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.
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.
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.
"the burden of proof is on the person who uploaded the content to prove they have the right"
It is impossible to prove that you have the right to content. There's just no reliable legal mechanism for this. Sometimes I can author an original work and have a copyright claim placed against it because it is similar to another. Sometimes I can outright copy someone else's work without a license and I retain rights to the content because it's a legally protected use (such as using Led Zeppelin's song in a form of satire).
In other words, to require proof is to prohibit all communication. Entirely! No exceptions!
1. Reviewing everything submitted by users is unreasonable to expect.
2. People are upset that takedown notices are issued for works to which the issuer does not hold copyright and that those who issue such notices do so with impunity.
I am not saying that reviewing everything is reasonable. I'm saying let's be glad the laws let you accept content without verifying ownership at all, and stop complaining that you have to take down content in dispute. The abusive takedown notices are a fraction of the number of legitimate infringements that take place. Content owners have to police the entire internet for their works. And we're supposed to have all this sympathy for the companies who have to respond to takedown notices by simply removing the content, not paying any penalty at all, when most of them are legit?
>Content owners have to police the entire internet for their works.
See, here's the problem. That is highly unfeasible, if not impossible (not to mention unethical) and should tell you more about the brokenness of distribution as a business model than it tells you about the need for copyright protection.
Oh, and about most of the notices being legit: Google estimates that more than a third of the notices they receive - of which more than 50% are aimed at competing businesses - are plain and simply bogus.[1] I'm sorry but I don't believe the claim that most of them are legit. And even then, such a high number of "false positives" are plain and simply unacceptable.
Oh, and there is still the thing about due process, which the DMCA completely eschews.
But in the end, it's meaningless to discuss this. I'll say it again: the DMCA is just one of the many useless tries to fight a symptom whose cause are the violent death throes of a business model that should have died nearly two decades ago. The root of the problem is still copyright, and as long as we cling to it we won't be able to find any meaningful solution, but keep trying to band-aid a leper with hemophilia.
I could write a lengthy response to this too but you are unwilling to even try to grasp my point, as apparent by your utter misinterpretation of what I said.
Hint: I was talking about policing the internet, not about protecting interests. The latter will always have to take a backseat if we have to prevent the former.
Oh, and yes, I consider the notion that you can "own" non-scarce resources such as music and software highly unethical.
Right?! It's unethical to check to see if someone is ripping off your work online? Let me tell a kind of embarrassing story related to this. Some years ago I got into blogging... Like, a lot. And I was checking out all sorts of desktop apps that posted to your blog and I came across one I liked. It was going for about $20 so I got a pirated copy and decided to share it on a certain torrent site. The creators tracked me down and asked me to take it down. They very sanely explained how they worked how to produce this and would like to be able to keep making it better but couldn't if people like me kept ripping them off. They had to police the web and I don't see anything wrong with their actions. I ended up seeing things their way and took it down. They weren't being unethical by asking me not to steal their app. It was me who was being unethical. I'm baffled by that statement.
And I'm still baffled that people like you are insisting that
a) this is a problem with piracy, and not - for the umpteenth time now - the brokenness of distribution as a business model in the face of a world where copying is virtually costless. It's not my problem if people still cling to it and are unwilling to adapt.
b) that copying something is stealing (or "ripping someone off"). It's stupid, it's wrong, and most of all it is dishonest. At least call it what it unfortunately is: copyright infringement. I have made it a personal rule to not take anyone serious who calls copying "stealing", as it shows either a total lack of understanding of the matter or deliberate deception.
If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution.
I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.
"exercised [...] shares"? That's not a meaningful sentence, so it's not clear what situation you're trying to describe.
In any case, either your partners can (in this example) dilute you or they can't. Neither of these is a fundamentally dishonest situation, you just have to make sure that everybody and their lawyer is on the same page as to which it is (and write your contracts accordingly).
Same with copyrights. People will be understandably aggrieved if they create works believing that the law will protect them and then it doesn't. But if we change the law so that new works created in future are not eligible for copyright protection, there's no such problem (because everybody should know what to expect).
