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Fallout2man wrote:

They also have an intimate understanding of campaign contributions from movie and record companies. These laws don't benefit people, they don't actually benefit artists (After artist copyright went up to his whole life they lost the ability to argue they were for the artists), they benefit a few large media conglomerates that constantly have re-used and recycled the same twelve characters for the past 80 years. Disney doesn't need mickey mouse anymore, they'll be fine without him. Do the poems of Robert Frost still need to be under copyright? Does the estate of James Joyce still really need Ulysses? With very few exceptions there are no companies that will likely ever make a new work from a property that's past twenty or thirty years old. Ironically enough the same companies that do all have business trusts with lovely acronyms and all contribute to as many politicians as they can. Show me how longer copyright terms and more restrictions can actually have any practical benefit for artists themselves on a whole and not just large companies and their A list. Right now, as I see it, the public is the one losing out here.

Why do you want Mickey Mouse? I sure have no reason to want Mickey Mouse. He's an institution, a mascot like Uncle Sam or Santa. A football team mascot. WHy shouldn't Disney retain the rights over the fricken mouse? Is it hurting you NOT to have the ability to use the mouse? Make your own mouse, for heaven's sake.
I sure have no interest in Mickey. God, that's your issue?

Bugs is cool. God, I wouldn't want any old idiot making Bugs cartoons. I'd prefer someone who has an interest in preserving the quality of the character than some punk who thinks it's be funny to make Bugs Bunny porn.

Why do you want the rights to Ulysses? You didn't make it. I have no problem with the rights staying with his family who, again, may have a little more interest in preserving the integrity of the property. Of course I was sort of horrified when Michael Jackson managed to buy the rights to the Lennon & McCartney catalog as he did & start selling them off as commercial jingles, but that was McCartney's own fault for not bidding high first. But it IS an excellent example of what can go wrong when someone other than those who have a vested interest in the product get their hands on it.

Aren't we talking about anime often not even a YEAR old? You sound like you're arguing NO copyright.

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Inalienable rights is based on the theory of social contract. The idea is that there are some rights that are necessary for free societies. Anyway, I don't believe that this right is a necessity to free society. In fact, on the contrary I think it makes the majority less free for a relatively low level of benefit to a few. I'll grant that copyright should exist in the form that allows for exclusive commercial distribution and attribution, but I will not grant that it should exist to prevent derivation/imitation/free distribution.

Why?
Why do we NEED free anime?
I'd think free food & gasoline would be more of a necessity. Lodging.
Gotta pay for all that.
Because someone works to produce it so they deserve to be paid for it, right? But not the makers of entertainment.

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If you want me to accept these rights to that degree you'll have to explain why they are 100% necessary to society. If we can live without them and artists/authors can get buy without them, I don't see a reason for us to give up that much freedom or convenience for little to no good. Also I'd hardly say 200k fines for sharing a few songs are "mere inconvenience." The penalties go far beyond what is reasonable.

THEN DON'T DO IT.

Back when I was an info operator I actually had a guy call me on the phone & ask if it was really a $260 ticket for riding in the carpool lane. I told him I didn't know for sure since I wasn't the court, but yeah, I thought that's what all the big signs warned people the fine for driving in the carpool lane with less than 2 people in one's car was $260 (Or was it $361? I forget now). He was a bit shocked because he thought it's only be $50, but he said he'd been riding in it for a year before getting caught so he figured the fine easily made up for his not being late to work for a year.

People who murder know they might get caught & sentanced to death. they obviously are banking in that not happening. Thieves, drug users--all know the consequences of their actions.

I believe it falls under "When you dance, you have to pay the piper"

Oh, sorry, you want compassion. Here, I'll break out my violin.

If the punishment is really unjust, it usually gets contested & changed eventually like that boy who was put away for way too long for having oral sex. People jump on the cause. Look at the people who protest all the executions. I thought l the whole music downloading stuff wound up with a lot of the fines reduced or dropped.
Of course since I don't download, I didn't really pay any attention to the whole thing.

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Also, I'd argue Gonzo gets a lot more protection than a modern pharmaceutical company. Why is this? It takes years and billions of dollars in research to make a new drug, yet it lasts for 17 years. You have previously argued for eternal copyrights. Do you think patents should be eternal also? After all, it took years of work and labor to create both. So why does it seem people value the protection of one so much more than the other? Could it be that most people realize that patents lasting forever is a bad thing? So why do so many think it's different for copyright? I personally don't see a great deal of difference.

???

God, you really lost me there.

You feel sorry for drug companies?

