Guest post by A few days ago I inadvertently caused a bit of a fuss. In writing about GOG’s Time Machine sale, I expressed my two minds about the joy of older games being rescued from obscurity, and my desire that they be in the public domain. This led to some really superb discussion about the subject in the comments below, and indeed to a major developer on Twitter to call for me to be fired.
Fascinating article on Rock Paper Shotgun from John Walker on why he thinks software copyright (and possibly other kinds too) should come with a much shorter shelf life. Although ostensibly about videogames, much of it could be said to apply to recent events in mobile OS development too.
http://www.osnews.com/www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/03/editorial…
Leads to a missing link location.
Just a heads up, the link points to an incorrect URL on OSAlert.
EDIT: Looks like somebody beat me to it while I was typing it out.
Edited 2014-02-03 19:42 UTC
Of course he wants to profit off Duke 3D forever… i don’t think Duke Nukem Forever brought him any royalties
Edit: he’s mentioned in the linked-to article with the following juicy quote: “A creator should be allowed to profit from his work indefinitely as long as there is a market for it”.
Edited 2014-02-03 20:51 UTC
I make a chair and i can sell it once, i make a song/movie/game and i can sell it again and again and again…
No as an artist, you don’t typically sell it, you license it. If its actually sold, then copyright violations are theft.
If they aren’t sold then its a different market not comparable to chairs.
Break the seal and i effectively signed the license agreement? Don’t recall that line of argument worked too well with boxed software.
I’m not following your line of thought. I don’t see how agreeing to a license agreement relates to the current line of discussion.
Are you saying “Yes I agree, music is licensed and not sold. BTW, I think the terms of the license are unclear, unfair, and unenforceable. Also I once heard of something unrelated that was licensed that had trouble enforcing its terms in certain jurisdictions due to the sneaky way the agreement happened”.
Or are you saying
“No music is sold and not licensed because the licensing agreement is unclear therefore they sold it to me. ”
Or something completely else.
I think it was Microsoft or some other company that got in hot water because they claimed that breaking the shrink wrap on boxed software was the same as accepting the license agreement found inside the box.
And in the case of a CD or DVD there is no license agreement at all.
Never mind that the terminology used in the entertainment press and such is always “copies sold”.
Licensing as a term only comes up when the “owner” does something that the “seller” do not approve off, like say turning CD tracks into MP3 files to load onto the “owner’s” portable player.
I think there are three answers to the situation.
1) Music is sold, obtaining a copy without paying the creator is theft.
2) Music is licensed, obtaining a copy without paying is copyright violation, not theft.
3) Music is sold, but obtaining a copy without paying the creator isn’t theft because of some reason that has nothing to do with weather or not its sold or licensed.
4) Individual copies of music are sold. You are free to sell (or give) that copy to others without the artists’ consent or sending them any money. Depending on the country you live in, obtaining a copy without paying (or making a copy and selling that to someone else) is neither theft nor copyright infringement; or it could be punishable by death.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
But it can be a felony, a federal offense in the U.S. with serious consequences, if you are found guilty.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/mie/news/2013/2013_12_19_aedward.html“ Northern Michigan Resident Convicted Of Criminal Copyright Infringement And Mail Fraud
Your point? Murder is a felony as well, and just as different from _theft_ as copyright infringement.
You can make the same chair hundreds of times, selling each of them for the same price as the first one. Only Bad Religion can do that with music.
But each chair made requires the same amount of materials and time as the first one. Once a gold master is ready, a copy is a fraction of that.
With the “small” difference that each chair you make takes time and effort and will cost you materials while making and selling copies of software cost you essentially nothing.
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You can design a chair — license the design — and sell it many times.
You can design a chair of such elegance and craftsmanship that in practice only a handful of manufacturers can persuasibely reproduce it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_Lounge_Chair“ Eames Lounge Chair
I code for a living. Am I going to work on a pet project that I can’t sell? Sure, but not nearly as much. The author goes way too far,and basically goes full socialist in his arguments. Not saying I disagree with his ultimate conclusion, but he gets there by a very flawed understanding of human nature and motivations.
