On the contrary, you are the one who cant see the similarity in situation. Spending 1 or 2 years for something, than using it to earn billions of dollars without having to do any further work differs very little from being born into somebody "right".
Wow, we really do disagree on this one, then. I think anyone who has created a work of such value that it makes that kind of money in that little time with today's system has probably done more for society than most people ever will in their entire lifetime. Of course, historically the number of people who have actually done that, or anything close to it, is tiny.
Are you sure you're not suffering from just a little envy here? Do you really begrudge J. K. Rowling earning a few million in a few years, even after she has brought a little extra happiness to more people than any of us will ever know? Do you begrudge the guys who founded Google their enormous wealth, even though the tools they have given us help millions of people to save time and find useful information every day?
We can quibble about the enormous sums of money involved, and whether any single piece of work can possibly be worth the disproportionate returns that these high-profile cases generate, but I think it's hard to argue that the people concerned don't deserve a big reward for what they've given to society.
If you can't see the difference between giving an elite group special rights just because they had the correct parents, and giving special rights to people who have actually spent their time and money to produce something useful in exchange for them sharing that useful work, then I'm afraid it's time for you to leave this discussion.
I think perhaps you're giving a bit too much credit to our legal system. As far as I can tell, most of the "big questions" over copyright have not (yet?) come to court.
However, since our legal system is generally "loser pays", our equivalents of the **AA groups can't employ the same scare tactics to make money. Our courts and politicians are also far less in Big Media's pockets than they appear to be in certain other places, particularly the US, and we don't have the concept of punitive damages that would lead to disproportionate rewards for suing people all over the place. Basically, our legal climate is such that going after serious offenders (the guys who mass-produce ripped DVDs and sell them at car boot sales, for example) can be and is done, but it's rarely worthwhile to go after the little guy.
As a consequence, behaviour like your photocopying example, while technically illegal (I think; IANAL), is effectively treated as "no harm, no foul" unless you do something to seriously upset the copyright holders.
Although what you say is reasonable, I'm not full of sympathy for organisations like the British Library. I live in Cambridge and studied here, and I can tell you plenty of stories about the University Library behaving atrociously towards those who rely on its special status to find source material for their research. The legal deposit libraries seem to act as laws unto themselves, very proud of their special authority, yet with little accountability and often offering a poor service to the people they are supposed to help.
I don't think mysterious deaths are likely to be a huge problem outside of detective stories. However, untimely death due to illness or accident is quite a concern, since any artist who was relying on income from their work to support a family would leave that family with much less if the works were immediately released to the public domain after their death.
IIRC, some of the media companies recently made a public statement saying they wouldn't prosecute people just for harmless format-shifting. This was probably a good move, because upsetting the entire MP3-player industry probably isn't a helpful thing to do if you rely on music sales to make money -- particularly if some of those MP3 players are made by another wing of your own parent company!
Nevertheless, while the statement you cited is true, our fair dealing statutes certainly don't describe exemptions in the kind of broad, open-ended terms that (for example) US "fair use" law does. For example, if memory serves, you have to look to some rather obscure bit of European(?) legislation that's filtered down to find cover for backing up computer software, not to the CDPA itself.
As an aside, in the UK, the nearest equivalent to the US "fair use" concept is "fair dealing", but it's much more limited. Basic things like format-shifting and other copying for strictly personal use are not currently included, for example.
It's an odd time for the British Library to publish this. The Gowers Review, mentioned in the Slashdot story, ran a call for evidence that closed back in April, and I imagine the BL submitted their comments to it. The official line is that the Review will publish the results in "Autumn 2006". However, I can tell you as someone who submitted a response that they wrote to me around three weeks ago, and asked me to confirm by last Friday whether I was happy for that response to be posted on the Review's web site (which is linked from the story), so it sounds like the reporting stage is imminent.
I wonder if the British Library is sneakily trying to push its own agenda ahead of the Review publishing its results in the next few days? After all, although the Review plans to make concrete recommendations to government on the future IP framework within the UK, the government still has to accept the results and implement the laws.
I think you miss the fact that a great deal of commissioned work IS publicly displayed, especially large sculpture and paintings.
A great deal? I don't agree. A tiny proportion of all works, usually in a few specific fields, are commissioned and then displayed publicly gratis. The vast, vast majority of works are not, including almost anything that's suitable for file-sharing. One might argue that a few of the big-name open source projects are an exception, where the sponsoring businesses have their own reasons for supporting the project, but that's about as far as it goes.
