While I doubt it's the reason they won't show it, it is, critically speaking, a terrible ad. If I were their employer and they offered me this ad, I would fire them. It's a minute long. It spends a lot of time (and attention span) on unnecessary exposition. Then, even after the point has been made, it lingers and lingers. Compare this to a typical ad spot of 15 seconds. It could the same thing better in a quarter of the time.
And it has a terrible tag line.
I was just about to make a point about the "what really sells books" sidebar, but I see Dan Blum beat me to it, and did a better job at it too.
Anyways: yar, what he said. And marketers really ought to look at what it is that the index cases (to borrow M. Blum's terminology) say makes them pick up books.
(Speaking as an index case myself, it's good covers. If I like the cover, I'll at least pick it up and read the back. Only recently did I realize how many of the books I own have covers by Michael Whelan.)
I find it increasingly surreal, as a life-long reader of fantasy, to watch Good and Evil creep into politics. Five years ago, I would have laughed at the idea of anything political being inherently good, or any politician being inherently evil. I thought of things as being much messier and less clear-cut than your average swords-and-sorcery epic.
And yet, here we are, and I find myself saying with a straight face, "Voting against Gonzales was an act of Good, for he is an agent of Evil." I don't expect to think about real life occurances that way. Makes me wonder when I slipped into this dimension, and whether I should be watching out for my evil twin.
"But by picking the starting point where the thing has already been created, two things happen: (1) you ignore how the idea relates to people before it is discovered (no restrictions, anyone cna discover it), and (2) you start from a point where the idea is the sole possession of one person, which frames anything that takes the idea from that person as "confiscating" it."
While I quibble with your framing of sharing ideas as "confiscation," those are indeed the two natural results of this argument--a point which I've been repeatedly mentioning for quite a while now.
"Thomas Edison had a lot of competition for being the first to invent a working lightbulb. If he hadn't invented it first, someone else would have.
Arguable. But only because even before it was created in reality, the idea of an idea of a working lightbulb was common currency in popular culture. As for the actual idea of a working lightbulb, i.e. the know-how of making one, no one related to that idea at all, because it did not exist. Edison, as the person who created that idea, that know-how; as the original sole possesser, accrued certain benefits for his efforts.
"Before the idea is created in actuality, it is something that the public relates to without any restrictions."
--except for the restriction that they don't relate to it at all because it doesn't exist. Any individual may create the idea, bring it into reality, but prior to its existence, no one can have any conceivable relationship with something that has no existence. Nothing real can relate to something unreal.
Now that I think of it, that is one of the biggest problems with your bounty hunter metaphor--you presume the pre-discovery existence of the story/idea/criminal. But creation doesn't work that way--prior to the idea being created, it doesn't have any real existence.
Greg said: "My definition is a thing with no legal restrictions of ownership upon it, regardless of whether the thing is known or not."
The two criteria, however, are not unrelated.
My definition is trying to define what public domain would mean if there were no legal restrictions at all--if there was no legal definition of public domain to begin with. Perhaps you are right that public domain isn't the right word in this case, since public domain is a legal concept. How about publicly-available ideas? It's a bit clunky, but it will have to do.
Your definition uses only a single criteria: "Is the general public legally allowed to use/know this?" (Public domain... is completely defined by "everyone can ___") Because your definition doesn't include a criteria like "Has this idea ever been thought up?" or "Can the general public know of this?" you inadvertently include a great deal more than you probably planned on. This gets you into problems.
My definition is not quite so bold. First, I limit my claims to ideas which can be proven to exist, i.e. things that have been created. Then I ask, "Can the general public use/know this idea?" If the answer is yes (the idea was shared with the public at large), then, by my definition, it is publicly available. If no (the idea was never shared with the public for whatever reason), then I do not consider the idea publicly available.
The test is a bit fuzzy, I admit, because the definition of "the general public" is hard to pin down. For convenience's sake, I have been treating the general public as anyone other than the creator, but obviously it would have to be a much more widespread than two people to be called publicly available.
The point is, however, that unless the idea in question is publicly available, whether it is public domain or not is utterly irrelevant. To take your ancient buried scroll as an example, whether or not it is public domain is a meaningless concept until it is discovered. Human laws do not extend infinitely; they only go as far out as they can be enforced. The limit of human knowledge is the limit of human law.
Thus, to claim that "Whether a thing is known by all, known by none, or discovered long ago and since forgotten by everyone, is not the grit of what it means to be Public Domain." is to abandon an understanding of public domain as a legal concept. And such an understanding is what your argument is based on. See now why my definition is important?
The "hermit writer" that you insist on bringing up over and over was a throw-away example used to illustrate one of the many points that made up my argument. Stop treating it like it was the main thrust of my argument. It is as relevant to this discussion as the rock and catapult are.
"Public Domain can apply to physical property like roads, pastures, common areas, and the like. That is the "naturalistic" definition, or the "reality-based" definition. You've got a resource that anyone can use. You could look at America's treatment of land to the west as "public domain", up for grabs to whoever settled it."
If someone can in the future own something that is currently public domain, then you are using a strange definition of public domain, IMO.
Physical public domain and intellectual public domain are entirely different things. Physical property is constantly subject to certain restraints that do not exist for intellectual property. Grass can only be eaten once. Every car that drives down a highway damages it imperceptably. In stark contrast, intellectual property's value, if anything, increases as more people use it. Shakespeare wouldn't be such a popular source if everyone didn't already know his work.
See what I mean about being stuck on the difference between ideas and physical objects? They behave very differently--analogies between the two are more harm than help.
"Your argument is just an odd version of "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?""
I would say my argument is "If a tree falls in the forest, and only one guy hears it, and he didn't record it, does anyone else know what it sounded like?" The answer being no. Where I think we disagree: "Is that sound public domain?" I would say no--no one else will ever be able to hear it, and the guy cannot share it, therefore it is in no conceivable way even potentially public knowledge.
About Tom Clancy and the hermit: You are right, and, being right, are still irrelevant to the point at hand. If people could independently come up with identical ideas, then being able to come up with those ideas wouldn't be a saleable ability. If I could come up with my own murder mysteries, I'd hardly need Aaron Elkins to do it for me, would I?
In absence of legal restrictions, the natural state of ideas is that anyone who possesses an idea can distribute it (or use it). So to tell one is to tell all--unless you can be sure that the person you tell won't tell anyone else. This is where the conversation begins to shade interestingly towards cryptology and information theory in general, as JVP has pointed out. However, I think that our hands are full at the moment. So let's just continue to pretend it's a nice clean cut off between creator and everyone else.
Public Domain is irrelevant to whether or not anyone knows the thing exists.
Now this is intriguing. You are positing a kind of meta-Public Domain, which contains all possible permutations of all possible ideas. So you would argue that all creators are merely dipping into this meta domain to give ideas actual existence. Then, after the creators have been rewarded for this service with the control of those ideas for a certain time, then those ideas reenter the public domain, this time as actualized ideas. As an Empiricist I scoff politely, but if you wanted to base an argument on this instead of bounty hunters, I'd be interested to hear it.
It'd thrill me to death if you'd stop making my arguments into metaphors and then critiquing the flaws of the metaphor. "That's like some crazy mad-scientist-type hermit who never shares his work!" is not a persuasive argument. Neither is "That's like Trade Secrets, and Trade Secret law lets people reverse engineer!" The trade secret in art isn't the idea, it's the brain that produces the idea. And I'd like to see someone reverse engineer that.
You're still bogging down on the problem that in copyright it's an idea that is the product. Trade secrets, patents, none of them are analogous, because in all of them the idea is merely a step in the production of something physical. In art, the information, the raw data, is the only product there is.
Greg said: While I don't completely agree with Dr. Samual Johnson that nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, I would say that someone who spends his whole life writing, but never lets anyone read any of it, is a complete blockhead. I don't think we should design systems or write laws where blockheads are the main actors in the system.
You like metaphors, so here's one for you: If you are trying to figure out how to use a catapult to fling rocks really far away, wouldn't it be useful to know how rocks behave outside of the catapult? Knowing how rocks behave when nothing else is going on would be crucial to understanding how rocks behave when air-borne, wouldn't it?
To tie the metaphor back, considering what happens to ideas in absence of a publishing industry, or high-speed internet access, or even language, is crucial to understanding what happens with those things. And what you discover is, when you take out all the things that make sharing information easy, nothing happens. No one else ever knows of it. Nothing magically becomes public domain, just for the virtue of existing. To become public domain, something must be shared.
If I were to tell a bed-time story to my child, and neither of us ever repeated it, it is not public domain. If I were to whistle a tune to myself while alone, it would not be public domain. If I were to write a poem on a piece of paper and then erase it, it would not be public domain.
To put it as succinctly as possible, if no one ever comes across a resource, it doesn't matter whether or not they have permission to use it. Since creators are neccessarily at some point the sole possessors of their work, they can choose not to share.
