Jumping In On The Lessig / Adkinson Copyright Debate 163
An Anonymous Coward writes: "LawMeme has an excellent response to William F. Adkinson's critique of Larry Lessig's ideas on copyright reform. What I found most interesting about the article though, was the link to this paper by Ernest Miller (of Yale's Information Society Project) and Joan Feigenbaum (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cryptography) that says we should take the copy out of copyright."
Lawmeme needs editors (Score:3, Interesting)
Hrmm. But maybe that's the point of law "memes" -- constructed to seep into the general consciousness rather than provide a well-supported web of logic. Regardless, whenever I read a Lawmeme article, I get the strong sense that they'll only appeal to the already-converted ("preaching to the choir"). Which makes me think they're wasting their breath. :/
Good Lawyer = Clear Arguments (Score:3, Interesting)
That is SO right, and so how come I don't remember hearing that point before (or how come I didn't think it up myself!)
I immediately thought of games (who didn't!?) retailing at hugely above their production cost, and books the same. Why do we accept these things? I for one would buy far more books and far more games if publishers set prices at simply a "fair margin". Who would rip games onto CDs for their friends if you could get them in the store (with a free CD case and handy booklet) for $5? Who of us wouldn't have libraries twice, thrice as big if books were similarly priced?
And if these new pricing schemes were in existance, wouldn't they force publishers to try and innovate in the way their "content" was delivered? There is no pressure to build a useable "e-book" while "paper-books" have such huge profits built into the system. There is no pressure to take the (in some cases) 3 boxes out of the packaging of computer games (3 boxes that mostly just get torn off and thrown away like christmas paper).
Ya gotta love a good lawyer or law writer, they always make arguments that set your mind to work!
The Argument Nobody's Making (blog repost) (Score:4, Interesting)
It's clear that the purveyors of movies, television, records and so forth are scared. They're losing money (or claim to be), and this does not make them happy. Their scapegoat is digital copying, as they refuse to accept that perhaps the content they provide is simply of poor quality, or badly and inconviently distributed, thus explaining their drops in sales. The response of the RIAA and MPAA has been to call for endless litigation and lawmaking, outlawing any behaviour that undercuts their profits at the taxpayer's expense. As above, many "activists" argue that this is illegal, immoral, etc. My response is different.
The key concept to note is "at the taxpayer's expense." The entertainment industry has every right to protect their content. What they don't (or should not) have, however, is the resources of government and public money. When public funds and time are used to save a failing industry, this is called protectionism, and it's a concept more familiar to Communist ideology than our Free Market. Of course, this White House is no stranger to protectionism, bailing out airlines, the steel industry, and offering farmers massive subsidies. And perhaps one can justify saving these industries: people need transportation, crops, building materials. But who can justify saving the entertainment industry?
It's entertainment, the superflous recreation that we fill our idle time with. While it generates a lot of money (and ergo political influence), entertainment has, ultimately, zero effect or worth to a population. Sure, music, film, and so forth are part of what defines a culture. But what the public agrees to support are the arts, works of inherant cultural value, not "Dude, Where's My Car?"
With this in mind, I think any debate about the worth of RIAA- and MPAA-proposed legislation comes to a grinding halt. The entertainment industry is allowed to protect itself using its own time and money; if they want copy protection schemes, for example, let them pay for research and development. But the instant taxpayer time and money is being spent to save big media, we've entered into profoundly unamerican territory.
Re:Good Lawyer = Clear Arguments (Score:2, Interesting)
At least patents expire.
simple is better (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sound-bite analysis (Score:2, Interesting)
Not as far as I know. Going mostly on inference, it seems that the origin of Copyright came up sometime in Europe, and someone made an argument for it good enough that the authors of the US consitituion thought that it was necessarilly a power that the federal government should have.
It's hard to imagine how copyright could be used for government censorhip, too. The government can just outright censor someone--especially when the idea of copyright was being invented, they had no reason whatsoever to "censor" someone in the convoluted scheme that "copyright censorship" would require.
(heck, copyright, if anything, works against plagarism, rather than working for censorship.)
Is prohibiting study and reverse engineering of code really either pro-technology or pro-market?
