Copyright as a ‘primary weapon’
p2pnet news view RIAA | P2P:- The, “business of companies that want to sell mass market goods to consumers is not suing those consumers.
“The business of the RIAA may be doing that because it has to justify its own existence, but the business of business is business, not litigation”.
So says Bill Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google who, almost exactly one year ago, decided to take his site offline because among other things, he found the state of copyright law, “too depressing.
Now Patry is back with copyright fanboy Ben Sheffner posting on Patry’s blog in which he (Sheffner), “quoted one of the Tenenbaum jurors who said of the jury ‘We wish there was another way that all parties could be satisfied’.”
If the business as business is business, “One would never know that from the industry`s reaction to virtually every new digital technology that has come along,” says Patry, going on »»»
The industry`s failure to offer any alternative after Napster isn`t just a small oversight; in my view, when coupled with the industry`s repeated suits against almost any business it had not authorized (read controlled), and the decision to send out massive cease and desist letters and suits against individuals, that failure is directly responsible for the highly negative attitude many people have toward the industry. The failure of the industry to provide a way for people to access legitimate product led consumers both to unauthorized product and to rightly conclude that copyright was the primary weapon being used to thwart consumers` desires. I really don`t think these assertions should be controversial.
I repeat that copyright doesn`t create economic value, a statement that is not intended to disparage copyright; it is merely to state the obvious: it is only consumers` willingness to but something that creates economic value. Consumers were willing to buy authorized music after Napster, but we all agree the industry failed to do so. The industry only has itself to blame for what happened afterwards.
Patry says he’s an, “enormous fan of the copyright industries and a, “very steady source of income to it,” adding:
“I buy about 300 books a year. I take my kids to see every kids` movie, buy the DVD when it comes out, and also buy two copies of the same product as a Nintendo DS game (which can be $30-$35 times two); I have bought maybe a hundred DVDs of Nickelodeon TV show DVDs, I buy dozens of CDs and would buy a lot more if the industry had supported the SACD format. I take my kids to live musical events. As a musician (clarinet) I buy lots of sheet music. I buy four hard copy newspapers a day and subscribe to ten monthly magazines a month. I have not bought any of these because they were copyrighted; indeed most of the sheet music is in the public domain but I am still happy to pay good money for a nice edition.
“The most respect that we can pay to copyright industries is to think only about buying such products and not copyright.”"
But, “The music industry forgot this.”
(Cheers, Ray)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
take his site offline – William Patry Copyright Blog returns!, August 8, 2008
too depressing – Willam Patry goes offline. DAMN !!!, August 4, 2008
Patry is back – My Reply to Ben, August 11, 2009
copyright fanboy Ben Sheffner – Jammie v the RIAA: $3.6 million, June 18, 2009
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August 12th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Clear succinct and on the button. Nice one.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I posted a comment on William’s blog this morning (the 3rd comment of mine on his new blog – he no longer publishes my comments, so they are effectively personal correspondence – assuming no spam filter) that pointed out he was barking up the wrong tree if he was waiting for the monkeys to drop down a new business model for the producers and customers of intellectual work.
That devoted expectation is properly recognised as cargo-cultism.
How can an industry that is based upon the idea of selling copies be expected to come up with a business model that is based upon the idea of selling intellectual work instead?
The last thing the copyright industries will come up with is the idea that people should be free to make and sell their own copies, to enjoy their natural cultural liberty. The corporation will not surrender their monopoly, because they have nothing to lose by keeping it, no conscience to pang them, no humanity to gain.
But then, if the lawyers are loonies for expecting salvation to come from monopolists, what the heck are we doing expecting enlightenment to come from lawyers?
Lawyers are mentally handicapped. They have had their instinctive sense of ethics surgically removed at law school: “As lawyers you are not to determine who is right or wrong, good or bad, nor what the law should be, but what the law IS, and how to exploit your knowledge of the law in the interests of your client – whether state, corporation, or individual.”
So here we have the sorry sight of a bunch of copyright laywers looking in satisfaction at the scales of justice, whilst having the niggling suspicion that perhaps something isn’t quite right.
In one pan there is the commercial interest of the immortal publishing corporation: their precious privilege of copyright (oh, and a large ingot of plutonium). In the other pan there is the cultural interest of the mortal individual in sharing music with their fellow man (whether Jammie Thomas, Brittany Kruger, or Joel Tenenbaum): their liberty to do so suspended from an arm of the balance by an invisible thread.
Not only has the publisher’s pan broken its chain, but it has smashed a hole through the table and is currently melting a crater in the floor on its way to China.
And what are the lawyers wondering?
Not whether justice has been done – it plainly has been done in their warped minds, but whether the prosecution of copyright infringers was a wise strategy.
Oh, right. Copyright is fine. It’s just that some publishers might have been ill advised to rub their customers up the wrong way by prosecuting and bankrupting a few who disrespected their monopoly, as a lesson to the rest of them.
The lawyers’ collective blindness to the corruption that has just occurred before their very eyes is staggering.
It’s like a bunch of Guantanmo doctors wondering whether the repeated drowning and resuscitation of people plucked at random from Afghanistan, whilst a justifiable information retrieval technique, is conducive to the dissuasion of terrorism and the encouragement of greater respect for US corporations’ trading infrastructure.
Guys? Haven’t you forgotten something?
What happened to the natural rights of the individual?
What happened to liberty? What happened to the land of the free?
There is something wrong with the picture of ‘justice’ before you. Mend the scales, remove the plutonium, clean up the mess and abolish the unethical privilege of copyright. Restore all individuals’ liberty to share and build upon mankind’s cultural commonwealth.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Great idea. I agree.
Problem is, I think, implementation, not conceptualization. How do we fix all of the above? Is it even at all possible for a lay-person to research and attempt to grasp the fundamentals of the current court proceedings? It it true that something is broken in the system: “justice” is perhaps a misnomer – or perhaps not considering the various nuances of the word. When you need an expert in the field of semantics to figure out your own rights – particularly when common sense appears to contradict what those experts are proposing – there is an imbalance in the scales.
Does the problem lie within the lawyers or the law? The article is spot on with the idea that “copyright doesnât create economic value.” The problem isn’t so much copyright itself but rather how the conscience-lacking corporate entities and their legal teams are manipulating the semantics of the law for their own gain. So if the Corporations won’t play nice, then maybe we can take away their toys instead?
Last election season, I discussed some of the local propositions with my father and also did some research on my own. While he and I are often like-minded politically, I found myself making different choices on voting day mostly because I supported an idea but he voted down the semantics of how the idea would be implemented. Perhaps he is right, though, in that the passing of a law puts some real weight on those words. Perhaps there needs to be an added layer of clarification put down with new law that expressly defines what purpose said law is supposed to defend or enact?
How does one go about changing law. exactly? As I stated before, I’m fairly certain that it is within the power of the people to do just that. Ufortunately I never took an actual class on government per se, and history as a rule was always my weakest subject so I don’t quite know where to begin. If I could get a better idea of where the battle lines are drawn, I could become a warrior of semantics as necessary. (Is it totally unheard of to think about law school at 37?)
What we need is a plan of action to equal our enemies’. I think I will draw up an outline of general strategy and post it for discussion and fine tuning…