It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120102/16374417254/it-is-time-to-stop-pretending-to-endorse-copyright-monopoly.shtml

by GBiT • 15 years ago

171 106 15 years ago

"I reject and oppose this monopoly that was never for the creators, but always for the distributors: a guild whose time is up and obsolete, and which has no business trampling on our civil liberties."

I like this statement. This summarizes a decent portion of the anger generated by the RIAA, the MPAA, and the U.S. Congress.

Zirro3• 15 years ago

This one is great as well:

"I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today."

When someone makes that claim, they ignore the thousands upon thousands of pieces of original music, film and pictures that artists, normal people, make available for free to everyone on the Internet every day.

slowpoke7• 15 years ago

Exactly. Also, I always like to ask people making that claim how they explain the apparently miraculous existence of art before 1557 (or 1710, depending on whether you consider the Stationer's Charter or the Statute of Anne to be the first real instance of copyright law).

erichocean2• 15 years ago

It's true that creators won't stop creating.

What's not true is that we'll continue to get the exact same kinds of things created. (Some of you may think that's a good thing.)

Take a feature film, for example. A film costs around $100 million to make, and $20 million to market.

Without copyright, that film can be easily copied by Illegitimate Theater Chain and then shown without paying the creator. Does anyone here think that $100 million films will continue to be made and marketed under such a system?

I don't.

Maybe, as a society, we shouldn't care about $100 million dollar feature films and maybe no one will be upset that they're no longer made in exchange for having no copyright laws.

One thing is clear though: copyright is the legal mechanism that allows $100 million feature films to be made today, and without it, they won't be.

billpatrianakos8• 15 years ago

There definitely is a lot of creating going on but how much of it is really worthwhile? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I can make a turkey by tracing my hand. Do you really want to see it though? A hundred or so years ago we had Picasso. Now we have LOLCats. I doubt people in the future will hold up our blogs, status updates, and pictures with funny captions as examples of the great achievements from the past. More art isn't necessarily a good thing. Turning up the noise in the signal to noise ratio never helps anyone.

It's a fine line we're walking here. I don't want to defend the copyright lobby but I'm not ready to say all this new "art" is good for culture either.

gvb• 15 years ago

But the copyright monopoly is given to the creators. Tell me, who holds the copyright to the book you are writing?

The problem is that the distributors (formerly) had tremendous leverage over the creators because they controlled the distribution (access to paying customers). Through the monopoly of the distribution channels, they were able to coerce the creators to reassign or license at a pittance their copyrights to them.

The "new media" (e.g. internet) is allowing direct distribution from the creator to the customer, squeezing out the "old guild" distributors. Disrupting the distribution monopoly of the "old guild" distributors is a Good Thing and is happening right now, and with the copyright monopoly still in place.

Disposing of copyright entirely as advocated by the article would cause horrible "collateral damage" to creators.

vannevar3• 15 years ago

...who holds the copyright to the book you are writing?

This is not as simple a question as it sounds. Before digital distribution, owning the copyright on a book in a world with no publishers would have been pointless. So while a writer might be granted a copyright, it was nonetheless for the benefit of distributors. People don't need to be financially incentivized to create art, but they do need to be financially incentivized to invest in printing presses, shipping networks, and book stores.

yuhong• 15 years ago

Reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3284452

CountHackulus• 15 years ago

I do enjoy that this piece is so well written, gets all the points across clearly and effectively.

sounds3• 15 years ago

I am a creator. I create:

• original songs

• original movies

• original apps

• original documents, such as this post

I am my own distributor. In other words, I am a competitor to the outmoded entrenched RIAA, MPAA, etc.

Because I am a competitor, and I am cutting the bottom out of their market by doing my own internet-based distribution, they are frightened.

Rick Falkvinge and the religion, Kopimism, made my day. :)

tzs2• 15 years ago

Where do you get money?

sounds3• 15 years ago

That depends on which medium you're talking about.

Apps: that's my day job. It pays very well, thank you. But if SOPA passed, I'd be hurting because the internet would change dramatically. I need a working, open internet to be able to compete with large software development companies.

Music, Movies: I "moonlight" this. I'm sure there are tons of software guys who are good at music, video, or a little of both. Live concerts pay enough to make the whole pursuit enjoyable. They wouldn't pay the bills, which opens up another can of worms -- I think our current society discriminates against many forms of art, and disproportionately rewards the few that it does reward. This is in line with the way our society frequently discriminates against women, certain racial stereotypes and many cultures.

