The Copyright Crusade a Lost Cause? 253
A. Smith writes "Ars Technica is exploring the relationship between property rights and copyright, arguing that copyright holders are making a mistake by stressing similarities between property rights and copyright. They compare P2P users to 18th-century squatters in North America: 'Like squatters of old, many ordinary users find copyright law bewildering and are frustrated by the arbitrary restrictions it imposes. Customers wanting to rip their DVD collections to their computers, download music they can play on any device, or incorporate copyrighted works into original creative works find that there is no straightforward, legal way to do these things.' They conclude by offering that more reasonable, understandable copyright restrictions would result in a user base friendlier to publisher interests."
Ideas cannot be owned! (Score:2, Insightful)
Given that ideas are not property, why can't society simply accept that people should profit from the application of ideas and not from the idea itself?
You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Inconsistent Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that also mean that if I own an unoccupied residence I don't have to pay property taxes on that?
Re:if ip = real p, how about some taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? I have stapler on my desk that I don't pay property taxes on.
On this desk alone I also have a mouse, a telephone, a can of coke, a screwdriver, a keyboard, 2 monitors, a flashlight, a spindle of blank DVDs... all property, all completely exempt from 'property taxes'.
I'm curious what idiot convinced you that all real property is taxed.
Re:What a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell it to customers of 321 Studios [wikipedia.org].
You don't own property now! (Score:0, Insightful)
If you don't believe me, don't pay your property taxes for a couple of years and see if you still own it.
Just food for thought.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:if ip = real p, how about some taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Property tax is the most onerous of all taxes. You don't pay income tax unless you make money, you don't pay sales tax unless you have money to spend, but if you don't have money for property tax you can lose* your home.
Please don't advocate that I have to pay property tax on my imaginary property. None of it in any way brings in revinue, and one of the two works I've registered is on a software program for a computer that has been obsolete for a quarter century.
Considering all the gibberish I've spread all over the internet since 1997 (sorry guys, still no new
-mcgrew
*If you leave your door unlocked you'll loose your home.
Re:You guys can try and twist the issue but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I buy content to consume (because that's what I'm buying, the packaging, including the disk, drive, whatever it's on is only a means to an end, nobody buys an optical disk to moon over...well, unless they're very VERY disturbed), I want to be able to consume it any damn way I please.
And NO, consumption does NOT mean "redistribution". I want to be able to make fair backups (which I won't be giving to people), or shift it off to a computer, digital video player, iPod, whatever.
Recorded media is NOT the same as a live show (as every live show is different, even if an identical set is performed). Thus there's no justification for what is, essentially, pay-per-play.
Additionally, we're not talking about public exhibition of the material either. We're talking about viewing in the privacy in the privacy of my own home, or on the street watching a screen small enough that it's only meant for me to view it anyhow.
I can, and DO, pay for the content I consume. I also comprehend the fact that the media on which this content comes is not indestructible. Thus, in addition to media shifting, I will make backups.
I refuse to be sold the same content, over and over again. And I refuse to be labeled a pirate or grouped in with pirates simply because I take care of my investment in my own entertainment.
Re:Publisher Interests, What a Hoot! (Score:1, Insightful)
FTFA -- blockbuster movies (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not that hard to imagine at all. Its hard to imagine they would spend tens of millions of dollars producing new movies if they couldn't make their money back and profit from it. But that has nothing to do with a "law that gives them exclusive rights in its commercial reproduction".
They could always find a new way of making their money back. -gasp-
Hell, "blockbuster movies" generally make their money back from theatre ticket sales, before even going to DVD. As long as you had a law in place that gave them control over public displays at theatres, in airplanes, satellite subscription services, etc they'd survive, and there would still be adequate incentive to make new movies.
And even if consumers were free to copy movies provided they did it non-commercially that wouldn't kill DVD/bluray sales anytime soon, and when the internet is fast enough that physical media is actually threatened, they can sell copies of them via itunes music store type services. A lot of people will pay a modest amount for a copy even if they can get it free legitimately, if the paid version invariably meets a high level of quality and is more convenient and is always available.
All the industry has to ask is: how do you compete with free? And the answer: better service. As long as copyright gives them the monopoly to charge for content they will always be able to compete, and profit.
If they don't want to, fine, they can get out of the business, and someone else will come along see the money on the table, and get in on this 'making movies thing'. Its not our job to ensure that something becomes increasingly lucrative as time goes on, and that's what hollywood is essentially demanding... that their profits not be allowed to fall... at all... ever.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:-1, Insightful)
I don't believe in Imaginary Property.
A book is a piece of physical property. Words and ideas should not be ownable.
