Egypt to Copyright Pyramids and Sphynx

empaler writes "We all know the usual pro-copyright arguments. Most of them hinge on the fact that the individual or company that has a copyright needs an incentive to make something that is copyrightable, and therefore ensure a revenue stream in a period after the copyright has been granted. In a never-surpassed move, Egypt is working on legislation to extend copyright well above 3000 years — they are going to start claiming royalties for using likenesses of the Sphynx and the Pyramids. It is still unclear whether the original intent of the Pyramids included 'making sure them bastards pay for a plastic copy in 3000 years' alongside 'securing a pathway to the heavens for the God King.' Speaking as a Greenlandic national, I want dibs on ice cubes." It sounds straight out of The Onion, but instead you can read another story on the BBC.

Take this Egypt!

/_\
Can't stop me from making pyramids!

Re:Take this Egypt!

That's a trapezoid, you geometrically challenged clod!

Re:Take this Egypt!

Yeah, and so were some of the early pyramids, as I recall.

Give the guy a break.

Re:Take this Egypt!

I think Canada should get a copyright on beavers.

Pay up, Mr. Flynt!

Oblig. Police Squad

"Nice beaver!"

"Thanks, I just had it stuffed"

US Treasury is Effed

How much are the royalties going to be for each dollar bill in circulation?

Re:US Treasury is Effed

Oh come on, the pyramids on the dollar bill is obviously fair use: parody! I mean, look at the giant floating eyeball on top of it! I roll over with laughter every time I see that thing...

Re:US Treasury is Effed

That's the All-Seeing Eye of Ra, and you've really pissed Him off with your flippancy. No solar power for j00.

Re:

No solar power for j00.

That'll tech us a lesson!

P.S.
Superman just mooned the All-Seeing Eye of Ra, please don't punish him with "No kryptonite for j00!"

-

Re:US Treasury is Effed

Hurray for the Sun God!
He is the One God!

Ra!! Ra!! Ra!!

Re:US Treasury is Effed

That's the All-Seeing Eye of Ra, and you've really pissed Him off with your flippancy. No solar power for j00.

Being that it was Teh j00s that actually BUILT the pyramids, I think it's only fair that the copyright on them should revert into their hands.

Re:US Treasury is Effed

How much are the royalties going to be for each dollar bill in circulation?

that's a recursion problem, because we'll just print more dollars to pay the bill. so the limit of, um, lemme see if i can find my old calculus book...

Re:US Treasury is Effed

That was sublicensed from the Masons.

Re:US Treasury is Effed

They are also suing Israel in international court for all the gold they took out of Egypt during the Exodus. Israel has yet to counter-sue for back wages for slave-labor on the pyramids. I guess this is part of a general strategy by the Egyptian government to insure their revenue stream w/o engaging in productive activity. They learned from SCM and Apple Core.

Copyright extension in reverse...?

What will they call it? The Sun God Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?

Fuck!

There goes my plans to get rich quickly by making copies of pyramids and sphinxes and selling them on the street for way lower than the original pyramid and sphinx.

Re:

According to the article on BBC, the Luxor Hotel pyramid is exempt because it isn't an exact copy.

I considered submitting the story myself earlier today, but I figured it was already in the pipeline from someone else.

They can choose to copyright...

..and the rest of us can choose to ignore their absurdity.

I want to make a point.. But.. how the fuck can I make an mp3 of the Sphinx?

Re:They can choose to copyright...

How will you ignore it? Thanks to the US Government, they must take Egypt's copyright claims seriously if they demand that other countries take ours seriously (and even let us infiltrate their citizen's lives CIA-style).

Actually the copyright laws are regulated by international treaty and this particular claim is not supported by the treaty. So the reverse is true, Egypt has zero chance of applying this particular law outside its own borders.

But thats probably not what they are after. After some haggling the owners of the Luxor will come up with some form of face saving deal that throws a little money towards preserving the originals and in return the Egyptian government will loan them some stuff.

External copyright might not be the goal

It is entirely possible that they don't give a mummified rat's ass about preserving rightst for the pyramids outside Egypt. This might be just another way to make sure anyone cashing in on the pyramids to sell tinkets and junk to tourists gives a cut to the government.

Or, perhaps this is going to be used like a submarine patent: They let people using the images just slide by until they want to cash in or cause someone grief. I somehow imagine that the money that Egypt makes off ouf tourisim is probably a lot greater than the money that say, the Luxor makes off of being shaped like a pyramid.

Im guessing that this is a strategic move.

Just like any other desperate move

This is how people start thinking when their old business model starts falling into pieces. Fewer and fewer people go to Egypt to see the pyramids, it is really not a surprise. Why not go to see the artificial islands in the United Arab Emirates instead? After all it should be safer and these 'wonders' are newer. It really is a more tourist friendly attraction for those going to the Middle East anyway.

But this will not work, sure Egypt can come up with whatever ideas they want but who is going to care?

Re:Just like any other desperate move

I agree with you that it may be a desperate move; but, lets face it - this is nothing out of the ordinary. This sort of thing has been done time and time again. In order to protect its own market from cheap foreign knockoff souvenirs, they are enacting these regulations. USA does it on a daily basis.

Though, here is an amusing precedent for you. Look at the original Christian gospels; in Acts of the Apostles, Paul visits Ephesus so to try to convert the local heathens. The locals, who worship the (to us classical) Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses, don't reject Jesus and monotheism. They are just upset that by replacing their gods with a single God (and Jesus), the local silversmiths would lose out on their souvenir trade: selling statues of Diana. So religion and (nationalism) take back seat to economy.

Sources for the interested:
* http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/newtestament/section5.rhtml [sparknotes.com] (look for 'trade')
* http://www.gospelhall.org/bible/bible.php?passage=acts+19&search=&ver1=kjv [gospelhall.org] (may need to look around for this Ephesus-trade section - I am a little rusty on the original)

Re:

"cheap foreign knockoff souvenirs"
Ironic thing is the souvenirs probably cost more than the original to build. Sweatshops may be cheap, but good ole fashioned slave labor wins hands down.

Hey, it's all a big joke!

Re:Just like any other desperate move

Fewer and fewer people go to Egypt to see the pyramids

There is a reason for that and it has nothing to do with copyright or newer monumental construction projects in neighboring Arab countries and that is the image that westerners in general and Americans in particular have about Arab countries from what they see in the terrorist beheading videos, the stonnings of women in the streets, and the unruley mobs chanting "death to America". Tourists are scared to death of visiting Arab countries and they should be. If the Eygptians want to attract more tourists to their country then they have to do something about the terrorist image that is being solidified in the west. Does anyone else remember the episode of 30 Days [wikipedia.org] where Morgan Spurlock asks people what is the first word that comes into their mind when he says the word "muslim"? The fact that Ayman Al-Zawahiri (aka the Eygtpian doctor and number 2 man of Osama) gets mentioned just about every time Al Qaeda gets mentioned in the news doesn't help. The Eygptians, the Saudis, the Jordanians and other Arab countries need to do more publically to counteract the negative PR moves being made by the terrorists or all but the most adventurous tourists might stay away permanently.

Re:Just like any other desperate move

None of which bothers me in the slightest - after all we lived with the IRA for thirty years in the UK. Egypt and the Middle East are perfectly safe and the media frenzy about the nasty terrorists is just that - on the ground by and large the people don't want to know where you are from. They want your money and will have it off any Western tourists by selling tat at overinflated prices, but that's true of any tourist place of course. Now the US - fingerprints on entry? Geez, I've not arrived and I'm considered a criminal. The protection offered citizens is not extended to guests, rude and overbearing officials, detention without trial, no thanks. I've been to both and the Middle East wins on general perceived safety.

Re:Just like any other desperate move

I can only explain from my personal point of view, but I'm one of the guys not visiting the US.

Fingerprinting tourists? What on earth were your government thinking? I'm not going to visit a country that demands my fingerprints on entry!

I have to admit that I now have a couple of less travel-destinations than before, but that's okay. I've still got lots to visit.

My current do-not-visit list:
  - The US
  - Japan
  - Iran
  - Iraq
  - Saudi Arabia
  - bunch-o-other-countries-down-there
  - Pakistan
  - Afghanistan
  - Chechenya
  - Myanmar
  - North Korea
  - Venezuela
  - Zimbabwe .. and I'm sure a small bunch more. But those countries are 'right out' at the moment.

There are hundreds of other countries I'd rather visit. The countries that act like barbarians are just .. not that interesting.

Are you surprised?

The reason people don't want to visit the US:

- presumption of being a criminal: get your fingerprints taken at the border, get inspected by idiots in the name of security every hour, get to take your bloody *shoes* off whenever you want to board a plane. Get real. None of that stuff stops terrorism. It does however, stop *tourism*.

