I'm wondering where the direct attack on copyright is in the post other than, perhaps, to note that copyright is neither a welfare scheme for anyone holding it on something nor is it a pension scheme.
Thing is, it was NEVER intended to be that. At least until the Sonny Bono Act.
The Band was never big as an ad background for ads except, perhaps, for the opening chord sequence in Chest Fever. That and it's been forever since I heard their music, except The Weight, even on goldie rock FM stations so royalties aren't coming in like they used to.
What the post does attack is the silly idea of a copyright "tax" on ISP connections to be magically distributed to musicians active or not. Not to mention the labels who would gain the most from the copyrights assigned to them by musicians.
I guess you didn't see that part so you decided on the pro-copyright ad hom instead.
You DO realize that you do more harm that good to the cause of copyright when you do things like this don't you?
Hmmmmm....on second thought keep the ad hom knee jerk responses coming. You make your side of the discussion sound even sillier than it often already is.
Let's also keep in mind that the only member of The Band still active is Robbie Robertson. And his solo stuff doesn't sound anything like The Band.
I've seen young folks who have discovered The Band and just love them and others who shrug and go "so what?". The Band was always an acquired taste, anyway, even in their big days. Always better live than in the studio, IMHO.
It's so sad to see every dip in sales, every fall in band sales blamed on piracy rather than changes in popular taste or, in the case of rock, abandoning the danceable music it began as to an over abundance of sonic noodling about represented by the likes of Kansas.
Hmmmmmmm....Canada is a relatively SMALL country???
Gee, I didn't know that!
Though I have known Brits who land in Vancouver to visit relatives and then want to pop over to Toronto for an afternoon visit.
It's not just us ferriers that the US bullies at their borders, it's their own citizens. Leave the U.S. without a passport and an American citizen finds it next to impossible to get back in again.
All this means, of course, is that the bad guys now know the rules in detail and can use them to freely enter and leave the States while the rest of us are harassed and bullied in the name of security.
Not so much the US Government but the RIAA and MPAA and their sycophants in Europe who actually own the EU parliament. In this case that means sharing information with the United States for alleged security reasons but they really want to track pirates!
I can understand the the need for nearly unreadable privacy policies of most sites in that there is NO way to keep people's people's data completely and totally private. Things like buggy code and too many people's tendency to share far too much of their own information making it easy to trace or track them. But, as Mike says, the whole idea is to make it as permissive as possible so that some "helpful" employee doesn't violate them.
That and they're written up in dense legalese that satisfies judges, privacy commissioners and so on that they're actually doing the minimum allowed by law.
They're kinda like the parking stub that says they'll rent you a space for a couple of hours but the owners of the lot aren't responsible if someone drives off with your Jag.
It's been quite the week for insightful, funny, slapstick and ironic humour to surface. Largely because it's been a week that never seemed to offer up topics that demanded one or more or all of the above.
While a number of our better known trolls have been active the number of trolling posts feels like it declined during the week or maybe they're just not as insulting, ignorant and self-centred as usual.
The prize and an extreme example of all three cam be found in tp's posts in Too Much Copyright headed "It's limiting both sides..." in which, among other things is positied the idea that there's some kind of mathematical relationship between how much time is spent on a creation in work time and free time and too much done in free time is grounds for rejection by a publisher. tp also explains to those of us too dense to get it ourselves that there's this vast conspiracy amongst publishers to to avoid the dangers of "impact" in what he seems to feel is a closed system with door locks instead of the open system that it is and that, within, this closed system there's room for only so much product at any given moment in time and so there are only "jobs" for a fixed number of authors and "product"--books--.
That this is disproved by the number of new authors who are published all the time in book form doesn't seem to have occurred to him.
The thread is often unintentionally humourous, funny to the point where ROFLOL is an apt description, language that is easily found in conspiracy theory forums and posts, totally out of touch with reality.
But tp must know something the rest of us don't because he seems able to suggest this closed system and market when most economists from Adam Smith to the present consider it an open one and that stock and futures markets are sure is an open economic system.
By reading him you're left with the impression that he believes all of this. To critics with concrete examples just how wrong he is his response is to show how wrong the critic is by standing his ground and patiently explaining just how and why he's right. A great reminder of the reality that even the most educated and talented among us can fall into becoming a conspiracy nut with a flat earther certainty that he's the only one who knows The Truth.
Re: Candor is a *good* thing. IP law may not be so easy to resolve, though.
At least part of the problem is the phrase "Intellectual Property" itself. When most people think about property they/we automatically think of physical things like our computer, home, lawnmower, cat or dog (though then it's a challenge to determine who owns who), bar of soap and so on. Ideas/invention and expression of same in prose, poetry, film, software aren't property in any conventional sense and in fact weren't referred to that way until sometime around or shortly after 1960.
You can't build a fence around them in a real sense, you can't put alarms on them in a conventional sense. In fact in a real sense in what most people instantly think of as property they aren't. They're a legal construction having no real world existence. Their results do but by themselves they don't exist in the real world.
If you want to say there's a fence around them the fence is made up of other legal constructs like copyright and patent law. Before the Web appeared they worked reasonably well and did what they were intended to do.
