IP and copyright. What is your view?

[Steophan]

@lance_strongarm

Taking something without permission is theft. Even if you unilaterally declare that no harm is done. That is not for you to decide.

Correct. As I’ve told you many times, though, copyright infringement doesn’t involve taking anything, so your continued insistence that theft is wrong is irrelevant. Also, I’m not declaring that no harm is done, I’m observing it.

I explained why your claims didn’t support your conclusions.

No you didn’t.

Again:

Your logic is full of holes. First of all, sales may be up - but it may have been up even higher without piracy. Second, sales volume isn’t the only factor - if prices drop to compete with pirates, that’s also a harm to legitimate sellers.

I’ve bolded your weasel words. You need to prove these points, not simply state that they may be happening. They are supported by no evidence or logic I’ve seen, and the onus is on you to supply it.

I’ll explain, again, what is actually happening. Sales are up, and costs are down. Revenue may also be down, but as the cost of distributing digital music is negligible, that doesn’t mean profit is down. It may be, but I’ve not seen figures that show either way. I’ve seen figures that show that record industry profits are down, but fuck them. I’m interested in the money going to the creator, not the exploiter, and anecdotally, more money is going to them. I’d be interested in seeing evidence to the contrary though.

[lance_strongarm]

@Steophan

I’ve bolded your weasel words. You need to prove these points, not simply state that they may be happening.

No I don’t.

You need to provide proof for your claims. I’m saying you haven’t provided adequate proof.

I’ll explain, again, what is actually happening. Sales are up, and costs are down. Revenue may also be down, but as the cost of distributing digital music is negligible, that doesn’t mean profit is down. It may be, but I’ve not seen figures that show either way.

Now those are weasel words.

This doesn’t come close to definitively supporting your conclusion.

I’ve seen figures that show that record industry profits are down, but fuck them. I’m interested in the money going to the creator, not the exploiter, and anecdotally, more money is going to them.

It doesn’t matter what you are interested in. The creator decides what to do with his creation, and record company profits may benefit the creator too (how could they not, in fact>)

[Steophan]

lance strongarm, I’ve clearly argued my case, and your refutation is simply “no it isn’t”. If you have nothing better, then fine, I’m quite happy to continue believing I’m right about this.

Or, you could come up with some cites, some facts and figures, and some logical argument why I’m wrong. I can guess what you’ll do, but I live in hope of being surprised.

[lance_strongarm]

@Steophan

lance strongarm, I’ve clearly argued my case, and your refutation is simply “no it isn’t”.

No, that is not simply my refutation.

I showed why your facts are inadequate to make your conclusion.

Or, you could come up with some cites, some facts and figures, and some logical argument why I’m wrong. I can guess what you’ll do, but I live in hope of being surprised.

I gave you logical arguments for why your facts don’t support your case. You simply don’t have enough information. Not even close.

[Blaster_Master]

I have IP, I’m a published both artistically and academically, and I’ve made available plenty of my stuff just for free, and I do not support copyright laws, at least not without major reconsiderations. There are major differences between how tangible property and intellectual property work and the laws just don’t reflect those differences in a meaningful way.

I understand that we need incentives for people to come up with new ideas and that’s what copyright and patent laws are intended to do, and they make sense to a certain extent, particularly when there’s been a large expense in creating the property, whether its a long time and lots of resources researching to create a patent, or a career in creating film or music or whatever. But I think the laws can also get to the point that they cause more problems than they solve.

Consider current copyright laws particularly as it pertains to Disney. The company has made numerous films that are derivative in nature. How many of their films are based on traditional tails or works in the public domain? Yet, they’re one of the leaders in continuing to fight to extend the copyright duration to protect their work. I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that the creator of a work should be able to derive some economic value from their ideas before everyone can just run wild with it, but how do we decide on a fair duration? More interestingly though, if something isn’t that impactful, it doesn’t really need the protection, and if it is impactful, like with the works of Disney, it hurts society that much more when something important like that can’t be used as inspiration for future works sooner.

Another major issue is that technology has changed how this all works. In times past there wasn’t just cost in the initial creation of the work but also in terms of producing copies, marketing, all of that. These days with the increase in digital distribution, it costs virtually nothing to reproduce a digital copy. I think the biggest issue, at least as far as music goes, is that record labels were a necessity in the past because it was relatively expensive to produce an album and distribute it and so they were able to get away with taking large chunks of the profit, but today, the costs of production have gone down enough that even relatively unknown bands can record high quality albums, and the cost of distribution is down to next to nothing. The need for labels has dropped and their massive cut is no longer justified.

