Absolute must-read in the copyright wars

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Your link doesn't work, but I assume it points what I already know: that the 2 modifications to copyright durations were retroactive and resulted in extending existing copyrights. Meanwhile, the reality is that there have only been 4 rounds of extensions in the US over the last 200 years. Ergo, as I pointed out before, it is not justifiable to definitively assert that round after round after round of extensions is inevitable and utterly unavoidable.

And those four changes increased the length of copyright from 34 years to in the order of 140+ years. Meanwhile, patent has gone from 34 years to 20 years. Has that meant that nobody invents anymore? I think not. And what would happen if you made patent law match copyright law? Retroactively, just like copyright has been. Think of the patent trolling that would go on...




Oh? As Kolenka also points out, open software licenses are copyright licenses. Thus, the enforcement of licenses like the GPL are explicitly based on copyright. So if you abolish copyright, you lose your ability to enforce your open license.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

You might make the argument that "free software demonstrates that you don't have to charge money for your creative output." And I've stated several times that copyright grants you the option to give your content away for free (without worrying about someone else profiting off of it, unless you somehow put it directly into public domain). However, so far it's proving rather difficult (although far from impossible) to run a viable business with an open source model, even if you start out with that as your explicit goal. Many (if not most) of the big dogs in software are all still proprietary: Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, EA, etc.

Now, I will agree to some points, namely:

• cost of producing and distributing some types of content will fall
• "free" options (notably ad-supported and promotional use) will continue, and almost certainly become more common
• some businesses will survive, and possibly flourish, using a more open model than current proprietary businesses

But while you can have dozens of amateur writers cranking out fanfics of various quality in their bedrooms and release it for free, it's still going to cost millions of dollars and require scores of professionals to produce the TV series that is the object of said fan's affection. Or, let's take the archetypal rock band; you've got 4 people who are (hopefully) good at writing and performing songs. But this does not mean they are also good recording engineers, know how to master their recordings properly (let alone well), book shows, do promotion in cities where they don't live, set up the equipment and do the sound at live shows, advertise their recordings, design their album covers and t-shirts and graphics, handle their own accounts and taxes, get their songs on the radio, direct their own videos, make CD's, get the CD's into stores or songs onto iTunes, and so forth. At least, if you want to sell more than 5,000 copies and play in clubs with a max capacity of 100, sooner or later you're going to have to get a lot of people to work on your behalf -- and they can't all afford to work for free.

And most of the "free" options just have other ways of making you pay. Broadcast TV is free, but ad-supported. Do you really want your Harry Potter ebooks to have half-screen ads on every other page? Also, most of the $0.00 Kindle books are set at that price with the intent that if you enjoy that author's work, you will enjoy it enough to subsequently buy other books by that same author.

I.e. there are scores of people, other than the initial creator(s), who are involved in producing and distributing content. Even if it becomes easier for the Lone Genius to produce their works and provide it directly to The Masses, there will always be a need for seasoned professionals who help an artist do their work, and a desire for works more complicated than what one person can produce alone at near-zero costs. You'll still need an orchestra and a chorus to do opera, extras to film movies, marketers to break out of the noise of the masses of free content.... Doing anything more ambitious than a volume of poetry is almost certainly going to require resources and skills far beyond the ability of a single individual to amass.

I.e. even if there is far more free content available in the future, if the quality of said free content rises, and even if today's media titans are destroyed by the technological changes: Paid content, publishers, and other middle-men aren't going to disappear.

Please look at Hong Kong television. It is heavily pirated. To create a show there, you have to have your cost structure such that advertising pays for the cost of the show (plus a profit) on the first run. If you do that, then piracy doesn't halt creation. It does place a cap on what a group can pay for a show. Of course there are no million dollar salaries and residuals, but there are new shows....

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Before 1900 pretty much all you had were book publishers....

I concur that there have been huge changes in media and distribution of content -- changes which in most cases actually justify the longer copyright terms. But the fact still stands that changes to copyright durations are uncommon, difficult to arrange, and therefore it is not justifiable to assume that we will have extensions every 20 years like clockwork.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

To answer your second point: yes, the GPL etc. make use of existing copyright legislation, but only to ensure people can't take stuff from the PD and steal/licence it themselves. If you take away copyright altogether, you surely take away the enforcement mechanism, but you also take away their right to claim it's theirs.

