There’s nothing recent about the concept of intellectual property. The cymbal market, for example, is dominated by a family which has kept a metallurgical trade secret for almost 400 years.
Yes, I do what? Whats the point?
@bwv812 I actually bet a co-worker that you’d personally reply to my post, so thank you right off of the bat. Our previous discussions demonstrate the vast gap in our thoughts on these subjects…as you know I am not a proponent of Big Thought and I am pro intellectual and creative freedom.
Yes, classically trade secrets were kept through secrecy, as were all secrets, kinda why they are called secrets. The whole point of secrets is you can’t own thoughts, so if you want to control it you have to keep it to yourself. You can find similar stories on the optics industry and Germany, or sword making in Japan, etc. If you had a secret formula you guarded it because if the information got out, you no longer owned nor had control over it, because no one had the audacity to believe that you could own a though or concept once it was public. Even so it doesn’t mean that such secrets were a good thing, often they set advancements back, sometimes hundreds of years as the optics in Germany did to the field of astronomy.
If you read up on the concept of Intellectual Property, it is usually traced back to the mid 1800’s, whether or not you consider that recent is up to you, but that is when most credible sources date its origins to. The two notable exceptions listed in the Stanford Law Encyclopedia were 1 year monopolies granted to Greek confection makers in the colony of Sybaris, and the Roman law of attribution, which allowed free use of any text so long as one attributed the original creator, similar to how the awesome Creative Commons works today.
The concept of Intellectual Property is a failed thought experiment, we are much better off living in a world of unfettered freedom of intellect and creativity and innovation.
@Ashen_Victor is answering your question which he quotes directly above, YES you can release Star Wars remixed items: Amazon.ca And yes you should be able to.
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You asked some questions and I answered them. Yes, you should be allowed to remix anything.
And THAT is the point.
Intellectual Property laws nowadays are insane.
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Damn! You were faster than me… 
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I couldn’t agree more!
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I’ve translated Cory’s novels into simplified Chinese without his or his publisher’s permission or knowledge (all in the name of “promot[ing] creativity and increas[ing] our access to knowledge and culture”) and they’re selling quite well on the mainland. I was worried that there might be some kind of problem over this, but the article above has taken a weight off my mind!
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Next headline: Bowie bowing under Boing Boing’s booing.
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B-fucking-zinga!
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Nice try, but Cory’s books are all cc licensed and translating them in to Chinese (or another language, or reciting from space) is permissible without permission. Encouraged, actually; http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/remixes/
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Do you even understand what the CC license means at that link?
The “selling” part would be a violation of the CC license if I’m not mistaken.
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I thought the general rule was that once it’s on the internet, it’s on there forever.
Hadfield wasn’t selling his cover. Or wait, are we arguing about the logical fallacy of @sdfrost’s inaccurate analogy? Sorry, I confused this for a rational discussion.
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Who is this Bowie guy?
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Ha! It’s not very far from what most people commenting on this post believe should be able to happen.
Morally? Morally, the concepts both of a government enforced monopoly and of the ability to prevent others from doing something between consenting individuals with no harm to any of the parties involved so that a third party may benefits are both vastly immoral and repugnant. It is a violation of our inherent rights - to freedom of of speech and of action.
Much like prison, though, we agree as a society that exceptions to morality can be made in limited circumstances for hopefully pragmatic purposes.
Copyright is a pragmatic violation of both morality and good law, recognized as such because it is worthwhile for the government to encourage culture even at the expense of a temporary curtailing of our rights.
The “right” amount is the amount we agree best promotes the creation, distribution, and advancement of culture. This is a democracy, of course - the exact amount is up to debate. But this modern notion that the government has some sort of moral obligation to limit freedom is absurd, and does not serve us well.
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Keeping innovations secret absolutely was a setback. Patents are supposed to work against that though by encouraging disclosure. In exchange for making inventions public patents give a temporary monopoly, and when that monopoly is up all the details are out in the open. If cymbal makers had gotten patents when they came up with a cool new alloy centuries ago we’d now know exactly what it was.
I myself would go back at least to 1787 seeing as Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution grants the Congress the power:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Perhaps not the best example of untrammeled re-mixing seeing as the cover shows trademarks for Star Wars and Darth Vader and the copyright page clearly states Lucasfilm owns the copyright and granted permission for use. If Lucasarts had said “no” there would not have been a published book.
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Look, there is not good answer to this problem. Here’s how it works:
With copyright - Somebody makes something worthwhile, rich people buy the rights and sue anyone who makes something based on it or something substantially similar.
Without copyright - Somebody makes something worthwhile, rich people recreate it and sell it and the author gets nothing.
The problem is that neither model is immune to being conquered and exploited by people with tons of money to the detriment of everyone - shocking! Right now we have a model that actively stifles creation by the many so that a small number of creators can get massively wealthy (like, let’s say Bowie). To me, that doesn’t sound like the best choice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, lawmakers do think that is the best choice
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Trade Secrets are a form of intellectual property. And yes, they were kept secret because there is no way to put the cat back in the bag. Of course, keeping things secret is even less productive to society than limited grants of monopoly, which is what copyright and patent protections are. In the absence of copyright and patent, we would see a lot more attempts to keep things secret, and a lot less (reverse-engineerable) pharmaceutical research and tech research.
The current formulation and duration of copyright and patent may be problematic, but they are attempts to answer a very real problem: the public good market failure that would otherwise make information/formulas/ideas/expressions worthless once published, which in turn encourages secrecy and under-production unless there is a way to ensure this IP is protected. [quote=“GlyphGryph, post:80, topic:31696”]
Morally? Morally, the concepts both of a government enforced monopoly and of the ability to prevent others from doing something between consenting individuals with no harm to any of the parties involved so that a third party may benefits are both vastly immoral and repugnant.
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But what is “no harm to any of the parties involved”? Authors may have moral objections to how their work is repurposed (Saving Mr. Banks is a good illustration of this), and in Europe authors generally have the moral right to be identified as the author. Is anyone harmed in the making of revenge porn? Sex photoshops? Celebrity sex photoshops? Who gets to draw where the line is drawn?
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Just because you can list examples of things that are questionably harm is not an argument that copyright accomplishes any sort of harm prevention. Where the line is drawn on an unrelated issue (revealing private affairs, presumably attempting to deceive audiences in such a way as to harm a third parties reputation) doesn’t really… have anything to do with copyright?
“Moral Objections” are certainly not harm, else I’d be harming countless people, I’m sure, in the bedroom and with my friends pretty regularly. I have “moral objections” to people taking down videos like this one, significant ones, but the only “harm” to me that’s going to result from that is self-inflicted, if there’s any harm at all.
Accreditation (and it’s friend plagiarism) is also generally a very different issue than copyright, and I don’t think it is relevant to the current discussion. Laws regarding accreditation are a significantly smaller infringement on freedoms and violation of other moral values, and thus the place to draw the line could easily be quite different.
If you believe copyright is a moral right, somehow, I’d be quite interested in seeing you justify it.
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