Congress wants to extend the copyright on some sound recordings to 144 years
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I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).
> must describe the content of the bill in a straightforwardly factual manner. An argumentative title or a slogan is not permitted.
From Erskine May, what the Financial Times calls “the bible on parliamentary procedure”.
https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f03876...
Yes, it will degrade into "Bill to Save America / Bill to Destroy America" most of the time, but that's the point: it makes the absurdity easy to spot and difficult to ignore.
verbs: prevent, promote
adjectives: good, ungood
Edit: More seriously, laws should be named with the same rules that apply to good commit messages, concisely describing the change being made. Or maybe they're more like pull requests... point is, you should be able to go down the list of them and get a good feel for the activity.
For example, there was a solar law on the ballot in Florida in 2016 that was written by oil and gas companies, that basically would have created a charge just for having solar panels. The new cost was to simply subsidize energy companies losing revenue from people moving to solar.
Predictably, the bill was sold pretty heavily as a pro-solar bill meant to make solar more competitive. Much in the same way anti-NN is often sold as a method of making it easier for smaller ISPs to compete with the giga-ISPs.
The word "wytai" from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows comes to mind when I think about how much of the US political process is based almost entirely on deception and tricking people into voting your way.
You can make something "more competitive" in two ways; kneecapping a leading industry does just as much "making competitive" as lifting up a tailing industry.
It can't even in principal be done in a binding way in mere statute, since newer law wins in case of a conflict, and even were it done by Constitutional Amendment, it would be hard to give it teeth.
Plus, it's plenty useful to have memorable named for laws, rather having to remember bill/session numbers (or, worse, the weird practice in California and some other places where laws, even when they actually have friendly names, are frequently referred to by bill numbers without session numbers, even long after adoption, when such identifiers are decidedly non-unique.)
The British constitution is, in some ways, built on conventions like this. It changes the calculus from legal to normative, and allows a sustainable banning of cute names even though, as you say, it can't be done in a binding way even in principle.
I agree. My main point was that legislation can't be the source of the fix; if you can engineer an independently-durable change in norms first, legislation can memorialize it and reinforce it, but a momentary majority can't establish it in a way that is resistant to the next momentary majority brushing it away.
That's very easy to fix by adding the year and jurisdiction where appropriate. For example, in my opinion, Prop 8 does not need any qualifier but should there be any ambiguity we could call it the 2008 California Prop 8. I don't think the value is there in banning names though. For example, the CFAA* would be just as horrible with any other name.
*While we are at it, please support a complete repeal of the CFAA. https://www.eff.org/helpout
For more on framing, see George Lakoff’s lecture on moral politics — reveals the way political language uses metaphors and How framing a debate ensures its outcome.
Repeating the frame reinforces the intended meaning. Merely Using the name of the bill defines its outcome.
“Tax Relief” - no one wants to fight a “relief” effort. Tax cuts for the rich would be the correct name.
“Clear sky initiative” is the name of a clear cutting bill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
That's a funny way to say "stop forcing people to buy healthcare".
[1] various characters replaced with their equivalents from the Cyrillic codepage
Got a new change to a crime? Well that all goes in the Crimes act, so that would be the “Crimes (Ammendment) Act 2018” instead of the “Drugs Are Anti Patriotic and Congress Persons Spensoring this Are Good Vote For US” act.
Far simpler and saner.
The vast majority of people in the U.S. do not follow what Congress is doing. They follow what media sources say Congress is doing. And media sources tend to focus on what bills will do.
I would argue that legislation names just do not matter. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are among well-known government progams whose names were not even in the titles of their enacting legislation.
"The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn’t increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn’t let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright’s massive, unpredictable penalties."
This is much, much more about record labels getting money rather than creators of content. The industry already heavily rewards purveyors rather than generators; if anything, this makes things worse.
A big part of the deterioration of current state of political discourse in the US could be attributed to this one issue. I have no conception of how such a limit on the content of bills could be defined and enforced while maintaining the balance of power, but the current system is insanity.
You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Congress. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) At the end of the day lawmaking and especially budgeting is fundamentally an ugly business. We should be careful about being overly cynical or fatalistic about it. The most important thing is transparency, but that requires the electorate to be more practically minded and less idealistic.
You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality.
Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem.
Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
Line-item veto, both where currently used in states (for the most part, Wisconsin seems to be a radical exception) and when it was (unconstitutionally) adopted at the federal level, does not allow that.
It allows separate veto of individual appropriations of money within a bill that included one or more appropriations. It doesn't allow separate veto of arbitrary provisions of law.
This can still drastically alter the intent of a bill, but not it in the way you suggest.
[1] Ratifying the previous day's minutes, for example
If we're lucky. More likely, before 2067 rolls around they'll "modernize" copyright again by extending it another hundred years.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_long_titles_(legisla...
> Music Monetization Act
https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-copyrig...
