So they try to hold the provider responsible. While I disagree with this, I can at the least understand some rationale behind it, even though this is inconsistent. For instance, if someone uses a gun to shoot down someone, why is the company providing the gun not held accountable here? They should also be forced to pay compensation damage to people being harmed here. But this is besides the point I am trying to make.
The thing is that I do not want to be held accountable under such a law. I believe when it comes to information, courts should not be allowed to restrict me or anyone else in any way, shape or form. I want a free society. That means flow of information can never be restricted by any such actors. Granted, this is not possible right now anywhere on Planet Earth as far as I am aware, and I understand the implication of this too (no more secrets possible), but I want this 100%. Yet I can't have that because courts restrict me, and all those who want the same, arbitrarily so. IMO this also means that such courts must be changed. Right now we have corporate courts where the money addiction flows in. I understand this system and the problems of this system. This is why there must be a transition starting from the society, to no longer make it possible to restrict service providers here in any way, shape or form. The same would apply to democracy - I don't want to accept indirect democracy run by lobbyists. I want to be in charge, in proportion to my vote, at all times, of every decision (I am ok delegating this to representatives, mind you, but not automatically and not always; in indirect democracy you vote for some representative who can then do whatever he wants to. I am not ok with this. How many former Trump voters would, right now, want Trump to be gone from power, or in prison? I think many would, considering the damage he caused and is still causing).
They absolutely can be held accountable. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) has carve-outs for: negligent entrustment - when a dealer or manufacturer provides a firearm knowing it will be used for a crime; negligence per se - when a seller knowingly violated state or federal laws in the sale or marketing of the product (and that sale was a proximate cause of the harm); defects in design; breach of contract/warranty.
However, selling a product for lawful use, whether a gun, truck, or Internet connectivity, does not make the seller liable if the consumer decides to use that otherwise lawful product for crimes. There has to be some assumption of agency (and liability) on the part of the individual who is clearing ethical/moral hurdles to do wrong.
I don't see how this unanimous court decision conflicts with that theory in the context of the ISP - in fact, I think it's a reinforcement of some common sense.
A fairer example would be holding Microsoft liable for people using Word for ransom notes or something.
The gun company will claim they sold for self defense or just for a hobbyist's collection - They'll claim that the gun owner used it for something else is not their responsibility. Same for any or product that can be used to kill someone with.
At worst, universities crack down harder on torrents, but that was always an option for labels.
In most classic U.S. jurisdiction, no, you cannot. Compelled activity or speech is generally frowned upon. The most important part of this case, IMO, was the Supreme Court constraining the Fourth Circuit's interpretation of contributory liability and attempting to turn the DMCA system into one for enabling those fishing expeditions.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/movie-studios-bit...
You may not be old enough to remember this, but that's exactly what they did in the 2000's
> Cox Communications v. Sony Music, 607 U.S.___ (2026), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the liability of an internet service provider for its subscribers engaging in copyright infringement.
> Cox Communications was sued by multiple music labels for lax enforcement of its users engaged in sharing the labels' copyrighted music, arging Cox finacially benefitted from these users. A jury trial found Cox to be liable. On appeal to the Fourth Circuit, the court dismissed findings that Cox engaged in vicarious infringment, but held that Cox was still liable for contributory infringement, with Cox potentially owing several million dollars to the labels.
> In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court found that Cox Communication was not contributorily liable for the actions of its users, reversing the Fourth's decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...
Now, if this were Comcast vs. Sony Music, it would be a closer call, but I still think Sony would have the edge.
Bigger deal than people think
I believe this removes the liability from seeding just a chunk of a torrent, we can get those seed ratios back up without VPNs and seed boxes
Cox stil sucks, no symmetic B/W in 2026? Cox thinks you only need to upload at 10% of the download speed you are paying for. i.e 300Mbit down, 30Mbit up speed limits (just an example).
At least I have options where I am. So many don't.
> (a) “The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another.” Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 434.
> In Sony, copyright owners sued the maker and the retailers of the Betamax video tape recorder. Id., at 422. The tape recorder could be used to record copyrighted television programs for later personal viewing, which would not constitute infringement. Id., at 449. On the other hand, it could also be used to reproduce and sell copyrighted television programming, which would constitute infringement. Ibid. The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.” Id., at 428 (internal quotation marks omitted). This Court reversed, concluding that “[t]he Betamax is . . . capable of substantial noninfringing uses”—like personal use—so “sale of such equipment to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement.” Id., at 456.
Going with your point, it does not say they can’t monitor and then sell the list of pirates to Sony/etc. for some extra income.
They just didn’t like doing it for free.
Have I got that right?
Imagine giving the power to rightsholders to terminate anyone's internet service with e.g, a DMCA takedown. I'm sure that won't be abused at all, and is a very necessary step to protecting "artists"
This is assuming you didn't answer for "your little brother", etc.
This is such a tiny number for a company which provides internet to over 6 million homes. I was expecting it to be in millions or at least hundreds of thousands.
