The Infringement Age: How Much Do You Infringe On A Daily Basis?
from the a-lot-more-than-you-might-think dept
Boing Boing points us to a paper from John Tehranian, called Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap (pdf), which attempts to show how far out of whack copyright laws are, with the simple tale of a hypothetical law professor (coincidentally named John, of course) going about a normal day, tallying up every big of copyright infringement he engages in. Replying to an email with quoted text? Infringement! Reply to 20 emails? You're looking at $3 million in statutory damages. Doodle a sketch of a building? Unauthorized derivative work. Read a poem outloud? Unauthorized performance. Forward a photograph that a friend took? Infringement! Take a short film of a birthday dinner with some friends and catch some artwork on the wall in the background? Infringement!"By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years."While the paper calls this "infringement nation," it clearly goes beyond our nation. We are living in the "infringement age," where it's impossible not to infringe on copyrights every single day -- yet many people still don't understand why it makes sense to change copyright laws to make them more reasonable.
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Filed Under: copyright, fair use, infringement, john tehranian
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eliminate them all
Turn off the voice recorders, unless you were the only one talking, you probably violate someone's copyright to record their voice.
Stop taking pictures, unless you are the only subject in your picture, you are probably violating someone's intellectual property by just taking their picture.
Stop telephoning anyone, anything you hear may be copyrighted material unless you were the one talking, but if you were quoting someone else, oh shit, better watch out.
This whole thing is getting so far out of hand that there is only one thing to do, hire a f***ing lawyer to sue someone before you get sued, or hope that you win more than the guy who is suing you so you can pay him. Oh, by the way, don't spread transcripts of your court proceedings, you may be violating your opponent's right to financial gain under the intellectual property right laws.
Can you sue your lawyer for writing down what you tell him in confidence? After all, it was your words that he wrote down, so he must be in violation somewhere. That's it, sue the G** D*** lawyers for creating this mess!
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Mind Eraser
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Re: Mind Eraser
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professors don't infringe
teenagers are different. they have their whole lives ahead of them and need to be re-educated about the importance of physical media and the media companies' business models.
music on cassette tape is not infringement. old people use cassettes. mp3s infringe because college kids use them.
it's all so simple.
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Re: professors don't infringe
It used to take over an hour to record a cassette, and sometimes I used to spent a whole Sunday afternoon recording a single cassette.
And really in the end all I was doing was transferring to a different media, and selecting the actual songs that I wanted, and leaving off the ones that I did not want. (selecting and arranging) You see they never did successfully make LP players for vehicles.
Now I can record a CD in less than 5 minutes, and that includes selecting the songs that I want, in the order that I want them. And unlike a cassette if I make a mistake or change my mind on the content, I just trash the CD and start over with a new CD, no big deal, but with a cassette starting over was a huge deal.
I think that transferring from one media to another or selecting or arranging on the same media is still considered by copyright law to be "fair use". Making available or acquiring for no copyright fee by digital method is not. Digital made this possible.
So here is the issue: In the present technological and social environment, the role of the recording companies becomes less and less relevant, (the actual value of recording and distribution of content services) the artists still need to be fairly compensated for their work, and present technological progress should not be unduly restrained. Or if so, this will be a recipe for the US to get passed by by others who impose no such restraints, and become a third world nation.
For instance Google provides what could be considered public services, yet there is no charge to the public for those services, the revenue is generated by a different business model. AOL charge for similar services, which model is working the best??? (generates the most revenue) The music and writing industries need to explore some different models, because society is changing, both in technology and lifestyle.
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???
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Make me feel better about being blatant
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Bad Laws ..
However, if over 50% of the public is breaking a law, maybe, just maybe, they will listen. Maybe.
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Re: Bad Laws ..
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to Overcast
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# 11
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Re: # 11
It just makes money for different people. Law enforcement and the prison system are big business these days. And while they're in prison you can use them as slave labor. (The 13th amendment allows slavery as criminal punishment.)
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Morality
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Let download
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The point was made that people before us, our fathers preceding generations etc. came up with ideas, inventions, revelations etc. and we use what has been gained from them to come up with what we have now and that becomes our children's inheritance and the process continues.
How can we claim intellectual property when everything we come up with builds off 'intellectual property' of others who come before us, who built off those before them and on and on.
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Prove you know what you're talking about
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Re: Prove you know what you're talking about
You must be new around here... We talk about fair use and the DMCA all the time. And, um, it's rather rude to go somewhere where you clearly don't know your hosts and demand they "prove" something...
Anyway, as you're probably aware, the big copyright players insist that there's no such thing as a fair use "right." It's merely a defense -- and it depends on a variety of things. Therefore, according to them, you cannot just "claim" fair use -- you can only use it as a defense after you are shown to infringe. In other words, those examples all do "infringe," though the prof could later argue fair use in court.
