3 ms·

That would be a fine argument in a world where the means of copying are heavy industrial equipment or otherwise uncommon in the home. That was the reality of t

That would be a fine argument in a world where the means of copying are heavy industrial equipment or otherwise uncommon in the home. That was the reality of the world from the invention of the movable type printing press until the PC. Now the means of copying books, music, movies, and software are a common household appliance, and yet we continue to cling to laws that were passed when only an industrial operation could make copies rapidly, all for the sake of keeping those industrial operations alive. Times have changed, and businesses need to change with the times. Kodak went out of business because they failed to adapt when digital cameras became small, cheap, and easy to use. New businesses now exist that make money because of digital photography. New businesses will rise to prominence because of 3D printing, assuming we do not kill 3D printing because of laughably dated concerns about copyright. Someone is going to sell you the raw materials that your 3D printer uses. Someone is going to run a search engine that finds the 3D models you are looking for and will tell you what materials you need (hopefully there will be many search engines competing with each other). Until we can manufacture integrated circuits in our homes, we will depend on Intel, AMD, TI, and others to make the electronics that run our 3D printers. Sometimes we just need to accept that the old ways of doing things are not profitable anymore. If we always worried about the businesses that are harmed by new technologies, we would still be using Roman numerals: http://www.storyofmathematics.com/medieval_fibonacci.html http://www.storyofmathematics.com/medieval_fibonacci.html (Edit: the ban on positional number systems was issued mainly due to pressure from businessmen who favored Roman numerals and general doubts about a numbering system that allows values to be inflated by tacking digits onto them: http://www.stevesachs.com/papers/paper_90a.html http://www.stevesachs.com/papers/paper_90a.html http://www.jstor.org/stable/2490013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2490013)

forrestthewoods 14y ago
We live in a supply/demand economy. This world does not function properly when supply goes to infinity. Copyright is mandatory to maximize the public good. Finding the correct balance of limitations is difficult and ever changing.
- betterunix 14y ago
  So says a person who carelessly breathes the effectively unlimited supply of air.
  - forrestthewoods 14y ago
    Are you shitting me? That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in a discussion pertaining to copyright. Ever. I'm not even going to feign apology that's how terrible of a statement it is. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. I'm going to copy and paste a block of text from "A Economic Analysis of Copyright Law" by Richard Posner. He's a highly respected judge amongst tech geeks at the moment due to his publicly declared war against patents. Please, please read this entire block of text. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html
    - betterunix 14y ago
      Posner's argument basically falls apart here: "...once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies..." On the one hand, he is saying that once people get copies, they are inclined to make more copies. On the other, he says that the price charged by the author will somehow influence whether or not people make copies. That second statement basically ignores the reality of both modern life, with computers and the Internet, and ancient life, where books were frequently copied regardless of what the author of the book wanted to be paid. People receive files at exactly the marginal cost of copying this files all the time, but that in no way discourages them from making more copies; people routinely make copies of creative works that are freely distributed by their authors. In reality, copyright has only ever been about authors at a superficial level. The first copyright law, the Licensing of the Press Act, was passed for the purpose of censoring authors by giving a specific guild a legal monopoly on printing, allowing the government to control the legal distribution channels of written work. When that law expired, the printers whose income was inflated by it began a lobbying campaign to restore their monopoly position, which was helped by a few authors; this led to the first modern copyright law, which served as the model for US copyright law (ironically copied from the English law). For all the claims about copyright paying the creators of copyrighted works, the biggest financial beneficiaries of US copyrights have been the businesses that sell copies of those works; that is as true today as it was 200 years ago. It was only recently that authors and musicians even gained the ability to distribute copies of their works without those industries. The public good served by copyright is not the entertainment or research works being created, but the distribution of those works. The point is not to pay authors, it is to ensure that printing remains a profitable business. The most extreme example of this is academic publishing, where not only are authors volunteers, but so are reviewers and editors. It is overwhelmingly common for authors, musicians, and actors of all kinds to have "day jobs" despite the financial success of their creative work; only a handful can live on royalty payments alone. Even if the point of copyright is to reward creative work and encourage its creation, the system as it exists today is a monumental failure. The article you link to actually combines the publishers and the authors of creative works into a single hypothetical entity: "To simplify the analysis, we ignore any distinction between costs incurred by authors and by publishers, and therefore use the term "author" (or "creator") to mean both author and publisher." My point here and elsewhere is this: the publishers are not needed anymore. We have much better ways to distribute creative work to the general population; we should be encouraging their use rather than trying to legislate them out of existence. Creative work is not dependent on profit (if it was, there would be almost no music in existence right now), nor is a market system strictly necessary to fund creative work (e.g. scientific research, which is funded by grants given to researchers or institutions regardless of the profitability of the work).

