It was little loved by my brother, who woke up crying every night for days because Optimus died.
Don't worry. Today's youngsters, trained as they are on Buffy, are quite used to randomly killing the protagonist once per series when a dramatic plot device is needed. They know their favourite character will come back to life later via a further highly implausible plot device, probably even stronger than before.
What was that? They already did that in Transformers too? I'm shocked. Shocked, I say! Shocked!!!
Does that mean we have to get Marty Kudelka to play Jazz, too?
(For anyone looking confused right now, Marty is Justin Timberlake's choreographer, and did the motion capture for the Citroen ad. Probably not the fantastic spoof though, I'm guessing...)
Imagine that every program would have it's commands displayed by icons on the keyboard.
I'm imagining. And then I'm remembering that almost no class of users remembers more than a small handful of icons on a toolbar, even when they're displayed all the time a particular application is in use, so I figure the chances of that actually helping many people on the keyboard are pretty slim...
I don't know (and neither does anyone else) how much advantage this idea could really offer until the usability testing is done. However, you can probably guess;-) that my initial reaction is that it would be a geek toy and/or a very useful niche product, rather than something likely to give good price/performance for everyday use unless the price differential becomes almost zero relative to an everyday keyboard.
Thus, odd-shaped F-keys, tiny F-keys, and the ever-dreaded F-Lock, which leaves unsuspecting users wondering why F7 didn't send "Ready!" over the team channel.
It's funny you should mention that. I was looking for a replacement for my trusty but now rather battered keyboard just the other day, and figured I'd drop into PC World - not my normal shop of choice for computer things, but useful enough for cheap and cheerful.
Or so I thought. I could have cordless keyboards, Internet keyboards, media control keyboards, even a nice aluminium thing that would have matched my PC's case. The one thing I couldn't have was a simple, standard-issue 102- or 105-key keyboard with all the keys in the right place.
I left without buying anything, though my (computer-literate) girlfriend couldn't understand why I thought having the arrow key block too low or needing to hit F-lock to use the function keys would be annoying. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
You're obviously attacking a straw man, but since you mentioned it: I imagine it would make no difference to the majority of keyboard users in the world if the keyboard was blank. More to the point, I doubt that many of the remainder would actually use the sort of customisation or specialist apps where this kind of thing might be useful, giving them little or no benefit over a standard set of fixed key markings.
As I acknowledged in my original post, I'm sure there are niche markets where this doesn't apply, but I expect that's what they are: niches.
Not terribly practical, though, even if they put it into production.
How many times did you look at your keyboard while you typed your post, really? In the middle of an intense FPS shootout, do you really need to know which key you configured to switch from the rocket launcher to grenades? Do you really have to check the keyboard shortcut for "Copy" in your text editor of choice?
No, me neither.
This is a fun idea, sure, and might have some genuine use in a few niches, but I doubt it's going anywhere as a mainstream idea.
Would this count as a software patent (a pretty fluffy term for such a precise arena)? Arguably, it's closer to a business process, along with the concept of one-click ordering, isn't it?
-It is not in compliance with the GPL, and therefore illegal;
Sorry, I've lost you. Are you really claiming that releasing a driver for Linux, but only as closed source, is illegal?
-none of the hardware manufacturers sells drivers, they sell hardware, dammit
No, they sell whatever they give you when they take your money. For some types of hardware (e.g., graphics cards), the drivers are a crucial part of that package, and good drivers are a major competitive advantage. As others have pointed out in the past, the difference between a $200 "gamer" graphics card and a $2,000 "workstation" graphics card is usually far more about software than hardware.
Now, that being the case, what sane graphics card manufacturer is going to give away one of their most valuable and expensive-to-develop assets -- the algorithms used in their display drivers -- just to appease a group who think having the source code is a prerequisite to software being useful? Depending on the details, doing so could even be viewed as negligence on the part of the management.
But is there any way to retain and make publically available a historical record of events as seen on the Internet without causing these problems?
