The folks in the governments (be it US, EU or UK) seem to have lost sight of why there's been "copy rights" for the past 200 years...
The constitutional basis (at least in the US) is to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" - US Const. art. 1, 8, cl. 8. And thus gave the exclusive right to the rightholder (ideally, the artist himself, even though this is unlikely nowadays):
To produce copies
To import / export the work
To create derivative works
To perform / display the work publicly
To sell / assign rights to others
But since copyright provides a monopoly, there is a limitation in time for it. The main reason is that copyright creates two main incentive -- to create and to diffuse the creative works. If there was no protection provided, creative people might just keep their creations for themselves in fear of being ripped off by other people.
Hence, there is no real fear to have about a "unlimited duration" copyright... in theory. Following the Sonny Bono act, the Supreme COurt printed this wonderful opinion where they basically said that even if the copyright duration was set to a million year, it would be constitutional since it was "limited". With such arguments from the highest ranking source of legal authority, I cannot help but feeling hopeless...
Copyright is not a bad system, just like the Communist Republics' constitutions were great civil liberties manifestos...
"One nation, under God, indivisible is not practicing religion, not teaching religion, not promoting religion."
Ex-queeze me? Pledging allegiance to "God" is promoting the fact that there is a god. The First Amendment also protects the freedom not to believe in any god, be it agnotism or atheism...
Contracts in a free-market economy are different when you look on the one hand at suppliers of good, competiting for better services, better prices or what not and, on the other hand, at people trying to get a job.
I personnaly think that work conditions cannot be negociated anymore, considering the work market, and that free speech should be protected, even inside a corp.
Re. the Kro$oft employee, all he did was sendign a picture of G5s being delivered @ Redmont HQ, not slandering Bill Gate for whatever reasons. It was both funny and informative, mostly harmless as well. It shows the absence of control on any corp. behavior and their powerful, unrestrained ability to censor and control their employees thoughts. Had the former employee been unhappy or upset about MS, or a strong Linux advocate, he had no reason to work there. But he was, which showed at least some commitment to the corp. Firing him for a smart-ass comment in his private area, even accessible to the public, was just an abuse of power, that's all...
There is no such thing as "Unalienable rights" (and mind you, I'm French, and we usually believe in Natural rights). The only problem is that, and globalisation teaches us the hard way, there no single universal agreement on what is and what is not unalienable. It all depends on a particular groups history and culture. The closest thing would be "concepts generally admitted by civilized nations" ("civilized" meaning "non despotic system"). Even if I cherrish Freedom of Expression, I can understand that, on some corporations' webspace, it would be plainly rude to spit in the soup they're serving on their very own premices. So, contracts are a good way, but not the absolute remedy -- one should be allowed to express oneself elsewhere on the same topics. Just like any general and absolute restrictions on speech are dangerous, a general and absolute freedom of speech without any duty in return is just absurd.
The main problem regarding contracts is that their whole theorization stands on the equality of the bargain power, which does NOT exist when you look at an employee/employer relationship. Besides, the first famous case of freedom of speech reduction occured when Micro$oft fired someone who took pix of G5's @ MS HQ and posted them on his personnal blog... There was no contract there, exept the hiring contract that, I suppose, didn't not mention a critical and ironical vision of the corporation. The question to be asked is where to draw the line between freedom of speech, which can even help a corp. to progress, and deference to one's employer. Somehow, I cannot help but being pessimistic about the issue.
I guess taht's what happens when you make the 1st Amendment only opposable to the Governments and not private individuals / corporations... Anyone read C. Edwin Baker's Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech ? Pretty interesting on the topic of free speech regulation to protect the speech from this type of pressures...
Well even if, it is still surprising to find those who make money with their arts more likely to "forgive" p2p networks... A couple of years ago, when Napster wasn't on the dark side of the force, you had Limp Bizkit, relatively unknown newcomers, supporting it (well, rather thankful of the fame it brought them without any advertizing costs), and Metallica, rock band in decline, who trashed the exchange platform, somewhat forgetful of how bootlegs made their band so famous back in the 80s.
Now, it seems that as soon as artists are trying to get in the business, they're trained through the Pavlovian way of record companies... Sadsadsad.
Just like when Weird Al came to fame, people saw him as a harmless buffoon, while if anyone came up with this now, there would be a hassle from the labels (see the Beatallica paranoia about this...).
Somehow I cannot help but thinking that those who have the biggest to lose are the the labels and the lobby groups (RIAA, MPAA, etc). If you look at the survey, those that are less frightenned by the so-called p2p-threat are the "elite" artist. Maybe they already have enough money not to care or get greedy about it (even though Metallica seems picky about losing a cent).
Seems to me that the record majors have done a great job getting the struggling artists to a paranoid high, so these artists would more easily give up anything to their glamorous protectors...
Oh, and about the copyright length, I didn't know that Disney was representing 11% of this survey;)
Since when did the US ever give a rats arse about non-US citizens
Well, they do care when said non-US citizens are coming on the US ground stealing their so wonderful technologies and jobs, I suppose (re:The racist Troll post).
IMHO, it is not without pertinence to set up security checks in fed. programs, but it really depends on the sensitivity of the issues at stake... An foreign Vet School student might be slightly less likely to compromize anything than a military engineer.
I just can't wait until they set up a new colored sensitivity chart from 'all clear' green to flashy 'classified' red.
This guy is not only a freeloader but also somewhat of a morron... Let's do the maths:
Say 900,000 songs on his drive,
12 songs per album -- that's 75,000 albums
$5 a CD (if you want to collect, you can go for near mint second hand CD, won't really change the quality, right ?)
That's roughly $375,000 worth of material.
Now, 3 G5 at $2k + 2 iMac, another couple of $2k -- 15 300MB external drives (to get to the 4.4TB) at $300 each -- that's $14,500 in hardware, just for his quest... Add up the $40 a month for each broadband connexion, $120.
Ok, It would take a couple of hundred years to reach the $375,000...
So off to the plan B of my brilliant demonstration -- Is all this music worth being saved so future generations can remember us by ? I mean... Céline Dion ? Ashlee "oops" Simpson ? Meta "Used to do rock" Llica ?
The big turning point in Business Method Patents, as someone stated, was State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. - 1998. The key point in this change of attitude was, according to Judge Rich, that "business methods have been, and should have been, subject to the same legal requirements for patentability as applied to any other process or method" (refering to In Re Schrader, 2 F.3d 290 (Fed.Cir.1994). Somehow, it makes sense -- the general set of criteria for patentability should apply to most legal subject-matter (not sure that it would be wise to grant a patent to a new process to produce Cocain;). Hence it is not the business method patentability in itself that seems flawed but the patent prosecution that let stuff go through without the proper checking. Especially regarding the facts in State Street, the mathematical process and business method really showed an innovative process, and it would have been counter-productive to bar this process from patentability...
Well as far as Biotechs are concerned, it is a delicate subject. When someone creates a new chemical or element (e.g. the slashdotium), there is no question about the invention factor.
But when a laboratory just decypher the gene pool of something that existed, and slightly change it to make it patentable, it's a harder question. Ex. : when RiceTech patented Basmati rice. [biotech-info.net]
This patent finally got revised but the problem is still there. As a lawyer, I just can't help but wondering how you can make it illegal not to manage your crop the way you want. Just like the rest of the IP field, the more it goes and the more we're headed to a world of licensing instead of ownership...
Originally, the purpose of patents is to secure a right for the inventor to exvclude people from stepping onto his findings and discoveries. It is a way to allow the inventor to get his money back on the time he spent searching. Without getting into details of the patent theory, the 4 most celebrated reasons why patents exist are (according to late Judge Giles Rich):
Incentive to inovate - back in the 1790s, there wasn't any big pharmaceutical laboratory or Del Monte, so to allow inventors to spend their time inventing and not wasting their talents down the factory, patents were a nice way to insure some subsides...
