TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain
michaelgeist.ca
michaelgeist.ca
The last bastion of hope is a "union of the consumers", where we collectively punish and break companies that we collectively see as dangerous to the future of our world.
We only need to tear down one company to be able to set off a chain reaction. Once consumers realise the power they hold as a well organised and effective collective, the people can pull back some of the power from the corporation (and our governments to which they now hold the power over).
Corporations can't survive without income and customers. Every day we vote with our wallets without giving it a second thought. It's time we started to appreciate that fact.
Edit:
I know this isn't particularly realistic :-(
Moreover, the ineffectuality of boycotts makes people less likely to actually believe in them.
Which is exactly what "they" want you to think.
And ACLU is an actual union, but I don't think they are particularly interested in the copyright issue.
FTA:
> Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott (Hebrew: חוק למניעת פגיעה במדינת ישראל באמצעות חרם, התשע"א-2011), also commonly known as the Boycott law, is an Israeli Anti-boycott law that was approved in the Knesset on 11 July 2011. The law has been widely criticised.
I strongly believe that Israel has a right to exist but laws like these do not give me hope for the Israeli people if they are complacent or (worse) supportive of these repressive laws.
I don't get how questioning fascism becomes a question over a state's legitimacy. Could you imagine if someone said that the USAPATRIOT Act brought into question the USA's right to exist?
It is absolutely possible to (and indeed we should encourage people to) speak up against the bad actions and policies of the government of Israel. Doing so does not make us enemies of Israel. This is so very simple and logical in any other context but I have to stop and think when it comes to this issue. I think I was trying to convince myself that I am not doing or saying anything that could hurt.
Perhaps by reaffirming my support for the right to exist hurts rather than helps the situation. I didn't think of that. I feel pretty stupid.
> Could you imagine if someone said that the USAPATRIOT Act brought into question the USA's right to exist?
If there was a large and vocal group of disenfranchised Native Americans which an active, extremist and violent military faction, then yes, I could imagine it. I wouldn't agree with it, but I could imagine it happening.
A more apt comparison would be the natives taking the Great Treaty of 1722 (or its violations) to be the reason why the United States is illegitimate as a country. That might actually be an interesting argument.
That wasn't really the point of my argument, which was hypothetical, and to match the situation in Israel would mean that Native Americans would have always had a somewhat similar stance as the theoretical one presented. I'm not trying to mix current Native American sentiment into the discussion.
> A more apt comparison...
That depends on your goal. Mine was to provide a hypothetical but somewhat equivalent situation to possibly put your statement in a new perspective.
> That might actually be an interesting argument.
It probably is, but I'm inadequately educated on the topic currently to make any useful arguments in any direction on that. :/
Then the others become less bad, and you switch to them. And so on.
I was getting upload speeds on the order of kilobytes per second on a gigabit fiber connection while my CPU was idling. Filed a support request and they bumbled around a bit and then ceased responding to me entirely until I opened another ticket and demanded a refund. It took 5 __months__ to get to this point, with them not responding for weeks at a time.
I'd recommend something like https://www.syncany.org/ over SpiderOak any day.
IMO the major functional differences between it and Dropbox are:
* You have to provide the servers that Dropbox provides. I.E. you have to provide the level of availability that you want. [2]
* FOSS licensed.
* Because your data is only ever stored on your machines, you are only limited by your own storage and bandwidth.
[2] This requirement has actually loosened to some degree because the latest version of Syncthing introduced relay servers. So you still need to provide available storage servers, but you can use relays to overcome partitions in your network.
To sum up my reasons very quickly:
- I want to store my data offsite, where it isn't vulnerable to breakins, fire, water damage etc.
- I have no offsite storage I can trust completely.
- Syncthing only supports storing plaintext on disk.
Therefore I can't use syncthing to securely and remotely store data.
This is where Syncany wins. You don't have to trust the storage endpoint.
Also, Syncthing requires having a CPU attached to your remote storage, meaning your remote options are limited to a VPS or dedicated server. This is significantly more expensive than buying block storage from Google or Amazon.
If Syncthing ever resolves https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109 I'll be open to using it, until then it's out.
1. Pick the top three offenders (not in the same industry).
2. For each offender, find their cash cow, or top 3 most profitable products.
3. Make a concerted effort to boycott those products, and those products alone, indefinitely. Make some real damage.
The purpose here is to make an example out of someone. Build morale among protesters that if well organized, they can be effective.
