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Has anyone ever tried to appeal a copyright law with on a first amendment basis? That is to say, the first amendment guarantees freedom of the press, or that you can write whatever you want. (Say, in a book) Copyright law says that you cannot write something (in a book) that has already been written. There is a clear conflict between these two laws, and the constitutional amendment should supersede the copyright law. Then again, the supreme court upheld obscenity laws, which even more clearly go against amendment #1.

That is to say, the first amendment does permit believing in anything, however it does not necessarily allow ritualistic actions. That's my interpretation, at least - you can believe that human sacrifice is a good thing, you can say it's a good thing, you can write it's a good thing, but you're not allowed to actually do it. (Assuming there's a homicide law, which there is)

Copyright law was originally written for books, but is currently applied to software. I wonder what the practical implications of abolishing copyright would be? GPL software shows that software would still exist without copyright...I'm sure people would continue writing things, also. Disallowing the writing of certain things causes ignorance, which in turn causes all kinds of problems. Also, allowing people to own ideas, via patents and copyright, sets up the basis for people to deny access to certain pieces of information, which in turn creates more ignorance and the inability to manufacture goods that could easily be reinvented or rediscovered. In fact, it could cause certain situations where the best goods could no longer be manufactured, if the patent holder so decrees. (Champaign is a good example of this) This inflates prices and lowers quality, the opposite of good capitalism.

Regardless of the implications, the common understanding of the first (and second, but I won't go there for now) amendment, and also any possible literal interpretation, clearly goes against certain laws that the supreme court has upheld. I think we all need to do something about this, either with voting (which seems to mostly be controlled by the media, which is controlled by the patent and copyright holders and is strictly, and unconstitutionally legislated) or through some kind of military coup, which I currently think I support. I would support the military overthrow of the currently traitorous civilian government with the intent of the removal of any unconstitutional laws, in particular obscenity, libel, slander, weapons laws, copyright, patent, cult, and probably many more laws. Violence laws, and even drug laws appear to be constitutional, although I suspect with a free media the drug laws would rapidly be overturned. Who's with me?

Law must come before religion, otherwise terrorism would be allowed

It falls over right there. Copyright says you cannot copy the works of another. Freedom of Speech (or whatever you call it over there) means you can agree with what has already been written, but you can't steal it and call it your own.

I object to your use of the word "steal" - to steal is to deprive another of property. Making a copy is not necessarily stealing - if my neighbor has a 2003 honda CBR600RR, and I take my handy 3D scanner and scan all the parts, then use my 3D printer to print all the parts, he's still got a motorcycle. If I ride off on it when he's not looking, then he no longer has a motorcycle. The second is stealing, the first is copying.

The first amendment (and this is USA centric - do you guys have a freedom of the press supreme law in, uh, Chilling?) guarantees that congress shall pass no law limiting the press. That to me includes copying, since that's what a press is good for. So I guess I strongly disagree with you in that freedom of the press says that you can only write original things (ironically, if you look at patents, most things have already been 'written', and most ideas already thought of, which makes this limitation extremely...limiting) My interpretation of freedom of the press is that you are free to print *ANYTHING*, not free to print anything except that which has already been printed, or is untrue (libel/slander), or has already been thought of (patent)...what part of the first amendment (sorry if this is USA centric) makes you think that you can agree with what has already been written, but cannot reprint it? It seems to me that freedom of the press is just that - freedom to print anything at all, no matter what. Which the traitorous supreme court has clearly gone against, with obscenity - the fact that they upheld obscenity shows that there's something wrong with their logic, which suggests that they upheld copyright for the same, illogical reasons?

It all comes down to your own interpretations I guess. Well, not really, it's up to the Supreme Court, hehe. But as I understand/ interpret the First Ammendment, all it does is guarantee that you're free to say whatever you want to say and not get arrested, or beat up with big sticks.

There's a clear difference between using a quote and plagiarizing someone. If I say "Batvink once said `it falls over right there'," then I'm clearly quoting. But if I should say "I once said `it falls over right there'," that's obvious plagiarism... rather than stating who the author is, I'm taking the credit for myself.

That being said, let me point out that one of the founding fathers in the US was Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin owned a newspaper... do you think that law was created so Ben Franklin could whip out a bunch of free copies of the latest popular novel at that time without getting sued? Or do you think the law existed so that he and his reporters could freely print an article claiming that said popular novel sucked and no one should read it?

