Copyright Issues in the Mainstream 307
dmayle writes "Recently, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled on a momentous topic, the Grokster case (as covered on Slashdot). It turns out, however, it's not just geeks who are taking notice, and we're not the only ones who think things are getting ridiculous. The Economist has a great story on the subject, noting among other things, that if the cost of publishing had come down with the internet, perhaps the amount of protection needed to encourage publishing is less as well." From the article: "Both the entertainment and technology industries have legitimate arguments. Media firms should be able to protect their copyrights. And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up (along with much of their business). Yet tech and electronics firms are also correct that holding back new technology, merely because it interferes with media firms' established business models, stifles innovation and is an unjustified restraint of commerce."
Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I find that high quality content and ideas are harder to "rip" and replicate. Maybe not the best example, but Slashdot's code and ideas are out in the open, yet there aren't many competing sites for the same audience. The problem, to some extent extent, thus perhaps lies with the quality of content.
The Economist (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Economist (Score:3, Insightful)
congress .. ha! (Score:3, Insightful)
This could happen if the public became suddenly sensitive to this issue, but since the same media companies are also controlling majority of information channels (i.e. TV, news media sites), such awareness will not appear any time soon.
So buckle up and get ready to be taken for a ride by the "content gods": they'll tell you what to watch and how much to pay for it.
Re:Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:5, Insightful)
The more support that independent artists get, the better, including OSS.
Wrong Venue (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Congress is a cesspool of corruption; and yes, Congress gets more time in bed with the entertainment industry in a year than any of us will have with our wives in our entire lifetime. But Congress is the place to fix this, not only because it's the appropriate place but also because Congress is more attune to what people want and more able to make policy decisions. After all, the Supreme Court refers to Congress and the Executive as "the popular branches" for a reason.
Do some research, determine what changes need to be made, and push them through Congress. If it's a good enough idea, then enough people will subscribe to it to convince their legislators to fix the problem. But don't bitch at the Supreme Court for telling you not to break the law. And if you want to make a point about it by breaking the law as a form of civil disobedience, remember (unlike so many current-day protesters) that the hallmark of civil disobedience is being arrested and charged with a crime.
Re:Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:2, Insightful)
That's somehow our fault and we should be punished for it? It is *not* the public's burden to have to support crazed, millionare actors; over-budget films with bad acting, no plot, and too many special effects; fad, cookie-cutter bands, that exhaust their appeal in two months, and expensive videos that may run for one week...
If the media companies want to waste their money on that, fine, but don't expect us to wait out 90+ years (when everyone who saw the movie when it was made) is dead.
Perhaps if movie companies had to make sure that they recouped all their lost money in less than 10 years they would stop paying artists the exorbidant salaries they do, would stop rushing out unfinished and questionable material, and would stop wasting their money on talentless people just because their boob job is top-notch.
Re:They've got to feed their families, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a false analogy -- here's a better one: say you make a horseshoe in your workshop. I then buy it from you. Is it now wrong for me to make my own horseshoes? These horseshoes I will make will not be taken from you -- they will be entirely my creation.
Now, society benefits from a supply of horseshoes, and you might not invent the horseshoe if, once you sold me one, I would never buy another from you. Therefore, society took an unusual step: by legal fiat, we will voluntarily give you a monopoly on your invention for a limited time, even though you can't force us to do it. Since it us doing it, we'll optimize the "limited time" to maximize the benefit to us -- long enough for you to make enough of a profit to justify spending time on creating new things, short enough so that we too can make a profit by making horseshoes. In fact, we realize that if we gave you a permanent monopoly you'll simply grow fat making horseshoes. On the other hand, but limiting the time of your current monopoly we hope you might decide to go back to the shop and invent something new (the crowbar?), so you can get a new monopoly.
Copyright law is based on the same principle, except now it's about ideas rather than physical invensions. Again, we need to strike a balance between allowing the authors to get a return on their investment of time and work, and between our desire to profit from their ideas by selling them as their are (reproduction) or reworking them in new ways (making derivative works).
Re:90+ years? We're all dead, except the corporati (Score:2, Insightful)
1. In an example of 'artists' who make a living on their creative assets, the old copyright standard allowed them to make on a temporary monopoly until that artist could create another piece of work to then copyright and derive income from.
Now, however, we have more people making a living off of infringment lawsuits than the money made from the copyrighted work in question. That's just sad on so many levels.
2. In the case of technology: 5 computers per license isn't that great when there are a growing number of people with a desktop computer, laptop and consistently upgrade. Do I have to spend another several thousand dollars to re(place | new) all my DRM'ed content after I get another 2 computers a few years down the road?
