In this Internet/computer age, with CD rippers, scanners, video feed uploaders, and myriad other ways to copy pop culture products and software (not to mention the increasingly sophisticated ways constantly being developed to circumvent protection, DRM, and the like), will the copyright one day wither away, collapsing under the sheer volume of anonymous copies of everything from Windows to Britney Spears freely circulating the entire world? Has that day already come?
Heck, some even go so far as to say that the entire concept of the copyright is a bad thing. Is there any way they’re right, and that such a happening would be in the best interest of the public at large?
I agree that trying to squeeze the square peg of digital technology into the round hole of copyright law is becoming increasingly untenable; but that’s not going to stop them from trying. We’re talking money here, dammit! I would like to see some new paradigm of profiting from intellectual property be devised, but more likely we’ll end up perpetuating the same half-assed system we have now: punish as many people as you can catch and process through the legal system, with no real hope of ever actually eliminating illegal activity. Sort of like how we handle drug use.
Well, I think they are right, but that is because I’m one of them.
The purpose of copyright, as written in the constitution, is to “promote the creation of the useful arts”. It was about the ends, not the means. Speculation about “intellectual property” etc. came much later.
Why wern’t the founders concerned with property rights? One is because the spread of information is essential to an educated and lively society. The other is that no idea exists in a vacuum. There would be no modern rock and roll without the Beatles. There would be no Stephen King without Shakespeare. There would be no World of Warcraft without Pong. Every idea exists in a culture and takes a lot of influence from them.
Furthermore, at some point something does become a part of the culture, such that it can’t be seperated. Like the song “Happy Birthday” (who’s copyright is still owned by two old ladies). We all grew up singing this. We wouldn’t really be America without us. It’s a part of each of us, and it’s absurd to think an individual could own something so fundamental. It’s like owning the sky- it’s just an absurd idea.
Finally, we all benefit from a rich public domain. It’s gives use more ability to learn, to create, to share and to make our culture richer. America is more than a collection of humans, we are a nation and a culture and our cultural products make us great. 500 years from now the Iraq war will be a footnote in history, but our great plays and books and movies will still be a part of culture. There is value in intellectual property beyond what it gives to an individual. And society exists to be valuable to the society members. Art and information are fundamentally different from other properties in this respect, and it’s absurd to pretend that they are exactly the same as a car that you own.
And so when control of information gets too tight, you limit new ideas, the very lifeblood of society. This happens today. For example, there are many documentries that can’t be released because the makers could not get or could not afford to get rights to a song that happened to be playing in the background of an important clip. I am a film maker and I won’t make documentries because I’m scared of precisely this. We have reached the point that instead of encouraging the creation of art, our copyright laws discourage it. Our society becomes a little less rich for every year more stuff does not enter the public domain.
I think we are basically already at the point where anyone who wants something for free can get it for free. There are still, however, a lot of people willing to pay for convenience, artwork and packaging, guaranteed quality, warranties/tech support for software; or because they just think it’s the right thing to do.
That number will decrease over time as generations that grew up accustomed to purchasing CDs and DVDs are replaced by younger generations for whom piracy is a matter of course. Eventually the music and movie industry as we know them will implode and be replaced by something different. Maybe that new thing will be better for artists and customers; maybe it won’t. I’m not especially looking forward to finding out.
Copyright will remain indefinitely. Even if it ceases applying to the general public, it will still be used to stop the book publishers from blithely selling works without paying the original authors. This is what copyright was originally created for, after all; the drafters of the constitution could not have possibly imagined the ease with which an individual can duplicate content in his own home today; it wouldn’t even have been a point for consideration. So, copyright will undoubtedly persist eternal, preventing businesses from preying on the intellectual property of The Little Guy and each other. (This is the pretty much the application of copyright law that is apparently ruining even sven’s day, incidentally, so he’ll remain screwed over regardless. Tough luck.)
As to wether people will stop using copyright to prevent The Little Guy from pirating stuff for his own use… does anybody actually get arrested for pirating stuff for their own use? As has been mentioned in another thread a few times, copyright at that level is already essentially unenforceable; the best content providers can do is to try and make the copying more difficult in and of itself. I expect we’ll see a few more stabs at that before anybody gives up trying.
Is the protection of intellectual property bad? Of course not. Right now, there are two reasons why people create art: for fun, and for money. I believe that a significant percentage of art is created for money. A total absence of copyright protection erodes or eliminates the financial incentive to make art for money, for the simple reason that if everybody’s getting it for free, nobody’s getting paid for it. While there are still those who would create some art even if they would not get their investment back on it, that number is going to be rather small compared to what we’re looking at nowadays. I bet that, in a total absence of intellectual property protection, even sven still wouldn’t bother making too many documentaries. Not if he knew he would only get a dozen or two dollars for them before they were posted to the web.
If another (viable) system for ensuring artists get reasonably compensated for their work could be created, then I’d be all for it, but the pirates wouldn’t be. At its simplest, for the artists to get paid, somebody has to lose money proportionately, and the most obvious candidates for that are those people who are enjoying their free copy of the work. I don’t see why they’d like some other method of paying more than they like the current method.
In short, there are indeed a number of artists that are inconvenienced by copyright protection; I can’t myself see it being that large a percentage of them, but what do I know. I do know that if we reach the point where most of the population refuse to pay for the media they’re recieving, then the number of people who bother to create that art is going to drop damatically. Which is going to be a bad day for everybody. (Or, if we have another actor for president at that point, we might see the Movie Gestapo conducting raids on random houses. Reason #2 for staying legal. )
I believe it will, but it probably hasn’t yet. Copyright is still going strong in the commercial arena - go to your local music store and see how many different record labels are selling Britney’s latest album. You’ll find exactly one. If copyright were disregarded by everyone, you’d be able to buy the same music from several different companies, and that competition would drive down the price.
Noncommercial copying, however, is unstoppable, and it’s only getting easier. Stamping out piracy is as unrealistic as stamping out drug use or speeding. In the long run, I believe the industry will have no choice but to reform their business model (e.g. charge for the initial act of creation, not for individual copies), add value to their product in a form that pirates can’t duplicate (e.g. free concert tickets inside the CD case), or go the way of the buggy whip makers.
I say yes, but of course I’m one of those people too. Copyright boils down to a restriction on free speech, not for the purpose of public safety, but for private financial benefit - I can’t give some piece of information to my neighbor simply because a third party would like to sell it to him instead. My freedom of speech is not for sale.
Not arrested, but they certainly get sued for thousands of dollars.
Can you elaborate on this? I thought the whole idea of royalties was that the artist gets paid in proportion to how successful the work turns out to be (in other words, how many copies sold). Under your system, I can imagine a lot of grossly unfair situations where an artist is forced to accept a pittance for their work (the alternative being it’s not released at all), and the record company goes on to make millions while the artist starves. So much for the sticking it to the man.
This is misleading and disingenuous. What gets copyrighted is not “pieces of information,” but the fruit of one or more people’s time, talent, skill, effort, etc.
FWIW, I advocate that copyright laws stick with the reasonable ones layed out in the consititution with reasonable time limits, etc. The idea is to strike a balance between motivating artists and enriching society, and I think the point in which “motivating artists” (and I think the huge amount of non-commericial offerings on the web shows that sometimes people do create for no financial reason) is somewhere far far sooner than 99 years.
So would I. I can think of three possibilities that might, either individually or in some combination, be workable.
1. Keep the copyright laws pretty much the same as they are now, but change people’s attitudes so that illegal copying is seen as dishonest and dishonorable and cheating people out of the well-earned rewards of their labors. The majority of people are basically honest (or so I like to think) and wouldn’t think of shoplifting or purse-snatching or scamming old ladies out of their retirement savings or driving drunk or… —not just because they fear getting caught and punished, but because it goes against their basic code of ethics. They’d lose their right to think of themselves as decent, honest, honorable people, and to have their friends and family think of them that way if they found out.
I suspect such an attitude could become widely accepted if, and only if, it were widely believed that it really did matter to the creators of the works whether or not you paid for your copy of their creation. And this might require a change in the system of ownership and payment, whereby the creators (writers, musicians, actors, etc.) see more of the money from the sale of their work. I think people are a lot more willing to pay for something they enjoy if they believe that money is going directly to the artist who is responsible for that work, and not to some rich, greedy publisher or record label executive.
2. Something along the lines of shareware: Music, movies, etc. is freely available for download, and/or for purchase for a nominal fee to cover the cost of materials and distribution (e.g. you could get CDs and DVDs for a buck or two each), and if you like, enjoy, or benefit from the work in question, you then send the artist or publisher some money (either a set amount, or it could be up to you to use your own judgment about how much you thought it was worth to you, how much you could afford to give. etc.) This also would probably require a change in societal attitudes toward paying for creative works. Could it work? I find it plausible but not likely.
