US copyright law shake-up: Days of flinging stuff on the web and waiting for a DMCA may be over

Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

Contemporary Hollywood films do not pass the threshold of originality required by copyright, since they consist purely of reheated dogshit.

That means they're in the public domain. Everyone fill your boots.

Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

After Earth.

I cannot believe you can call it complete and utter shit.

Think about it, that film was amazing in the fact it will now make you avoid any other films by the smith family when as a whole.

Life gives you lemons, I say avoid the lemonade.

Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

"The really telling thing here is that pictures and sound recordings are meaningless, valueless waves."

After Earth

You stole After Earth!? I think you're the one who lost out here.

Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

a non cow, i believe you are more right than wrong, *especially* in the over-valuation of celebutards: they are made into brands/products that we are led to believe are otherwise superior to you... they are not, they ARE you...

in fact, i can prove it by the following: are there or are there not a fookton of 'reality' shows which showcase the talents of zillions of 'nobodies' who can dance their ass off, sing their heart out, and otherwise perform JUST AS WELL -if not better- than all but the once-in-a-generation geniuses ? ? ?

the answer is, yes, there are a fookton of talented folks out there (we ALL have talent(s), whether it is in entertainment is another matter) who could step into the shoes of any/all the celebutards out there who are MARKETED as the coolest thing since sliced bread...

every single actor on the planet could be raptured out of here, and there would be more than enough talented people (arguably, we are ALL actors) to step up and fill in admirably...

no, this celebutard-worship is both a purposeful propaganda ploy by the puppetmasters, as well as a natural reaction in trying to have 'leaders' in a leader-less society...

Re: *Sigh*

"We Australians have told Hollywood to make their products affordable and on time and film piracy will come down. Did they listen? No. Instead, "

Re: *Sigh*

Accessible, affordable and convenient legal options do seriously reduce piracy rates. I'm part of the piracy community, and I've seen first hand the effect that Netflix and Steam have had. It's cost us a lot of members.

Re: *Sigh*

"Seriously, I don't understand why Hollywood won't/doesn't lobby the American government to just ban VPNs (and only allow American security services to be the sole users of VPN)."

Probably because Hollywood can't hold a candle to Wall Street. And Wall Street REQUIRES specific use cases of VPNs to maintain federal and international legal compliance needed to remain in operation: necessary evils.

Re: *Sigh*

Has film piracy gone down? For now, yes

I find this extremely unlikely.

Re: *Sigh*

I don't think it's Hollywood enforcement that has made piracy go down. It's services like Netflix make it easy to watch something for not a silly price. For the fist time not being a pirate is easier for the average person.

Unlike the stuff Hollywood come up with like that Ultraviolet pile of crap they are trying to push. Or the new "super ticket" that replaced it in Canada.

If the US ban VPNs it would A, piss off thousands of companies that use it to join there offices together. B, have as much effect on the rest of the world as limiting encryption key size did for Netscape exports.

Re: Partial moderation/approval...

Lawyers will earn a lot of money figuring that out. They're never happier then law is confusing and unpredictable. Pigs at the trough you might say.

Re: set up a DMCA takedown system

I refuse to engage with it because it is USA Law that may be in conflict with International conventions.

Not convinced it does. The problem with this argument - and I take your point - the problem is that most jurisdictions will consider the DMCA to be a standard form of copyright notice. If you ignore it and it goes to court (the DMCA is intended to be a delete all for the media industry obviously) then the court might frown upon your behaviour.

It's a super risky thing to ignore, even outside the US, even though it's US law. I know it sounds odd, and it is odd, but courts do recognise other country's legal systems all the time - but with a DMCA they don't even need to do that. To get around that you'd have to prove not that the DMCA is incompatible with the convention (it's an irrelevance in a hypothetical case) but that a standard copyright notice signed under the penalty of perjury doesn't apply. That being said 95% of the DMCA notices I see are vexatious..

It used to be 20 years IIRC, and the pace of technology should force the terms to be reconsidered in that light, similar to patents. Also, copyrights and patents should be non-transferrable; they shouldn't be considered as assets but as protections similar to the freedom of speech. Consider them the limited freedom to write and the limited freedom to invent (both without being copycatted). If copyrights were shrunk back to a universal 20 years and nonphysical patents shrunk down to about 3 years, that should be a reasonable compromise (and relax, Disney, we're not touching trademarks, so you don't have to worry about Mickey Mouse).

Copyright duration

Life of ACTUAL creator (not the company employeer) + 25 years is ample.

50 years is too little if you are 18 and life + 50 years is too much.

It used to be 14 years, with an option to renew one time for an additional 14 years.

As for "to protect the small independent content creators," I foresee a problem with the implied non-protection of "big businesses who use it to bully the small people."

Small independent content creators may not have (in general probably will not have) the resources to monetize their creations, and the big businesses that do have are quite likely to be unwilling to do so without obtaining the copyright. However, if the the copyright is not effectively transferable, it will have no value to them. Like a great many market restrictions, this could reduce the total utility to the people as a whole, whether creator, non-creator producer, or consumer.

It might be possible to mitigate this by various more or less complex contract provisions, but it is not clear that we would be better off collectively than we are now.

Any attempt at a watermark would be met with attempts to REMOVE the watermark. Plus copies can be intercepted before the watermark phase. Since a lot of work goes between filming and final encode, it can't be done in the filming phase for risk of being mangled in post.

Copy write vs Copyright

A copy writer writes commercial copy especially for advertising.

A copyright reserves the right to use a copy of the copyrighted materials to the copyright owner, who may,or may not, grant permission, usually for a fee, on request, either directly or through a copyright management process such as is implemented by BMC and other music management organizations. Copyright holders have requested that people not use their copyrighted material for their own purposes, such as promoting their political point of view especially when a) no fee was paid, and b) the political point of view was not in accordance with the copyright holders political point of view.