In Soviet Russia, the government guaranteed a paycheque to workers. This resulted in lackastical attitudes and poor work. Perpetual copyrights, granting artists and authors an effective permenant stipend for their work subsidized with the public dime, removes the element of 'need' from their work, reducing the quality of work. Look at bands that make it big and are set for life from royalties. I'll never have the 30 dollars I paid for Saint Anger by Metallica back, no matter how much I deserve it.
Let's actually examine the data set we're talking about: 1790 copyright(14/28 years), 1831 copyright(14/42 years), 1909 copyright(28/56 years), 1962-1974 copyright(??), 1976 copyright(75 years), 1988/Berne convention copyright(life plus 20 years), and the latest point, the sonny bono copyright copyright(life plus 70 years).
The most important thing to note about the first two data points is that it was entirely possible for an unmaintained publication to fall into the public domain well within an author's lifetime through neglect. Until 1909, after 14 years an author was required to re-register to get the full copyright term. Until 1976, it was possible for someone with an average lifespan who read a novel as a kid to use the content for himself during his or her own lifetime.
As a historian, I think I'd be ok with a copyright term that lasts as long as it does(It's still ridiculous profiteering, but welcome to 2008), if only there was mandatory registration upon publication, and if every 14 years the copyright holder was required to re-register. This would eliminate copyright lawsuits to a large degree because the library of congress could answer questions about the copyright status of a piece of work, where today historians must go to incredible lengths to determine the status of copyrighted works created by defunct companies. If all it took was a phone call to the copyright office, or a visit to the copyright office website, then it would be much easier to condone long copyright terms.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that every single major movie created by Disney builds upon works in the Public Domain. Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinochio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and Alladin. The Lion King simply plagurizes a Japanese manga from the '70s because you could do that sort of thing at the time. It's incredibly difficult to accept that the public domain isn't important to new creations in light of this fact.
You can buy a portability pack for the DS, which'll set you back like 20 bucks. Comes with a protective case, some game cases, and more importantly, a USB to GBA and NDS power cable and a 12V to USB power cable.
I don't even bother keeping track of that grey thing anymore. If I'm on the road, my DS can be charged by my laptop. If I'm at home, my DS can be charged from my PC.
Integrated batteries allow for a longer battery life per charge, and with USB, a more convenient charge cycle. Dealing with dragging an AC power unit everywhere is a pain when you can just have a mini-usb plug in all your computers.
See, your arguement rests on the idea that you're right. Besides a nebulous "Think about it!! It makes SENSE!!", you don't really have anything to counter.
All you have is a hypothesis that doesn't predict the further evolution of copyright. You pick two variables with two data points that have a weak correlation, and ignore the fact that the rest of the data points don't correlate. Your arguement falls apart because current copyright is 70 years AFTER the death of the creator. It certainly has been longer than the creator's lifespan as long as I've been alive, and I predate the Internet.
If the Congress was trying to make copyrights last for the life of the creator, it would be very simple to do so. Today, in fact, the law today starts a "count-down clock" to the public domain upon the creator's death. Since they didn't implement a "life of the creator" time span when copyright was first implemented, it seems reasonable to assume they chose a fixed length for a reason. They also, I suspect, chose to force copyright holders to re-register at 1/2 the full length for a reason. As massive, immortal media conglomorates with millions of dollars of lobbyists become the primary benefactors of copyright, we're going to see copyright extended again and again, not because of some new technology, but because corporations are immortal and greedy and powerful.
If Eve Online was 20 years old or whatever, then yes, I don't see any problem with that. If it's still running because it's really good, and it's still making CCP Games 10 dollars a month per subscriber after 20 years, I really think it's reached a point where the investment 20 years ago has been paid for. If not, then it had a sporting chance.
A MMORPG is a good example of why copyrights don't need to be perpetual, though. Ok, let's say the copyright expires. So what? People aren't playing Eve Online to play Eve Online, they're playing it because of the community. The company is still adding value, the company is still earning the money it gets. If the company decides to release new content, then that content can all be copyrighted anew. New executable? New art? Oh my god. The old stuff is in the public domain, but the new stuff is all good for another 20 years. The law actually incentivizes creating new content!
It's not like this is a new or radical idea. Copyrights were originally designed exactly that way.
Lobbyists, special interest groups, and foreign governments have pushed us to expand our copyright law against the good advice of the founders.
Not really, the creative processes are completely different.
What's not different, is that with the increase in public domain information available, artists and writers have a much healthier world in which to produce, and those that create a new and interesting product will sell, and those that create a crappy uninteresting product won't sell.
I'm thinking of all the songs that use a 2 second sample to make something new and interesting out of something old and boring.
You can say you don't see it happening, but patent law is a precident that shows one scenario. Under patent law, there's a massive incentive to create to acquire the monopoly, but with a short turn-around, people can at the end copy or improve the invention. The internal combustion engine is one of the best examples, iirc. The original was crappy, but the guy who invented it had an incentive to invent it because the monopoly was there. After the patent expired, there was an explosion of innovation as other companies took the patent and tried to make something better that they could patent.
The drug industry is an excellent parellel. If the guys who make Prozac had a 130 year patent on the stuff, there'd be no incentive to develop new drugs. Instead, new drugs are constantly under development, because cash cows of today will run out in a relatively short period of time.
Everything becomes a part of our culture. Something have a insignificant role (like FreeBASIC XL Magazine), but it does play a role. For that reason, after society has paid in cash to protect IP rights to incentivise creation of new content, it's just that after a limited time the content ceases to be protected and becomes part of the public domain.
I'm reminded of a scene from Burnt Face Man, where the guy goes "I'm not lying, and if you do it, I'll give you this SEGA GAME GEAR." to hilarious effect. The only reason it's funny is because I know what a sega game gear is, and because the game gear is part of my culture.
Remember, we pay in dollars and cents to protect IP. This guy, for example, will probably cost a million dollars to charge, convict, and imprison. We ought not to do such things because we're nice people, but because we're going to get some value out of the action.
I'm not trolling. Even though you won't get hit for public performance of happy birthday most of the time, the song DOES bring in more than 2 million dollars per year in revenue for a record company that bought the rights. The two teachers who wrote the song in 1924 are long dead and left no heirs, however. If you ever make a documentary, you can't sing 'happy birthday' or show it being sung, or you'll be charged, and you'll be lucky to license the song for $10,000.
I'm not touching your second part with a thousand foot pole.
But actual physical products have different rules.
If you design a widget and patent it as a product, you've got about 20 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product.
If you copyright a picture of a widget, you've got over 130 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product(barring further retroactive extensions).
So I guess, your interpretation would actually scale back copyright to patent time periods. Either that or you extend patents to 130 years and destroy all innovation.
I'd say, let's ignore technology for a second. There are ways to violate copyright that don't have anything to do with technology.
For example, I could pick up a guitar and play "happy birthday" at a kids birthday party, and I could be sued. The song is over 100 years old. It's a part of our culture. It's a part of history, but I can't publicly perform it without breaking the law. Odds are I won't be prosecuted, but the song "happy birthday" brings a record company 2 million dollars per year in revenue. I see that as leeching off of society.
I could pick up a copy of "mein kampf". It's an important historical document. The document is 60 years old. It gives a look into the genesis of one of the worst genocides in human history. I can't read it in public. I could be sued for copyright infringement.
More recently, protest songs from the '60s. You can't even buy the CDs, becuase the record companies won't release them. If you are old enough, you could pick up a guitar and play them, trying to show that 40 years ago there was just as much going on as today, but you could be sued for copyright infringement.
I think the biggest problem with calling anything a "compromise" is that it isn't. Disney in particular mined the public domain for their stories, then copyrighted the stories they mined. Diseny didn't create Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They didn't create Sleeping Beauty. They didn't create Aladin and the magic lamp. They didn't create beauty and the beast. They didn't even create the lion king(though they just blatantly plagurized that one). They built upon stories in the public domain, but now they've lobbied and gained effectively perpetual monopolies on the new resulting properties.
A compromise, in my mind, would balance the rights of content creators with the society and culture they borrowed from in order to create their works(and the society that subsidizes their works by paying to enforce unintuitive unnatural copy rights).
Remember, except possibly for Walden, no work is created in a vacuum. It draws from previous works, and from society, and from the experiences of a culture and an individual. Such a "compromise" ignores this, and makes intellectual property simply a rush to own the commons.
That's patents though, which is another issue. Patents are saner than copyrights because they're so much shorter. I wouldn't be ok with collecting cheques for 130 years for a plant I designed.
Patent laws short turn-around actually spurs innovation by forcing innovators to continue to innovate to keep getting a paycheque.
No, copyright is justified by the idea that IP has value and ought to be paid for. What I'm asking is, what justifes the idea that copyright ought to last the entire lifetime of an artist?
Copyright isn't a natural property right. If it was, then it wouldn't exist. If I buy a car from you, or a banana from you, or a shiny rock from you, it's mine. I can do with it what I like. I can crash the car, set the banana on fire, or throw the shiny rock into a grinder, turning it into shiny dust. It's my property, it's my choice what to do with it.
Once I buy a book from you, however, you still have some control over what's done with it. I can't make copies of the book. I can't read the book out loud for profit. I can't do a lot of things. I'm severely limited by copyright law in unnatural, unintuitive ways(Did you know you can't read a book out loud even if you've paid for it? That's performance, and you're not licensed to do so).
All enforcements are done to derive benefit. Anyone who tells you differently hasn't thought things through enough(Why do you pay taxes to pay for police if police don't add any value?). In this case, the constitution clearly says the benefit society is to recieve in return for establishing a system of patents and copyrights is the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
Hey, the Republicans didn't fuck you NEARLY has hard as they could have. I mean, imagine if they had actually taxed you for the war, instead of just taking out loans we'll get our grandkids to pay back?
Now, your innocent grandkids, they're probably getting screwed about as badly as is possible. Hope you enjoy your cheques from the government!
What would be the justification for making the time period the lifetime of the artist?
Society would be paying to enforce copyrights over the life of the copyright. These can be non-trivial costs. To jail this guy for 15 months, for example, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and taxpayers will pick that up. The cost of the trial, the cost of the police, all these costs are paid for by society. At the end of the copyright, the payoff for society is that the work is placed into the public domain.
It becomes a trade-off, and I don't see the benefit for society. After 20 years, the artist has made a profit or they haven't. Increasing that time period isn't going to induce the artist to create any more works, but society will pay greater and greater costs to enforce copyrights on a larger and larger body of work, most of which isn't even used anymore(How do you buy a copy of steamboat willie? You don't.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like what you'd actually want is one with no depth information from lighting at all, and one with only depth information from flash.
The fully lit one would contain the base colours, the flash one would drop off the brightness as the square of distance.
Of course, as a voxelmap, I'd argue that it's not very useful to 99% of applications...
In Soviet Russia, the government guaranteed a paycheque to workers. This resulted in lackastical attitudes and poor work. Perpetual copyrights, granting artists and authors an effective permenant stipend for their work subsidized with the public dime, removes the element of 'need' from their work, reducing the quality of work. Look at bands that make it big and are set for life from royalties. I'll never have the 30 dollars I paid for Saint Anger by Metallica back, no matter how much I deserve it.
Let's actually examine the data set we're talking about: 1790 copyright(14/28 years), 1831 copyright(14/42 years), 1909 copyright(28/56 years), 1962-1974 copyright(??), 1976 copyright(75 years), 1988/Berne convention copyright(life plus 20 years), and the latest point, the sonny bono copyright copyright(life plus 70 years).
The most important thing to note about the first two data points is that it was entirely possible for an unmaintained publication to fall into the public domain well within an author's lifetime through neglect. Until 1909, after 14 years an author was required to re-register to get the full copyright term. Until 1976, it was possible for someone with an average lifespan who read a novel as a kid to use the content for himself during his or her own lifetime.
As a historian, I think I'd be ok with a copyright term that lasts as long as it does(It's still ridiculous profiteering, but welcome to 2008), if only there was mandatory registration upon publication, and if every 14 years the copyright holder was required to re-register. This would eliminate copyright lawsuits to a large degree because the library of congress could answer questions about the copyright status of a piece of work, where today historians must go to incredible lengths to determine the status of copyrighted works created by defunct companies. If all it took was a phone call to the copyright office, or a visit to the copyright office website, then it would be much easier to condone long copyright terms.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that every single major movie created by Disney builds upon works in the Public Domain. Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinochio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and Alladin. The Lion King simply plagurizes a Japanese manga from the '70s because you could do that sort of thing at the time. It's incredibly difficult to accept that the public domain isn't important to new creations in light of this fact.
Gold plated USB power cables! To make sure you get the very best waveform quality!
They probably did what Kodak does. Look at the little proprietary cable, and you'll probably see a little resistor drawn across the data terminals.
It's a stupid thing for them to do, but it's not terribly difficult to rig up a cable just for charging devices too retarded to just work.
You can buy a portability pack for the DS, which'll set you back like 20 bucks. Comes with a protective case, some game cases, and more importantly, a USB to GBA and NDS power cable and a 12V to USB power cable.
I don't even bother keeping track of that grey thing anymore. If I'm on the road, my DS can be charged by my laptop. If I'm at home, my DS can be charged from my PC.
Integrated batteries allow for a longer battery life per charge, and with USB, a more convenient charge cycle. Dealing with dragging an AC power unit everywhere is a pain when you can just have a mini-usb plug in all your computers.
The last Kodak camera I bought came with a USB wall charger. My DS usb kit comes with a car USB charger.
