Crowdsourced Finnish Copyright Initiative Meets Signature Requirement 166
First time accepted submitter Koookiemonster writes "The Finnish citizens' initiative site (Finnish/Swedish only) has fulfilled the required amount of signatures for the third initiative since its founding. This means that the Parliament of Finland is required to take the Common Sense in Copyright initiative into processing. The initiative calls for removal of copyright infringement as a crime, reducing violations by private individuals to a misdemeanor."
Torrent Freak notes "This makes Finland the first country in the world in which legislators will vote on a copyright law that was drafted by citizens."
U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how much U.S., cough, international pressure will they get so that there's no chance of any such law ever passing. Should this initiative succeed in Finland, there's no knowing what other countries may pick up on the idea - and that would really be disastrous to the public image of the media cartel. Note that I specifically said "disastrous to the public image". As far as I can tell, it'd actually improve the bottom lines of the cartel, but they themselves seem to pretend otherwise. It's an industry driven by a bunch of control freaks, it's not even about money anymore.
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Personally I think it's best for them just to ignore piracy and not comment on in one way or another; just go on selling your products. If you
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:4, Informative)
No need for U.S. or international pressure. Finland is subject of multiple so called "intelectual property" agreements, which require lot of rules in question to be implemented in national law. And you can't overrule it - sorry, that's why they went "IP trade agreements" in first place.
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If such agreements become incompatible with Finnish law they will have to be abandoned. I can't really see how that would end up hurting Finland more than it would the US.
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They are technically "overruling" even constitution, it doesn't mean that they can be incompatible with it though. Only way to strip those rules from law book is void agreement. But for that there can be much wilder political and economical consequences.
Would like to see healthy discussion about it anyway of course.
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And that's the problem, actually. Finnish politicians have this weird thing going where they show their responsibility and altruism by hurting their own country. It lets them pretend to be European leaders or global leaders rather than the leaders of a small, insignificant country at the arctic circle. And being leaders, it's not them but the rest of us who pay the price.
That's the reason why Finland typically goes above and
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Ok, then it is doable then, good to know :) Of course, question is if there's goodwill from politicians to do this, but still...if agreements doesn't block it, there's some hope :)
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No need for U.S. or international pressure. Finland is subject of multiple so called "intelectual property" agreements, which require lot of rules in question to be implemented in national law. And you can't overrule it - sorry, that's why they went "IP trade agreements" in first place.
Finland could ignore these treaties. America would go to the WTO crying foul, the dispute settlement body would probably agree, then finland would have to either repeal the relevant law or suffer the consequences. In this case the most likely consequence would be the US getting to take retaliatory measures of some kind against Finland, either an import tariff on Finnish goods or maybe even getting to crap all over finnish copyright.
This might be just what we need to get rid of Linus as he loses the copyrigh
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I didn't say that you can't ignore treaties. You can. But you can't precisely pinpoint implications. Starting from lawsuits, and ending with political fallouts.
U.S. is biggest IP producer to date, so they will protect their export. I can fully understand them. World couldn't allow such agreements in first place.
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:4, Insightful)
no one wants to control people who create things; nobody is trying to force the people who create things to do anything. they just want to remove the control over people who reproduce what other people have created.
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course, the obvious reaction:
Blame Canada [youtube.com]
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They don't want you to be one of their clients.
Fortunately it's not a problem as long as you don't need them to be one of your providers.
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Fortunately it's not a problem as long as you don't need them to be one of your providers.
That's easy to say when you're not the one surfing the net and come across several news articles a day that consist of blocked videos. I remember once CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) posted an article with a link to a youtube video that just said "Content not available in your region" The article was only up on CBC for about 20 minutes before they corrected it, but it was still kind of a slap in the face when our own public news corporation is posting stuff their supposed audience can't watch becaus
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You can blame our Canadian media companies, they're the ones licensing things for decades and preventing Netflix from getting movies and TV shows.
