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The Case For Perpetual Copyright
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun May 20, 2007 01:46 PM
from the for-a-limited-time dept.
from the for-a-limited-time dept.
Several readers sent in a link to an op-ed in the NYTimes by novelist Mark Halprin, who lays out the argument for what amounts to perpetual copyright. He says that anything less is essentially an unfair public taking of property: "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind." This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain, words which don't appear in the op-ed. In a similar vein, reader benesch sends us to the BBC for a tale of aging pop performers (virtually) serenading Parliament in favor of extending copyright for recording artists in the UK. Some performers are likely to outlive the current protections, now fixed at a mere 50 years.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
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The Case For Perpetual Copyright
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what are you wacked? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:5, Informative)
This guy is known to write biting satire... Either that article is a fine example, or its one of the worst reasoned essays I've ever read.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.google.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 12 2006, @06:04PM)
With perpetual copyrights, we would have perpetual heritage disputes (who owns the works of Aristotle these days?), and all important works locked away. This is just stupid.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perpetual copyrights are today's equivalent to burning down the Library at Alexandria.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:4, Funny)
No one was landing on the moon back then, and there was no Interweb.
Since burning the Great Library resulted in all this progress, we should immediately implement perpetual copyrights. Q.E.D.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is not that we landed on the moon - the point is where would we be in the astronomers of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India had been able to work together since the beginning.
Instead we have entire continents that went to fire and sword as one empire after another fell. With them fell their knowledge, their science, and their arts. Perpetual copyright is tanamount to having the most beautiful spouse in the world... but being unable to touch them or speak to them.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.lulu.com/zotz | Last Journal: Sunday December 17 2006, @11:19AM)
Yes they could, but only at the expense of giving up their claimed "moral high ground"...
Not that I think it is the moral high ground in any case...
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOFnAlXrV8 [youtube.com]
UFO Potcake Film! Check it out!
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
If you want to keep control of an idea, don't tell anyone about it. Nothing the government can do will keep people from imagining that Harry Potter had one more adventure. Eventually an idea will grow beyond control no matter how strong the copyright laws are.
Request for Payment to Mr Halprin (Score:4, Interesting)
In light of a rumored bill before Congress to retroactively extend the limited copyright in the US to 25000 years after the death of the author (or the destruction of the last copy of the work, whichever comes last), we are investigating several potential copyright infringements in your last op-ed entitled "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?".
Descendants of James Madison request to be compensated for any citation, partial or full, of any of his works. Descendants of Hammurabi (currently estimated at about 127 million) claim copyright on any western law text and discussion thereof, as they are all derivative works of Hammurabi's Code of Law. Finally, there have been claims by descendants of Evander, son of the Sybil, that all Roman letters fall under their copyright, and that therefore any text using them needs to pay them a fair share of proceeds.
Preliminary calculations put the projected statutory infringement fines at 4.2 trillion dollars. This number may change as more claimants come forward. As it is unknown how much more the US Congress is going to extend copyrights, we suggest to settle sooner rather than later.
Sincerely,
Howard Howe,
Dewey, Chetham & Howe, LLP
Please reprint and distribute freely.
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to share freely, don't do it at all. You're not a special and unique person, and you have nothing earth shattering to say that would justify participating in a system that restricts access to information and culture based on money for no justifiable reason whatsoever.
If you have so little passion for what you think and so little pride in what you create that you would prefer not to share it with the rest of us unless you are bribed to do so, then I would suggest you go get a job at MacDonalds and spend you free time on the beach working on your tan.
You're just contributing to the ever growing pile of soulless trite commercially driven crap that dulls the mind and obscures the work that has merit anyways. We won't miss you.
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:5, Insightful)
Note too that the artist with the perpetual copyright would in fact need to pay a fee to the manufacturer of the paint he or she used. After all, the work that the paint company went through to create the paint needs to be recognized.
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.haeleth.net/)
If I do some work, I get paid for it once and that's that. What's so special about artistic work that means artists should get paid again and again and again for the same bit of work?No, of course not. He has the right to sell the paintings he paints, and his descendants have the right to sell any paintings he didn't sell in his lifetime. Just as an author has a right to sell the stories he writes. Just as a builder has a right to sell the houses he builds. That's all perfectly fair.