Like, the only reason to comply with such an onerous and censorious takedown regime was specifically to disclaim contributory copyright liability that SCOTUS just unanimously decided to erase. Is it such that as long as people aren't stupid and don't market their services as an infringement facilitator, which most don't, that they don't have to honor 512 takedown notices now? Conversely, services dumb enough to actually market themselves as infringement tools probably can't get rid of their liability by the 512 safe harbor. So there's no reason to actually honor a DMCA takedown request anymore.
That said, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a customer should only be terminated as a last step and only after the ISP has been made aware that their customer is actually a repeat offender. Getting a large number of unproven accusations should not be enough.
But if you’re a pure ISP and not hosting content on your own servers, then I guess, yeah DMCA doesn’t really apply to you?
No.
The entire reason they went after Cox is because cox has deep pockets and there was a possibility that Cox would just settle and work with them rather than fighting this all the way to the supreme court.
The problem sony has is the maximum money they can claim from an individual is just way less than what they can get from a business. Almost certainly enough to justify the legal fees.
This is not a profitable business for anyone but low-level scumbags who are also lawyers (so they do not have to pay for lawyers.)
Related, the music industry loses not a dime to piracy. If all piracy stopped tomorrow, they wouldn't likely make an additional cent. Which means that all money they spend to fight piracy is a loss - which is why they tried to make examples out of people and publicize it i.e. if we will go after this poor single mom, we will certainly go after you. But they would not go after you, because they're not going to spend that kind of money.
Which is the reason for going after ISPs and search engines, to make it their responsibility. Meaning that they would have to pay for the monitoring, they would be cutting off people's internet (which is almost scarier than a copyright violation suit in the age of monopoly and blacklists.) The RIAA could just sit back and spend nothing, just send lists of IPs to ISPs to be cut off, and watch piracy disappear. With the shield of a SCOTUS judgement, ISPs could cut off internet as quickly as youtube bans for DMCA, with no consequences.
The situation now is that they can go after individuals, but nobody is obligated to help. It's all on their dime.
(Of course, we have "Evil Communist China" where there is no property tax, and people own their homes and can live there. Id argue they're more free than we are.)
But copyrights and patents and trademarks? There's no tax on those "properties". And gee, companies are the ones to likely own these properties, not individuals.
I'd like to see how free someone in China feels if they put up a Winnie The Pooh yard-sign (which I can do freely in the US, despite Disney owning the copyright for the likeness that I would use).
There is no reason why tax has to be done as property tax. Property tax demeans actual ownership of a place for us to live. (And why the hell do corporations get away with no tax on intellectual property, or even pay on profits, whereas we humans pay on revenue and property?)
Worse yet, property taxes also enshrine the idea that the community's schools in poor areas deserve poor education. Do children in poor areas deserve poor education? Cause that's how you end up with "great and slum schools".
And the police in my area? Its sheriffs. And meh. I dont want them to keep getting military playthings.
Street? That's what gas tax and EV tax is for. And those built in with gas tax funds per gallon, aka use tax. Or vehicle registration tax.
Fire fighters? We have volunteer fire fighters.
I'm seeing a whole lot of tax and tax and tax, and shit for return on this forced investment. And property tax HAS had people end up homeless. 1 family homeless due to property tax is 1 too many.
In practice Megaupload is not an established company. Other consumer file storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud are trillion dollar companies with deep legal benches and lobbying muscle. YouTube seeded the service with pirated content and Google helped fight off a copyright lawsuit by finding evidence that one rights holder uploaded their own video and then claimed infringement.
The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.
I don't know anyone who sold television recordings, it was always for personal use. How could the lower court get this so wrong? Was this just one uninformed judge? Or was this actually less certain at the time?
The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
To be clear, this was the only way to get most of the stuff being traded and sold. TV shows or films with no VHS release, or anime with no official dub or American format release.
There are no standards for lower court judges. They frequently do things that are grossly illegal.
Here's a US lower court judge who spontaneously ordered that a child's name be changed because of the judge's religious beliefs: https://volokh.com/2013/08/12/judge-orders-that-childs-name-...
The claim was that recording for personal use was still copyright infringement
We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.
Expect to see heavy lobbying from the music and video industry to create some kind of "Know your Customer" regime internet service providers in order to create such a liability.
I wouldn't call this a slam dunk for privacy or liberty, given what it is going to force the various actors to do in response.
For now, though, let the file sharing flow!
If every ISP were at risk of being on the hook for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually already doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.
The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal, and I'm honestly surprised to see this supreme court do the right thing.
and this is already true today, except instead of being ISPs, it's youtube and other user generated content platforms.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
Free then make it cost more. A lot could enter the public domain, and valuable IP could be kept by companies as long as they’re willing to pay.
Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
So the copyright holder would have the option to EITHER cashout at any point (and consider the work/invested effort paid) OR counter-bid the sum of everyone to keep it.
Not sure about the implications, but it would encourage the most (economically) productive route
Further, I think that the premise is flawed. Rather than being more protected by being profitable, a work should be less protected the more it has profited the owners. If you can make $50 million profit as an individual from your creative work that took 5 years to produce, then you're done. Dozens of lifetimes of wealth for 5 years of work? No, that's more than enough. You don't deserve more money for that. You have been suitably encouraged. The trouble with that idea is that "creative accounting" is too easy, so that won't really work, either.
