We need a massive, concerted effort to widely distribute digitally, for free, the works of all the authors who would have entered public domain. It's clear that negotiating with our leaders has failed; the free and open internet that has served us so well in the preceding decades is closing faster than ever and our only hope is digital civil disobedience.
Whilst "digital civil disobedience" is all well and good, breaking their rules won't help us break their will.
The last bastion of hope is a "union of the consumers", where we collectively punish and break companies that we collectively see as dangerous to the future of our world.
We only need to tear down one company to be able to set off a chain reaction. Once consumers realise the power they hold as a well organised and effective collective, the people can pull back some of the power from the corporation (and our governments to which they now hold the power over).
Corporations can't survive without income and customers. Every day we vote with our wallets without giving it a second thought. It's time we started to appreciate that fact.
How will this work practically? Let's say we want to try this just for a month. Make a list of such companies and try not to spend our money with them. First of all, making this list itself isn't that simple, because of confusing and ever changing murky corporate structures (apps like buycott [1] can help here). In many industries, a handful of players control the entire market - just 3 or 4 companies control meat supply in the US, Monsanto controls a huge portion of seeds and so on. In the end we'll probably end up with a list of couple of dozen companies in our "bad list" and our options to shop (even the basic necessities) will be severely limited. Not saying it can't be done, it is just difficult to do it without some serious collective effort. It is definitely a good exercise to brainstorm ideas though, we gotta start somewhere.
SpiderOak isn't "better" than DropBox. It supports privacy but the service and support is utterly appalling.
I was getting upload speeds on the order of kilobytes per second on a gigabit fiber connection while my CPU was idling. Filed a support request and they bumbled around a bit and then ceased responding to me entirely until I opened another ticket and demanded a refund. It took 5 __months__ to get to this point, with them not responding for weeks at a time.
[2]
This requirement has actually loosened to some degree because the latest version of Syncthing introduced relay servers. So you still need to provide available storage servers, but you can use relays to overcome partitions in your network.
The first requirement is the one that kills SyncThing for me and why Syncany is more appealing.
To sum up my reasons very quickly:
- I want to store my data offsite, where it isn't vulnerable to breakins, fire, water damage etc.
- I have no offsite storage I can trust completely.
- Syncthing only supports storing plaintext on disk.
Therefore I can't use syncthing to securely and remotely store data.
This is where Syncany wins. You don't have to trust the storage endpoint.
Also, Syncthing requires having a CPU attached to your remote storage, meaning your remote options are limited to a VPS or dedicated server. This is significantly more expensive than buying block storage from Google or Amazon.
Competing with them with a decentralized corporation is the only option here. They will manage to work around any boycotts by rebranding products through alternate channels.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Some German Cinemas have refused to show any Disney movies for months, and are still discussing if they’ll show Star Wars at all.
Disney wants far more of the profit the cinemas make, which is already next to nothing, and for some cinemas would lead to them paying Disney more than they have in income.
>The last bastion of hope is a "union of the consumers", where we collectively punish and break companies that we collectively see as dangerous to the future of our world.
You aren't likely to ever get the majority on board just for the sake of a boycott.
But if you make it so the products are completely free, safe to use, easy to obtain, and publicly supported as moral even if technically illegal, you can get the public to engage in a boycott of at least electronic media or media easily made electronic.
Well, if we could break Disney while letting lawmakers know it's not because we want Porno Mickey, but because that little freak of nature is anal raping our constitution, maybe that would do it.
You're being downvoted for extreme comparisons, but I can bet none of the downvoters has even heard of, let alone read, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[0]. I've read it, and used similar wording as parent in my reaction.
Well, I could have been a little more subtle in my choice of words. But it's really frustrating to know that one simple cartoon character is doing so much damage.
Edit: Actually, I think it's not so much my choice of words, but that this is HN and there's plenty of people here who are interested in copyright lasting infinity less one day.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of consumers don't know or care enough about copyright to form a union. And you can't have any leverage as a union if you are a small minority of the entire consumer-base.
