The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture 278
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
helps to make the internet democratic.
Lets ask ourselves how many governments around the world don't want the Internet to be more democratic.
Re:Democratic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
We're too lazy
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Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the english speaking white man will stop expecting my language to become english by virtue of my shared skin color, we'll talk.
That actually is incorrect. The reason a particular language becomes a so-called lingua franca has much more to do with economics than politics, racism or anything else. You just have to follow the money.
The dominant military and/or economic power in any given period in history generally finds its language becoming popular, if nothing else because of all the other countries who wish to do business with it. So yes, I guess you could say that the United States (and the British Empire before it) expect those of other nations to speak English, if they wish to do business with us. Otherwise we don't particularly care.
Furthermore, in many parts of the world the local dialects are so thoroughly fragmented that people from one village often can't understand the native tongue of those a few miles away. Take Africa for example: widespread knowledge of both English and French have done much to facilitate communication among the various peoples of that continent. Want to do business with a neighboring town? Best learn English (or, as I said, French, since they had a huge influence there as well.) So you may find your ego being bruised by having to learn a language that is not your own but, historically, that's the breaks. And when the American economic empire finally falls (and we're on the way down, now) whoever takes up the reins will force us all to learn their language. Which, oddly enough, will probably be English since China is on the way to becoming the next economic (if not military) superpower, and the Chinese are making a heavy investment in the English language. Last I heard, there were more people learning English there than the entire population of the United States.
So get used to it. The English language is not going away any time soon.
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-1 Strawman
-2 Missed point.
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Yes, because next comes ad-hominim and then with the use of the strawman, we're at burningman.
-nB
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Yes, because next comes ad-hominim and then with the use of the strawman, we're at burningman. -nB
Hey, best get your hooded robes and that flaming cross ready for the next part of this thread. It's all downhill from here.
Re:Democratic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed as a fan of artificial languages (conlangs constructed languages) I once wanted to see one used for international communications (specifically an IAL international auxiliary language).
Rick Harrison, a prominent figure in the international conlang community wrote an essay [rickharrison.com] on why IAL will never work. Essentially the point is that people don't choose to agree on a common language, instead whoever wants to start conversation learns the other language first.
The up side is that you don't *have* to learn English, just be the best burger seller in your country and McDonald's will send someone to ask to buy your business in *your* own language.
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shouldn't that mean that the second most common language should be Japanese?
Why would that follow? Most Japanese businessmen already speak adequate English. A hell of a lot better English than Americans will ever be with Japanese. They learned it in order to be able to trade with the United States ... and because so many other countries also use English for international business, that was sufficient.
Also, once a given tongue reaches the point of being a de-facto common language, there really isn't much need of another. If you have multiple common languages then you don't really
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From what I can tell, the most often spoken European language in much of the Third World is French (it's widely spoken in African and still spoken by many in Indo-Chi
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As a Portuguese, I resent that. Portuguese is the 6th language in the world, and the third European language, after English and Spanish. French only comes in 11, after German.
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Most Japanese businessmen already speak adequate English.
No.
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the Chinese are learning Engrish in droves.
FTFY.
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. There's another reason why English in the lingua franca of the Internet. A major feature of the English language is its ability to incorporate foreign words and phrases in a useful way which colors, expands, and even conceptually improves the language. For example, this sentence is perfectly sensible English.
Hey amigo, konichiwa! That was some serious schadenfreude Bob showed earlier when Kate's car broke down, n'est-ce pas?
In this sentence, I used words from a total of five languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish. It doesn't matter that two were Romance languages. I could have used "chombatta" instead of "amigo" and gone completely neo-African cyberpunk. Hell, if I spoke Klingon, I could have added some of that in. The German word, "Schadenfreude" adds a new word to English which explains a concept that doesn't exist in the language already. Notice also, that I could use the Saxon genitive to expression possession instead of the less efficient "the car of Kate".
The result is that English can expand really fast. It's likely the most extensible and expansive language on earth. It is always easily expressible without reliance on numerous accent marks. Japanese requires more effort to express electronically. Japanese also isn't as extensible in written form as English is. Japanese is written using multiple forms: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji. The Japanese pull it off well, but these are hacks - especially romaji. The Chinese have the same problem.