EDIT –
Or to put it more bluntly: I agree, but damn if that wasn’t the biggest collection of straw man arguments I’ve seen on the internet in a long time.
Edited 2014-02-03 20:59 UTC
According to the author, this argument is “astronomically false”. I could not disagree more — though perhaps not in the way the people who came up with this argument would expect. I DO think that everybody needs financial (= self-preservation) incentive to create/work. We are only human: we need food on our table. (Maslow’s Pyramid, anyone?). But then the best way to encourage creativity was exactly to put these works into the public domain after a relatively short time (20 years seems about right) — so that the those who created them would have to exert their talents to create more memorable work. How is that for an incentive?
Other than that, the article was TL;DR. It was way too much ranty for my taste.
Edited 2014-02-03 21:34 UTC
Work..well yes. Why else would you work your ass off for someone else?
Create? No. To many, work is what you do so you can create *without* having to worry about your creation being profitable. It might be nice if it makes you something but it’s not the primary motivator.
Edited 2014-02-03 22:00 UTC
You nailed it on the head. That’s the exact right response. Nothing more to add.
People don’t need a financial incentive to create – true artists will happily produce art so long as their needs are met.
If we lived in a post-scarcity, post-currency society, the creation of new ideas would be motivation in and of itself. As automation increases, and AI improves, it’s only a matter of time before 99% of people are working for the sake of working – at that point, why not get rid of money and allow people to spend time creating ideas related to their passions, without feeling the need to generate useless wank (beauraucracy, red tape etc.) in order to live.
However, we live in economies and not societies, so people need money – for now, without a patronage system for artists, there’s no way most of them can dedicate time to their passions, and are forced into wage-slavery instead.
When you get rid of money, who’s going to fix the machines that are doing all of the automation? And who’s going to build new ones? Well, I guess you will, cuz if there’s no money, I’ll be sitting on my ass all day, every day, playing video games
Machines repair machines, and build new ones.
Many people would sit and do that, but there are also many who would use that newfound freedom for research or art.
The “newfound freedom” is a myth.
Despite all the stuff I’ve automated at work, I’ve never had anyone say I could go home any earlier.
Because you still live in a society with scarcity? See how ‘dole bludgers’ are demonised as leeches, but people who move money around to make more money aren’t?
If you didn’t have to work, you would eventually get bored of consuming content, and make things/discover things, right?
Edited 2014-02-04 22:02 UTC
Dude, there are people who don’t work now, living off their parents/boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever, that never seem to get tired of not doing a damn thing. Some are scamming the government for disability or food stamps.
They’re the subset that wouldn’t create.
The subset that would are busy being tied up creating things/doing work for company profits.
tl;dr: People without motivation != people with motivation.
My point is that some people can’t be bothered to work when there’s money involved, even if it means they live in a shithole and are surviving off Ramen. There’ll be a lot more of them when you tell everyone that we’re doing away with money and they don’t have to work anymore.
Whilst it may well be that a large percentage of people would act that way, the original point was that artists *will* work without financial motivation.
Regardless of how many lazy sloths there would be, there would also be a large number of people driven by curiosity and creativeness, who would create for the sake of creating – without money, the joy of discovery or creativity is its own reward.
I’d argue that it’s much more satisfying than sitting and consuming – and I doubt creative output would decline in that circumstance due to that satisfaction and drive.
Right, so you’ve got hundreds of thousands of creative types happily working for free, but who’s going to keep electricity going to your house (esp when it’s freezing outside and there’s a power outage), clean the garbage off the streets, or come and redo your carpeting when your toilet overflows, and there’s turds floating down your hallway?
We’re still a long ways away from having machines do all that, so you’re going to HAVE to have some sort of motivator if you get rid of money.
I don’t think you understand post-scarcity.
Money isn’t actually important, and things don’t actually require much effort to maintain.