forrestthewoods 14y ago

We live in a supply/demand economy. This world does not function properly when supply goes to infinity. Copyright is mandatory to maximize the public good. Finding the correct balance of limitations is difficult and ever changing.

betterunix 14y ago
So says a person who carelessly breathes the effectively unlimited supply of air.
- forrestthewoods 14y ago
  Are you shitting me? That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in a discussion pertaining to copyright. Ever. I'm not even going to feign apology that's how terrible of a statement it is. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. I'm going to copy and paste a block of text from "A Economic Analysis of Copyright Law" by Richard Posner. He's a highly respected judge amongst tech geeks at the moment due to his publicly declared war against patents. Please, please read this entire block of text. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html
  - betterunix 14y ago
    Posner's argument basically falls apart here: "...once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies..." On the one hand, he is saying that once people get copies, they are inclined to make more copies. On the other, he says that the price charged by the author will somehow influence whether or not people make copies. That second statement basically ignores the reality of both modern life, with computers and the Internet, and ancient life, where books were frequently copied regardless of what the author of the book wanted to be paid. People receive files at exactly the marginal cost of copying this files all the time, but that in no way discourages them from making more copies; people routinely make copies of creative works that are freely distributed by their authors. In reality, copyright has only ever been about authors at a superficial level. The first copyright law, the Licensing of the Press Act, was passed for the purpose of censoring authors by giving a specific guild a legal monopoly on printing, allowing the government to control the legal distribution channels of written work. When that law expired, the printers whose income was inflated by it began a lobbying campaign to restore their monopoly position, which was helped by a few authors; this led to the first modern copyright law, which served as the model for US copyright law (ironically copied from the English law). For all the claims about copyright paying the creators of copyrighted works, the biggest financial beneficiaries of US copyrights have been the businesses that sell copies of those works; that is as true today as it was 200 years ago. It was only recently that authors and musicians even gained the ability to distribute copies of their works without those industries. The public good served by copyright is not the entertainment or research works being created, but the distribution of those works. The point is not to pay authors, it is to ensure that printing remains a profitable business. The most extreme example of this is academic publishing, where not only are authors volunteers, but so are reviewers and editors. It is overwhelmingly common for authors, musicians, and actors of all kinds to have "day jobs" despite the financial success of their creative work; only a handful can live on royalty payments alone. Even if the point of copyright is to reward creative work and encourage its creation, the system as it exists today is a monumental failure. The article you link to actually combines the publishers and the authors of creative works into a single hypothetical entity: "To simplify the analysis, we ignore any distinction between costs incurred by authors and by publishers, and therefore use the term "author" (or "creator") to mean both author and publisher." My point here and elsewhere is this: the publishers are not needed anymore. We have much better ways to distribute creative work to the general population; we should be encouraging their use rather than trying to legislate them out of existence. Creative work is not dependent on profit (if it was, there would be almost no music in existence right now), nor is a market system strictly necessary to fund creative work (e.g. scientific research, which is funded by grants given to researchers or institutions regardless of the profitability of the work).