Shatner signed a contract with a company that didn’t bother to sell any product. He’s kind of SOL, regardless of whether or not someone else tries to fill that market niche.
I my world, a ticking clock on exclusivity might get CBS to rethink the idea of not bothering with a DVD, maybe kick off a budget DVD department that gets these products out into the market with a minimum of fuss.
Exactly. Creative people create their own characters. That’s part of the job.
The thing is that CBS has expenses in distributing the work that the OP does not. They have contracts to live up to, payments to make, and other things that make it unprofitable to distribute the show. Further, the people who create the show deserve to get paid for their work.
Also, no one is going die if CBS keeps the show unavailable. No one is going to suffer a terrible disease. People will just have to go through some time period without watching a TV show. Hardly a major disaster, and at most a trivial inconvenience.
Life plus 75 is a bit long and going back to life plus 50 would be fine. But Life plus 50 has been the European standard for over a century and it didn’t seem to hurt their creativity one bit.
Quite the contrary. Capitalism is very willing and able to provide “wants” (such as entertainment and other non-necessary items) for those who want them and are willing and able to pay for them. My point was that society and the law are more willing to make concessions to genuine needs, and not so willing to make concessions to mere wants.
I think that as long as we’re talking about copyrights, the “fair use” exception is a great example of what I’m trying to say. If you want to copy a copyrighted work, and you can do so legally because of “fair use”, it is because your creativity would be stifled otherwise, and so you are allowed to copy just what you really need to copy. But if you want to copy a copyrighted work, and “fair use” does NOT allow you to do so, it is a safe bet that your goal is more of a “want” than a “need”, at least in the eyes of those who wrote those laws.
Google was sued (or threatened with them) for their Google Book projects without proper permission and stopped doing it. Now it’s just public domain works and those where they were given permission.
Even when they started their Google Books service, they contacted authors for permissin (they contacted me, for instance). They got in trouble in the beginning because they didn’t get permission from the actual copyright holder.
Google – which certainly can afford all the lawyers it needs – knew they held no cards.
Why do you assume that a corporation whose job is to make money is just being lazy and sitting on a potential profit?
Isn’t a more likely explanation that CBS has crunched the numbers, including the cost of negotiating residuals with the actors, and the residuals for the writers, and the cost of paying for licences for music, and the costs of manufacturing and distribution; and assessed those costs against the likely sales, and concluded there would be no profit?
Note that the OP has not mentioned any attempt to compensate the actors, writers or musicians out of the profits he’s made.
Would a free-lance distributor in your world be able to ignore the claims of the actors, writers and musicians to be compensated for their work?
Buncha ways. Artists contribute more to the world if they create original characters and universes, rather than just work in a borrowed one. (Batman universe, Crumb, Star Wars) Of course, 95% will be crap either way.
There’s a major correlation between the number of talented people entering a field and the financial rewards of the field. The creative fields are very hard to make a living in, and residuals/royalties encourage people to stay in the fields as a career. There’s not much job security otherwise. Popularity dies very easily, and grabbing it again often proves impossible. The lottery effect — the chance of hitting it huge someday, keeps dreamers going. Hitting it big and then having publishers freely release the 10 albums you created before you became famous, with no compensation to you — well it would suck, and make people not want to continue.
…and to continue on that theme, if publishers can just wait a decade or two, and then use a creator’s work without compensation that’s likely to become a reason for not publishing their early work.
In regard to Mr. Natural, I don’t think it would help Bob’s creativity if he had to keep working with characters he developed 50 years ago in order to retain rights to them. If he wants to produce a Crumb version of the Bible instead, that’s a good thing for the world. A little financial security can be like tenure and sabbatical — it lets people pursue their dreams without total attention to careerism.
———
Do those reasons trump the competing idea that the most and best creative works will be produced under brutal dog-eat-dog competition? Couldn’t say for sure, but to me they’re reasonable arguments in support of the morally superior alternative. (I really don’t care for the idea of a publisher saying, “I’m sorry Ms. Kominskey, but with Bob dead we won’t be be sending any more royalty checks for our newest repackaging of his cartoons.)
More? Earlier? I don’t know. Perhaps if F.W. Murnau had changed the screenplay for Nosferatu just a little bit more, then perhaps he would have avoided an infringement ruling — honestly, I’m not sure that under current American copyright law that the Bram Stoker estate would have won that case.
Obviously, I am in favor of the public domain. I’m fine with Count Dracula appearing in new stories by new authors without the permission of Bram Stoker’s heirs. I’m fine with Shakespeare and Jane Austen being freely rewritten into many forms. I’m fine with Sherlock Holmes starting to go into the public domain. I’m fine with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic book; the movie was horrible).
On the other hand, I’m fine with Anne Rice currently having control over Lestat, for the rest-of-her-life-plus-something.
So there’s got to be a balance. Where do we draw the line? There’s no intrinsically perfect number. In my view, 14 was way too short, 28 was way too short. Life-plus-50 seems fair to me. Life-plus-100 (Mexico) seems unnecessarily long. Is 70 too long? It’s a judgment call. I don’t know what the perfect number is.
Exactly.
If Chrysler (owner of copyright in “X Title”) isn’t giving you what you want, you don’t get to walk into a Chrysler dealership and just take it. You look to Ford (owner of copyright in “Y Title”) who is giving you what you want.
You might not be getting exactly what you want—this exact work in this exact medium at my chosen price—but you might be getting two out of three—a similar work on DVD for $45 for a box set.
That is capitalism. That is the market working. Any particular sellers doesn’t have to offer exactly what any particular buyer wants at a price the buyer likes and any particular buyer doesn’t have to buy what any particular seller is offering at the price being offered.
