related reason (e.g. a teacher telling a student to write an essay), others do so for non-copyright related economic reasons (e.g. a painter selling an original painting as an object, without bothering to make more copies as posters, postcards, etc., and thus not exploiting the copyright).
Patronage is one of the ways to incentivize authors in the absence of copyright. It also is entirely possible for patrons to pay artists to create works even when copyrights exist. Copyright is just yet another incentive; it's not the only one, probably not the most important one, and it doesn't prohibit others from continuing to function.
That's actually one of the problems with granting copyrights automatically. We should only grant it when necessary. Authors who would create and publish works regardless of copyright shouldn't get them, as they would have done it anyway. Lacking psychics, the best way to handle this would be to require authors to register their works in order to get copyrights; authors who are incentivized by copyright would probably do so, and authors who didn't care probably wouldn't. Likewise, have short terms and renewals, so that if an author did care to register but eventually stops caring, the work can stop being copyrighted before the maximum period of time it might be copyrighted.
But what seems to many the biggest problem of all is piracy. And on the flip side, DRM and draconian anti-piracy laws. On this, copyright is a clear loser.
Again, I think that it may be possible to find a reasonable middle ground. Piracy, it seems to me, falls into two camps. First is piracy engaged in by natural persons, and which is strictly not commercial in nature. For example, Alice making a copy of a movie for Bob, without any compensation, including payment for time, for blank media, for access, nor sharing ratios, nor ad views, etc. The rest is piracy engaged in either by businesses, or by anyone who is seeking to make money at it. I think that most people would tend to find the former unobjectionable, and the latter objectionable. So why not legalize the former, while retaining penalties that are at least related to the amount of damage for the latter?
As for DRM, I'm against it, but it's not possible to just ban it, due to free speech. So the next best thing, IMO, would be to have copyrights only granted to works which are published (defining publication very broadly, including performance) without DRM. If the copyright holder or a person acting under the authority of the copyright holder adds DRM, then the copyright is terminated immediately. Meanwhile, establish a program under the Library of Congress, which is ordered to break DRM systems, coordinate their work with third parties that are also breaking those systems, provide information and support for breaking them, distribute works for which the DRM has been broken (as they are, by definition, in the public domain, this is just a matter of bandwidth), and generally make DRM an unappealing, though perfectly legal and valid choice, for copyright holders.
Without copyright, the public benefits greatly (as you imagined) from having the ability to do anything they like with works that they have access to, including making copies, and sharing them freely. Some works are still created and published without copyright, as we know from history.
The idea of copyright is that if we grant authors a temporary monopoly over certain actions relating to their work, they will turn around and charge higher prices for those actions, or the product of those actions than would be seen in a free market. Whether or not they actually recoup their expenses or turn a profit depends on whether people are willing to pay (likely for hits, unlikely for flops). This then causes authors and publishers to invest more of their own money in the creation and publication of works, because they hope to make money, than they would if there was virtually no chance of getting the best possible return on their investment.
More works are great, but if they were forever broadly monopolized, they wouldn't be worth it to the public. Thus, the monopoly has to be limited in scope (which works and rights copyright covers, what exceptions there are to copyright) and duration.
The goal is to grant just enough of a monopoly that the benefit to the public of having more works created and published than otherwise is greater than the harm caused by not having those works immediately and fully in the public domain. Ideally, you'll have the greatest benefit for the least harm, yielding the greatest net public benefit. (If it's impossible to have a greater net benefit with any possible copyright law than without, then we're better off without copyright at all)
So while your proposed library is great, the concern is that new works might only trickle into the library, because authors that won't create without the economic incentive of copyright will do something else. If you can handle the delayed gratification of copyright, you might have many more works flooding into the library over time, but not immediately upon creation and publication (at least, not free of restrictions).
I admit that copyright can go too far, and that the current law surely does so. Works should be far less protected than they are now, and should lose all protection (if they ever have it at all) much more rapidly. But I'm not convinced that we should abolish the whole system. I think that if the delay is sufficiently brief, and the payoff is sufficiently good, we can handle having copyright.
For example, would you be willing to wait for a year from the date a work is published (if the author seeks a copyright), to when it becomes freely available in your library, if it meant that the library would have more works by the end of that year than otherwise?
I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity.
Well, we at least are agreed on the need for reform, and as I suspect that most if not all of those reforms will involve either reducing the length and scope of copyright, or at least not enlarging it, surely we can at least work together on those parts of our agendas that are compatible. I see no need for in-fighting until at least something has been accomplished, letting the members of coalitions fall away naturally as they become satisfied. This may mean that there aren't enough people on board to go the whole way to copyright abolition, but at least the abolitionists get closer to their goal, too. Plus, working together gives each group an extended period of close contact with the other, and the chance to share ideas and perhaps even convince people to jump from one to another.
Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.
I can only guess that what you mean by that are people who support the 14+14 year term of the 1790 act, though I'm not sure where the '7' comes from. In any case, I don't support that, except at most by coincidence.
Rather, I'm interested in maximizing the public benefit. The 14+14 year term that people sometimes want to resurrect is simply a traditional term, but not one founded on anything relevant. IIRC, it's vaguely related to the length of an apprenticeship in 16th century England. I'd like to see some proper studies done to determine what the optimal length of copyright is for various types of works (e.g. books, software, movies, etc.), that are scientific, and not just revivals of past term lengths, or outright guesses. I saw a paper a few years ago that came up with a maximum of 15 years; I'd like to see more such studies, by more economists.
I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.
Well, I'd agree with you for some things anyway. Copyrights on architectural works could be abolished outright and no one would ever notice. And for the same reason, the recent noises about copyrights on clothing designs need to be challenged. The US has managed to prove its point v. Europe as to databases.
The fine arts mostly could get by without copyright; an original Picasso is worth a lot (a fact which he was known to exploit), but a poster of a Picasso is not. Counterfeiting a work of art and passing it off as an original is merely fraud, and we don't need copyright to handle that. Some level of copyright might be appropriate for more commercially minded fine artists (Thomas Kinkade is technically a fine artist), but at least let's have rigorous formalities requirements so that they have to register in order to get a copyright, and have to renew the copyright frequently up to the maximum term length (which is actually something that ought to be required across the board for copyright).
Then of course she got it home and it wouldn't play at all.
Minor nit: that was an article about DRM preventing a movie theater from screening the film, not about DRM preventing someone from watching the DVD at home. But I've heard the stories about that, so let's move on.
It is healthier for producers to accept that customers want media in whatever format is convenient, and after they get that media it is conceivable that it will be format shifted, shared with friends, and shared with strangers. Producers should accept that some people will experience their media without paying for it.
I agree. But I think that we can have this in practice -- well, except for the part where we can convince producers to accept it -- with well-crafted exceptions to copyright. For example, I've long supported the idea of making otherwise infringing activity engaged in by natural persons
So I back kangarooski in saying, bring on the copyright free world where "no content will ever be created again".
Well, you may have gone a little far. I think that the fundamental idea of copyright is a good one. That is, if having copyright increases the net public benefit (number of works created and published + works being in the public domain, or at least restricted as little as possible, as briefly as possible) more than not having copyright, then copyright is a good idea; it leaves us better off. Ideally, the copyright law we have should be carefully designed so as to produce the maximum public benefit. A copyright law that goes too far should be reined in, and a copyright law that produces a net public benefit less than the baseline of if there were no copyright is literally worse than having none at all.
While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.
I'd be happy with simply reforming copyright so that it better (or ideally, best) served the public interest. I don't think we need to abolish it, but I wouldn't take that option off the table.
My point was more that with a better copyright law, we might no longer have multi-hundred-million-dollar blockbuster movies, due to a lack of investors that believe that they'll see a greater profit than some other option. But I think we'd still see plenty of movies getting created and published, and I think that while they might be of a different character than the sort we see now (mainly having less spectacle), I think that they are apt to still be quite good.
it comes down to a simple equation: If people want to watch movies with major actors / actresses, superb visual and audio effects, etc. there will need to be a business model in which the people producing these movies can make money. The actors, set builders, makeup artists, visual effects people, caterers, property managers, etc. all need to be paid.
If, instead, we want to watch a bunch of home movies on YouTube - we can have that instead by just continuing to eat away at the movie business model by violating copyright.
Doesn't bother me any. In the end, writing, acting, and directing are important. The rest of it is nice, but not essential. For example, I remember seeing 'Driving Miss Daisy' -- the play, not the movie based on it -- back, oh, over 20 years ago, now. IIRC, the whole thing had only three actors, and the props consisted of two stools, a telephone, and a table to put the telephone on. While lower budgets might change what sorts of movies get made, I think that there will continue to be plenty of good ones. And if audiences are called upon to use their imaginations a little more to fill in details, then I don't think that's a problem either.
Let's say that you own a run-down shack and the acre of land on which it sits a few miles out of town, far from convenient roads. You never spend the slightest effort or any money in maintaining your property or your shack, much less making improvements. There is no property tax, you don't engage in transactions that are subject to sales tax, and you don't earn enough to pay income tax, because you basically just engage in the minimum amount of work to sustain yourself. You essentially live off the grid. Due to its poor condition and outlying location, your property is worth almost nothing.
Meanwhile, the nearby town grows. New roads are built by taxpayers, improving access to your land, among others. Neighboring property owners improve their land, and start to build housing on it. Eventually, the entire area is chock-full of multi-million dollar houses, new schools, new commercial development, and property values skyrocket. Soon, your lot is the only undeveloped lot remaining, but is seen as the single most desirable lot there is. An interested buyer offers you several million dollars for it as-is. You agree.
Now then, you didn't do a single thing to cause the value of your property to climb. You didn't build roads, you didn't improve your land, you didn't improve your shack. You didn't even pay taxes, because of the way you lived, that supported the government's involvement in any of these things. All you did was sit there like a lump, while events unfolded around you.
Should you get the money for your land, or should it be split up amongst your current and former neighbors, and the government, who did the actual work that caused your land to have more than minimal value?
Most people -- and the law -- will agree that you, and you alone, should get the money (less taxes) because you owned the property. The fact that it was other people who created the value is irrelevant.
Turning to copyright, you need to remember what copyright actually is. Copyright is a right to prohibit other people from doing things with regard to a work, such as making copies of the work, making derivatives of the work, performing or displaying the work, etc. The problem is that people have a right of free speech, and this right encompasses repeating the speech of others.
The two rights are in complete opposition to one another, so it doesn't make sense that both would exist, and if you have to choose one, I think that most people would choose free speech. After all, then the only harm authors suffer is competition, instead of outright censorship. That is, too much speech (if there is such a thing) isn't nearly so bad as too little.
Copyright basically lacks a natural right as a foundation, and doesn't even have much history behind it. It is, in fact, utilitarian in nature. That is to say, no author naturally has a right to censor me if I repeat what he already said. Instead, if that author not only wants to use his right of free speech to say something, but to prevent me from doing the same, he is going to have to convince me to willingly keep silent so that he can speak without competition.
I may be willing to do this, but only if I gain more than I lose from it, and thus we get into utilitarianism: Is it possible to have a copyright law that benefits the public more than it harms the public, and if so, what particular copyright law results in the greatest public benefit for the least public harm? Whatever it is, that's what the copyright law should be.
This is a lot like most publicly regulated monopolies. For example, a town might invite bids from different cable tv companies for a monopoly on cable tv service in the town for five years. The winning company has to pay for its monopoly, build infrastructure that will be owned by the town, and provide at least a minimum amount of service as defined by the town. And after a while, the monopoly expires, and the town can decide to either open up the system to competition, o
Well, let's remember something here: lawlessness can spread.
Consider Prohibition. While it merely made it illegal to make, transport, and sell alcohol, and was widely flouted (despite having had broad popular support when it was enacted -- people honestly thought it was a good idea!), it led to much worse things. From Prohibition, we wound up with massive amounts of official corruption, the development of a smuggling industry that could be used for anything, violence in the streets as criminals attacked one another, and the rise of organized crime that merely turned to other enterprises to support itself later on, and which is still problematic.
It's important that we legalize at least some behavior that currently constitutes copyright infringement -- say, non-commercial infringement engaged in by natural persons -- so as to keep the threat of lawlessness contained. I'm not suggesting that we abolish copyright, or that we legalize everything, but rather that the law should reflect the norms of society where possible. Sometimes the law will have to run counter to those norms (e.g. desegregation), but in those cases there should be an important reason for going against the will of the people. Copyright just isn't important enough.
So let's not celebrate piracy; instead, let's recognize it as a symptom of a law that's gone too far, and take steps to reign in that law before it causes problems.
my belief that an artist / programmer / writer / whatever has a moral right to control their works under a legally given monopoly where others agree that there is value in the work/
But you do have an obligation...you either come to a compromise that both sides agree to, or you walk away.
Well, I think you could look deeper. You're assuming that there must be enforceable rules that supports this, but I don't think that must be so. While human rights are important (such as the right to control one's own labor, and the right to free speech, including repeating the speech of others verbatim), copyright isn't one, and copyright isn't obligatory. It might be useful to have, but in that case we can define what it consists of, in scope and duration, so as to maximize its utility.
