51–60 of 61 posts
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Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." -- United States Constitution
The Constitution was written long before copyright and patent were put on sound economic footing.
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Can you provide a citation for your opposing view? Here's a more recent quote from the Supreme Court: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an author's creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this…
Mark Lemley's paper on the subject is my go-to: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=582602
> > Intellectual property rights are an exception to that norm, and they are granted only when – and only to the extent that – they are necessary to encourage invention.
Meanwhile, you have not offered an alternative justification for copyright monoplies, as far as I've noticed.
edit: It's also notable that a major purpose of Lemley's paper is to debunk the notion that there is any meaningful "free rider problem" in the world of patentable and copyrightable, but you claim a "free rider problem" is a major incentive to keep copyright and patent law.
How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money. The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get…
Define that in a way that makes it intrinsically desirable. Otherwise, it's a red herring.
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A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claime…
>You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive? I'll grant you that the phrasing of the 'myths' on the site is more absolute than is generally used by copyright proponents, but the arguments are extremel…
In addition to that, there's the fact that a lot of the benefit to creators of a lack of copyright monopolies is the increased richness of source material to draw on for inspiration of new works. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about "ripping off" existing material to make a fast buck, either. I'm talking about the fact that every creator is inspired to some extent by the works he or she consumes, but many works are not as easily accessible to the potential creators of the future, so that the inspirations that might arise after a creative person experiences a given existing work that is, unfortunately, never actually experienced by that person due to lack of legal distribution, simply never come to pass.
Then, of course, there's the fact that people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the propaganda of the copyright economy that people who have not yet made a name for themselves as creators of marketable works are convinced without any evidence apart from that indoctrination that their major problem in life is figuring out how to make money off of copyright, which to them by default involves appealing to a major distributor to publish their work. The truth of the matter, of course, is quite the opposite: the major problem in life for such a creator of marketable works is getting it into as many hands as possible. The biggest enemy of the common creative person is obscurity, not "free riders", "pirates", or whatever else people imagine would destroy their lives if not for the protectionist monopoly power of copyrights.
My experience, as a writer and programmer of mixed success, is that when people notice my work I have a difficult time stopping them from giving me money or otherwise offering me incentives to continue; when they don't notice my work, I can't get people to accept it for free. There is no hyperbole in hits. I have literally put together websites where I attempt to distribute materials for free, just because I think it's good and should be seen by more people. The result is that nobody notices for long periods of time, but then eventually people might start taking notice -- and when that happens, well, to use one recent example, someone actually tracked down one of my email addresses via intensive web searching then used PayPal to contribute money to me because they couldn't find any other way to pay me for work I had already given away to the world for free, using a license that generally mimics the conditions of a world without copyright, on a site where I specifically stated that circumstances made it legally inadvisable for me at that time to solicit any contributions for my work.
Honestly, I think the concession that people might make a little more money with copyright than without it is not only negligible, not only overcome by the unrelated benefits of a lack of restrictive copyright monopoly, but actually the opposite of how it would work in general.
In short . . .
> The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
I think -- based not only on a more comprehensive overview of the economic effects of copyright than most people ever imagine, and not only on observation of what happens when people start working with business models that do not strictly rely on copyright (e.g. Radiohead, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Google, EnterpriseDB, and so on), but also on personal experience many times over -- that even just considering the direct effects on published, financially successful creators themselves the benefits outweigh the detriments, and when you add in those who are not yet so successful those benefits only increase.
Then, as you say, there's the matter of people other than the creators themselves. Except for push-marketing middlemen and lawyers, everyone gains. The real reason we don't see as many examples of this in action as we'd like is because the people whose propaganda makes up the majority of the argument are the push-marketing middlemen.
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Can you explain why a patronage model is unable to solve these problems?
Perhaps it could, but clearly we produce vastly more new works under copyright than we ever did when we relied on patronage. That doesn't necessarily demonstrate a causal effect, but again, I come back to the argument that nothing today is stopping wealthy patrons from funding new projects, yet hardly anyone is. I don't know why we'd assume lots of multimillionaire philanthropists would, either individually or with a…
When patronage was en vogue, we didn't have as high a rate of literacy or access to digital editing tools. These facilitations of the process of creation, even ignoring things like cheap paper and disposable writing implements that last months and cost less than a bottle of water, dwarf any legal changes that might otherwise apply (notwithstanding France's dark period of outlawing the printing press altogether as a tool of sedition). If copyright has anything to do with the current rate of creation, it is primarily by impeding the spread of inspirational materials that might otherwise hasten creative people's efforts. Compare copyright-controlled England with mostly copyright-free Germany in the 1800s to see how the freedom to copy and resell lit a fire under the asses of both writers and publishers, and created a lot more writers by spreading knowledge far and wide and as rapidly as possible to create a (for the era) highly educated population.
> it would take lots of very rich people giving up a lot of their wealth to get anywhere near funding just what today's movie industry costs
I think it's pretty clear that there is little correlation between relative level of funding and relative quality in the movie industry. In any case, there are other ways to get funding without relying on copyright than purely status-related patronage.
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http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/ Also, your complaint about them being 'strawmen' is true, but makes no sense. They are common 'myths, which is to say exaggerations of things people claim everyday. You yourself make several of his 'myths' in your post. > The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Wi…
> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made)…
I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions.
> not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.
That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability.
> More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position.
It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you.
> There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
Personally I am torn on this topic. We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright. On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry…
How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims.
> Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.
Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors.
> Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.
Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject:
We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.
So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine???
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Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put thos…
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that ris…
I don't think economics works the way you think it does. You just removed not only the incentive to make a better (but more expensive to produce) work but also the financial incentive to create any work at all.
Why is this a problem?
Why is it a problem to replace a system that supports the creation of original, innovative works with a system that pushes heavily toward creating endless derivative works and minor variations of the same tired ideas? Are you really asking that question seriously?
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
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> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made)…
> I have never seen anyone . . . I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions. > not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that. That's because…
Well, since you appear to be quite happy putting words under my fingertips, perhaps you'd like to tell me what I think on this subject? I'll give you a free clue to start with: at no point in this discussion have I come anywhere within a hundred miles of defending the likes of Chris Dodd and the xxAA style Big Media lobbying groups, whose attitudes I have opposed consistently up to and including contacting my elected government formally on several occasions. (I'm not in the US, but we have some similarly aggressive copyright advocates here in Europe who are just as dangerous.)
My problem with a lot of the more recent comments in this discussion is that it's suddenly turned from talking about the original article to talking about some strawman at the opposite extreme as if those of us who don't agree with Falkvinge are somehow supporting the status quo. The original article takes an IMHO foolish absolute position of completely revoking copyright without proposing any alternative model to promote creation and distribution of new works. However, the alternative of breaking the social bargain the other way is no more palatable to me, with its effectively unending copyright via the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and similar legislation, ever more absurd penalties for hypothetical and often purely economic damages, and so on.
There is a middle ground, and what I would have hoped would be a common sense viewpoint: legislative policy on this kind of issue should be driven by clear moral and/or economic principles, and it should be made based on empirical evidence wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, neither of the sides taking extreme views on copyright is even close to having a decent case based on real data so far.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue there, but it looks like it's somewhere between a slippery slope fallacy and an attempt to undermine the existence of any legal system.