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New Copyright Alliance Formed In D.C.
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 25, 2007 08:42 AM
from the they-own-j00 dept.
from the they-own-j00 dept.
jombeewoof alerted us to a story that went past unnoticed last weekend. A new industry-backed 'Copyright Alliance' was formed in the city of Washington, DC. Tasked with the nebulous goal of 'promoting the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs, and growth', the ultimate goal of the organization is to strengthen copyright laws overall. "Backed by organizations like the MPAA, NBC, News Corp., Disney, Time Warner, the Business Software Alliance, Microsoft, ASCAP, the NBA, and others, the Copyright Alliance has already secured initial support from several members of Congress ... The group is headed by Patrick Ross, a former senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a strongly free-market think tank. Ross has written about IP issues for years, and in a 2005 opinion piece claimed that he was 'looking for anyone who wants to join me in seeking that elusive middle ground.' His new gig may be a strange place to fight for that 'middle ground' in any meaningful sense, as the Alliance is dedicated to 'strengthening copyright law' using 'bilateral, regional, and multilateral agreements to protect creators' and advancing educational programs 'that teach the value of strong copyright.'"
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I for one (Score:3, Funny)
Too much control (Score:5, Insightful)
Obvious quote (Score:5, Insightful)
The more laws they create, the less those laws will control. When law becomes esotheric and illogical, people stop heeding it. Partly because they don't even know that it's illegal, since it's anything but common sense that it should be. Partly because they don't care, since it does not match their personal morals. And finally partly because they think it does not matter what they do, they'll break some law anyway.
Parent
Paradox patrol (Score:2)
age old conflict (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just an age-old battle between the classes. The masses benefit most from the free flow of information, and an elite few benefit from being able to prevent that free flow.
Money vs many, once again.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Too much control (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should the people have to give up the right to share things they found funny/interesting with other people in the digital age?
Please take another look at our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The "right to make money off a creative work" is not listed as an inherent right. The right to express yourself however you choose is. Copyright in its original form was intended to be an agreement between the public and the creator for the public to temporarily give up those rights to freedom of expression in order to allow the creator a brief period of time of no competition to market his creative work, if it is indeed marketable.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should content creators have to give this right [to distribution] up in the digital age?
If our country was actually still functioning as a democracy, it's not up to the content creators to keep or give up this "right". It's not some right they ought to have that they are giving up. It's an unnatural "right" that the consumers are extending to the content creators, and it's up to the consumers if they want to keep extending that "right" (keeping in mind of course that some of those same consumers might also be in the content creator group).
But unfortunately IP is no longer being op
Re:Too much control (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Conversely, I believe that shorter Public Domain laws would create more growth. Would you rather companies continually invest in their employees to continue creating new works or have a few select individuals profit endlessly?
Another main point of debate is fair use. Copyright owners don't want any fair use, the
Too much copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
The government grants the copyright monopoly not because it wants these firms to make money; they grant it because they hope that ARTISTS (see what I did there?) will make more of their art when they can make a buck off of what they do, for the purpose of making a rich culture. So, the purpose of copyright is not financial but cultural gain. This comes with the implied benefit that the ARTIST can make money. When the copyright is held by anyone but the artist, there is no more cultural gain to be had.
The default setting for stuff that goes out of your head and into other people's sight/ears/whatever is that it is no longer yours. I tell you my Great Idea, now you can use it. I sing you my song, you can play it as well. That's the default mode. It's very easy to copyright something (just stick on your name, the year and the alt0169 symbol) but it's so hard to get it back into the public domain where it belongs (after a reasonable period of time,) it's ridiculous.
Also, extending copyright past the death of the artist involved. Make more art, Jimi! Make more art, Django! Make more art, Pablo! Make more art, Joan [blogspot.com]!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Berne.
Does anyone see a reason why this wouldn't work?
Berne.
More specifically:
"Copyright under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration"
The idea has been voiced several times by copyright scholars and others, and it isn't such a bad idea (would fix the orphan works problem, works not making money anymore would enter public domain sooner). The largest stumbling block to make it a reali
Re:Too much control (Score:5, Interesting)
The right isn't inherent in them, it comes from the public. Why should the public continue to give it to them? I'm not averse to it, but we shouldn't give it to them unless it provides a greater net public benefit to give them that right, given the costs it incurs, than it would if we didn't.