An artist could run his business much like a political campaign. Put a thermometer graph on his web site indicating how close he is to the amount he needs to fund his next album. When he reaches his goal, he starts work, and when it's done, it becomes free for everyone to enjoy. If he doesn't reach the goal within X months, everyone gets a refund.
And just like the vast majority of independent politicians out there, most artists won't even cover the cost of the payment/refund system they have to set up. Why would anyone ever support a new and unheard-of artist?
For that matter, do you really think it would be better if established artists could collect huge advances on a new album and then produce any old rubbish and take the money? Personally, I prefer the current system where the artist has to "come up with the goods" (figuratively speaking) before getting compensated for their efforts, and critics can get hold of a copy to review before everyone else commits.
Here are a few problems with your suggestion that come immediately to mind:
No-one has yet devised an effective system for micropayments. Everyone's got "enabling technology". Being able to do anything useful with it is a completely different question.
Not all art lives in digital computer files.
Without any compulsion to pay a fair rate, that same technology would make it unnecessary for people to use the paid-for system in your world, reducing all shared art in your system to donationware. As we saw in a recent article, that doesn't work very well, despite all the wishful thinking.
I would totally agree that copyright isn't necessarily the only possible incentive. I generally come down pro-copyright in these discussions, because I think that the principle is sound and it serves effectively as a possible incentive. While there certainly are abuses going on, I think they are almost invariably "implementation faults" with the way the principle is legislated in some jurisdictions.
However, I don't agree with your alternative proposal. The basic problem with arguing that we could just revert to art as a service industry is that it removes a convenient economic mechanism for many people to contribute a small amount and all receive a work, when the cost of producing that work is significantly more than any one individual consumer would consider it worth. You're back to only rich patrons being able to afford to commission new works, and potentially hoarding them in private collections rather than sharing them for the general good. Everybody else can still pay a few pence for a mass-produced paperback, but they're limited to such content as artists choose to give away for free, which as I argued before is a big reduction compared to the choice available today.
Sorry, you've lost me. The existence of copyright doesn't confer any particular power to the state, other than incidentally in cases like Crown Copyright in the UK. Of course it's a law created by the state, but then so is any other law. I don't see your point, unless you're arguing that all laws are infringements of liberty (which of course they are, viewed in isolation, but the question is whether they're a net plus).
Who do you think the police will be stopping more often?
a. Fat, ugly, old women
b. Attractive young women
Well, I can't speak for the police. I do know, however, that a particular friend of mine gets the full search treatment at airports a lot more often than any of my other friends. Establishing whether that's because she comes from the former Yugoslavia or because she's exceptionally beautiful is left as an exercise for the reader.
I do not know much about economics, but I do not see how it benifits a society to not freely share and celebrate music and other forms of art.
Then I respectfully suggest that you study some introductory economics for a while. The point of copyright and related laws is to offer something to those who create useful works of art as an incentive to share them. Of course there's no benefit to society to give up the right to share the art that's already available, but how many of those works would have been released without the incentive, and how many would not be in future if the incentive were removed?
Now, there is a strong case that some useful works would be still be made and released. Just look at how much software used to be released as freeware, or is released today under some open source licence. But there's also a strong case that it wouldn't be anything like as many as we have now: the vast, vast majority of useful software that gets written was not written purely because someone was kind enough to spend many hours producing a useful or enjoyable work for the benefit of society, and the same goes for books, movies, and so on.
That is what makes the incentive reasonable: you can't share and celebrate art that no-one has.
FWIW, our rank-and-file police officers have consistently resisted calls for more general arming of those in the service, for a long time now. Most of the "initiatives" to arm the police more widely come from the higher-ups and the politicos, not the guys who are going to be faced with the decision to pull the trigger. Obviously there are times when a police response involving firearms is called for, but personally, I'm happy that this be the exception, and the guys with the specialist weapons be specially trained to use them, and it seems like most police officers here agree with me.
