Lessig Defends Free Culture in Keynote 179
lisah writes "Professor Larry Lessig, a keynote speaker at this week's Linux World Expo, took issue with current copyright laws and their effect on a free read-write culture. Lessig says that, by today's standards, the simple act of creating a video mashup renders its creator a 'pirate' and argued for sweeping changes that would embrace a fair use culture. Lessig asked the audience to consider sharing works under a Creative Commons license and redirect money they would spend on restricted content to organizations that support a fair use and free culture. He says that opponents of a free read-write culture have strong financial and political backing so unified community support is crucial. 'If the debate is controlled by lawyers and lobbyists...," says Lessig, 'this debate will be lost.'"
Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.hatrack.com/research/interviews/yoda-pa tta.shtml [hatrack.com]
(at the bottom of the page)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
B.
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12-year-old interview (Score:2)
He's dead wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Trademarks must be defended. Patents and copyrights don't.
Interesting to see that OSC would sue over something he obviously doesn't understand. Hopefully his lawyers would stop him.
It's also interesting to see an artist c
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Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Except copyright law itself. The derivative works part of copyright keeps that from happening.
So yes, those 13 year olds can be sued for just such a performance especially if they released it.
B.
Money! (Score:3, Interesting)
How much money would this culture cost the entertainment producers? If fair use is really fair then it should still allow
I do not think that media should be allowed to be replayed for free. Significant amounts of money went into making TV shows and movies and the like and any system must ensure that the producer gets his cut. Contrary to the demands of my sig, not all information should be completely free. Using the CC license [creativecommons.org] is a happy medium. The I really think that this speaker has the right approach, so to speak. From TFA:
Re:Money! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's funny. Compare a Ferrari from 1983 (random date) that cost $230,000 to make and sold for $800,000 to a baseball card from 1930 that cost $0.02 and sold for $0.50. The Ferrari is less worth today, but the baseball card increases its value. Conclusion: the price of a good does not depend on the cost, but the on the desire of the buyer. The more desire there is for a product, the higher the price will be. Austrian Economics, check it out.
Good idea in theory. In practice, that's communism. And as we already know, that didn't and continues not to do so well. (Compare: someone who polishes turds. Should he get paid for the hard work he does?)
Re:Money! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well if we're going to remove artificially create rights and restrictions we also need to get rid of most laws. Or are you being hypocritical? Why do YOU have a monopoly on your property? I should be able to take whatev
Re:Money! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point. Copyright did not start out to be a mechanism for forcing people to pay for content every time they were exposed to it. The current incarnation is completely counter to its original purpose, and arguably no longer serves the public in a positive way.
Huh? By that reasoning all artificial rights are communism. Everything short of total anarchy is communism.
Forced distribution of resources dictated by the government is communism, capitalism lets the market dictate how they are distributed. By what definition is copyright capitalistic?
Re:Money! (Score:2)
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Forced distribution of resources dictated by the government is communism,
Er no. Communism is a political philosphy, not an economic one like capitalism. They are in no way opposites.
Government control of resources is known as a Command Economy, or centrally planned. Its a part of the communist idea, but you can have a planned economy with any comuunisim at all (it is quite popular with some extreme right wing politicians as well).
capitalism lets the market dictate how they are distributed. By what
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Upon what do you base this statement? Is it a coincidence that, after The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx's most significant work is called Das Kapital? Marx saw capitalism and communism as not just comparable, but inextricably linked. He argued that communism would be the economic system that would succeed the era of rampant capitalism. Who knows... he may yet be proven right. The capitalist era seems only to be gaining stea
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Re:Money! (Score:2)
And you've just illustrated with Intellectual Monopoly is not property. It just doesn't translate. /. we can queue the unlimited number of bad analogies, but the reason they are all bad
As this is
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Any idea can literally be known by every living human and this doesn't preclude the next-born to also know or have this idea, and in no way impacts all those that already have the idea.
