Joel Spolsky offered the one and only sensible way to fight back that will actually work: go on the offensive and get legislation introduced to roll back the extensions of copyright & other IP laws.
For example: "Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?"
Not only should these laws be rolled back anyway IMO, but by merely pushing for these you'll drain the resources of the RIAA&co so their offensive campaign stops.
Anyone taking that approach will need to figure out how to counter the "international treaties that can only be modified by unanimous consent require us to have insanely long copyright terms" argument.
I could seemingly get behind a much shorter copyright term. However, won't the enforcement measures needed to protect those new works be just as complex, ineffective or invasive as they are for 70 year copyrights? Enforcing copyrighted works, no matter how long or short the period, would require much the same overreaching action, right?
Because many "pirates", especially the more competent ones, are motivated in part by the sheer immorality of the copyright extensions (or so many have claimed here on HN and a few other places I frequent). In many ways, copyright enforcement is in a similar place to the enforcement of Prohibition at the end of the 1920s, where otherwise law-abiding citizens willingly broke what they considered bad law.
The commercial success of DRM-free music on iTunes, Amazon MP3, Magnatune, etc. and DRM-free games in the Humble Bundle would seem to contradict this point.
This part of the final paragraph summarizes it well.
"[St] Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says "How dare you terrorize the seas"? The pirate captain replies, "How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I'm called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you're called an emperor." The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only."
"At O'Reilly, we had a narrow escape a few years ago. "Head First Java" starts each chapter with an image taken from an old movie for which the copyright had expired, placing the movie in the public domain. Someone collected several of those movies into DVDs and copyrighted the DVD. Luckily, we discovered it (and were able to find new images) before we published the book and ended up with a court summons."
I don't think that's how it works. You can take anything you want out of the public domain, make minimal changes to it meeting a certain standard, and copyright the result, but that only gives you a copyright to the result. You don't suddenly own the thing in the public domain, which would be utterly absurd.
They may have been concerned about getting sued by someone claiming they took it from their resulting copyright work rather than the original public domain work, but even that would have been very easy to defend against and a lawsuit in bad faith to boot. (And those are just a constant threat, regardless.)
I'll copy to only being a very interested layman and not a lawyer, but I've never heard of individuals being able to just reach out and grab things out of public domain at will and fully own them. If that were possible then there would simply be no such thing as public domain, and that's not the case.
O'Reilly may have (expensively) prevailed in court heretofore, but now we have the Supreme Court declaring that works once in the public domain can be retrieved into private possession. It's an open question whether that ruling would have applied in this case - all the better to explode the legal fees. Good call by O'Reilly.
Jerf is correct in this. Public domain materials remain so except as modified or improved by the creative work of others and, in that case, only the creative improvements fall under copyright, not the original materials.
The recent case of Golan v. Holder held that Congress has the constitutional power to revive the copyright on foreign works that had fallen into the U.S. public domain as part of its treaty-based efforts to promote the arts through reciprocal arrangements with foreign countries. It further held that such "re-copyrighting" doesn't violate the first amendment rights of persons who had relied on the prior public domain status of the works that had been removed from public-domain status.
The Golan case is, to me, a really absurd outcome and reflects a weird mix of liberals on the Court (e.g., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the opinion) upholding sharp encroachments on free speech and conservatives (who joined in a 6-2 ruling) upholding rather large assertions of constitutional legislative power where a strict construction of the constitutional language ("limited times," etc.) would seem to point in the opposite direction. I think it is a bad decision. But it by no means empowers any private party to try to claim that anything in the public domain somehow shifts back to copyright status by virtue of what that private party does. The case is irrelevant to that issue.
IANAL, but I feel pretty confident that you are egregiously misrepresenting that ruling. When you say "works can be retrieved into private possession," that makes it sound like you can pick out a public-domain work and claim it for your own, which is not at all a fair summary of what the court said. It's like hearing that locking somebody up without food or water counts as torture and false imprisonment, and then proceeding to tell everyone, "It's an open question whether you can legally refuse to give someone your food when he asks." I do not believe the question is all that open.
As anybody who takes the time to read the ruling will see, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the power to make laws that retroactively extend the copyright of certain works that had fallen into the public domain, and specifically said that Congress was empowered to do so if a treaty required it. I do think it's a bad ruling, but it is a far cry from a private party being able to swoop in and snatch works out of the public domain.
I thought you might be referring to that. That ruling isn't really a precedent for "Public works being re-copyrighted". It was a little more complex and related to a treaty the U.S had agreed to.
The works in question were still under copyright in other countries.
So let's say that you release 2 DVDs with 3 movies each. Then a book, such as Head First Java has pictures in it from all 6 movies and no other. Clearly the selection of pictures in this case was inspired by the selection done for those 2 DVDs, is it not?
Bad example. Releasing those DVDs doesn't give you that much rights over the still-public-domain content.
Look, it's not as if copyright isn't being abused rampantly by all sorts of parties from the top to the bottom, but let's not get stupid about it. There's no copyright doctrine that lets you own the entire idea of a particular list of six movies. Even to the extent you can have a collection copyright [1], that merely limits someone from releasing two DVDs with the exact same movies, if indeed it would even limit that as you'd at least face a bit of a challenge in convincing a judge that meets a minimum creativity bar. (Collections covered by that clause are generally somewhat larger.)
Now more than ever, it's important to know exactly what we're facing and exactly what we're not facing, because if we let ourselves get sidetracked by entirely non-existent threats that's energy we're not spending on the real ones.
