Copying is all fun and games until Disney comes and "copies" your art in their products. (Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513535 ) Then we get out the pitchforks.
I like the idea of sharing, but unless all the ducks are in a row someone is bound to get hurt, and it's not clear to me if the proposed legal statement is sound.
We get out pitchforks when Disney violates copyrights because Disney is at the forefront of the copyright expansion effort. The fact that Disney wants us to retool our computers and the Internet to protect their business, while simultaneously playing fast and loose with other people's copyrights, is what makes people angry.
In theory, yes. But people will still be unreasonably angry if they say "go ahead and copy" and then a big corporation copies it and makes millions of dollars and you are entitled to nothing.
Honestly, I fail to see what this adds over a well chosen creative commons attribution.
I am not sure that is really true. I have not met many people who are angry about bootleg DVD sales; most seem to dismiss them as being of low quality, or just get annoyed when the person trying to sell them does not take "no" for an answer.
There is no argument over non-profit file sharing as it is already unenforceable. If you profit from other people's work you will be smacked down, rightly so. It is not that complicated. Anything you want (digital) can be gotten for free if your time has no value so it comes down to being lazy/cheap.
Lets replace Disney coporation with the red cross, and the "your art" with community art in a church.
How many pitchforks would red cross get in the scale of a 0-5? Would it be the same as Disney, or TPB, or that 8 year old girl in Finland? Would it even be meaningful to have all the ducks and their 8 year old girls on the same row?
I think it's very tidy to make the distinction between copying art to enjoy it as a consumer and copying work to pass it off as your own for economic gain.
That distinction has been made by the Creative Commons licenses. Copyheart seems like a lovely idea, but it's trying to solve a problem that CC solved a long time ago.
It's also trying to solve a problem CC created -- the proliferation of mutually-incompatibly licensed works whose license terms are so overly complex (and so poorly presented) that most people using them don't really understand what they do. Unfortunately, the "copyheart" thing takes it too far in the other direction, resulting in some potentially very legally problematic situations for reuse.
"People copy stuff they like. They don’t copy stuff they don’t like. The more a work is copied, the more valuable it becomes. Value isn’t taken away by fans, it is added by them, every time they copy."
Awesome quote from the article which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Then maybe you can help me understand what it means. Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy, while thousands of unauthorized copies are downloaded from torrent sites. How does all this "value" put food on my table?
At what point in history has copyright truly been about compensating authors? Copyright began with censorship laws, and eventually came to be nothing more than a government-granted monopoly for printing press operators. Despite the Statute of Anne mentioning authors, it was the lobbying pressure by printers who sought a competitive advantage that led to that law being passed. Authors and other artists are an afterthought.
It puts food on your table in the same way it did for PSY (the "Gangnam Style" guy)... People learn about you, and will pay a premium for almost anything you touch. For example, to see you live, or to speak to you about anything, or to buy your old house or car at substantially more than it's worth. In short, you become a celebrity. That is the intangible value created for yourself, as a reward for the intangible value you create for society. It works in areas like math and research too. Publishing research will get you a better job. Similarly, having your song copied will give you more income, even if it's just a tip - like a waitress, or a street mime.
It's a spectrum of risk - from donations to Kickstarter - and nowhere in there is copyright - a restriction on other people's creative work (to the detriment of everyone, including yourself) - necessary.
I've got to agree that if I created the most watched YouTube video of all time that even I would probably be able to turn that into some cash. But I don't think that's a viable solution to the problem of novelists, etc., being able to earn a living in a world of unfettered copying.
Copyright is not a restriction on anyone's "creative" work. It restricts the right to copy things. (Not that I'm happy with all the details of current copyright law.)
I have to disagree. Copyright prevents re-use and new work.
The novelist wishing to earn a living is also taking a risk being a novelist, just as I take a risk in paying for an education that may not land me a job. I still charge for my time. The novelist can still charge for his or hers. We both must do something useful. If his or her novel is useful "enough" to live on alone - wonderful - but we shouldn't take it for granted that that is necessarily going to be the case, or that something like copyright will help it to be, or that that would even be a good thing (that people can make a living doing something that society wouldn't even naturally value enough to remunerate).
At the same time as all of that is going on, people are going to continue trying to make the best of what's around - and that includes copying.
Most novelists do not earn a living from their creative work and must work a day job to survive. There are rare exceptions, of course, but in general artists do not earn enough from their creative work to pay the bills. This is as true today as it was before the Internet, before electricity, and before copyright laws.