Even the Free Software Foundation (which holds the most extremist views on the subject) acknowledge that putting works directly into the public domain opens the possibility that a given work may get re-absorbed into proprietary software -- i.e. that putting their code directly into public domain strips the code of all protection. Their idea of "Copyleft" explicitly relies on the powers of copyright to protect the open nature that they want to see for software. In their own words: "Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible."

So if you want to release your content freely, and only want recognition rather than royalties, in a world with copyright you can do just that. In fact, you can use copyright to ensure that no one charges anyone for your content, if that's your preference. If everything goes into PD, your work has zero protection.

And while totally "free" software (as in, source code and all derived code is required to be open) can work and work well for some projects, it won't work for medium- or large-scale works like operas, many feature films, and so forth.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

The point you seem to be missing is that the most problematic point about copyright is the "time-limited monopoly". While publishers etc. would certainly still be able to publish, print and sell books, they would not be able to claim a monopoly on the text, nor claim it can't be distributed online.

To be clear, I am certainly not missing the potential and actual problems associated with extensive copyright terms. I'm just aware that this arrangement is not 100% negative, and that the problems are not so severe that they justify total abandonment of copyright -- especially given the protections offered by copyright to every content creator, no matter how limited their resources. Also, I'm aware that in a world without copyright, the publisher has no obligation to pay royalties and content creators of any size will lose significant protections of their work.

Sorry to use a cliché, but even if there are excellent reasons to reduce copyright terms, there is no justifiable reason to toss out the baby with the bath-water.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

You don't need copyright to sell books; why else are publishers still making money off of Jane Austen?

A publisher can make money off of a Jane Austen or other public domain book because at this point, it costs nothing to procure the rights. You don't have a writer who is due royalties, wants an advance, or needs to recoup research costs; you don't have to pay editors or agents; marketing costs are minimal.

(Are you sure you want a scenario where the publisher can print up and sell whatever books they want, without any obligation to pay the author?)

For ebooks, the only way you can make money off of public domain is to add something of value, such as convenience, new content (e.g. an interpretive essay) or superior formatting to a free version. By now though, most electronic PD content is free and/or offered by non-profits like Gutenberg, and the window for a publisher to earn money off of PD is rapidly evaporating. (At best, PD will become a loss-leader for the retailers.)

In terms of "monopolies," you should also keep in mind that copyright does not require that an author grant exclusive publishing rights to one company. For example, a photographer offer a series of photos to a magazine, and retain the right for a different company to publish those same photos in a monograph, as well as the right to sell prints in gallery exhibitions. Or you could stipulate in your contract that the publisher has exclusivity for only 25 or 50 years. You are also welcome to start a publishing house that does not require exclusivity. I don't know how long it would survive, but who knows, it could be a huge success. The salient point is that nothing in copyright itself requires that the content creator surrender exclusive rights to a publisher; copyright is highly flexible in this regard.

And just to be explicit on the point, I fully support PD. But putting everything directly into PD is not a sustainable model for most new content, especially other artworks that require collaborative work by professionals. A sci-fi TV show may be able to produce special effects at a far lower cost and higher quality than it did in the 1970s, but will still clock in at $1-2 million per episode. "Free" in an era where advertising rates are plummeting may be able to do cheap Hong Kong soap operas with novice actors, but not much more than that.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

(Re your silly band example: read those posts by courtney love etc? band aren't making money off cd sales anyway, and even tours organized by Sony et al are pretty hard to make money off of when you're financially stupid. Sure they won't be able to do a "big" tour without help, but then, they won't be going bankrupt being ripped off by the RIAA members either. It seems a win-win.)

Courtney Love has about as much credibility as Bernie Madoff. She's a terrible choice to hold the "copyright reform" banner.

As to my example, calling it "silly" does not alter the fact that a band which does all that work by itself or is on a small label is going to be severely limited in reach and scope. The band may prefer that environment -- they may be like being independent or on a small label, may be satisfied with smaller sales with higher royalty rates, and might not want the pressures or financial responsibilities of attempts to gain large-scale success. But the fact remains that it is still rare for a musician band to gain national or international prominence without a major label.