3. Make creative works freely available for download, copying, etc. but also offer slick, nicely published and packaged editions, perhaps with extras, for sale to people who really like the work in question and want to add it to their collection. To some extent, this currently exists. For a long time people have been able to hear and see music, movies, shows, etc. essentially for free on the radio and TV, and even tape them if they want to keep them; but people still bought records and tapes and CDs and videotapes and DVDs. And I think there will always be people who want those physical items on their shelves. There are many books available online for free reading or download—mostly older works that are now in the public domain, but not all. Yet bound, printed copies of the more popular of these books continue to be published and sold.
I disagree. I think over the next 5 - 10 years you will see CDs amd DVDs disappear and be replaced with uncopyable media and hardware. New content will only be available on the new media, and as your CD and DVD players die you won’t be able to replace them.
Yes, the blind spot of piracy advocates like Mr2001 is that this is still a brave new world we are entering into. RAmpant piracy of digital content is simply creating a very hungry market within the creative industry for technololgy that can thwart it, and that market will eventually be satisfied.
That said, this situation has come about because copyright terms in this country are far too long, IMO.
A prime example. Some of the first software-based video games (PONG and others among the earliest ones were hard-wired state machines with no software, placing them under patent law) were created in the mid-1970s. There is a vibrant community of enthusiasts for these games who currently operate in the legal gray area of swapping games (and appropriate emulators) without permission of the copyright holder. Some of these copyright holders are on record as saying that’s fine with them, others have not wieghed in, leaving the fans uncertain as to whether they may eventually end up in legal trouble if the copyright holder gets wind of their activities.
Had we not passed the Copyright Act of 1976 in preparation for eventually signing the Berne Convention (tying us to Europe’s far-too-restrictive copyright laws), and its bastard step-child, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, then the public would be better served in this instance. A game coywritten in 1973, for example, would have ended its initial term in 2001. The copyright holder could have renewed for another 28 years, but in the realm of video games, many would not have been of a mind to, others would have dissolved with their assets in disarray, others might not have seen the point, where still other might see free access to their historic catalogue as good advertising for their current product. As a result, a much larger catalogue of this stuff would available as public domain rather than as “abandonware”.
Under current law, a program published in 1973 will be under copyright protection until 2068. Who exactly does this serve?
Except in special cases (improperly formatted copyright protection notices on films from back when the law was stricter, rare cases like “It’s A Wonderful Life” whose term was not renewed), most of the public domain was created before 1923, and this date will remain frozen until at least 2018. How much better would it be for the preservation of American culture if today, as per the 1909 copyright law if it were still in effect, everything before 1978 that no one had bothered to re-register were freely available to the public, and everything before 1950 was freely avaible, period. The circulation of classic films would renew our appreciation for them, important genres such as jazz and blues would not be as moribund as they are because they would be in wide release and available cheaply.
I’m for a more reasonable copyright protection term, and the technological ability to enforce it.
Yes, exactly. I argued this point with Mr2001 in a different thread. As someone who works in the videogame industry I can unequivocally state that the “charge for the initial act of creation” scheme that he refers to above is not a viable business model.
If unauthorized consumer copying begins to seriously undermine the film/music/videogame industries we’ll quickly see a collaboration between the major hardware manufacturers and the content producers to create new distribution formats that are much harder for the average consumer to copy.
And if that fails … then home entertainment options will dry up as the creative industries shift to business models where they only release new content in controlled-access venues. It used to be that if you wanted to hear music you’d go to a concert. If you wanted to see a movie you’d go to a movie theater. If you wanted to play a videogame you’d go to an arcade. We could easily find ourselves returning to those days. If movie studios can’t make money off DVD releases because of rampant copying then they simply won’t release their movies on DVD anymore and will build their financing around theatrical revenues only.
Another model would be to designate a portion of everyone’s monthly ISP charge to a royalty fund. Say $5.00, or $10.00, or whatever. And that monthly charge gives you unlimited access to every movie, book, song, game, photgraph or artwork ever created, all organized logically in many different schemes. Every song you listen to or movie you watch or e-book you read is flagged. At the end of the month the total royalty money is divided up among all creators based on the number of flags their work gets.
And once a creator is dead, or a certain number of years after the product is released (less than 50 years at least!), the product becomes public domain.
Copyright, patents, and intellectual property are pragmatic attempts to advance the useful arts and sciences by granting the originators of new work a temporary monopoly on the use of their work. They aren’t granted because people own their ideas. It’s impossible to own an idea. It’s just that we want more books, more music, more inventions, and in order to get them we have to give the creators something in return.