And many of those that do know and care simply don't care enough to stand by their principles (or simply would rather pirate stuff in private - which doesn't have the same impact as a union).
> Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott (Hebrew: חוק למניעת פגיעה במדינת ישראל באמצעות חרם, התשע"א-2011), also commonly known as the Boycott law, is an Israeli Anti-boycott law that was approved in the Knesset on 11 July 2011. The law has been widely criticised.
I strongly believe that Israel has a right to exist but laws like these do not give me hope for the Israeli people if they are complacent or (worse) supportive of these repressive laws.
> I strongly believe that Israel has a right to exist but
I don't get how questioning fascism becomes a question over a state's legitimacy. Could you imagine if someone said that the USAPATRIOT Act brought into question the USA's right to exist?
Wow, I didn't even think about it as I wrote it. I think I wrote it because I needed to remind myself. I guess somehow I have put it in my head that people who oppose anything that the government of Israel does is likely an enemy of Israel. You're right. Reality is not so black and white. I know I criticized George W Bush right here in the US about the "either you're with us or you're against us" dichotomy. Kind of makes me a hypocrite when I don't see my own bias on the same topic when it comes to Israel.
It is absolutely possible to (and indeed we should encourage people to) speak up against the bad actions and policies of the government of Israel. Doing so does not make us enemies of Israel. This is so very simple and logical in any other context but I have to stop and think when it comes to this issue. I think I was trying to convince myself that I am not doing or saying anything that could hurt.
Perhaps by reaffirming my support for the right to exist hurts rather than helps the situation. I didn't think of that. I feel pretty stupid.
The fact that you feel the need to do this is evidence of how powerful their propaganda machine is: even criticizing an objectively awful law we feel the need to go out of our way to assure our audience that we are not hate-filled antisemites as a precaution, because of how often any criticism no matter how valid is instantly written off as hateful antisemitism.
Because Israel's right to exist is constantly attacked by many people, to the point that any criticism of them may be interpreted by some as a criticism of their legitimacy, whether that's a logical assumption or not. Unfortunately, to effectively communicate you often have to write for other people's (sometimes mistaken) assumptions about what you may mean.
> Could you imagine if someone said that the USAPATRIOT Act brought into question the USA's right to exist?
If there was a large and vocal group of disenfranchised Native Americans which an active, extremist and violent military faction, then yes, I could imagine it. I wouldn't agree with it, but I could imagine it happening.
if Native Americans are only now begining to complain about their rights being taken away, because a law was passed stripping the rights of their settler/conquerors, they're probably a few hundred years too late, and badly misdirected.
A more apt comparison would be the natives taking the Great Treaty of 1722 (or its violations) to be the reason why the United States is illegitimate as a country. That might actually be an interesting argument.
> if Native Americans are only now begining to complain about their rights being taken away
That wasn't really the point of my argument, which was hypothetical, and to match the situation in Israel would mean that Native Americans would have always had a somewhat similar stance as the theoretical one presented. I'm not trying to mix current Native American sentiment into the discussion.
> A more apt comparison...
That depends on your goal. Mine was to provide a hypothetical but somewhat equivalent situation to possibly put your statement in a new perspective.
> That might actually be an interesting argument.
It probably is, but I'm inadequately educated on the topic currently to make any useful arguments in any direction on that. :/
Interesting. Since the difference between not buying something and a boycott is communicating your intentions to the public, I think this is really a restriction on speech.
>breaking their rules won't help us break their will.
It seems to have worked for movies and music. We broke the rules and shared the product, they entered the online market and started offering a product people wanted, people bought it.
I'm not interested at all in playing by their rules. I'm interested in preserving access to our cultural artifacts. Keeping work from the people after the death of the author is pure greed and we shouldn't stand for it.
Frankly, I think the only plausible way to deal with this is to compete with it. That is part of what Creative Commons is about.