This post (and my other writing): I don't make money directly from it. But I think everyone benefits from the free sharing of culture. SOPA can pry it from my cold, dead fingers...

michaelfeathers2• 15 years ago

I hesitate to post this, because I think current copyright law is ridiculous, as is SOPA, and I love mash-ups and mix-culture, etc.

But.. the fact of the matter is that for music at least, I'm pretty sure that without copyright in the early days, we would never have had the variety and originality we've seen over the past 100 years or so. I remember an anecdote about the Rolling Stones, that they only started writing originals when they realized they could make money off of the publishing. I also notice that lots of early church hymns and political songs were merely new sets of lyrics put on the same melody over and over again. There was no incentive to make new melodies, so people reused. It was a far cry from the diversity we see in music today. People are pretty much forced to make something new all the time.

That said, I love artists like Girl Talk, etc. I just don't know where the right line is.

icebraining• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure that without copyright in the early days, we would never have had the variety and originality we've seen over the past 100 years or so

But that's not the question, is it? Conditions have changed, and hence we need to evaluate if copyright still makes sense, regardless of whatever benefits it brought in the past.

michaelfeathers2• 15 years ago

That's fair. I think we get too bent out of shape trying to figure out what is right for all time.

econlaws• 15 years ago

There was an awful lot of great variety and originality in music in the few centuries before music copyright was enforced as strongly as it is today. Mozart, among others, did make a lot of derivative music but much of that was (and still is) earth-shatteringly fantastic, like most art (and code for that matter) that builds on existing work.

Popular music would survive very well with much reduced copyright laws in the same way that fashion survives today. Jungle -> Drum and Bass -> Grime -> Dubstep, no one wants to listen to the previous trend - pay for access to the latest, pay for it as it comes out, pay for concerts and live events - there are lots of models that would leave music thriving if publishing rights went away tomorrow.

elwin• 15 years ago

> I also notice that lots of early church hymns and political songs were merely new sets of lyrics put on the same melody over and over again.

That's because those songs were meant to be singable by everyone, most of whom had no formal musical training. Tunes were reused because people could start singing the new lyrics right away if they were already familiar with the melody.

billpatrianakos8• 15 years ago

It sucks that we have to qualify our opinions around here with "I'm against SOPA and copyright sucks but...". I wish we could just make a point without having to deal with fanatics jumping the gun and making opinions into something they're not. Let's all remember that there are little subtle nuances to everything. It's as if you felt like if you didn't qualify your opinion like that someone would automatically call you out saying "oh so you're in favor of SOPA, the death of the Internet, all our human rights, and you drink the blood of freshly slaughtered puppies! I'm downvoting you!". I don't know, at least that's how I feel whenever the copyright issue gets brought up around here.

Joakal• 15 years ago

I would rather like governments to punish abusers of copyright if the intent of it was to promote innovation and creativity.

Since there had not been any attempts to punish or reduce such disproportionate abuses, there's no place for more copyright legislation until that happens. And I'm not talking about people's perception of piracy. If I have my grandmother's birthday video on Youtube automatically taken down, the judge will ask, what damages did you suffer? Is law really asking for damages for freely sharing memories?

It's a good catch-22 to kill free sharing. Lose the ability to share or force people to sell their content in order to claim damages against companies abusing DMCA.

Continuing to push it further will paint a view of the proponents having draconian intents. Especially when such myopic legislation including restricting Internet goes against the original aims of copyright; promoting innovation and creativity.

grellas• 15 years ago

A few thoughts:

1. I am against SOPA-style enforcement schemes as much as is anyone here at HN - laws that impose potentially ruinous penalties based on vague standards lacking all due process protections are laws that stink, however assessed, and SOPA offers that and little more amidst a drama featuring shady lobbyists, venal motives, and hordes of lawyers waiting in the wings to wreak havoc on the core elements of the Internet and the public at large in order to promote the interests of a narrow faction of copyright holders.

