Copywrite laws are they to vague?

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by PvK:

Mhmm. But in the case of fan art, the corporations waving legal threats are not little businesses, and the fan art is not competing with the corporations' business in any signifigant way. Fan art is in fact a promotion, celebration, and endorsement of the product.

Perhaps - but at present, there is no known way of making the one work (protection of the little business) without causing the other (protection of the big buisiness, often when it isn't really needed).

Originally posted by PvK:
Moreover, private citizens should have the right to mention and produce non-commercial images or even duplicates of commercial media. If they can't, then you're very close to prohibiting things like parody or even discussion of corporate media.

Not really - is is surprisingly easy to discuss the issues without recreating copyrighted media. For example, has anyone felt the need to post a dipiction of Superman to get the conversation going?

Originally posted by PvK:
With even small children participating in discussions by means such as web pages etc., digital images have become a very common form of expression. Trying to make it illegal for the sake of paranoid corporations' intellectual property-mongering is preposterous and well, evil.

Perhaps - but it is the same rules that protect the little guy that allow for the paranoia. The system works much better when things expire after a time.

Originally posted by PvK:


That's a very different kind of thing from fan art.

For one thing, you're talking about a patent of an algorythm. In many cases, the patent office grants patents for ideas which are something anyone can thing of by considering the problem, so that whole institution is in need of complete reworking.

For another, you're talking about a megacorporation as the perp, not a private citizen.

Only in specifics, not in effect. You want a fan art Version? Fine. Suppose Alice makes a comic named Zoe, which becomes a commercial success. Then Bruce produces a mod for SEIV based on Zoe that everyone loves. Due to this mod, SEIV doubles its revenue (we can dream, can't we?). Unfortunately, the Zoe fans who would be buying Zoe merchandise are now spending considerable sums on SEIV, reducing the amount Alice recieves. Totally unknown to Bruce, he has reduced the rewards Alice gets for her hard work. Further, it is almost impossible to track how much effect this had. The only way to deal is to require permissions on such things.

Sure, copyrights and patents have problems, but so far it is just about the only model that seems to work out. Besides, with a private citizen loophole, Megacorps would be able to hire private citizens to do the distribution to the same effect.

Originally posted by PvK:

Megacorps will of course succeed in perpetuating their ownership of anything they can get their hands on, for as long as they can get away with it. I wonder how long it will take for another system to replace it. Clearly it's awfully inefficient to have us designing hardware and software and lawsuits all for the purpose of limiting everyone's access to media, when the technology to freely share all of it is already in place. There needs to be another system developed for rewarding content creators, which allows creative people to earn a living while still making their content available for free distribution.

PvK

The current system will Last until someone comes up with a demonstratably better system and can show that it is better, and either overthrow the megacorps or show them that the new system is in their best interests. However, this hasn't happened yet. The service based open-source model might be such a thing, but it has yet to pan out. We shall see.