English can grow to accommodate words from other cultures as they become trendy. If Brazil becomes an amazingly cool place culturally, and people outside Brazil start using Brazilian slang, English will better adapt to include Portuguese words than say German or Russian. If I were to bet on any language surviving another couple thousand years and still being structurally the same while still growing, I think it will be English. Sure, we probably not recognize it cause the first person singular pronoun will be "Wa" instead of "I", but a language like Chinese can only maintain its native structure by resisting multi-cultural extension.
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A major feature of the English language is its ability to incorporate foreign words
That's how all languages work.
You're just ethnocentric about your language, and ignorant about other cultures since you don't know examples invalidating your affirmation, like how the Japanese word for "door" is "doa" (they can't finish words in "r"), and for bread it's "pan". Heck, in French an iceberg is called "un iceberg".
It's a feature of the English language, that's true, but not exclusively so, as you assumed. It's... icky that you'd take that common feature and write a number of paragraphs about how
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He didn't say that borrowing was unique to English, just that it is unusually common in English. No one said that that makes English inherently better, only that it can be an advantage in some circumstances.
I don't know if the GP's thesis is right, but it's much more reasonable than you make it seem.
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just ethnocentric about your language, and ignorant about other cultures since you don't know...
Actually, I am a native German speaker. English was my second language. I think you showed more ignorance there than I did. You can attack me for favoring English all you want, but you didn't actually counter anything I wrote did you? No, you didn't. The fact remains, English has a competitive advantage over other languages that will guarantee that English will continue to thrive on the Internet. If you want hedge your bet on the computing world adopting written Cantonese, go for it.
And no, that's not how all language works. If you studied language, you'd learn this. There are a number of languages that are fairly stagnant. I never said *exclusive*. I said it is a major feature. And I gave an example how said feature works well. Perhaps you required more comparative examples in the other languages I know? I'm sorry, I just didn't have time to meet your exacting demands.
Modded for informative? Hardly.
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English will better adapt to include Portuguese words than say German or Russian.
No.
What on earth makes you think German, etc. do not have loan words? Why do you think the French made an (idiotic) law to prohibit loan words?
Japanese has even separate alphabet (katakana) for loanwords, for fucks sake! (Romaji is not Japanese, btw). There are huge number of loanwords in Japanese (mostly from English), e.g. "paso-kon" (personal computer), "toile", "pan" (bread).
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I didn't say German or French don't have loan words. I speak both - German natively. France outlawed loan word because the French fear their culture is shrinking. They didn't want invasion from foreign culture, especially English.
I didn't say Romaji is Japanese. I said romaji is used in order to include western alphabet based words. You guys get really pedantic, but then you flame me for going into specific details.
The lack of gender and the simplified declension of nouns, and ability to use a limited chara
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What you describe is slang, not a (formal) language that can be called English. From a communication perspective, what percentage of people would fully understand your sample sentence? My wife and I routinely mix English, Thai, Swedish, Spanish, and maybe even a tiny bit of Mandarin in conversation, but I'll guarantee you someone fluent in all five languages will still have trouble understanding what the heck we *mean* or how to construct a response using diction in each language that we would understand.
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Of course. After all, we're talking about specific lexicons that vary from group to group. It took me years before I learned that a "spider" is a frying pan.
Among my peers, my example would have been understood. I don't expect it to have been universally understood by all English speakers. My girlfriend is an Brit ex-pat Aussie. I understand what a "sheila" is, but I don't expect southern Californians to.
My example only points out that in English, I can easily take words and phrases from other languages and
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What you have described is called a loanword [wikipedia.org] and it is not a concept limited to English. Many of the words used in legal codes for most of western Europe is French in origin (I.E. amicus curae) this includes German, Spanish and Italian languages as well as English.
You will often find common ancestry of words. The Thai word for
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Ah, but when you talk about someone in English, you probably would use she or he. Perhaps you should try languages like Finnish that are truely gender/status neutral. We even write the words as they are pronounced.
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are valid reasons to think twice before allowing online voting. The most common being that it's impossible to verify that the voter is not being influenced by someone at the time of voting.
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly [musicmachinery.com].
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The parent has a valid point.
Internet voting is way to easy to hack, but states with minimal rule of law can have vote rigging and violence at polls.
Re:Democratic? (Score:4, Interesting)
When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.
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When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.
Actually, if you look at how the system was actually designed originally, there were no parties at all.
The problem is that over the years our system has been corrupted and bastardized to the point where it really just doesn't work anymore.