Yes. Any security device is only good until it's bypassed. A blanket numbing effect on the development of new security workarounds helps lengthen the effectiveness of security.
It's not *pro-innovation* or *pro-startup*, but it is "pro-technology" and "pro-market."
________________
Personally, I think the whole sheebang would just go away if code was covered by patents rather than copyrights, and copyright protection was widespread, fair, and had no legitimate reason to bypass. (and, no, that wouldn't necessarilly mean having a way to give bypass to those with fair use... they could just re-type or handwrite their own input like they were doing for years.)
'course, doing such requires a time machine, or a massive government subsidy. The key word here is *cheap*. *sigh*
The xxAAs use copyright to smother artists... (Score:3, Interesting)
These people(?) would rather sell reruns of crap for pure profit than spend a buck on a creative artist.
They see artists as a necessary evil which is controlled and manipulated by putting the art and the artist through a mill which grinds out "hits" while grinding down the artists.
Sometime the hype is so transparent that anyone with an ounce of integrity would hide their face in shame. Instead , you get some babe shilling shit while holding up a can of beer for scale.
What gets air play or screen time is not what's good or what is worth seeing but what some soul-dead accountant decides you should see.
Harry Potter books sold? Lets play it safe and make Harry Potter movies. How about a remake of
Eventually, they media mavens realize that the rerun is more profitable, specially if all the artists are dead of old age. How else can you explain Alphal-fuckin'-fa still being on TV? How about the "Three Stooges," week after week after week? Used as filler between commercials.
The reason they don't want anybody to be able to copy anything is that THEY want to SELL every byte that comes over the 'net and they don't want you to be able to hang on to any of them because then they can't charge you over and over for the same cra, uh, content.
The creators of content, the animators, artists, authors, musicians, playwrights, thespians etcetera will soon have no market anyway.
500 channels on TV and ALL running infomercials.
Message-less Media in the purest McLuhanistic sense.
The artists who are already the source for the content, will have to form their own separate distribution networks and use some form of micro payment PER COPY (the bane of the xxAAs control mechanisms.
Imagine after the introduction of IPv6, when DynIP can finally be disposed of and spoofing becomes a great deal more difficult, a very minor change to the FTP protocol, call it cFTP, which records, when necessary, the address of the recipient of a document or packet stream.
Imagine a micro payment scheme which records charges for every copy of some artist's work collecting money from the recipient and depositing it in the artist's account.
Now imagine the xxAAs wondering where all the sucke, uh, audience has gone? Don't we WANT to pay for the n-th rerun of "My Mother The Car?"
Re:The problem with copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
What happens to basic plotlines? What happens to literary devices? What happens to _words_?
Art does not occur in a vacuum. All artists stand on the shoulders of those who came before. We rely on previous generations and our contemporaries to provide us with inspiration, to open new directions to pursue, to give us something to react to.
You implicitly insult Shakespeare, who recycled material constantly. You insult Picasso, who truthfully noted that great artists steal. Hell, you insult Spider Robinson who's specifically rebutted [baen.com] this stupid argument before.
Total originality would be completely alien and incomprehensible. It's worthless. A mixture of original and derivative elements is absolutely necessary. There are multitudes of excellent derivative works in existance. Disney's had their fair share.
But good writing pops up in surprising places -- I've read fan fiction that was not only superior to the original source material, but could probably do quite well if it were released commercially.
Honestly, what the hell do you think countless generations of now-unknown people did but retell each other's stories, changing them slightly as they went along? It's a good thing, and absolutely to be encouraged! (which is why we do, if you actually bothered to study the intent of copyright law)
monopoly and oligopoly (Score:2, Interesting)
Adkinson claims that the "5 movie studios and 7 record labels" should be plenty to create a competitive market. He argues that there is no real monopoly beyond that which is expressly allowed by copyright itself.
This argument felt funny to me, and it didn't take me long to realize why- there is something of a "critical mass" phenomenon when it comes to monopolies. You can have a monopoly in one big thing (e.g., operating systems) OR you can have a large number of small monopolies (e.g., in music.) The power of the record labels emerges from a single entity that has so many small monopolies at its control. This is what skews the market, as opposed to the ideal- a large number of small monopolies in the hands of many people.