I think it should match patent law. 20 years, and that's it. After that, if you want to keep making profit, you need to make something new. Because that's what it's supposed to do: let you make a living if you're able, and encourage you to keep working to create more.
It makes sense too: some things just aren't very profitable, and some are. If it's really worth it to the creator, they can pay for it. If they want to keep it locked up for 75 years, they better be prepared to pay very handsomely.
One problem I see with this system is: how does someone know if what they're trying to copy is protected by copyright or not? The government would have to maintain a public database to query. Another possible problem is the Berne convention, which harmonizes copyright across countries.
But yeah, the system we have now is terrible.
Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.
What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.
The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.
I think the law is too long now, but a decade is too short to protect artists. Even a patent is 20 years.
and is there anything really wrong with that?
I personally would have liked to see fan made movies of various IPs like star wars, and harry potter, but it is impossible due to the long reach of copyright infringement.
I'm not so sure they're unrelated.
The bondage of intellectual property forces very particular branches of human development to the exclusion of others. It's no surprise that restriction of thought and creativity - and most of all, music - is to be found alongside war and predation and uninspired leadership.
so you can't create works for hire than?
I want a system that doesn't syphon money to the corporations over the individual creator and the corporations can't tell me I can't use the song.
I think 25 or even 50 years is more defensible. But 100? Nah.
But the crushing problem today for many of us here is SOFTWARE PATENTS. These should never have been allowed in the first place; and until their scourge is abolished, everyone is at risk for having his work stolen with one.
And their arguments aren't entirely without merit, either.
Hard to make them on a site dedicated to selling software and its byproducts, perhaps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....
But Grokster et al openly advertised that you could get all music "for free".
Where the gray area is would be something that arguably can ONLY be used for piracy (an example of what this would be is hard to imagine, but maybe a device that can ONLY duplicate encrypted blurays and cannot do it for non-encrypted ones - yes I know there are arguments even here via fair use/backup/personal copy) and/or something that is substantially advertised as for piracy - something that nobody would have a reason to buy unless they were pirating, perhaps - something where free/open source similar software exists but can't be used to pirate?
I know some file sharing sites do ip logging so if DMCA strikes happen, they can simply ban the ip too.
Is there anything tangetially important to these file sharing sites too after this decision by Supreme Court?
I can imagine that as long as they operate legal things as well and dont do things under the intention of just being used for piracy (from their sides but we all know the reality)
Then, they don't have to do anything other than just accepting the DMCA notice.
There are definitely server providers who are more privacy oriented while being affordable who only get involved not even with DMCA but rather some court ruling within their specific country which can be permissive.
So is it possible for now for a file sharing provider to say that we follow the DMCA but only if you can get it written from a local judge that we will remove these files for the purposes of Privacy for our end users?
In that vein, merely selling a tool even if a predominant use or intention of that tool is infringement, the infringement must be actively induced or invited by the seller. This is also affirmed in detail in the USSC opinion: "The Court has repeatedly made clear—see Kalem Co. v. Harper Brothers, 222 U. S. 55, Sony, and Grokster—that mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe."
This is the primary part of the opinion, the first 7 of 27 pages. I'm still reading the rest and will update when finished. (Concurring Opinion and Dissents I believe)
===
The meat of the opinion has some interesting elements as well:
* "Internet service providers, such as Cox, have limited knowledge about how their Internet services are used and who uses them. They do know which IP address corresponds to which subscriber’s account, but they cannot distinguish one individual user from another...However, because online infringement is so widespread, pursuing each individual infringer does little to stem the tide.": mere IP logs are not enough to establish liability, perhaps. More importantly, it is opined that individual fishing expeditions dont actually serve the end of eliminating infringement. This does not absolve individual liability, but it becomes important later.
* "Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate Internet service to infringing accounts would expand secondary copyright liability beyond our precedents ... The Fourth Circuit’s holding thus went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony. It also conflicted with this Court’s repeated admonition that contributory liability cannot rest only on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it.": This points to another case where Circuit and District courts have been ignoring the instruction of higher courts, in this case, inventing new liabilities where none existed. This doesn't go so far as to repudiate entirely the idea of fishing expeditions having teeth, but it places a clear guardrail around expanding liability without laws establishing such.
===
The Sotomayor concurrence on judgment states that the Justice does not believe the methods used by the majority opinion are correct, but still agrees with the judgement because of insufficient information presented by Sony. I think the analysis gone into in this section is flawed, but it is also not precedential since it is not the Order part of the opinion. I am also out of time to poke at that part for the moment. It does relate this case to the closest recent big case on secondary liability though, that of Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, so its worth reading even if the justifying analysis I think does not fit.
The big difference I guess is whether you think negative jurisdiction (limiting what the government can do) vs positive jurisdiction (further enabling the government) is more important, but considering HN and the exhortations against divisive commentary, I'd rather not dive into the weeds arguing that part here.
Love to see it. I'm still mad about the Sony rootkit[0] and the people sued for absurd amounts over downloading a few MP3s back in the 00's.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
[0] they were constantly sending CDs that were fucked-up in totally new ways every time
This ruling could mean that they'll increase their efforts targeting individuals with threatening letters demanding that they admit wrongdoing and settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars at a time or else get sued in court and be forced to pay a lawyer tens of thousands to defend their innocence. It could mean they actually take more individuals to court instead of dropping the case every time they threaten somebody with enough money to hire a lawyer to defend them at trial.
The media industry is also pushing for more control in other ways as well like blank media style taxes which would let them rake in a steady stream of cash without needing to make make specific accusations. They also still want to be able to force ISPs to instantly blacklist any IPs they accuse of streaming copyrighted content. They've got this power in many countries already and innocent users have already been screwed over by it. They may decide to focus their efforts on getting this pushed through in the US now.
I doubt this ruling will lead to the kinds of broad copyright reforms we need, but it's long past time the courts started pushing back on the insane power grabs of the RIAA/MPA. No other industry could get away with demanding what they have.
I had several roommates, and we each were responsible for a utility. I was responsible for internet, and Cox was our provider.
I received multiple e-mails from Cox about copyright infringement. I can't recall them, but I remember it being serious enough for me to tell people to stop.
Thinking back, I feel like Cox's position is right and fair; let users know they're being observed by copyright holders, and inform the user that they could be compelled to provide their identity to complainants.
But ultimately, the responsibility to "stop" the supposed infringement is on the holder, not Cox.
Well, those would be in the same position now that they previously were I think.
I'm trying to understand how a judge would say that the only practical use of backups were copyright infringement, since that is completely contrary to both my experiences and what I believe to be common sense. If the answer to my confusion is that this actually was the major use case and my experiences were rare, then that's fine. Otherwise, I can't help believe this is yet another case in recent history where judges are completely backwards on technological understanding, or maybe even under influence from copyright holders.
I don't think I can understate the amount that I hate this line of reasoning.
Suppose we apply this logic to writable CDs. Some drives could only read but not write CDs and those devices cost less than the ones that could write. Moreover, the early writable drives were stupid expensive and because of that most people in those days only had readers.
Then in those early days, the usage of the drives would skew more heavily towards piracy, because it would be more common to spend $1000+ more on a CD writer if you're operating a commercial piracy operation and keeping it busy than if you just want to write something to a single CD instead of an entire $20 box of floppy disks once or twice a year.
A few years later the price of the writable drives has come down to almost as low as the price of the read-only drives and everybody has them and is using them for all kinds of legitimate things. But that doesn't happen if pointing to a high initial rate of piracy can get them banned before they get widely adopted for other purposes.
There's a reason why they said "substantial non-infringing use" instead of asking what percent of existing use it is at some specific point in time.
For copyright law, Congress does not expressly allow secondary liability for third parties FOR COPYRIGHT unless the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement. In this case, Cox was not cutting off copyright infringers BUT since their service could be used by same infringers for valid use, they didn't have to.
For arms producer, Congress has exempted them for liability and courts have ruled, yep, Congress gets to make the rules here.
Congress could overturn both rulings by changing the law.
This is what we want. Congress makes the rules, courts interpret but don't make new rules.
They sold them under the counter. I just wanted to know what was going to happen ahead of all my friends haha.
It's moderately hard to build a law based on what people think is "fair" mainly because fairness often has more to do with feelings (it would be fair for someone to make a Hobbit movie because the author is long dead; it would be unfair for someone to make a Potter movie because the author is alive, etc) than with an easily quantifiable rule.
I've often thought the solution is to define copyright (of things published, not trade secrets and unpublished works) as being something that can ONLY be defended as long as the work is "available" in the marketplace for "reasonable" amounts. As long as Warner Bros or whoever it is keeps selling the Lord of the Rings (extended edition) on DVD or whatever, they can j'accuse infringers of downloading it.
But ten years after it's no longer in print? No longer in copyright, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
Overall, IP seem to be a massive mistake.
Copyright terms longer than a reasonable 5 years are only benefitting Disney and the other big copyright cartels.
They are not serving the purpose of copyright: To encourage creation.
No.
Let's take an example of 401ks.
Any company that has a 401k has to pass non-discrimination testing to ensure their plan doesn't favor highly compensated employees over non-highly compensated employees. This is done through Actual Deferral Percentage and Actual Contribution Percentage tests. Just doing these tests can be very costly.
If you don't want to do these tests, then you can follow a 'safe harbor' action where the company automatically contributes x% for everyone. If the plan executes the 'safe harbor' action, then they automatically pass the two tests above.
However, if they don't follow through that plan they may still not have violated the nondiscrimination policies if they end up passing those two tests.
So to bring it back to the circumstance here, because Cox was not following their own processes which would have afforded them safe harbor they do not get the benefit of being automatically protected from the action. Then the court goes to see if Cox was sufficiently involved in the violating actions in order to be liable, and the court found that Cox was not.
So going back to the line...: > It's sufficient to have a process that satisfies the letter of the law, but you can simply not follow through and enforce it.
