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maxwellelvis Mad Scientist Wannabe from undisclosed location Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: In my bunk
Mad Scientist Wannabe
#176: Nov 20th 2014 at 5:41:27 PM

Robotech.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great
RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#177: Nov 20th 2014 at 11:17:31 PM

@ Ever 9: You've said that you think taking a copyrighted work and just rewording/redrawing/reshooting it should still count as infringement. If you take that position, then that means you don't want copyright to just cover the exact words/images/sounds that make up a work, but want it to cover the amalgamation of ideas being expressed, too. And a derivative work must, by definition, use an amalgamation of ideas that someone else created, so I have a hard time seeing how you can still allow derivative works without being logically inconsistent.

Cronosonic (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#178: Nov 21st 2014 at 2:51:51 AM

[up] Except only the actual work being covered by copyright, not the ideas, names or concepts contained within, is more or less the norm outside the US, as stated previously. Granted, that's information I got from a law student who specializes in copyright, but I don't exactly have any reason to doubt his claim.

Japan in particular has surprisingly light copyright laws, considering Hirohiko Araki easily got away with so many blatant musical references in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure until material actually started getting localized. See also the doujin scene, which is also thriving due to publishers actually seeing doujin works as free promotion, because, hey, if someone's making doujin work based off someone else's work, the original has gotta be pretty good at least, right?

Also, I do think the one thing that wouldn't suddenly cause a flood of derivatives to spill out onto the market is the unwritten rules of the free market itself. Over-saturation of the market can cause consumers to lose interest, as shown many times in the history of capitalism - the speculator bubble bust of 90s comics and the death of Guitar Hero as a viable brand was due to too many releases within a short time frame, and Call Of Duty is displaying a slow but clear decline due to yearly releases. While a larger amount of cheap online content is much more sustainable, it's not like it'll be that easy for an original work to get buried by its derivatives, especially in the information age. It's not like we've have a flood of works based off a specific thing in the public domain recently, and to my knowledge that sort of thing is rare at most.

I really don't want to get too involved in this argument, but I'm more inclined to agree with Ever9 overall, ownership of a specific expression is fine, but I'm not remotely convinced of any moral right or economic benefit to an intellectual monopoly of ideas or names. That being said, I'm also all for a more 'Creative Commons' attribution setup for derivatives.

Really, I'm personally agree with the notion that 'nothing is original', or at least, nothing is totally original. That's the thing about ideas, they very rarely come from a vacuum, if ever. It's the expression and execution of those ideas that truly count, not the ideas themselves, and the notion of providing a monopoly to someone over a specific permutation of a concept or a name just because they published it first for 'moral' or economic reasons seems completely ridiculous to me.

Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#179: Nov 21st 2014 at 5:43:23 AM

[up][up]Raven Wilder:

You are putting motivations into my mouth that I have never expressed in this thread. I'm really trying not to be an ideologue here. It's not that I have decided in advance that "copyright shall only apply to exact replication", and fight for that at all cost, like it's some self-evident moral imperative. My position was always simply that creative work should be rewarded proportionally to it's value, to freely and justly promote the progress of arts.

When I look at the current state of the industry, with fan works and similar transformative arts being suppressed and censored, (even though in principle their degree of derivativeness is not different from many elements of the Western Literary Canon that we revere so much), my opposition to that simply comes from the belief that this particular regulation that we have doesn't justly reward creative work, and doesn't appropriately contribute to the health of our artistic culture.

If there are ALSO some possible "amalgamation of ideas" that are not new creative work themselves, just pirates abusing a loophole, and serve no other purpose other than draining the profitability of deserving artists, I'm all for suppressing and censoring them, and I have never claimed otherwise. Freedom of speech is not absolute, it's just quite more important than the current system acknowledges.

edited 21st Nov '14 6:30:48 AM by Ever9

Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#180: Nov 21st 2014 at 5:50:31 AM

[up] Would it help to have a universal, global standard of copyright, instead of the current situation of different standards around the world?