I might add that many record company executives -- who, if I read your earlier comments correctly, you view as "parasites" who offer no value to artists -- have actually earned the respect of many musicians, who acknowledge their contributions to music: Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, John Hammond, Rick Rubin, Teo Macero, Russell Simmons, Rudy Van Gelder, George Martin, Bill Graham et al. Not to mention dozens of radio DJ's, clubs, and yes, labels that have all become a vital part of the intricate history of contemporary music.

Bad business deals or unscrupulous behavior by record labels ultimately doesn't have much to do with copyright. If a label demands you sign a deal memo before signing a contract, or isn't paying you what they owe, or is harassing you rather than supporting you, copyright is not the cause or even exacerbating the problems.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

In terms of "monopolies," you should also keep in mind that copyright does not require that an author grant exclusive publishing rights to one company. For example, a photographer offer a series of photos to a magazine, and retain the right for a different company to publish those same photos in a monograph, as well as the right to sell prints in gallery exhibitions. Or you could stipulate in your contract that the publisher has exclusivity for only 25 or 50 years. You are also welcome to start a publishing house that does not require exclusivity. I don't know how long it would survive, but who knows, it could be a huge success. The salient point is that nothing in copyright itself requires that the content creator surrender exclusive rights to a publisher; copyright is highly flexible in this regard.

Those monopolies were once instated because they were afraid that print runs would result in stock destruction. Yes, authors don't "need" to sign exclusivity contracts, but when the choice is between signing or not being published.. exclusivity is demanded, not asked for in a silky tone of voice by a kindly old lady after she's given you the money.

Bad business deals or unscrupulous behavior by record labels ultimately doesn't have much to do with copyright. If a label demands you sign a deal memo before signing a contract, or isn't paying you what they owe, or is harassing you rather than supporting you, copyright is not the cause or even exacerbating the problems.

The fact that slave-owners could act with impunity vis-a-vis their slaves had nothing to do with the fact that 1. they had a socially superior position, and 2. they had the legal right to do whatever they want, and 3. they had the money (earned by their slaves' labor) to lobby to keep the status quo?
That really is a politically naïve argument to make. Copyright legislation has been written by copyright owners; the fair-use was thrown in by clear-headed people once, but has since been mostly ignored (or diluted, see DMCA).
Copyrights are what allowed those companies to earn money to get to the position of relative power versus the individual creator/musician/whatever; now that they have that money, and they can say "look, we can make or break you", the individual is screwed. "Not in the Land of the Free," you might of course now reply, myths being what they are, but then, we never like to talk about the fact that power is distributed unevenly, especially when it concerns amoral "persons" like corporations.
But by all means, pretend that copyright law is the only way to go just because nobody is having major commercial success with an alternative yet.
The US car industry only survived through heavy gasoline price subsidies; had these been removed, the industry would be gone or enormously smaller (but more competitive). There would be less money to be found there. But that money might've been used on something else, and earned somewhere else (in car engine innovation? ).
I don't really understand why you think it a valid argument that the current revenue levels have to be maintained through idiotic legislation that, like trade tariffs, abridges the "market" to do its work at the cost of the tax payer (because they're the ones paying for the subsidies). Sure, people will earn less writing books, but then, so do horse buggy manufacturers.
Right now almost nobody is willing to even try CC-licencing (although that's not the same as a non-exclusive commercial licence) books. (Though UChicago is apparently considering it) You can still sell those, you see, and if you want even give authors a part of the royalties from printed book sales (which you can also still sell), and there is no reason why publishers wouldn't have to still pay royalties over the books sold; it would just mean they can't claim they're the only one doing so from any given book.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Oh? As Kolenka also points out, open software licenses are copyright licenses. Thus, the enforcement of licenses like the GPL are explicitly based on copyright. So if you abolish copyright, you lose your ability to enforce your open license.

Not under UK law. It's a clear case of a valid contract (The offer is the ability to use the software, and in return you accept conditions on redistribution). The limit on contracts is you cannot put in unfair terms, which would include badly unbalanced terms.