I suppose it's better than a straight-up dictatorship... But it's nearly impossible to affect any actual change at all in this system. As you said, it's impossible to get a viable third party going... And the existing two parties are just variations on a theme... And w
Re:Democratic? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no reason to dump the current system rather than make a couple of minor adjustments to remedy the worst of it. Moving to a system like we have in WA or they have in IA where the winners don't get to do the districting is a substantial step towards genuine democracy. Taking another step by moving to a form of primary such as the top two where the candidates that best appeal to the voters get advanced rather than getting an automatic opportunity for all parties is another significant step.
It's also worth pointing out that Canada and the various EU member states have their own problems. Sure they have a huge number of parties, but it doesn't magically improve the quality of the legislation or legislators. That takes a lot of work and for the population to be both informed and care.
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Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Democratic? (Score:5, Funny)
The topic went past the event horizon and isn't part of this universe anymore.
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We have. Look at the Pirate Party in Europe. The difference is here in the USA we have a flawed system... When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.
The American system is FPTP [wikipedia.org] like the British one, we managed to get a Third Party [wikipedia.org], and a bunch of smaller ones [wikipedia.org]. Why the USA hasn't developed "The Texas independence party" or "The New York First Party" etc. is beyond me. You guys should have parties from all 50 states represented in congress, where are all your local parties?
And just because you stand little chance of being elected isn't a reason not to create or join a smaller party. The Greens in the UK have all three main parties spouting their messag
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There's also the matter of people that have to work on election day, one of my co-workers is stuck working a full twelve hour shift and would have a huge amount of trouble voting if not for absent
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There's also the matter of people that have to work on election day, one of my co-workers is stuck working a full twelve hour shift and would have a huge amount of trouble voting if not for absentee voting.
Aren't businesses required by law to give employees several hours off during elections? that sounds like a pretty unfair system if people can be kept from voting by employment obligations.
in Canada: ...
All employees who are qualified electors, that is, those who are 18 years of age or older and Canadian citizens on polling day, are entitled to three consecutive hours on polling day for the purpose of casting their ballots.
Employers cannot impose a penalty or deduct pay from an employee for the time off the
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Lets ask ourselves how many governments around the world don't want the Internet to be more democratic.
Can't burn an ebook?
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Lets ask ourselves how many governments around the world don't want the Internet to be more democratic.
Can't burn an ebook?
Sure you can [slashdot.org]
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Then they added:
"Think of the children!"
and:
"Look at the silly monkey! Look at the silly monkey!" *head explodes*
Our ministry of culture (Score:3, Informative)
Frederic Mitterrand, the nephew of the former president, just appointed by our dumbass in chief Sarkzy, just stated that he wanted to fight "free [libre] internet fundamentalists."
I sooo wanted to cockpunch the son of a bitch. And the god damn sarkock-sucking media who didn't point out the outrageous nature of that fascist statement.
simple. (Score:2)
By the people, for the people ?
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Unfortunately, your signature is the way it is these days.
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Boyle's book: 'The Public Domain' (Score:5, Informative)
As a lawyer working in the area, I highly recommend Boyle's book, 'The Public Domain [thepublicdomain.org]' - available under a Creative Commons licence, as well as in dead-tree format.
A fascinating (and easy to read) discussion about the concept of 'the public domain', which is well worth reading for anyone who cares about the future of technological development / societal impact of overbearing IP regulation etc.
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Copyright law IS a black hole... (Score:2, Interesting)
...so much so that places like /., which quite often provide original thinking upon a variety of subjects to anybody cunning enough to use a web crawler, should think about including "any derivative works originating from ideas or opinions expressed within the contents of this website constitute prior art and are covered by the GNU GPL" (or some such, while bearing in mind that IANAL).
One of you geniuses may unknowingly and casually toss out a feasible idea. It would burn you, to see somebody turn that int
Re:Copyright law IS a black hole...BANG! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be the perfect opportunity for me to show up at the other side of the door with a shotgun and an attitude.
Seriously, the more unreasonable the laws become, the greater the self-justification for breaking them, whether by shotgun, or P2P digital file sharing.
Copyright law vs. Black Holes (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, copyright law really is a Black Hole!
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Your idea that the site should include some boilerplate that says all content is license
Economic benefit vs economic waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development. How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar? However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org] doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
Re:Economic benefit vs economic waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development
That's because most right's holders have an intolerable sense of entitlement and really want protection in perpetuity. There is an implied contract with society and the right's holders, we provide you with a legal framework to protect your economic interest in creative works an in return the work passes into the public domain after a defined period of time. By extending the copyright period I feel my future compensation has been seized without being compensated for the loss, I paid my taxes what happened to just compensation?