Our current copyright law is based on the industrial technology of the printing press. Before the printing press there was no such thing as copyright, because each manuscript had to be made by hand. It would have been absurd to imagine that you couldn’t make a copy of any work you could get your hands on, and indeed copying was the only way of insuring that those works would survive. But there was no financial incentive to create new books, you couldn’t make money authoring books.
And along comes the printing press, and later the record player, and the movie theater. Suddenly it was possible to make money from NEW works. And so the old system didn’t make sense, because if anyone could copy freely there was no way for the creator himself to make more than a fraction of the money from selling the new work. And so we grant the creator a temprorary monopoly on copying his work, and this is enforceable because it takes specialized equipment and a substantial capital outlay to create copies of books, or records, or films. And if you’re trying to make money by selling those books, or records, or showing the films, it’s pretty easy to track down who made the copies. And it’s pretty easy to seize the copies and the money and give them to the creator.
Except now that doesn’t work. People generally aren’t copying because they want to sell the copies they make, they copy because it doesn’t cost anything and only takes a few seconds of effort, and act of copying doesn’t seem to have a very direct effect on the creator of the work anyway, if there even is an identifiable “creator”. And since there’s no central industrial copying equipment it’s very difficult to even know that such copying has taken place. And the copiers aren’t making money from copying, they’re just not paying for their copy. And there’s no incentive for someone to try to keep others from copying their copy, what do they lose? Nothing.
So our current system is going to become more and more unworkable. The recent changes in the law that essentially extend copyright for eternity won’t mean a thing, because they are unenforceable. And all the digital rights management in the world can’t prevent clean copies from circulating. And the more draconian DRM becomes the more incentive people have to circumvent it. Eventually someone’s going to come up with a better business and legal model, and those who refuse to get on board will find themselves out of luck.
Yes, but I don’t think that arrangement needs to be set in stone. Most people are paid in proportion to how much work they do, not how much their work turns out to be appreciated in the future.
How will the record company go on to make millions if they don’t have a monopoly on distribution?
Yes, and what is the fruit of that time, talent, skill, effort, etc.? A piece of information. A novel is a sequence of words, a painting is an arrangement of colors in a two-dimensional space, and so on. That’s information, and that’s what gets copyrighted.
There is no such thing and I don’t believe there ever will be.
First off, if you give someone a disc and the player, the player must be able to get the information off of the disc to play it. A clever hacker can tap into the mechanism of the player to intercept the data as it’s read from the disc. Most folks won’t have the skill to do that, but it only has to be done once, by one person anywhere on earth, before the system is broken.
Second, even if the player is unhackable (maybe it’s rigged with explosives?) and it’s impossible for anyone to construct another device that can read the media (maybe it needs chips made out of enriched uranium and methamphetamine?), there’s still the “analog hole”. That is, movies and music still need to be delivered to human eyes and ears, which means displaying images on a screen and playing sound through speakers. At that point, anyone can make a copy by pointing a camcorder at the screen. It won’t be the best copy, but (1) with enough preparation, it can be pretty good, and (2) most people don’t care anyway, as shown by the popularity of bootleg movies made with camcorders in the cinema.
If that ever happens, I will eat a hat of your choice.
The very concept of DRM is flawed from the ground up. You can give someone an encrypted disc, but if you want them to be able to watch or listen to it, you have to give them the keys to decrypt it, too. And once they have those, you can’t control what they do with the decrypted data. The hungry market for technology that can make bits uncopyable is similar to the hungry market for perpetual motion machines - of course people want it, but that doesn’t mean it’s possible. I’m sure we’ll see all kinds of startups with technology they claim can make bits uncopyable, but they’ll all turn out to be either mistaken or fraudulent.
And then we’ll see a shift away from casual copying done in the home, toward copying done once by professionals in underground bunkers, who then distribute the data over the internet to average consumers. This is already what happens with hard-to-copy media like PC games, GameCube games, and cartridge games.
Yes, and that piece of information is also the fruit of the time, talent, skill, effort, and the all-important etcetera that an artist exerts. Literally speaking you’re both right, but I think the point that was being made is that the decision to refer to somebody’s two years of hard work as ‘information’, as if it were nothing more than a random pile of bits or a xerox of the times tables, is a pretty dismissive way to refer to the time and human effort that went into making that piece of easily duplicatable entertainment, without with that entertainment wouldn’t exist.