On top of that, there is no hard and fast definition of fair use -- but rather a set of "tests" which are subjectively applied, meaning that you cannot say with any certainty that these are fair use -- which is part of the point he's proving with the paper.
Anyway, if you take a look around at our past writings, I think you'd find that over the past decade we've been writing on Techdirt we're well aware of copyright issues and fair use, and there's no need to demand we "prove" anything.
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Lazy law profs and poor peer-review seem to be the
In short, this paper is a big lie.
It is really quite a shame, because if the author of this paper was not quite as lazy as he appears it would have been possible to create a list of actual everyday acts which were minor (but _real_) acts of copyright infringement and then demonstrate how technological progression might magnify the quantity and impact of these minor activities.
** The only action listed which really an infringement is when the law prof copies cases, analysis, and summary of recent decisions by the Supremes and passes them out in class without any sort of comment, editing, or markup that would make handing them out a transformative act he runs afoul of "the Kinko's case" -- anyone want to say something about how they only infringing act was performed when this "law professor" decided to be a _lazy_ law professor?
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A simple change that will never happen.
I for one can envision one simplification of copyright law in the area of "Fair Use", I would define Fair Use to be the following - "When you purchase any content you gain exclusive rights to use that content in any form, on any device one copy at a time. Should copyright holder release a new version of said content without modification of original source media you are entitled to an at cost "upgrade" to the latest version plus a minor fee. The total charge not to exceed the actual cost of manufacturing media + 2% or for digital download 2% of the cost purchasing remastered digital download content new. You may also make any derivative work from said content for completely non-commercial purposes."
What this does is, if I buy a movie, photo, book or song, I gain full rights to use one copy of that content at a time - period. I can make as many copies as I want and put it on as many devices as I want. You are entitled to a virtually free upgrade, If they decide to re-release the same content without actually changing the original content, as in not re-performing it, and only re-master it to "improve" the quality and then re-release it on another media or in another digital format. You are entitled to this because you bought lifetime rights to the work not just to rights to the specific copy of the work. Now before you shoot down my simple recommendation - wrap you head around it some more.
I bought a lot of records and tapes from specific artists. When they came out on CD, I was required to once again buy the CDs if I wanted to move to the new format. But I had already paid for the rights to those specific copyrighted materials. With my new simple fair use right they would have been required to give me a CD of each artist at cost + 2%. When the same works came out as digital download I would have paid them 2% of the cost of buying the digital tracks online.
Why doesn't the industry like Digital? For two reasons, I can give you an exact copy of the work and they can't simple re-master and re-release it on another media and get everyone to buy it again. Once it's a full quality digital copy of the original or adequate quality digital copy, you can't get better than the original content after all, you can't get everyone to pay for it again.
If my fair use was implemented so that everyone knew what there rights are in this one area would go a long way to simplifying copyright law while still protecting the rights of the copyright holders. Of course they'd rather you paid them ever time you played or used any of their content. They don't want to sell lifetime use rights. They love the pay for play model.
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Irony
I have been saying this for years, when the majority of the population comitts multiple crimes simply going through thier daily life, then there is something wrong with the laws, not the people.
Look at the sexual misconduct laws, the copyright laws, and the alcohol laws. It is possible to rack up a life sentence and untold millions simply going to a nightclub, trying to pick up a chick, failing, retreating with wounded dignity to your pad, and finding solace in a good first person shooter. That is flipping outrageous.
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Spread The Love
Let's take down Samsung, Sony, IBM, Dell etc. for giving me the tools to commit copy crimes. No! Wait! Let's go after Al Gore who (by his own admission) invented the internet from which I do the majority of my theft.
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Have you heard of fair use?
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Re: Have you heard of fair use?
It's an after-the-fact defence -- if you can persuade the authorities that it applies to your use of the material in question. You have to persuade the judge that your particular use was, in context, actually fair use.
In the mean time, by contrast, any bozo can issue a DMCA takedown notice, and your counter-claim that your use is plainly and self-evidently "fair" nonetheless doesn't prevent your material from being blocked, or from being co-opted as an income source from the complainant.
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Imitation Hits the Marketing Business. Again.
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I wish I were a suer
Okay, sure, maybe I can't actually get $4 billion from every person, but I'll start with the richest people in the US and work my way down.
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Fair use
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Gene Simmons
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the infringement age
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"copyright infringement"
And now they are coming out with Blu-Ray disc's. So now the industry wants us to buy all new movies on the new format. What a rip off...!
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Fair use and transformative works
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We copy things in our heads all the time, so...
seriously, that's how our brains work, by keeping many many copies, some transformed (who has a perfect brain then?), etc etc
Thought crime will be next target of copyright proponents balckmail scheme (while publicly announcing they have stopped harassing pirate minds to placate the government, of course)
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