It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.
But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.
Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 27 2015, @10:56PM
Don't feel like you have to like it - not everybody does.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 27 2015, @11:08PM
Download and concert schedule links are busted.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 27 2015, @11:51PM
later this evening, not just now as I had supper and need to sleep it off.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Saturday March 28 2015, @06:28AM
You can find some more creative commons music at Jamendo [jamendo.com] and Magnatune. [magnatune.com]
For sound effects there's Freesound. [freesound.org]
For pixel art there's OpenGameArt. [opengameart.org]
There's a plethora of free and/or open source game engines too, search one up if you like (I prefer to create my own, but don't do that, I'm crazy).
Don't forget, without remixing the public domain, Walt Disney wouldn't have had most of his creations. Everyone borrows from the public domain. New works that borrow nothing from culture must invent new language, new harmonic scales, new concepts of humour, etc. I have tried doing so and the work was too alien to be culturally relevant (except to a few linguists, who are still only partially finished decoding the self-teaching lexicon). Neurology dictates the formula for humour and aesthetically pleasing acoustic, literary, and visual art. Thus, if your art is for human consumption it will utilize methods long established to convey wordplay, mood, etc. even given a completely new symbolic language. E.g., one can not invent the concept of a pun within the new language, one can only apply the existing concept to the language. Inventing new alien forms of "humour" just isn't funny to humans because human humour plays on the expectations of the audience, and these are expectations are based on common cultural experiences which must be borrowed from to create humorous experiences; The same is true of harmonic melodies, and visual arts, etc.
It's a shame to see copyright become so draconian. There is a growing resistance to the proprietary tide. Some people, like myself, are content with being paid once for doing work once and release the output of that work "freely" to the public (since they already paid for it to be created). Royalties you say? If I want more money, I just do more work. This eliminates "Piracy" (you can't "steal" what isn't created) and requires no DRM (I don't do the work until payment arrangements is made up front, often held in 3rd party escrow).
Within the current copyright futures market proprietary creations are made for free, then the creators gamble the future of their studios by trying to monetize copies that are in near infinite supply via artificial scarcity. Economics 101 says the price of copies should be zero regardless of cost to create or demand given an infinite supply. In the Information age what's scarce is not 1's and 0's. What's scarce is the ability to create new arrangements of bits. So, I simply monetize what is scarce: My labour. When the artificial scarcity is taken out of the equation it's easy to see that FLOSS or up-front crowdfunding are not really new methods of business; They're just like all other sane labour markets such as home builders, mechanics, etc. Negotiate a price up front for the work, do the work, get paid once, and do more work to make more money. Only one owner benefits from the building of a home or fixing of a car (1 to 1, work to benefit ratio), but information based works can benefit an entire culture (1 to many, work to benefit ratio); It's not a mere coincidence that the very technology which makes copies in near infinite supply also facilitates the new many to one direct payment systems which compliment the 1 to many work to benefit ratio. There is an issue of bootstrapping into a good reputation when first starting out, but a few smaller projects done for free or releasing a few projects under the existing artificial scarcity model can demonstrate capability.
When it comes to game development the work-for-pay model is not much different than working under a publisher. The dev still have to do more work to get more pay. Crowd sourced funding allows me to replace the publisher with consumers. This is GREAT because Publishers pay 3 to 5 times the cost of development in marketing. With crowdfunding I get free market research, advertising and publicity when I pitch to the consumers directly. I can ask for twice what I would get paid under a publisher and still create the game for cheaper than a publisher sells it to the public. When the work is complete all players who want to play can have the game for free -- It becomes free advertising for my next work. One issue that's slowly being resolved is that things like Kickstarter have gotten people used to the idea of devs only asking for a portion of what they need to earn on the project, which leaves them stuck charging for artificially scarce copies or failing to complete the project. I do my FLOSS based work in modular instalments when possible so the paying public can direct the course, or even contract a different dev for the remainder of the work if they don't like my output (a rare, but important feature few have yet adopted in big crowd-funding projects).