Electricity is essentially maintenance-free once you have sufficient solar and wind infrastructure.
There’s nothing stopping large roomba-style trucks replacing garbage trucks.
The same goes for cleaning and building; it’s actually quite simple, an automaton could do it.
We’re certainly not more than a century away from AI and robotics capable of all of that, and if you read my initial post, getting rid of money was what I proposed for *after* we have good AI/robotics.
Money isn’t important – stuff is.
Money is just a means for getting stuff.
Ergo, once we’re post-scarcity, and base needs are met for all, greed isn’t the primary motivator – inquisitiveness, creativity and a desire for recognition are.
As such, artists don’t *need* a greed-based incentive.
WorknMan,
The point is completely valid, however I think a large part of the reason we need people for menial work is economic rather than technological.
Theoretically replacing human workers with technology should be good because having less work equates to more time to pursue a meaningful (less work-bound) living. However this presupposes all else being equal. Capitalism has this weird quirk were less work results in a lower standard of living, even if technology keeps GDP stable and rising. This is due to the imbalance between the relatively small set of corporate owners reaping the rewards of automation and the large set of displaced workers suffering the consequences.
The rebuttal to this is usually that employees can be retrained to work on the technology that is displacing their jobs, and this is true to an extent. However the result is still fewer overall jobs, and indeed this is the fundamental reason why technology is able to reduce costs in the first place. The result is increased unemployment which translates to lower wages through supply and demand. I’ll admit it’s a pretty startling conclusion.
Technology has tremendous potential to improve conditions for humanity, yet as long as we stick with capitalism as the root of our economy, there’s only so much good technology can do as it becomes capable of replacing most of our workers. If we don’t adopt new economic models, the results of automating the majority of our jobs will be disastrous as the means of production will be even more concentrated than today and more people become unemployed due to the lack of work.
Edited 2014-02-05 05:16 UTC
To be honest, I actually agree with you. People in the US are screaming about low-skilled jobs being shipped overseas and demanding that they be brought back, but they’re never coming back. What is currently being done by cheap workers in China and elsewhere will eventually be done by robots. Eventually, we’ll have automated everything to the point where there’s not enough for humans left to do. And I guess some would argue that we’re already there. So then we start looking for alternatives.
And the good news is that in the new ‘Utopia’, there never should be anybody doing any work that is unnecessary. If it wasn’t for capitalism and the need to keep so many things proprietary, the company I work for would not even exist. However, the fact still remains that we’re a long way away from not needing humans to do work, and I don’t imagine we’ll ever get there entirely. So we’re still going to need people working. And if you get rid of money, you’re going to need a way to get people off their asses. Unless you’re just planning to let a bunch of slobs leech off the rest of society, what would be your recommended solution to get people to work, when they’re not getting paid? It’s kind of like in the FOSS world – some people will contribute something back, but most people just take.
Trust me, parts of my childhood were spent growing up in white-trash neighborhoods, and I’ve run across many lazy sons of bitches that you’re probably not going to get motivated by talking about the good of society. They’d rather live off spouses and whoever else vs actually having to get a job. Incidentally, these are the same people that liberals want to hand out food stamps and universal healthcare to, but I digress
Note, that we are speaking about hypothetic future where society provides enough resources to make one’s living comfortable without getting engaged into working for salary. Now, there are different motivating factors for people: social status (if you have duties, you are respected), self-realization (people have hobbies nowdays, you know) or whatever else. Again, it is hard to imagine such world, as our mentality includes concept of reward as one of the fundamental concepts, which is something the hypothetical no-currency future just can’t be based on.
My wife is a novelist; most of our household income comes from copyright. Would her income be different if copyright was shortened from life+70 years to a fixed term of 20? Hell no.
The vast majority of cultural goods have a short period on sale, recoup or don’t recoup their costs, then get deleted. The economics are calculated with a high discount rate and the expectation that the useful saleable life is ~3 years. The company’s expected value for the last century of copyright is essentially zero, so that’s what they’ll offer you as an extra advance – nothing.
