With the way that US elections work, they’d either get next to no influence, or would have to compromise their goals to get support from one of the two main parties. If voting were like in the EU where percentage of party votes = percentage of party representation, then it might be different and we -maybe- wouldn’t have a 2 party system.

Prohibition has done shit little to me but I have suffered for years at the hands of alcoholics and drug addicts.

It’s OK I will take care of them for y’all. Wouldn’t want to impinge upon their rights and freedoms.

Wait, I hope I didn’t just infringe.

‘Fraid so… though over in the alternate reality of Saneville not so much since songs 50 years old aren’t subject to copyright there…..

“I am ashamed to admit I have never considered the possiblity that the entire of our society is now disenchanted will all aspects of copyright law, both as enacted and conceptually.”

Conceptually and in pre-1976 practice, copyright law was great!
Simple, effective, practical.
Then Disney started pushing it’s agenda as their earliest cartoons were reaching automatic Public Domain status.
The resulting mess is largely their fault.

Then vote for them if they have any candidates in your area. Failing that, the Greens tend to side with the Pirates so vote for them. The trouble with your electoral system is that it is similar to ours. This means the Pirates need more votes than they would under proportional representation.

However, people tend to vote for those candidates they believe will get in because they don’t want to risk “wasting” their vote by voting for a minor party. Vote for them anyway. If enough people do, the majority parties will have to deal with them. Eventually, one of the majors will end up being sidelined. This is why the Liberal Party in the UK is no longer the Opposition. That’s gone to Labour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_%28UK%29

Because alcohol doesn’t kill people around you like tobacco smoke does.

Inspiration for the above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nJR15e0F4

The discussion is about what exists in fact, not the idealist dream of copyright.

What exists in fact is The Copyright Cartel.

The Copyright Cartel is the anti-human, greed-driven aberrant monster that was accidentally created through failed experiments at copyright and that exists today as both an enemy of the people and of progress.

The Copyright Cartel exists solely to accumulate massive wealth almost exclusively using terrorism via the threat of the force of law. Remember that law is a concept that is meant to protect society’s interests, not The Copyright Cartel’s wealth-accumulation methods.

The Copyright Cartel is an enemy of the people, period. It must perish.

The legal and effective way to cause The Copyright Cartel to perish to starve it to death.

It only takes the actions of the people to succeed.

The Copyright Cartel itself, the so-called “rulers” owned by The Cartel, and all the greedy hangers-on making their livings off supporting their anti-human terrorism must be boycotted in every way imaginable and starved into non-existence.

through too many bad laws *

Michael, I respect your position, however, theft cannot occur without loss. And as no loss occurs in infringement, which is merely the creation or use of an unofficial copy, it is therefore not theft. You cannot steal what cannot be diminished, and digital content cannot be diminished so long as new copies are made. Infringement or sharing is addition, not subtraction, and it is also multiplication on an exponential level. Stealing, therefore, is unethical, but infringement is not.

JQP, for any boycott to be successful, it must inflict billions of dollars worth of damage upon its targets, because these companies are multi-billion dollar companies and in order to cripple them, they must suffer monetary damage on that level. For that to happen, it would require hundreds of millions of participants in a worldwide, coordinated effort.

I would not be opposed to such an effort, however, but to launch such an economic offensive on that scale would require a great deal of planning and preparation and the involvement of major sites on the internet to ensure the message reaches as many individuals as possible. The support of several major technology companies and consumer rights organizations would further bolster this effort, as they did for the anti-SOPA blackouts.

At this point, I’m somewhat agreeing.

When I Google creative commons books, for example, I get this list.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Books

However, I can’t conveniently get access to these books anymore. Few are willing to host them without requiring a login. Before what happened to Megaupload, I used to have access to all sorts of permissibly licensed books just by hitting a download button. Megaupload, Scribd, etc… would host them. After what happened to Megaupload, all of these file sharing services, that substantially hosted non-infringing content, no longer host non-infringing content to be easily downloadable (ie: without registering at least). I have to Google these titles separately and go through all this extra trouble to find and download them. Very few are willing to host permissibly licensed or independent books and content and make them easily available anymore because of the associated liability.

I blame IP laws and the government-industrial complex directly.

This is especially true of new startups, maybe only incumbents like Youtube who already have the resources to stand their ground in court would be willing to fight and even they are being held to insane standards in places like Germany.

Like IP extremists on Techdirt have said a few times, this isn’t just about whether or not they are guilty of breaking the law. What it’s really about is stopping competition altogether and it’s working.