Culture is getting dull. As we continue to extend these copyrights to protect Mickey, we dilute our own creative potential.
And I'm not sure Mickey is worth it. Disney makes an empire out of the Brothers Grimm, and refuses to give back.
That's the problem.
People can't easily understand what is being lost either. That's the other problem.
Personally, I find myself less inclined to participate. Rehashes of the same stuff just doesn't appeal. But, many people are fine with it all, or they don't realize the difference in overall "vibrancy" possible.
Thanks to the rules in the agreement, the license holders can ignore me and sue my government (who I assume will gladly settle), and I'll pay for the content in my taxes anyway...
> It's clear that negotiating with our leaders has failed
I don't think that's quite white happened. It seems more like, our leaders have had their power stolen from them; they couldn't take the public's side even if the tried. Here, we have a policy decision - copyright duration - over which the legislature has traditionally had authority. But the decision was made by a group of diplomats and corporations, without legislative input or access. I don't think our leaders have real access to public opinion on this issue; wherever the decisions are made, corporations create a bubble of disinformation to conceal our ire.
Isn't distribution done by third-party services either? Kindle store or iTunes store aren't copyright holders, for example.
The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.
>The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.
I think part of the idea is that whether the creators are dead or not, having copyright and "unrelated people feed off", still maintains an economy over the item and gives it monetary value. Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.
E.g. Disney only being able to create or allow the creation of Mickey Mouse stuff (t-shirts etc), leads to a large business for them, taxes for US etc. (Plus pays a lobby to ensure longer copyright). If Mickey Mouse was suddenly public domain, that would stop and its characters would be devalued very fast, with everybody competing with ever cheaper products with him on.
And they would come up with some other creative character with a new copyright duration, thus enriching our public culture with their previous works and employing people to create new works for people to enjoy.
Twenty years ought to be enough to recoup your investment, but I'm open to compromise. In any case, (rougly) 150 years, as it currently is, is way, way, way, way, way, way way too long.
>And they would come up with some other creative character with a new copyright duration, thus enriching our public culture with their previous works and employing people to create new works for people to enjoy.
Isn't letting them keep their copyright for long, an even stronger inventive for OTHERS to come up with some new characters? (in order to compete with them).
Maybe. It also stifles other creative endeavors that could be done with those characters by other authors. Lots of cool stuff is done with things in public domain (think Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, plenty of others), and I don't buy an argument that people would stop creating new things if they could simply copy someone else's.
Until you realize the source material that made Disney what it is today is mostly in the public domain (while even their oldest adaptations aren't and -- if Disney have their will -- never will be).
Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.
Really? Copyright is siloing off culture in unprecedented ways. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is under copyright by his estate, and will be until the 2040s. It can't be used by anyone without paying (large) licensing fees to his estate, even though they had literally nothing to do with the creation of the speech.
Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright.
There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?
A famous stained-glass window in a church in my home town was heavily censored (i.e. publishing photographs of it resulted in legal threats, fair use or not) because the estate of the late artist who created it vigorously enforced his copyright. High-resolution photographs were available for free of every stained-glass window on the church website, except for this one. At times there were even talks about covering it up physically because of claims about public display licensing issues. The artist in question likely didn't see any of this coming during his lifetime.
Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.
>Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.
I think you have the whole process upside down. Digital media already has no value, and it can already be copied freely.
The changes in the law that Disney and other copyright maximalists are doing is attempting to re-value digital media. So, the only option open to them is to push for ever more draconian laws simply to protect their broken and outdated business models.
That's not true. Mickey Mouse himself is protected by trademark, which never expires as long as it is vigorously defended by the rightsholder. Copyright expiration would only affect those old, old films starring Mickey.
The law is like a magic spell invisibly binding the hands of people by soft power and binding the hands of people through the law enforcement by hard power.