Piracy is an exception, but self interest remains a rather poor guide for proper behavior, generally speaking.
That's an odd thing to say, given that self-interest is the entire basis for copyright.
The public is self-interested; they want more works created and published, and they want those works in the public domain, where they are most useful to the public. In order to get more works created and published, they will temporarily allow restrictions on those works (where representatives of the public get to determine the scope and duration of the restrictions), so as to incentivize authors at the least cost to the public. Ultimately, the works are required to fall into the public domain. If the cost of copyright to the public is greater than the benefit to the public, there would be no point in having it, as the public would literally be better off without it (or with a differently formulated copyright law where the public benefit outweighed the public cost). The ideal copyright law is the one that provides the greatest public benefit, regardless of how appealing authors and publishers may find it as opposed to some alternative.
In doing this, the public has appealed to the self-interest of the authors, who want to make money by charging monopoly prices for their works, in order to recoup their investment and make a profit. It isn't guaranteed that they'll do so -- a work could still be a flop -- but they've got an opportunity. Financial self-interest is the only incentive that copyright can offer; while there are other incentives to create works (e.g. becoming famous, art for art's sake, sending a message to the audience, etc.), copyright doesn't matter for those.
So really, copyright is self-interest all the way down. It may only appeal to one kind of self-interest, rather than the whole panoply, and it may involve delayed gratification of self-interest, but it's still self-interest. There's nothing else at work there; it is not altruistic.
Piracy is simply self-defeating, in that pirates, who cannot stand to wait for the copyright term to end, engage in what would be lawful behavior later, but at the cost of reducing the incentivizing effect that all of the rest of society is counting on, thus reducing the overall benefit to society. Of course, this assumes that the copyright law is properly formulated. If the lawmakers have become corrupt, and no longer write the law so as to best serve the public interest alone (with whatever benefits authors receive being determined purely as a matter of what's best for society), or if social norms have changed, and the law no longer quite reflects what society wants out of it, then it may be that the law is no longer justified, and the pirates are acting correctly, if unlawfully. In that case, it's the law that needs correction, not the pirates.
In any case, though, I think you really missed the mark regarding self-interest. Self-interest is the only legitimate reason to have copyright, and governs whether there should be copyright, and if so, what it should consist of -- so as to exploit the self-interest of others in serving your own self-interest.
But, you have no right at all to copy the book and sell the material (which is what the copyright covers).
Where did I say otherwise? Remember, you said "if you make a work and copyright it, then nobody should profit off of it without your permission." So I countered with a way to profit off of someone else's copyrighted work without their permission. Basically, your earlier statement was too broad.
Also: You have been given rights to your copy ONLY, not any copies that you want to make of it
Well, that's not precisely how copyright works. Remember, copyright is a negative right; it isn't a right for the author to make copies, etc., but rather a right for the author to prohibit others from making copies. Likewise, when a copyright expires, no new rights in the work are granted to the public, but instead the author loses his right to prohibit what the public can do with the work. Thus, merely by existing, you have a right to make copies of a work. But, while that work is copyrighted, the author can prohibit you from exercising your natural right to do so. Further, you don't have a right to demand access to a copy of the work in any event. Instead, you must wait for someone who has access, and the right to further grant access, to grant you access (e.g. by the author selling you a copy of the book) so that whatever rights you have in the work that you can exercise finally have something to be applied to.
A copy, for the purposes of copyright law (see the definitions section at 17 USC 101), is any material object in which a copyrighted work has been fixed. For example, if you write a poem on a sheet of paper, the poem is the work, and the paper in which it is embodied is a copy (the first copy is still a copy). If you xerox it, there is still only one poem, and thus only one work, but now there are two copies of it. You could destroy the first copy and the work would continue to exist in the second copy.
Thus, if the watch, or something on the watch, is copyrightable, the watch (or at least the relevant portion thereof) is a copy, because it is a material object in which the work is fixed.
Good effort, but wrong cite. 17 USC 602 addresses whether or not bringing the watch into the US is an infringement by itself. Assuming that it is not an infringement merely to import it, you would want to consult 17 USC 109 to determine whether or not it would be an infringement to resell it on eBay.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice the rationale for copyright, given in the first clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Whatever copyright law has subsequently become, it traditionally has absolutely nothing to do with artistic "creativity." It's main purpose is to advance society by promoting scientific and useful creative endeavors. (I should note that the word "Arts" in the 18th century had slightly different connotations than today; it still had a lot to do with skilled crafts.)
Fashion is actually not "useful" in that sense, and therefore should not be protected by copyright.
Sorry, no, but you were so close.
The copyright and patent clause empowers Congress to grant copyrights and patents, surprisingly enough. And it is written in that order: copyrights, then patents. Copyrights are to be granted to promote the progress of science, by protecting for a limited time, an author's writings; Patents are to be granted to promote the progress of the useful arts, by protecting for a limited time, an inventor's discoveries. The framers knew their grammar, and didn't mix up the two parts of the clause.
The trick is just that the English language changes a lot -- which is why Shakespeare can be tricky to read, and Chaucer very difficult -- and in this case, since the Constitution was written in the late 18th century, the meanings have virtually flip-flopped. For example, the original liberal arts (the trivium and quadrivium) used to also be called the liberal sciences -- science just meant knowledge that was learned by study. The arts, meanwhile, were applied skills, often undertaken by skilled craftsmen, i.e. artificers. Remnants of this meaning of art, as applied to the subject of patents, still exist: after all, a patent concerns state-of-the-art technology, but can be invalidated by the demonstration of prior art, and must be written so as to be understandable to a person having ordinary skill in the art which the patent relates to. Further, most patents -- the sort that most people think of, when they think of a patent, are utility patents, only granted for useful inventions. Lack of utility is the reason why perpetual motion machines can't be patented, as an example, because they don't actually work.
Copyrights don't apply to fashion precisely because fashion is useful. Fashion would be considered a sculptural work, but the law specifically prohibits useful sculptural works from being copyrighted (lest copyrights overlap with patents), and where the useful and non-useful portions of such a work cannot be separated, the whole thing is rendered uncopyrightable. That's why a picture printed on a shirt might be copyrighted, even though the shirt itself is not, but a creatively designed shirt is not copyrightable at all.