Perhaps we missed a step, where we concluded that retaining a complete record of the entire Internet was actually in society's best interests (or indeed even technically possible). IMHO, what we're really interested in is preserving the works likely to be of value and perhaps the overall picture of the Internet for historical interest, not every banner ad and spam that ever existed, and every personal message written quickly while drunk and taken down just as quickly when sober.
I'd suggest that a far better approach would be to simply provide an opt-in service, where anyone happy for their material to be archived could easily indicate this. In particular, anyone contributing an article to the Internet for free -- something likely to be a work of value and at risk of disappearing -- would be encouraged to send a copy to the archive, or do something robots.txt-ish to let the archive find and store it for them automatically. If this were commonly known, I imagine most people would opt in; after all, they're happy to make their material available in the first place.
Making the system explicitly opt-in doesn't require a lot of effort on the part of contributors, and avoids every single problems we've discussed in this thread with concerns over privacy, copyright, or whatever deterring people from contributing information if they fear it will last forever.
I actually don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, and I do find the behaviour of certain large, profit-making groups with regard to copyright contemptible. However, I can't help thinking that you're looking at this purely from the consumer's point of view, as if the only people on the other side of the fence are megacorps, when the vast majority of the time that's not really true, and even when it is not all of them are as unethical as the **AA and friends.
The answer to problems with information like drafts and trade secrets being public knowledge after being published is simple, don't publish them.
And what if I didn't, but someone did so without my permission? Sadly but inevitably, not all staff at all companies will ever be trustworthy, no matter how hard you try to pick good people. But now, instead of just getting the page containing the illegally leaked information taken down, that information is forever allowed to be kept in the public domain, through no fault of my own.
Lets talk about natural versus artificial rights. Freedom of speech is in my opinion a natural right. Copyright is, in my opinion an artificial right, granted as part of an agreement between authors and those who would benefit from said authorship. Authors are rewarded for giving works to the public with the rights to make money. What advantage does a copyrighted work that is not available to the public give to the people who are giving up their natural right to copy it freely?
The same advantage as a work that is never released at all: none. But you never had the natural right to copy it freely, because the natural state is that you don't have it at all. I think your whole argument forgets this fundamental point.
As I've posted several times today, the position you and a few others here are advocating seems to assume that the same amount of information would be available, and as quickly, in the absence of copyright protection. I just don't see how that's ever going to be the case.
Someone who doesn't want to give away their work won't, copyright or no. Someone who wants to give away their work completely without restriction will give it away, copyright or no. The only group who matter here are those who are prepared to grant access to their work but only on their terms, and the only thing reducing the power of copyright can possibly do is reduce the inclination of this group to provide their works at all.
Copyright is indeed a two-sided bargain, but you write as if society were doing the creators of works a favour by saying "If you publish, we'll still let you keep these rights". Society's perspective is pretty much irrelevant here, because the default is that things don't get published at all, and no-one gets them under any terms. Hence the question society should be asking is "What will it take for you to give me access to your work?" I don't think giving a raw deal to anyone who ever posts anything on the Internet is going to be part of the answer.
You do realize that the vast majority of copyrighted works including art, literature, film, and music are completely unavailable to the average person right? About.05% of all copyrighted books are still in print and maybe 3% are still available either new or used. The same holds true for music.
OK, I think we need a reality check here. I'm writing this about a mile away from a British Copyright Library, in which is stored a copy of just about every book ever printed in this country. Many of these are now out of copyright, and could be freely copied or reproduced by others if they wished; all it takes is asking for admission and explaining what you're looking for. The fact that the books may have gone out of print is hardly copyright's fault; they would inevitably have done so anyway.
However, there's rather a difference between that, and archiving the kind of exam
OK, let me give you a realistic scenario, where actual harm would be done. (In fact, two very similar sequences of events to the following happened at around the same time to people I know well.)
Suppose, as an author, you decide to put up drafts of your book on a web site as it progresses, perhaps to raise awareness of your work or promote related discussion, or maybe just because you think the draft might help someone, somewhere, and it costs you nothing to do them a favour. The site changes over time, and finally when your book is finished, you take down the web site and publish the finished work in hardcopy form.
