Random Foo!
Jun. 25th, 2006 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Haven't done one of these in a bit, but time for another Big Random Post
The first topic is Copyright and the coming zombie apocalypse.
Now how's that for a title?
Anyway, recently I downloaded both the original Night of the Living Dead and The Last Man on Earth. They're both public domain movies so the links are to fully legal torrents (and I seed them so you might even wind up downloading from me!). Of course, they're also both black and white. I've seen them both before, but this is the first time in years. Both fairly good movies. NotLD is a bit annoying in that the main female character is basically catatonic for most of the movie (but then pretty much everybody except the lead doesn't come off very well anyway), but overall quite an enjoyable flick. The Last Man on Earth is a an old Vincent Price film that's a pretty good adaptation of I Am Legend, about the last man left on Earth after a plague of vampirism claims the globe. Book is better, obviously (and got me wanting to read the book again), but it's fairly enjoyable to see a movie adaptation (it's a far better one than The Omega Man). Of course it's moderately annoying because, from what I understand much of the dialog had to be redubbed after filming and so they don't always match the lips to the sounds.
Anyway, I was attracted to them mainly because they were public domain, but I've been thinking a bit about copyright recently.
See, yeah, like a lot of people, I download stuff. But I generally still support copyright, and so I usually restrict my downloads to one of the following categories:
1) Things that I know I'd never pay for and have little chance of ever seeing for free on TV but that I have some interest in. This is the most ethically dubious, but hey, I'm weak.
2) Things I already own in another format but I want digitally for one reason or another (even if that reason is just 'I don't want to dig out the tape'.
3) Things like television shows that are available elsewhere in the world but because of stupid canadian networks deciding to delay or not air them, would wind up being horrendously delayed. I consider this 'timeshifting'. I'm just timeshifting them several months ahead of where I would have otherwise watched them for free.
Anyway, I support copyright in theory, but I think it really needs a major overhauling. Copyright terms should be drastically reduced (I think anything over 25 years after first commercial publication should be public domain), and perhaps even moreso for noncommercial use, since the internet has made a new world that's just... changed things. It's as if, after the invention of the printing press, scribes tried to make it illegal to mechanically print books, under the theory it's the devil's work or something. Our culture is slowly becoming more participatory, and copyright needs to adapt to that. But in general, a hell of a lot more needs to be put into the public domain. Once something's part of our shared culture, it should belong to all of us. They can still hold trademarks mind you, I have nothing against that (in theory, although I suspect it'd need some tweaking in practice), so only DC could sell a 'Superman' comic, but anyone could write a story or have a comic that featured Superman, so long as that fact wasn't used to advertise it.
The problem is that in our society as it stands, it's almost always easier for a company to swing the law in its favour if it can make more money (or keep making money) at the expense of the public interest.
It's kinda like the problem with terrorists. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying corporations are like terrorists. Terrorists at least generally seem to have a moral opinion. A completely wrong one, granted, but it's there and it's motivating them, whereas corporations just seem to think of what makes them money. What I mean is that because they have this interest in making money, they can plan and attack at their leisure, and try their best to sneak things into law when nobody else is looking, whereas we (the people who might get screwed over) have to be on guard all the time.
That's why copyright terms gets extended (because heaven forbid disney movies ever fall into the public domain! Better to change the law!). That's why there are in some places laws that make it illegal to tamper with your own property if that tampering might make it easier to circumvent copyright (even if it's for a legal use). Or why it might become illegal to create new technologies to do certain things. They can bribe (often legally, through campaign donations) people to make things go their way or try to sway public opinion by throwing money behind (possibly misleading) ad campaigns.
It's not just copyright, it's all sorts of things. Look at Network Neutrality, for example. Nobody in their right mind really wants companies to be able to charge more for you to, say, use google than to use their own search engine, or block off sites that don't agree with them. But that ability would make certain companies a lot of money, so they can just keep pushing and pushing in the hopes that at some point we won't push back. Because if we stop pushing back, even if only it's after the 1000th try, all the money they spent in pushing will have been an investment paid off. And often it looks like they don't even need to push.
The one defense the average person has from this asymmetrical warfare is human nature. Yes, the entertainment companies are out of line, but so are we, we'll just download stuff if we just want to try it or if it's airing in one market but not ours, or if it's prohibitively expensive. In general, if they tell us 'no, you can't', and a) we can't see a good moral reason behind it, b) they're screwing us in too many other ways, and c) it's too easy to do it, then we simply will.
Catch-22 tells us the people in power have the right to do to us anything we can't stop them from doing. Perhaps the reverse is also true, in some limited sense. I suspect over the long term culture will be inevitably changed by the confluence of technology and us being mildly selfish, always-looking-for-a-freebie, yet remarkably creative people, and copyright will cease to exist in any meaningful way, and we'll evolve the theory that if you create some piece of art, it's intended for everybody to do with what they wish. In the old days this might have led to the lack of any new production of art, but I really think that once we've reached that point it'll be so easy for people to create that people will do so anyway. The only trouble will be sorting the great stuff from the crap. But we have difficulties with that as it is.