Perhaps as much by coincidence as anything else, the appearance of the Web and its widespread use copyright term lengths have become unreal while what can be patented has been expanded to include things like software and business methods starting with court decisions. Software patents largely opposed by the tech industry while business methods were welcomed by those who thought they had something to sell in that area, say ISO.
Enforcement on alleged infringement began with patents and businesses we now call patent trolls. Non practicing entities who produce nothing and make nothing out of the patents they hold except for lawsuits. Then the entertainment industry started screaming about infringement which they renamed "piracy" and not only over-estimated its effects but actually refused to believe the evidence of their own balance sheets which told them the opposite.
The crash of newspapers and magazines, while related to the Web, came about for different reasons.
So the entertainment industry started on a campaign to alienate their market by filing legal actions where they could and lobbying for even more protection than copyright currently provide. They over reached, badly and brought copyright as a political issue along with them when SOPA and PIPA were proposed, with more information around ACTA and the growing resistance to TPP by Pacific Rim countries who object to what they perceive as American IP extremism.
As to TPP, two of the largest trading nations on the Pacific Rim -- China and Canada -- aren't even there which leaves a huge hole in whatever agreement they may come up with. Oh yeah, and ACTA is on a death watch.
Whatever we come up with that will replace the current regimes of copyright and patent law MUST take into account the cultural, societal and economic changes the Web has brought with it. Changes similar to though far exceeding the Industrial Revolution. These laws don't just need reform they need replacement as they address a different world.
We're now at a time where anyone can become a publisher. Many are, just look at all the blogs around the Web. All of which address real or imagined needs or just vanity.
Anyone now, can record a song at home with better gear built into the software to record it and mix it than was available even a decade ago. The analogue portion hasn't changed all that much but the digital world HAS changed how music is recorded.
Anyone can make a movie or a video if they wish to. Many try and most come up with something no better than the 8mm home movies that we boomers remember with such horror.
You get my point. For better or worse the world has changed and "rules" such as copyright and patent law have to change with them before society totally rejects them I'd have never thought of copyright as a form of prohibition. I do now. Alcohol and drug prohibition has solved nothing though they did and are arguably making the problems they were supposed to resolve worse.
It's not just lawmakers who have to come up with a sea change in terms of what copyright and patent law were intended to accomplish in a world that, in less than a decade, will probably cease to exist for all practical purposes. Keeping in mind that they were never intended to become a never ending welfare program for authors, musicians, photographers, painters, inventors, publishing companies, recording and movie studios and others. It's a sea change in outlook and expectation we all have to make. Things are possible now that never were before. Creative reach is further than it ever was. The genie is not only out of the bottle, it's gone and is giggling at us while we try to turn the clock back.
We do need a troll free discussion about this that focus's on what we want copyright and patent law to accomplish and totally redesign both, whatever we call them, to do that without regard for what that may do to legacy industries.
I despair at times that we can do that or come close to it. Then again, humans do have the surprising ability to change course in the middle of the stream before we're forced into it at times. Perhaps this is one of those times.
I didn't say that you could choose a second publisher, now, did I?
Though I did point out earlier that one of the reasons for the enactment of the Statue of Anne, the first copyright legislation in the English speaking world that part of the reason for that was multiple editions of the exact same book by different publishers before the Statue was passed. In essence the publishers were destroying each other.
"the publisher just do not have resources to spread your product to half the available world;"
As I don't know, nor do I want to know, which publisher you signed up with I don't know their resources. Some do have the resources to publish the book in half the "available world", outfits like MacMillian and Penguin come to mind without having to think about it. Of course, they don't until they have your book (product) as a best seller in their home market and THEN it's published in other markets they serve globally. It may even be translated into languages other than English at that point.
And if their home market is the United States or United Kingdom then, as book markets go, they are not considered a "tiny part" of it. They are considered to be the trend setters of the English speaking world, in fact. Once again, if they have a best seller on their hands on one or both of THOSE markets if they've been holding back in other English speaking markets the release the book in all of them. THAT is called maximizing profit which is what they want to do, after all.
Assuming the the contract the writer signs with their publisher isn't strictly exclusive then perhaps they get to shop the book around themselves. More likely if they don't then..
"Take his xerox machine and start selling it themselves? One person can only cover very small area of the world, or are you going to start travelling the world and selling it yourself?"
that is far from the only alternative. In this day and age it's the worst one. By the way the photocopy option isn't available as the layout of the book itself is covered by the publisher's copyright including the selection of font, illustrations if any, kerning, spacing, how a chapter break is dealt with and so on. So you can forget that option.
What you're failing to understand is that the Internet and Web have changed everything about publishing. Should your publisher release you from your contract because the book just sat there gathering dust in book stores or you fire them, though you have not right to republish what they've already published unless they assign your copyright to the work, as opposed to the physical book, back to you. At that time you can self publish and put it on the Web. There are inexpensive to very expensive programs that allow you to do that and can even go so far as selecting the appropriate file format for ebooks. So you take your "product" put it up on a web site and, voila, it's available to the entire world. You can choose how to promote that book, say blog like crazy about it, offer sneak peaks as Amazon does and more but, unless you really want to you don't NEED to travel the world or out of the comfort of your armchair, if that's your wish. The choice is yours at that point.
