Lindens, give us a public domain!

Oh, I'm not against copyrights. I think Ama explained things pretty well...

I think the entertainment industry (generally speaking) has the money to "buy" whatever they perceive will be a benefit to them in the long run, whether it's a good or a bad thing for everyone else. They don't care...especially people like those running the RIAA, you should read up on them some and find out what kind of *ridiculous* things they have been doing (and trying to do).

Copyright law isn't the only thing the RIAA is playing around with. If they had their way, personal privacy would be pretty much nonexistent. There's more at stake here than just "music copyrights", and really... "protecting" the RIAA money grubbers isn't *that* important to begin with, even if they deserved it. There are more important things at stake...

Would you also agree with making copyright non-transferrable?

SL the game has died. It has been shown quite evendent due to LL actions. Can't say I love the whole concept, however I finally had to face the reality.

I think it is a bit of a leap from the RIAA wanting the identities of people who break the law by distributing copyrighted music (and whether that law is just or not, it is a law), and eliminating all personal privacy. It isn't as if the RIAA wanted to put a camera in my house.

For the record; I am in favor of open source as a choice of the writer of software. If a band wants to give away its music for free, they can post it on the web themselves. But, I am a software engineer and if I come up with an innovative way to do a task, I would like the opportunity to profit by it. I think that it is obscene the amount of profit the record companies make compared to the artists. But when someone distributes hundreds or thousands of copies of a recording, it hurts both the label AND the artist.

Also,as long as I am ranting, ownership of Mickey Mouse isn't purely a profit issue. The fact that Disney owns Mickey means that you won't be seeing him in any porn in the near future, or selling Nikes, or any other use that would detract from the image. And I am aware of Donald Duck Orange Juice - but they don't run sweatshops in third world countries

No? They did ask for the right to break in to and intentionally damage the computer of anyone they suspected of having infringing copies of their intellectual property. Without it ever seeing any official. And they wanted it to be legal for them to take any means necessary to find that information out on your computer, which means they were asking to be able to look at any and everyones computer contents without permission and for it to be legal.

In a society with as many computers as we have, if that isn't getting rid of privacy I'm not sure what is. The measure never made it through the house or congress, luckily, but they did try.

I am 100% sure there is mickey porn. That is nearly a black market anyways and they produce pretty much whatever they want. Sure, you don't see him on the cover of playboy or playgirl but that would probably be more tastefull than what you would find if you looked.

Mickey is an Icon and has been for a very, very long time. It is time (past time) for disney to create some new icons or move on with the newer icons they have created, and let mickey go to the public domain. Then others can write stories of him or use his likeness in their own creative efforts. Whether you would find those efforts tasteful or not is imaterial.

Okay Ama, and coca cola should be forced to give away its formula for coka so that competitors can put them out of business with it? This kind of thing wouldn't help the little guy at all. It would speed up the process of consolidating power to mega corporations. Franky I'm a little worried about your desperate need for new micky mouse material

As for the record industry and RIAA, I'm with Dusty. Yes they're greedy evil bastards, but that doesn't give anyone the right to steal from them. If you want to speed up the demise of the record industry as we know it, buy music from independant artists and labels. Stealing the music owned by the major labels only serves to speed us headlong into a more repressive and draconian society. If you keep stealing food out of the crocodile's mouth you can't act surprised when you get your hand bitten off.

Grrrrr Ama, that's the second time you've said what I wanted to say! (Thanks lol)

Yes, the RIAA wants the right to HACK into our computers and delete files (while doing who knows what else)--files that THEY think we shouldn't have.

Chip, here's an alternative to stealing crappy RIAA music:

www.boycott-riaa.com

btw, Disney only wants to hold all their old copyrights because Walt Disney was the true creative mind behind it all, and nowadays they couldn't think of something original to save their company's life.

Walt Disney... creative?
Nothing Disney ever created was original. They made spoofs of existing movies as far back as Steamboat Willie being a spoof of the then-popular Steamboat Bill movie.
From http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html

You want to know how important it is to have a stronger public domain and less stringent copyright controls?