Now, that's the long term. In the short term I sadly suspect the media companies are going to tighten things up more and more, which really sucks because I'm not expecting to live in the long term.
Oh, btw, all this being said, I'm not advocating a 100% piratey 'download whatever you want whenever' policy at this point, because I still want creators to be compensated (even if it has to be filtered by thousands of middlemen). I'm still sticking to my policy of only downloading stuff that fits into one of my 3 categories.
Speaking of zombies, Book Foo:
Finished: The Warrior's Apprentice (Lois McMaster Bujold), Battle Royale (reread) (Koushun Takami), I Am Legend (reread) (Richard Matheson)
Started: The Year's Best SF 10
Thoughts behind cut, not terribly spoilery.
Warrior's Apprentice wasn't bad. The later Vorkosigan books are better, I think, and some of it just sort of happened too easy for my tastes - I was hoping the story of how it came together would be a little more involved, a more intricate web of lies that was used. But still enjoyable, and important to read if you like the series.
I don't have many new books left so I'm doing a lot of rereads, plus I really seem to be craving an apocalypse or zombie outbreak or something. Craved reading Battle Royale again and enjoyed it, still have the pictures in my head of an ideal 'American film remake' and how it would play out (the secret is, almost complete scene for scene translation for the book, with only a few minor changes for pacing or cultural translation). Not that the proposed American Film Remake is likely to do anything like that, and so it'll probably suck as a translation even more than the Japanese film (sorry, I watched it again recently and it does).
The short story collection is okay so far, some good stories, some that don't do much for me, and some that don't do much for me but give me interesting side ideas off some topic or another.
Some recent icons! (Veronica Mars, Doctor Who)
Social Interaction Report: For Friday Friday I saw 'girl I sometimes talk to when the truck is late' (serves better than 'girl I used to talk to on Sunday mornings') and it actually went pretty well, on my end. By which I mean I was able to keep up the conversation with what I felt was reasonable ability (of course she was clearly tired so I let it lapse sometimes when it looked like she was trying to grab a few last moments of sleep before she had to work), and was even able to use a bit of sarcasm and perhaps an amusing response or two. One of the better non-standard social interactions I've had in recent memory (standard social interactions include conversations with people I actually work with or have an established relationship of some sort with (which is why I often don't count things like discussing old TV shows or the coming zombie apocalypse with the guy I work with on Sundays in social interaction reports).
The first topic is Copyright and the coming zombie apocalypse.
Now how's that for a title?
Anyway, recently I downloaded both the original Night of the Living Dead and The Last Man on Earth. They're both public domain movies so the links are to fully legal torrents (and I seed them so you might even wind up downloading from me!). Of course, they're also both black and white. I've seen them both before, but this is the first time in years. Both fairly good movies. NotLD is a bit annoying in that the main female character is basically catatonic for most of the movie (but then pretty much everybody except the lead doesn't come off very well anyway), but overall quite an enjoyable flick. The Last Man on Earth is a an old Vincent Price film that's a pretty good adaptation of I Am Legend, about the last man left on Earth after a plague of vampirism claims the globe. Book is better, obviously (and got me wanting to read the book again), but it's fairly enjoyable to see a movie adaptation (it's a far better one than The Omega Man). Of course it's moderately annoying because, from what I understand much of the dialog had to be redubbed after filming and so they don't always match the lips to the sounds. Anyway, I was attracted to them mainly because they were public domain, but I've been thinking a bit about copyright recently.
See, yeah, like a lot of people, I download stuff. But I generally still support copyright, and so I usually restrict my downloads to one of the following categories:
1) Things that I know I'd never pay for and have little chance of ever seeing for free on TV but that I have some interest in. This is the most ethically dubious, but hey, I'm weak.
2) Things I already own in another format but I want digitally for one reason or another (even if that reason is just 'I don't want to dig out the tape'.
3) Things like television shows that are available elsewhere in the world but because of stupid canadian networks deciding to delay or not air them, would wind up being horrendously delayed. I consider this 'timeshifting'. I'm just timeshifting them several months ahead of where I would have otherwise watched them for free.
Anyway, I support copyright in theory, but I think it really needs a major overhauling. Copyright terms should be drastically reduced (I think anything over 25 years after first commercial publication should be public domain), and perhaps even moreso for noncommercial use, since the internet has made a new world that's just... changed things. It's as if, after the invention of the printing press, scribes tried to make it illegal to mechanically print books, under the theory it's the devil's work or something. Our culture is slowly becoming more participatory, and copyright needs to adapt to that. But in general, a hell of a lot more needs to be put into the public domain. Once something's part of our shared culture, it should belong to all of us. They can still hold trademarks mind you, I have nothing against that (in theory, although I suspect it'd need some tweaking in practice), so only DC could sell a 'Superman' comic, but anyone could write a story or have a comic that featured Superman, so long as that fact wasn't used to advertise it.