I'm pulling for National Health Care myself & believe America is one of the only 2 of the top 35 industrialized countries without it is due to that same political campaign thing you're whining about. Just the other day I was reading about a medical research company that has NEVER produced a product--they say they have a promising lead, get investments & oops, dead end.

Not that they wouldn't get paid if there were National Health Care, but I lose more sleep over Americans dying because they can't afford healthcare than I do worrying about stupid kids downloading anime maybe going to jail or paying fines.

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If the punishment is really unjust, it usually gets contested & changed eventually

We would hope it would be changed. Sadly some have a lot of money to spend on lobbyists and they insist the fines and penalties need to be higher than they already are. If we could remove lobbyists and campaign financing from the political arena we might see a more fair allocation, but that's not happening at this point.

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Why do you want Mickey Mouse?

Mickey mouse is just an example of the issue. Mickey mouse is one of the reasons for the push to continually extend copyright terms. The reason he points out Mickey mouse is this, but also the fact that Disney used quite a bit of other peoples literature in developing their own tales. Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, etc. are based on prior literature and are derivations. Can anyone make a derivation of Mickey Mouse? No, because it falls under copyright. We aren't saying we personally want to use Mickey Mouse, but there are other characters/settings/etc. that might be desirable to add to. Disney did this, but in the modern world we have practically destroyed this ability for the future.

Of course some would say it's better to create new things than to add to the old, but pretty much everything is derived from something before it. Given more power there are those who would probably take issue with similarities. We've already had lawsuits spoken of in this forum for music video that had similarities to Final Fantasy. What prevents them from going a lot further than that? You might say a jury/judge could rule against them, but if it's just a regular guy on the other end of the lawsuit they can't compete with the media companies' lawyers.

Xanas wrote:

Also, I'd argue Gonzo gets a lot more protection than a modern pharmaceutical company. Why is this? It takes years and billions of dollars in research to make a new drug, yet it lasts for 17 years. You have previously argued for eternal copyrights. Do you think patents should be eternal also? After all, it took years of work and labor to create both. So why does it seem people value the protection of one so much more than the other? Could it be that most people realize that patents lasting forever is a bad thing? So why do so many think it's different for copyright? I personally don't see a great deal of difference.

Wait a minute.

So pharmaceutical companies deserve protection under patents for 17 yrs but Gonzo doesn't?

I really don't believe all this fuss is over people's downloading anime made before 1990. I thought all the fuss is everyone wants anime that aired in Japan up for free downloads in DAYS.

Hypocrite.

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Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, etc. are based on prior literature and are derivations

And blind? When my daughter was small, I seem to recall knock-off videos of the annual Disney animation cheap at Target & Walmart. Disney putting out Tarzan? Don't want to spend $20 for the official version? These knockoff were like $5. No, they weren't the Disney story. I've seen the knock-off version of Snow White (it reeked, actually). Disney put out Aladdin? My daughter actually got a lot of emjoyment out of The Thief & The Cobbler which was also set in that area.

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We aren't saying we personally want to use Mickey Mouse, but there are other characters/settings/etc. that might be desirable to add to

I fail to see your point.
Obviously knockoffs are made still. [/quote]

This conversation has taken its usual dumb and redundant route, but I feel compelled to say one thing -

The woman who got hit with the $222K judgment (out of a possible $3.6 million) wasn't 'fined'. That was an award by a jury, not something the RIAA extorted. She made the choice to go to trial when she was quite obviously guilty of what she was accused of. She chose to go with a defense that amounted to: "No matter how many times I used that exact same user name on the Internet, this wasn't me. And even if I did do it, you can't prove you have those copyrights." It reeked of nothing so much as Bart Simpson going "I didn't do it. I wasn't there. Nobody saw me!" For whatever reason, she was exposed to $3.6 million in damages and gambled on copyright infringement being something popular enough with a jury that she could get away with it. She was just plain wrong.

I'm no fan of the RIAA. The RIAA definitely has its victims, but she doesn't deserve to be the poster child for them. It would have been better for everyone who hates the RIAA if someone so obviously guilty hadn't been the first to take get one of these all the way to trial with such an idiotic defense. All she accomplished was being blatantly stupid enough to get a very salient issue settled in favor of the RIAA so that actual distribution of shared material is now irrelevent.

Just to be a little bit on topic - wrt to Japan pushing for penalties for illegal downloading - so what? We already have that in the US, and the traction against people who only download anything without also sharing it has amounted to precisely 'zero'. Even to the extent that it is criminalized, so what? Simple downloading is ridiculously difficult to prove. All such laws consist of is scary warnings for something virtually impossible to prosecute. If all it does is slow down the rate of illegal downloading then it accomplishes its mission. If it doesn't, then it is just another useless law.

