In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create and publish things with absolutely no hope of profit or legal protection, and yet we bend over backwards to extend our protections for the lucky few to the tune of the author's life + 70 years. Even more if for hire. Tell me how that's in the public interest.
If you accept this is a good thing, then the degree problem becomes one of proportionality. I agree that life + 70 years is exorbitant, but that particular formula is relatively easy to change legally. Practically, you have to fight powerful interests (Disney) to change it, but it can (and IMHO should) be done.
One interesting notion is to fully privatize the problem of artificial scarcity. This might look something like leasing a Disney device (for example) to watch Disney content. This seems like something of a nightmare, until you realize that you don't really need to watch movies.
Among other matters:
- Your devices are no longer fully under your control, and don't answer to you.
- Even where DRM isn't itself directly. malware (Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), it inevitably creates backdoors for APTs.
- The legal proscriptions on analysing and assessing ADRM mechanisms create both minefields for researchers and multiply the existing security threat risk.
But most critically, and pretty much fully torpedoing your voluntarism argument, device vendors may be contractually or legally prohibited from producing non-DRM-afflicted devices in their own relationships with DRM gatekeepers, meaning that there are no (or very crippled or expensive) DRM-free alternatives.
Witness ongoing efforts to plug the "anologue hole" (https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole) in various devices and software.
FWIW, my complete crap Chrome browser on my complete crap Samsung Android device refuses to allow me to screenshot this HN thread claiming it is a "DRM protected page".
I'd love to replace the device with something vaguely comparable. Between licensing restrictions, monopoly coercion, and market dynamics, there is literally nothing available.
Or more briefly: Your assertion is absolutely unsupported by empirical experience.
Imagine if J.K.Rowling wrote the first 3 Harry Potter books but didn't see a dime because the second they got popular everyone with a printing press started selling them royalty-free. Would she have finished the series? I got to read all 7 books because J.K.Rowling was incentivized to write them by her copyright.
I think most of us agree that copyright has value but its become excessive.
This is such an obvious notion and it's not discussed nearly as often as it should.
It's not like my employer will be sending my last paycheck to my children 70 years after my death...
Property rights in general are anti-competitive and support rent-seeking. That's actually very much the point of them; to insulate a particular interest from those who would compete with the person to whom the right is granted and enable the grantee to reliably extract value from the subject of the right, including by monopoly rents.
Two things have messed with that deal - corporations are now treated as people, who live forever, and copyright extension allows corporations to extend copyright past the lifespan of the public they've made that bargain with.
I'd argue that a bargain that you can never collect on is not a valid bargain - the whole basis of copyright has been undermined - now it's just a monopoly.
Some novelists spent years collecting rejection slips (e.g. Stephen King; Larry Niven did it full time with a trust fund), which is probably irrational. But with no pot of gold at the end, only the properly delusional or wealthy could justify that investment.
OTOH copyright enforcement isn't that effective, so publishers meaninglessly vary textbook editions yearly, with expiring access to essential online content.
To rely on people producing things producing things without economic incentive is essentially the argument for anarchosocialism. It might work to some small degree for passion projects, but what the overall volume of creative production would collapse as creatives would have to find other ways to support themselves.
In the 19th century in Germany, Germany had no copyright or patent laws. There was an explosion of creativity and technological progress, and Germany became the European leader economically and technologically.
Which could work if we were to implement something like universal basic income, or progress to an agalmic economic society. I'm not optimistic on either of those.
Fanfiction runs into legal trouble with copyrights.
The problem is that when it comes to the really sticky, complex issues that affect huge swaths of human rights, it's very possible for justices, in your words, to "rely upon fact and logical argument," but base their end goal/optimization function on either "what did the founders of the country factually and logically intend" or "what do the norms and ideals of modern society suggest would be factually and logically sustainable" without regard to the opposite viewpoint.
