Songs for Saturday: Copying Is Not Theft

[mdlbear]

This wonderful little video came in by way of Google+ this morning, and I figured I'd share it: Copying Is Not Theft - YouTube

It comes from QuestionCopyright.org | A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright. Here's another: Credit is Due (The Attribution Song) | QuestionCopyright.org. Just because copying isn't theft, it doesn't mean that it isn't sometimes wrong. Credit is always due, and sometimes payment is, too. (Though I personally believe that the term of a copyright should be exactly the same as that of a patent, namely 20 years.)

And All Creative Work Is Derivative isn't really a song, but it's a brilliant piece of choreography. Using statues.

You can find the whole collection of ""Minute Memes" here at QuestionCopyright.org.

Comments

[elf]

I want copyright lengths to be variable by the amount of value the creator assigns to them--indicated by paying for the right to keep a monopoly on distribution.

15 years: free, no registration required. Take photos, write songs, publish a book of college essays among your friends without fear that some mega-corporation will snatch them away because you caught the pulse of popularity. Start an art business. Make digital movies & post them online under Creative Commons; find out how marketable the art is. Do research & publish results while looking for career options. And so on.

After 15 years: Pay $100 to register copyright for another decade. Sell book for profit. Sell movie rights. Sort through college newspaper articles & figure out which ones are worth compiling in a "best stories of the 90's" ebook. Convert PhD paper into a layman's book; sell 600 copies and be ecstatic. Allows small businesses to register their publications without making them go broke.

26-35 years: Pay $1000 to keep registration. If it's still profitable enough to deny public use of it two-and-a-half decades after creation, fork over some real money for that. For books in series, for popular movies and songs, this is a nominal charge. For things without obvious current commercial use, it requires thought whether or not to register--but any person who makes a living off creative work should be able to afford registering the few things that are still commercially viable. Big corporations, of course, will be able to keep almost everything registered.

36-50 years: Pay $5000 for this 15 years. Again, Disney will have no problems, but individual authors, composers & bands will let their older works drop into the public domain. However, songs that are still being requested on kareoke machines, and books in very popular series, will still be able to bring a profit to the original creator.

51-75 years: Pay $10,000 for 25 year block. Disney keeps its movies locked away from public use. The Tolkien estate keeps the main trilogy & the Hobbit locked up; less certain about the less popular books.

76-100 years: Pay $50,000. Disney faces hard choices: how many of those cartoons are still individually commercially viable? Each of the blockbuster movies might still be worth re-registering, but the less-popular ones, and the ones they don't want to exploit, will hit the public domain.

Extend indefinitely, at $50,000 per 25 years. Any estate or company that thinks it's got forever-valuable content can keep the monopoly by paying the public--in the form of the government--what's essentially an "IP monopoly tax" in copyright registration fees.

[mdlbear]

I don't like this at all -- it means that cultural icons like the Mouse would be permanently off limits.

Part of the original idea behind copyright, and it still applies to patents, is that works move rather quickly into the public domain, after the original creator has had a chance to exploit them during their few most profitable years. Once in the public domain, other people can build on them.

[elf]

While I don't like The Mouse being perpetually off-limits, I have my doubts that Disney would pay $66,100 per cartoon to keep them out of the public reach for the current length of copyright, much less another $50k for every 25 year block after that.

Every movie. Every individual cartoon. Every book. Every themed set of valentine cards. Every figurine. Each individual work would have to be renewed and paid for. I suspect that a lot of the backlist would immediately be released into the public domain, because even Disney doesn't have pockets deep enough to pay tens of thousands of dollars per artistic work just to prevent other people from copying or making derivatives.

The ones they still want to exploit, they'll keep--and while copyright law was built with the notion that they're not allowed to do so indefinitely, that principle was already shot to hell in Eldred v. Ashcroft. I'd rather deal with something that said, "you want it forever? Pay for it forever"--with the notion that it's "limited" because no company has infinite money (no less sensible than the current ruling, IMHO)--and allows the content that's not considered financially exploitable to be released.

The Mouse is already covered by trademark, and can't be used in ways that would result in public confusion about what's official-and-authorized. That's a different part of IP law entirely. (I think a lot of the problems are caused by corporations trying to extend trademark laws to cover all copyrights.)

A simpler form of your proposal.

[(Anonymous)]

elfwreck, you might like this article then:

http://questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout

It's similar to what you propose, but it uses a strictly market-determined price -- yet still includes public-benefit considerations. See what you think.

