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View Poll Results: Which would you vote for
Copyright forever 32 21.77%
Fully do away with copyright 115 78.23%
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Old 02-09-2012, 01:47 PM   #361
QuantumIguana
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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
Somewhere back at the beginning of the thread, someone recommended Mark Helprin's book Digital Barbarians. So I went out & got it, & it's a great read. The guy really knows how to use words. And his strong pro-limited copyright argument makes a lot of sense. If you think you are against copyright, you ought to give this book a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/op...pagewanted=all

Here is an opinion piece where he argues for eternal copyright. His argument is deeply flawed at best. He compares copyright for "limited times" to slavery. Intellectual property is a purely governmental construct. An author does not truly own the book, they merely own government-granted monopoly on copying the book.

Calling it "stealing" for the book to someday enter the public domain is question begging. Physical property exists whether or not government exists. Copyright doesn't exist except as a creation of government.

I support copyright, but I can't support his eternal copyright, it would lead to stagnation.
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Old 02-09-2012, 05:41 PM   #362
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Originally Posted by QuantumIguana View Post
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/op...pagewanted=allPhysical property exists whether or not government exists. Copyright doesn't exist except as a creation of government.
Both statements are correct, but so what? Without the law, there is no property, physical or otherwise. There is only possession by the strong. In this sense, the law creates physical property as surely as it creates intellectual property.

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I support copyright, but I can't support his eternal copyright, it would lead to stagnation.
Helprin specifically states in his book that he is NOT arguing for eternal copyright. He is arguing against abolition of copyright.

Now, you can either read the article as a condensation of the argument in his book - and therefore not in favor of eternal copyright - or as an extension of the argument in his book - and therefore in favor of eternal copyright. But it really doesn't matter, because I have only been talking about the argument as made in his book.

As for "supporting eternal copyright", it depends on what the copyright law says. I would have no problem at all with an eternal copyright law that said "if copyright applies, after 20 years, the owner may not forbid the use of the copyrighted work, but is entitled to one percent of any gross receipts in excess of $1000 from the use or sale of the copyrighted work or an immediate derivative." I would have a lot of problem with the further extension of copyright as it currently exists.

The only reason I think that the descendants of Shakespeare shouldn't get royalties is that there aren't any descendants of Shakespeare. How much they should get is open to discussion. Arguably, the royalty should diminish over time to practically nothing. In most instances, time & the division of interest should take care of that. And it would probably be a good idea to provide that after a term of years, copyright can only be owned by a real person, not a corporation or institution.

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Old 02-09-2012, 06:11 PM   #363
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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
Both statements are correct, but so what? Without the law, there is no property, physical or otherwise. There is only possession by the strong. In this sense, the law creates physical property as surely as it creates intellectual property.
Not at all. Law does not create physical property. Property existed long before laws. Copyright is an entirely artificial creation.

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Now, you can either read the article as a condensation of the argument in his book - and therefore not in favor of eternal copyright - or as an extension of the argument in his book - and therefore in favor of eternal copyright.
There's no other way to read it, it is flat out a call for eternal copyright.

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The only reason I think that the descendants of Shakespeare shouldn't get royalties is that there aren't any descendants of Shakespeare. How much they should get is open to discussion. Arguably, the royalty should diminish over time to practically nothing.
He may not have descendants, but he surely has relatives, if distant ones, and if copyright was eternal, they would be entitled to inherit. If you think that the public domain is "stealing", then you can't justify diminishing royalties over time.

If it wasn't for the public domain, Shakespeare might have been forgotten. One reason it is so widely performed is that no one has to pay to perform it.

Shakespeare has made an immense contribution to culture by being in the public domain. If it was under copyright, culture would be strangled.
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Old 02-09-2012, 07:20 PM   #364
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If copyright had been eternal in the past, we would have been robbed of Shakespeare, his wasn't the first telling of Romeo and Juliet.

With physical property, law merely gives you a mechanism to help you defend your property beyond the limits of your own power to do so, law doesn't create property.

