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Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

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Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#171

Post by Thorrez »

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #101
SeanLuke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. So using the J.K. Rowling example: provide a plausible way that she could make money off of her writing, and particularly her first risky book, in the absence of copyright.

There are a number of cases where creators of popular works have been granted substantial sums to create subsequent works through crowdsourcing. Edit for examples. Cyan, creator of Myst and Riven, had two very successful Kickstarter to fund new works. First, they raised $1,321,306 to make Obduction, then $1,433,161 for Firmament. Elite: Dangerous raised £1,578,316 for a modern remake. Yes, it works for books, too: ht…

Crowdsourcing still relies on copyright usually, and does in the cases you mention. It's simply preording a game or a book. Without copyright there would be no need to preorder the game or book, you could simply wait until it is out and make a free copy of it.

Both Obduction and Firmament are for sale. They aren't free games.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#172

Post by dredmorbius »

pwg wrote: post #153
dredmorbius wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem simply should not exist.

Agreed. But sadly it does, and while it does the options available are try something else or do without. In this case you can try Firefox for Android on your phone to see if it behaves better than Chrome.

The point really isn't to solve my personal inconvenience of a problem that should not exist.

It's to point out the problem that shouldn't exist, its root cause, and only one very minor, mundane, and utterly ridiculous consequence. Of a problem that should not exist.

At all.

For any reason.

But thank you regardless, your heart at least is in the right place.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#173

Post by metaphor »

stefan_ wrote: post #96
imapluralistyep wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and…

So why did Georgia feel the need to anoint this one the official annotated code? There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself? What doomed their copyright is that they took state money to do it. Is it just corruption and they figured they can charge both sides?

> There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?

Because the annotations angle is a red herring? In the Oyez transcript of oral argument[1], Citron (for the respondent) made what I believe to be a relevant remark disputing the petitioners' assertion that legal annotations would be more expensive:

> One is the actual useful versions of these codes are already plenty expensive. There's a lot of discussion of the cost for a printed volume, but online access, which is what really most practitioners need to use, most people want to use, it's much more expensive than the $400. But, even accepting that the price is lower, I think that favors us, because what's going on there is an exchange of -- you're going to accept a price cap in exchange for the right to publish this officially, not for publishing the annotations, because Westlaw makes the annotations and is allowed to charge six times as much. Lexis isn't going to agree to do the annotation work in exchange for a price cap. What it wants for the price cap is the right to publish it officially.

As I understand the game being played prior to this decision (to be sure, IANAL): although annotations undoubtedly have market value, the market (for liability and other reasons) will nevertheless tend towards official sources, and if you're the official publisher granted monopoly, who cares if the thing being sold has a price cap ($?) when the subscription to the service that provides access to said official thing won't ($$!)...and even if said subscription cost was pragmatically constrained by market forces, the dragnet scales from typical legal/government/academic players in the arena to capturing a proverbial crap ton of otherwise unmarketable endusers on the receiving end of the law ($$$!) while taking share away from direct competitors ($$$$!!). Then make a free, unofficial version available in an attempt to pacify public dissent, but seed a mandatory disclaimer that it may contain errors, so anyone with skin in the game who can pony up will be compelled to do so.

[1] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

supernova87a wrote: post #47

Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era. In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create a…

> I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking

Property rights in general are anti-competitive and support rent-seeking. That's actually very much the point of them; to insulate a particular interest from those who would compete with the person to whom the right is granted and enable the grantee to reliably extract value from the subject of the right, including by monopoly rents.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#175

Post by dredmorbius »

rayiner wrote: post #59
rumanator wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis Where do you fit Italy, Spain, or even Portugal in your logica analysis? Because arguably the US is being hit harder than any of those countries and yet they are respecting their quarantine with notable results. Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Sweden has suffered as m…

The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden. Sweden has had 2,300 COVID-19 deaths for 10 million people. The USA has 25 times as many deaths, but 32 times the population. Indeed, American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm have far fewer deaths. Washington DC is a little smaller and has similar density, but has had 165 deaths, versus over 1,100 in Stockholm. (Deaths are dou…

The folly of using linear scales to score exponential phenomena should be noted here. 32/25 is 1.28, less than one doubling interval.

