I guess it just depends on your point of view. I would have found a sentence lauding the railroads and the mechanized opening of the West to be pretty 'cringe' if they had not mentioned this.
I submit that you could cut the entire sentence out of the piece and not lose anything other than a vague sense of judgment from the author.
But hey, I also don't think observing the basic fact that the railroads led to the "opening of the west" would qualify as "lauding" that fact, any more than observing that "George Washington was the first US president" would be "lauding" George Washington. For that matter, I can also enjoy a train ride without feeling the urge to "acknowledge" that Cornelius Vanderbilt did some bad things.
(...though I sadly acknowledge that we're well 'round that bend as a society)
Ooh, Now do photography … or abstract painting … or fine wine … or hedge fund. Any field where the judgement of quality is subjective is going to be full of hailed charlatans and unrecognized geniuses. It's one of the true ironies of art.
The story about a two-bit plagiarizer is interesting, but the author doesn't really make the connection between hoim the rest of the music world. He refers to the Lera Auerbach Sonata as "pretentiously banal" but in the same breath says her "work has been performed by some of the best soloists alive." What are we to make of that? That the author is a good judge of the music and performers are poor judges of the music, even though they are presumably more intimately familiar with it?
Maybe it's the music critic who has no clothes, rather than the composer. Maybe we're all naked.
This is your reminder that Claudine Gay is still a professor at Harvard despite the fact that her entire (unimpressive and short) research CV was built on plagiarism.
People are busy. Not everyone is willing to spend their time diving into the latest ad block tricks. Some have decided that it's a better use of time to just avoid sites that use dark patterns and aggressively anti-user-friendly design to get you to click on ads instead of the actual content you came to see. This doesn't mean they lack skill — it's possible they just have different priorities.
This seems like a cease and desist letter waiting to happen. Are you worried that using the name “Jeopardy” and styling it so closely to the actual game might bring Sony lawyers knocking on your door?
It's possible, but there are other jeopardy game maker sites out there that charge money and have existed for 5-10+ years that do similar things but with "Jeopardy" actually in their name (e.g. jeopardylabs)
Worst case, they do, and then I know I made a good product.
> "The rule of thirds is perhaps the greatest fallacy ever foisted upon the beginning photography student, a canard from lazy educators designed to give the impression that their ideas are based soundly in theory."
I'm curious about the argument that is framed with "it presumes the unnatural (even if useful/positive) present state of copyright as a naturally occurring thing."
I don't think this should be discounted so quickly. Nothing in this domain — money, private property, laws, justice — are obviously naturally occurring things. One of the great traditions in the effort to understand how rights and value come to be is the creation of narratives that connect the rights to early natural states. We see this in Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, etc. You could just ask the question of whether the current state "works well", but then you are in the wheelhouse of Jeremy Bentham and other utilitarians. Fine, but so far these kinds of arguments don't lead to worlds many of us like.
I submit that intellectual property is absolutely less natural than e.g. real or personal property. I haven't done a deep dive, but I'd strongly wager that if you did a sweep of traditions of property across times and cultures, you're going to find a LOT more uniformity over the idea of property rights over PHYSICAL THINGS like land and food (and probably money or other forms of exchange? maybe not) than you will IP.
So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children? Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
>So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children?
They certainly can. Certain assets are depreciating with time though, like copyrightable works. They only have value because of the law in the first place, and the law sets the timeline for that value to depreciate to zero.
Perhaps supporting a writer shouldn't be a career/investment opportunity though.
>Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
Like, with taxes on inheritance? We should and we do. And arguably, we don't do it enough.
The question is: are the authors that much better off from the way the laws are now? Is the society overall? If we tell the authors that, in fact, their grandchildren won't be able to profit off of their books, what kind of literature shall we lose?
We already have the answer, since the draconian copyright laws are pretty recent. Great works of literature have been written before such laws existed, and introduction of these laws hardly improved writing overall (or the plight of the author, for that matter).
This kind of hectoring discourse is aggressive and rude. You can do better.
Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.