However, I don't believe a painter's descendants have a right to demand money every time someone looks at one of his paintings, and I don't believe an author has a right to demand money every time someone reads a story he wrote. They can make money by doing work and then selling it. If they then want to make more money, they can do more work, just like everybody else has to.And they manage to make a living just fine without perpetual copyrights, so what's the problem?Why? What the hell gives a child the right to earn a living from his parents' work? If you want to have a living, you should have to do your own work and earn your money, not sit back and expect money to roll into your pockets because of someone else's hard work. Why should people expect to get money from work they had nothing to do with producing? What's fair about that?
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.quantumtemple.com/)
I don't know, would you deny a plumber the right to make money every time you use your faucet or toilet, or would you want to pay an architect every time you opened your door to your house? How about "his" family after he's dead? Anyone can be an artist or writer and there is no certification or even skill required to produce it so why we would treat what would appear to be the least qualified people as though they were better than truly skilled and certified artisans is beyond me.
This seems akin to how our society is obsessed with completely defying natural selection by making sure we warn the idiots and retards of society that it's not wise to bring a plugged-in toaster into the shower with you; it's little more than making it easier for the idiots, whose only valuable contribution to society might be one single work of art, to live a long and comfortable enough life to breed and produce even more idiots. Real artists who want to make money should have to work, like the rest of us, to reap "repeating" benefits and their families can reap them IF the artist was wise enough to invest it for them. If they can't produce enough good art to survive then maybe they're not cut out to be an artist.
What such a thing would encourage would be our entire society to give up any education in hopes of making one single piece of art, visual or auditory, that will actually sell decently so they can live as though they are entitled to a comfortable living because of that single work, making our society even dumber than it already is. What we call an IQ of 80 would soon be our 120.
Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the population is even dumber than that. --George Carlin.
Re:Kill Disney (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.tjerkstra.org/)
they will buy the public domain (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday November 11 2004, @05:39AM)
Not a good parallel (Score:4, Insightful)
Information always had value. But by limiting its availability, it also gets a price.
Artists Have No Right to Permanent Copyright (Score:3, Funny)
Don't they...?
There is no intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 20 2006, @10:30AM)
"If I have an apple and and you have an apple and we swap we will each have one apple. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we swap we now each have two ideas."
Surely this is how intellectual "property" should work.
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday November 03 2003, @03:59PM)
I don't know the best solution to this situation. Clearly we want to reward people to create patterns for a living: writers, musicians, filmmakers. Just as clearly, doing so using the same mechanisms as physical property is no longer workable. (It was, at one point in the past: an author traded his book to a publisher for money, who then had the exclusive license to print physical copies. That no longer holds in a world where such things are sold electronically.)
Like I said, I don't have any solutions. I do know that I find the attitude that "if I can copy it I should be able to" (which I see a fair bit of on Slashdot) rather self-serving: people are taking their newfound ability to copy music, movies, etc. and objecting to any attempt to limit it as if they were entirely entitled to it. The sellers are still working under an old paradigm, and it's unfair to tell them that they're the losers until somebody manages to come up with a new paradigm.
I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm. Instead, the attitude seems to be, "Hey, free music/movies/etc!". Tremendous effort is put into breaking any new copy protection (which, I concur, will be ultimately futile) and none into suggesting a new business model.
(Well, there's the ever popular "musicians should play more concerts" model. If I ever meet such a person in person, I shall ask them if they've ever tried to play concerts professionally, and if they haven't I shall spit in their faces.)
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.borkbork.org/~bigjoe | Last Journal: Tuesday December 30 2003, @03:11PM)
In my opinion, when you create something and share it, you've given up your exclusive right to it. It "belongs" to society, simply because locking it up requires an unnatural effort to prevent an idea (or information) from being expressed. That's why physical property and intellectual property are just naturally different things. As I said, I'm willing to tolerate an artificial "lending" of that property back to its creator long enough to create an economic incentive to create, but the laws as they stand now are ridiculously imbalanced.
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget his other flaw. (Score:5, Insightful)
Go ahead and skip paying the property taxes (unless you're a church) and see how long it takes the government to take those away.
If you want to treat "intellectual property" the same as physical property, then let's start with taxing it. Even if it doesn't make a profit for you. If you've released it, it goes into Public Domain unless you keep paying the taxes on it.
I actually believe that this would be the best "middle ground" between the the two sides. 99.999% of the stuff published would NOT be valuable enough to keep paying taxes on, year after year after year. Say $5 per item (single song, single story, single program, etc).
