response 46 of 206:

Sep 8 21:21 UTC 2000

I'm going to put my little copyright essay here.  No slight intended to 
willard's other excellent Napster item, it just seems to fit better 
here now.
 
-------
 
Consider:  Copyrights have no moral force in our culture.
The right to tangible property goes back to the roots of Western culture:
"Thou Shalt Not Steal" is in the Ten Commandments.  And even a child 
sees that if I take something from you, you don't have it any more, and
this is a wrong.

But copying is different.  If I copy something from you, you still have
it.  The Lord did not say, "Thou shalt not copy thy neighbors' scrolls."

Copyright has never been an "absolute" right, in the sense that
most property rights are absolute.  (Let's wave off land-use regulations, OK?)
In the US, copyright law has balanced ownership incentives to
creators with access and "fair use" by the public, and the
scope of copyrights has been subject to adjustment through the years.
The Constitutional language which gives Congress control over copyright
law says that the purpose of copyright is public benefit -- *not* the
maximum profit to copyright holders.

Copyright is an economic regulation which only goes back a couple of 
hundred years, and it was designed to regulate the behavior of businesses.
It's only worked this long because until now copying machines, in the 
most general sense, were big expensive things which only businesses 
could own, and business are (1) relatively limited in number, and (2)
cost-sensitive to things like civil lawsuits.  So the civil court 
system was sufficient to keep the businesses in line.

In the 20th century, the ownership of copying machines has spilled
down into the general population.  And I had a flash of blinding
insight last night: so far, "Society" has refused to use the big
guns of copyright law against the public at large.  As the public's
copying activity has expanded, copyrights have been rolled back.

Legally, the first step was with the VCR.  In the Betamax case, the appeals 
court held Sony liable for infringement; we came very close, as a society,
to banning the VCR.  However, the Supreme Court made some new law 
out of whole cloth:  they arbitrarily decided to declare that   
"timeshifting" a TV show was not an infringement; and then they ruled
that because the VCR had newly-declared non-infringing uses, it   
could not be sued out of existence.  Copyright rolled back  
in the face of public copying activity.  

Though audio copying came first -- the music industry got really 
panicky in the heyday of cassette recorders, 
with a campaign about how "Home Taping Is Killing
Music."  -- the legal situation didn't resolve until later.
Widespread home cassette copying was tolerated for years -- I am unaware
of anyone ever being prosecuted for it.. 
Eventually in 1992, the Audio Home Recording Act 
defined a clear legal zone for private users to 
make copies without fear of being sued.  Again, copyright was rolled back.

I honestly don't know how the current struggle will turn out.
Congress gave the copyright industry and the courts a Great Big Gun
to use against the public in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
$1000 worth of illicit copies is now a felony
charge; by the standards of the law before 1995, this is draconian.

It's so draconian that the law has hardly been used yet.  Of the 
guesstimated 20 million Napster users, most must have $1000 worth 
of illicit songs, and so they would be slam-dunk prosecutions
under the law.  But the number of prosecutions under this
section of the DCMA is one: one poor student at the U. Oregon who 
had MP3 files on his web site.  And that prosecution was two years ago.

response 48 of 206:

Sep 8 22:23 UTC 2000

((I'm sorry, it was the No Electronic Theft Act which set a felony 
charge for non-commercial copyright infringements of $1000, not the 
DMCA.  I keep getting those two mixed up.))

response 50 of 206:

Sep 9 01:59 UTC 2000

Re #49: Yeah.  What gets me is that putting audio on a data blank is
apparently *always* an act of piracy, even if it'd otherwise be considered
fair home use.

response 52 of 206:

Sep 9 05:24 UTC 2000

Re #46: Ken apparently has a set of "absolute" laws that he follows,
while he facily ignores human laws. That is mighty convenient, to make
your own arbitrary laws. Thieves really love that theory. All of his
smoke and mirrors about "tangible" (property) and "intangible" (ideas,
concepts, inventions, compositions) are a lot of hypocracy and 
demagogery. In all of human history, what is right and wrong; what
is ethical and not ethical; have been decided by humans adopting laws
in one form or another. So called "property rights" are a human construct
adopted millenia ago, and which are now a serious problem as humans
become more crowded on the globe. Copyright laws are a human construct
adopted centuries ago, because prior to then there was little value to
individuals of their thoughts and inventions, as they could not be
defended. So "property rights" are fading, and "copyrights" are becoming
more important, as we shift from a culture of stuff to a culture of
ideas and information. 

response 54 of 206:

Sep 9 06:21 UTC 2000

((I'm also quite peeved that Rane has decided to attack my own personal
ethics, which he knows nothing about, based solely on my arguments 
and social observations in resp:46.  Rane, with regard to the topic 
currently under discussion:  I have *never* downloaded an unauthorized
piece of music from the net.  You'll have to explain to me the 
"hypocrisy and demagogery" in my essay.  Line by line, please.))

response 56 of 206:

Sep 9 11:38 UTC 2000

I'm a little surprised no one has brought up all the laws that people 
have deliberately broken, such as the apartheid laws in South Africa, 
the various laws pertaining to fugitive slaves in this country, laws 
that kept the Jews under in Nazi Germany, debtor laws in England, anti-
abortion laws in the US, and so on and on and on.  Would Rane sneer 
that it was "mighty convenient" that the heroic men and women who broke 
these laws were "making their own arbitrary laws"?  

response 58 of 206:

Sep 9 16:02 UTC 2000

I said nothing about Ken's ethics in #52: I was only responding to his
"absolutist" stance, that ethics of "property rights" somehow have an
origin other than humans at some time deciding predominantly that that
was useful (to them). The "hypocrisy and demagogery" lie in using an
absolutist stance for which there is no evidence to further his arguments.
(But I'll settle for it being just one of the two... 8^}). 

