The Tyranny of Labels
Just about two weeks ago, Robert Boynton wrote a great piece for the Times about the free culture movement. It's not available for free from the Times anymore, though if you run this Google search, you'll find lots of places where it is archived.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation has now launched an attack on "the movement." So let me note two important quibbles I have with an otherwise great article.
First is scope: There is no complete history of this movement that does not mention Pam Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Eben Moglen, and more recently, Julie Cohen. Harvard's an important place in this, no doubt. But it is not accurate to speak as exclusively about Harvard. Litman and Samuelson made these issues salient. Moglen has been guiding the Free Software Foundation since the start.
Second is spin: I know the world loves to simplify, but it is totally misleading to frame this issue as left vs. right. The name "Copy Left" is silly both because it is not true to the real "copyleft" movement -- started by RMS, et al., and because this movement is not a movement of "the Left." Look at the briefs in the Supreme Court in the Eldred if you want a flavor of this. Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman are not leftists.
It is important and great that Boynton's article made these ideas clearer to the world. But for those who read no more deeply than headlines, I'm afraid the real meaning of the Free Culture movement will be lost.
UPDATE: Turns out there is a free link to the Times article still available, but you have to find it using Aaron's amazing tool (which I had stupidly missed before).
UPDATE v2: Tim Phillips comments that the list should include Dennis Karjala and Neil Netanel. Well, actually the list of people who have been writing in this field is extremely long, and Neil's writing -- both about the importance of copyright and the importance of limits to copyright -- is very important. But I didn't mean to describe all of them. Dennis does deserve special mention for the extraordinary work he did at the beginning of the battle over term extensions, and throughout the life of the Sonny Bono Act.
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Comments (20)
Agree 100%.
The other thing that is that the issue is painted as black and white - e.g. either total copyright protection or none - when even outside of the digital world the "edges" of copyright law degrade gracefully to allow realistic "fair use".
Like Lessig said, for those who read no more deeply than the headlines, this will never be understood.
I was wondering what the people here think of the idea of taxing blank media and CD-burners to compensate copyright holders. I find it to be an absolute abomination, but that's because I use those devices to store my own data and other free items. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why I should endorse this scheme over the status quo? And on a related note, why does this idea always focus on compensating the music industry? I'd be willing to bet that if you took the number of pirated copies of Window floating around and multiplied by $300 you'd come up with a much larger number than any figure the RIAA could trot out.
My quibble with this, and I believe there are others who agree with me, is that an iTunes type system does not innovate at all in distribution. It's still stuck in the method of pay X amount to receive product A. And just to add on to that you may only use A with these restrictions (unless I'm mistaken most all pay-per-song downloads have heavy DRM on them).
True innovation will occur when a system is devloped such that deserving people receive payments and yet provide complete freedoms on their work.
Another very minor point is that it should be copyleft, not copy left. I think the /. post pointed this out.
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To Greg Buchholz:
Business Software Association (funded by all the large software corporations) has been going at this a lot longer than the RIAA and MPA. They've raided business' and sent out C&D letters to many people too. They usually don't go after home users because:
A) Home users pirating Windows doesn't add up to much compared to a business, especially since the fines are incredible.
B) When home users get used to using certain software they usually demand their company to have it too. Which then leads to industry standards when a cheaper alternative is just as good or better.
Quoting from pff blog (on our fear that what is essentially fair use will be controlled through an unholy alliance of code and law):
And this failure of the said journalist somehow confirms that the people who fear this are loony leftists?
Likewise for the claim:
Except, of course, when one wants to legally derive from the works published years ago. By the same reasoning, one could argue that since there is no effective control of illegal narcotics, drug companies are perfectly free to produce legal drugs based on those compounds.
[this is where I gave up poking holes in that piece of prose]
If this is the best the opponents of preserving fair use and limiting copyright terms (and advocates of turning our hardware into our enemy) can come up with, it seems we will have to expend the time and energy playing devil's advocate lest we win not by having the right idea but merely because we managed to maintain our intellectual integrity.