A real balance between these viewpoints keeps the pendulum from swinging out of control; it serves as a low-pass filter on the often-wild steering of policy, or the whims of a short-term-focused electorate. But it's equally important that the ultimate power reside long-term with the people. And one very possible outcome is that our justices succumb simultaneously to a pandemic, during an administration that, to be as charitable as possible, does not seem particularly concerned with nuance, system stability, or universal enfranchisement. And it's a lot to ask of a justice to hold both the meta-meta-viewpoint and legal precision in mind, especially as it seems likely that constitutional questions will be in play as November approaches. All we can do is hope they will rise to the occasion.
Anything like that would not be something expected from country's best laywers. A judge given a quarter million USD salary must be the best of the best in performance, and not to deputise his most important duties.
> it's clear that regardless of their backgrounds and circumstances of their appointment, each justice is incredibly intelligent and engaged.
I heard of much less charitable descriptions of the process, with the most frequent being about the well known mental decline of some judges.
> The problem is that when it comes to the really sticky, complex issues that affect huge swaths of human rights, it's very possible for justices, in your words, to "rely upon fact and logical argument," but base their end goal/optimization function on either "what did the founders of the country factually and logically intend" or "what do the norms and ideals of modern society suggest would be factually and logically sustainable" without regard to the opposite viewpoint.
This is one of very many problems. US court system has become too much more than just a legal institute it should be.
The point my law instructor told me was that a judge just a lawyer on the government payroll, and half of them should be sent back to the law school so bad their skill level was. Then, if you can not trust half of them with most basic judicial duties, why should you entrust them with the fate of society, moral guidance, and big matter topics?
Basically, the elites in the West tend to think too many things about lawyers, when they shouldn't.
He was a lawyer by trade, and he was not happy with society putting lawyers in charge of running itself at all.
The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.
Where do you fit Italy, Spain, or even Portugal in your logica analysis? Because arguably the US is being hit harder than any of those countries and yet they are respecting their quarantine with notable results.
Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Sweden has suffered as much as neither Spain or Italy.
There are some disasters, but even then you get beautiful rebuttals (e.g. Kagan's dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause)
This ruling split the judges in an uncommon way, which was even more welcome.
In my experience with the US Federal Gov't (through my wife and family) applying the boring law is the norm, and what's not normal is when political actors inject themselves or create a narrative about an issue to suit their purpose. US Federal Employees are deeply apolitical as a workplace culture.
We see a lot of the latter, but there's only so much bandwidth for it. Most work is boring and getting done in a professional manner
Your optimism is refreshing, but this is not how law works.
Judges and lawyers start from a conclusion, and then find case law to back up their conclusion.
Now, to be fair, most judges and lawyers who are competent tend not to go far off the established precedents. This is especially true at lower levels where higher judges are going to review your case--nobody wants to be the judge who gets overturned all the time.
Judges are not engineers. The law regards "truth" as subject to negotiation without objective boundaries. An engineer regards "truth" as "the thing that kicks your ass when you contradict it".
There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?
What doomed their copyright is that they took state money to do it. Is it just corruption and they figured they can charge both sides?
The principle is obvious, and so while I can understand the dissenters' line of reasoning somewhat, it's absolutely flabbergasting to read some of their bullshit. Here's Thomas:
> Lastly, the annotations do not impede fair notice of the laws. As just stated, the annotations do not carry the binding force of of law. They simply summarize independent sources of legal information and consolidate them in one place. ... The majority resists this conclusion, suggesting that without access to the annotations, readers of Georgia law will be unable to fully understand the true meaning of Georgia's statutory provisions, such as provisions that have been undermined or nullified by court decisions. That is simply incorrect. As the majority tacitly concedes, a person seeking information about changes in Georgia statutory law can find that information by consulting the original source for the change in the law's status -- the court decisions themselves.
How magnanimous! It's appalling that this is the opinion of one of our top jurists: Want to practice law in Georgia? Better go find it, and hope you find all of it. But wait, there's more!
