7 ms·

I've mused on this idea elsewhere, but it's applicable here too: I can't help but feel today's absurdly draconian copyright laws and lengths are going to make

by acabal 10y ago

I've mused on this idea elsewhere, but it's applicable here too: I can't help but feel today's absurdly draconian copyright laws and lengths are going to make our century a terrible cultural black hole for our future-human descendents. The vast, vast majority of creators who produce culture--books, movies, music, visual art, etc.--don't see widespread distribution, success, or fame in their own lifetimes. This is true today and it was true in the past too. Today, we have people like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and others, volunteering their time and energy to lovingly archive, curate, and distribute out-of-copyright works. Many of these works get a cultural second life: people today can freely discover and read a book published before 1923, whose author might have died penniless and unknown in their day. Their work, their name, their ideas, and their legacy lives on 100 years after their death, even if the world they lived in overlooked them, because volunteers can freely update and distribute those works. Can we say the same about the vast majority of work produced today, for whose creators don't attain widespread fame or cultural influence? Everything anyone produces, from a smudge on a piece of paper to the Great American Novel, now automatically gains a copyright that can last over a century, and that has almost never failed to be extended. As one of the many everyday creators who never see significant success, how would you feel if your work was not only ignored today, but for all time too? Our future-human descendents are going to think culture from 1923-2100 consisted of almost nothing but the 400 comic book movies, the 75 Star Wars movies, and Harry Potter. Everything else will be too unprofitable for a megacorporation to distribute, and illegal for anyone else to.