Also, well, the GPL might run into problems (as with many contracts) with the Plain English standards, but the preamble would establish the basics to be upheld in that case, and that's how it'd end up being enforced in-spirit.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Not under UK law. It's a clear case of a valid contract (The offer is the ability to use the software, and in return you accept conditions on redistribution). The limit on contracts is you cannot put in unfair terms, which would include badly unbalanced terms.

Also, well, the GPL might run into problems (as with many contracts) with the Plain English standards, but the preamble would establish the basics to be upheld in that case, and that's how it'd end up being enforced in-spirit.

My bad in reinstalling Kali's. His words, not mine....

[Jaime_Astorga]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

But while you can have dozens of amateur writers cranking out fanfics of various quality in their bedrooms and release it for free, it's still going to cost millions of dollars and require scores of professionals to produce the TV series that is the object of said fan's affection.

Not necessarily. Fan and individual videos have been produced. For a live action example, check out the Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart series. The videos are a little short, but they are sound in principle. For animation, flash cartoons like the Neurotically Yours series (warning: NSFW) and various machinima videos are worth a look. Computer created animation is actually gonna have the biggest growth in ease of production in the future, since computer technology is always improving and making it so in some years high end desktop computers will be good enough to produce respectable CGI animation. While the video game engines the machinimas depends on would probably slow down without copyright to act as an incentive for companies, I think the FOSS community could pick up the slack of making 3D rendering engines for making videos. A FOSS-like distributed model of production could also be adopted for creating such 3D content, where several people who have never met all come together in order to make a great thing. And speaking of FOSS:

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Even the Free Software Foundation (which holds the most extremist views on the subject) acknowledge that putting works directly into the public domain opens the possibility that a given work may get re-absorbed into proprietary software -- i.e. that putting their code directly into public domain strips the code of all protection. Their idea of "Copyleft" explicitly relies on the powers of copyright to protect the open nature that they want to see for software. In their own words: "Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible."

Free software is defined as such by four "freedoms;" the freedom to run the program for whatever you want, the freedom to study the program, the freedom to redistribute the program, and the freedom to change the program (numerated 0, 1, 2, and 3, respectively). The GPL enables those freedoms. Freedoms 1 and 3 depend on availability of the source, so the GPL requires the source code be released as well.

Please note that freedoms 0 and 2 only need to be protected because copyright currently exists. That leaves us with freedoms 1 and 3 to consider. Since with a public source code the company couldn't restrict those freedoms, either, they would have to keep their code hidden as a trade secret, and have no recourse if it leaks out. So overall, some gains and some losses for software freedom from copyright abolition, since without copyright the GPL would lose the ability to force people using software copyrighted by it to release the source code of their modifications.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga

Computer created animation is actually gonna have the biggest growth in ease of production in the future, since computer technology is always improving and making it so in some years high end desktop computers will be good enough to produce respectable CGI animation. While the video game engines the machinimas depends on would probably slow down without copyright...

For PC games it's (copyright) already effectively non-existent. The games are up on torrent networks before their street dates (or at "worse" at the same time as the street date). Also, several game engines have (and have had for several years) specific hooks to help mechanima producers!

Also, you missed Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. There's also some amazing work out there shot in Eve Online.

[Moejoe]

Big Buck Bunny (an excellent CGI comedy short) was made with Blender an Open Source 3D animation package and in an open source collaborative fashion. I recommend it to everyone

http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

For PC games it's (copyright) already effectively non-existent. The games are up on torrent networks before their street dates (or at "worse" at the same time as the street date).

Free bootleg versions don't make copyright non-existent.

The original publishers competitors can't sell them. For that matter, the bootleggers can't (effectively) sell them. Competitors can't grab a video game, copy the code, replace the characters with Popular Cartoon Of The Week, and release it under their own label.

The #1 purpose of copyright is to protect from *corporate*, not individual, poaching. Unless we figure out a way to do that with some other legal method, we need copyrights.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Yes, authors don't "need" to sign exclusivity contracts, but when the choice is between signing or not being published.. exclusivity is demanded, not asked for in a silky tone of voice by a kindly old lady after she's given you the money.

