4 ms·

> Copyright law is always a balance between creators and society. Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts. Current copyright law is a

by shmerl 6y ago

> Copyright law is always a balance between creators and society. Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts. Current copyright law is a horror that's totally skewed towards hoarders of intellectual property who only want to take away more and more from the public all the time. Garbage like DMCA 1201 should never have been allowed to exist. Reverting this mess back to the original intent would be hugely beneficial for the public.

jokethrowaway 6y ago
Copyright should be exactly like any other contract and should be treated as a breach of contract if you infringe on it, if you signed it. If you're selling your work to millions of people you're probably making a decent amount of money. The difficulty of enforcing millions of contracts at the same time are nothing but a market way to tax your profits. The less you sell, the easier it will be to pinpoint the culprit and sue him. As a creator you're in your right to sue whoever breached your contract with them and redistributed / copied your work / didn't respect your conditions, but is it going to be cost efficient (especially if you consider the marketing side of piracy)? Someone pirating your content without entering into a contract with you is not breaching any contract and, despite being highly immoral, is not doing anything wrong. The original copy must have been sourced from somewhere though, so I would consider it fair to put the entire cost to whoever breached the contract first. If as a society we create regulations that allow big corporations and their friends in the government to infringe on people's freedom, we're not only losing our freedom but also increasing inequality.
- shmerl 6y ago
  Copyright isn't a contract though. It's a government sanctioned ability to control the use of information. It shouldn't exist in the first place, unless public gets something in return, which is progress and useful arts.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts. No, it wasn't. That's the justification for the US Constitution allowing the US Congress to create US federal IP laws, but copyright law is older than the US, and was very much not created for that purpose. (And, despite exercising a power expressly created for that purpose, it's pretty clear that the actual present US copyright law wasn't created for that purpose, either.)
- shmerl 6y ago
  That was the stated purpose. Other purposes didn't make it into the law and never should have made it. Public doesn't need to grant some control over information to hoarders of IP so they could make profit on it if it doesn't benefit the public. Copyright is always a close kin to censorship and is unhealthy in general, unless there is some trade-off that public gets in return. It should never be "to allow profit for IP holders" idea.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Copyright law, and trade protection law, has existed for hundreds of years, and indeed patent protection was one of the things that gave England hundreds of years of technological advantage over its larger adversaries in France and Spain. (The period from which England benefit lasted for hundreds of years, the actual individual advantages were a few years to a few decades depending on the invention at issue.)
    - shmerl 6y ago
      We are talking about the purpose of them. And to burst the bubble here, it's not the profit of the IP holders. Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        If you want to argue against the past 600 years of human history in favor of the imaginary history in your head, that's your prerogative. Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful Patent law protections in England absolutely were a factor in England's dominance of France and Spain, despite the hugely disparate sizes and resources of those countries. Moreover, the US's early embrace of patents is why so much of modern life can be traced directly to inventions created in the US. Electricity, modern manufacturing, computers, the radio, television, air flight, all traceable to private individuals and companies incentivized to invent in the US because the patent system rewarded them for doing so.
gamblor956 6y ago
As written in the Constitution, the provision granting Congress the authority to create copyright laws on its face does not include anything about fair use. In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights, and at the time, fair use was not part of the (limited) intellectual property base of law in the States or the UK. Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.
- shmerl 6y ago
  Fair use should simply be a clarification of cases when copyright shouldn't apply in the first place for those who think it might apply there. To put it differently, when copyright starts being harmful to the public, fair use is a more explicit way to rein it in and keep things as they should be. In theory, if the law could be defined with 100% clarity, you wouldn't need fair use as an additional tool to prevent abuse. But things are rarely that clear.
- nybble41 6y ago
  > Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether. Fair use was introduced by the courts as an alternative to copyright being deemed altogether unconstitutional as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. If the fair use exceptions were to be eliminated then we would be back to copyright itself being unconstitutional. Personally I think the courts were too quick to capitulate. A few narrow fair use exceptions are not sufficient to reconcile the inherent censorship of copyright with freedom of speech. > In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights … What the text actually says is that "The Congress shall have the Power 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". It does not say that "creators" have exclusive rights automatically; that requires action on the part of Congress. And whatever Congress enacts in this area must comply with the rest of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment. Even if that means that copyright effectively cannot be implemented at all.

