Copyright maximalists realizing this have moved to circumvent democracy globally by enshrining their most draconian laws into "free trade" treaties. These treaties have the proven ability to overturn the will of national democratic bodies and are almost impossible to remove once imposed.

It's globalists and internationalists that circumvented democracy. The copyright maximalists are just trying to take advantage of the opening.

You're usually full of rock solid arguments and facts about how the sky isn't really falling. That was a real bummer to read. :(

We, the US public, out of the goodness of our hearts and wanting to foster art, gave up our right to "repeat what we heard" (copying, when what you hear is digital) in return for incentives to create art.

And then bam; decades later the incentives are the de facto baseline, and have been extended with almost no public awareness (let alone debate) using the special interest money that our goodwill created for them.

It is the ultimate checkmate of democracy, and if it weren't so unjust, you would have to hand it to the media industries for playing so masterfully.

Well, good job. You got us. You took the rules we made, and took the public (US, but even more abroad, by exporting your draconian laws via more special interest money) and absolutely destroyed us. You won. Game over.

But wait... not quite. The game is politics. And if you had been content to simply swim in your unimaginable Scrooge McDuck pool of gold dubloons, you would swim until the end of time. But the public is finally starting to notice, and the technorati whose careers and employers (like Google) depend on having a level playing field (even though they try to tilt it in their favor when they can) are starting to notice. I'm not so optimistic that change will come, but if it does, my vote will be for whatever is closest to "burn the fucker to the ground". And some other people feel the same way.

What's the possible consequence of such an extreme change? I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts. Fewer Kany Wests. Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Those are such small consequences that, to be honest, they might be additional benefits.

It would be best if the copyright system were reduced to a smouldering ruin, so that the public could better understand exactly what we gave up when the copyright regime was created, and make a more informed decision about which incentives really are needed to make innovation happen. Until we do, the special interests created by those very laws will continue to make us pay for the favor we gave them.

Was it so bad back when you could just buy software for money? Before business models built on eyeballs and data mining instead of copyright?

But in the case of proprietary file formats, or really any non-crypto-based attempt to hinder interoperability, the less control, the better. For example, Microsoft could have hypothetically designed their DOC format for the explicit purpose of creating legal issues, such as by having files consist of a series of API calls to reconstruct the document (like WMF!), so that anyone parsing the document would have to reimplement the APIs. To be fair, the need to do so for actual compatibility would weigh heavily in favor of fair use, whereas the story with Android is somewhat weaker (especially because nobody seems to have told the Federal Circuit that Android actually is compatible with existing Java libraries, rather than the API copying being solely for the sake of programmer familiarity...) Also, there is no real need to use copyright for this purpose in the first place: patents have been shown to be quite effective in locking down file formats (c.f. H.264, x86 instructions) - and don't have fair use - so arguably copyright gives offenders nothing they couldn't achieve by other means. But then, patents are limited-duration and who knows, maybe the law with respect to them will be improved some day. No need to hand out extra tools.

Visual J++ was a very usable Java. Had Sun failed to sue it out of existence, the world would have had a Java with a good UI stack developers actually used, an IDE that was not unusably slow and buggy, AND almost all packages built for Sun's Java would drop right in without problems. Visual J++ would have created the same effect on the use of Java that Android did, but it would have happened approximately 10 years earlier.

Sun's suit was tremendously destructive of a very useful product that would have helped the cause of Java's wide use. Unnecessary, spiteful, and an own-goal.

EDIT: And less VB, and more Windows applications software running in a managed language runtime, years earlier.

Can't argue about the UI stack in general, but IntelliJ is a dream compared to anything Microsoft have ever produced.

Forte later became NetBeans and today it is fine but it was rubbish back then especially compared to Microsoft's tool chain.

This is what it took to make interactive Java successful in Android: Subtract cross-platformness, add a runtime designed for a specific OS architecture, add a nice UI stack, and add modularity to apps that makes component lifecycle useful to running apps efficiently. Among other mods. Android "corrupted" the fuck out of Java which was absolutely nowhere as a language for interactive software.

Oracle should have gotten on the bandwagon.

Joel on Software had article about the file formats several years ago. Apparently big chunks of the files are basically just memdumps. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

I don't know if this is still the best way. LibreOffice has came a long way for sure, but still doesn't reproduce Word's layout perfectly (which is still the expectation).

E.g. if I open a word document in libreoffice (to do e.g. review and commenting), save it without any changes to the layout, then I'd expect the original author to have the same document layout as before... and that is not so. The same applies to LibreOffice Calc - opening and saving the document produces changes.

Can't you just have a unit test that verifies that reading and immediately writing a document should keep it completely unchanged, except possibly for metadata?

I do not envy those who have spent years of their life trying to reverse engineer .doc and .xls formats... those are pretty nasty.

My understanding with Java is MS had signed a contract with Sun so there were other obligations. From a purely engineering POV though it makes total sense to extend. When I embed a language in my app (lua, JavaScript, whatever) the first thing I do is expose all my functionality.

Ok. Shame on me. You win. Checkmate.

But you won't fool me twice. No more support for "innovation" and "intellectual property" of any kind.

You can still ask me to pay for it, but you won't have the copyright industry stick to swing at me if I decide I'd rather get it from an unsupported source because your version only comes with digital restrictions.

