Wonder if this is an attempt to create the groundwork for a legal precedent supporting "environmental personhood": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_personhood
Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
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Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#12Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree. Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
it's not just what to do with their rights, but the creative effort to create a work that deserves copyright. Trees don't make choices and engage in that type of creativity, nor does the forest floor or canopy.
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#13There's two factors to copyright: economic rights and moral rights. Economic rights are concerned with the author's ability to protect personal monetary gain from the use of their work. Moral rights are concerned with the author's ability to gain reputation via acknowledgement, and prevent loss of reputation via improper framing/usage of the work. Generally, the idea of all this is to allow authors to maximize personal gain and minimize personal loss. IMO, the fundamental benefit to society of this framework is that it encourages people to voluntarily make decisions to produce creative works that will be a net benefit -- without these protections, people would not produce as much creative work because there would be less incentive to direct their effort in that direction.
From that perspective, it doesn't really make much sense for an entity other than a human or group of humans to hold copyright of a work. A non-human entity doesn't have the capacity to choose where to direct their efforts based on future economic/reputation gain, so copyright or lack thereof will not affect their contributions to creative works.
So whether this is good or bad depends on the specifics of how copyright works in the relevant jurisdiction. If a human author has the ability to unilaterally choose whether any non-human entity will hold copyright of a work, or if a human has the ability to unilaterally capture all gain resulting from the work, then I see this as generally good -- it has no major negatives, and allows humans to recognize the important of non-human entities.
However, if a non-human entity automatically holds joint copyright, and a human coauthor cannot make unilateral decisions about the work, then this could be a bad thing. Human would tend to choose to avoid involving a non-human entity in the creation of a work, since they would get less incentive from doing so. That to me feels like the exact situation that that copyright was invented to avoid.
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#14Wonder if this is an attempt to create the groundwork for a legal precedent supporting "environmental personhood": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_personhood
This reminds me of Cyrus the Great being so angry at a river that drowned one of his horse that he spent a summer having his army carve it up into 360 channels.
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#15This reminds me of the Monkey Selfie[1] dispute. A photographer set up a camera in a forest and a monkey came by and activated it and took a picture. The resulting picture became famous and PETA tied up the photographer in court for years trying to get the copyright assigned to the monkey. They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#16> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship. So is this really meant as some kind of backdoor activist legal hack (e.g. use this copyright case to ultimately change the environmental policy of some major countries)? It smells a little like https://en.wikipedia.org/…
> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship. That sounds unlikely. Just because one country does something silly does not mean other countries have to follow suit.
That is why we have WIPO.
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#17I was really hoping this was about the iconic song "Ecuador" by Sash!
That would be 25 years too late, but still well deserved
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#18Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree. Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
Perhaps forests should be legal persons?
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#19Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree. Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
> Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons.
Good thing they got that covered, then. As per the article:
> In a historic ruling, the legal personhood of the Los Cedros biological reserve was recognised by Ecuador’s constitutional court in 2021, when it determined to cancel mining permits in the reserve.
> Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
People can be corrupted and bought. Someone who acts on behalf of another can betray the latter for personal gain. See for example the stories of Britney Spears and Brain Wilson.
On the other hand, if the entity owns itself, you can’t legally harm it without consent, which can’t be given. See also The Tree That Owns Itself.
Re: Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator
#20Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree. Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
Perhaps forests should be legal persons?
And this one is, as per the article.