Incentive to disclose - the bargain between the patentee and the PTO is protection v. disclosure. Hence, the new discovery is readily available for the rest of mankind, and promote the progress of arts and sciences
Incentive to comercialize - the patent gives a right to exclude people from using the patented invention, making the inventor the manager of his rights (either licensing to other company or enjoying is own monopoly of distribution)
Incentive to design around -- Because once you know what is patented, it can give you new ideas. Unfortunatly, it has been struck down somewhat by the so called doctrine of equivalent
However, the US have really blown a fuse here... It is enslaving a foreign country to the almighty US. For the oil, well, I could understand the general purpose, even though I do NOT agree with it. But this is just mean and wicked...
I agree that most of the IT infractions are already on the books IRL. Nonetheless, they are mostly local books, not international books. After working with comp. forensics, I can tell that even if it is technically doable (read my lips, I didn't say easy...), IT law enforcement is a heck of a mess when several physical locations are involved (hosting, ISP, attacking computer, attacked computer...)
On the specific IT crimes, computer intrusion has been on the books since the late 80s, at least in France, and the CyberCrime convention started a global movement towards procedural agreement.
That being said, the use of a third-party arbitration might not be a bad idea, most of all because they might be among the few case-law renderers to actually know soemthing about what they're talking about (cf. the Yahoo! Auction case in France and the (not-so) clever Juge Gomez) [
Another comparison that might be worth something in the actual pseudo-stealing debate : how has the global 'entertainement' budget been affected ?
As a member of the "18-24" age-rank, my budget is more or less $700 a month, all inclusive. I'm sorry to say that if I have the choice between any $15 CD and any $15 DVD even with no bonus, I'll go for the DVD, 2 out of 3 times, unless the record is one I really want.
I might spent $50 a month on entertainement -- but I never bought videos, because they take a lot of space and are poor quality. Now the DVDs have come out, the market has more variety, but my wallet is still the same size...
Sure, the CD sales went down the gutter, but it is not because of the p2p, it is because of a basic market regulation rule of thumb : the customers will always go where they get their money worth, hence DVD over CD.
If broadband and p2p had been available 15 years ago, I bet they would have blamed the failure of comemrcial pre recorded DAT, or 8 years ago commercial MD, on p2p instead of poor money-worth ratio...
Well, i think you've put your finger right on the main issue of the music industry... Blank CD is around.40 a piece, much less if you buy them in bulks, like the industry does. If you add the box, the color booklet and some other costs for the machines and all, plus the artists' paycheck, i should be around $3-4 a piece.
The question isn't entirely why do they keep on saling CDs that much (the answer is because they can), but who are the sorry SoB enjoying the cake (aka record company, music stores and so on).
Quite frankly, i'm a French student, i don't have much money (er... right now i'm -500), but i will always be willing to pay $9 or less for a industry-made CD, given the fact it as more content than simple music (which could be a very nice booklet, full color and stuff, extra cd, video content and such.)
>>plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.
Would that judge also push the analogy so as to say that a non-secured overflooded mailbox would hence be public, because it lays at the boudary of the public street and accessible to whoever put his hand in ? That sounds pretty shallow...
There is something funny, though, in the governments schizophrenia upon property -- here in France, if you are caught leaving trash on the street and you can be identified as the one who dumped it, you get a fine 'round 183. That's to say you're *responsible and the owner* of the garbage. But I doubt they think about fining you when the police is looking through your dumps.
Lastly, the ruling is interesting in its limitations : the trash is your until it's in the garbage truck -- so, even if the authorities cut a deal with the garbage company, once mixed with other people's own dirt, they cannot hold what they could find against anyone;) Frustrating it must be...
Slashdot Mirror
The folks in the governments (be it US, EU or UK) seem to have lost sight of why there's been "copy rights" for the past 200 years...
