Why are so many upset about TPP's copyright provisions?

[Atman]

Of all the bad things about the TPP, I'm genuinely baffled by the number of people furious about copyright enforcement. The arguments don't make a lot of sense, as

I've read people talking about their supposed "right" to post anything the want online, or stream movies or music without paying for it. Do you feel the same way about paying your auto mechanic or paying for the groceries you purchase? Creative works my not be as tangible in terms of being a physical "thing" you get to hold in your hand, eat, or drive to work, but real people spent real money, time, and talent to record that song you love or write that book.

Many people feel creative works are "public" just because they're so easy to steal. But that is exactly why copyright laws were written, to provide ownership protection for a "thing" which is you don't necessarily buy off of a store shelf. Just because it's much easier to steal a song that it is to steal a car doesn't make it any less of a theft. Besides, these TPP provisions are aimed more at the blatant criminal theft and mass counterfeiting of copyrighted works, such as in China where they simply don't care.

When I traveled to Thailand a few years ago I brought some new-release DVDs to my nephew, blockbusters which I didn't think he'd have access to. Nope. Shops everywhere openly sold bootleg DVDs of movies that were still in theaters in the states. This is the kind of crap TPP is attempting to crackdown on, not you sharing one or two sings with a friend.

[kelliekat44]

1. Because lots of people uses the Internet and any claim to deny them free access gets lots and lots

play and lots of hysteria going. And they can spread that hysteria like wildfire across the globe using social media and that way you can make lots and lots of people hate something they know absolutely nothing about.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

2. Lots of things about the TPP to hate but this isn't the mole hill to die on.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Because they are awful.

Read up: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared

Fair use only a suggestion. Huge expansion of copyright duration for no reason other than profit.

Problematic criminalization of drm "tampering".

TPP is by the corporations and for the corporations.

[portlander23]

5. Yep

Copyright law in the US is already broken. Exporting it worldwide will just make it worse. I assure you that you don't need to reserve all your displeasure with the TPP for only the big ticket items. This is a bad deal all around.

[hifiguy]

12. The ridiculous extensions of copyright duration

over the last half-century have all been driven primarily by one corporation: Disney.

Every change in copyright duration for decades should have been honestly called "The Protect Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act." Disney as an entity genuinely believes that its copyrights should be eternal.

Disney is one very nasty organization. Not surprising, considering that Kindly Uncle Walt was a rabid right-winger, vicious anti-Semite and loathed even the idea of unions.

[Atman]

15. Disney's ENTIRE corporate image is based around Mickey Mouse.

It was Walt's creation, and it now is the symbol for a multi-billion dollar corporation. Why should they just allow the character to fall into public domain? I don't really understand why one could be upset at a company trying to protect their property.

[hifiguy]

16. Because the copyright laws do NOT exclusively apply to

Mickey Mouse. And the changes Disney demands in the copyright laws apply to EVERYTHING covered by them.

And copyright laws were originally intended to let individual creators benefit from their labors - composers, authors, artists, actual people during their lifetimes and then allow those ideas to pass into the public domain. At least that's what I was taught in law school. They were never intended to allow corporate entitles to hold eternal rights to a concept. They are another useful legal framework that has been corrupted, twisted and turned against the people and the public interest by corporate interests.

And Walt has been dead for going on 50 years.

[Chan790]

4. It's not just the breadth but the length of those provisions that is the problem.

The problem with the Copyright provisions isn't just that they are over-broad to protect creators...they are written to explicitly take works currently in the public domain and revert them back into copyright protection, extend other copyrights (such as the one to the original Mickey Mouse film Steamboat Willie into functional perpetuity), and end clauses that allow orphaned works (that is, works that have no apparent heir to their copyright) to lose copyright due to lack of anybody to assert copyright...something that actually aids in their preservation.

That last one is the most problematic to people that actually think about these things. It will do a great deal of harm in terms of destroying our cultural heritage...it's impossible to create copies and deriviative works of orphaned works under copyright because there is nobody to grant their use. This results in these works often being lost to time...and they're not always small unimportant works. If the TPP-proposed copyright protections had been in place as recently as 20 years ago...there would be no existing copies of Gone with the Wind (The film, not the book) or Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis. The original archive copies were damaged and creation of restoration-copies would have been a crime.

[KamaAina]

10. hifiguy calls all U.S. copyright law since WWII the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act".

Disney appears to be the driving force behind all this life-plus-75 or whatever stuff.

[jberryhill]

6. VW's diesel-cheating software was protected from copying and analysis

Any tool or technique used to get at the embedded firmware in your car, your appliances, etc., is an illegal device.

