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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 a separate matter but it is not breaking precepts incidentally many monastics like most people in developing countries use pirated software all the time if copying was stealing they d risk falling into an expulsion offence however even though there is no expulsion offence for using the software it is still often illegal this is one of the many reasons why monastics should use free and open source software foss such as linux this also highlights one of the often overlooked details of copyright history software is an unusual industry in that extensive copying has existed as long as the industry has people have been using millions of pirated copies of windows and other software as long as they have been around yet software companies are thriving and making record profits for the buddhist tradition as indeed for most ancient traditions there is no notion of intellectual property people borrowed and copied all the time buddhist texts are full of cases where monks or nuns are quoting verbatim passages from the buddha or others and there is never an issue of ownership that s because the dhamma is not about ownership it s about helping people let go of suffering the dhamma was felt to be if anyone s the buddha s the buddha encouraged his students to teach the dhamma in their own language so that from the earliest days the dhamma existed in multiple translated forms all of which were considered to be the words of the buddha when the texts were later translated into chinese and tibetan they continued this tradition regarding these texts as the word of the buddha in exactly the same sense as the original scriptures which were themselves translations from one indic dialect to another however in modern times agreements such as the berne convention ruled that translations should be considered to be original creations i think this is a mistake i ve done original writing and i ve done translations and they are very different kinds of things you can for example get a computer to do translation albeit poorly but no computer can write a meaningful original article be that as it may it is clearly contrary to the entire buddhist tradition and needless to say no one thought to consult buddhists about this it was a law made in europe by some rich white men who were not even thinking that their acts might affect an ancient spiritual tradition from the east yet this law has been adopted by many buddhists who use it to control how translations are made no longer are buddhist scriptures regarded as the word of the buddha but as the property of individuals or more likely of corporations this tendency is found mostly among western translators asian translators mostly stick closer to the original spirit although they sometimes use restrictive licences of various forms not only are translations regarded as owned by individuals even the original texts are frequently subject to copyright claims you d think that a millenia old text would be pretty firmly in the public domain but apparently many publishers of original texts don t think so going beyond the extremely broad scope of copyright law they publish licences with their texts sometimes releasing them under various creative commons licences but you can only licence something that you own and you can t just go around claiming to own something that you don t to make such a claim is or it should be illegal since copyright law is written almost entirely to protect the interests of content providers it is not clear to what extent such a claim is fact illegal but the principle is clear enough the basic justification for copyright is that if we don t copyright things creators won t get compensation and the work will not be done this is a dubious argument in the creative industries generally since not only as we have seen is there no real evidence that copyright ensures a decent living for artists but because artists are not motivated primarily by money this is even more applicable to buddhism no one translates buddhist texts for money which is a very good thing because if you did you ll be pretty disappointed we the monastics academics institutions or private individuals who do the work of translation do it out of love there are vast quantities of translations that have been done and simply put out there with no attempt at getting recompense and even in the minority of cases where works are published commercially the translators and the many assistants who made these works possible typically don t get any income from them given this it seems to me that the best way to produce high quality translations is to make our work freely available so it can be copied adapted and improved if funding is needed for example if someone wants to take time off work to complete a translation we should rely on the buddhist culture of dana which has supported the maintaining and spreading of the texts for so long when i suggest that we shouldn t use copyright on our texts people say but how do you stop them being misused i just don t get what the problem is does anyone really think that there are hordes of malicious people waiting out there to do awful things with buddhist texts if by some remote chance someone does do something malicious with my work such as s...
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