The constitutional basis (at least in the US) is to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" - US Const. art. 1, 8, cl. 8. And thus gave the exclusive right to the rightholder (ideally, the artist himself, even though this is unlikely nowadays):
- To produce copies
- To import / export the work
- To create derivative works
- To perform / display the work publicly
- To sell / assign rights to others
But since copyright provides a monopoly, there is a limitation in time for it. The main reason is that copyright creates two main incentive -- to create and to diffuse the creative works. If there was no protection provided, creative people might just keep their creations for themselves in fear of being ripped off by other people.Hence, there is no real fear to have about a "unlimited duration" copyright... in theory. Following the Sonny Bono act, the Supreme COurt printed this wonderful opinion where they basically said that even if the copyright duration was set to a million year, it would be constitutional since it was "limited". With such arguments from the highest ranking source of legal authority, I cannot help but feeling hopeless...
Copyright is not a bad system, just like the Communist Republics' constitutions were great civil liberties manifestos...
Ex-queeze me? Pledging allegiance to "God" is promoting the fact that there is a god. The First Amendment also protects the freedom not to believe in any god, be it agnotism or atheism...
Contracts in a free-market economy are different when you look on the one hand at suppliers of good, competiting for better services, better prices or what not and, on the other hand, at people trying to get a job.
I personnaly think that work conditions cannot be negociated anymore, considering the work market, and that free speech should be protected, even inside a corp.
Re. the Kro$oft employee, all he did was sendign a picture of G5s being delivered @ Redmont HQ, not slandering Bill Gate for whatever reasons. It was both funny and informative, mostly harmless as well. It shows the absence of control on any corp. behavior and their powerful, unrestrained ability to censor and control their employees thoughts. Had the former employee been unhappy or upset about MS, or a strong Linux advocate, he had no reason to work there. But he was, which showed at least some commitment to the corp. Firing him for a smart-ass comment in his private area, even accessible to the public, was just an abuse of power, that's all...
There is no such thing as "Unalienable rights" (and mind you, I'm French, and we usually believe in Natural rights). The only problem is that, and globalisation teaches us the hard way, there no single universal agreement on what is and what is not unalienable. It all depends on a particular groups history and culture.
The closest thing would be "concepts generally admitted by civilized nations" ("civilized" meaning "non despotic system").
Even if I cherrish Freedom of Expression, I can understand that, on some corporations' webspace, it would be plainly rude to spit in the soup they're serving on their very own premices. So, contracts are a good way, but not the absolute remedy -- one should be allowed to express oneself elsewhere on the same topics.
Just like any general and absolute restrictions on speech are dangerous, a general and absolute freedom of speech without any duty in return is just absurd.
The main problem regarding contracts is that their whole theorization stands on the equality of the bargain power, which does NOT exist when you look at an employee/employer relationship.
Besides, the first famous case of freedom of speech reduction occured when Micro$oft fired someone who took pix of G5's @ MS HQ and posted them on his personnal blog... There was no contract there, exept the hiring contract that, I suppose, didn't not mention a critical and ironical vision of the corporation.
The question to be asked is where to draw the line between freedom of speech, which can even help a corp. to progress, and deference to one's employer. Somehow, I cannot help but being pessimistic about the issue.
I guess taht's what happens when you make the 1st Amendment only opposable to the Governments and not private individuals / corporations...
Anyone read C. Edwin Baker's Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech ? Pretty interesting on the topic of free speech regulation to protect the speech from this type of pressures...
It would be interesting to check with some Chinese /. users, but they'd already be in camps ;-p
Another search that returned an apparent objective result : "chinese democracy human right" with Tibetan NGOs appearing first...
Not that I like the almighty power of capitalism, but if it can help bringing human rights in China...(but not in the US conception, though)
Well even if, it is still surprising to find those who make money with their arts more likely to "forgive" p2p networks... A couple of years ago, when Napster wasn't on the dark side of the force, you had Limp Bizkit, relatively unknown newcomers, supporting it (well, rather thankful of the fame it brought them without any advertizing costs), and Metallica, rock band in decline, who trashed the exchange platform, somewhat forgetful of how bootlegs made their band so famous back in the 80s.