The problem with hard power is, that it is expensive. If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully. Instead, the government needs cooperation of the people by formulating the law in ways that are acceptable to the people. By providing thought systems propagated through school and media appropriate patterns are engraved in the nations minds. People need to either think "this law is just" or "i don't want to go to jail for that" or "i don't want to lose everything that i hold dearly" or "i don't want my family to starve" for the spells of the law to work.
We are more and more coming to a point where the proponents of copyright law must either step up the propaganda, the enforcement or change the law.
>The problem with hard power is, that it is expensive.
Only for total enforcement, and only when the technology is not advanced enough to make even that cheap.
Here's a hypothetical example: with widespread internet surveillance, you could just charge people immediately on the first sign of them pirating something -- take the money off of their bank accounts/salary, kind of the same way one gets a traffic ticket through camera surveillance, but even faster.
>If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully.
Who said that they don't? It's often not the police state that fails, it is the state in general, and for other reasons.
Is there any indication that this has an overall limit of 95 years as per the U.S. Copyright? ("Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date."[0])?
This cannot be stressed enough, that the real losers here aren't people who want to remix ultra-famous copyrighted works-- it's that works that nobody cares to profit upon will remain orphaned.
If there is one protection to the Public Domain that needs to take place, it's that copyright owners should have to show a willingness to profit off their material (by paying a recurring fee) so we don't experience this deadweight loss.
Copyright protection does more than generate profit. For example copyright provides the teeth for the GPL, and the various CC license requirements.
In general, I think the concept of tying copyright explicitly to profit and fees could produce a pretty strong chilling effect on hobby projects and other free culture.
I'd prefer to see some sort of safe harbor defined for people to archive orphaned works, or otherwise keep track of them. Active copyright holders could opt out of the safe harbor on a regular basis via some centralized process akin to registration. If their opt-out lapses, the safe harbor returns.
The difference is that the safe harbor would be narrowly defined to permit archiving, but not free distribution or reuse. That way a community can keep track of things, but there is no radical shift in the protections that rest on copyright.
"Significant among those changes were the elimination of the registration and notice requirements, which resulted in less accurate and incomplete identifying information on works, and the automatic renewal of copyrighted works that were registered before the effective date of the 1976
Copyright Act." [0]
Bringing back registration and ending automatic renewals would do a lot of good. (Adding a fee would be better.) Has there been any work on laws to do this?
The problem is the Berne convention explicitly forbids requiring registration for a work to enjoy the benefits of copyright. The USA ratified this convention in 1989.
However, I agree with you. There needs to be some mechanism pushing back on copyright holders encouraging them to let their works revert to the public domain. A nominal fee at regular intervals would go a long way to encouraging this. However, perhaps something more aggressive is needed. Since the advocates of increased copyright duration often phrase their argument in terms of "intellectual property", perhaps a copyright property tax would be more appropriate.
"OK Disney, you can keep the mouse out of the public domain, but that will be $50M/yr."
EDIT: It appears she hasn't pushed ahead copyright formalities (in the form of the Eldred Act) much since 2005. Here's hoping something new comes up...
The general rule is that copyright terms are never reduced. Some of the countries in TPP signed up for the Berne convention before 1978, which means that the US method would reduce the length of some copyrights.
Have the copyright extensions actually been upheld in court? Nothing stops a legislator from passing an unconstitutional law, but if nobody fights it then it won't get struck down.
> 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.
Depends on how you literally minded you read it and how the Supreme court feels:
1) Any copyright or patent that does not promote Science of Useful arts is unconstitutional
2) Only written words are protected, not visual or software.
3) There should be some limitation on the term but it could be way past couple of googols in years.
and so on. The constitution is (un) intentionally vague in a lot of places.
4) Copyright cannot extend past the life of the author, since only the author can have exclusive rights to his writings. I.e. copyright is non-transferable to heirs, corporations, etc.
Do you think I'm being paranoid if I thought that the author/copyright holder would suddenly have an "accident" if their death meant it would end the copyright?