If you do so, be brief, polite, and state your position, for or against as well as the strength of your position (strongly against, etc.). The staffer will simply aggregate everyone's for/against positions. Verbal abuse or extra emotion is not helpful.
Basically a nation state forces people to adopt Stockholm syndrome under the guise of pragmatic acquiescence
Promoting artists to create art has long been sidelined as a goal of copyright. Now, copyright is there to make sure already copy written works are profitable forever. I mean think about it. All they have to do is take old music and movies and repackage it as new media. Disney movies from the 30s can be remade today with CGI. Pop music from the 80s can be remixed in 2040, and a whole new generation of people will buy it up, without any artists involved. Copyright has lost its purpose.
I've heard it claimed that Google could have never been started in Europe due to their copyrights laws being so onerous.
Nothing is less constant than the demand for entertainment, and that's reflected in current pricing.
A new blockbuster movie costs $15 in 3D, $12 in 2D.
A month later it costs $6 at the second-run theater.
Three months later it costs $20 on Blu-Ray for as many times as you want to watch it.
A year later it's included in your HBO subscription.
A year after that you can buy the disc for $10.
Ten years later you can buy the whole series for $30.
Forty years later it gets shown as 3AM filler on a cable network you don't pay for separately.
144 years later there are film scholars who have heard of it.
The demand for classic opera recordings is constant. Year after year people will buy the 1966 recording of Tristan & Isolde at the Bayreuther Festspiele with Wolfgang Windgassen singing Tristan. These are reliable moneyspinners for the record companies, you'd expect to see initiatives to extend copyright.
1.07^144 is 17,000.
So, if the album costs $10 in 2018 dollars, it should cost $170,000 at expiration.
Figuring in inflation and conservative returns give 5% per year, so 1125x markup. The album would only be $11,250 in 2018 dollars at term expiration.
They should have a congressional page follow Orin Hatch whispering in his ear "remember you are not a singer songwriter, your songs all suck, and nobody would ever listen to them if you were not a senator."
But if I understand the article, the current state of play is that Hatch introduced this into a bill that had already passed the House. If the Senate passes this, then it's different from the bill that passed the House, so it goes to a reconciliation committee. If the copyright extension survives that, then the modified bill has to pass both the House and the Senate.
So, yes, this is bad, and we need to work against it. But we still have several chances to block it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...
http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-not-a...
I'm hardly a fan of copyright, but the arguments that this is not actually an extension seem sound.
So I guess my take on this is that I still feel that copyright terms (95 years or longer, depending on certain circumstances [0]) are too long, and I can see that this bill might technically not be making the problem worse.
That's unfair. There is nothing for free, specially in politics. It's more probable that, the work, has been already done and now they are receiving the prize for their lobbying efforts.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618
It's fascinating to hear these oral arguments, because you have some of the smartest legal minds in the world making references on the fly to obscure two-hundred-year-old case law, stringing things together in logical ways in much the same way that the most exciting engineering conversations in our line of work involve rapid conversations at a whiteboard, where deep technical knowledge and logic come together to create frameworks and business models that have never existed before.
But while lawyers and justices are engineers in one way, building case-law "frameworks" to improve the citizenry's experience based on a wide range of constitutional knowledge and common sense... lawmakers are engineers in another way, "hacking" those frameworks to see what they can get away with. Sometimes "hacking" is good, but it's entirely dependent on the moral compass of the hacker.
In this specific case, the Supreme Court had argued on the basis of a balance of harm to different types of "progress" as laid out in the Constitution: is it more likely that progress will be economically incentivized if copyright terms are extended retroactively, or if copyright terms are not extended retroactively? At the time, a lot of this was tied up in ensuring consistency with international law. But that's not the case under the 144-year CLASSICS Act now being considered - as Lessig describes in the op-ed, "no other jurisdiction creates a similar right anywhere."
So to me, the balance if the Supreme Court were to review this case would be to consider a streaming music provider's incentives. Do more people hear and become inspired by 1930's public-domain jazz music if:
(a) it's all public domain, anyone can start a startup streaming it; or
(b) it's protected, and large streaming companies like Spotify can invest more money into the propagation of the work because they have exclusive rights to a subset of it, even if the subset that is now "orphaned" is not accessible as it would be in (a)?
It's a complicated question, and as a technologist I would lean towards (a) if harmony with international law is no longer a consideration. But, as I mentioned, legislators are "hackers," and with the Supreme Court unable (by design) to proactively limit their ability to build on the existing precedent that extensions are possible... it all comes down to their moral compass and alignment with their economic incentives.
...and per [1], Orrin Hatch has received $664k over his career from the "TV/Movies/Music" industry.
(IANAL but things like this make me want to be one.)
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-c...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?c...
So, what is a "limited" time? The current trend seems to be toward considering any mathematically finite number of years to be "limited". A hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion, a googol (10 ^ 100), a googolplex (10 ^ 10 ^ 100) — these are all finite numbers.
