So ... What does "out of copyright" mean?

Factual Questions
41

right… permission of the Reader. What happens if someone wants to publish all my posts here and the Reader doesn’t want that to happen? Do they have a final veto? Can they extort money from me and my publisher? Or is any publisher who pays me money the same thing as me republishing? If that’s true, what’s stopping me from declaring that everyone in the world is my agent, and are doing my work in republishing my postings?

umm… have you ever actually tried reading it?

Whether i make money on it and whether the original publisher loses money on it are points one and two! It DOES make a difference. The amount that’s copied is only one point, and number three at that. It is not at all clear to me why posting a whole article does not fall under fair use. (Other than that case law and corporate-ass-licking judges might’ve twisted it that way.) I certainly believe that summing up the costs and benefits of reposting articles ends up benefiting society. And if you disagree, I hope you’ll say why it doesn’t rather than saying, “shut up, that’s not the law.”

In addition to the above, then how come someone has a right to copy my whole post, and I don’t have a say? The disclaimer at the bottom requires the Reader to give expressed written permission. And what about forums without such disclaimers? (I mean I can see why it would fall under the quote of the law above, but why is there a difference between posts and articles?) And when archiving, you must copy the whole thing?? What’s stopping Google from copying every single book and magazine out there and calling it all an archive?

Seems to me copyright law is all just a bunch of ad-hoc bs patched together (sometimes in favor of users, but I don’t think sufficiently so). Not that I think that that approach is wrong. I don’t believe there is one principle on which laws should be attempted to be based (like in physics). It just means that we shouldn’t feel so self-conscious about inventing all sorts of other ad-hoc rules by which we let works get copied. WE SHOULD DISPELL THE NOTION “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY” FROM OUR MINDS, AS IF IT WERE SOME SORT OF FIRST PRINCIPLE. There ain’t no fair-use provisions where I have to let people borrow my things, are there?

I never claimed to know a great deal about this… but you don’t know everything either so stfu.

42

You really don’t know what General Questions is for, do you?

43

I’m a little disturbed by this interpretation. It’s my understanding that the spirit of copyright laws were originally for (1) protecting the creator’s rights to earn money off their product, and (2) protecting the PUBLIC’s rights to access and enjoy it – hence, public domain. Nowadays, the laws are all about (1) and very little (2).

Some copyright owners sit on a property, don’t publish it, don’t distribute it, and won’t license it to ANYONE, or charge such exorbitant fees that no one bothers. For example, movies & TV shows on DVD often have music replaced, because the RIAA increased their licensing fees (blaming Napster & such…hack…spit…) Maybe Cadillac can afford $10 million to license “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin (or however much it cost), but a movie like “Almost Famous” can’t. So went up with shows like “Wiseguy” coming to DVD with ALL the music replaced (and the original music was intrinsic to the show’s style) and shows like “WKRP in Cincinnati” will probably never see DVD at all, for the same reason.

The Reader has no control over what YOU do with your own copyrighted material. They can do whatever they want with what you publicly post, but if a third party wants to re-publish your material (with or without your permission) they have no dog in that fight.

I go off on this tangent myself all the time (and most people call it delayed teenage angst, maybe they have a point) but really, it used to be considered “American” to rebel against what we perceive to be unjust laws – whether it’s slavery, civil rights, or too high a tax on tea. :wink: It ain’t like that anymore…everyone seems fit to suck at the corporate teat, speak when spoken to and don’t rock the boat, accept the law as MORALLY correct and don’t ask questions. And that really bothers me.

44

Or if you copied from an old printing that’s now public domain.

45

Moderator Warning

Alex. First, you don’t tell someone stfu in General Questions.

Second, if you want to debate the moral issues, take it to Great Debates.

Third, if you have facts, present them. If you have opinions, take it to another forum.

samclem General Questions Moderator

46

Since this is GQ, let me try to present some actual facts into this thread.

No, they have no say over your use of your posts.

No.

You can sell your words to any publisher, period.