In the Eldred v. Ashcroft case the Supreme Court upheld infinitely extended copyright terms. The only two judges that dissented were Breyer (presently the best on intellectual property issues) and Stevens (previously the best before retiring in 2010).
Public Domain's Number One Enemy = Mickey Mouse. Until there is some way to protect Disney and not have its IP placed in public domain we will never have nice things again in the public domain.
Boycott anything which uses Mickey mouse /at all/ , and which is produced/owned by an entity which has license to use Mickey mouse, or license to use it in that way?
(So, not things that use Mickey mouse without getting license, but yes anything which licenses from Disney to use the littlest bit of the ears.)
So, if a Disney toy has it on the packaging as a logo, don't buy it, or on a tag, or on a receipt etc. etc. (Provided that the use is not ip infringement)
The goal being to make it so that using the micky mouse likeness in a licensed way does not increase income (ideally, reduces it), so there is no longer an incentive to "protect" the ip.
So, kingdom hearts, Disneyland, most Disney toys, etc etc.
Until there is a solution for Mickey Mouse the millions of dollars will keep everything behind copyright. We solve that one we will have Public Domain again.
1. Organize a local event or travel to DC in the week of Nov. 14, there is a 90-day window to mobilize opposition to TPP, https://www.eff.org/event/global-week-actions-against-tpp-tt.... EFF actions in DC will coincide with APEC meetings in the Philippines, where US officials (including trade reps) will push the TPP, and EFF Philippine allies will have mass protests.
2. Remember how many companies rallied against SOPA? Ask your tech employer to issue a public statement on TPP and digital rights. Create a public list that links to company statements. TPP unfairly advantages legacy business models at the expense of emerging business models. It is not about "elites" vs. "citizens", it is about crony insider companies vs. all other companies.
3. Ask organizations like Wikipedia, Archive.org, Google, Facebook to run banners to raise awareness about TPP, asking users to flood TPP governments with calls for representation. Companies and citizens have never had so many channels for rallying opposition. If TPP (and TTIP and TISA later) passes, those channels may be limited in the future. Use them or lose them. We not only need to stop each of these bad agreements, we need to reduce incentives for future bad agreements. They are a DDoS on the legislative process, at the expense of opportunities to create sensible rules which support technology innovation and the goals of modern civil society.
I put up most of the TPP on genius.com yesterday [0]. All chapters from 0 to 30 are there except for chapter 20 and the annexes of chapters 2, 12, and 15. I am still working on reformatting the text since formatting is lost when copying from a PDF to an HTML textbox.
I still have not heard back from genius.com support about some of the technical issues I am having: I can't delete/move chapter 20 with the rest, and new chapters do not appear in the collection list ("album" in genius parlance).
If you know anyone with legal expertise who is willing to annotate a few places, please forward them to [0]. Alternatively, please retweet [1]. If you want to read the US government's take on the TPP, this link has a summaries before the full text in each of the chapters [2].
Summary: international trade deals involve a lot of tradeoffs in various sectors of a country: e.g. throwing textiles under the bus in order to get some advantages in automotive. If the initial negotiation of the treaty was open, special interest groups would make massive amounts of noise and no country would be able to come to agreement. Once the treaty is done being written, then countries can debate it internally, in its entirety. There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over.
But that argument stops working once certain industry groups do get access to the negotiations, which I thought was the case here.
Also, this agreement goes way beyond a simple trade deal; parts on this undermine the very basis of our democracy and justice system. I don't see how any democratic country can possibly agree to this.
Not only our democracy and justice system, but the systems of the other signatory countries as well. For many of them, the TPP will result in loss of relative sovereignty to the American multi-national corporations that are privy to the details of the deal-- Novartis being the biggest pusher in the pharma aspects of the deal as they relate to copyright.