Merely to support authors or the publishing industry isn't a good enough reason. How does supporting us benefit us more than it costs us? Are there no alternatives that would yield a greater net benefit? Remember that having more works created and published is beneficial, but that it is also beneficial for the public to have more freedom to do with works what they will.
Parent
This smells like a "Bad Thing"(TM) (Score:2, Insightful)
Not strongly free market (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
This is why (Score:4, Informative)
The result of being apathetic in politics is to be run by evil men.
Re:This is why (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:This is why (Score:4, Informative)
Where's my clue-by-four when I need it. You have much more representation in government than a single rancher in Wyoming because you reside in the seat of government.
There is a reason why the federal district was denied representation by those who had just earned the right to representation via Revolutionary War. You already have enough influence.
More importantly, you live in a roughly-square patch of land that's not terribly large.
Perhaps you should move out of it to Maryland, where you'll have all the representation you need.
Was this the answer for Southern blacks during the Jim Crow era?
Parent
Strengthening?? (Score:2)
The middle ground... (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly will they "teach" (Score:5, Insightful)
advancing educational programs 'that teach the value of strong copyright.'
What exactly are they going to teach. Most laws do not remotely cover what is needed with today's technology. For instance, if you start teaching about copyright "infingement" someone will ask if it is an infringement if you rip a CD or copy a movie for personal use. The current problem is that NO ONE KNOWS 100%. These issues have not been hammered out in a court of law and the current statues have no opinion either way.
The first thing that really needs to be done (besides possibly shortening copyright) is to define what exactly can and cannot be done with an existing work. Until then, whatever anyone attempts to teach about copyright is 100% opinion and speculation.
As a side note: The really pathetic thing about copyright is that it was initiated to promote the science and arts, but has since been hijacked by what I believe to be the lowest benefit to our society - the Entertainment Industry.
Re:What exactly will they "teach" (Score:5, Interesting)
Backups... how many backups should be allowed? One? Three? Ulimited? That remote backup site that, convieniently, all your friends know the password for? Is it fair use to lend a copy away while you still have it on your media server? Would it be fair use to lend a friend get a copy instead of your original disc? Again, if this is a hundred friends where the one original is making the rounds and everywhere it touches there's copies being made, it's probably not.
In any case, the answer is really quite simple in the end: If it's protected by DRM you can't do shit, it's all a violation of the circumvention paragraph, and fair use is only a defense to infringement. Fair use might as well be stricken from the books as a legacy law only applicable to pre-DRM works. Don't like it? Tough.
Parent
Re:What exactly will they "teach" (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the fuck are you to say something like that? This fucking battle is not over. Our rights trump their ability to make money.
WE ARE NOT TO STAND BY WHILE THEY TAKE OUR RIGHTS AWAY! Just because lawmakers are easily influenced by money and are ever so helpful in ensuring that their pockets remain full does not mean that we should roll over, play dead, and take it in the ass while the copyright holders extend their life expectancies, revenue streams, and shit-eating grins.
I guess you could be a shining example of exactly what they want to accomplish. Congratulations.
Parent
What rights? (Score:3, Interesting)
Polemic aside, what rights exactly are you talking about?
One of the biggest problems in this debate is that both sides have extremists who have little objection to stretching the truth, and just plain making stuff up when it suits them. Frankly, there are a lot of reformers who don't have the first inkling of what copyright actually is and does. I still remember getting into a debate with somebody who I challenged to tell me what was wrong with copy
Content not worth protecting (Score:3, Insightful)
The software and record companies have invested millions into developing copy-prevention, lock-out chips, etc and it gets defeated by some person with 20 lines of code. That is why they want congress to write laws against it. How do you think the CEO of CBS felt when he gets music mp3s emailed to him from some guy who beat a copy-protected CD with a black marker the day it came out.
I have always believed that DMCA was never designed to fight music and software pirates, but to stop the Open Source software developers. I would not be surprised if congress tried to "license" developers in the coming years. Something else that bothers me is if the try to merge the DMCA and the Patriot Act.
Nothing good can come of this. (Score:2)
As today is the 30th anniversary... (Score:3, Funny)
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
Education for whom? (Score:2)
Don't they already teach this at the business schools that produce these jackasses? And do they honestly expect anyone else - say, productive members of society - to buy this line of bullshit?
