This is why nobody takes copyright law seriously:
Yep. The pro-copyright forces think the world owes them a living, even to the extent of making things pre-emptively illegal and destroying innovation that might hurt their profits.
Here it is in the man’s own words:
Because anything else is stealing! It’s just outright stealing from all those hardworking people! It is! YES, IT IS! STOP LAUGHING YOU FUCKING THIEF!
Derleth, I really don’t understand your point. My assumption is that someone named after an author would be sympathetic to protecting the work of artists and creators, but apparently that’s not the case. Unless this is a whoosh.
From the linked article:
[INDENT]…his other work on copyright were continually focused on benefiting the copyright holder. He never mentions that this is not the purpose of copyright law. It is the means. But the intent is to benefit the public. Oman does not ever seem to take that into consideration.[/INDENT]
Copyrights benefit the public by protecting the work of artists. It’s the same way that policeman benefit the public: by letting people keep their lives and the possessions they’ve worked to obtain.
Patents benefit the public by making tech advancements public knowledge (while rewarding the creators), and that’s great because technology can make life safer, better and healthier. But depriving someone of their “right” to obtain lost episodes of Star Trek against the wishes of the copyright holder isn’t really hurting anyone in a significant way.
Baal, I write software that lets people publish on the internet. It is used to distribute copyrighted material, sometimes without permission. It changes frequently and regularly includes new features.
Should I have to apply to congress to approve every line of code I write? Or just every new release? Is it a per-feature thing? When does software as “new technology”?
And to take the other extreme: should a new technology (say, pumping images directly into the brain) be allowed to use content (novels/movies/music) that is otherwise protected against free distribution, just because there aren’t specific regulations against pumping it directly into people’s brains?
My take is, “no”. Like pretty much everything in life, the right approach is nuanced and practical. So, I can’t say exactly what restrictions, if any, should be placed on your software. But your profits should not be dependent on taking income away from copyright holders.
So, effectively, every single line of code I write would have to be submitted for approval, since it’s hard to say if it should or should not be restricted, and that’s the only way to be sure.
When someone uses software I wrote to violate copyright, what should happen to me?
This is what I wrote:
Like pretty much everything in life, the right approach is nuanced and practical. So, I can’t say exactly what restrictions, if any, should be placed on your software.
Your response carries the aroma of straw.
It’s a reasonable and honest question.
I’m writing a new feature that involves publishing content on the internet. It may or may not be used by someone to violate copyright. Would the proposed law require that I submit my code for approval by congress? How do I determine which code or features would require approval? What happens if I fail to submit something?
No one ever said that, and that’s not what Oman is asking for protections against. Existing copyright law would already cover that case.
What Oman wants is for that technology to be preemptively illegal because it might be used for copyright infringement.
Oman’s argument already relies on the absurd proposition that technologies that can be used for copyright infringement be made illegal; he wishes that to be taken a step further in saying that they should be illegal by default.
Tellyworth is right in that there’s no way to draw a line in what constitutes new technology in software. Further, there’s no way to predict what might be used for copyright infringement, since all computing is essentially just “shuffling data around”, and copyright is just shuffling data to the wrong people.
Obviously the law won’t be that every line of code has to be submitted to Congress. Most likely, we’ll get a vague law that’s selectively enforced against the bad guy of the month.
IANAL specializing in intellectual property (or any other kind). This seems to be the money quote in the OP’s linked article:
[INDENT]Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.[/INDENT]
There’s a lot of ambiguity there. It’s a complicated matter, and ambiguity is likely unavoidable. Here’s what I see as the heart of that quote:
[INDENT]the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established.[/INDENT]
It refers to technologies that need “new exceptions” to the “broad” existing rights. That seems reasonable. It’s certainly possible to put a doomsday spin on the paragraph, but with the influence software companies have in America, it seems unlikely Congress would do anything to make the domestic software business suffer unduly.
In the digital age, the pendulum has certainly swung against copyright sanctity, so I’m more concerned about additional erosion of creative control than I am about draconian measures crippling America’s software and tech companies.
I see no reason to be generous in my reading of a man with his reputation. He is on the side of strong copyright and I have no reason to believe that his position is in any way nuanced.
The statement was in a response to a system which he admits is legal under existing copyright law. There actually isn’t a new exception needed, but the content owners are unhappy, and therefore he thinks that copyright holders need even broader rights than they do today, because there might be technologies which they never anticipated (probably because they’ve been on the wrong side of technology since the very beginning).
You are probably right that the Microsofts and Googles and Apples don’t need to worry, because they have extensive lobbying of their own. What about the other companies or individuals?
There is no “certainly” there. You are welcome to that opinion, but my opinion is precisely opposite; that the real sanctity is in innovation, and that the content industry has wielded far more control than they deserve, and that it has only gotten worse.
Copyright exists for one purpose according to the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
We are far, far past the point of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts when it comes to current copyright law. No one quits producing new things because their great grandchildren won’t continue to collect royalties or because a company is allowing people to watch television on their phone.
But that’s the thing: The copyright laws we have now have granted extremely broad rights based, for one thing, on the idea that it’s illegal to do otherwise legal things if doing them involves circumventing some technological measure.
With the DMCA, Congress has already made the domestic software business suffer unduly compared to foreign software businesses.
