Posts by Matthew Poole
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Ian: there may also be a question of proportionality. People are allowed to use reasonable force in defence of their lives or those of others. They're not allowed to use force to defend property, because we're Not Bloody Merkins.
From what the Police have said, some degree of force in defence of property is accepted. I suspect that's in relation to s52 and s53 of the Crimes Act, which provide for "defence of movable property" by way of "reasonable force", but require that the defender "does not strike or do bodily harm to" the offender. So beating someone with a hockey stick doesn't count.
Also, on the "Not Bloody Merkins" note, s55 actually provides for the use of "such force as is necessary" to prevent someone breaking and entering into a dwellinghouse. It's not quite lethal force, but you're well within the law to punch or kick someone to stop them breaking into your house.
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And now to the Otara thing. When I read that Herald article this morning my instant reaction was that I'd love the stick a clue-by-four up McVicar's fundamental orifice. Sideways. I've since realised that getting it past his head could be a problem, but where there's a will there's a way.
I always assumed that the police had a good reason to charge the shopkeeper. Contrary to public opinion, bringing charges against people who defend themselves isn't usually a vindictive act. It's frequently about making a specific point. In the gun shop case (Carvelli?), the point was that it's not OK for gun shop owners to keep a loaded firearm handy in order to afford themselves protection. I imagine that this case will have some similar point, probably that the shopkeeper went looking for trouble, with a hockey stick, rather than just trying to apprehend a shoplifter. Note that I'm speculating here, and have no information as to what the actual reason is. We will, no doubt, find out in due course.
Kudos to Miller for his public retraction. Shame that McVicar's too stupid to know when he's backing a losing horse. Though I guess it's possible that no matter what the outcome of the prosecution the general public opinion will be that the shopkeeper was prosecuted for defending his property, and I imagine that McVicar will do his damnedest to ensure that that's how it plays out.
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I wish anyone good luck should they try and explore any copyright held by the Oxford Union.
And just to deal with this, the odds are that the answer is "none, whatsoever". Unless it was a scripted debate, and OLU wrote the scripts, they're simply a venue. A debate isn't usually a performance, since the basis doesn't usually doesn't qualify as a literary work. There needs to be some kind of structured, recorded (as in written down, or similar) beforehand, on which the performance is based, and IME debaters don't talk closely to a prepared script.
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Depends what you mean by "they made".
In this case, that they showed up to the debate with a mic and a tape recorder, and actually took down the audio signals themselves (or by way of an agent).
If they have a copy taken off a TV feed, then it may be that TVNZ authorised them to take a recording. Or they may even have been given a copy of the audio track. As I have demonstrated, ownership of copyright is a messy, messy subject. When you're dealing in a non-performance that occurred a decade before the current Copyright Act was written, it's getting even murkier. UK copyright law is more useful to us than our own, and I have no desire to try and establish what the situation with copyright law was in the UK at the time of the debate. Then there's retroactive changes and all the other legislative fuckery that makes such things a decidedly non-trivial exercise, certainly one that's far beyond my degree of care (and really, really stretching my ability to trace drafting and implementation changes in legislation).
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Why are the police, no matter how "unlightly" they work, charging a person for protecting themselves, their family and their property?
We will doubtless find out once the case has been to court. Their reasons are sufficiently compelling to made a retired senior detective retract his earlier statements on the matter, which should be a good enough for anyone who gives a damn about lawful behaviour, as opposed to simple media-incited knee-jerking.
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If a talk is taped by a media organisation, does the copyright sit with the media or the speaker. Do groups like the Oxford Union have their speakers sign a release that transfers the copyright?
Or is the "creative input" of turning up and getting the levels right enough to acquire copyright?
A person who records a performance has copyright in that recording. The copyright in the performed material rests with various people, or nobody, depending on various things. For a debate, which is generally somewhat off-the-cuff, there's no performance copyright since there's no base literary work, as opposed to a play, or even a speech or lecture.
So, to give you a quick answer, yes, "turning up and getting the levels right" is enough to get copyright in your recording. But absent an exclusivity agreement, you cannot do anything to stop others making their own recordings, and the makers of those other recordings are the holders of their own copyrights in those recordings.
