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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 219 responses total. |
brighn
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response 63 of 219:
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Feb 20 21:56 UTC 2002 |
#62> Their children didn't create the works, they did. If they want their
children to benefit, they should set up trust funds for the money they earned
while they were alive.
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jmsaul
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response 64 of 219:
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Feb 20 22:08 UTC 2002 |
I'm just telling you what the justification is.
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mcnally
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response 65 of 219:
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Feb 20 22:16 UTC 2002 |
I think on this particular issue I'm one of those conspiracy theorists
who believe it's all about the Mouse. Disney will use every trick in
the book (and, if necessary, write a new book) to make sure that no
Disney-owned character ever passes into the public domain. Movie and
music studios have similar goals. Arrayed against these titans are a
handful of archivists and librarians. As much as I hate to say it,
the smart money is on the Mouse.
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brighn
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response 66 of 219:
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Feb 20 22:47 UTC 2002 |
#64> I know. I even understand adding a certain amount of time after death,
to cover surviving spouses. But I think that when it gets into kids, then
grandkids, that's just getting silly.
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krj
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response 67 of 219:
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Feb 20 23:50 UTC 2002 |
While I understand that "the smart money is on the Mouse," I wonder how
much the Disney deep pockets matter, now that the Supreme Court
has agreed to hear the case?
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scott
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response 68 of 219:
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Feb 20 23:55 UTC 2002 |
No matter how long the copyrights get extended, Mark Twain is still not going
to come back from the dead and write more books.
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jmsaul
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response 69 of 219:
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Feb 21 00:04 UTC 2002 |
Re #66: These days, the real problem is that IP is owned by corporations.
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krj
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response 70 of 219:
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Feb 21 01:21 UTC 2002 |
Seems like much of the DMCA action has now moved away from music and
into game consoles and software. Slashdot carried this story from about
a week ago:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/14/1745238&mode=thread
in which the original author
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mcmillen/dmca/
reported having a serial cable (designed to connect a Sega Dreamcast
machine to a PC) seized by US Customs, citing the DMCA.
The cable is needed if one is to develop anything for the Dreamcast
on one's PC and upload it to the game console; theoretically this is
still a legal activity.
A followup Wired story indicated that Customs seems to be after all
shipments from this particular Asian vendor, Lik-Seng, in an effort to
stop the importation of modification chips for the Playstation.
It's not totally clear to me, but it looks like region coding is now
being elevated to the level of a copyright-protecting encryption.
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mcnally
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response 71 of 219:
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Feb 21 01:53 UTC 2002 |
The Dreamcast development cable thing seems to have been mostly due
to a problem with insufficient granularity at customs -- customs was
seizing all incoming merchandise from a vendor rather than just the
items which were alleged to be in violation of the DMCA.
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mdw
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response 72 of 219:
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Feb 21 04:32 UTC 2002 |
I don't think the copyright extensions have much to do with the
interests of authors or their families. I think most of it has to do
with the interests of various big corporations. Increasingly, most of
the real money in the creative business is not in properties owned by a
single person, but in properties owned and controlled by big
corporations. This is certainly true of Mickey, it's also true of most
other movies, most TV series and characters, most computer software...
Even in the case of a creative property owned & controlled by a single
person up until their death, I question whether it's really fair that
their great grand children, who probably never even knew "the master",
should still have a financial monopoly on the work 70 years later.
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jmsaul
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response 73 of 219:
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Feb 21 13:07 UTC 2002 |
I don't think so; I think 70 years is way too long.
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krj
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response 74 of 219:
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Feb 21 17:13 UTC 2002 |
Slashdot again: The copyright office has come out with its proposals for
royalty payments for webcasting. As expected, the arrangements seem designed
to crush small webcasters. Royalty payments for pure webcasters are set
at twice the rate for a web stream of an over-the-air broadcast,
despite there being little to no advertising revenue in the webcasting
business right now.
Webcasters are also to log and report information about every single
listener to their service.
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/02/20/2351222.shtml?tid=141
also links to two journals at:
http://www.kurthanson.com/index.asp
(Radio and Internet Newsletter)
http://www.radiohorizon.com/index.php3?fcn=displayarticle&id=2424
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jazz
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response 75 of 219:
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Feb 21 17:15 UTC 2002 |
Oh, now that's cute.
That may just drive the technology underground, like digitized music
sharing.
