After all, if you can't sell enough in ten years to feed your family while you work on the next creation, you should probably take up farming instead.
But that is not what the Pirate Party is proposing. They are proposing total abolition of copyright, (and by logical extension, patents too).
They are essentially saying that If I get a peek at your great manuscript, I can rush it out before you even get a chance to sell the leatherbound first editions.
No, the Pirate Party wants to reduce the copyright term to five years, while allowing non-commercial copying for private use, and retaining the creator's right to attribution.
The term five years is based on the fact that most commercial culture collects most of its revenue within five years of publication.
There are still natural scarcities the artist can take advantage of. For example, his personal endorsement (many people are prepared to pay more for the "official" version). His personal labour (holding lectures, writing courses and workshops). Being first to market (many people are prepared to pay more to get the work just one day earlier).
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him.
Lots of people are willing to work for free. Like all the people who do fansubs and scanlations, or write fanfic, or put up their original art on the Internet. I've released one of my short stories under Creative Commons, and more are to follow.
It has always been the case that most artists can't live off their art. The problem with art is that it's so much fun, too many people want to do it. There just aren't enough job opportunities for them all.
The law in any country puts limitations on copyright, such as fair use. I.e, it balances the interests of the creator with the interests of the public.
Not only that, his works only came into existence because of "piracy". Shakespeare based almost all of his plays on older works. If he had lived today, and the works he copied were still in copyright, he'd been sued into oblivion.
Your implication is that without public funding or Copyright, creative works would no longer be produced. History demonstrates how ridiculous this is.
You need a history lesson.
Most of our great works were produced under a system of patronage or direct performance before there existed means of coping. Even Shakespeare worked for money.
Yes? Doesn't that demonstrate that public funding and copyright are not needed for artists to get paid?
There's a difference between artists and other professions. Most artists do, as a matter of fact, produce art without getting paid. Most writers don't profit off their writing, most graphic artists don't profit off their graphic art, most musicians don't profit off their music, and so on. And that's how it always has been. If they earn any money at all on their art, it's usually far less than they would gain from taking a minimum-wage job. Often, they spend more money on supplies or self-publishing than they gain from sales. And yet, they're happy to do it.
And yes, I'm an unpublished writer myself. I've decided to release some of my writing under Creative Commons, and send some out to publishers, and see which is most succesful.
Actually... the current copyright system makes it profitable for corporations to market a few artists heavily, which makes it harder for the small artists to be seen in all the media buzz. In some respects, it's a zero-sum game: giving priveleges to some artists automatically makes the situation worse for the others.
Psychological studies consistently show that being financially rewarded makes your work less creative. Money distracts from other motivations, such as the pleasure of doing a good job.
To motivate people to do a good job, you need to pay them enough to take the issue of money off their minds, but money should never be the primary motivation.
So when the artist could have made a minimum wage living off selling paintings, if you can duplicate without reciprocation the works of art and he cant survive off just art anymore, he has to take on a menial job that detracts from an otherwise gifted individual.
But that's how the majority of painters already live. Precious few painters can make a living off their art, and most of those that do, do it through government hand-outs.
With or without copyright, the painter would still get paid for the original.
Too complicated - remember that every single snippet of text you write is copyright protected. Not only the fees, but the bureaucracy would become excessive for small businesses, such as bands, advertising agencies and writing workshops.
The fees would also become ridiculously high for those who produce a large number of smaller works, such as greeting cards and clip art.
Your civil rights? Really, you have a civil right to enjoy someone else's works without paying them?
I assume the GP meant that our rights to privacy, free speech and a fair trial are being sacrificed in the name of hunting "pirates".
The DMCA can be (and is) used to suppress free speech. A corporation can issue a take-down notice to a third-party hosting provider such as YouTube, and since the third party has no interest in contesting the take-down notice in court, the corporation gets its way even if the material is legal.