The point is that the "impact" of the book, regardless of publishing method, is limited only by the resources available and the amount of "product" sold. It's not limited geographically or in any other way.
The subject of the book may limit you. A book on learning to program in PHP or ASP doesn't have the same potential for sales as does a work of general fiction (prose or poetry).
What you're trying to convince me of is that the publishers of the Harry Potter books chose not to satisfy the immense demand for a new Harry Potter book due to its alleged "impact". Impact, be damned, they printed and distributed as many copies of the book as they were capable of until the demand lessened.
Your description of the publishing world is that it operates in some strange world of mercantilism, price fixing and supply fixing. The last pair illegal the last time I looked.
Copyright has nothing at all to do with any of it. It wasn't designed with that in mind. It was designed to protect the rights holder, who isn't usually the writer, for a limited period of time until the work fell into the public domain. Nor was it intended to last forever which is where we seem to be going.
It's that ever increasing length of copyright that's being talked about as a form of prohibition, technically it is, and the fact that's it's a perversion of the purpose of copyright.
What you propose is several degrees more of a perversion of copyright than the term. Thankfully it doesn't exist.
Actually, in many ways their income in irrelevant, their creativity is the relevant part.
Musicians starting out on in their own, they absorb most of the costs of what they do including travel, set up, sound check time and all the rest of it in their spare time from their day jobs so they can play the gig. Start-ups software or otherwise are 17 hour day propositions.
Many of those creative software businesses being set up today are in open source, too, remember. The gaming sector is mostly closed source, I know.
I'm certainly not condoning an attack on small business, independents, average working folks, musicians or anyone else on a crusade against Sony and Disney.
But, as a craftsman myself I can tell you that I've been held up at jobs too often in my working life by information that isn't freely available than helped by things like copyright and paywalls. Information should be free, as in freely accessible. If it sometimes needs paying for perhaps I will if I need it badly enough but if I can't find it then it's NOT freely available.
You're trying to compare the structure of medium and big business to that of smaller enterprises and that just doesn't work. Their needs are widely different. Where a large corporation may not need some information NOW, the smaller ones often do but often can't get it because of the action of the larger ones who hold the copyright on it. When it's said that information is or ought to be free it doesn't always mean free of charge though it means freely and easily accessible and freely available. Setting information free helps the little guy a whole lot more than the mythical damage it can do the big one.
The ownership goes to publisher to prevent authors from expanding their "impact area" in the world to too big. Exclusive contracts often prevent authors from going to next publisher and selling the same product again several times. Each product only gets small market.
Now where did you get THAT from? Exclusives prevent the author from going to another publisher but not to stop the writer from doing anything. Publishers want to hold onto writers with a record of turning out best sellers and so they want to increase the "impact" area as much as possible. More sales, you know.
What you are trying to want us to believe is that a publisher will limit the new book by a Stephen King or a Margaret Atwood in order to keep your "system" going and, therefore, limit their profits. Both sell a huge amount of "product" with each new release all over the English speaking world.
Even restricting the discussion to the English speaking world there are already thousands, perhaps far more than a million, published authors on the globe. In places like China and India alone the number IS in the millions in their own languages. And both are huge markets for books written in English as well.
No, it's more like people doing it for living are entitled better guarantee that there is some money available than the people who spend their free time for it. Work time vs. free time is easy way to choose which products are entitled this better guarantee.
Copyright did NOT appear to guarantee authors or publishers an income. It might have improved the chances for both but it did not and does not guarantee it.
You also need to remember that those who write guaranteed best sellers likely started out writing in their spare time and submitted manuscripts written in their spare time to publishers before they got their fist contract.
Copyright is not a welfare system for writers or publishers. And heaven forbid that it ever comes to that.
The pyramids are still way much better than anything your amateur artists have managed to create. These were created in slave labor and involved thousands of people, but no one would today say this would be acceptable today, regardless of how wonderful the result would be.
In fact archeological evidence has established that the myth that the Great Pyramids were build by slave labour to be absolutely and completely wrong. They were, in fact, built by free Egyptians. There's ample evidence of "towns" constructed for that purpose around and near each of them that were occupied so we now know who, what crafts, trades and kind of people they were. Work stopped for after the annual Nile flood so that the men could go home and plant the crops for the coming season and resumed when that was done. Work stopped again for the harvest and resumed when that was done for the remainder of the year till the next flood. The people working on the Great Pyramids were paid labour and not slaves.
The craftsmanship of the Great Pyramids themselves and the smaller ones around it is something we can no longer do. Even with all our modern tools, we can't replicate that. Nor absorb the cost of it.
For all of that, the Egyptians first few attempts at pyramids failed and that failure is visible and easily found around Egypt.
And for all your notions of what is "work time" and what is "free time" the builders must have been amateurs. Yet those structures have endured for about 3300 years. Some amateurs!
And yes, their construction took thousands of people each doing their own jobs and yes there were slaves there but by all the evidence available now the slaves did NOT take part in the construction. They were there to cook food, keep the "camps" clean and provide for those doing the work when their families couldn't be there but they didn't build the pyramids.
Copyright prevents certain kinds of products to enter the markets. One such product is a product that was copied in it's entirety. Another product is such that was created by using people's free time. If your work can be easily copied by _everyone_ in the world, then authors have no position in the marketplace, when those limited number of opportunities for selling products are taken by products that were directly copied with small amount of effort. Copyright tries to keep the market in the hands of original authors, and not in the hands of simple copiers. How the products were created is not relevant - only the market is.
