[LINK] Oz copyright amendment on /.

[Jarvis, Guy]

ISTR that when the Ming Dynasty decided that the Middle Kingdom (China circa
1500AD?) was the coolest place on earth/in history and hence closed their
society to outsiders, certain technologies were protected against external
leakage by capital punishment (read: off with y'head), eg silk mfg,
printing, explosives etc.

Perhaps such extreme IP protection led to the decline and stagnation, in
terms of continuing technological development, of Imperial China as a world
power, such that bunch of pommie drug dealers were later able to blow said
Imperial navy out of the water and setup a dealing base on a little island
called...Hong Kong ;)

A distant remembered cliche from primary school days - "there is nothing new
under the sun" - ie all works are derivative and dependent on our society
and ancestors, so....

how about this (radical, revolutionary, subversive) line of thinking, a test
if you will:

what if there was no copyright protection for digitisable works, how would
society win and lose?

Media publishing corporations would say "there is no incentive for us to
remain in this business, so we will take our bat and ball home etc" - okay,
today the means exists to  disseminate any works which are digitisable at a
cost which tends to zero - ie stuff the outdated publishers.

Then what of the authors and creators of works which can be digitised, are
they not entitled to demand money from everyone else who wants to view or
use their works? 
Why? they have a choice to create (unless suffering from some
obsessive/compulsive disorder) - if they don't consider it worth their while
to create works, then furry muff.

I suspect that the well of human creativity will not dry up (this mailing
list is a fine example of the desire of people to speak their truth/crap on
endlessly and I don't see any $$$ changing hands...)

-
Guy Jarvis B.Eng.Hons
Principal Consultant
eBusiness and Internet Innovation
eNTiTy1 liMiTEd
www.eNTITy1.com <- Workspace
www.cluetrain.com/apocalypso.html <- Headspace

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-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Barry [mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au]
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 3:53 PM
To: Rick Welykochy
Cc: Danny Yee; link@www.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [LINK] Oz copyright amendment on /.


The Chinese invented movable type using clay during the A.D. 1000's. 
The Koreans invented metal movable type in the 1300's.  Europeans 
developed movable type independently in the mid-1400's.  The first 
books printed in Europe by movable type appeared in Mainz, Germany, 
between 1453 and 1456.

250 years pass.

The first modern copyright law was adopted by Britain in 1709. 
Copyright as a concept based on controlling copies has only been 
around for less than 300 years. The idea being that the owner of the 
work could base revenue on controlling copying

Suddenly copying is much easier than it was before. Controlling 
copying is much more difficult

At 7:37 PM +1100 4/3/01, Rick Welykochy wrote:
>
>(*) do you photocopy books you buy, in case you damage the original
>     when using it as a beer coaster?


I would if it was as easy as copying digital files.

>
>(*) do you make backups of audio CD's?

Some to tape, yes.

>
>(*) when we used vinyl records, did you somehow make and keep a copy
>     of the vinyl? same observation for cassettes and (eek) 8-tracks :)

If I could have afforded a tape recorder at the time (1960s)

>
>Hmmm ... all of a sudden, since it's digital and copyable, we should be
>able to copy it. That's illogical and doesn't fit the precedent behaviour
>w.r.t. copyrightable works.

The question is, if it is so easy to copy is it practical to try and 
control copying in the way it has been done in the past, especially 
if it involves collateral damage to freedoms we cherish?

>
>Get with the plan. Society has always protected copyrighted material.


Not unequivocally. There are two arms to this. The right of the 
creator to receive reward and the right of society to benefit from 
the creation

>Coming to grips with easily-copyable digital media doesn't imply we should
>throw the last century's IP practices out the door.


True, but we should recognise that trying to balance the need to 
reward the creator, against society's wish to use the creation, 
cannot so easily be done now by using control of copies as the 
mechanism.

>We should all have the right to licence/copyright our works how we see fit.

We live within a society. Compared with the past, increasingly, 
anything we create is dependent on others. Our rights exist within 
what society deems them to be. But this is all part of deep ethical 
debates about rights and obligations within society.

Our evolution places us a hunter/food gatherers existing in 
cooperative (with some competition) groups of about 150 people, 
competing (with some cooperation) with adjacent similar sized groups. 
Overlaid on this is the culture we built, Dawkin's memes, which vary 
from time to time and place to place. Globalisation is starting to 
take much of the place away but the time element remains.

It could be that part of society's control of the reward system for 
the creation of intellectual works  which uses the control of copies 
as its methodology is out of time and is past its use by date.

Tony
-- 
phone  +61 2 6241 7659
mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry