Posted on 11/18/2014 2:24:35 PM PST by reaganaut1
Queen Anne’s laws are not referenced by the text of any of our laws or Constitution, so they don’t apply to us.
Our laws are our laws, despite what lawmakers “were thinking when they wrote them”.
You’re focusing on Mickey Mouse and corporate Disney, but to the author of little means, they gladly will let Disney corporation have Mickey for 120 years, as long as the author of little means can have copyright to his own works during his own lifetime.
Getting rid of copyrights altogether would do absolutely nothing to change Disney’s perpetual hold on the Mickey Mouse character as a marketing icon of their business, since it is covered under trademark law, and thus is enforceable as long as Disney continues to use and protect their trademark.
Open source is a scam. While open source organizations have the patina of some “everything’s free”, “community”, “non-profit” endeavor...
the patina is merely a cloak for elite financial interests to develop new product companies into a de facto industry standard right from the product’s outset, and exterminate all competition from small software vendors - right from the outset.
This is accomplished quite simply: the “open source” version is developed and put into place first. Any smalltime developer who wants to sell competing software won’t be able to, because they will be competing against the open source product that is distributed free of charge. Everyone will want the “industry standard” “open source” product - and to millions of smaller enterprises and potential personal customers - the fact that it’s free makes it a no-brainer to try to use it if they need or want such a product.
Of course, the open source version will, at the outset, not be up to par for “enterprise”, or large business, customers.
After a few years, the “enterprise” version can be rolled out and sell at “enterprise” prices.
Can the small developer compete with the enterprise version ? Hardly, because corporate sales prospects will mostly just parrot the line that they only want to use “open source” software, even though that same corporate customer is paying bigtime for the enterprise version of the open source product.
A good example of this is github:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
If you look at github’s website - it looks like an open source utopia where there is NO PAYING for anything - anyone and everyone can use github FOR FREE.
You have to poke around a little to find Enterprise github and the enterprise pricing.
And you have to check out the details in that wikipedia article to notice the $100 million private equity investment, etc.
BULLCRAP! Copyright is the only thing protecting those who create the music, books, and have intelligence enough to do so as a career. God given talent was meant to be used to make a living...it takes time to write book, be a composer, or create a play, or other talented artistic expression.
No copyright means why waste your time?
What next? No patents on engineered ideas, so the people like the owner of AMAZON.COM can steal your items to sell without paying a royalty? Of course, that’s what Amazon does now...if you give them something copyrighted to sell, then you agree that they can lower the price to suit themselves. Period. Predator society.
Those too lazy or stupid to create just steal without paying, that’s what’s being promoted here...with the NO Copyright idea.
Thousands of authors, musicians, and others are being ripped off by those, just like this man who want someone else’s hard work but do not want to pay for it!
Anyone on this thread who thinks that is okay is a thief themselves imho...no respect for God’s talents that he gave to people as a way to develop and make a living.
The foundations of copyright may not have originated in a free society, however, over the years it has been a Godsend to those whose talents would have been abused and exploited by the wealthy.
BULLCRAP! Communist collective ‘for the common good’ concept.
How many songs have you stolen from free websites that violate copyright law? Godly? NO, talent comes from God and is meant to be used to make a living.
Those who can’t do teach instead of creating. And I was a teacher. Copyright law is necessary or CHAOS would ensue... since no one would have any idea of who said what, or who painted what, or who wrote what song...etc and so on.
Put your violin where the sun don’t shine.
Thank you...I was beginning to think I was the only one who understood the value of protecting one’s investment of time, energy, and creative ideas.
Strawman alert!
Noone here is pushing for the abolition of copyright or patent law. We merely do not support the perpetual copyright that has evolved as a result of us having the best congress money can buy.
If you were astute, you would have noticed I held up the British copyright law the Founders surely had in mind when they drafted the Constitution, the Law of Queen Anne (which claim I think I can easily validate since the first copyright law passed under the Constitution was an imitation of it), as a model of a good copyright law -- 14 years, extendible by another 14 at the request of the author, not the author's estate (which didn't create anything), not the author's publisher, just the author -- a return to those terms hardly results in CHAOS. There wasn't cultural CHAOS in the colonial times when the Law of Queen Anne was the copyright law governing what became these United States, nor through the Federal era when American copyright law had like terms.
