The Copyright Fuss Revisited

mpawlo writes "I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw introducing a framework for the debate on how we should obtain a balance between users and authors where the author has good incentives to innovate, but where society at large is not too restricted due to the author's previous innovations. I am afraid that I personally have few practical solutions to introduce, but you might find my text useful as a quick introduction to what the copyright fuss is all about and why you should care."

The main thing I'd like to see no-matter what

[Anonymous Coward]

Is no retroactive copyright protection. The terms of copyright at the time you create something should be the same terms that apply to it forever. You only need and know what the incentive is before you create it. Changing it after the fact does nothing to increase your incentive.

Art, not innovation.

[Planesdragon]

Copyright does NOT protect innovation. Look at Tolkien & how just about every "innovation" he made has been swiped by the fantasy genre. Same thing for the GUI, same thing for music, etc, etc.

PATENTS protect ideas, innovations, and inventions. Copyright should be pared back by whatever means necessary so it can stop doing the job of Patents (or trademarks!).

protection vrs freedom

[Shymon]

Copyright laws will always be messy if only beacuse there is no cut and dry options. A law that says all works are free to anyone undermines the purpose of creating those works (open source software being somewhat of a exception to this) and one that never releases information into the public domain is also a less then perfect solution. and while this is a gross simplification it's applicable to almost every aspect of copyright laws (fair use and the like). for all the ranting about these laws on slashdot very rarely do i see a realistic purposed solution to the problem, which suggests that it probably won't be solved in the near future, or maybe ever.

We need to replenish the public domain

[why-is-it]

Disney's never going to have to come up with anything new, because they'll just keep getting extensions for Mickey Mouse.

And therein lies the dilemma. Disney has made several fortunes by taking something that was already in the public domain and building on it. I don't know if the Brothers Grimm even get mentioned in the credits of the Disney films that are based on their stories. Now we see Disney purchasing politicians and legislation to extend their copyrights in perpetuity.

I wonder if anyone at Disney recognizes the irony of it all...

Easy Solution

[ch-chuck]

if you're an 'artist' and are adamant about being paid for each and every copy, don't create anything that can be easily copied by your admiring public. That includes audio, video, writing, software, or ip in general. Face it, your just trying to cash in on the 85% profit margin of being able to produce once, make easy copies and distribute them. But now your customers have the ability to make easy copies and share them. Face it. Instead, go into sculpture, crafts, paintings, custom autos, landscaping, live performances, etc etc etc.

NO, this is not a troll, just a clear headed statement of fact. If you want to press an audio cd and sell copies, fine. Just realize there's going to be 'shrinkage' from maximum profit and you can cuss and stomp, beg for govt assistance, try to get consumer devices banned, mandate DRM in every electronic device, but the genie is already out of the bottle and everybody has one now. Artists and publishers are just going to have to adapt to the new environment or go extinct.

Re:open source + ransom model

[kawika]

It seems like the ransom model is really just a copyright/patent model with an additional dollar limit on it. That is, the code is released when a particular amount of money is made OR when a particular time limit is reached. That limits the profit upside of any particular development, but doesn't protect from the downside.

Plus, it's not the gross revenue I would care about, it's the net. Lets say I release a product under a ransom model and I've priced the ransom with the assumption that maintaining and enhancing it will take half my time. I budget the other half the time for lucrative consulting. Unfortunately, the product ends up sucking down nearly all my time just to get enough buyers, and the sales aren't enough to yield a good salary. At some point the buyers dry up completely because they figure it's easier to wait for the time limit than to pay.

The Author isn’t the problem...

[Lissst]

Please excuse my ignorance on this because I haven't read the essay yet, but from my perspective, the problems aren't with the authors, but with the corporations that own the authors work. I don't think the author gives a rats ass who does what with something he/she created once their dead, only the cooperation that owns the rights of that authors work cares. I personally say that when someone dies, so does the copyright, END OF STORY!!!

Re:Copyright laws don't need to change

[stratjakt]

>> For those of you that want to bring up Walt Disney - do you really think society would benefit greatly if the copyright on Mickey Mouse ended?

Who's to decide what 'greatly' means in your context? Will it end world hunger? No. Will it cure cancer? No. Will I be able to show my (grand)children the entertainment I grew up with, in an uneditted non-PC form, without owing anyone anything? Yes.

>> Who cares if it's going to be 120 years (or whatever the number is) before John Irving's novels fall in to the public domain? You want to read one - check one out of the library, it's free.

Well, not only are you then limited by what happens to be in the library, it won't be free for much longer. More and more books are appearing on shelves shrinkwrapped with a pretty EULA borrowed from the new 'digital' legislation. The contract of first sale is no more. As it happens more and more, without 'whining', it becomes more acceptable. Libraries will soon be museums, nothing more.

You ever seen a digital library? Where I can check out a video game, word processing app, etc for free, borrow and return it?

>> You pissed because music is more expensive than you'd like? Listen to the radio - it's free!

