Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Friday January 15 2016, @11:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the his-lips-to-congresses-ears dept.

TechDirt reports:

As lawyer Cathy Gellis points out, at least in the US, it's likely against copyright law for many radio stations [to play nothing but Bowie's stuff for 24 hours straight as comedian Eddie Izzard suggested.]

[...] It's written directly into US Copyright law (at the bottom of the page)[1]. At some point, years ago, Congress (or, more likely, a recording industry lobbyist), wrote up rules that said online radio couldn't play too many songs in a row by a single [artist], because of the ridiculous fear that if they could, no one would buy music any more.

[...] Once again, it seems that copyright law is getting in the way of what sounds like a perfectly lovely idea: creating a day-long tribute to David Bowie. No wonder he was so keen on having copyright go away entirely.

In 2002, he gave an interview to the NY Times in which he predicted the end of copyright altogether, [paywall] as well as record labels, as they would no longer serve a useful purpose.

[1] Page does not degrade gracefully; content is invisible (without stylesheets, apparently).


Original Submission

Related Stories

Colleges Consider "Trigger Warnings" in Curriculum 55 comments

Raw Story summarizes a New York Times report that Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as "trigger warnings," explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace. "Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom," said Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor, who often uses graphic depictions of torture in her courses about war. "Any student can request some sort of individual accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous."

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said, "It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects."

A summary of the College Literature, along with the appropriate trigger warnings, assumed or suggested in the article is as follows: Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (anti-Semitism), Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (suicide), "The Great Gatsby" (misogynistic violence), and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (racism).

Note: The Raw Story link was provided to provide an alternative to the article source, the New York Times, due to user complaints about the NYT website paywalling their articles.

NYT paywall by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Touché) by isostatic on Friday January 15 2016, @12:05PM

    by isostatic (365) on Friday January 15 2016, @12:05PM (#289843) Journal

    In 2002, he gave an interview to the NY Times in which he predicted the end of copyright altogether, [paywall]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:56PM (#289875)

      Interestingly I get to the linked page directly, without any trace of a paywall.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @02:00PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @02:00PM (#289876)

        Me too, both pages. Three cheers for NoScript!

        Hip hip! ...

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @12:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @12:15PM (#289844)

    Well let's see. Richard Matthew Stallman said he wanted to remove operating system software from the realm of competition, and in a way, he has. Everybody uses Linux. From supercomputers to phones, everybody uses Linux. Mention to a geek that you prefer Windows or BSD, and said geek will shout insults at you until you shut the fuck up about anything except Linux. Everybody prefers Linux. It's the free thing that everybody copies onto everything because it's free. Nobody needs to create another Linux, because Linux already exists. Linux even killed the GNU Hurd. Killed it dead. Nobody seriously expects the Hurd to be finished, ever, because Linux exists.

    What does this mean for copyright? Well let's see. What would happen if copyright didn't grant exclusive rights to content creators? What would happen? Look to Linux to see what happened.

    Who THE FUCK would even bother CREATING anything EVER AGAIN?

    Goodbye arts and music. Don't need new shit. We got ourselves a whole collection of old shit for free. Let's watch some old shit. It's free.

    • (Score: 2) by quadrox on Friday January 15 2016, @12:22PM

      by quadrox (315) on Friday January 15 2016, @12:22PM (#289847)

      Please don't feed this obvious troll.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @12:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @12:29PM (#289850)

        But I was working on yet another free-OS project, and the troll enlightened me. Now I know to give up and install Linux instead. Thank you, helpful troll!

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday January 16 2016, @12:12AM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday January 16 2016, @12:12AM (#290065) Homepage

      Factual correction: Linux didn't kill Hurd. Hurd killed itself. Linux was supposed to be a hacky stopgap personal project in the interim before the non-hacky and well-designed Hurd was finished. Linus has even Except, of course, the Hurd was never finished.

      I also highly doubt that RMS said "he wanted to remove operating system software from the realm of competition", as the GPL actively promotes competition. Most likely he only wanted to remove OSes (and all software) from the realm of proprietary competition.