The proposed SOPA bill is even worse, since it'll allow courts to shut down entire sites if one of their users upload infringning content. Since it's impossible for a site such as YouTube to check every clip users upload, the RIAA and MPAA will have the legal right to shut them down any time the want. The hosting providers will survive only as long as they please the copyright holders and do everything they say, including banning perfectly legal content.
Copyright laws are to preserve the right of copying the work for the copyright holder. Period.
Not true. In Europe, copyright also covers performances , the right to attribution, the right to not have your work used in an "insulting" context, and the right of the performing artist to receive economic compensation, just like TFA says. Some or all of these rights also apply to the USA.
Satire and remixes don't matter and are already protected anyway.
Remixes are not allowed under fair use. Satires are not allowed under fair use either, but parodies are, if they don't rely too heavily on the source material. (The difference between a parody and a satire is that a parody lampoons the source material, while a satire lampoons a third party.)
Is a TV set or Microwave oven that much different than a song or a book?
Yes. You can't steal a song. If you copy my song, I still have my copy left.
I am at a loss to see how anyone can keep writing books any more than I can see why anyone would stock more microwave's in a store from which anyone take anything they wanted.
In the entire USA, at most a few hundred authors can live on their writing alone. The others derive their income from related work, such as holding lectures or writing courses, or having an ordinary day job. In other words, even if it became impossible to live on your writing, most authors wouldn't notice any difference. That's how it always has been, even in the good old days before the Internet.
The situation is similar for music artists - most artists have never been able to live on CD sales, but have had to rely on concerts and merchandise. The main difference the Internet has made, is that they don't have to rely on expensive CD pressing to attract people to their concerts and merchandise - they can just put their music up for free on the Internet.
Newspapers have also been in a similar situation long before the Internet - they've derived most of their income from advertising, not selling newspapers.
I'm an unpublished fiction writer myself, but I realise that even if I succeed and become reasonably famous, it's unlikely I'll receive any significant income from book sales, and I'm probably better off using my fame as a writer to get a more interestng day job.
It's entirely possible that people who were, say, buying 10 times as much media as the average person are now also exactly the people who are more likely to turn to 'piracy' to satiate their media desires. If that means they now buy 5 times as much media as the average person, that still suggests the notion that pirates buy more stuff than non-pirates; but they're still buying less than before.
True, but it defuses the argument that people have no reason to buy media if they have access to them for free.
There's also a Canadian study that compares how music sales are affected when the songs become available on filesharing networks, and finds that the net effect is zero (Industry Canada).
( wouldn't know about Sweden - Dutch law already allows downloads of media regardless of whether or not the copyright owners like it, which may impact behavior to begin with. )
Here in Sweden, it's been illegal for a few years to download music and movies that were put up on the Internet without the copyright holder's consent. (It's still legal to make copies for private use from authorised copies, e.g a store-bought music CD or movie DVD.)
Yes, keeping the right to attribution is probably a good idea. Even the Pirate Party only wants to reduce the copyright term to five years, and retain the author's right to attribution.
Once it is released to the wild, and anyone can "manufacture" it (that is, it can be copied and distributed readily) then it doesn't matter if you've stuffed a billion dollars into developing it. The economies of scale due to zero reproduction cost render it valueless.
That's only relevant if people actually copy it. If only a few hundred people find the software useful enough to copy it, then those people will have to share the whole billion-dollar development cost.
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
That's not at all like modern copyright. In ancient times, you paid for access to a particular physical copy, not for a right to manufacture copies. The money went to the owner of that physical copy, not the author.
Modern copyright was instituted to grant a legal right to the *author*, to ensure he got paid for his work (or at least that was the official reason). If you buy a copyright license, it doesn't pay for the medium, labour, or access to the original - those are separate from copyright in the modern sense.
I'm not familiar with the Italian and German copyright lawsuits in the early 1500's, but generally, before the Statute of Anne, copyright was a right granted to the *printer*, not the *author*, which makes it different from modern copyright. I.e, the state granted printers the right to print certain books (and not others), which functioned both as a privilege and as a censorship device.
