Creative works do not spring forth from the void. They are created in the context of a society, drawing heavily on the intellectual and cultural heritage of that society. Anyone who claims to be the absolute and exclusive owner of a creative work is a thief and a hypocrite.
Because, apparently, it’s not real work. (I would put another rolleyes here, but there aren’t enough.)
Who’s to say that being a doctor isn’t real work? Or being a train conductor? Who gets to decide what is and is not real work, anyway? If something takes training or at least a lot of practice and effort, not everyone can do it, people want to benefit from the outcome of the activity, and it takes time to accomplish, then why doesn’t it qualify as a “real” job? If that isn’t a “real” job, what is?
Apparently there are people who seriously believe that all these creative works are done by people who are just born with it—they don’t have to lift a finger to get good at it—and it’s all a joy. Joy joy joy. The glorious joy of creating. No struggle. No frustration. No worries. No false starts. Just happy happy, fun fun, so how is that work?
Only doofuses really believe this. Apparently, there are a lot of doofuses out there. Sad.
Best not let ANYBODY read it, then. They just might imagine things you didn’t intent when they read it. Happens all the time. Also rape of your universe, by your remarkably broad definition. Must be tough.
That is an essential point here – radical anti-copyright positions wouldn’t get even minimal traction if not for the recent gross abuses of the copyright bargain on the part of monopoly grantees.
Here’s an article you may find interesting, by Richard Stallman, on an issue which the Slashdot essay also touches on. Basically, it argues that it is best to avoid the term “Intellectual Property” for two reasons (not all of the following comes straight from the article):
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By grouping together four different areas of law (copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets), the term is suggesting that all four should be treated equally. In fact, current US and European law does not treat them equally: the laws are different and so are the legal theories on which they are based. And it is perfectly possible to have different opinions about them; for example, there would be nothing inconsistent about advocating the abolishment of patents, but at the same time favoring strong copyright protection. Talking about “intellectual property” steps over that difference as if it does not exist, and thereby skips a very important part of the debate.
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By using the term “property”, it is taken for granted that copyrights/patents/etc do, and should, behave like physical property. Again, this is not the legal theory which today’s laws are based on. The US Constitution, for example, clearly recognises that authoring a creative work does not automatically mean that you own it. Instead, you are granted a “limited-time exclusive right” to distribute the work, “in order to promote the progress of science and useful arts”. Originally, this limited time was something like 20 years with a one-time option to extend for another 20. If copyrights truly behaved like physical property, why would they not last forever? Because the framers of that constitution realized that while it makes sense to grant the author of a story some power over who gets to distribute that story, “opportunity loss” is not necessarily something that deserves the same kind of protection as actual physical objects. Nobody owes you a profit.
Incidentally, Leaper and hroomba, the population of “the Slashdot crowd” is somewhere around a million people. All of them do not share the same opinions, anymore that the Straight Dope membership speaks with a single voice. While it is fair to assume that you’ll find more copyright and patent skepticism on Slashdot than here, the opinions expressed in that essay are somewhat extremist by Slashdot standards as well.
Huh? So I should create, be it a song, a better mousetrap, or a cure for cancer, purely for the spiritual joy of it and “the intellectual and cultural heritage of that society” will pay my bills? What you said is purely a self-justification for theft. Stealing what I create because of some faux-Marxist fantasy of property is no better than robbery from my home because I have a DVD you don’t have.
I’m not after money, I need it to live. I do what I do because I love it, but that doesn’t help me if I starve to death.
That was at a time when they were often paid by patrons and concepts like royalties didn’t exist.
Completely different. Doing so doesn’t degrade the marketability of my work. Writing their own derivative stories which may conflict with the real story that I’m slowly unrolling could.
Copyrights last too long. Fifty years or the death of the author, whichever comes second, would be fine by me.