But it's not hectoring (and was not intended to be rude). Authors build things. Just like people who build companies, houses, inventions, etc. There are a lot of theories of how ownership happen, but many (at least in the US and Europe) come from some for of the labor theory of ownership. We own the things we put labor into and create. Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can benefit the family of those who create things of value after death but not works of art, music, writing, etc., you haven't really made a cogent argument. Calling me rude is just an ad hominem argument, which we shouldn't entertain as serious.
The big difference between copyright and propery is that me owning a table doesn't stop someone else from making a similar looking table. Copyright that lasted forever would mean that new adaptations of anything could never be made without licensing from the hedge fund that had bought up the original rights from 500 years ago.
> owning a table doesn't stop someone else from making a similar looking table.
and copyright doesnt prevent you from writing a story about a boy wizard attending a school and fighting against a evil big bad. Nor does it prevent you from writing a story about a rag tag group of rebels fighting against an empire.
Copyright puts a chilling effect on making anything resembling the original work, so long as the plaintiff (usually a large corp or hedge fund) has a better team of lawyers than the defendant (new writer)
Surely you end up with one abstraction (of ownership) each. If you teach me some idea, I still know it even if we've agreed that I won't teach it to others for profit.
> If we exchange ownership of ideas, we end up with one idea each
How would that work? Given that one exposed to an idea, a person cannot exactly erase it from their mind...
I mean if I have an idea and I give it to you the idea itself is still in my mind. And in order to give it to you I have to communicate it to you, so now it is in your mind too. So innately, while physical objects are physically moved, ideas are only ever copied; the former creates a sense of ownership because when a brick is in your hand it is not in mine, whereas the latter makes this notion of ownership impossible.
Let's try anyway. If I write the idea on a piece of paper, zip it into an envelope, and give the envelope to you, not only do I still have the idea in my head but can you really claim to somehow "have" the idea too? Unless you open the envelope and you don't get to actually "have" it, you have an envelope which contains a copy of the idea that's still in my mind and not in yours. You don't even know what I've given you unless I shared the idea with you beforehand, at which point we're back to square one and the piece of paper is moot (it may carry more detail but that's immaterial to the concept of ideas fundamentally being only copied).
A person has an idea and writes it on a piece of paper, puts it in an envelope, gives it to me, the person dies, I don't ever open the envelope and then I give it to you. Did I ever "own" the idea? I don't even know what it is? A copy of the idea has disappeared when the person died, the piece of paper has a copy on it, and once you read it that idea will be in both in your mind and the paper until you burn the latter.
So maybe you're thinking, but the person of origin of the idea matters. Okay, let's go along with it. Say you and I never even remotely interacted, and I come up with a "foobarbaz" idea and you come up with a "foobarbaz" idea, and we happen to meet. We exchange ideas and realise "oh we had the same idea!"; how can the idea be "the same" if it has been independently conceived and the person of origin matters? To double down on that, after the transactional exchange, we both have one "foobarbaz" idea , not two identical ones each: the operation was a complete noop.
We could drill down further about whether any idea can ever be truly original or if it's about standing in the shoulders of giants, so a huge proportion of any idea or the process having led to is is actually not original at all but instead remixes.
All this to essentially say that "ownership of ideas" and "usage rights" are really a completely artificial construct, one that aims to replicate ownership as it is born out of physical reality.
Which brings me to TFA's situation, in which half a million books are essentially disappeared purely for the sake of pretending ideas are like bricks, as in they should be "owned" because someone could make money off of it, which is not even true because even if I wanted to throw a truckload of money at these folks they would still not allow the ideas to be accessed because they can't be bothered to republish - even though they can be bothered to sue - so the paper/bits might just as well be set on fire, which is most certainly not what the authors would have desired.
PS: Obviously authors deserve tools that help them make a living and combat plagiarism, but this situation is way beyond that and highlights how these artificial constructs are completely upended to the detriment of all.
If I sell you copyright of my code, I might still have it on my computer but I lost any rights to use it. This is a standard business arrangement that anyone on this site knows and uses. I don't think it's as complicated as you make it sound.
