Re: [GD-General] Pro-IP bill passed the house: User-created content providers, beware!

[Troy G. <tro...@gm...>]

> Sadly, laws don't prevent illegal acts, they just frame the recourse
> if one is committed, detected, and successfully prosecuted.

And that's the real problem. It's not that IP and copyright is bad, it
worked exactly as it should up until the recent digital age. It's that
the notion of "fair use" has been diluted by the copyright holders
(and that the copyrights have been extended arbitrarily as previously
outlined).

Where does copyright issue really come into play in most people's
daily lives? They want to be able to copy a music track that they
purchased (through CD, online music store, etc.) to a different device
or machine. This should be fair use. Copyright tweaks to plug this
hole only cause more problems and reinforce the wrong aspects of
copyright protection.

If I want to mash up video clips from my favorite movies, mix it to my
favorite songs, and throw it up on YouTube, well, that's a little
different. YouTube is effectively public performance, which fair use
doesn't allow for. That's understandable. As an artist, if I created a
song my ability to protect its public performance directly benefits my
paycheck. Otherwise, what would I retain?

Sharing songs on the old Napster? We all knew that was illegal for the
majority of songs shared. Something for nothing when it normally costs
$15 is clearly not "honest" regardless of how much we chant "data
wants to be free." We can argue that it's a great business model for
the artists, and that's a valid point, but that doesn't make it
"right," it just means that artists would be sensible to explore it as
an option.

Copyright is a practical matter. If created a game and sold it to
someone, without copyright protection that person could turn around
and sell as many copies as they wanted, at whatever price they wanted,
undercutting me in the process. I think we can agree that that's
simply not sustainable. Digital works don't have a natural resource
cost as does, say, a hamburger or a stereo. Those items can't be
magically cloned at zero cost. Digital IP can be, and copyright is
essentially society's gentleman's agreement to treat freely (as in
beer) copyable things as if they have a natural cost (established by
the owner of the IP).

Think of it like a hamburger. McDonald's can't really say anything if
you purchased 1000 burgers from them each day, carried them over to
your hamburger stand, and sold them for 2x the price. Realistically,
they probably would try to say something, but you get the point.

But, if I sell a *copy* of something I created to someone, then they
make 1000 free copies and sell those at half the price, they make 500x
off a 1x investment in my stuff. Just because they have potentially
better marketing, or a built in market.

Fair use is the real remedy. Corporations trying to prevent fair use
is the problem (DRM). And IP rights being assigned to corporations
indefinitely is also a huge problem. I think Bob is right, if IP was
only assigned to individuals (who could then license it to their
employer, for example) or if assigned to corporate entities (in the
case of work-for-hire), it should have a "natural" lifetime (50-75
years).

And for those bashing corporations: there are lots of problems, but
there are also benefits to corporations being defined as equivalent to
individuals. For one, if I'm injured because of a worker's
incompetence, I can hold the corporation responsible as opposed to
some hourly teenager. Also, programmers should really like the concept
of a corporation: it's polymorphism. We had all of this "code" (laws)
written for individuals. Instead of writing all new "code" for
corporations, we wrote one piece of code that established an is-a
relationship between corporations and individuals and magically all of
the existing code "just worked." Of course, as we all know, it's
usually not *that* simple, so we've need to patch things here and
there. But fundamentally, the *abstraction* is sound, it's just it's
use and misuse that's broken (just like copyright laws).

Which comes back to what I originally quoted from Mike: laws, rules,
locks, DRM, anti-piracy controls, etc., are all circumventable
ultimately. They only work on honest people, which are exactly the
people who we should be least concerned with. The goal is to find the
balance that fairly defines the rules of the game but then allows
referees to diagnose the gray areas. But we have to have those rules
in order to *clearly* define what's outside their bounds.

Troy.