Hatch says destroy the downloaders computers.

Great Debates
41

I agree with the “copyright violation is not stealing” view. Calling it theft is a politically motivated strategy to make the violation seem more important than it actually is. It can be a harmful action in some cases, but the harm it does is always less than in a traditional theft in which the original owner of the property is then deprived of its use.

If I were to make ten copies of a copyrighted song and give them to friends, and as a result one of them failed to buy a $15 CD that they would otherwise have bought, I have distributed $150 of value to the world while costing the copyright holders only $15. The world gains, perhaps, though there is the problem that this is likely to reduce the incentive of other artists to produce music, so the overall effect is not clear.

What is clear to me is the the current American system is very, very slanted toward the industry special interests (in other words, politics as usual). The current system results in a tiny percentage of musicians making an incredible amount of money, while the vast majority of musicians barely make ends meet by working in night clubs and the like. The money for CDs flows from people of modest income to people who are very wealthy. In addition, people who buy CDs but would be willing to download them are forced to pay record companies for a service that they don’t want.

Copyright law also make it prohibitively expensive for other artists to combine or modify music originally written by others. I read about one author who gave up on writing a book on the history of rock and roll because he couldn’t afford the rights to print the lyrics to songs. There is also the absurdity of commercial businesses not being able to sing the happy birthday song because it is copyrighted.

I think most copyrights (of all categories) should be reduced to five years or less. This would still provide plenty of incentive to creators since good money can be made selling to people who want the latest thing. Meanwhile much of the public that has limited buying power would enjoy far greater access to a wide variety of art, software , and other works. Music copyrights could probably be eliminated altogether since the artists can still make huge sums in concerts.

I’m not holding my breath, however, since legislators are always far more interested in the special interests than the public interest.

42

If downloading music is stealing, then I’ve spent my whole life being a thief.

From grades 4 on up till college I played in orchestras. We read Mozart and Beethoven off xeroxed copies of sheet music. Originals were too expensive to distribute to 30-some odd kids. So it was infinitely more practical to run off copies of the score for us to read from. I’m sure the teachers did not consult with the publisher before doing this. But we made great music.

From college on up till vet school, the photo copier again got some heavy use. Text books range from $50 to $200. Can a student subsisting on a Ramen noodle diet afford to buy every textbook listed in the required reading section of the course syllabi? Not likely. It was much more cost-effective to copy a few sections out of the Hagen & Brunner rather than plunk down $200 for the whole damn thing. And I did not consult with the publisher before taking these liberties with the copy machine.

Back in the day when I was a kid, before PCs and internet, there were radios. And boy did I enjoy recording my favorite songs on to tape cassettes. It was a lot of fun. I don’t know one person who didn’t do it.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, I say. If it is stealing according to some dictionary definition, fine. All that means is that there are a whole lot of unrepetant thieves out there. A lot.

43

Um, getting away from the tangent here…

I don’t think Hatch was serious even for a second with this decree of his. He did it to rile people up and perhaps to make it easir to push legislation that actually CAN pass into law. Any idiot knows there is no way in hell they can legalize something like this, and the RIAA would be even more incredibly stupid to persue it. You think people hate them now? Imagine the boycott that would happen if they dared to try destroying people’s property. No, this one won’t fly but its little brother might, keep your ears open for more from Hatch in a couple months, this time with less of the vigilante edge.

44

sure maybe riaa member labels are reporting a loss, but indie labels are reporting an increase. file sharing seems to have the affect of alerting people to alternate music. since indie label affiliated artists are the majority. it seems filesharing is doing more good then harm.

45

This will be my first and last post in this thread, as I’ve become too involved with this type of discussion before to bother again.

There is a wealth of evidence to show that music sharing helps independent artists make money. People who download their music like it, and then may go to their shows or buy albums. Of course, the most common objection to this view is “but indies are starving artists! they’re barely making ends meet! I can only think of two indie bands who are nationally recognized!” If you want justification, please answer one question: before the internet, by what means could you hear the music of an indie band two towns over, much less in a different state, much less across the nation? They had no method of distribution. And without a method of distribution, their only hope was to keep living out of their mother’s basement until some roving RIAA talent scout picked them up. So don’t whine about file sharing taking hard earned money from indie bands. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them.