As you're defending this so eloquent, mistakes of logic, ignorance of history, the law and more I have to assume you believe this nonsense.
It's really hard to know where to start. It may come as a complete surprise to you that most authors before they were published and signed with a publisher did create their work in their "free" or spare time. And it was that work that was submitted to one or more publishers by the author for them to get published. At some point it was picked up, revised in line with an editors suggestions (also in free or spare time) and then published. New authors don't get cozy things like advances, you know. Rarely does a new work by a previously unknown writer become a best seller to their first work will have a limited print run and far less promotion than, say, Stephen King.
In your imaginary world this writer wasn't a professional because he wasn't published prior to the publisher running off a couple of thousand books. In the real world, by the way, the writer has, by then assigned their copyright to the publisher.
Let's move on. You claim that if a writer chooses to release a work under a Creative Commons license then they cannot be, by your definition of the word, a professional because they will never sell anything. Real world experience says otherwise whether you like that or not. The existence of downloaded free copies actually increases the ability to sell, if not that work, then the next one. The sales possibilities, then, are not limited. Except by imagination, of which you have little. Before moving on every Creative Commons work I know, including my own, are protected by copyright.
About all you say that makes sense is when you say that how the work is created doesn't matter, the market does. Which invalidates your statement that works created in "spare" or "free" time can't possibly be professional.
As for a world flooded with copies I'd suggest you read the background behind the Statute of Anne in England which created copyright. You'll find that publishers were flooding the market with the same works by the same authors at the same time. In part, then, copyright came about to protect the publishing industry at the time from itself. The other goal of expanding education is similar to the stated goals of copyright in the United States.
Incidentally, a market exists on so called "pirate" sites that's counted by the number of downloads or active torrent links.
Copyright may attempt to keep the works in the hand of the rights holder but THAT more often that not is not the author.
Until the advent of the Internet and the Web it was publishing houses NOT copyright status that by and large determined the market for written goods. Works in the public domain were printed although those things that made a particular publisher's edition unique were covered by copyright even though the work was not. IF you can...think Holy Bible.
As for simple copying, the market that you describe has been chock full of anthologies for years, assembled by editors and issued regularly particularly in the Fantasy and SciFi categories or any others where the Short Story is dominant. Remember that these are EXACT copies of earlier published works.
Piracy is a market failure but the failure is in the hands of the publishing, recording and motion picture industries for not making their catalogues available in a timely, easy to access and purchase manner as well as not encumbered by DRM. That piracy exists at all is all the evidence and testament you or anyone else needs to prove that failure.
By the way, new authors are appearing all the time so your final statement is out and out wrong. In fact the publishing industry in the United States shipped a record number of books in all categories and formats in the last fiscal year. So there is space for new authors and demand is still there for new works by new people.
I see there's more you insist on being wrong about so it's time to move on.
Shhhhhh..no one is supposed to know that. It's supposed to be secret!!!
In either event my comment stands, that they don't create much of anything. They just copy. And they want to toss people in jail for doing what they do.
If the Board and Executive get most of the money then that shows how brain impaired the shareholders are.
I'm going to open this by saying that God doesn't care about our squabbles over copyright and more than God cares about the outcome of a sporting event.
As you say (indirectly) the ironic part of the attitude of IP Maximalists in the so-called "content industry" often end up copying themselves. Over and over again. A perfect illustration of just how uncreative those running the business in the "content" industry truly are. That's not to say that those lower down the food chain aren't creative. Many are wonderfully so.
For them, it's alright to copy files, scripts, indeed whole film and recording catalogues because they own them, dammit!
The notion that they should pay attention to the "greater good is laughable to them.
And yes, I know that the only job of the board of directors for a publicly traded corporation is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. I'd suggest that as attitudes towards and about he insanity that copyright has become I'm suggesting that, over time, being a maximalist will hurt sale and profits as much or more far worse that piracy is supposed to have had.
Both the authors and publishers are trapped in a thought maze that says a "shared" book is a lost sale. Of course, as the video succinctly explains the opposite it true. Similarly to the fact that a lent book doesn't result in a lost sale but often results in increased sales.
They're so trapped in finding the way out of the maze that they've missed the exit hundreds of times. It's clearly marked though they miss it because it doesn't enter into their minds that what they see IS the exit.
Whether it's copying or lending or whatever they can't get beyond that property thing to latch on to the reality is that the more a creation is shared, lent, copied the more the person(s) responsible for it's creation and initial distribution are rewarded. They can't catch the clue because, in their minds, the clue doesn't exist or, where it does, they call it "piracy" or "theft".
"this is what happens when society or people cause important problems for others - sometimes some people just have way too much and can't deal with it, and then they take their own lives.
And let's stop claiming that no single event can be more than 1% responsible for a person's suicide."
Bingo!
I'm not at all sure what caused this man to take his life outside of the court ruling, if anything, but there doesn't have to be a cluster of issues going on for a suicide to result. You're also right in that it's the perception of how serious the problem(s) is/are to the person who commits suicide. For that person, at that moment, there is no other way out.
