Max was interviewed a few months back by Confusionism for a series called “Extra-Ordinary,” a series described as such:
Extra-Ordinary is a project in which I ask people two main questions.
What concerns you in the world today?
Who is the smartest person you know?Extra-Ordinary is a network experiment. I interview a person, then ask them who the smartest person they know is?. I then interview that person and ask them the same question, so on and so forth ad infinitum until we work it all out and I have interviewed a whole host of really interesting, creative, intelligent switch on people.
Topics: Copyright locking up good ideas on corporate balance sheets; Bob Dylan; and the smartest person Max knows is . . . the only person he knows!
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Don’t have a website, but please interview Jacque Fresco pleeeeeeeease.
Lots of love Heather Odom. Tunbridge Wells UK
PS I think you have some fabulous ideas, but not as good as Jacque Frescoe’s
Copyright does not protect ideas (good or bad).
Copyright protects original works of authorship.
Do you really think the sheeple people are looking for good ideas?
Which is more popular Project Gutenberg or American Idol?
Maximus ~ looking good.
Stacy – seeing as you are actually the brains behind this operation, don’t you think the game is already over, the buzzer has sounded and the trophy has been awarded…. I mean, we’ve already lost; how are we going to communicate once the internet is locked, stocked, and barrelled?
So would argue that American Idol is a product of copyright protection.
Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.
—quoted from Ch.5, “The Paradox of Choice”, 2004
Thomas, I think that Rachel Maddow would say that copyright protects bad ideas and shields those bad ideas from being challenged. Recently, the National Organization for Marriage had a video of her show–in which she criticized the org’s. use of actors to create anti-gay propaganda–removed from You Tube. The organization made copyright claims to get the video removed.
See: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/anti-gay-rights.html
@Mep
That’s more indicative of a sue happy culture than having anthing to do with copyright law per se. I’m sure it would be legal within the “fair use” doctrine.
@Max
In this new copyright free utopian paradise, will everyone be selling T-Shirts?
I was thinking an ‘obfuscation’ approach may work for some copyrighted material. What I mean is that you make it hard to prove the work you confiscate as a ‘copy’ is in fact a ‘copy’ because it has been encoded in a way that is hard to trace back to any one ‘original’. It creates a situation somewhat like when the sun is shining and two guys both say at the same moment ‘Nice, the sun is shining!’. Can the first guy prove the second guy stole his material? You can do that with texts, i think also with movies by developing a new type of encoding…
Max Keiser! The Greatest thing to come out of America since the Fluffanutter!
goddamnit.
I”m starting to agree with him.
Shit.
My grandmother slapped then politician Helmut Schmidt one in the face because he tryed to tell the people that he is the boss, when my grandmother reminded him that she is the boss because her tax dollars being used to pay his salary!
THE WHOLE OF MAX AND STACY IS GREATER THAN
THE SUM OF ITS PARTS. OM TARA TU TARE TURE SVAHA!
Max, what gets to me is that you talk about intellectual property almost entirely in terms of copyright.
If you really want people to understand it, you need to use the word “protectionism” to describe I.P., and talk about how deregulating patents in one country (and not honouring overseas contracts) would give said country a boom from the influx of copycat industrialists that wouldn’t be able to make their product elsewhere.
I think Max gave an excellent example with the Lion King’s song. Corporations seals what already exists from indigenous cultures, patents them and makes money off of them. Some “newly discovered” medicines actually come from herbs that indigenous cultures have know for thousands of years to help with certain illness. The funny thing is that after the corporations patent it they can sue anyone who uses it, even from the people whom they stole it from! And the indigenous people can’t prove that their knowledge was stolen from them.
Max, you have been living in Paris for too long. The ‘May 68′ / ‘Real artists are pure (therefore poor), live on the streets and don’t need to eat food’ culture might have contaminated your brilliant brain ! In Paris there is this notion that wealthy artists are frauds and that the ‘real ones’ live like roaches, wear tibetan hats to cover their greasy long hair, and live off their government welfare ‘intermittance du spectacle’ like bums.
Max, I have been agreeing with you on everything so far, but I am not sure I roger you about all these copyrights issues.
If I understand you well, you seem to think that music should be free because it ‘costs nothing to make ?’ You reduce value of art to the price of the medium it is diffused on ? You also seem to mix up CD prices, royalties and copyrights…
Basically what I understand from what you are saying is that you want the music industry to become a service industry, where the musician makes money only when he performs live ( just like a hairdresser or a plumber ) with no ownership of his creation, right ?
The idea that removing incentives to creation will actually improve the level and volume of creation is SICK…it is quite the opposite. If I can’t own nor sell my music, why should I bother ? Money is a part of the equation of creation. Do you think Michelangelo would have painted the Sisteen Chapel for free, just for the ‘love of art’ ?… of course not.
I mean, why should recorded music become free all of a sudden ? Where does this idea come from that it is immoral to make money selling music and that musicians are some sort of frauds or scams? Is it because they ‘enjoy’ working?
What you are promoting is plain simple looting. If music should be free, than why not create a site to make bread or leather jackets free too ?
I understand that major record companies are exploiting artists and therefore should go down, but by promoting the idea that music should become free you are actually hurting musicians, especially indy musicians.
Also you seem to recognize intellectual property theft when you describe Disney stealing from the Africans. Wait, piracy is cool, isn’t it ? Please clarify !
I agree Max with where you ‘re going with copyright. I believe things are really basic and simple. You have a transmitter (artist) and you have a receiver (audience). Up to now, the companies would facillitate the interaction between the two of them, thus becoming a conductor. The problem is that the companies instead of taking that role, they have engaged in a somewhat dictatorial behavior, where they say “I’ll tell you what to listen to, I know what’s good for you”, towards the audience. At the same time they don’t pay any money to the huge majority of the artists they claim to represent saying “Without me noone would know you”, and “you can always make money from the concerts”. Truth is, concerts have always been the traditional way for musicians to make money. Before and after the recording industry. Problem is the companies believe they are more important than both the audience and the artists. So, instead of riding with technology and cooperating with the other two, they want to stick to their old habbits. In the country where I live, traditional recording companies are more or less irrelevant to the local scene now, and what you have are new companies, which are tv channels’ offsprings.
As for cinema, do you remember what they were saying in the beginning about piracy? “We’re not selling the same products, we make high quality products you can watch in a theater, nothing to do with those crappy cds.” Nowadays they’re trying to do the same with blu-ray. The problem is that they produce less and less good films, and they’re losing little by little the faith of the audience. While more and more artists are turning into financiers, to find money for their films.
In the artistic department, I think what’s destroying the companies, is arrogance. Instead of just helping the process, they’re hijacking it. If they don’t change, they will die.
In the scientific department things are more revolting. Remember the affair between J.P. Morgan and Nicola Tesla, where Morgan was funding Tesla to discover a source of cheap energy, and when Tesla discovered it, Morgan said “well done” and put it in a safe, because he was making money the oil way? The same thing goes everywhere you have copyright use in science.
The problem with copyright has to do with companies. They abuse it to restrict knowledge either by setting prices too high, or by keeping it in a closet. The way these guys work, they’re already becoming irrelevant.