Is 'Fair Use' Unfair To Humans? 259
An anonymous reader writes "This article in Wired advances the idea that humans are losing the copyright battle against machines because the fair use laws are tilted against them. The writer wanted to include photos in his book, but the licensing fees were too high. The aggregators, though, like Google, are building their own content by scraping all of the photos they can find. If anyone complains, they just say, 'Fill out a DMCA form.' Can humans compete against the machines? Should humans be able to use the DMCA to avoid copyright fees too? Should web sites be able to shrug and say, 'Hey, we just scraped it?'"
Copyright itself is problematic for technology (Score:5, Insightful)
In today's age of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated. Gone are the obstacles to distribution and duplication that existed in days gone by, and as the past decade or two has shown us, dropping copyright as a concept will do nothing to deter people from creating new works, only remove the incentive for people to create static media for a living.
I fully recognize the benefits that copyrighted works have provided for us in the past, and the incentive it provides for new creation. However, I'm not sure copyright deserves to survive in today's technological world when it does as much to deter creation and innovation as it does to foster it.
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so what content have machines created all on their own?
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http://vimeo.com/68859229 [vimeo.com] eDavid - nuff said.
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So it needs to be fed an image? Our eyes feed images to our brain to process/interpret/etc
Can a blind person paint an image they've never heard described/touched/etc? Is what they paint random or inspired by the input they've received?
The point is that it can take input and paint the same thing over and over without it being identical twice. The next logical step would be to add in a database of images/techniques and an algorithm that would allow it to create interpretations based on what it's observed i
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My 4 year old nephew can do that with paint. That doesn't mean that he's an artist, that means that he's a 4 year old that can splatter paint all over the place.
Computers aren't presently capable of the sort of intuitive leaps that define brilliant artists. They can't presently show you something in a new way and what they do show you is based upon what a programmer created.
Perhaps someday AI will reach the point where it can do so, but that's not something that I expect to live to see. Or at very least, I
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Well, here's an algorithm that generates music [wolfram.com]
Re:Copyright itself is problematic for technology (Score:5, Informative)
However, I'm not sure copyright deserves to survive in today's technological world when it does as much to deter creation and innovation as it does to foster it.
Right, the unfairness that this guy is talking about is for the book authors, and his suggestion is less freedom for the web authors. Classic mistake.
Copyright itself is less than 500 years old - a response to the technology of the printing press (along with some misguided economic thinking in the 1600's - Adam Smith hadn't even published yet), and given our means of mass-communication today, we've moved past it. Technology changes, and the rules of the game need to change along with it.
For the US, it should have been obvious to the framers that taking away the property rights of (Everybody - 1) for the sake of some "rights" to imaginary property for one person was an error, but at least they had the idea that it should be only for real people and only for a short time, if it was at all. Madison massively underestimated the ways that people will twist a well-intentioned but flawed system for their own sociopathic benefit. That "limited times to an author" can be held to mean "for a corporation, a century after an author's death" should be evidence enough that the mechanism has failed.
He rightly says:
But from that assumption he ought to conclude that creative workers will reward other creative workers because they're decent people, not because somebody has a gun to their head forcing them to do so. The 4% of people who will freeload are not worth imposing tyranny on the other 96% so that a corporation can profit from Transformers 3 in the year 2149.
Another gem:
And I thought copyright was an out-there fantasy. The author is right to raise the issue of unfairness, but more unfairness isn't the solution.
Re:Copyright itself is problematic for technology (Score:5, Interesting)
For the US, it should have been obvious to the framers that taking away the property rights of (Everybody - 1) for the sake of some "rights" to imaginary property for one person was an error, but at least they had the idea that it should be only for real people and only for a short time, if it was at all.
Not re: copyright per se but entirely relevant nonetheless:
"Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson
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Great quote, thanks. No wonder they shipped him over to France while the Constitution was being forced through.
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"... other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
But copyright was a relatively new concept at the time. History since pretty clearly shows that those countries that had it fared FAR better than those that did not.
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I think Jefferson was informed wrongly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law [wikipedia.org]
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Well, then what is the solution? How would you pay the authors, musicians and photographers? Or will they need to get day jobs to fund the work while the aggregators get rich?
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This also doesn't mean that book, songs, and pictures will cease to be created. It just means that the people doing it will be doing it most likely for "love of the game" and not the money.
Besides, "starving artist" needs to be more than a cliché.
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I really believe MORE people will be able to make a
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I disagree, apart from a few phenomenally talented individuals, creating something that will move the art form ahead, takes a huge amount of time and energy. Sure, there will be exceptions, but the truth is that to fully develop ones ability to shade or to make marks on a canvass takes years. To draw as well as Jim Dine, would take decades, if you're even capable of drawing that well.
Day jobs might be necessary, but they shouldn't be necessary because we don't provide adequate protections to them. The money
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Well, then what is the solution? How would you pay the authors, musicians and photographers?
"How will the cotton get picked?" Even if we don't have a better solution now, in light of the lack of a clear market for such solutions, that's still no justification for doing what we know to be a wrong thing.
But Creator Endorsed [questioncopyright.org] looks like a good pass at a replacement system.
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How would you pay the authors, musicians and photographers?
Uh, you'd had them money, or send them payment via paypal, or via Amazon, or some other payment processor? And they'd get a much bigger chunk of that money, because there would no longer be a publisher taking a cut.
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Commissions for artists and photographers, concerts for musicians. Writers are trickier, but not impossible; the problem is largely because of the false dichotomy between "eternal absolute copyright" and "free for all". Bookstores are still in business, after all, and there's no reason why "copyright" couldn't simply mean that the author gets a mandatory cut of the sales, for example.
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Actually, the artists are allowed to have monopolies. It's in the constitution.
But your use of the word "monopoly" is unfair because they don't enjoy monopolies in the classical sense of the word. If an author writes a book on the civil war, the author can't stop others from writing a book on the civil war.
A more accurate word is "property" because the law gives the artist much the same rights as a carpenter or a plumber. Just as a team of carpenters can put a lock on the front door of a house that they bui
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Actually, the artists are allowed to have monopolies. It's in the constitution.
The GP only said that they weren't entitled to them. They do get them, that much is clear.
How many homes would carpenters build if any old squatter could just rush in and live for free after the last nail is driven home?
You're right to invoke the property argument here because it's key. The home the carpenters built is real property. Nobody should be deprived of their real property, or the right to do with their real property
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We choose to treat intellectual property like real property because the system works. Or I guess I should say that it works better than pure anarchy.
If you can show me a working system that encourages people to synthesize information and share it with the population, I'll sign right up. But right now the Wikipedia is the only example I can see and it has many limitations. (It's also protected by copyright and I wonder whether it would work without copyright.)
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Have you not been to the Internet? Millions are creating content every day. We're doing it right now!!!!!
You give far too much credit to the abilities of "professional" authors.
Really all they have to do is put up a low cost pay wall or pay to download site and post the work up. Hundreds of thousands would pay $1.99 or so to read their work.
Just like apps they would get a big spike on release day and then it would fall off and pirates would begin trading but if priced right most people will pay a few dollar
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We choose to treat intellectual property like real property because the system works. Or I guess I should say that it works better than pure anarchy.
Rather than just say it, you should offer some evidence. Do you have some examples of such "pure anarchy"? Do you have some data to show their cultural output is inferior compared to ours, and evidence that this cannot be accounted with by other factors?
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So you're saying static media is outdated and deserves to die a painful death?
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The reason would be that many people wouldn't bother sharing their work because it could be appropriated by somebody else that wouldn't have to pay the development costs.
I don't mind giving my artwork away, but I'll be damned if somebody else is going to be making money off of it.
That's a detail that you're missing. Where's my incentive to share my work with strangers if I have no control over what they do with it? At least under the current system, I can ensure that I'm the only one that can charge for it.
Re:Copyright itself is problematic for technology (Score:4, Funny)
Getting rid of copyright only helps the very same megacorps that Slashdot whines about. Why would any of the MPAA/RIAA member companies, for example, need to pay any royalties to their artists when they could just swipe the work for themselves and be done with it? The only reason they pay artists anything is due copyright law.
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Are there really plenty of others? The Chicago Sun Times recently fired their photography staff. Is there some wellspring of photographers rushing to take pictures of all of the news events? Oh sure, a few people will upload pictures to Flickr of some big events, but I don't see anyone getting out of bed at night to cover the fires or disasters.
And it's not just about profit. I want to encourage talented artists to make a profit so they'll be able to afford to take time off from work and make more art.
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If you want to encourage talented artists to make more art, hand them some money and ask them to make more art. There's no laws needed for that transaction.
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Again, how do creators eat?
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You are free to create or not create. You are free to give or not give your creations away, should you make any. What you are not free to do is lord it over not only people you give one to, but also third parties that have never had any kind of direct dealings with you. Simply because I happen to heard something that was first thought up by you does not mean you own whatever ideas it might i
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Not zero, but so infinitesimally small that it might as well be zero for the vast majority of bands. The majority of those who get substantial revenue from RIAA/MIAA are the acts that were invented by the RIAA/MIAA, and managed by the R/M, and produced by the R/M ... so that the R/M big wigs can triple or quadruple dip into those profits.
The rest have to tour, sell TShirts and other merch, etc.
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Because artists actually make money under the current system. Without copyright there's no obligation for a Google to pay artists anything, even while they might make significant revenues on the ads associated with music; further there's no obligation for, say, Proctor and Gamble to pay a musician anything for using their song in a douche ad.
Eliminating copyright does not significantly eliminate rents in the system. It shifts the rents in the system away from creators and on to middlemen.
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The problem we have now is trying to make personal creativity profitable again.
The Copyrights and Patents were the way to solve the problem historically. The person was creative and made something they had rights to the idea. This was all fine and good because printing information or making stuff was hard, and we needed a lot of capital do such. So the creative person gets paid by the idea with the price built into the cost of producing.
The cost to produce has gotten cheaper and easier, and all we need i
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Creative Professionals needs to make a living, however the price of their ideas have reached free. So we need to really think of how to reward creative professionals.
Or we need to ask whether our society does indeed owe a living to "creative professionals".
The cost to produce? (Score:2)
The cost to produce has gotten cheaper
Not quite. The cost to REproduce has come down dramatically. The cost to PRODUCE works in the first place is higher than ever.
That is almost certainly due in part to celebrity stars and their demanding agents, at least in some creative industries. However, it is also because many of the works that are produced today have far greater production values than anything we produced as a society even a few years ago.
I think any case against copyright as a principle (as distinct from abusively distorted copyright i
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The problem we have now is trying to make personal creativity profitable again.
Profit is not necessary to make people creative. Plenty of people play in garage bands. Others write, and give away, free software. Police arrest people for painting free murals on buildings, proof that people will continue to create even if we actively try to discourage it.
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Police arrest people for painting free murals on buildings, proof that people will continue to create even if we actively try to discourage it.
That's a good analogy. Especially considering history.
You're arguing that you eliminate the rent-charging ability of copyright holders over creativity, and that the price of the products of creativity will be driven to zero, and everyone will be their own maker and composer and artist.
Here's what will actually happen: guilds. Instead of a limited monopoly on specif
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I'm trying to think of where our education went wrong to the point that people like you think you should get free stuff just because it's easy to do.
If Ansel Adams were alive today, you would deny him the right to profit from his efforts just because it's easy for you to copy photos.
You don't see anything wrong with that?
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Limiting the amount of people exposed to his creations with copyright law actually works against that.
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Actually, it's society's fault. I could just as easily say, "It's the file sharer's job to figure out how to get material for free. Extending loopholes to protect a sharing model isn't something that we should justify."
Plenty of laws protect business models. The cops stop us from looting stores and I'm happy for that. I like stores. I like to be able to buy food and things I need. Now you might argue that vegetables will just grow on their own. Sprinkle some seeds and then nature does the rest. That's true
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"In today's age of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated. Gone are the obstacles to distribution and duplication that existed in days gone by, and as the past decade or two has shown us, dropping copyright as a concept will do nothing to deter people from creating new works, only remove the incentive for people to create static media for a living."
I disagree completely. I think this view comes from a lack of understanding the actual history of copyright (including recent history), and a rather astounding and unjustified leap from "somebody used a thing to do harm" to "we need to abandon the whole concept of that thing".
First, I do not believe that "the past decade or two" have demonstrated anything like what you assert. Certainly, we have seen some recent, bad, changes in copyright law and observed the resulting bad effects. A good example is almo
Copyrights (Score:2)
It isn't enough to DMCA something. IF you have a copyrighted work, and GOOGLE uses it for commercial purposes, then sue them, and scraping an image (or whatever) to put into a database, which they offer for free, to sell advertising IS commercial use. Sue them. DMCA is just the first step in stopping their usage. SUE THEM for commercial use of your works.
Also, using the tools built into web standards (i.e. "robots.txt") is your friend. IF you post something copyrighted on the internet, it will be "stolen" b
bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
tough talk is easy.
reality is you'd need to be paying lawyer $275 or more an hour for about 700 to 1500 hours plus expenses. who here has that kind of income to gamble? I do not.
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If your $275/hour lawyer can't resolve a simple copyright case without spending a year of near full-time work on it, your lawyer isn't worth $275/hour. The essential facts in the case are unlikely to be disputed, so the result is likely to depend on two fundamental questions of law, at least in the US: roughly speaking, can they escape via fair use, and can they escape via the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Even if you litigated it all the way, you should still be done in no more than a few hours of court tim
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those are real numbers for simple copyright case, look it up. Also, simple patent case averages twice to three times as much, again that 's fact.
I have lawyers in family, you however are talking out of your ass
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If you actually had lawyers in your family, and you had learned anything from them, you would know better than to claim things like "those are real numbers for a simple copyright case" without citing that case properly. You would also know that patents and copyright are completely different legal areas, and that "simple patent case" is pretty much an oxymoron.
Another thing that's easy is claiming your personal views are facts while not giving anything verifiable to back them up, but that also doesn't make a
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Scrape them yourself (Score:2)
Scrape them yourself in a semi-automated way, host them somewhere and provide a way to submit a DMCA take-down notice.
Done and done.
There is a way to mark them (Score:4, Funny)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Boom. Your images wont get illegally used by Google. You can send me the money your would have spent on lawyers.
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The weird part is that anytime you view those images your computer makes an copy of the image in your cache, in your memory, and on your screen. So are we counting that as making copies? What if the search engine doesn't cache it and sets the image src to your website and uses your bandwidth, would that be a
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Is 'Fair Use' Unfair To Humans? (Score:3)
Iframe (Score:2)
Corporations, not machines (Score:2)
I saw what you did there. "The aggregators" that tell you to fill out a form aren't machines, they are corporations.
Nice try though.
-- MarkusQ
The aithor is confused. (Score:5, Insightful)
The author of TFA is deeply confused - she can't distinguish between pictures used as content (what she wanted to to, and not fair use), and pictures used as links to content (a murky grey area under fair use). Because of her inability to distinguish the difference, she feels unfairly treated.
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This isn't as straightforward now as it used to be. Google has now introduced full-sized image search which allows people to pull images directly from their Google search page rather than linking to the source page. Once upon a time, Google was able to get away with this because it only linked small-sized thumbnails that weren't suitable replacements to the original. The searcher actually had to link to the page to get the content, as you point out.
Now, however, the searcher can get the content, full-sized,
Google isn't publishing a book (Score:2)
In your example, the writer is actually copying the photos into his book. That's one thing. Google, OTOH, isn't publishing a book containing copies of the photos. They're creating an index of photos that exist. To make it minimally useful, that index has to include a thumbnail or other depiction of the photo so viewers can tell whether that's the image they were looking for or not (a prerequisite for deciding whether they want to go to where that image is published or not). I'd say that if a writer wanted t
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But Google's not completely innocent in even that. Clicking the thumbnail shows you a high-res image. They even provide a direct "View Original Image" link that allows you to download someone else's image without even visiting the web page. In fact, they're an enabler to the very author the example gives.
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That's why the second paragraph. It IMO makes a difference when Google's showing only what anybody could grab without paying or having any strings attached. It's like a publisher complaining about bootleg copies of the flyer that they left stacks of outside on the unattended table with the "Take One" sign over them. I'm not going to classify that in the same category as bootleg copies of the books inside the store that nobody can walk off with without paying (or making a deliberate effort to steal).
As far a
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But Google is direct-linking the image and not the page. It's just not very nice to web content owners. Even if it's just as legal.
Bad example on broadcast radio - the artists get royalties on that.
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In your example, the writer is actually copying the photos into his book. That's one thing. Google, OTOH, isn't publishing a book containing copies of the photos. They're creating an index of photos that exist. To make it minimally useful, that index has to include a thumbnail or other depiction of the photo so viewers can tell whether that's the image they were looking for or not (a prerequisite for deciding whether they want to go to where that image is published or not). I'd say that if a writer wanted to do the same thing, publish an index of where all these works were with thumbnails of them, they ought to be able to do it under fair use just like Google does. But producing an art book with full-size high-quality reproductions of the photos wouldn't be producing an index.
Also, Google only creates an index of what the publisher has made publicly available. So what Google reproduces on their pages is by definition something the publisher isn't getting paid for when people just look at it. Google doesn't go behind paywalls or subscription barriers to find things, unless perhaps the publishers have explicitly coded their site to give Google that access for free and in that case IMO it's the publisher's look-out. To me it makes a difference in what's "fair" when you're handing out full-sized copies for free, no strings attached, to anybody who grabs one off the table vs. if they can only get them by coming into your shop and plopping down their money first.
So, based on your reasoning, I should be free to include small images of all of those pictures in my paper printed catalog because like Google, I would simply be creating an index and for it to be useful requires a thumbnail. Of course, there is ample case law specifically against that in printed material, so the real difference then is that if you do it on paper media, it is a copyright violation, but on-line it is not? That doesn't hold water, either, which is why Google says to file a DMCA complaint.
No
Most laws are unfair to humans (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans don't have limited liability protection, can go to jail, can't transfer their lives to another under a different name, can't claim income through a different tax jurisdiction, and aren't immortal.
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Limited liability is a subside from the wealthy to the entrepeuner. And the subside is actively granted when the wealthy decide to hold an interest on each entrepeuneurship, it's a completely opt-in system.
That is, except when any government money enters into the question.
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Nothing new here. (Score:2)
Humans aren't losing out on content to machines. Yes, Google and others scrape content, but they aren't machines. They are corporations owned by other humans. All this article is about is small players not being able to compete against big corporations. That has almost always been the case. The fact that laws like the DMCA make it even harder for small players to compete just aggravate an already imbalanced system.
The middle ages had a feudal system, the modern world has a corporate system. In the middl
welcome to the machine (Score:2)
should we forget about copyright already? sure enough.
Corporations, Not Machines, Are The Issue (Score:2)
The commenter is confusing the actions of corporations with the productive assets they utilize. A machine may scrape a site, but it took a human - usually following the guidance of her/his employer - to set the machine in motion. A corporation, especially a corporation of > 1, can distribute the work of collecting copyrighted material, hosting it, organizing a sales effort around it, responding to the bitching and moaning, and seeing to any resulting adjudication.
A person, motivated by fun, or acting as
Well... (Score:2)
"copyright" itself is by definition an unfair concept (it attempts to combat one kind of unfairness with another) so it stands to reason that anything else that comes from it would also be unfair. (Ditto for patents.)
I mean, you do know that it's a totally made-up concept, right? Copying is a true human right. We have eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear, brains with which to remember and analyze, mouths with which to speak or sing, and hands with which to create. If I watch someone make a chair,
So Google makes publicly available that which is (Score:3)
already publicly available?
And this is some great injustice . . . how?
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
This and it's backwards - humans are losing out to copyright. Copyright is the entirety of the problem not fair use.
Yes I believe people should be able to recoup their invested time/money and some form of copy protection is needed for that but the current laws are doing it to the detriment of society.
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
This is it, in a nutshell.
Copyright as it is wielded today for *most* uses is a net loss to society. Look at book copyright, movie copyright, music copyright. The only thing that has come out of copyright from them is recycling of old media, nothing creative, nothing to promote progress of the arts, and no benefit to society. We've actually lost a ton of history due to excessive copyright - and those with a vested interest would love to keep it that way.
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that some history is locked away in books that can't be copied, I think that many, many writers and artists are only able to devote time to their work because copyright allows them to charge for access to their work. All of the new books at my store-- including plenty of non-fiction-- is protected by copyright.
The only counter-example I can think of is the Wikipedia. While it is quite good, it has a strange reliance on copyrighted work. It requires all information to be based upon a citation to a real publication-- a publication that's usually protected by copyright.
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
The only counter-example I can think of is the Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is copyrighted. Creative Commons is not the same as public domain.
Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living). But the way it is applied and retroactively extended far beyond the lifetime of the creator is not reasonable. We should have clear rules for "fair use", and a sensible duration of, say, twenty years. One proposal I like is to have a "copyright tax". An artist would automatically get, say, a ten year copyright, and after that would have to pay an increasing annual fee to maintain the copyright. If you want the government to enforce your monopoly, then you should pay for that.
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So you want extended copyright for Disney, but not for mid-tier authors? That sounds backwards to me.
I think instead we need a hard look at mandatory licensing for derivative works. If my youtube video of humorous cats using your 10+ year-old music somehow makes money for someone (me or youtube), then that someone should owe you a percentage (and require attribution), but let's end take-downs for 10+ year old works.
