Copyright Math

[Friendly]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0

[Skykid]

Very good.

[moh]

I came here thinking people were copyrighting mathematical operators..

5 +© 5 =® 10™

[Friendly]

Note: $150,000 X 40,000 = 6 Billion, not 8. Other than that, it's excellent.

[DJ Incompetent]

Fantastic!

The How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law is also extremely good.

[Drum]

I am a shrill, tedious bore when it comes to stuff like piracy, but stuff like this warms my heart. The industry and law surrounded copyright is really crooked and messed up.

[Skykid]

Fantastic!

The How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law is also extremely good.

Yes it is.

Keep em coming folks.

[Ex-Cyber]

Yeah, the math is complete nonsense, and has been for years. It's nice to see this perspective being presented in a respectable venue. Still, I think the core mistake is not a mathematical one but a conceptual one. It's not just that they're inflating their losses to a hilariously implausible degree, it's that they routinely portray them as actual damage to the economy, as though people were destroying copies rather than creating them.

The How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law is also extremely good.

It is, though I think the value is almost entirely in raising awareness of remix culture rather than in Lessig's policy views. I guess I'm one of those "extremists" that he's talking about, in that I think copyright is essentially obsolete and not worth attempting to "fix", because the core policy of controlling copies doesn't make sense anymore. He acknowledges the core reason for this -- in the digital age, every use creates a copy -- but doesn't seem willing to really pursue its implications. I feel like he's especially dodging the issue when he says he's just for common sense and not talking about "piracy" and then uses an AMV as his lead example. It's a fine example of remix culture, but it is effectively tantamount to "piracy". A music video carries the music track, which can be trivially stripped back out into a separate file. How could one possibly craft a common-sense exception/limitation that allows this while still respecting the interests of music copyright owners?

Anyway, I'll just do a little QFT here:

I have complained more than once over the past few years that the copyright law is complicated, arcane and counterintuitive; and that the upshot of that is that people don't believe that the copyright law says what it does say. People do seem to buy into copyright norms, but they don't translate those norms into the rules that the copyright statute does; they find it very hard to believe that there's really a law out there that says the stuff the copyright law says.

From this paper, which is an interesting read.

[Ed Oscuro]

We can say it's absurd for copyright owners to project losses as "real," but if we can assume that they have done their homework and have a working assumption as to how much they would sell, but some new form of piracy turns that upside down, then their legitimate prediction is undone. Now, I know most people are going to say that's a misrepresentation, but I don't think it is - the torrents and other stuff that make it very easy for all of us to pirate whatever we want are new technology.

Where I part ways with the traditions of copyright law is in asking about the ways it's enforced (go to jail or pay tens of thousands for uploading a few copies of a song via a torrent? lol) and the ways it's distributed (hey guys, we have successful ad supported models via radio and television and more and we have dealt with threats to value before, but nevermind that, we are gonna demand full price!)

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More on-topic, I recall reading a year or two ago an argument from economics that essentially said that the future returns of a work are not a meaningful incentive to make a work, or to make it better (due to the time preference of money). In other words, the promise of many dollars in the far future is probably equivalent to somebody today throwing a penny in your tip jar. That's not going to pay for your expenses, let alone motivate you to record a song or pen a comic. We can make arguments about corporations and heirs to an estate, but that is a modern argument that loses sight of the original purpose of copyright, which is to allow an author the means of controlling display of and profits to their work within a reasonable period.

In other words, the argument about the copyright debate should mostly hinge on the value of money now to pay for creative efforts.

An analogy is found in patents, which are awarded for a much shorter term because of the general realization of the disruption of industry (and society) that would occur if a company was given too overly lengthy patent terms. Ironically, we still see some of that disruption effected not just by patent trolling but by the assertion of copyright on core components of a product.

I think Disney would not agree, but aside from them disagreeing just because they're Disney, the fact that they can still sell their works has a number of beneficial effects that you don't get without paying (some of that money does go, after all, into the bonus features we now find on rereleases of many classic movies; beyond cleaned-up prints and audio tracks, including theatrical trailers and maybe a poster or a few paragraphs is pretty standard for many releases now). So there the argument might be "how much is creating incentive for companies to re-release products and add to them adding to the buyer who would otherwise get the core product (just the movie, bare-bones) free?" That would be with the classic understanding of the problem. Alternatively, if we stretch our brains a little bit, is there a way to get that stuff (Kickstarter maybe says a tentative yes) out there, and the company to make money, while the core product is taken out of copyright? In other words, is it possible to give a company standard financial incentives to improve a product (discounting government subsidies, of course, which might actually not be all that unreasonable either - many classic films are being preserved with grants by private and government agencies, for example).

One thing that does bother me about this is the large amount of work put into many movies and games, which is not always recouped despite the often very high level of quality of the component pieces. Hollywood has had a system in place for years for dealing with this; games companies probably have a lot of it figured out as well. But that was before torrenting really could take off. Even if they figure out how to cover some losses with hits, we are looking at some of the stagnation that is seen in Hollywood all too often. The thought that we might see companies scaling back their works as a response is also concerning, especially as the next round of game consoles looks set to be vastly more capable than the last one, and requiring probably much more content to be generated (even factoring in procedurally generated fluff). Of course, if they can't make money, they shouldn't bet as if they could.