This is true - most do not. But many writers, composers, photographers, etc. do in fact earn a living from creating. I just said that I want to live in a world where this remains possible. If we throw this out along with copyright, we've certainly lost something.
New technology always causes us to lose something. The issue is whether or not we gain more than we lose, and the answer is universally "yes." The combination of PCs and the Internet has made copyrights obsolete, and with that the concept of royalties is obsolete. Yet what we have gained from those technology vastly outweighs what we have lost. Poor students who can barely afford tuition can access textbooks they would otherwise be unable to afford. The concept of "rare" or "out of print" is a thing of the past. One no longer needs to travel long distances to find a library with a copy of some book or photograph.
People who have no idea how to develop a photograph can send copies to their entire family at near-zero cost. Researchers have presented systems that can create accurate 3D maps of cities using photographs published on the Internet.
I would not throw any of the above away just to preserve the ability of a tiny minority of authors, musicians, actors, etc. to live on their royalty payments. I want to be able to read scientific papers without having to spend hours searching bound journals at some library. Creative workers can and will find ways to monetize their abilities in a post-copyright world, and they will have to do so without relying on DRM and without trying to destroy the Internet.
I absolutely agree with you about the importance and wonders of the internet. And you are undoubtedly right that the internet is making copyright, or at least the traditional view of copyright, obsolete. But we have some ability to create the future by influencing the direction of technology, law, and cultural attitudes. And to fail to replace copyright with something else that allows people to make a living through intellectual and creative work will be a grave mistake. Just ditching copyright and embracing unfettered copying while hoping that creative people will somehow figure out how to feed their families will mean that less, much less, gets created, and we will all be poorer for it. So far, no idea has been shown to be viable: voluntary payments do not and will not work, because enough people will not pay; taking your show on the road only works for able-bodied people with certain combinations of talents, and even then only while they are young and without children - when they need a steady income the least. We need new ideas, and new legal frameworks. Just saying that everything should be free leaves us endlessly recycling the creations of the past, created in the days when authors were still getting paid.
"less, much less, gets created, and we will all be poorer for it"
I have seen no evidence of this. In fact, the Internet boom has been one of the most empowering and prosperous times for creators (distinguished from mere distributors) in my memory. (In fact, I don't recall nearly as much quality music 10 years ago.) Furthermore, the alternative model you seek is simply that of time-tested patronage, which has been the default for anything worth doing since the beginning of history. Today we have the possibility of crowd-funding. I have not been given any reasons to expect less art, only more. Netflix, for example (arguably still a mere distributor), is even producing original series for it's own subscription audience. Copyright is part of the present economy, but Netflix would still want new content for it's channel were it not. Subscriptions are just another form of patronage.
I would think the heaps of money PSY made from YouTube royalties, including those from other people's videos that use his song (thanks to ContentID) and iTunes sales (where his song was #1 for many, many weeks) were among the things that put food on his table.
They undoubtedly were. As long as copyright exists, you'd be a fool not to exploit it. At the same time, it has been observed that the proliferation of parodies, remixes, and downloads only added to the revenue and profitability: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121002/11573120572/gangn...
What do you mean "at the same time"? Those derivative works were profitable because of copyright--that's how ContentID works! How would Psy profit from derivative works if he wasn't allowed to actually claim ownership of his original work? Why else would YouTube ever pay him for videos he didn't upload?
You don't seem to have grasped the point: You brought up Psy, but then proceeded to leave out all the evidence contrary to your agenda. The polite word for that is bullshit.
It does if you are smart enough to pursue this value. Money from selling books doesn't have to be your goal. If thousands of people are reading your work and getting value from it you may offer more value that they would, this time, exchange for money.
Just like music stars earn a lot of money from live shows. You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book (as a freemium modelo for book market). You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher. You may create online courses to offer to those who read your book (if it is a technical one) or try to sell the rights to TV movies if it is literature.
Well, it is hard to create from an hypotetical situation, but I think you got the point.
This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value, the downloaders receive value, but no exchange is made. The idea that the author has to create MORE value to MAYBE be able to participate in an exchange is just a weak argument for people who don't want to admit that an exchange should take place right off that bat, and if not, the downloaders should not receive any value from the author (i.e. don't download and read the book).
> This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value
Ok, so what type of "value" are we talking about here and what determines this value? Is it economic value? The only reliable way to determine economic value is scarcity. If something is abundantly available (like oxygen or sunlight) its value in this regard is exactly zero. Anybody can obtain it and nobody can prevent it from being obtained. So in that regard I don't buy the argument that the artist has created economic value.