Lawyers make the big bucks because they have to read through entire laws to understand the context of the whole, and are not allowed to pick out pieces to make points with. The entire copyright law is in a .pdf at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf

The argument that you can ignore case law because you don’t like it is not one that’s going to get you very far, even if you can somehow find a judge who doesn’t lick corporate ass. There are good reasons that case law all agrees that copying of entire articles is illegal, even if you don’t make money off of it.

One is that section 107 of the law is a specific grant of privilege to certain forms of news, education, and criticism. It is not a blanket indemnity from the provisions of section 106. Another reason is that the four factors are not ranked in order of importance. All must be considered case by case. That puts the amount of material used and any commercial purpose at an even level with whether the use of the copy is legitimately one of the privileged forms. It also means that depriving a copyright owner from the fruits of future payments by making a work illegitimately available is as important a bar to copying as charging for the work.

This where KGS’s argument fails.

If copyright owners feel that they can increase the future value of their property by not licensing it today, then then can and even should do so. It is not merely legally correct, but morally correct as well.

What the suitable term limit for copyright is can be endlessly debated. But since the European Union raised the limit, and the U.S. matched it to prevent endless legal worldwide wrangling, there is next to no chance that the limit will be reduced. Essentially the entire western world would have to agree to do so at the same time. It’s not going to happen. Debating it or making sniping comments about corporations may be fun for GD, but it has nothing to do with the facts in this thread. Fair use will stay fair use and copying of whole articles illegal no matter what the length of copyright is.

47

Then please explain the significance of the partial sentence, “No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted without express written consent of the Chicago Reader, Inc., except…” Is it totally void of meaning? Can we take it down?

Morally correct?!?! What exactly do you base your morality on, again? Protecting people’s rights to make money? Morality must be based on the total good for society. Please explain why publishers not letting works see the lights of day can possibly be morally correct. Ok, maybe we should save the good things for later. Hmm, that’s actually an interesting objective and an interesting mechanism. See, my mind isn’t closed to original ideas. But i’ll bet you anything that that wasn’t what you were thinking.

I know… case law is case law. I’m not trying to argue something as would pass our current criteria of so-called “justice.” I’m trying to discuss things as we should view them if we stepped back a foot or two for a change. Case law just means stuff as was decided before. That’s hardly a philosophically-justified argument. Anyway, I’d much rather hear your take on the “good reasons that…law agrees that copying of entire articles is illegal” as it pertains to uses of the educational type as on this message board (and for use in classrooms, as another example).

As for all the moderators out there… don’t try to fight it if a thread takes a different direction than was originally intended. If you want to move the discussion as it currently is to a different forum, then please do so. But don’t come in and say, “no, no, stop talking.”

Anyway, i’ve been thinking about copyright more deeply and i’ve concluded that the whole thing about right-to-wring-as-much-money-as-you-can might work out, as it might for physical capitalism, if only you had a state of perfect competition and a perfect exchange of information on the quality, price, and availability of products. (ie, if any schmo could publish a record and have it compete on a competely equal footing, aside from quality, to the big record labels, then they could have all the monopoly rights they’d like). However, is that really a correct description of reality? Does our present divergence (whereby people are led to buy big-named records because the tools aren’t available to discover all the other competitors) skew the end result for society? Does it break the ideal structure such that publishers make more money than they should and people get less benefit than they ought? Should we modify our laws to compensate for this unfortunate result, as well as modify our laws to try to fundamentally counteract the phenomenon? I think that we are at a turning point in civilization where that perfect competition and flow of information will finally come about and the debate may turn moot. But as part of this process, we have to ask such questions and make the prophecy self-fulfilling. Do we have the sort of competition that would make a pure system of intellectual property make full sense?

48

Because the works belong to the copyright holders, not to you or society at large. Just as you have the right to control your own property, so do copyright owners.

It might benefit society at large if someone stole your car to transport little old ladies to their doctor appointments, but that doesn’t make it legal or moral.

49

Exactly.