The items that ARE that valuable are so valuable that the owners (not necessarily the original producers of the work) can BUY legislation that extends copyright indefinitely for EVERYTHING. Even the 99.999% of stuff that isn't worth it.
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this one of the ways a culture can commit suicide?
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" actually infringes upon others' right to think.
Imagine the future. It is clear that some day, maybe soon or maybe distant, we will know how to interface computers directly with the mind. We will quite literally expand our own minds. What is the difference between a book stored in your digital memory and a book stored in someone's birth-given photographic memory? What is the difference between DRM in a computer and DRM in a mind? How can you have preemptive systems that stop the transfer of information without affecting the computers connected to our brains? This is, literally, the path to third-party mind control.
Are we going to have "intellectual" laws that make it illegal to remember something for too long, or too precisely? Will we have laws that make it illegal to communicate something you know? Because, at its base, this is what intellectual property is. It will become more and more evident as humans gain physical control over their own minds.
So much insanity in that article I don't know wher (Score:3, Insightful)
"Freeing" a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, "The Garden Party," while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
Has this guy heard of the internet? Where anyone can 'publish' for almost no cost.
Re:So much insanity in that article I don't know w (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I'm in favour of the public domain, and in favour of it sooner rather than later. When your idea, or you implementation, or your song, or your algorithm, or your sheet music go into the public domain, it fosters innovation. The short-term monopoly you are given fosters the actual creation, but when it enters the public domain the real innovation hits. Look, for instance, how hiphop artists are sampling old public domain records. Look at code that's free to be changed. The examples are endless.
But at the end of the day the real challenge is not people extending copyright and treating patents like warheads and trademarking the "Apple". The real challenge is, instead, educating the masses why what you create isn't yours naturally. It's ours. It's the way it's always been: what humanity creates belongs to humanity. You can try to stop it, of course. But you'll fail.
Re:People should be paid but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they still have unlimited time to 'commercially exploit their material'. The limit is only on the time that the ability is solely theirs.
When the copyright expires on Madonna's stupid Bananas song, she doesn't lose the ability to make money from it. She can still sing in it concerts, sell CDs/MP3s/whatever, and anything else she wants. Others will be able to sell CDs/MP3s of it, but they will still be completely unable to BE her and sing it live in concert.
And for her to stop making money on the CDs requires the assumption that nobody will pay for the official CD. Collectors, fans, and others who simply enjoy the music will continue to buy the original to support the artist.
What removing lengthy copyrights DOES do it remove the bullshit from the system. No more price-gouging for CDs. They can't pay the artist $.07 a song and sell them for $1.30 anymore. They'll have to actually have reasonable rates because someone else WILL sell it for a reasonable rate.
(My apologies to those of you who actually like the Bananas song. All 3 of you.)
Copyright is Public Protection (Score:5, Insightful)
So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society. IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society. The article's author wants to subvert the contract completely in the favor of one side. In U.S. contract law, for contracts to be valid, both sides have to have had a clear benefit for the contract to be considered valid.
Copyright already has been subverted to the one side so often (copyright extensions) without any clear benefits given for the other side, I would have to start arguing that the contract is not valid anymore. I don't believe anybody is owed rights that place an undue burden on society unless society also benefits in some way. This is not the case here.
If you want your thing protected forever, lock it in a vault, don't let it see the light of day, and don't tell anybody about it. Let it die, along with you eventually.
Re:Copyright is Public Protection (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.mung.net/ | Last Journal: Monday June 16 2003, @08:41AM)
What everyone is forgetting is that society agrees to enforce copyright but it has costs. I agree to let you and only you sell your work (without taking it, just copying it or doing whatever I would wish with it) because then you have an incentive but there is no reason for me to spend lots of resources to ensure that you keep all the gain if there is no give back.
The cost on enforcing copyright is paid for by society with the idea that it gains. If there is no gain, why spend enormous resources protecting copyright?
Copyright is not some inherent right and I keep thinking everyone keeps forgetting this.
Strange (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 19, @07:48AM)
Strange, in his article Helprin doesn't mention anything about HIM paying royalties to Shakespeare's descendants for his use of the title Winter's Tale [wikipedia.org] for his novel (it is the name of, and a reference to a Shakespeare play). Presumably he should cough up something for the use of a similar plot device too.
No mention either of what he should be paying the descendants of every innovator in printing technology.