Likewise, while the utility doctrine doesn't apply to software, copyright also cannot cover ideas, processes, methods, etc., and where a work includes those things, e.g. a book describing a system of accounting, the useful portions are uncopyrightable, e.g. the description of the system might be protected, but not the system itself. When a part of a work exists because non-creative factors dictate that it be there, it is apt to be uncopyrightable. When a part of a work describes a non-copyrightable idea, and where there is only one, or are only a few ways of describing it reasonably, it is apt to be uncopyrightable lest the copyright effectively operate as a patent. Doctrines such as merger, scenes a faire, abstraction-filtration-comparison, etc. are often applied to software. While some parts of programs may be copyrightable, functional considerations tend to render other parts unprotectable, at least as a matter of copyright.
A novel, on the other hand, might be completely creative, and useful for nothing more than to prop up a piece of furniture on an uneven floor. Its lack of utility, but its creativity, is what puts it in the realm of the copyrightable.
Fashion is an interesting case because it's exempted from copyright laws, and the legal reasoning for that exemption is specious. Think about it: fashion is too utilitarian to be copyrighted, but *software* is not?
Well, it's more that the legal reasoning has not kept up with events. The utility doctrine only applies to pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works because the subject matter of copyrights (creative works) should not overlap with the subject matter of patents (functional items), and where both are inextricably entangled in a single object, there can't be a copyright. (E.g. a fork with a design on the handle is separable, as the overall shape of the fork is not copyrightable, but the design standing alone is; an artistic fork, however, is not separable, as the shape might be both useful and decorative at the same time) Check out the Brandir Ribbon bicycle rack for an example of a sculptural work that is uncopyrightable due to its utility.
Unfortunately, the drafters of the law didn't understand that software is similarly functional, and the issue has never really been readdressed.
Copyright protection in the fashion industry would probably result in many, many more fashion houses springing up.
That's pretty likely wrong. Look at architecture: Prior to 1990, architectural works (i.e. buildings) were not copyrightable in the US. Since 1990, they have been. Now, have you noticed "many, many" more creative architectural works getting made that otherwise would not have been made, where you cannot attribute the creation of those works to non-copyright-related factors, such as a housing boom, or CAD, or general trends in architecture? Was the US almost totally bereft of good architecture prior to 1990?
No, it's been a total waste, with no benefit to the public, but which does cause harm to the public. Fashion is thriving; it does not need the subsidy of copyrights, or the anticompetitive effects, e.g. rent-seeking, that come with the wholesale granting of monopolies.
Likewise, something that would seriously benefit the software industry would be shorter copyright terms for software (since not all classes of work need the same amount of subsidy -- ideally we'd be able to grant the minimum necessary for each work on an individual basis, but probably the closest we could practically manage would be to require registration in order to get copyrights, and to require very frequent renewals to maintain them), and to require that the authors of software works deposit both full and complete copies of the binaries and source code with the Library of Congress, with such commenting and additional information as is deemed appropriate, so that even though rival developers could not copy the software while the term lasted, they could at least learn from it, in much the same way that a film student can learn techniques by seeing them used in movies, and authors can learn literary techniques by reading books employing them, and so on. Binaries obscure works, and there's no reason why we have to put up with that. This wouldn't be open source, but you might think of it as inspectable source.
Some people are, but not very many. It's sort of like a 95/5 rule: 95% of the lifetime profits will be generated in the first 5% of the term; the remaining 5% of the profits will be generated over the remaining 95% of the term.
We could probably chop the term length down to just the 5%, and it wouldn't materially reduce the number of works created and published (which is all the public wants badly enough to grant copyrights for), since the long tail amounts to rather little.
Clothing is a physical good. If you can make one instance of it, you still need to repeat the whole manufacturing process to make more. This is not true of digital information.
I don't agree with what I take as your general point that clothing is different from, say, software, because clothing cannot be copied with a single click.
Duplication technologies are neutral, and there's not a single one that pirates can use that legitimate publishers cannot. In the age of hand-copied books, a scribe would have to write out each page, but so would a pirate; there's no piratical advantage. With hand-set type, a printer could print each page using the same sort of press as a pirate; again, no piratical advantage. And this continues with either both sides having parity, or the legitimate publisher having the advantage over at least some pirates (e.g. a legitimate record publisher can make CDs at a far lower cost per unit, and with far greater speed, than a pirate using a mere CD burner in his parents' basement can). Publishers can even use BitTorrent or RapidShare or other technologies much beloved of pirates -- it isn't like someone is stopping them from enjoying the gains of modern technology -- they just don't want to.
A clothing pirate has to laboriously make or acquire cloth, cut it, sew it, ship the finished clothing, etc., but this is no different from what the legitimate clothing manufacturer does. Both get to use the same silkscreen technology, the same sewing machines, etc. This is not appreciably different from the videogame developer and the videogame pirate both having to use the same Internet and the same protocols to distribute a game as efficiently as possible. One of them might choose to operate at a disadvantage, by pressing discs, shipping them to stores, etc., but that's hardly someone else's fault.
This is not true of software, movies, music, etc. A lot of IP retains its value for decades or longer.
Not entirely. In the majority of cases, the bulk of the economic value of a work is realized upon the publication of the work in a given medium. For example, a movie usually has its biggest ticket sales on its opening weekend. Each weekend thereafter, sales will tend to decline. Eventually the movie no longer sells enough tickets to justify being shown in a first run theater, and is kicked out. The reels are then shipped to the second run theater, but again will make most of the money it will ever make in that venue up front, with steadily diminishing returns. Soon the movie ends up on pay-per-view, on home video (for rental or for sale), on premium cable channels, on basic cable channels, on network TV, etc. but for each release, most of the money that will ever be made will be made immediately, with less money for the work in a given medium afterwards. So while a work might retain some value for a long span of time (although not all works will: yesterday's newspaper is never going to outsell today's), the bulk of its value is usually realized very quickly. After that, you're just collecting the dregs.
This is why copyrights should be short. It benefits the public by having works in the public domain sooner, while not significantly harming authors or publishers, since they've already made the vast majority of money that they will ever make from the work, and thus aren't apt to lose out on anything significant. We could safely reduce term lengths to, say, 15 years and it probably wouldn't be more than a blip on the spreadsheets of the copyright holders.
Now I'll admit that in a few very, very rare cases, there are works that have surprisingly long-lasting value. But outliers are really not what we want to design our policy around. This is particularly so if the value isn't really related to the copyright, but to something else. For example, Disney wants long-lasting copyrights because if they lost their copyrights that relate to Mickey Mouse, this would imperil their trademarks (in much the same way that losing a patent on a good can imperil the trademark for the same good -- see e.g. the Shredded Wheat case). Frankly, I don't see that as a good enough reason to put up with awful copyright policy.
Precisely.
This is not true, at least in the US. Everything that is written is automatically copyrighted by the author, including this statement.