I think the essential difference is that shares in a company are not pure information that can be reproduced at negligible cost.
Point is that even though "shareholder rights" are somewhat abstract, they are less at odds with the laws of physics than "intellectual property rights".
In an ideal world we would be able to do away with copyright but I don't see that abolishing is right for everyone. Right now it does make sense for music and movies. That hurts middlemen but not the creators. That's fine. But in the software world it's different. You are hurting the creators.
You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.
Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing. Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply. When you argue that the developer only has to put in the work to make it once and is getting a free ride because he's just distributing copies well that's just a cop out. It isn't exactly the software itself that people are being charged for. It's what they are able to do with that software that they get charged for as well as the experience of using it. Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book? Why is it wrong to have a choice? Copyright holders don't go around telling people that they can't give away their own work for free so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.
I see and understand the anti-copyright arguments (at least more than half of them). I see the abuses by copyright holders and governments and I don't like it. But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes. If I knew of a way where both interests could be served equally I'd get on board with abolishing copyright. As it stands now I can't do that so I pray that SOPA doesn't pass and hope that we can all find a nice middle ground.
>You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.
My stance on the matter is that copyright takes away from the general public in the first place. It's not justified, and abolishing therefore means restoring it to the way it's supposed to be. Sorry, but I don't accept copyright as a given something whose abolishing we have to justify. On the contrary, the burden of proof lies on the advocates of copyright to show that it is justified to take away from the general public to hand a monopoly on non-scarce resources to private parties. And I am quite positive that it isn't.
>Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing.
No, it isn't. Stealing has a strict definition: I take something away from you, which you lack afterwards. Copying involves no loss. No, not "lost profits" either. It's bullshit. Applying the word to copying is just a pathetic appeal to emotion.
Funnily enough, labeling us "pirates" in an attempt to villainize us has probably been the greatest thing the entertainment industry has ever done. It was adapted as a proud, if sometimes self-ironic label, and eventually spawned an entire political movement which now operates in pretty much all western countries with varying degrees of success.
>Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply.
Oh yes they do. Waving them aside like that doesn't change the fact that existing software is most definitely non-scarce. There's no limit on how much you can copy it. What you are talking about is the creation of software, which falls under the same category as claiming that without copyright, there would be no music.
>Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book?
If you consider writing a book a service, then basically yes, s?he should be payed once. As every other artisan providing services is. There were even business models like that, with varying degrees of success (ask for sum $x, release book under public domain when $x is reached).
>Why is it wrong to have a choice?
If that choice conflicts with reality, then no, you can't have a choice. And reality is that you cannot and should not be able to stop copying and sharing. It's pointless and largely impossible without extremely draconian measures, and, again, highly unethical to attempt to do so.
Oh, and you have quite a choice. You can either release your works and deal with the fact that they will be copied and shared - or you don't release anything.
>so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.
But we are not. We're just saying you can't stop us from sharing. Those are two different, though related things. I can only refer you to the GPL as a good example for this: while you cannot demand access to source per se (and you can charge for a copy of the program if you do so choose), you cannot demand that others stop giving access (share) either. It's basically the golden rule. I cannot demand you to give me a copy of your program. Neither can you demand that I stop giving a copy I received from where-ever to other people. Your rights stop where mine begin. Copyright infringes on my right to share.
>But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes.
Well, that's a pity to heard but ultimately not of interest, as hard as it may sound. As I have said multiple times, distribution as a business model is dead. The horde of copyright-dependent zombies which are still crawling around are a danger to our future society and need to be put to rest as fast as possible. If you can't adapt and find new ways to make ends meet, then I'm afraid you will have to find a new job.
You make some good points but you and everyone before you who have made those points fail to address one key issue. How does one adapt? If distribution is dead than what's the alternative? Desktop computing will be with us for some time to come and desktop software will continue to be in demand. So now every software developer has to find a new line of work because some people think copyright needs to be abolished? Give me a break. This anti copyright stance is like chopping off your head to cure a headache anyway. Copyright still serves a very useful purpose and is far from evil in and of itself. It's just how it's being used that is the problem. So instead of taking such extreme positions on this why don't we come to our senses and all agree that protections need to be scaled back but not gotten rid of. You wouldn't tell a convenience store they now have to find a new way of doing things because they can't stop the shoplifters.
If copyright is gone then everything is up for grabs and it can have unintended consequences that make the same people who were against it cry out for help. Right now the argument is framed in such a way that it only takes consumers and willing creators into account. There are people who create things that neither want to profit from them nor share them with the world. In a world without copyright you place much more of a burden on those people to lock away their work. Your diary is up for grabs in this type of world and if ever someone felt like publishing it as their own or selling it there'd be nothing you could do about it. That tutorial you wrote on your blog, the one that's free to access to anyone, well that just ended up in an O'Reilly book without credit and no one asked you. Sure, they won't make a killing off it in this world but it's pissing you off and you think "that's just not right".
I'm wondering if all these great ideals the anti-copyright proponents talk about are the true goal or if there's a little bit of jealousy, sour grapes, and inferiority complexes thrown in there. It kind of reminds me of the guy who works at the McDonalds drive thru who talks a lot of shit about rich people and how it's not fair and we need to spread the wealth while he just sits in his drive through hoping his bank account will fill up with piles of cash one day.
What is under copyright protection right now that we can't create around or over or through? Do we really need to base our work off of someone else's to make something better? Doesnt the greatest disruption come about as a result of inconvenient restriction?
Abolishing copyright sounds great and the ideals around it are just beautiful but the world isn't an ideal place and great ideals and philosophies don't really lend themselves all too well to reality when put into practice. So in the meantime why don't we jump back to reality and get SOPA voted down, lobby to scale back copyright instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and generally just be more realistice about these things.
>How does one adapt? If distribution is dead than what's the alternative?
That's not my problem, to be blunt. I'm simply stating the fact that distribution as a business model is dead in the face of unlimited, near-costless sharing of data. It's really the same as with the burden of proof for the need for copyright: it's the task of the ones demanding a business model to find one. Not ours to provide you with one.
>Copyright still serves a very useful purpose and is far from evil in and of itself.
That's your opinion and I do not share it. I consider the very idea of copyright unethical (or in other words, evil), and you will not convince me of the contrary.
>So instead of taking such extreme positions on this why don't we come to our senses and all agree that protections need to be scaled back but not gotten rid of.
This statement works both ways. Why don't we come to our senses and stop the insanity that is copyright already? We can throw phrases like this at each other all day long.
>You wouldn't tell a convenience store they now have to find a new way of doing things because they can't stop the shoplifters.
And again the stealing analogy. Stop it already, repetition does not make something correct. There's a reason theft is unethical, and that is because you take something away from the other person. Copying involves no loss for anybody, there is only gain.
>There are people who create things that neither want to profit from them nor share them with the world.
So? They don't need to publish it then. I do not see any problem. If a lack of copyright forces people to finally think a bit about the security of their data, I'm more than fine with it.
>Your diary is up for grabs in this type of world and if ever someone felt like publishing it as their own or selling it there'd be nothing you could do about it.
If I'm dumb enough to put it on the internet, then I will have to deal with that. It's like crying that people can see what you publicly post on Facebook.
>That tutorial you wrote on your blog, the one that's free to access to anyone, well that just ended up in an O'Reilly book without credit and no one asked you. Sure, they won't make a killing off it in this world but it's pissing you off and you think "that's just not right".
Why would that piss me off? Sure, attribution would be nice, but in the end more people will read my tutorial. I do not see the problem.
>I'm wondering if all these great ideals the anti-copyright proponents talk about are the true goal or if there's a little bit of jealousy, sour grapes, and inferiority complexes thrown in there.
Really now, we're down to lame appeals to spite?
>Do we really need to base our work off of someone else's to make something better?
Why should we reinvent the wheel all the time? Besides, in the case of art, everything is based of something else. There is no art in the void.
