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he extinguishing of suffering and grief for realizing the correct method for the witnessing of nibbana that is to say the four kinds of mindfulness meditation dates friday 10th of july to saturday 18th of july 2015 7 days and 8 nights venue castlecreag academy old castlecreag raod castlecreag nsw 2749 1 30 hours from sydney in the penrith valley cost 440 00 per person covers accommodation facility hire food cost and other logistics bhante s time and teachings are freely given contact deepika weerakoon meditateasy gmail com may 20 2015 sujato 4 comments copy this copyright is a big deal there s hardly a single computer user who hasn t faced the possibility of using or creating content that infringes copyright and it is a huge deal in the area of buddhist texts where many texts are protected under some form of copyright law i m going to make a somewhat complex argument here so let me state my conclusions up front i think copyright is a bad idea i think we would be better off without it but regardless of whether it has certain applications in some areas it contradicts fundamental buddhist principles and should never be applied to buddhist scriptures why is copyright a bad idea the basic premise of copyright is this that we can ensure creative incomes by legal means the purpose of copyright is to provide a legal avenue to ensure the rights of original creators are respected that is to say a copyright notice is nothing if it is not an implicit legal threat it says if you don t comply you are a criminal and we will take you to court the problem is not just that these threats don t work it is that they prevent us from even considering more humane and socially based measures when copyright laws evolved over the past few centuries we lived in a completely different world copying took effort and it could be reasonably contained but for the past 20 years or so the combined effort of human ingenuity and industrial output has created billions of machines that can copy incredibly fast and has put those machines in the hands of most of the people on this planet then you say to everyone please don t use these machines for copying have you heard what happened in the garden of eden let me make a huge leap and guess people copy stuff anyway have a look at how many copyright takedown notices google gets yep that s over a million requests every day for one company and see how it s soared over the past few years at the same time as the protectors of copyright have pushed hard for creating ever more draconian laws there aren t that many bad people in the world if the law says that millions of people are criminals it s the law that is wrong not the people any law that is broken this often is ill conceived it seems to me that successful laws are of two kinds you either have laws that govern things that are very exceptional only a few people do them and they fall well outside what are considered acceptable such as murder theft and the like in such cases you ban the thing and impose substantial penalties but other kinds of laws govern things that most people do or might do it s not so much a matter of prohibiting things because they are wrong but managing them in the interests of the public good i m thinking of things like speeding tickets or building regulations or non smoking zones in such cases we try to nudge people towards a better behavior you tweak them making them more stringent together with an education component and gradually build a social expectation of acceptable behavior the problem with copyright law is that it tries to apply the absolutism which is appropriate for the first kind of law to something that should be managed by the second kind of law you can t just make people stop copying things they like it s never going to happen maybe you could make them modify their behavior but until you give them a way of doing that it is a losing battle copyright law it is often believed may be justified by reference to the economic reality but if that s the case why do the proponents of copyright resort to falsified data to justify their positions there are on the other hand multiple accounts by authors and formal studies that show that publishing books freely on the internet dramatically increases usage and has little effect on book sales the intended purpose of copyright is not to protect corporations but to protect the work of creators but here s the thing before i was a monk i was an original creator i was a songwriter and i lived among creative artists for 6 or 7 years pretty much all my friends were writers poets actors musicians painters or dancers and i can t recall a single time when copyright law was actually relevant to anyone true i made a small amount from song royalties but it never affected our lives all that much and anyway even if you as a struggling artist became aware of a copyright violation what could you do about it take a publisher or record company to court good luck with that what you d do if anything is contact the alleged violator and if they didn t do as you asked you d grumble about it you don t need a legal system for that copyright becomes relevant when you step up into the realm of corporate sponsored art you sign a contract giving the copyright ownership to a company for us it was a record company otherwise it might be a book publisher a movie studio or whatever then they own the copyright and you get a small percentage in our case about 10 so much for protecting the rights of creative artists if there is a copyright violation the company goes to court because they can afford to now in some cases this can be justified for example it s really expensive to make a movie you need companies to provide the financing and bear the risk but this is a purely contingent fact and it changes depending on technology in the past for example a publishing company was needed to produce books gradually technology has eaten away at the specialist services that publishers can offer typesetting proofreading design marketing printing distribution all these can now be done easily by individual authors who can then keep full copyright control over their works on amazon nearly 50 of creator revenue for genre titles is now from self published books so the fact that producing some kinds of creative work requires large companies and legal protection does not mean that such protection is necessary everywhere the notion that copyright exists to protect creators withers when you consider the devastating impact that the radical expansion of copyright has had on works whose creators have died here s some background on this from professor james boyle of duke law school congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement which had guaranteed that 85 of works and 93 of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn t want or need a second copyright term and copyright which had been an opt in system you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright became an opt out system you got a copyright automatically when you fixed the work in material form whether you wanted it or not suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era to essays posters locally produced teaching materials was swept into copyright and kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years