I think the opposite is more irrational. I want to be able to sell my work, and I want to own my work for myself too, otherwise I have no chance of competing against the big corporates. GPL licenses don't make any sense if the authors don't control the copyright, so open source would die.
Yes, it's arbitrary - just like practically everything else. Having to drive my car on a road and not kill anyone is arbitrary, but leads to good outcomes.
> Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can benefit the family of those who create things of value after death but not works of art, music, writing, etc., you haven't really made a cogent argument.
Easy. The ownership of intellectual property can indefinitely remain with the author (or be passed on to their children, spouses, etc).
We even have a great model for it now: NFTs.
The right to copy that work, however, isn't something that was either created or owned by the author. That exclusivity is a privilege granted by the state, introduced because it was believed to benefit the society overall.
You can inherit a car, but not a driver's license. The argument is that the exclusive license to copy a work of art is really more like the latter.
I think this is a specious argument. The value in intellectual property is the right to copy it. You can make a similar argument for other property: you own your car, but the right to drive it was not created by you. You own your house, but the right to occupy it and prevent others from occupying it is not created by you. It's not clear if you are arguing that there is some natural right to own and inherit a car that is granted by some authority other than the state and where that authority comes from.
>It's not clear if you are arguing that there is some natural right to own and inherit a car that is granted by some authority other than the state and where that authority comes from.
Sure! There is a natural right to own things: I have a thing, I am not giving it to you. I am the authority. If you want to have it, well, you'll have to do something. Because you can't drive my car while I'm driving it.
That was the problem that the communists ultimately couldn't resolve: people end up having things no matter what you do. My, mine are one of the first words humans learn to utter.
"Intellectual property theft" is a misnomer; like "identity theft".
>The value in intellectual property is the right to copy it.
You are almost correct.
It's not the right to copy. It's the exclusivity, enforced by the state. By definition, it's a privilege (not a right), and is created by punishment.
Information has no inherent value once it becomes public knowledge. The state needs to be actively involved for public information to have any value.
So, we're not talking about the right to copy that gets passed along. Nobody is talking about taking that right away.
It's the privilege to command the state to punish someone for making a copy without one's permission that we say shouldn't be passed along to one's heirs.
I think copyright terms should be much shorter, but I do not think someone should be far worse compensated for writing a work at 85 than 25. Or suffer from oddities relating to publication time vs death.
People don't just write books to profit while they are alive. They write books so their families have something to pay the bills once they die as well. Books are hard enough to write and sell successfully. The few that make it are special for the families of the writers, and you want to take them.
You're free to give away your work. Stop telling others what to do with their work and that you want to take it because they died.
Does your plumber's family get to live of the toilets he installed? Why shouldn't they be able to do that but a writer's family can?
> Stop telling others what to do with their work
We are not telling them what to do we are saying authors shouldn't have the right to restrict what we can do, or to be more precise, say - because that's what copyright is in the end, a limitation on free speech.
Design patents have a 15 year life. I'm a great lover of books and arts in general, but I'm not clear on why ownership rights in some creative endeavors should be massively privileged over others. Can the families of authors not write books of their own, or engage in other economic activity?
What about the families of people who toil over creative work and don't hit the jackpot? There are many fine writers/artists who never gain more than a niche audience while garbage sells big. Go to a bookstore and look at the history section, pseudo-historians like Bill O'Reilly are given more shelf space than serious historians. To be frank I almost exclusively buy from used book stores for the last decade because nonfiction offerings in chain/non-specialist bookstores are so bad. Vendors of used books tend to select for quality rather than popularity.
Sure they can, just like you could have your house taken from you and you could build another one. Why do your kids expect to get your house when they could build one too?
Is was never their house to begin with. We just allowed to not use it ourselves for a while but that doesn't mean we can't change that arrangement when we realize it's actually a very bad deal for most of us.
If the author desires for their wife or children to inherit the results of their work, the author should keep the works private and give it to their survivors for them to release over time.