>why don't we jump back to reality and get SOPA voted down, lobby to scale back copyright instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and generally just be more realistice about these things.
Why don't we finally accept reality and get rid of copyright because it is a fundamentally broken concept that makes absolutely no sense in the face of globally available many-to-many communication technologies which enable near-costless sharing of information, like the internet?
Isn't it possible for the user who uploaded the content originally to file a DMCA counterclaim, at which point the content can go back up until a traditional court case finalizes the issue?
It's still (IMO) a bad piece of legislation that is being abused, but it's not as bad as putting the complete burden of proof on the accused.
Yes, it is possible for the original person to provide documents showing their ownership, and for the company to put the content back up.
It has the potential to be a decent piece of legislation. It removes friction for sites to allow UGC, it allows copyright holders to issue takedowns, and it allows for companies to make decisions about contested takedown requests if they care enough to do so. However, users who upload content abuse it, sites who know they have a lot of infringing content abuse it, and people without claims abuse it by issuing false takedown notices. The law would be better if takedown notices, their resolution, and most things about the process were transparent, and there were penalties for users who upload content they don't own, penalties for companies who infringe far more than they don't, and penalties for people who issue takedown notices without a legitimate claim. I believe an administrative organization responsible for tracking and reporting these things is worth the expense to let companies keep innovating while protecting the rights of content owners, and making it easier to penalize abusers of the law.
> 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.
>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.
> 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?
> But honestly: when and why should you be able to cash in on coffee mugs showing disney's rendering of the seven dwarfs?
I think your question is backwards; it puts the burden of proof on the wrong side. Freedom is not what needs justification; rather, restrictions on freedom need justification.
A better question would be, "When and why should you not be able to cash in on coffee mugs showing Disney's rendering of the seven dwarfs?" And if no adequate justification is found for restricting freedoms, then they ought not to be restricted.
> You would see it justified to cash in on someone else's work after she "sold some copies"?
In fact the answer to the example of Harry Potter should be that if copyright didn't exist, then it would be hard to sell any copy. Maybe some people would be able to sell printed copies, or better copies, or from a manufacturer approved by the author, etc. -- but most (electronic) copies would be available for free.
The question is: would it be bad? You seem to think that it would be morally bad; I'm not sure what morals have to do with it. It would be legal.
Would it be economically bad? I'm not sure either. In general, contrary to what people seem to believe, the economy benefits from cheaper goods.
But the larger point is that works of the mind belong to the public. They used to be in the public domain by default. Copyright is something that is cut from the property of the general public, and given to someone as an incentive to produce more original work.
The public should make sure they're getting their money's worth when granting copyright extensions. And, as it is obvious this is not the case, we should be demanding copyright reduction.
When you want ten bucks, ask for a million. When you want a shorter copyright length, ask for zero.
I read far more fiction produced with zero expectation of financial return than 'traditional' fiction. Sure most of it is terrible, but so are most books. When Harry Potter fan fiction outpaces the actual published books by 1,000's to 1 all it takes is a sane ranking system to find something interesting to read. If the cost of abolishing copy-write on fiction books is no fiction book would be published in any form then I would find that perfectly acceptable, because I know there are plenty of viable alternatives.
So, while I think you can make a case for copy-write it's not necessary and at the extremes it's clearly harmful. Just think of how many great movies would not have been produced if if Shakespeare's plays where still under protected. You don't get to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in a world of unlimited copy-write. (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594743347/ref=asc_df_1594743347184...)
PS: I think a 5 year copy-write length for movies, TV shows and video games is a perfectly acceptable, but I don't think they need copy-write protection either.
How about in the case of "better quality mugs"? Trivial examples can often reveal important points, when examined closely. What if Disney Mugs, Inc, a solely-owned subsidiary of Giant Immoral MegaCorp, made very poor quality mugs, ones where the handles broke off? If you infringed copyright, and made unbreakable mugs, lots of parents and children would be very grateful.
