UK student faces U.S. extradition in copyright case

[K. A. Pital]

So I don't think I'm on board with your ideas, Stas.

Stopping the copying of books of all things is the hardest and least possible part of that whole copyright affair, due to the protected status so-called "Internet Libraries" enjoy in some parts of the world. So regardless of whether I really think that book writers should be able to live by royalties (which I think is not the only possible model), this is the really impractical part.

The former model strikes me as a great cruelty to artists; the latter strikes me as impractical because it discourages people from taking the time to perfect their art.

I might be cruel to authors, but so what? People are cruel to inventors as well, and much more so. They demand their works to be public domain. If you make a great cultural contribution, why should it be any more protected than a great invention? For the reason of non-essential nature of the contribution? But if we accept that with the rise of industrial society culture becomes an equally important sphere of public welfare, and education and culture are absolutely necessary for the advanced society, should we not treat books the same way? I would note that the destruction of copyright, for example, would make the world of scientific literature a lot more interconnected, since articles, books, experiment results could be shared without fear of copyright reprisals. And in fact, such initiatives already exist. Scientific works are written by people who get a wage from the higher education institutions or scientific institutions they're a part of, and do not rely on remunerations from sales.

On the other hand, the bans and witch-hunts against internet libraries are the worst type of copyright hunts, much worse than hunts against movie- or music-copies, since the latter are far less essential to educational development and cultural development than books.

Everyone seems to be taking it as gospel that copyright restrains and damages culture. I ask again, other than restricting distribution, how does it do that? If restricting distribution is the only problem, well, then we should probably agree to disagree, because I do not see ANY way to move to your system without completely restructuring society (something I know that you support). Myself, I tend to be skeptical of drastic, unprecedented, changes (although I do acknowledge that somebody has to do something first).

Restriction of distribution is damage. Why don't you ban libraries, since they distribute a non-material right to universal access to copies, often without any fee? Also, "unprecended"? Free libraries, freely written books (put by their own authors on the net) and free education as a system of sharing scientific knowledge without access restrictions operate for quite a while. And their operation has been a massive success with hundreds of thousands if not millions of people accessing the knowledge, the literary heritage and so on and so forth.

Before the internet, and more particularly digital distribution, this entire line of reasoning would have been looked at as insane. Libraries were maintained as a public service, but everyone knew that they were a money sink.

"Money sink"? The role of public libraries in the elimination of illiteracy and advancement of knowledge among the working class is not to be underestimated. It is these public libraries and university libraries which universities themselves rely on. Are you willing to shove the cost onto universities? Are universities and higher education itself a "money sink"? What sort of insane bullshit is that! The benefit from advanced knowledge to humanity and its industrial economy has been much greater than any spending on libraries, internet, universities or all of them together.

So you think that arthouse movies should be the only ones made? Think about what site you're on.

I said that blockbusters will also survive unless they tank at the box office, you can't replace a cinema trip experience with a poorly made screen copy after all. So blockbusters and arthouse films survive. "Direct to DVD" and crap which relies on DVD sales to survive will die. Is that a huge price for freedom? Pardon me, but movies which don't make enough money at the box office are either (a) arthouse (in which case losses are accepted beforehand) (b) crap (in which case they should fucking die).

I suspect that you'd have a lot fewer bands if they can't at least partially offset the costs.

Fewer but better? Works for me. As you know, the advent of radio and TV basically killed thousands of so-called "little theatres" which operated in villages, small towns et cetera with actors who acted too bad for a big city theatre but good enough for the unwashed peons. If the digital age kills mediocrity, it does us a service thereby.

Yes, some of the greatest masterpieces were created with no intention of profit, but most of them weren't.

My random picker tells me that quite a few of the "greatest masterpieces" were created without any intention of profit or, even if they had such an intention, they failed to gather the profits. Writes do not have any superiority over inventors - scientists, chemists, etc., if the latter have their author's right revoked in just 5 years, so shall the writers. They are no privileged caste, and neither should they ever be.