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Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#181: Nov 21st 2014 at 6:28:32 AM

[up]We already have plenty of international copyright treaties, but realistically, US copyright is the bottleneck that countries have to follow if they want to be viable.

I'm not even from the U.S. myself, but I keep focusing on their law, because everyone from Canadian cartoon studios to British fantasy writers and Polish game developers would be most influenced by a change in that one.

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#182: Nov 21st 2014 at 6:56:29 AM

Honestly, at this point, I'm tired of circling the same points over and over. Ever 9 is quote mining my posts to respond to specific bits that he wants to, and either missing or ignoring the fact that the next part of my post (which he didn't quote) is addressing the points he's making in his response. I don't know if he's simply not seeing it or he's arguing in bad faith, but either way, I'm not interested in going in endless circles about it.

For reference, here's my stance in total. I believe that artistic works consist of more than just the words on the page, images on the screen, shapes on canvas (etc etc), they also include the ideas and concepts illustrated by those basic building blocks. Copyright can and should include protection for the more abstract aspects of the work (the characters, setting, plot, etc) rather than being limited to the basic concrete parts (words, images, etc). This higher level of protection is necessary to ensure that the creating artists receive credit and compensation for their work. If other artists were allowed to make derivative works based directly on a copyrighted work without the copyright holder's permission, then that dilutes the original artist's ability to receive credit and compensation for their work (ie, they're not "the writer for [their franchise]", they're "the guy who did [first work in their franchise] and then other people came in and ruined it/did better than he ever could have"). With less ability to make money from their work, fewer artists will be able to support themselves professionally, and thus we, the public, receive less and lower-quality art, which is bad for everyone.

I certainly support existing copyright exemptions, such as using copyrighted works for the purpose of criticism and parody. I also have no problem with Serial Numbers Filed Off works clearly inspired by copyrighted works, as long as the creator actually removes all the copyrighted elements from the new work (eg, Fifty Shades becoming an independent work from Twilight). I also think that copyright current lasts far too long — I'd say that copyright should last for the life of the artist plus a year or two (to give the artist's estate time to prepare for their works to enter the public domain), or about ten to twenty years from creation, whichever is longer. (I'm not giving exact dates because I'm not familiar enough with the industry to know how long it usually takes for these things to make money.) Works for hire, not having a single living artist, would default to the second term length (ten/twenty years). After that, the work enters the public domain and all bets are off.

If anyone wants to bring the discussion into new territory, then I'll be happy to participate. But if it just covers the same thing over and over again, I'm not interested in being part of that conversation.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#183: Nov 21st 2014 at 7:05:09 AM

I'll just bring up the case of something unusual when it comes to copyright. In 1929, author J M. Barrie donated the copyright of Peter Pan to a childrens' hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital. To this day, GOSH has the rights to royalties and licensing of the work in several countries, including the UK and USA.

I guess this falls into a grey area in the context of this discussion, right?

edited 21st Nov '14 7:05:53 AM by Greenmantle

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NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#184: Nov 21st 2014 at 9:04:26 AM

Not really. A copyright holder is allowed to do whatever they like with their copyright. They can hold it and not let anyone else use it. They can license it, giving it away temporarily in exchange for money. They can sell it wholesale, transferring it to someone else. Hell, they can even get rid of it entirely, and put the work into the public domain early.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#185: Nov 21st 2014 at 10:51:01 PM

@Ever 9: I'm going to use King Kong as an example again.

Suppose I make a movie about a film crew that travels to a remote island where prehistoric creatures still live. There they encounter a fifty-foot ape (called Kong by the island natives), which becomes enamored of the young starlet brought along on the film shoot. The film crew then captures the ape and brings him to New York City to be a Broadway attraction. However, the ape escapes, kidnaps the starlet, and climbs the Empire State Building before being gunned down by airplanes.