If I am reading your argument correctly, though, the publishers are "parasites" who offer nothing of value. So why would you accept their terms? Small media companies, with a fraction of the power of the big houses, have existed for decades. Certainly in this day and age, it's not necessary; e.g. you can self-publish without granting any exclusivity via Scribd, Smashwords, Amazon and many other services.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

The fact that slave-owners could act with impunity vis-a-vis their slaves had nothing to do with the fact that 1. they had a socially superior position, and 2. they had the legal right to do whatever they want, and 3. they had the money (earned by their slaves' labor) to lobby to keep the status quo? That really is a politically naïve argument to make.

No, it's an awareness of where the actual problems lie.

If you have a contract to pay me X amount of a product I designed, and you fail to pay me and engage in all kinds of shenanigans to avoid paying what you owe, the problem doesn't lie in patents or copyrights. It's in the fact that you are failing to fulfill your contract. Similarly, if I sign a contract that ends up with me losing money and you earning it, that's not a copyright issue; it's a contract issue.

This is not to say that copyright is never abused; rather, that on the balance it offers extensive and flexible protections to everyone, regardless of their status.

Copyright is not slavery, and the mere suggestion is hyperbole. No one is forced into signing a contract; if you don't like the terms, and you sign anyway, that's your own fault.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Copyrights are what allowed those companies to earn money to get to the position of relative power versus the individual creator/musician/whatever; now that they have that money, and they can say "look, we can make or break you", the individual is screwed.

Isn't part of your argument that these companies offer nothing of value in the first place? If so, why can't individuals avoid them altogether? Oh wait, they can. They can go with a smaller publishing house or record label or movie studio, or self-distribute their work.

Copyrights are part of what has allowed media companies to thrive or just survive. It also takes business savvy, the ability to gather and manage financial resources, and perhaps most crucially, the ability to actually sell what content creators are making. And many of these companies formed and developed their capacities well before copyright terms were anywhere near as long as they are now.

And it also takes some guts. Media companies need to accept significant financial risks -- and often pay for those risks. Media companies are not exactly the darlings of Congress, either; they are often taken to task for generating and/or distributing content that runs afoul of some politician's sensibilities sooner or later. And, of course, you occasionally have companies that intentionally challenge the law to preserve the rights of all creators -- e.g. Random House's involvement in the lawsuits that established Ulysses as "not obscene" and thus protected under the First Amendment.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

But by all means, pretend that copyright law is the only way to go just because nobody is having major commercial success with an alternative yet.

Re-read my posts. I'm not saying by any means that "you have no choice." My argument is that if your goal is to achieve national or international success (which many, but not necessarily all, content creators do), you will need far more resources than almost any lone individual can amass.

More to the point, if you are a lone individual and you choose to release your work on a smaller scale, copyright law automatically protects your work. While I can see that you are focusing on the impact of copyright for the large companies, you are failing to recognize that copyright's automatic and flexible nature is a huge benefit for small-scale content creators -- or that the alternatives you suggest (open source, Creative Commons) use existing copyright law as the means by which these open licenses are protected in the first place.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I don't really understand why you think it a valid argument that the current revenue levels have to be maintained through idiotic legislation that, like trade tariffs, abridges the "market" to do its work at the cost of the tax payer (because they're the ones paying for the subsidies). Sure, people will earn less writing books, but then, so do horse buggy manufacturers.

Well, for starters, that's not my argument at all.

Part of what I am attempting to explain is that copyright protects everyone. Similarly, copyright is also highly flexible, and even the counter-examples you cite (e.g. OSS) rely upon it. I am supporting "current legislation" (copyright) because ultimately it protects the creator's rights.

Or, to put it another way: copyright basically establishes that the individual or group that creates a work essentially has ownership of that work, and can control how it is distributed. The alternative is that all works go directly into public domain the instant that it is in a fixed form -- i.e. the creator loses all ownership and control instantly, even before the work is completed. (Even copyright with short durations still qualifies as a form of copyright, btw.) I do not say that the latter option will "completely" destroy artworks -- besides the fact that it's histrionic, it's not true -- but I do not see any benefit to such a system, or any viable replacement to a total removal of copyrights, especially given the flexibility offered by current copyright laws. And if the problem is that "copyright durations are too long," then that's all you need to say -- rather than suggest the entire system needs to be junked, or mischaracterize it as only providing an advantage to large corporations.