Unfortunately, you discover that your publishers are very edgy about material that's not completely original. When you tell them that your work was previously on the Internet, large amounts of contractual wrangling ensue while you try to convince them that no damage has been done, and their rights under the copyright you're about to assign to them aren't compromised.
If this has wasted days of your time, and making the original articles or draft chapters or whatever available didn't give you much advantage, would you make them available on-line at all next time around?
This is pretty much exactly what happened to a couple of friends of mine, and consequently neither of them ever publishes anything that might even potentially form part of a later book on-line any more, because it's just not worth the hassle. Now, these are smart guys, and their web sites were regarded as an interesting and useful resource within our field, but no longer, and no-one is any better off for it.
If places like the IA get carte blanche to redistribute whatever material they like the instant it hits cyberspace, then before long they will presumably become as ubiquitous as Google is now. Publishers will become even more negative about material that has previously been available on-line, because once it's out there, they have no way of controlling it. The whole idea of publishing drafts or prepress versions as a cost-nothing service to the community will simply die, and services like the IA will have killed it.
It might not go this way, but judging by multiple real life examples, it's not unlikely. Tell me again how the IA promotes the distribution of works as effectively as copyright?
I admire your enthusiasm. Alas, it doesn't change the fact that your post is still full of incorrect assertions, starting with the very first line. In fact, making content available by a web site is not by itself counted as publishing in most jurisdictions. (Check the legal definition where you are; I've yet to find a place where any of the qualifying categories applies to Joe's Typical Home Page.)
That in itself renders most of your remaining arguments unsound, but you also seem to be arguing that there's some over-riding academic interest in any material that appears on the web, regardless of all other considerations. That's akin to advocating free speech, even if it means shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre, defamation, breaching an agreement to keep something you were told in confidence a secret, etc. I think most people would agree, given those examples, that free speech should not be an absolute right, but rather a default state that is only trumped by more important considerations. I don't see why the Internet should be any different, and promoting the production of new works by the mechanism of copyright is certainly an important consideration.
And I'm really sick and tired of people that have absolutely no idea how the protocols work attempting to use the law to cover up their mistakes.
If you were even half as clever as you think you are -- or had just bothered to read the article -- you'd understand that we're talking about a permanent archive not a temporary cache or proxy, and that the established robots.txt convention has only ever been a polite request that could be ignored. The protocols don't make any provision for the legal requirement not to redistribute copyright material without either permission or a suitable exemption, so relying on them is a pretty weak position to take.
You'd also realise that accusing someone of "hiding behind the law" is just a feeble way of saying "I don't like the law, I wish the law said something different, and since it doesn't I'm going to imply some kind of inappropriate behaviour on the part of those who follow it" and such a statement isn't really going to convince anyone who didn't agree with you anyway.
Regarding the peculiarities of this specific case, and the more general argument about the legality of the IA, please see my comments on the reply just above yours, which challenged me on much the same points.
Regarding the Library of Congress, I think your idea has some practical problems. In particular, copyright is an international agreement, and your Library of Congress has no particular right to do whatever it wishes with Internet-based materials under international law. Do you really want to create a motivation for the rest of the world to disconnect the US from the Internet?
The IA also has some major differences from existing national reference libraries. In particular, the presence of a work at a national reference library does not give near instant access to as many people as might want to read the work simultaneously. The Internet does. Just as P2P is the scourge of big media groups that tolerated copying the occasional videotape or CD, so an "electronic reference library" would render copyright inert for the entire Internet, and in doing so hit all the problems that copyright was intended to solve in the first place.
Copyright doesn't exist to allow someone to make a reasonable profit; that's just one way in which it seeks to attain its real goal, which is to promote the creation and distribution of useful works for the benefit of society. Again, please see my previous post for the logical conclusion of your approach, and why I think it is wrong.
Actually, while they do not give up any copyright, there are a number of explicitly stated, legal uses of copyrighted materials and there is a great deal of public benefit to enumerating a few more of them. Can you honestly argue it is not in the public's best interest that a historical archive of the internet exists, for educational reasons if no other?