Most of the public would consider those pretty enormous consequences.

Heck, I'd be upset if I had to switch away from a MacBook Pro to a commodity-PC-hardware + Linux solution for personal use today, even without any of the other things that group of people and companies you mention have produced. And I'm a-ok with paying for those things, or paying other people for doing interesting things on top of those things.

Maybe you think the risk of that actually happening is pretty small, but as-written, the consequences are actually pretty huge.

In your hypothetical example world, Linux would be on equal playing field when it comes to video/hardware drivers. So it could compete as a serious gaming platform. Without vendor lock-in, hardware would have to be more interchangeable, so can select their own choice of hardware, which can be cheap or expensive or powerful or quality or pretty etc and fit it inside an aluminium casing if they like. They could get a matte screen and a nice keyboard ...

Without Apple's market power behind it, nobody would consider using iTunes over a normal mp3 player.

There is demand for pretty computers, powerful ones, durable & sturdy ones, et cetera. That won't change without Apple. Sure it won't offer the exact same things Apple does today, but on the other hand it will provide a whole bunch of things that Apple today doesn't or won't. On the whole it will be neutral or positive.

I was not part of that, and neither was I part of some minority complaining while the majority did this. I don't think this ever happened. Just because there's a pretense of democracy doesn't mean the general public is actually to blame for everything.

It's not like copyright law is something Presidential candidates run on. I think the author is overstating his case with regards to public perceptions. The first problem with public perceptions is, when laws are forged in the court room (or codified in treaties), they're essentially happening removed from public scrutiny. Not everyone is reading EFF manifestos.

It's even worse because they're technical questions, requiring a certain expertise in IT as a specialized field, meaning a small percentage of people in the U.S. understand much less care about these laws.

Where I may agree about a shift in perceptions is for a different reason. As more people have entered the field, which now has television shows about it and some of the world's largest companies to boot, there are more people with an interest/curiosity or knowledge in IT. Better able to understand the ramifications of rulings about APIs.

But as someone said, we don't really leave in that much of a democracy as we think. Corporations have a louder voice. If they stand to benefit for a position they'll make more noise (in legal efforts or lobbying) in favor of it. And it's no surprise that we're seeing two behemoths battle it out.

And when the public votes with there money (the Montgomery bus boycott) and back it up at the ballot box, you could actually effect change.

Are you straight or ironic? Let's not forget that, in the current system, labels get served first while those artists remain in debt. It works with the system of advances and invoicing, mostly for tours and TV, but in the present situation I've found the example with album sales: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml

They were implemented and then continue to stick around way too long in an archaic non-working state - because they were well meaning. But making sure it will actually have the intended effect is not a requirement. The enforcement side is always left to figure it out after the fact. The reality of the law is something that can be delayed, what matters is moral gratification of the policy makers.

This is sadly prevalent in American policy: laws always start with good intentions but often ultimately a) causing net-negative via side-effects or b) not enforcable so a giant money/time sinkhole. Serious scrutiny beforehand could probably detect the majority of this stuff but that's not a requirement in office apparently.

Not really, and this is where I think copyright owners have gone off the reservation with their enforcement strategy. The point of copyright isn't to keep kids from pirating a few songs, just like the point of property right's isn't to keep kids from walking across your lawn. That's not what's going to destroy the value of your property. The point of copyright is to force Netflix and Amazon Prime and Youtube to bargain with you instead of just ripping you off. And that's not hard to enforce.

You know, I've never heard this position articulated before, but it seems incredibly, and obviously reasonable. To me, the balanced position of "enforce copyright vigorously when significant value is at stake, but don't harm consumers by obsessively trying to prevent minor infringements" seems the most fair position.

That's not how facts work. You can't say "it is a fact that [hypothetical scenario] leads to [expected outcome]" except in the case of very well understood mechanisms narrowly applied. I don't think the sociopolitical effects of copyright law are one of those situations.

Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing such works of the commercial value of their efforts." The history of copyright starts with printing restrictions to control the flow of "dangerous" information, but the first modern copyright statute (the statute of anne) deliberately came into existence to protect ideas by granting protections to authors of content for n years. Until this point. Copyright was a grant of a printing monopoly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law

> The Statute of Anne had a much broader social focus and remit than the monopoly granted to the Stationers' Company. The statute was concerned with the reading public, the continued production of useful literature, and the advancement and spread of education. The central plank of the statute is a social quid pro quo; to encourage "learned men to compose and write useful books" the statute guaranteed the finite right to print and reprint those works.

Comments to DannyBee's link address this mischaracterization of modern copyright history. One example: http://questioncopyright.org/comment/8491#comment-8491

Copyright law was created as a way to support a nascent publishing industry by granting it a monopoly. It was not created to help artists or whoever. http://questioncopyright.org/promise

(The history here is accurate and can be verified with other independent sources)

The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how?

Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?

The complaint was that "that's not how facts work" but the statement in question was in fact verifiable.

If you want to provide proof of a better solution, go for it. Proof that there does not exist a better solution is logically impossible, so clearly not a reasonable request.