Not at all. Because it was not enforced, Cox lost the safe harbor protections and had to defend themselves.
With DMCA claims, it's an adversarial accusation with inherent unreliability built into the collection mechanism, usually submitted by third parties. The process doesn't lend itself to the same kind of auditability and accountability as securities and investments.
> The Fourth Circuit’s holding went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony by holding that “supplying a product with knowledge that the recipient will use it to infringe copyrights is . . . sufficient for contributory infringement.” 93 F. 4th 222, 236. This holding went beyond the two bases for contributory liability recognized in the Court’s precedent and conflicted with the Court’s repeated admonition that contributory liability cannot rest only on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it. Pp. 9–10.
> (c) Sony argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor—under which Internet service providers cannot be secondarily liable for certain forms of copyright infringement if they have implemented “a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders” who “are repeated infringers,” 17 U. S. C. §512(i)(1)(A)—would have no effect if Internet service providers are not liable for providing Internet service to known infringers. The DMCA does not expressly impose liability for Internet service providers who serve known infringers; it merely creates new defenses from liability for such providers. The DMCA itself made clear that failure to comply with the safe-harbor rules “shall not bear adversely upon . . . a defense by the service provider,” as here, “that the service provider’s conduct is not infringing.” §512(l). P. 10.
the MPAA has money, and they will go after the government to fix their problem
As I said in a sibling comment, quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion as opposed to "final bill that has been revised in committee and is going to the floor for a full vote". The details of implementation are certainly critical, and not trivial either! I'm fully in support of thinking through various use cases. But part of why I'm interested in alternate approaches is that they might give us finer grained tools.
>Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
I have actually considered that as well but didn't add it into a quickie comment. If we take the second path of approaches I listed there, then thinking about it all open source software would fall under a special even more permissive class of the tier 3, in that it already has "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing for all right? Except that it's also free. The motivation here is the "advancement of the useful arts & sciences" and the public good, so having it be explicit that "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
All that said, I'll also ask fwiw if it'd even be that big a deal given the pace of development? I do think it'd be both ideal and justified if OSS had a longer period for free, that's still a square deal to the public IMO. But like, even if an OSS work went out protection (and keep in mind that a motivated community that could raise even a few thousand dollars would be able to just pay for an extra decade no problem, the cost doesn't really ramp up for awhile [which might itself be considered a flaw?]) after 10 years, how much is it worth it that 2016 era OSS (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window) now could have proprietary works be worth it against 10 year old proprietary software all getting pushed into the public domain far faster? That's worth some contemplation. Maybe requiring that source/assets be provided to the Library of Congress or something and is released at the same time the work loses copyright would be a good balance, having all that available for down the road would be a huge win vs what we've seen up until now.
Anyway, all food for thought is all.
Agreed, and my comment was aimed at exactly that. :)
An example of my concern: What would happen to GPL-licensed software if the copyright expired quickly? Would that allow someone to include it in a proprietary product and (after the short copyright term ended) deny users the freedoms that the GPL is supposed to guarantee? I think those freedoms remain important for much longer than 10 years.
> (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window)
Do you mean that the copyright term countdown would reset whenever the author makes changes to their work? (I'm not sure if this is the case today.) If so, couldn't someone simply use an earlier version in their proprietary product in order to escape GPL obligations early?
> "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
Yes, I think this makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Indeed.
Setting aside variable details like time frames and cost structures which can be debated separately, what I found interesting about your suggestion is it's a mechanism to create an escalating incentive for copyright holders to relinquish copyrights even sooner than the standard copyright period. Currently, no matter what the term length, it costs nothing to sit on a copyright until it expires - so everyone does - even if they never do anything with the copyright. And the copyright exists even if the company goes bankrupt or the copyright holder dies. Thus we end up with zombie copyrights which keep lurking in the dark for works which are almost certainly abandon-ware or orphan-ware simply because our current system defaults to one-and-done granting of "life of the inventor + 70 years" for everything.
Obviously, we should dramatically shorten the standard copyright length but no matter what we shorten it to (10, 15, 20 yrs etc) we should consider requiring some recurring renewal before expiration as a separate idea. Even if it's just paying a small processing fee and sending in simple DIY form, it sets the do-nothing-default to "auto-expire" for things the inventor doesn't care about (and may even have forgotten about). That's a net benefit to society we should evaluate separately from debates about term lengths.
I see your suggestion about automatically escalating the cost of recurring renewal as another separate layer worth considering on its own merits. My guess would be just requiring any recurring renewal would cause around half of all copyrights to auto-expire before reaching their full term - even if the renewal stayed $10. The idea of having recurring renewal costs escalate, regardless of when the escalation kicks in, or how much it escalates, is a mechanism which could achieve even more net positive societal benefits by increasing the incentive to relinquish copyrights sooner.
And you get the hilarious (if not sad) situations often, where the exact same actions is wrong if committed by one group, and right if done by some other group.
