The Bitter Legacy of Mickey Mouse
theamericanconservative.com
theamericanconservative.com
One wishes more rich people turned into people like Ron Unz. He continues to impress as an uncategorizable scholar and journalist, working on what interests him and uncovering significant (if controversial) things. And TAC is one of the best periodicals of its type.
They also stand outside MSM consensus in a way that has genuine integrity. Consider Eric Margolis' cover story from their inaugural issue (Oct 2002), a blistering critique of the impending Iraq War that got almost everything right. Not everything—in retrospect, he arguably overemphasized oil—but the piece was a truth-speaking deviation from the groupthink and propaganda that dominated that period. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/iraq-invasio.... I think most people would be pretty proud now to have launched a magazine with that in 2002.
Basically, they've established themselves as freethinking conservatives who have nothing to do either with the decadence of party conservatism or the fanaticism of the right-wing base. That's what makes them valuable and worth reading—such voices are needed. Not that I agree with all they say, of course.
(By the way, if you have time for podcast-type thingies, I've found a couple of other sources that are surprisingly good. But I'll save that for some other off-topic thread :) Or you're welcome to email me if you'd like to discuss any of this offline.)
The net-effect could be interesting; articles would move into the public domain fairly rapidly (why pay to maintain the copyright of an article from fifteen years ago about Y2K?) and established bodies of work with huge corporate incentives would stay copyrighted for decades.
Disney want's to keep their mouse until the sun burns out and I couldn't care less. All these other works that are now in legal limbo because of that is what bothers me.
Unregistered works, are granted 10 years of protection, then either must be registered or become public domain.
For individuals, After registration, Artist Lifetime, then renewal every 5 years thereafter.
For corporate owned/created work, registration good for 30 years, and renewal every 5 years thereafter. Possibly, work must be kept in commercial availability somewhere in the 5 year cycle or you potentially could be challenged for the right to renew.
I like this system because it solves something I see as a serous problem, abandoned works.
No copyright which includes anyone's lifetime (and most copyrights are held by corporations anyway) can be deemed reasonable in an age where information and culture moves 100s of times faster than it did when the term was 7 years.
It was 56 years (28 year first term, which could be renewed for a second 28 year term) when Mickey Mouse was created. The shortest it has even been under Federal copyright law in the US was 28 years (14 year first term, renewable for another 14 years) under the Copyright Act of 1790.
Copyright was granted to benefit the public, arts and sciences. It was not created as a right to profit indefinitely to mega corps.
Corporate or collective works, though, I agree. I think a 7-year expiration would be fine. I expect that approximately zero investment decisions on new movies or TV shows turn on the money they expect to make in year 8. And even without copyright, modern studios are adept at producing new versions and higher-end editions that would get new 7-year terms.
What is individual copyright? It becomes debased if you are saying it cannot be sold to corporations. Lifetime is a ridiculous capricious standard.
A lifetime standard is only as capricious as life itself. Given that the laws are made to serve human needs, I'm ok with it drawing a distinction between serving living ones and dead ones.
Which is, actually, pretty much precisely the issue with a large number of works presently under copyright: their owners cannot be identified and their copyright status not determined. These are the so-called "orphan works".
No to mention the administrative overhead for companies and individuals to renew their work each year.
But, if those problems could be overcome; interesting idea.
More to the point, if you're going to have it, how are you going to enforce it on the Internet? The number of ways in which a high-quality digital copy of a potentially copyrighted work is nearly infinite. Some of them are legitimate: reading a properly licensed file into memory in order to consume it. Some are clearly not legitimate, and others fall into a gray area.
The practical ease with which copyright may be violated is in itself an argument against its rigid enforcement. Without a pervasive technical infrastructure the question of, "Can I copy these bits?" is essentially unanswerable. The duration of copyright is not nearly as large of a problem as enforcement -- the current system doesn't seem to work too well. To a first approximation, there is no such thing as copyright of a digital work. So why should that change, and how do you plan to do that?
If you have a problem with copyright in and of itself, make a case based on that. The logical conclusion of your argument as it stands, however, is "laws may be violated so we should have no laws".
Let us further consider a world where 10% of all copyrights were enforced. The world may be less incarcerated, but I doubt it. The world we inhabit has in all likelihood an enforcement rate of less than one in one billion, and violators include most of the population.
You have made a logical error in oversimplifying the argument at hand. Either extreme of enforcement is absurd. It is to no one's benefit to have laws which may be routinely violated, often unknowingly, by the overwhelming majority of the population. That being the case with copyright means not that people are a problem, or the technology is doing something other than what it was built for, but that we are trying to criminalize something that is fundamental to the functions of both.
You may well argue for the necessity of law, but please instead argue for the necessity of this law. It is abundantly clear that the law as written is as effective as criminalizing flatulence, or the encroaching tide. One hopes that in those events you will not feel called upon to make the same argument.
You could say this of virtually any law. Under your construction, the current president of the United States would be in prison on drugs charges, the former president for desertion, and the former president's wife for vehicular homicide.
Law (and its enforcement) are inherently discretionary. Appropriate use of that discretion is key to a well-functioning society.
There is a great deal that's wrong with the present copyright scheme. A rational scheme, with much shorter terms of copyright, very brief corporate assignments (after which terms revert to authors), mandatory registration for copyright extended beyond a de minimus period (3-7 years or so), ample and clear exemptions for various fair use (personal, educational, creative, remix, adaptation), and an escalating fee schedule for additional extensions, would help greatly.
While digital capabilities make copyright violation much easier, they also make detection and correction of significant violations much easier (too easy, according to many).
The topic at hand is a particular law, however. I'm glad that you agree that mindless enforcement is bad. Show that there is a subset of copyright that is practical to enforce on the internet. At the risk of repeating myself, I do not believe that such is practical, and the scale of the violation is easily on par with (e.g.) an attempt to criminalize normal bodily functions.
There is no good outcome when laws are routinely and unknowingly violated. You are ducking the hard questions, and focusing on the legal niceties. You should also make an argument as to why a law that would punish all citizens if fully enforced, should not be considered a bad law.
For someone attempting major commercial exploitation of copyrighted materials, there's virtually always an entity which can be reached by injunction, subpoena, or legal action.
Filesharing (a noncommercial exploitation of copyrighted works) is harder to track down, but more overt forms of sharing generally can be identified. Remember: both the copyright enforcer and the copyright infringer need to identify and access the infringed work. The same actions which make it harder for the copyright enforcer to identify infringing uses make it harder for infringers to infringe.
Not impossible, but difficult.
There are many cases of plagiarism and content stealing, yes. But for the most part, once detected, these can be shut down. Tracking content theft from a developed country to a less developed one may be difficult (technically and legally), but it's also a relatively small economic loss.
What did you have in mind?
He's not promoting lawlessness, he's recognizing it as the current state of affairs, and suggesting that we address it differently.
Compare: "The practical ease with which privacy may be violated is in itself an argument against its rigid enforcement."
It is not only the artificial scarcity of creative works that makes lengthy copyright so obscene, but also the inability to build upon earlier works.
• The rights to make and distribute copies,
• The rights to make and distribute derivative works,
• The rights to publicly perform and display works.
The power to even have Federal copyright law comes from this grant of power in the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Shorter terms promote progress by making works more widely available, but longer terms ALSO promote progress by letting authors make more money which improves things on the supply side, so setting the term requires balancing these, and I see no reason that the optimal setting for, say, copying should be expected to be the same as the optimal setting for, say, making derivative works.
I also see no reason the term needs to be the same for different types of works. Music, literature, movies, and computer software are very different so why would we expect that a term that is good for music when it comes to balancing wide distribution vs. author incentive to also be good for literature, moves, and software?
The problem is that attempting to categorize works might be futile. Eg. chiptunes (a form of music) originally were software written for the sound chips. Would they fall under "software" or "music" category?
Basically, if you are making money on the property, you will be able to afford the tax. If the property is valueless, then you stop paying the tax, and it goes into the public domain.
I'm not even sure how you could do comparable sales for intellectual property. Yeah, Disney's publicly traded, but imagine an trying to assess the value of an asset owned by a privately held company that doesn't have to disclose any financial information.
And even if you could assess values, look at the mess of property taxes in California with Prop. 13.
The problem with this is that the creators of marketable and valuable IP could not exercise creative control of their IP without paying a tax on the market value of their IP even if they don't make money on it. Not sure about that.
I'm not buying into this idea at all, just adding a perspective.
One approach I have heard that might work is that you get some amount of time of free copyright (20, 30, 50 years), and then have an increasing copyright-registration fee for each year or extension period beyond that, up to some maximum term. It could either increase linearly or exponentially, or someplace in between. I'm not entirely sure it would work, but I think the idea has some merit.
I think it would be in the interest of the public that you have a more limited in time copyright and after a certain delay an obligation to let other creator reuse assets with a compensation schema that allows new creations.