I'm mystified by your claim that being able to trace the provenance of art is somehow dependent upon copyright. We know who painted the Mona Lisa, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, who composed "The Lady Russell's Pavan", who wrote the Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos, even though da Vinci, Chaucer, Dowland and St. Romanos the Melodist painted, wrote, composed, and wrote, respectively, before there were any statutes analogous to copyright. Albrecht Durer made a very good living selling prints which he had no way of copyrighting, since there was no such thing (and we know which are his prints, the absence of copyright law in the times and places where he worked notwithstanding). He even provides an example of defending his brand in the absence of copyright law, because he successfully sued a copyist for fraud for passing off his prints as being by Durer.
Do reply to what's actually being said.
No, the Law of Queen Anne isn’t referenced in the Constitution, just the concept found in it of “for a limited term”, but my claim that it is related to the Founders’ intent is validated by the fact the the first copyright law Congress passed with its new Constitutional powers was essentially a copy of the British Law.
My mark-up of the copyright code? It’s too painful to port the html, correct it so it will work in an FR post and actually mark it up.
In brief, shorten copyright terms to 14 years, permitting registered copyrighted works to have their copyright renewed for another 14 by the author or artist. Add some some clarification of fair-use so incidentally quoting a melodic line in a new piece of music doesn’t require payment of royalties (I regard the Australian precedent involving a flute riff on “Waltzing Matilda” in Men at Work’s “Down Under” as an abomination) and craft some analogous provisions for images and phrases.
That sort of copyright was good enough for the Founding Fathers, and modernized to cover sound-recordings, software and the like, should be good enough for any FReeper.
I’m also puzzled as to why you’re going on about “open source”. Did I post anything about open source? Nor do I see what the use or abuse of open source has to do with any of the points at issue here — Leef the Forbes article we are ostensibly discussing doesn’t mention open source software, and I didn’t mention it in my posts.
Yes, we know who the painters were, however most made little money until after they died. For example...Van Gogh wasn’t even famous until after he died, and his brother THEO s wife held a showing of his work, and now his paintings sell for millions.
Van Gogh was a starving artist, who had mental issues and could have used some money. Did he really commit suicide in that field? Well now they don’t know for sure....
This is not the era of Impressionists, who had the benefit of the Paris Salon, and some like the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt (not always included in their ranks 1844-1926) was from a well to do family in Pittsburg. The Artists had the Paris Salon, which was a major factor in exposure and their later success. Many came from wealthy families and benefactors.
No, there wasn’t chaos in colonial times because people were more sophisticated, civil, and decent. And you could make a contract with a handshake....now they all lie, steal, and plagiarize just to get in politics or make money off someone else’s creation or ingenuity.
The new conglomerates steal royalties of authors like on Amazon. And then put their headquarters in Luxenburg and don’t pay their taxes, so suing them is an international issue and too expensive. I don’t know her, but Vaughn has proof of her losses on her website, as do many others.
Royalties and pricing was what the Hatchett vs Amazon dispute was really about. Artists are interested in creating and not having to defend their work from the lazy people, who have no real ideas.
There are plenty of multiple manufacturing companies of what were once magnificent pieces of art, pottery, or writings...no longer of any real value after being changed several times. Oh the original is of value, but the interest wanes the more you see it....or read it in other forms.
Copyright keeps the majority of people honest, there will always be the copycats in a lesser form. Distortion ruins creation.
Once a new piece has flooded the market and becomes ‘mundane multiples’ with no character left.... it is no longer ‘unique’. I like originals in art, clothes, furniture, and books.
The only reason people want ‘no copyright law’ is because free stuff is their due...it’s the entitlement mentality of our age. Those people ruin everything they get their hands on because creativity cannot live in minds that are filthy, greedy and lazy.
More important to some are increases in perversity and immorality. We create something innocent and the disgusting change it into something we no longer want our name attached to, so if there is no recourse like copyright law to sue, and get it removed from the market...the artist is forever associated with its creation over the distortion. For Christian works that expressed a God ordained purpose, this distorting is blasphemy.
Patents/copyrights that are technology or social have been under attack as everyone wants a place to start...however the original idea has the right to exist in it’s own inspired form. Altered ideas that were copyrighted and stolen....
Facebook is a good example, because Zuckerburg was not the one with the idea, he stole it, while working for those guys and cut them out of it. Those twins were busy with sports and commitments. He has made not millions but billions on someone else’s project in college. I can’t think of a better reason to copyright, or patent an idea, product, or creation than that one.
GREED is a national past time in America now. I believe the loss of real creation talent would be the consequence of ending copyright or patent laws.
You’re still arguing with some absent or hypothetical advocate of abolishing copyright. Does anything you wrote in any way argue for the current regime against the alternative I propose of returning to the terms of copyright which prevailed during the colonial and Federal eras?
Van Gogh? He was a starving artist not for lack of copyright laws, but because not enough people were willing to buy his paintings. Both the Netherlands and France (where he lived from 1886 until his death) were party to the 1886 Berne Convention that inflicted life-of-the-artist-plus-50-years copyright on the world.
John Dowland, in copyright-free Elizabethan England made a living as a singer-songwriter. Albrecht Durer made a living selling prints in the copyright-free and legally chaotic Germany of the “Holy Roman Empire”, and as I noted successfully defended his brand against copyists fraudulently selling “Durer prints”.
A lot of what you write about publishers appropriating royalties from actual authors and artists, actually supports my position that copyright extension should be a right of the original artist or author, not a second-party “rightsholder”. Most of the distortions of copyright law have been created because we have allowed the exclusive rights to works which the Constitution specifies Congress may grant to authors and inventors to themselves become “property”, a commodity which the author or inventor can sell. Outside this thread, in the real world, the most forceful advocates of lengthened copyright terms, suppression of derivative works and everything I’m actually arguing against are not artists, but the very sort of conglomerates you are suggesting copyright protects artist from — the RIAA puts a lot of effort into making sure music publishers get paid, but not very much making sure actual musicians and composers get paid, so that actual musicians and composers often have to sue their RIAA-corporate-member publishers to get their money.
Again, stop arguing against a position no one is taking, or if I’ve been inattentive and there is someone on the thread, unknown to me, advocating the abolition of copyright, post your replies to him, not to me.
Van Gogh s paintings were shown by his sister in law after his death, and then sold.
Your intellectualism about this issue is self absorbed. Intelligence knows that without some protection legally, there is always some greedy sap wanting what others have FOR FREE.
This is no longer a debate, it is fact for most of us. Argue with yourself or others, my decision was made and stands firm on the copyright/patent protection.
Enough said.
Copyright law protection is 70 years with the creator or estate/company, etc. And if you are arguing something other than Copyright law then name it...such as DRM, which is digital rights management. DRM is a totally different issue, and should be named if that is what you are specifically talking about? The two are not the same.
Different issue.
You've just pointed out that things got worse since the Berne Convention inflicted life-of-author plus 50 years copyright on most of the world. This in no way invalidates my point that Van Gogh's starving was not a result of lack of copyright: he lived the last few years of his life in France which was signatory to the Berne Convention.
Nor does pointing out what is have anything to do with what ought to be. Telling me what copyright law is in no way changes my view that current copyright law is wrong, any more than telling me that abortion on demand is legal changes my view that it should not be. Why did you bring up DRM? Nothing I've posted, other than a waggish reply to a remark about The Pirate Bay, is in any way based on a critique of copyright as "depriving" people of free goods, but entirely on the dileterious effect the current combination of long copyright terms, expansion of copyright to imitate the French droit d'auteur (like life-plus copyrights another legacy of the Berne Convention), and its reificaiton as property has on the creation and propagation of culture.
You continue to argue as if my position were that copyright should be abolished. Unless your next argument somehow addresses the fact that I am really arguing for a return to the terms of the Law of Queen Anne (and the identical terms the first Congress under the Constitution gave), not the abolition of copyright, I will not reply.
Get a life. I am not interested in debating copyright.
There are more important things going on right now with Ferguson, and the stolen e bola blood.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3229727/posts
Evidently not: had you been interested, you'd have read my posts enough to realize I wasn't advocating abolishing copyright. Perhaps in the future you should not post, or at least not make quarrelsome posts, to thread on issues you are not interested in debating. It would save both you and your fellow FReepers aggravation.
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