Look at it this way, AD. You own a piece of property, empty land. Someone comes up to you and says they want to buy it. You say no, that you think it’s going to be worth twice what the offer is because the area will be developed more in the future. The buyer then says, it doesn’t matter what you want. You have to sell to me now and at my price. That’s the law.

You would never accept that. There would be riots in the street if any government wrote that into law.

But you’re willing to do it to someone else’s copyrighted works. That’s your idea of morality?

Copyright is not about corporations. It is about creators. I make my living by writing. That’s my property and my livelihood. You want to tell me that you can take everything of mine for free? It’s not going to happen. That’s not up for argument. It’s a fact because it’s the settled law of the land.

I’m not going to debate you on this in GQ. Here all I can say is that you’re simply wrong about the facts. Your total understanding of the subject is nonexistent. You literally have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know the history of the subject, the current state of the law, or the issues at stake. You can’t understand even the most basic written-for-the-layperson legalese. You don’t even know how to read a mod’s warning.

Go do a forum search for “copyright.” It’ll bring up 750 threads. Go read them and maybe learn something about the subject before continuing this thread.

50

sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh. I don’t know, after all the breath i’ve spent up to this point… I ought to give up. But maybe, just maybe, i’ll give it another shot.

Exapne, you just started throwing out hypothetical reasons for why not having stringent property laws for physical possessions (in particular land and cars) would displease a great deal of people. Why it would end up hurting society (if we define that as the state in which we end up leaving the citizens). All that does is fall in line with my assertion that we base our laws on utilitarianism. That we write laws to BENEFIT PEOPLE! If you want to keep arguing in your vein, how about you give an example where people (on average and in sum) end up being hurt by a law but that you feel that it ought morally exist anyway. I would really like to see you pull that one off.

Regarding your particular example… there was a column very recently discussing how the police in some jurisdictions may take your car to serve the common good. Thank god you’re not the one writing our laws.

Also, you make the completely illogical step from physical property (which if someone takes you obviously don’t have anymore) to intellectual property.

No, obviously I’m not telling you that people should be able to take everything you have for free. I’m telling you that the method by which you get compensated and encouraged to create ought not go so far as to discourage you to disseminate. By making your buck off the restriction of the spread of knowledge, the benefit of your work is not fully realized. Intellectual property owners would also have it in their interests to see the abolishment of libraries. (Oh god, you know you can get every book and many CDs and videos for FREE?!?! For a month at a time?? Imagine how many books do not get sold because of that.) But anyway, we have to first agree on the former point that laws get drafted up to be in society’s interests, not because of analogies to laws that are in society’s interests.

Um, i stopped talking about the current law half a thread ago. You are just trying to bring up poor excuses for why you don’t want to entertain the possibility that there might be some whole other way of handling things. Your rebuttals of, “you don’t know the law, shut up,” only reveal your poor rhetorical skill seeing as the only knowledge of copyright law necessary for the current discussion is knowing the power that it gives holders. And even that is not necessary for the more important point that, as a principle, laws are based on utilitarianism (or at least something rather close to it).

And as for this being GQ not GD. Fine, what do YOU want to talk about? Do you have anything more to say about what “out of copyright” means? Was that covered insufficiently, in your opinion? Am I stopping the facts from coming out on this issue? If not, then let’s please not halt discussions with appeals to technicalities.

I’ll end my post with that idiotic statement.

51

“Regarding your particular example” should be “Regarding Walloon’s example.” Sorry.

52

Here, let me help.

53

Whether it serves the common good that property can be commandeered by a restricted class of authorised persons in an emergency would seem somewhat irrelevant to a debate about whether it would serve the common good for it to be lawful for the general public to be able to commandeer property because they want to.

Before you take up Garfield226’s offer, you might like to consider the fact that there have been dozens of threads in GD on this subject before. Do a search. I often participate, so you could put my username in if it would help narrow down. Read up. You will see that the types of points you are making here are common as dirt and take about as long to sweep up and bin.

An example: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=282908&page=1&pp=50