I think md gets a little carried away in #56 in making a comparison
between copyright laws, and laws that intimidate, oppress, or make
criminal, basic human rights. Is copying of copyrighted material a "basic
human right"? Laws concerning *property*, tangible or intellectual, are
the proper sphere for debate and amendment. There are no *absolutely
correct laws* in all matters of property, but only laws arrived at by
disputation and democratic processes. Society is in jeopardy when laws
arrived at by these processes are ignored or violated, when there are
means to redress errors in laws by said processes. 

How many here that think nothing of violating laws on copyright - whatever
they may be - also drive through stop signs without stopping? 

response 60 of 206:

Sep 9 18:38 UTC 2000

Yes - they tend to obey the laws they think *others* should obey - but
probably not very consistently. (I bet almost all drivers that run
red lights get furious when someone else runs a red light and almost
hits them.)

response 62 of 206:

Sep 9 20:09 UTC 2000

I have mixed feelings about intellectual property law.  I think people who
create intellectual property are certainly entitled to some sort of
protection.  However, that doesn't seem to be how such laws are usually used
today.  Instead they're used as weapons by corporations, to hoard ideas and
stifle competition.  Take the recent "Disney Amendment" to copyright law. 
It does the creator of an idea no good to have his copyright stay in effect
75 years after his death, and I doubt many people are producing more
material because they know the protection will extend that long.  It does
help corporations, though.

It particularly galls me that even after a company has made a decision to
take an item out of print, it's still illegal to copy it.  This is pure
hoarding.  Ideally companies would release such items to the public domain,
but they rarely do.  (Some Borland software being an exception.)  This is
one case where copying is illegal, but I don't feel it's immoral.

"Look and feel" copyrights are another really hazy area.  Where would we be
today if someone had copyrighted the look and feel of the "steering wheel
and pedals" interface to cars? :>

response 64 of 206:

Sep 9 23:22 UTC 2000

  re #54, 57:  If you're genuinely puzzled by Rane's response, I think you
  can better understand it by considering it a "Serdar Argic"-like reaction
  to your mention of the Ten Commandments..

response 66 of 206:

Sep 10 09:24 UTC 2000

Mike, resp:64 ::  Ah.  *Lightbulb goes off.*  Perhaps Rane is reading
the intro to my essay as stating that tangible property rights have a divine
or supernatural origin, and thus are superior to intellectual 
property rights created by mere men, and thus I have triggered his
anti-religion thing.

When I used the example of The Ten Commandments, I meant to express 
that "Thou shalt not steal" was embedded in the roots of our culture,
not that it carried divine sanction.    The reference to the Lord's
views on scroll copying was, um, humorous.

A simplified and less entertaining way of writing my introduction:

Tangible property rights are rooted in 4000 years of our culture and 
they are learned in childhood.   They thus become almost instinctual
to normal adults; this is what I mean by saying they carry 
"moral force."   

Intellectual property rights are only around 300 years old and they 
are not taught to children. They are not instinctual to normal adults; 
they are almost INCOMPREHENSIBLE to normal adults.  This is what I 
mean by saying that they do not carry moral force.

The rest of the essay goes on to argue that it is probable that 
copyright is not meant to apply to "normal adults," any more than 
anti-trust applies to the average citizen.

response 68 of 206:

Sep 10 10:43 UTC 2000

Re 46.  Ken, excellent points and historical summary.

Actually, though, even leaving aside land-use regulations, NO property
rights are absolute.  If a law is passed which, say, makes something you
own illegal to possess, forcing you to choose between getting rid of it
and breaking the law, you are not owed any compensation by the government.

response 70 of 206:

Sep 10 22:59 UTC 2000

Taking a physical object deprives someone else of its use, but
there is no such harm from making one's own copy of an object.
Ownership of the object is a natural right (*somebody* has it),
ownership of the idea of the object is not.  IP is a construct.

Intellectual property rights are a compromise, authorized by the
Constitution "to promote progress in the useful arts".  They are
limited monopolies, and are supposed to compensate inventors and
authors for making their creations public ("patent" is synonymous
with "obvious"); after a time, things go into the public domain
and everyone can make free use of them.  75-year copyright terms
burden the public with the court costs for defending them, and
return nothing to the public.  It's time to chop them back.  The
copyright term of the original US law was 17 years; that'll do.