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'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

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Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#141
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective. What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations Society created the concept of copyright and intellectual property for a reason and it is emphatically not the protection of income streams after you are dead. Whether a person exists who cares about a thing is not a reason to preserve it.

That reason was to generate more works.

Before the conception of copyright artists would create physical works to be sold after they died to support their families in part because such works would be more valuable after they died.

Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people.

Thus copyright not expiring as soon as people die is supporting the original goal of copyright. The total length of copyright is a different question.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#142
post #21

[flagged]

Please don't post tasteless comments like this on HN. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.

Great, I'm never getting into YC now...

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#143
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post tasteless comments like this on HN. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.

Great, I'm never getting into YC now...

On HN we expect people to comment substantively whether they hope to get into YC or not.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#144

> The case centered on the copyright battle involving Anne Frank's diary If there's a copyright dispute somewhere, you can bet it's either Anne Frank's estate, Tolkien's estate, or the Beatles's old record label. It's never the authors who actually made the work. It's always their heirs.

For more like this, see the list of banned authors on MAM. I believe JK Rowling is one.

No, Rowling is not a banned author on MAM (and that list is exactly what I thought of when posting this comment).

Hello, fellow user.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. At that point, you're effectively saying copyright is only sensible for things produced by a single unaided person. Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's li…

> For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem. The solution is just not implemented because in reality copyri…

As for the last point, I was contrasting "a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life" and "from the date something was made available to the public" - i.e. does copyright start when something was first created or when it was first made publicly available?

In that case, whilst it might be a derivative work, the original would be unavailable to be copied so it would effectively reset the copyright clock. This is effectively a parallel to the case in UK copyright law where an unreleased recording is covered by copyright for 50 years, and if released at any point in those 50 years gets covered for 70 years from the date of release.

> Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem.

It is the complete opposite to an entirely solved problem, because not everybody agrees how long copyright should last, or even if it should exist at all. You might think your solution would make it a solved problem, many others would disagree. Governments similarly believe that the copyright term lengths they have enacted into law are correct, and that the lengths enacted by other countries are wrong, and maybe people (including yourself) disagree with them.

As a consumer, I'd prefer copyright terms to be shorter in general, but as someone who's spent around half their career working in games development, and on the kind of games that need a team of 100+ and so need heavy investment and protection in order to recoup that investment, I also support the idea of copyright in general. While my specific area probably doesn't need copyright terms longer than a decade, I can also see that in other areas these lengths are justified - I still listen to older bands, and see it as entirely fair that e.g. Pink Floyd should still receive money if I want to buy an album they made 60 years ago. Similarly, if I want to watch Wizard of Oz, it's absolutely fair that MGM should still get a chunk of royalties from a streaming platform. That money is going to fund the films of the future.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law does not state "you have to pay for this, unless it's inconvenient".

Is your position that legality == morality?

No, my position is that you cannot follow the law a la carte.

Moreover, morality is not objective, therefore anyone can claim that any particular law is against their morality and think it's justified to break it.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your position that legality == morality?

No, my position is that you cannot follow the law a la carte. Moreover, morality is not objective, therefore anyone can claim that any particular law is against their morality and think it's justified to break it.

Yeah, and?

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my position is that you cannot follow the law a la carte. Moreover, morality is not objective, therefore anyone can claim that any particular law is against their morality and think it's justified to break it.

Yeah, and?

My statement was self-contained.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#149

For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title: This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web. It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Interne…

> which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.

Yeah, like third party sanctions.

Oh wait…

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#150
post #54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware it’s the case in the US too? I don’t see what is supposed to be bad or terrifying here. French regulators (why the scare quotes?) entire reason d‘être is what you frame as suspicious, but it’s pretty standard, the state governs the infrastructure in its territory

US regulators don't order ISPs to block websites. The FBI will occasionally seize a domain, but only after a court order.

The seize the domain of a foreign country after US court order.
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