They have, however, created intrinsic cultural value. But cultural value is a completely subjective metric. How do we determine this value? Perhaps by counting the number of people who "appreciate" the art by obtaining it, legally or otherwise. But that would suggest that popular art is always more valuable than unpopular art, which we all can probably agree is false.
Starving artists are caught in a catch-22 situation. Until they become popular, their music is essentially worthless. Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art. Most starving artists have a hard time giving their music away, let alone selling it, and I've yet to see one budding artist get upset about their music going viral. At what point does the artist stop encouraging the free and open spread of their art and start discouraging it by enforcing copyright law? And would they not be hypocritical by doing so?
>Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art.
Except where they don't add value by pirating something they otherwise would have paid for if it wasn't easily available to pirate with hardly any downside risk.
>This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value, the downloaders receive value, but no exchange is made.
That's where you're wrong. An audience is value in and of itself. The trouble most authors have is with leveraging that value. Traditionally they'd handed the keys over to a big publisher and hoped for the best -- a sucker bet if I'd ever seen one. Now that the exclusive power of distribution has been stripped away from traditional publishers there's actually more opportunity than ever for an author to find and derive value from an audience; it just takes more savvy (and less luck).
That's a pretty naive view of the situation. An audience who perhaps doesn't pay for art but does help spread the word about that art is indeed valuable. Perhaps even more valuable than someone who pays for art but tells nobody else about it.
Sorry, but the naive one here is you - a bunch of pirates telling a bunch of other pirates about this awesome new thing they should pirate doesn't really help you, the creator. But by all means, rationalize away.
Also, why does the one who purchases it have to not spread the word and pirates do? Is that how this whole argument works? A paying customer is probably just as likely to inform other paying customers about this purchase he just made. More likely, in my experience.
Look, there is likely a critical mass of piracy that is concurrent to a rise in purchases as something grows in popularity and becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist. I remain unconvinced that the piracy causes it, and isn't just a sign that whatever is being pirated is good and would is gaining awareness and marketshare, but sure, I'll just go ahead and give up on that argument. But if you don't reach that critical mass, which by and large, most don't, then you are just gaining an audience that isn't helping you at all.
Also, just to be clear - I don't view all piracy equal. When I talk about it, I'm primarily talking about game piracy.
This thread started talking about the value that readers provide. People listen to the Beatles partly because people listen to the Beatles. Where's the direct cash payment for that value add?
If musicians aren't going to reward the people that advertise their work then they shouldn't release it in the first place.
"You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book"
What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
"You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher"
But if the publishers can't make any profit because everyone is just love-copying books, they won't be able to offer me any money.
"online courses" "TV movies"
These sound like plausible ideas at first, but the courses and movies could be torrented as easily as the book, so this profit stream dries up as well.
> What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
Welcome to the creative industry. The previous copy-protected market guarantees your living in no way. The vast majority of talent is simply fighting obscurity. You're arguing about the results of fame, which is very rare.
> What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
If the only alternative is to destroy the free Internet and our computing freedom, then yes. I'm sorry.
I think it's quite uncommon to have a commercial product that is widely pirated but not widely sold. It's always going to be roughly the same proportions of sales-to-pirates for your product. if you had thousands of copies downloaded but only a handful of copies sold, it probably means it wasn't a very popular book, and wouldn't have sold well regardless of piracy or not. If pirating didn't exist, your sales numbers might not change much because the benefits of no piracy (payment being the only option) somewhat cancels out the benefits of piracy (widespread knowledge of your product).
I'm not condoning piracy, but the effects of it are complex. I'd rather replace it with a friendlier approach, like Bandcamp's pay-what-you-want options.
I don't have any citations. It's not a hard rule and doesn't apply everywhere, but I feel like it would be somewhat applicable in this situation. It's just a thing that I've concluded as a result of my own experiences with selling digital media (games and music). Piracy did indeed spread awareness of my music and game, although it's hard to say if caused any lost revenue.
