451–460 of 614 posts
How much value does Wikipedia or the IA bring compared to your average unicorn startup?
There's a problem there we need to figure out how to solve...
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You're presenting a false dichotomy. The alternative to our current system isn't solely "no copyright at all". It's pretty simple: reduce copyright terms to something much more reasonable. I believe the original copyright term in the US was 14 years. I'm sure we can guess why that has been raised several times since then: greedy corporate interests. Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should…
To go to anything less than 50 years after the death of the creator would require leaving the Berne convention and the TRIPS agreement... and the WTO (since the TRIPS agreement is part of the founding set of agreements in for the WTO). The political will to change that in 164 countries for for the US to leave the WTO would need to be quite substantial.
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How about copyright reverts to its original duration of 14 years with an opt-in renewal for an additional 14 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Various treaties that have been signed and approved prevent that. Copyright longer than 14–28 years is not a bad thing, but copyright for longer than ~50 years is IMO questionable. I’d love to see some of those treaties renegotiated to limit copyright duration for Works for Hire (e.g., most software out there), but also to reduce the overall length of protection…BUT. I’d also love to see RAND compulsory licensing on…
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Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time.
They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
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>> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". The IA would not "fail" i…
The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits. Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul. It can be true that the internet…
Oh you sweet summer child.
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Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
I never thought of it that way before, but that tracks.
I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect f…
There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
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Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
That's not the case here. The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time. They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
I was just addressing the 'how did they survive this long'? part. It's basically the flip side of places that leverage their superior legal resources to draw out lawsuits to get the other side to drop them/make them not worth the time. "We're going to be such a pain in the ass you're just going to quit out of sheer frustration."
Personally, I think the IA fucked up really hard here.
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Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..." If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overtur…
Fully agree. Copyright was originally conceived as a scalpel, but has been turned into a bludgeon. Its current scope and power is far too great.
I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect f…
Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..." If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overtur…
Don't worry, 50 years was only close to the median amount of time that it takes for old laws and old court rulings to be overturned
So it wont undermine your brand to support, ironically, what might be seen as a rogue court outcome nowadays