Separately, I am definitely not insisting that we should freeze our economy into a structure circa 1995; far from it. I'm simply pointing out that a) content creators work with media companies of their own free will, and b) if you want to make something that requires collaboration and/or has a big national or international impact, it will be extremely difficult to do so without charging for it. And best of all, c) current copyright happens to be flexible enough to allow for an entirely new business model to develop and possibly even dominate.

If you don't like long copyright terms or DRM or companies that don't pay what they owe the artists, then your criticisms ought to target those specific issues. Ripping out copyright altogether will not relieve these problems; if anything, it will make them worse.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga

Not necessarily. Fan and individual videos have been produced....

Just to be clear, I fully understand that it is possible to do some work of a collaborative or complicated nature with far fewer resources than it did 10 years ago. E.g. Praying With Lior was shot digitally with a small crew, and probably cost a fraction of, and has a wider potential audience than, earlier documentaries that were done on film and could only be shown in movie theaters.

However, all you have to do is compare the "Waldemart" video to a real Harry Potter film to see what $100 million of production value gets you.

Perhaps in the future, enough people will be willing to participate in a distributed 3D rendering farm, or use other techniques, to reduce the cost of production. But I still view it as unlikely that you will make anything on the level of quality of a Harry Potter film or the Metropolitan Opera on your credit card. And, of course, we should keep in mind that small-scale works are fully protected by copyright, no matter how the creator(s) choose to distribute them.

Originally Posted by Jamie_Astorga

So overall, some gains and some losses for software freedom from copyright abolition, since without copyright the GPL would lose the ability to force people using software copyrighted by it to release the source code of their modifications.

Well....

Let's say we are in a world without copyright. The instant you write code, it's in the public domain. However, unless you construct the law such that it's a requirement that any and all code needs to be released openly, you could still use NDA's and contracts to develop proprietary code. And ironically, this method of establishing free software comes with a price, as it deprives people of the freedom/choice to keep their code private. It's like saying "you can have a diary, but only if you publish it on the Internet without any restrictions whatsoever."

Other consequences: this schema essentially eliminates their ability to earn an income from their code (though you could still charge for support). Also, vested interests like military and intelligence services will want to reserve the right to keep their code under wraps, which opens a big ol' loophole in the "you must be free" law.

So even if you believe that open source is a good thing, I think you'd have to be pretty extreme to say that "proprietary software has absolutely no right or reason to exist."

Again, the positive here for copyright is that it is flexible enough to allow both proprietary and free models to exist and flourish. If you can build a viable business or achieve other goals with GPL software, copyright will protect you every step of the way.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Isn't part of your argument that these companies offer nothing of value in the first place? If so, why can't individuals avoid them altogether? Oh wait, they can. They can go with a smaller publishing house or record label or movie studio, or self-distribute their work.

Originally Posted by Buchanan and Campbell, in Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice, Ed. Spinello & Tavani

But, there has been an even more pronounced consolidation of ownership in the mass media: 80% of music is distributed by five companies, and 70% of the major radio markets are controlled by four companies. In 1996, in the U.S., no single entity owned more than six radio stations. Today, Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations after the FCC relaxed ownership rules in 1996. Of the 91 “major” televisions networks (including cable), 80% are owned by six companies. In 1947, 80% of newspapers were independently owned. Today, less than 20% are independently owned. In 1992, 70% of prime-time network programming was independently produced. Today, after the FCC rescinded rules separating content and transmission ownership, 75% of prime-time programming is owned by the networks (Lessig, 2003).