Yes, that's true - ideas are nonrival goods. But they are not free goods, and they do roughly obey the law of supply and demand. The question becomes how to create incentives for the production of ideas, if the ideas cannot be valuable to the idea-generator.
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I'm not sure what you mean by this: ideas aren't goods, but they are 'free' as in anyone can trade time and neuron-cycles for one. The notion that intellectual monopoly should be called intellectual property is marketing speak by those that want to extort rents... ideas aren't 'goods' or 'property' as they can't be 'owned' in the physical property sense.
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True - left alone, humans will create. For themselves. But creating a market in ideas is the only way to have a mechanism that can easily compensate people for creating things of value to others. I think your example of OSS software is illustrative in this regard. There are no shortage of projects for popular n
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Well ...that's just not true. "only way"? current way, sure, but a market for ideas is only a coupl'a hundred years old and yet Mozart composed music that is still appreciated today and he was compensated. Am I suggesting that was a better way? maybe not, but it's different....
Re:Money! (Score:2)
If there's a demand for polished turds, yes. But if The Market says "We want turds, but we don't want to pay for them" while the Turd Polisher #1 says "My turds are $3" then The Market needs to find Turd Polisher #2, who's giving them away for free, instead of subverting Turd Polisher #1's business
Re:Money! (Score:2)
(Yeah, mod me -1: Disgusting.)
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This is, of course, exactly what file sharing enables. The Market says "we want 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', but we don't want to pay fo
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Well, I say they are, and I think most consumers would agree. You can buy more than one kind of corn flakes and more than one kind of sports car. The differences between a Ferrari and, say, a Lamborghini or a Viper are miniscule compared to the difference between one song and another.
But other than trademarks (which have virtually no effect on
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I don't think so. Consider anyone else who provides a service: a barber, for example. Before you pay him to cut your hair, you have no idea how well he's going to do it. And yet this hasn't killed the market for haircutting, has it? You can get recommendations by word of mouth, you
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Er.. a system that allows one person to opt himself and everyone else in isn't exactly "opt-in". The rest of us don't get a choice.
But as we know, it doesn't need to be moved. Millions of people earn a living by providing services as nothing more than serv
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Good idea in theory. In practice, that's communism. And as we already know, that didn't and continues not to do so well.
I don't follow how paying the person responsible for the work -- the person without whom the work would not exist -- equates to communism. Please clarify?
Compare: someone who polishes turds. Should he get paid for the hard work he does?
Of course he should -- if there's a market for polished turds. But more to the point -- should the poor sot who crapped out the turd be getting pai
Re:Money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Through gratuitous copyright extension however, the system has been perverted into what is primarily a vector with which to attack others through the legal system. What was originally supposed to be a way to increase the size and quality of the public domain is now being used to create virtually unlimited monopolies on information. Whatever view you may have on copyright, it's certainly not being used as it was originally intended. The Creative Commons is a step in the right direction, but we're still stuck with the problem.
Re:Money! (Score:2)
What was originally supposed to be a way to increase the size and quality of the public domain is now being used to ensure that no new content ever gets into the public domain. The exact opposite of the original intent.
Re:Money! (Score:2)
The purpose of copyright is to encourage and reward creativity and ambition. It is not to make of the public domain a refuge for the second-rate.
I see posts almost daily on Slashdot complaining that there is nothing new in movies or music or games.
But when the Geek produces his homemade own sci-fi epic, it is, quite predictatively, an anal-rententive remake of Star Trek:
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The purpose of encouraging the artist, however, is
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Precisely, the intention was to make our public domain and culture first rate. The fact that it has been turned on itself to produce money rather than improve our culture is a shame.
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I see this repeated often in Slashdot YRO discussions, but have seen little primary or secondary source material affirming this interpretation of copyright envisioners' intent.
The purpose of copyright, intrinsically, is to confirm that creators have a special intellectual property right, that they have some form of possession over the creative works they make that others d
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"Copyright law, in turn, traces back
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Re:Money! (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you monetize/calculate the revenue of your work released under "Creative Commons" or other licenses?
