Arguments About Copyrights
Here's an article talking about how copyrights on games are too long, and public domain should come sooner for some works:
Games should be public domain sooner [edit section]
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/03/editorial-why-games-should-enter-the-public-domain/- has some good points, but lots of straw-men as well, selectively answering only the 'dumb' opposition
Here's a response that is more nuanced: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140206/07190726113/rps-takes-critics-idea-that-games-should-eventually-enter-public-domain.shtml
Statute of Anne, the original copyright law [edit section]
Put something here about the original copyright law.Mason Wheeler says:
You're ignoring the relevant facts here, attempting to twist history to fit a harmful ideology. Yes, after they lost their monopoly/censorship regime, the Stationers attempted various bills to renew it, but as your historian notes, every one of them was unsuccessful.
The Statute of Anne was passed in 1709, 2 years after the last of the unsuccessful Stationers' bills was introduced, and it was not a way to restore the stationers' monopoly, but a way to guard authors against the abuses that had sprung up in the power vacuum that resulted when the monopoly fell. Attempts to equate copyright with the Stationers' monopoly are both dishonest and harmful to the goal of positive copyright reform, so I wish you wouldn't persist in it.
Richard says: The idea that copyright went initially to an author was a bit of spin by the stationers to get a bill passed. It created a right that could be transfered to the stationers, once again giving them control over producing copies. The problem that copyright solved was avoidance of competition on a single title in an industry that had to use batch production. This required that a printer estimate the volume of sales before printing copies of a book and the printer produce the estimated number of book before selling a single copy.If somebody else came into the market with the same title, the result was often that both printers were left with a large number of unsold copies. That is at the level of a single title, competition in producing copies was disastrous for the competing parties. The control over who got to print a title was a beneficial side effect of imprimatur. When imprimatur was abolished, the stationers made several attempts to restore it in a milder form as a printers right, and when they realized that parliament was not going to give them this right they came up with the idea of creating an authors right, which could be transferred to them by contract.
Then, as now, think of the starving author,artist,musician is the cry of those who would control their works for their own profit.
Pragmatic writes: With respect, Mason, it's true that copyright began as a censorship tool. See this link for details: http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/commentary/uk_1557/uk_1557_com_972007121517.html
It's not just copyright that was used for censorship, but it was an essential tool. See also http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=41
The idea was to only let "registered journalists" publish anything and light everyone else on fire if they dissented.
Lord Camden quote [edit section]
Here's a quote apparently from the origin of copyright:Anyway, I think it best to quote Lord Camden in his 1774 Judgement:
“If there be any thing in the world common to all mankind, science and literature are in their nature publici juris, and they ought to be free and general as air or water. They forget their Creator as well as their fellow-creatures who wish to monopolise his noblest gifts and greatest benefits. Why did we enter into society at all, but to enlighten one another’s minds, and improve our faculties for the common welfare of the species? Those great men, those favoured mortals, those sublime spirits, who share that ray of divinity which we call genius, are intrusted by Providence with the delegated power of imparting to their fellow-creatures that instruction which Heaven meant for universal benefit: they must not be niggards to the world, or hoard up for themselves the common stock. We know what was the punishment of him who hid his talent; and Providence has taken care that there shall not be wanting the noblest motives and incentives for men of genius to communicate to the world the truths and discoveries, which are nothing if uncommunicated. Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner; to be enjoyed it must be communicated: scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter. Glory is the reward of science; and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views. I speak not of the scribblers for bread, who tease the world with their wretched productions; fourteen years is too long a period for their perishable trash. It was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, Locke, instructed and delighted the world. When the bookseller offered Milton five pounds for his PARADISE LOST, he did not reject the offer and commit his piece to the flames, nor did he accept the miserable pittance as the reward of his labours; he knew that the real price of his work was immortality, and that posterity would pay it. Some authors are as careless of profit as others are rapacious of it, and in what a situation would the public be with regard to literature if there were no means of compelling a second impression of a useful work! All our learning would be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and Lintots of the age, who could set what price upon it their avarice demands, till the whole public would become as much their slaves as their own wretched hackney compilers.”
Both Sides [edit section]
Here's a nice argument on both sides of the issue:gwathdring says:
Sunjumper brings up a very important point, which I’m going to use as a spring board.
