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Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda writes an update to what has been going on with with proposed changes to copyright law as they make their way from the European Commission and over to the European Parliament:
Ever since the European Commission presented its hugely controversial proposal to force internet platforms to employ censorship machines, the copyright world has been eagerly awaiting the position of the European Parliament. Today, the person tasked with steering the copyright reform through Parliament, rapporteur Axel Voss, has finally issued the text he wants the Parliament to go forward with.
It's a green light for censorship machines: Mr. Voss has kept the proposal originally penned by his German party colleague, former Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger, almost completely intact.
She walks through the following points to notice in the so-called compromise:
- Obligation to license
- The censorship machine is here to stay
- A tiny problem with fundamental rights
- Very specific general monitoring
- A few exceptions
- Critical parts remain unchanged
She closes with encouragement that it's not too late to stop the Censorship Machines:
Now it's time to call upon your MEPs to reject Mr. Voss' proposal! You can use tools such as SaveTheMeme.net by Digital Rights NGO Bits of Freedom or ChangeCopyright.org by Mozilla to call the Members of the Legal Affairs Committee free of charge. Or look for MEPs from your country and send them an email. But most importantly, spread the words! Ask you local media to report on this law. The Internet as we know it is at stake.
Source : Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament's copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate
See also : Proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market : Draft compromise [sic] amendments on Article 13 and corresponding recitals (warning for PDF)
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday February 23 2018, @12:45AM (3 children)
So is the natural right you are proposing copying or educating our children?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 23 2018, @12:43PM (2 children)
The copyright extremists are the ones guilty of conflation. They have done their utmost to convince everyone that there is no difference between copying and stealing. Recall Valenti's infamous comparison between the VCR and the Boston Strangler, one of the most over-the-top, histrionic, and hysterical statements, that sadly is all too representative of the entertainment industry's attitude. Might as well say that buying from the grocery store is stealing from McDonald's. If there hadn't been that evil grocery store, McDonald's could have sold you another Big Mac with fries.
Education isn't the only area that suffers from extreme copyright. Our public libraries is another big one. Our libraries should have been allowed to go mostly or completely digital, but they can't because of copyright law. That's a huge, huge drain to expect us to keep our public libraries static, stuck with mid 20th century tech. Think of it. The contents of an entire bookshelf of books can be stored on 1 hard drive. Lost and damaged physical media would be a much smaller problem. We would not have to travel to and from a library branch any more, we could simply download copies over any convenient network connection. No more having to return books, no more late fines. No more denial because all copies are currently checked out. All that space currently devoted to printed books could be repurposed. Most of all, the searchability would be orders of magnitude better. Have you ever used a card catalog? Granted, that at least has been computerized. But not as well as it could be, with all the text, not just titles and author names.
What little we've been allowed has revolutionized research. But we could so easily have much, much more. There's no knowing what discoveries might have been made, if only there weren't all these parasitic publishers trying to lock up and hoard our research. Cures for all kinds of health problems, improvements in our understanding of maths and sciences, computers and machinery that are more reliable and easier to use.... Lost progress is perhaps the highest price of all that we pay for keeping copyright and patent law. Ironic that patent and copyright law now work against progress, the very thing they were intended to promote. Instead of modernizing, we and our libraries are forced to stand off to one side while a private entity, Google, gains for themselves only the concessions we all should have.
You can argue that copyright should be drastically reformed, but kept. I favor repeal and replacement of the entire system with several alternatives, such as various forms of patronage, revenue from ads and endorsements, live performances, work-for-hire arrangements, and so on. No one should have to ask for permission to use another's work. Instead, it would be so much better to have a system that's permissive, and which arranges suitable compensation after the fact, not beforehand. Authors should not have the "right" to flat refuse the use of the works they wrote.
Three more damaging things about the concept of intellectual property is first that it plays us all for suckers by playing on our fears of loss. We're biased that way. Research shows that we are not rational when it comes to potential loss, will refuse gambles we should take, and are prone to hoarding. Then there's the lone wolf issue, the implicit assumption that advancement can be neatly compartmentalized and reduced to the actions of individuals, lone geniuses toiling away in their secret lairs, sort of like Dr. Evil, overlooking the contributions of society and group effort. Western society is especially individualistic and prone to that kind of thinking. The way we train our students, from grade school all the way through graduate work, is that each has to do all the work all by themselves, to prove that they understand the material. The attitude is that unless explicitly required, working in groups, even just pairs, is verging on cheating. Closely related is the assumption that progress can be neatly demarcated, as if ideas don't bleed over into each other and share many characteristics, and can be delineated and separated as easily as property lines can divide the land. For all those reasons, intellectual property as we currently conceive it ought to be retired.
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday February 23 2018, @10:16PM (1 child)
Your comparison about grocery stores and McDonalds is frankly incoherent.
Libraries and research are another example of educational exemptions making sense, and similarly to my last response, in my area they do have those exemptions in place and libraries do distribute digital data. Again, I don't know about the EU. Sadly the example I used in my first response speaks to the American systems treatment here being far from ideal.