Enough with this nonsense. A book isn't a family business, it's not the family home, it ain't the family farm, it's an artifact that you produced once, it makes no sense to inherit the right to copy it. We allow inheritance to exist because it creates social good by facilitating community continuity. And the best social good when it comes to copyright is to let it expire as soon as possible; let's be honest, "until the death of the author" is still eons longer than any author deserves. It shouldn't be more than 20 years, max.
The founders of the US intended copyright to last for 14 years, with the ability to renew for a single extra 14-year extension. Like patents, copyright was intended to expire quickly in order to serve the good of the public. Thank Disney for fucking that up for everyone. You have refuted your own argument.
This is really the core of the issue, all the stuff about what a world without copyright would be like is navel-gazing that will never happen.
But specifically a lot of us have an issue with the fact that beginning in the 20th century, copyright durations have been increasing so quickly that it's starting to look more like copyright is becoming permanent.
The founders were well aware of the negative societal effects of monopoly. We are well aware of them and suffering under several forms of monopoly today, many of which are enforced through copyright. The founders chose to grant a LIMITED and TEMPORARY monopoly to copyright holders, not an UNLIMITED and PERMANENT one, because of this. The eminently reasonable and middle of the road position is that we should reduce the duration of copyright, restoring it to its original intent. This corrects one of the general class of pro-monopoly errors we have made which have increased wealth inequality and damaged our society.
It is truly extraordinary how much damage Disney has done (with government as a willing collaborator) against the original intent of the founders and the will of the people.
We can agree 95 years is too long and also not want to abolish the whole system and let everyone use knowledge immediately without proper compensation.
Nor encorugae assassinations by having stuff go public domain immediately upon death.
A book is knowledge, knowledge can 100% be a family businesss to be continued. I don't see it as any different from a family restaurant protecting their recipes in an otherwise cutthroat industry.
The terms is too long as is, but I see no reason to not have any posthumous transfer period so the family can figure out what they want to do with their knowledge.
People have a secret but still share it while withholding some knowledge. They risk someone reverse engineering it, but it's still being monetized.
Whats the difference here? Have idea, share some of it, monetize it from peope who want to use it, later on it's a free for all or enough knowledge comes to easily reverse engineer it anyway.
^Just because an artist releases a work to the world, doesn't mean they have any natural rights to own what the culture does with it.
No natural right, no. But humans are greedy, tragedy of the commons, etc. So governments made copyright to protect those artists.
It's been, as usual, perverted by the people who least need that protection, but the idea is still sound. In a world of greed, give the creators time to be greedy so they can make a living off their own work. Then later on its a free for all.
Aside from the flaws in your analogy already pointed out to you, there is actually very little value in a secret recipe. A skilled cook will be able to reproduce something close enough just by seeing and tasting the result. The real value of a family restaurant is the pride in their legacy that gets them to actually stick to a recipe that gets that result instead of cutting corners in order to maximize profit.
Not sure this argument works unless you are willing to give away the other property on death like houses, stocks, farms, etc. Maybe 60 years is too long, but that doesn't seem to be your argument.
Genuine question since I don’t know much about inheritance. Don’t things like houses, stocks, etc get taxed in certain places? Whereas I don’t think copyright does? In a way, that is similar to having to give property away upon death (can’t pay the tax, forced to get rid of it).
People who hold copyrights for profit tend create corporations to hold the copyrights, then just pass on shares in the company to their heirs.
These shares are valued the same as any other shares for an opaque, non-public company, with a single owner, whose assets have very ambiguous and widely disparate values, and which has the ability to cease operations for long periods of time and still remain profitable.
In other words, they’re worth whatever the owner wants them to be worth.
This is just my cynical interpretation. But if you think valuing real estate is hard, try valuing copyrights.
The usual steelman I hear is that Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed because he knew the royalties after he died would take care of his family. I grant that's a marginal case but I don't know that the CBA there actually works on long copyright's side.
Taking copyright away on death is a bad method, and that's a reasonable argument against it.
It should be a fixed term that isn't very long. And if that term ends before death and they want more money then great, write something new.
I think most people objecting to copyright lasting after death are really reacting to how long it all is, and the average amount of time that is. Some of them really don't want it to go past death, but I think most of those objectors would be fine with copyright that lasts exactly 25 years no matter what.