> The majority's rule will leave in the lurch the many researchers who relied on the previously bright-line rule. Perhaps, to the detriment of all, many States will stop producing annotated codes altogether. Were that to occur, the majority's fear of an "economy-class" version of the law will truly become a reality. ... For example, Georgia asserts that Lexis sold the OCGA for $404 in 2016, while West Publishing's competing annotated code sold for $2,570. Should state annotated codes disappear, those without the means to pay the competitor's significantly higher price tag will have a valuable research tool taken away from them.
Cry me a river! Listen to this shit: He thinks that the law will get more expensive if we don't let Lexis keep taking a cut. No, the law ought to be free, and the state ought to bend over backwards (or forwards) to ensure that the law is published so widely and legibly that there truly is no excuse for not being able to access it. The twenty-five states across the USA that currently publish annotated codes are in for a bit of a rude awakening, as they will be asked to stop dicking their citizens.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...
What this case is about was some kind of annotated version of the statutes that included case notes and precedents and such. Georgia tried to claim that was subject to copyright. The Justices disagreed, claiming that the annotations were primarily created by legislators in the course of doing legislative work, and thus also could not be copyrighted.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-1150/114285/201...
I personally don't think this is a coincidence. I would guess that Ginsburg's thinking is heavily influenced by conversations with her daughter. Or perhaps Ginsburg's strongly held opinions on copyright influenced her daughter's career.
> Beyond doubt, state laws are not copyrightable. Nor are other materials created by state legislators in the course of performing their lawmaking responsibilities, e.g., legislative committee reports, floor statements, unenacted bills. (Ante, at 8–9). Not all that legislators do, however, is ineligible for copyright protection; the government edicts doctrine shields only “works that are (1) created by judges and legislators (2) in the course of their judicial and legislative duties.” (Ante, at 9) (emphasis added). The core question this case presents, as I see it: Are the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) done in a legislative capacity? The answer, I am persuaded, should be no.
We may be okay with this particular outcome, but would we feel the same way if they did it for say Roe v. Wade (or some other more established opinion that you like, depending on your political leanings)? I can't tell how serious this is, but it sounds like another attempt to weaken stare decisis to me (again, with the disclaimer that I am not a lawyer or legal expert of any kind and maybe it's not nearly as bad as it sounds to me?)
Those in the majority instead say “If judges, acting as judges, cannot be ’authors’ because of their authority to make and interpret the law, it follows that legislators, acting as legislators, cannot be either.” They say this extends to the annotations as “That of course includes final legislation, but it also includes explanatory and proce- dural materials legislators create in the discharge of their legislative duties.”
Whether the majority is correct in their decision or not, I think this is definitely a reasonable clarification of past precedent. I think Justice Thomas’s dissent is accurate when it says that this was not as clear cut a confirmation as the Majority opinion’s writing makes it out to be, but I think saying the decision is incongruous with previous precedent is also incorrect.
> We may be okay with this particular outcome, but would we feel the same way if they did it for say Roe v. Wade
That's... pretty much exactly what they did for Roe v. Wade.
The EFF has some coverage on the issue [0][1].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/eff-court-dont-let-pri...
[1] https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevail...
Public.Resource.Org photocopied and distributed the complete standards, cover to cover, including ASTM's illustrations, logos, etc. But what aspect of the manuals are the actual law? The technical measurements? From what I understand, the Georgia annotations became law by reference in their entirety. I don't think it's obvious here and I worry the court will rule against them :/
Regardless, I love Public.Resource.Org's work and wish them the best.
What they decided way back then was that opinions of state court judges, like opinions of Federal court judges, were not copyrightable. They also decided a little later that annotations written by a state-employed annotator where the state did not claim copyright on the annotator's work could be copyrighted by the annotator.
What's new in this case compared to those cases that originally established the government edicts doctrine is that it was a state that was trying to assert copyright ownership of the annotations.
> First, the author of the annotations qualifies as a legislator.
Whoa! There is a massive amount of such code, and the folks writing it are usually thought of as private lawyers, rather than public legislators. That's a big deal, since the legislative process cannot be unconditionally private, but has to be balanced to keep the public informed.
And if so, what is the larger significance?