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, I get it - it just seems like it's solving a problem no one has. What's needed today is a clear legal way to automatically license works still under copyright, not a way to cut off revenue to creators (especially not less popular, non-corporate creators). No one should be getting takedowns for fanfic, mashups, mixtapes, cat videos, or videos of themselves trying to play a work, even if that work is still under copyright.
It's not about making copyright shorter, it's about making it less restrictive -
Orphan works (Score:5, Informative)
The problem that a progressively increasing copyright registration fee solves is the problem of orphan works [wikipedia.org]. Under the current system, lots of works are still covered by copyright even though the copyright owner cannot be found and thus the works cannot be licensed. A system like the GP is suggesting would force abandoned works into the public domain where they can be preserved, while still allowing actively used works to have a longer period of copyright protection.
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
This makes sense to me. According to my publisher, the vast majority of the profit from any new book is made in the first three years. There are a few outliers, but these are the ones where both the publisher and author made so much money in the first three years that they'd still have a huge incentive to bring it to market even if they lost copyright after three years. If you're still making more than a token sum on any book (or piece of music or film) after 7-10 years, it was truly exceptional and you've already raked in a huge pile of cash.
There are some problems with this approach though, such as how do you deal with incremental changes? There are some FreeBSD source files that I've modified that still have original Berkeley copyrights going back to the early '80s. Would I need to pay several billion to copyright my changes, or would my changes be copyrighted separately and I'd only pay $1 (and would I pay $1 for FreeBSD, or $1 for each one of the several hundred source files I've modified)? If it's the latter, then it becomes very difficult for some third party to work out which parts of a file have lapsed copyright and which still have valid copyright.
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Good post, but..
"Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living)"
On the surface you are right, but this sentence is loaded the wrong way. There is a false implication here - that one must have copyright in order for authors and artists to make a living. This is demonstrably false.
Copyright IS "evil" to some degree though that's not the word I would have chosen (a little more loading) it fundamentally boils down to a violation of the fundamental liberty of a person to use their own
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Even free things are copyrighted, by the way.
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Wikipedia always has to expect the maintainer of a site to disappear - losing interest or losing internet
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What about authors like Corry Doctrow that give away their books under a creative commons license, or randel monroe author of the often (obligatorily) quoted web comic XKCD who again licenses his works under a creative commons license. Or the bean free ebooks while maybe not under creative commons or public domain are giving away the books. I could probably think of more example but these were the first one that immediately poped into my head for writing but if you were to include all creative works there i
Re:Image metadata is the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of history WAS locked away in books that couldn't be copied, then the last copies were destroyed. Same has happened to film and audio recordings.
That doesn't necessarily mean abolishing copyright is the right answer. It should be shortened. It could have a publish or perish clause. It could have broader exceptions. It could have realistic penalties. It might even have strings attached to assure that once expired, the work does enter the public domain with DRM stripped. It could certainly stand to be clarified soi that copyright and the DMCA can't be used to lock out 3rd party ink and toner (for example) using a ROM as a flimsy excuse.
Do ALL of that and you leave artists still able to benefit from their work but do a lot less damage to society and culture in the process.
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Laborers don't license anything. They agree to work for X conditions, then they work and get paid. The product of that work is the sole property of the employer. The ditch digger has no further rights in the ditch he dug once he is paid. he cannot contest the sale of the property and he cannot demand to be paid again if the ditch is expanded upon or used for something other than rainwater.
I'm saying the artist only has limited latitude. For example, the first sale doctrine says he cannot block future re-sa
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I think that many, many writers and artists are only able to devote time to their work because copyright allows them to charge for access to their work
Because deceased authors are always putting out more new works since we've extended copyright past the natural lifetime of the author and not at all for rent-seeking by the heirs/descendents/scumbags.
Right?
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BMO
As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.
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The problem is, it doesn't solve the issue at all - infact, it causes a lot of issues along the line.
Robots.txt is an extremely coarse method of control, it's either "yup, come in and do what you want" or it's "go away". There is absolutely no "you can use my content for a search index or non-commercial use, but not commercial use" leeway.
To use your example, it tells the aggregators that they can do what they like on the lawn (but not the drive way, path or porch), up to and including digging chunks of it
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this is exactly what robots.txt does
For crawling/indexing. It's nothing to do with re-publishing.
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Guns don't kill people, I do.
AI is artificial intelligence. It's a tool just like a shovel, gun, or car.