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To me it do
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Exactly. Google has a payment processing business. Couldn't they collect micro payments, like $0.10 per video just to enable such things without the "unavailable" bullshit? Especially that the content for crying out loud is available . It's sitting right there on the server, they had to add extra logic to disable the content ! It's just that some idiots who pretend they are poor but really don't care for our money. Too lazy to make the content available, they'd rather whine about poor abused media.
Heck, i
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But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
See, the problem I have with copyright reformers is that copyright is a quite well thought out piece of law (relative to most, anyway). It gives people who create things an optional tool that they don't have to use. It allows everything from Hollywood movies to open source software. If someone felt their work was best given away for free, they could certainly d
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First of all, it's not the creators who have the control.
Secondly, it's the punishments that go overboard.
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The punishments *can* be harsh, but typically it's simply an order to quit and provide restitution.
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It's an interesting discussion, one in which two completely different thought processes are on exhibit, and I know for goddam sure which side of that debate I am on ...
Still and nevertheless ...
The initiative and hence the basic discussion in its connection is not about whether copyright should exist and be enforced. It is about how draconian and dishonest the penalties should be.
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there are good reasons to give people control over intellectual property, but I don't get why anyone would think that's obvious or some inherent right or entitlement. Why should making something prevent other people from making the same thing with their own resources? When you introduce an idea into popular culture you are planting a seed on someone else's soil. Then, like Monsanto, you are saying "you aren't allowed to use this plant without my permission, or in ways I don't approve of". It clearly doesn't have the same strength as physical property, and I can't take it as obviously something a creator is entitled to.
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Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the authors should get exactly the same type of protection I do on their livelihood. I get paid hourly, once I have completed an hour of work I will never be paid for that same hour again. Why should it be different for someone who makes something copyrighted? I am not able to obtain any future royalties on the ethernet cables I install today, and the end customer gets full control of them to do whatever they want. They will never have to compensate me further if they want to move them, re-terminate them, sell them, or put data signals accross them. Once I've installed them, and they've paid me, we're done and I no longer have any say whatsoever in what they do.
Authors created work for thousands of years before copyright was invented. I don't see them stopping even if copyright were to vanish altogether.
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are alternative models. My favorite is the kickstarter approach:
1. Studio makes a trailer for their potential awesome movie (Movie in this example, it works for other media too).
2. Studio announces production cost.
3. People pledge their money towards production, considering how much they want to see the movie, how much they've liked things by the studio in the past, and so on.
4. If enough people pledge, the studio takes their money and makes the film. They have an incentive to do a good job, because if they churn out rubbish no-one is going to contribute to their next project.
The content gets made, the people get paid, and no copyright is required at all.
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Hear, hear. Especially that there are niche markets that may turn out not so niche once the market gets to speak and the "analyses" of the marketeers are refuted.
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That's a great idea, but the problem is that the cost of digital reproduction is near enough zero as makes no difference. If you publish an e-book, and I buy a copy for $5, why would anyone else buy a copy when they could get one for free from me? Some people would do it out of habit. Others would do it because they feel it's the honest thing to do. But most people would not. I've got to imagine that it would be really hard to make a living this way.
You'd probably have to switch to a Kickstarter-like m
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You'd probably have to switch to a Kickstarter-like model. The prospective author uploads a high-level summary of what he wants to write. People who want to read it donate a couple bucks. The author then writes something and releases it for free. This would probably work, at least in a sense, but it'd be hard to fund longer works this way. You'd get a lot of short stories, novellas, and serials. I've got nothing against those formats, but I do like to have some diversity.
Naw. New authors would probably be limited to those categories, because they wouldn't attract a lot of funding, and they'd couldn't afford to be locked in to a novel-length commitment for a pittance.
Established authors (either established via the traditional publishers, or by getting a reputation in the shorter formats) could probably get a novel kickstarted. Genre superstars, like George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, or J. K. Rowling could probably be funded almost instantaneously.
The problem with Kickstarte
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My point isn't that I should obtain royalties, it's that nobody else should either. Once the work is done, there's no reason to pay for the same work again. Copyrighted material is every bit as much of a comodity resource, there's so much content made very minute of every day that a person couldn't watch it all in their lifetime, and most of it is created with no expectation of any compensation.