I think what people are telling you here is that is if the rippers make the market harsh for the content producers, the content producers are going to team up with the hardware producers and rise to the challenge. That doesn’t seem at all unlikely; they already own each other, after all.
It’s not even that hard to imagine a scenario for it. Here’s one: the major studios make a command decision to start making most or all of their movies in 3D. Even assuming no advances in technology they could use dual polarized images as the base technology.
The christmas after the big summer release, they start selling a line of projectors for these movies. Dual projecting lenses built into the unit, which has the player built in. It plays special double-sided blue-ray disks, “to hold both images at once”. The two sides have to be perfectly aligned to play properly. No dual-sided blue-ray readers or writers are ever sold; the disks are also made overlarge for a standard blue-ray drive (though the unit will still play the older DVD formats well enough). Aside from the inherently complicated reader and projector systems, all internal circuts and computers are built into one solid opaque block of tamper-resistant material that has a tendency to shatter if struck hard enough to crack. This block is superglued to both the top and bottom of the unit, as well as the reader unit. The unit has the standard audio outputs and no data or video inputs or outputs.
This could be made NOW. They could have the units designed by the end of the year and have produced them in quantity by the time Star Wars 7, Harry Potter 5, the Hobbit, and the X-Men/Spider Man crossover movie released next Christmas. It would be very expensive to design and make and they would likely have to sell it at a loss, but they could make up the difference in movie sales thereafter. (Even double-sided, the media would be comparatively cheap to produce.) A unit like this would trivially solve the analog problem, since polarized 3d cannot be captured by a camcorder; it would strongly resist the direct copying of the media to the computer by even the most elite hardware haxxor, and most importantly it would totally prevent the average person from playing back any copies sent out by that elite haxxor, especially on the original unit (without which you would at best get a 2-d result). In short this doodad would blow the crap out of the illegal copying and distribution of movies. And it only took me five minutes to think of this. Imagine what they could come up with if they really tried!
I’m sorry if you or anyone else thought I was being dismissive. I’m just being realistic.
Let’s say you spend 10 years of your life making a sculpture out of ice. It’s beautiful, it’s the result of a lot of time and talent, but the fact is it’s still ice. That doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate it as a work of art, but it does mean you have to keep it in a freezer if you don’t want it to melt. All the effort you poured into it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of ice.
Likewise, if you put time and talent into writing a novel or painting a picture, the fact is it’s still information, and if you don’t want everyone to have it, you can’t reveal it to anyone you don’t trust completely under circumstances you don’t entirely control - your time and talent doesn’t change the fundamental, copyable nature of information.
All right. Will this happen before or after they rise to the challenges of making a perpetual motion machine, squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, and solving the halting problem?
Indeed. You’d need two camcorders, each fitted with a polarizing filter. You might also need to make friends with the ushers or projectionists, or at least buy some baggy pants with huge pockets.
It only took me five seconds to think of a workaround. Imagine what the hackers could come up with if they really had to try. Actually, you don’t need to imagine, because they have come up with solutions time and time again.
Of course, there is no way to play the resulting analog copy on a home unit, rendering the dude with the two camcorders meaningless. There is no way to duplicate the 3-D recording.
You and I have already skipped down this road together before. Spare me.
There are of course, two aspects of protecting one’s copyrights. You can prevent the copying outright (which has been impossible since the invention of the printing press; the current technology changing and advancing nothing but speed and scale), or, more realistically, you can beef up your ability to prosecute those who violate your copyright. As they always have, efforts to thwart the technology to copy are proving fruitless, so the technology is already shifting to enforcement technology.
The pirates’ main tool is their supposed anonymity on the web. This is horseshit. Every machine on the net broadcasts a bevy of information about itself, and services are springing up that provide all the necessary information to prosecute. Currently, the services prices are expensive to the point that it only makes economic sense to go after the biggest offenders. Look for the the technology to get cheaper and more easily available, as all digital technology has for the past 35 years, and we’ll see some serious widespread lawsuits within the next decade.
You could use two projectors equipped with polarizing filters (seriously, how could you not think of that?), or simply discard one of the recordings and watch the movie in 2D.
There are a few very solid ways to communicate anonymously, from small trusted networks like WASTE, to obfuscated routing like Tor, to large projects like Freenet. If those “serious widespread lawsuits” materialize, expect to see a shift toward the use of such services - the main reason they aren’t already in use is performance, which may improve in the years to come, or may simply become less important as legal risks increase.
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