Heck just go read the article
It is my sincere belief that you and I are not special, everything we have ever thought about has been thoroughly discussed by someone else already, probably over a thousand years ago, and if we had never been born, one heck of a lot of people would have an equal chance of coming up with whatever you have come up with.
To me, an idea, a concept, is like an ecological niche. It's out there already, waiting to be conquered, independently of humans and their precious little thoughts. Whether someone can come up with something, is mostly a product of their times, of what stimuli said person has been exposed to.
The brain is an organic processing unit. We are no more different from each other than mass manufactured CPUs.
Even if you're, say, Einstein, the fact that you were the "first" (he actually wasn't) to have fancy ideas about the speed of light, energy, or relativity, it just means you're the one who won the lottery, and were selected by an inordinately complex chain of random events to bear the torch of enlightenment for your generation.

coca cola is a seperate issue for a few reasons. One being a formula for a product is patentable, not copyrightable. Second being, according to common lore (meaning I can't verify it), coca-cola never got a patent for the express reason of never wanting it to go to the public domain. That should mean that if you can figure out on your own the formula to exactly make coke, as long as you don't infringe on their trademark you should be ok.

The idea, I think, is that a copyright or a patent offers a protection of your works so that you may make a profit at the cost of eventually giving it to the public domain.

I don't agree with Eggy about no new ideas. I think there are new ideas, I also think those new ideas are often not possible without building blocks to build on. You can't build the top of a skyscraper without first a foundation.

The real issue for some I am thinking now is this point: the public domain is a Good. I firmly believe this to be so, it allows anyone, big coorporations or the little guy, to access, use and build on the ideas, and concepts.

I basically agree with you Ama, but I still see the need for public domain being more important with patents than with copyrights. No one building on the work of walt disney is going to cure cancer. Someone building on the work of pfizer might.

Okay then, I said that tongue-in-cheek anyway. Although I was thinking more along the lines of Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, etc. I don't know much about the "history of Disney" (heh) but I assume those characters are pretty original.

I really just wanted to insult the lack of creativity Disney has and if you want to include Walt Disney in that, that's fine with me.

the problem with copyright extention is not that you can't use micky mouse for your own.. the problem is that the collective fabric of our society has been robbed of 20 more years of culture and art.

There is a place for individual ownership.... there is however a real problem when that individual ownership is extended 90 years past the date of the idea.

Public domain is a necessary right for a productive and flourishing culture.

Look at it another way... copyright used to be the same length as patent, 7 years... in the successive 250 years patents have been extended 10 years in duration... copyrights have been extended 83 years, and counting indefinately.... the vast majority of that extention coming after mickey mouse (in the last 70 years copyrights have been extended by 50)... that means that in 70 years of time the collective fabric of american society has only been allowed to move forewards 20... and i hate to say it, but it will probably never move forewards again.



what all this has to do with SL is really minimal though. It really sucks... but i can't see any way to support public domaining of people's things when they drop out of the game... ESPECIALLY not now that they essentially have a continual non paying, non landowning subscription, forever

i understand there are some issues requiring *someone* to change an in-game item to simply not be broken... such as the pixel length issue that cropped up in 1.1 and broke alot of clothes.... but i don't think forcing things to public domain after only a few months can possibly be fair... i think the lindens should however possibly setup a support system to refund money on objects (they can check how much ya spent, at least for 'buy' purchased items) that break (they know what they've changed and what it will ruin)

to those that say such a system would be impractical and annoying for the lindens to use, i fully agree.. but then again theres something to be said about encouraging at least some backwards compatability when they change major stuff (aka if ya change a bloody script call make it a new function and leave the old one alone)

There is a difference from something being taken as public domain, and something being derivative. I am not familiar with "Romeus and Juliet", but I would be willing to bet that the Bard didn't take it nearly word for word; he expanded, created dialog, etc. Same with the historical plays. I don't have problems with people writing stories with elves, dwarves and magic rings. I even liked Bored of the Rings. But if someone wrote a cheesy book that copied long passages from The Silmarillion, called it Beren and Luthien: A Love Story and promoted it as part of the Middle Earth saga, I would have problems with that.

