Copyright Comes To The Internet

from WinCustomize Forums
A new global agreement about copyright on the Internet is about to come into effect after the necessary 30 nations agreed to ratify it. Over 140 nations were involved in drafting the agreement.

The treaty will let "composers, artists, writers and others to use the Internet with confidence to create, distribute and control the use of their works within the digital environment."
Those countries that have ratified the agreement will now have to offer artists certain minimum rights.

Source: http://www.nandotimes.com
8,910 views 19 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I forgot to say : "Yay"!!
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
About time, too!
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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Here's a link to another article about it: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/12/07/011207hnwipo.xml

It's basically the same 'digital' copyright laws as before but spread across a lot more of the world. Sadly, it also perpetuates the "WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty" which supresses technology and information distribution in favor of profits for a few special interests and manufacturers.

Protecting the intellectual property of artists and developers is one thing. Sabotoging the development of beneficial technological advances is another. Look at who benefits from the SCMS - maybe 5 music publishing conglomerates, look at who looses - the public is denied use of the best magnetic tape recording format ever invented. And it only got a lot worse from there... the last reasonable decision in this matter was by the US Supreme Court in the "First Sale Doctrine" decision which disallowed the ban on video tape recorders for the public. Since then all the decisions have been made behind closed doors by special interest groups bribing congress to mandate the restrictions without a public forum.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Wow yuk that sucks
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
yay? congrats, most of your mp3 players will be useless, even if the mp3's are those you made yourself from your purchased cd's. this has almost nothing to do with protecting artists.

copyright is broken. currently, if valuable information is under copyright, it's basically lost if the copyright owner has no interest in publishing. got a favorite sci-fi short story, published 50 years ago in a collection? your only hope is to find it in a used bookstore. you can't get it new (in most cases). treatise on land management which might help farmers in some barren area regain use of the land? it was published with a print run of 150 copies 30 years ago, the publisher's long gone, the author's dead... too bad, still can't make copies of it for another few decades.

A logical system which was proposed (and stupidly shot down) would've been a copyright system based on diminishing returns... 1st year, copyright's free; author pays nothing to retain all rights. next year, it's a buck. year after, 2$. year after, 4. year after, 8. It would become more and more expensive over time to retain copyright - thus, ensuring that information would enter the public domain in a timely manner. If it's really juicy stuff which everyone wants, you can probably hold the copyright longer, since you'll be making enough money off of sales to hold the copyright as years go by. would'nt last past, oh, ~40 years... that'd be getting ridiculously expensive.

just a thought, and a pissed off attitude towards copyrights as they currently stand (I bought my damn cd's, ain't got a pirated mp3 on my system - but they still wanna tell me where I can listen to my discs? Fuck 'em.)
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
and this is where the hackers step in.
some are good, finding bugs and security holes, some are bad, breaking (cracking) security on everything form programs to e-books.

and whenever soemone comes up with a new methodology to "protect" soemthing, soem 14 year old "cracks" it within a few hours.
(i remember steven king's little experiment with "Ride the Bullet". It was relaeased in a "secure" format at 12 PM EST...it was available in the newsgroups as a printable PDF by 4.20 that same day).

The truth is, copyright has becoem a commodity of the very rich. If you can afford to persue it, and you have covered yer butt, you can "win".

If you can't afford to persue it, with both money and tiem, you have no rights.

ANd in the end, those who want will get, no matter what.
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Can someone explain this in plain English?
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
already did, not our fault you couldn't understand. blame your teachers, and the republicans for keeping educational funding low. oh, and the american people for voting jackasses like bush & reagan into office.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Wow Yay !

I would have hoped that this news would have been more positive in the outcome, but after reading some post's here I can see that it doesn't inspire. Then again I am not suprised.

Still I am hoping for the day when all our work can be protected properly...

CD's.. Yea that sucks too as far as I am concerned. Sorry but I am in the belief that I buy a Cd and I would like to listen to it where 'I' choose not some guy in an office some where who thinks it will help stop pirating. When all the Copy Protection actually does is stop people not only playing CD's on their Pc BUT ! some times on some Music Systems too.

I have read quite a few complaints on that so far. Including claims that the Quality is deminished in some way because of the protection now being used on CD Music.
Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Does anyone else picture Herman from The Simpsons when they read something from shoggot?

thecat... I wouldn't worry much about CD protection. Someone will crack it sooner rather than later. I won't be kept from playing my CDs on my computer.
Reply #12 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I am with you on that Firestorm and youre right, some one will it is enevitable
Reply #13 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Intellectual property rights is definitely one of the toughest things to balance.

On the one hand, you want to protect the authors, creators of intellectual property. On the other hand, the increasing decrease in rights of those who "license" (i.e. buy) intellectual property is very troubling.
Reply #14 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Shoggot you will have to excuse me if I don't take anything you write seriously. Shouldn't you be rolling in your own waste over at that other site howling at the moon over the "evils" of commercialism?

Let me articulate my question more succinctly, can someone who isn't a known kook please explain in laymen terms what these new laws will mean to the average person.
Reply #15 from WinCustomize Forums Top
i don't like the idea that they can keep me from making backups of my CDs. my CDs scratch like crazy and i have some that are irreplacable.
Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Emily, What is it you don't understand?
Shoggot wrote it plainly, I think. It means yo won't be able to listen to MP3s.
In case you don't know what MP3s are, it's an format that allows you to save songs on your computer.
Reply #18 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Not being able to save songs on the Computer is some thing we all probably have taken for granted and feel we have a right to do when we back up our CD Collection. Hey I am referring to Legally obtained CD's here, not what some one infringed on a copyright issue over some thing like Napster.

The argument is that the new format of the CD's which are protected in this way will (and) have been alleged to play (or not play very well on certain types of Music Systems. People also believe that the quality is not as good as it was when the protection was not there..
Reply #19 from WinCustomize Forums Top
"...blame your teachers, and the republicans for keeping educational funding low. oh, and the american people for voting jackasses like bush & reagan into office," shoggot.

A bit of advice for you, shoggot...

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

Try getting some facts about what you're saying before you say it.