Just like the government industrial complex have destroyed everything outside the Internet through too many anti-competitive laws, they are doing the same thing to the Internet. It’s unacceptable. Bakeries are afraid to allow children to draw custom drawings on their birthday cakes because they may draw an infringing picture of Spongebob. Restaurants and other venues are afraid to host independent performers (without paying royalties to collection societies under the pretext that someone might infringe) because they may get sued by some collection society and face expensive legal battles. The government-industrial complex wrongfully monopolize Cableco infrastructure and broadcasting airwaves and they use their military power to prevent competition from entering these domains.

At this point, I’m all for abolishing IP laws. If they can stay in some reasonable form, I do think some good could come from them. But I’m very skeptical.

Yea. Prohibition of drugs causes far more casualties than any copyright laws. Many people are having their lives totally destroyed due to moronic anti-drug laws.

You cannot spread the message on a worldwide scale, JQP, without sufficient coordination. The only way to make hundreds of millions of individuals act in concert in this effort is to encourage them to become involved, but do so on the scale required for inflicting billion dollar damages requires planning, coordination, and widespread visibility. Otherwise, few will participate and any such boycott will be ineffective.

>Any good reason for that – it would have stopped Holst’s >”Planets” since he obtained his income as a teacher – not as >a composer?

well, the Planets would have been replaced by some other work by some other author. And bonus would be that now 2 people have enough money to live, instead of just Hoist getting all of it.

In practise, if a work is created, it will get some market from the publishers. But the area reserved for each product is smaller if the author is not doing it for living.

> First of all, “amateur” art is often better art than
> “professional” art. This is especially true the closer you > get to “pure” art, such as music and writing, as opposed to > things like graphic design or computer programming.

Yes, but you know… The pyramids are still way much better than anything your amateur artists have managed to create. These were created in slave labor and involved thousands of people, but noone would today say this would be acceptable today, recardless of how wonderful the result would be. Today the requirements of what you can expect people to do are different from what they were few thousand years ago, but once you change free time to mean work time, you’re very near of creating another pyramid with slave labor. Once this becomes required of everyone, the world will not be better off. There is reason why the rules for free time are available. Competition needs to have level playing field, and using free time has it’s dangers.

Like Tolkien?

There is no concerted scale on P2P.

We all know what is right in this case, people don’t really need to organize they just need the tools to make it happen and by tools those can be legal tools like CC-by-SA licenses, GPL, better tools to share like new P2P clients, more curating websites about open resources and that is on the legal side of things on the illegal you can copy anything and just give it away to anyone you know, it is not that hard.

The best way to damage that industry is to make it more agressive, the more agressive they are the more people get turned off and the more people move away from it, so the only thing people need really do is to troll the copytards, so they get pissed and think they need to do something about it, the more medieval laws get the sooner they will be gone.

The catalyst for the end of IP is legislation the bad kind that massively increases the power and punishes everyone.

It takes some decades to work its magic but eventually things get uggly and when they do there will be no reasoning with the angry mob, because every single person will have a bad story about how IP hurt them and those around them.

This is not something that needs massive coordination, this is natural stuff that will happen, people can see it happening, but to control it is almost next to impossible, so just let it happen, do your part, that is all that is needed.

Do not give those people money, and when possible migrate to other alternatives, be an early adopter of something.

> Considering that “professional” artists are the ones who
> don’t own their own copyrights, and that the ones who make > money off of royalties are the publishers rather than the
> authors, that seems to be exactly what you’re saying.

It does not work exactly like this. To keep the system going, the system limits the area and time where each author can market his products. The whole world is not available to most authors infinitely. The ownership goes to publisher to prevent authors from expanding their “impact area” in the world to too big. Exclusive contracts often prevent authors from going to next publisher and selling the same product again several times. Each product only gets small market. When there are thousands or millions of authors in the system, the whole globe is covered. Everyone gets small area.

Anyone trying expand their market presence too much will become a problem in the system. The area you are allocated should be based on amount of work that went into your product, not based on how many times you can duplicate your work with a for-loop. (we have spam and virus problems caused by the people who tried this, and piracy is similar)

> Unless you’re saying that “professional” artists can’t
> compete with “amateur” artists in an open market. If that’s > the case, then those artists have no business being
> “professional” in the first place.

No, it’s more like people doing it for living are entitled better guarantee that there is some money available than the people who spend their free time for it. Work time vs. free time is easy way to choose which products are entitled this better guarantee. Choosing to drop everything and start doing it for a living is the decision that needs to happen to get that guarantee.

Quote:

Then when it’s illegally copied it’s the artist that directly suffers.

That goes against some artists stating tha actually piracy increased their sales treefold.

That also goes against an empirical verifiable business model that allows people to copy, modify, redistribute and even sell without having to have permission or being criminalized.

quote:
“That goes against some artists stating tha actually piracy increased their sales treefold.”

The fact a few in the minority disagree with the majority does not prove anything. When most artists agree their income has increased due to illegal copying, then you will have a point.
In the end, the goal of artists is to create art and to be funded sufficiently to create that art.
It actually makes no sense to criticise a better way of funding your art. Ergo, if the vast majority of artists criticise the anti-copyright view, it’s simply because it does not demonstrate a viable way to fund the arts.

How is that?

Did the world get McDonalds spamming them using automated scripts to make customers buy their burgers?

Oh i can understand it, its all about money to them, that is their main driving force………..for us, well, we are a generation who thinks information sharing should be nurtured, not kicked in the balls

Wow. Are you really comparing a wild animal to a human? LOL! A monkey in a science experiment and a human being paid to create a game/music/whatever are not the same thing. Are you seriously saying people shouldn’t be paid to make things like video games and music?

quote:
“I just don’t understand why would you want to annoy people, sell less and be willing to get vilified just so you can assert control apparently because you want to and not because of any rational line of thinking.”

I don’t understand that either.
So the fact millions of creative people suffer those consequences means they must have a strong reason to do so.. or they would not do it.
A small minority practice the free information business model.
Creative people are amongst the most innovative, independent thinkers in society. So if a new way of working actually worked, there would be no argument. people would just be doing it.
So why aren’t they?

This is exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to encourage. Copyright exists solely to benefit the public, and the main benefit is supposed to be the wider distribution of literature and artworks.

Wider distribution is clearly not correct for this. If it was, they would have never forbid _copying_. Copying is easy way to get wider distribution. In fact, whole copyright is moving responsibility for distribution only to the author. It is limiting that _only_ author is allowed to do it. It is author’s exclusive right to do distribution. The world is not allowed to do it at all.

The actual benefit from copyright is that authors have opportunities to _sell_ their products in the market when those opportunities are not taken away by unauthorized (cheaper or free) copies.

If money doesn’t move, the whole thing just is not doing the correct thing.

It’s also naive to assume big business wont take advantage of a dismantling of copyright. Copyright and patent also protect one business from another.
Imagine an independent black writer releases an account of their father’s role as a lawyer in the civil rights movement as a free e-book. It’s a sensation and Steven Spielberg decides to make it a movie.
Without copyright, the penniless black writer gets nada. Not only that but Spielberg chooses to hire Tom Cruise to play the black lawyer as an enlightened southern white lawyer.
How many public appearances and t-shirts does the original writer have to sell to earn the money they would have earned from Spielberg buying the story, instead of just copying it?

That’s another good point of why to be cautious of nixing copyright. But I wonder what everyone here will think of that. Last time I said something like that in a comment, (that big tech would have NO incentive not to be the new asshole middlemen if the labels actually died) the reply was “lol 10 or 15 percent off the sales aren’t a big deal.” It’s only 10 or 15 percent NOW…if big tech succeeds in killing off the labels, I won’t be surprised if all of a sudden that small cut becomes a lion’s share!

quote:
“In either event my comment stands, that they don’t create much of anything. They just copy. And they want to toss people in jail for doing what they do.
If the Board and Executive get most of the money then that shows how brain impaired the shareholders are.”

Musicians don’t have shareholders. Neither do many creative software businesses.
Your condoning attacking individual creative people and small business start ups using executive and shareholder income as an excuse.
That’s the problem with the free information movement, it’s a very blunt tool.
You impact small independents, average working individuals and small privately owned businesses in pursuit of a crusade against Disney and Sony.

“Post whatever you want and make yourself heard.”

Exactly, he who is afraid to fail will never succeed. Making mistakes is how you learn, if you are afraid to make them you will never learn.

Nah, you are just another overweight dude living in the basement aren’t you, be honest we all know you are not what you say you are.

Why those people don’t represent the whole of society, why should they have more representation in any video.

Want to be fare lets get a 100 to one video where musicians get only 1/100th of the time to speak, now that would be representative of society.

Funny how humans and monkeys behave the same way isn’tit?

Quote:

The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform a task. According to self-perception theory, people pay more attention to the external reward for an activity than to the inherent enjoyment and satisfaction received from the activity itself.

Source: Wikipedia: Overjustification Effect

One can possibly infer by that, that using copyright to incentivize the creation of anything is a bad thing, because it harms the goal of creating more quality content, so that copyright should not be used for it and instead another way should be found that produces something better, maybe like cooperative production where everybody contributes to a certain production and everybody rips the benefits of that production?

People should always get paid for services and work they do, they should never be allowed to extract rent from past work and copyright do exactly that.