That's why I asked people earlier not to judge Greg Ham on this unless they've been in his shoes or the place he was in until he came to the decision to take his own life. With all due respect to FITZ! everything you say is or may be true but to Greg Ham it wasn't. He'd reached the end of his rope, in his mind, and there was no way he could get out. It's irrational to most of us but to him it was entirely rational. Again, until you've been there you can't judge. Maybe if you've sat at the other end of a crisis centre phone line talking to someone in that state you have a very good idea. If you've ever been suicidal yourself, though, you DO know. I don't know of a worse place to be emotionally, physiologically, morally or ethically but the person in that state "knows" there is no other way.
It doesn't matter, no matter what, it was tragic. That's not debatable.
And yes, that's the problem with the argument's about "other" problems. It defects from the triggering event. And for some, makes them feel better about it and for some...ohhh so superior.
On the post: The Band's Ex-Manager Accuses Reddit Of Profiting From Piracy In Debate With Co-Founder
Re:
Thing is, it was NEVER intended to be that. At least until the Sonny Bono Act.
The Band was never big as an ad background for ads except, perhaps, for the opening chord sequence in Chest Fever. That and it's been forever since I heard their music, except The Weight, even on goldie rock FM stations so royalties aren't coming in like they used to.
What the post does attack is the silly idea of a copyright "tax" on ISP connections to be magically distributed to musicians active or not. Not to mention the labels who would gain the most from the copyrights assigned to them by musicians.
I guess you didn't see that part so you decided on the pro-copyright ad hom instead.
You DO realize that you do more harm that good to the cause of copyright when you do things like this don't you?
Hmmmmm....on second thought keep the ad hom knee jerk responses coming. You make your side of the discussion sound even sillier than it often already is.
On the post: The Band's Ex-Manager Accuses Reddit Of Profiting From Piracy In Debate With Co-Founder
Re:
I've seen young folks who have discovered The Band and just love them and others who shrug and go "so what?". The Band was always an acquired taste, anyway, even in their big days. Always better live than in the studio, IMHO.
It's so sad to see every dip in sales, every fall in band sales blamed on piracy rather than changes in popular taste or, in the case of rock, abandoning the danceable music it began as to an over abundance of sonic noodling about represented by the likes of Kansas.
On the post: US 'Blackmails' EU Into Agreeing To Hand Over Passenger Data
Re: now that Obama is in office...
On the post: US 'Blackmails' EU Into Agreeing To Hand Over Passenger Data
Re: Re:
Gee, I didn't know that!
Though I have known Brits who land in Vancouver to visit relatives and then want to pop over to Toronto for an afternoon visit.
On the post: US 'Blackmails' EU Into Agreeing To Hand Over Passenger Data
Re:
All this means, of course, is that the bad guys now know the rules in detail and can use them to freely enter and leave the States while the rest of us are harassed and bullied in the name of security.
Well done!
On the post: US 'Blackmails' EU Into Agreeing To Hand Over Passenger Data
Re:
AArrggghhhh :-)
On the post: To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You'd Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year
That and they're written up in dense legalese that satisfies judges, privacy commissioners and so on that they're actually doing the minimum allowed by law.
They're kinda like the parking stub that says they'll rent you a space for a couple of hours but the owners of the lot aren't responsible if someone drives off with your Jag.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
While a number of our better known trolls have been active the number of trolling posts feels like it declined during the week or maybe they're just not as insulting, ignorant and self-centred as usual.
The prize and an extreme example of all three cam be found in tp's posts in Too Much Copyright headed "It's limiting both sides..." in which, among other things is positied the idea that there's some kind of mathematical relationship between how much time is spent on a creation in work time and free time and too much done in free time is grounds for rejection by a publisher. tp also explains to those of us too dense to get it ourselves that there's this vast conspiracy amongst publishers to to avoid the dangers of "impact" in what he seems to feel is a closed system with door locks instead of the open system that it is and that, within, this closed system there's room for only so much product at any given moment in time and so there are only "jobs" for a fixed number of authors and "product"--books--.
That this is disproved by the number of new authors who are published all the time in book form doesn't seem to have occurred to him.
The thread is often unintentionally humourous, funny to the point where ROFLOL is an apt description, language that is easily found in conspiracy theory forums and posts, totally out of touch with reality.
But tp must know something the rest of us don't because he seems able to suggest this closed system and market when most economists from Adam Smith to the present consider it an open one and that stock and futures markets are sure is an open economic system.
By reading him you're left with the impression that he believes all of this. To critics with concrete examples just how wrong he is his response is to show how wrong the critic is by standing his ground and patiently explaining just how and why he's right. A great reminder of the reality that even the most educated and talented among us can fall into becoming a conspiracy nut with a flat earther certainty that he's the only one who knows The Truth.
On the post: Josh In CharlotteNC’s Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Candor is a *good* thing. IP law may not be so easy to resolve, though.
You can't build a fence around them in a real sense, you can't put alarms on them in a conventional sense. In fact in a real sense in what most people instantly think of as property they aren't. They're a legal construction having no real world existence. Their results do but by themselves they don't exist in the real world.
If you want to say there's a fence around them the fence is made up of other legal constructs like copyright and patent law. Before the Web appeared they worked reasonably well and did what they were intended to do.