I would argue that the Constitution was written by and for human beings, and therefore "limited" means "limited on a human timescale", and therefore the upper limit should be about half a mean human lifetime. Certainly, if a typical human can be born after a copyright is established, and live their life and die before it terminates, in their experience that's effectively an unlimited duration.
They want copyright forever. They have the entitlement to think it should be forever.
Since those in power no longer respect it being for a limited time, I put forth the "exclusive rights" should not be respected either. I do not consider or respect any copyrights held by Mary Bono as a result.
Gotta love corrupt America.
Ah yes, as opposed to all the other developed European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., which all signed the TPP/TTIP, which contains similar massive copyright extensions.
A monopoly on creative works--something that didn't exist before the person who created it--is far less artificial. (And granting a monopoly on something that's non-rival, so everyone can have as much of it as they want so long as they're willing to create their own, seems far better than granting one on a scarce natural resource.)
Besides, current property is quite far from the Lockean concept of mixing your own labor and only taking it when "there is enough, and as good, left in common for others", which the original "natural right of property".
Pack animals will do the same. If you attempt to take their property, the leader (State) will likely engage with you.
Ideas are far more abstract.
But courts — urged on by copyright owners — have extended the scope of copyright protection to nonliteral aspects such as (for example) look and feel and structure, sequence, and organization. Sometimes this is done while paying lip service to the principle that copyright doesn't protect ideas. The resulting fuzziness of the boundaries is one of the major sources of complaint.
The case with copyright is that copyrighted works are by definition not fungible; if you create a trivially similar work, you violate the copyright.
Err, there's a reason the first three rules of real estate are 1. location 2. location 3. location
The key thing about land is that it's unique, there is no other place on the entire planet identical to the place you're standing. There may be similar places, and that may be fine enough for some people. But plenty of wars have been fought over a particular piece of land. Just ask the Palestinians if land is fungible.
That analogy would only make sense if Palestinians were being offered similarly-sized and similarly-resourced land, to compensate for what was taken away from them at the beginning of the Nakba 70 years ago.
Except, they're not. The land was seized, with no new land provided in return. Over time, more and more has been occupied and taken away from Palestine.
But more importantly, very few bits of land are all that special. Location, location, location means that if a business got its pick of nearby plots, most would happily switch, and reap the benefits!
And why do you think that description of copyright law is inaccurate? Copyright protects concrete expression, not abstract ideas, and independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement. How many sci-fi books are basically identical and rehash the same tropes? That's not copyright infringement. It's only infringement if you actually copy someone else's work.
This is inaccurate. Copyright has been extended to cover fictional characters for instance.
Consider that at the copyright term of 144 years proposed, the character of Count Dracula would still be under copyright, and not freely usable for artistic works.
Theoretically, you could independently conceive of Count Dracula[1] and put him into your own work without violating someone else's copyright. To prove violation of copyright the copyright holder must as a preliminary matter provide evidence that the defendant likely had access or exposure to the copyrighted material. Only once that evidence exists could the fact finder infer, based on similarity, actual copying. For widely disseminated pop cultural material, however, exposure is a rather easy burden to meet.
[1] I presume for the sake of argument that the character Count Dracula is per se copyrighted. But I don't think that's true. AFAIU only certain stylized versions of that character are copyrighted. This necessarily follows from the fact that to show violation of copyright you must first identify the specific material that has been copied, and then show substantive similarity and the extent of copying. IMO modern copyright law is too liberal in this regard (i.e. favors copyright holders) and has gotten rid of many bright line rules that rejected infringement claims early on. But all of this absolutely matters if you're going to trial. The Oracle v Google case was fundamentally about how to construe similarity and extent in the context of APIs.
As to the Dracula example: why should you be able to use the fruits of someone else’s labor for free? There is literally an infinite amount of independent things you can create without using other people’s work.
Why not? I like the letter 'i'. Why do you get to use the letter 'i' for free when it is my favorite? Every time you use it without paying me, you deprive me of the potential profits that i could make licensing that usage. Why do you get to benefit from the heat my body gives off?
Anything that has infinite supply is going to have a low price (to free) price without artificial constraints. In this case the artificial monopoly is copyright. There is no scarcity, so gov't "regulates" and "distorts" the market to reward content creators. This is not a natural state.
I'm not against a well-balanced copyright system that actually encourages creation in exchange for a limited time monopoly.
Can you provide an example?
While the protection of the copyright of Steamboat Willie in itself is probably of no consequence to Disney, it's foundation to the licensability of Mickey Mouse is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_sta...
Mickey Mouse the character is protected by trademark. Unlike copyright, there is no time limit on trademarks. As long as they remain in active use and defended by the mark holder, they remain protected. To be clear: Steamboat Willie could enter the public domain tomorrow and it would not affect Mickey's trademark status.
Not exactly paradise.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2018/01/canada-successfully-stand...