Free Culture
"Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire.…
For those who don't know the specifics of intellectual property law: Copyright is unwavering. The law says that the author/owner gets exclusive use of that content for a really fucking long time (something like life + a century, thank you Disney lobbyists). Full stop. The courts recognize that that lack of nuance is unreasonable. Therefore, they have ruled that copyright law doesn't apply if the use is "fair," hence the phrase "fair use." There's no hard-and-fast way to know if something is fair use. You're basically betting that if you ever get sued, the court will be on your side.…
It's less common but hardly unprecedented. 1. Charles Stross (one of the four examples above) used to point readers to BitTorrent for his free book downloads: http://web.archive.org/web/20090514034859/http://www.antipop... (And he complains about automated scanners flagging legit files as copyright violations: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbecile... ) 2. Unni Drougge use The Pirate bay to post a torrent of an audio version of her best-selling novel: http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1029.html 3. Larry Lessig releases his book "Free Culture" as a torrent:…
"Software must be provided as a package – not as a service – with each user running their own private copy." My ideology resonates with this statement. On a more rational level, I agree that an environment that promotes application diversity encourages competition and innovation and ultimately will keep the tech economy humming. I can see that removing the infrastructure requirement for distributing and providing web applications opens up web application development to a larger group. There are shades of similarity of this idea with copyright reform and the free culture ideas of Lawrence…
Ah I have a thought about this. I have noticed for some time that Lessig walks a strange line on the issue of IP (intellectual property) and freedom & privacy. Lessig believes IP is necessary & requires architectural changes to the internet to protect it. He is in favor of government monitoring to protect IP as long as it is done in accordance with the law, and he proposes a flawed mechanism (P3P) to protect your privacy. ---- Disclaimer: I haven't had the time to scrutinize this guy. I'm merely writing down the ideas that have been crystalizing in my head the past year or so while…
>Well, Hamlet (like all of Shakespeare's works) is not copyrighted I find it interesting that the HN community is usually deeply anti-copyright until they're own works or the works they like are used seemingly without permission. Then we all become copyright nannies and strict copyright lawyers. This is why I think IP reform will never truly work. We're all to hypocritical about it. We want to use Disney's stuff but we don't want to let Disney use anyone else's. If the stuff that someone else owns is more valuable that ours we want it. When someone takes something of value from us, we…
How about "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"? An excellent, excellent read on this is Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture". Available under CC as PDF or EPUB. http://www.free-culture.cc/ It explores the politics and history of copyright, copyright extension, freedom of use, and the importance of having freely available works. My preference would be for a return to something much closer to the original terms of copyright. Limitations on publication, on…
> It's not unreasonable to ask permission before you use something. It just isn't. It can be unreasonable if it makes it harder to society in general to reuse and innovate on previous works. Intellectual property in general can be quite destructive. Heck, take a look at Permission Culture, which is actually a negative thing: Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists such as Luis Villa[1] and Nina Paley[2] to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted…
Everyone should read into the real history of so-called "intellectual property"- a made up phrase that tries to conflate trademarks, copyright and patents as if they had anything to do with each other. Lawrence Lessig's accounts are a good introduction [0]. Research the censorship laws in the century prior to the Statute of Anne, and the burnings in St James' Square where 'unauthorised' publishers were immolated on pyres of their own books. The first official publishers were granted a licence for violence to smash up the presses of their competitors and burn down their shops. Such a crock…
> How is this in any way honest? Through a paradigm shift, which is long overdue. Should the public have free access to scholarly papers and pay to see the doctor, lawyer, and geneticist? Should the public have free access to musical recordings and pay to see the artists live? Seems to me in both cases the net effect, the consequence, would be a higher quality of public discourse and appreciation. And that would be in the public's interest. By comparison, implicit in your argument is an endorsement of the current system, wherein 77 years of copyright is just fine. From a…