IIRC, there were some informal experiments carried out on Usenet and perhaps some other places. It turned out to be pretty easy to determine whether two authors were in fact one and the same. Automated analyses could no doubt be employed, and at that point it's just a matter of waiting to find something, anything, in the entire recorded history of the net, where that author used his real name or some other personally identifiable information. I think it's easy if anyone cares to try, and it will probably become common in the future once someone develops and markets a tool just for that. (It would probably help to pre-scan as much as you could, so that you don't have to revisit the same ground all the time)
Pro-privacy tools would have to effectively disguise writing style, and it seems like a much greater challenge to me.
I think you seriously underestimate moral rights as an effective incentive.
I don't think so.
Some of the aims of moral rights are accomplished by copyright so the lack of a separate moral rights regime in the US isn't much of a convincing argument that authors aren't motived by them.
This is untrue, primarily because moral rights are non-transferable, but copyrights are. Also because there are numerous exceptions to copyright, which given the right circumstances, would indeed allow someone to make copies of someone's work without permission and with altered or deleted attribution.
For authors and academics, recognition that a work is yours is a huge motivator. Preservation of the integrity of your work is a huge motivator.
And yet copyright doesn't provide them with this, and they seem adequately motivated already. The minor amount of additional motivation that moral rights would provide on top of the existing copyright regime would pretty certainly not outweigh the burden to the public of having such rights.
but I think it'd be OK to say that you can't publish a "distorted" work in someone's name unless they approve
Absolutely not. For example, suppose Alice is a famous author who sells the movie rights to her book to Bob, a filmmaker. Bob owns the relevant rights, and so Alice cannot exercise control over what he does. She ends up unhappy with the movie version of the book. It is important for Bob to have the right to keep Alice's name attached to the movie as the author of the book the movie is based upon 1) because her name is part of the draw, and it would be unjust for Bob to have paid all the money he did in getting the rights and making the movie if he cannot market it truthfully and adequately, and 2) because it is truthful and useful for informing the audience that this movie was authorized by Alice and it is based upon her book; depriving the audience of that information is injurious to them and the marketplace.
The proper thing to do is to chide Alice for selling her rights outright, because if she cares about the movie version, she should have licensed the rights with some authorial input as an attached string. If she doesn't care, she should be free to sell the rights altogether, so we mustn't remove her freedom to dispose of her copyright as she sees fit. But she should not get some kind of magical veto power over truthful information which absolutely everyone else -- the filmmaker and the public -- want to be out there.
In fact, since most authors don't benefit at all from copyright -- as you've argued successfully in the past -- it's very likely the motivation of most authors is more in line with moral rights than copyright.
No. Authors are motivated by copyright even when it doesn't actually benefit them (because their work is an economic flop) because authors are often easily exploited optimists. Think of all the people who think they'll be amazing musicians or authors. There are also other non copyright-based economic motives. For example, most fine artists simply sell individual copies. A Picasso is worth a lot more than a poster of a Picasso. Picasso did not bother to make significant money from posters, and so wasn't really motivated by his copyright, which wasn't all that valuable to him. Even if everyone had been making copies of his art, it still wouldn't have been the actual canvas (or whatever) painted by him. Commissions are also non-copyright economic motives.
Art for art's sake is another motive. This, in a variant form, is probably what's behind most/. posts. People want to express their opinions. Certainly this is true for me (I am also interested in correcting misinformation about copyright). Not everyone cares what people on/. think about them.
Reputation is another motive. But one's reputation isn't necessarily lessened by others' use of your work or even your name. But assuming that an artist's reputation is harmed somehow, then
Meh. Personally, I held off on registering until I was forced to because they stopped letting you enter in the name that would appear on your posts manually. (This is why my/. number is about twice as high as it otherwise would be; my then-roommate Altus has a lower number because he didn't wait)
Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you.
Actually, when the aggregate of all your posts, plus writing style, which is extremely hard to disguise, is considered, it's not that hard to link it, if anyone cares to.
Me, I support anonymous posting, including being able to post with a handle but without registering. I've never been happy with the present system.