Were creative works shared, copied, and appropriated with impunity when it was perfectly legal to do so? Why, yes they were! Did the creatives lose out on monetary gains in those cases? Certainly. And copyright law evolved to solve that problem. You are perfectly free to believe it wasn't a problem in the first place, or that the medicine is worse than the disease, but I think you have to make the case for why creatives should not be paid for their work, or how else outside of market economies we should pay creatives for their work, if you believe that would be a better system.

Problem? Are you sure this is really a problem? We assume by default that it is, but think of this for a second: on the one hand, monetary benefits for a few. On the other, a restriction on the liberty to copy and publish for everyone.

This wasn't always the case: historically, only a few people had the ability to share or publish anything. Copyright wasn't so unbalanced then. Now however we have the internet.

Given this asymmetry, the well being of creative people itself is secondary to the well being of everyone else. The real reason why creative people should be paid is because we want everyone else to be able to enjoy their creations.

It's easy to get caught up in individualistic considerations, such as "I did, it so I deserve a reward", or the opposition between "the" artist and "the" consumer. This can reduce to ridiculous arithmetic errors, such as, the picture of "the" starving artist that lost significant income because "the" consumer didn't pay $5 for a song.

We need to grow a sense of scale.

Forever unto me, the tuple (Int, Int) shall be mine.

True, though I suggest a better alternative is that some types of work -- in particular, those necessary for effective communication or for interoperability -- should be explicitly exempt from copyright protection, regardless of any creative element.

Copyright itself is an economic trade-off, sacrificing some freedom in the interests of promoting what is considered a greater good.

In the same spirit, I would argue that the ability of different parties to communicate and work together effectively is a greater good than anything copyright incentivizes and should therefore take precedence.

Curiously, the US legal system already recognises a similar principle in the way it treats typefaces. I submit that analogous treatment is appropriate for APIs, file formats, communications protocols, and the like.

you're moving the goalposts. post you responded to was not questioning the right of creators to be compensated for their work.

It looks to me like he's only claiming that copyright protections mitigate a specific harm, not that they're necessarily a net benefit.

However, the size of the copyright-backed creative industries today, by any reasonable metric I can think of, is vastly greater than the size of the creative industries built around the alternative models that have been tried noticeably often so far. That seems to include all of volunteer-based, crowd-funded, mass donation-funded, traditional patronage where some wealthy benefactor funds an entire work, and pay-what-you-want models.

Likewise, the quality of work produced with the economic incentive of copyright tends to be better, often much better, than what is produced based on other funding models or a voluntary basis, particularly in areas that aren't things anyone is likely to do just for fun. (Some people may disagree, but I consider this point so obvious by now that it's rarely worth engaging on.)

That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far, and it's readily falsifiable if anyone does in the future.

Patents are a different matter. I suspect the pros and cons vary significant from one field of research to another, with the general trend that patents might be useful in fields where the cost of R&D really is prohibitively high without some reliable way to exploit any successful projects, while patents are probably doing more harm than good in fields where they are more often used for sneaky legal manoeuvres than to incentivize genuinely innovative, widely useful, but expensive work.

Sorry you find this tiresome. The history of popular and culturally relevant music can be seen as basically a history of uncompensated outsider art becoming coopted and repackaged into dull derivatives.

You may find, for example, Elvis clearly superior to the mostly uncompensated African American traditions he pulled from, but that's hardly a position so universal as to be obvious.

I know you caveated with especially things people don't do for fun, but basically all art attracts people doing it for art's sake.

> That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far

The overwhelming majority of artists will never see any return for their works. There is such a long tail of garage bands making music for fun that it's hard to imagine the need for financial incentives to encourage greater saturation of that industry.

Financial incentives don't encourage great art, they only incentivize commercial art. There are overlaps, but we can't pretend those are both the same thing.

I don't entirely agree. Appreciation of art is subjective by nature, but the way we usually quantify value in our society is financial. A work that is popular will be more financially successful. A work that does not have such broad appeal but which is worth a great deal to a smaller group can also be successful. So unless you want to make some argument that art that is neither widely appreciated nor strongly appreciated by a few can still be great, I don't think the concepts you mentioned are as independent as you're suggesting.

I would also point out that copyright incentivizes the creation and distribution of utilitarian creative works, not just artistic ones. In some respects this is the more valuable side of copyright, because as you point out, with artistic work there will probably always be some level of creativity whether or not it's compensated. With more practical works, say business accounting software or a high school science textbook, there's much less incentive to create the works without some form of money or other compensation involved.

But even in the case of artistic work, I think it's fair to say that a successful professionally edited and published novel is likely to be better writing on average than most popular fan fiction. There are some impressive amateur video productions on YouTube these days, but no-one is making a hobby show with the production values of Game of Thrones. A few potentially decent games have achieved quite impressive funding through Kickstarter, but some of them still haven't actually been shipped years later, and typically they're multiple orders of magnitude below what the budget for a modern AAA title.

You can draw similar comparisons in most fields covered by copyright, whether artistic or simply utilitarian. Certainly not all commercially produced works backed by copyright are successful. Copyright doesn't guarantee anyone a financial return on their hard work. However, it does provide a direct incentive to produce better works and distribute them more widely, because the more successful a work is, the greater the return it will generate.