I supposed some fraction of pirates would have instead paid for the media had they not been able to pirate it, but there would also be a fraction of paying customers who would not have heard about the media had their peers not pirated it. It's hard to tell if these two populations are roughly equal in size, but I have a hunch that the second group is larger. This is based on our sales data following our involvement in the Humble Bundle: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
If you look at the third chart, you can see that after the Humble Bundle spikes, the blue line starts to have an upward slope, whereas it was almost flat before. This indicates that sales on Steam increased after the Bundle finished, due to the huge influx of new players (many who only paid a penny). It seems that the more people playing the game, the more copies you will sell, because more awareness is raised. There are a lot of factors involved in that that don't let me conclusively say that this effect extends to pirates too, but it seems reasonable. Since I can't do anything about piracy, I don't let it bother me too much and just focus on making things worth buying. It's just a part of the business, so it's factored into it all.
It create the same value as a kid going to class, sharing a bag of sweet or fruits with the others in the class. Except, the bag is a star trek replicator. The act itself produce community, and community create society, and functioning society is a requirement for a even basic standard of living.
Denying people access to knowledge, culture and useful information on the single basis of money is in my view wrong. Why should we let poor farmers die of famine by denying them access to knowledge that cost us nothing to give? Why should only children from rich families be able to access culture and become great artists?
To quote professor Eben Moglen: The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
I think that's totally awesome in theory. In practice, I can give away all of the software, music, and artwork that I create, because we have "replicators" for it, but it seems that Honda can't replicate me a car and the local contracting company can't replicate me a house.
Don't misunderstand me. I really want to give away everything I create for free. I think that would be wonderful. But until and unless the parties that create what I want and need are willing and able to do the same, it kind of puts me in an awkward position.
I guess one solution is to work for pay only on things that aren't copyable yet, and consider all things that are copyable to be, by default, of zero monetary value, and if made at all, then made as a charitable gift to society. Is that a good path? (Really asking, not a trick question.)
>I guess one solution is to work for pay only on things that aren't copyable yet, and consider all things that are copyable to be, by default, of zero monetary value, and if made at all, then made as a charitable gift to society. Is that a good path?
This is a really good question and it's been in the back of my head for years. I think reality might force it to be the only tenable position, although one important piece you're missing is the willingness for people to pay you even if they don't have to. I think people recognize that there is value in your product, even if they aren't required to pay for your product to receive it. Many won't, but some will voluntarily pay you to compensate you for the value they received.
Advertising is another option.
The end result I see is we give up the massive budget productions (AAA movies), and instead receive creative works created by passionate individuals who want to spend their free time (youtube). If I had to choose between that result and destroying Internet and computing freedom, I think I would pick giving up massive productions.
I don't know. It's an interesting question, thanks for bringing it up.
Its one way to do it, and I wouldn't mind giving a free beer to those that do when I meet them.
Personally, I think there are many ways as a creative person can do to lower or even remove potential harm from copyright. For example, if I were to ask what part of my projects would be potential important for a kid trying to learn, I should be able to identify where copyright might be better removed than enforced. Until society figures out a way to not prevent children and starving people access to knowledge, all I can do is to realize when my work might prevent rather enable and then act. Depending on what ones work is, that can either be very easy thing to follow, or very hard. I hope its not hard, but if it is, I wish you luck :).
In addition to the other answers, don't forget that in the situation described, if you remove the 'thousands of unauthorized copies', you still haven't sold any copies.
In terms of semantics: "Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy."
In more meaningful terms: If people do not value your book highly enough to pay you for it, then without the thousands of unauthorized copies, you are an unknown writer languishing in obscurity. With the copies, you have at least started to publicise your name and your message.
"If people do not value your book highly enough to pay you for it"
But the crux of the matter is that people will, in overwhelming numbers, choose not to pay if they are not compelled to pay, even if they value the content. If you eliminate the thousands of unauthorized copies, it is not true that I still haven't sold any copies. I would perhaps have several hundred sales. I might prefer the several thousand free downloads, but I should have that choice.
Look at the "Pioneer One" example brought up in another comment. Four million downloads and a mere $20,000 raised. People feel entitled to free stuff; no matter how great they think it is, if they can get away with letting others pay, they will. All the "fans", and they refused to kick in one dollar for the content that they value so highly.
I think the poster boys for pay what you want, Radiohead and NIN, don't think this model is a good idea anymore because of exactly what is mentioned above: people want too much free stuff if they can get it and that isn't sustainable.
You're right about the $100,000: I skimmed too quickly. So, 29 cents per download for the ones we know about; the actual number of downloads is probably much greater, as pointed out in the article. And, still not nearly enough to provide livelihoods for the people involved in the project, so my point remains.
"your argument seems to hinge on the idea that they would make more money if they could."
