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25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

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Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#231

Post by majewsky »

thinkingemote wrote: post #124
akira2501 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In media one of the things we have to "deal with" is Sound Exchange. When we play a song, we have to keep track of that, and how many people heard it, then settle up at the end of every month with SX. There should be an open royalty payments system for everything and available to citizens. So that I can credibly say, "look, I did pirate this entire TV series, but I want to pay the obligatory contract rate, and I want…

this reminds me of one of the only interesting use cases for blockchainish stuff. Lets say a movie would have it's unique id and links to creators, publishers, writers, actors etc together with how much they should be settled with. You buy a movie and the creators get their proportion automatically. You now have the official version of the movie. You take the movie and make a fan cut and sell that, you are added to t…

Which part of this benefits from blockchain?

Suppose an alternative implementation where a media file contains a signed certificate of creatorship that can include other certificates (so your can cut would have a certificate signed by you, including as a payload the original certificate signed by the original creator). I can immediately see several attacks on this system, but I don't see an attack that blockchain would solve.

For example, the fan cut could just not include the original creator's certificate. I don't see how a blockchain would help in uncovering this. Maybe if the blockchain contains the full video files? Then you could use regular plagiarism detection software or ContentID-type systems to find possible rights violations. But then the blockchain size would quickly balloon beyond the point of usefulness, and also it's not substantially different from just putting all the involved media on public web servers for people to mirror.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#232

Post by eru »

Y_Y wrote: post #213
eru wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...] How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?

I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain. I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options. The…

> They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.

Does the auction have any teeth at all in that case? Just always bit an infinite amount of money, if you don't want to sell.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#233

Post by throwaway48476 »

bandrami wrote: post #223
onion2k wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else.. That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial se…

This sounds like regulatory failure creating a deadweight loss. IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong.

It absolutely is a regulatory failure. The point of copyright was to protect authors not eliminate the public domain.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#234

Post by Akronymus »

SarahC_ wrote: post #156

It is clear now that paper archives are far superior to digital ones. Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased. We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.

> Digital archives don't degrade over time

They certainly do. File formats become obsolete, the drives can accumulate errors, when copying the files from an old drive to a new one, some files may get forgotten about, someone loses some metadata, etc.

https://www.getty.edu/news/preventing-digital-decay/

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#235

Post by throwaway48476 »

modeless wrote: post #101
jpk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.

A better fix would be to make copyright last 5 years from the date of publication. I'm betting that for the vast majority of copyrighted content the vast majority of the money is made in the first five years. Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our c…

The model where copyright has a short automatic duration plus increasing costs to renew every n years is better.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#236

Post by Y_Y »

eru wrote: post #232
Y_Y wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain. I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options. The…

> They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low. Does the auction have any teeth at all in that case? Just always bit an infinite amount of money, if you don't want to sell.

Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.

Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#237

Post by throwaway48476 »

gnicholas wrote: post #204
jpk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.

So if someone makes a painting, or a sculpture, she would have to create and distribute copies or risk losing protection? I could see how this might make sense for things that can be perfectly copied, but not so much for anything that is even slightly 3D.

Lookalike sculptures and paintings are not copyright able.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#238

Post by throwaway48476 »

sytelus wrote: post #142
nutrie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Do I lose the copyright then and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away? That’s just one example of possible implications. My point being, trademark is directly tied to the dynamics of the free market, while copyright only indirectly. And copyright is not forever.

I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generat…

In Europe it was common to have disputes between parties with competing several hundred year old claims. Adverse possession prevents this.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#239

Post by eru »

Y_Y wrote: post #236
eru wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low. Does the auction have any teeth at all in that case? Just always bit an infinite amount of money, if you don't want to sell.

Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work. Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I ca…

You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.

Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#240

Post by Anotheroneagain »

ivanbakel wrote: post #203
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That piece was written literally by the same person. Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine. It's a tall tale.

>Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction. Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his descript…

So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?

I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.

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