the effects were culturally catastrophic copyright went from covering very little culture and only covering it for a 28 year period during which it was commercially available to covering all of culture regardless of whether it was available often for over a century unlike fahrenheit 451 the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and in most cases the authors are unknown the works are locked up with no benefit to anyone and no one has the key that would unlock them we have cut ourselves off from our own culture left it to molder and in the case of nitrate film literally disintegrate with no benefit to anyone the works may not be physically destroyed although many of them are disappearing disintegrating or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them but for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it and all this right at the moment when we could have used the internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access that this extension of copyright is useless and harmful is not just the opinion of a few radicals in 2002 a team of 19 economists including 4 nobel laureates submitted an analysis to the us congress on the copyright term extension act of 1998 where they concluded that taken as a whole the authors believe that it is highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension under the ctea outweigh the additional costs and yet it is still with us here s a stunning graphic that shows just how deep a hole in our culture copyright law has dug it s from a paper titled how copyright keeps works disappeared by paul j heald of the university of illinois college of law this graphic shows how books published before the magic public domain date of 1923 are far more available than those published after essentially publishers make texts available for a decade or two and then they languish unread until they enter public domain the proof is in the pudding empirical studies show that creative workers earn an average of around half the median wage and what income there is is extremely unequal and uncertain in a survey of 25 000 authors in the uk and germany authors martin kretschmer and philip hardwick of the bournemouth university business school wrote that if the aim of copyright law is to provide reasonable renumeration for writers this study shows quite conclusively that current copyright law has empirically failed to meet these aims they added after this study copyright policy cannot remain the same and yet not only has there been no reform things continue to get worse as in the top secret deals being forged in the trans pacific partnership if the law doesn t really protect creative artists then who does it protect copyright law is an instrument of capitalism and like all instruments of capitalism it aims to make the rich richer who is making all the fuss about copyright farmers in kenya street cleaners in manila bus drivers in brazil no it s the owners of massive wealthy corporations the practical result of copyright i allege is to take money out of the hands of creative artists and their fans and concentrate it in the hands of the rich who control the means of production think about it why was copyright law created in the past 300 years or so isn t that the time when the printing press became used a printing press allows mass copying of writing but it does so at considerable expense in terms of the physical machinery and space but also in terms of time and experience and carefully learned craftsmanship when the laws were created this served a purpose as the capital printing presses distribution networks and the like was necessary to propagate work so a class of company known as publishers was created to deal with these things and enable the printing and distribution of books but now the measurable effect of copyright law is to prevent people from accessing content and the reason for this is straightforward the whole idea is based on a state of technology that simply doesn t exist any more profit arises from the demand for a good whose supply is limited in the 20th century the supply of intellectual content was limited and so it was a valuable commodity now it s not despite the efforts of content providers to keep it so information is the cheapest thing in the world much cheaper than water the economic thinking that underlies copyright law is deeply disconnected from the real world i have looked for demographic data on the economic effects of copyright law and haven t been able to find anything so allow me to make an unsubstantiated hypothesis if anyone knows of some information please let me know but here is my thesis the flow of money from copyright is on the whole from the poor to the rich from the colored to the white from the female to the male from the underdeveloped countries to the developed and from the young to the old prove me wrong if we are to retain any form of copyright law we should develop it like the second kind of law i mentioned above in a gradual and pragmatic way together with an education process one model would be to make copyright law more like patent law it would be opt in so a creator would have to make an application for copyright which spelled out the reasons for applying copyright in this instance if the application was successful a percentage of earnings say 10 would go to the regulatory body thus providing funding for it this would ensure that copyright is only applied for substantive works and works where the creator genuinely expects that they will lose more than 10 of their earnings by copying the copyright would apply for a reasonable period say 20 years as is the case with patents as long as humans have existed they have created the first signs of human creative activity are nearly 100 000 years old creativity is an expression of the human spirit it doesn t belong to capitalism no matter what you do people will create people all over the world are creating writing painting playing music and they couldn t care less about copyright copyright law is not about fostering creativity it is about keeping alive an economic order based on 20th century technology which ensures that a small circle of the rich get the bulk of the economic gain from creative activity what about buddhism you d think that it wouldn t need stating but evidently it does buddhism is about letting go copyright is about holding on even if we can accept a case for certain forms of copyright in certain spheres of life how should that apply to buddhism after all buddhism not merely survived but flourished for thousands of years before copyright came on the picture perhaps some historical perspective is in order the first question which can be dealt with swiftly is whether copying is stealing under the buddhist precepts the answer is no stealing in buddhism requires that the owner be deprived of something copying is not taking you could argue that the creator is indirectly deprived of income but that is irrelevant there are plenty of ways to indirectly deprive someone of income i could set up a rival business for example i might even do that out of malice to deliberately harm you that may not be a nice thing to do it might even be illegal but it has nothing to do with stealing of course breaking copyright is against the law which is...
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