As for stunting creativity - I think that copyright promotes creativity. Instead of rehashing the same stuff, people are forced to create new stuff. Steamboat Mickey might be derived from Steamboat Bill, but Mickey has done things that Bill never did (including the black market porn stuff that is illegal.) I wouldn't like for someone to take a photo of my avatar, Photoshop it to include an act of bestiality, and post it in a Mature sim. However, there are other cartoon mice, ducks, etc. that are unique and that neither detract from nor infringe upon Mickey.

If you like a SL script or object, there is nothing preventing you from recreating it from scratch, as long as you do not promote it as being the original. If you like a texture, create or commision a copy (btw, I would be willing to bet that a lot of textures out there are someone else's copyrighted material, but that is another issue).

and steamboat petey will never get a chance to, because disney has made an empire out of EXPLICITLY taking stories out of the public domain and then forbidding a *SINGLE* drop of their ink or note of their songs from *EVER* going back to that same pool that has served them so well



The real issue is that as disney has proved, there is real and lasting value in being ABLE to take once told stories, that have become sort of the under-current of society, the domain of the public.. and putting your own unique spin upon them.

Our grandparents had the ability to take the stories and creations of THEIR grandparents and create new and wonderful things out of them.... *we* no longer are allowed that same luxury, and thats a sad, and unfortunate thing

Why should we have to put up with this? The active players come first, not those on one year Horizons breaks. If a lifer that owns land/objects in world doesn't even bother to log on ONCE in (say) three months, why can't their land be released? It's not like that kind of player can quit. I don't know what the legal side of it is, but I really don't care about the virtual "belongings" of inactive lifers if they are hurting active players by taking up space. Send it to their inventory and be done with it.

Now, if LL could potentially be SUED for deleting someone's virtual crap because they were inactive in SL, the legal system is quite screwed up (oh wait it already is ).

Charity should come from the heart, not the barrel of a gun. I think if we made it known to everyone who ever created something in SL and then left that their entire inventory was going to go public, some would be very annoyed.

People can upload things (like textures and sounds) that they created and have a right to expect copyright protections for. People can create things in-game, and they have a right to expect some protection for these as well, to the extent that the work is original.

If I spend four hours drawing a picture and upload it, I don't want to hear that sixty days after I leave, it's laid open for anyone to take and do with as they please. I don't care that my prior experiences influenced the picture. Those prior experiences aren't what spent four hours synthesizing themselves into the picture. I had to do that. I applied labor. That has value. If you don't think it has value, please feel free to spend four of your own hours synthesizing your past experiences into something.

If a person wishes to contribute something before they leave, let them do so. If they don't do it, don't go robbing their graves.

While I support the public domain I agree with huns and (I think?) Garoud - it just won't work in SL. Especially with the new TOS changes to allow you to maintain your copyrights / IP rights. That makes SL really more or less a publisher or host and they really can not decide when something becomes public domain. They essentially removed themselves from that role.

The public script library is a good place to start. A public repository of textures and sounds would also be great, and if I had the webspace I might set it up. In game would be easier but as I have seen is much less user friendly. A repository for public domain builds might be interesting but I'm not sure how much use it would get - what would be 'good' to put in it?

My last post wasn't referring to public domain at all, I was responding to the observation eltee pointed out.

On the topic of SL/copyright/public domain I do agree that we can't make stuff created by people "public" when they quit the game. (Since SL is tied into real life copyright law now.)

But I do think it's okay to delete the stuff (that's in-world, at the very least) created by people who have quit.

Won't argue this point at all. In fact I always thought this was the linden policy. However I am one of those people that rarely leaves his little section of SL so its hard to tell sometimes ya know.