Your "individual author" is a huge red herring, if these figures are anywhere near representative for the book market. (And I suspect that they are)

Also, the original point of Intellectual Property Rights was to protect the PD/"commons", by providing an incentive for people to go release stuff into the market and from "secrecy" (through offering limited-time monopolies). Today, however, the only point of every IPR change we've seen after 1919 is to keep stuff from going into the public domain.* The point of IPR was solely this: to provide adequate incentives, (which it already did well before 1998), and from which premise a retroactive extension is absolutely indefensible. The works had already been created, so how in heaven's name can you argue that there needed to be more incentives? Right now the only arguments being made are that it's somehow "unfair" to authors or musicians (or inventors etc) for them not to be rewarded for 90 years+..
But, per your own argument, they should have lobbied for a better contract at the time of signing, and not 20-50 years later via a retroactive copyright extension.
Also, patents provide an incentive for inventors, sure, but even in industries with razor-thin margins there are still companies willing to jump into a market, and any ecosystem (or market) will after some time figure out a way to function, so it's not as though monopolies are absolute necessities for markets to function. And what patenting is doing right now is arguably just as much stifling of competition as promoting innovation, because nobody is allowed to touch these patents unless they pay egregious and arbitrary licencing fees, even on essential things like dominant software protocols or biomedical stuff.
Without any proof whatever that the markets broadly currently cannot function (did you see the record Boxoffice revenues (topping 10 billion this year) announcement? It seems pretty hard to argue that the movie industry needs more protection via the DMCA, as all media carriers can be copied at will with the current technology, and yet they're still getting away with whining about the fact that they're being pillaged. Sure, the music industry is having more trouble, but it's hardly as though every company falling under the current copyright legislation is suffering. Why is there no burden of proof? "It's too difficult to calculate losses, so why bother" is not a valid answer, btw.)

* (It was the eleventh time that Congress had extended the term of existing copyrights in the last forty years.)

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Also, the original point of Intellectual Property Rights was to protect the PD/"commons"

Sigh. Go back and read the Statute of Ann again.

"To encourage learning"

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Sigh. Go back and read the Statute of Ann again.

"To encourage learning"

To encourage learning, you need to have as much information available freely as possible. To get this, you need to give people incentives not to keep whatever they find out a secret. To do this, you might have to resort to IPR. -> And we're back to Jefferson. (You do realise the Statute of Anne only applies to the UK, and that while the founding daddies knew of it, they did not limit themselves to the ideas expressed there? And that a lot of the current problems are related to US copyright law specifically?)

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Your "individual author" is a huge red herring, if these figures are anywhere near representative for the book market. (And I suspect that they are)

Also, the original point of Intellectual Property Rights was to protect the PD/"commons", by providing an incentive for people to go release stuff into the market and from "secrecy" (through offering limited-time monopolies). Today, however, the only point of every IPR change we've seen after 1919 is to keep stuff from going into the public domain.* The point of IPR was solely this: to provide adequate incentives, (which it already did well before 1998), and from which premise a retroactive extension is absolutely indefensible. The works had already been created, so how in heaven's name can you argue that there needed to be more incentives? Right now the only arguments being made are that it's somehow "unfair" to authors or musicians (or inventors etc) for them not to be rewarded for 90 years+..
But, per your own argument, they should have lobbied for a better contract at the time of signing, and not 20-50 years later via a retroactive copyright extension.
Also, patents provide an incentive for inventors, sure, but even in industries with razor-thin margins there are still companies willing to jump into a market, and any ecosystem (or market) will after some time figure out a way to function, so it's not as though monopolies are absolute necessities for markets to function. And what patenting is doing right now is arguably just as much stifling of competition as promoting innovation, because nobody is allowed to touch these patents unless they pay egregious and arbitrary licencing fees, even on essential things like dominant software protocols or biomedical stuff.
Without any proof whatever that the markets broadly currently cannot function (did you see the record Boxoffice revenues (topping 10 billion this year) announcement? It seems pretty hard to argue that the movie industry needs more protection via the DMCA, as all media carriers can be copied at will with the current technology, and yet they're still getting away with whining about the fact that they're being pillaged. Sure, the music industry is having more trouble, but it's hardly as though every company falling under the current copyright legislation is suffering. Why is there no burden of proof? "It's too difficult to calculate losses, so why bother" is not a valid answer, btw.)

* (It was the eleventh time that Congress had extended the term of existing copyrights in the last forty years.)

Even with all the complaint about patent monopolies, it's only 20 years! After 20 years, it's PD. I can live with that. What i can't live with is copyright at 140+ years....