Now, it seems that as soon as artists are trying to get in the business, they're trained through the Pavlovian way of record companies... Sadsadsad.
Just like when Weird Al came to fame, people saw him as a harmless buffoon, while if anyone came up with this now, there would be a hassle from the labels (see the Beatallica paranoia about this...).
There : http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Artist.Musicia n.Surveys.pdf -- it appears almost on every pages...
The artists that lose big are the big artists.
;)
Somehow I cannot help but thinking that those who have the biggest to lose are the the labels and the lobby groups (RIAA, MPAA, etc). If you look at the survey, those that are less frightenned by the so-called p2p-threat are the "elite" artist. Maybe they already have enough money not to care or get greedy about it (even though Metallica seems picky about losing a cent).
Seems to me that the record majors have done a great job getting the struggling artists to a paranoid high, so these artists would more easily give up anything to their glamorous protectors...
Oh, and about the copyright length, I didn't know that Disney was representing 11% of this survey
So, after CDs and movies, TV is the new victim of this Internet evil machinery ! Sue them ! All of them !
Since when did the US ever give a rats arse about non-US citizens
Well, they do care when said non-US citizens are coming on the US ground stealing their so wonderful technologies and jobs, I suppose (re:The racist Troll post).
IMHO, it is not without pertinence to set up security checks in fed. programs, but it really depends on the sensitivity of the issues at stake... An foreign Vet School student might be slightly less likely to compromize anything than a military engineer.
I just can't wait until they set up a new colored sensitivity chart from 'all clear' green to flashy 'classified' red.
Say 900,000 songs on his drive,
- 12 songs per album -- that's 75,000 albums
- $5 a CD (if you want to collect, you can go for near mint second hand CD, won't really change the quality, right ?)
That's roughly $375,000 worth of material.Now, 3 G5 at $2k + 2 iMac, another couple of $2k -- 15 300MB external drives (to get to the 4.4TB) at $300 each -- that's $14,500 in hardware, just for his quest... Add up the $40 a month for each broadband connexion, $120.
Ok, It would take a couple of hundred years to reach the $375,000...
So off to the plan B of my brilliant demonstration -- Is all this music worth being saved so future generations can remember us by ? I mean... Céline Dion ? Ashlee "oops" Simpson ? Meta "Used to do rock" Llica ?
The big turning point in Business Method Patents, as someone stated, was State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. - 1998. The key point in this change of attitude was, according to Judge Rich, that "business methods have been, and should have been, subject to the same legal requirements for patentability as applied to any other process or method" (refering to In Re Schrader, 2 F.3d 290 (Fed.Cir.1994). ;). Hence it is not the business method patentability in itself that seems flawed but the patent prosecution that let stuff go through without the proper checking. Especially regarding the facts in State Street, the mathematical process and business method really showed an innovative process, and it would have been counter-productive to bar this process from patentability...
Somehow, it makes sense -- the general set of criteria for patentability should apply to most legal subject-matter (not sure that it would be wise to grant a patent to a new process to produce Cocain
Just my two €urocents...
Well as far as Biotechs are concerned, it is a delicate subject. When someone creates a new chemical or element (e.g. the slashdotium), there is no question about the invention factor.
But when a laboratory just decypher the gene pool of something that existed, and slightly change it to make it patentable, it's a harder question. Ex. : when RiceTech patented Basmati rice. [biotech-info.net]
This patent finally got revised but the problem is still there. As a lawyer, I just can't help but wondering how you can make it illegal not to manage your crop the way you want. Just like the rest of the IP field, the more it goes and the more we're headed to a world of licensing instead of ownership...
Just my two €urocents...
Mos Def's clothing budget had taken everything, so they had to go with the deodorant ball you put in the running shoe, instead of the shoe itself...
BAD Mos, very bad !
Without getting into details of the patent theory, the 4 most celebrated reasons why patents exist are (according to late Judge Giles Rich)
- Incentive to inovate - back in the 1790s, there wasn't any big pharmaceutical laboratory or Del Monte, so to allow inventors to spend their time inventing and not wasting their talents down the factory, patents were a nice way to insure some subsides...