I was imprssed with a statement that professor Lessig emailed me at one time: "Criticism is an opportunity for improvement." I am pleased how well Netanel, Fisher, Yu and Litman are working together to create a system of compensation for songwriters. I don't see any destructive competition going on. Perthaps this is the best example of "peer review" we can imagine, and it is not so much different than community collaboration is it? "Build it and they will come." The creation of the Music Database is a daunting task, but I suggest it will require "many hands"--- a community collaboration.
I met with Rep. Rick Boucher last week. The efforts to create a Federal Music Judge are ready to pass Congress, and H.R. 1417 cuts across Party lines. The next step is implementing a collection process. Personally, I favor a quasi-regulatory agency, independent of ASCAP or the Copyright Office. Toward that end I have submitted Netanel's work.
One of the things that annoys me the most about discussions of "copyleft" as a philosophy or movement is that there is often confusion in the tying of projects such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source movement and the Creative Commons. There is a basic philosophical distinction between code and media, be it music or prose or video. Opening code means allowing others to tinker with it, while often opening media is understood to increase access to said media. In this sense, there are ways in which the Creative Commons licenses (some of them, at least) are much more restrictive than the GPL.
There are those artists putting out work that allows remixing of their media, but all too often I see people (usually copyright holders) discussing open access as if that was an equivalence (see: Stephen Wolfram's recent release of A New Kind of Science to the web which I discuss briefly in my blog).
I know the world loves to simplify, but it is totally misleading to frame this issue as left vs. right. The name “Copy Left” is silly both because it is not true to the real “copyleft” movement — started by RMS, et al., and because this movement is not a movement of “the Left.”
sir, how do you define “the left?” can we agree that lenin was a leftist? and marx? if so, how it is “totally misleading“ to place into “the left“ those who believe, along with lenin and marx, that society benefits from the public confiscation or private property? this is the core belief of “the left.“
based on the dark history of “the left“ it is not at all surprising that you would want to distance yourself from the label, but if you do not distance yourself from the ideology you should not complain when the label is properly applied.
I disagree with the blind mice. If the argument is about who is trying to get the government to do what to whose property, one should not lose sight of the fact that IP satutes concern themselves with getting the government to restrict usage of physical property even when the ownership of the physical property is not in dispute. (As in I cannot make copies of this plastic disk that I own onto these other physical disks that I alo own. Or, in the case of DMCA, I cannot even peek into and understand how a device I own works to make it work the way I want!). Take a peek at the libertarian (of the Hayek/Von Mises etc. kind) literature and you will see the legitimacy of intellectual 'stuff' as property is far from uncontroversial even among the holders of that philosophy. If an argument sould be contructed that shows libertarians are in fact Leninist, I would love to see it!
(note that an alternative reply to the mice could involve the 'bit police' and gestapo/Stalin analogies much in the same spirit as involving the Marx/Lenin boogeyman. As things stand today in the US, that probably would be far closer to the truth.)
One of the things that annoys me the most about discussions of “copyleft” as a philosophy or movement is that there is often confusion in the tying of projects such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source movement and the Creative Commons.
Licenses tied to the three philosophies are quite different from each other, but surely we can lump them together as a movement? The 'Free Culture' movement?
I don't see how remixing media is that much different from tinkering with code? Wolfram's stuff is copyrighted, so it's not part of the 'movement'.
three blind mice,
I guess National Review is now hosting Marxist/Leninists.
I guess National Review is now hosting Marxist/Leninists.
yep, a neo-conservative by any other name remains a tyrant.
Bulent Murtezaoglu, you have framed this argument in the only terms which are truly relevant: the balance between individual rights and the tyranny of government. unfortunately, the constitutional debate in america is about something else all together.
as an example, we three blind mice believe the duration of copyright should in principle be equal with that of any other property. land, which is fixed and limited in its extent, is not subjected to a "limited times" restriction and this has not hindered progress. it makes even less sense for ownership of intellectual property, which is an ever expanding volume, to be limited in duration.
our position is that "limited times" is an unnecessary restriction which does nothing to promote progress. (the weakness of all the constitutional arguments for and against in eldred reveals this as so.) by mixing "limited times" and "progress" the authors of the U.S. contitution got this completely wrong and everyone in america suffers because of it.