I think a lot of lawmakers are trying to enforce one standard that should work for all mediums of content, and there just seems to be too much difference between digital content and physical to blanket over everything conviently.
backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Justice Breyer, back before he was on the Supreme Court, wrote an interesting article [wikipedia.org] on this, arguing that publishing costs were high enough that we might not need copyright. This was before technology drove publishing costs way down.
There seem to be a lot of people who think "copyright was fine when it was a pain for me to copy stuff, but now that it's easy to copy stuff, we should get rid of copyright". They seem to think that the purpose of copyright law was to tell people they couldn't do what they weren't going to do anyway.
Re:um, no (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright was also meant to protect the consumer, that is, from other less-inspired legislation that would turn it into some perpetual monopoly ala the crap that goes on in the country we broke away from. As copyright has been mutilated, it has protected the consumer even less. And don't let me get started on how badly it has fucked the historian....
Re:Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, special effects (especially CGI) are cheaper to buy than acting talent. Movie success is becoming increasingly dependent on star power, allowing the cast to command incredible salaries.
I think this has little bearing on the copyright debate though. Today, many people want to see Tom Cruise, and are willing to pay for it. A studio is thus justified in paying him US$20M to act in their movie. This is an investment they make -- they hope his name will attract move people to see the movie, thus increasing their profits. Now, the time frame for the studio to profit from this is actually quite short -- let's be conservative and say that it is no more than 30 years. After that, most people will only watch the movie for historical reasons, since there will be many newer releases with more current stars (e.g. Sean Connery).
What is my point? That, assuming 30 years is enough to make a profit (or not) from a movie, the motivation of the studio to make it (independently of how astronomical is the cost of productions) only depends on the returns during that period. Therefore, there is no need to give the studio a 95-year monopoly on reproduction of the movie. A copyright term of 14 years, renewable once [if the movie turned out to be good enough to make it worth their while] would be sufficient and will not reduce their innovation.
Re:New Era? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They've got to feed their families, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright at 14 years would allow for ample opportunities for all artists and authors to get paid for their work, as most of commercial use of the work happens within those 14 years anyway. AND, it allows for other, new authors to create new creative derivative works without huge legal problems; it solves abandonware; it solves orphanware (allowing to reproduce an obscure song cannot get the author's permission because he is dead, but resolving the legal issues of ownership would cost countless thousands).
Re:New Era? (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's not all. The consumer of {movies,music,software} will perceive it as free. As a consequence they'll consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. This will lead to escalating costs for everyone. [invisibleheart.com]
I think it will create many times more problems than the single problem it might solve.Re:New Era? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you even hearing yourself? A central organization (sorry, I'm not a Brit, so I spell it with a "z") with the authority to handle purse strings, and with the authority to collect that money from someplace (taxes? from whom? do all people consume all entertainment in equal measure?) is called The Government. The crazy notion that there is some fixed-size pie out of which all entertainment funds would be paid to creators misses the entire point of creating something new in the first place. Without the prospect of being the person that brings some huge, wildly popular new creation to the audience, all you're talking about is just creating an army of mediocre pie-slice-takers.
Will people be happy being forced to fork out a few grand a year for products? They fork it out already voluntarily
But they fork it out according to their tastes and willingness to spend. "People" do not all spend the same on their entertainment. Not even counting the people who cheat and pay nothing, there are people who will actually go to the theatre and see the same movie more than once, or that actually buy DVDs for their kids... but then there are people who never go to the cinema, and have no kids. The difference in media consumption could vary by thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Do people get a say in what's produced?
They do already. If something is truly terrible, people won't pay for it. If someone has a reputation for continually producing terrible work, no one will risk investment to pay them to produce more. Or, if they do, that's their business.
How do we insure the producer is producing a quality product?
Why do we care? And, "quality" by what standard? That's the whole point. Some parts of population have a completely different sense of what "quality" is. For example, I just don't get Bollywood films. They aren't compelling to me in any way. Likewise, there are people who consider Merchant Ivory films so glacial as to be anesthetic. So, why introduce some ridiculous bureaucracy to weigh in on it? The audiences, critics, reviewers, bloggers, and word-of-mouth friends are vastly more efficient at moderating the quality and helping you decide when to spend money on entertainment.
strict auditing of the producers
Auditing by... the governemt? Auditing by some elitist guild? How about just stick with auditing by the audience? Why make everything more complex, add a compulsary component (essentially, if you don't pay your entertainment taxes, you go to jail?) and an entire additional layer of non-creative people who do not have a personal vested interest in seeing a particular film, for example, make it to the audiences...
but one which does eliminate the problem sellers we are now facing
Problem sellers? The problem is the non-buyers. If the people that claim they respect the artists actually did respect them by doing business with them in the way the artists have asked, we'd have no problem at all. Artists that go through big studios/companies have one approach, artists who use oddball indy-methods have another approach... no, the only problem here is that some people simply don't want to pay for entertainment, and know that, for now, they have a fairly good chance of not getting caught with their ripped copy of some DVD.