No, you're confusing whether or not works are inherently copyrighted -- they're not -- with when copyrights are granted for those works, at the whim of the government. Congress doesn't have to grant copyrights, and has broad discretion as to whether particular works or types of works are eligible, what must be done for copyrights to issue, when those copyrights are granted, etc.
At the moment it is a very simple procedure, but it doesn't change that authors do not control whether or not they get copyrights; the government has to actually issue them. The natural state of a work, therefore, if the government doesn't step in and grant a copyright, is to be in the public domain.
You can't just say something is public domain
I'll take that bet. I say that my works are in the public domain. This isn't a license; I say that my works lack a copyright altogether.
For instance, if someone doesn't register a work ever (like most internet posts) then why doesn't it pass more quickly in to the public domain?
Better still, why should anything be copyrighted at all, if an author doesn't take affirmative steps to get a copyright? If the author can't be bothered to indicate that he wants protection for a particular work, I don't see why protection should be given.
And I don't mean, me personally. The government has plenty of agents with guns and badges and, even tanks, that can do it on my behalf.
No, not on your behalf so much as everyone's. The government only exists, and has the right to act, and the ability to act, because people agree that it ought to. They don't agree on that to help _you_. You're nothing special. They agree on it to help themselves. The only reason that you have a right to property that you cannot defend yourself, personally, is because people want that right for themselves, and by acting cooperatively (i.e. if you will recognize and defend my right to my house, which is what I want, then I'll do the same for you, even though I don't otherwise care), they get it.
We have copyright because it serves the public interest more than not having it, and we have a specific implementation of copyright because it serves the public interest more than any other implementation. The problem is, what if that's no longer true? What if our copyright laws do not serve the public interest better than any alternative laws? Or if any possible law would be worse for the public than none at all? In that case, we'd have to reform copyright, or abolish it altogether. That might not be good for you, personally, but if it's good for everyone, generally, then that's good enough.
The law is pretty clear. I'm sure everyone has heard about the Hurt Locker pirates being sued. All it will take to reduce piracy to virtually nothing; is a 50% change of getting sued for 10k every time you download a movie.
Or we could change the law -- it's not as though it is immutable -- and make it completely lawful for individuals to download movies, so long as no party involved acted in a commercial fashion (e.g. no exchange of money, no file sharing ratios, no protocols that require uploads in order to download, no charge for costs of blank media or accounts, no advertising, etc.). This might increase piracy, but it would decrease illegal activity.
Unless you think the law is perfect right now, which AFAIK no one believes, then it's clear that we need to go in one of two directions; yours, which makes copyright stronger, or mine, which makes it weaker. One of these will produce a greater benefit for society as a whole, and not just for one small portion of it.
I'm open to any suggestions, but my suspicion is that even taking into account all of the effects, and the effects of the effects, and so on, that we'd all be better off lessening copyright.
No, that's entirely wrong. Works are inherently in the public domain (although as a practical matter the right to copy something doesn't amount to much unless you have a copy to make more copies of). Copyright temporarily takes them out of it, to a limited extent, but in time they revert back to the public domain.
It's as if a piece of land held in common by the people of a town, and administered by the government of that town, which the people have called into being and legitimize by consenting to it governing them, were rented out for a term of years. When the term expires, it goes back to being available for everyone. If the rental were just so that a few people could profit, we'd call that a bad deal, and call the government that agreed to it either foolish or corrupt. If it benefited everyone more than not doing it, only then would it be acceptable.
Your local cable tv utility is probably an example of this.
And like, how can a person *own* the land, right? It's like, the land man....and it's old and you can't own it!
Same question, actually!
If you claim to own the Brooklyn Bridge, that's fine. But your ability to exercise control over the bridge -- by prohibiting any traffic of any kind to cross it, for example -- either has to be founded on your personal ability to defend the bridge from those who want to dislodge you from it, or other people's willingness to accept your claim of ownership.
If you can't defend it, and no one respects your claim, you're likely to just get arrested, because you're outnumbered.
That is how property works.
Copyright is the same, except that once information has been made known to someone else, it is impossible to defend it (unless you kill them before they can spread it). So it is much more dependent on the consent of others.
And why should others consent to claims of exclusivity? Only if it somehow is in their own best interests, surely.
If you having a copyright on your work, that keeps me from doing things that I might want to do with that work, nevertheless benefits me more than it harms me, I could agree to abide by it. Now you need only convince me -- and not just to the basic idea, but to the specific details as well, e.g. the number of years the copyright lasts, the specific things I'd be prohibited from doing, etc.
An opinion that seems very prolific on Slashdot is that consumers have a right to consume anything that has been created. They don't. The right to consume is not recognized by law, nor should it be.
Why?
I suppose that people should not be obligated to share things; if you write something in your diary, for example, you should not have to let other people read it, nor should other people be able to compel you to let them read it. And if you wanted to destroy that only copy of the work, which was in your possession, you could, though it would be nice if you wouldn't. However, if you have granted other people access to a work, then they do have a well-recognized right of free speech which would permit them to copy it. Since they'd own those copies, instead of you, they could grant others access as they liked, and things being what they are, sooner or later someone would grant access to the whole world.
A justification that I see fairly often is that if someone couldn't possibly buy a product then piracy of that product is ethically neutral because you can't be causing a loss of sales. I disagree with that because it is still a violation of the right that the copyright owner has to control the distribution of copies
Copyright is utilitarian, through and through; it is amoral, as are the creators, copyright holders, and infringers who interact with copyright.
Though if morality were a factor, surely it would be on the side of the pirates who put information to productive use, who spread it to anyone who is interested, and who preserve it (if only by there being so many copies floating around that at least a few will survive a calamity -- which is how classical works survived the Dark Ages, and how works that the BBC destroyed its own archival copies of show up from time to time, to name but two examples). Surely it's not actively moral to try to keep a stranglehold on creative works just to turn a profit. Maintaining the privacy of oneself or others might be moral, but we are talking about works that are intended for publication to anyone with enough cash, so privacy just isn't relevant.
Why should a right to consume trump a right to control the distribution of your ideas.
Because it is impossible to control distribution without controlling the exercise of the right of free speech by others. Censorship, whether by the state, to prohibit dissent, or by a business, to prohibit copying, is offensive and inherently unacceptable. It might be tolerable under the right circumstances -- concealing troop movements in a time of war, or granting copyrights where they produce a greater benefit to the public, even taking into account the costs, than doing otherwise -- but the onus is on he who would censor to prove his case, and even then he might find that no one is willing to tolerate it. In a legitimate government, where the right to govern stems from the consent of the governed, that's an entirely acceptable outcome.