Agreed. That’s why my point was that the Slashdot crowd, like everyone else, contains its share of people who view downloading as victimless crime or Robin Hood style redistribution of wealth–in other words, like everyone else, they’re free riders who think they’re not hurting anyone. Stealing music isn’t about philosophical beliefs in copyrights, it’s about getting something for nothing, and the Slashdot crowd is no better or worse than the population at large, except perhaps that their technical savvy makes them much more effective downloaders.
What’s missing from the whole piracy/copyright debate is a discussion of the benefits of piracy. Piracy creates a network effect that’s obviously beneficial to creators, and I would love to see some plausible numbers on how much Adobe has benefitted from the fact that Photoshop is one of the most widely pirated pieces of software around. Evil Captor brushed up against this point: When end users pirate something (or violate copyright, say with fan fiction), it gains much wider distribution than it would otherwise. In the case of Photoshop, this means that Paint Shop Pro was losing sales, and Photoshop skills were more widely distributed. A company looking to hire someone to run Photoshop had lower training costs because of that. Photoshop, for the last decade, has simply been the photo manipulation tool, something it wouldn’t be if they had an uncrackable distribution scheme, since only companies and professionals would be able to afford it. As it is, the people most likely to buy it still pay for it, and those least likely to buy it still use it, learn skills, and view it as the best in fact.
I haven’t read the essay yet, but I agree with the excerpt. Making use of information is a fundamental part of being human, whether you’re consuming it or sharing it. To the extent that copyright laws limit people’s ability to do that, they infringe on that human right.
That in itself doesn’t mean I think content creators shouldn’t be paid for their work, just that that system of payment should adapt to the way people use information, not vice versa. Compulsory licensing would be an important step - maybe an author should get a few bucks if I read his book, or if I write another book with the same characters, but he sure as hell shouldn’t be able to tell me whether or not I can write that new book.
The concept of ownership is necessary for physical things, because physical things can only be in one place at a time. My wallet can’t be in my pocket and yours at the same time. You can’t drive my car to Los Angeles at the same time I’m driving it to Chicago. For every physical object, someone has to decide how it’ll be used at any given time, and that person is the owner.
OTOH, information can be everywhere. I can listen to a certain song in my living room at the same time as my neighbor is playing it for his guests, my cousin is listening to it in her car, and my brother is burning it to a CD. There’s no reason for anyone to “own” it and have sole discretion as to who’ll be allowed to use it, because everyone can have their own copy simultaneously.
Except, of course, that if someone stole DVDs from your home, those DVDs wouldn’t be in your home anymore. If you called the police to report a robbery, and you said the stolen property was still right there on the shelf where you left it, just imagine how they’d react.
Assuming you did get published, what if the publisher forced you to sign over the copyright to them? What if they subsequently prevented you from publishing sequels and instead hire some commercial hack to do it? What if they flooded the market with cheesy merchanise, looking for quick profit?
Copyright does not always mean that the rights of the “creator” are protected. Sometimes quite the opposite, in fact.
There is a good case to be made for copyright but I think this is one of the clearly outrageous excesses of copyright law. I wonder whether the very practice of “signing over” copyrights (or patents, for that matter) to large profiteering corporations shouldn’t be restricted.
In some respects, the GPL would be unnecessary in a world without copyright, since you’d be able to disassemble, modify, and redistribute any software. It’d just be harder without the source code.
The Slashdot crowd is not monolithic, and not everyone who uses, supports, or contributes to open source software is a fan of the GPL in particular. It’s nice to have a way to keep software free, but the GPL is still just another way to force people to use information the way its authors intended. Many folks in the open source community, including myself, would happily give up the GPL’s enforced freedom if it meant no one would be forced to use information the way its authors intended.
But he’s not forced to sign it over. That requires a choice on his part—a choice he doesn’t have to make.
If his work is good, he can cut a deal where he doesn’t have to sign over copyright. Of, if the publisher insists on owning copyright, spectrum can self-publish, or go find another publisher who will let him keep his rights. Not all ideal options (especially self-publishing, though that’s gotten cheaper and easier to do these days), but probably better than watching your work get bastardized by a bunch of hacks.
