

Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15turow.html

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wccrawford
Isn't the argument usually the opposite? That due to the copyright laws today,
Shakespeare couldn't have even written his stories?

The sword cuts both ways. He can't base his works on other peoples' works, or
he can't put a lock an key on his own.

Also, his plays weren't meant to be read, they were meant to be seen being
performed. Unsurprisingly, that's how the popular music artists of today make
the most money as well. It's not even piracy that causes that, either.

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anamax
> That due to the copyright laws today, Shakespeare couldn't have even written
> his stories?

> He can't base his works on other peoples' works, or he can't put a lock an
> key on his own.

Did Shakespeare reuse many non-public characters? I ask because that's where
copyright is an impediment to story writing.

That is, Disney can go after me for doing a story with Woody the Cowboy, but
not Carl the Cowboy, even if Carl is secretly alive.

However, I heard that Pixar patented putting eyes on the windshield for
vehicles that are alive.

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elwin
> Did Shakespeare reuse many non-public characters? I ask because that's where
> copyright is an impediment to story writing.

Shakespeare reused large portions of the plotlines from contemporary plays.
_Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_ are two I can think of. But I think he changed
most of the names.

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Boosh
How can you not all see the main point of the article? Namely, human beings
act/create/innovate when they are properly incentivized, i.e. financial
compensation. It's the same argument with socializing our health care system.
There is a reason the U.S. has the most advanced health care system and best
trained medical community in the world. Take away those incentives (socialize
the health care system) for the medical community and you can bet the U.S.
will not be as innovative. Say what you will but people are motivated by
financial incentives. "Money changed everything. Almost overnight, a wave of
brilliant dramatists emerged, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben
Jonson and Shakespeare. These talents and many comparable and lesser lights
had found the opportunity, the conditions and the money to pursue their craft.
The stark findings of this experiment? As with much else, literary talent
often remains undeveloped unless markets reward it."

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tokenadult
"Copyright, now powerfully linking authors, the printing press (and later
technologies) and the market, would prove to be one of history’s great public
policy successes. Books would attract investment of authors’ labor and
publishers’ capital on a colossal scale, and our libraries and bookstores
would fill with works that educated and entertained a thriving nation. . . .

"Yet today, these markets are unraveling. Piracy is a lucrative, innovative,
global enterprise. Clusters of overseas servers can undermine much of the
commercial basis for creative work around the world, offering users the
speedy, secret transmission of stolen goods."

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kiba
How is it "unraveling"?

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tokenadult
If I correctly understand the submitted article, the claim is that most
writings that have been written in earlier decades in the expectation that the
author would make money from copyright royalties are now readily available in
pirated versions that can be downloaded around the world without any payment
to the author. So the paying market is unraveling, because the main
distribution of new content now is pirate distribution. Do you read what the
submitted article says differently?

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kiba
Where is the evidence that piracy cause the paying market to unravel?

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Tycho
CD/music sales have been declining for a decade. The latest Call of Duty game
will shift more units in a single day than the top selling album will sell
annually.

Book sales, overall, I'm not sure, but I don't think they've been in major
decline. _Yet_.

The worry is that Kindles and iPads will do for novels what the iPod did for
songs: drastically change the preferred method of consumption to something
more vulnerable to piracy. The article is predicting a future trend.

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kiba
This opinion article is poorly written. It's a bunch of assertion with no
empirical evidence to back it up.

So the market for books and inventions is unraveling, how? Who are these law
professors and experts that says these things? What are their arguments?

Ignoring evidence? Put the data into numbers we can understand. Is there any
case study of a country with no IP laws? What does history tell us?

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hessenwolf
I struggled to take it seriously at all after the following sentence.

"They are abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have
made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright
impedes creativity and progress."