Your statement that someone should make money over and over again for the same work just because it generates reve
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Many if not most of the artists I know, have met, or worked with [both inside and outside of academia] do what they love in such a way that what you're talking about [pay them by the hour] is not even remotely feasible.
Among other things:
* They tend to work for enormous lengths of time on only one thing. Writing a book, for instance, can take years - and often if not usually requires such a devotion of time that doing anything else - like
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The vast majority of published authors are, in a way. They're paid up-front with an advance, and never see royalties because their books don't sell enough. Ok, it's not quite "paid by the hour", but it is paid upfront with no perpetual royalties.
The royalties only benefit the publisher, and some few authors who sell enough numbers to earn back their advance. It's pretty much identical to the Kickstarter type model - the only difference is the source of the funds (one large publisher vs many small individual
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For a regular peon, yes. Only the fat pig overlords get to have money continuously shoveled to their front porch for NO WORK ON THEIR PART.
Bulding a car (Score:2)
>Why should making something prevent other people from making the same thing with their own resources?
I can scour the web/junkyards for free parts for a Ford F150, build it, get it licensed and sell it as Ford F150. Why cant we do that with say music or movies?`
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:4, Insightful)
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
Because no one - no one, not a single person on earth, ever - creates in a vacuum. Everyone steals from everyone, gets inspiration from everyone else, and so much content gets created that it is guaranteed that two people will create very similar art. As such, copyright is by definition an inhibition of the creative process. For a real-life example, see the lawsuits about red double-decker buses in front of a black-and-white Big Ben.
People do create less when they are unable to earn an income doing so.
Some of the most fun I had with music was attending house concerts a friend of mine was throwing. These people will keep singing with or without copyright. Some of the best pictures I've seen come from amateur photographers. They'll keep doing it with or without copyright. Same for painting, games and any other art form.
You're mistaking getting rich with making money, creating art with selling art, and that less is always worse. Even if 90% of all artists stopped creating, there'd still be more art around than you can ever consume.
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As such, copyright is by definition an inhibition of the creative process. For a real-life example, see the lawsuits about red double-decker buses in front of a black-and-white Big Ben.
I believe I know the image you are referring to, but I have never heard about a lawsuit in relation to it so I got curious as well as disturbed at the thought of the ridiculousness artists are faced with, sadly my search-fu failed me in my attempts to learn more. Can you provide a citation?
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But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic
It do seem basic, however do you really believe that for example Britney Spears, RHCP or any upcoming artist signed to a label by contract have any control of what they create? If you do, then we'd better not continue debating the topic as we obviously live in parallel universes and we'll never be able to even begin to understand each others differentiating opinions.
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Nobody forces any of them to sign with a label. I know some who make an honest living without doing so.
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The subtle point of the Initiative that seems to be lost on you is that there exists a whole spectrum of possible implementations of copyright law in between the quasi-Hitlerian approach taken by Hollywood and the rest of the high-volume industry and the free-for-all approach envisioned by fourteen year olds in the comment section on TPB. Making sure artists are compensated for their work is one thing. Very few people seriously argue against that. But allowing the monopolisation of culture for the lifetime
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Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Interesting)
> But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?
Because there's a blurry line that, once crossed, transforms a creative work from a mere commercial expression into part of society's cultural tapestry. Once that happens, you could argue that the creators should still have the right to profit from it for a term, but that the original creators themselves no longer truly "own" it in any moral or cultural sense. It has become bigger than they are.
Some examples:
* Disney's "Victory through Air Power" and "Song of the South". Walt Disney himself sought to personally destroy every copy of VtAP after World War II. He failed only because a lost copy was sitting in a Department of Defense warehouse. The film, viewed today, is positively horrifying... a thousand times more when it sinks in that it's a *DISNEY* film showing yellow planes with slanted eyes divebombing American ships. It's definitely not a cartoon to show little kids for entertainment. BUT, it's one of the most potent records we have today for understanding the cultural background of America's involvement in World War II. It vividly illustrates it in ways that are chillingly real because it's so over the top. The era's newsreels are so sanitized, they almost qualify as comedy. But a *DISNEY* film playing to blatant racial stereotypes? Whoah. That's big. It makes it really sink in how totally Americans were into World War II locally.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, Disney (as the film's creator) has the absolute right to destroy it. ***SHOULD*** they?