the ONLY problem with eternal copyright is the lengths to which the government must go to enforce it. the longer a work is in existence, the more it becomes part of the culture, and the greater the lengths which government must go to in order to preserve the exclusivity. from a constutional point of view, this is all that should matter, but because jefferson (whose tangible propery included human beings he kept as slaves) didn't quite understand the basics of intangible property either, americans are stuck arguing non-relevant issues.
it's even more complicated than this because it can also be framed as an issue of individual rights versus individual rights. when it comes to CD recordings, for example, many people say, well, dammit I bought the CD, I have the RIGHT to play the contents on my linux box and any technological means which hinders this is a violation of MY RIGHTS. I have the RIGHT to share this with anyone I care to, etc.
well the other way of looking at this is that what you bought was the expression, not the content. hacking the encryption renders the content subject to piracy which tramples on the rights of the individual artist.
we three blind mice feel the present debate from "the left" is far too focused on the rights of the masses, the rights of non-creative individuals, and too dismissive of the rights of authors and inventors.
based on the history of the past century, the greatest form of tyranny has resulted from the public confiscation of private property - a goal which we believe the EFF and their supporters aim to achieve.
this is very, very much is a debate of right versus left and to pretend it is anything else, as professor lessig would have us believe, is to avoid the real issue. discussing innovation related program activities is not going to get us anywhere.
what we hope Bulent Murtezaoglu is to see this debate continue within the framework of your comments and to approach this honestly instead of hiding it within the obscurities of innovation.
at the same time, we concede that the U.S. constitution says what it says, and the canard of "progress" is very much at the heart of the matter for americans. it is indeed unfortunate this is also used by "the left" as convenient cover for their malicious agenda.
we will continue to argue from the perspective of the rights of authors and inventors in order to provide the balance of opinion which we believe is lacking in this debate.
perhaps together we can arrive at a compromise.
Mice,
I'll leave constitutional law to L. Lessig, but you are right there are two ways of argument here: one is to disregard the current legal situation and argue the philosophical fundamentals and the other is to bicker about what might be practical given the constitution. You seem to imply that the former approach is clear-cut and Jefferson (and many after him) were simply misguided in their assessment of the 'property' status of intellectual 'stuff.' I claim it is perfectly reasonable to be ambivalent about what exactly intellectual property is while simultanously holding other tangible (exhaustible and scarce) kinds of property sancrosanct. That is not necessarly my personal belief but not only can I see the sense in that, many people who'd hardly be considered on the 'left' have solid arguments illustrating that point (check mises.org for example).
If you grant all that, then you end up roughly where the US is wrt IP . That is 'property' status is given to certain kinds of intangible intellectual stuff based purely on utilitarian (and based on 'common good' at that!) reasoning. Given the muddy philosophical underpinnings, I think it is a pragmatic compromise and one that served this country very well.
I disagree both with your characterization and conclusion of what the uncontroversial physical property rights argument wrt technological measures would be. In your CD example you list several issues:
So the point of contention for your example (and mine) is the third item: whether or not the government should prevent the owner of the computer from running a certain program on it. Note that the ownership of the computer or the program is not controversial. My naive view is that it is a trivially obvious recognition of fundamental property rights to assert that the computer owner is doing nothing that the government should concern itself with. I would be very happy, however, to be educated by three blind mice to come to regard that assertion as one supportive of government expropriation of private property!
Speaking of property, I am unsure if LL intended the comments section of his blog to be a medium of banter between three sight-impaired rodents and a guy whose name he can't pronounce. Maybe we ought to drop it?
This is what the comments section of a blog is for. If he didn't want us discussing the things he posted, we wouldn't be able to.
Mostly I want to talk about the mice:
I assume with your references to Marx and Lenin that you are referring to Communism. Apparently you mice haven't figured out that "Soviet-style" communism is not pure big-C ideological Communism. The only lesson we learned about Communism from the previous half-century is that human beings put in a position of power will do everything possible to preserve and extend that power in perpetuity. The Soviet experiment failed because, like all such attempts to bring power to the common man, it was co-opted by its leadership into their own personal gravy train- if indeed it was ever intended to be anything else. So when you start talking about the "dark history of the Left," just remember that it isn't *my* Left.
...and I single individual feel the present debate from "the right" is too focused on the profits of major media conglomerates and dismissive of the creative potential of the public domain.
