U.S. supreme court sentences Public Domain to death...

Yep, today is the day that public domain died as we knew it.

I already know this thread is reeking like gasoline, nonetheless an import development for every artist. So try not to get it to off-topic and ultimately locked until people are informed.

In this court decision the U.S supreme court decided that the congress can reactivate copyright for anything under public domain. :spin:

Even better, it’s already being discussed what impact this decision has on patent protection.

I leave it up to you to figure out the implications of that situation and to find out more if you’re intrested.

Another slam with the bat against freedoms knee and once it finally falls over, SOPA will snap it’s neck. :frowning:

the U.S supreme court decided that the congress can reactivate copyright for anything under public domain.
Not quite. Is it not just making the US comply with the Berne Convention, to give non US material the same protection as US copyrighted material. To me its a sensible situation.

anytime something is given up, no matter how small, it is a bad thing…it is like vice grips on a tooth…little by little until the tooth is crushed under the pressure, but…I have no idea what was decided exactly so I need to go read up…

@arexma dude you are not american? why do people act like the are american’s by proxy. If you don’t care what the Japanesse, Chinese, Russian or UK supreme court do why care about the US supreme court does. People have an un-health interest in a government they don’t vote for beyond foreign relations the internal politics of a country are not worth knowing unless you happen to live in said country.

Yeah, I wonder who is going to claim the copyright of a public domain music now…

America (United States of) has extradition treaties with many countries and doesn’t hesitate to request that foreign nationals be sent to the US by their governments for trial for breaking US laws. Most governments comply. Case in point..

Another case is Julian Assange, whom the US hates for embarrassing them. He wasn’t in the US when he released the cables, the servers weren’t in the US, etc. He’s an Australian citizen. The US will ask Sweden, Britain, or even Australia if he ends back here for him to be sent to the US for trial for espionage. Any of these governments will comply.

Because it happens that your country then bullies other countries with threats of putting them on black lists and we end affected by the silly policies (silly my ass: it is a very well planned control going on there).
For example my country Spain: law was pased because threats from USA.

Now I wonder how copyright protection could be reactivated for a public domain article if a number of them were created by people who died hundreds of years ago, it’s not like you can ask for their consent to reactivate copyright.

There’s also the fact that there are a lot of cases where something is brought out into the public domain because it was the wish of the author, in those cases it would seem unlikely that they would want to re-establish copyright

However on the other side there is also the occupy movement and the resistance to SOPA etc.
I think people wake up as well and start realizing that corporations are lobbying law too far.

crazychristina

well Assange’s case is nothing else than being tough for US voters and feeding the very propaganda and ideology fueled media.

however point is that like with Megaupload the questions is where does it end? A USA arresting non Americans in a foreign country?
Thats pretty bold.

But considering how things backfired for the US gov regarding SOPA and PIPA I think things will balance itself out - at least I hope.

I am not from the US, and don’t elect their goverment but that does not mean one can’t or should have no interest in foreign affairs, which today more than ever is as important as internal policy.
If you want to sit back and turn away while freedom is shred and sacrificed for profit piece by piece, be my guest, but that’s not quarantined US law, it’s global politics.
And no one can be so blind as not to see that most politics, and especially US politics are not in favour of the people, but are benevolent to the very industry and corporations lobbying the law.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”

I don’t care if a wrong is done to me, or to a black gay moslem from Strawberryland. If a wrong is done to good people it’s a wrong.
And the internet is the loudest voice I got - we got.

The problem is rather milking a dead cow, and the exploitation of cultural heritage.
Currently if an author dies, the copyright is nullified after 70 years and the piece becomes public domain if it’s of cultural interest. It used to be 50 years, however the US already made it 70 years, the EU changed it as well… guess why? And yes, also to 70 years.

Let’s play a ridiculous game:
So in 70 years Thriller by Michael Jackson becomes public domain and the EU decides it’s the national anthem nowforth of all european countries. 5 years later the RIAA and lobbists of Epic Records “persuade” the US gouverment to envoke the copyright again, in favour of Epic Records, the release label and rights holder. Now the EU is “asked” to pay royalties of course, and just at the day when the copyright starts again, you upload a video of you singing along to Thriller in underpants using a toothbrush as microphone to Friendyourface.
Thanks to SOPA/PIPA and to you, Friendyourface, the succesful upstart company of a friend of yours in competition with a big US company, is immidately blocked in the US and you’ll be sued going to prison for 5 years for uploading music illegaly (which is by the way one year longer as the guy who killed M.Jackson)

Exaggerated? Yes. Impossible? No.

tyrant monkey

no offense man but your view is very short sighted.

the past and current developments clearly show how the political elite in the USA is pursuing legal actions against others which are in no relationship to the so called crime they committed - such as Julian Assange.