First, the term was 14+14 for a total of 28. Second, while a shorter term is certainly called for, it's probably better if we avoid automatically using numbers that made sense in the 18th century and instead figure out what numbers make sense now (with regard to term length, number of terms, and number of renewals; i.e. maybe 7+7+7+7 is better than 14+14, or maybe 2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2 is better than both). Third, there are other things that need to be fixed besides term length. If all that is fixed is term length, copyright as implemented will still be very bad and be a big problem for everyone. Wholesale reform is needed with regard to both the length and scope of copyright. Fourth, ignore the GPL and CC. The big picture is too important to permit us to romanticize particular licensing schemes. While I suspect that the best copyright reforms would not prevent the GPL, CC, or at least some successor to them, from working, we ought to be willing to seriously consider any manner of reform if its benefits outweigh its costs. Given how few works use the GPL and CC, and that they could effectively be replaced by similar concepts in the law itself, if that happened to be a good idea, it isn't worth concentrating too much on them.
No, not really. If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'pirate,' you'll find that authors have been using it in this context for at least a century before copyright law even existed, which was back in the golden age of the 'arr matey' sort of pirates. If they had had to coin an equivalent word today, with the same emotional impact, it would probably be 'terrorists.'
Since they've been doing it for about 400 years, there's little chance of getting anywhere with complaints now.
What anti-plagarism provisions? It's generally not illegal, and there's no reason to make it so. If someone doesn't get caught, the law wouldn't matter. If someone does get caught, it's bad for their reputation, but the law cannot possibly mandate that their reputation suffer. There's no problem here for which the law could be a solution. Private enforcement (e.g. complaining to the school, which will protect its reputation by sacrificing the prof.) does actually work.
Setting aside that moral rights also cover the integrity of works (i.e. whether and how much people can alter the works of another) and whether artists can remove the attribution of a work to them (i.e. if they don't like what you've done to their work, they can take their name off of it, as if they were never involved in any capacity), it is bad to require people to correctly attribute works.
Provided that the re-attributor is not engaging in actual fraud, why does it matter to the law what they do? From experience, we know that it has no appreciable effect on whether authors create and publish works, which is all we seek to get authors to do when we give them copyrights. The law should encourage the most creation and publication with the least burden to the public. Adding on useless restrictions to the public is bad policy. To the extent that anyone actually cares about proper attribution, non-legal means are better ways of dealing with it. When an author gets caught plagarizing -- which isn't illegal now, btw -- his reputation suffers for it. This happens outside of the system; a judge cannot order that people think less of the author. It happens regardless of whether it is legal or not.
Copyright laws deal with economic motives because that's basically all that the government can do. Other motives for authors aren't dependent on copyrights or the government.
Before I became a copyright lawyer, I supported myself as an artist. Then and now, I'd agree with the above poster. This is a common and sensible attitude among artists. Certainly it has gone a long way into informing my thoughts about copyright law, where it does and doesn't work well, and how it could be made better for everyone.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I think you'll find that they are both artificial rights created by the state.
But I agree, the distinction is important: copyrights of any kind exist solely to benefit the public, which has equal interests in 1) having works created and published, and 2) being absolutely free to do anything with those works. A copyright law is only tolerable if its net result is a greater satisfaction of both interests than some alternative, including not having a copyright law.
If some rights of attribution and integrity actually benefit the public by causing authors to create and publish more works than they would otherwise, and if their burden on the public (which has an interest in stripping or altering attribution and ignoring the integrity of works) is less than that benefit, then we should be all for them.
But history shows that it's actually not that important to authors. Oh, they'd like it, certainly. But the vast, vast majority of them will create and publish works whether they have those rights or not. Consider as an example, the US, which has a lot of authors doing a lot of work, and no moral rights save a tiny (intolerable) bit for some, but not all, fine artists. And that's new. We didn't even have that until quite recently. We didn't lack for fine arts before, and we aren't exactly drowning in a surfeit of them now.
The evidence is clear that such laws are a public burden without a commensurately greater public benefit and should therefore not exist.
Which brings us to what "one can be opposed to." I'm in favor of any copyright laws where their public benefit outweighs their public burden, and I am in particularly in favor of the copyright laws with the greatest public benefit and the least public burden. But I'm against arbitrary distinctions between so-called economic and moral rights. I'm happy to have anything on the table, so long as it is a utilitarian table.