Can we agree that that should count as copyright infringement of the movie King Kong, even if it doesn't use any of the same dialogue or scene composition?

If so, suppose that I instead make a movie where all the plot points I mentioned above are covered by a two minute long prologue, using narration and a montage sequence to cover everything very briefly. Once that's done, the rest of the movie is an original story, showing what happens to the characters introduced in the prologue following the giant ape's death.

Do you believe that should be considered fair use? If so, why?

P.S. Regarding Peter Pan: because the profits from the franchise go towards a children's hospital, the British Parliament gave it a special exemption that allows it to collect royalties from anyone who adapts the story, even though it should have fallen into the public domain back in The '80s. This rule only applies in Britain, though.

edited 21st Nov '14 11:02:42 PM by RavenWilder

Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#186: Nov 22nd 2014 at 7:17:14 AM

Afterword to the Native Jovian Saga:

Yeah, I'm feeling the same way too.

In conclusion, I stick to what I said previously that this was a particularly good discussion where we could at least get somewhere on sharing basic motives, unlike most that end with debating principles of political philosophy 101, and the definition of "rights".

I feel that I was far from quote mining, I would have been glad to reply to anything that Native Jovian says in support of his idea that franchise controls increase the overall artist community's output, and taking them away would decrease it, beyond the returns to the same let's-imagine-that-one-studio-would-have-lost-money-without-franchise-control anecdote. We lost progress on this aspect of the discussion somewhere around page 6, with my claim that franchise control "provides exactly zero extra dollars to the industry", and his reply that "Something that benefits the industry as a whole but not them specifically will not incentivize them", revealing a lack of willingness to discuss this issue in the context of providing a consistent economical model.

The moral side of the moral issue (whether derivative artists are creators, whether they deserve credit, whether they deserve control of their own creative works), we made better progress, with an agreement on all but the last point, where Jovian only seemed to revert to what I consider semantic wordplay in the last few posts.

It's possible that in my repulsion of derivative art's censoring, I have giiven the impression that I only care about recognizing "just the words on the page". This is not the case. The best short summary on my own moral stance on artist rights, can be found in my previous reply to Raven Wilder:

I'm really trying not to be an ideologue here. It's not that I have decided in advance that "copyright shall only apply to exact replication", and fight for that at all cost, like it's some self-evident moral imperative. My position was always simply that creative work should be rewarded proportionally to it's value, to freely and justly promote the progress of arts.

When I look at the current state of the industry, with fan works and similar transformative arts being suppressed and censored, (even though in principle their degree of derivativeness is not different from many elements of the Western Literary Canon that we revere so much), my opposition to that simply comes from the belief that this particular regulation that we have doesn't justly reward creative work, and doesn't appropriately contribute to the health of our artistic culture.

.

edited 22nd Nov '14 7:17:29 AM by Ever9

Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#187: Nov 22nd 2014 at 7:46:39 AM

[up][up]Raven Wilder:

Can we agree that that should count as copyright infringement of the movie King Kong, even if it doesn't use any of the same dialogue or scene composition?

Actually, no, we can't. What I had in mind when you were talking about taking a novel and rewording it, was going through Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone paragraph by paragraph, changing sentence structure and using synonyms of phrases. That's a far cry from sharing a four sentence premise. I have no problem with the latter, whether it's stretching throug the new writer's content as a framework, or put at the opening as a backstory.

What you are describing here, should be Fair Use because it's an actual creative production. Hell, I'm pretty sure that with the exception of the name Kong, it is Fair Use even now, and the name itself hardly takes away that creativity. In a movie, the combination of cinematography, acting, script, music, and added subtleties are valuable enough to be called an artistic work rather than merely a "copying". That four sentence premise still leaves enough room to present the whole thing as a family friendly Disney animated movie, a gritty, shakycam "modern monster movie", a satirical feminist criticism of former King Kong movies and their underlying Damsel in Distress trope, or as a generic shiny blockbuster.