I am an entertainment producer. Its easy to make cheap copies of whatever (CD/DVD/download) you are selling. So one cannot determine the loss of revenue if you release your work under a "Creative Commons" license.
I dont put any type of restrictions on the DVDs (there is an FBI warning, but who takes it seriously) I sell. Inste
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We've become attached to the speculative/at-risk work model of art production, even though I'm not convinced that it's really all that beneficial to artists. It results in many more artists and much more art than the market really demands at any given time, and many more failures than would otherwise happen, if artists waited for a demand to exist, and then created for that demand, rather than the other way around.
If you are a sculptor,
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Cheap mechanical reproduction shouldn't be confused with actual artistic output. The reproduction has little in the way of actual inherent value, since it contains very little labor. We are used to paying more for copies tha
Re:Money! (Score:4, Informative)
You are wrong about TV The producer/actors/etc involved in a TV production are paid on the first airing. By the commercial inserts. If the program HAPPENS to be successful and go into syndication, there will be additional payouts, but that is NOT guaranteed. And, in some cases, is rather ludicrous (examples off the top of my head: reruns of Jeopardy, American Idol, or Survivor?).
In other words, some shows MUST have made all the money on the first airing; we can presume that most others do so as well.
TV programs and movies cannot be, as a result, directly compared. "Piracy" cannot really hurt TV, unless the program is pirated BEFORE it is released with its commercials. Indeed, PVRs with commercial skip are a greater "threat" to the TV content producers. Which is why product placement becomes such a big deal. I watch "American Idol" (a guilty pleasure). I rarely (never) watch it "live", but from my PVR, with commercials deleted. However, I know Coke and Ford sponsor the program - product placement. (and, yes, I *am* influenced by the ads.
YMMV
Ratboy
"Piracy" can hurt movies; but not to a big extent. Specifically, it is still very costly to download a full-resolution (DVD) quality movie. I compute the typical cost in Toronto to be $5. Given that this is directly comparable to DVD rental, and considerably less convenient (days to download), AND is only DVD (SD) resolution, I don't think the theater experience is really threatened. And that is where the movies should be paid for -- the theatrical release.
Nonsense (Score:2)
The producers, writers and actors of TV shows expect that if they do a good job, their show will go into syndication and sell on DVD. You can't just deprive them of that income because those sales aren't guaranteed. The fact that people are willing to pay for the DVDs and watch those reruns and that advertisers are willing to pay for those reruns to be aired prov
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It is irrelevant how much a product costs entertainment producers. If as an entertainer you want to make a profit, then
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Copyright registration requirements wasn't cut out due to few outlets but to comply with the Berne Convention requirements.
See "1886: Berne Convention" and "1976: Revision of the U.S. Copyright Act "
on
http://www.arl. [arl.org]
Sadly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sadly... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sadly... (Score:2)
That is because the media companies want us to be entertainment sinks. Much of the population is too busy filling there mind with crap to notice what is going on in the world unless its being broadcast to them by one of the big six.
Check out "You Are Being Lied To" by Rusk Kick for some insightful information
Re:Sadly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and no.
Wait until DRM restrictions are slapped on TV's (HDTV anyone?) and begin to interfere with Joe Couch Potato's ability to watch the latest pablum.
Then, there will be outrage.
Rise, hippies! Rise!! (Score:3, Interesting)
It has my support, though, for what that's worth. I wish the idea the best of luck, and I gladly participate.
Re:Rise, hippies! Rise!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Open source software folks are probably the best ones to realize the flaw in that argument, since by the same standards something like Linux would only be for amateurs. But still I think we all view indie content as necessarily lower-quality, which makes the whole thing a self-fulfilling prophecy... artists see no reason to be professional amateurs so they DO hold out for the big labels. We'd rather watch Firefly on DVD than support some of the cool things web artists (working under CC) want to do.
If everyone that reads Slashdot pledged to spend $10 a month on CC content, I bet you'd see a lot more quality content emerge, and it'd require a lot less willpower to swear off copyrighted things completely.
Re:Rise, hippies! Rise!! (Score:2)
Actually... er... never mind. Carry on.
FOSP (Score:2)
Pron On Tap (Score:2)
Duh
Re:Rise, hippies! Rise!! (Score:2)
Corporate music as background noise (Score:2)
How do you avoid Muzak [wikipedia.org] and other brands of corporate music played as background noise in grocery stores, on some public transportation, in medical clinic waiting rooms, at the office etc?
Accidental access, accidental similarity (Score:2)
You pay for it all right, not in money but in the right to compose songs. U.S. copyright case law considers "access" plus "substantial similarity" to equal copying. If you hear a recording of an all-rights-reserved song on Muzak, you are for the rest of your life deemed to have had "access" to the work. Years later, if you ever compose something that is accidentally similar, you are an infringer and a
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It also makes the assumption that creative works, like foods, are fungible; that any one is as good as any other. In neither case is this particularly tr
More then Just Complaining, Lessig Rocks (Score:5, Informative)
While I am somewhat awed by Lessig's ability to present, my real admiration for him comes from how he has pursued his cause. Lessig argues for radical change in current laws. He is not the only person to argue for radical change. What makes Lessig different is that had has not only made attempts to work within law to bring about change, but he has gone even further and tried to implement what he advocates within a voluntary and completely legal manner without reliance on the force of government to enact the change that he seeks. Lots of people advocate some sort of radical change in society, but relatively few make a genuine attempt to bring about such change through methods other then complaining to the government to use the force of law.
The Creative Commons is an incredible accomplishment. While the CC is in no danger of displacing current media, it has certainly started to make a dent. Will the CC ever make a dent large enough for the average Joe to really sit up and take notice without legislative change? Perhaps not, but what it has done is create an ecosystem to explore the 'fair use' world that Lessig envisions. Even those who find the watering down of copyright power revolting can not honestly proclaim any sort of mal-intent from creating a way for artists who want to offer their works to the public domain a simple and easily identifiable way to do so.
I strongly encourage anyone who is even vaugly interested in this debate to check out Lessig's book, Free Culture. Keeping in tune with Lessig's philosophy on copyright, the book is freely available online. Some enterprising readers of the book also have a complete reading of the book in MP3 format. Check it out.
Lessig Rocks, NOT! (Score:2)
Personal Thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose that the validity of that statement is rather dependent upon the jurisdiction under which you have chosen to live. As for the dire consequences of this particular example, I shall be hard pressed to lose much sleep; first of all, the statement only applies in those circumstances in which the creator of the video clip
Re:Personal Thoughts (Score:2)
I am unfamiliar with the finer nuances of the English language. When one refers to an entire group ("opponents"), without using an adjective such as "some," does one imply that the rest of the sentence applies to every person b
Re:Personal Thoughts (Score:2)
Accidental copying (Score:2)
Am I given a choice, or do the other 99.999999% of the voting population choose for me?
Not so fast. There exist
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Yes, you are given a choice as to where you desire to live. The only manner in which the voting population of your current country could limit that choice would be if they decided to completely seal off the country and not allow anyone to leave (as was done in many Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, though that was definitely without the consent of the citizenry).
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So how do I find the money to leave? And what country outside of Berne is developed enough that I don't lose more in press freedom than I gain by escaping the corruption of copyright?
And I am in fac
Keynote? (Score:3, Insightful)
FTFH: Lessig Defends Free Culture in Keynote
If he's going to be defending "Free Culture," then shouldn't he really be doing it in Impress [openoffice.org] and not Keynote [apple.com]???
Lessig needs to rant less and lobby more (Score:4, Interesting)
Lessig is starting to sound like Stallman. Stallman is more effective, though. What we need is some serious lobbying, along the following lines:
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Copyright harmonization The US should not go beyond the 50 years of the TRIPS agreement. 50 years from first publication, copyright expires. That's it. Free Elvis! (The US can do that unilaterally. Less than 50 years requires international negotiation.)