I don't see it that way at all, I see it as you being willing to virtually end all production of non-proven artists in order to satisfy your own pleasure.

And your argument for that is... what? You accepted that arthouse and blockbusters will survive, just like self-financed bands and big concert-cashing bands, just as those writers who do not rely on royalties. Which would by the way include a vast majority of scientific authors, but will exclude, yes, a huge majority of crap entertainment artists - tons of worthless detective fiction crap and so on. Boo fucking hoo and cry me a river.

[Questor]

Stas -

I think we fundamentally disagree on this, but I'll sum up my viewpoint: Absent compelling public good, someone's ability to monetize their creative effort should not be restricted by the government.

So, in my view, the exception is not the copyrighted works, but the patents - for compelling public good.

As for your argument of eliminating mediocrity, that is only acceptable if you believe that profitability is the only measure of quality. Also, by eliminating most of the ability to generate profit, you create massive barriers of entry.

Lastly, I'd really like a significant list of examples of great works of literature that were not created out of desire for profit, either directly or indirectly. I'm having a hard time coming up with examples, but it's been a long week.

[K. A. Pital]

Absent compelling public good, someone's ability to monetize their creative effort should not be restricted by the government. So, in my view, the exception is not the copyrighted works, but the patents - for compelling public good.

The increased access to knowledge is a public good (okay, I will say that boulevard literature and modern recreational fiction deserves to have copyright, because indeed it serves no public good and is worthless crap for the most part). So the exception should be created for copyright, not for the absence of it. Public domain should include everything which relates to cultural heritage, which is important knowledge (key scientific works in any branch of science may not and shall never be copyrighted) and underpins education thereby. I would note that the open education projects and libraries have done far more good to mankind than the copyright of select individuals.

As for your argument of eliminating mediocrity, that is only acceptable if you believe that profitability is the only measure of quality. Also, by eliminating most of the ability to generate profit, you create massive barriers of entry.

One, I did not say so. Profitability is not the only measure of quality - however, arthouse movies are in general unprofitable since their nature precludes them from gathering profits in the cinemas, which is the main source of income, and home-made bands who shun large producers likewise may have nice quality of music, but since they are out of the industry, they're lossy by definition. However, what is excluded is mediocre entertainment which can barely break even using sales of DVDs or CDs. Which itself tells that this is a commercial band or movie (not arthouse, not homeband type), but too crappy to make any money at the scene or the theatre. Too bad.

Lastly, I'd really like a significant list of examples of great works of literature that were not created out of desire for profit, either directly or indirectly. I'm having a hard time coming up with examples, but it's been a long week.

Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel, Melville's Moby Dick, I could find many, many more if I wanted to. The problem with your argument lies within the fact that books often sell very poorly during an author's lifetime, and most of the books are written well before any profit can be gathered. In fact, sometimes the books are made by the author even without any prior contract with the publisher. Thus the author has some other source of income, obviously, otherwise he'd starve while writing the damn book.

And on the other hand, "professional writers" who make dozens of novels per year, sometimes a new one every month (love fiction, pulp fiction, crap fantasy and "modern scifi" - genres where 99% of what's written is utter crap, to an unforgivable extent, and the volume of money made off said crap is enormous) - those obviously exist only and solely from their books being sold. However, as you said yourself, why should we count profitability as important when considering the value of art? Such authors are making and selling cheap crappy shit.

Most great classical authors - regardless of genre! - had other sources of income not impacted by "copyright". Tolkien was a professor. Shakespeare was a playwright. Moliere? Playwright. Marx did not get rich off "Das Kapital" and in fact wrote it being rather poor. What about Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina? This guy did not need any income from the publishing of his books. Milton (Paradise Lost) was a civil servant, a tutor and a generally rich person. What about anther great classic, Dostoyevsky? Likewise did not get rich for his writings (in fact, he got sent off to a penal colony instead, duh).

Did this negatively impact the quality of works of these people? No. The vast majority of writing is done in advance before getting any sort of profit from it and thus authors more often than not have some other source of income. That is normal.

[Questor]

Are you telling me Melville wasn't a professional author? Really?