If you believe otherwise have you paid your car manufacturer this month? have you paid the farmers, apparel people, and everybody you depend on to work for their contributions that you steal from everyday and never pay a dime?

I see what happens with open source, everybody contributes to the software then some poor programmer is hired by locals to implement something they need the software to do it and he implement that in the open source code and give it back and so local jobs are created.

We would have more theaters and more retail stores moving more money about in the entire country without granted monopolies, more people trying to create and expand markets, more people experimenting with new business models, more people actually succeeding in selling something in more ways than one.

You forget that humans are also animals, we are not that different from them when it comes to basics, they have all the same underlying instincts that we have and tend to act in the same manner, that is why they are used as proxies in psychological experiments.

You can understand that can’t you?

quote:
“you don’t get to tell everybody else that you can tell them how to use something or for what to use it,”

But you get to tell me what I do with my art?
Hmmm, I guess that’s fair.. I guess?

Yes, theft cannot occur without a loss- but what about unjust enrichment? Is that somehow OK in your world? You take the creative output of another- that is being offered for sale- for your own personal enjoyment, without compensating the rightful owner and that is not unethical? You need to change your name from The Logician to The Self-Serving Excuse Maker.

The same goes for the music industry.
Justin Beiber isn’t backed by low paid Asian musicians.

Are you kidding me?

LoL

Quote:

Lucasfilm http://www.lucasfilm.com. Autodesk? Maya?. We are very proud of what our Singapore team has achieved with. Transformers 3.

images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/lucasfilm_maya_transformers3.pdf

The beauty of it is that I can’t tell you what to do, you can do whatever you like as long as you don’t get to tell other not to use it in some way you don’t like it, there is your limit like everything in life.

You can sell it alongside others trying to do the same thing, you can rip it apart if you like you can go to the couch and keep feeling sorry for yourself what you don’t get to do is to dictate to others what they should do.

Hmmm, how about I get paid for the work I’m doing THIS YEAR?

I think you have North and South Korea confused. Which is a little alarming given the differences between the two.
Secondly, Singapore isn’t a cheap 3rd world country. Singapore is actually #8 on the list of the most expensive cities in the world.
It may just have a better standard of tech worker when it comes to animation etc

How about your work for it.

Remastering, production of merch and apparel is though.

I’m running a small business.
What you have to do is accept you have to budget costs to cover information that isn’t free.
For example, I buy all my software tools. They don’t come free, but they do if you pirate them.
Talking of mythical damage done to big business. It’s largely a myth that piracy really damages big business. It mostly damages small to medium businesses, because we have tiny margins and don’t have the power to diversify to the extent big corps do.

Yah right LoL

I was ripping music in the 70’s, ripping games in the 80’s and was all Google’s fault.

And that is why driving while under the influence of alcohol is illegal

But killing someone with a car while drunk as a skunk recieves a significantly smaller jail sentence typically than, say, fraud or copyright infringement. Nice to know where the government’s priorities lie isn’t it?

> The ownership goes to publisher to prevent authors from
> expanding their “impact area” in the world to too big.
> Exclusive contracts often prevent authors from going to
> next publisher and selling the same product again several
> times. Each product only gets small market.

Now where did you get THAT from? Exclusives prevent the author from going to another publisher but not to stop the writer from doing anything. Publishers want to hold onto writers with a record of turning out best sellers and so they want to increase the “impact” area as much as possible. More sales, you know.

Where did I get that? Well, maybe I’ve sold one of my products to the publishers. That’s how you get information about how the process works. Of course publishers want you to think they can sell the product to half the world and other side of the galaxy. The truth just isn’t available when doing the decision which publisher to pick. Several publishers is _not_ available. (and I know because I’ve _rejected_ publishers — contracts just do not allow both publishers to use the same product) Publishers can’t get the contract if they don’t promise half the world. The reality hits only after signing the contract – the publisher just do not have resources to spread your product to half the available world; so they just use tiny area of it.

Now that author is not allowed to choose another publisher, what is the author going to do? Take his xerox machine and start selling it themselves? One person can only cover very small area of the world, or are you going to start travelling the world and selling it yourself?

That’s a stupid analogy. Look at it from the consumption perspective. Tangible goods are consumed or used. You pay the full price at time of acquisition/use. Entertainment is consumed as an experience. If a film producer has to recoup investment on a single sale (like a manufacturer) then the first guy would pay $20 million and everyone else would get it for free. How would that work? The ability to recoup incrementally over time is what makes entertainment affordable.

I would read Eldred again, including its reference to Graham v. John Deere ( a case involving a patent), paying particular attention to what the Supreme Court has stated about the “precatory clause”, i.e., “In order to promote…”. Even in Eldred the Petitioner conceded that the precatory clause is not a limit on Congress’ legislative power under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

IOW, the “guiding” principle is that if patent and copyright laws are created, the only limiting principles are that they are secured to authors and inventors, and that such laws are to provide exclusive rights for limited times. Eldred and Golan, and many of their ancestors, demonstrate that “limited” is to be determined by Congress, with the Supreme Court as yet not having been presented a case where “perpetual” is the keystone issue.

Alcohol doesn’t cause people with Asthma to practically cough up a lung from the smell like cigarette smoke does.

WTF?! Most countries haven’t had prohibition as the 1930s or never had it as all!

MPAA guy: “bla bla bla (…) it’s wrong!”

If most works were public domain, then we’d be inundated with remakes, sequels, and prequels of movies that we wished would have stayed dead.

Dude, you really have no idea what you are talking about. Creative projects like music or video games are those same all day propositions as well.

Since the professional is in the minority, does that not just turn everything you’ve said on its head? The sheer volume of ego in your posts makes me want to vomit all over them. Of course, I could dry that out and sell it as art and probably make a buttload of cash. Nay, a /metric/ buttload.

Here’s the thing about Mickey Mouse … he could be trademarked, which last indefinitely (until the end of the World or it stops being used). Copyright gets you life of the author, plus 70 now. Maybe Disney Inc. was dumb enough to spend money and time on a fight to protect their competitors.

But I think the Mickey Mouse mark is well known.

Trademark=forever
Copyright = Life +70 …. which would you choose?

He could be is wrong he is trademarket, Mickey is a trademark of Disney, his cartoons on the other hand would have been in the public domain by now and could be used, edited or whatever if it was not for the copyright extensions that took that away from the public along with hundreds of thousands of others works artistic, educational and scientific all because of freaking Mickey mouse.

Except that ignoring copyright is not stealing, is ignoring the granted monopoly to exclusive distribution of a work.

If sharing is stealing I will die a thief.

I see a future where copyright and advertising don’t exist. Call me crazy!

As always, a very thoughtful response.

Unfortunately, Supreme Court opinions are oftentimes laced with seemingly contradictory pronouncements, with the one to which I was referring (repeated twice) being essentially as follows:

More forcibly, petitioners contend that the CTEA?s extension of existing copyrights does not ?promote the Progress of Science? as contemplated by the preambular language of the Copyright Clause. Art. I, ?8, cl. 8. To sustain this objection, petitioners do not argue that the Clause?s preamble is an independently enforceable limit on Congress? power. See 239 F.3d, at 378 (Petitioners acknowledge that ?the preamble of the Copyright Clause is not a substantive limit on Congress? legislative power.? (internal quotation marks omitted)). Rather, they maintain that the preambular language identifies the sole end to which Congress may legislate; accordingly, they conclude, the meaning of ?limited Times? must be ?determined in light of that specified end.? Brief for Petitioners 19. The CTEA?s extension of existing copyrights categorically fails to ?promote the Progress of Science,? petitioners argue, because it does not stimulate the creation of new works but merely adds value to works already created.

Thus, the petitioner’s conceded that the preambulatory clause did not impose a limitation on Congress’ legislative powers, but then proceeded to argue that in effect it was.

The quotes you provide are “mom and apple pie” commentary that appear in decisions such as this (it is not a limit, but let’s now talk about how it might be a limit without actually being one). In all candor, these irrenconcileable positions leave most who follow the Supreme Court in matters such as this collectively scratching our heads.

Nevertheless, the issues raised by the petitioner did not relate to the precatory clause, but to the substantive limitation that rights secured by the clause must be limited in duration, and that by failing to do so the First Amendment has been “laid to waste” (quote mine). As the court stated, this was a rather novel argument, taking the admittedly non-limiting precatory clause and using it to forge an argument that it really is. The court did not bite, and rightly so under existing precedent.

I have never argued that any of this makes any real sense to professional and layman alike, but there it sits and as yet has not been specifically overruled by the court. One this does seem clear however; it is not a de facto limitation, but the Congress does appear to use it as a non-mandatory guidepost when crafting legislation.

We already have one.

Though you’re right, good luck seeing any influence from them.

Same here. If someone can copy your product in its entirety, a free market dictates that they should be allowed to do so. If you can’t compete with them, then you have a problem with your business model.

Exactly. If I have the ability to copy stuff at zero cost, ideally there is nothing stopping me from doing it. That’s the natural state of things. The burden of proof is on those trying to go against nature by setting artificial restrictions like copyright.