What is your opinion on copyright laws?

This is an excellent documentary on copyright laws and all perspectives of copy rights. You can watch it on Google Video but in order to obtain a good quality version of it, I recommended download the torerent. http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/download

Beware it is copyrighted!!! But it's free.

Anyways in the movie they point out how in US copyright laws (and court cases) it's illegal to take anything from a song and make a mix using it. I am strongly against this ruling and law. If this law was around for the last 1500 years then all the architects here should be sued. In America we are considered the melting pot of the world, we have been stealing ideas from the Europeans for buildings, government, society, structure, etc... Should Europe sue us? We are profiting from it. People do buy house with the "Swiss look," or another type of look.

I believe the law should be written to where you can use part of anything copyrighted as long as you don't use it in whole or it's entirety. You would be allowed to use any part of it as long as it does not exceed 60% of the total item. Like you can't take more than 60% of the length of a song. In the movie one group got sued for using only a bass part from a song that was flipped, stretched and repeated. Just by listening you can't notice it, and sure as hell don't know how the original group found out about it.

What is your take on copyright laws?




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This post has been edited by yano: Aug 20 2007, 01:47 PM

If they did as you proposed the that would make the GNU the standard copyright or the CC copyright the most common.

Which I wouldn't have a problem with.

Yeah, but even the GNU General Public License just underwent some changes (it is on version 3).

I would definately say that there must be a time limit on copywrighting - otherwise we'd be paying somebodies family every time we used anything with one of the "simple machines" - inclined plane, wheel and axle, etc.

If I go to all of the trouble to write, rewrite numerous times, and finally have published a book, then I'd want to get paid for my work. When was the last time you had a book, or a song, or anything else, for that matter, published? If you had, you wouldn't mind if someone took a copy of your book, had millions more copies made, and then started just giving 'em out for free? And the recipients of those free books did the same thing? Those royalty checks wouldn't be very big, now would they?

What copyright laws do is protect artists from people that would steal from them. They're like the laws against walking into the neighborhood drugstore, emptying out the cash register, and walking out. I believe that's known as stealing.

Oh, Europe's old architectural designs aren't copyrighted, so it's OK for you to copy those, if you like.

The whole issue of copyright law needs to be reviewed especially with regards to the Internet. One can go, for example, to a free public library and read any periodical or book it has, but the Internet Public Library is limited to only those books out of copyright. Google and others seem to be testing existing law by making available on line almost all books in existence. What happens in the next few years will be interesting.
Z

The current lifetime of copyrights are lifetime of author + 100 years. Which I think is ridiculous. Compared to what it was in the early 1900's, it was only 14 years. Which later changed to 30 and I think remained at 30 until recently.

Yeah, this is going a bit overboard. And I'd bet just about anything that it arose out of people's desires to get rich off of dead relatives. The artist isn't going to be needing any royalties, any more.

Well in some cases if an author is credited as being a company it's the time the company's "alive" (or still around) + 100 years.