And this has been exactly my fear about the whole ACTA and similar debates. That the revolt against crappy IP laws would be twisted into opposition to free trade.
I just hope we're prepared for a fight to make sure the reports stay high-quality, unbiased, non-partisan, and free of lobbyist influence. Because once they become footballs in public debates, there'll be significant pressure to make them say whatever the politicians commissioning the studies want.
The First Amendment doesn't operate differently in Oregon than in the rest of the States. My understanding of this case is that this gentleman's stripping was not forbidden by Oregon's specific statues on nudity, not because it was protected First Amendment speech.
New patent application: A Method and System for Creating, Storing, and Retrieving Inaccurate Information Regarding Breaking News Events Within a Multimedia Environment.
Pros: It's hilarious. And every time a news outlet screws up, it's a lawyers'-fees and statutory-damages lawsuit bonanza!
Cons: News outlets might actually pay the extortionate license fees rather than improve their reporting.
I really hate to see free trade coming into conflict with free expression this way. TechDirt may have convinced me to oppose this whole treaty, but if it falls apart over protecting something as asinine as the "Buy American" laws I'm going to yell a string of curses that will probably get me investigated under CISPA.
At a guess: any actor in a movie or TV show will only get that job after signing a contract allowing the studios and networks to use their performance in whatever ways they want (and only those ways).
So the effect, presumably, would be to leave the big legacy producers unaffected, while creating a whole new way for anyone trying to reuse that material (both illicitly and under what has been fair use) to get sued.
Just my own quick impression, I'm nowhere near an expert.
I think it's worth making the point that Techdirt's articles (though I couldn't say about individual authorship) have often emphasized the opportunity cost of stricter IP enforcement on innovation (i.e. that patent trolling tends to dampen the speed of invention and technology adoption). If that can be a legitimate complaint, then so could the film industry emphasizing opportunity costs of piracy on film industry employment, so that they may have a legitimate if piracy simply slowed new hiring without actually turning it negative.
I still think their copyright positions are fundamentally awful, and I'd be looking for evidence that employment is actually impacted in the way they claim. But it's still a good idea to be wary of hypocrisy in argument.
So I agree with the overall point, but bringing up changes to the Statute of Anne in response to German scriptwriters is probably not the best strategy here.
Compulsory licensing has been something that I've suspected might be an elegant solution to a lot of modern intellectual property troubles for a while now. Pleasantly surprised to discover that some of our international trade frameworks have considered that exact possibility. Kudos to India for implementing it, and I'm eager to see how it works out.
Hmmm, but how do you define "automated" in this context? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the conclusion, but it seems to imply that if I create an algorithm or some other "automated system" that can in turn produce creative works, then those end products should automatically be in the public domain.
The examples coming to my mind are visual art; like if I design a program that produces aesthetically pleasing fractal images without any input other than some publicly available string of numbers (like weather data or something). Should I not be able to claim copyright on those images?
Lab fees, library fees, the cost of textbooks for every class, not to mention original tuition itself. Yeah, I can imagine that really easily.
I'll tell you though, the really horrifying moment will be when universities start charging their alumni license fees for every time they use the knowledge they learned in classes.
You're making "deregulation" into a straw-man. The problem isn't that businesses in the United States are regulated, it's that they're badly regulated. It's that corporations have to spend millions of dollars annually to hire armies of lawyers just to figure out how to comply with the law, and with little reassurance that they won't still be sued because someone else's army of lawyers has a different interpretation.
"Overregulation" in the context of the Economist article and Mike's post doesn't mean the restrictions imposed by these rules are necessarily onerous. Rather, it means that the rules are so hideously complicated and poorly written that fewer and fewer people have a solid idea of what those restrictions even are in the first place. To quote from the original article:
The law that set up America's banking system in 1864 ran to 29 pages; the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 went to 32 pages; the Banking Act that transformed American finance after the Wall Street Crash, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall act, spread out to 37 pages. Dodd-Frank is 848 pages long.
It then goes on to explain that much of those 848 pages only lay out directives for agencies of the bureaucracies to create their own more in-depth rules; that so far, multiple agencies have produced competing supplements clarifying only some of the needed sections, but already adding hundreds of new pages to the regulation each.
Whatever noble ideals may have led to these sorts of rules, the legal nightmare they're creating is not actually improving the situation. The focus needs to be on better regulation, not simply more or less.
Sunset provisions don't mean that a law will expire, just that it needs to be reauthorized to remain in effect. And yes, it would probably be worthwhile to include such provisions in everything, even prohibitions on treason and smuggling. That can help cut down on the legal clutter of poorly considered or outdated laws (consider, we don't have much need for regulation of horse and buggy traffic any longer). It would also encourage continuous analysis and tweaking of the details of laws which we still find mostly useful (making it more likely that such minutiae as sentencing guidelines will be revised when they've gone overboard).
With the metrics, I do think they'd be a good idea, but it'd be harder to make them strict rules than Mike implies. The problem being that, since new laws have equal authority to old laws, Congress is never truly bound by any restrictions created by its previous incarnations. Even so, by passing laws with clearly defined metrics and standards for success, we would create much more solid ground arguments for or against specific measures. And that makes it easier to hold lawmakers accountable to their own opinions and decisions. It would be much harder for prohibitionists (of anything) to argue for continued strict enforcement if their past laws came with measurable, stated objectives like "reduce consumption/infringement by 20% from levels in X year", but was then shown to have had negligible impact.