Some means of registration has been standard for copyright law ever since the very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne, from England in 1710. The first federal copyright law enacted by the then-new United States under the then-new Constitution, was the 1790 Copyright Act, and it granted nationwide copyrights from the date of registration; if you didn't or couldn't register, then you didn't get a US copyright. And that's been how the United States worked until the disastrous 1976 Copyright Act, which is still in force today.
So I'd say the traditional system of which I speak is the entirety of US copyright law for nearly two centuries, with strong influences going back another 80 years.
You're not suggesting that copies of every draft of every document and every element of every creative work be deposited at a modern day equivalent of the stationers office?
No, of course not; that would be nice from an archival point of view, but ultimately silly.
I am suggesting that for every copyrightable creative work for which a copyright is sought, a registration would have to be made, along with a deposit of the entire work. I think that the final form of the work, that is, the form in which it is published or otherwise made publicly known, would be sufficient. In some cases, supplemental information would be required in order that the work would materially and meaningfully be available to the public, particularly looking forward to its entry into the public domain. For example, for a compiled computer program, reasonably well-commented source and notes on the compilers and platforms used would be required so that 1) people could study the source, just as they can study a book, to glean the unprotected ideas from it, and 2) people could reasonably easily alter the program when it entered the public domain (or before if an applicable exception applied).
While it would be nice to get the drafts that were used to create the published work, I think that it would be best to let the drafts fall under the copyright for the published work, without needing to deposit them as well, so long as they were unpublished. If they were published, it would be important to get a deposit and probably a supplemental registration. I don't think that it would be appropriate to extend the term, or to grant a whole new term to the drafts as if they were a separate work, but I don't have strong feelings on that, and I'd be glad to discuss it.
That's a totally insane opinion, even for an IP extremist like yourself.
I have only two things to say to that. First, not only is it not insane, but mandatory registration and deposit were central to US copyright law for a very long time, and to some degree even survived the craptastic 1976 Act for a while. Second, I'm not an "IP extremist." I would describe myself as a moderate. I am interested only in reform to the extent that that reform would maximally serve the public interest. I have no desire to tear anything down just for the hell of it. But I also have no tolerance for abuses of the public, which are sadly commonplace today.
There was a recent proposal by the British library that all UK web sites be archived. It may have been well intended but was nonetheless laughed out of technology and publishing circles - with good reason.
There is no good reason whatsoever, and I support the proposal. A website is no different from anything else. Newspapers that printed two, and sometimes three editions a day had no difficulties with registration and deposit if they wanted a copyright. Website authors would have no difficulty either. If they were unwilling to bother, then we should be unwilling to grant them a copyright. Copyright is, after all, a quid pro quo system. It's not as though it would be particularly difficult for the site authors, and I would strongly support the creation by the Copyright Office of automated methods of submitting the updated sites, paperwork, billing, etc.
Yes, it basically just needs to be a token indicating an interest by the author. The Copyright Office, like the Patent and Trademark Office, should not be self-supporting. Promoting the progress of science and the useful arts is not hindered by drawing upon the government's general fund, but can be hindered if there is too great a bar for authors and inventors, rather than just enough of one. (I suppose the Trademark Division of the PTO could be self-supporting; they don't promote anything, but are simply engaged in commercial regulation. But I don't see that they absolutely must be, either.)
1. It shouldn't be, and the sooner we can get back to the traditional system, the better. 2. Even now, the protection is pretty poor if you don't register. This is a good thing: if an author doesn't care enough about his own work to register, why should we care enough about it to give it full, or any, protection? The author is the best judge of whether the work should be protected.
You can't take their work and claim it as your own
Actually that traditionally has not been part of copyright in the US, it barely is now (it hardly ever applies, it's so limited), and it's a bad idea. This sort of behavior either falls under fraud, defamation, or is not worth making illegal. Generally, the latter. I've never heard of an artist that refused to create and publish works for such an inane reason, with the possible exception of times when an artist has himself to blame for making bad deals with others. Since copyright is simply meant to get them to create and publish at the least cost to the public (where the burden of copyright itself is the main cost), there's simply no reason to give them anything extra, whether they want it or not.
and you can't make copies and sell them for a profit
Selling them at a profit is irrelevant. Copyright applies to the making of copies, whatever you do with them, even if you do nothing at all with them. It also applies to what you do with copies. And to performances and displays of works, which aren't copies. And to the making of new derivative works. Whether or not it should deal with some or all of these things is an interesting issue, but copyright is not what you seem to imagine it to be.
