61–70 of 132 posts
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I agree that it's not helpful. I do think the verbal abuse and anger comes from the helplessness people feel since they know that these senators are greedy sociopaths that already know bills like this are bad and won't take your voice into consideration.
And yet people vote them in.
Basically a nation state forces people to adopt Stockholm syndrome under the guise of pragmatic acquiescence
So glad I live in Canada. American corporatist evil seems boundless.
Canada signed the TPP which makes copyright 70 years after the death of the creator. Not exactly paradise.
> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ( "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).
How about having a mechanism to allow the opposition to vote on a secondary name which will be included alongside the primary name in official correspondence? Yes, it will degrade into "Bill to Save America / Bill to Destroy America" most of the time, but that's the point: it makes the absurdity easy to spot and difficult to ignore.
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> So it doesn’t induce people to create more works of art and entertainment. Promoting artists to create art has long been sidelined as a goal of copyright. Now, copyright is there to make sure already copy written works are profitable forever. I mean think about it. All they have to do is take old music and movies and repackage it as new media. Disney movies from the 30s can be remade today with CGI. Pop music from…
I'm not a lawyer, but retroactive copyright extensions seem to me like they should be unconstitutional. It's logically impossible to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by dead creators after their works have already been published by extending their copyrights. These laws should only be able to apply to new works going forward.
Which recording was this bill written for?
Elvis. Then the early beatles stuff. In the next couple decades some actual pop songs are ready to hit public domain.
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I don't think it's unconventional. Almost nobody outside certain circles cares about the "public domain." It's a romantic idea that has little relevance. And why do you think that description of copyright law is inaccurate? Copyright protects concrete expression, not abstract ideas, and independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement. How many sci-fi books are basically identical and rehash the same trope…
> It's only infringement if you actually copy someone else's work. This is inaccurate. Copyright has been extended to cover fictional characters for instance. Consider that at the copyright term of 144 years proposed, the character of Count Dracula would still be under copyright, and not freely usable for artistic works.
Theoretically, you could independently conceive of Count Dracula[1] and put him into your own work without violating someone else's copyright. To prove violation of copyright the copyright holder must as a preliminary matter provide evidence that the defendant likely had access or exposure to the copyrighted material. Only once that evidence exists could the fact finder infer, based on similarity, actual copying. For widely disseminated pop cultural material, however, exposure is a rather easy burden to meet.
[1] I presume for the sake of argument that the character Count Dracula is per se copyrighted. But I don't think that's true. AFAIU only certain stylized versions of that character are copyrighted. This necessarily follows from the fact that to show violation of copyright you must first identify the specific material that has been copied, and then show substantive similarity and the extent of copying. IMO modern copyright law is too liberal in this regard (i.e. favors copyright holders) and has gotten rid of many bright line rules that rejected infringement claims early on. But all of this absolutely matters if you're going to trial. The Oracle v Google case was fundamentally about how to construe similarity and extent in the context of APIs.
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There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party t…
One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Co…
http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-not-a...
I'm hardly a fan of copyright, but the arguments that this is not actually an extension seem sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party t…
One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Co…
You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality.
Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem.
Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elvis. Then the early beatles stuff. In the next couple decades some actual pop songs are ready to hit public domain.
Wait, isn't it life plus 70 years? If so, the only Beatles music that would be public domain any time soon would be if there were songs by Stuart Sutcliffe...