Led Zeppelin copyright case.

[presence]

I'm assuming in your anarchist society that you have a mechanism to deal with murder, correct? Why couldn't the same mechanism be used for copyright laws?

because after murder something is missing and after copying the original still sits unmolested

 

[Intoxiklown]

copywrite is theft and cannot exist without a violent state
copying things is not theft because the original owner of the original item still possesses it


/endthread

I'm with you, and at the same time I'm not with you. I know...that makes a lot of sense.

I understand your premise, and agree to a point. Please know I not really arguing in the following, but rather thinking out loud trying to grasp the entire concept. By all means, please feel free to correct, explain wrong conception, and educate me.

I saw another thread in a subforum that ties into this. Natural law all stems, basically, from property rights. The ownership of our bodies, our land, our mind, god, ect. From that mindset, is not intellectual property something for the originator to do with as they please? If I work for 10 years, and compose both music and lyrics for a song that crosss genre lines, racial lines, the whole ball, am I wrong to declare rights to royalty from any other artist that wants to record it? I say record, because now they are profiting off of my work. I don't see why someone should care if people cover their song on stage, that's free publicity to a crowd that may have been unavailable to me before. But if they put it on their album, and release it as a single, shouldn't they be required to at least pay royalty fees (after getting permission)?

I understand many times these lawsuits are really reaching, but sometimes it's just blatant. As I said earlier, there are only 12 notes in music, so it's not hard to find similar progressions in many songs. But a good example was Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" (you know you just started humming it. don't lie). It was a blatant ripoff from Queen's "Under Pressure", no permission was sought, ect. Their defense was, "It's not the same hook. The last note is an octave lower". It still followed the exact same pattern, just simply went a tad lower on the last note.

Do you feel the same way regarding patents? If not, why? Aren't they both the fruit of someone's vision and work?

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm simply asking where the distinction of hat property is protected, and which property is not.

 

[Sonny Tufts]

and our economy will thrive on while your government will enforce your ego's ability to steal "your ideas" from the collective.

Copyright law doesn't really protect ideas -- it protects the expression of ideas, which doesn't come from "the collective". No committee or collective wrote Gone With the Wind.

 

[Zippyjuan]

If I'm an artist or an inventor, I'm moving out of your country and into one that has copyright laws. You get rid of copyright laws and you'll have a huge brain drain.

Government is force and force is not going away, get used to it.

When everybody can freely steal what I create and take the profits or benefits of my idea, I don't have any incentive to share or release my idea. It slows or stifles innovation.

 

[Madison320]

because after murder something is missing and after copying the original still sits unmolested

Who decides in your anarchist society that murder is wrong but copying is ok? And why can't copying "not be ok"?

Suppose you had 2 perfect anarchist societies. Couldn't you have one that allowed unlimited copying and one that didn't? Wouldn't the one that protecting intellectual property have a higher standard of living since all the top engineers would want to live there? Why would you want to "hope" that you can copy some inventions from the other society when you could just have the inventors live in your society?

 

[Madison320]

When everybody can freely steal what I create and take the profits or benefits of my idea, I don't have any incentive to share or release my idea. It slows or stifles innovation.

I agree. I just think the plaintiff should show harm. I think it's too easy to just claim you should get some of the profits of the defendant.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

Copyright laws in the US are well and truly fuxored, and we desperately need major reform to bring them more in line with the primacy of liberty...however what the full anarchists do not understand is that when you eliminate the profitability of creativity, then you will get less creativity. This is an axiom they understand in other areas... ie you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize, but their rejection of all-things-IP overrides the economic consequentialist argument and makes it (to them) irrelevant. If you keep pressing the profit/creativity effects, they usually end up with a vague, "The market will find a way" argument.

IP needs to be done a lot different than it is being done now. What we have now is horrible. Nevertheless IP needs to be protected at least after some manner, if only to keep creativity profitable and spur innovation.

I will now be pedantic and say again, the fact that I say IP must be preserved in some manner does not imply any kind of support in any way for the current system. I suspect the radical ancaps will still try and paint me as an ally of copyright trolls, since that is what they always do, no matter how many times I make it clear that I support basically nothing abut the current system, but I will place this disclaimer up front so that I can just ignore such stupidity and not waste time on such baloney sausage for the thousandth time.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

And the two six note three chord progressions that were the same between the two songs are not nearly enough alike to even suggest plagiarism. You may as well pick three words out of a dictionary and claim wherever they are strung together is a violation. It's stupid.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

When everybody can freely steal what I create and take the profits or benefits of my idea, I don't have any incentive to share or release my idea. It slows or stifles innovation.