How has Disney "taken a story out of public domain?" Is it now illegal to retell the Cinderella story? I can think of a couple of non-Disney remakes. Steamboat Bill/Mickey? There was a Simpsons episode with "Steamboat Itchy." Disney has not taken things that were once public domain and made them proprietary. If you want to make a new Snow White cartoon; you are free to do so. You just need enough creativity to make your own animations, write you own songs and dialog.

I wouldn't want my neighbor to landscape my yard. I wouldn't want someone to put bumper stickers on my car. And I wouldn't want someone to alter my story.

well two points in comment.. i didn mean they REMOVED them from the public domain, i meant that they 'mined' the public domain for ideas and stories, and then made their fortunes retelling them.

At the same time they have their own original cast and characters and stories, dealing most specifically with mickey donald and goofy etc... and they have been VERY adamant about keeping them OUT of the public domain, going so far as to almost single-handedly extend copyrights by 35-40 years with a series of successful lobbies of congress each time mickey might have been 'endangered'


as to the second one... while its understandable that you want to retain controll of your stories and ideas... would you also want to deny someone, NINETY YEARS from now, to have the chance to re-invigorate your story by retelling it in a way thats more fitting to the world as it will be then?

the real travesty isn't so much that we can't all make money with mickey mouse.. the real travesty is the amount of literary, musical, and cultural history that disney has robbed the public of in the process of maintinaing its mickey copyright.

take a look here at project gutenberg for an idea of just how draconian things have become...

http://www.gutenberg.net/howtos/copyright-howto.shtml

and while yer at it.. stop and pick up some books to read... they've managed to archive thousands upon thousands of books that belong to the people.

Besides.. don't worry about your stories getting 'stolen'... since NOTHING in america will lapse into the public domain again until 2019 at the earliest, and if you died tomorrow, your work wouldn't be free to the world until 2079

I heard a story about this on the radio.

Apparently there's a lot of old niche music that's being lost forever due to apathy on the part of the record producers to re-produce the works or at the very least release them to the public.

It seems they'd rather sit on them and let the last remaining master copies rot into oblivion rather than share something they don't even value.

It doesn't get much more selfish than that, my friends.

Wild guess, but is an example of that The Beetles' music?

I doubt it Garoud, beetles music still sells, and still sells well. It is probably more obscure music.

Look, if someone leaves the game, they effectively "die", and then it doesnt really matter what happens to the contents of their inventory, does it?
It matters even less what happens to nocopy/nomod items created by that person, and in fact, it could be argued that if someone isnt around to offer support for their product, we should have the right to try and fix it ourselves, or get someone else to do it.
When you leave, its usually because you stopped caring about the game and moved on to something else.
If you have to leave for some other reason, and dont want your stuff to fall into the public domain, DELETE EVERYTHING.
Then when your inv is about to hit the recycle bin, there wont be anything for others to salvage.
Copyrights used to be 14 years, and only if the author remained alive. The concept of copyrights extending past the author's death was introduced solely for the sake of supporting his widow and children, in a time when people died much younger, and women werent supposed to have jobs.
It doesnt make sense in the real world today, and it certainly doesnt make sense in a virtual place where virtual people dont really need money to stay alive, or have offspring to support with said money.
LL would certainly love to cut down on uploads even more, while at the same time allowing people to enhance their builds with more (and free) textures.
Back in the day, we had a COPY TEXTURE command in our pie menus. Everyone could "steal" your precious little textures (hey, guess what, they still can, and they will always be able to unless LL starts encrypting all streamed data).
This feature was meant to cut down on uploads and encourage sharing and creativity.
But I guess LL has been steadily tipping the scales towards the relative few (but vocal) who are money-grubbing control freaks, so the whole talk of sharing, collaborating, and creativity that brought me into this game no longer applies.
SL is now a 3D online marketplace where all that matters is getting money and protecting "rights" you shouldnt have.