The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie

I like the idea of protecting people's work on the vast and impersonal internet, but at the same time I always fear that someone will smash down my door and hand me a lawsuit for using their copywrited map of Greece in my paper about civilizations. As such I currently only use images I have personally created for anything that I plan on taking credit for, which isn't working out very well for me, given my extremely lacking creative abilities. I have a website that contains some original artwork (in the loosest sense of the word), but for some reason it only allows people to see it that use the same internet provider as me. The address is www.publish.shaw.ca/bgarlick/ if you're feeling lucky. Oh, and it's my birthday on the 9th. You don't have to get me anything.

I think the next few decades are really up for grabs as far as how intellectual property laws and the Internet find an equilibrium. I wonder sometimes if anyone (myself included) really appreciates what a wild and unprecedented phenomenon the Internet really is: an untamed and chaotic non-place where anyone can instantly reach a global audience with whatever content they can embed in HTML, for little to no money - provided they can draw that audience to themselves, and they don't get sued out of existence. We take it for granted that it'll stay that way, but weren't radio and TV once like this? I actually don't know, but it would be worth researching. And I applaud whoever takes that initiative.

I think the idea of "intellectual property" is becoming obsolete. The whole copyright/trademark/patent scheme is the product of a bizarre period in history which might be winding down; hell, if you wanted to, you could define the Industrial Revolution as the time when patenting was practical. Oh, and you don't have to say you love me. Just be close at hand.

I've taken a rather radical route, one that may do more harm than good should I ever acquire a "following". Nearly everything I make, from contemporary classical scores to my webcomic, is Public Domain. This grew out of a fear, bordering on paranoia, of record labels. That fear gradually gave way to the realization that I'm never going to sell any of this crap, so as long as it's easy to get it for free, nobody else will either.

If, at some point, I think there might be money to be had, I may switch to a Street Performer Protocol like system. Right now, though, I'm so far below the radar that I don't generally worry about my work showing up on 4chan photoshopped onto Goatse. And as long as I don't *know* that's what's happening, it doesn't bother me.

Man, the Street Performer Protocol. I loved that idea. Did anyone ever get that to work? I remember Stephen King doing some half-assed version of it and declaring it a failure.

I thought you might be interested in an Electrical Engineer's perspective on intellectual property. A patent is the last thing you want. Rather than file a patent which expires eventually and isn't respected in China anyway, I prefer hiding as much as possible in an encrypted DSP and surrounding the entire product in epoxy. This also saves you the hassle of ever fixing a broken piece of equipment. Patents only give your plans away and are not defendable unless you have a lot of money.

hell, if you wanted to, you could define the Industrial Revolution as the time when patenting was practical.

I have to disagree with you. Patent law allows -- actually requires -- companies to share information. Without it, the only way a company can make a return on research investment is keep the results a secret. Without patents, a company has two choices. It can not invest in research because its too difficult to get a return (a bad thing). Or it can withhold the results from the community, which is a major roadblock to advanced development (and another bad thing).

A strong collective body of knowldege is critical to a technological society, and patent law (flawed though it may be) is necessary to make that body of knowledge feasible.

There's also the issue of the people behind the works wishing to remain out of view. Drew of toothpastefordinner.com has a whole page up about this issue and Chris Onstad, who writes Achewood, is notoriously obtuse in inteviews.

Greg Stolze released a couple of games with what he called a "ransom model" (see Meatbot Massacre and ...in Spaaace!), which I think adhered pretty closely to the SPP.

I think that the YTMND phenomenon -- kids grabbing whatever they can get their hands on, boiling it, mashing it, sticking it in a stew -- is beautiful. That's how art evolves. The great storytellers, from Shakespeare to Disney, mashed up old plots into their own thing. The great painters learned from copying the masters.

The YTMND kids leave their sources uncredited because it's easier, not so much because they're indifferent. Their intent is not to plagiarize, but just to churn out cool stuff quickly.

The fault lies with tools and file formats. Imagine if embedded in every "content" document, every image or sound or movie, is a tree. Each node represents an imported element -- who created it, and its own creation tree. When the kid fires up Photoshop or Flash or whatever and start pulling in elements, the tool by default grafts their creation trees to his document, which is labeled with his own name (and email, web address, whatever). Assuming the kid is not malicious but simply lazy, anyone can inspect his final document to see exactly who created exactly what, down to the raw original content.