- no protection by the law: as a foreigner you are not protected by any american laws. The constitution doesn't apply to you. The authorities can do with you whatever they want, for any reason they feel like. You could be sitting on a beach one moment and being beaten up in Guantanamo Bay the next, and noone would care.

- lawsuits. Get involved in any kind of accident, and american lawyers will bleed you dry. You might not even be able to go back to your own country.

Is any of this true? Well, it really doesn't matter now does it? As long as people like me perceive these risks to be true we won't visit. And there plenty of other places in the world to go to.

Things get even more interesting if you are arabic-looking, or if you have done anything that american law does not approve of (even if it was legal in the country where the act was committed!). In either case, the risk of going to the US increases considerably.

Does this mean...

...that they will ry and sue the Incas?

Wait, wait;

Isn't copyrighting a geometrical figure [wikipedia.org] about the same as copyrighting a number? How exactly do they plan to go about doing this?

Re:Wait, wait;

You trademark Mickey Mouse. You copyright particular examples of work containing him.

Wow, impressive.

"Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries."

That's pretty astounding arrogance right there. Since when do one country's laws apply anywhere outside their borders? Not to mention that they have no right to try to "copyright" stuff that was made 3000 years ago, by people long-since dead.

Re:Wow, impressive.

That's pretty astounding arrogance right there. Since when do one country's laws apply anywhere outside their borders?

They learned from America, whose government has pretty much the same attitude in many areas.

Not to mention that they have no right to try to "copyright" stuff that was made 3000 years ago, by people long-since dead.

Ask Disney about the Grimm Brothers.

Re:Tit for tat

No, international treaty means that your copyright will be honored under the laws of the other country in that country. To prosecute someone in the United States, you have to file a case in US District Court under Title 17, not under the Berne Convention.

If Egypt retaliates for something like this, they would be viewed as violating the treaties by every other state, and be subject to significant sanctions. Not to mention, they are still trying to get back lots of antiquities from all those other countries.

Re:

Don't forget the beloved WTO - no telling how it could make the situation even more absurd that it already is.

This is...

a total pyramid scheme...

Criminal Charges

The original owners were the pharaoh era royalty. The present government does not derive directly from the royal line. Therefore to claim ownership rights on property not rightfully theirs is to deprive the original owners of their ownership.

It's stealing. Lock the bastards up. Call the PIAA (Pyramid Industry Association of Assholes).

Makes sense--IP is a land grab, not an incentive

At first blush, this seems absurd, but once you think about it, it really isn't very different from what copyright (and IP in general) has become in recent decades. Disney, for example, is voting themselves eternal copyrights over their stuff, much of which is derivative. I think it's only a matter of time before each culture decides to lay claim to their corpus of work, from the beginning of time. It'd be an interesting battle, as arguably the creators of the English language contributed more to The Little Mermaid than Disney did...

Noah's Ark Found! Noah's Ark!

Hmm, all the regular news staff are on leave and the editors are pulling stories out of their bottom drawers to fill newsprint. We used to call it 'cucumber time' - don't know why, but it does feel like a good description for this time of year.

This will challenge the Berne Convention

I think that they are taking the international legitimacy for this from the Berne convention [wipo.int] in partcular article 7 [wipo.int] which states:

the term shall be governed by the legislation of the country where protection is claimed

Thus their (Egyptian) legislation on the term is automatically accepted and enforced in all signatories to the Berne convention.

Either:

• Other countries will ignore it, or
• Other countries will enforce it -- which I doubt, or
• It will force a re-evaluation of the Berne convention.

I hope that it is the last option, the Berne convention has been abused by the likes of Disney which has bought votes in the USA senate/... to extend copyright in the USA and thus giving it the ability to milk the rest of the world for things that should have fallen out of copyright, like Steamboat Willie [wikipedia.org]

Re:good idea, bad implementation

Regional designations. OK. So if it's egyptian, it's pyramids. If it's foreign, it's "squared-based volumes with triangular walls". Hey, it works for champagne and tequila :D

Re:

They built them perhaps, but they didn't design them. Slave labour requires no contract and technically it could be considered as Volunteer labour. So arguing whether the jews should get a piece is redundant.

I am more interested in where this might leav

Re:So where does this leave the jews?

I am more interested in where this might leave Extraterrestrials.

Yeah, right. Are you going to tell a Goa'uld mothership that it can't land because it would be violating your copyright?

Re:So where does this leave the jews?

"This bit of accepted wisdom, that "...the Pyramids [were] built by slaves who were Jews.." (as stated in your message of 1 September), is a canard that does not deserve repetition. First, it is anachronistic and illogical. The "Pyramids" -- presumably the three great pyramids of Gizah and perhaps the earlier pyramids to the south, including the Step Pyramid of Sakkara -- were built in the Third and Fourth Dynasties, 2650-2575 BC and 2575-2467 BC. The Jews did not exist at that time. The ancestors of the Jews, the Hebrews or "Children of Israel" -- Bene Yisra'el -- did not enter Egypt until centuries later. If one looks at the biblical narrative, Joseph, son of Jacob aka Israel, who brought the people of Israel into Egypt to settle in the land of Goshen, was driven in a chariot just behind Pharaoh's. The Egyptians did not have the wheel when the great pyramids were built. By the time the Egyptians had wheels, and horses and chariots, the great pyramids were ancient. Even if one were to determine that the migration of the Sumerian/Chaldean Abraham from the Sumerian city of Ur to the land of the Canaanites took place around the predynastic or early dynastic periods of ancient Egypt, there would still have been no Jews in Egypt at the time -- or anywhere else for that matter. Second, recent scholarship on ancient Egypt has suggested -- concluded, perhaps -- that the pyramids were built by corvees of native Egyptians and undoubtedly of slaves as well, conscripted into temporary service on the pyramids, probably during the flood season when their labor on the farm could be spared. Those who were not actually slaves through warfare or other reasons were subjects of Pharaoh who were made to give their time and effort to a great national cause. Managing these labor gangs were professional craftsmen whose villages near the pyramids have been under excavation and study". Ronald Hilton - 9/6/01

Re:So where does this leave the jews?

No, he's right on. The Jews were certainly slaves for other projects, just not the pyramids. There were quite a lot of buildings going up around the time of Ramesses II (who was possibly the antagonist to Moses), but the Egyptians had long since switched to burying important people in the Valley of the Kings.

Re:So where does this leave the jews?

In fact, there is evidence they had nothing to do with them. This comes from the fact that there is evidence that Egyptian labor was used to build them, and it wasn't slave labor, but a decent job during the "off season".

Re:Firehose is weird

Perhaps I'm really bad at writing summaries, but I posted this same story on Firehose almost an hour before this one even came up.

But you probably spelled "sphinx" correctly. It was the extra creativity of fucking it up to "sphynx" that got this one noticed. Remember, it's not accuracy that gets you on Slashdot, it's the ability to distort and misinterpret a story so it will generate the most page views that counts.

Indefinite copyright already exists in the USA

Yes, there is _some_ movement in the US to make copyright indefinite, but (at least for now) it is not close to becoming law.

Sorry, you missed the boat. The law to make US copyrights indefinite passed 8 years ago. It was also challenged all the way to Supreme Court, and found to be 100% constitutional.

It was called the DMCA, and contained provisions to extend copyright indefinitely (even though nobody seems to realize it.)

See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.

Re:Indefinite copyright already exists in the USA

See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.

Nice try, but:

a technological measure `effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.

(Empahsis mine)

Once something has slipped into public domain, it no longer has a copyright owner to protect the rights of. The technical measures would still be in place, but they would not be given the force of law after the expiration. CSS [videolan.org], Fairplay [slashdot.org], PlaysForSure [engadget.com], and to an extent AACS [doom9.org] and BD+ [engadgethd.com] have all been broken by groups working underground. If commercial entities would be able to reproduce public domain works for profit, the force behind the cracks would increase tenfold.

As much as I hate the DMCA, it doesn't give an indefinite term to copyright. I suppose it's possible that an unbreakable DRM could be created (though I doubt it), but that's not the force of law.

Re:Eh?

Prior art doesn't matter in copyright. You are thinking of patents. If I preform Hamlet on stage, my performance is copyrighted the moment I do it. If I don't want you to video tape it, then copyright would be on my side. Nothing stops you from performing it yourself though because Shakespeare's copyright on the play has expired. Of course it wouldn't be expired in Egypt if this law passes.

Re:Eh?

If I preform Hamlet on stage, my performance is copyrighted the moment I do it.

In the US a performance must be "fixed in a tangible medium." It isn't copyrighted unless you film it, record it, or write it down.