First scenario: One million US/Canadian citizens sporadically decide to buy from company Y instead of company X... nobody notices.
Second scenario: Company Z suddenly loses 100,000 customers for their core product... I'll bet you someone notices.
I suspect if that had a noticeable impact the other related companies would fall in line to avoid being targeted for a boycott.
Disney wants far more of the profit the cinemas make, which is already next to nothing, and for some cinemas would lead to them paying Disney more than they have in income.
So cinemas have been boycotting Disney.
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/star-wars-boykott-deutsche...
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Edit: Actually, I think it's not so much my choice of words, but that this is HN and there's plenty of people here who are interested in copyright lasting infinity less one day.
You aren't likely to ever get the majority on board just for the sake of a boycott.
But if you make it so the products are completely free, safe to use, easy to obtain, and publicly supported as moral even if technically illegal, you can get the public to engage in a boycott of at least electronic media or media easily made electronic.
It seems to have worked for movies and music. We broke the rules and shared the product, they entered the online market and started offering a product people wanted, people bought it.
I'm not interested at all in playing by their rules. I'm interested in preserving access to our cultural artifacts. Keeping work from the people after the death of the author is pure greed and we shouldn't stand for it.
I don't think that's quite white happened. It seems more like, our leaders have had their power stolen from them; they couldn't take the public's side even if the tried. Here, we have a policy decision - copyright duration - over which the legislature has traditionally had authority. But the decision was made by a group of diplomats and corporations, without legislative input or access. I don't think our leaders have real access to public opinion on this issue; wherever the decisions are made, corporations create a bubble of disinformation to conceal our ire.
Frankly, I think the only plausible way to deal with this is to compete with it. That is part of what Creative Commons is about.
Culture is getting dull. As we continue to extend these copyrights to protect Mickey, we dilute our own creative potential.
And I'm not sure Mickey is worth it. Disney makes an empire out of the Brothers Grimm, and refuses to give back.
That's the problem.
People can't easily understand what is being lost either. That's the other problem.
Personally, I find myself less inclined to participate. Rehashes of the same stuff just doesn't appeal. But, many people are fine with it all, or they don't realize the difference in overall "vibrancy" possible.
The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.
I think part of the idea is that whether the creators are dead or not, having copyright and "unrelated people feed off", still maintains an economy over the item and gives it monetary value. Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.
E.g. Disney only being able to create or allow the creation of Mickey Mouse stuff (t-shirts etc), leads to a large business for them, taxes for US etc. (Plus pays a lobby to ensure longer copyright). If Mickey Mouse was suddenly public domain, that would stop and its characters would be devalued very fast, with everybody competing with ever cheaper products with him on.
Twenty years ought to be enough to recoup your investment, but I'm open to compromise. In any case, (rougly) 150 years, as it currently is, is way, way, way, way, way, way way too long.
Isn't letting them keep their copyright for long, an even stronger inventive for OTHERS to come up with some new characters? (in order to compete with them).
Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright.
There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?
Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.
Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.
No, it wasn't.
The first copyright law adopted under the Constitution may have established that length, but that's a very different thing.
I think you have the whole process upside down. Digital media already has no value, and it can already be copied freely.
The changes in the law that Disney and other copyright maximalists are doing is attempting to re-value digital media. So, the only option open to them is to push for ever more draconian laws simply to protect their broken and outdated business models.
The problem with hard power is, that it is expensive. If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully. Instead, the government needs cooperation of the people by formulating the law in ways that are acceptable to the people. By providing thought systems propagated through school and media appropriate patterns are engraved in the nations minds. People need to either think "this law is just" or "i don't want to go to jail for that" or "i don't want to lose everything that i hold dearly" or "i don't want my family to starve" for the spells of the law to work.
We are more and more coming to a point where the proponents of copyright law must either step up the propaganda, the enforcement or change the law.
Only for total enforcement, and only when the technology is not advanced enough to make even that cheap.
Here's a hypothetical example: with widespread internet surveillance, you could just charge people immediately on the first sign of them pirating something -- take the money off of their bank accounts/salary, kind of the same way one gets a traffic ticket through camera surveillance, but even faster.
>If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully.