It's a very "leverage your info to make money no wait not like that" scheme. I think I just don't understand what the difference is between an insider who sits on a board (illegal) or has a nephew who's an SVP at the company (illegal) and a politician setting the laws that shape the whole industry (legal apparently?) or gets tips from same (legal apparently?).
This example is just standard issue corruption. Politician gets to exempt themselves, so they do.
> It's always seemed fundamentally flawed to me that the exchange laws are designed to prevent people benefitting from insider information but then the entire purpose of the stock exchange is to make money by leveraging information asymmetry to make choices other rational actors wouldn't make because you have more knowledge or data than they do.
Insider trading laws are designed to prevent people that can affect business outcomes from benefiting by affecting those outcomes. For example, a senior executive screwing up a crucial delivery to gain money from short positions.
The idea is society benefits from the assumption that all executives are ideally holding long positions on their business.
Instead of quarterly filings, if you are considered an insider (or is affiliated with one), you are required to have your trades be instantly reported and be public the nanosecond you make them. You are allowed to make use of the insider info, as long as you adhere to these transparency measures.
That doesn't do anything at all to remedy the situation. Better would be to require trades by insiders (and the particulars of those trades) to be locked in and publicly announced at least seven calendar days in advance. You need not announce the reason for the trade, but you must announce the amount of whatever it is you're selling and/or buying and the date at which the transaction will happen.
Yes, I'm aware of the whole "scheduled stock sale" thing that folks at a certain level have to do when trading in the stock & etc of the company they work for. IMO, that should be mandatory for all employees and their families.
Before the insider trading laws, the stock market was much more volatile and was more akin to gambling for people out of the know. For people in the know, it was an easy way to extract wealth from those on the outside just looking at the numbers and publicly available information.
Eg imagine if this is how the system worked right now. You could have streamers watch unpopular (modern) movies with their audience. Or a youtuber could read a book to their viewers (listeners). And it wouldn't have to be content that's 100+ years out of date.
You could also make it so that when the copyright protection first expires then a percentage of the income earned through the use of the work gets paid to the author for some number of years. Eg you're free to use the work, but you've got to pay some percentage of the revenue to the author for 10 years.
Why is this something that the government should promote?
Think everything they do is right? Hell no.
And every once in a while you need to check if your list of allies should change.
> It takes a certain kind of educated liberal bubble to think that is "hilarious"
No, the hilarious part is that the "educated liberal bubble" will do exactly that thing, and then wonder why everyone else is seeing them as crazies; because they'd rather side with bad actors on their side purely because other side is attacking them, no matter the reason.
And of course, not only them. It's natural human herd behavior. And it leads to absolutely terrible end results
The crime is the crime. No matter the leaning of the criminal
"It is valid to love my mom, even when she makes me clean my room. This is the thing liberals will never understand."
Don't you have some "cathedral" you gotta go neckbeard on about somewhere else? Perhaps a divorce court hearing?
I think the point is that they don't like Sony music because they are so often on the wrong side, this time included.
In reality, this would have made their innocent customers pay for the crimes of their guilty customers and made both Sony, and in the long run, Cox richer, because once paying an extra $5/month becomes normalized, then there's no way they're going to go back down in price just because the fine is paid off, any more than the government will ever stop charging tolls on a toll bridge that was paid for by tolls no matter how many times the cost of the toll bridge is paid off.
Proof: compare the quality and price of their service in neighborhoods with access to fiber to the home as opposed to just having access to Cox via coaxial cable.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
As for how I arrive on my views, it's obviously not an entirely rational process, but the rules you get from viewing property rights and self-ownership as fundamental seem to lead to the most preferable outcomes to me. If I were forced to adopt a more deontological philosophy, it's also the one that has the fewest obviously absurd conclusions, though not entirely. From this it's, in my opinion, pretty obvious to be skeptical of copyright law more generally (Ayn Rand would disagree) and therefore I welcome any precedent that weakens it.
And your first sentence is not remotely true--or rather, it is quite conceptually confused. Whose "confusion" are you talking about? Not mine, generally. There are of course disagreements about which side is right under the law, but often those disagreements are a result of bad faith--take just about every case Trump has ever appealed up to the SCOTUS. And many of the decisions made by the current crop of right wing ideologues on the Court are made in bad faith, especially Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, in that order of corruption. Many of the "disagreements" are based on bogus "textualism" and "originalism" frameworks that are applied completely ad hoc and hypocritically and were invented by conservatives solely in order to provide them with a basis for making rulings based on their ideology (the historical record is quite clear on this).
Anyway, the point was that I decide based on my view of the law, not who the parties are. Since you seem to completely miss the point, have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle, I won't comment further.
That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any other item.
People barely remember the studio getting hacked and releasing a film
Maybe, just maybe assume the best in people instead of jumping to the worst interpretations you can.
I don’t think this case or anything else has been affected by AI training on copyrighted material, if it is deemed infringing.
They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.
The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-tosses-authors-ai-tr...
Anthropic ($1.5B+ Settlement): In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit over using roughly 500,000 copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" to train their Claude LLMs.
> In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit over using roughly 500,000 copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" to train their Claude LLMs.
