Emily L. Ferguson wrote:
At 9:35 PM +0400 1/2/08, herschel wrote:
I say let's fight for free art.
Herschel
And if art is free how are the people who do keep their own copyrights
supposed to feed, house and clothe themselves?
By selling services people want to buy in a free and open market?
I think by polarizing the discussion to the extreme positions of "no
intellectual property rights of any sort" vs. "permanent ownership
throughout eternity by the creator and his heirs and assigns", we
exclude all possible reasonable positions.
One important thing to remember is that nobody has a right to continue
to make a living the exact way they've been doing it, or any particular
way that somebody theorizes they should be able to have. Technology
(for one example) changes the economics of lots of things, and it's
nearly always for the greater good even if it's for the short-term harm
of some people. I'm sympathetic to (and willing to spend money to
alleviate) the short-term harms caused by changes, but that's not
enough reason to completely rule out any idea for the future that might
cause short-term harm.
I think economic incentives are important (effective), and I think art
and entertainment are important. Therefore I think the system must
allow for a large number of people to make money producing art and
entertainment; it shouldn't all be produced for free by amateurs.
I think cross-references between artworks are an important part of the
ongoing cultural conversation. Therefore I think there has to be a
fairly large and liberal concept of "fair use" or something like it, and
the term of protection for these sorts of artworks needs to be short
enough that a work is still relevant to the cultural conversation when
it loses full protection.
I also think that the question of how the creators get paid shouldn't be
used as an excuse to control (for commercial advantage of a few
companies) how art is distributed and how it is experienced by the end
customers.
"Intellectual property" is a high-level abstraction, and the attempt to
equate it to physical property causes all sorts of confusion and error.
There is nothing comparable to the "natural" fact that only one person
can physically possess a piece of physical property at a time in the
realm of intellectual property. That's why the primary form of
intellectual property of interest in this discussion is governed by
"copy" right.
I see two major practical frameworks for compensating creators.
In the first, every *viewing* is directly paid for. This isn't feasible
for paper books, but the world is moving away from hardcopy or even
analog media, and at least in theory a fully-DRMed world *could* charge
people for every viewing of a film, every reading of a poem (online),
etc. I hate this idea with a passion, for a number of reasons. That
level of DRM will be terribly intrusive, and will essentially remove
people's ability to program their own computers. It'll hold back all
sorts of artistic uses people want to make of the new media. It'll make
it much harder to distribute art in readily-viewable media, reinforcing
control of our cultural expression by a few media conglomerates. It's
abusable by a police state to search for thought-crimes (and we're
already getting into that even here in the USA).
In the second, we attempt to control through ordinary legal means the
commercial distribution of works for profit or in high volume, but don't
try to monitor things at the level of knowing about each individual
viewing. Piracy will be detected and punished after the fact, there
will be no attempt to preemptively prevent it through technical means.
Inevitably, some level of piracy will go uncaught (I'm talking about
commercial-scale piracy). To go with this, we need some explicit
statements about things constituting "fair use" and hence being legal.
#1 on this list, it should be explicitly legal for an individual to
convert a work from one medium to another for his own use (just as
people made cassette tapes from their LPs; that was litigated and found
to be legal). Backup copies should be legal. Format conversions for
convenience and to keep the work usable on newer technology should be
legal. Creators will have the ability to pursue civil actions against
infringers.
People who hoard copies of as many DVDs or CDs as they can lay hands on
aren't commercially significant; those people wouldn't have bought the
vast majority of their collections at commercial prices. It's wrong,
it's illegal, but it's not worth spending enforcement money on, because
shutting those people down wouldn't give any measurable increase in
money to the creators. There also aren't very many of them.
It's reasonable to look at sites and individuals doing large volumes of
file transfers of formats often used for copyrighted works, but there is
still a presumption of innocence here. It's wrong (and technically
hopeless) to shut down the protocols they use, because they're often
used for legitemate purposes (many of the less commercial linux
distributions are shared mostly by bit torrent, for example; and some
people are deliberately releasing their video creations that way; in
both cases the benefit is that they don't have to pay for high-bandwidth
hosting) and they can easily be changed to avoid blocks.
Creators should be sane about when and how they try to enforce their
rights. Many TV shows didn't get popular enough to be released on DVD,
and yet they still have thriving fan groups, who trade copies around.
That's clearly technically illegal, but since the show was never
released on DVD the alternative is for the show to die completely.
Generally, I don't approve of using copyright to make a work unavailable.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/
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Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