      >Who THE FUCK would even bother CREATING anything EVER AGAIN?

      All of the private companies who donate time and money to improving Linux? I believe that the majority (more than 50%) of the development on Linux are supported by private companies nowadays, by way of hiring/payrolling FOSS developers.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:04PM (#289860)

    What you should try is:

    youtube-dl

    http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl [github.com]

    A lot of people post here [at the Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

    Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

    I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB*, but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

    chmod a+rx youtube-dl

    ^ the chmod command only once, then:

    torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

    Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

    Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

  • (Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday January 15 2016, @01:12PM

    by fliptop (1666) on Friday January 15 2016, @01:12PM (#289863) Journal

    it's likely against copyright law for many radio stations [to play nothing but Bowie's stuff for 24 hours straight as comedian Eddie Izzard suggested.]

    In 1989, WXTB (98 Rock in Tampa, Florida) played "Stairway to Heaven" over and over for 24-hours, w/o commercial interruption or any breaks at all [wikipedia.org]. Then they played nothing but Led Zeppelin for about 2 weeks. Wonder how they pulled that off in light of the copyright law.

    --
    Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @02:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @02:25PM (#289881)

      The key part is in the next sentence. From TFA:

      at least in the US, it's likely against copyright law for many radio stations. The specific issue has to do with those radio stations that also stream online.

      To elaborate:

      As you may or may not know, there are a set of rules that you need to follow to be considered a "non-interactive" webcaster, and among those are the "performance complement" rules:

      1. No more than 4 tracks by the same featured artist (or from a compilation album) may be transmitted to the same listener within a 3 hour period (and no more than 3 of those tracks may be transmitted consecutively).
      2. No more than 3 tracks from the same album may be transmitted to the same listener within a 3 hour period (and no more than 2 of those tracks may be transmitted consecutively).

      The important point is, these rules do not apply to exclusively terrestrial radio stations, because I don't know what. The internet or something. Boo.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by quadrox on Friday January 15 2016, @03:13PM

        by quadrox (315) on Friday January 15 2016, @03:13PM (#289902)

        THe point is probably that it is much easier to create an internet radio station than a terrestrial one - which means that in theory you could create a separate station for each artist/album/song/whatever. At that point nobody would have to buy music anymore, because you could just connect the station featuring the music you want to listen to right now.

        How feasible such a large number of radio stations would be in reality, I don't know. But at least there wouldn't be any spectrum/frequency limitations such as with terrestrial radio.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @01:22PM (#289865)

    According to replies I received on this one should have been some clever selection of contributors such that they are the digital version. WTF is wrong here and there are more "Made in Zimbabwe" labels on it, he never gone over my home. If you're in this world.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 15 2016, @02:30PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday January 15 2016, @02:30PM (#289882) Journal

    Thanks to the labels having used (c) to ripoff musicians, many are opposed to it, actually want people to download their recordings even for free. And really, it's not much different than checking out a copy from the public library. Either way, the artist receives nothing immediate. I didn't know David Bowie was one of the musicians opposed to (c). I know Metallica is one of the exceptions.

    Researchers are routinely asked to transfer _all_ rights to a publisher, for the privilege of getting published. Technically, researchers aren't even allowed to give out copies of their own published research, but many do so anyway. The publisher in turn pays the researchers absolutely nothing. They pocket 100% of whatever monies they manage to shake out of people with their paywalls, sending royalties of 0% to the authors, and justify this practice by citing the supposed expense of reviewing and publishing. However, reviewing is done by peers, for free. Even the organizers of the journals who find peers to do reviews tend to be academics who receive no compensation from these publishers. Mostly, the cost of research is borne by the public through grants. As to the cost of publishing, more and more that is made trivial by electronic media. We're still far from having the paperless office, but it's inching closer.

    I'd love to see (c) abolished. Repurpose the © symbol in utf-8. Didn't deserve such a short code, but we're stuck with it now.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 15 2016, @03:10PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday January 15 2016, @03:10PM (#289897)

      Speaking as a part-time musician with a few recording credits to my name:
      1. My biggest copyright-related concern is that somebody else takes my stuff and publishes it for profit without giving me a dime. This is what copyright was originally supposed to protect against, and I have no problem with that aspect of the rules.