You're certainly right about the obsession with weapons rather than actions, though. When we wind up banning things like small-calibre pistols used for sport shooting and traditional weapons used in martial arts classes, yet violent crime (and in particular gun crime) stats are not showing big improvements (probably because almost no-one uses a.22 or a katana to commit armed robberies...), then you have to question whether the policies are aiming in the right direction. But it's politically incorrect to suggest that we undo the earlier legislation or, God forbid, we go further and legalise concealed carry of certain weapons that are effective equalisers for self-defence but hard to do mass-damage with. (After all, it's not like every police officer does carry at least "non-lethal" weapons like batons and spray for self-protection. Oh, no, wait, they do.) I guess we'll have to wait for reality to kick PC's backside a bit more before this happens.
The US system is broken as we have no punishments for violating the authority given to a police officer. That is to say if a cop here breaks the law and uses his badge to do it, he will likely get a lesser punishment than an average citizen, rather than a stricter one.
We have similar concerns over here. Theoretically, police officers are supposed to get hit harder if they break the rules. In practice, we have an authoritarian government pushing for ever greater use of "summary justice" -- a quaint euphemism for letting the police officer be judge, jury and if he wants, executioner, where the only way to avail yourself of due process is usually to give up any possibility of taking a "procedural penalty" like a formal caution or fixed penalty.
Presumably this is because the US has a functioning government, which can realisticaly threaten immediate action. Ths EU doesn't, so the airlines know that if the violate EU agreements it will be a long time before it has any consequences for them.
Yeah, the US is always quick to punish corporate offenders, while the EU hangs around and does nothing forever. How is Microsoft doing these days, by the way?
I'm not exactly a friend of the airlines, but it seems like they're screwed either way.
Only if they continue to fly to the US.
Look at the mass disruption and consequent political fall-out recently caused in the UK just by inconveniencing passengers with over-zealous security checks. Those lasted a few weeks before the policy was softened back to almost its original level, and the government is now being sued, or likely to be sued imminently, left, right and centre. On this experience, I imagine the US administration would cave in about three seconds if every major European airline refused go fly there until their information-hording policy was backed down to more reasonable levels. The damage to the US, for which the administration will inevitably be held responsible by the electorate, would be far greater than the damage to most airline companies.
Being as commerical airliners will always have an appeal to terrorists.
So will any mass-transport system, any crowded shopping area, any essential infrastructure such as water, gas, and electricity supply, any government office...
You can never protect all the targets forcibly. There's just too much opportunity, and even if you had the resources to do it, you'd have so many security assets that you'd have problems with inside jobs.
IMHO, any response to terrorism has to be based on not caving on principles (and thus showing that terrorism works), on effective intelligence, and on sufficient preventative measures that it's hard to organise something without triggering those intelligence systems. Blatant infringement of civil liberties does not fall under any of these headings, AFAICS; quite the contrary, in fact.
This is all fine, unless you're in the UK, in which case the government has conveniently made an arrangement for airlines to give the US all the information they want legally, circumventing the EU law on a technicality. It's good to know that Tony is independent of George's dog-handler these days, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, we really do disagree on this one, then. I think anyone who has created a work of such value that it makes that kind of money in that little time with today's system has probably done more for society than most people ever will in their entire lifetime. Of course, historically the number of people who have actually done that, or anything close to it, is tiny.
Are you sure you're not suffering from just a little envy here? Do you really begrudge J. K. Rowling earning a few million in a few years, even after she has brought a little extra happiness to more people than any of us will ever know? Do you begrudge the guys who founded Google their enormous wealth, even though the tools they have given us help millions of people to save time and find useful information every day?
We can quibble about the enormous sums of money involved, and whether any single piece of work can possibly be worth the disproportionate returns that these high-profile cases generate, but I think it's hard to argue that the people concerned don't deserve a big reward for what they've given to society.
If you can't see the difference between giving an elite group special rights just because they had the correct parents, and giving special rights to people who have actually spent their time and money to produce something useful in exchange for them sharing that useful work, then I'm afraid it's time for you to leave this discussion.
I think perhaps you're giving a bit too much credit to our legal system. As far as I can tell, most of the "big questions" over copyright have not (yet?) come to court.
However, since our legal system is generally "loser pays", our equivalents of the **AA groups can't employ the same scare tactics to make money. Our courts and politicians are also far less in Big Media's pockets than they appear to be in certain other places, particularly the US, and we don't have the concept of punitive damages that would lead to disproportionate rewards for suing people all over the place. Basically, our legal climate is such that going after serious offenders (the guys who mass-produce ripped DVDs and sell them at car boot sales, for example) can be and is done, but it's rarely worthwhile to go after the little guy.