Regardless, I'd rather have the dull roar of back-and-forth lawsuits over pirating than have the government collect money from me, on pain of jail time, and then decide by committee which artists should get paid out of that year's creative pie fund. No thank you. I think watching the Cultural Revolution in China handle it that way was enough of a lesson for everyone, don't you?
Re:um, no (Score:5, Insightful)
No one has any natural right to any possession. Fundamentally, my property is defined by what I can either take and hide, or take and defend by any force I have available.
Government, via "social contract", creates and protects property rights and acts as the sanctioned force used to enforce those rights. The question then becomes, "what defines property, what defines fairness, and what limits and enpowers those rights?"
And that's why there's any argument at all. All the players in the intellectual property game have different and sometimes opposed ideas of roles, rights, and responsibilities. Fairness begins to boil down to "fair to who?", with the answer becoming "whoever can influence government to protect their interest best".
Explicitly, copyright was used to create and protect possession of the intellectual expression of a creator's ideas to allow those creators to profit for a short time by creating artificial scarcity and temporary monopoly. (Ideas and their expressed artifacts, uncaged, tend to flow around and multiply without regard to their creators' wishes to make a buck by them.) This was explicitly intended as incentive to publish, to share with culture the product of a creator's mind. The consumer's "right" to that creator's creation were deliberately circumscribed during the copyright time period. After that, the creation escapes into public domain.
Now, however, the rights of creators (or more specifically, the rights of those media corporate entities who co-opt the creators and wield their rights by proxy) have placed their profit rights well beyond the reasonable scope of incentive and, as you say, into the realm of perpetual monopoly, at the expense of the society which was intended as the primary beneficiary.
Sad, truly sad.
Re:But.. (Score:2, Insightful)
copyrights != patents
And if the first horseshoe costs $100 million?.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely true! Yet I suspect that most of the ongoing illegal distribution of media on the internet would still violate any of proposed changes to rebalance copyright suggested in the Economist article. What percentage of P2P music and video is older than 14 years? Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?
Re:They've got to feed their families, too. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cost of publishing or cost of creation (Score:3, Insightful)
But here's the fucked up part, a movie is considered a failure if it doesn't recoup its cost in the first few weeks. Add DVD sales and a movie is going to make 90% of the money they can hope to wring out of it in 2 years max. And I would suspect thats a long estimate.
So why the hell do they need 90 years to sit on these thing!!!
Re:90+ years? We're all dead, except the corporati (Score:3, Insightful)
If they release it into the world, the whole thing changes. It starts influencing things, people build around it, teach it to their kids. It becomes our thing, rather than their thing. So it is only fitting that they lose the right to control it after a suitable time.
If all ideas belonged forever to their originator, it would be a pathetic world. Can you imagine science where you'd have to license every idea you built on in order to publish your own work? Music where every instrument, every note, every muscial style was copyrighted to death, and completely unavailable? Literature where all plots are copyrighted? Can you imagine computer science where, in order to write code, you have to first buy a license to use a programming language?
That's what you're advocating. That's apparently what you want, so you can horde the tiny part of the world that you originated, which is based entirely on the works of everyone who went before.
Just be glad they didn't feel the same way.
It is the duration that hurts (Score:2, Insightful)
Long copyrights protect artists from having to compete with old public domain works. Copyright lasts so long that only very old work is in the public domain. Old stuff gets "retired" by the copyright holders, neither for sale nor in the public domain.
That is against the public interest. If artists can produce work that is better or more up to date than good, old work, then a short term of copyright provides a business model and funding. If an artist's work cannot compete with the good, old stuff, because lacks enduring merit and also lacks shiny newness it does the general public great harm to force it onto them by retiring the good, old stuff.
Re:backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
There seem to be a lot of people who think "copyright was fine when it was a pain for me to copy stuff, but now that it's easy to copy stuff, we should get rid of copyright". They seem to think that the purpose of copyright law was to tell people they couldn't do what they weren't going to do anyway.
This assumes that the sole purpose of copyright is to protect the author or their content; if so, it's a valid point. But falling distribution costs also mean that it's cheaper to acheive the same level of creation we had previously. Cheaper production means faster return on your initial 'investment', thus a shorter copyright period is required to secure that return [in the general case].