- Incentive to disclose - the bargain between the patentee and the PTO is protection v. disclosure. Hence, the new discovery is readily available for the rest of mankind, and promote the progress of arts and sciences
- Incentive to comercialize - the patent gives a right to exclude people from using the patented invention, making the inventor the manager of his rights (either licensing to other company or enjoying is own monopoly of distribution)
- Incentive to design around -- Because once you know what is patented, it can give you new ideas. Unfortunatly, it has been struck down somewhat by the so called doctrine of equivalent
More info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patents ;http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/ipr/pa
However, the US have really blown a fuse here... It is enslaving a foreign country to the almighty US. For the oil, well, I could understand the general purpose, even though I do NOT agree with it. But this is just mean and wicked...
Oh well, 51% cannot be wrong. Or can they ?
Just my 2 Eurocents...
I agree that most of the IT infractions are already on the books IRL. Nonetheless, they are mostly local books, not international books. After working with comp. forensics, I can tell that even if it is technically doable (read my lips, I didn't say easy...), IT law enforcement is a heck of a mess when several physical locations are involved (hosting, ISP, attacking computer, attacked computer...)
On the specific IT crimes, computer intrusion has been on the books since the late 80s, at least in France, and the CyberCrime convention started a global movement towards procedural agreement.
That being said, the use of a third-party arbitration might not be a bad idea, most of all because they might be among the few case-law renderers to actually know soemthing about what they're talking about (cf. the Yahoo! Auction case in France and the (not-so) clever Juge Gomez) [
Another comparison that might be worth something in the actual pseudo-stealing debate : how has the global 'entertainement' budget been affected ?
As a member of the "18-24" age-rank, my budget is more or less $700 a month, all inclusive. I'm sorry to say that if I have the choice between any $15 CD and any $15 DVD even with no bonus, I'll go for the DVD, 2 out of 3 times, unless the record is one I really want.
I might spent $50 a month on entertainement -- but I never bought videos, because they take a lot of space and are poor quality. Now the DVDs have come out, the market has more variety, but my wallet is still the same size...
Sure, the CD sales went down the gutter, but it is not because of the p2p, it is because of a basic market regulation rule of thumb : the customers will always go where they get their money worth, hence DVD over CD.
If broadband and p2p had been available 15 years ago, I bet they would have blamed the failure of comemrcial pre recorded DAT, or 8 years ago commercial MD, on p2p instead of poor money-worth ratio...
Well, i think you've put your finger right on the main issue of the music industry... Blank CD is around .40 a piece, much less if you buy them in bulks, like the industry does. If you add the box, the color booklet and some other costs for the machines and all, plus the artists' paycheck, i should be around $3-4 a piece.
The question isn't entirely why do they keep on saling CDs that much (the answer is because they can), but who are the sorry SoB enjoying the cake (aka record company, music stores and so on).
Quite frankly, i'm a French student, i don't have much money (er... right now i'm -500), but i will always be willing to pay $9 or less for a industry-made CD, given the fact it as more content than simple music (which could be a very nice booklet, full color and stuff, extra cd, video content and such.)
>>plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.
;) Frustrating it must be...
Would that judge also push the analogy so as to say that a non-secured overflooded mailbox would hence be public, because it lays at the boudary of the public street and accessible to whoever put his hand in ? That sounds pretty shallow...
There is something funny, though, in the governments schizophrenia upon property -- here in France, if you are caught leaving trash on the street and you can be identified as the one who dumped it, you get a fine 'round 183. That's to say you're *responsible and the owner* of the garbage. But I doubt they think about fining you when the police is looking through your dumps.
Lastly, the ruling is interesting in its limitations : the trash is your until it's in the garbage truck -- so, even if the authorities cut a deal with the garbage company, once mixed with other people's own dirt, they cannot hold what they could find against anyone
~3ST