The movie equivalent of your original situation would be if someone would slightly re-edit an older movie's scene order, or maybe add one or two scenes, and call it a remix, which is a new work. Which it technically could be, but the lowest effort examples of it could be abused as an excuse to to just re-run what the audiences would still recognize as the previous movie, but for free.

Regarding Peter Pan: because the profits from the franchise go towards a children's hospital, the British Parliament gave it a special exemption that allows it to collect royalties from anyone who adapts the story, even though it should have fallen into the public domain back in The Eighties.

That sounds like a random special tax. When they openly waive both the original purpose of copyright, (incentivizing the arts), and it's limitations, then it's basically just redistribution.

Which might be fine, but normally you take special taxes from activities that are harmful or contain negative externalities, such as smoking, bottled water, or traffic. If they are taking royalties from an otherwise public domain theme's artists, they might as well be collecting royalties from the sci-fi genre and give it to homeless people, or take royalties from website ad reveues, and give it away as veterans' pension.

It has nothing to do with artist rights, and it doesn't seem like a particularly useful way to organize redistribution either, it's just the state randomly taking and giving money.

edited 22nd Nov '14 7:48:32 AM by Ever9

Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#188: Nov 22nd 2014 at 8:12:40 AM

[up]

It has nothing to do with artist rights, and it doesn't seem like a particularly useful way to organize redistribution either, it's just the state randomly taking and giving money.

The copyright for Peter Pan was donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital by the author, J M Barrie in 1929, before his death. It was later reaffirmed in his Will. Doesn't that have any effect on it?

edited 22nd Nov '14 8:17:05 AM by Greenmantle

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Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#189: Nov 22nd 2014 at 8:20:23 AM

[up]As an author, you are free to give your money, or your whole license, to whoever you want.

But once you do, and the new owner gets special exceptions from the normal term length limitations, due to reasons that are completely unrelated to the principle of arts incenivization, it kind of stops being a real copyright issue.

edited 22nd Nov '14 8:20:59 AM by Ever9

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#190: Nov 22nd 2014 at 9:51:45 AM

What you are describing here, should be Fair Use because it's an actual creative production. Hell, I'm pretty sure that with the exception of the name Kong, it is Fair Use even now, and the name itself hardly takes away that creativity. In a movie, the combination of cinematography, acting, script, music, and added subtleties are valuable enough to be called an artistic work rather than merely a "copying". That four sentence premise still leaves enough room to present the whole thing as a family friendly Disney animated movie, a gritty, shakycam "modern monster movie", a satirical feminist criticism of former King Kong movies and their underlying Damsel in Distress trope, or as a generic shiny blockbuster.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, seeing as how A Fistful Of Dollars was successfully sued for being an unauthorized remake of Yojimbo, even though the former is a Western while the latter is a samurai movie.

Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#191: Nov 22nd 2014 at 12:55:58 PM

[up] At the same time we have a whole trope of A Fistful of Rehashes, about imitations of that plot, and generally, the supertrope page Whole-Plot Reference. Even if the examples there included less copying than your example, it's hardly a measurable value.

It's frustrating that the exact details of Fair Use's edge can depend on a single judge's mood (and like I said, it's something that we don't really have a solution for either).

edited 22nd Nov '14 12:56:34 PM by Ever9

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#192: Nov 22nd 2014 at 2:59:35 PM

So it sounds like we agree on general principle here, that copyright does cover the abstract aspects of a work; we're just disagreeing over how closely something has to match a copyrighted before it counts as infringement.

Ever9 from Europe Since: Jul, 2011
#193: Nov 22nd 2014 at 3:43:35 PM

Exactly. I'm all for as many aspects of a work being covered, as possible. My problem is simply with the blindingly obvious imbalance of another artist's work also getting roped into the first one's copyright.