Perhaps as much by coincidence as anything else, the appearance of the Web and its widespread use copyright term lengths have become unreal while what can be patented has been expanded to include things like software and business methods starting with court decisions. Software patents largely opposed by the tech industry while business methods were welcomed by those who thought they had something to sell in that area, say ISO.
Enforcement on alleged infringement began with patents and businesses we now call patent trolls. Non practicing entities who produce nothing and make nothing out of the patents they hold except for lawsuits. Then the entertainment industry started screaming about infringement which they renamed "piracy" and not only over-estimated its effects but actually refused to believe the evidence of their own balance sheets which told them the opposite.
The crash of newspapers and magazines, while related to the Web, came about for different reasons.
So the entertainment industry started on a campaign to alienate their market by filing legal actions where they could and lobbying for even more protection than copyright currently provide. They over reached, badly and brought copyright as a political issue along with them when SOPA and PIPA were proposed, with more information around ACTA and the growing resistance to TPP by Pacific Rim countries who object to what they perceive as American IP extremism.
As to TPP, two of the largest trading nations on the Pacific Rim -- China and Canada -- aren't even there which leaves a huge hole in whatever agreement they may come up with. Oh yeah, and ACTA is on a death watch.
Whatever we come up with that will replace the current regimes of copyright and patent law MUST take into account the cultural, societal and economic changes the Web has brought with it. Changes similar to though far exceeding the Industrial Revolution. These laws don't just need reform they need replacement as they address a different world.
We're now at a time where anyone can become a publisher. Many are, just look at all the blogs around the Web. All of which address real or imagined needs or just vanity.
Anyone now, can record a song at home with better gear built into the software to record it and mix it than was available even a decade ago. The analogue portion hasn't changed all that much but the digital world HAS changed how music is recorded.
Anyone can make a movie or a video if they wish to. Many try and most come up with something no better than the 8mm home movies that we boomers remember with such horror.
You get my point. For better or worse the world has changed and "rules" such as copyright and patent law have to change with them before society totally rejects them I'd have never thought of copyright as a form of prohibition. I do now. Alcohol and drug prohibition has solved nothing though they did and are arguably making the problems they were supposed to resolve worse.
It's not just lawmakers who have to come up with a sea change in terms of what copyright and patent law were intended to accomplish in a world that, in less than a decade, will probably cease to exist for all practical purposes. Keeping in mind that they were never intended to become a never ending welfare program for authors, musicians, photographers, painters, inventors, publishing companies, recording and movie studios and others. It's a sea change in outlook and expectation we all have to make. Things are possible now that never were before. Creative reach is further than it ever was. The genie is not only out of the bottle, it's gone and is giggling at us while we try to turn the clock back.
We do need a troll free discussion about this that focus's on what we want copyright and patent law to accomplish and totally redesign both, whatever we call them, to do that without regard for what that may do to legacy industries.
I despair at times that we can do that or come close to it. Then again, humans do have the surprising ability to change course in the middle of the stream before we're forced into it at times. Perhaps this is one of those times.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It's limiting both sides...
Though I did point out earlier that one of the reasons for the enactment of the Statue of Anne, the first copyright legislation in the English speaking world that part of the reason for that was multiple editions of the exact same book by different publishers before the Statue was passed. In essence the publishers were destroying each other.
"the publisher just do not have resources to spread your product to half the available world;"
As I don't know, nor do I want to know, which publisher you signed up with I don't know their resources. Some do have the resources to publish the book in half the "available world", outfits like MacMillian and Penguin come to mind without having to think about it. Of course, they don't until they have your book (product) as a best seller in their home market and THEN it's published in other markets they serve globally. It may even be translated into languages other than English at that point.
And if their home market is the United States or United Kingdom then, as book markets go, they are not considered a "tiny part" of it. They are considered to be the trend setters of the English speaking world, in fact. Once again, if they have a best seller on their hands on one or both of THOSE markets if they've been holding back in other English speaking markets the release the book in all of them. THAT is called maximizing profit which is what they want to do, after all.
Assuming the the contract the writer signs with their publisher isn't strictly exclusive then perhaps they get to shop the book around themselves. More likely if they don't then..
"Take his xerox machine and start selling it themselves? One person can only cover very small area of the world, or are you going to start travelling the world and selling it yourself?"
that is far from the only alternative. In this day and age it's the worst one. By the way the photocopy option isn't available as the layout of the book itself is covered by the publisher's copyright including the selection of font, illustrations if any, kerning, spacing, how a chapter break is dealt with and so on. So you can forget that option.
What you're failing to understand is that the Internet and Web have changed everything about publishing. Should your publisher release you from your contract because the book just sat there gathering dust in book stores or you fire them, though you have not right to republish what they've already published unless they assign your copyright to the work, as opposed to the physical book, back to you. At that time you can self publish and put it on the Web. There are inexpensive to very expensive programs that allow you to do that and can even go so far as selecting the appropriate file format for ebooks. So you take your "product" put it up on a web site and, voila, it's available to the entire world. You can choose how to promote that book, say blog like crazy about it, offer sneak peaks as Amazon does and more but, unless you really want to you don't NEED to travel the world or out of the comfort of your armchair, if that's your wish. The choice is yours at that point.