Of course, this addresses the problem of attribution, which is different than the legal problem of copyright. The problem with copyright, again, is that the default is wrong. I believe that, in our brave new YMNTDish world, public domain (with embedded attribution trees) should be the default, and you only get copyright protection if you slap a "copyright" sticker on it. I believe that people want to share, as long as they get credit, but they're lazy. Creative Commons (as you've written before) is not for the lazy, or faint-of-heart.

While I really have things I need to be doing that are more urgent that discussing copyrights and such, I will quickly note that I have never seen blog comments that included such Web-rarities as punctuation, grammar, and well-formed opinions, not to mention screen names that refer to literary figures rather than video game characters or things like "hotGURRL789." Congratulations on displaying basic intelligengce, posters!

I agree that the major downfall in the whole system for copywrite is laziness. Take for example, some of the work on this very website. If I was to use a line or a comic, is it nessesary that I contact you and get your express permission? Wouldn't you rather that I write "this was created by Lore Sjoberg" than having to deal with 50 emails a day asking permission to rate something, similar to the way you did in your book? (Which, by the way, I bought) I think that people should expect some sort of recognition for their work, but take the legallity out of it.

While I'd agree that the lapse of the system of truly restrictive copyright is, at its core, because it's just easier to ignore it entirely for most (as earier noted Bret) and, to a degree, laziness, I don't know that I agree with Anonymous' comments. It's not a valid assumption, I think, that Person A, who actually created whatever nifty art Person B's going to loop Tarzan Boy over, is going to prefer a simple acknowledgement on Person B's website. Sure, Person B's citing his source, but what if Person A's of the opinion that most of those that will see what Person B's posted will mostly ignore the citation, attributing the credit to Person B because they don't quite feel like bothering to find out who Person A is. While many (if not most) would gladly share such that they don't have to respond to hundreds of emails every day, and others might be just fine with responding positively to most of those, while maintaining the ability to decide where their stuff ends up, some clearly don't like having their work used by anyone at all for any reason, no matter how minor, unimportant or patently stupid the usage.

I agree that enforcing restrictive copyright is impossible on the web. I don't see that changing any time soon. But I don't believe that the solution to the worries of some that their work is out there on some hack's blog without citation is to resign to copyright being entirely useless. Sure, said hack, who might respond to a cease and desist, has thousands of hack buddies who won't, but concluding that it's ok to use someone else's work against their wishes because said hack buddies are going to do so anyway doesn't follow.

Has art become so much about the recognition of one's work, not of the art itself, that people can't stand the occasional person not knowing who made it? If the internet is impersonal and anonymous, so much so that I don't have to take credit for the post I accidentally forgot to put my name on earlier, (March 3rd, I was Anonymous by accident) why are people so interested in making sure everyone who sees thier art knows that it was them who created it?

Most of the artwork I have come accross on the internet is credited to "SlipperyJohn_17" anyways, not real names, so why is it important that people know who created it? I'm not protesting people who take pride in their work, but why is it the point of legal action? Shouldn't art be about art, not credit or ownership?

I'd tend to sympathize with that view, but I fear that's probably because I'm not putting anything artistic out there. If I were spending hours working on a webcomic only to have someone come by, steal it and claim it as their own, I think I'd feel a bit cheated. Perhaps art should be about the art more than the ownership (again, I sympathize with this view, but as a non-artist), but making essentially moral judgements doesn't really play into copyright law, or shouldn't, in my opinion. The offense isn't that the occasional person doesn't know who made it, but rather that they believe someone else made it. If you consider the current climate, people are more concerned than ever, one might conclude, with minor recognitions for contributions on the web. Which is why people jump for joy when their blog is, for some reason, picked for profiling on CNN.com.

Lore, I think you were more right than you knew to keep the discussion of copyright issues to a separate post -- even just mentioning the word turns on a lot of peoples "this is my opinion about copyright" button. There's a lot of comment here about the intricacies of incorporated material, but I think Lore is complaining about something simplier than that. (At least I think he's complaining about the same thing that bugs me.) Works, including wholly original works, are often posted on sites like YouTube and there's nothing posted to tell you who created it.

brendan says: Has art become so much about the recognition of one's work, not of the art itself, that people can't stand the occasional person not knowing who made it?

But as an audience for art, if there's no attribution attached to a work (or, ala eBaum's world, no accurate attribution) then I can't find any more work by the same creator. Which is often beneficial to both the artist and the audience.