Spooky23 10y ago
It's worse when you think of inaccessible government and corporate archives, most of which will be lost in a few decades.
cryptarch 10y ago
There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. It was very sad to see What.CD go down recently. They had every release of every LP, EP and demo, of every obscure artist you could possibly imagine. The curation and amount of content made commercial services like Spotify and TIDAL look barren in comparison. Best of all: there was no DRM on the content and you could freely use your VPN. I just hope enough libraries survive for the content to last.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.
  - optionalparens 10y ago
    There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MereInterest 10y ago
Not only that, but it has already been happening [1]. Books that were published before copyright became infinite are available. Books that were published within the past 5-10 years are available. The vast majority of books published between those regions are not available. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...
Hondor 10y ago
Why do we need to preserve access to so much work? The world already contains more than enough old literature for anybody to read in a lifetime. There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death. If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
- rhizome 10y ago
  It's been a long time since I've read anything so abjectly ahistorical and anti-intellectual. There is always an underground, "culture" is not singular but a collective noun, and the barometer of cultural value has never been "the limits of what one person can consume." "What one person thinks others should have access to," on the other hand, now that one has a long, sordid, and sometimes-violent history. >If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is. Demonstrably false. Each employee of that small business talks about their job, and/or moves on to other jobs where their previous working experiences are expressed in terms of both job performance and managerial habits. This is cultural dissipation (in your "workplace" context, but also carries to others), the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture. It took 200 years for most anybody to consider Baruch Spinoza as anything more than some old excommunicated shitbird. Palmyra is currently being reduced to dust and memories. There are more examples.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    > This is cultural dissipation [...] the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture. This. Tangentially, one of the things I really liked about the film "The Cloud Atlas" is the subtext of cultural dissipation through low-probability events. The implied moral being: "Try to always be the best person you can be, because you don't know which moments of yours are going to end up having lasting significance.
fnord123 10y ago
1. Start fund to buy copyrights for works no longer in copyright in an electronic form with rights to print. 2. Relicense works that have been purchased where possible for open access. 3. sell subscriptions to people to accrue money which helps buy works. 4. Let people who subscribe prioritize the purchases. 5. Let people who leech know that they are slowing the purchase process down by merely reading and not contributing. 6. Negotiate buy out clauses for those who claim royalties on their out of print works (shouldn't be much since the works weren't in print and hence no royalties could be produced!) 7. Start fund for authors to actually produce new works. Delivery of payment upon completion of work. ~patron model. 8. Probably work with writers' guilds and unions to help make sure payments are fare and reflect the needs of authors. But don't let them take the piss and renegotiate contracts when they let go of royalties for their out of print work but their work suddenly becomes popular.
rmc 10y ago
Thank god for pirates. People are (illegally) storing and perserving films, TV shows, etc. Wanna find a lesbian film from Germany from before the Nazis? Pandora's Box is on the torrent sites! Piracy is good for our heritage.
WalterBright 10y ago
There's a way to deal with it that satisfies all concerned - make copyright extendable after 20 years, but only if you pay an annual fee. That way, works that megacorps can still make money off of can remain copyrighted, while essentially abandoned works will slip into the public domain.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  The counter-argument to that is that you still get corporate owned "fiefdoms" where A) a company can keep things out of the public domain eternally for relatively cheap even if they don't make money off of it by subsidizing it from other balances, and B) the point of things eventually reaching the public domain is novel uses/reuses outside of what the original creator (or at least owner) imagined for it. (A is especially relevant in the era where there are really only 5 major media corporations with huge backlogs and enough "war chest" funds to protect them for potentially centuries/millenia.) One counter-balance I've seen mentioned is that any proposed annual fee should be exponential (presumably with a relatively modest exponent such as say (1.0, 2.0]) with the number of years since original publication date.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Buy-in from megacorps is needed to get this passed. Requiring exponential fees will ensure it'll never happen.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      Yes. It's a Catch-22 in current US culture. The solution to said Catch-22, at least in the US, was supposed to be the wording of copyright in the US Constitution, but it hasn't been strictly interpreted since arguably the first extension term act of congress and Eldred v Ashcroft all but sunk any hope that it ever would be... Copyright, just like Patents, was designed as much to force things to expire as to hold them hostage to creators/owners ('limited monopolies' to encourage creators/owners with an emphasis on 'limited' to eventually win out for the public good). All copyrighted things should eventually expire, for the public good (that's what the US Constitution tried to provide for, originally). There likely isn't a solution that our corporate overlords would accept that includes decent expiration terms, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. It's the entire point of Copyright to regulate this sort of thing. If Copyright doesn't regulate expiration terms than what is the point of having Government involved at all? Might as well save the courts time and money, cut out the middle man, and let the megacorps build their own "Mickey Mouse cops" to police copyrights at that point... We don't have to live in that dystopia and we can as citizens demand that the federal government do its constitutionally mandated job of providing for the public good.
goflyapig 10y ago
You're framing this as being harmful to the original creators of these works, but I'm not sure I can understand that, since the original creators have/had full control over their copyrights. If a creator only desired widespread distribution, they could do it by explicitly putting their works into the public domain, or by only selling time-limited exclusive copyright licenses. So why don't they do that? (My take is that it's because they would rather try make a living by selling/leasing their copyrights, and perpetual copyrights are worth more money than limited ones.)

by acabal 10y ago

Spooky23 10y ago

It's worse when you think of inaccessible government and corporate archives, most of which will be lost in a few decades.

cryptarch 10y ago

There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. It was very sad to see What.CD go down recently. They had every release of every LP, EP and demo, of every obscure artist you could possibly imagine. The curation and amount of content made commercial services like Spotify and TIDAL look barren in comparison. Best of all: there was no DRM on the content and you could freely use your VPN. I just hope enough libraries survive for the content to last.

Klathmon 10y ago
why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they distribute their content? At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  There are peer-to-peer sharing options that have tried to do this (now and previously), but aren't widely adopted in the face of bit torrent. Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue. The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons. If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music. Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    Why not: one crew builds great P2P software, another uses it? I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby. In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

MereInterest 10y ago

Not only that, but it has already been happening [1]. Books that were published before copyright became infinite are available. Books that were published within the past 5-10 years are available. The vast majority of books published between those regions are not available. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...