How much new land has been created in the last 5000 years? None (with the exception of some small volcanic plots); the property rights have just been reassigned and subdivided. Or to take a more parochial view, in the early 1800's I could "create" some new land for myself by moving West and putting up a fence. I didn't have to pay anyone (until the government decided to sell my own land back to me again after declaring it "U.S. Territory" but that's beside my point). Those days are gone; all lands now belong to someone and they expect to be paid to surrender it. No more is being created (unless we start colonizing the Moon and Mars). "Progress" in terms of land creation is at a standstill, and has been for many many years.
But creativity is a (theoretically) limitless resource. The song or short story I write today is not the sum total of my output, I will be able to write more songs and stories as long as I'm alive. If other people "consume" my story by reading it, that doesn't mean I can never write another one. "Progress" in terms of intellectual creation is continuing every day. So the proposed analogy of land property rights and artistic/intellectual property rights is in my view fatally flawed. They are apples and oranges.
Certainly it is unnecessary in the current environment, where it has been rendered totally meaningless and void by repeated extension legislation and strict constructionist court judgements ("as long as there is a limit, it's OK no matter how long it is"). Your mousey dream has already come to be, and look where it's taking us: endless fees, restrictive licenses, technological innovation at the direction of the courts...is this truly a "free society"? Freedom has been crushed at the feet of the almighty dollar. What is freedom, mice? Freedom only accessible to those who can pay?
...and by your tone, such confiscation for the good of all is something to be abhorred. Far better for creators to be able to withhold the benefits of their creations unless and until they are paid whatever amount they feel proper. Imagine if I invented the cure for AIDS or cancer; how many millions (billions!) could I gouge out of the public for the right to use my formula to save their lives! This is surely the dream of the big pharmaceutical companies. Yes, I know drugs are patented, not copyrighted, but the effect is the same. If I write the Great American Novel and then extort millions from some publisher for the right to print it, it is extortion notwithstanding that it is legal. And until my price is met, the public do not benefit from my novel- they are therefore indirectly harmed. Even after publication, if my novel is priced so high (due to my copyright-driven extortion racket) that only the affluent can afford it, those who cannot afford it are still harmed by not being able to read it. They have to depend on libraries stocking it, and then they have to wait until it is returned by the previous borrower. If my publisher decides that sales of my novel in Wyoming aren't going to be enough to recover their costs of distributing it there, it won't be released in Wyoming. It is in no case better than if I had released it completely free of charge into the world. Confiscation for the public good is just that: good.
However, we have decided (or rather, our Western Civilization has decided for us) that property is a concept we want to adopt. In order to live in this society, we have to exchange our creative product for money. From a creator's standpoint, I want to get the maximal value out of my creations in terms of money; perpetual copyright makes perfect sense from that point of view. But the price of that copyright is the deprivation of the benefits of my creation from those who cannot afford to pay; they will NEVER benefit except maybe in peripheral ways (from the actions of those who are able to pay). So the compromise we tried to strike was to secure the exclusive copyright for a "limited time"; long enough for the creator to extract a reasonably good value from the creation but short enough to allow society at large to benefit from it reasonably closely thereafter.
I think we have given the creators too much support (heresy!). The pendulum has swung too far towards their side; their copyright is effectively perpetual, and the non-paying public will never get full benefit from their creations. We will never know what forms those benefits may have taken, because we will never get to see them. And really, in general we are not supporting the creators at all; we are supporting massive distribution operations that not only have to pay the creators for exclusive licenses for their creations but also must add on top of that profits for themselves. Those distribution operations sprang up because of the difficulties of physical distribution; difficulties which are now going away.
This has gotten very long and I will stop. But I think the mice are way off-track here.
Bulent Murtezaoglu, anyone who lives outside the four corners of american jurisprudence cares not a whit for the straightjacket of the u.s. constitution. patents and copyrights are international issues and ones which should not be held hostage to the constraints enshrined in the u.s. constitution by the muddled thinking of slave owners. jefferson was eloquent, but not intelligent and his eloquence obscured a great deal of plain, old, simple-minded ignorance. deal with it and please don't burden the rest of the world with it.
•He bought the CD: yes he owns the plastic and the metal and it is advertised to encode a particular set of music. This is fine, I think we both agree.
yep.