Yes, absolutely you can. There is no public interest in something unpleasant/illegal that someone said about someone else when they were very upset, and later deleted. There is no public interest in some personal material that was inadvertently or illegally released via the Internet and then removed being preserved. There is no public interest in legally-protected trade secrets that were illegally released in violation of an NDA being advertised to all and sundry; if that were in the public interest, the law wouldn't recognise the concepts of trade secrets and NDAs in the first place. Even getting closer to the usual concept of publication, it is doubtful whether there's any benefit to old drafts of an article that were put on-line during proofing remaining available when a finished, corrected version is published (on the Internet or otherwise).
Those are just the first few examples that come to mind, but the significance is clear: just because some information was available somewhere at some time, that doesn't automatically means there's a benefit to society to preserving that information in an obvious place for all time.
Copyright is supposed to be about one thing and one thing only, promoting science and arts. That is the only constitutional provision for its existence.
I'm going to skip your constitutional arguments, because copyright is an international convention, and most of the world isn't subject to your constitution. Can we agree the more neutral definition that copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society?
What? How does this limiting of the rights of others encourage them to distribute the material? They, like the majority of copyright holders these days, don't want the work to be available at all.
Your position is illogical. We're talking about material that has already been made available. If it's a work of value, then probably it was removed because the copyright holder was going to distribute it via some other means, or was working on a newer, better version and didn't want the out-of-date material getting in the way. If it's not a work of value, then there is little public interest to be served in preserving it, particularly if doing so causes any harmful effects to the parties involved.
(The specific example in this story is rather unfortunate; of course the court should throw the case out, though it should do so on the basis that the plaintiff is trying to profit from breaking the law, not on the much more general principle that the IA can ignore copyright on a whim. This is hardly representative of the "majority of all copyright holders", however.)
The archive is in trouble not because the violated the intention of copyright. They, in fact, are trying to uphold the very principals upon which it is founded.
Perhaps, but they're going the wrong way about it. At the moment, people who create useful works have two choices: keep it private, or publish it on their own terms under the provisions of copyright. If you remove copyright, then the only possible change is that fewer people will choose the second option. There simply is no upside; there was never a "force people to publish works on your terms instead" third choice.
This is why copyright works as an incentive, and effectively moving the goalposts by saying to someone after they've published "Ah, but now we're going to distribute your work on our terms anyway" simply undermines the whole system. In doing so, it ki
I agree that the circumstances are different. However, copying and redistributing the material is clearly copyright infringement by default in all of these cases. If I understand your argument properly, you are saying that the foreknowledge that this might happen should serve as a defence or provide an exemption in the IA's case. However, I don't see how that same legal principle wouldn't then exclude the other scenarios as well, with the consequent reduction of copyright to meaningless red tape for anything Internet-based.
It is an inherent consequence of the medium being used. The concepts of sharing, linking and caching were there before anyone ever did anything commercial with the WWW
I notice you dropped any mention of archiving and republishing from that list.
This is one of the reasons why the software industry is nowadays making more and more money from services and money made from direct product sales is becomming less and less important. Adapt or die, its very simple.
The software industry has always made money in both ways, and they're both important. Without either, it is unlikely that the industry would be as successful (by any useful measure).
As for adapt or die, remember you said that when abusing the system means you can't buy any DVD player that isn't locked down in hardware to force viewing a half-hour of ads before every movie, you can't download any music without DRM nor connect any "untrusted" device to the Internet, any open forum on the Internet is subject to government moderation, use of technology like P2P and Bittorrent is a criminal offence, and all your Internet access is logged so that if any material that might breach these conditions is traced to you, you can be sent to prison for 10 years under the successor to the DMCA. That is the kind of adaptation that your attitude encourages, and right now, the big content providers are happily following the road, the small content providers are getting screwed, and the rest of us will pay for both along with you.
Copyright is not for keeping documents hidden. Copyright is for giving the author/artist a chance to profit from their work before other publishers get the chance to.
Not really. Copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society, however your particular jurisdiction's legal system may phrase that. The fact that it does this by securing certain rights to individuals is simply the way it tries to achieve that goal.