That 0.0058% of the population felt compelled to submit comments opposing the legislation is as statistically insignificant as it will be at election time. Politicians are no more likely to get voted out for this in Japan than they are in the US. The fact of the matter is that even the most unimaginative people in the general population like to believe that if they happen to create something awesome that they will get a chance to profit from that creation, rather than having it freely swimming around the world via the miracle of the Internet. It's always other people's creations that should be free, not 'mine'. This is what makes it more of a natural right than opponents of copyright think - believing that a right is yours makes it natural for you. People hang on to that notion, which is why politicians don't get voted out for such legislation, and that's why juries don't necessarily act like you might hope for.

CCSYueh wrote:

Why do you want Mickey Mouse? I sure have no reason to want Mickey Mouse. He's an institution, a mascot like Uncle Sam or Santa. A football team mascot. WHy shouldn't Disney retain the rights over the fricken mouse? Is it hurting you NOT to have the ability to use the mouse? Make your own mouse, for heaven's sake.
I sure have no interest in Mickey. God, that's your issue?

Why should Disney be able to own Mickey Mouse forever? Why is that necessary for society?

Mickey Mouse is an often used example because Disney was the big pusher for the Sonny Bono Copyright term extension act. I may not have any need myself for Mickey Mouse but what if someone else does? What if someone else has this great idea no one else has ever thought of, that just happens to build on some old Disney ideas? That's the entire point of having a public domain. Look at a lot of Disney movies, they were adaptations of old stories that they made and added their spin to. Artists don't just create art out of nothing, it comes by building off of old ideas and personal experiences and feelings. The only way to facilitate that is to have a rich public domain for artists to build off of, that's one of the more practical reasons for why copyright is supposed to be limited. New art can't be created if everything is locked under corporate control. If things get swayed too far to one side of the playing field then eventually only large corporations will have the ability to create anything.

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Bugs is cool. God, I wouldn't want any old idiot making Bugs cartoons. I'd prefer someone who has an interest in preserving the quality of the character than some punk who thinks it's be funny to make Bugs Bunny porn.

So are classics like Alice in Wonderland and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz now worthless because anyone can make material based on the books? Have the characters of Dorothy, the mad hatter, the tin man and the white rabbit suddenly lost all value because we can use them wherever we wish? Sure some hackjob could make a porno out of it but most of us would just not even bother paying any attention to it. If anything it'd only be slightly different than the realm of fan fiction today, with the exception that more people would probably be inclined to build much better written and serious material off of the source, since if their work is transformative enough they can copyright that variation and sell it. Copyright can be a good thing, money talks and art is a nice thing to have.

The public domain is necessary for art to continue to be made. A lot of our best classics, such as Ulysses, are based on older stories.

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Why do you want the rights to Ulysses? You didn't make it. I have no problem with the rights staying with his family who, again, may have a little more interest in preserving the integrity of the property. Of course I was sort of horrified when Michael Jackson managed to buy the rights to the Lennon & McCartney catalog as he did & start selling them off as commercial jingles, but that was McCartney's own fault for not bidding high first. But it IS an excellent example of what can go wrong when someone other than those who have a vested interest in the product get their hands on it.

Even if someone had a really great idea that'd be amazingly creative and transform the way everyone thought? You may say that he should contact the family but again, the family has no real guaranteed interest in preserving integrity, and why should they? They are given an extremely powerful tool of control and they can leverage that like Michael Jackson did to make them more money, why should they want to do anything else? They could, but I'm guessing that'd be the exception more than the rule. Why should the family get something that they didn't even create? This isn't a family heirloom it's a government contract

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Aren't we talking about anime often not even a YEAR old? You sound like you're arguing NO copyright.

Well, to get the subject back on track. I don't believe in abolishing copyright, not yet anyway. It'd have to be so trivial to create any form of art that you could do it in your spare time with ease first. Copyright is a means to an end, it's a means to encourage more art to be created. That said the fact that most of America are currently criminals, many not even realizing how deep they're in (read the article I linked earlier in the thread, it has an actual case study.) trouble, that seems to say that the law isn't working right now. So I think we really just need to start with a clean slate and figure out how to best encourage more art in the digital age and how we can get people paid while making it so that people aren't racking up violations in the millions of dollars per day without ever realizing it. Until that point I believe (relevant part-->) downloading in a lot of cases can be considered an act of civil disobedience, since it shows people how horribly broken the system is right now. The law is turning people off, and more and more of them are just saying to hell with the whole system, and even if you crack down harder that won't do anything but make the situation worse. Do we really want or need to be paying tax dollars out the ear for the war on copyright infringement? I don't think I need to point out the parallels to certain other conflicts of law right now that just aren't really working despite insane penalties and overzealous enforcement.