•He plays it on his Linux machine. Well, he was sold the music with the understanding that he could listen to it. The computer is HIS property, so clearly he can run whatever program he wants on it (assume the machine is not networked). So he plays the CD there. Again, perfectly reasonable, no property rights of either kind is violated. I think we are in agreement.
not entirely, he has broken his agreement with the copyright owner by separating the content from the expression. there is a violation of the copyright, but a small one whose impact on the copyright owner is probably minimal and maybe within the scope of fair use.
Now comes the technical measure impeding his use of HIS hardware. This user knows how to bypass it — he has a program running on HIS hardware that enables him to play the music he bought. This is where we diverge. You want him arrested, I regard him as doing a perfectly fine thing with his property (that is, his computer) and the musician/publisher’s (that is the musical melody he was sold).
full stop Bulent Murtezaoglu. if DVD Jon wants to play his DVDs on his linux box – fine (this is what the norwegian court said.) it is a little "c" crime and the impact on the copyright owner is minimal. if DVD Jon wants to show how clever he is and share his code breaking expertise with others so that they may do the same, then arrest that man. (unfortunately norwegian law doesn’t make this a crime – yet). the impact of DVD jon’s actions in spreading his hack have serious implications for the copyright owner.
•He reproduces the CD and gives a copy to his friends (let us assume the music is one year old and the copyright protection has not been waived). There we both agree he’s in violation of the law as he well should be.
agreed. and if he posts an MP3 on Grokster, he is also in violation of the law and should be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
So the point of contention for your example (and mine) is the third item: whether or not the government should prevent the owner of the computer from running a certain program on it.
no, the point of contention is whether or not it should be legal to circumvent technological protections AND share these hacks with others. it is the effect of one’s action on the copyright owner which is, for us, the guiding principle.
getting back on topic, ignoring the impact of grokster's P2P technology on the copyright owner and arguing that it fosters "technological innovation" is completely and utterly irrelevant to the issue which is at the heart of the matter - i.e. Grokster's deleterious effect on the copyright owner.
How much new land has been created in the last 5000 years?.... “Progress” in terms of land creation is at a standstill, and has been for many many years.
rob, you’ve obviously never been to the netherlands.
i think we have given the creators too much support (heresy!). The pendulum has swung too far towards their side; their copyright is effectively perpetual, and the non-paying public will never get full benefit from their creations.
rob, here is another heresy for you: patents and copyrights do not encourage creativity. what they encourage is disclosure and dissemination. unless inventors and authors feel safe in sharing their inventions and writings with others, they always have the option of keeping them secret and where is the public benefit in that?
the mice did not say that we favor perpetual copyright, what we argue is that in economic principle there should be no difference between the perpetual ownership of land (a more or less fixed resource) and of writings and inventions (a sphere of limitless dimension). the difference is that land is tangible, easily delineated, easily fenced off, and easily protected. the level of governmental tyranny on other individuals and the public at whole (the views of the sierra club notwithstanding) necessary to enforce perpetual land ownership is limited.
intangible property, on the other hand, requires a completely different level of governmental tyranny to enforce perpetual exclusivity. it is this reason, and only this reason, why limited times makes sense. outside of america, this should be the basis of the argument and not the unrelated, or at best tangential, concept of “progress.” the ameican debate is, however, restricted by the intellectual security fence of “progress” and those who argue this as a universal principle are doing the world a disservice.
Confiscation for the public good is just that: good.
this is what marx argued in the 19th century and what robert mugabe is saying today: that the workers must own the means of production. marx didn't expect that his economic model would become the tool of a tyrant like mugabe, but pretty much everywhere his ideas have been placed into practice they have been co-opted by tyrants.
has there been even a single exception to this? anyone?
rob, if you keep running an experiment and get the same result, it is theory which should be attacked, not the experiment.
