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YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

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Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the responses seem to be a bit off-target. I'm specifically talking about copyright being linked to the lifespan of the author. It's arbitrary and unfair on authors. I'm not saying we need long copyright terms. I don't know what the optimum would be - maybe 10 years, maybe forever (like indigenous culture).

Our copyright terms need to be reasonable. They aren't reasonable right now. The term has been ratcheted up from the original 14 years with an option for a 14 year renewal to the ridiculous author's live plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication/120 years from creation (which ever is shorter) for works for hire. I'm all for keeping much of the current copyright regime around, including extending the term to s…

Regarding indigenous culture, I'm talking about how natives claim ownership of art styles because their ancestors created them and they use social pressure to stop others from copying them. See https://medium.com/the-omnivore/the-cultural-awareness-requi... for example.

For patents, it's important to ensure that ideas become available for everyone else to enjoy despite giving a monopoly to the inventor. That's because an invention may be the best way to do something and we would be worse off if we couldn't use it. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't protect anything fundamentally important. It's just individual products of human creativity. If you want a cartoon animal, you can always create your own without having to build on Mickey Mouse. The protected ones don't really matter except that they've been pushed into popular culture and people have lapped them up. We could do our culture in a way that doesn't suck at the teat of industrial culture-generation factories like Disney if we didn't want the impediment of copyright.

So I don't think your argument about give and take is really convincing. We could even have infinite copyright and the world would get along fine. If some obnoxious copyright owner enforced their rights to strongly, somebody else could create an equivalent work that was just as good to replace it.

I don't think they'd do it without copyright though, as evidenced by the fact that almost nobody does. Even open source developers still use copyright to restrict distribution (GPL) and amature artists demand credit (CC-BY).

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i havent read the book yet, but i am surmising that the claim is that money originally arose in order to service debts, not because (at that time) it was more efficient?

No - the claim is that money fundamentally arose for taxation (either to the government or to the priests), and may also have been useful for long distance trade between partners with no expected long term relationships.

i see, thanks for the clarification!

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow we can get draconian international agreements on copyright enforcement that the biggest corporations and countries have to bow down to but when it comes to things like child labor or climate change our hands are magically tied.

The notion that nations do not have international agreements that bind countries much more tightly with more rigorously enforced penalties on child labour or climate change than copyright infringement is flat out laughable. If child labour exploitation was enforced as loosely as copyright infringement most of the world's children would be in workhouses.

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Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your examples are real things. They exist in the physical world. Naturally finite, tangible. It makes intuitive sense to most people. Data is the opposite of all that. Society is trying to retrofit all of that physical world intuition into the virtual world. It doesn't work. It sorta worked up to the mid 20th century because data was still tied to the physical world. Now that computers exist and are globally n…

> All of your examples are real things. They exist in the physical world. Naturally finite, tangible. "Ownership" isn't physical. > It makes intuitive sense to most people. This is just pleading to the anonymous crowd of an imagined silent majority who agree with you. Ask a majority if they think it should be legal to open a store selling bootleg copies of Britney Spears CDs, videogames, and whatever else they want t…

> "Ownership" isn't physical.

Land is.

> This is just pleading to the anonymous crowd of an imagined silent majority who agree with you.

What? I'm saying that most people intuitively agree with you when it comes to ownership of physical things. I don't see what the issue is.

> So you think it's not real? Go ahead. Try it then.

Have you ever been to a developing country? There's an entire block filled with stores just like you described less than 15 minutes from me right now.

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. To infringe copyright at scale in the old world, you needed industrial hardware like printing presses. Centralized operations of significant size. Easy target for litigation. Now nearly everyone on this planet has a pocket computer capable of creating and transmitting unlimited numbers of any piece of data at practically zero cost. People don't even realize they're doing it, it's so natural. They create truck…

Ok, so littering should be legal, too? Running a red light? And yellow light?

No?

