What is ©?
What is Copyright? What is Copyright protection? Is Copyright protection a good thing or is it not? Read them up if you don’t know from the links below.
Information from the U.K. Patent Office
Information from the U.S. Copyright Office
Information from whatiscopyright.org
Do you think that we need Copyright protection here in Maldives? Let’s discuss the pros and cons.
December 11th, 2005 at 08:17
>>What is copyleft?.
>>One of the most important reasons creators or authors might want to make copyleft applicable to their work is that in so doing they hope to create the most favorable conditions for a wide range of people to feel invited to contribute improvements and/or elaborations to this work, in a continuing process.
>>Although copyleft idea was developed around Free Software Foundation, both copyleft and copyright licenses are used for things like documents (for example books), art (for example music), and computer software.
December 12th, 2005 at 02:47
So… we have the right-wing and the left-wing even in this? I think both Copyright and Copyleft (or a Creative Commons License) has its own purposes.
When information was passed on slowly, before the invention of the world wide web and the internet, Copyright was more appropriate as, under its protection, intellectual property was protected for usually the inventors or its owners. Then, the common ideology behind this was not to share the invention secrets. It was thought that, it they did share, the inventors would loose their motivation to invent or create because then it was thought that they were driven by its rewards – mainly monetary.
However in recent times, this notion has shifted to a more sharing concept with computer networks and convergence technologies. You would argue for example that, the music in the CD that you just bought had no use if, you did not have a right to copy it to your cell phone, etc. Then it shifted again to exclude personal use.
More and more people now believe that by sharing and tweaking things others have created, of course with their permission, the result would be better, as with open source software for computers and such as using loops to create new music. This way, more products would be created at a faster rate. Time is not wasted, starting from square one. This has not stopped invention or creativity either.
Then again, none of the above really mattered if there was no legal basis for it or, if the population did not have a need or believed in its principles. So, where do we stand?
December 12th, 2005 at 04:18
>>>In a broader view, copyright is very recent. Copyright laws originated in the 18th century. Initially it was used as a system that balances the motivation of the creators while ensuring that the content had a free circulation in the public domain which all other creators could build upon.
>>>With capitalism, the copyrighted contents became properties of media corporations instead of authors and artists.
>>>Now copyright is often used as a tool to prevent or curb creativity.
>>>Until the 20th century and the rise of the recording industry, copyright played no major role for music. Bach’s Concenrto in D Major BWV 972 for example is simply a re-orchestration of the ninth movement of Vivaldi’s L’Estro, Armonica.
>>>Beethoven didn’t have to buy a license for writing the Diabelli Variations, from the Austrian Anton Diabelli.
>>>The Walt Disney Corporation founded much of its wealth on folk tales such as Snow White, and Sinbad, by taking them out of the public domain and turning them into proprietary films and merchandise.
>>>Bio Piracy: nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin
>Some content derived from Lawrence Liang’s Guide to Open Content Licenses v1.2. and bbc.co.uk
December 12th, 2005 at 18:43
I agree that copyright has protected the interests of record companies more than the artists with their lengthy contracts. So there is actually a new movement by which artists are encouraged to go under new licenses and not just sign exclusive contracts.
It is also very interesting what corporations could make out of folk tales. Aren’t there any ways folk tales are protected? Or… can’t someone use it to make something new out of it then?
December 13th, 2005 at 01:11
Copyright literally equates to ‘the right to copy’. For this to happen there must be a definite producer of the product (what is to be copied) – some products, such as most folk tales, are hard to attribute to any one producer as they are of unknown, vague or contested origin, thus they are not automatically open to copyright laws. The rights to such products may of course be bought by someone as long as it’s possible to identify the product as distinct from the ever-growing body of what is considered ‘general’ and ‘apparent’ knowledge. This then is a second condition of a product that can come under copyright laws – it must be definite. For example, the idea of copyrighting the English language is rightly absurd.
Even the most ardent free market advocate will concede that capitalism does have its dark ways. As a general, if normative, rule copyrights ensure that producers, innovators in this sense, benefit from their discoveries and are justly rewarded for their ingenuity. The market economy rewards such producers with profit by awarding them ‘the right to copy’. The prevalence of market dictates, sometimes over common sense, does in several cases allow for the abuse of this entitlement however.
As some of you have noted, a copyleft has now developed opening the way for more open-ended and collaborative attitudes towards ‘production’ or ‘creation’. Such changes are for the most part inevitable today with the rapid development of technology – which has given rise to terms such as ‘the global village’ – and the hopefully increasing realisation that we all inhabit a common world and none of us can opt to hermetically seal ourselves off from each other. For instance, the music industry is having a hard time trying to promote CD sales in the conventional sense.
So do we need copyright laws in the Maldives? A very broad question to which I will only offer at this juncture a schematic answer. There are too many considerations to be made for me to be able to sufficiently deal with the issue in this short period of time – I have around 20 mins. In the end it comes down to striking a balance between encouraging creativity by rewarding innovators with exclusive rights to copy the fruits of their labour, and opening the way for contributions from others to save time and optimise production, as al-basso has noted, while keeping in mind the socio-economic impact (to and from whom the money is exchanged basically) of copyrights in a particular society.
December 16th, 2005 at 22:16
Imagine a world without copyright!
A world without copyright is easy to imagine. The level playing field of cultural production – a market accessible for everyone – would once again be restored. A world without copyright would offer the guarantee of a good income to many artists, and would protect the public domain of knowledge and creativity. And members of the public would get what they are entitled to: a surprisingly rich and varied menu of artistic alternatives.
December 17th, 2005 at 12:52
Quite a good argument. For anyone who’s unsure – creativecommons.org