Come celebrate World Hypocrisy Day

Not just Silicon Valley. From Britain to Germany, to Israel, etc, IP theft is a major problem.

"Your brilliant Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before you’ve even finished funding it"

Yekutiel Sherman couldn’t believe his eyes.

The Israeli entrepreneur had spent one year designing the product that would make him rich—a smartphone case that unfolds into a selfie stick. He had drawn up prototypes, secured some minimal funds from his family, and launched a crowdfunding campaign.

But one week after his product hit Kickstarter in December 2015, Sherman was shocked to see it for sale on AliExpress—Alibaba’s English-language wholesale site. Vendors across China were selling identical smartphone case selfie-sticks, using the same design Sherman came up with himself.

Sherman had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats. Before he had even found a factory to make his new product, manufacturers in China had spied his idea online, and beaten him to the punch.

"Who in history has campaigned to make themselves worse off and giant corporations richer?"

May I suggest Andrew reads any book on the history of the Republican Party from 1870- the present? Because it's traditionally been kind of their USP.

It ought to be.

Copyright is a good idea. The trouble is that it is not being used in the way that the original proponents intended.

The creeping extension of copyright: "The Mouse Protection Act" provides a good example.

When first enacted copyright was for a limited period. See the "Statute of Anne 1710". Then copyright was for 14 years, now in a lot of jurisdictions it's more like 70 after the death of the author. What happens when Disney hits the expiry date on Steamboat Willy & Co.? Expect another extension is my prediction.

Copyright with limits is fine, unlimited copyright is nothing but a government approved perpetual monopoly.

Andrew Orlowski is ElReg's Richard Stallman. I've come around to the point where, instead of being annoyed that he keeps writing, I'm upset that he's mostly right, most of the time. It just hits too close to home that he's also more cynical than I am.

The 2006 list is comrprised of two banks, who probably produced their profits from fees and gambling; two energy companies, who produced definite goods but also contributed planet-destroying levels of pollution; and Microsoft.

Structurally, the 2017 list looks much the same: Facebook is as parasitic as the worst bank; Amazon delivers a useful service but still sucks blood to make coin; Google has managed to produced clear goods, like Chrome, but has trampled over people's IP, and Apple is a manufacturer creating value from the ground up.

Part of the problem is the history of the Internet. Remember way back when there was "shareware" and "freeware"? No real rules were enforced as people dumped whatever they felt like on their websites for free. Recently, Myspace did it with music until they got clamped down on.

This "free" mentality is still there and deeply ingrained by now such that any regulation/laws won't have much effect and it's spreading to other industries. People feel they pay for their internet and that gives them the rights to whatever they find. The Chinese actually take it a step a further for actual hard goods. Though in fairness, their laws are a bit different.. they only recognize Chinese patents and copyrights by native Chinese. We seen examples where various bits of tat and equipment were patented by them for stuff invented elsewhere.

The world has changed and not in a good way.

Sigh, so Andrew wrote his article again, for, what is this, the two hundredth time now?

Let's try a different response to it, this time.

Honestly, Andrew, I think you have quite a lot of a good point in general. Google, Facebook etc. certainly are doing a lot of benefiting from other people's work, and of course a lot of the reason they push for various legal changes is to let them keep doing this.

But you never seem to look at the *other* side of the question. You like to talk about copyright in very idealistic terms, about how it protects the rights of individual creators. And it *does* do this, and I agree that broadly speaking this is a social good, and we should frankly disregard the people whose argument is basically "I want to be able to take other people's stuff without paying for it". There's no need to accommodate those folks in a reasonable debate.

But there *is* a reasonable middle ground to this debate. You never seem to engage with the problem of cynical self-interest on the *other* end of the copyright debate spectrum. In just the same way as Google and Facebook aren't *really* going to bat for ordinary people in most of their IP lobbying, large media conglomerates aren't *really* going to bat for ordinary creators in most of *their* IP lobbying. When large media companies push for yet another extension of copyright terms - what are they up to, now, the life of the creator plus the heat death of the universe? - they're clearly not bothered about making sure creators get recompensed. They want to make sure that large media companies can continue to make money off the creator's work a century after all the creator's descendants have perished.

When large media companies push for laws that effectively ban format shifting, they're not concerned about individual creator's rights. They just want to try and make more money by compelling us to buy the same thing from them five times.

It'd be really nice if, in future, you could look at the topic in a more balanced way, and recognize that there are large, rich, cynical, self-interested lobbyists at *both* ends of most copyright debates, not just one end. And that those of us who object to some elements of maximalist copyright laws aren't all just a bunch of pirates or a bunch of saps who've been duped by Google. Some of us are just regular people who are perfectly happy to respect creator's rights but, at the same time, would like to be able to make our own choices about where and in what format we store and consume the content we're paying for.

Copyright

Should be creators life + one Generation (i.e. 25 years) Max. The Life + 75 is crazy.

ALSO publishers should not get the author's exclusive rights for more than 5 years.(Books are worst at traditionally full copyright term even if it's pulped 2 months after release). All publishing. Books, Music composition, Performance, Scripts, Acting etc.

The publisher should be able to continue Non-exclusively publishing, but pay royalties. We don't what the crazy where BBC wasn't just reusing video tape to save money, because they had no repeat rights etc, but actually destroying films. BBC were the worst Cultural vandals in UK 1960s to 1990s (at least).

Also collections, stock photo houses, governments, BBC etc defacing photos with (c) when it's now really public domain. Or charging big fees for photos or film archives which copyright has expired or they never owned, they just happened to have to physical item.

How can 5,200 year old Irish Newgrange interior or French Eiffel tower view be copyright?

I'm 100% behind copyright and against Google / Facebook / stock libraries landgrab.

"What's yours is mine, what's mine is mine!"

