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Re: Access denied

#81

Post by Ryanmf »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #48
darkarmani wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean because there were no good music artists like Elvis and the Beatles 20 years ago? Or even Michael Jackson for that matter?

Ah. Perhaps DHH was right... We're heading OT, but perhaps that I didn't make obvious that my comparison was relative is what caused your confusion. Relative to new stuff, there is very little pirating of stuff over 20 years old (probably even over 1 year old since content is ephemeral). While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relati…

Does "amount of pirating" refer to the number of individuals downloading? The number of torrent files? The number of kilobytes downloaded in aggregate?

Last I checked, all the copyright lobby and their lawyers are interested in measuring are the number of infractions (as a proxy for a completely fictitious number of "lost" sales).

A single Beatles anthology torrent (like this one—http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6061246/The_Beatles_-_The_Com... —with nearly 1000 currently active seeds) contains a wealth of useful material for adapters, remixers, mashup artists, and other curators/authors of potentially transformative works, an untold amount of potential inspiration for creators of all stripes, and ~400 potential infractions waiting for whoever has the misfortune of being caught accessing it.

Compare this to one infraction for downloading a copy of Skyfall.

Furthermore:

>While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relative to the pirating of Sky Fall, The Hobbit, Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Games Of Thrones, etc.

I'm willing to assert—with just as much evidence—that you don't have the aforementioned numbers "to hand" because they don't exist.

Re: Access denied

#82

Post by jlgreco »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #72
guard-of-terra wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gangnam Style is available on Youtube for free. You don't know what you are talking about. You just don't, having missed all this internet stuff. According to Last.Fm statistics it does not seem that any musical band is listened to more than The Beatles. And virtually everything by The Beatles in the circulation is "pirated". And this stuff should be damn near public domain if you ask me.

>You don't know what you are talking about. You just don't Totally. I don't. I just don't. >Gangnam Style is available on Youtube for free. Oh shit. I didn't know that [OK, I did. And it's not free, but you seem not to have read the last billion "you're the product" posts.]. Oh wait, 10 seconds of research on TPB says: Gangnam Style [one song] - 8k Seeds Beatles [lots of stuff] - 3-4k seeds And that's just one modern…

Consider how long the Beatles have been that high, and how long Gangnam Style has been that high. And then of course perform the standard RIAA multiplication by number of song files in each.

Re: Access denied

#83

Post by notahacker »

Contero wrote: post #47
w1ntermute wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. It feels completely unreasonable to me. There's no reason why Disney should be given an exception when others aren't. It's idiotic to suggest that they should get special treatment just because their IP is commercially valuable.

Why is it idiotic? I see more value in having Disney pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP than I see in making sure that their specific content gets into the public domain. Who cares about steamboat willy if Disney is going to fight tooth and nail over it? It's everything else that will expire into the public domain that I care about.

Disney are only willing to pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP if they believe the public are actually willing to pay them significantly more because they have that IP.

It's not such a big deal applied to films; the amount in the government coffers is swollen by less than the extra Disney fans have voluntarily spent on old films, but no great loss is suffered by those who aren't willing or able to pay Disney's asking price. But establishing a principle that corporations should be able to retrospectively extend the fixed-term of their IP for cash would be particularly dangerous when it comes to things like patents...

Re: Access denied

#84

Post by MartinCron »

jlgreco wrote: post #70
MartinCron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a good argument for justification of piracy Which, by the way, is indistinguishable from rationalizing the sentiment of "I want stuff without having to pay for it"

How is that so different from "I want to keep the rights to a cartoon I drew for ever and ever and ever.." ?

Of course it's not that different at all. Rationalizations happen on all sides. We're all guilty of them. I just think we should try to be honest with ourselves and each other.

Re: Access denied

#85

Post by jlgreco »

MartinCron wrote: post #84
jlgreco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that so different from "I want to keep the rights to a cartoon I drew for ever and ever and ever.." ?

Of course it's not that different at all. Rationalizations happen on all sides. We're all guilty of them. I just think we should try to be honest with ourselves and each other.

I don't see much advantage to doing the 'honorable' thing in the face of corporations that won't. If doing the right thing anyway is your cup of tea, then knock yourself out, but I'm really not interested in that.

Re: Access denied

#86

Post by MartinCron »

TruthElixirX wrote: post #75
georgemcbay wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be fine with a provision to extend copyright by paying fees, but only if the fee went up each time, like say 2^x * 100 dollars each x year over the base.

They're already paying fees for this in the form of lobbying. The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now. How does that fix anything?

The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now.

No, lobby money goes to lobbyists, election campaigns, and to support services of the lobby industrial complex. Money from "this should otherwise be public domain" fees could go to the general treasury and help pay for, well, anything.

Re: Access denied

#87

Post by chc »

mcculley wrote: post #28
netrus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that they do it to prevent copying. I can access every article from the newspaper on their website as nicely formated HTML.

You have to go out of your way when writing an iOS app to prevent selection/copy in text views. They had to at least think about it.

Or they just don't use standard text views and didn't go out of their way to re-enable it. Back in the early days of OS X, you'd see a lot of controls that looked like the real thing but acted in subtly different ways because they were re-implementations to add some minor feature.

Re: Access denied

#88

Post by 205guy »

MartinCron wrote: post #45
njl wrote: post #5

There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership. The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades…

If you change it from a nominal fee to a progressively larger and larger fee, you let content owners who really care about their long-term IP ownership compensate the public for the fact that the work isn't part of the public domain, as it otherwise would be.

I think there is a distinction here that needs to be made: copyright is about the marketplace, not actual ownership. If I drew a mouse cartoon and really liked it, and maybe just showed it to my kids every year, I could keep it secret and I (or my heirs) could own it forever. The public isn't owed any private works or any compensation for what could-have-been in the public domain.

But if I want to commercialize this art, then I need to release it into the marketplace. As soon as it is released, it can be copied (or there will eventually be a technology to copy it). Therefore, copyright is society's (and the government's) way of protecting my ability to profit while making my art public. In exchage for that protection, the US laws used to impose (there was not choice, other than secrecy or copyright) the release into the public domain after a certain time.

The issue is, marketplace protection (legislation, enforcement) costs money. The richness of public domain material seemed to justify the cost on society. If copyrights become perpertual, it would make sense to me that the ones who benefit should pay for it. Then again, they could argue that an open marketplace full of desireable content is valuable in and of itself (to both society and the economy).

Re: Access denied

#89

Post by pessimizer »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #21
praptak wrote: post #8

To me the whole copyright extension issue is a good argument for justification of piracy. If the copyright industry side can just replace the social agreement (protection of works in exchange for them going public after a reasonable amount of time) with one they like more, why would it be immoral for the content consumers to to the same? I'm talking about the ethical side, not legalities. The fact that said consumers…

>To me the whole copyright extension issue is a good argument >for justification of piracy. There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old, so I'm not sure how the copyright extension thing would justify piracy...

>There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old

There's an enormous amount of pirating of content that is over 20 years old.

Re: Access denied

#90

Post by jimworm »

The last copyright extension might be the last Disney could push for. If they pushed it significantly further, they would lose the copyright of their older works to the Brothers Grimm.

Walt Disney's first animated film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was published in 1937, 74 years after the death of Jacob Grimm. The Mickey Mouse copyright extension is 70 years after the death of the longest surviving creator.

That said, they could lobby to increase copyright terms for post-1927 works only, or corporate works only and leave natural persons out in the cold. It's uncertain whether these moves would be too politically extreme for Disney.

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