On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 11:28, District Webmaster wrote: ><snip> > > And I don't buy the "societal benefit" argument. Having somebody else > own a copyright on "The Grapes of Wrath" hasn't prevented me or anybody > else from benefitting from it. Even if I couldn't afford to buy it, we > have wonderfull library systems that allow me to enjoy its delicious, > creamy literary goodness. But, more importantly, it _IS_ priced so that > I can afford it -- it's in the copyright owner's best interests to make > it affordable to me. If they price it out of the consumer's ability to > buy, they sell no copies, make no money, and the whole incentive for > publishing is destroyed.
Society doesn't have a "right" to be benefited by a work. Rather the creator of the work has an obligation to pay back society for making his work possible by providing for him everything from the education, the tools, and the ideas upon which his creation bas made and made possible, once he has been adequately compensated for his sacrifice. Copyright law provides for this (at least it used to). You mention how having a copyright on the Grapes of Wrath doesn't stop you from benefiting from it. That is true, but in the era of DRM, you will no longer be able to do so. > > A creative work doesn't have, need or want to be owned -- it IS owned by > it's creator, the instant he or she creates it. By right of ownership, > the creator should be able to decide what happens to a creation -- > including passing it to heirs, or the public, or whomever they chose. I > don't adhere to the school of thought that says governments or societies > should forcefully take property from their citizens. Well, that's not what the current copyright law says, and nor do I think it should. Perhaps one of the reasons why the Founding Fathers did not see things the way you see them, is that they recognized that there are situations where this idea of one man owns one idea and can control it exclusively does not work. If two people independently come up with an identical (or very similar) work? Perhaps an abstract painting of a bowl of fruit. Does one man get exclusive ownership of the work and not the other? Does the second man have to pay the first according to the first's terms? The idea of societal ownership of something seems to strike a lot of Mormon's wrong somehow. Somehow it just seems to socialistic to be palatable to us Mormons, which I find amusing. I will never argue that we should have free and unfettered access to copyrighted works while the stewardships on them are still in force. (IE file sharing cannot be condoned.) Here's an interesting one for you. You decide to publish a special printing of the book, "10000 Leagues Under The Sea" by Jules Vernes. The text is not altered, but you produce a nice leather-bound volume. I buy your book, cut the bindings, and scan the pages, one at a time, into plain text (with no pagination or particular format). Is this legal? You better believe it. The copyright expired long ago on that work. As long as I don't copy your layout (pretty headings, etc), I am morally and legally in the right. Now suppose you were an e-book publisher with DRM. DRM now creates an artificial copyright because to extract the text (to which you don't have exclusive rights), I have to break the DRM, which is now illegal. This is the crux of the problem. DRM is extending copyright to make it just as you described in your last paragraph. This is wrong. The scary part is that with real books some day disappearing, DRM-locked e-books could very well spell the end of all public-domain texts. This potential for evil outweighs most potential for good, I'm afraid. A sobering read (read it while you can): http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. You may think this is a little extreme, but in the last 10 years, I've seen most of it start to happen. Michael > > Dave > > >>> Ross Werner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/24/04 10:30 AM >>> > On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, District Webmaster wrote: > > > Just because Mozart could transcribe a symphony after hearing it > doesn't > > mean he did it, then went on to perfrom the work without the author's > > permission. > > Actually, I remember hearing a story along the same lines, where some > composer had a top-secret symphony that he would only play at certain > times/places, and Mozart somehow got a ticket and copied the whole > symphony and, thereafter, played it without the original author's > permission. (And, actually, copying of whole themes and ideas was > rampant > throughout classical music ... should Mozart's descendants have received > > royalties every time someone plays a Variation on his Theme? After all, > if > he _created_ the theme, to take his _creation_ (which /somebody/ has to > own, right?) without permission would be morally and ethically wrong, > isn't that the argument?) > > ~ross -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