But the funny thing is, as I think others have pointed out upthread, despite how available music is for free, people are spending more money than ever on music. Hell, a number of bands will provide most or all of their albums for free on their websites, YouTube, and various other outlets, and they’re growing in popularity very quickly. There are plenty of people out there, like me, who WANT to pay for the music if we like it, we want to see them live, and we want to purchase their merchandise because the product they’re creating has value and we want to support them.

I think this is a very positive thing, not just for intellectual property in general, but music specifically. In the past, if you liked one song, you were forced to buy a whole album, or at least a single to have a copy of it. And other bands that may have fewer overall fans but who love the entire album would make less money despite producing overall higher quality music. With this newer model, a band that can only produce one decent song every so often won’t be able to rip off the consumer by forcing them to buy more than they want, so if they want the same, they need to produce more music that more people want.

But here’s the thing, creating laws protecting IP are going to continue to become less and less feasible. There will always be people who won’t pay for anything and there will always be people willing to go above and beyond to support the artists they love. Why are we fighting against this trend when it looks like it’s actually generating more money and generally better quality product?

Of course, music is a bit different from other forms of IP, especially not artistic ones. If a company spends millions creating a new product and another company immediately steals it, there’s less incentive for innovation. I think it would be great if there were a way to immediately put those kinds of ideas into the public domain but still compensate the innovators so that everyone can benefit from them, without paying an excessive premium for the technology, especially when two different patent owners may not be willing to play ball, but I’m not really sure how to handle that. I’d like to think it might work out in a similar way to how music seems to have, but I’m not that confident.

Either way, at the very least, a lot of the copyright and patent laws at least need to be rethought with consideration for modern technology. Certainly the current laws of life of creator plus so many years afterward is a real disservice to the public.

[RTFirefly]

@Little_Nemo

Another non-vote for the missing option of “I support IP and the idea of copyright but think our current system isn’t working.”

We’ve got a system that’s the worst of both possible worlds - it favors neither the creators nor the general public. Our current system is designed to benefit the middle men.

A non-vote for the same reason.

Also, the purpose of intellectual property laws is set down in our Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

While the grant of exclusive right to one’s creations for a limited time clearly has that effect, it’s an effect that surely has diminishing returns over time. And if the creators of tangible inventions, covered by patents, don’t seem inhibited in the rush to invent by the fact that they will have to relinquish their exclusive control after 20 years, it seems hard to believe that authors, musicians, sculptors, etc. would have noticeably diminished output if their works had a similar term of exclusivity, rather than the current life-plus-70 years.

(Has there been a visible burst of creativity in these fields ever since copyright was extended from 28 years, renewable once, to life plus 70? If there was, I sure didn’t notice. Where’s the next Beatles?)

In short, I’m in favor of a term of patent and copyright lasting for a fairly short time (20 years seems to work), with serious teeth in the enforcement provisions - but after 20 years, everything goes into the public domain.

As a bonus, here’s the world’s stupidest anti-piracy ad. It structures its anti-piracy message around a scene from The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939. Since under the laws in effect in 1939, the movie would have entered the public domain no later than 1995, it illustrates the point that the “anti-piracy” forces are in fact the pirates, having stolen from the rest of us 17 years (and counting) of the right to use that film in whatever way we wanted, through their greater ability to get their preferred legislation through Congress.

[Steophan]

@lance_strongarm

I gave you logical arguments for why your facts don’t support your case. You simply don’t have enough information. Not even close.

Piracy is not harming music sales. That is observable fact. It is not theft. That is a legal definition, and, in the way the word is normally used, a moral one.

I contend that it causes no harm. As it’s impossible to prove a negative , the onus is on you to show that it does. Do so, or shut up.

As it happens, I and others have shown plenty of evidence that piracy benefits creators, and current copyright laws harm both them and consumers, not least Blaster Master in his excellent post just above this one. You, on the other hand, have shown nothing. Again, show something, or shut up.

Merely claiming you have a logical argument for something isn’t the same as actually providing it.

[lance_strongarm]

@Steophan

Piracy is not harming music sales. That is observable fact.

No. Your facts do not come close to establishing this. I have explained why.

It is not theft. That is a legal definition, and, in the way the word is normally used, a moral one.

It is both morally and legally theft (sorry, legally it’s violation of copyright).

If you see someone with a huge box of pencils and you decide it’s not theft to take one because he can’t possibly use them all, or someone gave them to him, or he’s already rich, or whatever reason you think excuses the theft because there’s no harm, that’s still theft. Morally and legally.

I contend that it causes no harm. As it’s impossible to prove a negative , the onus is on you to show that it does. Do so, or shut up.