However, that being the case, the individuals do have those rights, and the society must respect them, or it's failing to keep its side of the bargain. If that means keeping the documents hidden in some sense, then so be it.
The law you're talking about is only an exemption to the US-based DMCA. The rest of the world doesn't necessarily recognise it. Moreover, AFAICS on a quick look, it doesn't actually cover the copyright issue, but the circumvention of copy protection technology.
Sorry, you'll have to find more than that to convince this audience...
by placing your content on the web aren't you implicitly granting a license to copy?
Yes, you certainly are graning implicit permission to copy for some purposes, but the context matters. In particular, you aren't necessarily granting permission to copy for all purposes, which is a distinction disturbingly few people posting here seem to appreciate...
As Dr. Evil has outlined, if precautions are not taken to make it clear that a particular entity does not want reproduction of their website, then by right of standard excepted practice, the website is public domain.
And as I argued in reply to his post, I believe he is clearly wrong.
One additional note: Libraries are free to copy and reproduce copyrighted material within certain bounds. I believe the internet archive should legally be considered a library of webpages.
That may be your opinion, but there is nothing in law to support it. Moreover, the situations are fundamentally different, so I'm not sure there should be, either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Here's a hint."
It was almost worthy of a Schwarzenegger movie. :-)
Don't worry. Today's youngsters, trained as they are on Buffy, are quite used to randomly killing the protagonist once per series when a dramatic plot device is needed. They know their favourite character will come back to life later via a further highly implausible plot device, probably even stronger than before.
What was that? They already did that in Transformers too? I'm shocked. Shocked, I say! Shocked!!!
Does that mean we have to get Marty Kudelka to play Jazz, too?
(For anyone looking confused right now, Marty is Justin Timberlake's choreographer, and did the motion capture for the Citroen ad. Probably not the fantastic spoof though, I'm guessing...)
A keyboard that turns into a robot... 1,000,000 times its original size?
I'm imagining. And then I'm remembering that almost no class of users remembers more than a small handful of icons on a toolbar, even when they're displayed all the time a particular application is in use, so I figure the chances of that actually helping many people on the keyboard are pretty slim...
I don't know (and neither does anyone else) how much advantage this idea could really offer until the usability testing is done. However, you can probably guess ;-) that my initial reaction is that it would be a geek toy and/or a very useful niche product, rather than something likely to give good price/performance for everyday use unless the price differential becomes almost zero relative to an everyday keyboard.
It's funny you should mention that. I was looking for a replacement for my trusty but now rather battered keyboard just the other day, and figured I'd drop into PC World - not my normal shop of choice for computer things, but useful enough for cheap and cheerful.
Or so I thought. I could have cordless keyboards, Internet keyboards, media control keyboards, even a nice aluminium thing that would have matched my PC's case. The one thing I couldn't have was a simple, standard-issue 102- or 105-key keyboard with all the keys in the right place.
I left without buying anything, though my (computer-literate) girlfriend couldn't understand why I thought having the arrow key block too low or needing to hit F-lock to use the function keys would be annoying. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
You're obviously attacking a straw man, but since you mentioned it: I imagine it would make no difference to the majority of keyboard users in the world if the keyboard was blank. More to the point, I doubt that many of the remainder would actually use the sort of customisation or specialist apps where this kind of thing might be useful, giving them little or no benefit over a standard set of fixed key markings.
As I acknowledged in my original post, I'm sure there are niche markets where this doesn't apply, but I expect that's what they are: niches.
Not terribly practical, though, even if they put it into production.
How many times did you look at your keyboard while you typed your post, really? In the middle of an intense FPS shootout, do you really need to know which key you configured to switch from the rocket launcher to grenades? Do you really have to check the keyboard shortcut for "Copy" in your text editor of choice?
No, me neither.
This is a fun idea, sure, and might have some genuine use in a few niches, but I doubt it's going anywhere as a mainstream idea.
Would this count as a software patent (a pretty fluffy term for such a precise arena)? Arguably, it's closer to a business process, along with the concept of one-click ordering, isn't it?
Sorry, I've lost you. Are you really claiming that releasing a driver for Linux, but only as closed source, is illegal?