2. It is not true, however, that the continued enforcement of copyright laws in a hyper-connected world depends on having SOPA-style laws in effect. The legitimate concerns bothering people about mass infringement on the web were addressed years ago in the DMCA and its scheme of offering safe harbors to those who upheld copyright while allowing for legal action against those who didn't has been a reasonable solution to the difficult problem of how to curb infringement when copying digital content is so easy. The SOPA-style laws are clearly an attempted power grab by which content holders now seek to overreach to get special advantages for themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is wrong but it is not an inevitable part of maintaining copyright protection. Indeed, it is not even a wise or prudent part of maintaining such protection, as is evident from the reaction it has provoked. By framing his argument in the way of claiming that it is, then, the author is setting up a straw-man argument against which he can declaim (in effect, saying, "see, copyright is culturally oppressive and can only exist as part of a regime that denies people civil liberties and many other things they treasure" and it can be nothing else than this - therefore, you either support copyright and its inevitable accompanying oppression or you support civil liberties - this is a false dichotomy).

3. Copyright can easily be abused and that is why laws relating to it need to be very carefully framed. That said, the protection it affords is an integral part of our modern world and does protect creative effort to a significant degree. Without copyright, I could take apart J.K Rowling's billion dollar Harry Potter empire by simply republishing and selling all the works myself, without compensation to Ms. Rowling. Without copyright, I could take Pixar's Toy Story movies and characters and reproduce them for my profit at my whim. Without copyright, I could take any company's source code and lift it for my commercial use while leaving the company that spent millions developing it without recourse. Without copyright, anything you or I write on our blogs, or in books, or anywhere else, can freely be used by anybody, word-for-word, and passed off as something having nothing to do with the author who in fact put in the creative effort to compose it. This list of such consequences is long and extends far beyond a narrow "content industry" composed of conglomerates - it reaches down to everyday people who, knowingly or not, rely on copyright to ensure that their creative work belongs to them and cannot be used indiscriminately by others.

4. There is, of course, a philosophical argument that all information ought to be free and that its use and dissemination should not be restricted in any way by any form of legal restriction. There is a case to be made for this argument, one with which I would not agree but one which nonetheless can be made in good faith as a goal of trying to achieve a better society. I do not denigrate that argument even as I oppose it. It is undeniable, however, that a society cast in this way would be radically different in terms of how it treats intangible rights and I believe that most people would oppose those changes. SOPA has whatever momentum it does have precisely because many people do feel it is a problem that creative content can be copied at will and without compensation in so many ways across the web. This gives a colorable reason for why SOPA is needed and SOPA proponents exploit this widespread feeling among the public, in effect, to try to put one over on people.

5. In the U.S., copyright has deep roots and is seriously grounded in the federal constitution and in congressional enabling legislation going back to the nation's founding. While copyright acts dating back hundreds of years to England were sometimes used as instruments of government oppression, that can't be said of how such laws have been implemented and enforced in the U.S. for over 200 years now. This fact is not changed by using loaded expressions such as "cultural monopoly" to describe those laws. Yes, studios and publishing houses have used the force of those laws to set up distribution mechanisms that have often given them large slices of the profits from the creative efforts of authors, filmmakers, etc. But that simply reflects the fact that huge sums of capital were needed to set up and maintain such distribution mechanisms and few could afford to take such steps independently of a close group of large entities. This "monopoly," if you want to call it that, is being broken up today because of the increased independence creative people have with modern technology. Those creative people, though, want to profit from their efforts even as they shed the old constraints - they don't want their works to become instant common property, usable and salable by all without compensation to the original creator, simply because technology enables easy copying.

6. Therefore, it is possible to oppose SOPA and endorse copyright laws with complete consistency. One can oppose overreach that leads to manifold evils while protecting the core of something that is worthy of protection. I think this article gets it all wrong on this score and therefore, while making some good points, is flawed in its core premise.

Zirro3• 15 years ago

"SOPA has whatever momentum it does have precisely because many people do feel it is a problem that creative content can be copied at will and without compensation in so many ways across the web."

Except for the distributors of such content and the politicians they've bought, I haven't heard of "many" people who like SOPA. Outside of their world, the momentum of SOPA barely exists. If you've read the news lately, you'd see that if anything, there's a huge momentum _against_ SOPA.

2arrs2ells• 15 years ago

grellas - Thanks for one of the best HN comments I've read in a long time.

Do you have thoughts on a solution more reasonable than SOPA to enforce copyright overseas? If I set up piratedwindows7downloads.com in China (or Sealand), it's hard to see how I can be held accountable for my infringement via the DMCA.

(To clarify: I don't think SOPA is the right solution to this problem.)

pyre• 15 years ago

  > If I set up piratedwindows7downloads.com in China (or
  > Sealand), it's hard to see how I can be held
  > accountable for my infringement via the DMCA.

