Pirate Party Leader: Copyright Laws Ridiculous 543
smitty777 writes "Rick Falkvinge, better known as the leader for Sweden's Pirate Party, recommends doing away with copyright laws since no one is following them anyway. FTA: '...he uses examples from the buttonmakers guild in 1600s France to justify eliminating the five major parts of copyright law today. The first two are cover duplication and public performance, and piracy today has ruined those. The next two cover rights of the creator to get credit and prevent other performances, satires, remixes, etc they don't like. Falkvinge says giving credit is important, but not worthy of a law. Finally, "neighboring rights" are used by the music industry to block duplication, which Falkvinge rejects.'"
Typical Politician (Score:4, Interesting)
He sounds like a typical politician, making big bold lies that are more descriptive of how he sees the world than how it is.
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software. Those that don't often give reasons like "I wanted to try it before buying it" or "It's not available for sale [where I live]/[in a format I want]" or "I can't afford it anyway", suggesting that they would follow the laws given the right circumstances.
It's good that people generally follow these laws, because the core idea of copyright (that creators have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work) is a good one.
Now, the statement that "Copyright laws are ridiculous" is unambiguously true. Any law that suggests the unauthorized download of MP3s causes trillions of dollars worth of damage to the economy is clearly insane. But suggesting that we should have no protection for creators at all is equally insane. It's just a nice fiery soundbite intended to get his supporters all worked up, so that they'll donate more or participate in get out the vote efforts, etc.
We need copyright reform, and hopefully the pirate parties draw attention to that fact. But copyright abolition is a cure worse than the disease.
Shorter copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's not pretend that copyright doesn't have a good purpose. If I create a new product (w/o a patent), it can take time for other people to copy it. They have to reverse engineer it, and figure out how everything works. And their copy might not be as good as my version.
But with books, music, software... It can be copied the day it's released. And every copy is an exact perfect duplicate. My copy is just as good as another persons copy.
And that difference, means it would be nearly impossible to monetize anything except physical products. So copyrights are needed and are important.
BUT that doesn't mean it should be protected for a 100+ years. Is the phone from 1876 as important today as it was then? Is last decades music listened to as much as music that was released last week? Are books from 100 years ago as popular as today's bestsellers? Copyrighted material becomes worth less as time passes.
After 10 years or so, very few copyrighted works are worth more than a fraction of what they were originally.
So set a 10 year copyright. I would even go for 15 years.. but that's starting to become excessive.
Exponential Growth (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow any work to be copyrighted for 1 year without paying any fees. Let that be the "copyright from the moment your pen touches the paper".
Beyond Year 1, the cost of extending a copyright should be $0.01 * 2 ^ (Year #).
So, renewing the copyright for Year 2 costs $0.04.
Year 10 is $10.24
Copyright protection for a decade is affordable for anyone, and sometimes cheaper than coffee.
Year 20 is $10,485.76
Year 30 is $10,737,418.24
Year 40 is $10,995,116,277.76
So it provides everybody with a reasonable measure of copyright protection.
It provides corporate entities a way to keep copyrights on things that are very profitable.
It ensures that all works will eventually fall to the public domain.
Why not?
Re:He seems to confuse the purpose of copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
"Useful Arts" actually refers to patentable handicraft; the consitution's motivation for the patent monopolies. This is the same word as you see in "artisan".
"Progress of Science" refers to knowledge subject to the copyright monopolies.
There's Not Enough Lawyers! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was just reading about this in Lessig's book, "Free Culture" [amazon.com] today. I can't recommend the book enough!
I never knew Walt Disney's Steamboat Mickey [wikipedia.org] infringed on Steamboat Bill, Jr [wikipedia.org] which infringed on the song Steamboat Bill [wikipedia.org]. Ironic, isn't it? Too bad the madness isn't stopping anytime soon...
Ahem, FCC? Yeah, could you read this.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This looks like it was cut and paste from some sort of official spreadsheet or list. Wasn't there a massive antitrust lawsuit back in the 1970s where the government came down down hard on Pay for Play radio stations? The snippet I pasted above looks to my untrained eye like prices for playing singles. Could you expand on where you got this info, DCTech?
Re:Typical Politician (Score:5, Interesting)
But copyright abolition is a cure worse than the disease.
The movie industry would bitch and moan for 5-10 years, then get back to business as usual, with movies being played in theaters and on TV, even if DVDs never get released (and likely, DVDs would be released at a $5-$10 price point, rather than the $30 price point most new DVDs list at). Books would stay as is. The result of complete abolition of copyright would be an explosion in music and software the likes of which the planet has never seen. Copyright is holding innovation back more than helping at this point, and doing so by punishing the general public. With it gone, more music would be out there, with no decrease in quality, and app store sized games would be released by the millions. Consoles would probably move back to cartridges and flash-based propriatary storage to maintain a digitial lock on games, and PC games would crash, but the fallout of the abolition would be a huge jump forward in Public knowledge, which was the original point of copyright. The US would be much much better off without copyright. I've visited some places with no software protections, and they are vibrant economies of software creation. You can code whatever you want without worrying that someone else has locked up some feature you thought up. Most software patents are obvious and not novel, and elimination of that hurdle increases programming output.
I can't see any likely future in which we'd be better off with the course we've set vs complete abolition of all IP laws. It would take some getting used to, and some would purposefully sabotage themselves to prove a point, but overall, the world would be a much better place if all I laws (patents as well) were abolished, than to continue the system as done today.
Of course, there is a middle ground, closer to what existed when the Constitution was first ratified where the terms were much shorter and patents could only be of "things" rather than "thoughts" that is better than either extreme. But that was perverted to what we have now, so I'd opt for complete abolition than a middle ground which the content exploiters immediately strive to overthrow, as they have already done once.