No, they sell whatever they give you when they take your money. For some types of hardware (e.g., graphics cards), the drivers are a crucial part of that package, and good drivers are a major competitive advantage. As others have pointed out in the past, the difference between a $200 "gamer" graphics card and a $2,000 "workstation" graphics card is usually far more about software than hardware.
Now, that being the case, what sane graphics card manufacturer is going to give away one of their most valuable and expensive-to-develop assets -- the algorithms used in their display drivers -- just to appease a group who think having the source code is a prerequisite to software being useful? Depending on the details, doing so could even be viewed as negligence on the part of the management.
<shrug>
Some customers are more trouble than they're worth. That's not derogatory, it's simply a statement of business fact.
Perhaps we missed a step, where we concluded that retaining a complete record of the entire Internet was actually in society's best interests (or indeed even technically possible). IMHO, what we're really interested in is preserving the works likely to be of value and perhaps the overall picture of the Internet for historical interest, not every banner ad and spam that ever existed, and every personal message written quickly while drunk and taken down just as quickly when sober.
I'd suggest that a far better approach would be to simply provide an opt-in service, where anyone happy for their material to be archived could easily indicate this. In particular, anyone contributing an article to the Internet for free -- something likely to be a work of value and at risk of disappearing -- would be encouraged to send a copy to the archive, or do something robots.txt-ish to let the archive find and store it for them automatically. If this were commonly known, I imagine most people would opt in; after all, they're happy to make their material available in the first place.
Making the system explicitly opt-in doesn't require a lot of effort on the part of contributors, and avoids every single problems we've discussed in this thread with concerns over privacy, copyright, or whatever deterring people from contributing information if they fear it will last forever.
I actually don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, and I do find the behaviour of certain large, profit-making groups with regard to copyright contemptible. However, I can't help thinking that you're looking at this purely from the consumer's point of view, as if the only people on the other side of the fence are megacorps, when the vast majority of the time that's not really true, and even when it is not all of them are as unethical as the **AA and friends.
And what if I didn't, but someone did so without my permission? Sadly but inevitably, not all staff at all companies will ever be trustworthy, no matter how hard you try to pick good people. But now, instead of just getting the page containing the illegally leaked information taken down, that information is forever allowed to be kept in the public domain, through no fault of my own.
The same advantage as a work that is never released at all: none. But you never had the natural right to copy it freely, because the natural state is that you don't have it at all. I think your whole argument forgets this fundamental point.
As I've posted several times today, the position you and a few others here are advocating seems to assume that the same amount of information would be available, and as quickly, in the absence of copyright protection. I just don't see how that's ever going to be the case.
Someone who doesn't want to give away their work won't, copyright or no. Someone who wants to give away their work completely without restriction will give it away, copyright or no. The only group who matter here are those who are prepared to grant access to their work but only on their terms, and the only thing reducing the power of copyright can possibly do is reduce the inclination of this group to provide their works at all.
Copyright is indeed a two-sided bargain, but you write as if society were doing the creators of works a favour by saying "If you publish, we'll still let you keep these rights". Society's perspective is pretty much irrelevant here, because the default is that things don't get published at all, and no-one gets them under any terms. Hence the question society should be asking is "What will it take for you to give me access to your work?" I don't think giving a raw deal to anyone who ever posts anything on the Internet is going to be part of the answer.
OK, I think we need a reality check here. I'm writing this about a mile away from a British Copyright Library, in which is stored a copy of just about every book ever printed in this country. Many of these are now out of copyright, and could be freely copied or reproduced by others if they wished; all it takes is asking for admission and explaining what you're looking for. The fact that the books may have gone out of print is hardly copyright's fault; they would inevitably have done so anyway.
However, there's rather a difference between that, and archiving the kind of exam
OK, let me give you a realistic scenario, where actual harm would be done. (In fact, two very similar sequences of events to the following happened at around the same time to people I know well.)
Suppose, as an author, you decide to put up drafts of your book on a web site as it progresses, perhaps to raise awareness of your work or promote related discussion, or maybe just because you think the draft might help someone, somewhere, and it costs you nothing to do them a favour. The site changes over time, and finally when your book is finished, you take down the web site and publish the finished work in hardcopy form.
