Posts by Stephen Judd
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Speaker: Losing cultural treasures under…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I certainly don’t know much about the extent of copyright.
It’s already really, really long – much longer than it was when it was first invented. If your Mum died tomorrow, which of course we hope she won’t, her work is still protected for another 50 years. 80 years for something to enter public domain is a very long time.
About your Mum’s books being out of print, I get it. But consider the case where the artist has given up the copyright to a publisher who just doesn’t give a shit, or who went bust, or sold it on to another company that no longer regards (books or music or whatever) as its core business.
And in the end, this lobbying isn’t for creators like your Mum. It’s for a few large companies to continue extracting value from portfolios they own for even longer than they currently do. Keeping our terms at the already very long limit of death + 50 years isn’t going to hurt your Mum in the slightest. Those large companies always point to small artists and act all altruistic and cry crocodile tears, but that’s a bullshit front.
I come back to: copyright is an artificial good we've created for public policy reasons. No different to say, fishing quota. It's an impudent demand on the public that we be barred from making new stuff out of old for even longer, with no corresponding public benefit.
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Speaker: Losing cultural treasures under…, in reply to Jeremy Malcolm,
I favour the Brazilian approach, where if a copyright work is not available after a certain term, the copyright lapses. In this way a incredible trove of Brazilian popular music from decades ago, where the publishers are defunct or don't care, is slowly becoming available again.
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Speaker: Losing cultural treasures under…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
A lot of use of copyright is not by listening or watching, but by making a new work out of them: quoting, sampling, retelling, reframing, whatever.
You can't just say dear owner, here's my money, now I'm going to make a derived work, and then do it. The owner may not let you, or they may demand more than you can afford. Or worse, and this can happen, you can't find the current owner, and you are either stymied or obliged to hope that you won't get sued out of the blue.
This is how long copyright terms retard cultural development.
The original intent of copyright was to provide an incentive for people to create, because creation is a public good. Now, it's grown to the point where it's an impediment to creation. We all know that the real reason terms have grown in the US is so large corporate holders can maintain their monopoly on popular franchises, and we need to understand that while this is good for them it harms the rest of us.
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Ooh ooh oooh I got one.
A bad look.
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The hacker known as "Rawshark".
Leadership.
Akshully.
Capital gain.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to NSA,
Anyway no offence intended Stephen and my apologies for any that was caused.
GROUP HUG! Seriously, I was stewing a bit doing the vacuuming just now and I appreciate this.
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I've never been employed by Fairfax. I have run the team that does the tech side of Stuff for Fairfax, working for Catalyst. Hasn't been my gig for about three years though. Of course I am a bit sensitive to the implication that my colleagues have fallen down on the job. And I hope it was useful to lay out what actually happened -- maybe your grandma isn't reading this, but clearly you are and could pass it on.
I do love the irony of being accused of "insinuations" in a comment dripping with speculation about my motives.
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For the record: Stuff, per se, was not hacked.
Stuff, like many other sites, uses a service called Gigya to do so-called social login and provide commenting services. Gigya’s DNS records were compromised last night – not sure how that happened – and that enabled someone to make gigya.com point to the wrong servers. Therefore when sites that used Gigya loaded, they served up some Javascript from the SEA.
The (tech security) moral of the story is that securing your site is not enough: if you include code from 3rd parties, you are vulnerable to their problems, whatever they are.