Yes, but not because they were training LLMs with it. The judge in the case found specifically that training the LLMs on the copyrighted material was not copyright infringement; the only copyright infringement Anthropic had committed was acquiring the material itself. In other words, if they had legally bought all of the books they used, they would have been able to train their LLMs on them with no recourse from rights holders.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
How does this work in Civil Law jurisdictions? Do you get the opposite of precedent, similar cases having different outcomes until the legislature resolves it?
(it is something of a problem for the US that most of its really big important freedoms come from courts against more repressive legislatures, though)
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.
I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"
Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)
The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.
I'm not a fan of Disney at all, just pointing out what i belive might be the flaw in the argument.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.
In the course of that discussion we definitely had some “what is an API” questions.
I don't have to buy shit from Sony if I don't want to, and you can't make me.
They definitely lost more on potential hardware sales the past few decades than I would have spent on content... even if it's not enough for them to notice.
By the involved professionals laws are commonly understood as norms, i.e. what is established through judgement in court when the instructions from the sovereign (and sometimes sources like common sense) are interpreted and applied to so called facts presented to the court during proceedings.
In this sense, what the politicians have their minions type down into some document isn't actually the law. Common law systems give judges more leeway in how to frame and interpret the sources of law than e.g. the swedish system, where politicians apply a process that produces a series of documents that explain and teleologically ground the text that parliament then votes on. This gives the sovereign a larger degree of influence over the instructions that judges use when creating law through their judgements.
As I understand it, this leeway in common law systems is thought to balance the latent tyranny of the sovereign, and function similar to constitutional courts in that judges can take the view of the people into account to a larger extent.
Not that I'd trust US jurisdictions in anything but certain business law settings, but some clever people thought and deliberated a lot when designing what they have over there.
> The law is an objective concept
I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.
> so clear that there can be no confusion
I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.
> and even apparent disagreement with your objective perception is really just people lying.
I didn't say that or anything like it, said nothing about having "objective perception", and said nothing about disagreement with this nonexistent thing, and said nothing about anyone lying.
I made no claim to objectivity, said nothing about clarity of law, or anything else that you're dwelling on here, only that I make decisions based on my own understanding--my phrase was "I think". And yes, you did miss or ignore my point and continue to ignore it while inventing supposed points of mine that have nothing to do with me (further instances of "have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle"). My only point was that who I side with isn't based on what I think of the parties involved.
And what point of yours am I disagreeing with? You said
> A case only reaches the Supreme Court if there is confusion over who is right under the law.
This is factually false, as I and others pointed out. This is all I disagreed with. It's also not relevant to what I had written ... I'll stipulate it to be true if that helps. It's certainly true if "only" is replaced with "sometimes". As I noted, there is typically disagreement about who is right under the law, but "confusion" need not be present. Sometimes SCOTUS--especially this SCOTUS--invites cases from parties they are ideologically aligned with just so they can reinterpret the law to agree with their preferences. Of course, the other party normally disagrees, but even that doesn't always hold, especially with this administration, which is happy to reverse cases brought by their predecessors.
> The Supreme Court decision itself is not a definitive guide to which side is right under the law, as they’ve overturned themselves multiple times.
I agree with the basic point (while not technically accurate ... due to Marbury v Madison, the law is what the SCOTUS says it is), but it's not relevant to anything I said.
> So how do you decide which party to side with?
As I told you: based on what I think. Can I be wrong about the law? Of course. But again, my fallibility and the court's fallibility and whether my thinking aligns with the thinking of the court etc. ad nauseam is not what I was talking about ... what I was talking about was considering the law rather than who the parties were. That's it; that's all. And I made this crystal clear. Whoever it is you think you're disagreeing with, it's not me. You want to have an argument about whether one can make objective decisions about the law, but I never claimed any such ability. All I said is that I side with who ==> I <== think (a fallible process, certainly) is right under the law, NOT WHAT I THINK OF THE PARTIES--not which party I think is more evil, which was the conversation I responded to. That was it---a point about my own behavior. That's all.
JFC ... over and out forever. (If I accidentally see this thread again I shall avert my eyes.)
stealing bread to feed the birds vs stealing bread to feed your mom -- both are still stealing
Stealing bread doesnt matter because stealing physical things deprives the owner of their thing. IP infringement isn’t theft in the legal or moral aspect.
Society would work a LOT better if there were a lot more rent-seeking against extremely wealthy people and companies.
the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.
If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?
The owner deserves to make as much money from their product as they can, but they should only be able to exclusively profit from that work in any form for 10 years. That's entirely fair.
Copyright isn't the natural order of things. It's an extraordinary restriction on our freedoms. If I hear a song, there's no kind of natural law making it wrong for me to sing it while out in public the next day. There's nothing morally wrong with that either. It's a massive imposition for the government to tell a free person that they can't share certain stories with others.
For almost all of human history copyright did not exist. The stories that were told, and which became foundational to all stories being told today, were not protected by copyright. People who heard those stories just retold the ones they liked again and again making whatever changes they felt like making and the most popular versions of those stories spread and gained a foothold on the culture. That is the natural order.