My argument is just that they absolutely need to make much more money if they are to make a living making TV shows, as other people do, and that voluntary donations aren't cutting it, because people don't pay when they are not compelled to. So this case, which was adduced as a counterexample, helps to prove my point.
The more likely scenario is that you will write a book and nobody will purchase a copy nor download one from torrent sites. Until you've become popular, your work is essentially worthless. You are validated by your appreciators.
Quite an uncommon situation as far as I have seen. Can you actually provide an example of a book (or anything else) that nobody bought, but that was heavily pirated?
The same way all that "value" you might get from a loving family, good friends, good weather and high self-esteem. Things have value even if they don't have a $ price attached.
Doesn't seem very loving to me if I explicitly state I don't want you to copy my work and then you go ahead and do it against my wishes. This appeal to emotion argument is quaint, but nonsense.
And how exactly do you plan to stop people copying your work? Short of locking down the internet this activity is not preventable. If you don't want people copying your work, don't publish your work. Keep it locked up in a safe and never let it see the light of day. You can smile knowing you've created a masterpiece that nobody will tarnish it by consuming it and spreading it throughout the world.
Seriously, though, this isn't about an appeal to emotion, it's about facing the realities of today's connected world. Information can now be replicated at zero cost. Therefore, it has zero monetary value. If you want to feed yourself, perhaps you should either come up with clever new ways of monetizing your artistic talents, or make physical widgets that do have scarcity (and hope to God 3D printers don't become more sophisticated).
"Information can now be replicated at zero cost. Therefore, it has zero monetary value."
This is not as obvious to me as it seems to be to you. Some things have monetary value because of convention. For example, money. These days money is just information, although there is still a little cash in circulation. What if I figure out a way, at "zero cost", to move information around such that your bank thinks that the money in your account is now in my account? The only things stopping me are laws, technical barriers involving cryptographic safeguards, and not being a thief. Why can't society decide, in the interests of fostering creativity, to erect these mechanisms for music, novels, and movies?
Because in order to erect mechanisms for preventing the spread of information, we must be willing to destroy the value that the internet provides in the first place. Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet.
Anyways, perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?
"we must be willing to destroy the value that the internet provides in the first place."
I don't see why that's necessarily so.
"Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet."
I'm not sure I'm following you. Having rules and conventions about how information is treated on the internet doesn't mean that the internet is destroyed. We have rules of the road, but we still have roads.
"perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?"
You're going from "destroy" to "reducing the openness"? I don't claim to have a solution that doesn't somehow "reduce the openness", or, in other words, apply some rules or mechanisms that are not in place now. I'm not interested in destroying or even significantly hampering the internet. But I also don't want the internet to destroy the ability of people to make a living from their creative work.
Reducing the openness of the internet is synonymous with destroying it. To stop piracy altogether, I believe the value of the internet would need to be completely destroyed, yes.
> I'm not interested in destroying or even significantly hampering the internet. But I also don't want the internet to destroy the ability of people to make a living from their creative work.
You do realize that it has always been very difficult for artists to make a living off their work. So difficult, in fact, that the vast majority do their art in their spare time and work other jobs to stay afloat, and that has been the case long before piracy existed.
I would argue that with the advent of the internet, and yes, file sharing (illegal or otherwise) has actually made it possible for more people to make a living off their art than could before these systems were in place. What you seem to be in favor of is protecting a very small number of people - namely signed, popular artists - while hurting the majority of other artists, people who share art, and the internet itself.
It's great if you want to make something and put it in the public domain. But I detect a normative undercurrent here, a suggestion that the author feels that restrictions on copying are bad, or at least not as nice, as her love-based approach.
I would like to live in a world where people can support themselves through creative work. And online culture has failed to come up with a replacement for strictly enforced copyright that doesn't involve de-facto monopolies, rampant advertising, and spying on people through their computers. Jaron Lanier goes into these issues in insightful depth in his book You Are Not a Gadget.
"And online culture has failed to come up with a replacement for strictly enforced copyright that doesn't involve de-facto monopolies, rampant advertising, and spying on people through their computers"
You do not need copyrights if you are willing to say, "Pay us for the next installment, or else we will not make it." No spying, no advertising, no monopolies.
Right up until you get a bunch of self-entitled pseudo-fans wailing about blackmail, ransom, and passive-aggressive behavior.
All right, I'm exaggerating a bit, but I've thought about this a bit as I'm self-producing my own cd. I feel like doing something like this would set up something of an adversarial relationship with my fans.