No one has the right to tell me what I may or may not say, even if I merely repeat verbatim the words of someone else. All that they can do is either not tell me those words to begin with (in which case I can't compel them), or convince me to respect their wishes, either personally, or through a government that I am willing to be governed by. It's entirely possible to do this (in fact, I think that copyright is a good idea, and is capable of being good in practice, though it might not be any good in its current implementation), but it is up to those who want copyright to do so. They don't magically deserve it just by being authors. Authorship doesn't transform someone into a superior human being, with veto powers over the human rights of someone else.
And the people who design cars wouldn't have money to keep designing cars.
What would they need the money for? Not food, or clothing, or parts, or equipment, or furniture, or other things. Probably not to pay rent -- if you had that sort of technology, it be a lot easier for people to move out into space. Raw materials? Between recycling (just throw last week's car into the hopper) and space again, not a big deal. Energy? Solar panels would be easy to make, and it would take a while before an entire Dyson shell was built; by then people would probably be going to other star systems. Services? Sometimes people would need the cooperation of other people to do things, but I don't think it would arise often enough (especially if the service is labor to make something once, which can then be replicated, and the service never needs to be repeated -- there's only so many of these things that would be necessary) to matter much after a while.
Star Trek style replicators solve a _lot_ of problems. They almost completely destroy the economy, but when resources are no longer really scarce, there's not so much of a need for one.
Inventions and creative works already work this way, the problem is simply that people still need to eat, be clothed, live somewhere, etc., and it's not yet as easy to make another copy of a turkey as it is to make another copy of a movie.
In any case, if no one had to work to fulfill their needs, because their needs would be fulfilled anyway, this gives people more time to pursue an education they might otherwise not be able to manage, and more time to pursue hobbies. Surely some of those people will want to design cars just for the fun of it, in which case innovation will continue.
A copyright monopoly is not the only possible way to compensate and encourage authors beyond what no system at all could do. There is patronage.
Well, there are actually plenty of ways to incentivize authors to create and publish their works. (Compensation is a red herring, though. Plenty of authors with copyrights go uncompensated because their works are flops. Copyright doesn't guarantee compensation.) Some authors are incentivized by a desire to create, others are commissioned to create things, others are required to do so for a non-copyright related reason (e.g. a teacher telling a student to write an essay), others do so for non-copyright related economic reasons (e.g. a painter selling an original painting as an object, without bothering to make more copies as posters, postcards, etc., and thus not exploiting the copyright).
Patronage is one of the ways to incentivize authors in the absence of copyright. It also is entirely possible for patrons to pay artists to create works even when copyrights exist. Copyright is just yet another incentive; it's not the only one, probably not the most important one, and it doesn't prohibit others from continuing to function.
That's actually one of the problems with granting copyrights automatically. We should only grant it when necessary. Authors who would create and publish works regardless of copyright shouldn't get them, as they would have done it anyway. Lacking psychics, the best way to handle this would be to require authors to register their works in order to get copyrights; authors who are incentivized by copyright would probably do so, and authors who didn't care probably wouldn't. Likewise, have short terms and renewals, so that if an author did care to register but eventually stops caring, the work can stop being copyrighted before the maximum period of time it might be copyrighted.
But what seems to many the biggest problem of all is piracy. And on the flip side, DRM and draconian anti-piracy laws. On this, copyright is a clear loser.
Again, I think that it may be possible to find a reasonable middle ground. Piracy, it seems to me, falls into two camps. First is piracy engaged in by natural persons, and which is strictly not commercial in nature. For example, Alice making a copy of a movie for Bob, without any compensation, including payment for time, for blank media, for access, nor sharing ratios, nor ad views, etc. The rest is piracy engaged in either by businesses, or by anyone who is seeking to make money at it. I think that most people would tend to find the former unobjectionable, and the latter objectionable. So why not legalize the former, while retaining penalties that are at least related to the amount of damage for the latter?
As for DRM, I'm against it, but it's not possible to just ban it, due to free speech. So the next best thing, IMO, would be to have copyrights only granted to works which are published (defining publication very broadly, including performance) without DRM. If the copyright holder or a person acting under the authority of the copyright holder adds DRM, then the copyright is terminated immediately. Meanwhile, establish a program under the Library of Congress, which is ordered to break DRM systems, coordinate their work with third parties that are also breaking those systems, provide information and support for breaking them, distribute works for which the DRM has been broken (as they are, by definition, in the public domain, this is just a matter of bandwidth), and generally make DRM an unappealing, though perfectly legal and valid choice, for copyright holders.
That's great, with one possible problem.
Again, remember the point of copyright:
Without copyright, the public benefits greatly (as you imagined) from having the ability to do anything they like with works that they have access to, including making copies, and sharing them freely. Some works are still created and published without copyright, as we know from history.
The idea of copyright is that if we grant authors a temporary monopoly over certain actions relating to their work, they will turn around and charge higher prices for those actions, or the product of those actions than would be seen in a free market. Whether or not they actually recoup their expenses or turn a profit depends on whether people are willing to pay (likely for hits, unlikely for flops). This then causes authors and publishers to invest more of their own money in the creation and publication of works, because they hope to make money, than they would if there was virtually no chance of getting the best possible return on their investment.
More works are great, but if they were forever broadly monopolized, they wouldn't be worth it to the public. Thus, the monopoly has to be limited in scope (which works and rights copyright covers, what exceptions there are to copyright) and duration.
The goal is to grant just enough of a monopoly that the benefit to the public of having more works created and published than otherwise is greater than the harm caused by not having those works immediately and fully in the public domain. Ideally, you'll have the greatest benefit for the least harm, yielding the greatest net public benefit. (If it's impossible to have a greater net benefit with any possible copyright law than without, then we're better off without copyright at all)
So while your proposed library is great, the concern is that new works might only trickle into the library, because authors that won't create without the economic incentive of copyright will do something else. If you can handle the delayed gratification of copyright, you might have many more works flooding into the library over time, but not immediately upon creation and publication (at least, not free of restrictions).
I admit that copyright can go too far, and that the current law surely does so. Works should be far less protected than they are now, and should lose all protection (if they ever have it at all) much more rapidly. But I'm not convinced that we should abolish the whole system. I think that if the delay is sufficiently brief, and the payoff is sufficiently good, we can handle having copyright.
For example, would you be willing to wait for a year from the date a work is published (if the author seeks a copyright), to when it becomes freely available in your library, if it meant that the library would have more works by the end of that year than otherwise?
I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity.