Re:Publisher Interests, What a Hoot! (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this is probably deliberate. By treating copies as being as valuable as the original, the record labels (for example) get to claim that what they do (make copies) has more value than what their signed artists do.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast-forward to today, where nearly any media can be created with low-cost (or free) tools and also distributed freely, and the argument about needing to recoup costs to distribute no longer has any meaning.
The point here is that copyright was not meant to reward having a good idea; it was meant to reward DISTRIBUTING that idea. (Similarly, patents are meant to reward PUBLICATION of ideas for others to learn from; that is, to facilitate new ideas building on old ones by making the details of the old ones explicitly public.)
Those disenfranchised by the law flaunt the law (Score:3, Insightful)
As it stands now, copyright law might as well be based not on author's lifetime but rather the lifetime of the last (mortal) survivor of the year when the work was first published. Disregarding Disney, that would appear to be the goal of Lifetime + 70 years: to ensure that your work is never exploited by anyone that directly knew of your being alive.
Copyright is Too Complicated on Purpose (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no provision for "making a killing". There is no provision for "protecting the author's heirs". Or anything else, except promoting science and useful arts.
Because the only right in question here is our right to free press. So long as the Constitution (and the law under it) just documents the actual rights we have, and creates a government to protect them, people will understand it. Those "Fair Use" rights are the real rights, which is why people understand them. Rights are familiar to us from real life. They're typically easy to understand. They shouldn't be that hard to protect.
And since science and the useful arts can progress perfectly well these days with the minimum protection from competition, everyone will understand if we roll back copyright to just very limited times, like at most 14 years for print, and as little as a week (or even a day or so) for content like news.
Re:Inconsistent Logic (Score:2, Insightful)
Depending on where you live you may already pay property taxes on said items. In some states
Re:What a shocker (Score:4, Insightful)
And why should "artists" be given preferential treatment compared to "inventors"?? Patents have a term of 20 years. period. Not after death and not extendable. Why should "artists" enjoy revenue two and half times as long?
I'll tell you why. Because the world is run by looters. Patents cover things like machines, manufacturing processes and drugs. Everybody acknowledges that without these things people get sick or quality of basic life is diminished. So the looters use their majority to vote that in a short period of time they can take any practical invention they want for free.
Just take the time to look at how much better copyright protects the creators profit compared to the tons of loopholes present that can invalidate a patent.
Re:Ideas cannot be owned! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because someone spent time on it doesn't make that time automatically worth something.
Re:Inconsistent Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Several U.S. states do have personnel property tax on cars. I suspect the only reason that car, bicycles, furniture and other non-durable goods are not taxed is because it is impossible to know you own them. But with a car, if you wish to register the car (to drive), you'll have to pay the property tax.
Do I want a personal property tax? No. I consider even real estate taxes extremely regressive and anti-social. But if you want to use words like "stealing my intellectual property" then you are giving people an entree to really treat it as physical property. It either is property or isn't. And if it is, it should be treated as any other property.
A lot of errors en route to a fairly obvious point (Score:4, Insightful)
Timothy Lee (the author of TFA) makes qutie a few errors. First, they claim "Critics of the practice [filesharing] analogize copyrights to property rights" -- this is flatly factually wrong. Critics of the filesharing note, correctly, that copyrights are a subset of property rights (not something merely analogous to property rights), and draw an analogy between violations of copyrights and violations of rights in tangible personal property. Mr. Lee has misidentified where the analogy is drawn.
Second, Lee counts the one argument for property rights as two different arguments, by falsely splitting it into the "scarcity argument" (which he claims doesn't apply to copyright) and the "reward" argument (which he claim does.) In fact, the scarcity argument (that property rights are beneficial because they promote a more efficient use of scarce resources) is simply an application of the reward argument (that people will be more motivated to create and preserve value when they are able to exclusively control all or some part of the value created and/or preserved by their action) to the case of management of existing resources. By falsely counting the general argument and its specific application as two independent arguments, Lee paints a picture of copyright being an area with a "weaker" argument for property rights, when in fact it has the exact same argument (at least, in terms of the basis of argument, which is what is at issue in this part of Lee's pience) for property rights.
Third, Lee miscategorizes the argument for property rights (and, therefore, for copyrights) as being about "necessity", when its not about "necessity" (which is conceptually binary -- something either is "needed" or not) but about utility (that, on balance, people are better off with property rights, even though some are denied access to that which they would otherwise have, than without property rights.) This mistake leads to him dismissing the need for copyright "for certain classes of creative work", because those forms would not completely disappear without copyright. This misses the point of the reward argument for property rights entirely, which isn't about necessity but net gain. (Note, I'm not arguing that, viewed through that lens, copyright, and particularly not especially the increasingly rigid system of copyright we have now, is justified, merely that you need to focus on the real basis of property rights argument to challenge it meaningfully.)