Like everyone else here, I'm a game developer. I toil away, hour upon hour, making games that people might enjoy. Copyright law exists so that I'm protected against someone ripping off my game and profiting from my hard work. And the First Ammendment gives me the right to express any opinions I might have in those games, and keeps the government from kicking in my door because I'm the guy behind Cheney Hunter. There's a clear difference, both in design and intention, between the First Ammendment and Copyright law. They both exist for clear and distinct reasons, and quite frankly, this country would be unbearable to live in without either of them. Now if we could just get the Copyright office to not take ten weeks to process stuff

Edit: And I seriously doubt they meant "press" as in a device used for printing stuff. I'm, well, positive that they meant "press" as in a person or party who reports news. Not that anyone actually reports news today, so I can see why that's confusing.

To copy something IS depriving another of his property. Or... at least the value of his property. Photocopying a motorcycle is not the same as photocopying a book. The "use" of the photocopied motorcycle is not the same as a "real" one. A photocopied book has the same exact "use" as the original though. It is depriving the author of the value of his work.

"There's a clear difference between using a quote and plagiarizing someone. If I say "Batvink once said `it falls over right there'," then I'm clearly quoting. But if I should say "I once said `it falls over right there'," that's obvious plagiarism... rather than stating who the author is, I'm taking the credit for myself."

True, there is. And although I disagree with the assertion that the USA would not be a great place without copyright (I think that there would be much MORE software, of the GPL'd sort, with a much larger number of smaller companies that modify existing software and then distribute it via a subscription service, much like WOW or even current versions of Windows...these companies would also sell support of their software services, and would find many ways to make money. Authors would continue to write without copyright protections, and I think we would see a lot more, shorter, denser writings with more information packed in them) but even though I understand the arguments (I'm a software developer too) and understand that people want their patents and works protected, there's a dark side too - what if someone patented, say, a 4-stroke engine, then legislated that all engines must be 4-stroke?

Car companies would continue to manufacture vehicles, however allowing them to copy each others' designs would enhance innovation, as they could copy (and even improve) the best features of the competition. Then there would be an increased emphasis on manufacturing the parts, rather than on holding on to the design and preventing others from manufacturing.

Regardless of the practicality, the first amendment, imho, does allow the printing of *ANYTHING*. Not to change the topic off copyright, but do you also justify the existence of obscenity laws, libel laws, slander laws, and even those laws that say when and how often politicians can advertise on television? All of these laws may be practical, but they clearly go against supreme rule #1. In the name of practicality, should we disregard the supreme laws?

Also - to Ron, I meant in the motorcycle example that you manufacture a new motorcycle to honda's patented design. What if somebody patented something very simple to manufacture, like say Bubbly Alcohol, which to my knowledge has been around for 2000+ years. (Jesus was a big wine freak) If this practice were allowed to go unabated, pretty soon no person could manufacture anything, and we would be forced to slave away 9 to 5 working for the patent holders and totally unable to manufacture anything at all, since just about everything has been patented. I think I should be allowed to manufacture a motorcycle to honda's design, just as honda should be allowed to manufacture any kind of motorcycle they want to, although this isn't expressly allowed or denied in the constitution...it's just an extension of what is and is not allowed in copyright law for books.

As for Ben and his newspaper, if I recall correctly Ben was a big supporter of having a new government, and was not a big fan of the amendments. He was in the group that thought the government would never overpower the militia in terms of force, (which they did with the invention of the hydrogen bomb, which can allow one person to totally pwn a non-hydrogen equipped army of millions of ordinary civilians, unlike the weapons of the 1790's which gave a large advantage to superior numbers), and of course I believe that when they said militia they meant the armed citizens of the country that were not affiliated with the government or in service of the Army. (Source: Wikipedia) There were a large number of anarchists in that time, and the way the founding fathers won the support of the anarchists was to include the constitutional amendments. Ben was not a supporter of the constitutional amendments, but included them because it was necessary to have those in there to get everyone to agree to the constitution. It does not surprise me that he wanted to protect his writing business with patent and copyright laws, which were probably passed without the support of the anarchists.

