28/10/2009
“ Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue for property rights, and that efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons…What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons without having to resort to property rights. „
The Victory of the Commons (via azspot)
Quote posted at 18:58
20/10/2009
“ Much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.
We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.
We think that it is inappropriate to make policy choices in the UK when policy options are still to be agreed by the EU Commission and EU Parliament in their negotiations over the ‘Telecoms Package’. We recommend that the government terminate their current policy-making process, and restart it with a new consultation once the EU has made its decisions.
„
The All Party Parliamentary Communications Group, quoted by Robert Andrews in MPs Urge Govt To Drop Disconnections, Blame Entertainment Business | paidContent:UK
Quote posted at 21:06
14/10/2009
“ Dear Copyright Alliance,
We, the undersigned, are just a few of the more than 304 million people living, working, and consuming across the United States. Our support allows you to bring significant cultural and economic value to our society and helps you to contribute $1.52 trillion to the nation’s GDP (oh, yeah, and we’re responsible for that other $12.32 trillion, too). Yet the value of our support is increasingly under threat as you attempt to extend the rights we’ve granted you to unjustifiable levels.
„
Beginning of the answer to the Copyright Alliance letter, by an anonymous reader in a comment to William Patry’s Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar [read in full]
Quote posted at 15:02
“ We also need a much shorter term of protection; I think the 56 years in the 1909 Act was quite enough. Life plus 70 makes a farce of copyright: there is no author on the face of the earth who would have refused to create under a life plus 50 regime because that regime was, allegedly, too short. „
William Patry, in an answer to a reader comment on Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar
Quote posted at 11:01
13/10/2009
“ In my prior blog I would occasionally write about the buffoonery of the Copyright Alliance, a laughably, tragically inept DC front organization for large corporate copyright owners portraying itself as the voice of individual artists. You know, the individual performing artists that the RIAA sought to deprive of their termination of transfer rights when the RIAA snuck in, in the dead of the night with no hearing, no bill, or no notice, legislation to convert them into employees for hire. You know, the artists whom the RIAA sought to deprive of bankruptcy protection. You know, the artists the MPAA has successfully prevented from gaining audiovisual performance rights in WIPO treaty negotiations. You know, those artists. „
William Patry in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar
Quote posted at 23:08
“ So here is my plea, President Obama and Vice President Biden: throw the Alliance’s letters in the trash where they belong, and demand that we have effective copyright laws: not slogans, not inside the beltway bunkum, but instead change in our copyright laws we can believe in. Copyright laws that further creativity and innovation not smother them. „
William Patry in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar
Quote posted at 17:04
Quote posted at 15:03
“ Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.
But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
„
Op-Ed Columnist - Paul Krugman - Bits, Bands and Books, Paying for Creativity in a Digital World - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Quote posted at 13:02
12/10/2009
“ Information that used to be “free” is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted, and restricted. The enclosure is caused by the conflicts and contradictions between intellectual property laws and the expanded capacities of new technologies.3 It leads to speculation that the records of scholarly communication, the foundations of an informed, democratic society, may be at risk. „
Law and Contemporary Problems: Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 111 (WinterSpring 2003)
Quote posted at 16:07
21/09/2009
“ In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? „
Post-Medium Publishing (via neekolas)
Quote posted at 09:01
20/09/2009
telecomix:
Why does the European Council keep wasting our time and money? (telecoms package) http://bit.ly/CJQfL
Text posted at 21:50
19/09/2009
“ However we have serious reservations about the content and scope of the proposed legislation outlined in the consultation on P2P file-sharing. Processes of monitoring, notification and sanction are not conducive to achieving a vibrant, functional, fair and competitive market for music. As a result we believe that the specific questions asked by the consultation are not only unanswerable but indicate a mindset so far removed from that of the general public and music consumer that it seems an extraordinarily negative document. The very fuzzy estimates for the annual benefits of such legislation (£200 million per year) make clear that such estimates are based firmly upon the premise that a P2P downloaded track equals a lost sale. This “substitutional” argument is, in reality, no more than “lobbyists’ speak”: it has little support from logic and no economist would seek to weave such a number into a metric aimed at quantifying a ‘value gap’ for the industries challenged by P2P. „
Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) and the Music Producers Guild (MPG) in their Joint Statement on P2P Legislation Featured Artists Coalition :: News
Quote posted at 18:07
17/09/2009
Quote posted at 22:51
16/09/2009
Quote posted at 09:00
15/09/2009
“ It is a maxim of universal application that every man is presumed to know the law, and it would seem inherent that freedom of access to the laws, or the official interpretation of those laws, should be co-extensive with the sweep of the maxim. Knowledge is the only just condition of obedience. „
excerpt from an 1886 opinion, Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 (C.C.D. Minn. 1886), quoted by William Patry in The Patry Copyright Blog: Oregon goes wacka wacka huna kuna
Quote posted at 23:12
Quoting the Crisis