Sure, if the book turns out to be one of the all-time classics then my wife will be getting cheques for the rest of her days. But let’s not pretend that incredibly remote jackpot possibility is in any way related to her decision to write novels, or a good way to organise our creative economy.
None of this is surprising, by the way: it’s well-known in both the commercial and academic world (see, for example, Pollock, R., 2009. Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term. Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 6(1), pp.35^aEUR“60.). It’s just that the trivial benefits of longer copyrights accrue to the authors and (mainly) the publishers, while the larger disbenefits are evenly spread amongst the public at large.
Also, a short copyright would be an INCENTIVE for her to keep creating new and better stuff instead of living from maybe just one only hit as happens sometimes with a singer, for example.
Edited 2014-02-04 10:34 UTC
The argument applied to music is particulary funny because the fact is out of all the artists and bands all over the world only a minuscule percentage actually see any return for the music they create.
Everyone would like to make a living out of what they love doing, but being doomed to nothing but releasing free demos isn’t stopping people from creating yet more songs, is it?
If this were about the early to maybe mid-90’s, that would be true in regards to single/album sales only. However, around that time is when independent distribution became viable for the average artist. A ton of artists made piles of cash going that route and they did it with unimpressive sales numbers. An average artist with a typical 50/50 deal would get about $4 per unit. You’re at $40k selling just 10,000 units, not including what you take from doing shows & merchandise.
Aside of that, it’s grossly misleading to say “artists and bands all over the world only a minuscule percentage actually see any return for the music they create”. Until 360 deals came about, artists may not make anything from sales but they could make plenty touring, merchandising, endorsement deals, etc. All of which only exist because of the music they create and therefore can be directly attributed to it.
The truth is most people not directly involved in the music industry have a lot of misconceptions about it which simply aren’t true. That’s what happens when you don’t know the full picture, or don’t understand it.
So what would be your estimation of the number of people making a profit (independent or not) compared to bands that make pretty much nil? (ie. breaking even at best).
You surely need a finantial incentive for touring, because you aren’t going to move around playing live sinking all your money and getting nothing to at least cover the costs, but is that incentive really needed to make music?
It’s impossible to answer that with any real accuracy, but I will say that more artists need another source of income to survive than living off of music alone. Music is a multi-billion dollar a year business so the money is there for the taking, but navigating to it can be very difficult. Especially for people who are new or don’t have good guidance helping them along.
There are 3 types of artists. Those who make music for the love of the craft, those who seek financial gain, and those who flounder around somewhere in the middle and aren’t fully committed one way or the other. Some people are content playing shows even though they don’t see any big financial gain. Success to them is being able to survive til their next show. The people who treat music as a business, and actually have business acumen generally do ok. They ones who don’t really know what they’re doing treat it as more of a hobby than anything. If it pays off, cool. If not, they don’t usually stick with it long term because it winds up being too much investment (time, money, or other).
So, the incentive to make music depends on why you want to do it in the first place, and then if you’re satisfied with whatever return you’re seeing.
RSA Animate has a great video on YouTube RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us that talks about the nature of motivation; hint, money is a very small part once survival is covered. There are also many books that have been written about the history of copyright (Lawerence Lessig is a big name) that suggest short copyright terms are better for innovation than long copyright terms. In many instances no copyright encourages more innovation than copyright. This makes sense when you realize that everything you do is built on the shoulders of those who came before you. If you write a program, you use libraries to create it; most of the time, you are just manipulating someone else’s work to fit your needs.
Copyright and patents grant people a limited monopoly to recover the cost of creation before you have to compete with others to sell your own idea; the concept that this is to ensure profit is relatively new (~90 years old.) It also allows you to be first to market.
One look at the movie industry will show you the problem with long copyright terms; we have seen the same films over and over for almost 100 years. Yes, sometimes a new idea comes up, but most of the time we just see a new remake of a work covered by copyright (Sherlock, Avengers, Superman, Xmen, etc…), which was licensed to someone with a lot of money.
