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Text of the page (random words):
her 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 say passing it off as their own i ll contact them and ask them to stop if they don t i ll rely on the power of peer pressure i ll write about it and let people know that there s a scam afoot the perps will fade away soon enough i d never take someone to court for anything like that so why issue an empty threat to me it seems that this concern betrays a deeper misunderstanding of what copyright law is all about copyright is not something that you can claim or not claim it exists by law because you made a creative work by operating under copyright law you are saying that anyone who violates this law is a criminal and is potentially subject to very large punishments what i am suggesting is that this should not be a legal matter we should dedicate our works to the public domain via creative commons zero or similar that doesn t mean that you necessarily support and encourage anyone to do anything they like with your work it means that whatever someone does you will not treat them as a criminal if you don t like what they do contact them and ask them politely to stop if you would like to issue some guidelines for use do so you can ask people to give proper attribution or to not change anything or to not use for commercial purposes but you don t have to make a legal issue out of these things i used to go along with the norm thinking that it was the right thing to do so i published my works under restrictive creative commons licences but as i ve learned more and my understanding of copyright has improved now i don t claim anything i think if someone wants to do something with my work great alexander duncan of chroniker press took my theragatha translation and made a nice printed edition it s terrific buy one if you like markus echterhoff of dhammatime just made some modifications to my open sanskrit font itself derived from open sans cool download and use it which brings me back around to something i alluded to earlier rather than relying on copyright we should adapt the millenia old means of negotiating usage of materials based on social interactions and this is once again an area where technology has completely changed the situation creators can stay in touch with their audience to a degree that has not been possible since publishing was invented copyright law is just bad psychology the people who want your things are your fans when you invoke copyright law you are treating your fans like criminals how do you think that s going to work out the relationship between the creator and their audience is the single irreducible fact of all public creative activity you need a creator and you need an audience what you don t need is a middle man by making a faceless company the middle man you distance the creator from their audience when a fan copies a work they don t think they are harming the creator they think of it as avoiding paying the man if the natural creative relationship between artist and audience is restored there will be a greater degree of respect and mutual support this is proven by such innovations as kickstarter which shows that people are quite happy to pay for creative works especially if they feel a sense of connection with the creator what i am suggesting is that innovative models like kickstarter or its buddhist version dana io give us an example of how a new relationship between creator and audience can be forged lulu com the print on demand service is another example rather than signing over the ownership of your work to lulu you retain ownership and use whatever licence you like lulu is more like a contractor you pay them for various services basic ones like printing and distribution and optionally for things like design and marketing but they never own your work you do most people don t realize it but the internet runs on dana most of the servers that power the internet run on linux which is free and open source software it was created developed and is still maintained by people who donate their work to the public good linux doesn t just power the internet it also underlies android and a whole range of other applications from computers embedded in various devices to the world s fastest supercomputers why do you think the very best computer scientists in the world use linux for their most performance critical work because it s better obviously generosity is not just a nice idea it creates better outcomes why because people do better work when you engage their positive nature than if you assume they are selfish another innovative example is the tex typesetting program developed by donald knuth he released the software for free as quality typesetting is a public good everyone should be able to do it and he made money by putting the detailed instructions in a book the texbook which was of course typeset in tex but he went further by offering a reward for anyone who found a bug in his program in this way he not only improved his work he engaged a community of clever people who wanted to work with him there s lots of other examples to be found in all these cases people found effective ways to use a fundamental principle of buddhist psychology that people work best when they are encouraged to do good if you penalize them for doing something harmless they ...
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