It’s a copyright case about images of his ship that was sunk over 300 years ago. 9-0 said that the guy who took the pictures and videos cannot sue the state of NC
That doesn’t make sense. Copyrights are recognized as intellectual property. Violations of copyright are recognized as a form of theft of property. We have an amendment that forbids “taking” of property without compensation, no?
Yet we have long-established precedent of “sovereign immunity” (going back far longer than the United States) that a state can’t be sued unless the state agrees to be sued :dubious:
So what prevents a State from taking anything it wants from anyone it wants, with total immunity and impunity? What use is the “taking” clause if it can’t be enforced and there is no remedy to violations like this?
Something isn’t adding up here.
To me the sovereign immunity thing is to protect the state and it’s officials from suits over when they are doing their job. The legal system would be a nightmare if anyone could sue a judge over a ruling they didn’t like.
If they do something “outside” their job, then they are unprotected. E.g., a judge coming down off the bench and hitting someone with a night stick.
I think infringing someone’s copyright is not “part of the job”.
It is puzzling why so many judges put intellectual property in a different slot that physical property. Theft is theft.
Think about one consequence of this ruling: The states can now install any commercial software they can get their hands on and use it for free. MS and such will not be happy.
When would a state agree to be sued? As far as software goes, they said they mainly decided this case based on past cases.
Intellectual property and physical property are radically different - theft under the law is typically defined as taking an object from an owner with the intent to deprive the owner of it permanently. Copyright infringement does not remove anything from the owners possession (much less permanently), so is clearly not theft in the traditional sense. In simpler terms, me turning on radio or playing a dvd at a bar instead of rather than my house is just not the same thing as taking the radio or dvd from the owner. Calling ‘you used a piece of your personal property in a way that I do not approve of’ theft just doesn’t make sense.
But there are laws that say I cannot download a song or video from Youtube, Amazon , etc and sell it to someone else.
Have a look at Seminole Tribe v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996), and Central Virginia Community College v. Katz, 546 U.S. 356 (2006).
Seminole is the modern treatment of state sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment. Short version, an individual can’t sue them unless the state agrees. Katz is the one time the US Supreme Court saw fit to find an exception to that immunity in bankruptcy law. 5-4 decision, and I’m not convinced they got it right.
Now, and I haven’t read the decision, can the photographer force the state to pay him a nominal royalty through some sort of non exclusive copyright license? Or may the state take and use his intellectual property however they see fit?
Predictably, no photos of Blackbeard’s ship in the article.
here is the decision
ECU (East Carolina University) has more than 250k artifacts from the Queen Anne’s Revenge
It seems the case was decided on the basis of sovereign immunity.
But what I find particularly odd is that he was specifically hired to document the salvage. Granted, he was hired by the salvage company, not directly by the government. But still, typically these sorts of jobs are work for hire and the contract would usually include transfer of copyright. So it’s not like he wasn’t already paid for it, there was just a failure to draw up an appropriate contract.
But the point is apt because it denies the owner all economic value of his or her property. Sure, if I pirate a copy of the movie “1917” the copyright holder still retains a copy in his or her possession, but that is not what makes it valuable. If I or anyone else can reproduce it without penalty, then the copyright itself becomes worthless.
Perhaps the Plaintiff here should have alleged a taking instead of copyright infringement, but the State of North Carolina violating his copyright does not deprive him of economic value as presumably he can enforce it against non-state violators.
But the prior point was excellent. Can states now load their computer systems with “free” Windows, MS Office, Adobe Acrobat Pro, any software they want, etc.? Can the state release the newest movies and show them for free to poor people (or to anyone)? Sell Disney merchandise?
The fact copyright expires rather argues against this interpretation.
Microsoft can enforce licensing schemes using phone-home mechanisms. That kind of remote shutdown will serve their purposes.
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But while the copyright is in effect, you have rights. It’s like leasing something. If you lease a building from someone and someone else moves in, refuses to leave or pay you, then that is illegal. That the lease expires is immaterial. (That an expiration changes things is a amazingly weak argument, IMHO.)
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In case you hadn’t noticed, these phone-home schemes and such are routinely gotten around. There’s an immense number of people out there running MS software without paying them a dime. Plus not all software developers can afford to implement or, far more likely, get a license for such a method.
This is just backwards. The “object of value” is not access to the content the copyright holder created. It is obviously trivial to let somebody see what they themselves created. The “object of value” is the right to copy it, which the creator typically wants to get money for. That’s why it’s called a “copyright”.
That would depend. As a still photographer, I haven’t done a “work for hire” job in over 20 years. When you hire me to do a job, you’re paying for a license to use my work in a particular manner. I retain copyright to all my images. This is not unusual in the photo business. Don’t know what it’s like with video.
I’ve seen part of the ship at this museum in Beaufort NC https://ncmaritimemuseumbeaufort.com/
and like everything else it’s closed now.
Exazctly and the traditional definition of theft, and what happens if you steal a physical copy, is that the owner no longer has the object. In the case of copyright infringement, the owner still has it. They are simply not the same thing, and straining analogies doesn’t change that. That’s why the courts treat things like copyright and trademark infringement differently than theft, because they ARE different than theft.
That is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether anything has been stolen. If I open a garbage dump next to your vacation home and tank the value of it, the property has been made worthless, but nothing I did can reasonably be called ‘theft’, it’s a different tort or crime.
Whatever strained analogies people try to make, it’s very obvious that courts treat ‘theft’ and ‘copyright infringement’ differently because they are two things that have major, objective differences between them. There is really nothing ‘puzzling’ about why ‘taking an object from someone’ and ‘using a copy of an object that you bought in a way the owner doesn’t approve of, or make a copy without permission’ are treated differently by the courts.
Well, I’m no lawyer, but I’m surprised that passed even cursory examination. Intent? If I steal your $100 bill, it’s because I want $100 – I don’t give a flying fig whether or not you’re deprived of it. In fact, if I could get $100 for free AND leave you the $100, so you wouldn’t be deprived and maybe wouldn’t even know or care, I’d much prefer to do it THAT way. So “intent to deprive” seems like a silly and trivial test for theft.
But, again, I think you are misrepresenting what is valuable. If you have a physical copy of the movie “1917” nobody is complaining that you have a copy of the movie. I mean, they are, but the thing of value that you are taking is the copyright holder’s exclusive right to make a copy, not the copy itself.
That’s been the definition of larceny for about 700 years, so it has some pedigree.
I think that you are confusing “intent” with “purpose.” If you take my $100, and intend to keep it for yourself, you intend what you do which is permanently deprive me of it. You keeping it for yourself by definition permanently deprives me of it.
That distinguishes it from seeing it fall out of my pocket in a store and you pick it up and hand it back to me; or you see the cell phone that I dropped earlier and you put it in your pocket and carry it over to lost and found. You still took what was mine, but it was not theft because you didn’t intend to deprive me of it permanently.
Or if I take your sweet car for a joyride, it is not theft. Yes, I took your car, but I intended to bring it back. It is not theft even if I wreck it and it never comes back to you because I did not have the requisite intent. It’s not theft, but it violates statutes pertaining to joyriding.