If I own a house, even without law, I have at least some degree of power to protect my house. But a house isn't analogous to intellectual property, if I take your house, you no longer have it, but if I take a copy of intellectual property, you still have it.

Intellectual property is like me seeing your house and making one like it. You're not out anything. Without law, short of building a dome around your house to prevent me from seeing it, there's nothing you could do to prevent this.

We might well decide that we really want to encourage houses, so we could tell people they can't make a house just like yours without your permission. We would then give you that right, but only for a limited time, in exchange for people being able to use that design after the limited time has expired.

If patents did not exist, there would be little incentive to create. But if patents were eternal, creation would come to a halt. If patents had been eternal, we probably wouldn't even have the light bulb, because no one could stand on the shoulders of giants. If I were forced to choose, I would choose no patents over eternal patents. It is the same thing with copyright. I favor copyright, but oppose eternal copyright.
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Old 02-10-2012, 12:50 AM   #365
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Originally Posted by QuantumIguana View Post
Not at all. Law does not create physical property. Property existed long before laws. Copyright is an entirely artificial creation.
If you don't understand that it is law is a necessary condition for the existence of "property", you do not understand what law is, or what property is.

Without law, you have only what you are strong enough to keep. If you want to call that "property" you may, but the word has no actual meaning used that way. You cannot speak of "property" without at the same time speaking of law.

There is no basis for a coherent non-religious argument involving the existence of property rights without accepting that law creates those rights. There is, of course, a religious argument that substitutes God-given rights for law, but the curious thing is that such an argument eventually brings you back to the understanding that the manner in which those rights are sustained is through law. Either way, without law, there is no such thing as property rights.

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There's no other way to read it, it is flat out a call for eternal copyright.
I thought you said you had read his book. The article is a condensed version of his argument in the book. In the book, he states plainly that he is not arguing for unlimited copyright. So either you are insisting on disregarding context, or you think he argues one thing in the book, and another in the article. Either way, for those of us who consider context, there are two ways to read the article.

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If it wasn't for the public domain, Shakespeare might have been forgotten. One reason it is so widely performed is that no one has to pay to perform it.

Shakespeare has made an immense contribution to culture by being in the public domain. If it was under copyright, culture would be strangled
.

On the other hand, because of the lack of copyright, we do not have any accurate version of Shakespeare's plays. If you know anything beyond high school Shakespeare, you know, for instance, that there are two different versions of Hamlet. We are extremely lucky to have any Shakespeare at all, precisely because his works were not protected. Had he had the protection of copyright, we probably would have some of his missing plays, and certainly what we do have would be more authentic.

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Old 02-10-2012, 01:05 AM   #366
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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
On the other hand, because of the lack of copyright, we do not have any accurate version of Shakespeare's plays. If you know anything beyond high school Shakespeare, you know, for instance, that there are two different versions of Hamlet. We are extremely lucky to have any Shakespeare at all, precisely because his works were not protected. Had he had the protection of copyright, we probably would have some of his missing plays, and certainly what we do have would be more authentic.
We're missing something from history but if people had been unable to copy it at will we'd still have it because um....

You lost me.

How would reducing the number of copies that could be made and the ability of people to freely preform over the years have increased the amount of work that has lasted to this day? Is there some magical conservation of bard-fu? One copy is has 1000 years of power but 1000 copies only last for a year each?

I don't normally use drugs but I'd very much like to try whatever it is you're on.
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Old 02-10-2012, 07:40 AM   #367
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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
On the other hand, because of the lack of copyright, we do not have any accurate version of Shakespeare's plays. If you know anything beyond high school Shakespeare, you know, for instance, that there are two different versions of Hamlet. We are extremely lucky to have any Shakespeare at all, precisely because his works were not protected. Had he had the protection of copyright, we probably would have some of his missing plays, and certainly what we do have would be more authentic.
Define accurate. If you mean the pure and unchanged words of the author, then we don't have an accurate version of most stories. Editors have been known to change a few things in stories.