The point is that the "impact" of the book, regardless of publishing method, is limited only by the resources available and the amount of "product" sold. It's not limited geographically or in any other way.
The subject of the book may limit you. A book on learning to program in PHP or ASP doesn't have the same potential for sales as does a work of general fiction (prose or poetry).
What you're trying to convince me of is that the publishers of the Harry Potter books chose not to satisfy the immense demand for a new Harry Potter book due to its alleged "impact". Impact, be damned, they printed and distributed as many copies of the book as they were capable of until the demand lessened.
Your description of the publishing world is that it operates in some strange world of mercantilism, price fixing and supply fixing. The last pair illegal the last time I looked.
Copyright has nothing at all to do with any of it. It wasn't designed with that in mind. It was designed to protect the rights holder, who isn't usually the writer, for a limited period of time until the work fell into the public domain. Nor was it intended to last forever which is where we seem to be going.
It's that ever increasing length of copyright that's being talked about as a form of prohibition, technically it is, and the fact that's it's a perversion of the purpose of copyright.
What you propose is several degrees more of a perversion of copyright than the term. Thankfully it doesn't exist.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
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Musicians starting out on in their own, they absorb most of the costs of what they do including travel, set up, sound check time and all the rest of it in their spare time from their day jobs so they can play the gig. Start-ups software or otherwise are 17 hour day propositions.
Many of those creative software businesses being set up today are in open source, too, remember. The gaming sector is mostly closed source, I know.
I'm certainly not condoning an attack on small business, independents, average working folks, musicians or anyone else on a crusade against Sony and Disney.
But, as a craftsman myself I can tell you that I've been held up at jobs too often in my working life by information that isn't freely available than helped by things like copyright and paywalls. Information should be free, as in freely accessible. If it sometimes needs paying for perhaps I will if I need it badly enough but if I can't find it then it's NOT freely available.
You're trying to compare the structure of medium and big business to that of smaller enterprises and that just doesn't work. Their needs are widely different. Where a large corporation may not need some information NOW, the smaller ones often do but often can't get it because of the action of the larger ones who hold the copyright on it. When it's said that information is or ought to be free it doesn't always mean free of charge though it means freely and easily accessible and freely available. Setting information free helps the little guy a whole lot more than the mythical damage it can do the big one.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It's limiting both sides...
Now where did you get THAT from? Exclusives prevent the author from going to another publisher but not to stop the writer from doing anything. Publishers want to hold onto writers with a record of turning out best sellers and so they want to increase the "impact" area as much as possible. More sales, you know.
What you are trying to want us to believe is that a publisher will limit the new book by a Stephen King or a Margaret Atwood in order to keep your "system" going and, therefore, limit their profits. Both sell a huge amount of "product" with each new release all over the English speaking world.
Even restricting the discussion to the English speaking world there are already thousands, perhaps far more than a million, published authors on the globe. In places like China and India alone the number IS in the millions in their own languages. And both are huge markets for books written in English as well.
Copyright did NOT appear to guarantee authors or publishers an income. It might have improved the chances for both but it did not and does not guarantee it.
You also need to remember that those who write guaranteed best sellers likely started out writing in their spare time and submitted manuscripts written in their spare time to publishers before they got their fist contract.
Copyright is not a welfare system for writers or publishers. And heaven forbid that it ever comes to that.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
Re: Re: Re: It's limiting both sides...
In fact archeological evidence has established that the myth that the Great Pyramids were build by slave labour to be absolutely and completely wrong. They were, in fact, built by free Egyptians. There's ample evidence of "towns" constructed for that purpose around and near each of them that were occupied so we now know who, what crafts, trades and kind of people they were. Work stopped for after the annual Nile flood so that the men could go home and plant the crops for the coming season and resumed when that was done. Work stopped again for the harvest and resumed when that was done for the remainder of the year till the next flood. The people working on the Great Pyramids were paid labour and not slaves.
The craftsmanship of the Great Pyramids themselves and the smaller ones around it is something we can no longer do. Even with all our modern tools, we can't replicate that. Nor absorb the cost of it.
For all of that, the Egyptians first few attempts at pyramids failed and that failure is visible and easily found around Egypt.
And for all your notions of what is "work time" and what is "free time" the builders must have been amateurs. Yet those structures have endured for about 3300 years. Some amateurs!
And yes, their construction took thousands of people each doing their own jobs and yes there were slaves there but by all the evidence available now the slaves did NOT take part in the construction. They were there to cook food, keep the "camps" clean and provide for those doing the work when their families couldn't be there but they didn't build the pyramids.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
Re: Re: Re: It's limiting both sides...
As you're defending this so eloquent, mistakes of logic, ignorance of history, the law and more I have to assume you believe this nonsense.
It's really hard to know where to start. It may come as a complete surprise to you that most authors before they were published and signed with a publisher did create their work in their "free" or spare time. And it was that work that was submitted to one or more publishers by the author for them to get published. At some point it was picked up, revised in line with an editors suggestions (also in free or spare time) and then published. New authors don't get cozy things like advances, you know. Rarely does a new work by a previously unknown writer become a best seller to their first work will have a limited print run and far less promotion than, say, Stephen King.