by shmerl 6y ago

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Copyright should be exactly like any other contract and should be treated as a breach of contract if you infringe on it, if you signed it. If you're selling your work to millions of people you're probably making a decent amount of money. The difficulty of enforcing millions of contracts at the same time are nothing but a market way to tax your profits. The less you sell, the easier it will be to pinpoint the culprit and sue him. As a creator you're in your right to sue whoever breached your contract with them and redistributed / copied your work / didn't respect your conditions, but is it going to be cost efficient (especially if you consider the marketing side of piracy)? Someone pirating your content without entering into a contract with you is not breaching any contract and, despite being highly immoral, is not doing anything wrong. The original copy must have been sourced from somewhere though, so I would consider it fair to put the entire cost to whoever breached the contract first. If as a society we create regulations that allow big corporations and their friends in the government to infringe on people's freedom, we're not only losing our freedom but also increasing inequality.

shmerl 6y ago
Copyright isn't a contract though. It's a government sanctioned ability to control the use of information. It shouldn't exist in the first place, unless public gets something in return, which is progress and useful arts.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts. No, it wasn't. That's the justification for the US Constitution allowing the US Congress to create US federal IP laws, but copyright law is older than the US, and was very much not created for that purpose. (And, despite exercising a power expressly created for that purpose, it's pretty clear that the actual present US copyright law wasn't created for that purpose, either.)

shmerl 6y ago
That was the stated purpose. Other purposes didn't make it into the law and never should have made it. Public doesn't need to grant some control over information to hoarders of IP so they could make profit on it if it doesn't benefit the public. Copyright is always a close kin to censorship and is unhealthy in general, unless there is some trade-off that public gets in return. It should never be "to allow profit for IP holders" idea.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Copyright law, and trade protection law, has existed for hundreds of years, and indeed patent protection was one of the things that gave England hundreds of years of technological advantage over its larger adversaries in France and Spain. (The period from which England benefit lasted for hundreds of years, the actual individual advantages were a few years to a few decades depending on the invention at issue.)
  - shmerl 6y ago
    We are talking about the purpose of them. And to burst the bubble here, it's not the profit of the IP holders. Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      If you want to argue against the past 600 years of human history in favor of the imaginary history in your head, that's your prerogative. Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful Patent law protections in England absolutely were a factor in England's dominance of France and Spain, despite the hugely disparate sizes and resources of those countries. Moreover, the US's early embrace of patents is why so much of modern life can be traced directly to inventions created in the US. Electricity, modern manufacturing, computers, the radio, television, air flight, all traceable to private individuals and companies incentivized to invent in the US because the patent system rewarded them for doing so.

gamblor956 6y ago

As written in the Constitution, the provision granting Congress the authority to create copyright laws on its face does not include anything about fair use. In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights, and at the time, fair use was not part of the (limited) intellectual property base of law in the States or the UK. Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.

shmerl 6y ago
Fair use should simply be a clarification of cases when copyright shouldn't apply in the first place for those who think it might apply there. To put it differently, when copyright starts being harmful to the public, fair use is a more explicit way to rein it in and keep things as they should be. In theory, if the law could be defined with 100% clarity, you wouldn't need fair use as an additional tool to prevent abuse. But things are rarely that clear.
nybble41 6y ago
> Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether. Fair use was introduced by the courts as an alternative to copyright being deemed altogether unconstitutional as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. If the fair use exceptions were to be eliminated then we would be back to copyright itself being unconstitutional. Personally I think the courts were too quick to capitulate. A few narrow fair use exceptions are not sufficient to reconcile the inherent censorship of copyright with freedom of speech. > In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights … What the text actually says is that "The Congress shall have the Power 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". It does not say that "creators" have exclusive rights automatically; that requires action on the part of Congress. And whatever Congress enacts in this area must comply with the rest of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment. Even if that means that copyright effectively cannot be implemented at all.