Semi-OT: Congress about to limit artists' copyright rights

[Jeffrey Watts]

The issue is that this is _not_ the custom, and never has been.  If I
write a book or paint a painting, it's mine, and if someone
plagiarizes or copies my painting I can sue them for damages.  This is
how it's always been.  They're proposing instead to change it so that
I must go out and pay someone to "register" my work - the supposition
being that unless I go out to "register" it, it's public domain.

While that may be tolerable for commercial artists, it's a total
screwjob for small artists and hobbyists.  You know, every know and
then some hobbyist manages to make a masterpiece...  And those folks
will get ripped off.  The price may be tolerable to commercial
artists, but it won't be for hobbyists.  You shouldn't have to pay
someone to protect what's yours.

Finally, your patent example is not cogent.  You file a patent when
you intend to make profit by your idea.  An artist doesn't necessarily
have a mass-market profit intention.  Maybe he's selling a painting to
a local patron.  Maybe she wrote a song for her daughter.  Those
people might not have aspirations of selling millions of CDs or lots
of lithographs, but that doesn't mean that someone else should steal
their labor and mass market it at their expense.  It's THEIR WORK.

This kind of bullshit bill basically says that your work is not  yours
unless you pay a fee to someone else who has the right to charge that
fee because they paid off a legislator.  So they start with artists,
but I wonder how long until that movement starts applying to other
kinds of property?  That kind of scheme is something the mafia would
be proud of.

Basically, if we went with your idea we'd start living in a world
where you need to pay someone to register all of the stuff in your
house.  If you don't register it, ANYONE can walk into your house and
steal your stuff.  Does that sound absurd?  Yes, it is, and it's a
extreme logical conclusion of what this bill is striving for.

I think this idea is stupid.  I'm sure it's a response to some people
arbitrarily suing companies because of some similarities.  If that's a
real problem the real solution is reforming the legal system and
making frivolous lawsuits more expensive - not creating some bogus
registry that will only benefit the registry companies.

Jeffrey.

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Billy Crook <billycrook at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hold up...
>
> It doesn't sound unfair to me at all that you should have to pay some
> fee to register your work in order to extort a fee out of someone else
> for using the same work down the road.  The fees shouldn't be
> 'excessive', but what does 'excessive' even mean today.
>
> It's completely fair that you have to pay to register patents and
> trademarks today.  It's fair because you are investing in the
> profitability of your innovation.  Copyrights should be the same.  How
> *fair* do you think it is that you are able today, to spend hundreds
> of hours on some work only to discover (after you've spent thousands,
> millions of your own money) to bring your idea to market, that there
> was some prior work with copyright that you had NO WAY to know about,
> but yet now, all your time, and all your money is in vain.  Copyright
> law is supposed to *promote* innovation.  Not discourage it.  It is
> entirely unreasonable and impossible to expect all new inventors to
> just "know" about every secret copyright out there.  At very least
> there should be a single registry one could search, and there will be
> some cost to run such a registry.  It can either be paid for out of
> your taxes, or by the people who profit from it.  The latter is
> obviously more fair.

-- 

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a
precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine