preloaded used iPods for sale
Jan 23rds USA Today Preloaded iPods prompt legal ponderings and associated comments at the blog of author, Kevin Maney, are interesting, and clearly passionate, but uninformed...perhaps because impassioned. On the one hand we have the defenders of the "property" of the content creators, or content rights holders, passionately claiming exclusive and unlimited control over every conceivable use to which their creations may be put. Maybe they haven't read the Constitution, which says. . .
Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. quoted at page 130 of Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture [see Lessig's blog for links to the book].
Progress ,not income generating, all encompassing property rights entitlements for every possible use, forever, are the constitutionally determined purpose of legilsated creative property rights in the US. To be sure, limited private creative property rights will be part of any progressive, innovative democratic society - but so will open access to public domains of all kinds of technologies, including digital technolgies and digitized content. Consider the creative property in medicines, increasingly a kind of biological software, that passes from permission phase to open access phase typically in 20 years, at the end of the life of most patents. The June 2004 Health Affairs article by Amir Attaran How Do Patents And Economic Policies Affect Access To EssentialMedicines In Developing Countries? makes it clear that of the 319 medicines regarded by the WHO as essential medicines all but 17 are in fact off patent, generic, and in the public domain to be developed, cultivated, built on and other wise used without permission from their original creators of patent holders. How much music, video, text from before 1985 is available for free (= open access) use - including incorporating that music, those videos, that text preloaded on used iPods to encourage the progress of culture? If you get all worked up about the price of medicines and the (legally granted yet limited duration) monopoly power of pharmaceutical companies restricitng access to and use of a host of benefical medicines -including the ability to transform them into derivative works and tinker or reverse engineer them - why aren't you getting worked up about limitations on your ability to work this way with digital content? With the increases in copyright duration enacted by your congress you're welcome to download public domain content from 1920 - 95 years ag0 - onto your iPod. Go for it! Please read or listen to Lessig's book/audiobook Free Culture - the audio book is available for free download at the Internet Archive as are pdfs of the book see Lessig's blog
The defenders of the rights of purchasers, buyers, owners, users....of digital content should be asking: what do they get when they undertake a digital processing action and/or transaction? A poignant statement of this question question comes right at the end of the USA TODAY article on pre-loaded iPods :"The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Note the question: Are you allowed to? Who must you consult before undertaking a digital transaction? What permissions must you seek, what permissions do you have to obtain, before undertaking digital actions and transactions? Why, in an innovative creative democratic society should you have to ask anybody permission to do anything with what you "own" in the privacy of your home/school/church/club whatever, and whether those personal social spaces are physical meeting spaces or virtual meeting spaces...as they increasingly are. Purchasers/users/consumers of digital content should be very worried that use-rights that they thought were unregulated and hence private (eg to read aloud, to print, to shift in time and format or location , to timker with, to explore, to extend without asking anyone's permissions) for personal/private use are seriously being eroded. How so? Because personal private digital actions transactions carried out by your computing devices - iPods are, after all, simply small computers are inherently coming under the scrutiny of Government regulation that is increasingly being harnessed to extend the sope of private use rights of digital content creators and publishers, and by the surveillance technologies of the Internet and the code and hardware that make it tick.
How will artists/musicians/writers/film producers make a living? How will they get paid? Good question - the answer is, the way they always have, usually pretty poorly, often by chance, and in one hell of an increasingly competitive environment managing one two three or four jobs while peddling their wares, digital and otherwise. Wake up bro - the Internet and P2P just made life in the artisitc world a lot different, a lot more accessible for a lot more small scale producers of digital content who, in the end, will probably be forced by competitive pressures to give most digital content away. Get that "give away". Indeed giving away digital content will become part of a broader strategy of finding other ways to create value out of creative works. All this is explained very nicely in Varian and Shapiro's Information Rules . Artists may affiliate themselves with organisers of digital content like iTunes or Napster, but my money is on Napster in terms of their subscritption pricing policy - fixed fee for organising digital content - as compared to apple's piece rate pricing system. [Frankly it is Apple's ability to organise music content on the most user friendlt mp3 and digital video player around and cooredinate that nicely with home computers...not the strictly enforced copyrightable property rights in information...that have created their success.] Artists, as ever, and now probably more than ever, will have to make a buck (or many bucks) at live performances of their indiviudalized works rather than at precorded digital music sales in the local record store. But hey, thats life in the digital age - and you can bet that when a local band or artist goes on tour they will already have some sort of following or the venues they play at will be able to generate interest without an established label or recording company - their ISP and webHoster will be their promoter, or if the DRM doesn't kill it, P2p digital sharing.
Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. quoted at page 130 of Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture [see Lessig's blog for links to the book].
Progress ,not income generating, all encompassing property rights entitlements for every possible use, forever, are the constitutionally determined purpose of legilsated creative property rights in the US. To be sure, limited private creative property rights will be part of any progressive, innovative democratic society - but so will open access to public domains of all kinds of technologies, including digital technolgies and digitized content. Consider the creative property in medicines, increasingly a kind of biological software, that passes from permission phase to open access phase typically in 20 years, at the end of the life of most patents. The June 2004 Health Affairs article by Amir Attaran How Do Patents And Economic Policies Affect Access To EssentialMedicines In Developing Countries? makes it clear that of the 319 medicines regarded by the WHO as essential medicines all but 17 are in fact off patent, generic, and in the public domain to be developed, cultivated, built on and other wise used without permission from their original creators of patent holders. How much music, video, text from before 1985 is available for free (= open access) use - including incorporating that music, those videos, that text preloaded on used iPods to encourage the progress of culture? If you get all worked up about the price of medicines and the (legally granted yet limited duration) monopoly power of pharmaceutical companies restricitng access to and use of a host of benefical medicines -including the ability to transform them into derivative works and tinker or reverse engineer them - why aren't you getting worked up about limitations on your ability to work this way with digital content? With the increases in copyright duration enacted by your congress you're welcome to download public domain content from 1920 - 95 years ag0 - onto your iPod. Go for it! Please read or listen to Lessig's book/audiobook Free Culture - the audio book is available for free download at the Internet Archive as are pdfs of the book see Lessig's blog
The defenders of the rights of purchasers, buyers, owners, users....of digital content should be asking: what do they get when they undertake a digital processing action and/or transaction? A poignant statement of this question question comes right at the end of the USA TODAY article on pre-loaded iPods :"The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Note the question: Are you allowed to? Who must you consult before undertaking a digital transaction? What permissions must you seek, what permissions do you have to obtain, before undertaking digital actions and transactions? Why, in an innovative creative democratic society should you have to ask anybody permission to do anything with what you "own" in the privacy of your home/school/church/club whatever, and whether those personal social spaces are physical meeting spaces or virtual meeting spaces...as they increasingly are. Purchasers/users/consumers of digital content should be very worried that use-rights that they thought were unregulated and hence private (eg to read aloud, to print, to shift in time and format or location , to timker with, to explore, to extend without asking anyone's permissions) for personal/private use are seriously being eroded. How so? Because personal private digital actions transactions carried out by your computing devices - iPods are, after all, simply small computers are inherently coming under the scrutiny of Government regulation that is increasingly being harnessed to extend the sope of private use rights of digital content creators and publishers, and by the surveillance technologies of the Internet and the code and hardware that make it tick.
How will artists/musicians/writers/film producers make a living? How will they get paid? Good question - the answer is, the way they always have, usually pretty poorly, often by chance, and in one hell of an increasingly competitive environment managing one two three or four jobs while peddling their wares, digital and otherwise. Wake up bro - the Internet and P2P just made life in the artisitc world a lot different, a lot more accessible for a lot more small scale producers of digital content who, in the end, will probably be forced by competitive pressures to give most digital content away. Get that "give away". Indeed giving away digital content will become part of a broader strategy of finding other ways to create value out of creative works. All this is explained very nicely in Varian and Shapiro's Information Rules . Artists may affiliate themselves with organisers of digital content like iTunes or Napster, but my money is on Napster in terms of their subscritption pricing policy - fixed fee for organising digital content - as compared to apple's piece rate pricing system. [Frankly it is Apple's ability to organise music content on the most user friendlt mp3 and digital video player around and cooredinate that nicely with home computers...not the strictly enforced copyrightable property rights in information...that have created their success.] Artists, as ever, and now probably more than ever, will have to make a buck (or many bucks) at live performances of their indiviudalized works rather than at precorded digital music sales in the local record store. But hey, thats life in the digital age - and you can bet that when a local band or artist goes on tour they will already have some sort of following or the venues they play at will be able to generate interest without an established label or recording company - their ISP and webHoster will be their promoter, or if the DRM doesn't kill it, P2p digital sharing.
posted by john fountain at
5:28 p.m.
1 Comments:
hi john
nice stuff
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Anonymous, at 3:29 p.m.
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