LOL. You don’t actually know what “prove a negative” even means, do you?

As it happens, I and others have shown plenty of evidence that piracy benefits creators, and current copyright laws harm both them and consumers, not least Blaster Master in his excellent post just above this one.

And I say your evidence sucks.

Merely claiming you have a logical argument for something isn’t the same as actually providing it.

I did provide it.

Seriously, dude. You made a claim, you offered an argument, I criticized it logically as not being sufficient to support your claim. That doesn’t obligate me to go out and disprove your failed claim.

[lance_strongarm]

@RTFirefly

As a bonus, here’s the world’s stupidest anti-piracy ad. It structures its anti-piracy message around a scene from The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939. Since under the laws in effect in 1939, the movie would have entered the public domain no later than 1995, it illustrates the point that the “anti-piracy” forces are in fact the pirates, having stolen from the rest of us 17 years (and counting) of the right to use that film in whatever way we wanted, through their greater ability to get their preferred legislation through Congress.

From a legal standpoint, that’s a circular argument. How else is a copyright law supposed to pass than through Congress?

[Mnemnosyne]

Thinking on the matter further, I think the main thing that needs to be addressed is length of copyright. Going back to the original 28 years alone would be enough to significantly improve the deal. There is no conceivable argument that the creator of a work doesn’t have a reasonable opportunity to make a profit off his creation in 28 years.

Given today’s world and technology, even 28 years is already a long time. I don’t see much harm in cutting it down to say, 15 years. In 15 years, the creator of any work today still has plenty of opportunity to make a very significant profit if the work is good. Consider Harry Potter as an example. The first book was published in the US in 1998, and if copyright was 15 years, would be going out of copyright in 2013. A quick google search tells me that franchise has earned just under 25 billion dollars. Not all of it has gone to the author directly, of course, but no one can argue she hasn’t made a reasonable profit off her work. And it can also not be argued that she wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright ended next year. Even a more recent series, Twilight, with the first book released in 2005, has made nearly five billion in revenue. Again, it can hardly be argued that the writer hasn’t made a profit, or wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright protection ran out in 15 years, or even in 10.

In fact, it may motivate creators to make new things more often, because they would have less ability to continue squeezing money out of decades-old works. They would have far more incentive to continue to be creative and produce new works, so they would have new things under copyright protection to make money off of. I think that would promote the creation of new works (which, as noted, is the entire reason for IP laws, as set forth in the Constitution) far more than allowing the Walt Disney Company to continue exclusively profiting off Mickey Mouse for 84 years and counting.

[Max_Torque]

@Gray_Ghost

To your second point, wouldn’t trademark (which has no duration limit) protect the image of Mickey Mouse from being used by somebody else to defraud the customer? As to defacing the work, that’s already protected in U.S. copyright law, provided it’s a parody of the protected work. Just ask 2 Live Crew. But I agree with you in that I suspect we have different attitudes towards the protectability of something like Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q or the graffiti-ed black and white tribesman photograph cited either in this thread or the other IMHO copyright discussion. My view is that Disney’s heirs will just have to console their wounded egos from watching ‘Steamboat’s Willy’ with a giant poultice of cash.

Trademark is only about the marketing. Trademark would prevent anyone from using the image or name of Mickey Mouse to sell their own version of “Steamboat Willy - Now With Dicks!”, but they can’t otherwise block the sale; once the cartoon is in the public domain, they no longer have any say over what happens to it, because it belongs to the public.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Mnemnosyne

Given today’s world and technology, even 28 years is already a long time. I don’t see much harm in cutting it down to say, 15 years. In 15 years, the creator of any work today still has plenty of opportunity to make a very significant profit if the work is good. Consider Harry Potter as an example.

I’d rather consider the more usual or typical cases than the extremes: the more modest sellers that don’t make their creators rich, and may take some time to find their audience.

Not to mention, if a work is guaranteed to go public domain in 15 years, that’s going to cut down on its sales in at least the last couple of those years, as people realize that if they just wait a couple more years they can get it for free. And while they wait, they have plenty of other 15-to-20-year old public domain works to choose from.

[Max_Torque]

@Mnemnosyne

Thinking on the matter further, I think the main thing that needs to be addressed is length of copyright. Going back to the original 28 years alone would be enough to significantly improve the deal. There is no conceivable argument that the creator of a work doesn’t have a reasonable opportunity to make a profit off his creation in 28 years.