Iraq is another story about foreign relationship - which is kinda ridiculous to think about when you realize it was also the CIA which changed the regime in Iran to their taste and when it failed they supported Saddam to attack Iran.

What I am missing is a large part of the population protesting and telling people such Mitt Romney to go to hell when he needs to lie in campaigning - considering the fact that currently the supreme court has more republican friendly judges.

A lot of the laws dont affect the rest of the world but few do - and that with also some drastic results.

In short, because America always forces the other countries to do their bidding.

How did a discussion about copyrights turn into a America-bashing-fest? At best, this thread should be moved to the OT-zone…

So if we were bashing Iran it would be quite alright?

SOPA/PIPA are Big Brother world domination stuff. It’s like the war on terror and Obama’s Defense Bill that was signed over the new year. And he seemed to have some reservations… yeah right. And then you have companies like Carrier-IQ that illegally downloaded private and sensitive information from people’s cellphones and into a database, including individual keystrokes! After a IT administrator, Trevor Eckhart noticed that his wi-fi was sending and receiving some secured encrypted data packages to a foreign Carrier-IQ server he contacted the EFF and steps were taken. Carrier-IQ’s excuse was they were using this spyware program for market research.

And worse there are companies like the Hacking Team and Gamma Group (The Spy Files) who will implement this kind of tech onto anyone’s hardware for the right price and the aren’t even dodging the ball on this one. Using your cellphone camera to take pictures of your surroundings and see who you interact with. Recording phone conversations or even activating the microphone without you knowing to listen what you are saying. A number of companies were actively involved with this during the uprising in Egypt including a company from South Africa.

A GPS locator, developed by , was used experimentally by the CIA to see if the military could home-in a missile on a unsuspecting Taliban. It didn’t work out too great but the fact that it was tried is reason to sit up and take note. Software developer Rich Zimmerman was astonished they even tried it with his program since it has no real functions that would support the idea. But they almost got it right so who knows…

But take these developments and put them in context with other VERY strange ideas:

Back in 1995 British Telecom announced it was developing a memory chip designed to capture a person’s entire lifetime’s experiences. The chip will be planted behind the eye and would record a person’s thoughts, feelings and memories through the minute signals send via neurons to the brain almost like binary code. Some media outlets (Telegraph and Mail) were concerned that this type of tech could be used in a strange way for a form of immortality. These recorded life experiences could be transferrred to a baby or a cloned younger replica (when the technology is feasible).

So what you have is a TOTAL CONTROL over what we experience today as freedom and privacy. And via medicine and enforced breeding programs a world could be created where people will have very little physical defects or ailments. But what should be considered a ‘defect’? Someone who thinks differently from you? Someone who inherently believes in a God or not? These are the same problems we have with these current bills being pushed through congress - they are vague and this transfers too much power to the government and corporate organizations.

And when people don’t have any freedom anymore then the importance of copyright is nullified. The future human being will be Big Brother’s (whoever that will be) property so he has no right to claim ownership to anything, including his own body.

But this will now happen overnight so the painful process will include laws, wars and economic collapse to ‘clean’ the system and make it more receptive for change. Like Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to salivate when a bell rings. After a flood destroyed his laboratory and killed a number of dogs the remaining dogs stopped reacting to the condition. He had to train their minds again from scratch!

Laws being passed in America effect the whole world, unfortunately. With corporate establishments and those with the most money making essentially all of the calls.

Calling it “america-bashing” is hardly fair, when truth hurts, remember that it only hurts because you know that it is truth. America has been doing its best to control international law for a very long time, and why would it stop? Simple really, it won’t.

To me really SOPA, PIPA and other laws are just a complete load of bollocks. Greedy people wanting more money from more lawsuits against the poor (or, relatively poor, if you prefer that). Really, companies like Universal Records don’t need any more money. They earn more money per year just from interviews and royalties in shitty TV ads than what anybody watching those ads and those interviews could even dream about. I think that people should pay money for stuff, yes. What they shouldn’t be doing is paying more than what things are worth.