Your definition of public domain is useful and important, and I'm glad you came up with it, but it is a legalistic definition of public domain. The definition I've been talking about is a, what, naturalistic definition? I'm not sure if that is the right word, but it is based on the way information works outside of any system constructed by humans. The way that this natural public domain works is the reason that legal definitions are neccessary. The natural definition is too harsh, too all-or-nothing.
Greg said: "I just realized that we're not discussing the problems with my "bounty hunter" frame." "We're not discussing ways of improving my "bounty hunter" frame. You are rejecting it in totality."
Yes. Do you know why? It is a bad metaphor. It is an even worse frame. So why don't you do yourself a favor and ditch the bounty hunter metaphor? It's doing your arguments infinitely more harm than good. See, a frame isn't really helping you much if you have to explain it over and over, or if it has negative connotations. If you think that "any "emotional" baggage around the metaphor is simply because it is a new frame that has never been applied before," and that all that will magically go away, then you are sadly mistaken. Lakoffian frames are meant to make your argument instantly and naturally sympathetic; your frame fails utterly at this.
To contrast your frame with Avram's: his dinosaurs versus mammals is instantly sympathetic and requires no explanation. It highlights the relevant issues, i.e. corporations' time is past, they use their unfair size advantage to fight against the next wave in evolution. Also, it implies the inevitability of their defeat. Not bad for half a paragraph.
"You view something created by an artist to naturally belong to them forever. You view copyright expiration as something that artists give to the public out of their own generosity. They bequeath their works to the public upon their death the way slaveholders might free their slaves upon their death. It's nice if they do, but (like Thomas Jefferson), they don't have to."
*sigh* Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway. No, my position has nothing to do with generosity of spirit. My position is, as you might have noticed if you had read the next three paragraphs, that both the public and the creator have certain privileges, privileges with certain flaws, which make any sort of transaction impossible. They are, in case I'm not being obvious enough:
-Creators can choose not to share their work with the public, in other words, refuse to allow it into the public domain (See? NOT INHERENTLY PUBLIC DOMAIN) Flaw- it's all or nothing, once released, nothing can never be retracted
-The public can reproduce intellectual work without any cost or detriment Flaw- provides no benefit to creators, thus discouraging creators from creating
Obviously, artists want to share their work with the public, and the public wants access to it. In order to bring about a mutually beneficial situation, both parties have to forfeit their privileges to a differing degree. Artists release their work on the good faith that it and they will be well-treated, and the public agrees to forfeit its ability to freely reproduce the work for a time.
See? No generosity, no slave-owners (nice framing, btw). Just two parties engaging in an commercial interaction for their mutual benefit.
This situation benefits the public much more than the creators. But that is only fair, because creators are a single person and will die, where the public is many people and will last for eternity. The public also has a huge negotiating advantage, because creators really, really, want to share their work, and the public, sight unseen, doesn't really care.
Greg said: It isn't a simple person-to-person interactive negotiation that's happening. It isn't a person selling a blanket haggling with a buyer who wants to purchase it. A group sets a price, and waits to see if any individual is interested in that amount.
Yes, it's not a simple person to person negotiation. No, it isn't a group setting a price and seeing who is interested. It is the opposite: an individual creates something and sees how much the public at large is willing to pay to get it. Currently, the accepted price includes agreeing not to reproduce it without permission, as well as a per-copy fee. This is something that the public at large agrees to, so that individuals within the public are able to possess (usually physical) copies of the work.
This is why I brought up the distinction between inherently infinitely reproducable work and inherently public domain work a while back--creators, not the public, have ultimate control. If every artist in the world banded together and refused to release any work unless they were granted copyrights in perpetuity, no one could stop them. Hell, if one artist refused to release anything unless she was granted copyright in perpetuity, no one could stop her. Obviously, every would just ignore her, but the public couldn't simply confiscate her novel.
In order for the system to work, both the creator and the public must give something up. Creators must give up the absolute control of their own work that sole possession allows, and the public must give up the right to freely distribute the work. It is the extent to which each must relinquish these rights that is subject to debate.
Essentially what copyright does, IMHO, is grant a privilege of control over a work--control that an author can naturally exert just by choosing not to share--in return for the privilege of being given access to that work. It allows a shading of control in an environment that is naturally all or nothing, allowing both parties to benefit. Without copyright, neither parties' interests are served.
The purpose of copyright is to arrive at a compromise of control that, as members of the human race, creator and/or consumer, everyone can agree on. One that does not overly reward or punish the public or the creator. Or so I'd like to think.
If that makes anyone's head hurt, I apologize.
As I see it, the purpose of copyright is to create market conditions in which artists are not punished for being artists. That's a little different than encouraging the creation of art. Art, in my experience, needs very little encouragement. I think that granting life-time control over the reinterpretation of one's work protects the original creator a lot more than it hurts anyone else. But that's me.
This assumes that judges and juries have no common sense.
Yes. I take it as a given that eventually any possible case will eventually show up in front of a very stupid judge. I would hope that even in that case, the right decision is clear.
Something I keep meaning to point out, but keep forgetting: intellectual works aren't naturally "public domain." They are naturally infinitely duplicable. It's very different. The creator must choose to make them available to other people for it to become "public domain."
See, now you've gone and encouraged me, Will.
So here's my plan:
Right to publish the actual work: 30 years
Right to license derivative work: Life or until primary publication rights end.
Why thirty years? Seems like a reasonable amount of time for nearly all profits to be extracted. This number seems like one that can be derived empirically by looking at actual sales numbers. I feel that 99% of all profits will be made in this time frame; if a different number comes up, then by all means, let's use that.
Why life? Like I said, the author has a unique relationship with their own work, one that no one else can have, or understand. If they want to sell all their movie rights like Michael Crichton, well, that's their privilege. If they want to sit on them like a miser, that's their privilege too.
Why until primary publication rights end? Otherwise you'll be dealing with derivative works where "the" is omitted in line 1, chapter 3. Just makes sense, I think.
Now, the Mouse: through this whole debate, it has always seemed to me that the Mickey Mouse that Disney wants to protect is totally different than "Steamboat Willy." They are protecting Steamboat because in order to protect the Mouse, they have to. So why not agree to treat them like different things? Create a section of copyright law that governs corporate symbols like Mickey and Marvin and whoever, that doesn't require keeping the copyright to all the work that they have appeared in. Would that work?
Fidelio said: "an unwilling live author, in control of their rights, is hard to get around."
Indeed. That was part of the point I was trying to make with my second example.
to Seth Ellis: yes, I meant to put "first Disney movie adaptation," but it slipped my mind somewhere in the process of writing it. Thanks for the clarification.
Now, more on bounty hunters:
(1) The public sets the price of the bounty just high enough that it attracts bounty hunters.
In the realm of slash (which I will assume you are all at least passingly familiar with), people DO write for no benefit. A really, really huge number of people. Writing, unlike bounty hunting, is not an inherently distasteful job that people need to be bribed into doing. Writers don't do it for the money. Bounty hunters do. Given that money-as-motivation is a big part of your argument, that makes this a bad mataphor.
(4) A bad-guy caught is a benefit the public enjoys FOREVER.
Erm. No, not really. Not forever. After all, everyone dies eventually, even assuming they don't retire. So you can't say "FOREVER" unless you want to say farmers provide a benefit FOREVER because the people who eat their food don't starve. And in that case, what is the difference between this and physical property again?
See why I didn't want to argue this in metaphor? Now we are having this useless argument about bounty hunters when we ought to be having a useful one about copyright. Bah.
Peter Pan's publication date: 1902
Peter Pan's first movie adaptation: 1953
Peter Pan's latest movie adaptation: 2003 (or 2004)
Fellowship of the Ring's publication date: 1954
Fellowship of the Ring's first movie adaptation: 1978
Fellowship of the Ring's latest movie adaptation: 2001
Acting as though the book-->movie-->video cycle is somehow quantifiable into some precise number, especially one as low as 20 years, is a little silly.
Now, about bounty hunters:
I know you are quite taken with the idea of frames and suchforth, but there's something you seem to have missed--all frames are inherently false. This is even more true when you are using a blatant, straight-out metaphor like your bounty hunter thing. Frames are useful in making people see things in a certain light that they may not otherwise notice, but they are not the same as the truth. What we are trying to do in this argument is, as near as language allows, to find what the truth about this system is, and what solutions the nature of that system suggests. After we've done that, then we find frames.
Frames are not the basis for argument--logic is. Frames are what you use to make your argument make intuitive sense as well as logical sense.
That being said, some of your logic-based arguments did persuade me. You're right, simply because a monopoly is the only way to make money from creative intellectual work doesn't give them the right to get that money forever. But still, the spectre of the movie adaptation haunts me. I don' have a good solution, but here are my thoughts on it:
begin braindump
Just because all sorts of property rights come in a big package doesn't mean they have to--what if the rights to reproduce the actual work lapsed after a reasonable time (when most any conceivable profit from publication has run its course), but the rights to derivative work remained with the author longer? Also, a system where the author has non-transferrable rights that always revert to the public domain after some period of time. For example, the author can sell a studio movie rights to a story, but only for a period of twenty years, after which things return to the author or to the public domain.
end braindump
Greg said: "If I copyright the word "the", and charge everyone a penny everytime they use the word "the", I could make money forever, and it's unnatural to prevent me from recieving that reward?"
