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We’ve recently returned from Boskone: a very nice convention. One of the interesting sights I saw there was a fellow preaching copyright absolute and everlasting. His writing belonged solely to him, he said, and should continue to belong solely to him (or, presumably, his heirs and assigns) forever more.
One hears such things from time to time.
It put me in mind of a particular passage in Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual Words, the first dictionary in the English language. I’m fond of it. Here’s the passage:
Isn’t that fun? You see there the advent of universal alphabetical order in our language. And if Disney or Lucasfilms or other entities I could name had been around at that time, and if they’d held the rights to Cawdrey’s dictionary, I can easily imagine them claiming perpetual ownership of the idea of organization by alphabetical order.If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to vnderstand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfecty without booke, and where euery Letter standeth: as (b) neere the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with (ca) looke in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu) then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.
I wish I could recall the title of the book in which the author ingeniously explained that he’d compiled a list of the major subject headings in his book and the pages on which they occurred, and printed it at the end of the volume. That was trippy, to be momentarily in a universe where the index was a brand-new thing that had to be introduced and explained to the reader. I remember that he had a good piece of down-home advice: if the reader discovered that he’d left some necessary or useful entry out of the index, they should take pen and ink, and enter it in their own copy.
Every book is unique. Every good book encapsulates value that is unique to that book. But all writing floats in a sea of other writing, and a book’s unique elements are never the whole of the book. Every writer is part of a larger general discourse, and in the course of writing will adopt, adapt, reject, comment on, and bounce new ideas off that body of discourse.
Aren’t you glad that, three hundred years later, we’re not paying royalties to the inheritors of the Cawdrey estate every time we use alphatical order as an organizing principle?
It is right that what’s new and unique in a writer’s work be recognized as peculiarly their own. That’s fine. But copyright is not a statement of inalienable natural right. It’s a social convention, intended to reward (and thus encourage) writers and publishers to produce more books. To pervert it into a claim of perpetual ownership, especially when that claim is being forwarded by large entertainment conglomerates, is the moral equivalent of driving a fence around the commons.
Was this a public statement? If so, I'd like to know who said it.
He was speaking from the audience during a panel. I didn't catch his name. I've seen the assertion made elsewhere at least half a dozen times.
Hmm.
I like the idea of 'copyright to me' through my lifetime for my writings; I made them, the profit should come to me, unless I specifically lend, trade, sell, or assign the property to someone else.
I'm less happy with my copyrights passing down to my heirs. It isn't that I don't like and love said heirs, but they didn't create the works or market them, and for the most part, they don't even care if the works exist at all. For estate purposes, yes, copyrights and their attendant royalties (if any) should pass to the next generation, but gawd... put a decent limit on that.
The current 'life plus seventy years' rule is ridiculous, IMNSHO. 'Life plus twenty years' is more reasonable; it covers the lifetime of me and any minor children I might leave behind, and if my work is still being read/reprinted after that, then the fans get a shot at hatcheting it before it becomes too badly stale-dated. I'll be dead and won't care by then.
And my heirs should get real jobs, anyway.
My 2 cents CDN.
Sometimes I wonder if a lot of these perpetual-copyright lovers (that is, the non-corporate ones) are under the impression that copyright is there to prevent plagiarism, so that once they're dead and gone no one can come along, claim their work, and obliterate the record of their efforts. Because a couple of people I've heard speak about copyright, with very limited grasp of what is was and how it worked, seemed to think that without copyright, we could end up with Dreadful Things happening, like Tim my next-door neighbor claiming to have written The Call of the Wild or something similar. I know, there are lots of ways to be confused about copyright, but maybe there are more people than just the two or three I've heard being at a loss who have the same confusion.
Of course, here in Nashville, Land of the Abused Songwriter, paranoia about such things is pretty common, and for good reason, because a lot of people have seen, through a range of clever dirty tricks, their rights to their work vanish the way this year's snow did down (never mind last year's snow; it went even faster). Misunderstanding copyright here is pretty common as well, which leads to people who didn't understand it to begin with having cause for paranoia.
Teresa - You are confusing copyright and patent. You can't copyright an idea. Perhaps Cawdrey's idea was patentable. I don't know.
Reprinting his words e.g. "If thou be desirous (gentle Reader)...." on t-shirts would be a copyright violation if the text was indeed copyrighted.
Although Teresa is confusing patent and copyright, Cawdrey couldn't patent his idea since there's prior art, though not in English.
What people forget about copyright is the idea that is embodied in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
You'll note it says "for limited Times." Perpetual copyright means that poorer nations won't have access to the information. It will never become public domain.
I have an idea for a science fiction story in which the language spoken by the upper classes is patented by a corporation, and poor people are forced to speak a pidgin, an open source compiled of the few words and sounds that haven't been licensed for use.
I reckon someday we'll be paying a toll just to talk.
Sean--
Have you read Ella Minnow Pea
by...Mark Dunn, I think?
It has some intriguing similarities with your idea, but not enough to invalidate what you're thinking about. You just might get a kick out of what he does with language.
Copyright is a government contract with writers and artists, and like all government contracts, it should be awarded to the lowest bidder.
Hi Sarah,
I hadn't read it. I'll look for it, thanks. Since I was 15 I've had to deal with the tragic truth that somebody always beats me to pretty much every idea I have, usually by several hundred years, often by thousands.
David Sanger, I know the difference between copyright and patent. I've also seen rights claims sustained that were based, not on the words used, but on the form, ideas, and other theoretically uncopyrightable content. The winners had lots more lawyers and money to throw at the fight.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Now if this was taken literally, only people could have copyrights. That could result in several benefits. Create something that people like and will pay for, then the corporation would have to keep you employed until your death even if you didn't create anything new. Of course, they could still produce it after you died, but then so could others. Good reason for them to want you to remain alive. Also, it would provide a good reason for corporations to attract as many brilliant people as possible and keep them happy so they don't leave to found their own corporations.
It's just sad how so many rights have been usurped by businesses that were intended to benefit people.
The idea of perpetual copyright bothers me for three reasons.
(1) It can make works unavailable (if you can't contact the heirs/assigns, for example).
(2) It raises the cost of classic works and thus makes them less available for use, performance, and so on (I say this as the owner of quite a few Dover Thrift Editions, and a great lover of that press's cheap classics).
(3)It makes it all too easy to suppress ideas -- if I own the copyright to, say, the Communist Manifesto, and I'm a staunch Randroid what are the odds that it would never again see the light of day?
One of the things that I'm finding bothersome about academic publishing these days is the growing insistence of the publishers of academic journals that copyright in anything they publish be assigned to them (sure, they say they'll make reprinting/republishing easy for the writer, but still...). Perpetual copyright on top of that....