As a consequence, behaviour like your photocopying example, while technically illegal (I think; IANAL), is effectively treated as "no harm, no foul" unless you do something to seriously upset the copyright holders.
Information doesn't want anything. It has no opinion. As with technology, information is neutral, and it's how people use it that matters.
Seen your first-born child lately? :-/
Although what you say is reasonable, I'm not full of sympathy for organisations like the British Library. I live in Cambridge and studied here, and I can tell you plenty of stories about the University Library behaving atrociously towards those who rely on its special status to find source material for their research. The legal deposit libraries seem to act as laws unto themselves, very proud of their special authority, yet with little accountability and often offering a poor service to the people they are supposed to help.
I don't think mysterious deaths are likely to be a huge problem outside of detective stories. However, untimely death due to illness or accident is quite a concern, since any artist who was relying on income from their work to support a family would leave that family with much less if the works were immediately released to the public domain after their death.
IIRC, some of the media companies recently made a public statement saying they wouldn't prosecute people just for harmless format-shifting. This was probably a good move, because upsetting the entire MP3-player industry probably isn't a helpful thing to do if you rely on music sales to make money -- particularly if some of those MP3 players are made by another wing of your own parent company!
Nevertheless, while the statement you cited is true, our fair dealing statutes certainly don't describe exemptions in the kind of broad, open-ended terms that (for example) US "fair use" law does. For example, if memory serves, you have to look to some rather obscure bit of European(?) legislation that's filtered down to find cover for backing up computer software, not to the CDPA itself.
As an aside, in the UK, the nearest equivalent to the US "fair use" concept is "fair dealing", but it's much more limited. Basic things like format-shifting and other copying for strictly personal use are not currently included, for example.
It's an odd time for the British Library to publish this. The Gowers Review, mentioned in the Slashdot story, ran a call for evidence that closed back in April, and I imagine the BL submitted their comments to it. The official line is that the Review will publish the results in "Autumn 2006". However, I can tell you as someone who submitted a response that they wrote to me around three weeks ago, and asked me to confirm by last Friday whether I was happy for that response to be posted on the Review's web site (which is linked from the story), so it sounds like the reporting stage is imminent.
I wonder if the British Library is sneakily trying to push its own agenda ahead of the Review publishing its results in the next few days? After all, although the Review plans to make concrete recommendations to government on the future IP framework within the UK, the government still has to accept the results and implement the laws.
A great deal? I don't agree. A tiny proportion of all works, usually in a few specific fields, are commissioned and then displayed publicly gratis. The vast, vast majority of works are not, including almost anything that's suitable for file-sharing. One might argue that a few of the big-name open source projects are an exception, where the sponsoring businesses have their own reasons for supporting the project, but that's about as far as it goes.
And just like the vast majority of independent politicians out there, most artists won't even cover the cost of the payment/refund system they have to set up. Why would anyone ever support a new and unheard-of artist?
For that matter, do you really think it would be better if established artists could collect huge advances on a new album and then produce any old rubbish and take the money? Personally, I prefer the current system where the artist has to "come up with the goods" (figuratively speaking) before getting compensated for their efforts, and critics can get hold of a copy to review before everyone else commits.
Here are a few problems with your suggestion that come immediately to mind:
I would totally agree that copyright isn't necessarily the only possible incentive. I generally come down pro-copyright in these discussions, because I think that the principle is sound and it serves effectively as a possible incentive. While there certainly are abuses going on, I think they are almost invariably "implementation faults" with the way the principle is legislated in some jurisdictions.
However, I don't agree with your alternative proposal. The basic problem with arguing that we could just revert to art as a service industry is that it removes a convenient economic mechanism for many people to contribute a small amount and all receive a work, when the cost of producing that work is significantly more than any one individual consumer would consider it worth. You're back to only rich patrons being able to afford to commission new works, and potentially hoarding them in private collections rather than sharing them for the general good. Everybody else can still pay a few pence for a mass-produced paperback, but they're limited to such content as artists choose to give away for free, which as I argued before is a big reduction compared to the choice available today.
Sorry, you've lost me. The existence of copyright doesn't confer any particular power to the state, other than incidentally in cases like Crown Copyright in the UK. Of course it's a law created by the state, but then so is any other law. I don't see your point, unless you're arguing that all laws are infringements of liberty (which of course they are, viewed in isolation, but the question is whether they're a net plus).
Lies! Falsehoods! Untruths!