* Disney's "Song of the South". This has always been a problematic film for Disney. It was controversial when it opened in theaters because it talked about one of America's most culturally-taboo topics at the time. No, I don't mean race relations... I'm talking about (*shudder*) /divorce/. Yep, that's right. For anybody who's never actually seen the original movie from start to finish, it's about a kid from Atlanta who gets sent to live with his grandparents on their farm in the rural south while his parents go through a messy divorce out of sight. Everything else was subplot. Complicating things even MORE for Disney, some of their most popular and enduring characters, memes, and marketable songs came from that very movie. Hell, half of Frontierland's characters and rides were inspired by it.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, Disney has the absolute right to destroy it, or at least prevent anybody from watching it commercially. ***SHOULD*** they? ESPECIALLY when you consider that even the original high-ranking NAACP members who complained about it later admitted that they'd never actually WATCHED it prior to issuing their condemnation, and conceded that while they weren't really *happy* with it, their original gut reactions were a bit overblown.
* Star Wars. The holiest of holy films that defined the childhoods of Generation X... and George Lucas' determination to screw with it to wring a few more bucks out of the original (or at least, the current copy re-edited and re-assembled from original footage). Nobody will argue that Lucas shouldn't have the right to make "improvements" with each new release... but should he ALSO have the right to suppress distribution (even when he's compensated fairly) of the original version? Remember, we aren't just talking about a mere movie. Star Wars (oops, "Episode IV: A New Hope") practically DEFINED the childhoods of millions of American (and eventually, European, Asian, and other) kids. If the Earth were about to be hit by a planet-killing asteroid, a rocket ship were about to leave earth with a few dozen survivors to keep the human race alive, and they had to choose between a copy of Star Wars (the original) and the bible, I put the odds at at least 40-50% that the rocket would be taking off with a copy of Star Wars on board.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, George Lucas has the absolute right (assuming he hasn't sold it to Disney) to refuse to ever license the origina
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I'd also add a more modern classic: The Church of Scientology has a history of using copyright to silence any criticism of the books central to the organisation. Anyone who quotes or even paraphrases from the books in order to point out the sillyness within faces the risk of a lawsuit - and even if they can successfully claim fair use, the legal fees can easily drive an individual into financial ruin. How much control should they have?
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:4, Insightful)
"But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?"
Enforceability. Laws don't come free - it costs tax money to run even civil courts, and much of copyright is now a criminal matter so there is the cost of investigations. There's the social costs too - it's near-impossible to enforce copyright in the digital age, so the only way to be effective in doing so requires either an automated censorship system of some sort (youtube), or restrictions on the availability of technology that can be used for infringement (DMCA laws, the 'blank media tax'), or draconian punishments for the few who are caught in order to scare the rest straight. All very bad things. Then there's the classic issue of rights: They are often in conflict. If you grant a creator control over something they thought up, then you are also denying the use of that something to other people.
You can't just pass laws based on vague moral hunches. You need to consider if the costs (outlined above) are justified by the benefits (Increased production of creative works, created jobs, moral rights of creators).
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But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?
How about, because they sold it to somebody, so they don't own it anymore. That's usually a pretty good answer.
