Posts by Matthew Poole
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If the sole benefit is the work's existence, then surely the second a book goes out of print, or a painting is sold, copyright should cease to exist? After all, the artist has now received as much money for the work as they ever will
No, artists can continue to get financial benefit from their work for as long as they have copyright. If you want to reproduce a painting, you have to get the permission of the artist, no matter who owns the actual artwork. You most likely have to get the permission of the owner of the work as well.
I was referring to the benefit to society, not the benefit to the artist (and like Keir I'm use "artist" in its broad sense, not the "fine arts" sense). Obviously there's potential benefit to the artist for as long as copyright is in effect, but I'm extremely leery about granting state-sanctioned monopolies that have no concomitant benefit to society as a whole. Which is, pretty much, the summation of my entire objection to a life-plus copyright term.
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Good ideas are also in short supply, and are therefore valuable.
Yes, they are. But if you happen to have the good idea first, and I can't prove that I had it without being exposed to your work (and with the internet, that's a pretty tough ask), then you've got a monopoly on expressing the idea in the same way. If the idea happens to have been patented, then I cannot even use the independent discovery defence. If you've got copyright in a musical composition, I cannot use more than two or three bars, especially if they're vaguely distinctive, without infringing copyright. I cannot have that song playing recognisably in the background of a movie, even if it's just on in a shop that I walk past, without having to get permission. I cannot take a photo of your painting and publish it without your permission. If a certain Auckland sculptor gets his way, I won't be able to take photos of installed public sculptures (the thing that looks like part of a buried building, on Ponsonby Rd, is actually a sculpture) and then use those photos, that I took, without your permission. Well, not for another 50-or-more years, anyway.
So while good ideas may be in short supply, it doesn't necessarily justify locking them up for many decades. We should be thankful that it's not possible to copyright the formula for a story (be it a move, a play, or a novel), because then we'd really be in the poo.
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Because artists are denied the immediate lump sum payment corresponding to the long term advantage that society derives from their work. In exchange, artists are promised that society will pay when the work is used. The artist earned the money at the point of creation, and then receives that over the life-plus-50.
But isn't part of the benefit that the work can be used as a base for future works? Plenty of material out there today has its genesis in works that have passed into the public domain. As I posited above, how much the poorer would society be if the works of Shakespeare and Mozart weren't available for all and sundry to build upon? If the sole benefit is the work's existence, then surely the second a book goes out of print, or a painting is sold, copyright should cease to exist? After all, the artist has now received as much money for the work as they ever will (I'll ignore the French system for art works), so why keep the monopoly around?
That's pretty well exactly equivalent to buying a bond and living off the interest -- society is given something of value and then repays over time. The artist earned that money and can thus bequeath it, whereas the cleaner hasn't and therefore can't.
Yes, but the bond is used to finance something else again. It's not just goods-for-money, it's money-for-money-for-goods-and-or-services. The money raised by the bond goes into producing yet another asset, benefiting more people. This is part of where trying to conflate real and intellectual property breaks down, and why I won't argue on points that are basically "But it works this way for real property."
Yet you bitched about a scenario where 20 years after the author was dead, there was still a copyright.
So? That suddenly shortens the term from life-plus-50 to life-plus-20 just on my say-so? I was raising a random gripe, I wasn't trying to suggest a scenario that's based on the precise statutory situation.
As for your marbles, patents and copyrights are from the same family. They're a statute-granted monopoly on use of the product of an intellectual exercise. Comparing the terms is completely valid, since the only reason they exist at all is by action of the law. Inventions have a clear benefit to society, or at least that's the rationale behind protecting them through the patent monopoly. Works of art, literature and music also benefit society, through cultural enrichment, but if they remain (effectively) forever out of reach for others to make use of them, how much of their real benefit is realised? Copyright is so broad and restrictive, in its current form, that much of our popular culture is out of bounds to even our children.
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The offender appears to have no criminal history
Interesting point: has that been verified?
Sorry, my bad. Misremembered this article. He wasn't on bail or parole. The way it's written suggests that he may have been "known to the police", as they say.
Either way, if he wasn't out on bail or parole it says that he's not the kind of habitual offender that McVicar et al get so worked up about.
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The point is that if you create a house or an artwork, you should, normally, be able to retain the income from it. The Supply of land has as much to do with this as does the supply of pencils.
If you want to try and conflate IP and real property, then go for your life. Me, I'm going to stick with arguing about one or t'other. Copyright lets you stop others from creating something like something that you've created, but in theory ideas and expressions should be limitless. Real property is a tangible, finite resource. Once I own a section of land, it's only available for your ownership if I'm prepared to sell it. That land's not going away, but there's no more to be made once all the land's used up, either (reclamation's hardly a sustainable alternative).