Renee,
I like your idea. I favor an inheritable copyright lasts a fixed term (say 40 years), long enough that a corporation can't camp on an initially unsuccessful work, and long enough that you can make a good faith effort to get the thing published.*
The significance of the heritability is simple: if you invest years of effort into creating something neat in the hopes of providing for your spouse/kids/aging parents and get hit by a truck the day after, they aren't screwed.
Have I missed anything?
-r.
*not sure if this kind of deadline would have helped a writer like Tolkien or not. Copyright is usually based on when the work is "fixed in a tangible form", so in theory drafts are protected, but in this scenario, finishing the draft starts the clock? That doesn't seem right somehow. Somebody help me out here a bit.
As long as I'm here...
...what about copyright on lyrics? I've seen some oddities reported, for instance, Neil Gaiman being quoted $800 for permission to quote seven words from a song. But if those lyrics were merely poetry, would fair use allow you to cite those seven words? (I know it is based on the proportion of the works cited and how the judge is feeling the day your case comes to trial.)
-r.
The difficulty of quoting copyighted lyrics is a good example of what clout does to the process. The music industry has aggressively fought the use of quotations from songs, so what would be legal if the same words were poetry becomes an invitation to a lawsuit if they're set to music.
rhandir: I think the thing that's missed in arguments for copyright surviving the death of the author is that it's a "think of the poor little children!" argument for limiting the rights of the public at large.
The business of writing is, like all business, risky. You can and almost certainly will fail, like most small businesses. This is one of the good things about the way American capitalism works: it's easy for people to try new ideas and succeed or fail so we can all keep coming up with new things to try. It's the scientific method writ large.
A very well-executed low key[*] PR and marketing campaign over the last few decades has managed to successfully implant the idea in the public that copyright has "always" been recognized as a basic moral right. (I have just been engaged in this discussion on a mailing list as may be obvious.)
As far as I can tell, the truth is the exact opposite. There was no notion of the idea of copyright until the 1600s, maybe somewhere around 1700?, and the idea was a brilliant extension of the then-perceived inherent right of the King to grant specific royal monopolies. (For instance, the King could for a fee grant one merchant the exclusive right to sell salt or tobacco, allowing them to jack up the price to whatever they saw fit.) Selling authors an exclusive monopoly on reproduction of their own works - if the Crown got their fee - must have seemed a brilliant spin on the idea. Same goes for patents. (BTW. I would love a cite for this, or correction - I digested this from previous reading but don't have a good reference for it.)
It was popular enough for the American founders to copy it, not too many years later. Note that unlike all the moral rights listed in the Constitution. Declaration of Independence, or Bill of Rights, copyrights and patents are listed in the Constitution not as any sort of "right" but as a clever way to jump-start the economy of the fledgeling nation.
Those who view copyright as a universal moral right must certainly see the world as having been a vastly and profoundly immoral place up through the 1970s, when the laws required that you register a copyright prior to publication in the US, and failing to do so effectively voided the copyright. Indeed I gather that up through the 1950s British and American publishers gleefully reprinted each others' books if the correct hoops had not jumped, with the infamous Ace Tolkein edition merely being the best known.
This is not to say that new "rights" are bad - as I noted in the mailing list discussion, the right not to be tortured is only a few hundred years old, and I'm all for that one.
However, copyright's newness should be enough to make us all profoundly skeptical about grandiose claims for its moral basis. Copyright as a concept fundamentally could not exist until the onset of mass production via printing presses. Claiming it could pre-exist that is like asserting that we all have a fundamental moral right not to have telepaths read our sexual desires; if society does not have telepaths, that "moral right" is bizarrely useless and thus inconceivable to assert. Copyright as a concept was likewise useless and inconceivable until the means for mass reproduction were established.
* I could not type that phrase without remembering the character of "Low Key" Lyemaker in American Gods. Those who have read it will follow the connection.
Arguably Teresa should have hung a lantern on the nominal difference between patent and copyright, but what's she's really doing is making a point about so-called "intellectual property" (a phrase that's come into common use only in the last generation or so).
The fact is, it's not "property" like your shirt is. It's a government-chartered monopoly. In the US, our Constitution specifically says we grant these monopolies "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". However, as Cory Doctorow pointed out at Boskone, big corporate copyright owners have found they get much better results asking lawmakers to "protect intellectual property" than they do asking them to "extend our monopoly." Once again we see, as Teresa once observed, that deceiving us has become an industrial process.
Dave Kuzminski:
Such a rule does apply to patents - only "natural persons" can apply for or be granted them. Having done it twice, I can say that it makes no difference: the employer requires employees to assign the rights to the patent to the corporation as of the time of application. Boom, done.
Unless you remove people's legal right to reassign ownership of abstract things, which would create all kinds of other legal problems, it would make no difference at all to require that copyrights have to be applied for by individuals.
Thank you Teresa!
I was thinking of how poetry is often reset to music, and wondering if there have been actual cases of rights being renegotiated.
Peter,
I think you dismiss the "think of the poor little children" arguement too quickly. Capitalism doesn't even enter into this. This is the basic purpose of government; balancing the interests of the individual and the group.
Look at the scenario I outlined: a fixed term. If the length of copyright can be shortened due to accident, then there has been a arbitrary taking of property from the artist/family.
Picture two writers, creating two works on the same day. The first is run over by a bus that afternoon and their family receives no income. The second lives 40 more years, and their family is supported on the sales of the work for that time.
The "think of the children" arguement based on the fact that people do not exist in isolation, and that, horror of horrors, some people support others financially. ZOMG! Somebody's getting something for nothing! Quick, call the Republicans!
If you want to get utilitarian on this, note that the marginal average increase in common good of assigning a work to the public domain even 40 years earlier probably does not offset the decrease in circumstance experienced by the individual family members!
-r.
p.s.
For those who are counting, yes, I think letting the length of copyright vary depending on the author's life that we currently have (life+70) is probably unfair too, except that there's not a whole lot of practical difference between a 130 year copyright (publish at 20, live to 80) and a 70 year copyright (publish at 80, live 5 minutes). If someone wants to use this fairness arguement to help overturn current copyright law though, be my guest.
The first copyright was 1710, the Statute of Anne. The first "patent" was actually a reward of 20,000 english pounds for the first person to solve the longitude problem, offered in 1714. A solution was submitted in 1761. The bounty was paid quite some time after that.
Note that the longitude reward wasn't a patent like we normally think of with exclusive rights for 20 years, it was a bounty offered to the first person who could successfully solve a real world problem.
A brief history shows that copyright started out at a 14 year exclusive term, and have been going up ever since, at the request of those benefiting from copyright.
A copyright term of "Life plus N" doesn't make any sense from a logical point of view. The longer an author works on a book, the shorter time they get to collect. "Life plus N" copyright terms only make sense when viewed from the point of view of authors who want eternal copyright, but will settle for a copyright that at least lasts as long as they're alive. Hell hath no fury like an author who made money from his writing and must see it pass into the public domain while they're still alive.
rhandir: I'm not a Randroid, thanks.
Peter,
sorry, I uh, flamed-on.
Oops.
-r.
Most of the current state of affairs regarding intellectual property law can be credited to one man: Bruce Lehman. Lehman was an IP lawyer for (in his own words) "motion picture, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, computer software and broadcasting industries" for ten years. Then, in 1994, President Clinton appointed him as the Commissioner of the Patent and Trademark Office. Lehman used his position to advocate for his former employees. He did an end run around congress and the supreme court and authorized software patents be granted. He went on an international tour, stumping for WIPO modifications, and eventually pushed for and got the DMCA, and while he was commissioner, the Copyright Term Extension Act was passed, extending copyright another 20 years.
As commissioner, he was in charge of setting the bounties for patents, and should have been setting them at rates that would encourage competiton. Instead, he implemented corporate welfare for his former employers, giving them fat copyright and patent rights.
After leaving his position as patent comissioner, Bruce Lehman starts his own company, an IP lobbying machine, which, again, in his own words
"was founded with donations from private corporations. These "capital contributions" supported the organization in its formative years"
This was, no doubt, Lehman's reward for his selfless public service as patent comissioner.
I have a dictionary (English-Spanish) printed in Philadelphia in (IIRC) 1839. It has no copyright on it, which is a good thing, because it's fairly clearly a copy of a British publication: it refers to the 'late Peninsular Wars'. So book copyrights are a bit later than that, at least in the US.
Lehman used his position to advocate for his former employees.
I take it that should read "employers." (This is only a copyediting point, not a quarrel with the ideas presented. If I were doing that, I would also query "former.")
An interesting series of coincidences can be observed in recent history. Every time Disney's "Steamboat Willie" is about to enter the public domain, Congress decides to extend copyright terms.
1928: Walt Disney makes "Steamboat Willie", the first cartoon to star Mickey Mouse. Copyright terms in 1928 were 28+28=56 years. Steamboat willie should become public domain in 1984.
1976: Congress does a massive revamp of copyright law, switching over to join the Berne Convention, which sets copyright terms to life plus 50 years. Corporate works, such as Steamboat Willie, are given a term of 70 years. Steamboat Willie will now become Public Domain in 1998.
October, 1998, Congress passes the Copyright Term Extension Act, extending all terms, private and corporate, by another 20 years. Steamboat Willie will now become Public Domain in 2018 AD.
Walt Disney currently reports a revenue of about 20 Billion Dollars a year. And the lobbying money they are required to report lists in the millions of dollars per year. Your congressmen at work.
IIRC, Howard Waldrop had something to say about the difficulty and expense of quoting from copyrighted songs in the intro to Flying Saucer Rock & Roll. He got around it by phonetically rendering the required phrases--I suppose this was made easier since most of the songs were doo-wop.
JBWoodford
John,
ooops. yep. my bad.
Greg
Copyright was born in the Crown's desire to censor the press via the Stationer's office and the Star Chamber court. Sixteeth century English printers were given exclusive rights to print acceptable material, material approved by the Crown. Milton, in 1644, wrote Aeropagitica after suffering through the Stationer's restrictions during the English Civil War. In Aeropagitica Milton passionately argues against a resurgence of censorship via the 1643 Licensing Act which proclaimed "That no Book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth Printed, unless the same be first approv'd and licenc't."
Perpetual copyright means that the rights holder can choose to withhold publication indefinitely; if the DMCA weren't warped enough, perpetual copyright would effectively offer another method of censorship. It would be yet another step backward.
It's a really dumb idea. Disney would love it.
John,
"former". Just got it.
laughter ensued.
Greg
Actually, copyright has a much more muddled history than even Lisa alludes to. There were certainly some censorship aspects to the chartering of the Company of Stationers by the Star Chamber in 1566. After all, that was the time of the Wycliffe bible, John Caxton, et al. However, the records of the time are pretty explicit that maintenance of monopoly control over printing was also a significant factor in chartering the Company of Stationers.
Then, too, one must remember that not everything was first done in England. The first letters patent were actually issued in Venice during the early 15th century. Italy (and, to a somewhat lesser but no less convoluted extent, France) also exerted crown control over the right to copy in the 15th century. In each instance, the right to copy was inextricably linked with the right to prevent others from copying. And the less said about "copy protection" in 16th-century Germany, the better.
The crux of the problem, at least in modern terms, is whether copyright (or more generally "innovation right", as distinct from "intellectual property" to avoid problems with trademark) is a natural or statutory right. "Perpetual copyright" theories all come from the assumption that copyright is a natural right. However, copyright (and patent) law as we know it has explicitly rejected that conception and labelled it as a statutory right. And this isn't recent--1787 in England, 1834 in the US, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century scattered across Continental Europe.
In short, Disney wants us to party like it's 1699. Just like the Amish. And that's a truly disturbing comparison (that might have more validity than I really want to envision). That, however, is not consistent with the legal foundation of copyright.
N.B. In case y'all hadn't figured it out, the historical and philosophical basis of "innovation rights" is both a scholarly and practice interest of mine. So there.
Part of the problem is that the infinite-copyright folks won the recent round of framing. The term "intellectual property" has become the defacto language used to describe copyrights and patents. The term isn't in the constitution. I believe it was invented in the 1970's about the time the US switched over the the Berne convention, but I could be wrong about that part.
It isn't property, except because the law makes it exclusive for a limited period of time. Intellectual property then is a subset of the complete set called Intellectual Works.
The people-for-rational-copyright failed in their initial counter-attack to the term "property". They responded for the most part by saying intellectual works are "abstract property". I even used the argument recently here, with a complete marble-mouth title called "Reification, the fallacy of property".
But then I realized that the works of copyright aren't an abstract thing, becuase that would still mean they are a thing, still property, and from a framing point of view, the term fails to reframe to the proper view.
But copyrighted works aren't "things". They are the result of a "service". Writing is not a manufacturing industry, it is a service industry.
This was behind my "Bounty Hunters" paper, showing bounty hunters providing a service of catching bad guys and getting paid for their services over a period of 20, 40, then life-plus-50 years.
But people have issues with bounty hunters, for their sometimes unseemly air about them. Then it occurred to me that there is yet another tale that still reframes the issue as a service, rather than a thing, without all the bobba fett images being tossed about.
The mice have a cat problem. The solution is to put a bell on the cat. The first cat is belled as is reflected in all the old fairy tales. But after that, the home owners get more cats, the cats reproduce, and new cats continuously need to be belled. The mouse that bells the cat is doing a service for all mice. The benefit immediately enters the "public domain", because all mice can here the bell, not just the mouse who put the bell on the cat. The problem, then, is for the mice to create an incentive system that encourages mice to invest time and energy to put bells on the infinite supply of cats.
copyright has a similar problem, without copyright law, works immediately enter the public domain. The idea of copyright is to create just enough incentive to repay authors for their service of writing and creating. This coudl be done lump sum, or it coudl be done by way of exclusive rights being awarded for various terms.
But the point is that it is a service industry.
Teresa - i've seen the same argument made with respect to patents, and when I posited that under the perpetual-intellectual-property regime we'd all be paying royalties to the descendants of the person who first discovered fire, the person I was arguing with had no problem with that. I was stunned.
This is an interesting example of how words shape thought. The phrase "intellectual property" encourages people with certain political biases to believe that copyrights and patents ought to be treated like "real property", and obscures the fact that the "property" is property no more than, say, a ten-year lease on the mineral extraction from some government-owned land is property.
Greg and Lisa: Thanks for the date reference and historic context! I love this place. I knew I was in the ballpark, but didn't know just when it was.
Aphrael, next time someone suggests infinite IP law, put it in terms of bounty hunters.
Why pay a $50,000 bounty when someone will bring in the bad guy for $10,000?
Why give 500 year terms if authors are willing to write for 40 year terms?
It clearly shows a lack of competition and the corporate welfare that inflated terms, inflated bounties, really are.
Greg - i'm not sure that analogy would work for someone who already views intellectual property as a natural right. From their perspective, it isn't about copyrights and patents being a price society pays to get something; it is about copyright and patent being a recognition of the creator's natural right to own what they have created, forever. To them, the public domain is nothing more than rank theft.
It's an entirely different perspective than mine; i'm more likely to consider perpetual copyright to be theft. Which is why finding common ground is difficult.
You must speak the words to reframe the argument. As long as they speak in terms of "natural right" and "property", and you say nothing, then that is the frame within which the debate occurs.
If you reframe the argument to be about efficiency, competition, free-markets, bounty hunters, then that becomes the frame within which the debate occurs.
The point isn't to neccessarily change the point of view of everyone. Your acquaintence who believes that copyright is a natural right may never be swayed. And that's OK. The point is to sway enough to make a difference.
If the world is hearing only that copyright is a natural right, then that's the frame they will think inside of.
"Common ground" may lead you to try to keep part of their frame in the conversation, and that won't work. "natural right" and "service industry" are diametrically oppposed. The idea is to frame it in a way that works for you and the rest of the world will say "Yeah, that works for me." To me, that's common ground. It just happens to be your common ground and you invited everyone over to your place for a party.
aphrael,
read Bell the cat and Setting the Bounty. They're both about 500 words short, and that's all you really need to change the conversation from "eternal copyright" to "efficient free market competition"
Ooh, I forgot about this one. This is a good frame that pretty much everyone in the US knows about: The thousand dollar toilet seat. Again, about 500 words.
[...] when I posited that under the perpetual-intellectual-property regime we'd all be paying royalties to the descendants of the person who first discovered fire, the person I was arguing with had no problem with that. I was stunned.
It's comprehensible, even if I don't agree with it. There's a peculiar sorcery attached to ideation in the minds of a great many people; they think that ideas are rare and precious, and if you should be so fortunate as to have one, then there should be no limit on your ability to squeeze money (the only acceptable measure of value in our society) from it. The fact that an idea alone has no value at all without a complex human implementation -- someone has to write the story or paint the picture, a lot of people have to work together to make a machine fly or stop a ruptured appendix from being a death sentence, everybody has to pull hard to keep something like democracy operating -- is lost on most folks.
All together now: what's the most stereotypical question SF/F writers get asked? It sure ain't "isn't believable characterization hard work?"
This is why a patent, at least when the Patent Office is doing its job properly, is for an idea reduced to practice, not just an idea. It isn't enough to say "wouldn't it be cool if there were a machine that cured cancer and made thousands of julienne fries in seconds, while spinning straw into gold?" Come up with an operating prototype, and there's plenty in it, though what the monetary standard will be is open to question.
And a large part of the group nature of ideation is that one can draw on the ideas and practice of the past. It used to be a fairly common idea that a secret cabal of guys who hid their knowledge of how to enrobe chocolate within an shell of confection, so that it did melt only upon the tongue, and not upon the hands that were the conveyance thereunto, was rather a bad thing. Now it's a "trade secret." It was useful, once, to refer to the guy from Avon or the Authorized Version of 1611 in a written work. Now you're likely to run into trouble from Fish 'n' Loaf Catering, a division of McDonald's.
Hi..long time lurker...
Not so many years ago, I worked for a Major Publisher and one of my responsibilities was permissions. As a general rule, we advised authors that two lines of a song were fair use (just like poetry) unless it was more than ten percent of the entire work. (Obviously, there were gray areas and arcane little “but ifs”). I was stunned to see Neil Gaiman’s $800 quote for seven words. I would have gone ahead and used it without paying. In my nearly-a-decade of business, not once did I receive a letter of demanding a fee or c&d on something I cleared for use this way. Have permissions really changed that much or was my let-them-sue attitude simply successful?
As Dave K. noted, copyright and patent protections are allied in the U.S. Constitution, and both are themselves facets of whatr is now referrewd to as Intellectual Property (IP).
The advent of a (supposedly) disinterested (hah!) State enforcing protections for IP is what took process protections (patents) out of the realms of craft guilds and their modes of IP enforcement -- large people with clubs and similar instruments having a Discussion With The Infringer.
I find the idea of perpetual copyrights absurd, both from the fact of restricting access to works (an earlier thread in this forum noted that some publishers, especially of music, keep recordings, in theory "in print" and never let the rights revert back to the originator) and as a foil to fools (as noted in *another* thread here [amazing way all these threads keep weaving themselves together] some heirs Several-Times-Removed or Old Enough To Know Better {or, as Renee noted, Old Enough To Get Real Jobs} seem to think that because there is any interest in reprints at all that there's gold 'tween them dar boards)
I also find the newest wrinkle enacted, that resulted in draconian retroactive copyright protection, just plain amazing and a tribute to the effiacy of The Greased Palm.
Greg London --
Please do not get me started on the ramifications of the DCMA. And, as you will likely agree, the side results from that law are not a matter of "unintended consequences." Pretty much all of the abuses of that law that we have seen were predicted at the time it was being "debated." As you say, "your congress at work." (and pay)
Greg London,
There is a slight flaw with the "thousand dollar toilet seat" scenario. It's an excellent parable -- but it probably isn't factual. I doubt that makes a difference.
I can't recall the details of the toliet seat fiasco, but I do recall the details of the $BIGNUM_DOLLARS "coffe pot" fiasco. (And if I was diligent, I would probably be able to come up with adequate search terms to support this, but bear with me.)
The short version is that the Air Force paid a lot of money to get a coffe pot installed in their transport planes.
The long version is that they needed a coffe pot that would keep coffe hot on a 12-18 hour flight so that paratroopers and flight crew would be fully awake when it came time to land. Said pot also needed to not burn the coffee, nor spill it on said paratroopers during arial maneouvers. (In addition to other arbitrarily specific parameters.) Basically, what the AF paid for was for a contractor to solve a one-off, custom engineering problem, that may very well have been over-spec'd by some bueaucrat. In addition, some of the controversial contracts included the AF retaining ownership of the dies and any specialized manufacturing equipment for the custom products.*
Ah, nuts. Futher googling has revealed this article on the "600$ hammer." Looks like stuff like that was due to bizzare accounting, e.g. lumping the item's individual cost with the R&D overhead to make it. I wonder if the explation I gave above is just a back-formation?
I guess I'll have to start muddling with snopes.
-r.
*For a frame of reference, custom dies for embossing business cards have a wholesale cost of 600$. Presumably at least 300$ of that isn't profit.
I don't know many corporations that are eager to be sued by the RIAA. Personally, I'd go for it, but they never seem to put me in charge.
it's fairly clearly a copy of a British publication: it refers to the 'late Peninsular Wars'. So book copyrights are a bit later than that, at least in the US.
The US wasn't all that great about enforcing international copyright for a long, long time. I seem to recall it being an issue as late as the 50s, when Tolkien/Allen & Unwin went to publish The Lord of the Rings in the US and found ripoff reprints of the first (British) edition already here.
Mark: I think times have changed. lawsuits are becoming easier for organizations who have their own legal departments. Might as well put that sunk cost to use and sue somebody, awight? Fair use is not objectively defined for most uses, and is left to a judge to interpret. That is enough of a wildcard to strike fear in the hearts of writers who are weak of lawyers and thin of wallet.
Craig: Too late.
"Some have argued that because it may now be technically feasible to "meter" each use of a copyrighted work, and to charge a user a fee for the use, the concept of fair use has no place in the NII environment.” -- Bruce Lehman, 1995
The DMCA was Bruce Lehman's +44 musketball attack on decades of Fair Use doctrine, and damned if he didn't roll all 6's on his damage dice to boot.
+5, Informative
Yahoo exec says "Labels should sell music without DRM"
Wikipedia's list of copyright lengths, by country.
-r.
There have been recent arguments in rec.arts.sf.fandom on these expensive hammers, toilet seats, and coffeepots. Summarising from memory:
Accounting practises are a part of the problem. At times, R&D costs have been shared across the items in a project in a quite arbitrary manner. The whole "weapons system" idea tends to bring things like ordinary tools into the package, so that the mechanic's tools, once a seperate procurement, carry a part of the R&D costs.
Apparently the expensive coffeepot is not so differently priced from the coffeepot Boeing would install in an airliner. Safety, and power, requirements will make them different from what you can buy in Wal-Mart.
And the toilet-seat story is a combination of specific requirements, and the need to make tooling for a small batch, lomg after the original production. Since that batch had to pay for the tooling, the seats were expensive. Subsequent batches cost much less.
These stories arise from people not understanding the accounting fictions, not comparing like with like, and not knowing what it costs to make something. Maybe politicians are ignorant. Maybe they are liars. Neither is all that good.
Veejane:
There never was such an idea as "international copyrights" until the '70s or '80s. For a US copyright to be valid and enforceable during the period you're discussing, it had to be registered with the USPTO prior to its US publication or offer for sale in the US. Failure to do so meant that it did not have a US copyright and could not obtain one. I think British law was similar - if it was sold in the UK prior to registration, it was open season.
IIRC, that is how Ace seized the ability to publish the LotR here - it had something to do with the British publisher slipping up and allowing the British edition to be offered for sale in the US prior to registration.
It may have been ungentlemanly or sharp practice, but it was completely legal and "good business" on both sides of the Atlantic.
(A bit of significant computer trivia: the Unix operating system probably entered the public domain in the US by the same road, in the 1970s or early 1980s. This never got ruled on by the judge in the AT&T vs. BSDI and UC case, because the parties abruptly settled out of court, but the judge dropped some very strong hints that he might rule AT&T had lost its copyright on Unix by distributing too broadly without having registered it.)
...he say "Ninety-five years?
Why judge, that ain't no time
I got a book set in New Orleans, gettin' life plus ninety-nine."
never was such an idea as "international copyrights" until the '70s or '80s
In the 1880's, Victor Hugo pushed for and got the Berne convention, a treaty between a number of European countries that agreed to recognize copyright protections from member countries. Without such a treaty, copyright was only a national law, and a work would be under copyright only in the country where the author lived. The work would be public domain everywhere else.
In 1905, the Berlin Act modified the Berne Convention to extend the Term of Copyright to the life of the Author plus 50 years.
In 1911, the United States entered the Buenos Aires Convention on Literary and Artistic Copyrights, which was the first international agreement regarding copyright for the US.
In 1952, the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) was adopted at Geneva in 1952. The United States became a signatory. This created the phrase "All Rights Reserved", which was a requirement to have your rights enforced in other countries.
In 1976, the US joined the Berne Convention.
Greg: I moved on from my publishing gig about eight years ago. Seems a lifetime. In any case, we actually took the attitude that if we were consistent, had general rules for fair use we always used, we could defend a use. While the author was ultimately responsible by contract, the author probably could have made the case that they were advised by the publisher and proceeded in good faith so I imagine the publisher would have joined a defense…don’t know what the end result would have been…as I said, we literally never received an objection. I think I’d still it do it today, but then I tend to be that person that flicks chips off shoulders and giggles.
Oh! Teresa, I’ve figured out the answer to your other post: obviously, with icey resolve, I braved the potential litigation storm and cleared fair use song lyrics for a moody author. That poor Arizona student found my pornographic abuse of copyright law to be morally repugnant to some people.
