Fair Use Threatens Innovation, Copyright Holders Warn (torrentfreak.com) 148
An anonymous reader shares a TorrentFreak report: Various music and movie industry groups have warned that fair use exceptions are a threat. The groups were responding to proposals put forward in Australia by the Government's Productivity Commission. They claim that content creators will be severely disadvantaged if fair use is introduced Down Under
. Several rightsholder groups argue that strong copyright protections are essential for the survival of their businesses. This includes a long copyright term of 70 years, as well as the ability to block access to content based on the location of a consumer. In addition, many believe that fair use exceptions will do more harm than good. For example, music group IFPI warns that fair use will threaten innovation and create legal uncertainty. "Licensing, not exceptions to copyright, drives innovation. Innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements between content owners and users, including technological innovators," IFPI writes.
Isn't that a contradiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Interpretation: Copyright holders don't want to play fair.
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Re:Isn't that a contradiction? (Score:4, Funny)
IF YOU UPHOLD FAIR USE! (Score:5, Funny)
We will be so RESTRICTED from artistic and technical INNOVATION that studios will be reduced to producing NOTHING MORE than endless REBOOTS of previously filmed efforts spun-off from ANCIENT COMIC BOOK franchises!
ALL COMMERCIAL MUSIC will be INDISTINGUISHABLE from style and content of hits released circa 2001!
DO YOU WANT TO KILL THIS VIBRANT CULTURE WITH FAIR ACCESS?!!!?
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endless REBOOTS of previously filmed efforts spun-off from ANCIENT COMIC BOOK franchises!
No collection would be complete without Hitler's Cocaine [comixjoint.com]
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Bob bless Dennis Kitchen.
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UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
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+++ATH0
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I would damn you as satire impaired, but this IS slashdot, and there are good odds that you are deeper into the autism disorder spectrum than the usual degree.
I USED FUNNY ALL KAPZ!
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What's Strine for 'whoosh', mate?
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What's Strine for 'whoosh', mate?
"Foster's"
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The good thing is that this is about Australia and not about some place where innovation is actually taking place. So in the end, it's a storm in a teacup.
What, you didn't like Cleverman?
Actually, the lack of an open-ended fair use system is probably partly to blame.
And while we are at it, how about patent trolls (Score:2)
This is good news and I was worried that Australia was stitched up by TPP.
As an Australian and British citizen in an IP creating industry I want something that gives me reasonable protection for my IP (and 20-25 years is about right) but at the same time gives me protection against patent trolls.
I voted for Brexit on the grounds that the EU is sleepwalking into TPP and I don't want my intellectual property to be governed by East Texas.
Maybe I should move back to Aus?
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It's highly probable that the UK will still end up in TPP or a similar trade deal. Leaving the EU throws a spanner in the negotiations that might take a few years to unjam, but that's all it'll do. There's just too much money pushing for such a treaty.
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Fair is the compromise between the balance of interests of the various people who create, consume and reuse of creative content.
"Fair" could be defined as anywhere between everything is automatically public domain and fair is giving the content creator absolute power over every tiny aspect about how this work is used until the end of time. Both extremes would affect the possible business models of content creators and the net social utility value that humanity derives from this content.
"Fair use" is the cur
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Re:Just plain false (Score:4, Insightful)
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Many will be happy to produce content with a balanced copyright law with fair use provisions. Those who would not can simply not produce. That will create room in the market for less greedy producers to fill.
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You misunderstand. In their language, "innovation" = "control of everything"
Full of Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
They're so full of it. What about licensing brings about innovation? Are they claiming people will only make new things if there's money to be had? I thought we debunked that myth a long time ago. Money is not the only motivating factor of innovation. I'd say it's the least important one, in fact; many people pursue what they do because they enjoy it and/or believe in it. The money's a damn nice bonus, but ultimately the goal of innovation is to improve the work/art in the field. If laws are passed that allow people to borrow ideas and combine them in ways people didn't anticipate, that's the very definition of innovation. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and holding exclusive rights to something for X amount of time only prevents innovation, *not* foster it.
They're a bunch of artless, lying suits, as we've all come to expect from the recording industry.
Re:Full of Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
You must understand that these are people who define "innovation" as "new way for me to charge more rent on the same old stuff".
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They're claiming that's not enough. What they're claiming implicitly is that your great-grandchildren have to be able to make money off of your work, otherwise there will be too little incentive for you to innovate.