A lot of people seem to me to be saying something like: “Well, the music industry isn’t losing money because of piracy. They’re losing money because they’re soulless corporate vampires who have for years ridden on the coattails of successful 1960s and 1970s artists and now are only interested in formulaic hit machines. If they bothered to develop quality artists and gave them the freedom to innovate and offered their works in exactly the form I want—‘ABANDON FAILED BUSINESS MODELS’—(singles, not albums; digital downloads/streaming, not physical medium; for 99 cents; not $19.99), they wouldn’t be in such trouble.”
Well, if all that’s really true, then what people would be doing would be abandoning the product of the corporate music industry and instead making independent musical innovators, local musicians, live musicians, musicians who offered exactly what they wanted in the form they wanted rich beyond their means.
Is that what’s happening? Or is it that people are rejecting the terms offered by the corporate music industry but going ahead and taking their product anyway through piracy?
Why are we even discussing this anymore? Kamakiri isn’t coming back it looks like?:D:p
Oh, he’s screwed. Not much point discussing him anymore - CBS is going to own everything he has including his computer, so it’s not like he’ll be a member for long. Broader copyright law with regard to abandonment, now there’s an interesting (albeit rehashed) topic.
Unless he has deep pockets, it’s unlikely that CBS will spend much time on his case. If he insists on making a big stink, I imagine they will offer a settlement to make it go away, otherwise, I think they’ll let it drop. How many cases go beyond a threatening letter?
No. No, you did not.
There is no way the word “wrong” can cover what you did. I’d rather describe it as “commit an error of judgement of mythic proportions”.
That Kamakiri should totally keep selling dvds illegally. That’s the vibe I’m getting from this thread.
As a straight moneyline bet (even odds on whether CBS sues or not), I’d go for “no.” But the risk:reward ratio is such that it makes absolutely no sense to poke the bear. My guess is that CBS does not ignore that email, but probably will reiterate to the OP their position and if the videos go back up, CBS will take it up a notch. They certainly have done so in more egregious violations in the past. I wouldn’t fuck with a cease & desist myself, but that’s just me.
Doesn’t matter at all.
The owner of the copyright has all rights to distributing the material unless they explicitly waive those rights. If they choose not to do so, that does not grant anyone else the right to do it.
Now, do I agree with that principal? Only sort of. They have the right to have their material be un-distributed. They have clearly made the decision that the costs associated with selling those videos themselves outweigh any possible profits. Or they may have decided that such-and-such material is something they no longer wish to be associated with. And since they own the rights, nobody else may make a profit from them without their explicit permission.
BUT - if they’re not interested, and there’s a demand, why not let others provide the media. which would otherwise be lost and forgotten?
The argument there is that if they let the OP sell whatever, someone else is going to try to sell copies of other intellectual property without recompense, and that’s a slippery slope. So, they give any infringer the legal smackdown.
OP: You shouldn’t have sent that email. Hell, you shouldn’t have been selling the videos in the first place. You knew it at the time, you know it now. If the email had been spoofed (and as others said, why would someone bother??), that’s just a reminder that your activities are visible, and sooner or later the real CBS would have gotten involved.
I guarantee CBS can afford better lawyers than you can, and you are clearly in the legal wrong.
Because it’s the owner’s decision whether or not something gets distributed and in what form it gets distributed. That is the principal right that the owner has under copyright law.
If the law says: “Well, if you don’t distribute it, then we’ll let someone else do it” then the owner doesn’t have that right to decide.
Think about this example:
You have kept a diary ever since you were a child. It contains records of all your private thoughts from your entire life—your desires, your dreams, your hopes. It has embarrassing confessions about feelings you have had and questionable things you have done.
You have kept that diary private your whole life and no one has seen it or read it ever. One day, you accidentally leave it out and a plumber comes across it while working at your house. He finds it and reads it and finds it quite entertaining. He tells his friends about it and now they all want to read it. So next time he’s working in your house, he takes it and makes copies of it and distributes it to all his friends and even starts posting portions of it on the internet.
It’s your creative work of expression. You have the absolute right to decide whether and how it will be distributed. That plumber (besides invading your privacy and theft) has infringed your copyright in your work.
And then when you complain, all of a sudden the law says “Well, we’re going to say that if you fail to meet an economic demand and distribute your work in the way that members of the public want it, we’re going to let someone else do it.”
It’s really the same with some made-for-TV William Shatner movie from the 1970s. The copyright owner has an absolute right to decide whether and how a work will be distributed.
Now, there is a problem with orphaned works that is somewhat different. In such cases, the copyright holder can’t be identified or contacted. We do need a legislative solution to allow at least certain uses of such works—such as for education, academic research, archiving, preserving, etc.—and should a copyright owner then come forward, come up with a way of compensating him or her.
Over the past few years there have been many people urging Congress to enact orphaned works legislation, but so far it hasn’t gained enough political will and the details of how it would work haven’t been worked out.
I hope **Kamakiri ** doesn’t get wind of that table saw that’s been sitting in my garage unused for three years.
He’d sell it, because, ya know, I’m not doing anything with it.
mmm
I agree.
Kamakuri should put his site back up & we should all buy from him to [del]really piss CBS off[/del] help fund his legal defense. :rolleyes:
So why don’t you sell it? Nostalgia?
You don’t have the only extant version of a table saw, though, and you having one sitting unused in your garage doesn’t prevent me from buying my own to sit unused in MY garage.
Well, yeah, provided you ignore the posts here just like Kamakiri ignored the facts and the law and…and…and…
I get it! I get it!
Well, of course I got your point in the first place, but I’m wondering if Kamakiri does.