Given today’s world and technology, even 28 years is already a long time. I don’t see much harm in cutting it down to say, 15 years. In 15 years, the creator of any work today still has plenty of opportunity to make a very significant profit if the work is good. Consider Harry Potter as an example. The first book was published in the US in 1998, and if copyright was 15 years, would be going out of copyright in 2013. A quick google search tells me that franchise has earned just under 25 billion dollars. Not all of it has gone to the author directly, of course, but no one can argue she hasn’t made a reasonable profit off her work. And it can also not be argued that she wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright ended next year. Even a more recent series, Twilight, with the first book released in 2005, has made nearly five billion in revenue. Again, it can hardly be argued that the writer hasn’t made a profit, or wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright protection ran out in 15 years, or even in 10.

In fact, it may motivate creators to make new things more often, because they would have less ability to continue squeezing money out of decades-old works. They would have far more incentive to continue to be creative and produce new works, so they would have new things under copyright protection to make money off of. I think that would promote the creation of new works (which, as noted, is the entire reason for IP laws, as set forth in the Constitution) far more than allowing the Walt Disney Company to continue exclusively profiting off Mickey Mouse for 84 years and counting.

Yeah, the opportunity is huge, if you hit it big. However, your examples are striking precisely because they are so rare. A typical non-salaried fiction writer starts out making maybe $4K-$10K a year, before taxes and agent fees and other costs of doing business. As you get more well known, you might expect to make $20K-$40K a year, and by the time you’re a well-known name cranking out 2 or 3 books a year, you could be making $60K to $100K. Super-popular authors who write genre fiction might make up to $250K, and the industry Big Dogs, like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Nora Roberts, pull in way-off-the-graph amounts of cash. Rowling, with an income higher than the freakin’ Queen of England, isn’t in any way a realistic goal.

But it takes 15 years even to get to that “well-known name” stage. So, if the term of copyright is too short, people get to start monkeying with your early works (and you stop earning money from them) just as you finally become successful. I realize that the goal of copyright is “promoting Science and the useful Arts” and all, but I don’t feel that it’s necessary to shorten the term quite that much to achieve that goal.

[iamthewalrus_3]

@Thudlow_Boink

I’m all for exploring different ways that artists and content creators can be paid. Not by passing experimental new laws, but by leaving ownership of the content in the hands of the creators or those to whom they’ve transferred the copyright, and letting them make the decisions and do the experimenting.

Is this substantially different from the status quo (which as we can see isn’t working very well)? Content creators have long had the ability to experiment, but for the most part haven’t done so. They don’t really have the right incentives to do so. Suggesting that we change nothing and hope that people (both infringers and content creators) start acting differently doesn’t sound like a great plan.

Repealing copyright laws strikes me as unjust, because it would be a betrayal of everyone who’s invested major time, effort, and/or resources in creating works with the understanding that they would then own the rights to those works.

Isn’t retroactively extending copyright exactly the same sort of injustice? After all, society made an agreement with past content creators in the form of the copyright laws in effect at the time. It was reasonable at the time, and those creators were willing to release their works under that legal structure. Then a few well-monied copyright owners managed to undo the agreement that was made and keep us from enjoying those works that should have entered the public domain.

[YogSothoth]

I don’t have IP and do not support copyright laws as they stand now, nor the efforts of some large corporations to manage copyright law. I do support some forms of copyright law because I feel artists should be able to profit from their works.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@Steophan

[…] I and others have shown plenty of evidence that piracy benefits creators, and current copyright laws harm both them and consumers […]

If true, might the arguments against piracy ultimately be coming from a group that is neither creator nor consumer?
[ChurchLady]Could it be…Big Media???[/ChurchLady]

Especially telling is that hardly anyone on the anti-piracy side dares even mention big media: publishers, marketers, distributors, middlemen. Artists vs. Pirates is the official scorecard.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@iamthewalrus_3

Is this substantially different from the status quo (which as we can see isn’t working very well)?

Over and over in this thread, people have been saying that the “status quo” or “current system” isn’t working well. I tend to agree, but part of the status quo is the current laws, and part of it is other stuff (how those laws are implemented and enforced, what the current copyright holders choose to do with their intellectual property, the systems in place whereby content can be distributed and creators compensated, etc.). And what’s not at all clear to me is exactly where in this current system the source(s) of the problems chiefly lie, and where changes can or should most effectively or feasibly be made. (E.g. Do we focus on changing the laws, or something else?)

[Beware_of_Doug]

Asking for that kind of clarity is asking a lot when people on the “creator” side are in so much denial, and those on the “consumer” side are guilty of their own sloppy thinking.

[Blaster_Master]

@Mnemnosyne

Thinking on the matter further, I think the main thing that needs to be addressed is length of copyright. Going back to the original 28 years alone would be enough to significantly improve the deal. There is no conceivable argument that the creator of a work doesn’t have a reasonable opportunity to make a profit off his creation in 28 years.