I'm pretty sure Moby Dick was his 3rd or 4th novel.

More later, it's late.

[K. A. Pital]

I think the point was that he got 500 bucks from his most important work in life (which is also the one that made it as a classic), Moby Dick. You could as well put an author on a wage if that's the amount of income he receives for creating a piece of the world's literary heritage.

[Simon_Jester]

So I don't think I'm on board with your ideas, Stas.

Stopping the copying of books of all things is the hardest and least possible part of that whole copyright affair, due to the protected status so-called "Internet Libraries" enjoy in some parts of the world. So regardless of whether I really think that book writers should be able to live by royalties (which I think is not the only possible model), this is the really impractical part.

Put this way: I think it should be possible to get paid for producing literary content. Some authors who produce good material do well off of this, others do not, and yes, it shelters a lot of stuff that is "trash."

Royalties are not the only way to achieve this, mind- I'm sort of indifferent to how it's achieved. I'll say more on this later.

I might be cruel to authors, but so what? People are cruel to inventors as well, and much more so. They demand their works to be public domain. If you make a great cultural contribution, why should it be any more protected than a great invention? For the reason of non-essential nature of the contribution?

Inventors are given access to patents, Stas- there is the opportunity for an inventor to profit from their productivity. In many cases the patents end up owned by corporations, but this is sort of inevitable since invention these days is usually a cooperative endeavor and no one person can claim to have invented something as complicated as a computer chip or a new type of aircraft engine or the like.

But if we accept that with the rise of industrial society culture becomes an equally important sphere of public welfare, and education and culture are absolutely necessary for the advanced society, should we not treat books the same way?

What, the same way as patents? That wouldn't be so bad- because it offers that guarantee. If you create a new thing that people want to use or enjoy, then for some reasonable span of time you will be better off for having done so, and then finally you lose your right to control use of the thing you have created and it goes public.

But that is not the same thing as "abolishing copyright in favor of copyleft." Inventions are not subject to copyleft, if that's what you're claiming.

I would note that the destruction of copyright, for example, would make the world of scientific literature a lot more interconnected, since articles, books, experiment results could be shared without fear of copyright reprisals. And in fact, such initiatives already exist. Scientific works are written by people who get a wage from the higher education institutions or scientific institutions they're a part of, and do not rely on remunerations from sales.

Yes- but scientific literature is different from cultural literature in that it exists only to aid in accomplishing some other task. Copyright is not a major barrier to scientific progress, unless it is artificially made so by companies trying to manipulate extreme copyright laws to get monopolies on important processes or ideas.

Restriction of distribution is damage. Why don't you ban libraries, since they distribute a non-material right to universal access to copies, often without any fee? Also, "unprecended"? Free libraries, freely written books (put by their own authors on the net) and free education as a system of sharing scientific knowledge without access restrictions operate for quite a while. And their operation has been a massive success with hundreds of thousands if not millions of people accessing the knowledge, the literary heritage and so on and so forth.

I have nothing against libraries, of any kind- but I want it to be possible, as opposed to "you must be dreaming/crazy" impractical, for someone who makes interesting things to be materially better off for it.

Before the internet, and more particularly digital distribution, this entire line of reasoning would have been looked at as insane. Libraries were maintained as a public service, but everyone knew that they were a money sink.

"Money sink"? The role of public libraries in the elimination of illiteracy and advancement of knowledge among the working class is not to be underestimated. It is these public libraries and university libraries which universities themselves rely on. Are you willing to shove the cost onto universities? Are universities and higher education itself a "money sink"? What sort of insane bullshit is that! The benefit from advanced knowledge to humanity and its industrial economy has been much greater than any spending on libraries, internet, universities or all of them together.

Excuse me, perhaps I'm confused. As far as I can tell, "Money sink" just means you have to put money into the library (or university) to get it to work- it costs more than nothing, the cost has to be supported by an outside source, be that taxes or some robber baron with a guilty conscience setting up an endowment or whatever.