The ancient Greek and Roman system is what will happen if we abolish modern copyright - people will pay for having easy access to originals, so they can read them or make their own copies at will.
If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.
Only if by "FOSS" you mean "GNU". People gave away gratis, open source software before GNU became popular, and called it "public domain". BSD-style licenses are less restrictive than GNU, so not much would change for them if copyright was abolished.
Or, it's proof of the danger of giving out privileges to businesses. They grow fat on them, and it becomes more profitable for them to lobby for more privileges than to improve their products.
I hope what the GP meant to write was: "If the sales price is considerably higher than the cost of production and distribution, it's an indication that competition doesn't work well in that market."
I can't tell if you're being ironic. Surely you must realise that the initial cost of creation matters a lot if it's several thousand dollars, and you only sell a few hundred copies at $0,99 each (typical for many smartphone apps)?
Also, it's doubtful that copyright is really needed for artists and content creators to make a profit. In the case of music artists, many of them have discovered they're better off giving their MP3s away for free and earning their money from concerts and merchandise. There are far more music albums published today than ten years ago, and studies in Sweden and Norway have shown that both the number of music artists AND the revenue per artist have gone up.
It makes sense, when you consider that a music artist usually only gets around 10% of the sales price of a CD through a traditional music label. Even if the pirate only spends half of what he would normally spend on music, there's still much more money for the artist.
And in actual fact, it seems that pirates spend more money on music and other types of media than other people, according to studies from many countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands.
Fair enough. But people have also been sharing seeds (as in crop seeds) for tens of thousands of years. And those reproduce indefinitely, and for practical purposes the copies are exact.
People have also been sharing songs and poems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, and employed mnemonic techniques such as rhyming, alliteration and metre to ensure the lyrics are remembered exactly. Examples: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Icelandic sagas, thousands of folk songs and old poetry.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, if you can't sell enough in ten years to feed your family while you work on the next creation, you should probably take
up farming instead.
But that is not what the Pirate Party is proposing. They are proposing total abolition of copyright, (and by logical extension, patents too).
They are essentially saying that If I get a peek at your great manuscript, I can rush it out before you even get a chance to sell the leatherbound first editions.
No, the Pirate Party wants to reduce the copyright term to five years, while allowing non-commercial copying for private use, and retaining the creator's right to attribution.
The term five years is based on the fact that most commercial culture collects most of its revenue within five years of publication.
It's all on their web page.
There are still natural scarcities the artist can take advantage of. For example, his personal endorsement (many people are prepared to pay more for the "official" version). His personal labour (holding lectures, writing courses and workshops). Being first to market (many people are prepared to pay more to get the work just one day earlier).
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him.
Lots of people are willing to work for free. Like all the people who do fansubs and scanlations, or write fanfic, or put up their original art on the Internet. I've released one of my short stories under Creative Commons, and more are to follow.
It has always been the case that most artists can't live off their art. The problem with art is that it's so much fun, too many people want to do it. There just aren't enough job opportunities for them all.
The law in any country puts limitations on copyright, such as fair use. I.e, it balances the interests of the creator with the interests of the public.
+1
Not only that, his works only came into existence because of "piracy". Shakespeare based almost all of his plays on older works. If he had lived today, and the works he copied were still in copyright, he'd been sued into oblivion.
Your implication is that without public funding or Copyright, creative works would no longer be produced. History demonstrates how ridiculous this is.
You need a history lesson.
Most of our great works were produced under a system of patronage or direct performance before there existed means of coping.
Even Shakespeare worked for money.
Yes? Doesn't that demonstrate that public funding and copyright are not needed for artists to get paid?
There's a difference between artists and other professions. Most artists do, as a matter of fact, produce art without getting paid. Most writers don't profit off their writing, most graphic artists don't profit off their graphic art, most musicians don't profit off their music, and so on. And that's how it always has been. If they earn any money at all on their art, it's usually far less than they would gain from taking a minimum-wage job. Often, they spend more money on supplies or self-publishing than they gain from sales. And yet, they're happy to do it.
And yes, I'm an unpublished writer myself. I've decided to release some of my writing under Creative Commons, and send some out to publishers, and see which is most succesful.
Actually... the current copyright system makes it profitable for corporations to market a few artists heavily, which makes it harder for the small artists to be seen in all the media buzz. In some respects, it's a zero-sum game: giving priveleges to some artists automatically makes the situation worse for the others.
Psychological studies consistently show that being financially rewarded makes your work less creative. Money distracts from other motivations, such as the pleasure of doing a good job.
To motivate people to do a good job, you need to pay them enough to take the issue of money off their minds, but money should never be the primary motivation.
So when the artist could have made a minimum wage living off selling paintings, if you can duplicate without reciprocation the works of art and he cant survive off just art anymore, he has to take on a menial job that detracts from an otherwise gifted individual.
But that's how the majority of painters already live. Precious few painters can make a living off their art, and most of those that do, do it through government hand-outs.
With or without copyright, the painter would still get paid for the original.
Too complicated - remember that every single snippet of text you write is copyright protected. Not only the fees, but the bureaucracy would become excessive for small businesses, such as bands, advertising agencies and writing workshops.
The fees would also become ridiculously high for those who produce a large number of smaller works, such as greeting cards and clip art.
Keep it simple.
Your civil rights? Really, you have a civil right to enjoy someone else's works without paying them?
I assume the GP meant that our rights to privacy, free speech and a fair trial are being sacrificed in the name of hunting "pirates".
The DMCA can be (and is) used to suppress free speech. A corporation can issue a take-down notice to a third-party hosting provider such as YouTube, and since the third party has no interest in contesting the take-down notice in court, the corporation gets its way even if the material is legal.
The proposed SOPA bill is even worse, since it'll allow courts to shut down entire sites if one of their users upload infringning content. Since it's impossible for a site such as YouTube to check every clip users upload, the RIAA and MPAA will have the legal right to shut them down any time the want. The hosting providers will survive only as long as they please the copyright holders and do everything they say, including banning perfectly legal content.
Copyright laws are to preserve the right of copying the work for the copyright holder. Period.
Not true. In Europe, copyright also covers performances , the right to attribution, the right to not have your work used in an "insulting" context, and the right of the performing artist to receive economic compensation, just like TFA says. Some or all of these rights also apply to the USA.
Satire and remixes don't matter and are already protected anyway.
Remixes are not allowed under fair use. Satires are not allowed under fair use either, but parodies are, if they don't rely too heavily on the source material. (The difference between a parody and a satire is that a parody lampoons the source material, while a satire lampoons a third party.)
Is a TV set or Microwave oven that much different than a song or a book?
Yes. You can't steal a song. If you copy my song, I still have my copy left.
I am at a loss to see how anyone can keep writing books any more than I can see why anyone
would stock more microwave's in a store from which anyone take anything they wanted.
In the entire USA, at most a few hundred authors can live on their writing alone. The others derive their income from related work, such as holding lectures or writing courses, or having an ordinary day job. In other words, even if it became impossible to live on your writing, most authors wouldn't notice any difference. That's how it always has been, even in the good old days before the Internet.
The situation is similar for music artists - most artists have never been able to live on CD sales, but have had to rely on concerts and merchandise. The main difference the Internet has made, is that they don't have to rely on expensive CD pressing to attract people to their concerts and merchandise - they can just put their music up for free on the Internet.
Newspapers have also been in a similar situation long before the Internet - they've derived most of their income from advertising, not selling newspapers.
I'm an unpublished fiction writer myself, but I realise that even if I succeed and become reasonably famous, it's unlikely I'll receive any significant income from book sales, and I'm probably better off using my fame as a writer to get a more interestng day job.