USB appears to be a more effective standard for universal charging stations than a plain transformer/rectifier/regulator.
See, your arguement rests on the idea that you're right. Besides a nebulous "Think about it!! It makes SENSE!!", you don't really have anything to counter.
All you have is a hypothesis that doesn't predict the further evolution of copyright. You pick two variables with two data points that have a weak correlation, and ignore the fact that the rest of the data points don't correlate. Your arguement falls apart because current copyright is 70 years AFTER the death of the creator. It certainly has been longer than the creator's lifespan as long as I've been alive, and I predate the Internet.
If the Congress was trying to make copyrights last for the life of the creator, it would be very simple to do so. Today, in fact, the law today starts a "count-down clock" to the public domain upon the creator's death. Since they didn't implement a "life of the creator" time span when copyright was first implemented, it seems reasonable to assume they chose a fixed length for a reason. They also, I suspect, chose to force copyright holders to re-register at 1/2 the full length for a reason. As massive, immortal media conglomorates with millions of dollars of lobbyists become the primary benefactors of copyright, we're going to see copyright extended again and again, not because of some new technology, but because corporations are immortal and greedy and powerful.
That seems like a silly thing to say.
Just use the USB charger for everything. I know my camera, my phone, my mp3 player, and my Nintendo DS all charge off my USB.
Lawmakers very nearly legislated pi to be equal to 3.
QED
You've got an unbelievably tenuous arguement there.
If Eve Online was 20 years old or whatever, then yes, I don't see any problem with that. If it's still running because it's really good, and it's still making CCP Games 10 dollars a month per subscriber after 20 years, I really think it's reached a point where the investment 20 years ago has been paid for. If not, then it had a sporting chance.
A MMORPG is a good example of why copyrights don't need to be perpetual, though. Ok, let's say the copyright expires. So what? People aren't playing Eve Online to play Eve Online, they're playing it because of the community. The company is still adding value, the company is still earning the money it gets. If the company decides to release new content, then that content can all be copyrighted anew. New executable? New art? Oh my god. The old stuff is in the public domain, but the new stuff is all good for another 20 years. The law actually incentivizes creating new content!
It's not like this is a new or radical idea. Copyrights were originally designed exactly that way.
Lobbyists, special interest groups, and foreign governments have pushed us to expand our copyright law against the good advice of the founders.
Not really, the creative processes are completely different.
What's not different, is that with the increase in public domain information available, artists and writers have a much healthier world in which to produce, and those that create a new and interesting product will sell, and those that create a crappy uninteresting product won't sell.
I'm thinking of all the songs that use a 2 second sample to make something new and interesting out of something old and boring.
You can say you don't see it happening, but patent law is a precident that shows one scenario. Under patent law, there's a massive incentive to create to acquire the monopoly, but with a short turn-around, people can at the end copy or improve the invention. The internal combustion engine is one of the best examples, iirc. The original was crappy, but the guy who invented it had an incentive to invent it because the monopoly was there. After the patent expired, there was an explosion of innovation as other companies took the patent and tried to make something better that they could patent.
The drug industry is an excellent parellel. If the guys who make Prozac had a 130 year patent on the stuff, there'd be no incentive to develop new drugs. Instead, new drugs are constantly under development, because cash cows of today will run out in a relatively short period of time.
Amazingly, the supreme court says "limited times" means whatever congress says it means as long as there's a limit.
They're literally correct, but it's ridiculous nonetheless.
Everything becomes a part of our culture. Something have a insignificant role (like FreeBASIC XL Magazine), but it does play a role. For that reason, after society has paid in cash to protect IP rights to incentivise creation of new content, it's just that after a limited time the content ceases to be protected and becomes part of the public domain.
I'm reminded of a scene from Burnt Face Man, where the guy goes "I'm not lying, and if you do it, I'll give you this SEGA GAME GEAR." to hilarious effect. The only reason it's funny is because I know what a sega game gear is, and because the game gear is part of my culture.
Remember, we pay in dollars and cents to protect IP. This guy, for example, will probably cost a million dollars to charge, convict, and imprison. We ought not to do such things because we're nice people, but because we're going to get some value out of the action.
I'm not trolling. Even though you won't get hit for public performance of happy birthday most of the time, the song DOES bring in more than 2 million dollars per year in revenue for a record company that bought the rights. The two teachers who wrote the song in 1924 are long dead and left no heirs, however. If you ever make a documentary, you can't sing 'happy birthday' or show it being sung, or you'll be charged, and you'll be lucky to license the song for $10,000.
I'm not touching your second part with a thousand foot pole.