The problem is that in our society as it stands, it's almost always easier for a company to swing the law in its favour if it can make more money (or keep making money) at the expense of the public interest.
It's kinda like the problem with terrorists. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying corporations are like terrorists. Terrorists at least generally seem to have a moral opinion. A completely wrong one, granted, but it's there and it's motivating them, whereas corporations just seem to think of what makes them money. What I mean is that because they have this interest in making money, they can plan and attack at their leisure, and try their best to sneak things into law when nobody else is looking, whereas we (the people who might get screwed over) have to be on guard all the time.
That's why copyright terms gets extended (because heaven forbid disney movies ever fall into the public domain! Better to change the law!). That's why there are in some places laws that make it illegal to tamper with your own property if that tampering might make it easier to circumvent copyright (even if it's for a legal use). Or why it might become illegal to create new technologies to do certain things. They can bribe (often legally, through campaign donations) people to make things go their way or try to sway public opinion by throwing money behind (possibly misleading) ad campaigns.
It's not just copyright, it's all sorts of things. Look at Network Neutrality, for example. Nobody in their right mind really wants companies to be able to charge more for you to, say, use google than to use their own search engine, or block off sites that don't agree with them. But that ability would make certain companies a lot of money, so they can just keep pushing and pushing in the hopes that at some point we won't push back. Because if we stop pushing back, even if only it's after the 1000th try, all the money they spent in pushing will have been an investment paid off. And often it looks like they don't even need to push.
The one defense the average person has from this asymmetrical warfare is human nature. Yes, the entertainment companies are out of line, but so are we, we'll just download stuff if we just want to try it or if it's airing in one market but not ours, or if it's prohibitively expensive. In general, if they tell us 'no, you can't', and a) we can't see a good moral reason behind it, b) they're screwing us in too many other ways, and c) it's too easy to do it, then we simply will.
Catch-22 tells us the people in power have the right to do to us anything we can't stop them from doing. Perhaps the reverse is also true, in some limited sense. I suspect over the long term culture will be inevitably changed by the confluence of technology and us being mildly selfish, always-looking-for-a-freebie, yet remarkably creative people, and copyright will cease to exist in any meaningful way, and we'll evolve the theory that if you create some piece of art, it's intended for everybody to do with what they wish. In the old days this might have led to the lack of any new production of art, but I really think that once we've reached that point it'll be so easy for people to create that people will do so anyway. The only trouble will be sorting the great stuff from the crap. But we have difficulties with that as it is.
Now, that's the long term. In the short term I sadly suspect the media companies are going to tighten things up more and more, which really sucks because I'm not expecting to live in the long term.
Oh, btw, all this being said, I'm not advocating a 100% piratey 'download whatever you want whenever' policy at this point, because I still want creators to be compensated (even if it has to be filtered by thousands of middlemen). I'm still sticking to my policy of only downloading stuff that fits into one of my 3 categories.
Speaking of zombies, Book Foo:
Finished: The Warrior's Apprentice (Lois McMaster Bujold), Battle Royale (reread) (Koushun Takami), I Am Legend (reread) (Richard Matheson)
Started: The Year's Best SF 10
Thoughts behind cut, not terribly spoilery.
Warrior's Apprentice wasn't bad. The later Vorkosigan books are better, I think, and some of it just sort of happened too easy for my tastes - I was hoping the story of how it came together would be a little more involved, a more intricate web of lies that was used. But still enjoyable, and important to read if you like the series.
I don't have many new books left so I'm doing a lot of rereads, plus I really seem to be craving an apocalypse or zombie outbreak or something. Craved reading Battle Royale again and enjoyed it, still have the pictures in my head of an ideal 'American film remake' and how it would play out (the secret is, almost complete scene for scene translation for the book, with only a few minor changes for pacing or cultural translation). Not that the proposed American Film Remake is likely to do anything like that, and so it'll probably suck as a translation even more than the Japanese film (sorry, I watched it again recently and it does).
The short story collection is okay so far, some good stories, some that don't do much for me, and some that don't do much for me but give me interesting side ideas off some topic or another.
Some recent icons! (Veronica Mars, Doctor Who)
Social Interaction Report: For Friday Friday I saw 'girl I sometimes talk to when the truck is late' (serves better than 'girl I used to talk to on Sunday mornings') and it actually went pretty well, on my end. By which I mean I was able to keep up the conversation with what I felt was reasonable ability (of course she was clearly tired so I let it lapse sometimes when it looked like she was trying to grab a few last moments of sleep before she had to work), and was even able to use a bit of sarcasm and perhaps an amusing response or two. One of the better non-standard social interactions I've had in recent memory (standard social interactions include conversations with people I actually work with or have an established relationship of some sort with (which is why I often don't count things like discussing old TV shows or the coming zombie apocalypse with the guy I work with on Sundays in social interaction reports).
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