There won't be. Feist is a Supreme Court case which pretty strongly holds that facts (such as a person's name, address, phone number, and other personal information) are never copyrightable, because they fail to meet the Constitutional requirements for copyrightability.
For those who can, it's trivial. Admittedly, it's not as open to the world as it ought to be, but it is a decent example of a work with a trivial cost associated with it. Remember, any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression is copyrighted under the present system. A poem chalked onto a rock qualifies.
There is really nothing in the factual scenario to suggest that there is an implied nonexclusive license to make and distribute copies of the song. When someone gives you a promotional copy of something, that's it; they gave you the copy and you can enjoy it. Your argument isn't reasonable, and no court in the world would go for it. 'Legitimate misinterpretation' isn't relevant. Whether there was a license or not is based on what was in the copyright holder's mind. The other party's behavior might shed some light on it, but it's not as probative as you seem to imagine.
Given that deposit was mandatory for a long, long time, they'll have no difficulty being that busy. Hell, how did you think they got such a large collection to begin with? Of course, you'd also see a tremendous number of works enter the public domain, since most works are not felt by their authors to be important enough to be worth taking even the slightest step to get a copyright. And if that's what the author thinks, who are we to go against their judgment and give them copyrights anyway? Authors who are encouraged by copyrights to create works will actively seek out copyrights. Authors who don't care will ignore getting copyrights and would have created the work anyway.
Actually, that's not really the case with trademarks either. A trademark holder should make sure that there is no customer confusion with regard to his mark, if he wants to keep it, but he can ignore other users of the mark so long as they are not generating confusion.
Because the costs of producing any work are non-trivial, and these works on the whole do enrich and further society as well as our individual lives a system to reward the production of such works should be in place.
Almost.
First, many works are trivially produced. Look at the average/. post, for example. Secondly, and more importantly, we should only encourage the production of works where the costs of that encouragement are less than the benefits that those works provide to society (where the types of benefits are 1) having the work created and distributed and 2) having the work be in the public domain so that it can be enjoyed freely). It doesn't make much sense to encourage the creation of works when the costs of doing so would be detrimental to the public even accounting for the benefit of having that work exist. This means that there are limits to how much copyright is best to have, and these limits have nothing to do, really, with where artists or publishers think that they ought to be.
It would probably be better to build a new usb device from scratch, which consisted of two devices in the same case, one of them being a drive, and the other being a malware machine. Easier than trying to make a drive into something more.
There are three things here: 1) the software itself, which is an intangible creative work; 2) copies of the software, which consist of the software embodied in some tangible object, such as a hard drive that has the software on it, and; 3) the copyright pertaining to the software.
It is impossible for anyone to own #1. The poster does own #2. And the author or other copyright holder holds (or could arguably be said to own) #3.
If it were possible to own software directly, we wouldn't need copyright. Copyright is a system for emulating what it would be like if it were possible to own creative works.
Likewise, you cannot license the use of software (and n.b. that the GPL specifically claims to not apply to mere use) because copyright doesn't cover use, and thus isn't available to be licensed to begin with! If someone has lawful access to a work or lawful possession of a copy of a work, he can use it freely. He may not be able to publicly perform it, and he may not be able to make copies of it (though see 17 USC 117 re: copies of software owned by the user), but he can use it.
Well, the same dichotomy does exist, but you'd really need someone more well-versed (no pun intended) in how music is structured and written to point out roughly where the dividing line would be. I can listen to music, and I know the law, but I don't really know the difference between a musical theme that generally lacks specific notes and an expression of that theme that has actual notes. Scenes a faire would be easier to pick out, OTOH. It's hard to describe them in text, but there are certain stock elements in music which are free for anyone to reuse, like the twangy sounds of surf music, or the use of theremins for themes for science fiction or horror settings.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, there were some informal experiments carried out on Usenet and perhaps some other places. It turned out to be pretty easy to determine whether two authors were in fact one and the same. Automated analyses could no doubt be employed, and at that point it's just a matter of waiting to find something, anything, in the entire recorded history of the net, where that author used his real name or some other personally identifiable information. I think it's easy if anyone cares to try, and it will probably become common in the future once someone develops and markets a tool just for that. (It would probably help to pre-scan as much as you could, so that you don't have to revisit the same ground all the time)
Pro-privacy tools would have to effectively disguise writing style, and it seems like a much greater challenge to me.