The only two fields I can immediately think of where serious money is made from creative works but probably would still be made if those works weren't subject to copyright are live performances and software created to support something else rather than for sale in its own right. Even then, not everyone protected by copyrights would necessarily benefit; for example, a band or orchestra might bring in a lot of money for a live concert, but probably someone else wrote the music or songs. So again, the financial incentive to write the best music comes from wanting as many performances of that music as possible to be enjoyed, and thus to maximise the royalties.

It's good to see different world views expressed clearly, but yours is incredibly foreign to me. For me, the number of dollars that someone else with much more money than I have is willing to pay for an object has almost nothing to with its greatness as art. I instinctively react against the idea as if you were saying "How can love between two people be considered great unless one party is paying the other a large sum to stay in the relationship?"

When 'brownbat' says commercial art, I presume he means art that is created because there is known demand from those with the money to pay for it. And when you say "unless you want to make some argument that art that is neither widely appreciated nor strongly appreciated by a few can still be great", this seems like it is totally ignoring the appreciation those without the ability to pay.

Why should we allow greatness of art be defined only by those who have accumulated a surplus of money? Sure, greatness is subjective, but when it comes to art, does it possibly make sense to restrict greatness to the subset of art appreciated by the rich? I would agree that art cannot be great if it is not "strongly appreciated" by at least someone, but can't it be subjectively great for that someone even if they can't afford to pay much for it?

The difference in our world view might be that I see "appreciative but unable to pay" as the default state of the majority of the world, and thus wouldn't think of restricting great art to that which is also financially lucrative, nor quantifying it by summing the product of the audience member's degree of appreciation times ability to pay.

However, when I wrote my previous post I was more thinking about products in niche markets. An academic text by an expert in a narrow field would presumably appeal to fewer people than a Harry Potter novel, but to those who are working in the field, it might be very valuable to see the insights of an authority on the subject. Thus it becomes viable to publish texts that cost far more than a novel for each copy, if there are enough people still willing to buy it at that price. There are parallels in other niche markets, say a relatively obscure music style where fans are still willing to pay for recordings by a band they enjoy, or specialist software that is only useful to a relatively small number of businesses but is so useful to those businesses that it can sell for thousands of dollars per user.

Are those specialist texts greater works than Harry Potter because they sell for more? Are those specialist software products greater works than the latest Grand Theft Auto? I don't think that's necessarily the case. To me, a popular work that brings happiness to many people can be great, even if the highbrow brigade would look down on it and say it wasn't very good. When they've brought as many smiles to as many children as JK Rowling, their opinion on that subject will mean something to me. :-)

I want to close by coming back to the idea that value is often subjective. I am certainly not implying that to any given person a work can only be great if it makes a lot of money, just as in your own example of two people being in love, only two people's opinions on the greatness of the relationship really matter. I am just saying that in the large, as an economic matter, judging a product by how much others consider it worth is one of the few relatively objective measures we have available.

While I think you make a fair prima facie case that financial value could track merit in art, as it does so in so many other domains, I would caution that 'weirdness' in the market for art could easily distort this. ('Weirdness' being the proper technical term, if I recall correctly.)

There are lots of reasons art markets are weird, imperfect substitutes, monopolies, winner-take-all dynamics. But I think the biggest factor here is that consumption of truly great art requires enormous search costs.

You can't be certain if you'll love a work unless you experience it, and no one has time to experience more than a miniscule fraction of all the art humanity produces any given day.

The impact is that producers and distributors can successfully make works of minimally acceptable quality, but then market the hell out of them to drown out other recommendations during our search for new great works.

That's why, while yes, GoT has been great, we are coming off nearly a decade dominated by reality TV with no rewatchability. Commercial art has demonstrated the capacity for perfectly fine returns with either model.

Meanwhile, I'm more frequently finding that some of my favorite works have been released for free online: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, John Dies at the End, The Martian, How We Got Here, or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

This shouldn't be too surprising, the idea that great works are possible without strong copyrights. Shakespeare wrote at a time where copyright protections did not apply to written plays, and you might find, according to critical acclaim, test of time, or market measures that Shakespeare has produced a few superlative plays.

If we look to the median, based on my admittedly informal hunch from working a few summers at bookstores, we have to start looking at things like middle of the road trashy romance novels, which I suspect will be a pretty comparable to median fan fiction (unchecked grammatical errors and all - for a particularly memorable, but not uncharacteristic example: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/sep/12/shif... ).

So we could go a few rounds where you note great commercial works and terrible amateur works, and I cite the opposite, but I think we both know that could continue forever with no resolution.

What we really need is some kind of impossible study that has amateurs and professionals performing the same works, and then some independent quality rating. Oh, and we also need to compare works with and without copyright protections.

Fortunately there is a test case for this, thanks to how many different versions will emerge of various audiobooks. Buccafusco & Heald used mechanical turk in an interesting way as well, really interesting study design:

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Do-Bad-Things...

Now, studio time and famous actors can make audiobooks incredibly expensive to produce. Production values could range from "microphone in a closet" to extremely high budget.

Even so, the study found no appreciable difference in quality for professional and amateur works, or for works with or without copyright monopolies preventing competition.

Despite all the sound and fury, I suspect you and I are closer than it might appear. I agree the utilitarian works may need help with compensation (I might quibble that copyright is an imperfect vehicle there, but sure). And copyright probably led to some very good stuff that we wouldn't have otherwise.

I really just feel like there are enough counterexamples and indications like the study above to make the value of strong copyrights an open question, I was reacting far more to your apparent certainty than to the position itself.