No, actually what they're claiming is that they have enough lobbyist to enact whatever the hell they want for themselves.
And by innovation they mean clever ways to sell the exact same old recording that you already own, maybe with some slight changes to the mastering or what not.
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This is a case where fleas are claiming ownership of the dog, and are adamantly defending their right to stop any kind of flea treatment because Profit!
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Don't you realize that before Intellectual Property laws, there was no innovation, no creativity. People lived grey, drab lives. No music, no art. People couldn't even eat because farmers had no one to innovate their crops.
Let me tell you, things were bad when people freely exchanged ideas. Artists starved. In fact, few people know that the real reason van Gogh cut off his ear was to make a sandwich. And there wasn't even m
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Exactly.
Assumption: You need copyright to make a profit.
Status: DEBUNKED.
If the Fashion Industry can survive without copyright [ted.com] then this is pure bunk.
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Something about calling it random doesn't seem to fit...
You require licensing? We can do that. (Score:1)
If licenseing drives innovation, this is a simple problem to solve. Require all copyright holders to use a license that includes some prescribed fair use clause. Done. Next.
Oh fuck off (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of business that survive just fine without freeloading on content that was produced almost a century ago. If you are unable to do that, that's a problem with your business and you *deserve* to go under. In fact, we wish you would so that better businesses can be built upon your stinking rotting corpse.
Sincerely,
Everyone.
Yeah, right (Score:5, Interesting)
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What revenue stream does the copyright on most open source projects guarantee? They are fully copyrighted (GPL, BSD, MIT, and many others), but are entirely free.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Informative)
For those that sell software, copyright guarantees (or so they think) a potential revenue stream through licensing. As to open source software, copyright becomes the vehicle for keeping the software free and open, and prevents it (theoretically) from being stolen by companies who want to make money off of it. At the same time, it does allow the copyright holders of the open source (GPL'd, etc) software to be able to sell their work if they choose under proprietary terms. This is one reason I select the GPL for my personal projects. It gives me the freedom to sell proprietary licenses if the code ever was interesting enough to catch a commercial vendor's attention.
In any case, the OP's point still stands, and I think he was making the point from the POV of the music industry first and foremost. They see copyright as a rent-seeking mechanism, not one for innovation.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright for a limited time encourages further creativity, since you can't count on revenue from previous work for the rest of your life.
Excessive copyright wastes time and resources on copyright fights that could be applied to better uses. If Mickey Mouse was now in the public domain, there'd more likely be more derivative products than there are today
Just look at Paramount squishing fan fiction videos that are no threat to the franchise (crappy story lines and excessive lens flair, on the other hand ...)
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What they are actually saying is they are being innovative, blocking innovation, by claiming an innovation will prevent 'er' innovation, sticking to the proper English definition of innovation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. Translation, we want to threaten children with imprisonment for copyright infringement in order to grab thousands of dollars from their parents (this shit was written by lawyers and whilst they are a kind of content creators normally associated with larger herbivorous farm animals, t
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If the finest minds in Hollywood weren't too busy on the anti-GMO and antivax picket lines to understand the term 'heat death of the universe' they would be lobbying for this as the new IP expiration date.
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I disagree that most social problems today would be fixed if corporations were not legal persons. Many social problems, however, is a different argument.
Do they even understand what fair use is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would they have to protect themselves from large corporations that invoke fair use as a defense? Fair use, by definition does not adversely impact the value of the work in question. If the copyright holders are being harmed in some way by some particular usage, then fair use cannot be deemed to apply in the first place.
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Well there are two sides of this coin...
The recommendation lists these items for fair use...
1. research or study;
2. criticism or review;
3. parody or satire;
4. reporting news;
5. professional advice;
6. quotation;
7. non-commercial private use;
8. incidental or technical use;
9. library or archive use;
10.education; and
11.access for people with disability.
I think the fair use exemptions for "professional advice", "library or archive use", and "education" are kind of the sticking points (where the big corps are ag
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Sharing something publicly kind of invalidates the notion of being for "private use" doesn't it? That it may be non-commercial is entirely irrelevant.
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There's an easy solution for them.
1. Allow lots of fair use rights.
2. Forbid the cracking of DRM, distribution/possession of tools to crack DRM, or distribution of media with DRM removed.
3. Release everything only in DRMed form.
I call it the 'Texas Abortion' proposal: You have your rights enshrined in law, but all means of exercising them are closed to you.
