So long as the work exists, it is a benefit to humanity. It might be widely distributed today, or it might be discovered a year or five years or a hundred years later. Regardless, the system is successful. Copyright isn’t about benefitting any particular individual by handing em a copy of a great work. It’s about the general benefit to society rendered by the mere existence of the work. With modern distributive and search technologies, we can be even more assured that greatness is likely to rise to the top eventually, even if it’s not initially commercially successful.
That’s a little bit too much of a nitpick. Trade secrets are generally included in discussions of intellectual property as a type of intellectual property protection.
Sure. And all the overwhelming masses of dreck is a net deficit, acting to actively dumb people down.
I’m not convinced. Not everything is preserved, especially the great stuff created outside studio systems.
No, it’s not.
You may not believe people are influenced by their entertainment consumption (and i’m including modern news media in that). We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.
You seem to have a bone to pick with modern culture/art/entertainment, which, sure, I understand, there’s a lot of crap out there. But it’s not at all clear to me that it’s related to intellectual property rights.
News media, for example, receives very little benefit from intellectual property laws. News is by its nature ephemeral and has very little exploitable value after a very short time period.
Yellow journalism (or worse) is a problem, but as far as I can tell it’s a problem totally unconnected from what this thread is about.
This seems just plain wrong to me. Methods of artistic filtration and critique have improved much faster than content production has.
Your argument is like saying that the internet is bad because people can put up shoddy webpages. But we have fantastic tools for finding the good ones. Not everyone uses those tools, they’re not perfect, and of course not everyone values the same things you do in art. But none of those effects are large enough to support the point you’re trying to make.
As long as you don’t approach art by, like, trying to watch all the youtube videos in alphabetical order or read all the books by ISBN, you are simply wrong that you can’t reliably sift dreck from great.
Can you honestly not find a single art reviewer out there whose tastes match yours to follow?
As for sorting dreck from “art,” I think this prediction is likely to fail.
Oh, it might be praised for technological aspects, but not much more than that. Isn’t it already pretty much a joke outside a narrow range?
Nope, in fact it’s receiving a positive re-evaluation of sorts among a lot of movie critics.
Seriously??? Who? I know if I come across it while channel-surfing I’ll only stay to laugh. Of course, one of my best friend’s grandmothers was a Titanic survivor, so I know a bit more real world stuff about it. And the movie ridiculously trivialized it for me.
Questions about this premise?
Under your definition:
Does JK Rowling have executive control over stories about a bullied kid that finds out he’s a wizard?
Does Rose-Acuff or Hank Williams Sr.'s heirs have exclusive control over song/stories/paintings/etc. about someone tormented about cheating on their partner?
Should Xerox have had exclusive control over GUIs and computer mice?
Someone theoretically could have obtained patent protection on the ideas for GUIs and computer mice, provided they had met the requirements (novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness).
Of course. Or a whole handful. But that’s still only scratching the surface of all the content produced.
But what does that matter for the argument you’re making? No mortal is ever going to do more than scratch the surface of all content produced. If you can find art that is meaningful and moving and powerful, and so can lots of other people, seems like the system is working pretty well.
No. I feel our legal system has generally done a good job in setting the narrowness of the ideas that are owned. So Rowling, for example, can own Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone but not the general plot of a bullied young boy finding out he has magic powers. (Which is lucky for her because if it was possible to own that plot, Neil Gaiman would own it.)
Your point would be clearer if you said that the legal system has said that “ideas” cannot be protected under copyright law. Let’s look, for example, at the current U.S. copyright statute, the Copyright Act of 1976:
§102 · Subject matter of copyright: In general
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:
(1) literary works;
(2) musical works, including any accompanying words;
(3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;
(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
(7) sound recordings; and
(8) architectural works.
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
To give a citation, these are the rights that the Copyright Act confers to a copyright owner. A copyright owner can sell or license any or some or all of these rights and retain ownership, or can sell es entire ownership interest.
§106 · Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Are you still arguing about terminology? Why?
J.K. Rowling wasn’t walking down the street one day and found a book series lying in the street for her to claim. It wasn’t something that somebody else gave her and she wrote down. The Harry Potter book series was something that Rowling created in her mind.
There’s a common term for something you create in your mind. It’s called an idea.
I could perhaps use the term “work of authorship” instead of idea in this discussion. But it would look ridiculous. And, more importantly, I am seeking a discussion of the broad category of ownership of ideas and that includes ideas that aren’t covered by the term work of authorship.
Yes, that’s exactly right. But at the point that it existed solely in her mind and was an idea it was not protected by copyright law. At all. It did not earn copyright protection until she wrote it down, that is, until she converted that idea from an idea to expression, and only that expression, not her idea, is protected.
If she had stopped on the street, grabbed someone by the collar, and told em her idea, that person would have been free to write it down emself, exactly as Rowling had told em. E could have freely copied every bit of that idea, because Rowling had not yet created something that copyright law protects–a work of expression fixed in a perceivable medium.
I started this thread because I didn’t want to take another thread off topic.
So could you extend me the same courtesy. If you want to discuss legal terminology, please start a new thread on that topic.
IMHO, you’ve been getting a lot of pushback on your terminology because, in many people’s minds, there’s a huge and important distinction between ideas and the creative works that are generated from those ideas. This has been discussed in several threads, such as this one: