Its the same law that protect people from others stealing GPL code. I assume you're in favor of that?
It's a long time, but it's not infinite. New works started entering the public domain again on January 1, 2019.
Let's see what happens come 2024:
> On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie—and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse.
I'm well aware of Disney's role in copyright law.
Disney's opportunity to do extend the term was before Dec. 31, 2018. That's how they extended copyright durations in the past - preventing any new works from entering the public domain at all. It's much harder for them to retroactively amend the copyright term now that some of those works have begun to enter the public domain.
If the author is anonymous(or work for hire) or lives for 20 years after they published the work then it is effectively infinite for ~91% of people assuming the best case.
Say what you want about the old 14+14 system but at least it would have meant that by the time you were a parent you could almost certainly share the works that were influential with you as a kid with your kids. With the current system you have to cross your fingers that it was popular enough to remain in print rather than moving to some limbo of unable to be acquired except 2nd hand or illegally.
Short terms can make that hard. For example, suppose your childhood thing was "Calvin & Hobbes". With a 14 year term that would be public domain by the time you are an adult, and I have no doubt that advertisers would have immediately conscripted Calvin to push toys and cereals ("It's even better than Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs") and such and saturated children's media with this.
So then you go to share with your kid what was your favorite comic strip when you were a kid, and they have no interest in a strip about the Kellog's and Mattel and such spokes character that they've been bombarded with already for years.
Maybe it is time to consider different terms for different copyright rights? Shorter term for the right to make and distribute literal copies, but longer terms for the right to make and distribute derivative works?
I must be missing something. Why is must something be under copyright in order for you to share it with your kids?
Ramifications of the Boston Tea Party: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/the-aftermath
India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Sati_Regulation,_1829
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/eu-ministers-approve-copyright-dire...
Then you get the effect that everything from the 20th century becomes available on YouTube, which is likely to cause increased viewership of that content over newer content pirated or otherwise. Which I suspect is the main reason Hollywood is really against shorter copyright terms -- not just losing the revenue from past works but having to compete with them when they're free.
I know I'm an extremist though(statistically speaking), even in this forum.
At the other end of the spectrum, everyone pirates the movies they want to see. The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.
In between the two ends is a large grey area. Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore. But pretending that every movie pirated costs the studios a ROI equal to the cost of buying the movie is disingenuous, too.
It is always acceptable not to watch a movie. Does that mean one doesn't want studios to make movies? No, they can still keep making movies if others care enough to keep them going.
This is just saying that movies will be produced in proportion to the amount of people who want to watch movies bad enough to actually subsidise their production.
The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy. Enthusiasts, companies with deep pockets, everyone who pours big money into research & bleeding edge tech subsidise the things that will ripple down to the rest of us with lower and lower margins, often in such a way that the original inventor/researcher/producer gets cut out of the loop in that market.
The market will correct itself so it's kinda pointless to hypothesize about a world where nobody wants to pay for a movie yet somehow everyone wants movies real bad.
I think fireworks are a good analogy. On New Year's eve, many people buy them and fire them, but others just go for a walk or watch the show from their window or roof.
This is correct; income from services like Spotify are pitifully low. However, it highlights an important distinction between two types of movie piracy: cam-rips of movies currently playing in the theatre, and "normal" piracy, which is of stuff available through retail. The thing with music is that you can't pirate a live band performance: there's very rarely anything comparable to a cam. For one thing, too much of the value of a live performance comes from the experience. Second, it's usually too difficult to capture such a performance as an ordinary audience member. (Official recordings released after the tour are different, of course.)
While I, like some others here, don't believe in intellectual property at all, I do think that artists should be rewarded for their work. Until we can get a better system, I question the ethics of taking something for free when you are in a position to easily pay for something of equal or better quality. So I personally have never torrented anything that was playing in theaters, and I think that's a principle one could reasonably stick to.
However, I think there's a striking difference between what you might call "performance rights", and right to copy. In the latter case, while I think it still makes sense to give the artist some recompense for their success, the situation is in fact much different. Other people regularly make these points, so I'll only mention the top few most relevant for me:
* It's usually impossible to rent / purchase a movie at home at watch it instantly without DRM. Many movies aren't available for streaming at all.
* Quality is usually quite bad when streaming. Even if you get lucky and can get 1080p or above (which means you're not a Firefox or Chrome user watching Netflix), the encoding quality of the film is usually quite bad.
* Even if you have a video rental service nearby, and they have the movie you want to watch in Bluray, you then need to have a Bluray player to watch it (more DRM), as well as hope you have the latest AACS keys, or that your player can download them in a reasonable amount of time if you do not. (Even then there are quite often encoding problems on Blurays, which pirates take the time to fix more often than not.)
In other words, the value proposition of pirating retail products is pretty good. You can instantly (or nearly so) watch a larger selection of films in higher quality than you can get through any other means, with no technological limitations. I think in this case, the value of compensating artists is outweighed by the competing value of the incredible increase in convenience and quality that piracy represents to the public.
None of this is to say that compensating artists isn't important; the problem is that the current system for compensating them sets up a whole bunch of competing values. While your "fireworks" analogy probably works for films in theaters, it doesn't exactly capture the realities of the retail market for films. That reality is that we need a better system for distributing movies that makes it possible to compensate artists without neglecting other values.
Compare U.S. airlines before deregulation got rid of the price floors there. Incredibly appealing service, with great waiting areas at the airport, gourmet meals in-flight, young attractive air-hostesses, and so on and so forth - but only if you could afford it in the first place! Behind all that luxury, we were actually seeing rampant wastage of resources.
Counterexample:
fanfiction.net 13'293'677 works
archiveofourown.org 4'825'000 works
fimfiction.net 125'797 works
[assorted forums and individual websites that make up the other half of my bookmarks] ? works
It looks like people will in fact make things even when they know - due to copyright law even - that they cannot make money on them.
Any creative work that will only get made if the authors think they can extort money from the people who benfit from it is a work that society is better off without.
If everyone only pirated, it would mean nobody valued that stuff enough to sustain it. If people doesn't value it, let it die. Can you imagine a world where nobody values movies or music or books? I can't. And therefore I can't see them dying, no matter what. So this concern is irrelevant to me.
This is definitely not true when it comes to royalty-based models.
If even a single user goes out and buys a license to Windows, then there is a definite argument to be made that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
However, such wishful thinking has no place in my worldview. Either a sale happened or it did not and it never was. Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay. Doubly so when it's only a loss if such and such had been so and so and yada yada. It never was. If you lost something, you go find it or call your bank and have them explain how the account now has less money than yesterday.
And yes, thanks to piracy, you might make fewer sales. I don't have a problem with that. I also don't have a problem with pepsi resulting in coca cola having fewer sales.
Well, you can. We have entire legal systems dedicated to assessing economic harm based on similar hypothetical situations. For e.g. Loss of income due to injury.. loss of earnings due to defamation.. diminished earning capacity due to a handicap, etc, etc. You can't simply say - "it never was or you never had that money". All these things have well established economic and legal histories. I don't know if those are part of your worldview. If you wish to reject them, then be assured that you are well outside of mainstream economic and legal thought.
A loss is simply a reduction. I hope you realize that a positive claim that piracy results in zero loss of revenue, has to be substantiated. At best, you can claim "we don't know" and you might very well be right - we simply don't know exactly what would have happened. But that is not the same as saying - we know nothing. We can piece together a model based on basic economic principles of market value, supply and demand, opportunity cost, etc, etc. and come up with a reasonable analysis.
Is called piracy because it's theft.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
Total IP abolition in combination with a strongly enshrined right to repair, which would necessitate access to source code of binaries given, would be perfectly in the spirit of the free software movement.
The same law that protects people from stealing GPL code also protects movie studios from having their content copied and redistributed without permission. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the GPL family of licenses' restrictions on exactly how you can use GPL software are legally difficult to discern from media companies' efforts to restrict how we are allowed to consume their works.
But there are things that I suspect would be easier to disentangle. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of provision where copyrighted works can more easily fall into the public domain when they've been abandoned by their copyright holders, for example. We could also stand to roll back some of the power grabs that media companies have managed to get codified.
What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright (2012):
> Copyright must be reformed. We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use (but with shorter, more sensible terms of protection). The big problem is that copyright has expanded in the past 20 years, going from being something that only corporations needed to care about, into something that criminalizes the entire young generation (and more and more people who aren’t even particularly young anymore).
> The Swedish Pirate Party wants to; Legalize file-sharing and other non-commercial sharing [...] At most 20 years of protection from the publication of a work. [...] Registration after five years. [...] Sensible regulation for quotations, parodies, and remixes [...] A ban on DRM
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-part...
Richard Stallman (2012):
> I agree with all three of these positions. I do suggest, however, that it would be better not to group together these three issues and only these three. Why would anyone group together these three unrelated laws? I suspect it reflects the mistaken concept of "intellectual property".
http://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#16_Octobe...
You can reform copyright without rendering the GPL unworkable. I asked Rick Falkvinge about this a number of years ago (2008-2010), and he seemed quite confident that the GPL would still be viable given their proposed reforms.
(Current Pirate Parties appear to use similar policies, such as Pirate Party UK:"A fair and balanced copyright regime that is suitable for the 21st century is an absolute necessity for the UK to remain competitive in a global economy that is built upon ideas and innovation. Copyright should give artists and innovators the chance to make money from their work; however, that needs to be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. We will work for copyright reform and reduce copyright terms to 10 years to balance everyone's needs." https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy/culture/home)
However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.
Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?
The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.
1) To gain a crowdfunding base of sufficient size to replace the current models and achieve the necessary budgets in the first instance would require massive marketing spend. This would HAVE to be forked over prior to obtaining funding and therefore represents a major risk because with crowdfunding, it's all or nothing.
2) Tragedy of the commons/freeloading. Why agree to pony-up when I can wait/hope for some other saps to do so?
3) Crowdfunding means paying for something that doesn't exist to be created and trusting that the creators can/will create it at a level of quality that matches what you expected from their pitch. But wait, you've already committed your resources to them. Why should they actually strive to create an optimal good when they get your money regardless of the quality? This is a huge problem with crowdfunding. In today's world, you can rely on word of mouth, reviews, previews, etc.
So, no, the proposed world would be much worse. The set of above reasons are really showstoppers, imo, and they don't even cover the full scope of the problems with your proposal.
Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
So many things made possible by copyright that we are accustomed to look like severe pathology when you look at them with fresh eye.
We aren't far away from that, but it's important to remember that creators now have the option to create without attaching copyright to a work. Copyright isn't mandatory. Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
Also, it isn't mandatory to consume copyrighted media. Just find something else that isn't encumbered by it if you wish.
> Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
And some peole choose to emit tons of CO2 because it's in their best intrest. The question is, is it in everybody's best interest.
A lot of people would be culturally poorer and more isolated if not for piracy and 100% secure copyrighted content wouldn't be as popular.
What does it mean to be culturally poorer? Attaching importance to pop culture knowledge sounds like the real problem.
Copyright is not just for popculture. Also learning materials, software and culture in general. Tonnes of people in the world got their higher education on pirated software and xeroxed books.
Long live capitalism, free choice and property rights: the greatest human forces of all time; the creators of prosperity.
Short copyright terms - someone mentioned 20 years max, with registration needed after 5 years. That sort of thing is better, far better than both longer copyright and no copyright.
The maximum term, IMO, should enable people to enjoy for free-gratis in their middle ages the media of their youth and build on that freely (libre) as inspiration to create cultural works for themselves and those that follow. Being able to have open, uninhibited access to one's own cultural inspirations well within one's working lifetime seems ideal to make sure that the demos get something worthwhile out of the deal.
Works restricted by DRM can't enter the public domain and so should be exempt from protection by copyright, though I'd allow some sort of deposit system whereby companies could put un-bound works in escrow, and so still be allowed to get copyright protections.
Anyone who is making a modest living producing their own original IP is not doing so because of IP protection laws, because they surely cannot afford to litigate (and they certainly can't afford to lobby to get the laws to favor them).
I think it is a rather nice trade to give up GPL if we get in return the right to repair to deal with DRM and no copyright to allow for sharing and modifying software.
Curious to hear why you think OS and security software should be black boxes and not open.
In general, do you not find carrying this level of paranoia on a daily basis is simply oppressive to your own well being?
As far as my daily life, no not really. I just live a life where I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together. It leads to a robust but distant social web.
Sounds exhausting, I can't imagine using that much mental energy to keep up this web, but your life your rules.
(I admit I too pirated music and sw during my college days, but I don't anymore..)
If you accidentally take a picture of my shitty origami art project you are not stealing
If you walk into a factory and take the mold for a military sonar device you are stealing.
At what point does changing the first story into the second story does it become stealing?
Either you can pinpoint a minimal set of changes in which it becomes stealing OR 'stealing' vs 'not stealing' is insufficient to accurately describe a situation
How is that different from society agreeing that it'll use taxpayers' money - through the police force, courts, etc - to uphold my right to keep control of my wallet, my car and my house, in the face of someone who might want to take them from me? My possession of these things is personal, yet society supports/enforces it when challenged.
In one case the condition is "I get paid", in the other "you have to contribute back your changes", but it's a similar underlying concept.
copyright doesn't mean "i get paid", it means "i get to withhold" (see all the out-of-print books, abandonware, etc).
GPL does not mean "you have to contribute back your changes" at all: "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourc...
one is about taking access away (for whatever goal), the other is about taking that option away (for the benefit of users).
In a legislative regime where all software is free, that goal is achieved without GPL so GPL isn't needed anymore; I get the permission to use, modify and redistribute all software as if I had received it with the GPL.
Not exactly. He doesn't want people modifying the recipe and keeping it a secret. Or atleast, not distributing food made from that recipe. (I know that analogy breaks down here.. but I tried!)
But Stallman and the pirate party have come up with a pretty nice proposal in the end: a much shorter time limit on copyright that can be extended if you give more rights to the user.