Hmm. My initial interest was making clear that there was no Marx or any other boogeyman involved in people wanting to run whatever software they own on their hardware. That seems to have happened, but:
The mice say:
There is no affect on the copyright owner because there is no copyright owner to be affected there. One guy figures out how to use some IP+nuisance sans the nuisance (fairly, no crime there of any kind) and tells the other how. No property rights have been violated yet and you want both guys arrested? For making use of their computers (did I mention the computers were their property?) and talking to each other? The story that goes with this seems to be: talking/communicating this information about the use of their property is so insanely dangerous that potential violations of copyright trumps both basic property rights and freedom to communicate. I am sure you are aware of the locksmith analogy, but given some of the methods of protection used (the autorun thing for example) this is analogous to arresting people for teaching their kids how to walk (because they might cross the property line).
That is not an uncontroversial position. That said, by itself, it would have been fine. But that is not your only position:
We are right back to public benefit here! So, do we legislate and trample over other property rights so people's fields are planted? (well yes we do, for farmers' votes^W^W to see to it that the public has a reliable food supply, but not on the basis of yet 'other' property rights). If your music is your property, fine. It resides in your head, the gov't doesn't force you to sing it and you most certainly can protect it with contracts if you are judicious in drawing them. Or, somebody pays you and you make it public. That would be perfectly OK. Enter the government, not as the protector of property but as a coercive agent for public good (very much an idea from the left BTW). What will you have the government say? It seems you'll have it say "to encourage sharing through ensuring economic viability not only will we recognize these intangibles as property, we will also prevent the manufacture (not just use) of all other property that could potentially be used to circumvent technological protections added to limit fair use and prevent illegal reproduction." Note that this is far more government coercion than the one you allude to as being necessary in making copyright perpetual.
I will leave it to CC/LL to show that there is actually more 'public benefit' from limited terms than both no copyright or unlimited terms. To my mind, the public good argument clearly fails to imply perpetual copyright. A property rights argument might work --if we stipulate there is no problem with intellectual stuff being property-- but even then it granting IP this 'super property' status remains unjustified.
As always, the mice make eloquent arguments with which I fundamentally disagree. I lack the luxury of time to thoroughly read into this excellent discussion, so I hope that the mice will forgive me for my obvious nit-picking on what stood out to me on a glance.
as an example, we three blind mice believe the duration of copyright should in principle be equal with that of any other property. land, which is fixed and limited in its extent, is not subjected to a “limited times” restriction and this has not hindered progress. it makes even less sense for ownership of intellectual property, which is an ever expanding volume, to be limited in duration.
-- I wonder how the mice equate rivalrous resources to non-rivalrous resources and how those differences affect CD versus real estate prices.
And of course, my challenge to the mice and all others who espouse the need for copyright enforcement in the digital realm remains: Prove the harm to your business or admit that your business model has failed to keep up with technology and the desires of your customers. I have an open mind, but I remain unconvinced that a teenager that downloads one song from Britney Spears has somehow deprived the Recording Industry of the sale of her latest CD. I also note the fact that I (and everyone I advise in such matters) eschewed using TurboTax last year because of their use of product activation, yet this year I made it a point to purchase their software (and refuse to let others "borrow" it) in order to recompense them for NOT treating their customers as a priori thieves.
--Jason
rob, if you keep running an experiment and get the same result, it is theory which should be attacked, not the experiment.
Pfffft. Drop two objects with hugely disparate masses to the floor (feather, pencil) and tell me how the pull of gravity can be seen as equal on both.
You need the right conditions. Largescale state ownership of property hasn't been given the chance yet.
Ok, state ownership has an ominous ring to it. Largescale nonexistence of individual ownership. Nobody *has* to own intellectual property.
We're having a philosophical discussion with mice. Life imitates art; Douglas Adams would be amused.
The mice squeaked:
You're back to arguing the Betamax case again. I don't question that there is potential harm in having perfect digital copies of movies and songs available on the P2P networks. The industry advocates have a reasonable argument: if people have full and free access to their products, why would anyone pay for them? Of course they wouldn't, but this line of argument ignores all kinds of issues. Not everyone has free access. I pay a huge monthly charge ($42.95) for broadband cable access; that's not free. And that only gets me connected; I have to have the knowledge to get and run the software, spend the time going over the listings of what is on offer, download the stuff (even with broadband, movies running into the gigabytes take hours to bring down), burn a CD or DVD (which takes more software, hardware and time)...my time has value, even if it's leisure time. "Free" downloads are most definitely not free. I can save all that time and effort by running down to Best Buy and buying the DVD rather than burning it myself- and that's what I and millions of others do every day, even in an environment where all this "free" media is out there for the taking. All that has to happen is that the cost of buying the industry's product costs less to me than the time I would spend getting it for "free," and the industry still gets their sale. So where is the deleterious effect on the copyright owner? That he can't extort as *much* profit from me as he might have been able to do before? I'll take that effect every time in exchange for the freedom to not have to be as good a programmer as DVD-Jon in order to watch my DVDs on unsupported operating systems.