Not for long! Digital radio! XM Band! W00t! They can embed a digital copyrighting bit right into the stream, that'll tell you if you can record it or not, or even hear it or not. HDTV - same thing!

The fundamental problem has not been exposed.

[aphor]

Property, as we know it, is a legal definition set down in our tradition by John Locke. It is confined in Locke's conception as things which can be found in the common, improved by individuals, and which also become scarce when they are used. Locke's example is apples growing on trees become a man's property when he "mixes his labour" with them in the process of collection. A collection of shiny apples is surely improved over scattered apples amongst bruised and wormeaten ones. When another person happens on the collected nice apples, it would be wrong to deny the first man the benefit of his "labour" by taking apples from his pile. (maybe I remember this totally wrong.. correct me if so)

If I set some music down on digital media, I have surely improved the media, and it would be wrong to deprive me of the fruits of my labour by taking my improved media from me, but if you improve your own blank media, indistinguishable from mine, by setting music down from memory as you remember hearing it on mine, you have not deprived me of the fruits of my labour.

Intellectual property is a fabrication and an illusion. It does not perform the same as the concept of material property. There is no ethical base for an Intellectual Property Right. Maybe, in a teleological sense we can justify an Intellectual Property Privilege, but we should all just stop using "IP" and Intellectual Property terms until we are sure we all agree exactly what they mean. We should understand them at least as well as the basis for "life, Liberty, and property" which became the model philosophy for American politics.

Information does not have the property of scarcity like Locke's apples. The more you share information, the more there is! (Let's not split hairs, I can demonstrate this aside..) Good or bad, news or propaganda, sharing magnifies it. This is opposite of real property. The more you share a bowl of rice, the less there is to go around. Our laws should not gloss this fundamental difference over.

Re:The fundamental problem has not been exposed.

[RatBastard]

Why should I be denied the fruits of my labors simply because they produce words on piece of paper, sound waves on a magnetic strip or images on a computer screen? Why is it that non-material property is valued less than material ones? Is it because ideas and expessions of those ideas are meaningless, or because they are so easily copied you feel that you should have access to them for free?

If I have no control or ownership of my writings, paintings, songs, etc.. then where the hell is my incentive to share them with you? For what possible reason would I ever release them? I wouldn't. I would hide them away and never let anyone see or hear them for fear that they would be given away to anyone without any sayso on my part and no chance of my reaping any reward for my labor.

Is that the world you want? A wiorld where no books are published? A world where no music is made available? A bleak, artless world brought into existance by people with your narrow-miinded and self-serving mindset?

That's not a world I want to live in.

That isn't historically accurate

[FreeUser]

But nothing compared to the lots and lots of books created after the existence of copyright laws.

When copyright was created, the number of published books plummeted to merely a third of their former diversity. That is a clear situation where one can compare apples to apples: the current state of the artistic environment immediately before, and after, copyrights were imposed.

Anything else is extraordinarilly disingenuous, ignoring the effects of a geometric climb in population, deployment of new and more effecient publishing technologies, and so forth, which are orthogonal to the effects of copyright.

Indeed, later increases in published material have more to do with increases in human population and deployment of technology than it does with copyright, and even those increases are dwarfed by the amount of derivative 'fan fiction' and unpublished works that have been created with no desire for profit whatsoever (many of which are technically illegal under current copyright law, as is, by the way, having a few friends over to watch a movie).

There are all kinds of alternatives to the absurd situation we have now, in which cartels dominate entire artforms by leveraging a system of government entitlement monopolies designed to favor publishers over artists, and both over the rest of society. These alternatives include tax incentives, small punitive taxes on anauthorized works with some or all of the proceeds going back to the orignial creater, etc. and require neither monopoly entitlements nor wealthy patronage.

Copyrights in the digital age must be reformed. To enforce the kinds of entitlement monopolies publishers have enjoyed since the British Crown created the first publishing cartel in the 15th century will require legislation so draconian as to make the former communist eastern block appear liberal in comparison, governance equipment in every home, office, car, and every portable electronic device that both monitors and reports a user's data usage habits, and a crippling of new emergent technologies that would have made any luddite of the 19th century, and every buggy whip manufacturer of the early 20th, proud.

Indeed, that is precisely what Disney and others are advocating, to which the only sane response of anyone who values any of the freedoms our forfathers died to create and protect must answer: if the choice given is one between the artists and publisher's profitability, and everyone elses privacy and individual liberties, then the artists will have to go out and get day jobs.

Of course, that false dichotomy is one Disney et. al. presents because they do not wish to see copyright reform, and would rather trample upon our privacy and liberty rather than adjust their business models to a new technology. In truth artists could make a perfectly fine living in an environment where they were not granted exclusive monopoly entitlements ... indeed, they would likely benefit greatly from it. The only people who would suffer would be publishers, but with the internet, publishers should rightfully be relegated to the role of providing a paid service to artists (and competing with one another to do so), rather than the robber barrons of culture they have been allowed to become for the several centuries.