If the anarchists who embraced the original constitutional amendments (the first 10) meant for there to be limitations, they probably would have worded those amendments differently. There is a good case to be made that we should throw away the constitution and start a new government, as it is certainly becoming dated, perhaps a neo-global government of some sort - however, until that happens we should follow the amendments of the constitution (and would you really want to live somewhere where you could be incarcerated for illegal writings, illegal speech, or where a politician could censor any negative information about them that cannot be easily proven?...oh wait, we live there now)...

Copyright links with plagiarism - plagiarism is the taking of other people's work, ideas etc. Copyright would be using people's work, ideas, etc. without their legal permission - of if you misuse it, misuse would be anything that didn't comply with what the copyright states - say a book, if you were to print your own copies then you'd be in breach of copyright law because you'd be depriving the publishers of money - and as the creator hasn't assigned their copyright to you but to the publisher, you'd be liable.

If you were to take the writer's ideas - say if I took the idea of Christine by Stephen King (Killer Car, American geek find car, loves it to death, gets bullied - killer car kills his bullies and it comes between love and friendship and desire, then that would be plagiarism) If I wrote to pay homage to Stephen King and made that clear (perhaps for copyright law got his permission) then that would be different because I'd be using a level of my own ideas and credited his ideas to his with his permission - I mean somebody wrote a book based around Rose Red and the credit was given and I'm sure so was the permission.

If I took a direct quote without the original writer being indicated, say if I wrote an essay on Samurai culture and took word for word what Tsunetomo says on Bushido, then I'd be plagiarising.

As far as the First Amendment goes, I personally think free speech is something that needs to have a certain level of restriction, I mean there have been people preaching at funerals about how the person deserved to die - despite not knowing them, but were fanatics who disliked the way he died. The constitution has good ideas, but when written the contexts it wouldn't applied to wasn't thought through - come on if we had complete free speech I could go on air in the USA and call everyone "MF's and say every censored word for TV".

Yes there's some contradiction, but is the first amendment really that important anymore? It was great for when it was written and it was there to help the people of the time. Free Speech was to avoid oppression, the right to bear arms was for protection of British invasion etc. most other countries don't have that sort of thing, just laws to help the country function that can be changed based on what's good for the time and era.

That's not how patents work. If you improve on an existing technology, or alter it to a point where it's genuinely different, you can get a patent of your own. Don't you think the people who invented the television patented their creation? The inventor of the Plasma TV (similar in function but dramatically different in design) didn't have to dish out cash for his or her creation.


That's where you're definitely wrong. This is sort of my catch phrase lately, but seriously, do not confuse quality with quantity. There's already massive modding communities for a number of games, but if you play most of those mods, you'll quickly come to the realization that most of them are absolutely horrible. A novice will make an inferior product to someone with experience 10 out of 10 times.

And regardless of how you try to word it, you'll never convince me that someone should be allowed to blatently plagiarize one of my games for their own financial benefit, or even just for kicks. When I create games, I create them as individual works of art. Should I choose to allow my audience to participate in the creative process, I'll provide a game with mod tools. But some games are perfect as they are, and if that's what the artist believes, no one should have the right to alter that work.


In every law you can find exceptions to the rule. I can easily justify every single thing you name here. And note that I'm probably one of the most liberal people on TGC... as left as they come:

Obscenity laws: These laws aren't designed to strip you of your rights or otherwise keep people from expressing themselves. I agree that certain censorship laws are a bit silly, but 99.9% of them exist for serious reasons. If I had a kid, I wouldn't want them looking at naked people during their saturday morning cartoons... would you? And I certainly wouldn't want my daughter showing up in nude photos on the internet when she were only a child. Obscenity laws exist to protect people, and that simply can't be debated. On the same hand, some people want to make these laws silly, but so long as they keep getting stopped by the competant ones out there, it won't be an issue.

Libel/ Slander/ Defamation: They're all the same thing... lying about someone or something. Why on earth should you be allowed to state something as a fact when it isn't? What sort of world would we live in if everyone could just make up history as they went along? "aersixb9 murdered his family. He loves Britney Spears and worships late night infomercials." Well, you're new here so I have no idea if any of that is true lol, but if someone stated that publicly, say, someone more credible than you are, and everyone started believing that was true, you can't honestly expect me to believe you wouldn't be infuriated by that.