I believe the point he was trying to make here is that who owns the copyright doesn't matter. If the company is willing to sue you and into bankruptcy and you don't have the money to fight back, you're screwed. "Justice" doesn't matter.
This article has a really good point - the discussion should shift from SOPA to how fucked-up and rotten these industries have become, on how they are destroying jobs, on how they are stifling creativity and ripping-off authors, on how they've abused the DMCA and on how they are bribing politicians.
Well, you can discus the morality of donations, but when you make public statements such as [1]:
Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’
for support need to understand that this industry
is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up
for them when their job is at stake.
How is that any different from a private citizen saying, "Those who count on the elderly for support need to understand we'll be watching very carefully who's going to stand up for MedicAid when their jobs are at stake"?
Bribery is, "Hey congressperson, I've got twenty thousand dollars that are yours if you change ordinance code to allow alcohol to be served at local gas stations."
Usually the FBI is very keen to find corrupt politicians, so if there is a whiff, and for all we know, there might be in this case, but we don't know yet, they'll pursue it. Here's a partial list: http://www.topix.com/forum/world/russia/TTEIUECQCP1EGDHCL
It's not always clear-cut, but my understanding is that there needs to be an implication of a promise of direct action as a result of exchange of goods, money, services, etc.
I view donations this way ... I like you, I hope you succeed, here's some money to go forth and kick-ass.
I view donations-related bribery this way ... my interests are important, here's some money to let you know how important they are ... you do know that I sell alcohol at local gas stations, right? Also, did I mention how I only sponsor politicians that serve my interests?.
Yes, that's not explicit by itself. $500,000 ending up in some bank account is the explicit part. The government's purpose is to serve the interests of all the country's citizens, instead of listening to the highest bidder. How can that still be framed as free speech beats me.
A little naive to think that's the only form of bribery.
Campaign contributions are probably one of the biggest forms of bribery in the US. Regardless of whether you "ask for direct action" it is implicit that if the Tobacco industry gives you money, you don't go shitting all over the Tobacco industry, unless you don't want/need that money any more.
It's still a bribe/corruption, but it seems it has become 'acceptable' in the US.
I commented on the original but I think that others here might also value this here:
I liked this post and the way that it turns the question of piracy upon itself, but I still felt like there were about three dramatic ideas missing, so I wrote those up and put them on my web site briefly:
I fear I was too verbose in that essay and perhaps I will edit it more later -- but basically, those ideas are (1) that easy copying has led to an absurd situation where you can buy things without getting them; (2) that copying is both absurdly natural and restricting copying is absurdly natural, so that we feel entitled to do both; and (3) that the media companies today face an absurd situation where they fight for their lives -- and as Y Combinator said, they might do quite a bit of damage on their way down.
I have to say, if how this SOPA,PIPA,ACTA,megavideo stuff is working out was planned ahead, expected, executed and coordinated; I can't help but be incredibly impressed. If they anticipated and had plans for all these paths then I have to admit my admiration for their brilliance.
From a game theoretic point of view these lobbyists or government groups or what have you were doing 5-step+ thinking. With respect to the recent events, everyone, including the tech community got played. Maybe not a Xanatos Gambit but verging on it.
Over time they quietly passed a slew of boring laws with aggregate equivalence near enough to SOPA - just without the concentrated firepower. With the recent ACTA, there is now an international baseline for the basic framework to tackle these things. In the US, SOPA and PIPA could have even been red herrings. Tying up attention bandwidth and energy so they could later go ahead and pass future laws and enact similar initiatives, with SOPA as the new reference point. Knowing the people would be drained and full from victory. Basic psychology. And if SOPA passed, well the more the merrier.
With that in place - even in the case of the failure of SOPA, the implications were clear. Nuclear options are on the table. Regardless of the success of the bill, they had a target, a well known centralized file sharing service. There were plenty of others, why megaupload? It is one of the most well known with some of the largest mindshare. Make an example of them and send a signal to similar and future services. With SOPA fresh in mind and now megaupload's demise, a chain reaction of similar services are either ending sharing or plain shutting down and taking people's files with them. Causing a cascade to all other services built on them - some legitimate the rest questionable.
With this case a precedent is set, the significance and direction of which I am not studied enough to know. But anyways, this is just for file sharing and counterfeiting services no? They deserve to be taken down as most of their stuff is illegal. Even if the things that we feared would happen in the event of SOPA is now voluntarily occurring to that group they should have known the risks when choosing to take that direction.
I don't know if it is appropriate to post the "First they came for the..." that is making its way around (maybe too much) but from an intellectual point of view this is amazing to watch unfold. Most of these bill writers probably have positive intent but the interactions involved are extremely nonlinear and sensitive, humans are not yet anywhere near intelligent enough to try and control such a dynamic and complex network without unintentionally compounding the scope, destabilization and extent of their actions. Morphing the entire network of interactions into something with consequences no one can truly predict.
But even as many fall, the constant energy into the system will likely create a more complex, less centralized and bullet proof internet and society in general (hopefully). So I suppose the good thing is that the media company truly care about the internet. They are pushing its evolution to something more robust and are fighting complacency. Just need to be careful to not overwhelm positive energy with dissipative forces and cause extinction.
For example: "Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?"
Not only should these laws be rolled back anyway IMO, but by merely pushing for these you'll drain the resources of the RIAA&co so their offensive campaign stops.
(https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/4GgaRiSy...)