But actual physical products have different rules.
If you design a widget and patent it as a product, you've got about 20 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product.
If you copyright a picture of a widget, you've got over 130 years to exclusively sell copies before others can copy your product(barring further retroactive extensions).
So I guess, your interpretation would actually scale back copyright to patent time periods. Either that or you extend patents to 130 years and destroy all innovation.
I'd say, let's ignore technology for a second. There are ways to violate copyright that don't have anything to do with technology.
For example, I could pick up a guitar and play "happy birthday" at a kids birthday party, and I could be sued. The song is over 100 years old. It's a part of our culture. It's a part of history, but I can't publicly perform it without breaking the law. Odds are I won't be prosecuted, but the song "happy birthday" brings a record company 2 million dollars per year in revenue. I see that as leeching off of society.
I could pick up a copy of "mein kampf". It's an important historical document. The document is 60 years old. It gives a look into the genesis of one of the worst genocides in human history. I can't read it in public. I could be sued for copyright infringement.
More recently, protest songs from the '60s. You can't even buy the CDs, becuase the record companies won't release them. If you are old enough, you could pick up a guitar and play them, trying to show that 40 years ago there was just as much going on as today, but you could be sued for copyright infringement.
I think the biggest problem with calling anything a "compromise" is that it isn't. Disney in particular mined the public domain for their stories, then copyrighted the stories they mined. Diseny didn't create Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They didn't create Sleeping Beauty. They didn't create Aladin and the magic lamp. They didn't create beauty and the beast. They didn't even create the lion king(though they just blatantly plagurized that one). They built upon stories in the public domain, but now they've lobbied and gained effectively perpetual monopolies on the new resulting properties.
A compromise, in my mind, would balance the rights of content creators with the society and culture they borrowed from in order to create their works(and the society that subsidizes their works by paying to enforce unintuitive unnatural copy rights).
Remember, except possibly for Walden, no work is created in a vacuum. It draws from previous works, and from society, and from the experiences of a culture and an individual. Such a "compromise" ignores this, and makes intellectual property simply a rush to own the commons.
That's patents though, which is another issue. Patents are saner than copyrights because they're so much shorter. I wouldn't be ok with collecting cheques for 130 years for a plant I designed.
Patent laws short turn-around actually spurs innovation by forcing innovators to continue to innovate to keep getting a paycheque.
No, copyright is justified by the idea that IP has value and ought to be paid for. What I'm asking is, what justifes the idea that copyright ought to last the entire lifetime of an artist?
Copyright isn't a natural property right. If it was, then it wouldn't exist. If I buy a car from you, or a banana from you, or a shiny rock from you, it's mine. I can do with it what I like. I can crash the car, set the banana on fire, or throw the shiny rock into a grinder, turning it into shiny dust. It's my property, it's my choice what to do with it.
Once I buy a book from you, however, you still have some control over what's done with it. I can't make copies of the book. I can't read the book out loud for profit. I can't do a lot of things. I'm severely limited by copyright law in unnatural, unintuitive ways(Did you know you can't read a book out loud even if you've paid for it? That's performance, and you're not licensed to do so).
All enforcements are done to derive benefit. Anyone who tells you differently hasn't thought things through enough(Why do you pay taxes to pay for police if police don't add any value?). In this case, the constitution clearly says the benefit society is to recieve in return for establishing a system of patents and copyrights is the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
Hey, the Republicans didn't fuck you NEARLY has hard as they could have. I mean, imagine if they had actually taxed you for the war, instead of just taking out loans we'll get our grandkids to pay back?
Now, your innocent grandkids, they're probably getting screwed about as badly as is possible. Hope you enjoy your cheques from the government!
I'd kill for that tie, compared to Cheney's tie of making people's heads explode with his thoughts.
Yes, it's copyrighted, and all commercial use of the song must be paid for. I believe the Phillipines is a signatory of the Berne Convention, which standardized copyright around the world, so it'd apply there too.
What would be the justification for making the time period the lifetime of the artist?
Society would be paying to enforce copyrights over the life of the copyright. These can be non-trivial costs. To jail this guy for 15 months, for example, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and taxpayers will pick that up. The cost of the trial, the cost of the police, all these costs are paid for by society. At the end of the copyright, the payoff for society is that the work is placed into the public domain.
It becomes a trade-off, and I don't see the benefit for society. After 20 years, the artist has made a profit or they haven't. Increasing that time period isn't going to induce the artist to create any more works, but society will pay greater and greater costs to enforce copyrights on a larger and larger body of work, most of which isn't even used anymore(How do you buy a copy of steamboat willie? You don't.)