1.2 billion * 65% = 780 million free works
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| Author | Content |
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| mbaehrlxer Apr 30, 2017 1:16 AM EDT |
the 1.2 billion number includes non-free works, which are not interesting, creative commons or otherwise. the more interesting number is 780 million free works. but also the 65% in itself is interesting: out of 1.2 billion works where the creators looked at a range of licenses from public domain to completely closed, 65% choose a free license. that is the majority. and that has me hopeful. greetings, eMBee. |
| dotmatrix Apr 30, 2017 5:02 PM EDT |
> 65% choose a free license. that is the majority. and that has me hopeful. This. And definitely. As a side note, this shows that creativity is shared freely. Thus the idea of copyright as a societal tool for providing a shelter for creative works which would only be shared with restrictive and punitive protections is shattered. Creativity wants to be shared because people are natural sharers. Creativity doesn't need a societal shelter under either for copyright or patents. |
| cybertao Apr 30, 2017 6:19 PM EDT |
Non-free still allows for end users to share the product, just not use it commercially. Which for the end user is what matters.dotmatrix wrote:Creativity doesn't need a societal shelter under either for copyright or patents.But licences such as CC and GPL are copyright licences. Without copyright law GPL wouldn't exist and everyone would operate in a FreeBSD type scenario - a company can take code, sell it as or in products, and give nothing back. Advertisers would be able to take a song you wrote and use it to sell tacky goods on TV without permission or remuneration. Copyright helps free-culture. |
| dotmatrix Apr 30, 2017 7:14 PM EDT |
>But licences such as CC and GPL are copyright licences. Without copyright law GPL wouldn't exist True. However, it could be argued that without copyright law there would be no need for CC and GPL. My argument is that the premise of copyright is incorrect. Humans are naturally curious and natural sharers of information. There is no need for an exclusive long term government mandated monopoly for the creative works to be created and shared. Ethically... society should reward creative works creation and sharing. But... the argument that people will only create and invent and share if an exclusive long term government mandated monopoly for the creative works exists... is fatally flawed. Furthermore, most of the rewards under the current legal framework go to large international corporations who seek to extract the most reward out of the least work.... which is the precise opposite of the entire idea. |
| cybertao May 01, 2017 9:50 PM EDT |
dotmatrix wrote:True. However, it could be argued that without copyright law there would be no need for CC and GPL."a company can take code, sell it as or in products, and give nothing back. Advertisers would be able to take a song you wrote and use it to sell tacky goods on TV without permission or remuneration. Copyright helps free-culture." Commercialised media made with the intention of leveraging restrictive licenses wouldn't exist or in the same way without it - they would't be the same and suddenly 'free' if copyright was abolished. It would hurt both the commercial production and free culture. dotmatrix wrote:Ethically... society should reward creative works creation and sharing.Yes, it should. Society has the choice. By that statement it could be argued there is no need to abolish copyright because society would elevate creative works that encourage sharing. |
| dotmatrix May 02, 2017 7:42 AM EDT |
>Advertisers would be able to take a song you wrote and use it to sell tacky goods on TV without permission or remuneration. Sure... that's not my argument though. My argument is that the song would be written even if copyright laws did not exist. I say this because a common reason given for things like copyright law and patent law is that the creative works would not exist without the protections... that people would choose not to share. And that base argument is false. The other part of my argument is that copyright and patent laws benefit the large international corporations rather than the actual humans who created the works. Benjamin Franklin did not patent his inventions.... Obligatory link: Ben Franklin on Patents |
| jdixon May 02, 2017 8:31 AM EDT |
> The other part of my argument is that copyright and patent laws benefit the large international corporations rather than the actual humans who created the works. A corporation, despite the best attempts of the court systems to argue otherwise, is not a person and cannot create things. Thus it should not be able to hold copyrights or patents. Those should be limited to people. My other problem with copyrights is the ridiculous extension of their length over the past several decades. |
| dotmatrix May 02, 2017 8:56 AM EDT |
