You are playing the part of the classic “angry young man.” You don’t literally know what you’re talking about. We don’t have lobbyists in Washington trying to convince Congress to extend copyrights even further, and we don’t produce comic books ourselves, my quote comes from the CEO of the third largest comic book company out there.
Hi Ed:
I don’t know if I’m angry so much as disappointed in the Media Corporations…as I said yesterday, they are playing the role of a “dog in the manger”, effectively preventing the Universities from digitizing and placing online millions of orphaned books for which the “copyrights” are effectively impossible to find (Well, the Media Companies could help fund this. But they won’t. Remember, Profits come before People).
I’m a bit disappointed in you, too, Ed. I mean, on the first page of this long thread, you asked for two things. Let me remind you what you yourself said:
"It seems some people have some negative things to say about copyright laws in the United States. I invite everyone to provide a list with specific examples and further details. It can be long or short. Here’s the issue: If there is a problem with a law and it goes to court, a judge needs to know two things.
- Who has been injured or treated unjustly?
- Show me evidence of harm or damages."
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=703541
I read through the thread, and watched as people gave diverse and thoughtful criticisms of copyright law, but were systematically dismissed, ignored or insulted. So I thought I’d add my perspectives. I argued that for (1) scholars and teachers and academicians and digital archivists and historians are injured by what we think are too long copyright terms, and (2) that there is lots of proof of Universities refusing to put their libraries online because they fear they will get sued, even as the old books/records/tapes crumble to dust, some to be lost forever. I further argued, based on Vatican directives and statements from the Holy See, that the Church overall does not support the idea of strengthening intellectual property “rights”, because it causes injustice, particularly in poor contries, and leads to an indefensible and unacceptable “digital divide between the information rich and the information poor” (their words, not mine).
vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_20020228_ethics-internet_en.html
So I have clearly given you what you said you wanted to see (well you said you wanted it, but I don’t think you do…rather, you want us to say that copyright law is good, noble and right because your salary depends on it).
“
A library of 8.7 million digital volumes. A trove of 100,000 ocean-science photos. An archive of 57,000 Mexican-music recordings. A common problem bedevils those different university collections. Wide online access is curtailed, in part because they contain “orphan works,” whose copyright owners can’t be found. And the institutions that hold the collections—a consortium of major research libraries and the University of California campuses at San Diego and Los Angeles—must deal with legal uncertainty in deciding how to share the works. A university that goes too far could end up facing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Many colleges now have the ability to digitize a wide variety of collections for broad use but frequently back away. And that reluctance harms scholarship, because researchers end up not using valuable documents if they can’t afford to fly to a distant archive to see them.”
chronicle.com/article/Out-of-Fear-Institutions-Lock/127701/
Universities fear copyright retribution when they try to save collections like the 8.7 million book HathiTrust, which contains 2.5 million orphaned works. In an earlier statement you said we should just digitize them anyway but keep them under lock and key (don’t put them online) until we could “hash out a solution” for them, and I righly pointed out the Universities fear copyright terms will get longer, not shorter. You say you aren’t lobbying Washington about this, and maybe that’s true. But as you can see by looking at the increases in copyright term in the USA from 1790 to today, this fear is completely reasonable, as copyright terms have been changed, several times, and always extended, not once ever decreasing:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Duration_of_copyright
People steal our work because they love it??? Wow. Just wow. You are obviously very intelligent and have fallen for a fake story. The reason most people steal our work is they want to pay zero for it, the second reason is they can charge advertising money.
news.viacom.com/Good bye,
Ed
The Universities are not stealing, they are sharing. In my post I said: “If somebody cares enough to share your work, then your unique creations won’t be lost. Somebody loves what you do, they care enough to keep it online and show it to the millions who can’t afford the Price Tag.” You just read “sharing” as “stealing”. Then you claim that we all “steal” books and records and tapes and films because we don’t want to pay, and want to make money by advertising it. Check out the HathiTrust Universities Online Digitization homepage (a “partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future”) and tell me how many advertisements you see:
hathitrust.org/
By the way, if you really want to know why people share stuff online, have a look at the Peer To Peer foundation’s own webpage, here:
blog.p2pfoundation.net/
"not only do most filesharers also buy music, but the evidence is in that the more active you are as a downloader, the more music you buy. In other words, they behave like library patrons, where it is known that people borrowing most books, are also the ones that buy more of them, for the simple reason they like reading, just as filesharers like listening to music. According to a recent study by the BI Norwegian School of Management: Those who download ‘free’ music are actually also 10 times more likely to pay for music downloads than those who don’t BitTorrent. Nearly 2,000 people participated in the study, which was conducted by Professor Anne-Britt Gran and his research team at the Department of Communication – Culture and language, and it seems that those who are au fait with free music on the web (both legal and illegal) are much more likely to dip into their pockets when it comes to purchasing the latest MP3s. The study also found that 50 per cent of those asked in the 15-20 age range have bought a CD recently.”
blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-morality-of-filesharing-why-the-pirate-bay-founders-are-p2p-heroes/2009/04/24
Jonas Anderson argues that filesharing actually benefits the music industry as a form of “outsourced labor”. But the argument is a complex one, and if the only thing that matters is Profit, then there’s no point belaboring it here. I will close with something that you should pay attention to, even if you don’t agree with what we say and hate the source and inspiration for our work:
“Umair’s conclusion in his second piece, which declares the filesharing war unwinnable by the music industry: “Here’s a final, “strategic” point:
every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets. Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.”
blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-morality-of-filesharing-why-the-pirate-bay-founders-are-p2p-heroes/2009/04/24
In short: the longer the legacy Media Companies keep on fighting a rearguard action, the worse it’s going to get. Face it, Ed…even you drive a car, not a horse and buggy.
Jacques