Re:Economic benefit vs economic waste (Score:4, Interesting)
How much money is NOT being made by NOT publishing stuff that's still under copyright but that isn't profitable enough to pay royalties?? (And maybe isn't profitable enough to justify tracking down an absentee copyright holder.)
Clearly there IS money in publishing old stuff, or most of the pre-1900 classics would be long since out of print, and such is not the case. They continue to be reprinted to this day.
I would guess that over the long haul, long copyrights result in a net reduction of money to be made all along the chain -- remember it's NOT just the author and his agent and the first publishing rights, but also all the reprint houses, distributors, and bookstores. It occurs to me to wonder how much long copyright contributed to the demise of small local bookstores, and may now be contributing to libraries that are social hubs but no longer house vast numbers of books.
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I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development.
At what point in history was cultural development more pervasive, or faster? It seems to me that art has become so pervasive that thousands of channels of it our broadcast twenty-four hours a day. When has it been easier for an individual to create and publish art? It costs essentially nothing today, how about in the past?
How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar?
It's not, you just can't share what someone else has created. You can create something similar if you want, you just can't steal what someone else has created.
However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
There isn't a conversatio
Now try to read the article (Score:5, Funny)
Here's what happens when I tried to read the article:
To continue reading this article, please register - it's quick, free and without obligation...
You have viewed your 30 days allowance of 2 free articles.
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I'd copy and paste it for you but slashdots unicode-retardedness seems to be a good copy protection mechanism.
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Bad news.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not "swallowing" our culture as much as fencing it off from all sorts of people.
I'm convinced, though, that the more corporations try to limit the availability of "culture" by trying to create a false scarcity, the level of productivity among local and online artists who refuse to participate will increase, and more people will turn to them for their art, music, literature, journalism, etc.
The only way to save our culture is to change the dynamic that exists between corporations and individuals. You might be surprised to learn that corporations did not always exist just to enslave the population. And I believe it will not always remain so.
My fear though is that they will try to close those "loopholes" by making it harder for individuals to distribute their own music without a "license". There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
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There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
Go one step further, and they will even restrict what you read, its not just about music and video 'media'.
Campaign donor - independent data files (Score:2)
There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
Go one step further, and they will even restrict what you read, its not just about music and video 'media'.
Go even one step further than that, and they will restrict who can read, listen or watch to a subset of those who are customers in good standing of specific campaign donors. Your congressman's eyes will glaze over when you talk about open standards or net neutrality. Request campaign donor-independent media formats or campaign donor-independent net access.
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the more corporations try to limit the availability of "culture" by trying to create a false scarcity, the level of productivity among local and online artists who refuse to participate will increase
Because work produced by "local and online artists" aren't covered by copyright?
Sorry, that work is just as "walled off" as everything else - which seems to me is the plan. The problem is that the current copyright regime is based on propaganda that copying is illegal unless you pay for it. If it's owned by someone, it's not part of our shared culture.
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You're missing my point (and simply regurgitating what PopeRatzo wrote.)
The point isn't that some people will do it for free, the point is that we're stuck in a place where it doesn't matter, because everybody thinks copying anything is illegal.
Lawrence Lessig says that most lawyers aren't sure if it's even possible [lessig.org] to put something in the public domain anymore. And if it's not in the public domain, then someone owns it - and if someone owns it, it's not part of our culture.
The Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
we need to tell Disney et. al. to screw off (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple solution is copyrights work for ten years, plus another 10 if you have a full sized derivative work, 5 years if you make a smaller work. (The derivatives get 10 years from their own creation).
This pays the artists a fair amount of cash, keeps the publishers/distributors in business, yet allows people to do reasonable fair use.
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Why not have different lengths of copyright, based on the type of work.
Certainly art like a painting or sculpture would be entitled to a longer copyright term than a commercial work like a cartoon.
The difficulty here would be to create a set of rules that determines what type of work something is, or indeed what types of would one should distinguish.
One rule might be to look at how much value a copyrighted work has after a certain number of years. Cartoons obviously have less value a few years old than duri
Re:we need to tell Disney et. al. to screw off (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
It is an unnecessary complication. One automatic 20 year term, and one optional 10 year extension should satisfy any artist.
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Why the Subject Matter Isn't Always Why They Read (Score:2, Informative)
Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
This is a little vague. The purpose of one of TFAs is to show how inaccurate the metadata on books in their database can be, and how Google is unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, when researchers use Google book search to look up information about books, rather than read the book (as the summary implies), they can be mislead.