This has all been disproven many times over. Please see the other threads on IP. Also see this book: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Inte...sr=8-1&keywords=against+intellectual+monopoly And this essay:

[h=2]Copywrongs[/h] [h=4]Samuel Edward Konkin III[/h] Having done every step of production in the publishing industry, both for myself and others, I have one irrefutable empirical conclusion about the economic effect of copyrights on prices and wages: nada. Zero. Nihil. So negligible you’d need a geiger counter to measure it.
Before I move on to exactly what copyrights do have an impact on, one may be interested as to why the praxeological negligibility of this tariff. The answer is found in the peculiar nature of publishing. There are big publishers and small publishers and very, very few in between. For the Big Boys, royalties are a fraction of one percent of multi-million press runs. They lose more money from bureaucratic interstices and round-off error. The small publishers are largely counter-economic and usually survive on donated material or break-in writing; let the new writers worry about copyrighting and reselling.
Furthermore, there are a very few cases of legal action in the magazine world because of this disparity. The little ’zines have no hope beating a rip-off and shrug it off after a perfunctory threat; the Biggies rattle their corporate-lawyer sabres and nearly anyone above ground quietly bows.
Book publishing is a small part of total publishing and there are some middle-range publishers who do worry about the total cost picture in marginal publishing cases. But now there are two kinds of writers: Big Names and everyone else. Everyone Else is seldom reprinted; copyrights have nothing to do with first printings (economically). Big Names rake it in—but they also make a lot from ever-higher bids for their next contract. And the lowered risk of not selling out a reprint of a Big Name who has already sold out a print run more than compensates paying the writing the extra fee.
So Big Names writers would lose something substantial if the copyright privilege ceased enforcement. But Big Name writers are an even smaller percentage of writers than Big Name Actors are of actors. If they all vanished tomorrow, no one would notice (except their friends, one hopes). Still, one may reasonably wonder if the star system’s incentive can be done away with without the whole pyramid collapsing. If any economic argument remains for copyrights, it’s incentive.
Crap. As Don Marquis put in the words of Archy the Cockroach, “Creative expression is the need of my soul.” And Archy banged his head on typewriter key after typewriter key all night long to turn out his columns—which Marquis cashed in. Writing as a medium of expression will continue as long as someone has a burning need to express. And if all they have to express is a need for second payments and associated residuals, we’re all better off for not reading it.
But, alas, the instant elimination of copyrights would have negligible effect on the star system. While it would cut into the lifelong gravy train of stellar scribes, it would have no effect, on their biggest source of income: the contract for their next book (or script, play or even magazine article or short story). That is where the money is.
“You’re only as good as your last piece”—but you collect for that on your next sale. Market decisions are made on anticipated sales. Sounds like straight von Mises, right? (Another great writer who profited little from copyrighting—but others are currently raking it in from Ludwig’s privileged corpse—er, corpus.)
The point of all this vulgar praxeology is not just to clear the way for the moral question. The market (praise be) is telling us something. After all, both market human action and morality arise from the same Natural Law.
In fact, let us clear out some more deadwood and red herrings before we face the Great Moral Issue. First, if you abolish copyrights, would great authors starve? Nope, in fact, the market might open a trifle for new blood.
Would writers write if they did not get paid? Who says they wouldn’t? There is no link between payment for writing and copyrights. Royalties roll in (or, much more often, trickle in) long after the next work is sold and the one after is in progress.
Is not a producer entitled to the fruit of his labour? Sure, that’s why writers are paid. But if I make a copy of a shoe or a table or a fireplace log (with my little copied axe), does the cobbler or wood-worker or woodchopper collect a royalty?
A. J. Galambos, bless his anarchoheart, attempted to take copyrights and patents to their logical conclusion. Every time we break a stick, Ug The First should collect a royalty. Ideas are property, he says; madness and chaos result.