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So copyright is enforceable because you can theoretically sue everyone? There aren't enough courts. > See how it's nonsense? It's not. Computers are increasingly non-free and DRM is a big reason. The copyright holders want guarantees that I can't run unathorized software against their data even though it's my machine. Combine this with worldwide governamental desire to regulate or ban encryption. It's an existential…

> So copyright is enforceable because you can theoretically sue everyone? There aren't enough courts. This applies to every single crime. Try getting the police or courts to do anything about your stolen bike. They won't. You can have the name of the thief, with video of them stealing it, and it won't be worth their time. Also won't be worth your time and money to sue them civilly. So theft should be legal?

> This applies to every single crime.

Not really. Crimes are limited by reality. One criminal can only do so much.

With copyright infringement you have insane situations such as over 80% of a country's population being guilty of it. At this point, is it even a crime? More like a local custom.

> Try getting the police or courts to do anything about your stolen bike. They won't.

Maybe in the US. It's rather common here. I have examples in my family. I see it in the news nearly every week: some drug addict steals a phone, police arrests him and the phone is returned to its owner.

> So theft should be legal?

From what you just told me, it looks like it already is.

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Absolutely no need to make it technically impossible, or even hard. Then why do they keep doing it? Get them to stop, please. Make them stop adding DRM to everything. Make them get rid of DMCA anticircumvention laws. Just stop interfering with our computers.

Again, it's not hard to stab someone, or to shoplift. Or run a red light. Why keep doing it? Because they made a thing, and they want to make money selling it. Pretty obvious, no?

Didn't you just say they'd be totally fine suing everyone?

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#238

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> ... we have hundreds of years of easy reproduction pre-copyright too. I'd argue the world is different now. We've only had general purpose computers and ubiquitous ultra-cheap networking for the last few decades. Infringing copying on any scale required significant financial investment in the past. I think it's also safe to say there was typically financial incentive behind most mass infringement in the past (i.e.…

> Infringing copying on any scale required significant financial investment in the past. No it didn't. More, yes. But 40 years ago you just needed two VCRs and a blank tape. The only thing preventing mass reproduction was copyright law. And pre-copyright this is also what happened. Because it was just not that hard. Even 500 years ago. > I'm guessing most infringement is today is casual-- created by the ease of copyi…

> It's your argument.

The actual argument is that society has fundamentally changed after the invention of computers. People copy, transfer and even modify copyrighted works every day without even blinking. It happens on an even larger scale than and at a fraction of the cost of VHS tape copying. Copyright no longer makes sense in the 21st century: it's become natural to infringe.

The fact that copyright no longer guarantees artficial scarcity is just yet another sign that it should probably go away.

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not off-target. Copyright terms have nothing to do with the author. If we wanted to maximize author benefit, we'd just make it infinite. Copyright term duration is about society. The truth is copyright is bullshit. Artificial scarcity is exactly that: artificial. It's a lie. Society is doing creators a huge favor: we're all pretending the creator's works are scarce. We're pretending we don't know how to make cop…

Just because it's artificial scarcity doesn't mean it's not useful. Money also has artificial scarcity and that's a pretty good invention. My point is that copyright is to incentivize authors to produce work but if it's limited by the author's lifetime, then older people will be incentivized less than younger people because they won't be able to sell the rights for as much money because they'll expire sooner. We don'…

My point is copyright duration should never have grown beyond 5-10 years to begin with. I'm not saying copyright should expire if the person dies.

> Money also has artificial scarcity

I don't understand. Why do you think that?

Re: YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

#240
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most DVDs were encoded 480p and 24 fps Only in NTSC regions. PAL region DVDs are generally 576p and 25 fps.

Since films are shot at 24fps, how were they converted to 25?

> Since films are shot at 24fps, how were they converted to 25?

Sped up by 4% to make them 25fps. The audio is supposed to be pitch-corrected, but some poorly done conversions did not do that.

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