Copyright exists, immediately upon creation (not publication) of a work.
It's different from trademark, in that practical applications, enforcement, registration, etc., does not invalidate the copyright.
Copyright can expire, which then becomes, effectively, "public domain."
Registering a copyright doesn't create the copyright. It simply makes it easier to go after those that disrespect it.
I'm pretty sure that the only way to truly transfer the ownership of copyright of a work, is to have agreements in place, before it is created (like "work for hire" contracts).
As a creator you can also explicitly dedicate a piece of work to the public domain, thus relinquishing any copy right to it. That’s what licenses like CC0, WTFPL, and The Unlicense do.
However, even being in the public domain does not in itself mean you can do everything. For example, in France you still have to respect the “moral rights” of the author, meaning you have to include their name and original title.
The "moral rights" in France and Germany, or the "Urheberrecht" in Germany and Austria and others in Europe prohibit even the creator to put things in the "public domain" to the full extend. There are pro and con debates about this, of course.
In the "monkey selfie" case, the monkey lost, and lost hard. Probably because PETA behaved like ... PETA ... They footgun themselves constantly, by acting way too extreme.
I am not sure what you are getting at, all property rights are made up agreements, as is what is defined as property, what can be privatized and what rights that affords you.
Take tangible land, your exclusive use of it has boundaries, for example airspace rights or mineral rights. It is all made up.
The difference is tangible v intangible, but in either case the rights are made up.
What is it with this new ontological wave on the Interwebs? For a mathematical axiom, do you need another axiom that tells us that the first one exists? And so forth?
How would you prove the existence of the universe? Do we not need a bigger universe that contains ours? And so forth? (Don't mention the big bang, which is a bunch of non-falsifiable formulas.)
Who has gotten jail or prison time for copyright violations in recent times?
I’m aware of recent cases in Canada where defendants chose to ignore a court ruling and attempt to republish very similar material as what the court had originally found them to be in copyright violation for. They were then found to be in contempt of the court which is a criminal offence and then ordered to complete jail time and pay substantial fines.
Copyright violations are not criminal offences in countries I’m aware of. Please tell me of any cases where a copyright violator faced jail time for the copyright violation and not for related criminal offences.
> Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, who ran the site; and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law.
>Ontologically, copyright doesn't exist. Copyright is an epistemology.
You keep using these words, ontology and epistemology. I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
>If copyright could exist, then a copyright for the copyright must be able to exist, and it'd be turtles all the way down
This doesn't make any sense.
First, not all things that exist are covered by copyright or have a copyright about them existing (air exists, but doesn't have a copyright. Neither do slugs, pebbles, Uranus, and other existing things).
Copyright is just sets of laws dictating ability to copy, distribute, and so on. It doesn't need a copyright for itself, and even if it did, the regular terms for reproducing any other legal code would suffice.
>Copyright, as intellectual property, is entirely made up as all other intellectual property is.
All human laws and conventions are made up. Doesn't mean anything - copyright is still enforceable with very real prison buildings, cells, and bars - and if resisting arrest for it, very tangible police battons, tasers, and bullets are not out of question either.
The law in the OP specifically includes websites, DNS, hosting, etc.
And this isn't some greyweb torrent site with a thousand heads. Without access to US advertisers there's no reason why Tiktok should even want to have US users.
Sentencing takes so long because the judge is allowed to consider basically anything, and there's a whole data-gathering process to facilitate this. It's just not likely to be a major factor.
Right, it's like an entire second trial. But the guidelines give a pretty strong indication where the sentence is going to land. Either way: the nominal losses are what is most likely to control; in particular, if you steal a bunch of money, bet it all at the track, and make enough to pay back your victims, you're not getting credit.
That one's silly too. Unless someone is so damaged they're not capable of ever not harming others, (think psychopathic murderers) what's the point of sentences that long? Anything past 15 years or so effectively destroys their existing lives anyway. I think that crosses from punishment to unnecessary cruelty and stuffing prisons.
On incapacitation, however, can you really not see Bankman-Fried leaving prison in his forties and doing anything but running out to raise new capital? His position throughout the trial seemed to genuinely convey that he didn’t think he did wrong.
> can you really not see Bankman-Fried leaving prison in his forties and doing anything but running out to raise new capital?
Maybe. How about we try though and monitor his activity from time to time. There are other cases where person's ability to work with something is restricted for a limited time.
Otherwise, you can apply "can you not see X leaving prison and doing what they were jailed for" to everyone forever. Over a decade in jail is a long time to change your views. There's that whole thing about rehabilitation as well as punishment in the idea of prisons.
As I read it[1], the plaintiffs allege that the government has overstepped its authority by using emergency powers to make new demands for information under threat of prosecution. There is a plausible argument for that position, and so a TRO is appropriate while the questions are resolved.
This is really it. A dysfunctional Congress serves to empower the Executive. And the Judicial branch only serves as a check so long as the Executive cares to follow their rulings.
This isn't just a problem if we get a malicious Executive either. If judges keep saying the Executive doesn't have some power unless Congress acts, and Congress continues to not act, then the Executive might be put in a position where they have to ignore judicial rulings in order to govern. Technically Congress can impeach, but a dysfunctional Congress isn't likely to get that one done.
Govern isn’t a verb in American Federal law severable from Acts of Congress. If Congress doesn’t act, then the President and his subordinates are not lawfully empowered to act the way they think Congress should allow them to act. That’s why they spend a lot of time trying to stretch their interpretation of previous Acts of Congress still in effect to try to justify what they want to do under the law. Sometimes they get away with it, sometimes the courts tell them “Nah, dawg.”
Also willingness to impeach is demonstrably not the problem. The resulting trials is where Congress stuffs it all up.
I’m generally of the same mind - but on the other hand if there isn’t consensus on certain policies at the national level isn’t inaction actually the right outcome?
The problem is that there usually is consensus that something should be done, especially among the public. But political infighting in congress over the last ~15 years stops any meaningful legislation from ever making it to the President's desk. Congress has been effectively abdicating more and more of their power to the executive branch.
It’s super clear they’re abdicating their responsibility and creating a stronger executive (like not passing a budget with this nonsense continuing resolution stuff).
But the public wanting something is easy to get people to agree to that they want something (better schools, better healthcare, less crime, etc.) is pretty easy, how that is accomplished (including how it’s paid for) is incredibly hard (take education does that mean: school vouchers, charter schools, bigger budgets, school testing, performance expectations for teachers, union rules, etc.?)
And maybe that's a good thing? The consensus that something should be done is dangerous. It leads to "something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done", which is terribly flawed logic that leads to terrible things being done.
If all the proposals are brain-dead stupidity, then refusing to pass one is actually Congress doing their job.
But the political climate of the last 15 years hasn't been congress deciding nothing should be done, it's been the two parties fighting over what or how it should be done, and filibustering anything that goes against their party line.
He seems to be confusing "freeware", which is basically a license for copyrighted work, with "public domain", which is the absence of a copyright.
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