Property is a concept extracted from nature by conceptual man to designate the distribution of scarce goods—the entire material world—among avaricious, competing egos. If I have an idea, you may have the same idea and it takes nothing from me. Use yours as you will and I do the same.
Ideas, to use the ‘au courant’ language of computer programmers, are the programmes; property is the data. Or, to use another current cliche, ideas are the maps and cartography, and property is the territory. The difference compares well to the differences between sex and talking about sex.
Would not ideas be repressed without the incentive (provided by copyrights)? ‘Au contraire’ the biggest problem with ideas is the delivery system. How do we get them to those marketeers who can distribute them?
My ideas are pieces of what passes for my soul (or, if you prefer, ego). Therefore, everytime someone adopts one of them, a little piece of me has infected them. And for this I get paid, too! On top of all that, I should be paid and paid and paid as they get staler and staler?
If copyrights are such a drag, why and how did they evolve? Not by the market process. Like all privileges, they were grants of the king. The idea did not—could not—arise until Gutenberg’s printing press and it coincided with the rise of royal divinity, and soon after, the onslaught of mercantilism.
So who benefits from this privilege? There is an economic impact I failed to mention earlier. It is, in Bastiat’s phrasing, the unseen. Copyright is a Big publisher’s method, under cover of protecting artists, of restraint of trade. Yes, we’re talking monopoly.
For when the Corporation tosses its bone to the struggling writer, and an occasional steak to the pampered tenth of a percent, it receives an enforceable legal monopoly on the editing, typesetting, printing, packaging, marketing (including advertising) and sometimes even local distribution of that book or magazine. (In magazines, it also has an exclusivity in layout vs other articles and illustrations and published advertisements.) How’s that for vertical integration and restraint of trade?
And so the system perpetuates, give or take a few counter-economic outlaws and some enterprising Taiwanese with good smuggling connections.
Because copyrights permeate all mass media, Copyright is the Rip-off That Dare Not Mention Its Name. The rot corrupting our entire communications market is so entrenched it will survive nothing short of abolition of the State and its enforcement of Copyright. Because the losers, small-name writers and all readers, lose so little each, we are content—it seems—to be nickel-and-dime plundered. Why worry about mosquito bites when we have the vampire gouges of income taxes and automobile tariffs?
Now for the central moral question: what first woke me up to the problem that was the innocent viewer scenario. Consider the following careful contractual construction.
Author Big and Publisher Bigger have contracts not to reveal a word of what’s in some publication. Everyone on the staff, every person in the step of production is contracted not to reveal a word. All the distributors are covered and the advertising quotes only a minimal amount of words. Every reader is, like Death Records in Phantom of the Paradise, under contract, too; that is, every reader who purchases the book or ’zine and thus interacts with someone who is under contract—interacts in a voluntary trade and voluntary agreement.
No, I am not worried about the simultaneous creator; although an obvious victim, he or she is rare, given sufficient complexity in the work under questions. (However, some recent copyright decisions and the fact that the Dolly Parton case even got as far as a serious trial—means the corruption is spreading.)
One day you and I walk into a room—invited but without even mention of a contract—and the publication lies open on a table. Photons leap from the pages to our eyes and our hapless brain processes the information. Utterly innocent, having committed no volitional act, we are copyright violators. We have unintentionally embarked on a life of privacy.
And God or the Market help us if we now try to act on the ideas now in our mind or to reveal this unintended guilty secret in any way. The State shall strike us—save only if Author Big and Publisher Bigger decide in their tyrannous mercy that we are too small and not worth the trouble.
For if we use the ideas or repeat or reprint them, even as part of our own larger creation—bang! There goes the monopoly. And so each and every innocent viewer must be suppressed.
By the Market? Hardly. The entire contractual agreement falls like a house of cards when the innocent gets his or her forbidden view. No, copyright has nothing to do with creativity, incentive, just desserts, fruits of labour or any other element of the moral, free market.
It is a creature of the State, the Vampire’s little bat. And, as far as I’m concerned, the word should be copywrong.

