The Case For Perpetual Copyright 547
Several readers sent in a link to an op-ed in the NYTimes by novelist Mark Halprin, who lays out the argument for what amounts to perpetual copyright. He says that anything less is essentially an unfair public taking of property: "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind." This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain, words which don't appear in the op-ed. In a similar vein, reader benesch sends us to the BBC for a tale of aging pop performers (virtually) serenading Parliament in favor of extending copyright for recording artists in the UK. Some performers are likely to outlive the current protections, now fixed at a mere 50 years.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this one of the ways a culture can commit suicide?
Authors (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously there are exceptions, people like Neil Stephenson have certainly embraced the future (well more like the present).
two words: "Property Taxes" (Score:5, Interesting)
The right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyright only exists because technology made it relatively simple to replicate a work and sell it many times over.
Re:Kill Disney (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:two words: "Property Taxes" (Score:5, Interesting)
In history (Score:2, Interesting)
But the English Alphabet, or the direct ancestors, there is an argument which theory applies.
Anyway, I was wondering how the article's author would react if he took his argument to heart, and had to pay royalties are every letter he writes and for every word he utters. Regardless of theory, SOMEONE had to create them before him, no? And their hard work isn't being compensated, apparently.
Re:Authors (Score:3, Interesting)
You could write a novel or an instructional booklet and release the entire thing online for free in HTML format and use adwords on the site that hosts it. You don't need to "sell a single copy". Just put it up, set up an adwords account and then spend a bit of time promoting / advertising it. If it's any good and people like it then the Internet's very nature will kick in and drive traffic.
To combat "piracy" you could even get creative and include the URL to your site that hosts it throughout the story. If your "book-site" offers more content than just the story/novel/whatever then any type-in traffic generated would probably result in some bookmarks and then more traffic via word of mouth etc.
Also since the "book-site" is going to be extremely keyword dense you should get some very broad yet targeted ads which could generate clicks and sales that you wouldn't really think about. This could actually create problems on the other hand but you don't have to go with a PPC system. You could advertise other books in a similar genre through affiliate programs etc.
Heck I might just try this myself. I've always wanted to write a book.
Re:Strange (Score:3, Interesting)
While it is still technically an 'ad hominem' attack, It pertains to the matter at hand.
Now, whether of not using a title and idea of another writer is actually against copyright is a whole other issue.
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:5, Interesting)
"If I have an apple and and you have an apple and we swap we will each have one apple. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we swap we now each have two ideas."
Surely this is how intellectual "property" should work.
Re:People should be paid but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Your proposal is basically like saying that when you want to get someone to paint your house, you'll just pay them a million dollars, because that's "plenty sufficient." The house painters will be thrilled, but it'll be tough on you. It's better then, to pay the least amount that will still get them to paint the house. The painters are still willing to do it for the lower price (though they'd prefer the million dollars), and you're no longer being wasteful.
There have been studies done as to the value of copyrights over time, for various works. First, know that the vast majority of works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Their authors are incentivized to create the works for incentives that are outside of the copyright system (e.g. fame, commissions, selling a specific copy rather than copies as commodities, etc.). These incentives are often at work even for the authors that do respond to copyrights, and so we should try to not provide any surplus incentive if these natural incentives will suffice.
Second, of the tiny fraction of works that do have economic value, the vast majority of that value is generally realized over a period of days to months of publication in a given medium, depending on the market for that work. For example, a movie will take in most of its box office beginning on opening weekend through a few weeks. This is the reason that movies don't stay in theaters long, and get more showings initially than later: they stop being profitable enough to justify showing as compared to something else. Eventually the movie hits pay-per-view. Again, there's a flurry of viewings in the first few weeks, but the work quickly gains the majority of all the value from that form of publication it will ever get, and drops off the listings. Then copies of the movie are sold (many to rental stores, many to individuals). Again, most sales over the entire life of the movie occur within a few weeks of release. Ditto for licensing to premium cable channels, then regular cable, and broadcast tv. If the movie is really popular with enough people, it might become a lasting (if always more modest than its initial release) source of profit. This is incredibly rare, however. Given the number of movies made, it's like a lottery win. We shouldn't base public policy around statistical outliers, however.
Frankly, you could give a movie studio a five year copyright term, and while I bet they would bitch about it to no end, it would still be quite profitable for them (offhand I'd guess around 95% of what their profits are now for any given movie) and they'd still make movies. This doesn't mean that I propose a five year term, just that there's no need whatsoever to give them a century or so, as you propose! That's a vast overpayment, and it doesn't produce significantly more or better movies, it just makes them more expensive in terms of the public interest.
Various types of works have various timelines. An episode of a TV show gets most of its income in 30 to 60 minutes, in a somewhat indirect fashion (as the income hinges on the viewing numbers). If it hits DVD, treat it like a movie. An issue of a newspaper, over the course of the day, mostly in the morning. A magazine, over a few days, maybe a week, depending on the frequency of publication. A book, usually over a period of three months
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:3, Interesting)
If all copyrights fell back to a BSD style license after some time frame, say 20 years, and started out by default to be a BSD style license then I agree.
Of course by BSD style, I mean you always have to give credit to the original author (Not to a university, or some RIAA that bought the rights.)