The only 'real' way to deal with this is some SOPA-style blacklist... or to copy Belarus[1], and require all sites that US citizens access to be hosted within the US... or to deploy trade sanctions against China (though I somehow doubt that the effects of the piracy in question would out-weigh the effects of the trade sanctions).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3415897

slowpoke7• 15 years ago

About 2:

It's funny you cite the DMCA of all things as an example of "good" copyright protection. The DMCA is almost as bad a clusterfuck of a legislation as SOPA, if on a much smaller scale. DMCA takedowns are often without due process either (just look at all the mistaken and automated takedowns on Youtube, or the fact that it's largely abused to try to gain an edge over competitors) and safe havens are a broken concept in the first place. Also, as far as I am aware the DMCA places the burden of proof on the receiver of the takedown notice to show that there was no infringement taking place (correct me if I should be wrong). That's ridiculous.

Additionally, the DMCA doesn't address the core problem of copyright either, which is that it's the core foundation of an outdated business model that needs to go the way of the dinosaur, and it needs to do so fast before it does any more incredibly difficult to to reverse damage on our future society.

We as a society need to find ways to rewards the creation of culture and art. Copyright isn't and will not ever be the solution. It probably never was.

A final remark:

>While copyright acts dating back hundreds of years to England were sometimes used as instruments of government oppression

That's a funny thing to say, especially the "sometimes". Oppression (censorship) was basically the reason copyright was invented in the advent of printing presses slowly becoming widely available in the middle of the 16th century.

earbitscom7• 15 years ago

Since you said, "Correct me if I should be wrong"... the burden of proof is on the person who uploaded the content to prove they have the right. The only burden on the UGC company is to take down content that is in dispute.

But to also correct you on your implied sob story for UGC companies...

Some person you don't know comes to you and says, "I wrote this e-book, or I wrote and recorded this song, or I made this movie," and they upload it to your site. You take them at face value without any due diligence, even though in some cases the file is called "Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin". Laws require you to have a license to play copyrighted works, but thanks to the DMCA they now say you can proceed as if you have that license, even if the person who gave it to you is not who they say they are. Thanks to this clusterfuck, you are protected as long as you take it down upon complaint. You must do no work to research whether you're dealing with the true copyright owner, no "due process", if you will.

Now, someone comes along and says, "Hey, that content is mine. Please take it down."

And you're upset that you have to take down this content and make the person who uploaded it verify ownership. You're upset about the work involved, even though your entire business is built on the backs of not verifying claims, and the entire creative world is left to police your site and every one like it. After you've had the content up on your site and, in many cases, profited from it being there, you're upset that now your user has to do some work when someone complains.

Let's take the number of real copyright abuses and hold it up to the highly dramatized number of false claims and see who deals with the larger clusterfuck.

bediger5• 15 years ago

About (5):

The grounding in the USA's federal constitution allows copyright but for a very well-defined purpose, increasing the size of the public domain. How much material went into the USA's public domain on January 1st, 2012? Answer: none. Current copyright law in the USA has slipped it's mooring, and become something other than a limited monopoly to encourage creation.

As far as implementing and enforcing copyright to suppress expressions, check out The Air Pirates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Pirates). Arguably, the lawsuit is all about Disney using copyright law to suppress something that was valid free speech.

About (2):

I don't see your point at all, unless you're strictly hanging on "hyper-connectedness". The internet works by copying into caches or buffers: it's one giant technical infringement. Without stricter-than-SOPA laws (see Fritz Holling's 2002 effort: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-866337.html) "copyright" per se is probably un-enforceable without a radical overhaul of the current peer-to-peer internet, and all the associated electronics.

wycats• 15 years ago

The "well-defined purpose" is actually:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"

And the only reason nothing entered the public domain is that due to a copyright extension, there's a gap during which time nothing will enter the public domain. I don't like continual copyright extensions anymore than you do, but the mere fact of a single copyright extension doesn't illustrate that copyright isn't serving it's intended purpose.

Natsu4• 15 years ago

> It is not true, however, that the continued enforcement of copyright laws in a hyper-connected world depends on having SOPA-style laws in effect.

This statement is true in that one can certainly continue to enforce copyright precisely as we do now, or to craft new measures that attempt to address the problem without creating so many new problems. The problem comes from the fact that none of these measures are likely to solve the problem from the studio's point of view.