Still the same smell, though (Score:2)
NOT free market -- free reign for cos. (Score:5, Insightful)
This just goes to show that many of the free market idealogues out there aren't really about free markets; instead they are all about unrestricted corporate activity. The two are not the same, and shouldn't be conflated. It's been shown time and again that maintenance of a free market requires government intervention (see Sherman Anti-Trust Act in the US); even the Austrian school will admit that their economic model requires adjustment (and by implication, government action) to correct for monopolies.
Re:NOT free market -- free reign for cos. (Score:5, Insightful)
I assumed they were using the words in their most Orwellian sense. You know, in "1984" the Ministry of Peace was in charge of War, the Ministry of Plenty was in charge or rationing, and as for the Ministry of Love... well you get the idea.
If you think of it like that, the Progress & Freedom Foundation makes perfect sense.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're right. A free market would be opposed to copyright.
There's no true free market. Here's what you have:
Ironically, in Russia or China, which still have more of a Command and Control Economy than the West i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright is a good thing: it's what gives the GPL its "must remain free" condition and allows the BSD license it to be more than public domain by retaining the names of the original contributors. If people put their hard work into making something, why shouldn't they at least get credit (and perhaps allow you to make a livin
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You miss the entire point, in your defense of copyright -- not surprising, since your ad hominem attacks seem to be your primary point.
Tell me, what defines a free market? Go ahead, think long and hard on this. Feel free to Google it, if you never took economics or have forgotten it by now. Ah, hell, I'll quote the first sentence in the Wikipedia entry:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, "free market" ideology is only "about" defining property rights in things that are inherently rivalrous. Physical property, and certain forms of intangibles, are rivalrous; ideas (and information in general) are not.
Property rights are properly minimal, n
Re:NOT free market -- free reign for cos. (Score:4, Interesting)
How so? Are not copyrights an government-induced restriction on supply of a good? Doesn't a free market require no artificial restrictions on supply?
IP has infinite supply sans regulation. This reduces its value to near zero in a truly free market. This is fact. Just because it doesn't serve the profit motives of IP holders doesn't mean that it isn't true -- but instead, we have an artificial restriction of supply in order to make sure that the price of IP remains high enough to maintain a profit incentive. Regardless, it's an artificial restriction of supply, and thus contrary to free market ideology.
All that said, I don't know what the best solution is -- I'm in favor of limited copyrights, but enforcement is a huge problem. What we're actually seeing here is the free market at work -- government-enforced restriction of supply is being overwhelmed by the infinite supply of IP and the ease of 'buying' and 'selling' IP for its true value as a commodity.
Personally, I think we're going to end up with a patronage system. Since supply is impossible to restrict, we'll see wealthy individuals patronize artists and musicians; we'll also see groups of individuals patronize the artists they like (i.e., donating money to artists they like). A more democratic approach to patronage than what existed in the Renaissance and later, but patronage nontheless.
Parent
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
You should relly question how getting the copyright on "Winnie the Pooh" extended
by 50 years benefits creativity.
The original author is long dead, his family sold the rights to Disney for a pittance
in the '60s. So all that is being protected is Disneys right to make money.
Parent
Free market (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have thought an organisation that was strongly free-market would be against stronger copyright laws.
I expect they are really "pro-big-business" rather that "free-market".
League of Evil (Score:2)
I have no problem with strong copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Death of Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The inability to share knowledge will collapse a democracy. A democracy can only survive with free access to information, and a population willing to be educated. Soon, we will have neither. How can we trust our neighbor to help run this country when they know nothing?
In fact, we as a soceity cannot survive without free exchange of information. Culture, the shared information of a group, includes not only "book learning" but stories, music, patterns, and ideas. All of those are being taken from us and gifted to monied interests.
Once, poems like Beowulf would be told, retold, and changed according to the zeitgeist. The characters would be familiar, the plot would be familiar, but the small changes over time would stand out to listeners, and the bards and shapers would emphasize or change different parts to better reflect their audience and the state of current culture. That is what held us together.
Now, we no longer have the power to control our own culture, it will be permenant and immutable for all eternity. Star Wars is a new Beowulf, but we as a culture cannot own it and make it ours. It is now eternal and unchanging, as will be our culture. Another word for eternal and unchanging is dead.
