Wikipedia is shutting down all English language sites starting tomorrow at midnight DC time to protest SOPA and PIPA, the Senate version of the SOPA act. Though SOPA has been withdrawn, PIPA could still get a floor vote in the Senate on the 24th. And even though the DNS blacklist provision has been removed from both bills, there are still a number of ugly remnants, as explained by the EFF.
If you want a concrete example of why Wikipedia is reacting so forcefully to this legislation, which would essentially shut down a site if it hosted content that the rights holder asserted violated copyright, look at this picture I used in a post on Sunday. It’s a scan from a 1944 issue of Life Magazine that is still under copyright. As you can see if you follow the link, Wikipedia has an elaborate rationale explaining why the use of that picture is fair use, and those reasons sound compelling to me. If they weren’t compelling to Time/Warner, the copyright holder, Time/Warner could issue a DMCA takedown notice and Wikipedia would have to remove the offending content. As long as Wikipedia isn’t making money from the use of the copyrighted material, is unaware of the infringement, and responds to the takedown notice, they can’t be held liable for the infringement. In other words, sites like Wikipedia have “safe harbor” under current copyright law, but they face the threat of complete shutdown under the proposed new law, if they’re a foreign site. That’s what’s so radical about this change, and why it’s provoked this response by Wikipedia.
By the way, thanks to the 1998 extension of the length of copyright, Time/Warner will be able to have rights to that image until at least 2039. Copyright extension plus SOPA/PIPA shows how far we’ve come from the original purpose of copyright, which was to give authors rights over their creations during their lifetime to spur creativity.
Karmakin
As I said in the last SOPA/PIPA thread, any sort of even-handed copyright enforcement bill MUST include codification of Fair Use/Right of First Sale consumer rights, including enforcement mechanisms to restrict technological measures that infringe on those rights, a solution for the orphan/abandoned works problem and a reduction on the amount of time before cultural works go into the public domain.
gnomedad
And across the English-speaking world, the kiddies do their homework using Conservapedia. Hilarity follows.
Southern Beale
Nashville bloggers had a coffee meet-up with Congressman Jim Cooper on Saturday (I wrote about it here) and SOPA was one of the things discussed. He mentioned that one of the overlooked groups pushing the copyright issue are pharmaceutical companies, since so many new drugs are created by U.S. companies.
I honestly don’t know much about it, I do know that living in Nashville which is a songwriters town, we tend to look at it strictly from an entertainment industry standpoint. We all tend to support songwriters’ ability to earn a living. However, I’m not sure SOPA really addresses them. Seems like songwriters already have very powerful protections via the music publishers and music licensing organizations — protections that we print writers don’t have.
But what do I know.
guster
Originally, it wasn’t lifetime, misterm. It was I believe 14 years -if- you filed, plus one fourteen year extension. So a maximum of 28 years.
guster
@Southern Beale: Oh, and I’m a print writer, too, SB. Make a (pitiful) living as a novelist. I think the current copyright nonsense is nonsense. 28 years seems a bit short to me, and I like that it’s automatic and doesn’t require filing any more. But I think that the current protection, whatever it is, 75 years plus something plus indefinite extensions as long as Disney requests them, actually hurts writers. My novels sink without a trace. I’d prefer them to be available to anyone in, say, 2030, to republish or remix or just distribute or whatever. At least then they’d be out there, which might lead to more opportunities for me. Couldn’t be worse than now, which I think just serves the already-successful.
Karmakin
@3. The economic effects of piracy are way overblown, especially on a macro-society wide basis. There’s some of course…cracking down on the “Globalization” of digital media is a big part of it (which to be honest I don’t really think is a valid concern), as well as true real outright pirate sites, which are quite rare.
We’re not talking about The Pirate Bay, or any sort of Torrent or sharing site. Or anything ad-supported. Or anything free. We’re talking about go to a site, give them a quarter, download an MP3. That IS real damage, don’t get me wrong.