Even assuming that "market size" is the right metric for comparison, that comparison assumes that the existence of copyright law has had no negative effect on those "alternative" models. Numerous readily available examples suggest that it has, however.

Would you share some of those examples? I've heard this argument made before, and I agree that undermining alternative models is both logically possible and a plausible concern in practice. However, the only examples anyone has come up with so far have been some form of derivative work with questionable added value.

Lacking any more compelling evidence, I tend to come back to balance that copyright is one economic principle that clearly can support the production of many useful works, and there is little empirical data to suggest either greater harms or better alternatives. But of course that position ceases to hold if and when such data is found.

That was about 5 minutes worth of examples; plenty more where those came from.

As I argued in another post, I don't think copyright should ever become an artificial tool to limit communication or interoperability, and as such work necessary to that purpose should indeed not be subject to copyright. It already isn't, to varying degrees, in various jurisdictions.

False takedown claims and the problems that result are more a symptom of allowing centralised hosting of content than anything else. YouTube and the like have no obligation to continue hosting anyone's content if it causes them trouble, regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of any complaints. As long as there are also no real penalties in law for malicious or negligent actions by big rightsholders, you're going to get this sort of problem anyway.

There are already supposed to be provisions, under banners like fair use or fair dealing, for various applications of works that don't prejudice the original intent of the copyright. Here again it's clear that regulatory capture is hard at work undermining the system, but likewise here again that's due to weak political leadership rather than an inherent problem with copyright.

The areas you mentioned where I'm not so sure are things like remixes, fan works, and mods. In many cases these derivative works do depend on the original creative assets for most of their value, and as such perhaps they should not be exempt from the normal copyright provisions.

In short, I don't see any of those as particularly compelling examples against the basic idea of copyright as a temporary monopoly on reproduction of creative works, subject to reasonable limitations of scope. Rather, I think they are compelling examples of how badly copyright laws have been captured and distorted over time by powerful special interests, particularly in the US, and to some extent of the dangers of giving up control of our own content to third party hosting or distribution services with their own priorities that don't necessarily match our own.

In a model without copyright, it wouldn't matter whether a work was derivative, or whether it depended on the "original creative assets"; what would matter is whether people found it useful, interesting, and worth supporting/promoting.

(As for the comment on decentralization of services, I'd agree, but at the same time that particular set of problems also wouldn't exist in the absence of copyright.)

However, if the underlying question we're asking here is still whether copyright adversely affects other potential economic models for creating and distributing new works, I think my original point remains valid. How would the scenarios you mentioned support alternative model(s) that would be more attractive to creators than what we have (or at least, should have) under some sort of copyright scheme?

You seem to be suggesting that cost should be a deciding factor in whether to protect creative work. I disagree that there is a difference here between copyrights and patents.

1) In the tech industry, calculating the "cost" would be anything but straightforward. What would be allowed and what wouldn't? The players are not even comparable - what would stop a large corporation to include their HR, legal departments, and executive team as part of their "R&D costs"? Whereas, a small software startup with 1-3 members getting paid ramen noodles would be hard pressed to properly chalk up a tiny fraction of the costs the large corporation. The large corporation would have no problem showing that "project X cost $1million+ in R&D costs" while the startup would be in $thousands or $tens of thousands. If anything, one might argue that the OPPOSITE of cost would be better indicator - I see more innovation deserving protection from small startups creating things in a weekend than large corporations pushing some new technology developed over years using teams of people and resources.

2) There exist numerous examples where traditional artists create works in relatively short time. How many times have we read about an artist who wrote a song in an afternoon or even an hour? In those cases, the "R&D" costs of creating the song or painting would surely be considered small (if not tiny) when compared to tech R&D. It's contradictory to suggest that creative works protectable by copyrights at times with lower "costs" should be more protectable than tech protectable only by patents.

I suppose I am, but only indirectly.

I view both copyright and patents as economic instruments. To me, the argument for temporarily restricting freedom to replicate others' work is based on the "greater good" that comes from incentivizing the creation of that work in the first place. However, that argument only makes sense where such an incentive is actually necessary, and to the extent that it is necessary.

If something really can be created by someone within a weekend, it is unlikely that the work or insights necessary to create it are particularly unique or valuable. There is little need to incentivize creating or sharing such work with years of exclusive control, because probably many others could (and some will) do the same thing anyway within that time, and granting the exclusivity is just an artificial barrier to any greater progress that any of those creators might then make.

On the other hand, maybe identifying a new antibiotic that will save thousands of people from "superbugs" takes several years of expensive laboratory research and then several more years of expensive trials and regulatory approvals, but once identified the marginal cost of manufacture is relatively low and many organisations have the resources to produce the physical product. It seems quite plausible that the research and trials and approvals won't happen in this case unless there is some extra benefit to whoever actually puts in the time and resources to do that work first. Given the likely benefit to society of having access to new antibiotics, I personally don't have a problem with incentivization in this case. (For the same ethical reasons, I also don't have a problem with revoking any exclusivity if whoever holds the rights isn't taking reasonable steps to use them by producing and selling the drug at a fair price; the goal is to promote discovery and availability of a useful drug to those who have a medical need for it, and anyone who isn't actually contributing to that doesn't need special privileges.)