Both of these sorts of measures don't guarantee better laws, and they certainly require a dedicated media and attentive public to hold lawmakers' feet to the fire. But they would certainly make it much easier for us to do exactly that. I, for one, think that's a worthy goal.
Corporations may not yet have the ability to copyright facts. But if they develop or acquire it in the future, absurd lawsuits will become far more likely, according to legal experts.
It looks to me like he explained it perfectly: the copyright owners are using their monopoly to reduce supply at the same time that demand increases, so that they can make a larger profit off the death of a celebrity.
Reminds me of when the printing shops deviously lowered prices in order to put all of the cartographers drawing maps by hand out of business. I swear, there's simply no respect for propriety in the business these days.
On the post: Canadian Cities Looking To Opt-Out Of CETA Rather Than Get Roped Into An ACTA-Like Situation
Sigh
On the post: Resolution Introduced To Make Public Domain Congressional Research Finally Accessible To The Public
If it happens...
On the post: Apparently Stripping Nude To Protest TSA Search Is Protected By The First Amendment
A quibble with the title.
On the post: Healthcare, Journalism, And The Mad Dash For 'The Scoop'
How about...
Pros: It's hilarious. And every time a news outlet screws up, it's a lawyers'-fees and statutory-damages lawsuit bonanza!
Cons: News outlets might actually pay the extortionate license fees rather than improve their reporting.
On the post: Did Apple's Claims Over Rectangles And Corners Lead To 'The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers'?
All they do is take the old horse, beat it to death, then tell you that you have to remove the horseshoes before you can ride the corpse.
On the post: After SOPA And ACTA, Now TPP Starts To Fall Apart
So conflicted...
On the post: Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote
Re: Re: Hey wait!
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Just Won't Quit: Pushing New Monopoly Rights For Performers Through Sneaky Treaty Agreement
Re: I don't get it
So the effect, presumably, would be to leave the big legacy producers unaffected, while creating a whole new way for anyone trying to reuse that material (both illicitly and under what has been fair use) to get sued.
Just my own quick impression, I'm nowhere near an expert.
On the post: The Latest In Hollywood Mathematics: A 46.3% Employment Increase Equals 'Countless Jobs Lost'
I still think their copyright positions are fundamentally awful, and I'd be looking for evidence that employment is actually impacted in the way they claim. But it's still a good idea to be wary of hypocrisy in argument.
On the post: Judge Preserves Megaupload Evidence For Now, While Gov't Tries To Pin Blame On Hosting Company
Because if they just get to keep it, then there may be some huge conflict of interest issues which are influencing the way this is playing out...
On the post: German Scriptwriters Attack 'Greens, Pirates, Left-wingers And Internet Community' For Daring To Have Different Views On Copyright
Er...
On the post: Putting Lives Before Patents: India Says Pricey Patented Cancer Drug Can Be Copied
On the post: Can A Company Be An 'Author' For The Purpose Of Copyright?
The examples coming to my mind are visual art; like if I design a program that produces aesthetically pleasing fractal images without any input other than some publicly available string of numbers (like weather data or something). Should I not be able to claim copyright on those images?
On the post: Online Technology Entrepreneurship Class At Stanford Postponed... Because Of Copyright
Re:
I'll tell you though, the really horrifying moment will be when universities start charging their alumni license fees for every time they use the knowledge they learned in classes.
On the post: Economist Notices That The US Is Getting Buried Under Costly, Useless Over-Regulation
Re:
"Overregulation" in the context of the Economist article and Mike's post doesn't mean the restrictions imposed by these rules are necessarily onerous. Rather, it means that the rules are so hideously complicated and poorly written that fewer and fewer people have a solid idea of what those restrictions even are in the first place. To quote from the original article:
It then goes on to explain that much of those 848 pages only lay out directives for agencies of the bureaucracies to create their own more in-depth rules; that so far, multiple agencies have produced competing supplements clarifying only some of the needed sections, but already adding hundreds of new pages to the regulation each.
Whatever noble ideals may have led to these sorts of rules, the legal nightmare they're creating is not actually improving the situation. The focus needs to be on better regulation, not simply more or less.
On the post: Economist Notices That The US Is Getting Buried Under Costly, Useless Over-Regulation
Re:
With the metrics, I do think they'd be a good idea, but it'd be harder to make them strict rules than Mike implies. The problem being that, since new laws have equal authority to old laws, Congress is never truly bound by any restrictions created by its previous incarnations. Even so, by passing laws with clearly defined metrics and standards for success, we would create much more solid ground arguments for or against specific measures. And that makes it easier to hold lawmakers accountable to their own opinions and decisions. It would be much harder for prohibitionists (of anything) to argue for continued strict enforcement if their past laws came with measurable, stated objectives like "reduce consumption/infringement by 20% from levels in X year", but was then shown to have had negligible impact.
Both of these sorts of measures don't guarantee better laws, and they certainly require a dedicated media and attentive public to hold lawmakers' feet to the fire. But they would certainly make it much easier for us to do exactly that. I, for one, think that's a worthy goal.
On the post: Astrolabe Drops Lawsuit Over Time Zones, Promises Not To Sue Again
On the post: Streaming Rights On Whitney Houston Movie NOT Pulled In Order To 'Make Really A Large Amount Of Money On DVD Sales' [Updated]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Streaming Rights On Whitney Houston Movie NOT Pulled In Order To 'Make Really A Large Amount Of Money On DVD Sales' [Updated]
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: French Court Fails Digital Economics; Claims Free Google Maps Is Illegal
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