pkgesic 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (2)
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On the post: Drone Attack: How We Might Willingly Embrace The Surveillance Society
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On the post: The Great Digitization Or The Great Betrayal?
pkgesic ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2012 @ 11:46amIs that you really mean?
Hi all, I'm a newbie and I pretty much joined the site because of this thread. So hello, nice to meet you all, but I'm a tad confused.
To start with, I think the libraries trying to enforce copyright on perfect reproductions of out of copyright material is doomed to failure. How can they claim creativity? So whatever they are claiming now, it won't hold against a legal challenge unless the law is changed. IMHO. Of course with the current, 'oh god the piracy, we have to do something about the piracy, lets criminalise the entire nation', attitude towards digital content, who knows what will happen?
But some of the other comments relating to copyright confused me. Copyright protects the artist not the corporation. Unless the artist was on a work-for-hire contract, or stupidly signed over all the rights to their original work to a company, the rights remain with the artist and they generate income from them, which allows them to create other works of art.
Corporations may well take advantage of copyright, but that is not the purpose of copyright. This is about individual artists retaining control of their work, it is not about corporate suits enforcing copyright to make more money.
Individual artistic copyright lasts for the lifetime of the artist plus 70 years in the UK. If it is a collaborative piece (like a film) it lasts for the lifetime plus 70 years of a fairly narrow group of people (director, writer, and so on; I think the producer is included, but can't be bothered to check). 70 year after the last one dies the copyright ends. Something that is created anonymously has a copyright period of (something like) 50 years from first publication.
That sets out my sketchy knowledge of the law, so lets get down to talking about my confusion.
I can see how certain aspects of corporate copyright could upset people, milking it, I think was the term used. But a few people seem to think that weakening copyright somehow helps the artist and sticks it to the man. I don't understand that at all.
JarHead seems to think that it is all about the money. That if you are dead why do you need to keep receiving royalties. Well, you may not need to receive royalties when you are dead, but what if you die immediately after finishing the work and your family needs the money you were going to earn to pay off debts you accrued when working on the artwork. Maybe they should be allowed to control your copyright for a bit, just for the sake of fairness, in a 'no man is an island' sort of way.
Manchin Shin suggested copyright should last 10 years. Yeah, the problem with such a short copyright span is obvious. What if the artwork takes time to build an audience? It could take more than 10 years for an audience to even exist, does that mean that the artist should receive nothing for their labour, that the corporations can simply hoover up all the cash and leave the artist destitute. Would that be fair.
And ten years is a really short time in the creativity world. Really short.
Lets take stories as an example, not just because I'm a writer but because the spin-off from stories are more varied than anything else. You can turn a novel (or short-story) into a film, a play, a computer game, a board game, a set of action figures, spin off other series or even just write some sequels. Just look at what 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek' do, to see all the possibilities that a single story can create.
So, why would a big company, which is all about the bottom line, pay the author of a story ANYTHING. Why not just wait 10 years, then the story is out of copyright and you can do what you like. You can make a film, a game, a TV series, then have the novel re-released under your own imprint or even have the novel rewritten to make it more audience-friendly, maybe you created a character that you know is going to make big-time money in merchandise and you want them in the original story. Yeah, sure, do what you like, it's out of copyright. The author can only weep in the corner or go postal. He or she will certainly have no rights.
The same thing can happen if copyright lasts 20 years or 30 years. Some pieces of art have a very long back-end after a very slow start.
RonKaminsky (hi) seems to think that because this is rare that it should not be covered by the law. A sort of "Sorry, you're an outlier so you are screwed' legal system. Very few pieces of art are really important, very few have a lifespan that can really take advantage of life plus 70 years, but a lot of artists are mid-listers. They may have another job, they may live hand to mouth, but the small amount of royalties the do earn helps to keep them afloat. Should that be taken away from them simply because 'the economic reality is that only a very, very small minority have value in the long term.' [RonKaminsky]
Dunno that all seems a bit Darwinian to me. "You will create important art or you will starve."
Anyway, just airing my confusion here. Is that what you all actually meant? I'm not looking for an argument. I like robust debate and I am not trying to flame anybody, or be a troll, or any of those other nasty things the internet makes so easy. I'm just confused. Do you really want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reduce artists to relying on patronage once again? Is that your actual intent?
Or is all this stuff actually about patents and other forms of intellectual property, which companies buy up for legal warfare in their fight to be top dog? If it is, then just be aware that not all forms of copyright are the same.
Nice to meet you all, I hope I haven't offended anybody, this is rather a long post but my confusion was deep.
Yeah these personal drones...they're gonna be connected to the net-of-things right?
Good market for a 'Waveaway' app for your smartphone that tells every drone in the vicinity to bug out. Most likely won't work on military drones.
Most likely http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/10/malware-compromises-usaf-predator-drone-computer-systems/
Yeah that was a corrupted mem-stick, but thousands upon thousands of drones all connected to the internet, getting their firmware updates over the net, getting their commands over the internet, with all those oh-so-security-concious netizens out there.
I'm really not worried about personal drones. Military ones yea, but even those will no doubt be hackable.