It’s just extremely rare.
The best way to look at it is that there’s X disposable income dollars in our economy. Even if you could wipe out piracy, you still have those X dollars. Doesn’t change it one bit. Now, there’s a very small effect where you’re reducing illegal “imports”, and that’s an economic good effect, of course, but the actual economic result of the effect is basically the same as converting any import to a domestic purchase.
The biggest problem with piracy, economically speaking is the microeconomic distortion effect. That is, if it’s easier to get X for free, then less people will spend money on X and get other things instead. One could argue that the music industry got hit hard with this distortion effect, although for a variety of reasons music is simply less culturally relevant now than it was two decades now. (Be it because of piracy, the killing of web radio, radio consolidation, competition from DVDs/Video Games, etc.) Which would explain much of the dropping sales of music.
So as of right now, the distortion effect is very minimal. Simply put, piracy is not a big problem. It’s not even a small problem. It’s an issue where people are making moralistic judgements..getting stuff for free is bad..where they’re not even relevant.
This isn’t about stopping piracy. It’s about monopolizing the culture. That’s all it’s ever been about.
Southern Beale
@guster:
Can’t you do that? As the copyright holder? Or do you sign that away to a publisher?
I’m a magazine writer. My shit gets stolen ALL the fucking time. I sign my first-time rights away to get paid for a pittance, and it’s up to the magazine to make a stink about it. Which they never do because let’s face it, some stupid little interview isn’t worth the hassle to them. I’m not Charles Pierce or anything.
It all comes down to being the big fish. One day we’ll both be world famous writers and then we’ll have the juice to do what we want with our own intellectual property.
Southern Beale
@guster:
Can’t you do that? As the copyright holder? Or do you sign that away to a publisher?
I’m a magazine writer. My shit gets stolen ALL the fucking time. I sign my first-time rights away to get paid for a pittance, and it’s up to the magazine to make a stink about it. Which they never do because let’s face it, some stupid little interview isn’t worth the hassle to them. I’m not Charles Pierce or anything.
It all comes down to being the big fish. One day we’ll both be world famous writers and then we’ll have the juice to do what we want with our own intellectual property.
Yevgraf
These copyright extensions are all about rent-seeking while putting in no further effort.
I defy anybody to find lazier people than American CEOs, publishers, producers and conservatives.
CarolDuhart2
My radical solution: a flat 50 year copyright. That term faces reality. Only a handful of created works are still valuable after 50 years. A Disney can renew for just one more term of 50, and that’s it. If nobody cares enough to actively renew that, it immediately goes into the public domain.
I have yet to see a rational reason why copyright should be any longer than that for the vast majority of works. The vast majority of works aren’t all that relevant outside of a few years and months anyway, and few people buy works that are any older than that.
Guster
@Southern Beale: No, I sign all that away to the publisher. Once the book is out of print, if my agent does his job, the rights revert to me–but publishers are now keeping books officially ‘in print’ forever, via digital editions.
Magazine writing is hard. I’ve had a few pieces published in sort of second tier magazines (Veggie Times, Fine Woodworking) and they took longer than writing a whole chapter.
Nobody steals my stuff. Nobody -reads- my stuff! Must be infuriating, but I think that’s the other missing bit of the equations: none of these ‘rights’ mean anything, absent the resources to enforce them.
PeakVT
@CarolDuhart2: I’d really like no renewals after 50 years (or author’s lifetime plus 25 years, which ever is less). If renewals after the initial period are granted, they should come with a significant tax dedicated to the NEftA that ratchets up every 20 years or so.
ET
Under SOPA reasoning even libraries who provide copiers and other reproduction techniques aren’t that much different (even if they provide Copyright law notice). I mean, the copier are there and libraries post signs about Copyright but the library doesn’t know what the person does with the copied material – so shouldn’t it be at risk by the same reasoning? Sure many users are using it for papers or for their own interest, but many libraries are used by people making money off collecting/copying sources in some way or another. Heck if Kinkos or some other similar service should be at risk as well.