Sure, there's a million ways to make better quality or more desirable goods. That's why the monopoly part of copyrights is undesirable from a consumer's standpoint. Goods of lower quality command higher prices when they're copyrighted or patented.
> You would see it justified to cash in on someone else's work after she "sold some copies"?
If I wanted to pay for her books at all, I would make sure to buy them from her, not some other random dude, who might have "improved" the story.
A lot of the people who buy Nike, Fila, Adidas etc. Would never wear a fake product, regardless of the quality. They want the real deal beacuse it is expensive. Even if the copy is made in the same factory.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Unless something changes, nothing will fall into the public domain again. And the act of repeatedly extending copyright was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
As pointed out, more than one copyright extension has occurred. But it's more than just that: the copyrights are now automatic, and don't depend on something being labeled appropriately, as was true in the USA until 1978. That alone makes "public domain" a much less useful concept, as one is never quite sure what the status of something is upon inspection.
The term of copyright has not just gotten longer, it's gotten less determinate: author's life + some number of years. Instead of a simple date calculation, we have to go reference mortality data, too.
Those two things are a pretty massive change, making it difficult to tell if obscure works have entered the public domain or not.
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.
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. 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.
1. The problem with implied copyright is that the majority of work is not intended for profit. Implied copyright gives at least 70 year protection to every trivial thing - every written email, doodle, picture and since people don't typically put a permissive license on everything they create that they don't intend to profit from we're left with a ton of work with hard to find authors that can't legally be used by anyone. It also means that services that deal with what people write (which is most online services) have to grant themselves lengthy terms of service conditions in order to operate.
Yes it is a balance between barrier to entry and public content, but I think the default should be the common case that benefits everyone - the public domain. I wouldn't want the registration process to be arduous or expensive though.
2. I agree (and this would solve the biggest problem with implied copyright, it's length).
3. You could claim non-commercial, profitless use of an album and share it freely - albums are a poor way to make money in the internet connected world. In my system they'd be thought of more as promotion for merchandise and tours. The fact that distribution is cheap and sharing is essentially free can be used as advantages. This would be a big difference, but I think the efforts would be better served in working with technology then artificially trying to prevent it from what it does well. I think the old way of doing things is only viable with draconian measures that don't benefit the public.
There's a lot of waste in the current system that doesn't need to be there, but the old distribution channels seem to want to create legislation to necessitate their existence rather than adapt.
The problem with implied copyright is that the majority of work is not intended for profit. Implied copyright gives at least 70 year protection to every trivial thing - every written email, doodle, picture and since people don't typically put a permissive license on everything they create that they don't intend to profit from we're left with a ton of work with hard to find authors that can't legally be used by anyone. It also means that services that deal with what people write (which is most online services) have to grant themselves lengthy terms of service conditions in order to operate.
Basically most work is intended for public domain, but not licensed permissively so it's lost.
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.
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?
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?
...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?
I agree, but only because your argument actually cuts the other way. J. K. Rowlings' billions don't come out of nowhere, they come out of the pockets of other children's book authors whose works can't get shelf space because monster marketing behemoths like Harry Potter dominate the retail channels. Copyright isn't even incentivizing distribution anymore, it's incentivizing pure marketing. Is that really what we want to do as a society?
> Copyright isn't even incentivizing distribution anymore, it's incentivizing pure marketing.
That's a very interesting point, I'd never seen that clearly before. Thanks.
> J. K. Rowlings' billions don't come out of nowhere, they come out of the pockets of other children's book authors whose works can't get shelf space because monster marketing behemoths like Harry Potter dominate the retail channels.
It seems to me that that can only be true if we could propose some other legislative system, under which readers would have spent the same billions, but now more evenly distributed among all the other authors. I can think of many systems with a weaker form of copyright, in which J.K. Rowling would have been less wealthy, but all the other authors would have earned less money as well.
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.)
> 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.
"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.
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.)
> 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).
"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.
"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.
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).
I totally agree the copyright system is unhelpful to society, but i think it's fair to say that copying wasn't exactly practical in the 1500's.