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:2, Interesting)
Because of course, "z = z^2 + c" was discovered way back in the middle ages, and not by a mathematician who is still alive today.
Come on, kids! (Score:1, Interesting)
Making the Case for Stealing-And a Lack of RESPECT (Score:3, Interesting)
As for file sharing and infringement, I think this is more a lack of respect -- sometimes for the artist, and sometimes for the money grubbing record companies that claim they're only in it for the artists, and known liars for saying so.
If you respect an artist -- and I respect Paul McCartney, for example -- so if I like his new CD "Memory Almost Full", I'll buy it. From all reviews, it's likely worth it.
But try and sell me an entire CD for one or two good songs, or resell stuff from the middle of the last century yet again, long after copyright should have expired, or sue people for file sharing when they never stole a single CD from you, and claim bogusly that every download is a lost sale, and I have no respect for you at all.
And try to go back to the famously non-working system of two and a half centuries ago that stifled creativity since no one could build on anyone else's work without permissions, lots of money changing hands, and copyrights owned by publishing houses rather than authors, and I have less than no respect for you.
And what might be less than no respect? Active opposition!
if Mark had his way... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice article. Here is an invoice for the Intellectual Property fees you owe to the descendents of the many works of art you appropriated.
- The descendents of James Madison, for your quotation of the Constitution
- The descendents of Thomas Jefferson, for the quotation attributed to him.
- The descendents of William Shakespeare, for using the title of his play "Winter's Tale"
- The descendents of Moses, for the phrase "Does not then the government's giveth support its taketh," which is clearly alluding to the book of Job in the bible ("the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away", Job 1:21).
- The Chicago University Press, which has appropriated the rights to the ellipsis, a glyph that has remained in Copyright since it was first introduced in 200BC.
We hope you will be able to secure agreeable licensing terms for all these works. In the case that you cannot, you will naturally need to remove the reference. We look forward to seeing more of your work, and thank you for helping to support a thriving intellectual property market.
--Intellectual Property Association, Inc.
Re:There is no intellectual property (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:3, Interesting)
The argument isn't that a child has the RIGHT to earn money from their parents' work, but rather the inverse: A parent strives to provide for their children, and thus an artistic parent would strive to create more valuable art in order to provide more revenue from that art to his/her children.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with this reasoning, but when you look at it from the perspective of the parent, there is some sense to it, as a reward for the artist.
Re:what are you wacked? (Score:2, Interesting)
No, but perpetual copyright does imply that three thousand years from now people will be struggling with a very similar issue regarding the works of, say, Hawking (should he write some more). I'd hate for future archeologists to have to track copyright on the rare documents they find before they revealed it to the world.
Just because bad ideas don't hurt us doesn't mean they're still not bad ideas.
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:3, Interesting)
And they can do this by selling their creations and saving the money - just like the rest of us.
Or even better, they can pass a work onto their children for them to sell later, as many things get more valuable after the creator is dead. Even better, they could leave a secret cache of their second-rate work and rough drafts to enrich their descendants - imagine a new work from Picasso or Shakespeare popping up on the market today.
Request for Payment to Mr Halprin (Score:4, Interesting)
In light of a rumored bill before Congress to retroactively extend the limited copyright in the US to 25000 years after the death of the author (or the destruction of the last copy of the work, whichever comes last), we are investigating several potential copyright infringements in your last op-ed entitled "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?".
Descendants of James Madison request to be compensated for any citation, partial or full, of any of his works. Descendants of Hammurabi (currently estimated at about 127 million) claim copyright on any western law text and discussion thereof, as they are all derivative works of Hammurabi's Code of Law. Finally, there have been claims by descendants of Evander, son of the Sybil, that all Roman letters fall under their copyright, and that therefore any text using them needs to pay them a fair share of proceeds.
Preliminary calculations put the projected statutory infringement fines at 4.2 trillion dollars. This number may change as more claimants come forward. As it is unknown how much more the US Congress is going to extend copyrights, we suggest to settle sooner rather than later.
Sincerely,
Howard Howe,
Dewey, Chetham & Howe, LLP
Please reprint and distribute freely.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here there are extensive rigths for everyone to roam the countryside. Property-rigths are what a society decides that they should be. Anyone not happy with the set of rigths they get if they purchase, say a Norwegian forest, are free not to buy one, so any arguments along the lines that it's "unfair" are pretty pathethic if you ask me.
Anyone can (in the countryside)
Re:Cease and Desist! (Score:3, Interesting)
I own a car, do your honestly think I would give a crap if you made an identical copy of it and drove away in it.
I bake a pizza it represents a unique artistic expression what kind of wanker would I have to be to complain if your made an identical copy of it and ate it.
We are talking about something you can copy which has absolutely no detrimental affect upon my ownership of the original, whether I created that original or bought it. Copyright is just a token temporary monopoly which has been wrongly applied and is now an abused protection far exceeding it's original intent.
I hear by copyright my appearance and wish to apply the right to gouge the eyes out of anybody's head who looks at me without paying (after all am I not entitled to permanent protection from copyright thieves) ;).
Re:Ah, the old "zero-sum" argument (Score:3, Interesting)