Summations Only

No, I'm simply explaining how that's not the only way to make a movie. It's already a successful paradigm for filmmaking, in fact.Again, the burden of evidence is actually on you to explain why filmmakers have no choice but to punish the people who choose to patronize them. I fail to see it, too. You'd have to ask the authors of the DMCA, and SOPA/PIPA, and ACTA, why they want to replace a successful system with a speculative one that punishes audiences. That's certainly not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that we keep a system already in place, a system that funded filmmaking and other artistic endeavors for centuries - people simply voluntarily patronize the artists they enjoy, and are not punished for doing so.

Right, the question isn't just "do we have Hollywood or not"; the question is do we have free speech on the Internet or not. Tangle seems to believe that Hollywood cannot exist in the face of a free Internet. I fundamentally disagree with that premise, but even if it were true - and no evidence has been provided that it is - it would nontheless be the case that a free Internet is more important than Hollywood.

Nobody's talking about posting "MGM's" movies with impunity, they're talking about posting copies of their own movies, which they have freely purchased from MGM. It's not clear why MGM should be allowed to prevent them, or why anyone who doesn't have a contractual relationship with MGM should be prevented from downloading those copies.I think the problem, here, is that we've allowed the fictious construct of "intellectual property" to override our rights with respect to our own real property to the detriment of everyone except a small group of powerful, well-monied rightsholders. The "moral imperative" is that you can't own an idea, a memory, because to do so means controlling what's in people's heads. After all, the only difference between a recording of a film and my memory of it is the accuracy of my memory. Similarly, the only difference between transmitting a recording of a film and your buddy re-enacting it as he tells you about seeing it last night is the fidelity of the transmission. Culture belongs to the people, not to the creators; that's why copyrights were meant to expire. The only reason that we, the public who owns all ideas, all art, all communications, extend copyright in the first place is for the same reason patents exist - to foster the development of the arts and sciences by awarding content creators a limited-time monopoly to profit from their work.Copyright was never meant to create an IP that would produce royalties forever, even when you passed the IP along to your children or grandchildren. At some point we're supposed to regain unfettered access to our own culture, because now that he's dead, I should be as much the owner of The Hobbit - a work that was incredibly influential to my development as a young person - as JRR Tolkien ever was. I'm as much the creator of that work's cultural significance as he is.And "allowing" is exactly wrong. MGM is free to put whatever DRM they want on their movies, to punish the people who decide to pay for it. I propose no law against restrictive DRM technologies that result only in an inconvenience for the customer. They have no right to demand that the government enforce that, or make it illegal for someone to circumvent rights technologies on content they've legally purchased. It's a far cry from "requiring someone to allow people to distribute movies for free." And nothing is stopping MGM from attempting a business model of "punish people who choose to patronize our art with restrictive, inconvenient DRM." They're free to do that in a world where we recognize that intellectual property is a fiction. I propose no law against DRM. But what they absolutely should not have the right to do is enforce a fictional set of "rights" at the point of the government's guns.The only people proposing a system that coerces people into something they don't want is you and Tangle, with your support for draconian laws against unauthorized copying.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

What if I want to talk about The Hobbit?Oops! There goes your argument. Copyright enforced at the barrel of a gun stops us from being able to talk about, reference, or remix our own culture. We own ideas, not the people who write them down. JRR Tolkien stopped being able to meaningfully control the dissemination of the ideas in The Hobbit the instant he shared it with anyone. The fiction of IP is just an attempt to put that genie - all genies - back in the bottle. Can't be done. But what can be done is an enormous amount of violence to free and open communication in a society.When you put the government in a position to say "this idea is OK for you to know; that one is not", when you create the mechanism that enforces those distinctions, you're creating the mechanisms for restriction of speech. That we're heading down this path at the behest of entertainers is what's truly amazing.

Obviously. The means of transmission, the medium of expression, is my mouth.

Because I'm a member of society, and its in the interest of the public to do as they choose with the products that they own.I recognize that that freedom is in tension with the desire of content creators to exercise control over the dissemination of their works. But let them advocate for their own interests; I'll advocate for the interests of the public to distribute, comment on, and remix their own culture.The compromise you suggest, where copyright is enforced only for six months, is a compromise I accept. But that's a long way from the current system of copyright in perpetuity. It's your position of infinite copyright that has not ever been defended except as a naked money-grab by those who have inherited revenues from popular works.

