Hard News: The Casino
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But the copyright system is only something that society extends out of the goodness of its heart.
or it could be something it installs in its society because it sees it as being inherently fair and along the lines of the sort of fairness it wants to promote in its attempts to become more enlightened and civilised and move away from its benevolent rulers schtick of times of yor
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then you need to understand why your potential customers do what they do,
that's simple, cos there's absolutely nothing stopping them.
the chances of getting caught and stopped are close to zero at present. you're fighting to keep it that way. good job :) -
And NEVER suggest that what you pay a lawyer has ANYTHING to do with the amount of work or training involved.
you may object to it but it's one of the justifications that go toward their price as with doctors etc.
you're welcome to use the word please too, I don't respond to demands if that wasn't plainly obvious. -
there's absolutely nothing stopping them
Technologically, you're correct.
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Advancements in boat technology enabled Columbus to get to the new world. And technology and disease enabled those that followed him to conquer it.
But were they quantum leap advancements? Or was it actually something pretty tiny, some minor enhancement in the art of sailing? Or indeed, was it simply that he had the guts (and backing) to try it?
The point I'm driving at is that quantification of what is a quantum leap and what is not is pretty thin on the ground. People argue about which advance was bigger than which, but there is never any definition of what it is to be a big advance, or how one could calculate the magnitude of the advance. Furthermore, a big change is not necessarily a good change.
This quibble is really only to address the rhetorical use of such metaphors as "this is the biggest thing since writing". I don't think they help much (although they are fun to speculate about, of course). The destruction of the entire human race would probably be the biggest revolution we could ever achieve (unless we rate taking the whole planet with us while we're at it), and we could probably do it, but that doesn't make it the best thing we could do.
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I don't buy this argument (which I'll call the "it's happening too much to do anything about it" argument).
I also don't buy it for decriminalisation/legalisation of drugs.having some drugs legally available and others prohibited for quite arbitrary reasons just encourages people to say "f**k the law, this is no worse than x". and it creates huge revenue streams for organised crime, in case you hadn't noticed. y'know, counterproductive, to say the least. the arguments for legalisation do not rest very much on the "everyone's doing it" assertion but more on the "wouldn't this give a much better outcome" line...imho.
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You seem to have bought into the idea that copyright is property. If that's the case, that's sad, as it limits the way you can think.
Oh boy, how patronising can you get, Mark? I am a socialist, so for me the idea of property is pretty dodgy overall. But because I'm a socialist, I also believe that our wealth is our work, whether it be cheese or poetry. So long as you make cheese that people want to eat, or poetry that people want to read, you're offering a service to society, and for that service you ought to be compensated.
So yes, damn right I think Islander is owed a livelyhood, and if society - through technology - has found a way of appropriating the fruit of her work without proper compensation, then I think society is in the wrong, and the wave of cultural change you're talking about needs to be vigorously critiqued, rather than glorified.
In this changed environment, what you're suggesting - by reducing the length of copyright terms - is in fact eroding the provisions that allow Islander and other commercially successful artists to profit from their work. Not only it's the wrong answer, but it's completely unrelated to the question, which remains: how do we look after our artists, now that we can take their stuff for free? To you the question seems to be how do we look after the poor victimised society. Society - and its habitual copyright infringers - are actually fine. You're on the side of the winners.
Sure, we can work around the edges and broaden the rights of fair use enjoyed by educational institutions so as to include blogs and the like, but that's not the big deal. The big deal is that there's a generation which is growing up in an environment where you no longer have to pay for music (and literature is next on the bloc). How they're going to behave ten years from now, we just don't know. But if in the meantime we keep feeding the discourse that intellectual property is not like cheese, and that artists will be artists compelled to do their thing whether their stuff is paid for or not, and that information should be free, and that pay for an artist is a subsidy and not just recompense, then we're just justifying the idea that people are entitled to all that free stuff (call it selective socialism if you will), and laying the ground for the behavioural change that you keep insisting is predetermined. Nothing is predetermined.
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The law encodes economic assumptions that no longer match what the technology delivers - notably scarcity and costly production and distribution barriers.
If copyright law assumed we all hand-wrote manuscripts, then introducing the printing press would have had a similarly disruptive effect. And it did.
For more on the implications and scope of the current digital change, Negroponte or Shirky are an easy place to start reading. There are many more that others here can no doubt recommend.
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If copyright law assumed we all hand-wrote manuscripts, then introducing the printing press would have had a similarly disruptive effect. And it did.
You talk as if the point of a book was in the physical carrier, and not in the words. There's a bit of truth in the first proposition, but a lot more truth in the second.
For more on the implications and scope of the current digital change, Negroponte or Shirky are an easy place to start reading.
If by easy you mean wrong about just about everything, then yes, Negroponte is a terrific starting point.
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the question seems to be how do we look after the poor victimised society. Society - and its habitual copyright infringers - are actually fine. You're on the side of the winners.
The current winners here are surely copyright owners, not creators or society.
The big deal is that there's a generation which is growing up in an environment where you no longer have to pay for music
I agree that is a problem. I believe that society loses if good creative people can't make a living creating, and so we need new arrangements to fix that.
The broader changes are not innately good, but they are so large and irrevocable that our choice is about how we handle them, not whether they happen. That's where I agree with Mark's position, and I can understand given his past professional involvement why it seems more compelling to him than to some of us.