You also seem to consider that it is bad to have two different versions of Hamlet. I would say that two is better than one.
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Old 02-10-2012, 09:20 AM   #368
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I thought you said you had read his book. The article is a condensed version of his argument in the book. In the book, he states plainly that he is not arguing for unlimited copyright. So either you are insisting on disregarding context, or you think he argues one thing in the book, and another in the article. Either way, for those of us who consider context, there are two ways to read the article.
It may be a condensed version, but he was the one who condensed it. I don't care what he said in his book, in this article, he explicitly calls for eternal copyright. So is he lying in his book or lying in the article?

Let us stipulate for the moment that property only exists as a creation of government. Helprin claims that copyright is a natural right, not a created right.

If I am mistaken in claiming that property is meaningless without law, and property is whatever government says it is, then Helprin is certainly mistaken in claiming that copyright is a natural right, let alone eternal copyright. If property is whatever government says it is, then the public domain can't possibly be "stealing", let alone analogous to slavery.

I am not arguing for the abolition of copyright, I'm not even arguing to shorten copyright, just that copyright should not be eternal. Continually extending copyright so that nothing again enters the public domain is no different than eternal copyright. Maybe we should just give a special copyright to Mickey Mouse so that other works can enter the public domain. Without the public domain, the great majority of works die.

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Old 02-10-2012, 12:45 PM   #369
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Originally Posted by Iphinome View Post
We're missing something from history but if people had been unable to copy it at will we'd still have it because um....

You lost me.

How would reducing the number of copies that could be made and the ability of people to freely preform over the years have increased the amount of work that has lasted to this day? Is there some magical conservation of bard-fu? One copy is has 1000 years of power but 1000 copies only last for a year each?

I don't normally use drugs but I'd very much like to try whatever it is you're on.
The only drug you need is copyright itself.

Per Dr. Debora B. Schwartz (English Department, California Polytechnic State University): http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/problems.html

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Plays were sold by the playwright to the company (i.e., by Shakespeare to the Chamberlain's Men, later called the King's Men), but printed versions became the property of the printers (who bought the manuscript from the theater troupe, the playwright, or an individual who had obtained or reproduced a copy of the text, with or without the authorization of the playwright). Because there was no such thing as copyright in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, playwrights and theatrical troupes tried to keep their plays out of print. Without copyright protection, there was no compensation to a troupe and/or playwright if a rival troupe obtained a copy of and produced a play, thereby cutting into the original troupe's audience (and profits). For this reason (and because copying handwritten scripts was a long and tedious task), individual actors generally received only a copy of their individual lines and cues. Some of the quarto versions of Shakespeare's plays seem to have been pirated from a single actor's partial script, with other passages reconstructed from memory or invented. A theater troupe would retain one or more copies of the full text to use as a prompt book; this master copy would be presumably be identical to or close to the "foul papers," Shakespeare's working manuscript of the full play.
(emphasis added)

If your plays are protected by copyright, you get royalties for performances by other companies. Performances of what? Of scripts you sell them. So you are much more likely to prepare a formal script to actually sell. The number of copies is not reduced - it is increased. Further, since your work is protected by law, you aren't as concerned about other companies stealing it if you allow copies of the script to circulate.

It's lack of copyright that reduces copies of scripts, because unprotected scripts are subject to pirating. So much of the play is kept in your head, or that of the actors. Probably, the only reason we have many of his scripts at all is that they had to be written down & presented to the censor before they could be performed.
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Old 02-10-2012, 12:55 PM   #370
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Originally Posted by Sil_liS View Post
Define accurate. If you mean the pure and unchanged words of the author, then we don't have an accurate version of most stories. Editors have been known to change a few things in stories.

You also seem to consider that it is bad to have two different versions of Hamlet. I would say that two is better than one.
What I am doing is pointing out that Helprin (and other authors) maintain that copyright protection makes it much more possible to create and promulgate an authoritative version of what the author creates. The kind of variences you are talking about have nothing to do with that point.

As for Hamlet, I'd be happier to have the Hamlet Shakespeare wrote, with any revisions he himself made, rather than pieces of Hamlets from different performances, imperfectly recalled by actors and playgoers, collected after his death and put together these days in various ways by modern textural theorists in an attempt to reconstruct what Hamlet looked like.

