[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

In the end, the best way to get creative people to to produce new creations is to ensure to that they get paid.

I'm not saying that authors should be starving, or should be willing to be starving. I am saying that "provide incentives to create" is a much, much broader field than "pay the authors."

Creators who want to make lots of money go into commercial writing or art--designing logos and branding materials for megacorporations pays a lot better than portrait-drawing, and writing tech manuals as work-for-hire pays more than writing biographies. (While copyright does allow for an author's copyrighted works to continue making income for decades, how many manage to do that? "You can get paid whatever the market will bear for the next 60 years, and your heirs after that... or you can get paid $22/hour right now, for as long as you can stand to write instruction manuals." More, for the more complex work.)

The idea that better enforcement or stricter laws to improve pay-the-author systems will "fix" the publishing industries is missing something... authors don't just want money; they want credit, too. They want readers. There's plenty of evidence that reducing readership to only those people who paid for a copy of a book would effectively kill any new author's career.

75% of readers traditionally never paid into the author's revenue stream. How will better enforcement allow for the continuation of this fanbase? Will it require print books, which are getting more expensive as ebooks push MMPBs out of the market? Will authors be able to rely on reviews only from pro reviewers & those who've paid for the books?

That will eventually mean bringing the EFFECTIVE rule of law to the Internet, including law enforcement against piracy.

It can't happen without destroying the internet as we know it. It's more difficult than controlling air quality... while smoking no longer happens in restaurants in my state, overall smog levels haven't dropped.

Computers are devices that make copies. That's what they do--copy data from one place to another. Sometimes they process that data; sometimes they just hand it over directly. But that's *all* computers do... move data around, which means copying it.

The media industries, in trying to insist on "copyright enforcement," have forgotten that they built their own doom into the extension laws... since EVERYTHING is copyrighted the moment it hits the screen, we have lawsuits against LexisNexis and firms submitting patents claiming that there's no "this is a gov't matter" exemption for copyright law (which there isn't). The newer laws would not only allow big corporations to go after file-sharers, but allow ex-employees to file suit against their employers for copying their emails (ones sent after the employment ended) or bloggers to go after aggregate sites... or the manufacturers of RSS code... or Google for directing people to "pirate" sites that "stole" their content w/o permission.

(The right to copy blog posts in RSS feeds hasn't been established in courts. The Google case that established the right to show thumbnails is certainly relevant, but that's not copying the entire original in a new place. There's no difference, legally, between AP's news content and random-blogger's blog content.)

And that's before we get into the utter wankitude of random-blogger-A suing random-blogger-B for quoting an excerpt to mock it. Yes, copying for parody is allowed... if the copy isn't too much and so on. What counts as too much? That depends on the court. It's not that any one of these cases would be hard to prove; it's that, with better quick-enforcement rules, the number of them would skyrocket.

The fact that copyright law doesn't distinguish between outright full copies, excerpts, translations, sequels, and utterly transformative uses like "I drew a picture based on this story" means that "better copyright enforcement" is "invitation to random accusations of IP theft from anyone who's ever had a grudge on the internet."

What's needed is legislation that would enable Law enforcement agencies to strike at piracy sites located in foreign safe harbors. Such legislation will most likely be enacted soon.

No, what we need is law enforcement to understand the technology so they don't try to enact stupid rules like "block access to a particular IP address," and to stop listening to the media corps' propaganda. LE needs to figure out (1) what kinds of damage are being done, (2) how much damage that is, and (3) who is liable for those damages.

I'm not saying "piracy is not a problem." I'm saying that the solution to that problem is not going to be "increase corporate ability to squash those they accuse of infringement, without reconsidering all of copyright law." The laws need to be rewritten from scratch to deal with the realities of computers and the internet--THEN we can start sorting out which types of copyrighted works need what kinds of legal protection.