Two examples from TFA: a search for "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results, and a book entitled "Culture and Society 1780-1950" was supposedly publish
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The "Black Hole" has not started (Score:3, Interesting)
IP-based economy (Score:2, Interesting)
Make it a public task to store our culture (Score:5, Interesting)
I made a really long-winded comment [slashdot.org] about it previously.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
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>> Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
>> Make it a requirement for companies that if they want co
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The argument for copyright is that in exchange for that right, society will get the works as public domain at a later time.
This is merely holding it in escrow. We are merely holding the items for safe keeping until such a time arises, that the copyright protections are no longer valid.
The only reason to fight against an escrow that costs you nothing, is if you have anything but pure intentions.
Arrest him now! (Score:3, Funny)
Unless this professor is arrested and waterboarded immediately the terrorists will win!!
Double Binds & Due Diligence (Score:2, Informative)
Corporations began as a means to limit risk exposure to investors in adventures in trade and, thus, encourage investment. Putting aside, for the purposes of my comment, their current morals & ethics, Corporations still function to turn a profit and limit liability for investors. The world has grown small and overcrowded and everyone wants a big piece of the pie. Urbanization can be viewed as our attempts to deal with relatively high populations and scare resources. The results are often bottlenecks that
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Have you ever heard of paragraphs? (plural)
Copyright and the old vs. the young (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if it is the case that if the USA's IP regime gets so oppressive it starts violent demonstrations, I wonder what our violent dystopian wasteland could be?
Will we have a future where the IP Exec's offices are stormed by mobs of angry young people wielding lethal force and murdering shareholders, board members and CEOs? What would such a future look like? Will we have the government executing citizens for IP related offenses? Will we go to war with countries over IP?
Kinda a scary thought.
No, its not copyright. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its the lawyers that are swallowing our culture.
Re:No, its not copyright. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the lawyers - they are only enablers. It's people who HIRE lawyers, and the citizens who fail to demand a stop to the insanity be enacted by their legislators who cause the problem.
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When you get to the mega corps, that are run by lawyers, they are self perpetuating and the general public really no longer plays into it.
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It's not a black hole (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean bitching at MS about IE and WMP is all well and good, but when the basic standard for proving you can operate a computer - the European Computer Driving Licence [headru.sh] - is nothing more than a short training course in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, it makes you wonder whose side they're on. At least call it Office skills or something. Why are we entrenching a foreign corporation on one hand and complaining about it on the other ? It qualifies you to operate a computer in the same way operating a washing machine qualifies you as an electrical engineer. You even get points for putting your name in the right place FFS.
(The tests in that zip are last years version - the new ones mean you have to use vista and Office 2007. They also dropped the Access section completely. Those files have not touched a Windows computer since I got them from the British Computer Societys web site.)
Some jokers are charging £500 for that shit (training and test). I'd get into it myself, except I would never ever feel clean again.
Repeal all IP laws back to 1790 (Score:4, Insightful)
The Copyright and Patent laws of 1790 are, imo, is sufficient enough 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;".
14 year copyright, with a 14 year extension, and 17 years for a patent is enough. Authors and Inventors shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurals for the rest of their lives, but actually contribute to society, which is what the original copyright and patent laws provided for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790 [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Not every author who would require longer protection is resting on their laurels though. Two of the big focal point of copyright protection, music and television, feature works which were created 20-30+ years earlier, but which are still commercially viable today. How do we protect the valid commercial interests of musicians like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, or The Who - artists with a legacy who still perform this music today? How do we protect the interests of the copyright holders to the soap opera General
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But when we're dealing with something like rock music, which is owned by the artist and is very much their pension after 30 years of labor
Maybe they should save money for a pension while they are earning it like everyone else has to. I mean I can see why I would want to be able to continue getting paid from my job after I've retired but I dont think that's going to happen. Many people would disagree that works require longer protection just because they continue to be profitable. They point of copyright law should be to encourage creative work by granting a temporary monopoly for the creater in which to profit after which time the other half
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Why shouldn't people be allowed to access the first episodes of General Hospital freely? why shouldn't a band be able to play one of Iron Maiden's debut songs without worrying whose lawyers they have to pay?
If they're still creating content, let them live off those royalties and give the public access to their older works. I simply can't see the problem with that scenario.
