Posts by Rob Stowell
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Ah well, that's ok then- I can live with incivility. ;-)
But it's a funny distinction, since it's an illegal activity. But nice to think that after we are all sued and fined, we'll still be able to say we have no criminal record. -
Copyright infringement in the form of downloading is not a crime
Wah? Mark, I thought you had some idea what we were discussing!
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You can lock it away and never take a copy from it again
But Mark, the problem is precisely that you can't stop people making unlimited numbers of copies, as soon as one copy is publicly available. Lockin' it away is stable door, oops, the horse is already dogfood.
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Don, what I don't understand is what you think we are "sacrificing" that ahm, we're not also "sacrificing" when we don't shop-lift.
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Just for clarification, because we need to know what we're talking about: copyright does NOT cover ideas. Not in New Zealand, or the US. Forms, genres, styles, themes, chord progressions, very short phrases of music- not covered, nor should they be, nor is anyone seriously calling for that.
To state the obvious: current copyright law makes it a crime for people to copy someone else's existing work for a limited time. -
(Ah, talking to Keir)
"if his estate had just said no?"
How bout Mr Jackson hired some writers to come up with a new story. Why would that be so dreadful?
In net terms, society would have gained a new cultural artifact, and not lost the old one. -
Yep. It's something I sometimes have to do. Always a drag, sometimes a drama. And often not worth it.
There is, I believe, something in the act about "reasonable efforts" but I don't know how the courts will judge that.
I totally get "too hard, what a drag, who'll bother, how can it be enforced." I just don't get righteous indignation about work being "denied": what gives anyone who hasn't bought or been given a legitimate copy of a work the "right" to have it? Infringing copyright is always going to happen. It's just disconcerting how quickly it's gone from being "minor" and "sneaky-keep-it-quiet" to big-time and "how dare you think you can stop me!" -
"New access is lost"-
That becomes a choice. You could always contact the copyright holders- and if necessary (gasp, how unfair!) offer to pay royalties to publish it yourself! -
Exactly, Kyle. What people seem to be arguing for is to be able to use (profit from?) the material for free. But I haven't seem anything serious that justifies such behaviour.
Egall new access to that content is lost when people decide to stop publishing it any more
Wah? If you can't get hold of an original copy, you can't copy it to start with. Let's say you want to copy and distribute it: "new access" is simply begging the question of whether you should be allowed to copy and distribute without permission.
Let's say it's otherwise going to be lost to posterity: I think you'll find this is explicitly allowed under the (new) law.
WRT creative commons- I'm very sympathetic to this movement. But a/ as mentioned, it depends on existing copyright law, and b/ it would have a very different feel if it were compulsory, rather than voluntary. Would people support that? -
There seems to be a lot of catagory confusion jumping around here- and some mistakes about what can and cannot be copyrighted. "Ideas" and "themes" are just not the sort of thing copyright applies to. Inventions can be patented, an idea can be turned into a painting or a novel: but gotta agree with robbery- it's ahm, not a simple jump from one to t'other!
An artistic work by two artists will take the same ideas and themes and turn them into unique individual works. THAT UNIQUENESS is pretty much what we value in art and artists.
It's also where conceptually (if not always in practice) copyright and patents tend to diverge. Scientific and technological inventions often occur almost simultaneously- because a lot of people are working along the same borders of knowledge. While it may not be a perfect fit, in science, it's often much more like the discovery of something that's already there; in technology, an adapation of the science to meet a human purpose.
Creating art can feel to artists a little like this discovery. Yet it's the individual's particular expression- their "take" on the material- which gives it more- or less- value. It's just not the case that if writer A or scultor B didn't happen to do it, someone else would have come along and written the same novel or crafted the same shape.