Personally I broadly approve of the 5 year term proposed by the pirate party.. it would still allow business to invest and get a return, but also allow information to be freely and openly shared with society within a reasonable time frame.
There are many types of art that was created in large quantities for fun or sale to the common man like beautifully painted furniture, tree carving, jewelry, painted rooms and paintings etc. I think it's a false dichotomy to classify art based on who funded it.
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.
One of the reasons certain things 'cost' so much to make is because when they are made they are worth so much. Without copyright these thing surely wouldn't make as much money as they now do, so to take your example of a movie, actors would therefore not be paid as much and so on down the line.
So I think the question is should so much money be made from some of these things?
Should for example actors and sports players be insanely rich while teachers and other public servants make so little?
Also relevant is the increased availability of professional software for film/music production, and advanced technologies for producing creative content which are emerging.
How much is a Hollywood movie really going to cost to produce in five years? (Ignoring inflated writing/acting expenses.)
The more I think about it, America would look very different if there was no copyright. There wouldn't be the huge companies that we have today. For example Disney has the sole rights to produce Mickey Mouse based products, but if anyone anywhere could produce Mickey Mouse based products, then suddenly a hole lot less money is streaming into Disney, and just take that effect and multiply it out=no more mega corps.
It would change the face of commerce and to that effect even employment, you'd probably have many more small businesses and a lot less "corporations".
In any case it would have very far reaching effects...
I don't think that the "high cost == high value" assumption is true of feature films. I've read that technically, most of the high-grossing films never actually turn a profit, due to very, very strange accounting.
When profit is disassociated from revenue, a lot of padding will go on. See the USA's defence industry for another example.
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.
This is an overreach. While you might not be able to imagine how it could be done, history shows that the market is extremely resilient and resourceful. I might agree if copyright had never existed, but now that people have a taste for such works, the market will find a way to provide them.
Game of Thrones costs $4.5 million per episode. Would HBO really make them at that cost if every one of their competitors could re-broadcast them the following day, without any kind of payment to HBO? If Target and Best Buy could just sell the DVD and Blu-ray a week later without any kind of payment to HBO?
I doubt it.
I'm not saying we won't have films -- we would -- but they wouldn't be even remotely as costly as what we have today. (Not everything one thinks that's a bad thing.)
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.
> A hundred or so years ago we had Picasso. Now we have LOLCats.
Survivorship bias. We just forgot about all the crap back then because nobody bothered to save many copies of it and the bad works have been forgotten, if not lost.
LOLCats will probably go the way of AYBABTU and Chuck Norris jokes one of these days. And later people will look back and only remember things like the Grey Album instead.
That's the same way people nowadays look back at 60s music with so much nostalgia, thinking of the Beatles and not, for example, "They're Coming to Take Me Away" by Napoleon the IV.
Saying that everything the common man is able to create today is "LOLCats" is just as bad as the "culture will die if we remove copyright"-argument.
Good things, works of art, survive. Those LOLCats will still be there in the future, sure, and some people may even appreciate them. But for those who don't, filtering out the "simple" stuff shouldn't be an issue.
The music I've been listening to all day has been produced by people who love what they're doing. They don't want your money. For them, it's enough that you take time and listen to their music. That's why they distribute it for free. And I can tell you that out of the things created by teenagers today, there are things I will appreciate just as much, or even more, in 50 years. That's more than enough to make them art to me.
You mention money. Why is it important that it's free? Is there something wrong with trying to be paid for your work? I don't totally agree that artists should be thought of in the same way entrepreneurs are. Saying that the person who wrote a song shouldn't be able to stop people from sharing it is like saying Samsung should be able to install iOS on a tablet and apple should find a different way to monetize their platform.
And as for culture, well culture is created by all of us. You or I or the next guy may have good taste but that doesn't mean the majority do. So when this ridiculous amount of creation goes on that means there will be far more crap than gems and with so much crap to wade through eventually it'll be lost and Lolcats will be considered culture and it'll be a sad day for culture. I'd like to believe that good things survive, I really do but that seems too optimistic to me. The music you've discovered wont be considered part of the culture of the future. Lady Gaga will. That's just what happens when there's so much to choose from.
