Copywrong – Moon of Alabama

April 10, 2005

Copywrong

The Internationale is still under capitalist copyright control, as is ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

Meanwhile Sony has patented `The Matrix´ idea:

According to the patent, which was granted in the U.S. in 2003, the method of brain stimulation centers on low-frequency pulses that stimulate the neural cortex without requiring any kind of implant.

(the sex industry would love that technology, but)

Sony reportedly described the patented technology as speculative work, and conceded there have been no experiments with it yet — and no prototype device exists.

So one obviously may patent pure speculation that something may work in future, without an idea how it may work and without any experiments and prototypes?

Two points on why this is wrong are obvious to me:

1. Unreasonable copyright stifles new art (in The Internationale case a movie) and patents like the above will stop anyone working in that field to develop something that might turn out to work like the idea Sony patented.

2. If laws like those covering copyright and patents become unreasonable they are not accepted by the public and will be circumvented or ignored. This creates a general aversion against the "rule of law" and undermines the society.

Posted by b on April 10, 2005 at 16:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Thanks for the link to the
Internationale page. I wonder
how long we’ll have to wait before it will again be “acceptable” to play it together
with the U.S. anthem.
As to copyright law, I defer to our resident theorists
with the hope that Slothrop (in particular) will continue to provide low-brow translations
of his more erudite analytical postings. I suspect that many
visitors here share my enthusiasm for Richard Stallman’s “copyleft” concept,
and the impetus that he, Linus Torvalds, and many others have
given to provide an alternative model for fostering the maximal diffusion of the fruits of human ingenuity. Neither the
cathedral nor the bazaar fulfills all our cravings, but I prefer a chorus of the Internationale in Rheims, to haggling about the price of tomatoes in a Damascus suk.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Apr 11 2005 6:28 utc | 1

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Apr 11 2005 7:31 utc | 2

Jamaica, I think has no copyright laws, at least for art. This probably had more than a little bit of a positive effect on the islands musical/cultural florish. Lots of musicians became famous in their own right for their ability to lift a popular rhythm, take out the lyrics, add their own rap over and re-release it, ie U- Roy, Big Youth etc ( and perhaps a precursor to USA HipHop). And I’m sure also that it put a major lid on the producers ego (and wallet) like Coxsone Dodd or Leslie Kong keeping them in the studio taking risks, and off the veranda nursing the Red Stripe. All and all ,copyright is a ball and chain.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 11 2005 10:01 utc | 3

My standard quip about copyright is that if the first person to figure out fire or the wheel had immediately copyrighted it and prohibited all imitators, well… I don’t think I’d be typing this on a laptop right now, let’s put it that way.
Intelprop is one of many aspects of contemporary capitalism that is way, way off kilter, grotesquely distorted. A legal convention that was supposed to provide limited short-term protection of original ideas followed by free dissemination to promote collaboration and creativity, morphed into the current Enclosure mindset which (noted here and elsewhere) occasionally hits mind-numbing nadirs of absurdity.
One of the old cyberpunk authors speculated on what would happen if China simply refused, openly and defiantly, to honour any copyright whatsoever — and flooded the world with reverse-engineered electronics, generic drugs, “bootleg” movies, and the like. They are the only country “big” enough to do such a thing and get away with it. The author in question suggested that this would be the end of copyright law, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Seems to me that the only real issue is false representation, i.e. as a writer of modest achievement, despite not exactly making money off my prose, I would be annoyed if someone else claimed to have written something that, in fact, I wrote. But we could have laws or principles against falsely claiming authorship of work that one did not write — “reputation theft” — without restricting the readership or the use of original materials.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 12 2005 5:30 utc | 4

“What matters who speaks?”–Brecht

Posted by: slothrop | Apr 12 2005 15:20 utc | 5

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