As one might expect, they will continue to push for stronger laws as long as piracy remains rampant. And piracy will remain rampant so long as there are even a few people capable of piracy: thanks to computers, one unrestricted copy is enough for everyone in the entire world. Short of, say, outlawing computers, that isn't changing any time soon. There simply isn't anyone out there who can bear the weight of enforcing these laws at a level that would substantially reduce piracy, so it should come as no wonder that the studios have long sought to put that burden on someone else's shoulders. I simply do not see a technical solution to this as such. Piracy existed before the internet, after all, and there are no firewalls, filters or DRM on sneakernet. Without a technical solution, the law loses force. It's about like putting up a bigger "KEEP OUT" sign because we have no fence to put up.

That's not to say the artists are just screwed, though. I mean, iTunes still does a ton of business, even though you could get everything for free. So there are ways to survive in spite of rampant piracy. There are also ways to improve copyright law itself. William Patry's _How to Fix Copyright_ has some interesting ideas on that subject. But in the end, that means that the solution comes from redefining the problem: rather than ending piracy, one must find ways to succeed in spite of it. That may not be fair to them, but I certainly believe it's necessary.

yelsgib2• 15 years ago

In response to #3 - isn't it very very strange to you that J.K. Rowling is able to have a billion dollar Harry Potter empire? I don't think this defense of copyright actually stands up to any rigorous examination. Why do people need to be able to make billions of dollars from children's books? From software? From art? What would people spend their money on if everything like this was essentially free?

yungchin2• 15 years ago

When there are network effects in play (ie my neighbour, or my classmate, or my facebook friend, or some columnist in a newspaper can recommend a book to me, and I will then be more likely to read that particular book), I think you should always expect "outliers" like J.K. Rowling. Note that I'm putting "outliers" in quotes, because she probably fits in with some power-law description of this recommendation network - I'd say it's almost inevitable that a highly-connected world produces some very big winners. But do you think it's fair to model the law on these few exceptional cases, when most of the copyright-holders in this world will never be billionaires?

bambax3• 15 years ago

> Without copyright, I could take apart J.K Rowling's billion dollar Harry Potter empire by simply republishing and selling all the works myself, without compensation to Ms. Rowling.

She probably would have sold a few copies before you'd be able to do that; and maybe you could produce a slightly modified version that would be better.

It's worth noting that some of the best works of mankind were produced when no copyright was in place, so the argument that associates copyright protections with content creation is weak at best.

It's also worth noting that the continuous extension of copyright protection would effectively hamper creation. Derivative works are authored all the time. Most of what Disney ever produced is derived from popular classics from the 18th / 19th centuries (I remember that in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", the original author, Victor Hugo, isn't even credited).

I think it's wrong to frame the debate as "copyright versus no copyright at all"; it would be more useful to discuss copyright length. But what has been happening thus far is that copyright proponents have cried wolf, advocated for longer and longer copyright protections, and stronger and meaner tools of enforcement, AND IT WORKED.

And there we are, discussing SOPA, or having to live with HADOPI (crazy French law voted last year).

It's only fair that reasonable people who think shorter copyright terms would be desirable, and SOPA should never have been drafted, become less reasonable, in order to be heard.

I think that's what "zero copyright" advocates are doing; and maybe they have a case. Would a society with zero copyright be "radically different"? Let's see. Would "most people oppose those changes"? Let's ask them!

We need to frighten the MPAA just as the MPAA has been frightening everyone. "Stop pushing or lose it all" is a start.

route66• 15 years ago

Just some comments:

> She probably would have sold a few copies before you'd be able to do that; and maybe you could produce a slightly modified version that would be better.

I don't even know what "better" means in the context of works of art. In any case it's about money: You would see it justified to cash in on someone else's work after she "sold some copies"? Also this remembers me of the common practice of the ripoff: "hendrix' greatest solo's": not mentioning that they were recorded by john doe .

> It's worth noting that some of the best works of mankind were produced when no copyright was in place, so the argument that associates copyright protections with content creation is weak at best.

It is not weak for that reason. Currently works which are commonly copyrighted nowadays are reproduced very easily: lossless copying, printing, electronic editing etc. Try that with the sistine chapel. You would have to clone the Borgias first. Quoting is indeed very common in art but it does not compare to copying. I think that the circumstances are not comparable.

> Derivative works are authored all the time.