It's entirely possible that people who were, say, buying 10 times as much media as the average person are now also exactly the people who are more likely to turn to 'piracy' to satiate their media desires. If that means they now buy 5 times as much media as the average person, that still suggests the notion that pirates buy more stuff than non-pirates; but they're still buying less than before.
True, but it defuses the argument that people have no reason to buy media if they have access to them for free.
There's also a Canadian study that compares how music sales are affected when the songs become available on filesharing networks, and finds that the net effect is zero (Industry Canada).
( wouldn't know about Sweden - Dutch law already allows downloads of media regardless of whether or not the copyright owners like it, which may impact behavior to begin with. )
Here in Sweden, it's been illegal for a few years to download music and movies that were put up on the Internet without the copyright holder's consent. (It's still legal to make copies for private use from authorised copies, e.g a store-bought music CD or movie DVD.)
Yes, keeping the right to attribution is probably a good idea. Even the Pirate Party only wants to reduce the copyright term to five years, and retain the author's right to attribution.
Once it is released to the wild, and anyone can "manufacture" it (that is, it can be copied and distributed readily) then it doesn't matter if you've stuffed a billion dollars into developing it. The economies of scale due to zero reproduction cost render it valueless.
That's only relevant if people actually copy it. If only a few hundred people find the software useful enough to copy it, then those people will have to share the whole billion-dollar development cost.
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
That's not at all like modern copyright. In ancient times, you paid for access to a particular physical copy, not for a right to manufacture copies. The money went to the owner of that physical copy, not the author.
Modern copyright was instituted to grant a legal right to the *author*, to ensure he got paid for his work (or at least that was the official reason). If you buy a copyright license, it doesn't pay for the medium, labour, or access to the original - those are separate from copyright in the modern sense.
I'm not familiar with the Italian and German copyright lawsuits in the early 1500's, but generally, before the Statute of Anne, copyright was a right granted to the *printer*, not the *author*, which makes it different from modern copyright. I.e, the state granted printers the right to print certain books (and not others), which functioned both as a privilege and as a censorship device.
The ancient Greek and Roman system is what will happen if we abolish modern copyright - people will pay for having easy access to originals, so they can read them or make their own copies at will.
If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.
Only if by "FOSS" you mean "GNU". People gave away gratis, open source software before GNU became popular, and called it "public domain". BSD-style licenses are less restrictive than GNU, so not much would change for them if copyright was abolished.
Or, it's proof of the danger of giving out privileges to businesses. They grow fat on them, and it becomes more profitable for them to lobby for more privileges than to improve their products.
I'm not sure copyright is needed at all, but a reduction to 28 years is still a huge improvement.
I hope what the GP meant to write was: "If the sales price is considerably higher than the cost of production and distribution, it's an indication that competition doesn't work well in that market."
I can't tell if you're being ironic. Surely you must realise that the initial cost of creation matters a lot if it's several thousand dollars, and you only sell a few hundred copies at $0,99 each (typical for many smartphone apps)?
Also, it's doubtful that copyright is really needed for artists and content creators to make a profit. In the case of music artists, many of them have discovered they're better off giving their MP3s away for free and earning their money from concerts and merchandise. There are far more music albums published today than ten years ago, and studies in Sweden and Norway have shown that both the number of music artists AND the revenue per artist have gone up.
It makes sense, when you consider that a music artist usually only gets around 10% of the sales price of a CD through a traditional music label. Even if the pirate only spends half of what he would normally spend on music, there's still much more money for the artist.
And in actual fact, it seems that pirates spend more money on music and other types of media than other people, according to studies from many countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands.
Fair enough. But people have also been sharing seeds (as in crop seeds) for tens of thousands of years. And those reproduce indefinitely, and for practical purposes the copies are exact.
People have also been sharing songs and poems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, and employed mnemonic techniques such as rhyming, alliteration and metre to ensure the lyrics are remembered exactly. Examples: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Icelandic sagas, thousands of folk songs and old poetry.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
I agree, I was just thinking about abuse from the side of the users.