The instances where creative works continue to be profitable after long periods of time and would suffer substantially from people copying what it does well and riding the bandwagon are exceptions. This whole line of argument, in my view, suffers from the delusion that in America causes us to believe we have to preserve people’s path to unfettered fortune just in case one of us common folk becomes Andrew Carnegie all of a sudden. Most authors are not J.K. Rowling. We should not design our system primarily to protect J.K. Rowling because what that ends up doing is protect the publisher and harm the creative industry until such a time as another J.K. Rowling comes along in which case it is protecting one sodding solitary person at the expense of restricting the many. Rinse and repeat. That’s just so backwards to me. Why do we feel the need to expend such energy to protect our more fortunate few when we could instead design realistic legislation that protected the whole system better rather than just it’s moguls and magnates? Why must the middle class always protect the upper crust on the off chance that some day they get there? It’s the same damn thing and it’s only somewhat less frustrating in economic policy surrounding art than in economic policy surrounding everything else.
Because that’s the other thing: copyright is economic policy. We should think of it as such, not as some noble quest for the preservation of ideas. But I suppose even if we thought of it that way, it would still be designed utterly wrongly since currently it’s designed to protect the profits of the few rather than the ideas of the many and inventive.
Finally, let’s return to J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Myer. Tell me … can you honestly say that their ideas have not been borrowed and bungled and stolen and copy-pasted and resissued? Their band-wagons not thoroughly overwhelmed so as to proceed down the bath at a mere crawl making dangerous creaking and buckling noises as it goes? Can you honestly say that copyright has prevented other people from profiting from their ideas? You cannot. So what *has* it done than? It hasn’t preserved their idea; it hasn’t kept other people from writing Teen Paranormal Romance so furiously following the Twilight extravaganza that it has become a whole damn genre shelf in Barnes and Nobles. It hasn’t crippled creativity in the industry nor has it preserved ownership and sanctity of the originator’s ideas. But has it protected the originator’s profits? Well, that’s a difficult question with cultural works–is Stephanie Meyer the originator? How original was her work? How much of it was hers? What did *she* legally steal as her many follow-alongs legally stole from her? What did she take without technically copying? Who’s work did she lean on? Whose advice did she take without more than an acknowledgment page mention if even that returned them? Further, has she not already been justly compensated? Has not her published raked in enough cold hard cash such that even she will never see a pittance in comparison? Has financial justice not already been done?
Consider how copyright is used. Oh, no! I used the word “Twilight” in my title for “Twilight Haze,” a book about werewolves forming a college fraternity at the University of Washington in Seattle. Poor Stephanie Meyer and Stephanie Meyer’s publisher, they just must sue for me to cease and desist this travesty never mind the shelf in Barnes and Nobles filled with thousand more flagrant copies that avoid using this phrase, that name. That’s perhaps a bad example because with enough money I could probably win that one–but you get the idea. You’ve heard those cases. You’ve heard of those mass-mailings, those C&Ds, those desperate attempts to preserve a monopoly even against the least threatening targets. All this in the name of protecting some fortunate and extravagantly successful creator’s right to profit *decades* after their death which in turn came *decades* after they passed out of any danger of losing their precious window of opportunity to profit either because they succeeded and made it big or because their work had fallen into obscurity. Tolkien is long dead, but his progeny continue to man-handle his licenses and rights and keep a firm hold on his ideas which, while close to my heart, are hardly representative of particularly profound originality–rather they are representative of particularly profound creative *effort* and *labor,* effort and labor that–duly compensated or not, can no longer be compensated seeing as the fellow is tone dead. We need not preserve the profitability of his damn corpse as though he created something so precious and unique and fundamentally his own it needs must be encased in the creative and financial equivalent of museum glass, trotted out only when the curators need to make a quick buck.
facets of 'IP as property' [edit section]
I’m quite at a loss as to how to better explain the workman analogy, unless you think his turning up to work each day to carry out brand new acts of manual labour in different places is the equivalent of sitting still in a chair while a shop the other side of the world sells another copy of your game.
Well lets invert that analogy shall we? Since you posit that “a plumber demanding a fee every time you use the tap he installed in 1992″ is unreasonable, how about a developer or publisher is only allowed to charge for one copy of their game? I mean they only made one game, seems unreasonable for them to be allowed to charge multiple people for multiple copies of the game right?
Good luck finding one person to pay for that one copy of the game when development costs run to hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds. I suspect if any creative industries worked in this way, none of them would exist beyond the purvey of enthusiastic amateurs.
Happy Birthday song info [edit section]
http://freeculture.org/blog/2010/10/21/good-morning-to-happy-birthday-for-all/file:Copyright-and-the-worlds-most-popular-song.pdf