How much money does a download of iTunes cost? Between $1~ and $2~. Not that much, but now take into consideration how much it costs for each one of those to be “sold” to a person. How much? Well, say a song gets downloaded 500,000 times (for a pop song, this is between average and low), how much did that cost in electricity and server runtime for iTunes/insertrecordcompanyhere? Considering that those servers are actually running for more than just one song at a time, virtually $0.00001 per download is what that song actually costs for them to sell. And how much money in production in the first place? Less than $10,000. (and considering the quality of most music today, should have cost about $100. But I digress…)

See my point? Things should be cheaper than they are. And greedy people at the heads of bullshit companies are making all the profit. And they STILL WANT MORE.

I am not saying you should illegally download things, I am not saying that breaching copyright is OK. What I am saying is that the American Government is in it to make themselves richer, and the fat-cats happy. Of course, this is not exclusive to America, this is a common theme, but america controlling the whole world with its grip around the nut-sacks of almost all governments is not a good thing to be happening. They have the power with these laws to essentially force anybody from anywhere to do anything, as long as they have the “evidence” to charge them. Then they can simply extradite them to wherever.

/rant

Other than that, I am surprised this thread isn’t already locked…

From the SC decision “the United States did not protect sound recordings fixed before 1972;”

And yet, somehow, the Beatles managed to be a success in the US before 1972.

By today’s logic, they wouldn’t have set foot in the US ( at least to sing ). There’s no “motivation” for them without the state granted privilege of copyright.

Well, I’m coming straight out and saying it is OK ( risky perhaps, but OK ). Why? Copyright itself is sheer nonsense. Nothing wrong with breaching nonsense.
There is no moral justification for copyright. After all, what is copyright? It’s the result of people ( elite(?), certainly not you or me ) successfully beseeching those in power to use weapons on their behalf. Nothing more, nothing less.
Any “justification” is just made up to fool the common folk. It’s a scam. Always has been.

Technology gave some the ability to amass wealth for a time because it was expensive to duplicate recordings. Times have changed. Deal with it.
All the rest of us have to. We adapt. We grow. We use new tools and become more productive. We improve life. The RIAA et.al. are no exceptions.

NO. :no: It’s not about greed as you think. I dunno if you read my previous post but it’s about utilizing power to instill regulations that would benefit individuals in the long term. It’s about control over people’s personal selfish desires, it’s about harmonizing humanity and in the end creating a “heaven on earth”.

When you have billions of dollars you don’t want more just for the sake of what… buying another 20x 747’s? :rolleyes:

Okay, let’s say you and 5 of your friends have Trillions of dollars between you :eyebrowlift:. And you have enough power and influence that you could sway government, bring about coups and start wars. What would you like to do and how would you go about implementing it? Remember, you have thousands of cultures, billions of individuals that might not understand or agree with your ideas. But if you stand for humanity, for industry, development and just plain Sci-Fi grandeur for the future then you will definitely want to impose regulations so that hackers, pirates, and people who don’t want to stand in line for your ideas finally do. Or do you want the whole world to continue their BS as they have for years?

Everyone will need to work together to achieve this utopia you want, won’t they?

People in power today don’t want money as we think about it, they want power to bring about the change needed in the world for something they think will be cool. A global village, a technological utopia where there are no wars, sickness or bickering. And what we consider as enslavement they deem to be a way of creating order and harmony as well as giving man something to work for. And if we all work together, what could we achieve?

Just F#$% imagine!! :evilgrin:

But noooo, you all want the freedom the create you own freaken Distro, your own My Little Office, my little this and that… and in the end? Fact is, this is a disastrous waste and spread of valuable energy. And the Big Brother governments and corporations world-wide know this for a fact.

[I don’t support these corporate world domination ideas. I just want people to realize what the reality of it is]

@gustav
You need to put those last two sentences in bold

I forgot to add… about Public Domain, copyright etc.

I don’t think the future world government regulating system will be compensating you and in the same way as we have come to accept so far. I think everything will be free, but regulated. So everyone will have access to everything but there will be no ownership. I have no qualms about these draconian copyright laws being implemented neither with a tyrannical bill that allows a president to detain someone indefinitely on pure suspicion. They need this control otherwise we’ll never have peace.

Don’t worry about it, it’s all part of the plan. Go sleep now, everything will be alright… :evilgrin: