731–740 of 835 posts
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It all boils down to people fighting for the right to do whatever they want to an unborn soul including shutting down its life processes at will. They all have different justifications and excuses. It boils down to the local morality hence why judges kicked it back to the local governments.
Souls aren't a real thing.
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The original terms do sound pretty good relative to today. 28 years, with some action required to renew. What does the Berne Convention say? “the general rule is that protection must be granted until the expiration of the 50th year after the author's death.” Since this is fairly globally adopted and not very US-specific, does that influence your opinion on terms? What is the reason that the Berne Convention allows fo…
My point is that fairness or guarantee of author’s natural rights or whatever is not in my understanding the fundamental premise for copyright (in the USA). US copyright, at least as established by the US Constitution, is based on practical/utilitarian considerations, and is primarily concerned with benefit to the public. In my opinion the Berne convention (which is instead premised on authors’ supposed natural right…
* edit, since I didn’t see your edits about the Berne Convention. That’s an interesting take. I thought most copyright progressives viewed Berne as a marked improvement over US copyright pre-Berne. The most important aspect of Berne is that it’s globally adopted, so the discussion about terms really needs to be about Berne more than US copyright law, I think?
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My point is that fairness or guarantee of author’s natural rights or whatever is not in my understanding the fundamental premise for copyright (in the USA). US copyright, at least as established by the US Constitution, is based on practical/utilitarian considerations, and is primarily concerned with benefit to the public. In my opinion the Berne convention (which is instead premised on authors’ supposed natural right…
I guess I don’t know what you mean then. The US copyright law and the Berne Convention are both trying to establish what should be deemed fair, with respect to publishing and copying creative works. They establish (define) the fairness of copying something you didn’t create. They also try to be fair to creators and society by giving authors some rights (time-limited exclusive copyright), and by giving society the rig…
Unlike working on something physical (say, a bushel of grain, a shirt, a bookshelf, or a house), when the work is an idea (like a better mousetrap or a catchy song) if someone copies it they can profit from your labor at your expense because they pay none of costs of creation, so can undercut and outcompete you.
Therefore, the thinking goes, creators won’t bother making new intangible creations like textbooks or paintings or inventions if they can’t have some kind of exclusive right over publication or use. (I’m not quite sure what empirical evidence there is for this claim. That seems like an interesting question, but it’s probably pretty tricky to investigate.)
The goal of the copyright and patent system is to encourage creators by granting them limited-time exclusive rights, whereby they can benefit from their hard work. Those creators then do useful work they otherwise would not bother with, and the public benefits.
But the premise is not an abstract ideal of fairness or a guarantee of moral rights for authors and creators. The premise is promotion of science and useful arts. At the point where the copyright term is interfering with (rather than promoting) science and useful arts, it is too long. That is, the fundamental question should be “does this system most benefit the public?” not “is this system the fairest to authors?”
I’ve never met a creator who decided what or whether to create based on their descendants' earning money from exclusive rights to their work 50+ years into the future. Maybe such creators exist, but I would guess those to be vanishingly few.
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I'm confused. You act hostile yet you seem to agree with the original comment. The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that. You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
> The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. No. The reason Roe v Wade was overturned is because conservative middle-aged/old white-guys with money are not happy about people, and by people I mean women , having reproductive choice. It's one of the areas that fundamental islam and conservative "Christians" have significant overlap, and that's not…
I'm a little bit worried about how this might affect Murfie. I've been an advocate for years for a model where people own physical media, and have access to the media they own in any way they see fit. The way this ruling is structured, it paves the way to make even ripping your own CDs to your MP3 player illegal. As common as it is, this right has never actually been tested in court.
That's just sensationalism. If they wanted to go after ripping CDs, they would have gone after that when CDs actually had more than negligible sales. CDs are a dead format in 2023. Most music isn't even released on CD anymore.
This judge seems to think that the first sale doctrine isn't even applicable.
The Google book scanning case had previously indicated that giving full copies of scanned books to the owners clearly fell under fair use in part because of the first sale doctrine. This ruling seems to ignore that.
I do truly hope you're right though.
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Yes, very few works need more than the original 7 years in order for them to get a sufficient return to make them economically viable.
When/where was it 7?
It seems like a good balance between private monopoly and public interest for the shirts of artistic works copyright protects.
If we work together, I think it would be realistic for us to attain a rollback of most recent one or two copyright term extensions by following a two-pronged strategy: (1) Show politicians on the left how copyright term extensions have largely amounted to a transfer of wealth from the public to large corporations, and (2) Show politicians on the right how rolling back to an earlier version of copyright would reduce t…
It's even more obvious that politicians on the right no longer care about limited government. They are currently trying to ban books.
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It’s kind of true that idea of IP is entirely made-up, but it’s also important to recognize that it was made up to support and safeguard author’s living . IP allows authors to require values of content to be preserved, recognized, and financially rewarded(in one-time or recurring payments). In the absence of IP, printing companies can take manuscripts and contents to profit off of copies free-for-all style, bankrupti…
Disney and Electronic Arts employs hundreds of thousands of employees that gets to enjoy their salary. They are paid through the IP. How is that not IP working as intended?
Without copyright, and especially century long Mickey Mouse copyright, it's easier to open your own smaller amusement park that competes with Disneyland, this will employ a lot of people outside LA or Orlando area. Plus I will still buy my games and movies from reputable sources that are fair to content creators. If some poor college students can't afford that, maybe it's good they can get a break.
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I agree with you until you parroted the propaganda trope about Roe v Wade. Roe has always been known as “bad law” even though it was never law, only illegitimate judicial dictate. It’s always been known as one of the worst rulings in American history. It’s unfortunate that you would demonstrate such logically compromise in such a blatant manner, ironically, in a post about “bad law”. Ironically, overturning Roe speci…
I'm confused. You act hostile yet you seem to agree with the original comment. The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that. You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
It's political. It's always been political. It always will be. The judges that want abortions illegal will find legal arguments to make that happen and vice versa.
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Maybe there's a middle-ground between zero IP and the near perpetual IP we have right now. Additionally, we must keep in mind in those debates that piracy causing loss of revenue has never been proven and is an urban legend.
Piracy (stealing) _has_ to cause loss of revenue. It’s right in the definition. There’s no way around it. There’s also a moral component to all this. Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
No that's not, that's an urban legend, feel free to point me to some aggregated research studies proving this, the copyright lobbies never managed to prove that during multiple decades.
Repeating something over and over again on TV by paid lobbyist doesn't make it true, you have to prove it.
> Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
That's debatable at best.