Re:Shorter copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
"Classic" things have had their time, and that time has passed. If those specific works are still around, they should have entered culture and be in the public domain as is the *default* without the government-granted copyright protection.
To those who answer "not totally ridiculous"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Please, I'm begging you: stop trying to negotiate as though the other side was rational and honorable, and would honor any agreement for the long term.
That's how they get us, every time. They pretend that they'll act like human beings, and then they push for more. Every time. Because that's what sociopaths do: they see the pie and they want it all. And they're willing to be patient if it gets them what they want. And make no mistake: what they want is the whole thing, forever, and every one of us paying them, regardless of how much we use or enjoy.
The only way to counter that is to act as irrationally, and in the other direction. It's not that there can't be a sane middle ground; it's that as long as we advocated for a sane middle ground, we got extended and renegotiated into the current situation. If we keep trying to negotiate for a sane middle ground, we're the ones to blame when the next Mickey Mouse preservation act passes. We're the ones to blame when the public domain starts to shrink. We're the ones to blame, until we start acting as sociopathic as corporations, including being so utterly charming that our point of view seems as reasonable as theirs, so the sane middle ground must be the right compromise.
Re:He seems to confuse the purpose of copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange.. it has always been my take that this is waht usually deters budding artists, and it isn't the issue of being paid.
First: many kids in school start learning to draw all on their own. They cover the insides of their binders and notebooks in cute, sometimes inventive gaphiti. Teachers get angry with them for "wasting their time", when in reality the teachers want them to do homework rather than draw.
This denouncement of the activity sends a destructive message that these activities are not worthwhile, at a particularly important point in neural development. Specifically, the creation of neurons for skills honed later in life happens during childhood, with aggressive pruning happening in teenage to young adult years. "Motor memory" and other intrinsic manipulation abilities develop at this time. By distracting from artistic development and interest in childhood, we literally program people to avoid becoming artists, and sabotage the ones that still persist, despite this message and even being penalised for their persistence.
Second: people believe nobody will want their art. Since art supplies are expensive, lessons to "properly" use those supplies are expensive, and the prospect of producing crap that they can't even give away, people avoid dabbling with artwork.
Third: if they produce art, how do they share it? (Art is impotent unless shared with others.) Recent trends with things like deviant art and other internet art communities have made this easier, but so far only a handful of artforms are able to be shared this way. For example, sculpture is particularly hard to share online, unless created in a purely digital form.
So, if you want people to make art, the better way to incentivize them is to stop telling kids that they need to stop seeking artistic output, show people that even horrible dross has aesthetic followings, and to help artists find those followings.
Notice that nowhere was any money involved.
The best thing that money does, is provide a tangible measure of demand for a genre of artwork. That's all.
Re:He seems to confuse the purpose of copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
The publicity given by the record label has certainly not reached me
Re:He seems to confuse the purpose of copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
Has this even the slightest relation to the things copyright holders go to court these days? (ie: digital copies of of movies)
It All Boils Down To This: Abolish I.P. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no such thing is intellectual property.
I repeat: There is no such thing as intellectual property.
Information ceases to be your sole property the second that it leaves your head, and since the invention of language, once broadcast in any way a piece of information becomes infinitely reproducible, and by their very nature all recordings of any kind, be it written words, pictures, or sounds, are also infinitely reproducible. Improvements in recording and publishing technologies, from woodblock printing, to the phonograph and typewriters, all the way to cassette tapes and networked computers, have made producing and duplicating information increasingly trivial. No form of information is technically scarce.
However, copyright laws and patents achieve their desired ends by attempting to create an artificial scarcity of information through legislative fiat. They in effect commoditize information which is inherently unlike a commodity, giving it scarcity and therefore market value. In the process of doing this however, much of the information's value is lost because its maximum potential utility is curtailed by limiting the number of parties which can use it, and by giving exclusive rights to a certain party over who can retain, utilize, and duplicate a piece of information, information access is effectively monopolized.
This is harmful to the value of information and those who use it, the creation of privileged monopolies over pieces of information practically ensures that they will be abused, and it fails to address the original problem of compensating authors. On the other hand, it confers extraordinary rights and privileges to rights holders who own copyrights and patents, frequently for information which was never created by them personally. Additionally, how is it just that someone should continue receiving compensation for work that they are no longer performing? How is it just that someone should be compensated for work that they never did? The absurdities of patent and copyright law immediately begin compounding on one another after even cursory examination.
Having said that, the act of producing original information and original records of that information can be readily commoditized. It is scarce - only so many people can produce a desired piece of information or a desired record, and from them only so many hours of work can be extracted. It is valuable - the production of new information benefits society, and maximally benefits society when information can be freely utilized by any party. Intellectual property is imaginary, but intellectual labor is a very real service which is the sole property of the intellectual laborer. Its value can be decided, it can be quantified, and it can be sold. Ensuring that intellectual laborers are adequately compensated for their work is of paramount importance to society.
In the case of patentable products which can be produced by industry, or for the processes used to create those products, wherever a patent is applicable, the intellectual laborers working for an industrial company or consortium of companies should negotiate their own pay. If they don't get paid enough, they don't produce work. Auctioning of services, prize competitions, and so on could be used to compensate the inventors for the production of inventions alongside regular contracts. As for the companies themselves, which use the monopolization of inventions to protect themselves from competition, any one industrial company does not have unlimited resources and is therefore incapable of using or producing every available invention. Those companies will still be tasked with producing products as efficiently and effectively as possible, without the purely artificial constraint of copyrights and patents applying to them. They will still have to decide how to best reach the market. The competition will simply be more fierce, and this is entirely desirable.
In the case of cultural artifacts and the recorded arts which can be copyrighted, the above still applies, and