This is really interesting - I'd never heard of this. But glancing over the page you linked to, it looks like 4 million downloads netted about $20,000 to fund the next several episodes. So they are massively popular, but barely covering the cost of production of an extremely low-budget series. This is therefore a labor of love and not paying anyone's mortgage or feeding any families. But they seem to have a lot of love.
Sure, though it is worth pointing out that they must compete with people who are using copyrights to their advantage. Even competing against the businesses that benefit from copyright, Pioneer One is able to survive; I suspect that in the absence of copyrights, Pioneer One would be more financially viable.
I want people to be able to profit from value they create, even if that value is easily copied. I also think that copying/sharing content -- writing, photographs, music, art, video -- has been incredibly healthy for the Internet and really everyone on the planet.
I've seen a couple of "Donate" buttons attempt to solve monetization for content creators that don't sell ads. I think there's room for a standard like this, something that could be easily attached to a byline that could travel with copied work.
If you "love" content enough to copy it, maybe you'll also copy a byline with a built-in donation link. If the content gets copied enough, and people get accustomed to easy and small donations just like Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets, then perhaps the culture of sharing content can financially displace the monopolies imposed by copyright.
There is something humorous in making a statement against copyright predicated on fans giving a PILE OF POO[1] about the creator's will. People already share what they like; they just don't like most of the stuff that's given away for free.
A part of me likes this, and a part of me ❤s this. The rest of me wants to hear what a lawter like Lessig (or someone with a silar amount of experience and stake in the legalese of sharing) would say about it.
My guess is this has as much legal meaning as putting "this is in the public domain" in a readme. (I.e. none)
I think the ethos of the copyheart as expressed in this website needs to be a little different. Sure, don't restrict your audiences' ability to copy and distribute your work, but when somebody sees the ♡ symbol, it should be a call to action for the audience to ♡ the work and the artist(s) creating it. If that involves supporting the work financially, then so be it. The audience of a work is responsible for nurturing, caring for it, and supporting it's production. This is what copyright tries to do it, but fails because it focuses too much attention on controlling distribution.
Use a simple license written with at least some vague grasp of the needs of copyright law for licensing, please. Much as I respect the people associated with Copyheart (Nina Paley, who I think created this whole Copyheart thing, is the "artist in residence" at QuestionCopyright.org), I find the way some people try to basically just pretend copyright doesn't exist as a way to fight against the problems it creates somewhat naive and/or irresponsible. If you want to make your works available freely to others in the same spirit as the Copyheart thing, feel free to slap a Copyheart message on it, but please add a simple, clean, copyfree license on it (such as the COIL, Open Works License, or WTFPL) on the thing as well.
The reason to do that is not for your benefit so much as it is for the work's benefit and that of the recipient. A vague, hand-wavy statement like the Copyheart message can expose people who copy, share, and possibly modify your works to legal difficulties down the road. Consider, for example, what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow and a week later your heirs start sending DMCA takedown notices to people circulating remixes or modifications of your work, even if those remixes are respectful, adhere to the spirit of your efforts, and give all due credit to you as the creator. Chances are very good that any attempts to fight such takedowns would not stand up well in court if the Copyheart message is all that you offered as "protection" for the people spreading your work to new fans.
Please, do the responsible thing. Use a simple license that is very clear and complete in its intent, such as the COIL, Open Works License, or WTFPL -- or pick anything from the list of Copyfree Initiative certified licenses that suits your fancy, I suppose: http://copyfree.org/licenses
Seems very similar to what Kopimi [1][2] is all about. It has been in use for quite a while. Take a look at the footer of thepiratebay.is for instance.
I love the intention of this site, which is to clarify when something is placed into the public domain, even though their carefree approach is legally risky for anyone to depend on.
However, I've never seen cognitive dissonance on such as scale as when people discuss copying and copyright, which makes most discussions useless. Rarely are arguments supported by scholarly evidence or appeals to utilitarianism, and the political statements on the above site are no exception.
Fundamentally, people like copying things, and some forms of copying are restricted by law. So either the law is bad, or they are a bad person. Nobody thinks they are a bad person (an pillar of ego which will never be shaken), and people hate being lectured, so it's the law that breaks, often with the flimsiest of excuses and fallacies ranging from the moral to the theoretical.
