Leaving Your Mark on the Web

Sigh.. Problem isn’t that no one understands copyright, its that some understand it all too well, and some others don’t understand just how bloody stupid pushing it as far as they do goes. Two cases – 1. A cassette I have, you can’t find on CD, or any place else any more. Its just gone. I AM sure the company still has the thing some place, but it wasn’t too popular, so, as far as the are concerned, it doesn’t exist, and never should have. By some estimates, there are old films, from the 50s, which are vanishing like this, with the original media they are on literally falling apart in warehouses, at a rate of dozens of a year, and accelerating. Why? Because the companies that own them won’t copy them, and no one else can afford to buy the rights.

That is copyright in an age where "content", even old content, like old movies, is so vast that to back it up you would have to have nearly every person alive on the planet spend at least a week making copies, just to that 1/4 of us could have some hope of ever seeing it again.

And, what is happening? Instead of making it easier for things to get into public domain, or otherwise protecting our ability to save any of it, for future generations, we treat it all as disposable, like its a plastic basket, you buy from the laundry isle in Walmart, and Scotus actually said, "Its perfectly OK to rob the public of existing public works, by re-copyrighting them." WTF?

Case 2 – Copyright fear, and software lunacy. The law still says, in theory, that you can "reverse engineer" something. There are problems with that though. A recent discussion, as of the last few years, on a game world called "Second Life" involved "procedural textures". They have automatic copyright on textures, you see, so logically any "procedural" one has to have the same protections. Only.. by procedural, it means that you are using basic, reproducible, math, to define what the texture looks like. This is roughly the equivalent of trying to copyright/trademark ***a specific triangle***, but all instances of triangles. Its that bloody absurd, and they know it. So.. No procedural textures, since you can’t protect something that someone can reproduce (or rather, reverse engineer, like a computer program) with trivial ease. Rather than state that its not possible to protect it, they simply don’t let anyone use it at all. Logical from a legal standpoint, sort of.. but its a disaster for people building things, who understand why it doesn’t make sense to protect it. And, the ones that don’t get this, don’t like it either, so everyone is equally unhappy.

This is, in some respects, coming to a head with projects like the RepRap in the real world too. If you can "print" your own circuit boards, wiring, plastic parts, etc… Well, how major/trivial does the change you make to something need to be, for it to be "new"? At what point is some idiot going to simply try to ban the technology, because it becomes trivial for someone with one of them, some basic materials, and a computer, with some 3D design software, to print a new coffee cup, instead of buying it from the store? How do you police 6 billion people, to make sure none of them are violating copyright, making too similar products, or trading "designs" that belong to some company that wants to charge $50 for something 1 billion of the people, assuming everyone had a machine, on the planet could "design" with the software in a few hours time themselves, and print? Where do you draw the line, when its trivial to copy, or reproduce, or make yourself, something, between "copyright", and just being a greedy asshole, who thinks they deserve every dime they can scrape out of everyone else’s pockets (possibly, like the MPAA, while relegating the original creator to 4th class status in the process)?

The law keeps trying to hold back the tide, instead of adapting to the reality of what is going on. Why? Because, dealing with reality might mean making half a billion a year, instead of a billion. Its simpler, in the short term, to panic, and try to stop people with increasingly larger and larger numbers of computers, from doing what they did 30 years ago with cassette tapes, or the like. But, at some point, there are diminishing returns, when you treat your customers like idiots, and don’t provide decent alternatives, at a sane price. The magazine industry has been figuring that out of a decade now. It only gets worse when you have to compete against people providing similar content, intentionally, for free, and their information is actually more up to date, and accurate. Bad news, all around, for people that think copyright is a hammer, to hit customers with, and not something, as originally intended, to provide "short term" protection, to establish a new product/business, before someone else got a crack at it too.