Evweebody know, it's dee AH-I-A-A dats de devil...
Posted on 09/22/2003 12:40:54 AM PDT by Prince Charles
Evweebody know, it's dee AH-I-A-A dats de devil...
I have a right to own my creations and my family or estate should have the right to reap the fruits of my labor.
If I wish to sign my publishing away that's my choice, not yours and not the gubmints.
Current copyright law is fair and just.
Card is my all time favorite science fiction writer.
The government is the only entity capable of writing and enforcing copywrite protections. Therefore, it is very much the "gubmints" bizness.
If you want copywrite enforcement, the gubmit is the only place to go.
It shows. Card should stick to what he does best.
Using your same logic, we should just help ourselves to food in stores, since it's just a recomposition of dirt and organic stuff that's been around since the dawn of man.
I just am puzzled why so many people don't see the "value" of intellectual property....
That said, I don't care if "big music" dies. I can make in my little bedroom studio music that's just as "good" as anything you can buy at the store for $17. The prices are far far far too inflated, and "music superstars" should be a fading breed....
Aside from getting the best possible vinyl playback equipment and the best possible sound card to handle the A/D conversion, I recommend getting a copy of SoundForge and the noise reduction plugin. Academic versions are available for non-commercial use.
The noise reduction is very sophisticated. It has a click and pop remover that is infinitely configurable to prevent audible side-effects. If you don't trust the automatic mode you can mark each and every click and treat it individually.
There is also a very sophisticted noise reduction process that can sample a "silent" grove, build a noise profile, and remove the noise from the entire recording without introducing "breathing" effects. If a touch of crackle makes you feel better, you can apply these these processes lightly, getting rid of only the most annoying pops.
The point of copyright protection is to allow you to "reap the fruits of [your] labor". Certainly. But please tell me what other type of labor can I perform where I can sell the fruits of my labor, over and over again without performing additional labor, in perpetuity? And imagine, if you would, the impact of perpetual copyrights on the pool of music, literature, and written works that many current authors draw on.
If I wish to sign my publishing away that's my choice, not yours and not the gubmints.
And 12,000 years from now, do you think your heirs should still control who can copy what you wrote?
Current copyright law is fair and just.
On what grounds? That you deserve to get paid for the rest of your life for effort that you expending once? Do work once and get paid forever.
As many anti-IP people will tell you, if you take the food from a store, you are depriving the owner of that food and they cannot sell it to anyone else. That form of stealing is significantly different than the form of stealing that goes on when you copy a book, movie, or song. Most people intuitively realize this -- even those who believe in protecting works of authorshiop.
I just am puzzled why so many people don't see the "value" of intellectual property....
I most certainly do. I think it is very important that artists get compensated for their labors. Even handsomely so. But I don't think that compensation should last forever. It doesn't for any other labor.
Let's look at your food store example. When you buy an apple, you are compensating the farmer (and all of those along the distribution chain) for their labor and resources. But once that farmer grows that apple, if he wants to make more money next year, he needs to maintain his trees and grow more apples. And more apples the next year. And so on. Now let's compare that with a songwriter.
The songwriter spends time writing a song. And they should certainly get compensated for that effort. But once they've written that song, they can make copies of it with trivial effort. So with perpetual (or near perpetual) copyrights, an author performs labor once and then simply collects money for that labor forever. What would it mean to farming if farmers could hit it big on one harvest and then retire? Or automakers could hit it big on one car and then retire?
Current copyright law is a bastardization of what people in America had in the 1800s. Sheet music was sold but there was no "performance fee". When records came out, there was no "royalty payment" for each recording. When radio came along, there was no payment for each spin of the record.
In parts of Europe, it is possible to keep a copyright alive forever. The Doors got bit by this for a bit of classical Spanish guitar referenced by Robby Krieger in Spanish Caravan. They only have to pay a few pennies per performance, but it is still owed.
Copyright extensions are now exceeding 100 years. Popular recordings reside in the hands of a few big corporations. The reason we are hearing so much about this now is finally ALL works from the dawn of talking pictures (movies) and 1930s music would be lapsing into the public domain. It's taken them awhile to amass the ownership of these works and they don't want them to go PD now.
The reference to "Work For Hire" must have escaped you completely. The artists who created and starred in these works don't see crap for their creativity. Some go to sue the companies and those cases drag on for a decade or more.
There are some works that will cease to exist if we wait another 28 years to allow people to privately restore and release the materials.
The understanding is that these works would become a part of the fabric of our nation and a part of our culture. One person would build off the works of another. Mark Twain is public domain as is Edgar Allen Poe and there have been many adaptations of their works as well as much circulation of their writings.
Tarzan books are public domain but the ERB decendents have claimed to have trademarked the literary character (a bastardization of that notion). Any attempts to adapt Tarzan will be met with lawsuits. This was the first popular character to lapse into the public domain and this is where the fight began.
Corporations are immortal, so they can see definite benefits of maintaining the government created exclusive monopolies granted by copy right. I doubt you've have seen quite the lobbying push for the current life + 70 years than was the case.
Consider this: in 1967, the Disney company produced an animated cartoon of the Jungle Book. Guess when the copyright for that particular work expired? 1966. If the copyright law in 1920 had been the same then as it is today, the Disney corporation would have had to wait until 2006 until they could legally rip Mr. Rudyard Kipling and his decendants off, and make millions of dollars from a concept they'd not created. So far, they've made at least 2 cartoons and one live-action movie that I know of based on the Jungle Book. All of this is perfectly legal and proper by the way because that is exactly the way copyright was supposed to work. The author gets it for a while, then we get it forever. I can, if I so desire, print up and bind a copy of any of Mr. Kiplings books, poems, or shorts and sell them without paying him or his heirs a dime.
However, since the 50's or so, copyright terms have been steadily lengthening. Coincidentally, it would seem that just before Disney's Steamboat Willie would enter the public domain, they are able to buy off enough congresscritters to extend it for another 20 years. Hmmmm.... It's o.k. for THEM to use other people's stuff but not for anyone else to use theirs? Hmmmm...
This year the Supreme Court upheld the newly expanded copyright terms. For some reason, they seem to believe that the "limited times" as written in the constitution can be expressed mathimatically as Infinity-1.
The point to all this is this: I, personally, have zero respect for any copyright beyond 28 years. So, I do my bit to make sure that anyone who wants a copy of The Beatles' White Album, Glen Miller's Pennsylvania 6 5000, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon or anything else more than 28 years old is available to anyone who wants it.
Anyone who doesn't like it doesn't have to play.
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