I think you seriously underestimate moral rights as an effective incentive.
/. posts. People want to express their opinions. Certainly this is true for me (I am also interested in correcting misinformation about copyright). Not everyone cares what people on /. think about them.
I don't think so.
Some of the aims of moral rights are accomplished by copyright so the lack of a separate moral rights regime in the US isn't much of a convincing argument that authors aren't motived by them.
This is untrue, primarily because moral rights are non-transferable, but copyrights are. Also because there are numerous exceptions to copyright, which given the right circumstances, would indeed allow someone to make copies of someone's work without permission and with altered or deleted attribution.
For authors and academics, recognition that a work is yours is a huge motivator. Preservation of the integrity of your work is a huge motivator.
And yet copyright doesn't provide them with this, and they seem adequately motivated already. The minor amount of additional motivation that moral rights would provide on top of the existing copyright regime would pretty certainly not outweigh the burden to the public of having such rights.
but I think it'd be OK to say that you can't publish a "distorted" work in someone's name unless they approve
Absolutely not. For example, suppose Alice is a famous author who sells the movie rights to her book to Bob, a filmmaker. Bob owns the relevant rights, and so Alice cannot exercise control over what he does. She ends up unhappy with the movie version of the book. It is important for Bob to have the right to keep Alice's name attached to the movie as the author of the book the movie is based upon 1) because her name is part of the draw, and it would be unjust for Bob to have paid all the money he did in getting the rights and making the movie if he cannot market it truthfully and adequately, and 2) because it is truthful and useful for informing the audience that this movie was authorized by Alice and it is based upon her book; depriving the audience of that information is injurious to them and the marketplace.
The proper thing to do is to chide Alice for selling her rights outright, because if she cares about the movie version, she should have licensed the rights with some authorial input as an attached string. If she doesn't care, she should be free to sell the rights altogether, so we mustn't remove her freedom to dispose of her copyright as she sees fit. But she should not get some kind of magical veto power over truthful information which absolutely everyone else -- the filmmaker and the public -- want to be out there.
In fact, since most authors don't benefit at all from copyright -- as you've argued successfully in the past -- it's very likely the motivation of most authors is more in line with moral rights than copyright.
No. Authors are motivated by copyright even when it doesn't actually benefit them (because their work is an economic flop) because authors are often easily exploited optimists. Think of all the people who think they'll be amazing musicians or authors. There are also other non copyright-based economic motives. For example, most fine artists simply sell individual copies. A Picasso is worth a lot more than a poster of a Picasso. Picasso did not bother to make significant money from posters, and so wasn't really motivated by his copyright, which wasn't all that valuable to him. Even if everyone had been making copies of his art, it still wouldn't have been the actual canvas (or whatever) painted by him. Commissions are also non-copyright economic motives.
Art for art's sake is another motive. This, in a variant form, is probably what's behind most
Reputation is another motive. But one's reputation isn't necessarily lessened by others' use of your work or even your name. But assuming that an artist's reputation is harmed somehow, then
No, Clarus goes moof, Claris goes back and forth with being independent of Apple.
Meh. Personally, I held off on registering until I was forced to because they stopped letting you enter in the name that would appear on your posts manually. (This is why my /. number is about twice as high as it otherwise would be; my then-roommate Altus has a lower number because he didn't wait)
Really, it's just another column in a database that can't realistically even be linked to you.
Actually, when the aggregate of all your posts, plus writing style, which is extremely hard to disguise, is considered, it's not that hard to link it, if anyone cares to.
Me, I support anonymous posting, including being able to post with a handle but without registering. I've never been happy with the present system.
First, the term was 14+14 for a total of 28. Second, while a shorter term is certainly called for, it's probably better if we avoid automatically using numbers that made sense in the 18th century and instead figure out what numbers make sense now (with regard to term length, number of terms, and number of renewals; i.e. maybe 7+7+7+7 is better than 14+14, or maybe 2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2 is better than both). Third, there are other things that need to be fixed besides term length. If all that is fixed is term length, copyright as implemented will still be very bad and be a big problem for everyone. Wholesale reform is needed with regard to both the length and scope of copyright. Fourth, ignore the GPL and CC. The big picture is too important to permit us to romanticize particular licensing schemes. While I suspect that the best copyright reforms would not prevent the GPL, CC, or at least some successor to them, from working, we ought to be willing to seriously consider any manner of reform if its benefits outweigh its costs. Given how few works use the GPL and CC, and that they could effectively be replaced by similar concepts in the law itself, if that happened to be a good idea, it isn't worth concentrating too much on them.
No, not really. If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'pirate,' you'll find that authors have been using it in this context for at least a century before copyright law even existed, which was back in the golden age of the 'arr matey' sort of pirates. If they had had to coin an equivalent word today, with the same emotional impact, it would probably be 'terrorists.'
Since they've been doing it for about 400 years, there's little chance of getting anywhere with complaints now.
What anti-plagarism provisions? It's generally not illegal, and there's no reason to make it so. If someone doesn't get caught, the law wouldn't matter. If someone does get caught, it's bad for their reputation, but the law cannot possibly mandate that their reputation suffer. There's no problem here for which the law could be a solution. Private enforcement (e.g. complaining to the school, which will protect its reputation by sacrificing the prof.) does actually work.
I disagree.
Setting aside that moral rights also cover the integrity of works (i.e. whether and how much people can alter the works of another) and whether artists can remove the attribution of a work to them (i.e. if they don't like what you've done to their work, they can take their name off of it, as if they were never involved in any capacity), it is bad to require people to correctly attribute works.
Provided that the re-attributor is not engaging in actual fraud, why does it matter to the law what they do? From experience, we know that it has no appreciable effect on whether authors create and publish works, which is all we seek to get authors to do when we give them copyrights. The law should encourage the most creation and publication with the least burden to the public. Adding on useless restrictions to the public is bad policy. To the extent that anyone actually cares about proper attribution, non-legal means are better ways of dealing with it. When an author gets caught plagarizing -- which isn't illegal now, btw -- his reputation suffers for it. This happens outside of the system; a judge cannot order that people think less of the author. It happens regardless of whether it is legal or not.
Copyright laws deal with economic motives because that's basically all that the government can do. Other motives for authors aren't dependent on copyrights or the government.
Before I became a copyright lawyer, I supported myself as an artist. Then and now, I'd agree with the above poster. This is a common and sensible attitude among artists. Certainly it has gone a long way into informing my thoughts about copyright law, where it does and doesn't work well, and how it could be made better for everyone.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I think you'll find that they are both artificial rights created by the state.
But I agree, the distinction is important: copyrights of any kind exist solely to benefit the public, which has equal interests in 1) having works created and published, and 2) being absolutely free to do anything with those works. A copyright law is only tolerable if its net result is a greater satisfaction of both interests than some alternative, including not having a copyright law.
If some rights of attribution and integrity actually benefit the public by causing authors to create and publish more works than they would otherwise, and if their burden on the public (which has an interest in stripping or altering attribution and ignoring the integrity of works) is less than that benefit, then we should be all for them.
But history shows that it's actually not that important to authors. Oh, they'd like it, certainly. But the vast, vast majority of them will create and publish works whether they have those rights or not. Consider as an example, the US, which has a lot of authors doing a lot of work, and no moral rights save a tiny (intolerable) bit for some, but not all, fine artists. And that's new. We didn't even have that until quite recently. We didn't lack for fine arts before, and we aren't exactly drowning in a surfeit of them now.
The evidence is clear that such laws are a public burden without a commensurately greater public benefit and should therefore not exist.
Which brings us to what "one can be opposed to." I'm in favor of any copyright laws where their public benefit outweighs their public burden, and I am in particularly in favor of the copyright laws with the greatest public benefit and the least public burden. But I'm against arbitrary distinctions between so-called economic and moral rights. I'm happy to have anything on the table, so long as it is a utilitarian table.