Politicians on television: I couldn't agree with this law more. I don't want to tip this thread over the AUP line (where it's already headed) but, simply put, if a politician can't deliver his or her message in a limited amount of television airtime, they aren't worth having as a leader. And it's not like TV ads are their only... or even their primary... source of gaining popularity.

One last thing...

Or maybe they didn't word it too specifically in the hopes that the nation would grow over time and develop the government as domestic and international policy dictated? These guys were pretty smart. They designed the constitution and bill of rights knowing our society would change over time. If they weren't capable of figuring that out, and they made these documents vague with no intentions of them changing in the future, then I'm moving to England next week.

Edit: And they REALLY weren't anarchists, forgot to mention that

Any more discussion like this will lead to a locked thread and an account ban. Warning posted.

Did you edit that out Ron? I didn't even see that posted

"Or maybe they didn't word it too specifically in the hopes that the nation would grow over time and develop the government as domestic and international policy dictated? These guys were pretty smart. They designed the constitution and bill of rights knowing our society would change over time. If they weren't capable of figuring that out, and they made these documents vague with no intentions of them changing in the future, then I'm moving to England next week."

Fair enough, perhaps they are worded vaguely...are they meaningless? Impractical? What do you think the first amendment means? You made some good points about the laws that currently restrict the first amendment...which leads me to believe that you think that the first amendment is either a)meaningless or b)irrelevant? I'm not really here to debate the practicality of the amendment itself, only the reality of it: that a)it is the supreme law of the USA, and b)that there appear to be many laws that contradict it, each with a good justification. What solution to this dilemma do you (all) propose? Should we (continue) disregarding the first amendment? Should we disregard the entire constitution, or just the parts that no longer seem to apply to the modern marketplace?

Like I said before, as the nation grows, the laws need to grow. The founding fathers, even the really brilliant ones, had no idea that the industrial age was coming, and definitely couldn't predict our modern information age. We shouldn't disregard anything in the constitution or bill of rights... we should alter them, through ammendments, as civilization matures. Many of the founding fathers were slave owners... would you endorse slavery in modern society? These men weren't infallible, no one is. They created a system wherein we could alter the laws as we needed them to be altered. They actually encouraged this in other documents from that time. It's why they were called ammendments instead of being called absolute law... in the title itself, the founding fathers clearly called for future generations to add to and alter the constitution.

I don't think the first ammendment is either meaningless or irrelevant. here's the first ammendment:

This clearly establishes a freedom of religion, a freedom for the press to report honest news, the freedom for us to assemble peaceably and protest the government when we feel the need to... and the freedom to say what we want about the government or each other. People abused these rights, and so certain limitations had to come into existence to protect certain people and parties from each other (and in some cases, from the government itself).

With copyrights, it's the freedom to protect your work from others. Not only to keep them from ripping you off, but to keep them from ruining the good name of your work. Let me use a real-world example:

I made a game called Eternal Equinox (plug! Man I'm good). It tells the story I wanted to tell, exactly how I wanted to tell it. If it weren't for copyright law, someone could make an exact clone of the game, in title and story and everything else... but let's say they changed stuff and made the game worse by comparison. Now there's two games called Eternal Equinox on the marketplace, once clearly worse than the other. If someone downloads the bad EE, it might come back at me for making an inferior product that I didn't actually create. Copyright law goes both ways .

"a freedom for the press to report honest news"

How did you get the limitation "to report honest news"? I understand that freedom would allow a person to print something besides "true" news, (truth is sometimes hard to define)...my interpretation of "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of the press" is that congress shall not make any law limiting what can be printed. Abridging is an old word, no longer in common usage (is it?)...what exactly does Abridging mean now, what did it mean then, and are there more than one interpretation of it? I would
#define abridging limiting
, which translates into "Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of the press"...is that an accurate modernization of the first amendment? Which brings us to the word "freedom", which I think means "do whatever you want", which now translates into "Congress shall make no law limiting the press from doing whatever they want", including but not limited to copying designs and software and books.

It has nothing to do with print as a form of conveyance or communication, or as a device. Press refers directly and specifically to journalism, and did so just as much back then as it does now. In much of Europe in the late 1700's there was a lack of freedom for journalists, being told what they could or could not write about, or worse... being told directly what they HAD to write about, by the government. And seeing as how the press (that specifically being journalists) were tasked with informing the public of the affairs of the government and the public at large, and being that in a Constitutional Republic (like the United States) the people are the ones in power, allowing the press (journalists) to freely report on the government to the people was absolutely vital should the the nation (as a theory at that time) succeed and survive.

