Pixar should provide their movies on demand at their website via a subscription service that allows you to watch old product for free. It would be a massive revenue source, and by being cheap and convenient enough to get it directly from the source, piracy and ownership of the copyright becomes a moot point as it relates to their ability to profit from it. Why spend ten or twenty minutes looking for a good quality stream (especially when Pixar intentionally seeds bad torrents) when you can get it in HD any time you want with a monthly subscription fee of $ 10?
Any limit favors one end of the spectrum at the expense of the other. A 100 year copyright term benefits Pixar a whole bunch, but screws everyone who would like to use an element or character or story of Pixar’s (or similar to one of Pixar’s, or one Pixar bought but still hasn’t gotten around to making a movie out of, or one similar to *that *one) within a legitimate creative work, in order to make a buck or two.
Hmm, also just realized your sword was double-sided : I haven’t even heard of America’s Sweethearts… but if its publishers have a crack legal team*, they can use it to prevent someone else from selling a very similar movie or (more likely) demand retribution when a very similar movie turns out to make a pile of cash. Because the very similar movie happens to be, you know, good.
And that, over the course of the next 100 years. Who’s going to even check their own work against a 100 year old movie no one has even heard of, let alone the enterity of a century worth of the world’s cinematic production ?
- which is an important aspect of the issue as well. Small time publishers and/or lone creators never really get to play the “you stole mah propedy !” game, do they ?
Ah HA ! Finally found the full text of the White Wolf lawsuit claim discussed earlier. It’s… well it’s even worse than I expected.
Among the 80 “unique similarities” are such items as :
- In the WoD vampires have the ability to disappear. In Underworld, many vampire disappear,
- In the WoD vampires hide from human society, in Underworld humans are unaware of the existence of vampires ; and my favorite,
- In the WoD, one female vampire character is an excellent assassin and warrior. In Underworld, the protagonist is female, a vampire, and an excellent assassin and warrior.
Stop the presses, Buffy is WW’s property ! Joss Whedon is a damn dirty thief !
Because we wouldn’t have Steamboat Willie, and all the other derivative Disney Movies, if the unlimited protection you are advocating existed at the time these movies were being made. They would have been illegal.
Exactly. And if unlimited protection is wrong, why is any protection at all not also wrong? When does copyright stop being a good thing for society and become a burden? How can we tell when this threshold is crossed?
RickJay wants to discuss setting different copyright terms to different types of creative output. That just extends my question to independently apply to each type of work. What is the ideal copyright term for a painting? Why? What is the ideal copyright term for a novel? Why?
We’ve already decided that information isn’t real property. It is inferior and is granted inferior protection. I question why we grant it any protection at all. Claiming credit for something you didn’t do is plagiarism, but using a cheaper distribution model is just competition.
Laws can do more than just adjust copyright duration down or up!
Because, of course, doing so is an incentive to create the art/program/whatever in the first place. The basic idea is sound IMHO; it’s just that present copyright law has become too extreme, and drifted from this purpose. And turned it into a ( badly thought out ) moral issue instead of a practical one.
This is similar to my position. The goal is to create an incentive for creativity. Free markets of ideas lead to essentially free information; due to the ease of copying, the supply of an idea, once divested, is virtually infinite. Therefore the price one can fetch for a particular idea is close to zero. We’ve got a unique situation where the supply of ideas is necessary to society as a whole, but in a free market, ideas are worth very little to their creators. Some people manage to get paid before the ideas are divested, which is when ideas are worth a lot. But the rest need somebody to adjust the market to where they can make a profit.
By framing the debate as one of property rights versus thieves, we’ve blinded ourselves to the goal of benefiting society through encouraging creation. We need to realize that the purpose of copyright is to distort free markets to society’s ends, with inevitable negative consequences. The discussion should be about minimizing those consequences while maximizing society’s benefit.
By bypassing the discussion of ownership and property rights, we see that copyrights are but one solution out of many for encouraging creation. Our modern digital age is currently highlighting the inescapable failures of such a solution, and we must realize that copyrights aren’t the only option. In short, instead of attempting to fix copyrights, I suggest we scrap it and find a new solution.
That is a frivolous lawsuit, but at the same time Underworld WAS almost entirely a White Wolf ripoff in the most obvious of ways.
Wuh ? It’s one or the other, no ?
ETA : and in any case, isn’t it a big stretch to leap from “it’s an X ripoff” to “it harms X” ?
Righto, so, how would software work?
As in, how do software developers make money if everyone can now copy their software without fear of the law?
Not necessarily. It’s possible to think Underworld was a White Wolf ripoff and also that it’s not worth suing over.
Whereas I suggest you find a new solution before scrapping copyrights. Copyrights have been moderately effective without seeming like too much of an oppression upon society for quite a long time; they’re only becoming onerous now because 1) corporate interests are forcing their durations to be extraordinarily long, and 2) the extreme ease of breaking copyright is making companies nervous* and leading them to search for their own alternate solutions to the problem, most of which seem onerous to users in a way that copyrights never have. Problem 1 can be trivially solved by adjusting copyrights, and problem 2 is more a problem with these new solutions you suggest than with copyright itself. Which makes me dubious about the merit of a world where we strip copyright from everything and spread the digital world’s DRM difficulties to every media.