[Atman]

7. That isn't true.

Investigative work of this type is not copyright infringement. It doesn't mean no one is ever, ever allowed to look at it. It means another entity cannot use it or reproduce it for their own financial gain. A "secret" held to deliberately break the law is not protected by copyright any more than a mass-bomber's manifesto is protected as a creative work.

[jberryhill]

8. Unfortunately, the law on DRM workarounds is not at all that clear

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have-uncovered-volkswagens-emissions-cheat-if-not-hindered-dmca

You don't seem to be responding to what I said about the "circumvention device" provisions of the DMCA.

17 U.S.C. § 1201 makes it presumptively illegal to develop the means to get at the code. We went through this already with DeCSS. It was illegal to distribute it, regardless of the purpose for which anyone sought to use it.

[starroute]

9. Any of these provisions are tools for government overreach

Did you see the recent story about the journalist with connections to Anonymous who's potentially facing a 25 year prison sentence for hacking one online newspaper story that was restored to its original state within 40 minutes?

Provisions like these may be pitched as directed against large-scale commercial violations. They may not be enforced against the ordinary low-level file-sharer. But they put anyone who engages in radical politics or social disruption at risk of major retaliation.

This is how totalitarian states operate. They criminalize ordinary, everyday bending of the rules -- and then use the criminal penalties selectively to repress dissent. And saying, "that could never apply to me" ignores the larger damage to society as a whole.

[hunter]

11. If someone doesn't want me to share their shit, I don't.

Sucks to be them.

Nevertheless there is much about current copyright and patent law that blows big vomit chunks.

My own most recent art (for the most part) lives in the Creative Commons. Except a couple of decades old scars, a few arts I sold the "rights" to.

Anything I do these days is Open Source or free with attribution for non-commercial purposes.

Maybe even poisonous for any commercial purposes.

[X_Digger]

13. Copyright laws are a balance with public and private good.

I think people forget that copyright isn't and shouldn't be forever.

Do me a favor, and read that last sentence again.

Ideas, music, works of art, drugs- things that are patentable or copyrightable- are not designed in a vacuum. The society that surrounds, provides for, encourages, protects, and assists creators- deserves recompense.

This is the concept of public domain-- that idea producers get a time-limited exclusivity for their ideas; then society and its members can use those ideas-- for free.

That's not even touching on fair use, which is also under attack.

*shaking my head*

[hifiguy]

17. Bingo.

[ronnie624]

21. Clear and concise.

What's not to understand?

[jwirr]

14. It really does not matter if we find one or two provisions

that we might like about the TPP. Thanks to the TPA none of it can be changed anymore. It is a matter of take it all or kill it all.

If we agree with it all the countries and their people including the US will have to take it all as it is. There will be no changes. Voting NO is the only way this can be changed.

They have created a plan with a hundred bad things in it and a few good things. They want us to think we are really going to get something.

[Xithras]

18. Modern copyright laws are so abusive that they are no longer worthy of respect.

Unlike material possessions, there is no inherent right of ownership with creative works or ideas. Copyrights are a privilege that society grants to creators to reward them for their work and to encourage the development of new works. Until the rise of the megacorporations, it was understood that the sharing of knowledge, music, and information was an inherently good and human thing to do, and that copyright was a temporary limitation on the inherent human right to share knowledge with others, imposed for the temporary benefit of the creator. Even with those limitations, the goal of copyright wasn't really to reward the creator personally, but to benefit all of society by encouraging the creation of even more new works.

The problem is that modern copyright law is used as a hammer to destroy the rights of others, to invade our privacy, and as a capitalistic mechanism to extort ungodly sums of money from people for doing what people have done for millennia. Over the past 50 years, we've obliterated the notion that sharing is a GOOD thing, and have perpetuated this myth that ideas are property and that there is some sort of inherent right to profit from them, even at the expense of society at large.

Modern copyright laws aren't about rewarding content creators, but about exerting control. They do not deserve respect.

[Atman]

20. All due respect, but...

...I find your argument to be nonsense. And, in fact, rather insulting. Why is the painting I create, the illustration I draw, the book I write, any less of a "thing" than the car you build? I think you should share your 1968 Camaro with me because, y'know, it's OLD, and it was never intended to last this long anyway.

Then, you totally lost me at how copyright protection for ME invades YOUR privacy. I suppose you mean because if the law is enforced you feel violated. Never mind that your ISP knows every site you visit anyway, but you're going to get upset if they catch you illegally downloading someone elses property.

