Copywrite laws are they to vague?

[PvK]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
You suggested "a significant slip up would cause, not a fine, but a total cease and desist order with frozen assets for five or ten years." for corporations - sounds good to me.

Which was exactly my point - if you make corporations count as people, then you need to adjust things slightly so that they are treated like people; a total cease and desist is very similar to a prison sentence; freezing their assests just prevents it from being a death sentence; apparently you just hadn't thought the implications of corps counting the same as private citizens through.

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What I meant was that corporations should not have the same rights as people, for instance:

* No right to sponsor candidates for government or petition government as if a private citizen. All attempts to influence government should be highly suspect.

* No right to freedom of speech. Corporate speech should be controllable by legislation.

* No "freedom to innovate" abusive predatory business practices.

* No perpetuating patents or copyrights by acting like an immortal person with insane wealth.

etc.

I never meant to say that they should be free from any of the obligations that people have.

Supposedly the USA is a government "for the people", not "for the megacorps" - organizations whose declared purpose is to maximize the corp's bottom line don't help any people except accidentally, or where it serves the corp's own needs. That's not good - corps should only exist where they help people and don't do harm.

...I was just trying to point out how Bruce could unintentionally hurt Alice by using her characters without her permission, which you had seemed to be denying was possible.

I'm not sure it's not possible. I think society needs to decide what level of bad behavior to tolerate, as in your "pervo-fan fiction" example.

As far as Alice goes, as I explained, I don't think your example would count as damage, because the modder didn't get anything, the product was in a different market from Alice, and SE4 sales were benefiting from a unique and valuable feature of SE4 (the ability to use player-made mods of any setting). I don't believe Alice has any claim to a share of SE4 sales because someone makes a mod based on her work.

Ideally, I'd hope to see a reward system where consumers can give approval to content providers, which results in them getting credit for the work that people like, but with distribution of the work being unrestricted. So Alice, Shrapnel, and even fan sites and modders could all get something to allow them to do what they do best, as long as enough people like it enough to register their approval.

No, that's someting different - they are trying very hard to reverse the above law+rulings on what makes an object leagal, changing it to "It must have no illegal purpose." Very different, and yes, an amazing power grab. It is actually quite leagle to make a backup copy of stuff you have a license to - you just aren't allowed to distribute them, modified or not, free or not, without totally transferring the license and all copies to a single recipient (many licenses prohibit trasfer).

Yes, that too. Similar to the moronic and vile attempt to outlaw encryption software, and the sniffing of all computer traffic for anything Big Brother might be interested in. It's not that evil schemers are fictional; it's that real evil schemers tend not to be as visible as they are in fiction.

There have been a lot of people trying to design an education system that will do that for a long time; so far, they have had only very limited success with individuals that would likely have no problems with that in the first place. The other problem is that such attempts usually require a surprisingly small class size, which isn't going to happen until the school system gets considerably more funding.

Well, the megacorps are dominating the economic system... if our civilization were more focussed on doing good than corporate commercialism, adding teachers and paying them enough would not be very hard at all.

...
The problem with corporate media is more a problem of a glut of channels; when there were only two or three channels available for any given area, there were only a few good show ideas a year, and so the bad ones tended to get thrown out. Now, you can pipe a few hundred channels into a household, but there are still only a few good show ideas a year. Unfortunately, it is surprisingly difficult to sort a good idea out from a bad idea beforehand, so the good ideas don't get the relative budget they desreve, and seldom get prime time. As for McDonalds, if people stop buying their food, they will eventually go away.

I'm more concerned about the level of control, and the motives behind the people with that control, than the quality level. Once again, it's controlled by organizations whose purpose is greed. Reporting standards are only valued as much as their perceived value as a commercial product, and to a slight degree, the amount to reduce fines and bribes to deflect ineffective government controls.

Am I correct in assuming that we both agree that cutting down on the amount of time patents and copyrights Last would help (though still not be perfect)?

Yes, absolutely!

I think we actually agree in principle on most things - we're mainly just bonking on specifics because you're talking more about the realities of the existing system, while I'm talking as an idealist about what I'd like to see happen.

PvK

[ June 21, 2003, 09:17: Message edited by: PvK ]