An individual author owns his or her work, check, Fifty (or seventy, or whatever) years post his or her death, I can live with copyright extending that long. But I can't imagine today's literature, at least the genre literature, the thing I read and write, without the use of common domain ideas - and it frightens me that whatever is in common domain today is all we will ever have. It doesn't bode well for future creative endeavours. We create myths today, just as our forebears created theirs - and someday, somewhere, if the human race survives that long, Star Trek is going to be somebody's mythology. It would be tragic if such things were absolutely out of a creative mind's grasp, to build future myths on.
The semantic framing of the whole debate fascinates me.
Pet peeve: "pirates" and "piracy". It's a pretty extreme label to pin on a practice which is, on the small scale, about equal to shoplifting, and on a large commercial scale roughly equivalent to any other form of forgery (watches, scent, designer handbags, whatever). But it's an example of how the folks who pin the label on the donkey get to define the debate. Piracy, after all, is a Serious crime, and deserves draconian sentencing (twenty years! life!) ... which is a whole lot harder to argue for in the case of shoplifting. And indeed, the next time the MPAA or RIAA accuse one of their profit centers -- excuse me, infringers -- of shoplifting, it'll be the first.
Lots of indie labels sell without DRM. DRM is a result of the Big Four music labels conspiring to keep control of things by extraordinarily stupid means.
The thing is, the size they are, they don't have to care how many people they piss off, as long as the majority of customers keep paying whatever the market can bear.
Four corporations control about 70% of the world's music. What they say, goes.
The Ladies Professional Golf Tour is trying this "mine forever and ever amen" business on.
To get credentials, media outlets must agree to hand over ownership of their photos to the LPGA and only publish or air stories about the event as news stories. Reporters covering the event can only write about the LPGA Tour, and those stories could be used in perpetuity by the LPGA for free.
More here.
Cliff Royston wrote, about copyright/patents:
Note that unlike all the moral rights listed in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or Bill of Rights, copyrights and patents are listed in the Constitution not as any sort of "right" but as a clever way to jump-start the economy of the fledgeling nation.
I've also found it interesting to note, however, that it's in the main body of the Constitution--in the first Article, in fact, and not an amendment like the Bill of Rights (i.e., an "oops, we forgot something" afterthought). [Article 1, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries... "]
It's right after Post Offices. :)
Greg, quoting: "Some have argued that because it may now be technically feasible to "meter" each use of a copyrighted work, and to charge a user a fee for the use,[...]"
I acutally wrote a novella inspired by that quote. (So have, I guess, thousands of others, and better.)
Charlie Stross: But it's an example of how the folks who pin the label on the donkey get to define the debate.
I call it Mitnick's Revenge. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick). Mitnick is an unlovely dolt but all he did was send stupid messages to stupid computers which then did stupid things. He did not "break into" anywhere. Anyone who has had their house broken into would know the difference.
But prosecutors, by overhyping the threat, have created a situation where really bad design decisions can be preserved long-term using the full apparatus of state power. The unnecessary and damaging restrictions resulting from this will continue for decades. Mitnick is by most accounts not someone to see the consequences of anything, but he might well have said to his prison guards, including the one who put him in solitary for eight months because he might have launched a nuclear attack by whistling into a telephone, "whatever you do to me is going to come back and bite you in the ass."
Mitnick could have appealed. Most likely he didn't because he had been threatened with even more severe treatment. But maybe he knew what a bad and unworkable precedent he was setting.
In short, we live in a zeitgeist where a period of innovation is coming to an end.
A few thoughts, assorted:
1. I don't like the current copyright regime. Especially for the reasons Anghara mentions: lack of common myths that can be drawn upon without fear of suit.
2. I don't mind the reification of intellectual property, but then again, I am kind of used to holding propterty that isn't strictly mine, or strictly physical property with intangible charactersitics. E.g. I "own" a house, but most of it is the bank's. Alternatively, I have a pretty, highly decorated, engraved piece of paper, that tells me that I "own" part of a corporation, which itself is a: a. "person" b. collection of factories c. set of financial structures d. group of people working together e. set of risks and f. continually varying money equivalent. Despite all this, I still think of myself as owning a kind of property, mainly because it is a convenient construct.
3. A heritable, unending copyright, like Theresa's interlocutor advocates leads to an interesting scenario in the long term. Take a "patent on making fire".
Generation 1: people pay one guy to use fire.
Generation 2: people pay a small family to use fire.
Generation 7: people pay a large family/small clan for the privelege to use fire. Hmm. Sounds like Medici's to me. Meanwhile, other useful patents have been enacted, so the fire clan pays license fees to other clans. City-states form around license monopolies. (Brad Pitt conquors Troy in order to secure the Helen license?)
By generation 10: most people owe most other people license fees for most of the useful things they use. The bookkeepers report that the equation balances out to nearly zero, (except for some recalcitrant ethnic groups that refuse to use chairs) and that given the time spent calculating the difference owed, everyone is actually in the red. The bookkeepers suggest that since almost everyone has inherited the license fees for most stuff, (and everyone benefits from the inventions anyway) that it could be moved into a special accounting category called "the public good".
In order to simplify things for future accounting, the relieved bookeepers suggest that perhaps setting a time limit on licenses would be useful. A set of politicians agree to try this out, and decide that 14 years sounds pretty good for stories, and that 10 sounds pretty good for ideas. ("But, only if they have a working copy of the idea, or a printed copy of the story.") The bookeepers sigh, and decide to go back to working on more important things, like inventing a method to track accounts using two entries.
-r.
p.s. If someone wants to take this story and re-work it into something good, go ahead.
Aren’t you glad that, three hundred years later, we’re not paying royalties to the inheritors of the Cawdrey estate every time we use alphatical order as an organizing principle?
And yet, the Dewey Decimal System, found in most public libraries and numerous private ones, is still owned by the DDC and charges any institution who wishes to use it a fee.*
The Library of Congress system is free to anyone, but only because it's owned by the Government and in the public domain. I imagine if Bush had been around two centuries ago, and thought he could make a buck from it, he'd have privatized the system of organizing the Congressional collection and sold it to the highest bidder (probably the UAE).
* Sometimes they'll wave the fee, if the institution is needy and penniless.
As a counter to the phrase intellectual property may I propose intellectual commons as a useful umbrella term?
I "own" a house, but most of it is the bank's
rhandir, that's not reification. reification is taking the act of belling a cat and calling it a "thing" owned by the brave mouse who did the belling.
A house is a house is a house. The concept of "love" is an abstract thing. Asking "where is love?" "how much does it weigh?" is the logical fallacy of reification. (it may also qualify as a zen koan, but that's a different matter)
The idea of "property" is that it is zero sum. For one to gain, another must lose. But when one mouse bells a cat, all mice benefit. If you want to set up a reward system that encourages mice to put bells on cats, that's fine, but to relate to their action of belling a cat as a "thing" is reification.