To the contrary - people can be (and have been) sued for their performances of a movie scene or song when those were not authorized by the original rights holders. Indeed, there's an entire movie about it. Now, it's generally the case that these performances evade scrutiny by the sheer volume of them and their general lack of redeeming value. But that doesn't mean they're not prohibited by law.There's an entire TV show about a high school choral group that performs pop hits, but completely unstated in the show is the fact that high schools are regularly sued for doing exactly this - performing copyrighted music without the expensive permission of rights holders.As evidenced by the fact that you never, ever hear it on TV, a group of parents singing the Birthday Song violates copyright law every time it happens; I can think of no better example of how copyright law insanity infringes on our rights to experience, adapt, comment on, and remix our own culture.

While it's likely that I could get away with it, it's actually not legal to talk about Hobbits without the written permission of the Tolkien estate.

The burden is not on me. The burden is on someone, like you, who believes that it's reasonable to use the courts to force someone to pay you money because they moved their body in a certain way.

It's not whether I believe it, it's whether the courts do. And the blame lies with a system that treats a copyright holder's absurd assertions as reasonable on their face. I shouldn't have to avoid anything, when Hobbits are as much a part of my culture as they are of Tolkien's. It should be no more a matter for the law that TSR wanted to use Hobbits in a game than it was when Tolkien wanted to use elves and goblins in a book. He didn't invent those things; he remixed them out of the public domain of culture. And, in turn, hobbits need to enter that public domain so that others can remix them. Nobody gets permanent ownership of an idea; even temporary ownership is a courtesy that we extend, ostensibly to promote the arts and sciences. Yet a vast treasure trove of such art was created long before the notion of that courtesy was ever considered. It's not necessary for the creation of art.

Oh, so I have free speech, just as long as nobody is around to hear it?

Bullshit. Are you, or are you not, defending a system under which choreography can be copyrighted?Did this

quote:

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(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

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appear in your Message 140 without your knowledge? If so, please inform Percy that the board has been hacked again and someone is posting under your name without your permission.

Well, that's true. But more importantly, the law prevents those defective products from facing competition from non-defective ones.I'm no free-marketeer, but this is a case where what the law is doing is distorting the free market. We don't face a market where all vacuum cleaners are subtly kinked in such a way that they only work in a limited series of circumstances, because such a vacuum rapidly erodes market share compared to its fully-functioning competitors.I think we can get by with competition, because consumers will gravitate to the products that don't restrict their interoperability. The better-informed consumers already are. The DMCA mandated that all VCR's sold include "Macrovision", a form of analog DRM. It's an enormous government-granted monopoly to the Macrovision Corp, another way in which the law is distorting the marketplace here. Yes, exactly. (Have him call the game's tech support hotline, if he hasn't already; frequently they can transfer the license or reset the registration.)

No, it's because while I'm driving it, you can't. (Its really not that hard to grasp.) When I take your property, I deprive you of it. But when I copy the idea of "Hobbits" and make a tabletop roleplaying game out of it, what are you deprived of? My interpretation or re-interpretation of the notion of "Hobbits" doesn't subtract that notion out of anyone else's mind. It only adds to it.The notion that someone can control an idea is the legal absurdity at the heart of copyright, and it's wrong. It deprives us of access to our own culture. Not only can I not legally talk about your car, you can't legally talk about your car. It's shape, it's design, the function of its parts - that's all copyrighted material that belongs not to you, but to the car company. If you were to sit down and explain to me the function of its engine, how the parts fit together and how they most frequently malfunction, you would be violating the copyright held by the car company and licensed to the publishers of the repair manuals. That's why you can't get the manuals while the car is still being sold as "new", the publishers have an agreement that keeps that knowledge out of the hands of consumers to support the mechanic's monopoly. Maybe that's not how it works in the UK but that's how it works here.Everywhere you turn, you're just giving me examples of how our speech, how our exchange of ideas and information, is circumscribed by the assertion of "copyright". Can't you see how eroding this all is?

In your opinion. So, this is the fourth, fifth, or maybe sixth time you've waved away restrictive outcomes as being just the result of the bad application of a "good" law. What can't you justify by such means? And doesn't the system that seems to foster such "non supported" lawsuits deserve any scrutiny? And it's great that you're so boldly championing the cause of Beyonce, but I'm sure her multi-millions of dollars will allow her to hire all the lawyers she needs to repel this nuisance suit.What about everybody else? What is a regular person without those deep pockets supposed to do when the RIAA lawyers come a-knockin', except give in to their automated extortion?The problem, here, is that nobody gives a shit whether NoNukes thinks a lawsuit is valid. Even an invalid lawsuit represents a substantial commitment of time and expenditure of money to repel, and for most people, it's simply easier to surrender to the invalid suit. All the RIAA has to do is threaten a suit, regardless of validity, to compel enormous settlements in their favor. I'd like to hear you say something about that system - you know, the one you keep defending.