Posts by Mark Harris
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Damn, I type too slowly ;-)
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@Simon
The concept of copyright hasn't actually evolved that much. Only the duration has really changed in 300 years.A bunch of people who are making $$$$ out of the process have been pushing for a change of name, but that's just applying lipstick. It's not evolution. The substance is still the same.
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@robbery
Dude, you're wilfully ignoring the point that has been made to you repeatedly that copyright isn't a property right. Never has been.Copyright has only existed as a legal construct since 1710, when the Statute of Anne was passed in England. Before that, publishers obtained the right from the Crown to make copies of a manuscript in printed form, not from the author at all. The Crown maintained a) that everything in the kingdom belonged to them andb) they needed to control what was disseminated in case it was subversive. From the late 1500's the Stationers Guild (which included printers and publishers) kept a register of who had the rights to make copies of which books, in order to resolve disputes between publishers.
Intellectual property, as a term, has gained modern usage since 1967 when WIPO was formed (at the urging of those who would profit from its formation, I'd suggest) but the term goes back to 1865 at least, as Wikipedia has it:
**History**
Modern usage of the term intellectual property began with the 1967 establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), but it did not enter popular usage until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.The earliest use of the term intellectual property appears to be in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." (1 Woodb. & M. 53, 3 West.L.J. 151, 7 F.Cas. 197, No. 3662, 2 Robb.Pat.Cas. 303, Merw.Pat.Inv. 414). The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years."[6] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.
The concept's origins can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist. The Talmud contains the first known example of codifying a prohibition against the theft of ideas, which is further discussed in the Shulchan Aruch.
Just because you want copyright to be a property right, doesn't mean it is. History, society and the law are against you on this. You need to accept that because your incessant "why" makes rational discussion difficult.
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He's back! We missed you, Gianni
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Thank you Robin and Sacha for a couple of excellent posts!
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Er, i suspect you can -- i think it'd the criticism -- or education --? bit of the applicable law, there's probably a fair use right somewhere in there.
**Fair dealing in New Zealand**
In New Zealand, fair dealing includes some copying for private study, research, criticism, review, and news reporting. Sections 42 and 43 of the Copyright Act 1994 set out the types of copying that qualify. The criteria are perhaps most similar to those applying in the UK, although commercial research can still count as fair dealing in New Zealand. Incidental copying, while allowed, is not defined as "fair dealing" under the Act. As in Canada, fair dealing is not an infringement of copyright.
The factors determining whether copying for research or private study is judged to be fair dealing in New Zealand are its purpose, its effect on the potential market or value of the work copied, the nature of the work, the amount copied in relation to the whole work, and whether or not the work could have been obtained in a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price.
which is not the exact same thing as "fair use" in the US context.
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She gets her phil, that's for sure
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@Keir
Fair enough, I do withdraw and apologise for that comment. I hadn't heard the term before and thought you were just bagging Californians for being Californians.Having now read the paper in question, I don't think it's a Californian ideology as much as a global digital ideology - it just happened in California first and, in 1995 when the paper was written, much of the digital industry was in that part of the world. I think the paper and theory are a little out of date and, with hindsight, remarkably shallow in analysis. It reads more like a political tract damning with faint praise than a reasoned analysis. Rosseto's counter was accurate, if a little impassioned:
Meanwhile, it's Europeans who are discussing "Californian Ideology" not Californians who are discussing "European Ideology." And not because some clatch of bureaucrats in Strasbourg or Luxembourg have issued yet another directive. Because Europeans are recognizing that 19th century nostrums are not solutions to 21st century problems - on the contrary, they are the problem - and it's time to encourage competition, risk taking, democracy and meritocracy, and dare I say it, dreaming about a different, better future.
As he says, there are always pioneers. You don't have to be Cory Doctorow to use the net to advance towards your particular goals - you just have to understand what he's done and apply the principles to your own work. The future is here - you can hide from it if you want, but I don't think you can say it doesn't work just because you can't see a way to make it work for you.
Nobody is just one thing. Nobody.
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@ robbery
spoke either like a man who's never actually created anything, or as a genius who hasn't had to work hard in his life :)
Don would be the first to say he is no genius (sorry, Don ;-) but lots of people think he's quite clever. He also works bloody hard at what he does, which is creative in a particular environment, which is computer software and an open source-based business model.
Either way you don't value the work of creatives which is sad, but a society who doesn't comprehend and value its creative types is a society that won't progress as a whole because it gives no incentive to do so
You make assumptions on two levels:
1) that Don doesn't value creative people, which is frankly bullshit. To the contrary, the argument around copyright is expressly about putting value on the work;
2) that creatives are inherently valuable, which is also bullshit, IMHO. Some are, some aren't.What classifies a creative? A 5 year-old's finger painting is a creative work, surely? Does it carry the same value as the Mona Lisa? Or, to use something still in copyright, a Colin McCahon painting?
It's the work that gets valued, not the person. The person is not diminished by a low value on the work. And it's the market that decides the value. An creator who makes work that can't find an audience and therefore doesn't sell, is out of luck. But that's the way life works.
Should they be rewarded simply for gluing a paper cup to a piece of cardboard, if that's what their 'art' consists of, even though no one wants it?
Was the possibility of selling stuff the only reason to make it? I know no creative writers who think like that, although i know plenty of journalists. Likewise, while all the artists I know would love to sell their work (paint's expensive, after all), that's not the reason they painted it, or sculpted it. They had something to say, and are overjoyed (usually) when someone puts a dollar value on the piece as a reward.
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@robbery
Your cup is half empty. Society doesn't gang up on creators - it grants creators an opportunity to profit from their work, exclusively, for a period of time. Included in that is a form of control over how that work can be presented.You can talk about copyright being property till you are blue in the face - it won't change the fact that, under that same law, it is not property.
Copyright isn't removed because something is deemed to be cool, therefore let's all have a bit of it. Copyright expires as an intentional part of its design.