Now for the RIAA: the RIAA isn’t losing squat from file sharing, or if it is, the losses are far below the $3 billion they’re claiming.

Cite

So argue about whether it’s right or wrong, argue about whether it’s stealing or not, but if you want to cry “but it’s taking money from us starving artists” just shut the hell up.

46

Not true. I have written and copyrighted songs. You have no rights at all over a song until you fill out the forms and send in your song to the copyright office. You’re not really protected even if you can prove you wrote the song. I had a song stolen once by another band who got a hold a rehearsal tape. I had no copyright on it because I had just written it. I talked to a lawyer and was told that there was nothing I could do to prevent that band from playing my song at their shows even though I had the tape and the testimony of bandmates who were there when I wrote the song. I also had the testimony of a person who was present when the other band was listening to our rehearsal tape and (he thought) joking about stealing my new song. Without that legal copyright I was screwed.

47

And what about out of print music? Or music where the copyright has expired?

48

Not according to the U.S. Copyright Office.

But rights to a composition are separate from rights to a recording, anyway.

49

On reflection, perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “separate”, since both the composer and the performer as well as others have stakes in a recording. But they are not the same.

50

Hmmm…maybe I got some bad legal advice.

51

And they own the rights to about 0.003% of the music anyone cares about. Maybe most copyright holders aren’t Big Evil Corporations, but the holders of copyrights of pretty much all the copyrighted works that most people are aware of, are in fact the BECs.

Not true. There’s a bunch of fair-use exceptions beyond making that single backup copy that are outside the province of the copyright holders. Still, they’re fairly small exceptions, and don’t in any way resemble a right to copy music that you don’t own a copy of, that any random stranger has made available over the Web.

But still, Hatch’s proposed solution is essentially an authorization of vigilante justice. If I’m guilty of copyright violations, the appropriate mechanism for determining guilt and punishment is the court system, not some privately-run remote mechanism for scrambling one’s computer.

I don’t mind the government contracting out trash pickup or road paving. But when they start contracting out matters related to crime and punishment, things go haywire. Private corporations are lousy guardians of our liberty.

Gonna get rarer and rarer.

If today’s copyright laws had been in effect a century ago, all of Rudyard Kipling’s works (just for example) would still be under copyright.

52

Maxim - folks who gleefully charge willy-nilly past copyright laws are folks who have never had an idea worth copyrighting.

Here’s the truly scary thing vis-a-vis Orrin Hatch: during the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary debates, I distinctly remember that Hatch was the only candidate who had a clue as to what being president is about.

53

Neurotik: Would you be so kind as to explain the concept of intellectual property to Tejota and others who seem to wish it did not exist?

54

You did. One of the copyright extension acts of the last few decades changed the rules so that copyrights no longer had to be registered to be valid. If memory serves it was the 1978 extention that did this.

So prior to 1978, a copyright had to be registered, after 1978, it exists automatically upon creation of the work.

Here’s the current law http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

You might also find this to be of interest
http://eldred.cc

55

Oh, I understand it. Far better than you do it seems. I spent most of my life with the same naieve view of what copyright was that so many on this board still clearly hold. It’s only in the past few years I had a reason to really look at what the law is and what it means.

And you know what? When you really understand copyright, you will realize that There is no such think as Intellectual property. ‘Intellectual property’ is a jargon term. It isn’t really property at all. For specialists, the jargon term isn’t misleading because the have a nuanceced view of what it really means. But the term is misleading if you try and take it literally, as broomstick is doing.

Well, first of all, because it can’t be bought and sold. It can only be licensed. The copyright naturally resides with the creator of the work. Unless it is a work for hire, in which case the copyright still reverts to the creator of the work after a period of time.

Now, an individual copy is property, and can be bought or sold. But the exclusive right to reproduce the work isn’t property, it’s a goverment granted monopoly.

Copyright is fundamentally a contract between the US goverment and creators. They agree to create and publish in return, they get a gurantee that no-one else can compete for the monetary reward of publishing. They also get an exclusive right to creative derivitive works and to perform the work (if applicable).

