What copyright costs us
It was depressing to read that William Patry, Google's senior copyright counsel, has decided to stop blogging. With only occasional gusts of lucid intelligence in the blogging community, Patry's blog was a full-out gale.
Due to "crazies...who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others" by comment-bombing Patry's blog, and due to the deteriorating use of copyright to harm rather than help, Patry has opted to leave the blogging building:
Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again.
On the "crazies," I completely understand. Anonymity and geographical distance make people bold to say things that ought not be said. I'm also guilty of this. I suspect we all are. Some things are too easily said with a keyboard.
But on the latter, it's dispiriting to see confirmation from such a copyright expert that we may be past redemption. In both copyright and patent law, the powerful continue to hoard their power (which is natural), while judges and lawmakers seek to capitulate to that power (which is not natural--or shouldn't be).
We have extended copyright terms to the point of inanity--competition moves ever faster, to the point that technology copyrights and patents seem to be measured in decades. And then there is patent law, home of a widening array of specious, obvious patents.
And so we're increasingly getting the industry that we deserve: a collection of monolithic monuments to old ways of delivering value. Let's hope that Google, open source, software as a service, and other disruptions to the static way of doing business succeed (so that we can have new monopolists to topple 10 or 20 years from now :-).
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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Copyright was meant to foster sharing of information while giving the creator a limited monopoly. The limited portion has been skewed out of proportion.
Contrary to popular belief, copyright is not their to protect big business, nor to protect you from big business.
It is there to encourage creativity so our country can have a healthy public domain. In 100 years the public domain will look very similar to how it does today and that will be extremely damaging to our once great country.
This notion that someone having copyright protection is some how stopping innovation on the web is just plan stupid.
All it means is people don't want to pay for the creative energies of others.
My bank requires I pay my mortgage. Without payment of my creative property, how am I going to do that?????????????
Corporate America has already bought Congress to make the Orphan Works copyright changes, so they don't have to pay for content. They simply want to make a taller hurdle for small copyright holders to jump over to protect their work. "Oh gee, I made a good faith effort to see who owned this material, but YOU didn't register it with the Orphan Works government agency, so I don't have to pay you."
c/net news.com should lead the charge by giving their copyrighted material away for free.
Anyway, I highly doubt that if a big company really wanted your content their lawyers wouldn't be able to take it (or at least make the cost of defending yourself so exorbitant that it would be worth it to you). So it's a joke.
Really, how is such a term required for you to pay your bills, is there a lot of ground rent in the afterlife?
This way, the recording industry would have an incentive not to snatch the rights from the artists but enter into licensing agreements under which the artists remain in control of their IP.
There are so many sound recordings from the last century which are no longer maintained by the recording companies who own them and as a result many will have deteriorated so much by the time the copyrights expire that they cannot be restored and will be lost forever. A similar situation with movies, too. If the copyrights were to expire sooner, and those works enter the public domain sooner, then they would be looked after by businesses specialising in restauration and reissuing expired copyright works. The way it is now, those businesses will be allowed access only after it's too late.
Short version: read article, then reply.
Everyone trumpets Google as the ideal free open company. Google's business model is to access free content so that they can deluge you with paid ads when you use their search engine. It's in their best business interest to have "free" access to everything so they can flog their ads. If Google was so altruistic about copyright then they should publish their search code as free open source code so anyone can compete with them. We all know that won't happen.
That is the problem, most people don't understand the difference between patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks and why they exist.
"We at Google want to make money selling ads showing other people's work. They fight us on it so the laws needs to change so we- and we alone- can make money. It would be hard and expensive to create the work (news, books, and video) on our own. It is much cheaper to just use someone else's work."
Does a Picasso lose its value because its creator is deceased? What about his heirs?
Creatives are not truck drivers, dock workers etc.
They are not paid by the hour. Actually they are not paid at all; until they create something that people feel has value. These creative people are who the copy write laws are intended to protect.
All of your readers could do with a read of Laurence Lessig's book on copyright, Free Culture. It will give you a great perspective on how copyright has evolved since the beginning of the 20th century, and how the advent of the Internet has changed all the rules, while regretfully, not changing too many of the associated laws or business models.
Too many people are living in the past, and unfortunately many of them have the power and wealth to make sure that we stay there (Oil companies, Pharmaceutical/Healthcare Organizations, Record Labels, and even the IRS).
Lessig's Blog: www.lessig.org
Free Culture Used on Amazon (no need to kill a new tree): www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0143034650/ref=dp_olp_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1217958728&sr=8-1
The collective intelligence represented so dramatically and elegantly by blogs also can be used to address the issue Mr. Asay raises about obvious patents. Congress (the proposed Senate Patent Reform Bill) and the judiciary (the U.S. Supreme Court 2007 KSR decision lowering the bar to proving patents "obvious") are all part of the momentum to reform the U.S. Patent system to its original raison d'etre, to have true innovation drive the patent system. What is needed is access to better prior art for the U.S. Patent Office to more accurately determine true innovation. http://peertopatent.org/ is an effort endorsed by the USPTO to effectuate this goal. The blogging community can support that effort by using and sharing this site as a tool for improvement.
Similarly, while the Orphan Works Act has received criticism (notably, the unfairness of registering), bloggers on a grassroots level should ensure that they register and encourage their peers to do so - sit atop the hurdles to better strategize. And I respectfully suggest self-regulating your communities, making a commitment to a higher level of discourse. A web site http://www.topcoder.com/ is an excellent example of that type of community. Otherwise, valuable copyright attorneys who can scour the Act to identify any advantages for individual authors may find no way to avoid diatribe but for abandoning discourse. The collective intelligence itself of blogs without any copyright or patent protection is a tremendous source for improving both systems.
I'd be honored to hear the opinions of other readers.
Cheryl Milone
Founder, Article One Partners
Contrary to popular belief, copyright is not there to protect big business, nor to protect you from big business.
It is there to encourage creativity so our country can have a healthy public domain. In 100 years the public domain will look very similar to how it does today and that will be extremely damaging to our once great country.
we all love patry because he favors reason over extremism and his writing is a healthy dose of centrism in an increasingly polarized argument. he is giving up on blogging because the copyright system has gone off course from the center and veered into extremist territory.
This is one reason I have refused to register my arts. The crazy costs of the courts.
One good case of monopoly is DISNEY. Mickey Mouse (the original sketch, not todays version) is STILL PROTECTED. It should be public domain due to the fact they stopped using it, and Walt's passing. Try using it and you will be in court faster than you can blink.
Nope, but if your only claim to getting paid is something that you did 50 years ago I hope you got a ton of money as an inheritance. As a senior IT professional I don't get paid for the work that I did 20 years ago, I get paid for the value that I create today.
The copyright system was initially designed to accomplish the same thing. Provide for creators to earn dollars for the value of their works for a limited time. You should probably read what it says. Limited time value of the work. Then the expectation would be that you would create something new of value. Just like every other working stiff has to do. Or if you can't create something new of value allow others to expand on the work to create something of value.
Imagine if the Bach or Beethoven family could have asserted copyright forever on their work how much poorer society would be. Or what if the Phoenicians had been able to patent a series of marks to represent letters and words? Heck, nobody would even be able to comment in writing about their "loss of revenue" without first getting their permission.
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by cheezr
August 6, 2008 8:58 AM PDT
- Totally agree - and for an interesting insight globally search and replace the word 'copyright' with the word 'microsoft'...
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