And I will guarentee you that Shakespeare would have loved copyright, and mocked you in the famous play he never wrote, The Internet Pirates, or Love's Labour Paid For.
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Old 02-10-2012, 01:05 PM   #371
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And I will guarentee you that Shakespeare would have loved copyright, and mocked you in the famous play he never wrote, The Internet Pirates, or Love's Labour Paid For.
He would have loved the copyright, but he also relied on the public domain.

From Wikipedia:

Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.


Also from Wikipedia:

Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. Its plot is based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1582. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but, to expand the plot, developed supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris.

Shakespeare's source for the tragedy are the accounts of King Macbeth of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
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Old 02-10-2012, 01:07 PM   #372
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It may be a condensed version, but he was the one who condensed it. I don't care what he said in his book, in this article, he explicitly calls for eternal copyright. So is he lying in his book or lying in the article?
You are changing the subject. The question is not whether he is "lying" in one place or another. The question is whether his article is open to two different interpretations. I take it that you have now conceeded that point.

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Let us stipulate for the moment that property only exists as a creation of government. Helprin claims that copyright is a natural right, not a created right.

If I am mistaken in claiming that property is meaningless without law, and property is whatever government says it is, then Helprin is certainly mistaken in claiming that copyright is a natural right, let alone eternal copyright. If property is whatever government says it is, then the public domain can't possibly be "stealing", let alone analogous to slavery.
I think that you are right.

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I am not arguing for the abolition of copyright, I'm not even arguing to shorten copyright, just that copyright should not be eternal. Continually extending copyright so that nothing again enters the public domain is no different than eternal copyright. Maybe we should just give a special copyright to Mickey Mouse so that other works can enter the public domain. Without the public domain, the great majority of works die.
I agree with this, too. In fact, I think that Mickey Mouse represents an entirely new dimension of intellectual property, radically different from that which copyright has historically been aimed to protect, and that the mechanisms protecting writers (and composers and other artists) are not appropriate for protecting that new industry. We have copyright, patents, and trademarks. Rather than lump Mickey Mouse in with copyright, we probably should give him trademark protection, or something entirely new.
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Old 02-10-2012, 01:13 PM   #373
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He would have loved the copyright, but he also relied on the public domain.
Funny about that, isn't it? Picasso said "good artists borrow, great artists steal."

Of course, had there been copyright, Shakespeare would have had to pay royalties himself...
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Old 02-10-2012, 01:29 PM   #374
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I do not concede the point, and I haven't changed the subject. There simply is no possible way to interpret his article as calling for copyright to be limited. Even at life +70 years, he still calls that stealing, the equivalent of slavery or confiscating farms. His point is that there should be no point where the work enters the public domain.

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Old 02-10-2012, 03:01 PM   #375
Sil_liS
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
If your plays are protected by copyright, you get royalties for performances by other companies. Performances of what? Of scripts you sell them. So you are much more likely to prepare a formal script to actually sell. The number of copies is not reduced - it is increased. Further, since your work is protected by law, you aren't as concerned about other companies stealing it if you allow copies of the script to circulate.
Copyright would have given the author the right to sell his play to one company, which he did anyway. What you quoted has to do with what the company did next. They didn't keep the script, and that is why it didn't survive intact in time. They tried to keep the script from being copied, just like the publishers are using DRM today, and that is why few copies exist. They didn't want the script to circulate. If there would have been copyright laws then we wouldn't have had the copies we have today.

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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
What I am doing is pointing out that Helprin (and other authors) maintain that copyright protection makes it much more possible to create and promulgate an authoritative version of what the author creates. The kind of variences you are talking about have nothing to do with that point.
The kind of variances I am talking about were brought up by you.

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Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
And I will guarentee you that Shakespeare would have loved copyright, and mocked you in the famous play he never wrote, The Internet Pirates, or Love's Labour Paid For.
You base this on what?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon View Post
Of course, had there been copyright, Shakespeare would have had to pay royalties himself...
Or he would have been a pirate, or he wouldn't have had the money to pay the royalties and his works would have never been created.
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