I suspect that your argument against storing printed books would brook more objection than you are counting on. Physical books have a related but separate appeal to the actual information they contain.
I find it incredibly ironic that you add patents into the debate in the paragraph where you insist that hidden discoveries not being shared is harming our scientific development. You do realize that the entire point of a patent is to make new designs known publicly so that the exact scenario you posit won't happen. Patents were literally introduced to keep people from hoarding useful designs.
Why do I favor reform rather than repeal, easy, reform might be possible!
Glibness aside, my life would be immeasurably poorer if several "professional" authors hadn't completed their works. You argue that patronage would support them, but while storytellers have existed since time immemorial, on the whole they haven't been patronized. You are probably going to point to kickstarter as an example of a modern patronage system, but Kickstarter is used to sell a product, no matter how much they claim otherwise. Do you see many creative projects getting big funding there? On the whole I have seen the successful creative projects scrape by, and all the huge hits have been for tangible (and even impossible) physical goods. Patreon is a stronger example for you, and even there I see a lot of tit for tat, you often patronize for priority access (or as a form of lottery), which wouldn't work in a free copy society. I don't think it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to conclude that a majority of that funding will dry up, and as is, no one has ever published a major work funded solely by Patreon that I am aware of.
The fact of the matter is, I am totally happy to have my hard earned cash go to Virginia Heinlein, which direct patronage wouldn't accomplish, which ads would diminish, and which live performance isn't applicable to. We have a system the WORKS today. It isn't even close to perfect, but we have never produced creative and technical works at the rate we do today. There are even works that are entirely commercial, of which Deadpool 2 was a great example, it doesn't have cultural value, or at least none I can see, despite the fact that I am eagerly looking forward to it. People wouldn't realistically front millions of dollars for the love of breaking the fourth wall without expectation of compensation, but people did because they thought it was an investment that would pay. Our education, culture, etc... are not benefitted by Deadpool movies, they are purely entertainment, but it would be a poorer world without them yet.
You know what I find funny, by definition an extremist is almost always someone who would insist that it is not they but you who is the extremist.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:16AM
Saying education is just an "excuse" is too trivial a way to put it. Education absolutely does imply copying. Copying is the primary mechanism by which education is accomplished. A great deal of the material students study should not be subject to intellectual property law because they are facts of nature that are not patentable, or because they are mere collections of data, or because they are far too old for any limited time monopolies to still be in effect. Yet the patent office is in the habit of granting overly broad patents, and the scope of copyrights and patents have been greatly expanded, so that education is under some threat. Textbook publishers have been gaming public education for decades, needlessly churning textbooks to sell more copies which also conveniently keeps the copyrights fresh. "Exemptions" isn't enough to stop the greedy publishers from extorting money from students.
> my life would be immeasurably poorer if several "professional" authors hadn't completed their works.
See, you too are infected with irrational fear of loss. You're thinking of what you might have lost, rather than what you might have gained. Maybe some works wouldn't have been made, but if instead a lot more, and better works were made, it's a worthwhile trade.
The infection has seriously warped our thinking. For instance, the fictional Star Trek technology known as the transporter, the transfer booths and stepping disks in Niven's Ringworld (1970 Nebula Award winner), the transfer machinery in in Zelazny's Lord of Light (1968 Hugo Award winner) to achieve immortality by moving people from their old bodies to fresh new young adult bodies, and a whole lot of other SF stories suffers this severe blind spot. Which is, that the same machinery that can magically move a person could as easily or more easily create a copy of the person. Even Kiln People shies away, positing clones that are inferior to the originals in that they live only a short time. We like to think we're unique, loving the idea of teleportation while hating the most reasonable method such travel might be doable, which is to create a perfect clone at the destination. This is so endemic that the entire SF genre of our time is the worse for it, pandering to our egos on that matter rather than challenging us.
> Patreon ... wouldn't work in a free copy society. ... I don't think it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to conclude that a majority of that funding will dry up
That's speculation. Patreon is only one site. Even if Patreon and Kickstarter do not work out, crowdfunding still could. What do you think the National Endowment for the Arts is?
> I am totally happy to have my hard earned cash go to Virginia Heinlein,
I'm not. She died 15 years ago. You pick one of the most objectionable features of current copyright law, which is that we never meant for artistic endeavor to become valuable heirlooms so that the grandchildren of famous artists need never work a day in their lives. That kind of compensation is so far in the future and so rare that it is a poor motivation for living artists.
> We have a system the WORKS today.
Does it?
> we have never produced creative and technical works at the rate we do today.
And you believe intellectual property law is responsible, rather than the massive increase in world population and the technological advances that have made recording, playback, and broadcast even possible?
> You know what I find funny, by definition an extremist is almost always someone who would insist that it is not they but you who is the extremist
Did I say I wasn't an extremist on this? I know my position is radical, even further out than most of the Pirate Party wants to go.