- I don’t think that companies are actually being brought down by pirates - not yet, anyway. They’re demonstrably nervous, though.
Yes, we should search for new solutions. But first we have to all admit that there can be other solutions and that we should all earnestly start trying to search for them.
And yet, those same technological forces that are making the traditional, simple ownership model not work are making more complex alternatives viable.
Possibly. If you’re referring to monitoring, eg, the playback of a song to determine how much compensation an artist should receive. But not really. Because a) you don’t need this fine-grained godeye to just get basic statistics and b) monitoring use is not the only metric. Some metrics may not have to do with surveillance at all, but still use technology. Eg, advances in voting could let critics and other tasteful people accumulate a merit score to a work that would also affect compensation. (Eg, the IMDB rating or the Metacritic rating.)
I admit that there can be other solutions. I don’t feel that obliged to worry about them though, because I see reducing copyrights to, say, 10, 15, or 20 years across the board and without exception being a pretty decent half-arsed solution that has the virtue of being simple and already on the table.
You want something else considered, think it up and put it on the table.
Not seeing what this has to do with the Disney problem - that’s technology independent. As for the DRM problem, I’ll beleive in these alternate solutions when I see them.
Well, speaking practically, you have to pick a metric. The current one requires people to put their money where their mouth is, and in theory anyway requires them to do so at least once before accessing the product, ensuring that the ‘votes’ are collected with some degree of reliability (sans piracy, which sidesteps the metric altogether). It also has the virtue of directly tying the rating with a pile of money with which to pay the content creators.
I’m dubious about any scheme that requires voluntary rating - only people who really liked it, or really hated it, would bother to vote. Thus something that a lot of people used with mild interest but a few people hated could get a lower rating/payout than something a handful of people really liked a lot but nobody else used. Also I’d be concerned about double-voting. Still, this could in theory be fleshed out to a viable system, though I suspect it would require a consilidation of statistics that would likely be perceived by many as an intrusion of privacy. (Voting with dollars at least has the possibility of anonymity, and as a bonus includes a disincentive against double-voting.)
I may be unclear what you’re referring to with “monitoring”, but from the look of it it looks like it would be fairly god-eye to me, if you can detect illict copies from being played on the sly. Perhaps this could be explained further?
I agree that copyrights are too long these days. HOWEVER:
If I spend years writing a book, and then die the day it’s published, you’re saying that my wife should get nothing?
Here’s the problem. Most authors don’t get paychecks. I can’t “rest on my laurels” after a book is published, because the revenue stream that shows up in royalties is late payment for last year’s work. I have to start working on the next project immediately, so that I’ll have an income next year.
The usual response to this is that authors (and songwriters, and painters, and…) should just get paid a fair living wage and there should be no royalties. Unfortunately, that means much of what I’ve written wouldn’t have been published. The royalty system means that publishers are pushing some of the risk onto the author, and if they can’t do that, they wouldn’t be willing to take chances on new stuff.
They are paying for the printing and marketing (and editing and proofing and so forth), but if it doesn’t sell well, the author doesn’t get paid–or gets just a pittance. The tradeoff is that if it does sell well, the author will get paid nicely.
If you wish to grouse about the copyright and royalty systems, great; but can you come up with an alternative system that keeps a steady flow of new music, books, games, software, and so on without screwing the artists?
Similar stories are in Mad Magazine a lot… (parodies, etc). If it is not funny it is still something that can be found in Mad.
What if copyright was NEVER EVER extended and if it must be extended, then it would only be extended on future works, not current works so that things from 1923 onwards would fall into the public domain. Authors of stuff from 1923 are mostly dead and additional money they receive wouldn’t encourage new works. It would just reward them for works they’ve already made which is unnecessary.
For many decades copyright was 14 years plus a possible 14 year extension. I think it would take a shorter amount of time for people to cash in on their investment these days so copyright should be 30 years or less.
BTW, a lot of creative people just get a wage and their company owns the copyrights - for about 100 years - so far. It doesn’t take that long for most things to break even (if they ever do) some popular cartoons made a profit after they were released onto DVD but that didn’t take long.
BTW, the Happy Birthday song is copyright!
http://www.unhappybirthday.com/
I guess you think that people should come up with something original if they have a birthday song in a movie rather than ripping-off a song. Well in the Peep Show TV show they did invent an original birthday song. It was dumb because it wasn’t realistic - people only sing the happy birthday song, not their song.
That reminds me of the toon porn that can be found where talented illustrators draw Disney, etc, characters in porn scenarios. The original creators of the cartoons probably wouldn’t want that to happen - on the other hand creators of many things wouldn’t want to be ridiculed on South Park. Another possible problem is that the toon porn creators are making money off of copyrighted characters. Well if the characters are very well known the creators (or at least the corporation behind it) would be well off and could afford to lose some potential income.