I've said this before but I do buy my anime myself, not because I believe I owe it to anyone, but because I love anime and want to support the people making it so they can make more.

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Why?
Why do we NEED free anime?
I'd think free food & gasoline would be more of a necessity. Lodging.
Gotta pay for all that.
Because someone works to produce it so they deserve to be paid for it, right? But not the makers of entertainment.

Why do we need free healthcare? That's a big plank of the democratic platform right now. Why do they say we need it? Because it might benefit our society on a whole if we socialized medicine. That's a novel idea, health insurance companies all die out and lots and lots of people will lose their jobs and may not be able to make ends meet doing the only thing they know how to do for work but it's a cause that's ultimately for the greater good. Sometimes individuals have to suffer for the society on a whole to grow. Not to say I'm endorsing either side but it's a common thing for people in California to be more democratic and support things like that, so I figured it'd be a good example.

Why do we need minimum wage? Or income tax? We're forcing business owners and workers out of their hard earned money that they deserved to be paid for their work. You can use that sort of argument for any number of things that ask someone to give up some cash to this or that cause. It sounds nice in theory but in practice we live in a world of compromise and sometimes things don't go how some people may have liked.

Why do we need any number of organizations we have today? It's all about a cost/benefit trade off we have in society. There are hard rights, which people more commonly refer to as negative freedoms, and then there are what many call positive freedoms, which are things government decides we all should have to make our lives better. Copyright falls into the whole positive freedoms thing. They aren't a right, they're a gift, a privilege, something we were bestowed by government that exists to serve a functional purpose. There never existed a right to make money off of something, nor a way to own ideas. It was created by government as a functional privilege for the people because it was believed it would benefit society, like the above things.

Now if the means aren't suitably meeting the end, then things need to change. It isn't taking away a right because it never existed to begin with, you can't see, hear, smell, touch, or taste a story. You can touch a book, see ink on its pages, you can listen to a metaphorical representation (voice on tape) of a real person having spoken the text of a book. You can watch a re-enactment of scenes from it in a play or movie, but the story, the essence exists beyond that. Which is why it can exist simultaneously on millions of books, and as a movie In hundreds of theaters or billions of DVDs and even be on TV all at once. Tangible things can't do that because they're bound by the laws of physics. The representation of the story, the media it's pressed onto or was interpreted into (like a play or a movie) is or was tangible at one point in time, but it's just then reduced into its own intangible metaphor (Digital data) of what once existed but exists no more. While there is cost to creating these representations that does not change the issue of tangibility. If it's not a physical object, it's not tangible, it has to be able to be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted like everything else. If it's not tangible, it can't be owned in nature, and therefore it's not a right to be able to possess it.

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THEN DON'T DO IT.

Please don't dodge the question here. If you expect us to answer you then you need to throw us a bone too, otherwise we just keep going back and forth to no end. I'd actually appreciate a response to my attempt to express what I believe are our fundamental differences on the belief of what copyright and its purpose is (re-stated again above.)

I'll also ask you:
Why?
Why do we need copyright terms of life plus 70?
Why do we need all digital locks to be made unbreakable legally even if we're breaking them for a legal purpose?
Why is copyright in its current state necessary for the continued functioning of society?
Why is it wrong to want to change it?

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Back when I was an info operator I actually had a guy call me on the phone & ask if it was really a $260 ticket for riding in the carpool lane. I told him I didn't know for sure since I wasn't the court, but yeah, I thought that's what all the big signs warned people the fine for driving in the carpool lane with less than 2 people in one's car was $260 (Or was it $361? I forget now). He was a bit shocked because he thought it's only be $50, but he said he'd been riding in it for a year before getting caught so he figured the fine easily made up for his not being late to work for a year.

Carpool lanes arguably serve a stronger functional purpose in society than copyright law in its current state does. Especially with traffic on the interstates like it is some days out here. I don't think 260$ is too big a fine for anyone unless you're really poor. Though I've heard that if you just ask the judge nicely they'll usually reduce the fine for you.

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People who murder know they might get caught & sentanced to death. they obviously are banking in that not happening. Thieves, drug users--all know the consequences of their actions.

You've actually made a very good argument for my position. Deterrence really doesn't work if enough people believe they aren't doing anything wrong. We can go back and forth on whether it is wrong, but you can't deny the fact that millions upon millions of people believe in less or no IP now. Whether or not we're right or wrong, can you really argue at this point that stepping up penalties will work? Especially when there are practical ways to marginalize any costs piracy may have. Even if people may be wrong, you can't deny the fact that it's doubtful this trend will ever change and that we therefore need to adapt and get it over with.

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I believe it falls under "When you dance, you have to pay the piper"

Oh, sorry, you want compassion. Here, I'll break out my violin.

If the punishment is really unjust, it usually gets contested & changed eventually like that boy who was put away for way too long for having oral sex. People jump on the cause. Look at the people who protest all the executions. I thought l the whole music downloading stuff wound up with a lot of the fines reduced or dropped.
Of course since I don't download, I didn't really pay any attention to the whole thing.

That's exactly why we're we having this debate in the first place. We believe it's unjust and we are in our own ways contesting the state of things as they are. Though what we're doing right here and now may not be horribly effective, if anything it may provide food for thought to at least a few people reading and allows us to understand the other side of the argument better and learn to compose our own points better. Well that and sometimes I honestly do get a sense of enjoyment debating about things, it's mentally stimulating.

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I'm pulling for National Health Care myself & believe America is one of the only 2 of the top 35 industrialized countries without it is due to that same political campaign thing you're whining about. Just the other day I was reading about a medical research company that has NEVER produced a product--they say they have a promising lead, get investments & oops, dead end.

See my analogy above, this is the sort of thing we're talking about. I can't personally comment on the whole national health care issue because I haven't researched it nearly as exhaustively but I can say I at least somewhat understand the premise. It will put an entire industry out of business though (why would we have health insurance if we always get free health care?) and it's doing that in the attempt to make society a better place. While obviously free health care has a far greater possible functional benefit to our society the premise remains the same. It's sacrificing the few for the needs of the many. That's what our society's all about isn't it? We try to broker compromises for the greater good of every citizen so we can all live a better life. Aside from the fact this is a more pressing issue, how is copyright reform any different?

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Not that they wouldn't get paid if there were National Health Care, but I lose more sleep over Americans dying because they can't afford health care than I do worrying about stupid kids downloading anime maybe going to jail or paying fines.

It's obviously more important, but still, you can't just write off one issue entirely just because right now it isn't as pressing. Maybe we need to focus on bigger issues but this is starting to come to a boil and the decisions we make now may effect society for many years to come. At the crux of this is the ability for companies to own and sell us our entire culture back to us and dictate exactly how we progress. I thought culture belonged to everyone?

CCSYueh wrote:

Wait a minute.

So pharmaceutical companies deserve protection under patents for 17 yrs but Gonzo doesn't?

I really don't believe all this fuss is over people's downloading anime made before 1990. I thought all the fuss is everyone wants anime that aired in Japan up for free downloads in DAYS.

Hypocrite.

The same could be said for someone arguing that Gonzo deserves more protection, power and money than drug companies when the drug companies invest far more money and man hours into each product and they also make things that offer us a far greater practical benefit to our society. Why can't Pfizer own the viagra formula forever? They invented it right, isn't it theirs? What about heart medication, or anti-anxiety or anti depressant pills? What about blood pressure and diabetes medication? Shouldn't the drug companies making them own them forever since they spent billions of dollars making them? What makes the rights of the drug company so different from Disney?

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And blind? When my daughter was small, I seem to recall knock-off videos of the annual Disney animation cheap at Target & Walmart. Disney putting out Tarzan? Don't want to spend $20 for the official version? These knockoff were like $5. No, they weren't the Disney story. I've seen the knock-off version of Snow White (it reeked, actually). Disney put out Aladdin? My daughter actually got a lot of emjoyment out of The Thief & The Cobbler which was also set in that area.

I fail to see your point.
Obviously knockoffs are made still.

Doesn't this just validate what I said earlier? You just told me your daughter got a lot of enjoyment out of a derivative work not made by Disney. Even Disney's works are based on older stories. The point is that these derivative works can be good they can be creative and they can sometimes change how we think about things. Are there also bad ones, yes, obviously. But this works against your earlier argument of saying how allowing people to make say, mickey mouse or bugs bunny cartoons would instantly de-value the characters and the original work they were based from.

Alright, the reports are stacking up and we're now getting to the point we're getting multiple pages worth of the same old, same old circular arguments. On top of that discussiong monopolies and whether companies should be able to even copyright what they create is bordering on off topic for this particular article. Seems the valid discussion has run its course and what is left is getting out of hand so sorry folks, gonna have to shut this one down.