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I think the cost/benefit should be a deciding factor in which classes of creative work receive these kinds of protections. It's not so much about the absolute cost, but rather whether it's worthwhile for creators to create already, and if not, whether the value to society of having the creation available justifies offering some extra incentive.

However, we do know funding work with copyright-backed models has been widely successful for a sustained period. We also know that alternative funding models aren't precluded by copyright and that several have been tried with varying but almost always much lower degrees of success.

As 'JoshTriplett mentioned in another post, one confounding possibility is that something about how copyright works today does in fact inhibit what would otherwise be a more successful alternative model. However, so far I've yet to see any compelling examples of that, either in this discussion or elsewhere, and even then you'd need that confounding factor to cancel out multiple orders of magnitude of benefit from some other model for the most successful alternatives I've seen so far to catch up with the most successful copyright-supported work.

That is certainly possible, but until there's evidence to the contrary, it seems highly unlikely.

It seems to me that it is very very rare that it is the copyright enforcement and/or necessity (will) to stay within legal limits that itself is the reason any given copyrighted offer stays profitable. People pays because they want to pay for quality, in general.

I'm arguing that copyright-supported creative effort overall produces and distributes significantly more and significantly better works than creative effort supported in other ways.

If that doesn't imply societal benefit to you, what does?

What permissively licensed software is available to design ships or office buildings or integrated circuits?

When Adobe created a gap in the market by making Creative Cloud subscription-only, it took just a few years for several quite slick and professionally well-regarded alternative products to appear, with feature sets catering to former users of Creative Suite products in specific areas. Those new products are all commercial and funded by copyright-protected sales. How long have FOSS products like the GIMP or Inkscape been trying to do the same thing, without ever succeeding?

Logically impossible actually.

What makes you think so? This is one of my greatest fears of another Clinton presidency.

The most likely way this is going to go down is Congress is going to pass the extension again and it's going to go to the Supreme Court. I would consider the probability of any other outcome pretty low.

The US legislative process lives and dies on building alliances and horse-trading. A word from the President and/or his/her promise of future help in other matters is hugely valuable. A law going through Congress and a law going through Congress with support from the President are two very different things in practice, and would be disingenuous to say that's not the case.

It used to, back in the day. That hasn't been the case for a while in today's extremely partisan environment where compromise is now a dirty word and presidential support for something makes it less likely to pass given the hostile congress that will remain even after Clinton wins.

That's all a big show on wedge issues. On topics that matter to people with money (bankruptcy laws, banking laws etc), it's just business as usual. The DMCA was passed in a similarly "partisan" environment. Don't believe the hype.

As such, all current candidates, with the possible exception of Sanders, would probably consider signing a copyright bill routine (Lessig isn't a candidate anymore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/105th_United_States_Congress

As a creator, I agree with the idea of copyright, but as a consumer, I think you missed the core problem with this statement.

I think most people can agree that enforcing copyright is fine: that is, creators should be compensated for their work, if they so choose to be. They should especially be compensated if anyone else is making money from their work.

Let's pick on the music industry in particular, because they are particularly big abusers and also the ones that messed the whole thing up.

One of the places the music industry went wrong was in micro-enforcing exact means of consumption. If they had it their way, I'd have to buy 3 copies of every song if I wanted to be able to listen in my living room, car, and portable device. Oh, and another 3 copies each every time a new format came out (Vinyl -> Cassette -> CD -> every various DRM form of digital). Further, they tried to restrict which devices you were allowed to use ("this DRM only works on stuff from manufacturer X or Y, not Z and definitely not your home-built custom rig").

This is where they really overstepped, in my opinion. And they did this at the same time that the technology for digital music (MP3) was becoming practical, affordable and mainstream. (As in: fast internet, fast CPUs, affordable storage, and many portable music player products)

So what was the result? What would have been an underground and niche world of piracy suddenly was offering for free something that was significantly better than what you got if you paid. Many people even downloaded stuff that they owned on CD, because it was simpler than ripping it. It's not a stretch to simply skip the step of paying for the CD initially. Instead of building something even better and easier than Napster (and others), they declared war on their customers.

It's really not unlike the current climate of ads vs ad blockers: it's hard to feel bad for the advertisers after their methods serve malware, obnoxious and intrusive ads, auto-playing video, popups, etc. Most people could tolerate banner ads, just as most people would have been fine paying for their music, but they took it a step too far and ruined it for the whole industry.

If the music industry had been okay with format shifting and unrestricted (non-DRM'd) playback, instead just concentrating on ensuring that their paying customers could listen to the music they bought however they wanted, the industry would probably look quite different today. Sure, there would have been some piracy (both causal sharing among friends and for-profit counterfeits), but there always has been.

Instead, they attempted to completely erase piracy and extract every cent they could from their paying customers by controlling everything, and didn't care about the collateral damage they were doing specifically to the people trying to give them money. In fact, they want to go even further and put people in jail over it.

So to me, at least, it's not about free-as-in-beer, I'm happy to pay for content. But once I pay, I want to be able to listen to it in the ways I want. Forcing me to use a specific manufacturer's product to be able to listen to the content is as offensive to me as only allowing me to listen to certain types of music based on the color of my skin.

In the software world we have licenses that explicitly lay this out.