Well, we at least are agreed on the need for reform, and as I suspect that most if not all of those reforms will involve either reducing the length and scope of copyright, or at least not enlarging it, surely we can at least work together on those parts of our agendas that are compatible. I see no need for in-fighting until at least something has been accomplished, letting the members of coalitions fall away naturally as they become satisfied. This may mean that there aren't enough people on board to go the whole way to copyright abolition, but at least the abolitionists get closer to their goal, too. Plus, working together gives each group an extended period of close contact with the other, and the chance to share ideas and perhaps even convince people to jump from one to another.
Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.
I can only guess that what you mean by that are people who support the 14+14 year term of the 1790 act, though I'm not sure where the '7' comes from. In any case, I don't support that, except at most by coincidence.
Rather, I'm interested in maximizing the public benefit. The 14+14 year term that people sometimes want to resurrect is simply a traditional term, but not one founded on anything relevant. IIRC, it's vaguely related to the length of an apprenticeship in 16th century England. I'd like to see some proper studies done to determine what the optimal length of copyright is for various types of works (e.g. books, software, movies, etc.), that are scientific, and not just revivals of past term lengths, or outright guesses. I saw a paper a few years ago that came up with a maximum of 15 years; I'd like to see more such studies, by more economists.
I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.
Well, I'd agree with you for some things anyway. Copyrights on architectural works could be abolished outright and no one would ever notice. And for the same reason, the recent noises about copyrights on clothing designs need to be challenged. The US has managed to prove its point v. Europe as to databases.
The fine arts mostly could get by without copyright; an original Picasso is worth a lot (a fact which he was known to exploit), but a poster of a Picasso is not. Counterfeiting a work of art and passing it off as an original is merely fraud, and we don't need copyright to handle that. Some level of copyright might be appropriate for more commercially minded fine artists (Thomas Kinkade is technically a fine artist), but at least let's have rigorous formalities requirements so that they have to register in order to get a copyright, and have to renew the copyright frequently up to the maximum term length (which is actually something that ought to be required across the board for copyright).
Then of course she got it home and it wouldn't play at all.
Minor nit: that was an article about DRM preventing a movie theater from screening the film, not about DRM preventing someone from watching the DVD at home. But I've heard the stories about that, so let's move on.
It is healthier for producers to accept that customers want media in whatever format is convenient, and after they get that media it is conceivable that it will be format shifted, shared with friends, and shared with strangers. Producers should accept that some people will experience their media without paying for it.
I agree. But I think that we can have this in practice -- well, except for the part where we can convince producers to accept it -- with well-crafted exceptions to copyright. For example, I've long supported the idea of making otherwise infringing activity engaged in by natural persons
So I back kangarooski in saying, bring on the copyright free world where "no content will ever be created again".
Well, you may have gone a little far. I think that the fundamental idea of copyright is a good one. That is, if having copyright increases the net public benefit (number of works created and published + works being in the public domain, or at least restricted as little as possible, as briefly as possible) more than not having copyright, then copyright is a good idea; it leaves us better off. Ideally, the copyright law we have should be carefully designed so as to produce the maximum public benefit. A copyright law that goes too far should be reined in, and a copyright law that produces a net public benefit less than the baseline of if there were no copyright is literally worse than having none at all.
While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.
I'd be happy with simply reforming copyright so that it better (or ideally, best) served the public interest. I don't think we need to abolish it, but I wouldn't take that option off the table.
My point was more that with a better copyright law, we might no longer have multi-hundred-million-dollar blockbuster movies, due to a lack of investors that believe that they'll see a greater profit than some other option. But I think we'd still see plenty of movies getting created and published, and I think that while they might be of a different character than the sort we see now (mainly having less spectacle), I think that they are apt to still be quite good.
it comes down to a simple equation: If people want to watch movies with major actors / actresses, superb visual and audio effects, etc. there will need to be a business model in which the people producing these movies can make money. The actors, set builders, makeup artists, visual effects people, caterers, property managers, etc. all need to be paid.
If, instead, we want to watch a bunch of home movies on YouTube - we can have that instead by just continuing to eat away at the movie business model by violating copyright.
Doesn't bother me any. In the end, writing, acting, and directing are important. The rest of it is nice, but not essential. For example, I remember seeing 'Driving Miss Daisy' -- the play, not the movie based on it -- back, oh, over 20 years ago, now. IIRC, the whole thing had only three actors, and the props consisted of two stools, a telephone, and a table to put the telephone on. While lower budgets might change what sorts of movies get made, I think that there will continue to be plenty of good ones. And if audiences are called upon to use their imaginations a little more to fill in details, then I don't think that's a problem either.
Because they created it
Well, let's run with that.
Let's say that you own a run-down shack and the acre of land on which it sits a few miles out of town, far from convenient roads. You never spend the slightest effort or any money in maintaining your property or your shack, much less making improvements. There is no property tax, you don't engage in transactions that are subject to sales tax, and you don't earn enough to pay income tax, because you basically just engage in the minimum amount of work to sustain yourself. You essentially live off the grid. Due to its poor condition and outlying location, your property is worth almost nothing.
Meanwhile, the nearby town grows. New roads are built by taxpayers, improving access to your land, among others. Neighboring property owners improve their land, and start to build housing on it. Eventually, the entire area is chock-full of multi-million dollar houses, new schools, new commercial development, and property values skyrocket. Soon, your lot is the only undeveloped lot remaining, but is seen as the single most desirable lot there is. An interested buyer offers you several million dollars for it as-is. You agree.
Now then, you didn't do a single thing to cause the value of your property to climb. You didn't build roads, you didn't improve your land, you didn't improve your shack. You didn't even pay taxes, because of the way you lived, that supported the government's involvement in any of these things. All you did was sit there like a lump, while events unfolded around you.
Should you get the money for your land, or should it be split up amongst your current and former neighbors, and the government, who did the actual work that caused your land to have more than minimal value?
Most people -- and the law -- will agree that you, and you alone, should get the money (less taxes) because you owned the property. The fact that it was other people who created the value is irrelevant.
Turning to copyright, you need to remember what copyright actually is. Copyright is a right to prohibit other people from doing things with regard to a work, such as making copies of the work, making derivatives of the work, performing or displaying the work, etc. The problem is that people have a right of free speech, and this right encompasses repeating the speech of others.
The two rights are in complete opposition to one another, so it doesn't make sense that both would exist, and if you have to choose one, I think that most people would choose free speech. After all, then the only harm authors suffer is competition, instead of outright censorship. That is, too much speech (if there is such a thing) isn't nearly so bad as too little.