      2. I definitely don't mind if my fans (maybe 100 or so, I definitely won't quit my day job anytime soon) listen my stuff for free: That just encourages them to come to my shows, which increases my take at the door.

      To give an idea as to why label deals are so darned tempting: People who try to be full-time musicians are almost always completely broke. Even those who are near the top of their craft: I know top-notch classical players with years of conservatory training who are fairly regularly booked and still barely make ends meet. Same for the bar band musicians, the folk musicians, the blues guitarist, and so forth. One of the musicians I know is a good enough organist to have played for multiple popes at the Vatican and gets favorable reviews for his jazz piano playing in the New York Times, but he makes his living primarily as an all-purpose music teacher rather than as a performer. So in those kinds of situations, an advance with a big dollar amount on it looks really really good even though it's a terrible deal. (I never got one, nor do I want one, but a friend of mine who managed bands went through the process a couple of times and knows the drill.)

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 15 2016, @04:23PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday January 15 2016, @04:23PM (#289926) Journal

        You want compensation. Fair enough. Copyright isn't delivering, but the idea has proven all too seductive, with its components of great wealth and fear. One of the many problems with copyright is the controlling nature, the implication that profit can only be realized through control, that people won't part with their hard earned money unless blocked by a toll gate. It's a fearful, negative, and wrong view of humanity, similar to the idea that employees are by nature lazy and must be pushed and prodded to do work. Not entirely wrong, but woefully incomplete. It is little wonder that this view is so uncritically embraced by the very sort of person most likely to rise to the top of a corporate organization specializing in the selling of data. It speaks to their greatest fears. Copyright is a system that works the way they think, fits their narrow world view. That's why they've responded with absurd levels of hysteria and histrionics, and made complete asses of themselves every time a technological advance changes things. Valenti's "Boston Strangler" is an example.

        But we also know of the big shortcomings of such a command and control approach. Initiative is squelched. Work is not preserved. Reuse is hogtied by layers of bureaucratic requirements. The default answer on whether anyone may do something with some copyrighted work is "no", and it shouldn't be that way. The expectation that a would-be user has to hunt down the rights holders, whoever they may currently be, and get their permission before going ahead with some project should be changed. It is an unreasonable burden. For example, Star Trek Next Gen occasionally used Sherlock Holmes. I strongly suspect a powerful reason for that choice is that Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright. Who knows what other cultural icons they might like to have tapped, if not for the burden of satisfying copyright? One of the few occasions on which this issue was resolved as intended was The Beatles Sgt. Pepper album cover. They had to do an awful lot of work to get the permission of every single one of the hundred or so publicly known, living people that they wanted on it. Should they have had to do that? I think not. Most such ideas are summarily dismissed for just that reason, takes too much time, effort, and expense to obtain all the permissions.

        Does it matter how you are paid, so long as you are? No? Can we pay without having to track or count exactly how many material copies have been sold, would an estimate made shrewd with statistical methods do? We should move ahead with other systems, in particular, patronage. What we have now is small, piecemeal, and hodgepodge. Things like Humble Bundle and the various crowdfunding sites are an excellent start, but we should have more. I think one thing we ought to have, to serve as a foundation for expanding these systems, is a free, public digital notary, to prove authorship, prevent plagiarism, and settle any questions of priority.

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday January 15 2016, @08:20PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Friday January 15 2016, @08:20PM (#290014)

          What I'm arguing for, which apparently you missed, is that copyright should restrict only publishers. Which was how it originally worked: Back in the day, if you wanted to copy a book by hand for free that was totally fine, but if you wanted to set it up on a printing press and make copies you had to pay for the "copy right" i.e .the right to make copies.