So how is that insanity? We already knew that. Is it somehow an insult to call libraries "not profitable?"

So you think that arthouse movies should be the only ones made? Think about what site you're on.

I said that blockbusters will also survive unless they tank at the box office, you can't replace a cinema trip experience with a poorly made screen copy after all. So blockbusters and arthouse films survive. "Direct to DVD" and crap which relies on DVD sales to survive will die. Is that a huge price for freedom? Pardon me, but movies which don't make enough money at the box office are either (a) arthouse (in which case losses are accepted beforehand) (b) crap (in which case they should fucking die).

Stas, there's niches in the middle that you're missing.

You seem to have missed a line in Questor's comments about "barriers to entry." If only movies guaranteed to sell tens of millions of movie tickets can be made for profit, then only very large studios that can afford big-budget special effects and big-name actors will ever make any money. That makes it hard for anyone else to get into the market. So you have Big Film (blockbusters) and Little Film (arthouse), but nothing in between, and nothing that can compete with a given Big Film maker because you can't make any money going into the industry unless you already have brand recognition.

You're also missing the idea of niche markets- for example, science fiction. A science fiction movie (unless it's a blockbuster with tons of explosions and special effects) will never draw the kind of audiences that a more generic movie might. It can't. But does that mean all art created for the niche is crap and should "fucking die?"

We end up with a lot of churn among the arthouse film producers (who no one really notices except a handful of cinemaphiles) and an oligopoly of Big Blockbuster makers who produce an endless stream of generic action movies. There's not much room in this model for subcultures, for films that most people ignore but a few million people really like.

I don't think that's a good thing.

I suspect that you'd have a lot fewer bands if they can't at least partially offset the costs.

Fewer but better? Works for me. As you know, the advent of radio and TV basically killed thousands of so-called "little theatres" which operated in villages, small towns et cetera with actors who acted too bad for a big city theatre but good enough for the unwashed peons. If the digital age kills mediocrity, it does us a service thereby.

I'm not sure I agree. There's a cost to this, and it's standardization. Because of radio and TV, there's less diversity in entertainment, and the individual artist is more beholden to big companies that own enough capital to create a major media production. There's less room for the individual to participate in art: instead of trying to act, or directly supporting others' ambition to act, if they want to see people acting, they're forced to sit on the couch and watch the boob tube.

Why is the death of mass participation in the endeavour when this happens to entertainment, when it's so often a bad thing in other areas? In culture, I'd think we would want to encourage that, to keep the souls of the people awake and make them participants and not just mindless consumers.

"Eliminating mediocrity" in commercial entertainment means consumerist culture and huge concentrations of capital in the entertainment industry. Is that a good thing?

Yes, some of the greatest masterpieces were created with no intention of profit, but most of them weren't.

My random picker tells me that quite a few of the "greatest masterpieces" were created without any intention of profit or, even if they had such an intention, they failed to gather the profits. Writes do not have any superiority over inventors - scientists, chemists, etc., if the latter have their author's right revoked in just 5 years, so shall the writers. They are no privileged caste, and neither should they ever be.

How long an "author's right" lasts depends on the country and the legal system. There can be a lot of debate over this, and (yes, D13, you get to say "concession accepted") it may be that there's more social utility in extending copyrights on fiction to a long period than there is in extending copyrights on material techniques and inventions- to a point. There has to be a limit, but that doesn't mean the limit should be the same for all things.

I don't see it that way at all, I see it as you being willing to virtually end all production of non-proven artists in order to satisfy your own pleasure.

And your argument for that is... what? You accepted that arthouse and blockbusters will survive, just like self-financed bands and big concert-cashing bands, just as those writers who do not rely on royalties. Which would by the way include a vast majority of scientific authors, but will exclude, yes, a huge majority of crap entertainment artists - tons of worthless detective fiction crap and so on. Boo fucking hoo and cry me a river.

Stas, I don't get this- why is only "great" art entitled to exist? Do you really think that by killing off all the 'mediocre' art, we would have only great art? Is it not more likely that Sturgeon's Law will continue to apply, and that ninety percent of everything will still be crap?