Copyright basically lacks a natural right as a foundation, and doesn't even have much history behind it. It is, in fact, utilitarian in nature. That is to say, no author naturally has a right to censor me if I repeat what he already said. Instead, if that author not only wants to use his right of free speech to say something, but to prevent me from doing the same, he is going to have to convince me to willingly keep silent so that he can speak without competition.
I may be willing to do this, but only if I gain more than I lose from it, and thus we get into utilitarianism: Is it possible to have a copyright law that benefits the public more than it harms the public, and if so, what particular copyright law results in the greatest public benefit for the least public harm? Whatever it is, that's what the copyright law should be.
This is a lot like most publicly regulated monopolies. For example, a town might invite bids from different cable tv companies for a monopoly on cable tv service in the town for five years. The winning company has to pay for its monopoly, build infrastructure that will be owned by the town, and provide at least a minimum amount of service as defined by the town. And after a while, the monopoly expires, and the town can decide to either open up the system to competition, o
Well, let's remember something here: lawlessness can spread.
Consider Prohibition. While it merely made it illegal to make, transport, and sell alcohol, and was widely flouted (despite having had broad popular support when it was enacted -- people honestly thought it was a good idea!), it led to much worse things. From Prohibition, we wound up with massive amounts of official corruption, the development of a smuggling industry that could be used for anything, violence in the streets as criminals attacked one another, and the rise of organized crime that merely turned to other enterprises to support itself later on, and which is still problematic.
It's important that we legalize at least some behavior that currently constitutes copyright infringement -- say, non-commercial infringement engaged in by natural persons -- so as to keep the threat of lawlessness contained. I'm not suggesting that we abolish copyright, or that we legalize everything, but rather that the law should reflect the norms of society where possible. Sometimes the law will have to run counter to those norms (e.g. desegregation), but in those cases there should be an important reason for going against the will of the people. Copyright just isn't important enough.
So let's not celebrate piracy; instead, let's recognize it as a symptom of a law that's gone too far, and take steps to reign in that law before it causes problems.
my belief that an artist / programmer / writer / whatever has a moral right to control their works under a legally given monopoly where others agree that there is value in the work/
Why?
But you do have an obligation...you either come to a compromise that both sides agree to, or you walk away.
Well, I think you could look deeper. You're assuming that there must be enforceable rules that supports this, but I don't think that must be so. While human rights are important (such as the right to control one's own labor, and the right to free speech, including repeating the speech of others verbatim), copyright isn't one, and copyright isn't obligatory. It might be useful to have, but in that case we can define what it consists of, in scope and duration, so as to maximize its utility.
Piracy is an exception, but self interest remains a rather poor guide for proper behavior, generally speaking.
That's an odd thing to say, given that self-interest is the entire basis for copyright.
The public is self-interested; they want more works created and published, and they want those works in the public domain, where they are most useful to the public. In order to get more works created and published, they will temporarily allow restrictions on those works (where representatives of the public get to determine the scope and duration of the restrictions), so as to incentivize authors at the least cost to the public. Ultimately, the works are required to fall into the public domain. If the cost of copyright to the public is greater than the benefit to the public, there would be no point in having it, as the public would literally be better off without it (or with a differently formulated copyright law where the public benefit outweighed the public cost). The ideal copyright law is the one that provides the greatest public benefit, regardless of how appealing authors and publishers may find it as opposed to some alternative.
In doing this, the public has appealed to the self-interest of the authors, who want to make money by charging monopoly prices for their works, in order to recoup their investment and make a profit. It isn't guaranteed that they'll do so -- a work could still be a flop -- but they've got an opportunity. Financial self-interest is the only incentive that copyright can offer; while there are other incentives to create works (e.g. becoming famous, art for art's sake, sending a message to the audience, etc.), copyright doesn't matter for those.
So really, copyright is self-interest all the way down. It may only appeal to one kind of self-interest, rather than the whole panoply, and it may involve delayed gratification of self-interest, but it's still self-interest. There's nothing else at work there; it is not altruistic.
Piracy is simply self-defeating, in that pirates, who cannot stand to wait for the copyright term to end, engage in what would be lawful behavior later, but at the cost of reducing the incentivizing effect that all of the rest of society is counting on, thus reducing the overall benefit to society. Of course, this assumes that the copyright law is properly formulated. If the lawmakers have become corrupt, and no longer write the law so as to best serve the public interest alone (with whatever benefits authors receive being determined purely as a matter of what's best for society), or if social norms have changed, and the law no longer quite reflects what society wants out of it, then it may be that the law is no longer justified, and the pirates are acting correctly, if unlawfully. In that case, it's the law that needs correction, not the pirates.
In any case, though, I think you really missed the mark regarding self-interest. Self-interest is the only legitimate reason to have copyright, and governs whether there should be copyright, and if so, what it should consist of -- so as to exploit the self-interest of others in serving your own self-interest.
I'm not that surprised. Haven't you seen what the Florida state capitol building looks like? Check it out.
But, you have no right at all to copy the book and sell the material (which is what the copyright covers).
Where did I say otherwise? Remember, you said "if you make a work and copyright it, then nobody should profit off of it without your permission." So I countered with a way to profit off of someone else's copyrighted work without their permission. Basically, your earlier statement was too broad.
Also:
You have been given rights to your copy ONLY, not any copies that you want to make of it
Well, that's not precisely how copyright works. Remember, copyright is a negative right; it isn't a right for the author to make copies, etc., but rather a right for the author to prohibit others from making copies. Likewise, when a copyright expires, no new rights in the work are granted to the public, but instead the author loses his right to prohibit what the public can do with the work. Thus, merely by existing, you have a right to make copies of a work. But, while that work is copyrighted, the author can prohibit you from exercising your natural right to do so. Further, you don't have a right to demand access to a copy of the work in any event. Instead, you must wait for someone who has access, and the right to further grant access, to grant you access (e.g. by the author selling you a copy of the book) so that whatever rights you have in the work that you can exercise finally have something to be applied to.
A copy, for the purposes of copyright law (see the definitions section at 17 USC 101), is any material object in which a copyrighted work has been fixed. For example, if you write a poem on a sheet of paper, the poem is the work, and the paper in which it is embodied is a copy (the first copy is still a copy). If you xerox it, there is still only one poem, and thus only one work, but now there are two copies of it. You could destroy the first copy and the work would continue to exist in the second copy.
Thus, if the watch, or something on the watch, is copyrightable, the watch (or at least the relevant portion thereof) is a copy, because it is a material object in which the work is fixed.
Good effort, but wrong cite. 17 USC 602 addresses whether or not bringing the watch into the US is an infringement by itself. Assuming that it is not an infringement merely to import it, you would want to consult 17 USC 109 to determine whether or not it would be an infringement to resell it on eBay.