From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Fri Mar 29 2002 - 14:29:07 MST
> (Hal Finney)
> > When Elephants Dance
> > http://www.farces.com/stories/storyReader$414
>
> It's red meat for the masses, but I can't agree that this
> is excellent commentary.
> ...
> The author's solution is threefold:
>
> "1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and
> retroactive to all existing works.
> 2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every
> other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and
> retroactive to all existing works.
> 3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations
> create nothing; they're consensual hallucinations and exist at
> our pleasure. I don't know about you, but I'm not much pleased
> any more."
Well, one-half out of three isn't bad. I do hate it, though, that
most of the guys on "my" side of the argument are socialist
weenies without a clue.
Sure, shortening the length of copyrights would be great, but you
can't do it retroactively. Even though I oppose the concept of
copyright, an author who created his works under the assumption
that he would use copyright-based methods to recoup his investment
has the right to expect the government not to pull the rug out
from under him. All future authors will create knowing that the
rules have changed and accounting for that. Of course, I likewise
think it is wrong (both morally and constitutionally) to /extend/
copyrights retroactively, as congress has done many times, and I
suspect the Supreme Court will agree with me on that one when they
hear Eldred v. Ashcroft next year (challenging the constitutionality
of the Sonny Bono Disney Corporate Welfare Act).
"Moral" rights of authors are nonsense. They have never had any
standing in US law, and thankfully so. They are an affront to
capitalism, and the very purpose of copyright. The stated purpose
of copyright is to help most of the economic value of a work go
to the author, to encourage his efforts. "Moral" rights specifially
allow an author to destroy the economic value of the work itself,
keeping it entirely out of public and away from public use. There
is danger of that in our system as well, so we have developed things
like compulsory licensing to deal with it--if you release a song,
you have to be paid if someone plays it on the radio, but you don't
have the right to /prevent/ anyone from playing it--as long as they
pay the compulsory license fee. If we retain copyright, we should
have more of those. For example, I can find no moral justification
for a musician to object to someone using his recording in a movie
soundtrack or commercial; sure, we may want to have some law to
require payment to encourage more music to be produced, but saying
"no" should not be an option--the whole purpose of encouraging more
creation with copyrights is to get more stuff created that eventually
adds to the public domain and common culture.
Like you, I don't see any way to avoid corporate ownership either,
and I wouldn't override private contracts in any case.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:08 MST