See, I was talking about creative work, you know, things that can be copyrighted, but if you'd like to talk about something else entirely, be my guest. This might be the wrong thread though.
Since you didn't like my starving poet, here's another example: author Bob A. Bob A has been working in the field since he was a young man, steadily churning out work since his twenties. He's made a respectable living, and now he is an old man of 70. Last year, some of his earliest copyrights expired, and studios began production on an adaptation of his first novel. It is a horrid butchery. However, there is nothing he can do--his rights expired. The studio has made tons and tons of money trashing his reputation, but he can do nothing to prevent it happening again and again as the years go by. See a little more clearly what I am getting at? Lifetime of author seems sensible because an author is concerned with their own work in a way that no one else can be--its a unique relationship, and I think deserves to be treated as such.
"A monopoly, by its very definition, means you can make money."
No, a monopoly, "by its very definition" means that you have exclusive rights to something. Whether you can make money is dependent on whether anybody wants what you have. Having a monopoly is, however the only way that creators of intellectual property can make money.
This isn't the case for inventions. Even if everyone in the world starts making something I invent, I can still make it too, and sell it. It is being forced to compete against entrenched competitors that makes copyright necessary, to give the inventor a competitive edge.
"the monopoly the public gives to a writer for a book should relate to the amount of energy the writer put into creating the book."
So if I write an immensely popular and wildly sucessful book that takes me two days to finish, I should recieve less of a reward than someone who slaves for years over her book? Persuasive.
Greg, your proposal ignores the way that things like book publishing actually work. When any given work can potentially make money forever, it's unnatural to prevent the creator from recieving that reward*.
Upthread someone mentioned that any solution to copyright is going to have to make corporate interests happy, as well as all the little folks. Another thing to keep in mind is the natural properties of the thing itself--if the new laws don't reflect that, then it will become as unworkable as, well, our current IP laws.
How fair is it to the poet who struggled just to get enough to eat for decades, to watch his poetry suddenly become immensely popular fifty years after he wrote it, and watch it incorporated into ad jingles and pop songs without a cent of it going to him?
Comparing writers to inventors is another false analogy--even once you come up with the idea, you still have to make the thing, and thus it is subject to the laws of supply and demand. A twenty-year headstart in manufacturing, name-recognition and distribution is tough to beat; this is not the case in book-publishing.
*Obviously, books don't really keeping making money forever, nor is it a constant output--the metaphor that leaps to mind is radioactive halflives, but that's just me.
On another note, I agree with the person who argued that public domain stuff isn't really worth it to the studios--it has to be a monopoly to be worth it. Given that, it seems that post-humous rights might be a bad thing--in Jane's situation, the materials remain in the hands of people who care, but is that generally the case? Greedy grandkids seems a bit more statistically likely.
P.S. I'm curious about what happened to Philip K. Dick's copyrights. A few years ago, a slew of movies based on his stuff was released, and all of the books were reissued. Did someone sell his movie rights? Who owned them?
I just wrote a rather wordy thingamajig about exactly how intellectual property is different from traditional property, and it hit me, that right there is the biggest problem free culture people face, trying to explain this to people. The whole idea is really weird. And, if you look at it from the standpoint of someone used to physical property (i.e. basically everyone), deeply unnatural. "Wait a minute," they say. "You mean to tell me that you can duplicate the same thing an infinite number of times and not reduce its value?" "Um," I say. "Sort of. But in a way it does reduce its value, because its value is entirely dependent on its exclusivity!" "Huh." Suspicious squint.
The necessity of creating a physical medium to convey informational property has concealed this problem for a very long time. Now that's changing, and we need to come up with a clear, intuitive way of getting that across to people.
As much as I sympathize with the political agenda of Igor Volsky, I find myself asking the question: How, precisely is this different than comment spam?
JVP: I applaud you for your valiant effort in your last post to make a gift out of your flaws; you succeeded admirably. It was, however a punchline that required a set-up altogether too long. A New Year's resolution concerning "relevance" might be suggested?
And about Quicksilver, I was personally somewhat disappointed. While I enjoy the setting and topic (I always forget how nationalistic early scientists were!), the characters seem lifted wholesale from Cryptonomicon (which I loved, but that's no excuse), and Stephenson's always masculine writing style teeters on the edge of misogyny in parts. I still hold out hope for the trilogy as a whole (I haven't read any of the others yet), but on its own, Quicksilver is my least favorite Stephenson book. Even including The Big U.
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