6 Responses to “The Law is Strangling Creativity”

1. Kevin Posted: Dec 17th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

   1 And once again engineering leads the way. In the field of engineering copy writes are rarely if ever respected. More often than not if a good idea is found everybody simply integrates it. I believe the Germans came up with the ejector seat during one of the world wars and American engineers never had any qualms about stealing that great idea. I believe the original purpose of the copy write protection assumed that inventions and art and the like would be very expensive and difficult to produce and people would not try to create things if they thought they could just wait a year or two and let somebody else do all of the work.

2. D-W Posted: Dec 18th, 2007 at 12:05 am

   2 Copyrights don’t protect engineering (technical) inventions. Your referring to patents which is a different animal. Patents give you the right to protect your invention in courts but the government does not enforce them for you. Also, there has to be a treaty with a foreign country before you can enforce your patent rights in said country. While I won’t say that devices haven’t been stolen, chances are America had no such treaty with the Germans during the two World Wars. More information on copyrights can be found here http://www.copyright.gov/ under copyright basics Patents were created to allow for inventors to have some period of exclusivity to profit from their invention before it becomes apart of the public domain. While there is no requirement to actually build the invention, you have to show enough information so that someone of ordinary skill in the particular field could make it if they chose to. Patents do not cover theory, writings, art or any other non-utility intellectual property (the one exception being design patents but even they deal with devices of some sort). It was an interesting presentation. I think that the presenters didn’t recognize that law in general has always been reactive and not proactive when it comes to just about anything. Laws don’t change until people start to challenge them, make arguments for their change and push for change. I know that it painfully slow but just like changing people’s attitudes towards from the status quo it takes time. I think his concept is good though. The culture is changing and eventually the laws will change with it. I kinda wish he was able to talk more about his culture code (?) or whatever it was thought would work to replace copyright.

3. Kevin Posted: Dec 18th, 2007 at 1:27 am

   3 Thank you for the correction.

4. D2k Posted: Dec 18th, 2007 at 3:14 am

   4 I’m pretty sure he was referring to Creative Commons license D-W.

5. Kevin Posted: Dec 18th, 2007 at 9:00 am

   5 One of the things that occurs to me is a donation and try then buy system. If the basic movie is offered for free at mid quality then a high quality download could be sold for a dollar plus download/DVD costs. Then you could take it further by tacking on extras. I know I buy the DVD’s for all of the cool features as well as the movie included. Hell if there was a Joss Wheddon fund I’d probably donate a couple of dollars a month to see if he would make more stuff.

6. fiftywan Posted: Dec 18th, 2007 at 10:26 am

   6 Great speech. He made me think about the french laws regarding intellectual ownership (and copyrights)… So far, it states that no author can prevent partial quotation and/or parody of their work. Yes, full copy and retail of said copy IS piracy. But making an AMV, or remixing something is not. But *thanks* to the influence of North America and the music companies, this law is threatened. Don’t know how long it will last until France get their own DMCA (it’s already started, I think…). In the meantime, I use creative commons licenses whenever I write something or upload a picture.