>A corporation, despite the best attempts of the court systems to argue otherwise, is not a person and cannot create things. It may be effectively argued that corporations provide the source of income without which the creators would not be able to create. However, my argument is that this argument is fatally flawed. It may also be effectively argued that a corporation is a legal entity within a Sovereign Nation who should have rights as well as tax levied... I don't necessarily disagree with the assignment of corporations as legal entities with rights and tax obligations. However, the international corporations do not pay taxes as an individual would. They pay almost no tax at all... and certainly do not pay taxes on the full income gained in any given Sovereign Nation. >My other problem with copyrights is the ridiculous extension of their length over the past several decades. The craziest idea of all is retroactive copyright extension. Even if it were true, which it is not, that a creator of a given work required an exclusive monopoly to share the created work... it makes zero sense to retroactively extend that monopoly since the work was created within the limits of the shorter time frame. However... I'm with Ben Franklin on the sharing of creative works. The most economical way to grow the wealth of society is to share creative works without limitation. Please do not confuse my argument here with the idea of socialism. I do not support the government enforced redistribution of wealth... People will naturally share, and will share more freely without enforced sharing at gun point. When I worked in retail as a young person, my manager used to say, "Locks are to keep honest people honest." ... which also means, "Locks are meaningless and ineffective... but give the appearance of effectiveness." The same is true of copyright and patents... "Copyright law keeps honest people honest. However, cheaters are undeterred." |
| jdixon May 02, 2017 10:23 AM EDT |
> It may also be effectively argued that a corporation is a legal entity within a Sovereign Nation who should have rights as well as tax levied... That is the standard legal position as I understand it. However, it breaks down completely when a corporation engages in wrong doing. You can't throw a corporation in jail, the best you can do is jail their CEO and board of directors. That limitation, IMO, renders the entire argument invalid. Never forget that corporations are a government creation. They can set pretty much any rules on them they want. |
| dotmatrix May 02, 2017 11:03 AM EDT |
>Never forget that corporations are a government creation. They can set pretty much any rules on them they want The definition of Citizen is a government creation. The rules can always be set the way they want. As George Carlin said: George Carlin wrote:You have no rights... Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. |
| gus3 May 03, 2017 1:08 PM EDT |
George Carlin was a comedian, not a lawyer, and not a legal authority. His chosen employment was to pander to his audience. |
| dotmatrix May 03, 2017 1:51 PM EDT |
As the perpetual oppositional individual, I will point out that employment... in general... is "to pander to an audience." A lawyer panders to a client and the court. The law is never as written. It's the best storyteller who wins. The best manipulator of the language who shines. The best panderer who prevails. George Carlin was a philosopher, I would say a brilliant philosopher, who chose stand up comedy as the medium through which to impart his thoughts. |
| cybertao May 03, 2017 3:37 PM EDT |
dotmatrix wrote:Sure... that's not my argument though.Copyright is a 'monopoly' on distribution, not production. Anyone can produce something. A large scale, high quality product needs a lot of resources which is where the monopoly is. So yes, stuff will still get made without copyright. Stuff that requires a return on investment, promotion, and distribution won't. Copyright doesn't stop the first from being created, abolishing it will hurt the second. |
| dotmatrix May 03, 2017 3:58 PM EDT |
>Copyright doesn't stop the first from being created, abolishing it will hurt the second. Copyright does indeed stop the first from being created... Derivative works are effectively extinguished. This prevents a wide range of creative works from being published. >Stuff that requires a return on investment, promotion, and distribution won't. This is the stuff that benefits the international corporations, which do not represent the largest portion of published works... and especially the unpublished works -- those creative works which are not published for fear of being dragged into court by the large international corporations. |
| cybertao May 03, 2017 6:06 PM EDT |
I personally feel the problem with copyright is the lengthy duration. Reducing it would allow return to the public domain and resolve that issue. It would also apply to led restrictive licencing such as GPL and flavours of CC so it needs to be long enough, but not to long. Prevention of derivative works doesn't stand in the way of producing free culture though. It is limiting, but in cases where production has to infringe on a popular commercial franchise for relevance and success then they are doing it wrong. Patents is a different story and a separate argument from copyright. |
| jdixon May 03, 2017 6:51 PM EDT |
> I personally feel the problem with copyright is the lengthy duration. Reducing it would allow return to the public domain and resolve that issue. It would also apply to led restrictive licencing such as GPL and flavours of CC so it needs to be long enough, but not to long. A single 50 year term from the date of publication sounds about right to me. |
| BernardSwiss May 03, 2017 8:45 PM EDT |
Back in the day when transport was by horse-drawn vehicle and sail-driven ship, and canals were the epitome of modern transportation infrastructure, and the electric telegraph had yet to be invented, a "copyright" grant of 14 years plus option to renew once (for a total of 28 years) was considered sufficient to provide both sufficient protection and reasonable incentive for authors and creators to continue authoring and creating their works. Ever since then, the amount of incentive and protection allegedly required to foster "progress in The Arts and Sciences" as expanded by leaps and bounds, till today the "limited period" generally extends to over a century -- even while the creators' have benefited from the ability to access ever larger audiences in ever larger markets, ever more quickly, ever more economically and ever more easily and conveniently. I would argue that this is entirely backwards. That horse and sail have been supplanted by steam and electricity, and then by diesel and fiber optic cables... That the technologies of making copies to distribute have likewise vastly improved, to extents that were once unimaginable... In short, that as it has become ever easier for the "owner" of "intellectual property" to reach and sell to an ever larger market, it clearly follows that any presumed need (or justification) to protect and incentivize the creator, for some defined period of time, with a government-enforced monopoly over distribution, has actually diminished, not expanded. So why do we keep expanding the scope of copyright "protection" and "incentive", instead? |