You would get laughed out of business if your plan was to sell ice to Eskimos during the Ice Age, but for some retarding reason most people don't think just as stupid for a business to sell bits to people with computers in the Information Age. This is the first generation growing up connected to a global information network, so there will be growing pains. Things are changing very fast. Adapt or become extinct. No amount of "piracy" can hurt me under the FLOSS / CC model since the more people using the product the better it is for me. How strange that the same old methods of labour monetization every other market uses would be ahead of the curve when compared to the "new and improved" copyright futures market.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 28 2015, @12:22AM
Good to have another study showing that greed does not work well. One more thing to counter the "greed is good" believers. We've seen that greed is weak, in politics, in war, and in scientific advancement. But there will probably always be people who just can't believe that, can't believe that the move that brings the most gain the soonest is not always the best.
One of the best examples of the failure of greed is the Confederacy. That was a society based at its root upon greed. Extract the maximum work for the minimum pay from people, by making them into slaves. Consequently, their society fell further and further behind. The South had a far smaller population and far less infrastructure and industry than the North, for decades before the US Civil War. And the reason why is slavery. Not only did slaves lack any incentive for innovation, they were punished if they dared try it, and just to make extra sure they couldn't, they were denied an education. A great deal of their economic output was spent to maintain slavery, which didn't do them the favor of being a good investment, no, it reduced their economy further thanks to the severe underutilization of people who could have contributed much more to the wealth of the nation if only they'd been allowed. The war was hopeless before it was started. Yet they were so attached to their wrong beliefs in the inherent inferiority of the African, so full of their own propaganda about the Southern Gentleman being a plain tougher and stronger man than a Northerner, that they started the war anyway. The only remarkable thing was that the Confederates held up as long as they did, didn't collapse immediately. A lot of people had to die to show the world, and especially the Southerners, that they were wrong.
So today, it is somewhat disheartening to see a sort of "neo-slavery" reemerging in the workplace. More and more, employers are treating employees like slaves. We learned that a 40 hour work week yielded about the maximum productivity, and got industry on board by convincing them of that. Now they've forgotten that, and routinely push workers to work 60 plus hours per week. They seek holds over the workers, encouraging them to get financially upside-down, so that they can more easily bully them, and force work for less pay and longer hours.
It's the same with copyright. If any endeavor needs sharp thinking and innovative work, it's story telling. Slaving on a Work for Hire basis takes away the edge. That's the reason Disney's output is so bland. Even worse is the whole Clear Channel radio empire. Safe, formulaic, and dull, with occasional propaganda campaigns in the form of Payola.
(Score: 1) by rondon on Saturday March 28 2015, @01:20AM
When you segued over to copyright, I thought that was a leap to far (especially from slavery). But, after reading your comment, it makes enough sense that the metaphor has value; perhaps artistic work for hire does follow some of the pitfalls of the practice of slavery. Still a pretty long stretch, in my humble opinion.
Other than that, I think you nailed it. The Plutocracy/Aristocrats absolutely want a return to feudalism, fueled by debt and illegal collaboration to depress wages. The evidence is all there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:52AM
Thanks. Meant to say also that greed retards progress, to the detriment of us all. Greed and fear of loss are the driving motivations for extending copyright scope to cover things that should not be copyrighted, and duration to such extreme lengths. It has nothing to do with the public interest or desire. And it is harmful to us all. Not even good for artists. Our public libraries should be allowed to embrace digital storage. A digital public library would be far cheaper to operate and at the same time far more useful because it is far more searchable. And it could be current. No more returns, late fees, damaged media, and denial because all copies are checked out.