The music industry does actually have this sorted out, with ways to license music for covers (mechanical licenses) or remixing -- although the latter is definitely complicated [1] and is similar to fan fiction in that many artists/DJs get started by making remixes.

There's an entire wikipedia page on legal issues relating to fan fiction [2].

It's definitely not an obvious thing. Using your example, how do you decide if 50 Shades of Grey is a legitimate new work or a rip-off of the next part of the story Twilight was going to tell? If a similar story was released by the author(s) of Twilight would it be considered a rip-off of 50 Shades of Grey? What if it was revealed to be in the works prior to the release of 50 Shades of Grey?

[1] http://djtechtools.com/2012/03/25/legal-concerns-for-digital... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

Copying is non-violent, whereas preventing it requires violence. And where does copying end, and thought begin? If I examine source code, or lyrics, or a short story, reflect on them, talk about them, and use what I have gleaned, haven't I copied them to some degree?

> And where does copying end, and thought begin?

In the same way we decide when a person becomes legally major. We draw whichever arbitrary line seems to make the most sense.

That a false equivalence, contracts are between two parties who both have no grant of violence.

It's the other way. You cleverly switched the "ought" with the "fact".

What is a fact, is that "intellectual property" is not a real, tangible thing, like physical property. We only reason about IP in this way because we say it is. IP is made of words, the concept is willed into existence by copyright laws, and is only real as long all parties agree (or are forced to) to treat it as such, but the way it works is exactly however we collectively decide it ought to work.

That's unlike the concept of physical property, which is simply forced into existence, due to the fundamental properties of matter+energy, being that that what is not destroyed or created, nor goes away when you stop believing in it. Properties that actually apply just fine to information too, it exists in the physical world after all. It just represents such a minuscule amount of energy that it appears almost completely free, even when compared to just the energy required to entertain it as a human thought ...

Information isn't really free, people just get all twisted up about the fact that it's fundamentally worth very little, compared to almost anything else. But the information was never the valuable part. If you offer to clean my dirty kitchen, that's worth some value ultimately based on energy required to perform the service. Note you can only sell me this service once. If you just tell me about a clean kitchen, that's also worth some value ultimately based on energy required to perform the service--roughly the same order of magnitude as the value of the utterance "cool story bro".

We're really still very much haggling over the price of information. And the offers on both sides of the table are not even remotely in the same ballpark. Both sides are playing hard, using all the tricks in the book and out of the box.

And that's possible, all right, I guess. You can force or decide to artificially prop up the price of something way beyond its value. They do that with diamonds and probably many other things. There's some tricks that can make that work for a rather long time, even. But ultimately you're not extracting value from the thing, but a power differential that indirectly imbues the thing with value.

This indirection is a way to create an "ought", but not a fact.

Which is fine in principle, there are many "oughts" I support completely, making up what I believe is good and right. But I accept that I cannot argue those as "facts", but only in other ways, preferably based on an ethical framework (but if you must, any power differential will do).

Now, I believe, and I don't know if this is a fact, that the situation is untenable. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but I doubt even copyright law can artificially prop up the value of information indefinitely. It merely postpones the inevitable crash to its true value. For instance, I am an artist, I can make a beautiful illustration or piece of music, and give it away for free. Not all artists might want to, but enough will to kick the bottom out of the market, if slowly over time.

The only way to prevent me from doing that, is to forbid me giving away my work for free, or forbid/complicate the public domain. What is what would happen if I offer my work to the world, but I lack the control to keep it free, only for some party that will play the game, to swoop in, assume ownership and sell it as IP even though it is against my wishes. Which I hope you agree would be at least as bad a situation as today's content producers crying about piracy=robbery. Yet it is exactly what today's audio/video streaming services are lining up to enforce. Someone has to own your works as intellectual property, or they will own it for you.

And ultimately the content producers get screwed out of their rights, which I hope by now you also see coming from miles away, because the value never came from the content, it came from the power differential enforcing the concept of intellectual property.

As a content producer, I'd MUCH rather get screwed over by piracy (which is available to everybody equally) than giving the large "content industry" corporations the exclusive screwing me, giving them the power to enforce intellectual property rights however they see fit. But don't think for a moment that I, small time content producer, will be in control of my content for anything more than its fundamental worth.

And either way, as an artist, I'll keep producing beautiful things because I enjoy doing so. Regardless.

And either way, if you want to make a living off content production, the only way is to sell the service (commission), not the content. Regardless.

This is incorrect (and I didn't grow up in the digital age, unless you call 4 function calculators the "digital age"). There is no such right. It is not a human right, nor is it something that you are intrinsically entitled to have.

Copyright is something that is endowed upon you by the government. It is intrinsically owned by society. You are granted a limited monopoly on copying. If society did not grant you this monopoly, you would not have it. This is how it has worked historically and this is how it is written in law currently.

The problem that you may be facing is the "right" in "copyright". It is an overloaded term. It refers to your legal ability rather than your moral entitlement.

Because copyright is not an intrinsic right, but rather a societal grant, it is important that we weigh the societal benefits of this grant. In my opinion, in this case the ability to receive a copyright for an API is counter to the intent of copyright. For example, why can we not copyright recipes or game rules or fashion designs? I won't rehash 100 years of legal debate on the subject, but rather give my opinion that similar criteria should be applied here.