You cannot argue about one and then bring in the other. They're totally distinct concepts. Scarcity, etc, comes into play with real property because I cannot own something that you own, and vice versa. But ideas aren't constrained in the same way. If you really think you can bring real property laws into the IP realm, I'm just going to give up the argument. -
The families of artists who earn very little from their work are more important than the families of other low-income earners,
I don't think anybody said that; you may want to check your sources.Not directly, no, but I've asked several times why the family of an artist should be entitled to this state-sanctioned income stream that isn't available to others who may be subsisting through their income-earning years. Since nobody's engaged on that point, I had to draw the conclusion that you think the families of cleaners and other minimum-wage earners are of less significance than the families of artists. After all, I don't see you demanding that Spotless Services have to keep paying the wages of any of their employees who die while in their employ just because their low incomes meant they couldn't provide for their family's future financial security.
far in excess of a human lifetime
20 years isn't very far in excessIt's not a 20-year monopoly, it's currently a life-plus-50-years monopoly, and if we sign an FTA with the US you can be sure it'll become life-plus-70 or such longer period as gets passed into US law the next time Mickey is on the verge of becoming public property. It hasn't been 20 years for quite a long time. 20 years is for patents, and most people think that's quite long enough. Which raises another question: why are artistic works of greater value than inventions? I'm not going to improve healthcare outcomes with a nice painting or a good book, but I might invent a new type of dressing (as has been done with manuka honey recently) or a better type of suture. Right now I only get 20 years to make money off those, then the world at large can use them and I'm not entitled to a cent. Do you want patent terms to be extended too, to match copyright terms?
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So are we arguing whether copyright should exist at all, or are we arguing about duration?
I thought I'd made it perfectly clear that my objection is not to the existence of copyright. For the third time, I accept that creators are entitled to be paid for their efforts. Rather, I object to the ridiculous terms currently provided by statute. My heart doesn't bleed for the "poor songwriters" of the UK who only get copyright in their lyrics for 50 years. If you can't make money off something when you've got a monopoly right over it for that long, what's going to have changed in 20 years' time?
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Matthew, you ask, "What needs to change that would have prevented this latest tragedy?"
Well, read my response. You don't expect to be spoon-fed, do you?
I've read it, again, and I'm still unsure what you think the police should've done to prevent it. Yes, yes, I know you wank on about societal changes, etc, but the reality is that a man like Austin Hemmings is unlikely to have been carrying a weapon of his own. So unless you've got some way of removing weapons from society, this self-defence notion only goes so far. In its absence, we're back to relying on the police for protection, and so, again, I ask you what you would have had them do differently to prevent this? The offender appears to have no criminal history, so you can't be blaming the courts and/or police for him being out on the streets. At 40-something he's a product of the time before the DPB, too, so you can't be blaming his DPB mum.
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Peter, you say "the focus of the law must change". Fine. What needs to change that would have prevented this latest tragedy? If you want to demand a change, you need to at least have an idea of what needs to happen to effect that change. Moving from a focus on victimisers to victims is all well and good, but what's that supposed to do when an offender has no history with the police? How would that stop the apartment-building slayings?
Are you proposing, as Russell has termed it, a "policeman at the dinner table"? Because that's pretty much what it would take, and even then there's no certainty. How would you prevent the double-homicide in Karaka, where a car was used as a weapon? No police history with that offender either.
Oh, and is that 51 murders, or 51 homicides? Because homicide includes manslaughter, and 51 actual murders by this point in the year would extrapolate to a never-before-seen year-on-year increase of about 50%. Our long-term murder rate (as opposed to year-on-year variation, which can be positive one year and negative the next) is declining, since the absolute number stays static while the population is increasing. But you already knew that, right?
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Keir, what about shares?
I've talked repeatedly about financial (mis)management. If you've got shares that you can will to your dependants, then you've obviously taken some steps to ensure future financial security. You're not relying on the work you did today to give them security, you've turned the rewards from that work into another income stream. There's nothing to stop a creator from doing the exact same thing. I seriously doubt that J.K. Rowling or John Grisham will have estates composed solely of the rights to income from their published works, and, indeed, if they do then they've got grossly incompetent financial advisers.
The family of a doctor who pioneers some breakthrough technique cannot rest on that particular laurel once that doctor passes on. If that doctor hasn't turned their income into a durable asset, their family is out in the cold. Without putting too fine a point on it, as much as I value literature and art I value medicine a whole hell of a lot more. But the arguments presented thus far say that the family of the doctor is of less import than the family of the writer or the painter.