---

The Voluntaryist
Editor: Carl Watner
July 1986 / Whole # 20
Pages 4-5

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Copyright laws in the US are well and truly fuxored, and we desperately need major reform to bring them more in line with the primacy of liberty...however what the full anarchists do not understand is that when you eliminate the profitability of creativity, then you will get less creativity. This is an axiom they understand in other areas... ie you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize, but their rejection of all-things-IP overrides the economic consequentialist argument and makes it (to them) irrelevant. If you keep pressing the profit/creativity effects, they usually end up with a vague, "The market will find a way" argument.

IP needs to be done a lot different than it is being done now. What we have now is horrible. Nevertheless IP needs to be protected at least after some manner, if only to keep creativity profitable and spur innovation.

I will now be pedantic and say again, the fact that I say IP must be preserved in some manner does not imply any kind of support in any way for the current system. I suspect the radical ancaps will still try and paint me as an ally of copyright trolls, since that is what they always do, no matter how many times I make it clear that I support basically nothing abut the current system, but I will place this disclaimer up front so that I can just ignore such stupidity and not waste time on such baloney sausage for the thousandth time.

Eliminating IP laws does not eliminate profitability of ideas. I and others demonstrated this on the other monster IP debate threads. ~hugs~

 

[GunnyFreedom]

Eliminating IP laws does not eliminate profitability of ideas. I and others demonstrated this on the other monster IP debate threads. ~hugs~

You have an extraordinarily fruitful imagination.

 

[Ender]

Led Zeppelin is arguing that it is an old and commonly used chord progression. The song in question :

Zeppelin is correct.

 

[Ender]

And the two six note three chord progressions that were the same between the two songs are not nearly enough alike to even suggest plagiarism. You may as well pick three words out of a dictionary and claim wherever they are strung together is a violation. It's stupid.

On. The. Nose.

 

[presence]

Copyright laws in the US are well and truly fuxored, and we desperately need major reform to bring them more in line with the primacy of liberty...however what the full anarchists do not understand is that when you eliminate the profitability of creativity, then you will get less creativity. This is an axiom they understand in other areas... ie you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize, but their rejection of all-things-IP overrides the economic consequentialist argument and makes it (to them) irrelevant. If you keep pressing the profit/creativity effects, they usually end up with a vague, "The market will find a way" argument.

China has very limited IP law. They have plenty of creativity, reverse engineering, and resultant manufacturing industry.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

China has very limited IP law. They have plenty of creativity, reverse engineering, and resultant manufacturing industry.

"very limited IP law" != "IP anarchy"

 

[Intoxiklown]

China has very limited IP law. They have plenty of creativity, reverse engineering, and resultant manufacturing industry.

Have you ever been to Asia? I ask because my time in Korea showed me one thing. Their entire economy was built around two things:

1) Rice

2) Pirated clothes, electronics, jewelry, sunglasses, ect.

Not being a smart ass. But I am unaware of many Chinese breakthroughs (speaking to modern times, of course), and in all my dealings with Chinese manufacturers, our relationship was based on them being able to produce popular goods in America at a fraction of the cost. Remember those $6000 massage chairs at places like Sharper Image? I made a KILLING off of imported ones, with real leather, that looked and performed as well as the US models, selling mine for $900. I bought them at $400 per. I couldn't keep enough containers on the water to keep up. In other words, I've abused the system for profit myself, so I'm not taking any semblance of a high road here.

The bigger point is, the only place I ever found really well manufactured and innovative were certain European companies (excluding the US, as I was looking for better pricing to open the doors for volume, or quality and innovation not readily available in the states), but Americans prefer saving a few bucks as opposed to investing in something that will last a lifetime. I never found anything in Asian nations that would be unique, and originated from there, outside of cultural items.

 

[Sonny Tufts]

One day you and I walk into a room—invited but without even mention of a contract—and the publication lies open on a table. Photons leap from the pages to our eyes and our hapless brain processes the information. Utterly innocent, having committed no volitional act, we are copyright violators.

There is no copyright violation in this situation.

Writing as a medium of expression will continue as long as someone has a burning need to express.

It's exceedingly doubtful that J.K. Rowling would have cranked out seven Harry Potter books while working a day job in the absence of copyright laws.

 

[Madison320]

China has very limited IP law. They have plenty of creativity, reverse engineering, and resultant manufacturing industry.

What if the whole world decided to go IP anarchy? Then you wouldn't be able to steal inventions from other countries because they'd never get invented in the first place.


Also I asked a question previously and I'm very curious about your answer:

because after murder something is missing and after copying the original still sits unmolested.

Who decides in your anarchist society that murder is wrong but copying is ok? And why can't copying "not be ok"?

Suppose you had 2 perfect anarchist societies. Couldn't you have one that allowed unlimited copying and one that didn't? Wouldn't the one that protected intellectual property have a higher standard of living since all the top engineers would want to live there? Why would you want to "hope" that you can copy some inventions from the other society when you could just have the inventors live in your society?

 

[nickpruitt]

This article best nails it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/18/if-led-zeppelin-goes-down-we-all-burn.html?via=desktop&source=twitter


If Led Zeppelin loses, and the once bright line between idea and expression continues to blur, this new legal standard would be one more weapon in the arsenal protecting the three major record labels and three major music publishers from outside competition—a power they desperately covet in this age of YouTube stars and mixtape hits. Don’t be fooled: David might win the battle, but Goliath ends up winning the war.

 

[presence]

I'm simply asking where the distinction of hat property is protected, and which property is not.

property is scarce