In related news (Score:2)
Simplify the Law (Score:2)
I run a Website for images (mostly) and text scanned from old books. When Google books started I thought at first I could just give up, but it turns out that the quality is so low for Google books that http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ [fromoldbooks.org] and other sites like it continue to perform a valuable service.
I have had to spend a lot of time researching copyright law. I started out believing wikipedia, hah! And there are tons of Web sites with myths about copyright, e.g. that anything published before 1923 anywhere in t
Science vs Art (Score:5, Insightful)
What most people are talking about when they talk about these copyright issues are the copyrighting and/or trademarking of artistic creations.
What's rarely brought up is the fact that there's a very analogous system in the world, too. For scientific creations, there's such a thing as patents. Patents are basically copyright for scientific inventions, as opposed to artistic inventions.
Now, if we compare patents to copyright, the vast disparity in protection length becomes obvious. In most countries, patents protect the exclusivity of scientific inventions for 15-25 years.
Artistic inventions are protected for *95* years. That is to say, 4-5 times longer.
Why? What makes them worth so much longer a protection than scientific inventions get?
The purpose of exclusivity expiring eventually (that is, not being forever) is to release the invented concept into the public domain so that the general public can eventually benefit from making use of the invention in whatever way society feels fit.
However, this right of the general public is by and large being denied at present when it comes to artistic inventions. Copyright terms are being extended and extended by Disney and other megacorporations because they don't want their big brands to become public property.
Imagine if Alexander Bell would have retained exclusive rights to the telephone for 95 years. The patent was issued in 1876. That means the telephone would have become public domain in 1971! The steam turbine would have become available to the general public in 1979 and barbed wire in 1982. The roller coaster and the diesel engine would have expired in 1993.
More importantly, what things would still be patented? We'd be waiting for the zipper to expire in 2012. Aerosol cans would become available in 2022, electric shavers in 2023. Radar wouldn't fall out of protection until 2030.
Imagine how much slower technology would have advanced if things like *zippers* would have to be licensed in order to be used in clothes.
Excessively long protection times directly harm the public, whether it be in the field of our scientific development or in the field of our artistic development.
The problem with digital search, lack of a catalog (Score:2)
As to the problem the article mentions re Google and other online book archives being a mess to find anything in, and hopeless for browsing -- what on earth would be wrong with cataloging them by the LOC system (which is *extremely* precise) or at least by Dewey Decimal (which is much fuzzier but at least you CAN find a category of interest without already knowing the titles/authors/keywords). That would bring their cataloging into alignment with libraries everywhere, and make it one helluva lot easier to f
"Orphan" works aren't orphans. (Score:2)
Wanna know how much money/time/energy Google has put into ascertaining whether the rightsholders of the "orphan" works they have scanned or want to scan are actually unreachable?
None. Nada. Zippo. They don't even claim to have made an effort. The settlement agreement makes such determination the duty of the "Books Rights Registry," an entity that does not yet, and may well never, exist.
What Google _has_ done is push the idea of millions of "orphan works" pining for freedom (next to Google ads, of course
American culture? (Score:2)
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Most of the problems with the Kindle are closely associated with Amazon's management of the device. Amazon has tried to hide the fact that the device does indeed have a protected Mobipocket PID, but I think this is eventually going to come out no matter what.
There is no hope for "right of first sale" for digital goods. You can resell your iTunes purchases - only if you don't mind the files being watermarked with your personal information. DRM isn't the point - the point is that if you can sell a copy of
Re: (Score:2)
The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
As short as possible. If 1 year will do, then 1 year. A study suggested that 14 years.
Copyright was intended to
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The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
Can you please expand on exactly what protections the "The People" require in this context?
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Who are the people that need protecting?
From what? Their inability to convince people to give them money, or from the reality that greed is not a useful commodity?
That's why you're having so much trouble, there is nothing to protect except peoples greed. Physical property works with markets because there is one constant truth: scarcity. Take away the scarcity and the whole point of a market economy disappears. If physical property was not scarce, like shared information is not scarce, would you still insist on a market to protect it?
When teachers
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Why, pray tell, do my "rights" require protection for 70 years after my death? Is some bag-man from the copyright cartel going to deliver a check to my gravesite? Or, are they going to spend it on crack-whores, congress-creeps, or just pocket it.? Doh
f I recall correctly, 17 years (+ 1 optional 17yr renewal) was how US copyrights were set up. Seems plenty fair to me. The first stuff I wrote came out when I was 33, if I die at 76, it will be over 100 years