It's kind of a shame that an otherwise-useful treaty that could lead to great cooperation and improved trade between important markets is so marred by these unconscionable IP terms. Reminds me of a similar treaty in Europe a couple years ago that got struck down in its entirety due to its ridiculous IP terms. I forget the name.
Secret, but not secret. Secret from the less powerful industries, small and medium businesses, not remotely secret from the more powerful ones. Secret from Non-US industry, not secret from those industries that own congress. Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf. So we all think it's corrupt, nice isn't it?
Let's just call it what it actually is rather than this lip-service bullshit to a reason that is clearly not being honoured. I'm extremely in favour of free trade deals, but you can ruin anything with corruption and that's what is happening here.
Take down your tariffs and subsidies and your country gets richer regardless of treaty. No really. Do a whole corrupt thing like this and everyone gets poorer. Except perhaps the mega-wealthy trying to avoid competition for their businesses and those in their lobby. The thing is the mega-wealthy don't want to be richer, they have far more than they or 4 generations of their family can possibly spend. They want power, they don't want upstart entrepreneurs getting rich. They want their relative wealth to the average to be as high as possible. It's sick, sad and twisted. Fortunately we have the Republicans to stand up for what's right with respect to classical liberalism.
>Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf.
Absolutely. For one, hollywood, RIAA etc representatives were involved in the discussions as "experts" in the first place. Plus their lobbies set the agendas for what the government is gonna ask for etc.
>There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over
So now we have to protest against whole document and WE AS PUBLIC, we citizens cannot negotiate paragraphs of the act because it's tightly coupled and one change will affect another paragraph. Now it all goes in or nothing.
You (media) can't dissect any new thing that gets added. Explain why it's bad, etc.. Now you have a huge dump of new information and everyone gets overwhelmed.
A while ago, I said something like "the elites have totally won the battle against the slave class (formally known as the middle class)" to a friend and he was shocked that I felt that way. I was half way joking but the more I think about it the more I think that it is game over for the non-elites, except for a few things that people can do:
1. Pay a lot of attention to your own job skills and education, managing career, etc.
2. Put a lot of energy into maintaining your economic outlook, that of your family and friends, and that of your local community
3. Ignore crap like the show of elections, and the show of "news" in general. If you want to do something positive then pick a cause, like a constitutional amendment to overthrow the Citizen's United ruling, and work on that cause year after year. Time better spent.
It's never been "game over" in the past. History has shown that oppression of the masses is usually the forerunner to a revolution. Why would be any different this time around?
(I'm not advocating revolt as a solution; just questioning the validity of the idea that the 'slave class' have no way to change things.)
People really harp off about 1984 a lot when speaking about surveillance but they always seem to leave out what I considered the most disturbing part of the book. The government in the story was very aware that they were following a pattern that would lead to a revolution. So they created a system where revolution was impossible.
1984 like most science fiction, was created to show an extreme. While there is no such thing as an unbeatable system, there is definitely people higher up aware of the possibility and actively preventing any major paradigm shifts in politics. The only thing that would truly force a revolution (which doesn't even have to be violent) is if people don't have enough food or their life is on the line. We saw this in the Arab Spring with the rise in wheat prices, which Saudi Arabia was able to avoid through subsidies.
History has shown no such thing. Slave revolts almost always failed. Popular revolts almost always failed. They also happened very rarely. Most empires fell from the outside, not the inside.
Also, America and Canada and the rest of the developed world in 2015 are freer and more prosperous than any time in history. We'd be setting a ludicrously low bar for revolt if copyright is what pushes us over the edge.
It's the classic problem in a democracy, that a minority with a vested interest (here, the rent-collectors on copyrighted material) are far more likely to effect what they want than a majority who, by and large, doesn't care that much.
I think the key here is simplifying things-- the public domain isn't going to afford the lobbying power as the rent-collectors, but we can at least try to simplify the message, that rent-collecting is harmful.
The Canadian copyright length is being extended. Does the TPP also put a cap on the US copyright length or are countries still free to extend their copyrights as they see fit?