This severely limits the chances of independent film makers to reach the main stream, and there is no way to quantify what new ideas will never be seen because of that. I feel that continuing this trend in the software industry will lead to: more excessive patent trolling (Samsung-Apple, Rockstar Bidco, Intellectual Ventures, etc…); large companies suing small developers for bogus patents to eliminate the competition; and the ultimate stagnation of the industry as developers lose the ability to create a new and original products.
Most great works came from the public domain. Nearly all Disney films are inspired by public domain stories; Avatar is obviously an adaptation of Pocahontas. The list goes on and on; how many love stories are based on the works of Shakespeare?
Oh yea, in the technology industry we have: magnetic storage, Fiber optic cables, RAM, processors, FAT 32 file system, most home routers, most Internet backbone equipment, most web servers, the Internet (TCP/IP protocol stack), HTML, etc. Most of these things were developed by Bell Labs and DARPA, which is why it all became public domain. Imagine if these technologies were all covered under a copyright that had to be licensed; what would we have lost?
Yet, I will never live to see a new file system inspired by the technology of NTFS, unless Microsoft develops it? I may never see a version of Halo created for Linux, or legally have an Xbox 360 emulator to play my Xbox 360 games when Microsoft stops supporting it. Heck, I will never be able to provide security fixes and patches for the Windows XP OS, even though some important software doesn’t run on Windows 7/8 (because the developer does not think it’s profitable enough to make it.)
Anyway, I don’t know how long copyright terms should last, but right now they are way too long. I think we should start over, and go back to 7 years, with an option to renew for 7 more. That seems fair. Especially now, when technology changes so fast. That type of copyright term would mean that just about now, all Windows ME/2000 technology would become public domain. A product that is not available for purchase, but people still use it for compatibility reasons.
Do you know of any computer software from 2000 and before that is still being sold today?
If George Broussard calls you stupid you’re probably doing something right.
How’d DNF turn out there, buddy? Figured out how the software development process work yet?
So here’s the thing. The argument is that developers/creators need to get paid. Right but are you telling me that everyone that was involved with the creation of, say, Duke Nukem 2 back in the day are getting their share of copies sold today? Because if they’re not the argument is moot.
I bet most of the creators and developers doesn’t see a single cent from those old titles and instead the money is going to a company that own the rights and had nothing to do with the original product.
Edited 2014-02-03 22:15 UTC
Nobody is forced to enter into work-for-hire deals or forced to sell their rights (assuming they have any to begin with).
It gets very tiring seeing people willingly enter into deals, only to turn around and cry about it later when they’re not being compensated above & beyond the terms. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people sell their publishing rights, couldn’t cash the check fast enough, then once they’ve blown all the money, turn around and throw a fit claiming to be a victim/ripped off because they don’t have publishing.
That may well be, though I would stipulate that sometimes the only alternative “choice” is not to work in one’s chosen field. Hardly a meaningful choice.
However, I think that the original poster’s point is the fact that we all have to hear about these poor individuals starving and suffering whenever copyright is discussed. Since they could not benefit and therefore do not stand to lose anything the argument represents a gigantic red herring and an appeal for false sympathy.
Thank you. that was exactly the point I was trying to make.
I would also like to note that copyright is not only about getting paid – it is also about being able to shape the distribution of copyrighted material. While an argument that copyright holder was sponsoring the artistic effort and is entitled to get rewarded (as someone noted above, the business model of this process mostly extends for much shorter periods of time then the copyright terms), I just can’t get, why if I ever write an all-time classic book (song, videogame, whatever), my descendants are going to be entitled to stiffle its distribution if they want so. The works of one of most notable Russian writers – Pushkin – were not published for the whole copyright term after his death because his descendents didn’t approve of that.
Speaking of video games I would also note, that there are games that I would like to have, but I literally can’t because their copyright holder doesn’t sell them any more, and everyone else just isn’t entitled to distribute them. Sure, most popular titles are still on sale (thanks to GOG), but these are still a small portion of copyrighted material that could potentially still feed someone be the copyright model changed to remove the need for copyright holder’s concent for work distribution after a sane period of time.