If the media companies want to retain control, they should stop selling the content, and stop making it look like a sale to the public while trying to make it something else by laws that violate fundamental legal principles - Contacts that the consumer doesnt actually sign, and that they can't read until after they p
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We don't have respect for the work because they don't have respect for themselves. Myself I'd like to see copyright law that forces one's hand: either you license it on reasonable terms, or it's public domain. Media hoarding should come to an end. A publisher of a book out of print doesn't care for a reprint or a digital edition? Boom, public domain. A video available in U.K. has been unavailable in the U.S. for a year? Boom, public domain. And so on. That way there would be no more human creativity that's
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I build a box. I sell it to you. It is your box. If you decide to use it to ship something to your cousin Raul, that is your right. If you decide to cover it with a tablecloth and use it as a plant stand, that is your right. If you decide to use it as a toilet, that is your right. Once legitimately transferred in exchange for payment, that box becomes you
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But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
So you would have no objection to GM telling you that you can only drive their cars on Tuesday or roads they approve? Or perhaps that you can only sell your car to people within 50 miles of where it was bought? Or that you can only use fuel they supply? Or that you cannot loan your car to another person? Or that they can take back to car without recourse? Or that their control over the vehicle exists for 90 years after manufacture or the last designer dies? All of these things are what the big lobby i
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I don't agree with this view. Copyright has always been about being able to copy, not about controlling what happens with the copy. It is a very radical departure to grant control of how copies are used to the copyright holder. If I want control then I need a separate and distinct contract and the terms must be spelled out in advance.
Ie, if I sell you a piece of software, then you can use it in ways that I do not approve of (stick it in a smart bomb). Of course software usually does come with restrictio
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Does the cow get to decide if you can make a milkshake? The dairy farmer? How about the grocery store?
If not, why not?
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So, should Ford be able to control your car after you buy it?
Haven't you noticed? A shocking amount of people believe in principles where that would be the case, and no arguments can ever sway them. The problem is that the believers in that principle actually think that a world where Ford controls your car after you but it isn't that bad after all. Perhaps to them, it is even preferable?
The Believer might be a minority in pure numbers but they are a vast majority in pure monetary interest and influence. The giant corporations and their executives largely are leeches
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At least I can understand these people even if I hate them as a class for what they have largely turned into.
It's the tools, the apologists, the morons who slurp down their dose of corporatist indoctrination who are forever impenetrable to my understanding.
Another way of saying what I am thinking is, I know and understand those who make themselves the enemies of what is right, at absolute best parasites on the people, but my truest disgust and disrespect I reserve for
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Remember that part in The Matrix, when Morpheus is taking Neo through the Construct, with the woman in the red dress?
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"Someone forced themselves to push out a turd just to get money, not because he really liked to do it."
Nice straw justificat
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no one wants to control people who create things
That's not true: The RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, and quite a few other large organizations would very much like to control people who engage in creative work so they can extract a large portion of the revenue that fans are willing to pay.
For example, there are thousands of good independent musicians out there touring, selling their CDs at their gigs, and nowadays selling or giving away their tracks online. You probably haven't heard of most of them, because the RIAA ensures that radio stations only play music distri
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no one wants to control people who create things; nobody is trying to force the people who create things to do anything. they just want to remove the control over people who reproduce what other people have created.
Except that it does control the people who create things. People who create things say "here is my invention/creation/concept, and I want the rules governing use and reproduction of that thing to be this and this and this". The creator can, if she chooses, say "go ahead, copy at will, I welcome it". The creator can also say "nope, I want my creation to be constrained by these rules".
Copyright infringers say "stuff what you want, I'm going to do whatever the heck I like". By their actions, they remove any ch
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, like wedding photographers, jewelry artists, poets, screenwriters, game producers, web programmers, novelists, small film makers - nothing but control freaks!
Not that I agree with the previous post, but you seem to mistake the media industry with the media creators.
The relationship between the two is more or less the one between cows and Nestlé. They milk the cow, process the product and even draw a cow in the envelope picture, but I wouldn't equate attacking Nestlé with being against cows or milk.
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Nestlé being Nestle [nestle.com].
Re:U.S., cough, international pressure much? (Score:5, Informative)
The people who create things want to control how they bring their work to market. You want to control the people who create things. Who's the control freak?
Coming from a staunch conservative like you, this line amuses me. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is, where copyright originated, what its purpose is and why people are upset with the current copyright regime.
Here, let me clue you in:
1) Copyright is a law that restricts the ability to make copies of anything human made.
2) Copyright is an evolution of the old royal print charters. Knowledge was known to be power, and the kings of yore realized very quickly they didn't want just anyone printing whatever they wanted.
