Copyright is not theft!

Recently there have been quite a few copyright-related posts which came up in my feedreader. This is of course a complicated and layered problem which can’t be solved in the couple of paragraphs of this blogpost, but at least I can post a bunch of great materials which should contribute to the edification of all of us.

From comixtalk.com: Copyright Is Not theft

Also from comixtalk: Nina Paley Discusses State of Sita Sings The Blues. This is an animated movie (which you can watch for free) that had legal problems because of the backing soundtrack, even though the music in question was created in 1920, so it should be in the public domain.

You might also be interested in the documentary rip! a remix manifesto (embedded below for your convenience). It is a documentary (Michael Moore style) talking about the issue. And while it isn't perfect, it manages to raise a lot of interesting issues (BTW, personally I find the songs on the Grey Album much better than the originals on the Black album - just a random example how derivative works can improve the original):

Finally here is a presentation from TED comparing industries with different level of copyright protection (via Slashdot):

This should be enough information to keep you outraged for weeks :-)

PS. Just a quick rundown of my current opinion: all works are derivative. But even if we skip over this, long copyright stifles innovation. And even if we don’t consider (or don’t accept) this premise, labelling all copying as “theft” is (depending) wrong, (possibly purposefully) misleading and unethical. For example I posses the copyright for all the materials published on this blog (since it is my original work), but I explicitly grant anyone to reuse the content under the conditions of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

PS #2: An other interesting documentary to watch is Patently absurd. I didn't include it above because it deals with patent law, not copyright, two domains which are frequently bundled together under the term "Intellectual Property" (together with trademark law), but the fact is that these three domains are completely separate and the laws governing them are distinct, ergo I didn't want to add to the confusion.

PS #3: Technology != Breaking the law. Just because I use bittorrent, it doesn't mean that I'm breaking the copyright law! I might be very well downloading a Linux ISO (as I frequently do), one of the many free (as in freedom) material from Clearbits (previosuly legaltorrents) or a World of Warcraft patch for that matter.

Dear people: try to think harder, even if it makes your head hurt!

This again is the case of a couple of links on the same topic piling up in my reader (this tends to happen if you take a pause in blogging :-)):

• Gmail's Spam Filter No Longer Effective?
• 60% of Facebook users consider quitting over privacy
• Poll: 93% say Facebook should make you 'opt-in' to sharing rather than 'opt-out'
• Marketing study: avid gamers average seven hours per day

The commonality between all these articles is that they make statements based on faulty questions (PHD Comics says it best). A website poll is not the same as a scientific study (to name just  one the problems - it has a selection bias towards the reader of the particular site - which wouldn't be a problem if the results wouldn't be presented as applicable for the general population). And even if they were scientific studies, the purpose of a scientific study isn't to find the absolute truth! It is to present a hypothesis which doesn't contradict any of the current observation. But it doesn't exclude the possibility that in the future there will be an observation which contradicts the hypothesis, and as such, it must be changed.

Who is hype-free?

I’ve done a writeup about the name of blog when I started it. However recently two links came up in my Google Alerts:

The first one is from Urban Dictionary and it defines hype free as “Slang word for drug free”.

The second one is from Yahoo! Answers and states pretty much the same thing (in a conversational form).

I didn’t know this meaning of the expression until these items came on my radar recently, but they are very funny (and certainly true in more than one sense).

Update: the Yahoo Answers page states that it was deleted “according to our Community Guidelines”. Bummer.

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