Yes. See above. But selling Harry Potter with some changed scenes is a ripoff and not a derivative work.

> Most of what Disney ever produced is derived from popular classics from the 18th / 19th centuries (I remember that in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", the original author, Victor Hugo, isn't even credited)

Completely agree. Disney is indeed fishy what concerns his copyrights based on other's efforts. But honestly: when and why should you be able to cash in on coffee mugs showing disney's rendering of the seven dwarfs?

loup-vaillant2• 15 years ago

By the way, J.K. Rowling explicitly allowed fan fiction from her works. I can't help but cite Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I enjoy even more than the original story. I'd be sorry to learn it has to stop because of copyright.

http://hpmor.com/

billpatrianakos8• 15 years ago

This is one of the few really reasonable comments I've seen about this issue. Most people are taking very extreme positions on this. It makes sense that they take such positions to be heard in the face of such radical opposition but here, amongst ourselves, why can't we just say that copyright has some merits to it. It isn't perfect but no copyright at all wouldn't be good. We can't be going around deciding that people in certain professions (musicians, visual artists, programmers) should no longer have any rights to their work and need to find another way to make money.

People will stop sharing their creations. I give away some open source stuff but I'd like to reserve the rights to some of my work for at least some reasonable period of time. People will always release great things for free but some people will either stop releasing or have less time or motivation to create these great things if copyright went away. This shouldn't be a choice between one or the other. Both choices put more people at a disadvantage than simply scaling back copyright would.

How about this, we all know government is broken. So do we get rid of it and become anarchists? Anarchists would say yes but the rest of us wouldn't. A better solution would be to address the issues causing the problem rather than simply getting rid of the thing that has a problem. You don't kill yourself to get over the flu. You don't stop eating completely because your fat. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let's keep copyright but modify it to benefit the most people.

Anti-copyright proponents would like us to think they are doing things "for the people". I say they're doing it for themselves. When you and all your friends think a certain way it's easy to think everyone else feels the same. Let's remember that "the people" are more than just consumers and ant-copyright-friendly creators. They're indie developers making awesome stuff we love, they're working at startups we drool over, and yeah, they work for the evil corporation too but are we really going to deny them everything they ask for out of spite? A good solution would work for most of the people most of the time (even the people trying to screw us but oh well). It isn't extreme or black and white and it takes into account that a creator's rights aren't any less important than a consumer's.

indrax• 15 years ago

From a speech on a copyright extension law, 1841

>Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightexte...

keen• 15 years ago

Without copyright, I could take apart J.K Rowling's billion dollar Harry Potter empire by simply republishing and selling all the works myself, without compensation to Ms. Rowling.

No, you couldn't. Who would buy the works from you, when anyone can legally obtain them, free?

You might sell physical books containing the works, but then you're not selling (licenses to) the works themselves, just paper.

I imagine in a world without copyright, many people (though not most) would still 'pay' for works such as Harry Potter, through services like Amazon, iTunes, etc. Customers would demand that these services share revenue with authors, similar to the current model.

The point is, without copyright, no one would pay you for Harry Potter.

praptak• 15 years ago

About 2: as long as I can send a gigabyte of encrypted data to anyone I know, copyright is unenforceable. You can either have private communication or copyright enforcement. So I disagree about this conflict being a strawman argument.

gonehome3• 15 years ago

I think the main problem with modern copyright is its length. Originally you had to register for copyright protection and it lasted 14 years (28 if renewed) before entering public domain. It was also primarily used to curb commercial infringement. The purpose of copyright is to "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."[1] The limited monopoly is simply the means to encourage creative work.

The current time frame of 70 years after the death of the artist distorts the purpose - it's no longer about encouraging creating works, but rather artists controlling and profiting for generations. This, in tandem with orphan works, makes nearly the last 100 years of culture off limits from the public. Perhaps most strangely the copyright time extensions have been retroactive which is really bizarre considering that people clearly don't need to be incentivized to create works they already created.

Today you can't even opt for something to be in the public domain, the best you can do is license it permissively. Unfortunately, because of large powerful interests and the heavy distortion of copyright's purpose I feel the problem is only going to get worse.

If I had the power to change copyright I'd do this:

1. Must register for protection (no implied copyright).

2. Lasts 7 years (14 with renewal) before entering public domain.

3. Non-profit sharing is not illegal.

Of these three points, the third is the most controversial. My opinion is that without draconian measures you can't stop file sharing. I also think the ability to make instantaneous and very cheap copies is one of the primary advantages of digital goods (making them non-rival goods). The public benefits from the ability to share and there is too much waste policing it. It would be better for businesses to adapt and find the advantages within the system (much how they already do).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

waqf2• 15 years ago

What virtue do you see in "1. Must register for protection"?

endersshadow• 15 years ago

1. Implied copyright is important--it eliminates the barrier to entry (as opposed to a patent, which requires a remarkable amount of paperwork and legal fees to attain).

2. 14 years is more than reasonable for a first pass before it enters the public domain. The reason it got up to 70 was because Disney didn't want Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain. The chief proponents of this are corporations, since they have lifespans much longer than you or I. They were retroactive because of Disney wanting to create new properties with the Mickey Mouse likeness.

3. That's high and mighty of you, but what determines "non-profit"? Surely you mean non-commercial? At any rate, then you or I could claim a profitless, personal use of an album that gets released, and share it freely. I'm very much a proponent of the idea of "fair use," but to say that "non-profit sharing is not illegal" is a little naive, methinks.

loup-vaillant2• 15 years ago

About 5 : (I quote you "Those creative people, though, want to profit from their efforts even as they shed the old constraints - they don't want their works to become instant common property, usable and salable by all without compensation to the original creator, simply because technology enables easy copying."

You only describe an instrumental goal here. The real goal is to have a fulfilling life (whatever that means), and the primary mean for most creative people is doing creative work, and being recognized for that.

Money only matter to the extent that it helps creative people doing what they want (namely, create). I believe extra profit is secondary most of the time.

As you pointed out, creators are more and more able to bypass established publishing entities, as distribution is becoming cheaper. Which means the creator gets a much, much bigger share of the pie. Therefore, the pie can shrink quite a lot before the creator can no longer eat. I don't think an abolition of copyright would shrink the pie past that point. (For those who already starve —need a day job—, that's another story.)

nl2• 15 years ago

Does anyone have any (non circular) references for the whole "the French tortured people to death for violating copyright on fabric patterns" story?

I cannot find anything about it anywhere (including searching Google Books).

Hari_Seldon• 15 years ago

The link in TFA takes you to a torrent freak article that explains it all with links

http://torrentfreak.com/and-when-even-the-death-penalty-does...

From the article:

"The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly."

original article in swedish (sources in the comments) http://falkvinge.net/2010/11/04/och-nar-dodsstraff-heller-in...

nl2• 15 years ago

I found that, but the "links" in that article go to things like "breaking on the wheel". There aren't actually any references for the story itself.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

... it happens just a moment after the singularity

yelsgib2• 15 years ago

A law is only a law if it is enforceable. Copyright is not enforceable since every copyrighted object is a requirement on the government's resources, and such objects are (basically) infinitely easy to create. Therefore, since the government has finite resources, it is simple to create a system where it cannot protect all (supposedly) copyrighted objects, namely one in which (# objects)*(resources required to protect an object) > governmental resources. It is a fundamentally unenforceable law and therefore not a law.

jstclair• 15 years ago

Wouldn't eliminating of copyright render the GPL unenforceable? I'd imagine you'd have to fall back to a BSD-style license, which (according to the FSF) is less-free? [not agreeing or disagreeing].

Natsu4• 15 years ago

It was written to turn copyright on its head. While it's true that eliminating it would weaken the GPL, it would also be less necessary, because freedom would be the default.

That said, I think RMS wrote an essay talking about why certain 'reforms' could be dangerous, in that we might end up with a weaker GPL but little else to show for it. I can't remember it clearly enough to find a citation for that right now, though.

Karellen• 15 years ago

Pretty much all FLOSS licenses would be unenforceable. They only work at the moment because copyright prevents works from being distributed without permission, and the only permission you get for distributing such works is through the FLOSS license. If you don't adhere to the license terms (e.g. providing source, attributing authors, whatver...) you have no other way to distribute without breaching copyright.

So BSD licenses would be just as pointless if there were no copyright.

gasull• 15 years ago

tl;dr:

"General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech, and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can't be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly."

Tycho• 15 years ago

People who want rid of copyright are people who want to kill the golden goose. They look around at all the copyright enabled businesses that have generated so much entertainment for them, and think 'You know what, I'd rather just have all this stuff for free, now. I don't care if we don't get any more in the future.'

It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly

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