Same goes for works covered by copyright. A book is a physical thing, but the part covered by copyright is the expression, and when one person expresses something publicly, all benefit immediately. You can set up an incentive system to encourage writers to write and reward them, but to relate to their expression as if it were a physical thing is reification.
Rhandir - would the bookkeepers actually suggest such a thing? Or would they realize that the incredibly complex system of payments constituted job security for them, and become staunch supporters of the system?
One of the ironies of the situation is that the transaction costs of such a system would be so high that the economy would grind to a halt -- hardly something I'd expect free market zealots to support.
I just read Spider Robinson's tasty short story, "Melancholy Elephants," which addresses this very topic. Though from a different angle... hm, don't want to spoil the story if anyone reading this hasn't read it. But it's good! (My copy was in "New Hugo Winners, Volume 1.")
Aphrael,
The only bookkeeper I know is a quiet, pleasant, practical person. She doesn't seem the kind of person who would enjoy busywork.
I kinda wanted to get at a couple of things in that little story: that if you substitute "merchant guilds" for "licensor", you essentially get a pocket history of Europe/the Mediterranean/China etc.
Basically, a heritable copyright resembles nothing so much as a drop of ink in a swimming pool; well defined at time zero, but immesurably diffuse within the hour. My point was that an infinitely divideable "property" resembles a "common good" over time. (Or, more accurately, given a constant supply of infinitely divideable properties, over time ownership becomes so mixed that essentially everyone gets a piece of the action.)
This is like the idea of six degrees of seperation: if knowlege is owned by a guild, and the guild is large enough, it is difficult to find customers who will pay full price, since the odds are that you are obliged to most of your customers through other weak links. This kind of flattening out of power is pretty easy to see in places like China, where you get complex interrelationships of "owing" one another, based on how "near" or "far" a person is from you/your social group. [ref term: guanxi]
-r.
On the topic of owning things you don't really own.
I will slit the throat of anybody who tries to deprive me of my CD collection (okay, that's an exaggeration, but only because I don't know much about knife-fighting). But really the 8 cents worth of plastic & metal that they're printed on don't mean that much to me, and everybody knows I don't own the music that those things can convince my stereo to play (thankfully, I do own that stereo). Why am I so possessive? I mean... I like liner notes, but not that much.
(Oddly and amusingly, part of the answer is that I went to so much trouble to put them where they are, and I'm defending the effort of my work.)
Greg London,
You correctly pointed out that the examples I gave weren't precisely reifications.
You said: A house is a house is a house. The concept of "love" is an abstract thing.
My thought is, yes, it is a house, but whose house is it, really? Through my own inaction I can "lose" it. The quality of wether something can be possessed or not is what people get hung up on. Let me explain.
If I laboriously write a manuscript, at the end of many months I have a really neat expression in the form of a stack of typewritten pages*. As long as I don't share it, its mine. My precioussssss. I can enjoy it, and no one can take advantage of this resource I've produced. So long as I retain control of the source manuscript, I "posess" the story like I would any other object, and the illusion of property is unbroken.
The problem comes in two parts:
1. The resource that I've produced is much more like "a sunny spring afternoon" than a pile of coal. (The expression has a physical** component {paper, symbols} and a nonmaterial component {plot, ideas}.)
and
2. I don't have much control over how its exploited once the idea gets out of the fixed form I put it in.
Publishing fixes problem #1: the physical form now can usefully be shlepped around in rail cars and delivered to many people. Copyright fixes problem #2: I can exert some control over how the resource is exchanged for money. But the illusion of property persists because it looks like I'm getting money in exchange for "stuff". In addition, it looks like a real life golden goose scenario: as long as I "hold onto" the story-manuscript (the publishing contract becomes the proxy for the story-manuscript) I can make as much money as I want! All illusions, of course, but it explains the irrational dreams of inheritors just fine.
My overall point is that holding a deed to a house , or a stock certificate is a lot more like "owning" a copyright than anything else (it has that mix of tangible and intangible). Given that we live in a culture where people own all kinds of abstract things, and refer to the as "property"... well I dunno.
Perhaps, maybe we are approaching this the wrong way. It may be useful to keep on referring to it as property, unless we can find a word for "something that has material and nonmaterial characteristics that can be kept, but never owned."***
-r.
*yes, yes, I know actually its little alterations in magnetic charge on a spinning disk, but I can't get too abstract!
**Or verbal, somatic, material, component(s). See 1st ed. AD&D PHB, p.43)
***Surely there is a riddle in the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon tradition along these lines?
As to quoting lyrics, when Allen Steele found out what it would cost him to quote Grateful Dead lyrics in his near-future books, he just made up lines that sounded like the Dead. He did a good job, if you tell that to some people, they're sure they were actual Dead lyrics.
To this:
It makes it all too easy to suppress ideas -- if I own the copyright to, say, the Communist Manifesto, and I'm a staunch Randroid what are the odds that it would never again see the light of day?
-- note this trouble with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex; the original translation into English is badly flawed, and there are people willing to correct it, but the English-language rightsholders don't find it worthwhile to publish a new edition, so that's that.
I was stunned to see Neil Gaiman’s $800 quote for seven words. I would have gone ahead and used it without paying. In my nearly-a-decade of business, not once did I receive a letter of demanding a fee or c&d on something I cleared for use this way.
Legally, there's a sharp difference between following common practice and doing something one has specifically been told not to do.
Also:
- what would making trouble against your cases have gained? The value of a quote certainly couldn't be more than the yield on the book, which I understand averages rather low; Anansi Boys was not going to be an average book. (A lawsuit probably wouldn't have cost all the revenue, as I understand it did when the owners of Here Come the Brides took on Hambly's crossover Star Trek novel Ishmael, but there would have been enough money at stake to attract attention.)
- How sturdy a target was your major publishing house? It presumably had its own lawyers, whose job was to defend against assaults by other lawyers; Neil Gaiman, however much administrative support he gets from Heifetz, TFLorraine, etc., is one person, who has better things to do than dealing with a lawsuit.
He may also have been more interested in staying clearly inside the law after having spent (per elsewhere in his blog) a large amount of energy dealing with someone who had stolen his work.
The older I get, the more I find myself inclined to support a very strict, fixed term for copyrights, not renewable - inheritable, and transferable within some limits. Part of this is seeing ways for creators to continue to make money even when they don't have exclusive rights - "hi, this is the version I endorse" makes sales, for starters. Part of it is seeing more and more harm from the alternative.