Who said that they don't? It's often not the police state that fails, it is the state in general, and for other reasons.
Not a great source but: http://questioncopyright.org/promise
This cannot be stressed enough, that the real losers here aren't people who want to remix ultra-famous copyrighted works-- it's that works that nobody cares to profit upon will remain orphaned.
If there is one protection to the Public Domain that needs to take place, it's that copyright owners should have to show a willingness to profit off their material (by paying a recurring fee) so we don't experience this deadweight loss.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"Significant among those changes were the elimination of the registration and notice requirements, which resulted in less accurate and incomplete identifying information on works, and the automatic renewal of copyrighted works that were registered before the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act." [0]
Bringing back registration and ending automatic renewals would do a lot of good. (Adding a fee would be better.) Has there been any work on laws to do this?
[0] http://copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-works2015.pdf
However, I agree with you. There needs to be some mechanism pushing back on copyright holders encouraging them to let their works revert to the public domain. A nominal fee at regular intervals would go a long way to encouraging this. However, perhaps something more aggressive is needed. Since the advocates of increased copyright duration often phrase their argument in terms of "intellectual property", perhaps a copyright property tax would be more appropriate.
"OK Disney, you can keep the mouse out of the public domain, but that will be $50M/yr."
At this juncture, it certainly seems that the US shouldn't have caved to signing Berne. We made it 100 years, why didn't we stick it out?
Well, commendations to Zoe Lofgren (representing San Jose) at attempting to renew U.S. copyright formalities. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_formalities#Renewed_...
EDIT: It appears she hasn't pushed ahead copyright formalities (in the form of the Eldred Act) much since 2005. Here's hoping something new comes up...
In general, I think the concept of tying copyright explicitly to profit and fees could produce a pretty strong chilling effect on hobby projects and other free culture.
I'd prefer to see some sort of safe harbor defined for people to archive orphaned works, or otherwise keep track of them. Active copyright holders could opt out of the safe harbor on a regular basis via some centralized process akin to registration. If their opt-out lapses, the safe harbor returns.
The difference is that the safe harbor would be narrowly defined to permit archiving, but not free distribution or reuse. That way a community can keep track of things, but there is no radical shift in the protections that rest on copyright.
Depends on how you literally minded you read it and how the Supreme court feels:
1) Any copyright or patent that does not promote Science of Useful arts is unconstitutional
2) Only written words are protected, not visual or software.
3) There should be some limitation on the term but it could be way past couple of googols in years.
and so on. The constitution is (un) intentionally vague in a lot of places.
4) Copyright cannot extend past the life of the author, since only the author can have exclusive rights to his writings. I.e. copyright is non-transferable to heirs, corporations, etc.
The most recent extension immediately received a Supreme Court challenge.
Lawrence Lessig was lead counsel for the plaintiffs (ie arguing the case against the act). He wrote an essay on the case and why he thinks it was lost: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...
(So, not things that use Mickey mouse without getting license, but yes anything which licenses from Disney to use the littlest bit of the ears.)
So, if a Disney toy has it on the packaging as a logo, don't buy it, or on a tag, or on a receipt etc. etc. (Provided that the use is not ip infringement)
The goal being to make it so that using the micky mouse likeness in a licensed way does not increase income (ideally, reduces it), so there is no longer an incentive to "protect" the ip.
So, kingdom hearts, Disneyland, most Disney toys, etc etc.
Indefinitely.l
1. Organize a local event or travel to DC in the week of Nov. 14, there is a 90-day window to mobilize opposition to TPP, https://www.eff.org/event/global-week-actions-against-tpp-tt.... EFF actions in DC will coincide with APEC meetings in the Philippines, where US officials (including trade reps) will push the TPP, and EFF Philippine allies will have mass protests.
2. Remember how many companies rallied against SOPA? Ask your tech employer to issue a public statement on TPP and digital rights. Create a public list that links to company statements. TPP unfairly advantages legacy business models at the expense of emerging business models. It is not about "elites" vs. "citizens", it is about crony insider companies vs. all other companies.
3. Ask organizations like Wikipedia, Archive.org, Google, Facebook to run banners to raise awareness about TPP, asking users to flood TPP governments with calls for representation. Companies and citizens have never had so many channels for rallying opposition. If TPP (and TTIP and TISA later) passes, those channels may be limited in the future. Use them or lose them. We not only need to stop each of these bad agreements, we need to reduce incentives for future bad agreements. They are a DDoS on the legislative process, at the expense of opportunities to create sensible rules which support technology innovation and the goals of modern civil society.