You can't really say that pieces of creative self-expression, are also "infringement" at the same time. Well, you can say that, as the current legal regime just demonstrates, you will just end up looking really hypocritical as you hail "artists' rights" while you criminalize the very publishing of whole genres of art, (and making life a lot worse for many artists than it would have been without your intrusion), who can't really be said to be doing anything less than Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, Stoppard, J. M. Coetzee, Jean Rhys, or Margaret Atwood did. (I mean conceptually different. I'm not talking about wordcrafting quality, or cultural significance, of course. Most fanfiction is a load of crap, and even even after getting commercialized and professionalized, 90% of works would still be crap, but that's no justifiction for censorship).

edited 29th Nov '14 3:12:32 PM by Ever9

Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#194: Dec 11th 2014 at 4:23:38 AM

Google News Spain to close in response to story links 'tax'

Google is closing Google News in Spain and removing Spanish media outlets from the service following a row with the country’s government over new legislation aimed at protecting local publishers that requires the search company to pay for using their content.

The tech giant announced late on Wednesday that Google News would close in Spain on 16 December. A spokeswoman said she was “incredibly sad” to announce the company was shutting the service.

The Spanish government passed a new copyright law in October that imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News in an effort to protect the country’s print media industry. The law comes into effect in January.

Known popularly as the “Google Tax”, the law requires services that post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies. It will also affect other news aggregators including Yahoo News. Authorities will have the power to fine websites up to €600,000 ($748,000) for linking to pirated content.

“This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable,” Richard Gingras, head of Google News, wrote in a blogpost.

He said Google was driving more than 10bn clicks to publisher websites every month and its Adsense product, which delivers ads to websites, paid out over $9bn to publishers last year, up from $7bn the year before. Google news is currently available in 70 international editions, covering 35 languages.

The Spanish law is one of a series of spats Google is now facing in Europe. European publishers including Axel Springer have accused the company of abusing its dominance in search and are pressing for action from the European parliament.

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Last month the parliament approved a motion calling for tougher regulation of internet search and suggested a break-up of Google to end its dominance in Europe.

Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.

“For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page,” wrote Gingras. “The internet changed all that - creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers’ attention and for advertising euros increased.

“We’re committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues.”

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AwSamWeston Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker. from Minnesota Nice (Elder Troper) Relationship Status: Married to the job
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
#195: Dec 11th 2014 at 8:16:28 PM

[up] That's interesting and all, but what's the point you're trying to make? (If I remember right, there's a rule here in On-Topic that links or block-quotes need to come with some kind of context or commentary.)

Actual Filmmaker trying to earn a Creator page. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry — available now on streaming and blu-ray.
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#196: Dec 12th 2014 at 1:27:16 AM

[up] I'm not sure. The story appeared interesting and needed to go somewhere...

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AwSamWeston Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker. from Minnesota Nice (Elder Troper) Relationship Status: Married to the job
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
#197: Dec 12th 2014 at 1:47:30 PM

[up] Well just make sure that when something's added to a thread, the "somewhere" is relevant to the thread's topic. The "Google Tax" story has nothing to do with copyright.

Actual Filmmaker trying to earn a Creator page. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry — available now on streaming and blu-ray.
NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#198: Dec 12th 2014 at 3:12:57 PM

The Google story is about a business bowing out of a market because of what it sees as overbearing copyright laws. The law in question requires copyright holders to charge for using even small snippets of their work — it doesn't allow for publishers to decide to release their work for free, much less acknowledge that displaying small portions of an article could easily qualify as fair use. Since Google doesn't directly make any money from Google News (ie, there are no ads on news.google.com), they decided to pull the plug rather than pay the additional costs associated with the Spanish law.

Seems relevant to a discussion of copyright to me.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
AwSamWeston Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker. from Minnesota Nice (Elder Troper) Relationship Status: Married to the job
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
#200: Dec 13th 2014 at 7:25:52 PM

[up][up] See, that clarification helps. Thanks, Native Jovian.

Actual Filmmaker trying to earn a Creator page. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry — available now on streaming and blu-ray.

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