- In some cases, copying is beneficial to the copyright holder (usually through advertising, network effects, or market segmentation), ergo, all copying must be beneficial
- Some authors are against copyright, ergo all authors are against copyright
- It's copying is okay if one's motives are pure (end justifies the means)
- If something is easy to do, and preventing it hard, then it must be right (naturalistic fallacy)
- Copying is the natural state of the universe, so it must be right (moralistic fallacy)
- A copyright holder doesn't deserve protection because they're evil ("behaved in a selfish way") stupid ("doesn't understand technology") or stubborn ("won't change business models")
- Copyrights restrict personal freedom, which is a natural and inalienable right of man, even though personal freedoms are always restricted at conflict points to ensure societal harmony ("thou shall not kill")
- Copyrights are based on property rights, but information is not property for reason "x", ergo copyrights are invalid on a technicality. In reality, many laws are enacted because of utilitarian value and need only require group consensus ("always stop at a stop sign; person on right goes first.")
- I paid money in return for "x", therefore I can do whatever I want with "x" (refusal to honor contractual agreements and/or acknowledge exceptions to property rights, which are ubiquitous)
- Copying is good for society because information sharing has no marginal cost (sophomoric application of economics)
- Because some people create without expectation of monetary reward, all people or corporations will still invest in creative works even when the return on investment decreases, or is non-existent
- Some people or corporations could, and thus all should, make money in secondary markets (personal appearances, product endorsements) rather than by selling copyrighted works directly
I would give my right arm for a rational discussion on this topic.
Empirically, copyright law is not effective. That is to say, copyright is massively violated for non-commercial use.
Enforcing laws which are empirically not obeyed is a bad idea, regardless of the philosophical merits of pro-copyright or anti-copyright arguments.
The most popular P2P protocols will advance to the point where enforcing copyright law means enforcing an absurd policy: if your computer shares copyrighted information even without your knowledge, you're guilty of infringement. The only way to avoid it is not to participate in such advanced P2P swarms (where nodes cache content for delivery to other nodes), since nobody knows the copyright status of a particular hash-addressable piece of content.
Enforcing laws in a way that bans a neutral computer technology (P2P sharing of arbitrary content) is untenable [1], regardless of the ethical, moral, and economic arguments surrounding copyright violation.
I see those arguments often. If you agree that those are not fallacies, I don't understand why you think copyright discussions degenerate into fallacies.
There are a lot of laws that aren't effective. Empirically, laws that attempt to restrain gamesmanship among investment megabanks aren't effective. Laws against many forms of tax evasion aren't effective. Here's one close to home: laws against breaking into computers, stealing whole databases, and splashing them onto Pastebin aren't effective. That could happen to any of your startups tomorrow, and the likelihood of the law protecting you is very low.
In all of those cases, people routinely flout the law. It's not just that it's hard to enforce the law; it's that people routinely violate it.
The ineffectiveness of laws is not a logical argument that the goals of those laws are bad. It's an argument either that the laws haven't been tuned properly, or that our enforcement priorities need to be changed --- in the case of copyright, probably in a direction you're not happy with.
Long story short: if you believe that this is a powerful argument against copyright, you forfeit a pretty big chunk of any of your arguments against Wall Street.
It seems like you are being intentionally obtuse: more surveillance can make almost any law enforceable. Requiring disclosure and regulatory review of exotic financial contracts doesn't violate individuals' privacy except in some very artificial and theoretical terms, and the downside risk is global in reach and magnitude.
Building the kind of surveillance that ensures individuals will observe all terms of service they unknowingly agreed to and can bring felony charges and large statutory damages against them reliably and efficiently does violate all kinds of individual privacy. It also institutionalizes a privileged place for publishers in the legal system, and brings Big Brother into our homes. None or that can be said for financial regulation.
We don't owe banks or publishers or buggy-whip vendors the ability to continue to do business in any particular way. We do owe people their privacy. There is a fundamental difference here you no doubt see, but ignore.
The point of copyright isn't really to keep little Timmy from downloading one or two songs. It's to keep some Korean operation from selling bootleg CDs in the free and clear, or to keep companies like Youtube from capturing all the profit that derives from content by virtue of being the entity closest to the user.
> Fundamentally, people like copying things, and some forms of copying are restricted by law. So either the law is bad, or they are a bad person.
This is possibly the least nuanced way to express this.
Good law isn't good if it isn't understood or if it's misunderstood. It may be either or both if people don't learn its history, purpose, and meaning. That isn't the law's fault; it's the people's. But it doesn't make the people bad, either.
