> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.
So is this really meant as some kind of backdoor activist legal hack (e.g. use this copyright case to ultimately change the environmental policy of some major countries)? It smells a little like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... [1].
[1] Also the coda of that monkey case is a pretty good example of the value of copyright outside the MPAA/RIAA/Reed Elsevier/etc. focus pushed by anti-IP activists.
> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.
That sounds unlikely. Just because one country does something silly does not mean other countries have to follow suit.
Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree.
Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
> Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons.
Good thing they got that covered, then. As per the article:
> In a historic ruling, the legal personhood of the Los Cedros biological reserve was recognised by Ecuador’s constitutional court in 2021, when it determined to cancel mining permits in the reserve.
> Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
People can be corrupted and bought. Someone who acts on behalf of another can betray the latter for personal gain. See for example the stories of Britney Spears and Brain Wilson.
On the other hand, if the entity owns itself, you can’t legally harm it without consent, which can’t be given. See also The Tree That Owns Itself.
> On the other hand, if the entity owns itself, you can’t legally harm it without consent, which can’t be given.
By the same token, the forest can't exactly start a lawsuit either (unless someone acts on its behalf, in which case we are back at the same person).
Just because they declared it a legal person, doesn't mean it actually is, in terms of how that phrase is normally used. At the very least a legal person normally can enter into contracts, buy and dispose of property. Like you said, the forest can't consent, and being able to consent is what it means to be a person.
On the contrary: it means that incapacitated individuals must have legal representation. A forest is like an incapacitated individual: you can assign a legal representative to it (which was exactly what was suggested upthread) but you can't expect it to actually take legal matters into itself.
it's not just what to do with their rights, but the creative effort to create a work that deserves copyright. Trees don't make choices and engage in that type of creativity, nor does the forest floor or canopy.
> Trees don't make choices and engage in that type of creativity, nor does the forest floor or canopy.
From a philosophical point of view, I'd argue that trees and life have much more of the ability to make choices and even express creativity than inanimate objects like a rock or even a computer.
IIRC in some courts recently, it was decided that the output of LLMs cannot be copyrighted.
It will be interesting to see how this legal case goes.
All of the animals, the flora and the rocks should be legal persons. The only entities that should not be legal entities are the humans (at least humans that I don't know personally) since they cause all of the problems.
This reminds me of the Monkey Selfie[1] dispute. A photographer set up a camera in a forest and a monkey came by and activated it and took a picture. The resulting picture became famous and PETA tied up the photographer in court for years trying to get the copyright assigned to the monkey. They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.
> They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.
Afaik, neither ended up owning the copyright (in usa, britian is more complex). The monkey doesn't own it, but neither does the photographer dude.
An interesting part of the case is it seems like PETA were mostly motivated by their own selfish interests to make money. Which is one of the big problems with nature legal personhood - at some point a human has to make decisions for the natural entity, and interests might be misaligned.
Would subways, oceans, individual birds and roadways also be eligible for this kind of authorship as well when they are included in songs or sounds-tracks?
I don't see how this would succeed without opening a can of worms that would muddy a whole lot of things.
the reserve attained legal personhood in 2021, so it isn't exactly in the same category as any of those things. or at least it wouldn't be quite that simple to assign non human things authorship.
This reminds me of Cyrus the Great being so angry at a river that drowned one of his horse that he spent a summer having his army carve it up into 360 channels.
There's two factors to copyright: economic rights and moral rights. Economic rights are concerned with the author's ability to protect personal monetary gain from the use of their work. Moral rights are concerned with the author's ability to gain reputation via acknowledgement, and prevent loss of reputation via improper framing/usage of the work. Generally, the idea of all this is to allow authors to maximize personal gain and minimize personal loss. IMO, the fundamental benefit to society of this framework is that it encourages people to voluntarily make decisions to produce creative works that will be a net benefit -- without these protections, people would not produce as much creative work because there would be less incentive to direct their effort in that direction.
From that perspective, it doesn't really make much sense for an entity other than a human or group of humans to hold copyright of a work. A non-human entity doesn't have the capacity to choose where to direct their efforts based on future economic/reputation gain, so copyright or lack thereof will not affect their contributions to creative works.
So whether this is good or bad depends on the specifics of how copyright works in the relevant jurisdiction. If a human author has the ability to unilaterally choose whether any non-human entity will hold copyright of a work, or if a human has the ability to unilaterally capture all gain resulting from the work, then I see this as generally good -- it has no major negatives, and allows humans to recognize the important of non-human entities.
However, if a non-human entity automatically holds joint copyright, and a human coauthor cannot make unilateral decisions about the work, then this could be a bad thing. Human would tend to choose to avoid involving a non-human entity in the creation of a work, since they would get less incentive from doing so. That to me feels like the exact situation that that copyright was invented to avoid.
> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.
So is this really meant as some kind of backdoor activist legal hack (e.g. use this copyright case to ultimately change the environmental policy of some major countries)? It smells a little like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... [1].
[1] Also the coda of that monkey case is a pretty good example of the value of copyright outside the MPAA/RIAA/Reed Elsevier/etc. focus pushed by anti-IP activists.
> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.
That sounds unlikely. Just because one country does something silly does not mean other countries have to follow suit.
That is why we have WIPO.
Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree.
Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
> Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons.
Good thing they got that covered, then. As per the article:
> In a historic ruling, the legal personhood of the Los Cedros biological reserve was recognised by Ecuador’s constitutional court in 2021, when it determined to cancel mining permits in the reserve.
> Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.
People can be corrupted and bought. Someone who acts on behalf of another can betray the latter for personal gain. See for example the stories of Britney Spears and Brain Wilson.
On the other hand, if the entity owns itself, you can’t legally harm it without consent, which can’t be given. See also The Tree That Owns Itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
> On the other hand, if the entity owns itself, you can’t legally harm it without consent, which can’t be given.
By the same token, the forest can't exactly start a lawsuit either (unless someone acts on its behalf, in which case we are back at the same person).
Just because they declared it a legal person, doesn't mean it actually is, in terms of how that phrase is normally used. At the very least a legal person normally can enter into contracts, buy and dispose of property. Like you said, the forest can't consent, and being able to consent is what it means to be a person.
The implication of what you're saying is that medically incapacitated individuals can't have legal representation.
On the contrary: it means that incapacitated individuals must have legal representation. A forest is like an incapacitated individual: you can assign a legal representative to it (which was exactly what was suggested upthread) but you can't expect it to actually take legal matters into itself.
We are in complete agreement.
Corporations (which are legal persons) also cannot autonomously do any of those things.
They only act through the stewardship of natural persons who serve in their interest.
You could do the same for a forest by electing some trustees or whatever.
it's not just what to do with their rights, but the creative effort to create a work that deserves copyright. Trees don't make choices and engage in that type of creativity, nor does the forest floor or canopy.
> Trees don't make choices and engage in that type of creativity, nor does the forest floor or canopy.
From a philosophical point of view, I'd argue that trees and life have much more of the ability to make choices and even express creativity than inanimate objects like a rock or even a computer.
IIRC in some courts recently, it was decided that the output of LLMs cannot be copyrighted.
It will be interesting to see how this legal case goes.
Perhaps forests should be legal persons?
And this one is, as per the article.
All of the animals, the flora and the rocks should be legal persons. The only entities that should not be legal entities are the humans (at least humans that I don't know personally) since they cause all of the problems.
This reminds me of the Monkey Selfie[1] dispute. A photographer set up a camera in a forest and a monkey came by and activated it and took a picture. The resulting picture became famous and PETA tied up the photographer in court for years trying to get the copyright assigned to the monkey. They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
This case is notably different because here the human artists are the ones fighting for the forest’s copyright.
> They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.
Afaik, neither ended up owning the copyright (in usa, britian is more complex). The monkey doesn't own it, but neither does the photographer dude.
An interesting part of the case is it seems like PETA were mostly motivated by their own selfish interests to make money. Which is one of the big problems with nature legal personhood - at some point a human has to make decisions for the natural entity, and interests might be misaligned.
So... how long would the copyright be good for then? Life of the forest + 70 years?
Maybe it it was assigned to a single organism, but it's probably a work for hire.
Probably not everyone's cup of tea but it's not bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxRjncYGLHE
(Cosmo Sheldrake is one of the composers, so this seems to be an original upload of the song.)
Looks like it's blocked in Fiji https://views4you.com/tools/youtube-restrictions-checker/?ur...
Bugger!
Thanks, that's a handy website.
Would subways, oceans, individual birds and roadways also be eligible for this kind of authorship as well when they are included in songs or sounds-tracks?
I don't see how this would succeed without opening a can of worms that would muddy a whole lot of things.
the reserve attained legal personhood in 2021, so it isn't exactly in the same category as any of those things. or at least it wouldn't be quite that simple to assign non human things authorship.
Before you know it, the Big Bang will own everything.
Wonder if this is an attempt to create the groundwork for a legal precedent supporting "environmental personhood": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_personhood
This reminds me of Cyrus the Great being so angry at a river that drowned one of his horse that he spent a summer having his army carve it up into 360 channels.
Or, in more modern examples - EU Commissioner Von der Leyen lobbying to exterminate wolves in Europe after a wolf killed her family's pony [0][1][2]
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-takes-on-the-big-bad-...
[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-campaigning-ha...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/27/a-wolf-k...
There's two factors to copyright: economic rights and moral rights. Economic rights are concerned with the author's ability to protect personal monetary gain from the use of their work. Moral rights are concerned with the author's ability to gain reputation via acknowledgement, and prevent loss of reputation via improper framing/usage of the work. Generally, the idea of all this is to allow authors to maximize personal gain and minimize personal loss. IMO, the fundamental benefit to society of this framework is that it encourages people to voluntarily make decisions to produce creative works that will be a net benefit -- without these protections, people would not produce as much creative work because there would be less incentive to direct their effort in that direction.
From that perspective, it doesn't really make much sense for an entity other than a human or group of humans to hold copyright of a work. A non-human entity doesn't have the capacity to choose where to direct their efforts based on future economic/reputation gain, so copyright or lack thereof will not affect their contributions to creative works.
So whether this is good or bad depends on the specifics of how copyright works in the relevant jurisdiction. If a human author has the ability to unilaterally choose whether any non-human entity will hold copyright of a work, or if a human has the ability to unilaterally capture all gain resulting from the work, then I see this as generally good -- it has no major negatives, and allows humans to recognize the important of non-human entities.
However, if a non-human entity automatically holds joint copyright, and a human coauthor cannot make unilateral decisions about the work, then this could be a bad thing. Human would tend to choose to avoid involving a non-human entity in the creation of a work, since they would get less incentive from doing so. That to me feels like the exact situation that that copyright was invented to avoid.
I was really hoping this was about the iconic song "Ecuador" by Sash!
That would be 25 years too late, but still well deserved