What "traditional system"?
Some means of registration has been standard for copyright law ever since the very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne, from England in 1710. The first federal copyright law enacted by the then-new United States under the then-new Constitution, was the 1790 Copyright Act, and it granted nationwide copyrights from the date of registration; if you didn't or couldn't register, then you didn't get a US copyright. And that's been how the United States worked until the disastrous 1976 Copyright Act, which is still in force today.
So I'd say the traditional system of which I speak is the entirety of US copyright law for nearly two centuries, with strong influences going back another 80 years.
You're not suggesting that copies of every draft of every document and every element of every creative work be deposited at a modern day equivalent of the stationers office?
No, of course not; that would be nice from an archival point of view, but ultimately silly.
I am suggesting that for every copyrightable creative work for which a copyright is sought, a registration would have to be made, along with a deposit of the entire work. I think that the final form of the work, that is, the form in which it is published or otherwise made publicly known, would be sufficient. In some cases, supplemental information would be required in order that the work would materially and meaningfully be available to the public, particularly looking forward to its entry into the public domain. For example, for a compiled computer program, reasonably well-commented source and notes on the compilers and platforms used would be required so that 1) people could study the source, just as they can study a book, to glean the unprotected ideas from it, and 2) people could reasonably easily alter the program when it entered the public domain (or before if an applicable exception applied).
While it would be nice to get the drafts that were used to create the published work, I think that it would be best to let the drafts fall under the copyright for the published work, without needing to deposit them as well, so long as they were unpublished. If they were published, it would be important to get a deposit and probably a supplemental registration. I don't think that it would be appropriate to extend the term, or to grant a whole new term to the drafts as if they were a separate work, but I don't have strong feelings on that, and I'd be glad to discuss it.
That's a totally insane opinion, even for an IP extremist like yourself.
I have only two things to say to that. First, not only is it not insane, but mandatory registration and deposit were central to US copyright law for a very long time, and to some degree even survived the craptastic 1976 Act for a while. Second, I'm not an "IP extremist." I would describe myself as a moderate. I am interested only in reform to the extent that that reform would maximally serve the public interest. I have no desire to tear anything down just for the hell of it. But I also have no tolerance for abuses of the public, which are sadly commonplace today.
There was a recent proposal by the British library that all UK web sites be archived. It may have been well intended but was nonetheless laughed out of technology and publishing circles - with good reason.
There is no good reason whatsoever, and I support the proposal. A website is no different from anything else. Newspapers that printed two, and sometimes three editions a day had no difficulties with registration and deposit if they wanted a copyright. Website authors would have no difficulty either. If they were unwilling to bother, then we should be unwilling to grant them a copyright. Copyright is, after all, a quid pro quo system. It's not as though it would be particularly difficult for the site authors, and I would strongly support the creation by the Copyright Office of automated methods of submitting the updated sites, paperwork, billing, etc.
I
Yes, it basically just needs to be a token indicating an interest by the author. The Copyright Office, like the Patent and Trademark Office, should not be self-supporting. Promoting the progress of science and the useful arts is not hindered by drawing upon the government's general fund, but can be hindered if there is too great a bar for authors and inventors, rather than just enough of one. (I suppose the Trademark Division of the PTO could be self-supporting; they don't promote anything, but are simply engaged in commercial regulation. But I don't see that they absolutely must be, either.)
You want "viola."
Viola seems to've met her end a-sea
All I can offer is Cesario
1. It shouldn't be, and the sooner we can get back to the traditional system, the better.
2. Even now, the protection is pretty poor if you don't register. This is a good thing: if an author doesn't care enough about his own work to register, why should we care enough about it to give it full, or any, protection? The author is the best judge of whether the work should be protected.
You can't take their work and claim it as your own
Actually that traditionally has not been part of copyright in the US, it barely is now (it hardly ever applies, it's so limited), and it's a bad idea. This sort of behavior either falls under fraud, defamation, or is not worth making illegal. Generally, the latter. I've never heard of an artist that refused to create and publish works for such an inane reason, with the possible exception of times when an artist has himself to blame for making bad deals with others. Since copyright is simply meant to get them to create and publish at the least cost to the public (where the burden of copyright itself is the main cost), there's simply no reason to give them anything extra, whether they want it or not.
and you can't make copies and sell them for a profit
Selling them at a profit is irrelevant. Copyright applies to the making of copies, whatever you do with them, even if you do nothing at all with them. It also applies to what you do with copies. And to performances and displays of works, which aren't copies. And to the making of new derivative works. Whether or not it should deal with some or all of these things is an interesting issue, but copyright is not what you seem to imagine it to be.