But no, we live with the antiquated and much more costly libraries we've had for years, and many other idiocies, all so that Big Media can drag their feet about changing their business model. It took equally big business interests, like Apple and Amazon, to drag them kicking and screaming into allowing downloads. They would rather continue to sell CDs, with the massive overhead of that distribution method. The ludicrous size of their estimates of losses to piracy that ignores the supply and demand curves of basic economics is telling, one of the clearest indicators that greed is what drives them. I'm looking forward to the demise of the last private bookstores. Used to like them, but paperbacks went up faster than inflation. When they passed the $5 point around 1990, I quit buying. Tried the used bookstore, but meh. Too much trouble to have to check back repeatedly when seeking specific titles. Borders, Waldens, and B. Dalton are all dead. Barnes and Noble is the only large chain I know of that's still in business. I was also unhappy with the game publishers played of holding up the cheap paperback release until a year after the release of expensive hardback versions. Pure profiteering, that. This applies even more to academic and research oriented ones like Elsevier. If anything directly retards the progress of science, it's those greedy private publishers, trying to lock it all up and charge hugely for access, for work that they did not help create or fund, and do not help preserve, indeed make it harder to preserve by trying to stop others from keeping comprehensive copies.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Saturday March 28 2015, @01:28AM
We learned that a 40 hour work week yielded about the maximum productivity
I've heard this about software engineering, but I don't imagine it applies to, say, assembly-line work.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:40AM
But many business oriented people seems to apply the assembly line paradigm onto creative professions. Which is self defeating in the long term.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:48AM
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-productivity.html [stanford.edu]
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time [wikipedia.org]
tl;dr: no country has worked put the best working week, but everyone seems to agree more / excessive hours are bad.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:37AM
> I've heard this about software engineering, but I don't imagine it applies to, say, assembly-line work.
I bet it applies even moreso. That kind work ranks up there as one of the most mind-numbing forms of drudgery there is, right after being a TSA agent. Overwork has to take a toll in the form of fatigue and inattention to detail. I bet music would help, but only to a point.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:19PM
You misunderstand. Greed is good for ME, or at least, it puts me in a better position, with power over everyone else, if only in the short term. Why would sociopaths give a single damn about anyone else?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:52AM
After all, they were merely standing on the shoulders of giants, 500-plus years of scientific and engineering progress, etc.
In fact they should pay me for using their crappy products!
OTOH what I do for a living deserves to be highly recompensed. It's damn good work, and it's extremely important that people recognize that I spent decades getting the necessary education and on-the-job training, including self-training after hours because I'm a self-starter.
So don't give me this BS that you can easily replace what I do. Plus it's not in the nation's best interest to let their own workers get shoved aside into menial jobs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:40AM
The original term of copyright was 14 years in the USA.
If you were still alive after that[1], you could apply for one more 14-year term of exclusivity.
After that, your stuff went into the public domain.
The last item in that list is the only thing that happened automatically.
It is now easier than ever to produce and distribute works, yet the term of copyright keeps getting longer, not shorter.
The length of patent protection is in the same ballpark as the Founding Fathers intended.
Now, if we can get the patent clerks to stop approving every damned thing put in front of them.
[1] This was in an era when the extent of medical "science" resulted in George Washington being bled to death by his "doctor" as a "treatment".
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:51AM
This is an era when the extent of medical "science" results in people being medicated to death by their "doctors salesperson" as a "cure". ;)
Other treatments can also be put into questioning as there is a gatekeeper with vested interests. The absolute lack of it would of course result in mayhem but it doesn't take away the fact there is interests that are not to the patients best interest.
(Score: 1) by rondon on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:48AM
Who the fuck modded this coward insightful (maybe I can check? Still somewhat new to being a member here)? She or he is using satire and a false dichotomy to hide the fact they are espousing a system that rewards rent-seeking and depresses innovation.
Please, please don't fall for the, "everyone will be out of a job if my patent/IP/copyright doesn't last forever and ever and ever!" bullshit line from the people who would love to own you and everyone you know. They don't want your assets, they want ownership of YOU!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 29 2015, @08:02AM
I'm paid for what I do. I'm not paid for what I did in the past (except indirectly, as what I did in the past affects my performance on my current job).
Yes, I publish stuff as part of my work. And no, I don't get a single cent from those publications. I get money to create those publications, though.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.