What about jokes? If someone uses your joke, it's taken away from you. At least in terms of a standup comedian or cartoonist. Who wants to see my version of a Charles Addams gag, or hear me tell a Woody Allen joke? If I get there first, or become more popular, they're the losers.
Being a freelancer also doesn't put me in the all information should be free camp. Because newspapers and mags and the internet make money from your stuff, and you've lost it forever.
Chip: I agree vis-à-vis common practice versus flagrant flouting. That’s what I meant by having rules to follow. To clarify a bit, for a mere seven words of a song, I wouldn’t have requested permission in the first place because in my judgment it was fair use within a realm of common practice (or, dare I say it, reasonable!). If it’s fair use, at a fundamental level, I simply don’t have to ask permission. Once I ask the question (i.e., permission), I’ve ceded the fair use decision to someone else and redefined common practice. At that point, if someone assigns a monetary value to something I think doesn’t have any, I either pay, don’t use it, or use it and risk a lawsuit predicated on the fact that I was given warning. Even if I’m right.
Imagine a world where every creator demands payment for any use, no matter how trivial. If a requestor in that world lets the creator define that rule, fair use in effect disappears even though the law recognizes the concept exists (which essentially is happening). In any case, to your point, fair use is all about defining when something’s worth it.
Which, IMHO, loops back to the perpetual copyright issue…I can say my copyright has value forever. But value is determined in the marketplace and if my fee is above the market, the creation will never be seen. If my heirs and their heirs think the same, they can sit proudly safe in the knowledge that not only is no one making a dime on my work (including them!) but no one can ever use my work to create new ones. At a certain point, an additional value of a creation is not what it sells for, but what it inspires. In our litigious world, perpetual copyright would eventually mean any inspired story is vulnerable to lawsuit if the pockets are deep enough. If the Brothers Grimm manipulated copyright the way Disney wants, Disney would never have been able to do Snow White. Creation eventual grinds to a halt (Story Inertia!).
This is really a discussion of Art versus Commerce. Cezanne inspired Picasso. Disney lobbies Congress.
I just ran across a great example tonight. I love the work of the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, and had not known that a copyright controversy has been roiling over his poetry for years, because one damned professor asserts the copyright to all of Clare's poetry that was unpublished in his lifetime -- which is most of it. This situation has prevailed for more than 35 years, evidently. The Guardian article is more than five years old; I don't know if there has been any improvement in the case since. Poor John Clare; why does it have to be the writers who most need the free exposure who attract the worst parasites?
Ultimately, the defence of the copyright idea depends on the assumption that otherwise a work will be exploited without payment to the creator.
In other words, if it were not for the law, the free market would force everyone to be a "pirate", including the corporations.
As has been said here before, the behavious of unconstrained corporations is often analagous to that of natural persons suffering from diagnosable mental disorders. including the behaviour a layman would label psychopathic.
So we get a bunch of psychopaths expectimng everyone to behave like them, and with the influence to get laws to prevent that behaviour. At first sight, this seems a Good Thing. Unfortunately, the insane get to write the laws, and have the resources to enforce them on others.
Of course, if a corporation is insane, shouldn't it be committed to an asylum?
Scott: I will slit the throat of anybody who tries to deprive me of my CD collection
"This CD is loaned for promotional purposes only and may be reclaimed at any time by the copyright holder." At least, that's what it says on a lot of my CDs.
Teresa: I wish I could remember the title and author of an sf short story I read back in the day. I think it was in Analog in the 1960s. Somebody either wrote something or invented something--something relatively minor. The galactic whoever-they-were liked it, and paid to license it. So the writer or inventor or whoever thought, cool, I made some money. But what happened was, since this bunch of galactic folks had bases all over the galaxy, and it took time to travel farther and farther away from Earth, effectively the guy was set up for life, from this one small thing: The licensing fees would keep trickling back to Earth in greater amounts as his intellectual property exanded outward like an enlarging ripple in a pond...
The story that Robert L remembers is "A World by the Tale" (Analog Oct 1963) by "Seaton McKettrig", a pseudonym of Randall Garrett. The intellectual property was the human hero's book about his trip on a galactic ship, regarded as unwittingly hilarious by the alien community. Perhaps something like The Young Visiters in space....
Mike Ford: Did people really used to think trade secrets were a bad thing? My impression was that trade secrets were viewed neutrally--they were just the way things were done. Now that I think about it, my impression is based on never having seen the topic discussed by anyone pre-modern, so I'm assuming that people weren't worked up about it.
Micael Turyn: "Can a moderate government of a relatively free people enforce this law?" is an interesting question, but I'm not sure you could get a "yes" in regards to murder.
Renee wrote, I like the idea of 'copyright to me' through my lifetime for my writings; I made them, the profit should come to me, unless I specifically lend, trade, sell, or assign the property to someone else.
But the ultimate purpose of copywrite isn't to profit authors; it's to further the arts. See the Constitution.
Furthermore, you're using government force to infringe on others' liberty. Doesn't mean copyright is necessarily wrong, but it does mean the burden is on those favoring copyright. Note that such government-mandated rules are widely understood to be economically inefficient (because the market price is not socially optimal).
I don't see why copyrights should last longer than 10 years.
You know, it's interesting that you write about the start of alphabetical order. This generation is -- just about -- being taught long division. They only teach it to the best students, and they're pretty desultory about it. Because it's now a broadly unnecessary skill.
The equivalent for my children's children, or perhaps their children, will be alphabetical order. I do still look things up in alphabetical order, occasionally. The indices of learned books, the town plan map in Ferret-on-Sea, that sort of thing. Once we have a searchable concordance for everthing, on the internet that we keep in our pockets, those uses will cease, and 99% of the population will have no need for the skill.
A few more links for you all:
As part of the UK Parliament public inquiry into DRM, I wrote a paper on DRM and copyright:
The UK Parliament set the precedent for Copyright law in the Statute of Queen Anne that defended authors from rapacious publishers, and which has served as the basis for global copyright law ever since. Re-reading it for this essay, I was struck by how well it balanced authors', readers' and publishers' rights:
Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing, or causing to be printed, reprinted, and published, books and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books;
We also recall Macauley's judicious balancing in 1841:
It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
"The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another seems never to have been started on this [i.e., the European side -- Jefferson was writing from France] or our [American] side of the water... that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. -- I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it... A generation coming in and going out entire... would have a right on the first year of their self-dominion to contract a debt for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for 14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations, changing daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant term, beginning at the date of their contract, and ending when a majority of those of full age at that date shall be dead. The length of that term may be estimated from the tables of mortality. Take, for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon... [according to which] half of those of 21 years [of age] and upwards living at any one instant of time will be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term beyond which neither the r
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