| skelband May 04, 2017 12:47 PM EDT |
> A single 50 year term from the date of publication sounds about right to me. Given that I agree pretty much with what BernardSwiss says above, 50 years feels like an eternity to me in the modern age where creative works have a much shorter useful life than in past times and consumption/distribution is much more rapid. If the aim of copyright is to give a monetary advantage to the creator to encourage works, then the term should fit that advantage, nothing more. Something in the region of 5-10 years seems about right to me and whatever term arrived at should be backed by hard evidence. Some also suggest that different media might attract different terms since there are differing realistic monetary lives. I think that might overly complicate an already difficult area. |
| jdixon May 04, 2017 7:46 PM EDT |
> Given that I agree pretty much with what BernardSwiss says above, 50 years feels like an eternity to me in the modern age where creative works have a much shorter useful life than in past times and consumption/distribution is much more rapid. You both have valid points. The reason I say 50 years is that it's less than a human lifespan, would pretty much cut the current term in half, and might be an acceptable compromise to most people. However, as long as Disney and Hollywood owns the legislature, don't expect any of our ideas to get a hearing in the US. |
| dotmatrix May 04, 2017 8:25 PM EDT |
>The reason I say 50 years is that it's less than a human lifespan, would pretty much cut the current term in half, The current term is: 70 years after the author's death for a non-corporate published work or 95 years for a published corporate work. http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm >However, as long as Disney and Hollywood owns the legislature, don't expect any of our ideas to get a hearing in the US. Yup. That's the answer... corporations have taken over the lawmaking governmental bodies. And, as all businesses, corporations seek to extract the most reward from the least work. Thus, copyright... like most other things... has been molded into a tool to beat back the little guy. sigh. At least we have the GPL. (however, abolishing copyright altogether would fix many things.) All praise to Saint IGNUcius Stallman. https://stallman.org/saint.html |
| CFWhitman May 05, 2017 10:18 AM EDT |
The thing is, the copyright terms that they have expanded to are in actuality a detriment to them rather than an advantage. The terms are so long that they are viewed as ridiculous and are ignored by a great many people who normally abide by the law. This makes it so terms are more likely to be ignored even on new material. There is the old argument about Disney that they need to protect Mickey Mouse from being in the public domain. However, Mickey Mouse can be protected by trademark, and doesn't need copyright protection. Just because people can freely share "Steamboat Willie" does not mean that they can use Mickey Mouse however they want. The motive of the studios and publishing houses isn't always what it would appear to be either. A lot of the motive that studios and publishing houses have had in the past for keeping terms long is, rather than wanting to make more money on the old material (they generally can't make very much more with old copyrighted material than with public domain material), that it means less free competition for their new stuff. This is so much the case that many works have been permanently lost because studios and publishing houses wouldn't authorize new prints of them and wouldn't release them themselves because they knew that they couldn't charge as much for them as for new material. The loss of these works to deterioration of current copies is completely opposed to the intention of copyright law, but copyright law was used to achieve it even when the terms were more reasonable than they are now. |
| skelband May 05, 2017 4:21 PM EDT |
> The loss of these works to deterioration of current copies is completely opposed to the intention of copyright law, but copyright law was used to achieve it even when the terms were more reasonable than they are now. I actually think that this is a serious issue especially as you say, that at least in the US, copyright was supposed to enrich culture and the public domain. Didn't they have to reshoot and remaster a lot of the original Star Wars footage when the only masters deteriorated to the point of uselessness? How many "lost" TV episodes have turned up on home VHS recordings from live TV? If everyone obeyed the letter of the law, much of our culture would be lost forever. I know that it is a big concern from people trying to archive and restore video games from decades ago. They are part of our collective culture. I would also suggest that this incessant reference to copyright as some kind of property is perverting what in principle was a defensible idea, that creative works enhance the common culture of humankind. Instead people and companies are locking their creations away like miserly old men, long after they have any monetary or emotional value to themselves. |
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