Hondor 10y ago

Why do we need to preserve access to so much work? The world already contains more than enough old literature for anybody to read in a lifetime. There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death. If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.

rhizome 10y ago
It's been a long time since I've read anything so abjectly ahistorical and anti-intellectual. There is always an underground, "culture" is not singular but a collective noun, and the barometer of cultural value has never been "the limits of what one person can consume." "What one person thinks others should have access to," on the other hand, now that one has a long, sordid, and sometimes-violent history. >If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is. Demonstrably false. Each employee of that small business talks about their job, and/or moves on to other jobs where their previous working experiences are expressed in terms of both job performance and managerial habits. This is cultural dissipation (in your "workplace" context, but also carries to others), the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture. It took 200 years for most anybody to consider Baruch Spinoza as anything more than some old excommunicated shitbird. Palmyra is currently being reduced to dust and memories. There are more examples.
- webmaven 10y ago
  > This is cultural dissipation [...] the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture. This. Tangentially, one of the things I really liked about the film "The Cloud Atlas" is the subtext of cultural dissipation through low-probability events. The implied moral being: "Try to always be the best person you can be, because you don't know which moments of yours are going to end up having lasting significance.

fnord123 10y ago

1. Start fund to buy copyrights for works no longer in copyright in an electronic form with rights to print. 2. Relicense works that have been purchased where possible for open access. 3. sell subscriptions to people to accrue money which helps buy works. 4. Let people who subscribe prioritize the purchases. 5. Let people who leech know that they are slowing the purchase process down by merely reading and not contributing. 6. Negotiate buy out clauses for those who claim royalties on their out of print works (shouldn't be much since the works weren't in print and hence no royalties could be produced!) 7. Start fund for authors to actually produce new works. Delivery of payment upon completion of work. ~patron model. 8. Probably work with writers' guilds and unions to help make sure payments are fare and reflect the needs of authors. But don't let them take the piss and renegotiate contracts when they let go of royalties for their out of print work but their work suddenly becomes popular.

rmc 10y ago

Thank god for pirates. People are (illegally) storing and perserving films, TV shows, etc. Wanna find a lesbian film from Germany from before the Nazis? Pandora's Box is on the torrent sites! Piracy is good for our heritage.

WalterBright 10y ago

There's a way to deal with it that satisfies all concerned - make copyright extendable after 20 years, but only if you pay an annual fee. That way, works that megacorps can still make money off of can remain copyrighted, while essentially abandoned works will slip into the public domain.

WorldMaker 10y ago
The counter-argument to that is that you still get corporate owned "fiefdoms" where A) a company can keep things out of the public domain eternally for relatively cheap even if they don't make money off of it by subsidizing it from other balances, and B) the point of things eventually reaching the public domain is novel uses/reuses outside of what the original creator (or at least owner) imagined for it. (A is especially relevant in the era where there are really only 5 major media corporations with huge backlogs and enough "war chest" funds to protect them for potentially centuries/millenia.) One counter-balance I've seen mentioned is that any proposed annual fee should be exponential (presumably with a relatively modest exponent such as say (1.0, 2.0]) with the number of years since original publication date.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Buy-in from megacorps is needed to get this passed. Requiring exponential fees will ensure it'll never happen.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    Yes. It's a Catch-22 in current US culture. The solution to said Catch-22, at least in the US, was supposed to be the wording of copyright in the US Constitution, but it hasn't been strictly interpreted since arguably the first extension term act of congress and Eldred v Ashcroft all but sunk any hope that it ever would be... Copyright, just like Patents, was designed as much to force things to expire as to hold them hostage to creators/owners ('limited monopolies' to encourage creators/owners with an emphasis on 'limited' to eventually win out for the public good). All copyrighted things should eventually expire, for the public good (that's what the US Constitution tried to provide for, originally). There likely isn't a solution that our corporate overlords would accept that includes decent expiration terms, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. It's the entire point of Copyright to regulate this sort of thing. If Copyright doesn't regulate expiration terms than what is the point of having Government involved at all? Might as well save the courts time and money, cut out the middle man, and let the megacorps build their own "Mickey Mouse cops" to police copyrights at that point... We don't have to live in that dystopia and we can as citizens demand that the federal government do its constitutionally mandated job of providing for the public good.

goflyapig 10y ago

You're framing this as being harmful to the original creators of these works, but I'm not sure I can understand that, since the original creators have/had full control over their copyrights. If a creator only desired widespread distribution, they could do it by explicitly putting their works into the public domain, or by only selling time-limited exclusive copyright licenses. So why don't they do that? (My take is that it's because they would rather try make a living by selling/leasing their copyrights, and perpetual copyrights are worth more money than limited ones.)