Any claims that the movie studios are anything less than an oligopoly is absolutely ludicrous. If I did a survey of 1000 people, how many of them could tell me what record label she's on? Does it even matter? Of course not. It's not even the entertainment industry. It's the copyright industry.
Making copies is not a crime (Score:1, Interesting)
I Blockquote:
That's the crux of it. That's why I get so riled by any attempt to legislatively force DRM (Digital Rights Mangling) into my computer. It feels like the government granting a few cartels the power to dictate the conditions under which citizens access and formulate their responses to public discourses. If that ain't speeding down the road to unfreedom, pass me the hemlock. Freedom just ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Different time limits for copyleft? (Score:2, Interesting)
The purpose of copyleft is freedom. Once copyleft expires, it is back to the bad old days of breaking interoperability for commercial advantage, keeping the source code secret, so that most programming is duplication of work already done, etc. There is no public interest in having copyleft expire.
A rewriting of copyright law, to 20 years from publication, because that provides plenty of incentive, could also provide for two types of public domain.
1)The current public domain, the source of copyright derivative works.
2)A GNU domain, perpetually copyleft.
the Anti-Publishers. (Score:4, Interesting)
The purpose of publishing is to share uncommon and excellent material with the public. Traditional publishers did their best to collect such material and make some reasonable facsimille available to as many people as possible. Once it was difficult and expensive to do that, so laws were made in the US to grant publishers a time limited (14 years) exclusive franchise to the work.
Todays publishers seek to do just the opposite. Today information, especially recorded music, is easy to share. Printed material, books, letters, and all manner of information is CREATED in digital forms now. So what's a publisher to do? Well, if your the music industry you take common material and prevent people from sharing it without paying them. Hideous new encryption technologies are being applied to music, movies and even books, which can not be deciphered without approved reading software which will not work forever. The publishers will keep the information and sell it to you each time you want it. The net result is the destruction of the public domain. Information once preserved by publishering will now be destroyed by it. Once publication becomes unprofitable, the publisher is likely to neglect it. Unlike previous ages, no monks will be able to come to the rescue.
Adkinson claims that competition will come to the resuce, but he is mistaken or lying. Publication and tellecomunications have become very consolidated. GE, Westinghouse, Disney, Sony and the federal governement essentially own broadcasting in the US. The list of companies providing internet service continues to collapse and we will be left with very few soon enough, all perfectly willing to collude with publishers in the vain hope of making a buck. Your voice will not be heard and you will not enjoy the works that others wish to share.
Music is a good example of this trend. What could be more common and less excellent than the "popular" music we hear on artificailly scare airwaves? Anyone can sing, most people have belonged to one kind of band or another, and generally the results are as good or better than top 40. How is it that all that work gets condensed to a National Standard Record store? Recent court decisions agains companies like MP3.com show that the big five music publishers of the world will not relinquish their cartel and the law will support them. Information is already being lost. The Bono copyright extention act to 75 years covers most of all recorded music. How many original works are perishing with their media right now? Early Jazz and other American art forms will be about as well preserved as the libraries of antiquity, sorted random and slim, instead of preserved as the original recorders wished. In the end, however, music is much less important than other published works, such as scientific papers, text books, even fiction and art work.
Proposed publishing methods do not contribute to the public good and are not worthy of public expendatures to protect.
Tax copyrights annually 1% on assessed value (Score:2, Interesting)
copyright extensions (or even if they don't), here is an amusing idea. I
think I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot
months ago -- and now that I poke around the web and usenet I see that
many others have discussed it a tiny bit. In such a worst case where
copyrights are indefinite, perhaps a property tax on copyright owners
might be enacted as a last resort, where rights holders get to choose an
assessed value for having the monopoly of all rights to the work, and
rights holders pay some percentage (1%?) per year of that assessment,
with the restriction then rights holders have to release the work to the
public domain if a payment to them is made for the assessed amount.
Possibly the assessment would be broken down into rights categories, so
that there could be payments for freeing specific subrights -- like
non-commercial use. This category approach would allow a work to be
bought into the public domain in stages.