That's the attitude Andrew Orlowski's got the problem with. I suspect he's confused it somewhat with copyright.

I came across these stories on a site run by our cousins the Aussies. You may find them interesting:

Zombie Copyright Extensions Unlimited

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10063/20160504-0242/www.antisf.com.au/the-stories/zombie-copyright-extensions-unlimited.html

"Nobody knew just how the dead author James Arnold Bond received the payments we made, or where they were banked and drawn on, but the law was the law, and had to be observed. Psychics claimed they knew, but then they would.

Psychics also proffered the writings they claimed our payments had inspired dead authors to write. Our slush piles were overflowing with such detritus. We were obliged to accept a certain number, of course. The Court of Appeals had ruled that contracts were still contracts, even between a dead author and his publishing company."

Postmortem Copyright

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10063/20160604-0022/www.antisf.com.au/the-stories/postmortem-copyright.html

"Professor John Walton's most popular work was titled: "Perverse Incentives of the Current Copyright Regime."

I've never read it."

With a cynical nod to that masterwork of postmortem copyright extenders:

Walt Disney And The Duck Lord

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10063/20160104-0000/www.antisf.com.au/the-stories/walt-disney-and-the-duck-lord.html

Inaugural Broadcast of The Children's Cooking Show: A Transcript

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10063/20160804-1031/www.antisf.com.au/the-stories/inaugural-broadcast-of-the-children-s-cooking-show-a-transcript.html

"But you know something? We discovered the DisneyWorld basements were infested with a group of three-foot-high mice walking around on their hind legs, wearing funny clothes and jabbering away in some outlandish gibberish.

Yes, dear, it was probably American."

A close friend of mine once told me I should be careful about life insurance, because it never pays to give someone a financial incentive to kill you. If I write a book at fifty and live for thirty more years and the publisher gets it for another seventy ... do the maths. Cui bono?

And of course the dead can't enforce the payment of royalties, can they? Cui bono?

Protecting a producer for a _limited_ time, maybe OK, but rentierism is slavery, thus evil!

The copyright and patent systems are broken because they last for too long and allow rentierism!

If a human or specific group of humans create a _unique_ idea and produce something tangile from this fine, they may deserve limited protection for a limited time period, with maybe reasonable period limited licenses, but not rent, but protection for long periods and IP sales/transfers, including to relations, are plain evil rentierism, just like (fraudulent) interest based credit aka Usury!

Capitalism has a premise called capital, which is just a disguise for renterism, and Marxism is just a conjured straw-man opponent to this (Marx was paid by the same gangster cartel) because they both push deliberately-parasitic, capital-based, Alchemy economics! Most governments are willing parties in this crime, because they benefit from it.

Hockey, Baseball, and Music

I remember when I was a wee lad, I occasionally read letters to the editor in the local paper saying how unfair it was that a baseball player made more money than a doctor, as the latter clearly did more important work.

But this ignored the fact that a baseball player could entertain thousands of people at once, while a doctor could only heal one person at a time.

And, in any case, in sports, the team owners make a lot of money, and player salaries are small in comparison.

But, on the other hand, the baseball and hockey and football players in the major leagues aren't that much better than those in the minor leagues. The reason their games draw in so much money has to do with the established reputation of the leagues, the large stadiums they play in, and so on. So it could be argued that the team owners deserve their big share of the revenue.

There are a lot of people out there who can sing almost as well as Britney Spears. Once again, though, the visibility provided by having a major label record contract contributes a great deal to the revenue stream generated by her recordings.

If the money generated by books, musical recordings, and movies went mostly to authors, performers, composers, actors, and scriptwriters, then it wouldn't be hard to see that copyright laws empower the individual. Since, instead, large companies, that often have contract terms with people in these categories that limit their ability to negotiate freely, are getting much of the money, this is why copyrights are questioned.

But it's not clear that the situation is genuinely unjust, or a natural free-market result, so it's unclear that there is a "right target" if copyright is the wrong target.

Anne Frank's Healthcare

The proceeds go not to some corporate bank account, but to the Anne Frank Foundation, a charity that among other good deeds provides medical assistance to Holocaust survivors.

That's all well and good, but the purpose of copyright was to encourage more creative works to be created, not to provide medical assistance to random strangers.

Or was the point of raising this to try to introduce the idea that posthumous copyright royalties should all be directed toward providing social health services?

Copyright Itself May Not Be the Problem

I do reject the theory that legal protection of intellectual property through copyrights or patents is a natural law human right. It's a monopoly created by the government because it was considered useful to encourage the creation of more artistic works and inventions, and so it is perfectly legitimate to debate what the appropriate extent of these protections should be to achieve the maximum social benefit.

Why there is such an anti-copyright movement lately, though, isn't because of a nefarious plot by Google or Facebook to brainwash everyone into supporting their plans to enrich themselves at the expense of the little people.

Instead, I think it's obvious that it's like this: the Internet made it harder to enforce copyright law. And so we have new laws, like the DMCA in the United States, that have become intrusive in limiting what people can do with their own property.

The music industry wanted to have a law passed to require people to have a license to own a tape recorder back when they first came out.

That's not promoting freedom.

The USA had the right idea - at one time.....

There is nothing wrong with copyright - when it is controlled sensibly.

The original US Constitution (or was it the bill of rights?) wording was good, along the lines that "Copyright shall exist for a _limited_time_ for the benefit of authors and artists..."

A limited time for a person is less than their lifetime; not that of their employers, descendants or any other entity.

The timescale now is ridiculous and totally against that original intention.

If I remember correctly, someone in the US government tried to raise that exact point a few years ago - and was dismissed as a result..

[ limit of 20 - 25 years, similar to patents, would give authors etc. good benefit without being overly restrictive long term].