If you want to share, share. Give half your dinner away if you want. Write songs and give them away for free. I assume you have another source of income which enables you to be so generous. But creative people do this for a living, too. We've gone to school to learn skills, we've got expertise that no plumber or car mechanic is likely to have. Why are creative people always expected to be cool with giving away our stuff, but virtually every other worker in society expects to be paid for their work?

[Xithras]

22. The problem is that you're conflating concepts.

Your post reflects the mental gymnastics that most copyright defenders practice to validate the current abusive collection of laws.

The painting you create is a THING with value because it's a canvas with oils and ink, and if someone steals it from you, you'll no longer have the painting.

But if I scan your painting and make a digital copy of it, you have contributed nothing to the copy that I have in my possession. I created it using my equipment, and you haven't been deprived of anything. You still have your painting, and I have a copy that I made using my own equipment and effort. The same concept applies to songs, movies, and all sorts of other forms of artistic expression. Unlike an old car, or an item from a store, or a service performed for someone, the original creator is not deprived of anything when a digital copy is made. If I choose to sing a song you wrote, I am not preventing you from singing it and am not taking anything from you. Images, songs, speeches, and other creative arts are IDEAS, and you can no more own an idea than you can own the photons that bounce off that painting you created.

Copyright laws are a gift that society bestows on creators. It's a reward to encourage the creation of new works, and it exists for the benefit of all of society...not just the creator of the work.

I don't oppose copyright, but I do oppose abusive copyright. I have no problem with creators being awarded a limited window in which they can collect royalties and payments for the use of their works. It helps to support the content creators, and helps society as a whole by promoting the creation of artistic works. What I oppose is the notion that copyrights impose ownership, and that people can be forced to pay out tens of thousands of dollars for sharing a single song. Over the past half century copyright laws have gone from a reward that society offered to artists and creators, to a tool used to control and regulate the way we share ideas and knowledge. To punish and imprison people for sharing a SONG is goddamned horrifying.

[Generic Other]

23. Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution

"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."

There are valid reasons for preventing the exclusive use of copyrights in perpetuity. Fair use includes the right to quote someone else's work for research, comment on ideas (as we do daily in DU), the ability to share and build upon ideas. This includes the right to parody another's work, the right to freely create work derived from earlier ideas and works. I too oppose the abuse of copyright because I see it as an impediment to progress.

When books, movies, photographs, and music are owned in perpetuity, most will be forgotten quickly. It isn't about someone losing profits after they are dead. It's about all of us losing access to ideas and works while we are alive.

We will lose access to works on the off chance they might belong to someone who could say no. That means you won't be able to make a copy of a damaged copy of your great-grandparents' photograph taken in the 1900s because you don't own the rights to a photograph only you or your family cares about. So the 100+ year old paper will fade and become worthless. You won't have the right to sell anything secondhand. Certainly, you would be infringing on someone's rights if you do.

Insisting on protecting your copyrights after you are dead means you might as well bury your creations with you so no one will ever infringe on your achievements. You and your work will be forgotten anyway once the commercial value is gone. There will be no Da Vincis or Van Goghs, no learning by copying the old masters, no evolution of art, technology or medicine. Everything will be static. Copyright is a reward for innovation, not a guarantee of protection of those rights forever. When you start down that road, it is a slippery slope right into Mickey Mouse's Magic Kingdom full of princesses he stole from fairy tales in the first place anyway. There will be no new and improved mousetrap derived from the one original. You want to create music using the same old chords others have used? You will find the musical scale protected, so no using a musical notation system you didn't devise, even sounds that are not original to you. Using a pencil or brush? Stealing someone else's original invention. You aren't using Arabic numerals, are you? A 28 letter alphabet? The English language itself? And what of borrowed foreign words and phrases? Are those your ideas? Who said you could wear pants? That is not your invention. And that cancer cure came from study of earlier scientists' works. Research is theft under the new definition of copyright. Unfortunately, the real theft is the stifling of innovation, invention and discovery well beyond the lifetime of those who push for extended copyright. They deserve to be forgotten for devising such a system.

When you lose your history, you lose the ability to move forward. Instead, everyone is required to re-invent the wheel every day.

Our cultural world heritage is being appropriated by greedy corporations for no other purpose than protectionism. If you are so afraid that others will value your contributions to society enough to use them, then hide it all in a box and rub your hands over your prize like a miser. The world will do just fine without you.

[Warren DeMontague]

19. I support protections for intellectual property rights. But I will let the EFF make the case

far better than I can:

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp