Posted on 12/31/2013 11:19:07 AM PST by zeugma
In a more personal example. We were visiting my wife’s family a while back. going through pictures we found one of a great aunt she had never heard of (even her dad, who would have been a nephew didn’t know of this woman). We took the picture to Walmart to make a copy.
They wouldn’t let us buy a copy because it was a studio photo and didn’t appear to be at least 75 years old.
The aunt is long dead, the photographer- dead.
Remind me who is benefiting from this law and who is it hurting?
Actually per the posting rules and the terms of your license to post here, Jim Robinson now owns the rights to your poem.
The Law has nothing to do with Wal Marts stupid policy
Neither you or Wal Mart would have violated any law by copying that photo.
Take it to Walgreens.
In what way have you heen deprived of your liberty if you have to fill out paperwork and file a fee to maintain copyrights or trademarks?
Your shrill avoidance of even miniscule responsibility being part of receiving a benefit is childish.
You are not defending a right. You are demanding to be free from responsibility. There is a difference.
The heck you say. Extending copyrights provides monopoly rents, at best to literary estates, and at worst to publishers who bought the rights from the actual artist or scientist. I'll warrant there is not a single work of art, music or literature or scientific discovery that has prompted by the thought of life-plus-70 copyright and the monopoly rents that can be generated, but the thought figures prominently in scientific publishers' locking up of scientific papers behind paywalls. The problem with extended copyright is not its effect on consumers, but its effect on producers -- the suppression of derivative works.
According to your position, the world would have been so much better off if Rachmaninoff had had to pay royalties to Chopin's publisher when he composed his Variations on a Theme of Chopin a mere 53 years after Chopin's death. He probably wouldn't have bothered. Do you really propose that Warner/Chappell's copyright on "Happy Birthday to You" (which served such culturally valuable purposes as preventing Star Trek: the Next Generation from using a Klingon translation of the song) and can, at least in theory, be used to file DMCA take-down notices against YouTube footage of children's birthday parties, actually serves the constitutional purpose of copyrights?
Congress did not do anything illegal, just normal corrupt decisions for personal profit as usual, it does nothing to promote the growth of ideas.
Copyrights and Patents are supposed to expire, congress has in fact made them almost immortal, well as long as there is a profit for to be made for themselves they will extend them.
if you don’t pay a fee to secure your home, your car, your hunting permit, your driving permit.......
So you favor more government control over property rights?
You should have to pay a fee to the government to hold on to your private property rights?
It amazes me to see all these Freepers jumping on the government control bandwagon when they see something free on the horizon.
The natural state of man is to covet that which belongs to someone else. Even Conservatives fall to this temptation.
There is no “natural” right to ideas. Never has been. That’s why the Constitution authorized congress to create a limited right to what we now call “intellectual property.
The limit has been strung too far and it now depresses rather than promotes the “progress of science and useful arts”
And yes, you do have to pay fees to government to hold onto you private property. They are called property taxes.
Amazing. I can’t believe I just read that on FREE Republic.
Really, spend some time thinking really hard about how society would work if ideas could be controlled in perpetuity by owners.
Supposing control were possible, it would require an extreme level of government oversight and violence to maintain. Not to mention the never ending lawsuits about whether somebody’s idea was new and unique or merely a rip off of a previous (and owned) idea.
Intangibles simply cannot be treated the same way as tangible property.
Beat me to it. Thanx for the Assuie link. I hadn’t known of that project.
Exactly. Copyright is an artificial state created "property" right. It does not, and cannot exist in nature outside of the restricting force of government. I'm not saying that copyright itself is bad, in and of itself, because that is certainly not something I believe. However, like any other government controlled grant, it can and will be abused by those with the power and money to influence the legislative process to the great detriment to the rest of us. This is where copyright has gone wrong, and helps greatly in making people lose respect for both the process and the law itself.
From a historical perspective, our entire copyright system grew and evolved what from what was once a rather lucrative franchise granted by the king to favored courtiers and printers guilds. Again, it was not a right that you were born with, such as a right to defense of self and family or a right to speak or worship. It was a property interest created by government for its own purposes. As this franchise grew and matured, it was recognised even by statesmen such as those who founded this nation that a private property interest granted for limited time, (14 years originally, renewable once for another 14), would serve the greater good of the citizenry by continually enlarging the pool of the public domain so as to further enrich the culture of us all.
This is not a topic where a casual tossing about of pithy slogans about someone wanting a free lunch is apropos.
P-Marlowe, you have not yet responded to my inquiries here as to whether or not you think it would be proper for the various great-great-great.....grandchildren of Francis Scott Key to be able to charge royalties each time the Star Spangled Banner is sung in a baseball park.
You do a disservice to your namesake, you can't be that clueless.
The music business has its hands full with songs becoming considered "folk art" when they were in fact created by someone. After seeing Inside Llewyn Davis ("It was never new; it will never get old; it's a folk song" or whatever that line was exactly), I then read the book it was partly based on. The issue of ownership is a very big deal in the music business because of that folk-art perception. Interesting that Van Ronk's ex-wife was still talking, after the film opened, about an arrangement that was falsely attibuted (one of the hardest things to copyright). And heaven help the unwary book publisher that prints more than two lines of a song lyric without prior permission.
With the electronic media, the pitfalls are so much greater, and the protections must be in place. If everything became free, all we would see is junk. So be thankful for the industry interests--they protect you too.
One of the biggest problems we have with this entire issue is that corporations and individuals look at this issue from a different perspective. While most of the time corporations seem t have a very limited time horizon, the people in charge also understand that corporations are effectively immortal, so from their perspective, perpetual copyright would be a positive thing. For those of us who live, breathe, and die, perpetual copyright just means more corporate control of everything.
Copyright has become a joke. Nothing will enter the public domain in the U.S. as present law stands until 2019. I look forward to being able to illegally download all of C.S. Lewis's work later this year from the few remaining countries that still have a somewhat reasonable copyright law.
I was trying to point out the historical changes in the publishing industry in the time since the copyright held for fourteen years. The development of publishing into a major industry is what changed copyright.
More and more, publishing is a horse race, as they say in the business. There are many, many books that more or less break even, and some that fail and are produced at a loss, but to make it all worthwhile there are the bestsellers. No one really knows which new books are going to hit the big time. And once an author does “break out,” he or she becomes a valuable commodity that has to be protected in order to finance all the others.
Sometimes a single book becomes a gold mine, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye. That success belongs to the author and the prescient publisher who recognized it. The ones that sell a normal amount of copies are subsidized by these big winners.
Market forces determine what we are most likely read, and that is a good thing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to sift through all the available books that were written as if it were a slush pile.
Uh, no. What changed copyright is a lot of money being fed to congresscritters.
The public domain is a public resource, and shouldn't be traded off to private companies merely because they are better able to bribe legislooters to do their bidding. These companies have stolen the public domain from us, even going so far as having works that had previously reverted to public domain status pulled back from it. It is the publishing industry and the politicians that enable them that are the thieves, not us.
Or you can access them via the "ReadCube" service promoted on the linked website for $3.99.
A McDonald's cheeseburger is kept behind a "paywall" of similar insurmountability.
And why do you think publishers tried to influence Congress? Last time I checked, that was still legal.
I couldn’t disagree with you more that a commercial product should suddenly belong to The People for free, and your views are the most hippy-dippy and communist I can imagine.
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