MarkJ
Copyright laws in this country are out of control. The Great Gatsby is still under copyright protection – it was published in the mid 1920s (I think 1924). The author is long dead. The publisher (and possibly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heirs) is still earning monopoly rents on publishing the book almost eighty years later.
All to protect the long dead Walt Disney from losing his trademark on Mickey. One wonders why the Disney shareholders are entitled, in perpetuity, to monopoly rents on a cartoon character created almost a century ago by someone who was not them.
cmorenc
@mistermix:
Foot-dragging students everywhere across the US caught in a deadline-jam to get a paper done Wednesday that’s due Thursday will be thrown into a mad panic when they discover this! The tried-and-true method of lazily depending on Wikipedia to do all the heavy research lifting for papers, and then using Wikipedia itself to crib enough links to footnotes to easily navigate past the frequently-imposed rule that Wikipedia is not an acceptable source to cite in such papers…well, this won’t work. Kids, hope your Google-fu is up to snuff and lots of you will be pulling all-nighters wading through all the chaff to find enough good wheat to feed your paper topic. All over America, students are going to be writing under handicap of even more fatigue and late-night sleeplessness than normal, and will turn in papers Thursday morning with more than the usual density of tangled grammar and syntax.
Judas Escargot
@Yevgraf:
I have a friend who says they use their ill-gotten gains to buy luxuries– like cigarettes, health care, and T-bone steaks.
R. Porrofatto
Thanks to idiocy, greed, Disney and Sonny Bono, if you write a book about cold fusion or curing cancer, it’s copyrighted until 70 years after you die. What makes this truly insane, if you invent cold fusion or a cure for cancer, you pretty much only get a patent for 20 years.
See this chart for how copyright terms have been fattened over the years.
PJ
@Karmakin:
If your livelihood were based on producing copyrightable works, I doubt you would consider the economic effects of piracy “overblown.” Check out the various papers released by Big Champagne – the number of pirated copies of recordings downloaded far exceeds those obtained legally, (even when, in the case of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, they can be obtained legally for free). The music industry has been decimated, and movies are next in line. From anecdotal experience, I know many musicians who used to be able to make middle-class incomes from touring and recordings; income from recordings has largely disappeared, so all of their income has to derive from gigs, which means they either barely scrape by now, or have been forced to give up music altogether. You may not care (and clearly the people doing the downloading do not), but if your assets were confiscated by pirates, you might.
JoeShabadoo
It should be obvious to everyone that copyright now does exactly the opposite of what it was intended.
It was made to spur innovation, creativity and new works by giving the author exclusive rights.
Now huge megacorps hold copyrights that are wedged into the public conciousness so firmly that new ideas get buried. From now until apparently eternity every new mascot character will have to compete with nostalgia backed by millions of dollars in advertising despite the creator being long dead.
Mnemosyne
@MarkJ:
IANAL, but trademark and copyright are completely different, and every legal opinion I’ve ever seen has said that Disney’s rights to the Mickey Mouse character would be in no way affected even if the early shorts went into public domain when the copyright expires. Even if the copyright to the films expired, no one could start creating, say, Mickey Mouse t-shirts using images from “Steamboat Willie” because it would still be a violation of Disney’s trademark.
But corporate lawyers are, frankly, fucking crazy when it comes to this stuff. Right now, we’re having a lot of problems getting permission to use publicity photos of deceased Disney employees (animators, etc.) that were taken by Disney staff photographers in the course of the employees’ jobs because they didn’t sign release forms. In, like, 1947. It’s completely insane.
Karmakin
@ET: In the real world, one of the biggest economic distortion effect in the culture industries, without a doubt, is public libraries. Bar none. Makes “piracy” look like nothing. (That said, Blockbuster and used media shops have a much bigger actual impact due to actually accepting money for distributing cultural goods that are not “theirs” to distribute..even though it’s totally legal”)
And we like that distortion. We think it’s a good thing if people without much money are able to read books. I just generally don’t make much of a distinction between books and other cultural goods. I think it’s a good thing if people without much money are able to watch movies or use software.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Karmakin:
This, in a nut shell.