Which for the US remais about 14 days (a marked imprvement over 2.14 when I first started looking at it), it's about 26 days for Italy.

When looking at exponential (or recently exponential) phenomena, rate-of-change matters vastly more than absolute value.

(And I'm not evev factoring in undercounting, testing failures,and other attempts to game the scoreboard here.)

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#176

Post by icebraining »

neurotech1 wrote: post #161
SeanLuke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. So using the J.K. Rowling example: provide a plausible way that she could make money off of her writing, and particularly her first risky book, in the absence of copyright.

The Andy Weir example. "The Martian" was originally a blog series, and actually his 3rd book. He created an ebook version of The Martian, freely downloadable at the time. People did give him donations though. He only added it to Kindle for $0.99, because Amazon wouldn't let him distribute it for free. It look off from there. When people would rather give the author $0.99 to make it easy to access on Kindle, than down…

In a world without copyright, Amazon could have just converted the book to Kindle themselves and keep the $0.99.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#177

Post by icebraining »

WalterBright wrote: post #121
SeanLuke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. So using the J.K. Rowling example: provide a plausible way that she could make money off of her writing, and particularly her first risky book, in the absence of copyright.

Rowling is quite an outlier - 1% of 1% of 1%. While a fascinating example, it seems unoptimal to center copyright protection laws around her experience.

She's only an obvious outlier after the fact, though; protecting all authors because they are potential outliers is a perfectly valid goal.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#178

Post by Taniwha »

supernova87a wrote: post #47

Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era. In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create a…

Originally copyright was a bargain between the creator and the government (originally the Crown, but now the people) - essentially it's "we give you a fixed term monopoly, and in return you turn your creation over into the public domain afterwards".

Two things have messed with that deal - corporations are now treated as people, who live forever, and copyright extension allows corporations to extend copyright past the lifespan of the public they've made that bargain with.

I'd argue that a bargain that you can never collect on is not a valid bargain - the whole basis of copyright has been undermined - now it's just a monopoly.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#179

Post by icebraining »

WalterBright wrote: post #155
colejohnson66 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who would host the workshops for her? Who would pay her to write more? She was rejected multiple times from multiple publishers.

I write and give away free software. People have paid to come to my workshops. They've paid me to write more. It's sort of like why would anyone pay to attend MIT, when you can watch videos of the lectures for free on youtube? Oddly enough, MIT is doing better than ever.

MIT has an IP-equivalent in the form of the exclusive right to tell people you graduated there. Plus a regular property right in who frequents the campus, and it's known that much of the value comes from the network one forms there.

Re: Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf]

#180

Post by icebraining »

megaman821 wrote: post #148
zozbot234 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the "rights" would not be those of a book publisher but those of a patron/sponsor . Being among the persons or corporate entities who e.g. J.K. Rowling officially acknowledges as the "sponsors" of her work would create a lot of clout, and with that a lot of very real value. Authors used to be funded like that before the current copyright-based system became predominant; it's not just a theoretical model…

If the model is so good, what is preventing her from doing it now? There is nothing in law saying you have to copyright your books, she could simply release it under creative commons. What even qualifies you to know what is best for authors and publishers? I love how so many people love volunteering other peoples work for free or propose they jump through hoop in some byzantine system to make money in a way that is a…

> I love how so many people love volunteering other peoples work for free or propose they jump through hoop in some byzantine system to make money in a way that is acceptable to you.

Yes, that's called democracy. Copyright must be a system that is acceptable to most of us. In fact, copyright itself is more "byzantine" than just having the State issue a stipend to anyone who produces a work of art - yet must we be OK with such a solution?

Similarly, Joseph Galambos considered that people who coined words were due a royalty when they were used. Is is unfair that we decide to use that work for free instead?

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