          At that idea establishes a perfectly good line between OK and not-OK: Are you making use of whatever-it-is in a for-profit enterprise? If so, you owe the person who created it. Some examples of OK things to do:
          - Using my music as background for your random freely-distributed Youtube video
          - Making remix for your own use or free redistribution
          - Playing it at your cousins' wedding

          Examples of not-OK things to do without paying me:
          - Hosting my music on a site somewhere loaded with ads for your own personal profit
          - Using the remix of my stuff you created as part of your own album that you're now selling
          - Playing it at a wedding where you were paid $500 to DJ

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
          • (Score: 1, Redundant) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 16 2016, @12:13AM

            by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday January 16 2016, @12:13AM (#290066) Journal

            What I have in mind is to make the default "yes". Should never be necessary to ask permission. When a work is used, the author may apply to a fund set up for the purpose of compensating artists for just such uses. The fund could be private or government run, and there certainly should be many independent ones, with different criteria, for more even coverage. Don't want artists falling through the cracks, which problem the current system has in spades.

            You, the artist, would receive money. You don't get to tell anyone they can't use your work, and hiding from the public or dropping dead making it impossible for anyone to contact you will be irrelevant. Be as unreachable as you like.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2016, @01:00AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2016, @01:00AM (#290081)

              In the United States prior to 1978, copyright was only granted when the work was sent to the Library of Congress along with a registration fee (and copyrights would expire unless a renewal fee was paid).

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 1) by terryk30 on Sunday January 17 2016, @10:24AM

        by terryk30 (1753) on Sunday January 17 2016, @10:24AM (#290656)

        2. I definitely don't mind if my fans (maybe 100 or so, I definitely won't quit my day job anytime soon) listen my stuff for free: That just encourages them to come to my shows...

        By that do you mean free copying? If so, I'm curious as to whether there's a point, for you, that it becomes inconsistent with:

        1. My biggest copyright-related concern is that somebody else takes my stuff and publishes it for profit without giving me a dime...

        which wouldn't be worth doing if the free copying became pervasive. (Aside from niche physical value-added packages, which I don't think you were referring to.) Does it simply come down to whether a musician should expect income only from live performances or not?

        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday January 17 2016, @03:23PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Sunday January 17 2016, @03:23PM (#290746)

          1. My biggest copyright-related concern is that somebody else takes my stuff and publishes it for profit without giving me a dime...

          which wouldn't be worth doing if the free copying became pervasive. (Aside from niche physical value-added packages, which I don't think you were referring to.)

          The kind of thing I'm referring to: Compilation albums, paid streaming services, sheet music collections, film soundtracks, TV background, commercial radio airplay, ad revenue from Youtube videos that have it.

          And there is in fact proof that widespread copying does not eliminate money from recordings: The Grateful Dead. They were downright encouraging their fans to make bootleg recordings of all their shows (including sometimes providing a way for those who were doing so to plug into the soundboard for a better quality recording), and there was a brisk trade in those bootlegs, but they still sold millions of albums.

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @07:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @07:31PM (#290002)

      Our entire government industrial complex is built on nothing but lies, fraud, and corruption. From the exaggerated social benefits of pharmaceuticals based often on fabricated or altered evidence to the exaggerated and often fraudulent claims of light bulb longevity (claims that they last 10 years when in fact you will be lucky if they last even one) our entire system and every aspect of it is nothing but a farce. The government does nothing to protect consumers from false advertising, only to choose winners and losers under the pretext of safety and consumer protection based on whoever greases the palms of politicians and regulators the most behind closed doors.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @03:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @03:51PM (#289915)

    So that you'd have to hire at least one practicing attorney to figure it out, right? I have no idea whether the TechDirt analysis is correct.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @06:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @06:50PM (#289993)

      ...or you could trust Mike Masnick (the author of TFA), who is a lawyer and, wearing his journalist's hat, encounters more cases dealing with "intellectual property" in a day's time than the suit-wearing guys who slog away at a tiny number of cases over a month's span.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @10:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @10:31PM (#290043)

        We like what he says, so we inherently trust him. If we didn't like what he says, or if he is arguing for points we don't like, we can safely write him off as a "shill".

        THIS is all you need to know for how we argue around here.