Given today’s world and technology, even 28 years is already a long time. I don’t see much harm in cutting it down to say, 15 years. In 15 years, the creator of any work today still has plenty of opportunity to make a very significant profit if the work is good. Consider Harry Potter as an example. The first book was published in the US in 1998, and if copyright was 15 years, would be going out of copyright in 2013. A quick google search tells me that franchise has earned just under 25 billion dollars. Not all of it has gone to the author directly, of course, but no one can argue she hasn’t made a reasonable profit off her work. And it can also not be argued that she wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright ended next year. Even a more recent series, Twilight, with the first book released in 2005, has made nearly five billion in revenue. Again, it can hardly be argued that the writer hasn’t made a profit, or wouldn’t be motivated to create new works if the copyright protection ran out in 15 years, or even in 10.

In fact, it may motivate creators to make new things more often, because they would have less ability to continue squeezing money out of decades-old works. They would have far more incentive to continue to be creative and produce new works, so they would have new things under copyright protection to make money off of. I think that would promote the creation of new works (which, as noted, is the entire reason for IP laws, as set forth in the Constitution) far more than allowing the Walt Disney Company to continue exclusively profiting off Mickey Mouse for 84 years and counting.

These are rather extreme examples, but I think they can actually illustrate how current copyright laws are potentially hurting the creation of new arts and progress. Consider the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises. Both artists are set for life. They have no reason now to create additional creative works unless they feel compelled to entirely for artistic reasons. If the time that they could continue to milk royalties off of them were to come to an end and they wanted to keep living the good life they have now, they might consider creating new series or extending the worlds of the ones they’ve already created.

Giving a more limited copyright should have minimal effect on smaller time artists as well. If I’m struggling to get a book published and barely making ends meet, what good does it do me to keep holding onto that copyright that no one is really all interested in for so long? It’s going to be a very rare case where something gets created and more or less fails commercially then reappears 20 years later and becomes worth fortunes.

And that still doesn’t stop the original creator from continuing to profit from it even after the time runs out. Consider Disney again. They fairly regularly will rerelease one of their classics for a limited time. If one of those were to drop into the public domain someone else could package it and try to sell it but Disney could do the same and, at least for me, if I wanted to purchase that work, I’d prefer to purchase it from the creator rather than someone else. And it might also encourage them to, upon rerelease, add additional features to it that make it worth spending money on rather than simply making it illegal to copy and unavailable except whenever they decide to release that film again.

In all of this, I just can’t see how knowing that something I create today, assuming I live at least another 50 years, and could belong to my great great grand children 120 years from, now provides any incentive to me to be creative that some period of time significantly less wouldn’t. That is, I could imagine someone might be discouraged from creating or sharing any of their work if they had no protection and some rich bastard might decide to just take it and publish it and keep all the money. But I just can’t imagine someone wouldn’t write a novel, record a song, paint, or whatever knowing it only has 15 or 20 or 30 years of protection rather than 70 years past his own death. That’s far beyond anything that promotes the creation of new art. If anything, it’s not individual people stealing from the creator, it’s the copyright holders, who at that point aren’t the creators, stealing from the public domain.

[Steophan]

@lance_strongarm

If you see someone with a huge box of pencils and you decide it’s not theft to take one because he can’t possibly use them all, or someone gave them to him, or he’s already rich, or whatever reason you think excuses the theft because there’s no harm, that’s still theft. Morally and legally.

Correct. If, however, I copy one of his pencils and use it, whilst leaving him with all his previous pencils, it’s not theft. Morally or legally. If I put it like that, do you understand how fucking stupid your argument that copying=theft is?

LOL. You don’t actually know what “prove a negative” even means, do you?

Yes. I say it causes no harm, and it’s now up to you to show it causes harm. I can, and have produced evidence that no harm is occurring, but even if you don’t accept that, and believe that less music is being sold now, you still have to show that piracy causes it. You haven’t, you haven’t even tried to show anything.

And I say your evidence sucks.

You do. That appears to be the sum total of your argument. Really, why are you wasting your time and mine with your nonsense?

Seriously, dude. You made a claim, you offered an argument, I criticized it logically as not being sufficient to support your claim. That doesn’t obligate me to go out and disprove your failed claim.

You did none of those things. I proved that piracy is not harming music sales, as music sales are not being harmed at all, by anything, quite the opposite.

Your claim is that they might have increased further if not for piracy. Quite apart from the fact that that is almost certainly false, it’s irrelevant.