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The current winners here are surely copyright owners, not creators or society.
Seriously? How so?
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You talk as if the point of a book was in the physical carrier, and not in the words.
I was talking about the economic point, not the cultural meaning. As you've no doubt gathered I'm usually more interested in the latter, but copyright does seem to be primarily about sociotechnical and economic forces than cultural ones.
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Seriously? How so?
I'm not even going there.
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I was talking about the economic point, not the cultural meaning.
Convenient distinction, but so long as you want to think this thing whole, as it where, you need to account for cultural meaning and value.
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The thing about real socialists in the West today, is that they are living in a capitalist world. To that extent, they may have views that socialists would totally abhor if the world was actually socialist, like owning copyright. But given that it isn't, the position is far more tricky. Like reality usually is.
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Sorry, got to duck out so don't want to get into anything detailed.
Accounting for cultural value is part of what's currently broken with copyright - let's fix it.
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I'm going to run with the line that you're not being sarcastic.
Definitely not. It's a perspective I haven't considered before. It needs some thought before taking a position.
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I believe that, not from some free-market ideological position (which I definitely don't have) but because I believe the quality of work would diminish under a subsidy. Subsidies are generally, given out at a blanket rate, to enable otherwise uneconomic activities to exist.
You didn't notice how you claimed it wasn't from a free market ideological position, but then the rest of the paragraph was straight out of free market 101?
But were they quantum leap advancements?
In the instance of Columbus, no.
In the instance of agriculture, yes. From no agricultural system, to having one is probably the greatest leap humankind has made technologically.
having some drugs legally available and others prohibited for quite arbitrary reasons just encourages people to say "f**k the law, this is no worse than x".
I don't disagree with that. But if you believe that it is bad, then "it's happening lots" doesn't seem to me to be the best argument for changing the law.
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In the instance of agriculture, yes. From no agricultural system, to having one is probably the greatest leap humankind has made technologically.
Certainly, not least in that it freed up time for people to specialise in things other than getting food. Which, of course, led to more new technologies.
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Not sure about that, maybe an even bigger step was developing weapons with which to hunt food and defend against predators. Rapid switch to being the most dangerous predator on the planet.
Or then again, maybe it was the art of copying other humans, which made the development of tools possible. Tough call whether to call that 'technological'.
Or perhaps it was standing upright that was really the big jump. That freed our hands up. That was possibly the first digit al revolution :-)
Of course, standing up may have flowed from brachiating, which flowed from tree climbing...and so we go back, every step being quite possibly crucial to every subsequent step.
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copyright does seem to be primarily about sociotechnical and economic forces than cultural ones.
Copyright, under anglo-saxon derived common law is purely an economic mechanism, not a cultural mechanism.
Convenient distinction, but so long as you want to think this thing whole, as it where, you need to account for cultural meaning and value.
Please point me at any part of the Copyright Act 1994 that deals with the cultural issues you're raisin.
Perhaps this is why we're talking past each other. I'm talking about copyright as it is, as an economic mechanism, why it's broken, what the future holds for it as a source of revenue etc.
You appear to be talking about the social issue of artists being cared for and rewarded.
These aren't the same things. In fact, you're actually asking for something much more radical than I am, as copyright under common law has always been about publishers. You seem to be looking more at the (initially) French model of droit d'auteur which is enshrined in the Berne Convention, and is more about control. While NZ is part of Berne, that only requires us to honour other countries' copyright claims, whether their lagislation is the same as ours or not (usually, there are slight differences such as fair dealing/fair use).
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You didn't notice how you claimed it wasn't from a free market ideological position, but then the rest of the paragraph was straight out of free market 101?
Actually, it was based on 2 decades in public service administering subsidies, but please don't let the facts get in your way.
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But if you believe that it is bad, then "it's happening lots" doesn't seem to me to be the best argument for changing the law.
It was why they got rid of prohibition, because it didn't work.
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Perhaps this is why we're talking past each other. I'm talking about copyright as it is, as an economic mechanism, why it's broken, what the future holds for it as a source of revenue etc.
You appear to be talking about the social issue of artists being cared for and rewarded.
We're talking about exactly the same thing - why else would you be insisting on the "nobody's owed a livelyhood" and "you're paid for the next work you produce" lines if the discussion all along wasn't how to care for artists and reward them? We've also been talking about the publishing and the recording industries naturally, but I think by and large people on these threads have been less concerned at what happens to them than to the artists themselves.
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Please point me at any part of the Copyright Act 1994 that deals with the cultural issues you're raisin.
Perhaps this is why we're talking past each other. I'm talking about copyright as it is, as an economic mechanism, why it's broken, what the future holds for it as a source of revenue etc.
You appear to be talking about the social issue of artists being cared for and rewarded.
Mark, you come across as an evangelist. You've got your eyes so firmly fixated on the prize that you exclude any pov that doesn't help achieve it. Are we surprised you were a public service manager in another life? No.
What laws set out to achieve and how things work in real life are never really synonymous. People find places, nooks and crannies, within the system where they can be comfortable to do their work. Artists of all kinds have been especially adaptable in doing this.
And despite your protestation to the contrary, i agree with Kyle - you sound very free market to me with the adapt or quit stuff.
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