It's really an issue of whether you believe that technology will increase the ease with which material is 'pirated', or will decrease the cost of production. In reality both will occur, but it's unfair to assert that technology is so beneficial to the 'pirates', yet does nothing for the creators.
Even if you could argue that the level piracy is outstripping the dropping price of creation, there's still the question of whether it serves society as a whole to fund more and more creation. As our resources increase, our standard of living goes up, population increases, people have more free time to pursue the arts as a hobby, etc., you could argue that there is less and less need for paid production of creative material. This doesn't apply as much to the big-dollar Hollywood movies, but those will continue to earn money through box-office sales for a long time anyway.
Re:The trouble with copyright, and a possible solu (Score:4, Insightful)
Artists have been creating art, sculpture and music several hundred years before copyright even existed, let alone before long (90-year) copyrights existed. There will still be art and music when copyrights cease to exist. You may have noticed that video did not in fact kill the radio star.
This metality strikes me as a sort of temporal cultural-centrism: "without the system we have now, there would not be the things we have now."
There are non-monopoly systems of distribution which provide material benefit to creators of art. Direct or indirect patronage systems, for example. My point is not to endorse these here, but rather to remind everyone that there are "other ways to run the railroad," i.e. - copyrights are not the only (or even best way) to provide art and music.
And I expect this to happen... (Score:3, Insightful)
And I expect this to happen oh, about NEVER!
People here live and breath to do certain things. Would the phonograph have driven Mozart out of the composing business? Did the player piano end live performances?
Do you really think Hollywood is suddenly going to decide, "Oh my, the masses have discovered broadband Internet connections. Time to turn out the lights, sell this valuable real estate, and get a new profession."
Ain't going to happen. They'll adapt and they'll continue to prosper. All this you'll lose all the good programming if you don't give us everything we want is nothing more than scare tactics. Truth is, most of them really can't do anything else, and wouldn't want to if they could.
Re:90+ years? We're all dead, except the corporati (Score:2, Insightful)
Business Model (Score:4, Insightful)
Over the past century the media publishers have continued to increase their profit for the same goods. Extension of the copyright life has served to increase this almost indefinitely. As long as there was not a vast web of computers connected via the internet this model works fine, however this medium of communcation does exist, and makes publication orders of magnitude cheaper than previous means.
The problem is the over-inflated profit margins of the 'legacy' publishing companies can not be supported in a free market where consumers are used to getting boundless resources for just a monthly access fee. Advances in technology allow musicians to record their own music just as well as the record labels (and actually many of the offerings from indie/free music are better than the vast majority of traditional record label offerings), allows writers to reach millions of potential readers, and software developers to distribute their own work without the overhead of packaging and promotion in traditional retail operations.
Extending copyrights, restricting file sharing to such an extent that it impinges on fair use, and holding the developers of software that supports it liable for damages is not the solution - it is only a short sighted bandaid to help companies maintain their profits at the detriment of invention and society in general. The real solution is for the traditional publishers to rethink their business model and accept the fact that profit margins will have to fall back to realistic levels, or they will lose customers.
Case in point: I no longer purchase traditional music CDs because of the inflated pricing and forced packaging. Instead I download indy/free music - which doesn't infringe on anyone's rights and is within the realm of what I believe is a reasonable price to pay (small or free - when compared to the major record label's prices).
Technology is ushering in a time when it is reasonable for individuals to make their own music, movies, and publish their own books. The middle-man in the sense of the large media distribution conglomerate is not needed, and most people are finding is not wanted. The more the conglomerates try to stem the tide of change through draconian means, the more people will search for alternatives that do not run afoul of the law and does not put more money into the inflated jaws of the media publishers. Publishing companies will either change their business model to play in this space, or perish due to the ill will they provoke in their (previous) customer base through insisting on pursuing an outdated business model.
The most interesting thing about all of this is how companies don't couch their lobbying for extensions to copyright and their efforts to 'stem the tide' as interrum measures. For all intents and purposes they are not attempting to change. This would be like radio companies lobbying congress to prevent televisions from being used to show programming in the 1930s - and all of us in 2005 sitting around a radio listening to the 'Slashdot' show. Time marches on, and breakthroughs in technology eventually become available to the public. Business has to be more flexible to deal with those inevitable changes when they come; this takes long term planning - which business is not good at (in an almost childish way; a child 'wants it now', and adult prioritizes, plans, and sets aside resources for the day when changes are needed to make the transition smooth). Instead the customer must deal with change - but the twist is the customers now have the tools to change and remove the middle man from the equation - which they will if businesses don't change their ways.
Re:um, no (Score:2, Insightful)