We need more KISS here, thats right – Keep It Simple, Stupid!

All rethorical and semantical hairsplitting will not help to reach our common goal of “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts”.

Why don’t we start with a simple goal that is reachable, instead of trying to fight all battles – related as they may be – at once?

More pragmatism than principle, please!

I’m talking about a copyright registry. All other issues, the length of copyright, the question of sampling etc. could be taken at a later stage. We should fight to get this registry back – require registration in exchange for continued protection of the few works from e.g. 1923 that still have commercial value today.

And then sit back and watch what google, teenagers and everybody else can do to works from 1923 that are not in this registry.

How naive is it to hope that with this under the belt, the public at large, Congress, and maybe even the RIAA would ‘get it’?

I think that Lessig has made a very good start that is polite and courteous to existing rights holders. Were his suggestions to be enacted, the revolution in innovation would be able to work its magic even more effectively, and the often unconscionable results of the RIAAs juggernaut would slowly disappear. (Suing grandparents because their grandkids downloaded music without their knowledge? Suing people without naming them? What is that?)

Does anyone have a response to my arguments here? Maybe I’m missing something.

Obviously you made the comment in jest but I think it illustrates a point that needs to be made quite effectively.

Whoever drew a cave painting ought to have ownership of whatever value that created with it (ideally whether they signed it or not). Some might argue they also ought to have some residual right of profit from future cave paintings of subsidiary artists that share similarity with the original.

The problem arises when that cave painter becomes so disassociated from reality as to think he has ownership of the color blue because he used it or of the idea of making paintings generally. The current copyright reich has gone so far upfield of the creative content itself that they may as well be trying to claim possession of the musical scale or the note C sharp.

From this layman’s point of view too much of the counter-argument is about why their creative work should not be so fully protected and not enough of the counter-argument is about drawing stark lines around what exactly should be within or without the scope of an artist’s protection.

Claiming Napster was not meant to proliferate piracy is analagous (as Lessig asutely pointed out) to Colt claming they have no idea what the guns they produce are being used for. I have no more respect for Lessig than I do for Colt when either of them use that false logic to support their views.

Claiming on the other hand that sampling (in creative non Vanilla Ice ways) or making mashups or doing anything else that results in a creative piece wholly different from its predecessor even if they share a common point of reference would be a much more compelling argument.

Copyright, should be about the set of sticks in the bundle as they are, being compared to another set of sticks… not about all sticks that could have been bundled or the similarity of any two particular sticks from one bundle to another that dont create a whole of any true similarity.

Even the cave painters would have been sentient enough to appreciate that much.

So, in the great debate of “What came first: Ideas or Protection of Ideas” he’s saying ideas didn’t flourish until we had IP? If Og had a copyright on his paintings of bison which lasted 90 years, where would we be today? Would Ug be able to communicate ideas back to his tribe? Would culture have developed?

Let’s slip down the slope a bit.

If hieroglyphs had been copyrighted by their creators, how would Egypt have managed to last 5000 years? That’s only 50 generations of copyrights under today’s rules. Do you figure 50 generations of ideas is enough to transforma culture from mud huts to the Great Pyramids?

Look at the histories of the great cultures. Point out the ones with restrictive copyright laws. For that matter, look at how they handled IP in general. Now tell me again how the only way we’ll ever have any creative individuals, great works of art, or enjoyable music to hear is through restrictive copyright protection laws.

No, I’m not. Never once have I ever supported the complete repeal of copyright. Sometimes I compare our system now with a system without copyright in order to understand how copyright regulates speech – but not to abolish it. I do care about artists, and creators. Three points you seem to have missed in your oversimplification.

1 – Increasing the scope of copyright makes it more expensive for creators in the future. Fair-use is not practical for most – look at Whe Wind Done Gone and Mattell cases. Furthermore, some great social criticism is not yet included in the doctrine. See fenslerfilms. Yes, I care about artists.

2 – Anyone who really cares about artists should be looking at contract law, not copyright. If you want to protect artists, you should help protect them from slavery contracts and feeble royalty payments. I guess you don’t care about artists that much after all.

3 – Many copyright activists, such as myself, encourage voluntarily opting out of the copyright scheme. The creative commons is not generated by force. Yes, some do advocate eliminating the copyright system, but they are few and far between. You can’t use their arguements to critique ours.

TBM: freely sharing a ditigal recording among many does not reduce the value to any individual consumer, but it completely destroys the value with respect to the creator.

Freely sharing the music does not effect the value to the creator at all, it reduces the incentive to create. The value of a book will never change no matter who does what to it. Is Hamlet less valuable today? No. The author’s incentives come from the right to demand money when their work is reproduced. This does not change the work’s value at all. The legal right to an incentive is very different from a traditional property right. Simply because we confer this right on any fixed creative work so that it can be traded in the market does not change its value, only the price we pay for it. (Yes, price and value are not the same thing).

TBM: the problem with commons-ists is that you look at this only from the narrow, short-term perspective of the consuming public – hence the marxist solution to confiscate private property on behalf of the “public good.” consider that once you have confiscated all private property for the good of the commons, there will remain no incentive for artists and authors to produce more.

The same root word, yes. The same concept, not even close. Short term? No! Exactly how is capping the copyright term at roughly 75 years short term? Everytime the publishers go to congress to extend the life of their copyrights, they parade the artists before them. Copyright exists because the public needs to extend a privilege to creators which gives them an incentive to produce creative works. That just plain isn’t private property.

Did Bell have a takings clause arguement when they were de-regulated? No, the public giveth and the public taketh away. If copyright was a property right, then every artist who lost protection for failure to follow copyright’s pre-1989 formalities would be able to sue the government for reasonable compensation for their loss. (The takings clause) Sounds ridiculous, right?

The commons is about having enough information (as in free speech) available to the public. Copyright helps with this. Too much copyright becomes counter-productive. It increases costs to creators which in the end results in less creative work. Most of the time copyright works pretty well. Sometimes it limits free speech and sometimes it makes new works needlessly expensive. You, my friend, need to at least read Judge Posner’s work. It explains this in detail. If you’ve already read it – read it more closely.

We’re not communists, we’re democrats interested in free speech and widely distributed knowledge. Exactly how is that a problem?

To TBM:

it is not at all clear to us that “free speech” advocates do not greedily share the mob’s ambition for free beer.

First, I agree with you that the relationships between libre and gratis are not well-definied, and I agree that it would behoove the community to begin to establish more clearly how the two interact; why open-source code, for example, need not be profitless, and why refusing to allow technology to restrict consumers’ fair-use rights need not hurt sales.

The reason I generally shy away from using the free-speech / free-beer dichotomy is because it imposes a metaphor that ends up being highly confusing. It least to false comparisions, as you mentioned when you pointed out that free beer is a social lubricant. I have to agree, getting drunk and talking a lot go hand in hand, but I think you also highlight the limited utility of the free-as-in-beer metaphor by extending it beyond its useful reference.

We didn’t come here do discuss semantics and cognitive pysch, though 🙂

I think you’re still misinterpret “the mob” as you put it, and their intentions with regards to openly-available or freely-distributable materials. While I have no doubt you are here alluding to the widespread use of peer-to-peer file sharing programs to distribute copyrighted materials, I think it is also worth pointing out that no substantive, causative relationship has been established between P2P software use and declining CD sales or consumer spending on music or movies. Reports that have been published, especially when sponsored by RIAA or MPAA, lead one to believe such a relationship may exist, or even goes so far as to make the false conclusion that such a relationship exists, but it really hasn’t been established in any credible way.

when have you distanced yourself from P2P downloaders? when have you agreed with the RIAA on anything? if indeed there is a difference between free speech and free beer, you should not always find yourselves on opposite sides of the briefs.