Nor to Japan, where some oceanic land-reclamation projects have also been done. But these efforts, while locally significant and admirable, are paltry in the grand scheme of things. I can't just pack up and go to the Netherlands and lay a claim on some land for myself, while I can plunk myself down at my typewriter and bang out a short story any time.
There isn't any, but you're assuming that in a world of complete freedom from copyright that no creator would release their work; and I just don't think that's true. Perfect copies of Vermeer and Van Gogh have not reduced the value of the originals. Copies of The Last Samurai were available online within days of the movie's release on Dec. 7th 2003, yet it still grossed $105 million through January 25th in the US alone.
I think we both agree in some measure on that point. Remember, the "Copy Left" are not (generally) arguing for complete removal of all copyright protection everywhere. They (we) are asking for a return to sanity, to reasonable periods of protection followed by release to the public domain. Under ideological Communism such protection would be unnecessary, but we are not living under such a system and must therefore compromise.
Duly noted. I would only point out that what America adopts tends to influence if not dictate what the rest of the world adopts, and therefore whatever influences color our debate will similarly be reflected worldwide.
If you keep running the experiment improperly, you absolutely can attack the experiment. People thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the Earth. The Earth was long thought to be the center of the universe. Men tried to fly for decades before the Wright brothers figured out how to do it. The sound barrier was thought to be physically impossible to break. Just because an experiment fails doesn't automatically mean the premise is invalid; you have to eliminate all other factors that might have led to that failure first.
The following is in response to several general
points in several comments made by "three blind mice"
in this specific blog. I am not going to quote
any of their comments lest I am accused for
stealing their property, as per their definition.
"three blind mice" need to remember that in
the U.S., we have eminent domain and right-of-way.
Although property rights are highly valued in our
society, they are not without limitations. The
property owners can't prevent people from crossing
the former's properties to get to the latter's own
properties. Also, the property owners can't
prevent the public from taking their properties
for the public good such as school or highway.
According to my vague recollection, there was
a case in Hawaii where a property owner owned
too much of the land in Hawaii that he was able
to control the rent for the apartments. He was
ordered by court to sell some of his land so
that there would be better distribution of land
across different property owners that would
provide competition.
Likewise, we have antitrust law that prevents
any individual or entity from using their
property rights to oppress other individuals
and entities. AT&T controlled most of the
telephone system and was ordered to break
up into smaller regional entities.
Just because we have eminent domain, right
of way, and antitrust law does not make us
Marxists. We do recognize many benefits in
property rights but too much benefits can become
a vice. Iron is very important to our body
but too little or too much iron can be harmful
to our body.
Just like that non-intellectual property rights
have limitations, intellectual property rights
have limitations. The limitations imposed on
the intellectual property rights are limited
times and freedom of speech and press. That is
how we have the fair use doctrine in the U.S.
copyright law. The fair use doctrine came from
the First Amendment. This is one area (freedom
of speech and press) that "three blind mice"
continually ignores. We don't think that it is
pragmatically right for people 100 years (average
term of life plus 70 years) from now to be
restricted by the copyright owners in how
they can use works that would have gone into
the public domain. 100 years are long enough
for the copyright owners to exploit their
intellectual property rights.
"three blind mice" also used a flawed
analogy between non-intellectual and
intellectual property rights. Just because
they share the same phrase "property rights"
do not mean that they should be treated the
same. If that were true, copyright owners
will have to pay tax on their intellectual
property rights, just in the same way as the
property owners pay tax on their non-intellectual
property rights. But, that is a flawed
analogy. Chemists know that just because two
different chemicals who have very similar
structure of molecules do not necessarily
have the same properties. In the same way,
there are many different categories of
rights and it is illogical to conclude that
all of them must have the same properties.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo@voicenet.com>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.