Unfortunately, you discover that your publishers are very edgy about material that's not completely original. When you tell them that your work was previously on the Internet, large amounts of contractual wrangling ensue while you try to convince them that no damage has been done, and their rights under the copyright you're about to assign to them aren't compromised.
If this has wasted days of your time, and making the original articles or draft chapters or whatever available didn't give you much advantage, would you make them available on-line at all next time around?
This is pretty much exactly what happened to a couple of friends of mine, and consequently neither of them ever publishes anything that might even potentially form part of a later book on-line any more, because it's just not worth the hassle. Now, these are smart guys, and their web sites were regarded as an interesting and useful resource within our field, but no longer, and no-one is any better off for it.
If places like the IA get carte blanche to redistribute whatever material they like the instant it hits cyberspace, then before long they will presumably become as ubiquitous as Google is now. Publishers will become even more negative about material that has previously been available on-line, because once it's out there, they have no way of controlling it. The whole idea of publishing drafts or prepress versions as a cost-nothing service to the community will simply die, and services like the IA will have killed it.
It might not go this way, but judging by multiple real life examples, it's not unlikely. Tell me again how the IA promotes the distribution of works as effectively as copyright?
Blockquoth the AC:
Remember that, as I walk up to you and stab you in the street in broad daylight. Perhaps we should legalise murder?
I admire your enthusiasm. Alas, it doesn't change the fact that your post is still full of incorrect assertions, starting with the very first line. In fact, making content available by a web site is not by itself counted as publishing in most jurisdictions. (Check the legal definition where you are; I've yet to find a place where any of the qualifying categories applies to Joe's Typical Home Page.)
That in itself renders most of your remaining arguments unsound, but you also seem to be arguing that there's some over-riding academic interest in any material that appears on the web, regardless of all other considerations. That's akin to advocating free speech, even if it means shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre, defamation, breaching an agreement to keep something you were told in confidence a secret, etc. I think most people would agree, given those examples, that free speech should not be an absolute right, but rather a default state that is only trumped by more important considerations. I don't see why the Internet should be any different, and promoting the production of new works by the mechanism of copyright is certainly an important consideration.
Blockquoth the AC:
If you were even half as clever as you think you are -- or had just bothered to read the article -- you'd understand that we're talking about a permanent archive not a temporary cache or proxy, and that the established robots.txt convention has only ever been a polite request that could be ignored. The protocols don't make any provision for the legal requirement not to redistribute copyright material without either permission or a suitable exemption, so relying on them is a pretty weak position to take.
You'd also realise that accusing someone of "hiding behind the law" is just a feeble way of saying "I don't like the law, I wish the law said something different, and since it doesn't I'm going to imply some kind of inappropriate behaviour on the part of those who follow it" and such a statement isn't really going to convince anyone who didn't agree with you anyway.
Regarding the peculiarities of this specific case, and the more general argument about the legality of the IA, please see my comments on the reply just above yours, which challenged me on much the same points.
Regarding the Library of Congress, I think your idea has some practical problems. In particular, copyright is an international agreement, and your Library of Congress has no particular right to do whatever it wishes with Internet-based materials under international law. Do you really want to create a motivation for the rest of the world to disconnect the US from the Internet?
The IA also has some major differences from existing national reference libraries. In particular, the presence of a work at a national reference library does not give near instant access to as many people as might want to read the work simultaneously. The Internet does. Just as P2P is the scourge of big media groups that tolerated copying the occasional videotape or CD, so an "electronic reference library" would render copyright inert for the entire Internet, and in doing so hit all the problems that copyright was intended to solve in the first place.
Copyright doesn't exist to allow someone to make a reasonable profit; that's just one way in which it seeks to attain its real goal, which is to promote the creation and distribution of useful works for the benefit of society. Again, please see my previous post for the logical conclusion of your approach, and why I think it is wrong.