RIAA changed gold record certifications many years ago to 500,000 copies, revised down from 1,000,000 and implemented the platinum-level recognition at sales of 1,000,000. This allows new, promising acts who have a modestly successful release to attain a higher level of recognition with key industry insiders. The new level of certification at a half-million in sales especially elevates the attention up-and-coming acts receive at radio. If nothing else, it’s another chance at name-dropping for new acts. I do think that’s positively benefitted radio playlists in the time since, despite all the other mayhem that’s gone on to screw the radio industry up 🙂

I don’t need to distance myself from P2P downloaders. They’re not doing anything wrong, necessarily. Some things you can do with a gun, or with a computer, or with a bottle of wine, or with a can of Lysol disinfectant spray are illegal. That does not make purchasing, posessing, or using any of them (given the right credentials).

And just for the record, I don’t use P2P programs.

I expect RIAA to allow me to maintain my fair-use rights over the materials I buy. The fact that they have used new technology exclusively as a way to make a better and more perfect control over how I can use my purchases is an affront to me.

The fact that DVDs are CSS encrypted and region-coded is marginally offensive. I cannot, for example, take my DVDs and play them on a player from another region. The fact that I must necessarily violate US law in order to view my legally-purchased DVDs on my legally-obtained Linux-based computer system is outrageous.

The fact that RIAA has authorized a system through which I can download music from them, but that music comes with strings attached which ensure they have more control than ever before over my use of that music is the reason I do not buy music online. It is silly, backwards, and against the whole idea of innovation for them to only allow expansion of new technology if and only if it allows the powers that be more control. We wouldn’t have a broadcasting industry ta all if that were historically the case. Radio would never have taken off, and God only knows what that would’ve done to the development of the television.

Finally, in my earlier post, I even gave an explicit example of a situation in which I paid cash for libre software. I don’t know why you insist on furthering the notion that libre and gratis are necessarily the same.

Also, I would suggest do some research into the sales growth forecasts for Linux-based servers in the next 5 years. The growth expectations are phenomenal — yet the software that runs the server is (mostly) libre. And they’re talking about throwing around billions of dollars in the server market for it. Here is a case where the libre elements make a huge value-added component to an overall product. If nothing else, a billion dollars is of an order of magnitude that even the RIAA should pay attention.

While I appreciate the crticial eye with which you monitor the message boards here, I wish you, too, would apply that same critical eye to both sides of the issue. It would certainly lead to insight that would benefit everyone here.

Like your sniping response, Turkewitz’s article smacks of the age-old tactic, used to great success of late in the political arena, of seizing upon a chance phrase in the opponent’s discourse and using it to paint them as out of touch with the mainstream/reality/common sense. That is a much easier tactic to adopt than to attempt a rigorous, nuanced response to their position.

Unfortunately for Mr. Turkewitz, the consistuency he claims to be defending (the artists, that is, which gets you a lot more sympathy than giant multinational media conglomerates) is not nearly so clear on matters of “free” music in even the most extreme “free beer” sense. A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project poll indicates that musicians are deeply divided over whether file-sharing is good (43%) or bad (47%) for artists. In any case, a majority (60%) feel that the RIAA’s recent campaign of suing file-sharers won’t benefit them.

A discussion about this shouldn’t be a discussion between copyright or not, but between the present level of copyright, and other potential levels.

To use the real estate example, it’s as if Lessig has asked a city to reconsider the a that permits pedestrians to walk on somebody else’s property if there is no sidewalk. Lessig has suggested that the current city law only permits pedestrians to walk on the very edge of the road, and this is dangerous to both the walker and passing cars.

In our example, the RIAA starts campaign to tell the world that Lessig has proposed that the city invalidate all deeds in the city, and seize all the land, and charge people rent for living in their own houses. The RIAA thenc ontinues to propose laws that make it a crime to even smell the flowers planted on somebody’s property without permission.

The homeowners start a battle between having strong property rights, or no property rights at all.

jessica, right now, file “sharing” is stealing.

if you think stealing is the way to effect social change, then you have nothing to contribute to this debate.