For example, if the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust puts, say, a
million dollar valuation on the "Skills of Xanadu" story (ironically
about freedom) relative to releasing it into the public domain (say, so
they could pursue movie rights for it), at an "intellectual monopoly"
tax rate of 1%, the trust would have to pay $10000 per year to keep the
monopoly. But if the Trust puts only a $1000 value on "The Skills of
Xanadu" to avoid significant taxes (only $10 a year then), I'd take out
my checkbook, maybe along with some other fans, and it would be free
today.
Note this assessed amount is for release into the public domain, not
necessarily the amount to be paid by someone else who wants the monopoly
transferred to them, which might be higher or lower, just like what real
estate sells for isn't necessarily the assessed rate. Since it it hard
to assess the value of a copyright, let the rights holder do it, as long
as this public domain buyout clause was in place to prevent overly low
self assessment of monopoly value.
If some people call patents and copyrights "intellectual property" (yes,
I know that term begs the question of how to handle them) then why not
laugh at them and just tax ownership of such "property"? After all, just
like real estate owners pay taxes to offset the heavy continual burden
their property puts on society (a need for police, fire departments,
water, roads, sanitation, planning boards, zoning, local schools, etc.),
there is a heavy continual burden on society for enforcing copyright
(prisons for infringers, costs of salaries for judges in court cases,
the time cost to individuals of making fair use determinations,
government subsidized distribution channels like the internet, the need
for the government to maintain accurate records, lawmaker's time, etc.)
which ideally should be born by copyright holders as opposed to the
general public.
Yes, I know such a tax might wreck havoc with the GPL or other freely
licensed software too. Most GPL copyright holders would probably need to
set their copyright assessment prices low and risk public domain
buyouts. And there are issues with previously selling off exclusive
rights separately to a work (although such rights holders could pay part
of the tax.) And there are issues with incrementally developed works, or
works with multiple copyright holders...
Still, the big issue is that the cost to society of the copyright
monopoly on any work is potentially high, and the person who should be
paying that social cost is really the rights holder, rather than passing
on external costs to others, as a form of social pollution. Some would
argue rights holders already paid a copyright tax when they registered.
Yet, people who get real estate pay a title transfer fee (sort of like a
copyright registration or renewal fee) but they still pay property taxes
afterwards too. If there was no records of taxes paid on a copyright,
it could be presumed public domain, or the copyright owner could be
pursued for tax evasion (until they disclaimed it to the public domain,
of course). This would make the state of copyright much clearer than the
current situation where it is very expensive to determine if a work is
under copyright, and if so, who currently owns it and how to contact
them. With real estate, all this is a matter of public record.
When registering to pay "intellectual property" taxes for their
monopolies, copyright holders might be required to deposit a complete
copy of the content and preferred form source in digital format in
escrow. This escrow would be in part to allow people wanting to use
public domain materials to easily search published content against
registered works. Escrow would also be in part to ensure the work would
be available unencrypted and unprotected when it became public domain,
such as if the rights holder stopped paying property taxes on it.
Perhaps the way to win the copyright battle, if all else fails, is to
give copyright holders what the want, then something else too that
naturally goes with it. Microsoft would have to put a price on releasing
the Windows source code to the public domain for example (including all
previous versions, which might have separate prices), and then they
would finally be forced to pay taxes. Yes, perennially people have
resisted taxes on capital, so it's an uphill battle, but it is another
front of the copyright battle to consider.
Obviously, stocks and bank accounts aren't often taxed by the federal
government while held (though some states do like with Florida's
"Intangible Personal Property Tax"),
http://www.myflorida.com/dor/taxes/ippt.html
so the argument would have to be worked through if the taxation was at
the federal level. And of course this makes the government meddle more
in everyone's affairs (at least, those claiming copyrights or software
patents) but maybe that's OK considering the alternative in this case
and how much they meddle already.
And, while I'm dreaming
monopoly tax could be used to fund more free software and free content
(and the other half would go to pay down the Federal deficit).
Note: even with laws like the above, I would support some form of
author's moral rights regarding their works, enforced separately from
copyright.