And see, the way things are, spectrum still has that CHOICE. Imagine how he’d feel if he didn’t. Maybe he’d think it were better if he never wrote the book at all, or that he never showed it to any publisher, ever.
Well, technically and literally speaking that is true.
However, there is the phenomenon of unfair contract terms. This is a solid legal doctrine. (Link 1, Link 2) In many industries, the balance of power between publishers and most artists is heavily out of whack in favor of the former. Which thus tempts publishers to shamelessly push for unfair contract terms. Artists have “no choice” (figuratively speaking!) but to go along because they need the publisher’s distribution and publicity organizations, etc., to get their work out.
Oh, I agree with you there, and I agree that it’s not right.
But it’s good that the artist still has the choice. I’d hate to think of them not having the choice.
A book is not “information.” It is a self-contained work of art which belongs to the author or whomever he sells it to. No one else. You may pay for the privilege of reading it (or get a copy at your library), but you have no inherent right to duplicate it and thus remove profit potential from the work. Your creation of a copy dilutes the financial incentive to write the work. Or at the very least, to publish it.
Except that I DON’T WANT you sullying my universe with your uncreative, derivitive bullshit. You want to write, go create your own world and characters, don’t be a worthless parasite and reuse mine.
You writing a book about MY characters could hinder MY ability to write and market the true second book in MY series. How is that at all correct? You’ll have in effect ripped my universe, the product of over a decade of work, away from me. That’s nonsense. I would sooner never have my work published than to have it raped by some no-talent ass clown who’s so worthless he has to leach off of the hard work of others to be able to write.
And it’s necessary for creative works because unauthorized knock offs and illegal copies dilute the market for profit for the true author of the real work.
A novel is not ‘information,’ it is a work of art. You call it information in order to debase it down to the level of current events or gossip, which we of course all widely spread about. But it’s not. Art is something greater than “information,” something more important, something which has a creator and an owner, whose rights over that work should be sacrosanct.
And unless each of you has paid for the copy of that song, you’re all parasites who are harming the artists who worked hard to create it.
Certainly, so long as they pay the owner and he chooses to give them a copy.
I would not sign such a contract. If that were the only contract available, I would not publish my work. I will never give up control of that which I have created. It is a part of me and it is mine, and I will own it until the day I die.
Sometimes, I have to chuckle at the uninhibited way that you express yourself. (Not a criticism in this case, just so it’s clear. ;))
Having been a veteran of these sort of discussions in the past, I’ll save everyone a little time and trot out the Shakespeare example—Shakespeare used old stories and “borrowed” from other authors for his work. Because that was acceptable back then, and it’s acceptable now, when the work is in the public domain. (“Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary” being remakes of Jane Austen’s work, for instance.)
However, I don’t think anyone doubts that Shakespeare had the ability and talent to make up his own stories, or at least “borrow” elements from others (like we all do, to some extent—often unconciously) without making it exactly in the same universe. He had enough ability to not have to do that. Just like (as I have mentioned many times in previous threads) my friends who have started out in fan fiction were able to change enough elements in their stories to make them unique and separate from the original work (Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever) and then get the work published under their own name.
They were good writers who enjoyed the subculture of fan fiction (I have a more lenient view of fan fiction than you do, apparently) but they were not dependent upon it for their creativity. I don’t believe that any person, if they have any ability, is absolutely unable to tweak their story, (or their artwork, their music) around enough so that it’s no longer a part of the original “fandom.” They may not like to do that, but if they are absolutely unable to do it—powerless to do it, then there’s something seriously wrong, and very likely they haven’t got much to work with in the first place.
I also think that fan fiction can be a fun thing, a great thing, even, but if the original copyright holder doesn’t like it, then that’s too bad. No fan fic for that universe, then.
You have no inherent right to have the state enforce your absolutist views about “intellectual property”. The possible loss of “profit potential” does not obligate the state to act as your henchman.
Property rights, and especially copyrights, are part of a social contract. Try reading the copyright clause of the Constitution. Copyrights exist because it is generally believed that, on balance, they are beneficial to society. They can be amended or revoked if they fail that test.