To Three Blind Mice,

The scarcity of paper money has nothing to do with the
rationale for anti-counterfeiting law. The job of United
States Secret Service is not to keep paper money scarce
but to make sure that there is no illegal paper money
in the public circulation. The primary reason for having
anti-counterfeiting law is to maintain the legitimacy in
paper money so that people can have trust in the
business transactions.

The decision to produce too much paper money or too little
paper money rests with the Federal Reserve System. Moreover,
there are different kinds of money out in the U.S. such as
barter, local money, alternative currency, and so on. In
other words, the Federal Reserve System does not have the
monopoly on the whole monetary system in the U.S.

This is not the first time that you have abused analogy
to advance your own positions. The closer the apple and orange
are examined, the more differences there are. It is
an insult to logic to apply every characteristic of apple
to orange on the basis of only few similarities between
apple and orange.

In spite of your unusually generous opinion, it is quite
incorrect to say that making a tape copy of CD is fair use.
Fair use is never intended to make illegal imperfect or
perfect copies. DRM is fine as long as users are able to exercise
fair use. But given your position for stronger and stronger
and stronger copyright, it seems that you are very eager to
lessen or trample fair use in the name of DRM. That’s shame.

Joseph Pietro Riolo

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.

As for backing up money, I do this regularly. Indeed I use my backup more often than the notes that I use to make the backup. Sometimes I don’t even bother with banknotes, I just get the money over the network from someone else. I think people even make a profit from distributing other people’s money in this way.
If I remember correctly, these networks are called “banks”.
I’ve long enjoyed the convenience these “banks” provide, but I now realise that they will destroy our society’s supply of money. Clearly they must be outlawed immediately and their operators imprisoned to serve as a warning to others who would threaten our economic wellbeing.

To all those of you who think the only possible motivation for creating something is money, I have bad news for you: you’re not creative – just jaded and greedy.

You have taken analogy to unbelievably absurd level.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I go along
with your game.

Because the U.S. treasury notes are not copyrightable,
the copyright law does not apply at all. So, you
don’t need a right to create exact copies of U.S.
treasury notes. You have the freedom to make the
exact copies of U.S. treasury notes. However,
because of the great potential use for fraud, the
freedom is slightly restricted. See:

http://www.treas.gov/usss/money_illustrations.shtml

for few restrictions. These restrictions are
covered by a different law, not the copyright law.

This shows once again that you have improper understanding
of the copyright law.

If your damaged dollar bill still has two serial
numbers intact, just go to a U.S. bank and have it
replaced with a new dollar bill. If it does not have
both serial numbers intact, I believe that you can
send the damaged dollar bill to U.S. Treasury and
request for a replacement. I have not researched
on that part. You can’t do that with a copyrighted
work. Again, another difference that you are blind
to.

About making a back-up of dollar, you can make an
enlarged copy of dollar as your back-up but no bank
will accept the copy as the evidence that you truly
are the owner of the dollar bill. If you lose dollar
bill, that’s too bad. It is no different from any
other thing.

You can do anything to the U.S. treasury notes subject
to few restrictions as I stated above. You can even
put your faces on the dollar bill. (If you do that,
you lose the value of the dollar bill because it is
no longer a legal tender.) You can even make a
derivative work based on the dollar bill.

You asked how this is any different from digital
music. Again, you are still blind to the difference
between tangible and intangible things. With the
U.S. treasury notes, all the intangible things in
the notes are in the public domain and the only
remaining thing that is ownable is the paper itself,
just like books that contain the public domain works.
Digital music is intangible thing. If it is copyrighted,
the copyright law applies.