P.S.: and of course lifetime + 70 years is rediculous copyright term for software. I doubt I’ll ever see someone using Windows 3.11 or playing Doom in late 2063. Emulators are mostly used by people who witnessed the real hardware that is emulated – how many of Doom players will be alive by 2063?
When copyright laws were first introduced authors often paid publishers up front. Books were printed in tiny runs and typically sold less than 100 copies. A “best seller” (eg Pride and Prejudice) would generate a few thousand sales over a 10 year period. Therefore it was necessary to offer publishers, authors and their heirs a long copyright period to recover costs.
In the modern era it is possible to recover costs and generate a profit in a matter of months or even weeks. The vast bulk of sales normally occur in the first few months and drop off rapidly afterwards. Any book that fails to sell well is either sold at a massive discount or pulped. Unsuccessful films are sent straight to DVD or TV.
Copyright for non-technical book publications, films and software should be no longer than 10 years. Copyright and all source code should automatically become public domain after that period.
Edited 2014-02-04 03:34 UTC
“Copyright for non-technical book publications, films and software should be no longer than 10 years. Copyright and all source code should automatically become public domain after that period”
Well, I don’t disagree — but this is an interesting bit, because my project, Krita, is now over ten years old. And if we agree on 10 years (or 12 years, for historical reason’s sake) is a good copyright term, how do you apply that to something that gets continually updated? A project like Krita basically never is finished.
There are still lines of code in the krita source repository that haven’t been changed since 2002. And there are new lines added every day. Do we calculate copyright for the thing as a whole, ab initio, or for the thing as a whole from when it gets discarded, or per file, or per line?
And given that Krita is copyleft, is moving the source to public domain necessarily a good thing? I’d be tempted to say it isn’t, but then, I am feeling a bit hypocritical because I also feel that a book shouldn’t be copyright for a long period.
Obviously there needs to be a special provision for “work in progress”. However fully completed or “abandoned” software such as old games and shareware should lose copyright protection.
But there are specific releases and versions. Meaning, the source code for version 1.0 would be protected for X years. The code for version 1.1 would be protected for X years. The code for version 1.2 would be protected for X years. And so on.
Short copyright periods would encourage developers to replace old with better new code to extend the copyright.
Do you really think that.
It would encourage them to replace it yes. But better ode is just wishful thinking!
Escrow with source code mandatory for software to even have copyright protection?
Copyright is an intellectual monopoly wholly created and enforced by governments due to special interest lobbying today. The history of copyright is even more discouraging. Copyright was created as a way to attempt to censor the production of works that went against the prerogatives of the ruling class religious, political, etc after the creation of the first printing presses.
Copyright is government censorship. In the past it was primarily ideological censorship and today it is primarily economic censorship. Patterns of code, language, or design (copyrightable ideas) are not property. Patterns are not inherently scarce after their initial creation and are therefore not property in the traditional sense because all things considered property are by necessity subject to economic scarcity.
It isn’t even clear that copyright produces inherently positive utilitarian economic benefits. There is an increasing amount of theory around copyright that it has many negative externalities, such as the ability to limit innovation in the spread of ideas. (Although limiting the spread of certain ideas was the original point of copyright so that isn’t surprising.) Copyright (especially its extensions) increases the power of the government and the lawyers who enforce this aspect of its laws. There is evidence that it can encourage the growth of monopolies and oligopolies in the economy. It also may slow down changes in culture.
Should the US Courts decide that API’s are copyrightable, then substantial economic harm may instantly occur by ensuring certain economic monopolies/market shares could never be overcome. Reverse-engineering API’s is often essential for small businesses to be compatible with larger players in a given market.
There is no reason that copyright should last more than 10 years given the way the known economics of various ideas and patterns actually work in today’s economy. There may even be reason to eliminate copyright altogether. The current system needs a complete overhaul in any case.
It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum… and I’m all outta gum.