0:19
“Copying is a practice that people have been doing for hundreds of billions of years…”
If you were an active user of this site, and not just a troll, you would already know the answer to that question.
I suppose if you were an active user of this site you would realize that these guys likely have little to say about copyright that hasn’t been rehashed here ad infinitum.
All well and good. No one likes to be called a thief – at least where I come from. But hey, I go to lot of trouble making my YouTube videos and taking my photographs, which appear o the Web in some form or another. How do I ever know someone isn’t just taking them and using them for some purpose that I didn’t intend?
But that’s fine with me. I don’t do these things to show off my talents in the hopes of making money, or even CREATE THEM for the PURPOSE of making money.
Why would it not be possible to have a behind-the-scenes micropayment system that covers EVERYTHING? Whether that be copying a photo I posted to Flickr or a YouTube video I linked to on my blog.
If such a behind-the scenes-system – say, something you sign up for ONCE and never bothers you again, except to say in a nice way “Your funds are running low!” would AUTOMATICALLY take one, maybe two cents out of your "account, without you being aware of it but knowing that it is doing so, every time you view a YouTube video – COMMERCIAL OR NOT!!, and sending it to the registered party’s “account.” In this way, 10,000 YouTube hits of your cat playing with your baby would put $100 in your account.
Me listening to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th on YouTube would automatically send one cent to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s “account.” Every time I replayed it.
Why is this hard to implement? Sure, it would be a vast project, but my God, iTunes was a vast project. Surely, I do NOT want to spend $576 on the latest version of Photoshop. But I don’t use it every day. How about every time I booted it and used it for more than ten minutes, every ten minutes thereafter, two cents would disappear from my “account?”
I don’t know what deal Brian Epstein got the Beatles for royalties on their first few albums. It could not have been much, now in hindsight releasing what amazing treasures they ended up being. But Beethoven got nothing every time some idiot played his Missa Solemnis a continent away.
Why, instead of this constant “You stole it from me! No I didn’t, I’ve bought it a hundred times in other forms, why should I pay you again?” bullshit, we just install this system of micro payments?
I’d put $100 into my account today, only if it let me listen to Jan Akkerman’s “10,000 Clowns on a Rainy Day” for a year any time I wanted to.
I feel like this might be a good time to mention that, when it comes to videos, BoingBoing and Youtube use a LOT of JavaScript. To most people, that probably doesn’t matter. To a person who doesn’t want potentially malicious and/or non-free code running on his/her computer without permission, and uses the NoScript add-on for Firefox, this is kind of a pain. Not to mention that I hate the hell out of cookies.
In order to watch that video, I had to allow 5 different scripts. 1 for BoingBoing, 2 for a site called Embedly (which looks like it just puts that static-y wall over the video window), and 2 for Youtube. After that I had to copy the video url and paste it into VLC. It’s quite a process.
You can change the site around if you want, to make things a little easier. But I’d like to propose another solution:
Just paste a link to the video. That way, I can copy the link and paste it into VLC and not deal with a bunch of annoying scripts and cookies. No messing with the code. Just some common courtesy.
And back to the topic at hand: I’m excited about this video series. I love Nina Paley, cartoons, CC/Public Domain art, and copying. I’m always looking for more.
Thank you for tolerating my WOT,
Chris
Yeah, I know. That was a figure of speech, for what it’s worth (typically called hyperbole).
Just what we need: a series about copyright that unashamedly employs earnestly-delivered hyperbole. You know, because disclaimers that something was “not intended to be a factual statement” are entirely valid and uncontroversial in such contexts.
If that is the case, then I do not find that they employ it effectively.
Oooo ya got me!
sounds like you are making a lot of work for yourself. i also use noscript, and i use noscript’s amazing ability to selectively choose which sources are trusted, so you can choose to allow boingboing, embedly, and youtube. since i trust contest from all three of those sites, everything works as it should. voila, no risk and no muss.
because even the creators of noscript couldn’t imagine the dire world of an internet without javascript they specifically designed their plugin to allow you to be most productive and whitelist trusted sources while blocking unknown, new, or untrusted sources. You too can live in a modern internet world while still being protected, you can use NoScript, and still have javascript enabled for sites that are well known and who’s content is trusted, even on those sites third party content will be blocked until you choose to trust it or not. safe and convenient, you don’t have to choose. amazing.
To me, that kind of defeats the purpose. I don’t regard Youtube content as trusted. Rather, I regard it as sometimes necessary, and not always something I need my browser wasting time trying to load, not to mention contributing metrics to a company that I don’t care for all that much. And I don’t want to permanently allow Embedly because I’ve never even heard of them. I don’t know what they do. Why is there a company dedicated to puting pointless static walls over videos? Why is there so much code getting between me and a 3-minute video? (I know, they make it easier to embed videos. But I think the point still stands.)
I have a lot of sites permanently allowed by Noscript. BoingBoing is actually one of them. As far as I can tell, the JS on this site make Jackhammer Jill bounce up and down and loads more posts when I get to the bottom of a page.
The problem with the Modern Internet world is that it was supposed to look like this, not like this.
I know these kinds of comments can be annoying. I’m sorry to be a thorn in anyone’s side. It’s just…Has anyone ever had the pleasure of wget-ing a video? The simplicity is almost a religious experience.
Point taken. For the record, we got caught up in getting the shots (time was scarce) and failed to notice said non-factual statement until the video got into editing. Thanks for the feedback & we’ll be paying much more attention to stuff like this in the future.
I whitelist sites, but it’s really annoying when a site like BB update things and break everything. Getting the comments to work here is hell (had to add type kit a short while ago, and some recent update to discourse seems to have broken something on firefox, even with all scripts allowed), and when you load a page with dozens of blocked scripts it’s often very difficult to determine from the domain names which ones are required to show the media and which ones are more interested in harvesting your data or serving you ads.
I donated to this very worthy cause. Thanks for the heads up Cory @doctorow !
God TOTALLY ripped off the idea for the current universe from a previous cosmological cycle.
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