To Spoonlike,

Unless you show me a law that shows otherwise, we
the public are the owners of the paper currency
(the tangible thing, not intangible thing). It is
never the property of the U.S. Government.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.

spoonlike, again you were on the verge of coming over, but your anti-copyright bias interrupted your thought process before the calcuation was done.

all US treasury notes are owned by the government and all copies of a copyrighted song are owned by the artist. this is what copyright means.

the artist may sell you one copy, but buying a CD doesn’t mean you “own the music” – you own one copy sold to you by the artist.

get it? you don’t own “the music” – ever. all you own is one copy.

that’s all you pay for and that’s all you get. rights to “the music” costs a bit more than the 20 evros you pay for a CD.

WJM you really should consider switching back to decaf.

the system of paper money works because there is an artificial scarcity of paper notes.

the supply of notes, of course, has a great effect on the value of any individual note. uncontrolled printing of notes leads to inflation – and a devalued dollar. (see peso.)

this is why counterfeiting – which is fundamentally a prohibition against copying – is illegal and enforced by trigger happy, heavily armed US treasury agents with bad attitudes. without it the system of paper money doesn’t work.

the prohibition is however rather limited to making copies that could reasonably be confused with the originals: printing a three dollar bill with your photo on it would not probably invite a late night visit from paramilitary forces of the US government.

similarly, the uncontrolled reproduction of digital music produces the same inflationary/devaluing effect on digital music as the uncontrolled printing of notes has on currency values.

and also similarly, if the copy can not reasonably be a replacement for the original (such as a low fidelity tape copy of an LP), you are probably causing no harm.

you cannot focus simply on the cost of production – as spoonlike also does – and ignore the inflationary effect.

this is why you fail to see that zero cost production is more of a reason FOR effective DRM than an argument against it.

it has happened that we have damaged a dollar so badly that it could not be used or exchanged. shouldn�t we have a �right� to make a back-up?

isn�t this just fair use? we earned the dollar, we own it, we should have the �right� to do anything we want with it without BIG BROTHER telling us what to do.

And the false analogies just keep on rolling in from the Blind Mice Trio. You never own currency … ever. All paper currency is the property of the US Government. You have *possession* of it, to be tendered in exchange for debts(public or private – it says it right on the note). But currency (at least current, in-circulation currency) cannot be owned in the same sense as digital music.

So no – even ‘social goods’ aside – it’s a bad analogy, and it doesn’t hold up under even a modicum of real scrutiny.

Cute, trying to equate counterfeiting with copyright infringement. And not really meritorious of a response. It is in the public interest to prohibit counterfeiting (“exact copies”) of currency; that same type of interest is not applicable in copyright law, although there may be related TM or tort (passing-off) issues, depending on the nature of the work. And those interests are private, not public, except to the extent that copyright in broad strokes makes for good public policy.

You’re obfuscating again.

Less than exact copying is not counterfeiting. There is no prohbition, at least in the country that I’m in, against less-than-exact copying of currency. That’s how coin and currency dealers can publish catalogues, or newspapers can run illustrated stories about the latest currency security features. That comes close to “fair use”, but that’s not really applicable when you’re talking about a criminal provision (counterfeiting of currency) rather than the civil rights created, for a limited time and purpose, by copyright law.

Go away, Rolo.

I’m disappointed to see you, of all people, swallowing Big Copyright hook line and sinker.

Copying for yourself, or for many other people, is one of a raft of factors which can be considered in determining whether a use is fair or not.

do you think that the public should have the “right” to create exact copies of US treasury notes?

it has happened that we have damaged a dollar so badly that it could not be used or exchanged. shouldn’t we have a “right” to make a back-up?

isn’t this just fair use? we earned the dollar, we own it, we should have the “right” to do anything we want with it without BIG BROTHER telling us what to do.

if we have the scanner, the printer, and the paper it doesn’t cost the US treasury anything to make another.

the technology exists. doesn’t it stifle innovation to deny this technology to the public?

isn’t the right to counterfeit guaranteed by the right to free speech?

so how about it? aren’t laws against counterfeiting just outdated concepts forced on an honest public by copyright extremeists at the US treasury?

what do you think would happen to the value of US currency if anyone could make their own identical copies – indistinguishable from the original?

now tell us, how is digital music any different?