It's only suspended until the war on terror has been won, silly.
Well, I can't speak for the police. I do know, however, that a particular friend of mine gets the full search treatment at airports a lot more often than any of my other friends. Establishing whether that's because she comes from the former Yugoslavia or because she's exceptionally beautiful is left as an exercise for the reader.
Then I respectfully suggest that you study some introductory economics for a while. The point of copyright and related laws is to offer something to those who create useful works of art as an incentive to share them. Of course there's no benefit to society to give up the right to share the art that's already available, but how many of those works would have been released without the incentive, and how many would not be in future if the incentive were removed?
Now, there is a strong case that some useful works would be still be made and released. Just look at how much software used to be released as freeware, or is released today under some open source licence. But there's also a strong case that it wouldn't be anything like as many as we have now: the vast, vast majority of useful software that gets written was not written purely because someone was kind enough to spend many hours producing a useful or enjoyable work for the benefit of society, and the same goes for books, movies, and so on.
That is what makes the incentive reasonable: you can't share and celebrate art that no-one has.
FWIW, our rank-and-file police officers have consistently resisted calls for more general arming of those in the service, for a long time now. Most of the "initiatives" to arm the police more widely come from the higher-ups and the politicos, not the guys who are going to be faced with the decision to pull the trigger. Obviously there are times when a police response involving firearms is called for, but personally, I'm happy that this be the exception, and the guys with the specialist weapons be specially trained to use them, and it seems like most police officers here agree with me.
You're certainly right about the obsession with weapons rather than actions, though. When we wind up banning things like small-calibre pistols used for sport shooting and traditional weapons used in martial arts classes, yet violent crime (and in particular gun crime) stats are not showing big improvements (probably because almost no-one uses a .22 or a katana to commit armed robberies...), then you have to question whether the policies are aiming in the right direction. But it's politically incorrect to suggest that we undo the earlier legislation or, God forbid, we go further and legalise concealed carry of certain weapons that are effective equalisers for self-defence but hard to do mass-damage with. (After all, it's not like every police officer does carry at least "non-lethal" weapons like batons and spray for self-protection. Oh, no, wait, they do.) I guess we'll have to wait for reality to kick PC's backside a bit more before this happens.
We have similar concerns over here. Theoretically, police officers are supposed to get hit harder if they break the rules. In practice, we have an authoritarian government pushing for ever greater use of "summary justice" -- a quaint euphemism for letting the police officer be judge, jury and if he wants, executioner, where the only way to avail yourself of due process is usually to give up any possibility of taking a "procedural penalty" like a formal caution or fixed penalty.
I can understand your not having seen it. For some reason I can't possibly imagine, they haven't exactly advertised it widely. </sarcasm> :-)
Here's a reference, courtesy of the BBC.
Yeah, the US is always quick to punish corporate offenders, while the EU hangs around and does nothing forever. How is Microsoft doing these days, by the way?
Didn't you ever hear the expression, "Two wrongs do not make a right"?
Only if they continue to fly to the US.
Look at the mass disruption and consequent political fall-out recently caused in the UK just by inconveniencing passengers with over-zealous security checks. Those lasted a few weeks before the policy was softened back to almost its original level, and the government is now being sued, or likely to be sued imminently, left, right and centre. On this experience, I imagine the US administration would cave in about three seconds if every major European airline refused go fly there until their information-hording policy was backed down to more reasonable levels. The damage to the US, for which the administration will inevitably be held responsible by the electorate, would be far greater than the damage to most airline companies.
So will any mass-transport system, any crowded shopping area, any essential infrastructure such as water, gas, and electricity supply, any government office...
You can never protect all the targets forcibly. There's just too much opportunity, and even if you had the resources to do it, you'd have so many security assets that you'd have problems with inside jobs.
IMHO, any response to terrorism has to be based on not caving on principles (and thus showing that terrorism works), on effective intelligence, and on sufficient preventative measures that it's hard to organise something without triggering those intelligence systems. Blatant infringement of civil liberties does not fall under any of these headings, AFAICS; quite the contrary, in fact.
This is all fine, unless you're in the UK, in which case the government has conveniently made an arrangement for airlines to give the US all the information they want legally, circumventing the EU law on a technicality. It's good to know that Tony is independent of George's dog-handler these days, isn't it?
I'm not sure what's more terrifying, the number of buzzwords in the one-sentence parent post, or the fact that I understood them all.
:-p