No. This has nothing to do with creative control. It has everything to do with the business of publishing things covered by copyright law.
Should we then have an extra brain implant to go along with it that makes us go blind if we look at copyrighted material without permission?
The control freakishness of the copyright fanatics is certainly headed that direction. I’ve heard in the past serious calls from them for the banning of public libraries and of paper books, and for books & newspapers to only be published in electronic form with retina scanners and eye trackers to ensure you aren’t sharing your book and that no one is reading over your shoulder. If we had the technology, I think they would be calling for monitors to be installed on our senses so we can’t see or hear something copyrighted without legal approval.
Agreed; you took some care to say, no, not every single line of code will have to be approved by Congress, and he just went right back and said that it would. Not a valid kind of argument.
The law was obviously intended to cut off a loophole…especially one which hasn’t even been invented yet and which we cannot foresee in detail. Otherwise, as you noted, someone might start “transmitting” old Star Trek episodes via a new technology (transporter!) without paying.
It seems a bit sad that this sort of thing tends to happen after the fact, via lawsuits.
I, myself, was involved in a suit of this nature, when a particular print magazine made all its back issues available on CD. The problem is that this involved re-printing of some of my material without paying me for it – and my original sales contract had specified that I maintained the rights. They settled out of court, eventually paying me for material which, if I’d said nothing, they would have been stealing.
The philosophical disconnect between those who respect property rights and those who do not is vast. It cuts our society into segments who cannot even meaningfully speak to one another. If one guy thinks it’s okay to steal, and another guy thinks it isn’t…how do they even begin to come to an understanding?
:rolleyes:
How do I determine which parts of my code need approval, or which features, and which do not?
What happens if I fail to seek prior approval for something?
The philosophical disconect between people who engage in reasoned rhetorical debate and those who can only utilize icons in a slap-dash fashion, is also vast and cuts our society into sections which are unable (or unwilling) to engage in meaningful discussion.
Are you inventing a completely new technology, never before seen, as radically different from anything previous as VHS and Beta tapes were different from broadcast television?
Or are you making a change that is relatively minor, such as the difference between format releases of VHS?
Or is it somewhere in between?
There are a lot of laws in the world that rely on a common-sense assessment. There isn’t any way to measure your code for compliance to standards, the way there is a way to measure blood alcohol level for purposes of laws against driving under the influence. A “reasonable person” standard may be necessary. There will be obviously extreme cases – if you add a line in your code to protect against a division by zero error, then no one is going to hold that as a completely new technology. If your code involves a new method of compressing an entire movie into a 20Mb package…that’s revolutionary!
The fallacy of drawing the line will always operate in competition with the fallacy of not drawing the line.
Baal Houtham said that the matter is nuanced and practical. That means that we don’t know the exact answer. We aren’t willing to be tied down with absolute arbitrary standards.
“A man with no more than fifty hairs on his head is a bald man, but a man with fifty hairs or more on his head is not a bald man.” Absurd. Meanwhile, “A man who has only one more hair on his head than a bald man has is also a bald man” is also absurd.
And a grebe walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Is a grebe a duck?
You tell me. The law doesn’t deal in analogies. Where does, say, a plugin for embedding a video fit? A feature that allows you to re-blog someone else’s content? A service that shares content between social networks? Something that modifies and distributes uploaded files to a CDN? A web service that aggregates content?
In other words, any code I write, any new feature I design, that involves copyrightable content, is something that might require prior approval. And since there are no absolute standards, no way to determine if it does or does not, the only way I can ensure I’m abiding by the law is to submit it for approval.
Or simply not make it in the first place.
They don’t, because the copyright fanatics are completely tyrannical and unreasonable, and would cheerfully turn the world into a totalitarian state to enforce their sacred copyright.
Not everyone agrees with you as to whether or not something counts as “property” or as “stealing”, and not everyone is willing to subordinate every other aspect of society to the attitude that copyright is some kind of holy absolute that can never be challenged or altered.
Well, your pardon, but I can’t agree with this.
True: not everyone agrees with me (on damn near anything!) I think there is a reasonable middle ground, where property rights are defended, far short of subordinating every other aspect of society. I’m pretty sure that nearly everyone on the pro-copyright side would agree with me on this. We aren’t monsters.
The profundity of the difference in philosophical views dismays me. It’s like the pro-choice/pro-life division. We aren’t really even living in the same philosophical universe.
You are, by the way, one of the members of the SDMB I most admire, and I very often agree with you. I guess this’ll have to be an exception, although solely to my agreement, not to my admiration and respect.
OK, how about this:
Free speech is a right that is recognized. Copyright is a right that is granted.
In the Constitution, free speech is recognized in that “Congress shall make no law” which abridges it. This is subject to some caveats, but, philosophically, the Founders recognized free speech as a natural right and wrote it into the Constitution accordingly. If Congress passed a law that attempted to enshrine prior restraint, that law would be struck down.
In the Constitution, copyright is optional. Congress is given the power to establish copyright laws if it so chooses. This is a fundamentally different kind of right, one which is temporary, conditional, and limited. It is not fundamental; if Congress so chose, it could abolish copyright tomorrow.
How can a right that is granted supersede a right that is recognized?