That being said, eventually Lee (after all the errors and unnecessary diversions) does get around to the rather simple observation that applies to all laws: that no law is effective (he narrowly applies this property rights, but it is far more generally applicable) unless the people subject to it generally accept it (either by accepting it as legitimate or at least by deciding its not worth the cost of violation), and attempting to more strictly enforce a rule that most people don't believe is right rarely produces that respect, even in the more minimal form. (It can, if the government is able to drive the combination of the cost and certainty of being caught out of compliance high enough, but that usually takes insane levels of enforcement that threaten the general perception of the legitimacy of the government, rather than just the particular law, if the prohibited act is widely accepted as something people should not be punished, or punished as harshly as is necessary to secure general compliance, for doing.)
I really wish Ars Technica would get a clue (Score:3, Insightful)
It all becomes clear with this statement: "The copyright system is currently undergoing rapid changes as technology undermines old business models and enforcement regimes."
Um, no, it isn't. The only way you can think this is if you don't understand what copyright is and does. And that's because copyright's primary purpose is to provide a legal framework between a creative artist and his/her distributor in regards to his/her art. So long as there is a legally binding agreement to do it - copyright provides the protection to the artist to allow negotiations - how the distributor distributes that art is inconsequential to the actual law.
Aside from which, last time I checked, change involved something, well, CHANGING. The law has not been rewritten, the Berne convention is still the international yardstick, and the necessity for a framework to allow a creative artist to submit work to a distributor without having to worry about being shafted before a contract is even signed is still there. The RIAA trying to abuse the law and failing does not mean that the law itself has been stricken down.
Who fact checks these things?
Re:Copyright is Too Complicated on Purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it is a "civil", revocable right granted by law. Apparently, you do not understand that there are rights other than "inalienable" rights.
No, the Constitution does not abridge the First Amendment rights. This has nothing to do with "free press". Your argument is a red herring and is obviously misinformed, because you apparently do not understand the term "freedom of the press".
Freedom of the press is about preventing government censorship and has nothing to do with copyright.
Please go back and actually learn about the subject before opening your mouth and making a fool of yourself.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then, when you use a work around or a fix so you can use the music/movies/games as you are entitled to, they make it illegal and tell you that you're a thieving pirate.
Fact is when I buy their shit, they just fuck me over, giving me shitty uncopyable DVDs with shitty unskippable adverts on shit I paid too much for, dogshit games fuck my computer up and 'CD's that wont play in my CD drive.
Now I'm not a christian, I ain't going to 'turn the other cheek', I much prefer the Satanist doctrine, 'Do unto others as they do unto you' and will those cunts rob me blind, fuck me over and cheat me out of my rights. So I now I'll do the same to them, and if they don't like it, fuck em. If they won't play by the rules and respect people fair use rights, why should we respect their copyright rights?
DRM and copy prevention shit used to piss me off too, but it doesn't any more, 'cos I stopped playing by the rules the same time they did.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:3, Insightful)
What they can do is increase the total number of ideas produced (although even that can debated). The price of getting those extra ideas produced is that the ideas that would have been produced anyway becomes less availible (due to inherent inefficencies of the monopolies that these laws create).
My personal opinion is that in most cases patents and copyright are simply a bad idea, unless society have a real shortage of new ideas.
Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... (Score:2, Insightful)
"recoup costs to distribute no longer has any meaning."
What about the cost of the original production. The estimated value of the production takes in to the account the estimated profitability. Who would pay for media production if there was no profit in it? Would you give me money to make an album, today? Especially if you knew I was just going to give the music away and you would have no ownership of the songs I write?
The point of copyright was indeed to make it distributable... by protecting ownership of the concept to ensure that there would be profit from the distribution. Here you err in logic. The lack of profit does not eliminate ownership, rather it eliminated the desire to share concepts that are valuable.
Additionally, distributors pay for the rights to distribute. That's how the music company makes money. Take a look at the business section of the paper: media sales (distribution) is major part of our economy. Larger that the mortgage industry. Without copyright and distribution rights there would be no professional sports either.
What do you think would happen to Microsoft, Apple, AP news, TV, Activision (and other game makers)?
From a personal perspective: Do you leave your name of your school work? Do you share your homework and papers in school knowing the class is graded on a curve? If you did, you only reduce your own grade in the process - and at graduation you'll have less of a chance getting a job because your grades would be average instead of notable. Putting your name on it establishes ownership. It limits others ability to profit from your hard work. Whether there is 1 or 1 gazillion copies is irrelevent.
Frankly, I think you just want free stuff and don't understand the cost and the sacrifice it takes to reach your hands.
Re:Possible model (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, go ahead and try to argue that possesion does not mean the ability to exclude.