In your imaginary world this writer wasn't a professional because he wasn't published prior to the publisher running off a couple of thousand books. In the real world, by the way, the writer has, by then assigned their copyright to the publisher.
Let's move on. You claim that if a writer chooses to release a work under a Creative Commons license then they cannot be, by your definition of the word, a professional because they will never sell anything. Real world experience says otherwise whether you like that or not. The existence of downloaded free copies actually increases the ability to sell, if not that work, then the next one. The sales possibilities, then, are not limited. Except by imagination, of which you have little. Before moving on every Creative Commons work I know, including my own, are protected by copyright.
About all you say that makes sense is when you say that how the work is created doesn't matter, the market does. Which invalidates your statement that works created in "spare" or "free" time can't possibly be professional.
As for a world flooded with copies I'd suggest you read the background behind the Statute of Anne in England which created copyright. You'll find that publishers were flooding the market with the same works by the same authors at the same time. In part, then, copyright came about to protect the publishing industry at the time from itself. The other goal of expanding education is similar to the stated goals of copyright in the United States.
Incidentally, a market exists on so called "pirate" sites that's counted by the number of downloads or active torrent links.
Copyright may attempt to keep the works in the hand of the rights holder but THAT more often that not is not the author.
Until the advent of the Internet and the Web it was publishing houses NOT copyright status that by and large determined the market for written goods. Works in the public domain were printed although those things that made a particular publisher's edition unique were covered by copyright even though the work was not. IF you can...think Holy Bible.
As for simple copying, the market that you describe has been chock full of anthologies for years, assembled by editors and issued regularly particularly in the Fantasy and SciFi categories or any others where the Short Story is dominant. Remember that these are EXACT copies of earlier published works.
Piracy is a market failure but the failure is in the hands of the publishing, recording and motion picture industries for not making their catalogues available in a timely, easy to access and purchase manner as well as not encumbered by DRM. That piracy exists at all is all the evidence and testament you or anyone else needs to prove that failure.
By the way, new authors are appearing all the time so your final statement is out and out wrong. In fact the publishing industry in the United States shipped a record number of books in all categories and formats in the last fiscal year. So there is space for new authors and demand is still there for new works by new people.
I see there's more you insist on being wrong about so it's time to move on.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
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In either event my comment stands, that they don't create much of anything. They just copy. And they want to toss people in jail for doing what they do.
If the Board and Executive get most of the money then that shows how brain impaired the shareholders are.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
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As you say (indirectly) the ironic part of the attitude of IP Maximalists in the so-called "content industry" often end up copying themselves. Over and over again. A perfect illustration of just how uncreative those running the business in the "content" industry truly are. That's not to say that those lower down the food chain aren't creative. Many are wonderfully so.
For them, it's alright to copy files, scripts, indeed whole film and recording catalogues because they own them, dammit!
The notion that they should pay attention to the "greater good is laughable to them.
And yes, I know that the only job of the board of directors for a publicly traded corporation is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. I'd suggest that as attitudes towards and about he insanity that copyright has become I'm suggesting that, over time, being a maximalist will hurt sale and profits as much or more far worse that piracy is supposed to have had.
On the post: Too Much Copyright: This Generation's Prohibition
Re: Re: Re: Re: Better safe than sorry
They're so trapped in finding the way out of the maze that they've missed the exit hundreds of times. It's clearly marked though they miss it because it doesn't enter into their minds that what they see IS the exit.
Whether it's copying or lending or whatever they can't get beyond that property thing to latch on to the reality is that the more a creation is shared, lent, copied the more the person(s) responsible for it's creation and initial distribution are rewarded. They can't catch the clue because, in their minds, the clue doesn't exist or, where it does, they call it "piracy" or "theft".
On the post: Meltwater Response To Associated Press Lawsuit: AP Is Misusing Copyright Law
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But then again to IP maximalists search, Big and Small is the bad guy.
On the post: Men At Work Musician Found Dead; Ridiculous Copyright Ruling Against Band Blamed
Re: We at least need some consistency
On the post: Men At Work Musician Found Dead; Ridiculous Copyright Ruling Against Band Blamed
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And let's stop claiming that no single event can be more than 1% responsible for a person's suicide."
Bingo!
I'm not at all sure what caused this man to take his life outside of the court ruling, if anything, but there doesn't have to be a cluster of issues going on for a suicide to result. You're also right in that it's the perception of how serious the problem(s) is/are to the person who commits suicide. For that person, at that moment, there is no other way out.
That's why I asked people earlier not to judge Greg Ham on this unless they've been in his shoes or the place he was in until he came to the decision to take his own life. With all due respect to FITZ! everything you say is or may be true but to Greg Ham it wasn't. He'd reached the end of his rope, in his mind, and there was no way he could get out. It's irrational to most of us but to him it was entirely rational. Again, until you've been there you can't judge. Maybe if you've sat at the other end of a crisis centre phone line talking to someone in that state you have a very good idea. If you've ever been suicidal yourself, though, you DO know. I don't know of a worse place to be emotionally, physiologically, morally or ethically but the person in that state "knows" there is no other way.
It doesn't matter, no matter what, it was tragic. That's not debatable.
And yes, that's the problem with the argument's about "other" problems. It defects from the triggering event. And for some, makes them feel better about it and for some...ohhh so superior.
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