Posted on 11/18/2014 2:24:35 PM PST by reaganaut1
The idea behind copyright was simple – creativity would be catalyzed if individuals were given the exclusive right to profit from their works for a period of time. The law was supposed to strike a sensible balance between financial incentives for creators and social benefits.
Early on, that may have been the case, but the law has changed greatly since the first Copyright Act was passed in 1790. Today, copyright does far more to create an information oligarchy than the robust information democracy the drafters of the Constitution and the first act had in mind.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Fixed; and that's one of the big problems: Copyrights/trademarks are essentially an unlimited period of time. (Thanks Disney. [/sarc])
The other is that there's a lot of organizations which are claiming intellectual property
over things they shouldn't — I have a friend who left Google after they tried to "renegotiate" his contract to include a clause saying that everything he did, even in his free time, was their property.
This clown is totally wrong.
What a moron.
Is he????? Jrr Tolkien is dead, but I cannot use his works without getting sued by another company that owns his “property”, even though it’s in the public domain.
Endless copyrighting is ridiculous, things just sit collecting dust when people could be adding to them but can’t.
All songs, stories, ideas are mostly rehashed from other great works of the past. Changed slightly and called new....NOW ITS MINE!!! HAHAHAHAH! Yep. That’s exactly how it is, too.
U.S. copyright protection is now 95 years, but Disney gets Congress to extend it every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain so for all intents and purposes, copyrights now last forever.
IMHO, copyright protection should last no longer than patent protection.
It’s very simple, but elites think sheeple are dumba$$es who don’t understand even simple things.
So the elites proceed to try to trick the sheeple.
Copyright is when a sheeple authors something, say a book, a software program or a painting.
Now the sheeple has copyright law to protect the property that he made, so MR. Elite can’t go and make millions of copies of what sheeple authored and sell those copies without sheeples permission; sheeple can therefore make money off what sheeple authors.
Public statements are not copyrightable.
The elite’s website in this case can have copyright over their content, but citing the statements made by Elite Summers on their Elite site is considered Fair Use.
The elites HATE the idea of sheeple making a lot of money for themselves.
So they cite invalid examples to prove that copyright should be abolished completely.
Damn those sheeple !
Sheeple should prosecute the elites so they are punished and removed from society.
Elites hate people - but the WORST people ARE THEM.
Here’s where the concept of ‘copyright’ all started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662
The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 is an Act of the Parliament of England (14 Car. II. c. 33), long title “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.” It was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1863.
The Act was originally limited to two years. The provisions as to importation of books, the appointment of licensers, and the number of printers and founders were practically re-enactments of the similar provisions in an order of the Star Chamber of 1637.
Printing presses were not to be set up without notice to the Stationers’ Company. A king’s messenger had power by warrant of the king or a secretary of state to enter and search for unlicensed presses and printing. Severe penalties by fine and imprisonment were denounced against offenders. The act was successively renewed up to 1679.
Because the elites twist the law to benefit them does not mean we should get rid of laws altogether.
When it’s interpreted reasonably well, copyright law works fine.
Copyrights on not endless, the protect the author and their immediate heirs. If you were an author and had made some money off your work, you’d feel the same exact way I do if someone stole your work and made money off it.
I’m a little guy; the guy everyone wants to take a copy of his work for free. Been going on since I was a kid.
Pay me for my work or do your own work.
I just want my free online movies back. Viooz has been eviscerated.
They should give you a choice when you file ; 20 years, no more, transferable or ; Lifetime of the copyright holder but is public domain upon death. Nontransferable.
They should give you a choice when you file ; 20 years, no more, transferable or ; Lifetime of the copyright holder but is public domain upon death. Nontransferable.
It seems to me intellectual property rights ought to remain in effect indefinitely and be transferrable from one generation to the next. Why should someone who creates a valuable entity lose rights and control over it just because time passes?
As usual, the Founders had it right and every change since has screwed things up.
“Tolkien is dead, but I cannot use his works without getting sued by another company that owns his “property”, even though it’s in the public domain.”
But doesn’t that mean that it is not in the public domain?
Have you failed to notice that the loudest advocates of effectively perpetual copyright and draconian punishments for “piracy” of copyrighted material are not authors, artists or programmers, but the rent-seeking “elites” in the publishing, recording, and movie industries?
The Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote that clause in the Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
They had in mind the Law of Queen Anne, which in Great Britain not only limited the term of copyrights, but limited them to authors — before that publishers could secure royal monopolies on the printing of certain material — and the Law on Monopolies of 1662, which limited the granting of letters patent to inventors.
It says nothing of Congress having the power to secure those rights to publishers, literary estates, or anyone other than authors and inventors. As a strict constructionist, I would argue that the current state of copyright law (and to a lesser extent patent law) are a violation of the Constitution. Alas, our courts have been suborned by commercial interests to read that clause as creating monopoly rights that can be transferred from the author or inventor, monopoly rights which large “elite” moneyed interests jealously guard against the “sheeple”.
Your argument is not an argument for perpetual copyright, but for inalienable copyright, that cannot be transferred to an person (whether natural or juridical) as is now commmonly done as a condition for publication so that the monopoly rights inhere not in the author, but, and in pre-Queen-Anne Britain, in the publisher (usually an “elite” interest), only used to grant permission to publish under terms agreeable to the author
This is what copyleft was supposed to fight. Funny seeing Google go after that kind of freedom to eliminate it.
No laws <-———— Good laws, upheld by courts -————> Draconian Laws Favoring the Elites
“Copyleft” subverts copyright law.
Its dopey idea of imposing its constraints on all derived works should not hold up in courts, but I don’t think it’s ever really been tested.
People - including judges - know that the elites want copyleft and “free software” as it cuts the legs out from under the software entrepreneur.
The Pirate Bay is resolving the issue
You’ve accepted the dubious notion that a government granted monopoly is “property”. Just because rent-seekers call it “intellectual property” and try to confuse us by conflating the reuse of previously developed technology, the quoting of melodic lines, the black-market in digital good of “piracy” and the theft of credit and honor which is what is actually stolen in plagiarism in the phrase “theft of intellectual property” does not make it so.
I suppose you think the world would be a better place if Ralph Vaughn Williams had either never composed Fantasia on the Theme of Thomas Tallis because he couldn’t secure permission to use the theme from whatever corporation held the perpetual rights, or had to pay royalties on the melodic line (ditto for Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini). Maybe we mathematicians should let our discipline grind to a halt by insisting on royalties for use of our theorems, and just to make sure, give that right to our heirs in perpetuity.
And even if you don’t care about music or mathematics (or literature, no Stoppard “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” — the Shakespeare estate wouldn’t release the rights to the characters), have you considered what a dead-weight on the economy all the monopoly rents being paid to the estates or corporations holding rights to old inventions would create, not just in terms of the monies paid, but the cost of maintaining the rights-holding infrastructure in perpetuity? How much should we all be paying the estate of Nikolaus Otto for our car’s engine?
Copyright and patents d*mned well better not really be property, and exercisable in perpetuity because if they are, the world economy (to say nothing of culture) will grind to a halt, and we all descend into a sort of feudalism with copyright and patent lawyers as our overlords.
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