-Karl Fogel (editor, QuestionCopyright.org)

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

My personal impractical idealistic radical solution: Convert our welfare system to government support for the arts, and make arts either free or at cost. Example: Under the current model, people who are disadvantaged are either paid a very small amount by the government (usually below subsistence) to do nothing. Instead, provide those who are unable to sustain themselves due to disability, lack of available employment opportunities, or a devotion to the arts with a minimum income that provides for a decent place to live, and costs of living at approximately 300% of what is currently the federal poverty line. Those who are disabled should be allowed to have or earn additional income if it is available to them up to 500% of the FPL. Those who are not artistic but can't find work should be employed or steered to employment by a government agency that is required to find them reasonable jobs. Those who wish to engage in the arts should be paid based on their quantitative contributions. For example, a musician would be required to produce 2 CDs per year or the equivalent in, say, onlne tracks or youtube videos; alternatively, they could make it up with live performance, or do some combination. Writers should be required to produce a certain number of pages or words each month and publish some part of that at least once per year either in book form or online. And so on.

Of course, that's never going to happen. I have two personal concerns with the current copyright system: song parodies, and making buttons. In the case of song parodies, I write them but effectively am blocked from recording them if I wish to have a 100% chance of avoiding lawsuit. In the case of buttons, pretty much any creative thing I ever came up with was copied by others to a point where no one knew I was the source. I've seen slogans I created in places as diverse as bumperstickers on cars in states thousands of miles from where I live, and even in a book by Robert Anton Wilson. As I understand it, they're not copyrightable except for artwork, and the only way to protect them involves trademarking, which is very expensive - the only person I know of who does that is Ashleigh Brilliant. The largest example I can recall of someone who should have made a lot of money off a slogan, but made very little, is panelologist Bill Griffith, who was responsible for "Are We Having Fun Yet?"

I actually got taken to dinner at Tony Roma's for the one that got made into a bumpersticker, and I was fine with that, since I didn't have the resources to make bumperstickers and travel all over the country peddling them. It said, "He's dead, Jim. You get his tricorder; I'll grab his wallet."

I'm not sure if we both created it independently, or Mr. Wilson got it from one of my buttons, but I remember seeing, "When laws are outlawed, only outlaws will have laws" in one of his books.

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

I agree that copying is not theft (if it were, destruction would be a null action) but it can sometimes be unfair competition.

Say some movie you want to see is out on DVD. You have a number of choices: Buy the DVD, rent the DVD and maybe invite your friends over to watch it, forget it and buy or rent some other title, forget it and go out bowling or to a live concert or something, read a book, and so on. All of these are competing choices, even if they're not listed as such in industry statistics. And if you bring the matter up, most people would consider it fair competition. It's up to the maker of the movie to price the product so that enough people will consider it a better bargain than an evening of bowling to make it worth while.

But if someone is selling pirate copies of the DVD, that is generaslly considered to be unfair. You're basically making the movie maker compete against himself but with the competitor having the unfair advantage of essentially no production costs. You're making him work for you for free.

Some places have laws that call that kind of thing "theft of services", but it's a rather abstract concept compared to theft of a physical object or even money in an account. Maybe it's more like slavery?

How would that be for a catchy sound bite: "Illicit copying is slavery."? It may not be much more logical than the theft comparison, but it may carry more of an emotional punch.

But even if calling it slavery doesn't stand up, you can still call it unfair. And even young children understand the concept of fair play and cheating.

Just a train of thought.

[slweippert.livejournal.com]

There is a big difference between making a copy for yourself, copy a song onto your MP3 to play in your car, and copying for someone else to play in their car. You paid for it. They didn't.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend Nina's stuff, including her cartoon collections.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Where it breaks down for me is in a couple of places. First, it's natural to want to share with friends. With the technology we had when I was a child, we invited friends to listen to records. Then along came cassette tapes, which were generally of bad-to-mediocre quality. Now, there is very little difference, comparatively, between original and copy. Sharing has always happened. It follows the technology. As far as sharing goes, I see it as serving a similar function to radio airplay. The more the music is heard, the greater the demand, and the result, in the end, is more sales and popularity for the artists. The other place is youtube. You can find almost any song there, by anyone from the original artist to someone singing off-key while they strum on a ukulele. Most of the songs are copyright, and while some, occasionally, receive complaints about that and go away, millions do not. Eventually, I wonder, if the artists, publishers and record companies continue to allow this, I wonder if it will create something like what they call an easement in real estate, where if someone has accessed your property for free for a certain period of time and you knew about it and allowed it, you can't change your mind and evict them.

yagcica (yatica)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

one way or another

sigh