That's more of an argument for making the duration fixed and not dependent on the authors life at all. Having both lifelong copyrights PLUS a fixed duration is just double dipping.
you dont need copyright for that. by the time he died the family could have kept the memoirs and sold the exploitation rights to whoever wanted them. contracts are a thing.
Exactly where do "exploitation rights" come from if not copyright? Anyone who is going to enter a contract for these "exploitation rights" is going to want exclusive rights so others can't just share, republish, copy, etc. This is what copyright affords those who want to sell "exploitation rights"
lets say a publisher secures the manuscript after buying it and the copyright is gone at the author's death. As a first mover they will make most of the money during the first publishing round. By the time copycats end up on the market most of the market for the book was captured by the first mover.
> Copyright is literally the opposite of property rights.
Why is that? Property rights, like copyright, is merely a societal construct that have been agreed upon (via legislative processes).
There are countries today that does not respect copyright (or impose their own copyright rules), just like they do so for property rights.
Therefore, this copyright is _exactly_ like property rights. In fact, copyright is slightly less powerful, since they have the potential to expire unlike property rights (tho of course, under US copyright rules, the expiration seems to be getting extended every time disney starts losing theirs...).
Property rights solve the problem of physical goods being rivalrous. We can't both eat the same portion of food; if one person has it another doesn't.
Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else. Many people can read the same (e-)book.
There are other reasons why societies originally granted a completely artificial temporary monopoly on information: the theory that it'll incentivize the creation of more works, which is a thing the society might want more than they want the ability to copy and modify and remix it on day one.
Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today, in a world in which we have not merely the printing press but digital information that can be trivially copied and modified, and a society of people who all have the tools at their fingertips to use that information to create and remix and do wondrous creative things with all of culture.
>Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else.
Not literally, but in every other sense, yes. It does. You make a great idea, and someone with more money, time, and resources will mass produce your product. They become ubiquitous with the product and the creator is now disincentized from sharing more potentially great ideas.We use copyright to make sure creators aren't disincentized.
The problem isn't scarcity, but falls into the same core issue. Lots of people want thing, but the owner wants either security or compensation that it's their thing.
>Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today
I'd still say so. More so today than before where it's only gotten much more expensive to live. Now we go to people outcopying each other and the creator is simply homeless.
It's theft. How many people, no matter how altruistic, will feel truly zen seeing their own idea copied by people who care nothing about thw craft making money, exploiting other labor, and otherwise making the world a worse place?
I argue less than the amount that at least want a steady living at the bare minimum. Something many struggle to achieve.
>why is the current model assumed to be the best, when it is based on a lot of outdated assumptions (e.g., physical copies)?
Because I've heard no better alternatives?
We don't need to throw the baby out with that bathwater. In increasing orderof viability: Implement UBI so artists don't starve guarantee an easy trial for proper compensation (which may still be pennies for thieves) if/when their art is stolen and makes hand over fist in money, or reduce the current time of exclusivity. The concept of keeping some time to benefit from your ideas exclusively isn't a flawed one, it just needs tweaks to the idea, or a fundamental shift in how humans survive in the modern world.
This isn't a legal definition, it's the dictionary term
>(the act of) dishonestly taking something that belongs to someone else and keeping it.
How is this action of taking someone else's idea and keeping the fruits of their mental labor not thievery?
Again, not legally arguing. The point here was to exercise the psychological reason that having your ideas taken without permission nor even acknowledgemrnt feels bad. Theft is bad and feels bad. People want to avoid that where possible.
Given the variety of agreements on international intellectual property law such as the Berne Convention, WCT, TRIPS pushed through multinational organizations like the WTO, the only country in the world with 0 copyright is the Marshall Islands (excluding audio-visual media regulated by the Unauthorized Copies of Recorded Materials Act, 1991). Even North Korea has life + 50 years.
Some countries decide to leave their copyright laws unenforced (or selectively enforced if they don't like you). Not much choice for people who don't agree with copyright law itself though.