Add to the dead culture and uneducated citizenry a new type of tax- the culture and learning tax, paid to everyone who holds IP. Do you think that given the total control of information flow that IP-holders wouldn't leverage every dollar from their holdings? They'll go so far to protect their "property" that they will certainly cut off all fair uses, such as critical review. Expect even bad movie reviews to go the way of the dinosaur. "Sorry Mr. Ebert, you gave us one too many bad reviews, your license to view all Universal movies has been revoked."
The only silver lining is that the same technology to lock down all ideas has given us a massive, nearly infinite virtual library. The internet, large hard drive arrays, and instant communications have given us the means to acquire and archive massive amounts of data. Do you remember your grade-school librarian? She was a scary old woman probably, and would scare the pants off of little kids. Librarians have always needed to be scary, as they have a hard job keeping information from the hands that would hide it. In the future, we are our own librarians. It's time to get scary.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot? (Score:3, Informative)
None of that is what I addressed.
First, I cannot put my stories in the public domain (I used to write more, I now help my wife write). If I do, someone like Disney can take the idea, copyright it (or even patent the plot), and prevent me from addressing their additions to my work. In fact, Disney or another large media company could force me to no longer use my original material in any substantive way.
The PFF is no libertarian group on IP (Score:4, Informative)
1) Prosecuting file sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act for any serious sharing of data.
2) Throwing the book at college students who use most of the bandwidth on the network for sharing, using college policy to suspend or expel them.
3) Making IP conform to the same law and expectations that physical property is governed by. This means I fully support normalizing the relationship between the two, with the only caveat being maintaining the sole "right to copy" in the hands of the creator.
PFF likes spam and software patents (Score:3, Informative)
secured initial support? (Score:4, Insightful)
A Good Article on Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
If you haven't read Bounty Hunters [greglondon.com] by Greg London, you really should give it a go.
He describes the struggle of society to reward creators in analogy to paying bounty hunters to track criminals. It's a good analogy, and the analysis in section three is good. He spends time talking about making copyright have the proper length so that artists create, but not so long that society pays too much. I must admit that before reading it, I was skeptical that copyright could ever work or had anything to offer. He convinced me that it can be a good system, but there must be fairness in the term of protection.
The last flesh-and-blood discussion about copyright I had was very illuminating. I publish in science, and generally see copyright as getting in the way; I believe ideas that I come up with make me more valuable, rather than having external value (they could be useful for others to learn, then they've increased the value of their labor). But I spoke with a friend who writes fiction. Naturally, she had a different bend. She wanted to be compensated for her work and she didn't want any other writer writing substandard work with her characters, diluting her vision. There were just different issues between knowledge-based creative product and entertainment-based creative product. I would write more about how I disagreed with her, and thought her fears were unfounded, but it seems unfair to do that without a chance to respond
Monopoly rights on thoughts are some of the most important things facing our society now. We've developed a system where the physical reproduction of these things (text, music, images) is dirt cheap, nearly free, and it is forcing us to reconsider exactly what copyright and patents mean. The "Intellectual Property" crowd has a lot of money, and I think they are dangerous. We need to forge a new compromise between creators and society that maximizes creative output. That will require negotiating the "price" of that work in terms of monopoly protections.
Copyright Tank (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright is derived from the Constitution's instructions for Congress to "promote progress in science and the useful arts". But they now impede progress more than they promote it. A "free market" is unencumbered by government-created monopolies like copyright. Copyright is a misnamed privilege to restrict free expression.
Does anyone think that Ross is busy protecting freedom, progress and markets? Or is he busy grabbing as much money as he can for people with licenses to print it?
Fucking hypocritical Disney (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare the lists at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_doma
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_anima
for more clues.
* mod me funny if you don't want me to gain karma for saying the same thing twice. I just think this is an important point which should be brought up in every single discussion where Disney wants copyright enhanced.
** I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to profit from their use of other people's work. I'm saying that their original creations should fall into public domain, same as all those other things did. But no. Their attitude is "I got mine, now no one else gets any." Fucking hypocritical bastards.
"Free Market"? Strange Definition (Score:3, Insightful)
All the micro-econ courses I took, every single one from micro-101 to price theory, stated pretty strenuously that fiat monopolies and the free market are antithetical. I'm not saying copyright is necessarily bad - maybe the free market is not efficient when it comes to creative works - but the intersection of the free market and copyright is the empty set.