On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 3:06 AM, Gautam John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Lawnun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > _Everytime_ a video is taken down, God kills a kitten? Hyperbole aside, > > It was meant to be - it's a meme. > I should have added cute memetic hyperbole aside ;-) Meme as it is, the point of my statement is that we're far from there. > > > targeted are not capturing 'discrete slices and slivers'--as you > > suggest--but entire episodes of a given work. > > I would tend to agree for pragmatic reasons. But in this instance, > it's more these slices I'm talking about and in some ways they are as > valuable as entire works. > When the works have something that they've added to the discourse, I'm right there with you. That's what fair use is designed to protect, and that is, admittedly, one of the areas where copyright law is in need of serious repair. And I agree--if it keeps to erode further, we step closer to that point where copyright law is officially without balance and is serving only one side of the bargain. But we're not there yet, by a long shot. And it has not gotten so bad in the land of copyright that Little Johnny duplicating that part of 'Spider Man 3' and slapping it up on YouTube because he thought it was cool, somehow makes it as valuable as the original work. > > > Making a copy of a work in full isn't anymore enriching to the world than > is > > stealing a book from a store. That hasn't, and isn't likely to change, no > > matter how revolutionary the new technology is. > > Again, this is open to discussion. How one is a physical good and one > is virtual and a copy does not destroy the original yada yada yada. > Fine. So let's get out of the realm of the physical altogether. It's still theft the same way as blueboxing used to allow phone phreaks to poach calls from the phone company, or the way someone copying down your information and stealing your identity is theft. In each instance, you're depriving something of value (revenue/opportunity/credit etc.) from someone else. Whether that thing of value is physical or not is irrelevant. > whether it's outserved its purpose (it hasn't), but to what end it can be > amended and adapted to meet the changing needs of the times. A good question does arise. Has it been perverted to serve a purpose > it was not intended to originally serve? > > In all historical interpretations that i'm aware of, the western notion of copyright law was founded on the idea of protecting rights (originally far more rigidly, imho) of the creators to their creation *for a liimited time, *with the understanding that those rights revert back to the public at the expiration. So in answer to your question, no, it hasn't been "perverted to serve a purpose it was not intended to originally serve," but we have lost sight of that original purpose and shifted the balance of the bargain to an unreasonable degree. The bathwater is getting murky, but that isn't an incentive to throw the baby out. On a side tangent -- why is it copyright law, to the exclusion of damn near anything else -- singled out for wholesale execution so frequently ? I mean, we've got plenty of flawed systems in the world -- governments, economic systems, tax laws, medicine, law, etc., where reasonable people tend to agree that although the system is fucked, its in need of service, not abolition. Only copyright law seems to be evil enough to inspire anarchy among otherwise law-respecting groups of people. Carey
