Trash intellectual property law?

What about ordinary folks who are also incorporated?

Like me, for instance. 

I'm not a musician, artist, writer, software engineer or inventor, so I suppose it wouldn't really destroy *my* livelihood or anything, so let's just do this!  It'll mean free stuff for me, right??

RevolutionPlease wrote:

I suppose Timebandit you're not wilfully abusing and it would likely have no effect on you.  Think big picture.

I'm curious as to what "willful abuse" is, exactly.  Can you elaborate?

I saw this documentary and it certainly gave me some new things to think about.

Like why is it Disney could steal traditional stories from every culture and then claim they own them.  I always admired Utah Phillips for his fight against the theft of Traditional music by people like Roy Rogers.  He was sued numerous times and his defence was always how could the supposed "owner" of the song have written it when it was taught to someone else decades prior to an entrepreneur claiming the folk tradition as their own intellectual property.

http://films.nfb.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto/

Tell that fairy tale to Disney lawyers with their law suits. Sure you have the right if you can afford to fight legal battles with the giants and their high priced legal talent.

Yup Disney and other American "entertainment" corporations smack artists, I would agree with that.

They sue many people take your pick.

http://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=disney+sues&ie=UTF-8&...

Timebandit wrote:

I'd like to note, though, none of them revolve around alternate versions of Cinderella, Snow White or other traditional tales - 

Wow you looked through about 323,000 links in that short a time I am truly impressed and in awe.

I think the problem is that nobody really wants to do a boring old remake of a boring old classic like Cinderella.  If someone wants to use the Cinderella image, they want to use the one that already has a high recognition factor: Disney's. 

I think Timebandit is correct to say that Disney doesn't own the classics, and that I'm free to remake the classics, but the classics in and of themselves don't really have a whole lot of appeal to folks.... unless Disney does them. 

To some degree, same with music.  I might want to use, say, Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair" in a television ad.  Well, it's an old, old song, and I'm certainly free to sing it myself, but that would be kind of missing the point.  If I want that song in my ad, I probably want THEIR performance of it, not my own.

Quote:

Why shouldn't you pay to use someone else's version of a song or video or whatever? 

I can't tell if you're asking, or asking rhetorically, but at any rate, I agree. Why should someone else's labour be free to me? How did they get tagged with the responsibility to write hit songs or produce fascinating documentaries or write bestsellers for me, for free? I'm asking rhetorically, though I've heard some real knee-slapping answers like "well, we all create the culture in which these works are situated" or "we provide an audience, and without an audience, that book/movie/song would be meaningless!". Srsly.

Rights to many things can be sold or exchanged.

If I'm a visual artist, I can sell my painting to someone and then it's theirs.  Why shouldn't I be able to sell a film to someone, or a book to someone?  I should think that part of protecting an artist's interest in their own work would be permitting them to sell it if that's what they wish to do with it.  And I'm not sure I see how it really matters who owns the copyright to a work.

That said, current laws could certainly take another look at how long those rights can stay exclusive.  I might suggest, for example, the lifetime of the artist, or, if sold, another 20 years at most.

So Timebandit do you agree with the extension of the time periods for various types of intellectual property.  

What is at stake is not the artists rights but rights of holding companies.  If the artist is dead does society need to extend the rights for more than 50 years after they die?  How about the Disney 95 year deal.  What is the purpose of those timeframes?  It seems to me they have nothing to do with protecting artists.  But then intellectual law is not my forte.

Yup after the death of the artist.  I can see some residual years of rights going to other entities but 50 years for a song that someone else wrote is not enough?  

The fact that as an artist you have to cloak yourself in the veil of a corporation is in my mind proof positive that corporations have more rights than individual artists or you wouldn't bother spending the incorporation fees.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Yup after the death of the artist.  I can see some residual years of rights going to other entities but 50 years for a song that someone else wrote is not enough?  

The fact that as an artist you have to cloak yourself in the veil of a corporation is in my mind proof positive that corporations have more rights than individual artists or you wouldn't bother spending the incorporation fees.

That's an exceptionally simplistic view.  There are many reasons why it makes sense to produce work through a corporation independent of intellectual property issues, but that's off topic and I'm not going to get into cultural industries 101 here.  I also don't see working via a corporation as "cloaking myself in a veil" - it's very clear and apparent who the owners, directors and officers of my corporation are.  A matter of public record, in fact.

If I come up with an idea or concept that has a value that can be marketed beyond my life span, why shouldn't I be able to sell that for an agreed-upon term that benefits me here and now?  Why should all and sundry get a freebie if I get hit by a bus tomorrow?  I'm okay with my kids continuing to benefit from my work after I'm gone, and I'd appreciate it if they were good stewards of what I've created so that it isn't misused in the future. 

Timebandit wrote:

RevolutionPlease wrote:

I suppose Timebandit you're not wilfully abusing and it would likely have no effect on you.  Think big picture.

I'm curious as to what "willful abuse" is, exactly.  Can you elaborate?

My guess is that it's "willful abuse" if any money is made off of it.

[IMG]http://i34.tinypic.com/11raq06.gif[/IMG]

Sven wrote:

Timebandit wrote:

RevolutionPlease wrote:

I suppose Timebandit you're not wilfully abusing and it would likely have no effect on you.  Think big picture.

I'm curious as to what "willful abuse" is, exactly.  Can you elaborate?

My guess is that it's "willful abuse" if any money is made off of it.

[IMG]http://i34.tinypic.com/11raq06.gif[/IMG]

Yeah, my subsequent example sure shows your ability at reading comprehension.

Keep fishin...

radiorahim]</p> <p>[quote=hsfreethinkers wrote:

radiorahim wrote:

But corporations have been lobbying to get governments to expand corporate rights so that aspects of say patent law, also apply to copyright law and vice versa etc.   They use the "catch all" term "intellectual property as if it was something that is real...when it is not.   It's a total bullshit corporate invented term and no one should ever be allowed to use this term without being challenged IMHO.

I used to practice intellectual property law, and it encompasses more than the big three. There are also industrial designs and trade secrets, for example. There is need for a catch-all term so that we can communicate. I've never heard that "intellectual property" is a corporate-invented term as you suggest, and the various forms are quite distinct in law and in practice. The article you cite doesn't support your statement about the origins of the term:

Quote:

According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fashion that followed the 1967 founding of the World “Intellectual Property” Organization (WIPO), and only became really common in recent years.

Yes it's quite true that more things are being "thrown into the bag" of so-called "intellectual property"...that's why its a dangerous term.     The political purpose of using this term is to confuse people and extend corporate rights in the process.

If you want to talk about copyright that's fine.   If you want to talk about patents, that's fine too.   But don't lump them all into this corporate "catch all" phrase of "intellectual property".

Sure WIPO was created in '67, but it's the corporate idealogues who've promoted the use of this term.   Progressive folks should reject the use of the term entirely IMHO.

 

I don't know - I see no evidence of that. The article is fine as far as stressing that the various types of intellectual property are distinct and serve different purposes. The idea that there is some conspiracy to use an umbrulla term "intellectual property", or that progressives should reject the term, well I call bullshit on that.

Timebandit in the post (#27) you claim others are to simplistic to discuss the law of intellectual property you proved you didn't even understand the most basic concept underlying a corporation.  But hey who am I compared to your brilliant understanding of everything. I love the way you don't ever admit your own limitations in knowledge but immediately go on the attack.  Anyone who doesn't know what the corporate veil is should not be calling anyone simplistic.  

In #34 you agree it is better to use a corporation which was my point that you originally said was over simplistic.  Go back read some stuff about corporations or maybe watch the movie "the Corporation"  so you can gain a more sophisticated understanding of the laws you are using to your advantage. The laws that give corporations more rights than individuals.

To reiterate my point from above; you cloak yourself in the corporate veil because it provides superior legal entitlements when compared to an individual artists rights.  We actually agree on this point but somehow you feel a need to attack me because I disagree that the corporate model is good for society.  Hey it is good for those who own them but that is different than it is good for society. 

http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm

hsfreethinkers wrote:

 

I don't know - I see no evidence of that. The article is fine as far as stressing that the various types of intellectual property are distinct and serve different purposes. The idea that there is some conspiracy to use an umbrulla term "intellectual property", or that progressives should reject the term, well I call bullshit on that.

 

If you want to divorce legal terminology or any other terminology for that matter from the political/economic/social climate that it exists in, then go ahead.

But in the business press...particularly the technology press, these days they almost never talk about the separate issues of copyright, patents and trademarks etc.  They almost always use the term "intellectual property" or "IP" for short.

This isn't a "conspiracy", it's just the way the corporate world works.   Corporations seek to expand their power in our society and one of the ways of  doing that is to change the way people think about things...and therefore we get terms like "intellectual property".

And to try to dismiss anyone who critiques how institutions tend to work as a "conspiracy theorist" is bullshit IMHO.

There were two excellent articles published in a 2007 issue of Harper's that address the problem of fair-use and intellectual property. The first one, entitled "On the rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context" (PDF alert), deals with Susan Meiselas's famous photo of Nicaraguan Sandinista Pablo Arauz, who is throwing a Molotov cocktail made out of a very visible Pepsi bottle, and artist/writer Joy Garnett's various reimaginings of the iconic photo. Graffiti artist Banksy probably has the most famous recent reappropriation of, or at least reference to, the image. The question, of course, is what consitutes "original" art, and what debt, if any, does an artist owe previous incarnations of an image, melody, narrative or character.

Jonathan Lethem (author of Fortress of Solitude) addresses the question in the same issue with the brilliant "Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," a pun on Harold Bloom's famous book, The Anxiety of Influence, in which he argues that every artist experiences anguish and nerves in their creative relationship to all artists that came before. There is an incessant anxiety to produce an original work, which is by definition impossible. Lethem's essay is composed completely of quotes, misquotes and paraphrases of other writers, challenging the idea that plagiarism as such is bad thing.

Quote:

LOVE AND THEFT

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?