You're attacking a statement that didn't exist in the parent post.

So, now I am a bit confused. Do they believe that they are morally entitled to a monopoly, or do they believe that it is simply a good idea? Because in the first case, it doesn't really alter my post. From societal standards, they are not morally entitled to the monopoly. The parent is, of course, free to disagree but they stand against centuries of legal history where this just hasn't been the case. It would be incorrect to state that only those who grew up in the digital age disagree.

If it is the second, then I will agree in general, but I think we should be very careful to balance the benefits. I believe that copyright on APIs will cause significantly more harm than good. So in this specific case, my opinion is that it is not right (as in not a good idea) to do it. It is certainly a debatable issue, though, with many reasonable arguments on both sides.

I disagree with that. To the extent that any rights are "natural" or "human" (as opposed to all rights being creations of the government), I think copyright is entitled to that status more so than say rights in land. My back yard is something that was here before I was born and will be here after I die. I had nothing to do with its creation, and I just bought it from somebody who bought it from somebody who stole it from the Indians. How on earth do I have a greater, more fundamental, right to that than to something I created out of non-existence?

If you build a business, you build it on the back of government-educated workers commuting on government-built roads, etc. "You didn't build that" and whatnot. But we consider you to have a moral entitlement to own and control your business, without assuming society has any special right to it other than universal obligations like paying taxes. But creative works--while they are influenced by society to a degree--are to a much greater extent singular products of creation. But you want to say you don't have a moral entitlement to it?

So, while there is a case for limited (a word which should have meaning) government-granted monopolies on products of the mind, they just don't have the same standing as rights which, if not natural to being a human, have a longer tradition than modern national governments. The word "natural" has meaning at least in terms of precedence, if not bloody in tooth and claw nature itself.

In other words, we could claim and defend a right to our lives and property and freedom to move about long before we could claim such a right to our thoughts as recorded somehow. We had to wait for government granted monopolies for the latter.

Finally, government itself holds copyright away from other rights. It's an experiment. It doesn't claim to be protecting such a right as a basis for legitimacy, but granting a limited protection. It's the difference between acquiring legitimacy and using it.

When you make a creative work, you own that work. This is a human right. It is yours. If you never show it to anyone, then they can't copy it. So in a way, you have the same monopoly in a trivial sense.

Let's say you have an apple and you eat it. I happen to have an apple to and watching you eat it I think, "That looks delicious. I'm going to eat my apple too". It's my apple. I'm allowed to eat it. I'm allowed to copy your action. It's a basic freedom that I enjoy.

Now imagine that you had a monopoly on eating apples. Well, that's pretty horrible for the world. Even if you were the very first person to think of eating an apple, it would be terrible for us to give you a monopoly on eating apples. There are lots of apples. I'm not depriving you of your human right to own apples (or eat them if you choose). Just because you happened to think of it first is no reason to deprive others.

The important thing is: you have no human right to stop others from eating apples. Even if nobody had thought of it before, your human rights only go as far as yourself and the things in your possession. Similarly, even if I was hungry, I have no human right to force you to show me how to eat an apple. It's your apple. It's your body. You can do what you like.

Let's say you have a piece of canvas and some paint. You paint a picture of an apple on your canvas. I think, "Hey, that's pretty cool". I happen to have a canvas and some paint. They are my canvas and paint and I can do what I want with them.... except paint a picture of an apple that looks like your picture. Because you have a monopoly on painting pictures that look like that.

This is almost as terrible as giving a monopoly on eating apples. However, as a society we have decided that we want to encourage innovative apple painting. So even though it is kind of strange, we grant a limited monopoly to anyone who paints an apple that looks different than apples that anybody else has painted previously.

So instead of a human right, what we've done is get together as a society to say, "Apple painting is an important part of our culture and we like to see new apple paintings. It is boring to see the same picture over and over again." We all agree (collectively, through our society) to abstain from copying other people's apple paintings for a certain period of time.

Now, do we have the right as a society to force you to divulge any new apple paintings you might draw? If there is a sudden famine and the only food we have are apples, do we have the right to force you to show us how to eat apples? I am not an expert in these fields, but I suspect that these examples would infringe on human rights, even if it would help society as a whole.

I hope that makes the issue more clear.

Don't know why you're being downvoted for giving such a comprehensive and thoughtful comment. Ridiculous really. I say even if you disagree with grellas don't donwvote, please reply and put the same amount of effort into the reply as was put into the comment above.

My paraphrase: ~[No one outside of Oracle is overly sympathetic to their money grab against Google. Everyone sees their claims as overly-litigious--based on the simple fact of having purchased Sun Microsystems rather than a legitimate defense of their own creative and value-creating effort.]

The OP seems to make some mistakes of fact. The decision was not Alsup's, but the jury's finding of fact: Google's use is fair even if API's are copyrightable (Alsup believed they weren't).

For the quote you don't understand, I believe the mistake is only in a single character, 'is' should be 'in' (to which I present Larry Ellison as the central counter-example).

As to the first round that occurred 4 years ago, the decision was Judge Alsup's. Here is my analysis of that decision at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4050490#up_4051761

Of course, in the verdict that just came down, the decision was that of the jury's and, yes, Google's use is fair even if API's are copyrightable - that is what fair use means.