Trying to have a culture where all art is created by a handful of dedicated master artists and super-professional companies is like trying to have a culture where all machines are operated by a tiny base of technology-priests. It's not going to work, you need a large demographic base of people working in the field to support and replenish the handful of geniuses.

[K. A. Pital]

Put this way: I think it should be possible to get paid for producing literary content. Some authors who produce good material do well off of this, others do not, and yes, it shelters a lot of stuff that is "trash." Royalties are not the only way to achieve this, mind- I'm sort of indifferent to how it's achieved. I'll say more on this later.

Wouldn't giving authors a 4-5 year royalty term and the rest of them time employing them in some sort of writer's associations be honest, then? If the way does not matter, putting them on a wage makes sense. It would be different, but it won't be "starving authors", and that's good enough for me.

Inventors are given access to patents, Stas- there is the opportunity for an inventor to profit from their productivity. In many cases the patents end up owned by corporations, but this is sort of inevitable since invention these days is usually a cooperative endeavor and no one person can claim to have invented something as complicated as a computer chip or a new type of aircraft engine or the like.

The original inventor does not profit for the entirety of his life. Patent renewal must be done constantly and patent terms are very short. Unlike copyright. I would say that France's "moral right" might extend as far as copyright does now (and even futher), but classic copyright should be drastically limited.

What, the same way as patents? That wouldn't be so bad- because it offers that guarantee. If you create a new thing that people want to use or enjoy, then for some reasonable span of time you will be better off for having done so, and then finally you lose your right to control use of the thing you have created and it goes public. But that is not the same thing as "abolishing copyright in favor of copyleft." Inventions are not subject to copyleft, if that's what you're claiming.

Inventions are not always subject to copyleft - unless one is explicitly protected as copyleft by the inventor himself. Copyleft is, ideally, what creativity should aspire to, but in the end, a patent-like system is more easily introduced.

Yes- but scientific literature is different from cultural literature in that it exists only to aid in accomplishing some other task. Copyright is not a major barrier to scientific progress, unless it is artificially made so by companies trying to manipulate extreme copyright laws to get monopolies on important processes or ideas.

Copyright is enough of a barrier. It is very hard to read scientific works, since they are copyrighted as well. Often by bodies which have no relation to the author, sometimes by bodies related to the author but in any case this limits the access of students across the world, not to mention other scientists. In some nations people aren't rich enough to buy hundreds of books. And that's how much you have to read for a decent scientific paper nowadays.

I have nothing against libraries, of any kind- but I want it to be possible, as opposed to "you must be dreaming/crazy" impractical, for someone who makes interesting things to be materially better off for it.

I am surely not entirely against any renumeration. As you could gather, my objections lie primarily with the exceptional longetivity of the current copyright and a lack of encouragement for copyleft works.

Excuse me, perhaps I'm confused. As far as I can tell, "Money sink" just means you have to put money into the library (or university) to get it to work- it costs more than nothing, the cost has to be supported by an outside source, be that taxes or some robber baron with a guilty conscience setting up an endowment or whatever. So how is that insanity? We already knew that. Is it somehow an insult to call libraries "not profitable?"

Yes, it is, because for your entire economy's compound growth - the profitability of most enterprises included - and especially intensive growth, heavily relies on education. And education heavily relies on - tada! - free access of students to a massive base of knowledge which they would otherwise have absolutely no funds to acquire in a legitimate fashion. So saying something is "not profitable" is just stupid. The total economic impact should be evaluated, not just separate parts.

Stas, there's niches in the middle that you're missing. You seem to have missed a line in Questor's comments about "barriers to entry." If only movies guaranteed to sell tens of millions of movie tickets can be made for profit, then only very large studios that can afford big-budget special effects and big-name actors will ever make any money. That makes it hard for anyone else to get into the market. So you have Big Film (blockbusters) and Little Film (arthouse), but nothing in between, and nothing that can compete with a given Big Film maker because you can't make any money going into the industry unless you already have brand recognition. You're also missing the idea of niche markets- for example, science fiction. A science fiction movie (unless it's a blockbuster with tons of explosions and special effects) will never draw the kind of audiences that a more generic movie might. It can't. But does that mean all art created for the niche is crap and should "fucking die?"