3) The purpose of copyright is to control the flow of information and goods. Some of it can be good (it gives writers a chance to make a living), some of it can be bad (it gives people the chance to manipulate the flow of knowledge).
4) What people are upset about is that current copyright terms go far beyond benefiting the original creator, have criminal penalties on them and actually make it very difficult to create something without getting lawyers involved. The only reason you don't see every novelist ever being sued by everyone else is because most are penniless.
Now that you know the story, feel free to participate in the discussion.
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The purpose of copyright and patents as outlined in the US Constitution ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries") is no longer being served.
Except that the things it costs hundreds of thousands or many millions of dollars to create wouldn't exist at all without the ability to bring back those costs (and the profit that makes it worth risking all of that money) sometimes many years after huge checks are written for talent and production budgets. Don't like it? Just stick with the artists who are willing to give away their copyrights immediately or after a short period of time. If you're right, and the giving up of copyrights shortly after a wor
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"The solution is it should be legal to enforce a monopoly for all practical purposes in perpetuity (certainly as it applies to me) on my work, because it supports an unnatural model for income which I want to perpetuate."
The reason it is unnatural is because it can only be supported by using naked force against people who are engaging in acts which in no
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Now, you tell me, who is the entitled baby?
The one who wants pet entertainment slaves to make them stuff for free. That's who.
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Wedding photographers are a good example. When the copyright law was updated in Canada, photographers had it changed so that they be default keep the copyright on that wedding you hired them to photograph. Previously the default that if you hired someone to create a work, you kept the copyright. Now if you don't put it into a contract, you have to pay for every reprint you want to give away after paying a good wage for a photographer to shoot pictures of your wedding.
Seems like control to me.
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Now if you don't put it into a contract, you have to pay for every reprint you want to give away after paying a good wage for a photographer to shoot pictures of your wedding.
No, now you pay for whatever the contract between the two parties says. You know, the think you both talk about and agree to before anyone signs anything or any money changes hands? If you don't like what a photographer charges, or what they're willing to sign over to you (license-wise) as part of that transaction, just go strike a deal with any of the thousands of other photographers looking to compete. Who cares what the default is? Do you sign contracts or spend thousands of dollars on professional serv
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You do not seem to know the business model very well. Wedding photographers usually have zero and sometimes even negative profit selling photos to the newlyweds once you take into account equipment and consumables. The profit is achieved by selling copies of the prints to people attending the wedding itself. A lot of these photographers do contract work for advertisement agencies as well. In this case the client gets to own the digital files. The difference is the client pays a lot more, a whole lot more th
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Perhaps the business model has always been different in Canada but I've never heard about or experienced wedding photographers selling prints to the wedding guests. Usually when you pay well over a thousand dollars for a professional photographer to spend a couple of hours shooting pictures you end up being able to give the pictures away yourself with only small reasonable payments for more prints. Now the photographer can argue that he should get payed over and over if you don't have exactly the correct c
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Well you earn a lot more than a thousand dollars a day in an advertisement shoot over here. A wedding depends on the wedding. Some of the richer clients here are handled using the business model you described. How many photos are shot for those thousand dollars and do you get anything in the deal other than the shooting work? Is the cost for the extra prints flat? A lot of people often forget that weddings are awfully seasonal. You have lots of them in the middle of the summer then you have next to no work
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Also I don't know how it is over there but over here the photographer starts working on the wedding around the early morning when the bride and groom are still getting dressed. If they live far away from each other you often need to have two photographers to be able to shoot them concurrently which means you have to split the pay. Then you have to be in there all the way. During the service, during the party, and afterwards as well. Quite often there is a photo shoot in the night in the house of the couple
What's the world coming to? (Score:2)
How will politicians survive without lobby groups paying their salary?
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It may well be the end-of-world-as-we-know-it!
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Power to the People (Score:3)
Can anyone from Finland chime in and let us know if this is likely to go ahead untarnished by the political process, or will it be a given lip service and normal politics resumed ASAP?
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Re:Power to the People (Score:5, Interesting)
A Finn here.
There is absolutely no chance that this results in changes in Finnish copyright laws. They'll have to vote on it, and they'll vote not to do anything just out of pure spinelessness.
Buried in committee (Score:2)
The law on citizens' initiatives requires any that get over 50k signatures to go to a vote in t
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Finn here.
This is the Litmus test.
The proceeding is somewhat new -- the previous initiatives have regarded the ethics of Fur industry, and gay rights (adoption, etc). Those are still pending.
How this differs, is that this is essentially one of Finland's core industries today, and the leading supporters are 35~ rising, well off, entrepreneurs, IT-professionals, etc. It is not just populist activism, but a real concern that has profound impact in actual business and prosperity of the country.
While this migh
The article and summary a bit misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The political process is not as straightforward as the article suggests: It will first be passed on to a committee which will listen for various experts and interested parties, including copyright holders' associations. The committee will then be free to make amendments and changes to the proposal, even though the proposal is already written in a form of law text. After the committee it will probably be subjected to other various committees for review, for example the constitutional committee to check if it is in alignment with the constitution. At the end of this long committee process is the public vote in the Parliament, which is most often just a formality.
Therefore it is not guaranteed at all that the intended changes will pass even if the law will be changed in the parliament.
Nothing will happen (Score:4, Insightful)
There will be no "vote on copyright law that is drafted by citizens". Some committee will just say that there are legal reasons why this can't happen and that's it. All this stuff does is stir up public discourse, which is IMO a good thing though.
Who really buys that anyway? (Score:2)
This means that the Parliament of Finland is required to take the Common Sense in Copyright initiative into processing.
And they will refuse this initiative according to the due process. Anyone who believes in 2013 that non-binding petition can make any tiny amount of difference needs to have a reality check.
You either have direct democracy inscribed in your constitution or you don't.
Similar system in the USA (Score:2)
We have a similar system here in the USA, where ordinary citizens can write whatever law they want and have our Congress vote on it.
Its just that instead of submitting millions of signatures to Congress, you have to submit millions of dollars [wikipedia.org].
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We have a similar system here in the USA, where ordinary citizens can write whatever law they want and have our Congress vote on it.
Its just that instead of submitting millions of signatures to Congress, you have to submit millions of dollars [wikipedia.org].
That campaign contribution is just a a way of expressing to your Congressman that it's a great idea with tons of popular support. Really it is. Protected speech and all.
Print shops? (Score:2)
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So if I set up a print shop that prints and sells copies of recent bestsellers and sells them dirt cheap to bookstores that sell them at deep discounts to consumer's that's a misdemeanor? How about if I download copies of the latest movie releases, burn them to DVDs and ship them all over Europe?
Then you would no longer be a private citizen but would be engaging in business. I think that almost everyone agrees that anyone who does that for commercial gain should have the book thrown at them.
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Good start ... now finish it off (no pun) (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
Crime or not a crime? Make up your minds (Score:3)
... calls for removal of copyright infringement as a crime, reducing violations by private individuals to a misdemeanor.
Uh, guys, a misdemeanor IS A CRIME [thefreedictionary.com] Petty theft and simple assault and battery are also misdemeanors. Maybe something has been lost in translation. Otherwise I think this initiative is a sad sellout. Copyright infringement ought to be a civil matter, damnmit.
Citizens? (Score:2)
Most laws are written by citizens of the country.
You have to be a citizen to be a government official.
And even when some record label writes some copyright law for the US, most likely a US citizen, who was part of said corporation, wrote it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Already happening in Finland, because the representatives are obligated to think and talk about gay marriage and banning of fur industry. An overdose of ethics and humanity. There have been calls to cease the whole citizen initiative system, which was established by law recently.
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And rightly so. Admirable as giving citizens a direct voice is, it's not necessarily representative. All it proves is that there are X people out there who support change Y. People against change Y may be more numerous but aren't taken into account. That's why elected representatives do their own polling. On the positive side, this sort of 'click the button' skewing probably does provide a counterbalance to traditional lobbyist skewing.
On this particular issue I'd expect it to be smacked down. Being t
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What does it being readable on line have to do with who wrote it?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)