There won't be. Feist is a Supreme Court case which pretty strongly holds that facts (such as a person's name, address, phone number, and other personal information) are never copyrightable, because they fail to meet the Constitutional requirements for copyrightability.
For those who can, it's trivial. Admittedly, it's not as open to the world as it ought to be, but it is a decent example of a work with a trivial cost associated with it. Remember, any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression is copyrighted under the present system. A poem chalked onto a rock qualifies.
There is really nothing in the factual scenario to suggest that there is an implied nonexclusive license to make and distribute copies of the song. When someone gives you a promotional copy of something, that's it; they gave you the copy and you can enjoy it. Your argument isn't reasonable, and no court in the world would go for it. 'Legitimate misinterpretation' isn't relevant. Whether there was a license or not is based on what was in the copyright holder's mind. The other party's behavior might shed some light on it, but it's not as probative as you seem to imagine.
No.
Given that deposit was mandatory for a long, long time, they'll have no difficulty being that busy. Hell, how did you think they got such a large collection to begin with? Of course, you'd also see a tremendous number of works enter the public domain, since most works are not felt by their authors to be important enough to be worth taking even the slightest step to get a copyright. And if that's what the author thinks, who are we to go against their judgment and give them copyrights anyway? Authors who are encouraged by copyrights to create works will actively seek out copyrights. Authors who don't care will ignore getting copyrights and would have created the work anyway.
Actually, that's not really the case with trademarks either. A trademark holder should make sure that there is no customer confusion with regard to his mark, if he wants to keep it, but he can ignore other users of the mark so long as they are not generating confusion.
Because the costs of producing any work are non-trivial, and these works on the whole do enrich and further society as well as our individual lives a system to reward the production of such works should be in place.
/. post, for example. Secondly, and more importantly, we should only encourage the production of works where the costs of that encouragement are less than the benefits that those works provide to society (where the types of benefits are 1) having the work created and distributed and 2) having the work be in the public domain so that it can be enjoyed freely). It doesn't make much sense to encourage the creation of works when the costs of doing so would be detrimental to the public even accounting for the benefit of having that work exist. This means that there are limits to how much copyright is best to have, and these limits have nothing to do, really, with where artists or publishers think that they ought to be.
Almost.
First, many works are trivially produced. Look at the average
It would probably be better to build a new usb device from scratch, which consisted of two devices in the same case, one of them being a drive, and the other being a malware machine. Easier than trying to make a drive into something more.
Not quite.
There are three things here: 1) the software itself, which is an intangible creative work; 2) copies of the software, which consist of the software embodied in some tangible object, such as a hard drive that has the software on it, and; 3) the copyright pertaining to the software.
It is impossible for anyone to own #1. The poster does own #2. And the author or other copyright holder holds (or could arguably be said to own) #3.
If it were possible to own software directly, we wouldn't need copyright. Copyright is a system for emulating what it would be like if it were possible to own creative works.
Likewise, you cannot license the use of software (and n.b. that the GPL specifically claims to not apply to mere use) because copyright doesn't cover use, and thus isn't available to be licensed to begin with! If someone has lawful access to a work or lawful possession of a copy of a work, he can use it freely. He may not be able to publicly perform it, and he may not be able to make copies of it (though see 17 USC 117 re: copies of software owned by the user), but he can use it.
Well, the same dichotomy does exist, but you'd really need someone more well-versed (no pun intended) in how music is structured and written to point out roughly where the dividing line would be. I can listen to music, and I know the law, but I don't really know the difference between a musical theme that generally lacks specific notes and an expression of that theme that has actual notes. Scenes a faire would be easier to pick out, OTOH. It's hard to describe them in text, but there are certain stock elements in music which are free for anyone to reuse, like the twangy sounds of surf music, or the use of theremins for themes for science fiction or horror settings.