The reason copyright law was created was not so that people can profit for as long as possible by restricting everyone else's ability to retell stories or sing the songs they've heard. It was created to promote the creation of new creative works. That aim can be easily accomplished in a single decade.
Locking up vast amounts of our culture behind copyright for ~100 years or more is what sounds like theft to me. Not only are copyright terms of that length excessive, but they are so prohibitively excessive that they actually hinder the creation of new creative works as well as the ability for people to profit from those newly created works.
For example, consider the problems encountered trying to make and sell Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_The_Blues). The artist behind that project went to extreme efforts to put her work out into the universe. It's easy to see how many others in her situation would have been forced to give up or could become disheartened enough to abandon the project after realizing that there could be no monetary profit in it.
When a work enters the public domain that doesn't even mean that the original author or previous owner of a copyright can't continue to make profit on that work. It just means that other people can build off of that work and/or can publish/sell/distribute that work to others. That's perfectly fair too. I've personally paid for works that were in the public domain on multiple occasions.
That's not correct and the law is clear on this respect. No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song. However, the moment you start selling tickets to the presentation, that's something entirely different.
You are literally leveraging the fact that someone put that song on the map. You didn't create it. You didn't promote it. You didn't do anything, in fact, except try to profit from it.
Libertarians still believe in property rights. Property can be tangible or intangible.
The point can easily be made with a simple peek into history. No one that recorded anything intangible, like a song, was selling it to others for commercial use because they didn't understand that intangible they had just created had value, but the moment they did, morally, they felt it was wrong and sought the courts for redress. There are examples in history:
In fact, the oldest documented examples of creators pushing back against unauthorized copying predate any formal copyright laws by centuries anda few stretch back to over a millennium! [1] [2]
[1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/04/the-world%E2%80%9...
[2] https://course.oeru.org/oerdsc/copyright-and-licensing/copyr...
Why is this important ? Because the oppression you mention of freedom, in order to happen, must be codified by government. If you have this issue going so far back in time, when government hadn't codified anything, its a clear indication that the issue trascends code and goes to the heart of what is moral and inmoral.
This debate of whether you own an idea, trascended the codification of the idea in government "repressing your freedoms" . The fact of the matter is, we believe strongly in freedom, as long as it doesn't transgress the freedoms of others. This is key. In this case, the freedom to reap the rewards of your hard work should not be infringed by the work of another. You are not more important than someone else. This is a basic tenet of liberty
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
The tool used was control over distribution. If income was the point copyright law could just hand tax payer money over to anyone who created something. That'd guarantee income instead of the system we have which allows artists to invest in the creation of a work and still never make a dime on it. Ultimately though, I do see your point and I agree that making it possible to earn enough money to justify the creation, publishing, and distribution of a creative work was a large part of the intention along with the establishment of the public domain.
I probably should have phrased that as "The point of copyright isn't to protect income until the work is no longer highly profitable"
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it.
Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless.
For an individual author, copyright should basically be for their lifetime. If they sell it, the copyright should only last 5 years after that.
A company like disney should get copyrights for like 1 year.
But also the type of media matters. IMO, news outlets and journalists should get copyrights for 1 day max. Old news is almost worthless and it's in the public interest that news be generally accessible and recordable.
No, copyright is a direct infringement on free expression. We've just tolerated it because the trade off was worth it. Not worth it because people would get rich and that was import to us. Worth it because having a chance to make money on a creative work encourages the creation of more creative works and having more creative works was important to us.
I'm sure that there were many times in history when someone came up with a good story and got mad that somebody else told a version of that story that others liked better. Not only is the ability to share stories more important than that one guy's feelings, but the result is better stories for everybody. Once people starting selling their creative works and it became easier to copy them we agreed that it was important that people had an opportunity to make money off their efforts so we'd have more works and that's where we started limiting people's freedom. When those limits are reasonable, it's a good deal. A balance where briefly people wouldn't be able to copy someone's work so they had a chance to make money and then later everybody could do whatever they wanted with it.
Recently the media industry has bribed their way into making the restrictions increasingly unreasonable, but we still want people to be able to have a chance to make money on their work so we just need to readjust to something more like what copyright started out as and less like what it's become.
> No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song.
That's wrong. There are performance rights (see https://copyrightlately.com/glossary/public-performance/) and it just requires you to have a public "audience". This is an issue that cover bands (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rocking-without-regrets-truth...) and karaoke singers run into and the way it's handled is that the venues are typically licensed to allow it.
Performance rights were what kept restaurants from singing happy birthday to their customers or paying Warner/Chappell for the privilege until a lawsuit clarified that they didn't have the rights to the song in the first place. By that point they'd already collected 50,000,000 in license fees though because performance rights are real and enforceable.
Realistically, nobody is going to sue you for singing a copyrighted song in public around others, but they could and there's a decent chance you'd lose that legal battle. Similarly, many small businesses will have a radio on or a CD playing that their customers can hear. They can be sued for that as well. Enforcement in that setting is rare enough though that small players take their chances, but big companies with fat wallets are prime targets for lawsuits so they tend to have a licensed solution to avoid massive fines.
Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.
This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.
So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.