I don't remember any straight-to-DVD science fiction film that wouldn't be crappy. Not a single one. And I've seen many of them. On the other hand, sci-fi blockbusters are not always stupid even if big budget. Prestige, Inception, to name a few.

We end up with a lot of churn among the arthouse film producers (who no one really notices except a handful of cinemaphiles)

Arthouse does a lot of niche production, though.

I don't think that's a good thing.

I understand the adverse consequences, yet for the increased benefits to society I would still support such a reform.

I'm not sure I agree. There's a cost to this, and it's standardization. Because of radio and TV, there's less diversity in entertainment, and the individual artist is more beholden to big companies that own enough capital to create a major media production. There's less room for the individual to participate in art: instead of trying to act, or directly supporting others' ambition to act, if they want to see people acting, they're forced to sit on the couch and watch the boob tube. Why is the death of mass participation in the endeavour when this happens to entertainment, when it's so often a bad thing in other areas? In culture, I'd think we would want to encourage that, to keep the souls of the people awake and make them participants and not just mindless consumers.

Perhaps you are right. On the other hand, mass participation "decreasing" is not such a bad thing in all other areas. The reduction of agricultural labourers due to mechanization is welcome, not bad. Same goes for the reduction of the industrial proletariat, actually, if it is achieved by greater productivity of select people. What is bad is a perverse order which does not allow these gains to be fully used to the benefit of the entire society. Same goes for the decreased number of producers in culture - is it really that bad? The 99% rule will stay, of course, but as someone who had experience with Soviet cinema - a creature of just one gigantic producer - I would say the result was not bad at all. One can say that due to the monopoly the organization was huge enough to include a lot of individuals with diverse creative talents, but seriously, if the Goskino can do so, why can't Hollywood monsters? The number is not a particular problem unless we have a really serious lack of creative people getting employed by producers.

"Eliminating mediocrity" in commercial entertainment means consumerist culture and huge concentrations of capital in the entertainment industry. Is that a good thing?

Under capitalism perhaps. But it is already so.

Stas, I don't get this- why is only "great" art entitled to exist? Do you really think that by killing off all the 'mediocre' art, we would have only great art? Is it not more likely that Sturgeon's Law will continue to apply, and that ninety percent of everything will still be crap? Trying to have a culture where all art is created by a handful of dedicated master artists and super-professional companies is like trying to have a culture where all machines are operated by a tiny base of technology-priests. It's not going to work, you need a large demographic base of people working in the field to support and replenish the handful of geniuses.

The Goskino worked. It was obviously imperfect, like the command economy itself, but it worked. It produced lots of movies for people to see - diverse movies, from arthouse to niche genres to blockbusters (comedies, etc.) with, perhaps, the exception of ultraviolent action movies, but that was an impact of censorship, not centralization. So maybe it is not as bad as one could think. First open-source movies are already made. A push in the right direction could limit creativity within copyright and expand it in non-copyright frameworks.

[Questor]

Stas, Simon is making my points more eloquently than I could at the moment, would you mind terribly if I bowed out?

[K. A. Pital]

Stas, Simon is making my points more eloquently than I could at the moment, would you mind terribly if I bowed out?

Yup, sure. I actually think that he's extending and clarifying some of your points, so that is allright.

[Terralthra]

I'm content with copyright for individuals who create the content. What I dislike is the idea that this can be transferred to immortal corporations when the copyright laws make such a point of deciding timing by the death of the author.

Works for hire date their copyright from the date of creation or publication. Works that are not for hire whose copyrights are transferred from the author to a corporation retain the author's death + n years as their expiration date. The idea the "corporations are immortal, hence so are copyrights" is silly. The problem is, as usual, money in politics distorts legislation from public good to lobbyists' good, and large corporations which hold many profitable copyrights have lots of money with which to lobby.