Do you really believe that crap wasn't produced in the past too?
And please, why would lady gaga be considered part of the culture? When you think about the 1700s do you remember Mozart or popular music? Because Lady Gaga is popular music. Mozart is not.
The fact that something is popular now, doesn't mean it will be in the future. And, as the masses didn't listen to Mozart at that time, we don't listen to contemporary music (I mean what in the future would be considered the 'classical music' of our time).
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.
...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.
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...
I'm glad you mention you build apps. I (finally) get that piracy isn't the real issue as far as music and movies are concerned. I see how they can make money despite copies of their work flying every which way for free but I don't understand how a software developer can be against copyright. It's one thing if you're all about the GPL and FOSS but those doing it as a living surely can't see sharing as a good thing, can they? If you're on the apple app store it's probably less prevalent but generally speaking, how can software developers make any money if they can't enforce copyright? And remember, not all software lends itself to the support model like ReD Hat.
I'm really torn. On the one hand I'm almost converted on the music and movie side of this but can't get on board because I still feel it hurts software developers. How does this not bother you?
I would happily sacrifice my ability to make a living writing software if it meant that all software was FOSS. That would absolutely thrill me to no end. I think that so much good would be done for the world therein that it would be ethically outrageous for me to object. I wouldn't spend that much less time writing software, either, because doing it 8 hours a day saps my will to do it during the other 8.
"I would happily sacrifice my ability to make a living writing software if it meant that all software was FOSS."
And I most certainly wouldn't. I use and contribute to open source, but I love development too much to do something else for a living. But I also have a personal life. I could not spend 40 hours a week doing another job, then spend 40 more doing development. I might spend 4 more hours doing development, and I expect that my learning curve would be severely stunted.
I think it's very unrealistic to think that passion alone could drive software development without the ability to spend most of your time learning and doing what you love.
And I think that applies to other creative endeavors, too. Yes, a lot of music gets created by amateurs. But I doubt Bach or the Beatles could have made the work they did if they had non-musical day jobs.
I personally don't think a basic income guarantee will fire passion.
I'd write software for art's sake even if I didn't get compensated for it.
However, I feel it is critically important to the discussion: Libre does _NOT_ mean Gratis!
To answer the question asked by billpatrianakos: "I still feel it hurts software developers. How does this not bother you?"
Software has been shared Gratis ever since it first existed (even before the PDP-7 era).
And yet software developers have been making far more than your average auto mechanic in all that time.
The distributors have been the ones most threatened by Gratis sharing. They can't mark up the software when they put it in a box and add a pretty manual (and add DRM or some form of copy protection, which only hurts honest consumers).
There will always be skilled hackers (i.e. developers), just as there will always be musicians creating music, even if the RIAA and friends disappear.
Gratis sharing is free advertising. The honor system is ultimately the only system of compensation that does not break in a system with no scarcity and unlimited sharing. Software has been born into that system; music and movies and writing are discovering that they now live in that world too.
Although it's new for musicians, hackers understand it intuitively.
Gratis sharing does not mean you don't get paid. However, if you go with a non-Libre distribution channel, you may not get paid. Artists who sign up with a label may end up paying the label for the privilege of performing. Admittedly that's an extreme case, but the fundamental theory of a non-Libre channel is trying to create artificial scarcity using computers where there is none -- so you only end up hurting your paying customers. Those who do Gratis sharing will only be affected marginally.
To get paid, just focus on providing the services to your customers. The customer is always right, yes, but also you should be able to see their needs more clearly than they can, themselves. In this way you become valuable to them as a source of continual improvement. Great musicians do the same.
If he finds sufficient reason to generate content, and that content competes with that produced by the RIAA, he's creating a competitive threat.
It's tough to compete with free.
That's precisely what Google does with its services in competing against Microsoft, because Google's revenue stream (ad sales) is unlinked from Microsoft's (OEM / site / direct software sales).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.'
"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."
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].
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.
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.
"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."
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.