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Take for example an artwork. The artist paints it, they have copyright. Someone buys it, they have copyright. A photographer takes a photo of it, they have copyright. A book publishes the photo, they have copyright. All four of those people/organisations have copyrights over the version that appears in the book. Copyright of the original artwork however rests with the artist and the owner.
No, wrong. A person who buys the painting does not get a copyright right over it, unless the artist assigns the copyright to the purchaser. By default, that doesn't happen. A person who commissions an artwork holds the copyright in the resulting commissioned work, but a person who simply buys an artwork that's already been created doesn't.
For the photographer, and the book publisher, while they do indeed hold copyright over their works (which in the case of the publisher is the copyright in the cover layout, not the copyright in the photo, unless they commissioned the photo in which case the bit above about commissioned works applies) they don't hold copyright over the original painting. They are also breaching copyright if they use their copies in the absence of a licence from the copyright holder, which in this case would be the artist.If TVNZ recorded the speech with their cameras, they have copyright over that recording, though it possibly also rests with David Lange's estate, and the Oxford Union.
Debates are a tricky one. If the debaters talk from preprepared notes, then they have copyright in their notes. Anyone recording the debate has copyright in their own recordings. A body organising a debate can grant exclusive recording rights to a particular person, but the breach by another person who also records the debate would be breach of contract, not breach of copyright, since the organising body doesn't hold copyright in the debate itself (unless it's a TV show that involves scripts and the like, in which case the studio holds the copyright in the show format).
In the case of the OLU debate, if the Archives have a recording that they made, or to which they have been assigned the copyright, then well and good. But if they merely have a copy of someone else's recording, then they have no copyright in that recording and are actually breaching copyright by charging for its use. However, given that it's the Archives, you can be pretty sure that they'll have the copyright issue well under control.
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Lyndon, you get copyright in their descriptions. For "real" characters (think the Hardy Boys, or the members of Tom Clancy's Ryan-verse) the bar is very high because the descriptions are of a non-imaginary base character. For imaginary characters, like the Lord of the Rings characters, their separation from reality lowers the bar.
In reality, you're never quite sure where the line lies until you've been sued and a judge has ruled. Look at the lawsuit over whether or not Rowling ripped off the idea for Harry Potter.
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Craig, I wasn't even aware of that situation. Of course there's a benefit, but it's also a rather unusual circumstance. Plus, if Peter Pan wasn't wildly successful, it wouldn't be much of a benefit to society that Great Ormond was entitled to royalties in the sum of fuck-all-of-nothing.
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Matthew Poole et al- tell me why anyone should have the right to use my words in other media for their own benefit without paying me for the use of those words? During the copyright period? (Or my estate once I'm dead?) And, my words sometimes make memorable characters which are my property too...
When did I ever say that they should have that right? Again, and again, and again, I've said that I'm not against copyright in its entirety. This is at least the sixth time I've said so!
What I'm against is the current durations, which ignore the social compact that gives rise to copyright in the first place. Copyright is a "You scratch my back, I scratch yours" arrangement. It's not necessary to have copyright in order to create. Look at ancient cave paintings, or Maori carvings. Created in the absence of copyright, so clearly copyright is not a prerequisite to creation. That's why I say that copyright isn't a natural right. It might be a matter of natural justice that you get compensated for your work, but it's not copyright that makes you create. This post is copyrighted, and will remain so for, currently, 50 years after my death, but I'd write it even if someone could use it tomorrow.If copyright terms were reasonable, I'd have no objection to them being willable. But I don't consider them even vaguely reasonable. If copyright were my earlier-suggested 33 years, and you died tomorrow, I'd have absolutely no problem with your estate getting such royalties as may come due from work you did yesterday, for the next 33 years. But after those 33 years are up, your work becomes available to all and sundry. That's what you give to society in return for the state granting you a monopoly, including supplying systems for enforcement of said monopoly, on control and use of your works.
Regarding unique characters, the way to keep them under copyright is to reuse them. If they only appear in a single work, then they're probably not going to be highly-recognisable and highly-sought-after. But if they appear in a series, the above value attaches to them, under the caveat that they won't come into the public domain until copyright expires in the last work in which they appeared.