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1. Davé said at 2:15pm on the 27th of November, 2006:

   First, you’re making the basic error of thinking that copyright terms are uniform.

   Consider that for a piece of recorded music, there already different copyright terms in play - mechanical/recording, composing and performing, I think? - all with different lengths. This is in the British news at the moment, because the Gower report is (hopefully!) going to recommend against the extension to 95 years from 50 that BPI and its shills like Cliff Richard have asked for.

   So it would be a very normal mainstream copyright law to have a longer term for theatrically released films versus television shows, perhaps, or for feature films versus documentaries, or for films that cost more than a certain threshold.

   You miss another trick when you say “If a studio spends $100m on a new film”. The reasons term extension is castigated as a corrupt concession to the interests of Big Media is because these copyright term extensions are retroactive. Until we get civilian time travel, a longer term isn’t going to encourage Cliff to write more music in the 50s.

   However, as you’ll have read on my long “What is Art?” screed, I have a very McLuhanesque perspective here, and I think that copyright need radical reformation to become honest about internet file sharing. We the people are sharing files, and you can’t make a computer that’s less good at copying bits, and we’re going to keep on doing it. If this means Spiderman 9 isn’t going to be financed, like its hard to finance producing horse-drawn carts these days, so be it.

   And a secondary comment: If you look at GNASH, you’ll see that, in fact, a a GNU+Linux distribution with a working Flash applet preinstalled is right around the corner :-)

   
   
2. Davé said at 2:20pm on the 27th of November, 2006:

   If we believe in the goal of copyright stated, for instance in the U.S. Constitution, the goal of promoting progress, what would be intelligent policies to use in the age of the computer network? Clearly, instead of increasing copyright powers, we have to pull them back so as to give the general public a certain domain of freedom where they can make use of the benefits of digital technology, make use of their computer networks. But how far should that go? That’s an interesting question because I don’t think we should necessarily abolish copyright totally. The idea of trading some freedoms for more progress might still be an advantageous trade at a certain level, even if traditional copyright gives up too much freedom. But in order to think about this intelligently, the first thing we have to recognize is, there’s no reason to make it totally uniform. There’s no reason to insist on making the same deal for all kinds of work.

   In fact, that already isn’t the case because there are a lot of exceptions for music. Music is treated very differently under copyright law. But the arbitrary insistence on uniformity is used by the publishers in a certain clever way. They pick some peculiar special case and they make an argument that, in that special case, it would be advantageous to have this much copyright. And then they say that for uniformity’s sake, there has to be this much copyright for everything. So, of course, they pick the special case where they can make the strongest argument, even if it’s a rather rare special case and not really very important overall.

   But maybe we should have that much copyright for that particular special case. We don’t have to pay the same price for everything we buy. A thousand dollars for a new car might be a very good deal. A thousand dollars for a container of milk is a horrible deal. You wouldn’t pay the special price for everything you buy in other areas of life. Why do it here?

   So we need to look at different kinds of works, and I’d like to propose a way of doing this.

   - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html

   
   
3. james said at 1:23pm on the 28th of November, 2006:

   I think I’ve been misinterpreted :) I said right at the start that term extension is bad whatever the length and that it is corrupt. Also, and I didn’t mention it, retroactive legislation of any sort is bad.

   The point of this post (insofar as it had one :) ) was to point out the new kinds of works that become possible when financed effectively by long copyright terms, and to suggest that if most people prefer Spider-Man 3 to Free culture, as I submit they do, then perhaps such democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

   
   
4. Dave said at 1:28am on the 8th of December, 2006:

   My point is that copyright as far as it effects the public is simply unworkable in the age of computer networks, but traditional effects as an industrial regulation will continue - to the extent that industry happens offline, because if this blog still had Adsense it would be industry, and if you started fishing for eyeballs by putting unlicensed copyrighted works on here, you would probably not be busteed for as long as rapidshare.de is still up. A secondary point is that the reason spiderman 3 is in high demand is because of the hype generated. Free Culture promises to do away with a culture based on hype, and replace it with a culture of peer to peer word of mouth. See http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/article_31.jsp#8 for details.

   
   
5. Dave said at 1:38am on the 8th of December, 2006:

   On democracy…. I figure something close to the original spirit of the USA government (in strong contrast with the Administrations of much of the 20th century) is as good as it gets… Basically libertarian constitution; where the culture values the constitution’s values strongly and stops the rise of fascism happening; (The Bush administration is fascist imo.) and stop things like free elections, free speech and a free press becoming a sham; Where referendums are held frequently on an on-going basis instead of quad/biannually, so the evolutionary tempo is higher; Where guaranteed minimum income and health care free at the point of use and public transport actually work. These things can be seen in various countries - Switzerland, north western Europe, Cuba, Japan - so I figure its possible they could be seen in one country at the same time.

   
   

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