Actually, the US should abandon all copyright treaties. That, we can also do unilaterally. Copyright harmonization isn't even a good idea. Each country should decide how much copyright, in terms of length and scope, is best fo
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Actually, the US should abandon all copyright treaties.
That's probably out of reach politically, and it's not even a good idea, but scaling back to the 50 years of TRIPS might be within reach. Few works have significant commercial value after 50 years. Maybe put in a renewal provision that allows renewal after 50 years for $10,000/year, to keep Disney happy. This would allow a smooth flow of old content into the public domain.
I don't think that this ("Make copy prote
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We'll have to work on it politically, but anything's possible. I fail to see why you think it's a bad idea, however.
Few works have significant commercial value after 50 years.
Actually, few works have significant commercial value ever. Of those few, fewer still have significant commercial value after a few months of publication in any given medium. Of those, fewer yet still have significant commercial value after a few years. Almost noth
Lobby *how*? (Score:2)
Turning your laudable agenda into reality takes more than tip-jar money - it takes soul-owning money. The other side has quite an
He did the same talk at Wikimania (Score:2)
Just Give Me Copyright Sanity! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you had to go back and ask the originators punk if you could use their sound and they had an absolute veto over it, we might very well not have punk and all the other types of music that sprung from that branch in the musical tree. The same goes for more other examples. Today, you can merrily write about vampires without worry of a lawsuit, but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground. This SHOULD be troubling. Our ability to create new culture is being stunted by demanding that anyone wants to bud off of some other creative needs to ask the original authors permission. Instead of having an explosion of stories and mythos from worlds from our popular culture, we have tightly controlled and stunted versions.
Further, even the most pro-copyright minded person MUST see the insanity of copyrights that last CENTURIES. Lessig doesn't argue for an end to copyright. He argues for some sort of sanity in it. Giving people copyrights that exists well past their death and then some is crazy. Dead artists don't need their works protected. If you want to use a Robert Frost poem, you damn well should be able to. The guy has been dead for almost half of a centaury yet you can still find your ass sued if you post one of his poems on the Internet.
No matter what you think of copyright, you MUST agree that the current system is insane and needs fixing. Perhaps you might not want to take it as far as Lessig does, but you certainly must agree that a mean who died in 1949 doesn't need his work to continue to waste away under copyright protection.
Re:Just Give Me Copyright Sanity! (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, if you write about a Sith Lord.
However, you can write about a guy that looks devilish, has wicked special powers with a vibro-sword due to his being specially attuned to the negative aspects of the universe, is an apprentice of another even badder bad dude, and is working on his skills with shooting lightning from his fingers.
The only problem you'll face then is accusatio
OK, but that's not copyrights (Score:2)
Should it? For one thing, you're not talking about copyrights. You're talking about trademarks -- which are another form of "intellectual property," but they aren't Lessig's main issue.
The problem with the Sith Lord is that Lucas owns a trademark on the term "Sith Lord." But
Re:Just Give Me Copyright Sanity! (Score:2)
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That's exactly it, though. Right now you can (and sometimes will) get sued just for writing about Lestat, regardless of whether or not you attempted to make money off it. If people felt free to explore tangents on other authors' works, some truly fantastic art might get made, and the orig
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Copyright is still a good idea, because without it a company like Disney could take a song someone posted for free on the web, press a million CDs and make a fortune off it without any compensation to the original author. And until the general public learns to voluntarily support artists (moving from a product to appreciation model), there needs to be some level of legal protection for artists. Still, MODERN copyright is a bad idea, and should be fixed.
