Spider Robinson wrote an interesting story about this issue of continually extending copyrights called “Melancholy Elephants”.
Here’s a link to the story on Spider’s blog
Hey, I agree that Cory has a point, and that it’s a useful metaphor. Just like I agree that the word “stolen” is useful when talking about things like hacked & leaked celebrity nudes and hacked & leaked Sony documents. But whenever people use “stolen” in that context, commenters here frequently jump in to say that you can’t steal copyright because it isn’t what they consider property. This was my point.
The U.S. supreme court says piracy is not stealing. Who are we to say otherwise?
Where have they said that?
They’ve more clearly said that Copyright is legal and constitutional (and thus presumably not stealing), so who is Cory to say otherwise?
Here?
And I might argue that piracy doesn’t steal anything from the rights holders, but preventing something from falling into public domain after a reasonable period of exclusivity does deny the public the freedom of the work that they’ve earned by granting and enforcing that exclusivity for a reasonable period of time. Quid pro quo?
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This is very US-centred. The 1976 Act effectively brought US copyright law into the Berne Convention system, taking effect in 1978 and reducing the copyright term on some works. The old 28 years plus renewal for 28 years can be longer than the 50-years post mortem protection of the Berne Convention. And at least one of the authors listed is still alive and working, so the particular book is still under copyright, world-wide, and there’s been no extension since the 1976 Act which makes any difference,
There are arguments that the 50-year term of the Berne Convention is too long, and the old 28-year basic term of the US system is enough to provide for an author’s children. I do have my doubts over the extensions to the Berne term in the EU, the USA, and some other countries.
But the USA is not the whole world, and it’s about time you Americans stopped behaving as though it was.
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
Obviously, the contours of the quid pro quo are mostly set by Congress, acting within the scope of the constitution, so it’s not like there is some Platonic quid pro quo.
If you’re going to recognize that rights holders have been granted a period of exclusivity, then it seems that piracy does steal that period of exclusivity from the rights holders. If I have a 99 year lease on a piece of property, I can usually enforce my rights of exclusivity on that property even if I am not using it and even if others can use it without harming my interest in it.
More to the point, if extending the period of exclusivity ifs theft, then isn’t the shortening/elimination of exclusivity through piracy also theft?
I’m not sure that the public has “earned” access to works after a set number of years so much as they’ve earned the creation of those works in the first place. That’s the quid. The exclusivity is the quo we paid for for that quid.
Its so much more fun to nitpick they hyperbole as you said before. The ridiculousness is further compounded by
- “stole” being in the wrong tense, Shouldn’t it be “will have stolen from you in 2015”?
- How can something I never had be stolen from me in the first place?
On the plus side, the internet has made a mockery of such shit.
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