Since it is a contract, and not property, only some of the rights can be transferred to another person. This rights transfer is called licensing. When ALL of the transferrable rights are licensed, we commonly refer to the holder of the transferrable rights as the ‘copyright holder’. But this is an incomplete view. The author or his heirs still retain some rights that simply cannot be ‘sold’.

See the copyright statute for a clearer picture.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

So you see, I’m not saying that copyright doesn’t exist, or that it isn’t a necessary part of the vast improvements in our standard of living over the past century. Hell, without copyright I would be out of a job.

But I really hate to see the simplistic (and ultimately wrong) notions of what copyright is get bandied about here. Bad mental models ultimately translate into bad assumptions about what is good policy.

When you see copyright as what it really is: A monopoly on expression It becomes much clearer that it isn’t a purely good thing, but rather a necessary evil. The harm that it does must be balanced against the creativity that it encourages.

Sadly, current copyright law is badly out of balance. The harm it does far outweighs the creativity it encourages. I would like to see copyright reformed (and copyright terms dramatically reduced), but I would never get rid of it entirely. I further think that if copyright terms were more realistic, people would be much less likely to casually violate copyright as they do now with the widespread downloading of music.

The history of the last 30 years of congressional action is that copyrights are effectively permanant. The Sony Bony act essentially guranteed that nothing will enter the public domain until after 2020, and that’s assuming that a future congress doesn’t extend existing copyrights further.

The teenagers of today look at copyright law, and they see something that doesn’t encourage creativity so much as transfer power and wealth and control over creativity into the hands of large corporations. This casual disregard of copyright is at least partly a reaction to that. It’s a way of taking control back.

The other major factor that encourages downloading is that the large music copyright holders have managed to create a world in which it is far more convenient to download music than it is to pay for it. And it’s widely understood that the artists that created the music only get a pittance of what the music consumer actually pays for it. The vast majority of the money paid for a CD goes into ‘overhead’ and corprorate profits and doesn’t benefit the artist at all. What consumers get for that overhead is a system that distributes music in a format that is less convenient to use than the stuff that they download for free.

You can’t really solve the problem of copyright infringing music downloaders until you address the fundamantal issues that push people in that directon.

Threating to destroy their machines is only going to make the problem worse.

56

A jaywalker “steals” his way across the street, and a sex offender might “steal” a child’s innocence, in the same way that a copyright infringer “steals” music (or potential profits) - that is, in a meaningless rhetorical sense, only useful for demonizing one’s opponents. I like to think we’re above that here at the SDMB.

Cite, please? (Hint: The “No Electronic Theft Act” isn’t about theft any more than the “Patriot Act” is about patriotism.)

You seem awfully sure. Naturally, you can point to a law that says “anyone who distributes copyrighted material without the author’s permission is guilty of theft in the second degree” or something to that effect, right?

57

This is not going to happen.

58

You got bad legal advice.

Here’s the truth - you DO have copyright the moment you create something. However, without filling out the forms and registering you have only limited recourse should your work be stolen. It will be harder to prove your case in court, and the damages you can (potentially) collect are limited.

The only way you could have stopped the other band from playing would be to take them to court. Did you have the money for a long legal battle? No? Then you were screwed, but that’s becuase of the cost of legal representation and courts, not because of copyright law.

At least when I was ripped off one of the other parties was an ethical group than had fallen prey to someone else’s fraud and were willing to set things right without going to court.

We’re talking a lot about copyright for music, but really the laws apply to all the arts. Unfortunately, some things are easier to steal than others.

59

I seem to recall that Mr. Anti-Drug Zero Tolerance Hatch’s son was arrested for pot and he got all hypocritical about it, saying his son needing help, sorta like Noelle Bush. But I can’t find a cite for it, does anybody remember this incident?

Sonny Bono helped to pass the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act in 1998 and then ran into a tree while skiing and died. Was he assassinated by a toon?

Negativland has had some interested battles with the RIAA and copyright law:

http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/fair-use/

http://www.negativland.com/fairuse.html

http://www.negativland.com/riaa/index.html

60

That is quite possible.

The copyright long ago expired on the music of those two musicians, so their words can be copied freely. Bad example. Now, an adaptation of their work might be something you can copyright.

Justify it however you like, you were a theif and you broke the law. I’m sure you weren’t the only one. That still does not excuse your conduct.

Then you were a thief.

Unquestionably.