The music industry for example; their problem isn’t people like me not buying an album in a decade because I am pirating, I don’t pirate. Their problem I have been exposed to so many more musical styles that my tastes have move way beyond what the music industry is willing to produce.
Villago Delenda Est
Corporations are immortal.
Of course, the Founders didn’t think that was a good idea, but later on, as money talked, such quaint notions were abandoned in the name of the triumph of Ferengi values over any other value system out there.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
Disney’s lawyers are notorious for this sort of shit.
Every few years (and I’ve told this story here before, but it’s worth repeating) the University of Oregon gets a “cease and desist” letter from some Disney lawyer about using Donald Duck as a mascot.
And, in response, the UofO sends a photocopy of the original document signed by Walt Fuckin’ Disney hisownself granting the UofO perpetual rights to use Donald Duck as a mascot.
Someone here once theorized that this was the equivalent in the Disney legal office of sending someone on a snipe hunt, a hazing ritual for the noobies.
Villago Delenda Est
@Judas Escargot:
Hookers and booze.
That’s what these parasites live on.
liberal
@Karmakin:
That’s an absolutely crazy thing to say. The distortion is created by copyright, in the sense that law is being used to price goods many orders of magnitude above their marginal cost.
liberal
@guster:
That’s laughable.
The entire point of the relevant clause in the Constitution is to provide incentives. That’s all.
The idea that a 10 year copyright isn’t enough to provide the same basic level of incentive as what we have right now (which is essentially infinity) is ludicrous.
(Whether government-granted monopolies on “intellectual property” are the ideal way to go about creating incentives is another matter entirely.)
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
Absolutely.
The “intellectual property” is monopolized so that exploitative profit can be derived from it.
It’s a legalized form of theft on the part of corporations, who produce no intellectual property. Individuals do this. It’s time to clamp down on THESE distortions that seek to deprive people of rewards for their work, in favor of “person” that does not exist.
Triassic Sands
@gnomedad:
This is the opening Conservapedia has been waiting for!
gaz
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Fuck it. I pirate. If I like an artist, I buy, and I go to shows. I know there’s no justification, but I simply do not give a fuck.*
I’m tired of being the bigger person.
I’ve been subsidizing rich assholes like record execs for years through lax marginal rates on taxes (which I pay for), and a ridiculous capital gains rate. Fuck em. That doesn’t make me right. But the point is I no longer care.
OTOH, with respect to microsoft.
They’ve been fudging their boxed sales of windows for YEARS, and owe Washington State by my rough calculations, maybe $700,000,000 in back taxes over the past 14 years or so.
So I actually make a point to refuse to pay for their software. As a Washington resident, I feel they owe me. So they are a special case. I also help people overcome MS attempts to thwart piracy. It’s my fucking civic duty – PAY YOUR DAMNED TAXES ASSHOLES!
MarkJ
@liberal: True, but the marginal cost would be zero otherwise, and at that price on-one would have any incentive to produce content. It’s not a perfect way to incentivise creation of new entertainment, but it’s probably better than the alternative. Where it really starts to get distortionary is when you have second and third generation copyright holders still generating monopoly rents on a work they had nothing to do with producing. F. Scott Fitzgeral will never right another book – how does it incentivise production of new material to give extra money to still living people based on the fact that he once, a long time ago, wrote a great American novel?
IMO Feist should still have the rights to her recordings, but Louis Armstrong’s and Charlie Parker’s recordings should be in the public domaine. One could argue that even the Beatles’ or Stones’s earlier recordings should be public domaine by now – they’ve reaped untold fortunes from those recordings already anyway.
mclaren
@Yevgraf:
There. Fixed that for you.