But Warner/Chappel Music Inc. of Los Angeles said the video infringes on its copyright to “We Are the World.” The song raised money for famine relief the video featured some of U.S. music’s biggest stars, including Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen.
“According to our records, no request has been made to use the Composition, no authorization has been granted nor has any license been issued for the use of the Composition on the website,” Kelly Isenberg, the company’s director of legal and business affairs wrote in a May 8 letter to the church.
Inasmuch as any use of “We Are the World” constitutes a parody and other fair use; given the parodic purpose and character of “God Hates the World;” its transformative elements; the complete lack of any commercial use; and the complete lack of any market substitution or confusion; your demands are respectfully denied. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. “God Hates the World” is clearly a parody of “We Are the World,” targeting that work with criticism and commentary, including commentary with critical bearing on the substance, style, nature, approach, marketing-of-an-idea-purpose, and various other aspects of the original work, in many particulars. The nub of the parody is to mimic the worldwide unity the song purports to reflect and encourage, and criticize that unity as God-defying and the heart and soul of why God hates the world, in our view of the matter.
The guy has a point; fair use permits bigoted parodies as much as any other kind.
From within the libertarian camp, one of the stronger anti-copyright arguments is the point that it is hard to prove empirically that copyright in fact fosters creativity, especially as compared to some of the alternatives to copyright. How does one go about showing that in the absence of copyright, there would be fewer created works or fewer quality created works or a lesser range of types of created works? To show this conclusively, one would need to know what would have happened in the absence of a market. For the same reason, though, it is hard to show that copyright (or related laws) do any harm; one would need to know what would have happened in the the absence of copyright.
Julian pinpoints exactly what’s wrong with the ludicrous claim that copyright infringement is a bigger problem than ordinary property crime:
There’s a big difference between a the cost of theft to an industry or firm and the cost to the country. If I steal your bike, I’ve cost you one bike, not America. America still has the same number of bikes in it. The cost to the country of the theft of physical resources is not the cost of the resources themselves, typically, but rather the efficiency loss of shifting those resources to less valued uses, the cost of resources expended preventing or prosecuting it, the opportunity cost of the effort expended on a zero-sum transfer, and so on. By contrast, piracy is actually positive sum in static terms: Nobody has any fewer programs, songs, or movies, while the pirate has (at least) one more. Nothing has been redirected to a lower-valued use. So the only actual loss in this case is the value of new IP that doesn’t get created because piracy prevents prospective creators from fully internalizing its value. (There may be further losses if we think piracy induces companies to raise the prices of their products, and there are consumers who are priced out of the legal market by this, but don’t avail themselves of pirate copies.) I don’t know how significant that number is—or even how you’d measure it accurately—but “hundreds of billions” just doesn’t pass the straight face test.
A software industry study released a few years back tried to translate piracy losses into job losses in the tech sector. And again, even if we take that number at face value, just looking at one specific sector is worse than useless. By that mode of reckoning, Bastiat’s satirical “Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles” should be read as a serious guide to policy.
Quite so. As I’ve argued before, attempts to inflate the costs of movie piracy fall equally flat. Even if we equate the lost revenue of the movie industry with the lost wealth to the country (which is almost certainly an overstatement), the losses to the movie industry are measured in the billions (about $6.1 billion, to be precise) not tens or hundreds of billions. And the software industry’s inflated figure is only $34 billion. “Hundreds of billions” isn’t even remotely plausible.
Fred Von Lohman’s article in the Post chides a group of Congressmen for expecting universities to enforce copyright by fining or expelling students, or by installing filtering software. He urges instead that the university collect monies to pay the music industry for a blanket license for unlimited downloading, as they do for software. At least, it is not a compulsory license. And it seems to be a a reasonably practicable solution at one level.
(One practical problem: does the license transfer the rights in the sound recordings only? Or the rights of the composers and such as well? Licenses for music distribution are notoriously hard to obtain because of this fragmentation issue. Set it aside for now).
But note one key element on which the scheme relies–in order to have any incentive to negotiate for a license,
Larry Lessig explains the difference between stealing a laptop and including an out-of-print book in a search engine. Yes, someone really did suggest that suggest those actions were equivalent. No, that person wasn’t very bright.
I hadn’t. According to the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday (via DCist), it was an instant landmark in American cinema when made by filmmaker Charles Burnett’s as his master’s thesis at UCLA in the 1970s. It was never released because the soundtrack had too many classic songs in it, making widespread screening too expensive.
Years ago Jim Delong started to write a book on property rights–the physical ones. His publisher insisted on discussions of intellectual property. He resisted. Surely, he thought, these things are very different. But he reports his surprising conclusion that the significance of the differences for policy is less than is often thought. Intellectual property, like physical property, must be protected, for the good of consumers and everyone else, doing as little harm as possible. As for the details, “tech” and “content” each raise valid concerns and the results of experimentation and give-and-take impossible to foresee. But a functioning market is in everyone’s interest.
During his tenure at CEI, he debated these issues often with Fred Smith. At first I was on Fred’s side, my own views on IP strongly influenced by Tom Palmer. Over the years, though, I began to see the issue as more difficult than my philosophy could answer by reference to the standard repertoire, even Hayek and Leoni.
Questions about IP arise in a context of hard problems in philosophy of law, difficult questions of empirical economics, and the hard question of how closely law in an advanced economy must resemble primitive law. And a blinding pace of technological and economic change that makes throws existing legal institutions completely out of wack. Particularly enforcement, the aspect of law taken entirely for granted in most policy discussions. In this environment, what are the odds that we can derive the answers we need to practical problems from first principles and get it right the first time?
I’m planning a paper on how growth in markets affects the efficacy of copyright, and am shopping around an abstract. I welcome your comments. The abstract goes a little something like this:
Does copyright protection offer the best means of stimulating the production of expressive works? Maybe it does now. If so, however, copyright will probably over-protect expressive works in coming years. We should hope that it will, at any rate, given that human progress will render copyright obsolete.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.