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> If the copyright holders are being harmed in some way by some particular usage, then fair use cannot be deemed to apply in the first place.
I'm sorry to say that this is nonsense. Criticism, satire, and political speech about a document are primary grounds for "fair use" quotations, and they can profoundly damage the value of a copyrighted work by exposing its quality or even exposing fraud by the author.
It's all about corporate greed (Score:1)
Fair use is essential.
Corporations exist to disrupt society, not to create it.
Re: Fair Use Threatens Innovation, Copyright Holde (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair vs. Free (Score:4, Insightful)
If fair use is hindering their business, how would free use weigh in? Take open source, for example. Microsoft could easily argue Linux is making it difficult to sell their OS for server use. In fact, I'd imagine that if they somehow managed to eliminate fair use, free would be their next target: making it very difficult through restrictive legislation to produce something for free unrestricted distribution without some sort of monetary aspects attached. Essentially forcing all competition to play on the platform they fully control.
There's been some very worrying news coming out of Australia in a steady stream. The Big Brother is certainly on a roll there.
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It's an easy argument to make. Free and open source software brings in no tax money, commercial software brings in a ton of tax money. Which would you expect government to favor?
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Free open source software lets a wider audience to increase productivity, which in turn has often quite direct positive effects in the economy. This is something the legislators usually don't (want to) take into account.
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> If fair use is hindering their business, how would free use weigh in? Take open source, for example. Microsoft could easily argue Linux is making it difficult to sell their OS for server use. In fact, I'd imagine that if they somehow managed to eliminate fair use,
They did, using SCO as a disposable legal proxy. Please review the legal history of the SCO copyright cases, captured in the archives of https://www.groklaw.net/ [groklaw.net]. Microsoft's fiscal support of SCO was established pretty early in the process: S
Blackwhite (Score:2)
How Orwellian of them to say so...
Fair use and automobiles (Score:3)
So, fair use threatens the survival of their businesses. In other news, the automobile threatened the survival of the buggy-whip manufacturers and the integrated-circuit chip threatened the survival of the makers of vacuum tubes.
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This one is the most amazing of all: that blocking content based on location somehow encourages innovation.
Of course I don't know why we're even discussing this. This reaction from the big corps is 100% predictable.
Re:The Public Domain Drives Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is what we had in the U.S. prior to 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect. I think the terms of the original Copyright Act of 1790 (14 years plus a 14 year extension) were adequate, and further extensions have been a cash grab by creators at the expense of society in general - a very real form of theft. Patents only receive 20 years of protection, so what's so frigging special about copyright? What we have now is an abomination that completely and totally defeats the purpose of the Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution, IMO. How exactly does extending protection for works after the creator's death encourage new works by that creator?
Threaten innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
What bullshit. The established music industry has already completely killed innovation. They want a nice zero-risk predictable business model based on marketing not creativity, because anything creative is new and by definition unpredictable so a necessarily higher financial risk.
They've been following exactly the same old image-manufacturing process at least since Bill Haley/Elvis/The Beatles.
It's are afraid! (Score:2)
It's afraid of user generated content.
The purpose of copyright is........ (Score:5, Interesting)
So here is the deal, I will trade you "fair use" for 4-year copyright limits.
However, you can't have 70 year copyright terms and no fair use. That is called unlimited MONOPOLY!
The purpose of Copyright was to give the person who created the work a limited monopoly to earn back their money, not money for their grandchildren.
Imagine if a plumber could charge you per flush for the next 70 years.
Imagine if an electrician could charge you every time you use a light switch for the next 70 years.
It is insane. We need FAIR USE!
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In most countries, copyright is not 70 years, but 70 years after the death of the author. So not only the plumber will charge you for all his life, but his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will also charge you for all their lives. Now pay and suck it up.
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Ugh Software Patents and Copyrights are destroying innovation globally as the patent trolls troll away.
Have you ever watched The Patent Scam Intro video on YouTube? [youtube.com]
Lawyers and finance at some point become another tax on productivity and growth. They are useful to a point but when spurious, vexatious litigation becomes the norm this is just feeding trolls.
I would challenge you to watch this video, reflect, and think about how you would draw the line between creators/innovators and the public good.
I have par
End end is near. Um... wait. (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently this "threat" has existed for quite a while. How have we ever survived?
From: U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index [copyright.gov]
Fair use is a judge-created doctrine dating back to the nineteenth century and codified in the 1976 Copyright Act.
And: Fair use [wikipedia.org]
The 1709 Statute of Anne, an act of the Parliament of Great Britain, created copyright law to replace a system of private ordering enforced by the Stationers' Company. The Statute of Anne did not provide for legal unauthorized use of material protected by copyright. In Gyles v Wilcox [wikipedia.org] (1740) the Court of Chancery established the doctrine of "fair abridgement," which permitted unauthorized abridgement of copyrighted works under certain circumstances. Over time, this doctrine evolved into the modern concepts of fair use and fair dealing. Fair use was a common-law doctrine in the U.S. until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. 107.
True! (Score:2)
Licensing, not exceptions to copyright, drives innovation.
How true! Almost forgotten is the fact that it was only through a carefully structured licensing strategy that William Shakespeare managed to innovate so much.
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, etc? (Score:2)
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Aww, someone sees his money printing business threatened, how cute.
They warn.... (Score:2)
You will all complain, then vote for these idiots (Score:2)
There will be much digital ink spilled over this, then you'll all mostly go vote for the same idiots over and over...
Until you start voting new people in, nothing will change...
And I don't mean one or two, I mean the majority, you need a new government, but you largely won't get one because "the OTHER guys suck, but MY representative is great"
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The system is broken. It can be shown that even if as much as 30% of the people (which is ridiculously many, your chance of motivating any is closer to a high single digit), changed their voting behaviour, the outcome would not change. It might be the other puppet The Party offers, but it still wouldn't get you anywhere.
Forget voting. If you want to change anything, the ballot box fails. Use the next one.
FTFY (Score:2)
Sounds like this is anti-commutative. (Score:1)
Yeah, because fair use really hurt America... (Score:2)
copyright holders say (Score:2)
mine mine mine mine MINE MINE MINE!
Consumers say (Score:2)
Yes, yes it is. Please step on it to test it.
It's the polar opposite (Score:2)
If the recent years have shown, fair use might be the only thing that could save innovation. How many new ideas have been thrown out by Hollywood et al? And in comparison, how many old ideas have been remade, rebooted, rehashed and regurgitated in other ways?
If anyone can regurgitate, i.e. what fair use entails because eventually all those "ideas" will become usable by anyone else again, those great innovative heads can concentrate on creating new and exciting wonders instead of being able to milk the same
bull (Score:2)
I do enjoy sometimes when they keep trying to re-interpret and re-explain what's what, but it does get boring after a while. And, of course, it's all bullcrap. But I wish they all would be transported to a universe where innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements and have fun over there
Bullshit (Score:2)
They are only trying to protect rent seeking schemes that almost exclusively benefit labels and studios and not actual creators. The goal is to maximize access and further creative while rewarding creators. Anything short of that is simply not good enough and introduces too many negatives including limiting how much benefit we can get from our technology and criminalizing everyone who may attempt to fully utilize the abilities of the technology.
Typical anti-competitive mentality. (Score:1)
What this means is they don't want to have to deal with someone else innovating and competing in their little corner of the economy. That's not good for business.
I'm not arguing for relinquishing the protections content producers have; "fair use" is narrowly defined for a reason: to ensure proper protections remain in place. What content producers don't want is to give legal pro
eat pie (Score:1)
Copyright holders want to eat more pie?
Let them eat and eat. Let them die.
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Please, as if that show didn't outlive its stay already in its first run!
Besides, Hagman is dead.
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No need to. Others do that for you without asking you, but also without charging for it.
Admittedly, they charge if you want to access it again... say, that does sound a bit like the content industry, doesn't it?
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What do you expect from a group that thinks DRM increases the value of content while it's evident that it decreases the content's value? Proof: Everyone would much prefer content without to content with DRM. What's more valuable to you, content that you can put on your media server or content that you cannot?
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Fair vs. fair. You give me the content I want, I play along the rules. You do not, I won't buy it. It is actually that simple.
I live well without your content. How well do you live without my money?
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Copyrights and patents have their place. With intangible goods, you have the problem that a lot of money goes into their creation while at the same time they are trivial to duplicate. We have just gone overboard with the time that protection is granted.
In the beginning, copyright was 7 years and you could tack on another 7 years if you could somehow show that it's necessary. We're talking about the 1700s, though. A time when the steps between writing a book and having it published took months, if not years,