Yes, absolutely you can. There is no public interest in something unpleasant/illegal that someone said about someone else when they were very upset, and later deleted. There is no public interest in some personal material that was inadvertently or illegally released via the Internet and then removed being preserved. There is no public interest in legally-protected trade secrets that were illegally released in violation of an NDA being advertised to all and sundry; if that were in the public interest, the law wouldn't recognise the concepts of trade secrets and NDAs in the first place. Even getting closer to the usual concept of publication, it is doubtful whether there's any benefit to old drafts of an article that were put on-line during proofing remaining available when a finished, corrected version is published (on the Internet or otherwise).
Those are just the first few examples that come to mind, but the significance is clear: just because some information was available somewhere at some time, that doesn't automatically means there's a benefit to society to preserving that information in an obvious place for all time.
I'm going to skip your constitutional arguments, because copyright is an international convention, and most of the world isn't subject to your constitution. Can we agree the more neutral definition that copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society?
Your position is illogical. We're talking about material that has already been made available. If it's a work of value, then probably it was removed because the copyright holder was going to distribute it via some other means, or was working on a newer, better version and didn't want the out-of-date material getting in the way. If it's not a work of value, then there is little public interest to be served in preserving it, particularly if doing so causes any harmful effects to the parties involved.
(The specific example in this story is rather unfortunate; of course the court should throw the case out, though it should do so on the basis that the plaintiff is trying to profit from breaking the law, not on the much more general principle that the IA can ignore copyright on a whim. This is hardly representative of the "majority of all copyright holders", however.)
Perhaps, but they're going the wrong way about it. At the moment, people who create useful works have two choices: keep it private, or publish it on their own terms under the provisions of copyright. If you remove copyright, then the only possible change is that fewer people will choose the second option. There simply is no upside; there was never a "force people to publish works on your terms instead" third choice.
This is why copyright works as an incentive, and effectively moving the goalposts by saying to someone after they've published "Ah, but now we're going to distribute your work on our terms anyway" simply undermines the whole system. In doing so, it ki
I agree that the circumstances are different. However, copying and redistributing the material is clearly copyright infringement by default in all of these cases. If I understand your argument properly, you are saying that the foreknowledge that this might happen should serve as a defence or provide an exemption in the IA's case. However, I don't see how that same legal principle wouldn't then exclude the other scenarios as well, with the consequent reduction of copyright to meaningless red tape for anything Internet-based.
I notice you dropped any mention of archiving and republishing from that list.
The software industry has always made money in both ways, and they're both important. Without either, it is unlikely that the industry would be as successful (by any useful measure).
As for adapt or die, remember you said that when abusing the system means you can't buy any DVD player that isn't locked down in hardware to force viewing a half-hour of ads before every movie, you can't download any music without DRM nor connect any "untrusted" device to the Internet, any open forum on the Internet is subject to government moderation, use of technology like P2P and Bittorrent is a criminal offence, and all your Internet access is logged so that if any material that might breach these conditions is traced to you, you can be sent to prison for 10 years under the successor to the DMCA. That is the kind of adaptation that your attitude encourages, and right now, the big content providers are happily following the road, the small content providers are getting screwed, and the rest of us will pay for both along with you.
Not really. Copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society, however your particular jurisdiction's legal system may phrase that. The fact that it does this by securing certain rights to individuals is simply the way it tries to achieve that goal.
However, that being the case, the individuals do have those rights, and the society must respect them, or it's failing to keep its side of the bargain. If that means keeping the documents hidden in some sense, then so be it.
The law you're talking about is only an exemption to the US-based DMCA. The rest of the world doesn't necessarily recognise it. Moreover, AFAICS on a quick look, it doesn't actually cover the copyright issue, but the circumvention of copy protection technology.
Sorry, you'll have to find more than that to convince this audience...
Yes, you certainly are graning implicit permission to copy for some purposes, but the context matters. In particular, you aren't necessarily granting permission to copy for all purposes, which is a distinction disturbingly few people posting here seem to appreciate...
And as I argued in reply to his post, I believe he is clearly wrong.
That may be your opinion, but there is nothing in law to support it. Moreover, the situations are fundamentally different, so I'm not sure there should be, either.