Abridgement basically means to cut something short. In other words, Congress can't tell the press to not write something and can't limit what they want to say. It's still commonly used in modern English, although it's a more academic term.

Edit: And you missed the entire point about not being able to copy designs or software, and how there's a reason behind that. Besides the economy crumbling to dust overnight, and plagiarists running amock with otherwise pristine works of art, there's a few million reasons as to why copyright law is absolutely necessary in our world, especially our modern information age

"Abridgement basically means to cut something short. In other words, Congress can't tell the press to not write something and can't limit what they want to say."

But congress did pass a law that limited what can be written. They passed many laws telling the press to not write many things, including all the things that have been discussed before.

I doubt the economy would crumble without copyright, although I cannot prove it. Then again, I bet you can't prove it WILL crumble, either! Sometimes when people have a difference of opinion, it's about a large societal issue that can't reasonably be experimented upon. In a perfectly scientific universe, we'd set up two parallel societies, one with copyright and one without, and no interaction between them, and see which one produces more/better works of art, science, manufacturing, books, etc...I do believe that the universe with no copyright will produce both more and better quality artistic works, although to be honest I'm not 100% sure of that. If we were to vote on a fair/use copyright issue I would probably vote to allow more fair use and less copyright -> although I may be in the minority on that one.

But you skipped over my other statement -> are you saying a) that if we were to follow the constitution to the letter, society would crumble, or b)I'm interpreting the constitution incorrectly, and we do currently follow it?

You don't think copying somebody else's work is stealing? Let's say you wrote a game over 3 years, and put all of your time, effort and money into it. At this point (like many innovators), you're risking the roof over your head. Now you release it, but some big publishing house with a huge marketing budget copies your game and gets their version in every shop in the Western World.

Are you going to say "Fair enough, there's nothing to stop you doing that". Or are you more likely - from your cardboard box on a street corner - to shout "You Thieving ********!"

Batvink proved it for me I think. With no copyright law to protect authors, we'd seen entire companies fall apart. Activision Blizzard is the biggest game company in the world, yeah? Well let's say there were no copyright laws. I could hack into and rip off any of the games in their catalog, including their cash-cow, World of Warcraft. Let's say I made the game better (the list of ways I could make it better would fill five threads), and sold my new and improved version for less money, with no monthly fees, and did this under the same exact name? People would literally flock to World of Mattcraft, and Blizzard? They'd simply fall apart. Now here's where it gets really interesting: what if I released the game for free? I could single-handedly cripple, if not completely bring down, their biggest game franchise. And if I did that to all or even most of their games, they'd be out of business. There's no positive bounceback for the offset the economy as a whole would see if copyright law ceased to exist.

Please don't take this personally aersix, but I have to ask: have you ever released a game before? If so, was it freeware, shareware, or fully commercial? I can't imagine someone working their tail off on a game (or any other creative work) and after it's been released to the public, not feeling strongly in favor of copyright law. Releasing a game is *nothing* like working on one. Anticipating the audience's response is something wholly different when you have a finished game on your hands, and once you get that feeling, it might change your opinion of copyright law, hehe.


I think it's a bit of both. In a free constitutional republic, Laws exist to protect citizens from themselves, the government, and each other. At the same time, it's our duty as citizens of the free world to challenge those laws when they stop making sense, or more importantly, when the powers that be start to abuse them. Copyright law, from the Statute of Queen Anne to modern laws, were born from necessity to protect authors, not from a desire to lessen the rights of the people.

That being said, what you're not properly interpreting is the intention of the constitution. You seem to think the constitution was written in stone, and that the founding fathers wanted it to remain as it was forever, when it's clearly obvious this wasn't their intention even remotely. The constitution is dynamically designed to be altered in the future, as history would require. If copyright law stops working, the government will fix it, and if they don't, we'll fix the government. And if we can't fix the government, why are we living here?

Kinda weird, first saying homocide law overrules the first amendment, and then stating copyright law doesn't. In fact, those are the same case. You're allowed to believe a work of art is a good thing, you can write it's a good thing, but you're not allowed to actually copy it.

You misspelled ********.

As someone has just pointed out to me, here is part of your US constitution...