Re:Mr. Lessig: Go get stuffed (Score:2)
Re:Mr. Lessig: Go get stuffed (Score:5, Informative)
But the bigger issue is whether Jack Ryan is actually the exclusive property of Tom Clancy as a concept. Fanfic isn't strictly legal if you're a copyright maximalist. Exploring the characters and ideas that other authors have created should be encouraged. "Patriot Games" may not be the best book in the world, but it could be that someone out there will write the Best Novel of All Time based on a character Mr Clancy created. But no one will try that if they think they're going to get sued. CC content creates an environment where derivative works can be made without fear of retribution, and quite possibly lead to more revenue streams for the originating artist.
CC does not have to mean "nobody gets paid". It's more about "nobody has to be scared of lawyers".
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As for whet
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As they are required to do, by the terms of trademark law. If you fail to "vigorously defend" trademarks, you could lose the protection. Again, you're not talking about copyrights with fanfic. You're talking about trademarks.
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I would submit that in a lot of cases, uninformed C&Ds are issued and heeded without trademark protection backing them up. And it's the state of overly-aggressive copyright law that makes it plausible that the threat is real. But yes, there is a distinction, so I'll agree with yo
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Certainly true; but that's not the fault of the issuer. Remember: Anyone can sue you for anything. Moreover, a lawyer can write a letter on any topic he/she wants.
I expect so. Because he'd be writing prose designed to target/consume an intellectual propert
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The blurring of copyright at the moment means that people avoid writing derivatives because there's no distinction between commercial and non-commercial works. If there's a chance I'll be sued for writing something, I really have to weigh how much I want to do it. Copyr
How far does "idea protection" go? (Score:2)
This is the real question.
For example: Do you think that the original Battlestar Galactica TV show constituted theft of the ideas in Star Wars? Did Lucas steal the plot of Kurusawa's Hidden Fortress [imdb.com]?
The problem with your interpretation is that plot ideas, characters, and so on do not spring from a whole cloth out of the author's mind, unaided by the culture and society in which the author lives. James Joyce couldn't have written Ulysses were it not for Homer's Odyssey. How could schools of artistic expr
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Bad choice of reference.
Ask Fox what they think. They sued the creators of the original Battlestar Galactica for copyright infringement, saying that BG ripped off from Star Wars. My point was that all art is derivative to at least some degree. It is never wholly original.
Given that you think BG stole from the Book of Mormon, should the Mormon Church sue the creators of BG?
Re:Mr. Lessig: Go get stuffed (Score:2)
Mash-up artists, like rappers "sampling" are working and applying their own creativity -- aka: hard work. ... most of them suck. Large.
I like mash-ups
Making *good* use of sound...any sound, is an art. And doing it well is arguably more difficult...if a note doesn't fit, you can't change it. It just doesn't fit.
You need to get over the notion that "art" is always _new_. In reality, art is new every
Mr. 2muchcoffeman: Go get stuffed (Score:5, Insightful)
Disney has made billions upon billions of dollars using the "intellectual property" of long dead authors. Do you really think Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, or any of other stories that built the Disney empire were dreamed up by Disney themselves? That didn't stop them from using the material. Where was their concern for the "protection" of ideas back then?
Walt Disney is every bit as dead as Hans Christian Anderson, yet if I tried to sell a story about Mickey Mouse I'd have about one week before I found myself assaulted by Disney's legal department. Why is one protected and not the other?
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Re:Mr. Lessig: Go get stuffed (Score:2)
- creativity is scarce;
- creating requires time people don't have;
- distribution is expensive."
You need to add one just after the second:
- creativity has expenses;
The cost of raw goods to create whatever it is you are making shouldn't be ignored.
B.
Re:Translation (Score:2, Funny)
"Oh, are you a lawyer?", said the newcomer, preparing to tell his story.
"No, I'm an asshole" was the reply.
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So, how does the fact that all rights are signed away to a record label or film studio impact this? The "rights of the artist" seems to be a fallacy that the holders of copyrights use to motivate widening and extension of copyright.
What happens if the copyright holder and the original creator of a work disagree on whether someone can create a derivative work? The artist has a right to decide