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krj
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response 76 of 219:
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Feb 21 17:59 UTC 2002 |
Time offers the best piece I've seen yet on movies88.com, which claims
to be offering streaming movies for $1 from the sanctuary of a giant
loophole in Taiwan's copyright laws. A sidebar includes an interview
with the shadowy owner of the site, who seems to have poured thousands or
millions of dollars into the project with little likelihood of profit.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,203474,00.html
"Beyond Hollywood's Reach"
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krj
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response 77 of 219:
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Feb 21 18:17 UTC 2002 |
resp:42 :: The one-month time-out did not produce a settlement; Napster
and the recording industry go back into court. Judge "Patel will
likely move ahead" with orders opening up the issues of"copyright misuse"
on the part of the labels, and also testing the validity of the labels'
ownership rights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-840756.html (from Cnet)
From another article, the opinion was expressed that four of the five
labels (excluding Bertelsmann, who control Napster) don't want a settlement;
they need a clear legal victory as precedent for future battles against
the next generation of file sharing services. The vaguely remembered
quote was that the labels need a precedent so they can shut down
future opponents in 30 hours rather than three years.
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slynne
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response 78 of 219:
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Feb 21 18:26 UTC 2002 |
Man, I just "happy birthday" to pass into the public domain. ;)
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mcnally
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response 79 of 219:
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Feb 22 00:16 UTC 2002 |
Salon offers a decent interview with the plaintiffs in the upcoming
Supreme Court copyright expiration case:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/02/21/web_copyright/print.html
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jaklumen
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response 80 of 219:
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Feb 24 00:35 UTC 2002 |
resp:78 no no no no.. I do not even want anyone doing a cover of the
tune that once was "Good Morning To You." It's great when people pick
alternate birthday songs when paying royalties is not desirable.
Perhaps it is true that more people will come up with birthday songs
once that all-too-familiar and often ill-sung (intentionally) ditty is
public domain, but.. really.
Anyone interested in an item listing all the songs about birthdays
that do not include "Happy Birthday"? I somewhat think tpryan would
have a handful of suggestions..
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krj
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response 81 of 219:
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Feb 27 04:04 UTC 2002 |
Some words from the copyright industry.
In the Washington Post, Jack Valenti of the movie trade group MPAA
lays out his case for prohibiting computers which can copy files,
though he doesn't mention the SSSCA by name.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174745.html
The RIAA issues its own press release on 2001 cd sales. Their numbers
don't tally precisely with Soundscan, possibly because the RIAA
includes "club" sales. But the basic outlook is the same.
The RIAA says it has a survey indicating that 23% of their customers bought
less music because they were downloading or making homemade CDs.
Units of recorded music shipped -10.3%
dollar value of those discs -4.1%
full-length CDs units shipped -6.4%
In analog formats, cassette sales fell 40%. LP sales, however, increased. :)
http://www.riaa.org
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krj
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response 82 of 219:
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Feb 27 15:28 UTC 2002 |
An entertaining Slashdot rant on the RIAA press release:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/27/0213252
"RIAA Almost Down to Pre-Napster Revenues"
"Napster came out in 1999, and the Recording Industry Association
of America had two great revenue statements for that year and the next."
However, when Napster was crippled, CD sales fell.
Causality would be very difficult to establish.
As was reported by the LA Times and logged earlier in one of these
items, CD sales stopped rising and started to fall the very week
Napster was forced to begin filtering.
(Slashdot links to an SFgate story with the same theme:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/08
/05/PK220163.DTL )
A number of followup writers mention that in most industries, falling
sales generally lead to lower prices. That hasn't happened yet in
the CD business, despite promising news stories at the end of 2000
that the sales slump would certainly lead to lower prices.
Instead, the recording industry is behaving as if it is a regulated
public utility, guaranteed a return on investment no matter what its
costs are.
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jazz
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response 83 of 219:
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Feb 27 16:51 UTC 2002 |
... and no matter what shape the economy's in.
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other
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response 84 of 219:
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Feb 27 17:42 UTC 2002 |
Good. If they go bankrupt, then they can (and will) be replaced by
larger numbers of smaller labels who lack the might to force their profit
enforcement down our throats.
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other
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response 85 of 219:
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Feb 27 17:44 UTC 2002 |
(I speak as someone who does not buy CDs except directly from the artists
-- with very rare exception -- and who actually might buy them if their
pricing was reasonable.)
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anderyn
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response 86 of 219:
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Feb 27 18:32 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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krj
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response 87 of 219:
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Feb 27 19:05 UTC 2002 |
A number of sources report that Senator Hollings opens hearing on the
SSSCA proposal, which would criminalize the further production of
every computer ever made to date, on Thursday. The Valenti piece in the
Washington Post (resp:81) is apparently a warmup pitch.
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