I still have not heard back from genius.com support about some of the technical issues I am having: I can't delete/move chapter 20 with the rest, and new chapters do not appear in the collection list ("album" in genius parlance).
If you know anyone with legal expertise who is willing to annotate a few places, please forward them to [0]. Alternatively, please retweet [1]. If you want to read the US government's take on the TPP, this link has a summaries before the full text in each of the chapters [2].
[0] http://genius.com/albums/Transpacific-partnership-tpp-negoti...
[1] https://twitter.com/TeeAyKay/status/663830955971338240
[2] https://medium.com/the-trans-pacific-partnership
If you've made up your mind about the TPP in whichever direction, please let your government know (Use #TPP on Twitter):
Canada: Prime Minister's Office: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/contactpm
Prime Minister's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau
Minister of International Trade: https://twitter.com/CanadaTrade and https://twitter.com/cafreeland
Members of Parliament (by postal code!): http://www.parl.gc.ca/Parliamentarians/en/Constituencies/Fin...
USA: White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/write-or-call
White House: twitter https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse
House: http://www.house.gov/representatives/
Senate: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_c...
* I am not affiliated with genius.com, or any political party. I just want an informed decision and the best possible outcome, whatever it may be.
Edit: spacing
Summary: international trade deals involve a lot of tradeoffs in various sectors of a country: e.g. throwing textiles under the bus in order to get some advantages in automotive. If the initial negotiation of the treaty was open, special interest groups would make massive amounts of noise and no country would be able to come to agreement. Once the treaty is done being written, then countries can debate it internally, in its entirety. There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over.
See also: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo...
So now we have to protest against whole document and WE AS PUBLIC, we citizens cannot negotiate paragraphs of the act because it's tightly coupled and one change will affect another paragraph. Now it all goes in or nothing.
Let's just call it what it actually is rather than this lip-service bullshit to a reason that is clearly not being honoured. I'm extremely in favour of free trade deals, but you can ruin anything with corruption and that's what is happening here.
Take down your tariffs and subsidies and your country gets richer regardless of treaty. No really. Do a whole corrupt thing like this and everyone gets poorer. Except perhaps the mega-wealthy trying to avoid competition for their businesses and those in their lobby. The thing is the mega-wealthy don't want to be richer, they have far more than they or 4 generations of their family can possibly spend. They want power, they don't want upstart entrepreneurs getting rich. They want their relative wealth to the average to be as high as possible. It's sick, sad and twisted. Fortunately we have the Republicans to stand up for what's right with respect to classical liberalism.
Absolutely. For one, hollywood, RIAA etc representatives were involved in the discussions as "experts" in the first place. Plus their lobbies set the agendas for what the government is gonna ask for etc.
Also, this agreement goes way beyond a simple trade deal; parts on this undermine the very basis of our democracy and justice system. I don't see how any democratic country can possibly agree to this.
1. Pay a lot of attention to your own job skills and education, managing career, etc.
2. Put a lot of energy into maintaining your economic outlook, that of your family and friends, and that of your local community
3. Ignore crap like the show of elections, and the show of "news" in general. If you want to do something positive then pick a cause, like a constitutional amendment to overthrow the Citizen's United ruling, and work on that cause year after year. Time better spent.
(I'm not advocating revolt as a solution; just questioning the validity of the idea that the 'slave class' have no way to change things.)
1984 like most science fiction, was created to show an extreme. While there is no such thing as an unbeatable system, there is definitely people higher up aware of the possibility and actively preventing any major paradigm shifts in politics. The only thing that would truly force a revolution (which doesn't even have to be violent) is if people don't have enough food or their life is on the line. We saw this in the Arab Spring with the rise in wheat prices, which Saudi Arabia was able to avoid through subsidies.
Also, America and Canada and the rest of the developed world in 2015 are freer and more prosperous than any time in history. We'd be setting a ludicrously low bar for revolt if copyright is what pushes us over the edge.
I think the key here is simplifying things-- the public domain isn't going to afford the lobbying power as the rent-collectors, but we can at least try to simplify the message, that rent-collecting is harmful.