Accusing people of moral failings is not how you start a rational discussion.
Last night there was a live webcast of a superb rational discussion on copyright involving several experts. Recording will be up soon, and I'll post it when available.
Also, in case anyone here is not yet aware of this, the US Register of Copyrights testified before congress last month about how desperately US copyright legislation needs radical reform: "...if one needs an army of lawyers to understand the basic precepts of the law, then it is time for a new law. " and other very strong statements.
There are reasons that using nothing but the Copyheart message to "free" a work is a bad idea. There are very good reasons to be opposed to the copyright regime under which we labor, however. As someone whose professional life has been primarily in the realm of copyrightable works for years, I can attest to at least my own circumstances being such that I would be better off if my professional works were not subject to copyright restrictions -- and those who most directly benefited from them (employers, clients, et cetera) would not have been harmed by that, either. In fact, the rote enforcement of copyrights by some who have paid for my works impose greater costs on them than letting the copyright infringers out there carry on unmolested (edit: such copyright infringers potentially including me, if I were to try to rehabilitate articles that had been left to die in unmaintained parts of tech content sites long after publication).
This is of course not always the case. Different business models have different economic trade-offs. The ethical and even practical arguments against our strict system of copyrights are many and varied, however, and many of them are quite compelling, including arguments related to artist obscurity vs. profits (see any number of authors and recording artists who point out that the major threat to an artist's livelihood is obscurity, not copyright infringement), imperialistic dominance of international markets (Information Feudalism is a well-researched book by academic experts spanning close to two decades' worth of intensive work), and even the overall benefit to humanity of free reuse of works (see Advancement Through License Simplicity -- http://univacc.net/?page=license_simplicity_1 -- for one such argument).
I don't want to waste too much of my time on an Internet Argument, but I figured I'd throw this stuff out there. Rational and compelling arguments against copyright, or at least against strict copyright with any resemblance to what currently applies, do exist.
Fundamentally, people like copying things, and some forms of copying are restricted by law. So either the law is bad, or they are a bad person.
that's a static analysis. isn't it more likely that society is changing in various ways, that law naturally lags the changes, and that the result is a mess as society negotiates with itself to find an appropriate adjustment?
I think that could well be the case in reality--but you wouldn't know it from most discussions on the topic, and I don't think that's how people people form their initial views, or why they continue to maintain logically incorrect arguments in their own minds.
In some respects, I think that some copyright denialists behave similarly to those who try to argue that the U.S. has no power to tax incomes because of various technicalities in the ratification of the appropriate constitutional amendment [1]. These people do not hold their to their positions because they are lawyers. They hold to them because they don't want to pay income tax.
To stick down the idea of copying as a universal good is to oversimplify things just as much as to insist than an author has an infinite moral right to make completely unrestrained profit from the things they derive from society for the rest of time.
It's an appealing notion, copying sounds fine when you phrase it as an act of love, and within certain limits; fan works and the like; it is. However, if you have unrestrained copying then people will copy in a predatory manner as well. For instance, by aggregating your work and others work through a portal so that you never see any advantage from it - or by putting your work into something that has a much greater cultural presence and effectively taking ownership of it.
Google (or some other search engine) needs to write something that makes it easy for anyone to "find the original" of some bunch of data (image, long-enough-string, music sample, etc.). Such a tool would ideally also be able to find derivative works.
This way attribution is trivial, and people will be much more willing to give their works away, while others would feel better about copying and modifying it. It would also render watermarks redundant.
Tin Eye, Google Image search, and Google's own algorithmic preference for original content probably get you half-way there, but it's easy to imagine how great it would be to have a full-featured "attribution discoverer" (or whatever).
I don't have a copyright notice below my website because it's not needed in order to have copyright on your work. However I also won't explicitly allow people to copy all of my work. In most cases it's entirely flattering, but for the times that it's not, I do remain legally entitled to have the content removed (or have the design or anything else removed). Moreover, a copyright notice affects the entire page. I bet you didn't think about comments that are posted by users, they now fall under your copyright (or explicit share-right) as well. Do you really want to licence user data that way?
Agree, it comes down to us (humans) being able to act as one unit, and when we can, everyone will be happy to copy each others work etc as much as possible. Because if someone doesn't have food on the table, we will also be there to help. I really hope we can reach this point in the next few decades! :)
I like the idea of sharing, but unless all the ducks are in a row someone is bound to get hurt, and it's not clear to me if the proposed legal statement is sound.