I was just thinking about this the other day. Many people who draw psychedelic art have brought forth from the mindsphere into external reality some very commonly seen visions. For example Alex Grey's Interbeing:



I've shown this to quite a few people who were surprised to see this in painting form because they had seen it a long time ago in their own minds!

It's all fair that they have the copyright over their own original work but for example I can't exactly copyright protect depictions of the mountains and oceans or stars or for that matter any natural feature.

Supposing a copyright case went to court where someone claimed infringement on one of these common visions, how do you think one could prove prior art? It's quite the bizarre dilemma isn't it? Use your imagination.

A thought or vision is not a "work", afaik. It's not a work until it's manifested into a physical form...so the answer is, imo, you can't.

Edit: And you can totally copyright depictions (paintings, photographs, sketches, etc.) of natural landscapes, how else do you explain artists doing just that?

That doesn't really affect the fact that these visions are themselves prior art. They are systematically reproducible although of course they come spontaneously and not everyone is guaranteed to see these visions. However it is clearly a product of a substance and the imprint of the brain; that is to say that some of these visions already 'exist' in the human brain waiting for a substance to bring them into the visual field. I hope you get what I am saying.

For example if two people have a dream and hear a beautiful piece of music (e.g. Devil's Trill Sonata) and both of them wake up and compose it, how could one prove they have any more right to that music than the other? There is technology in the works to decode neural signals and convert them into visuals so I expect at some point in the future we could perhaps record our senses. In such a case how would the courts treat a case like this?

Then, at that time, if you were to record a dream or thought or whatever, date it, copyright/publish it and someone were to present a work that was not substantially different, perhaps you would have a case. If however, you are just claiming, "Hey, I thought that/saw that/experienced that too/first," you have no claim. This is why patents/copyrights deal with tangible works and not abstract thoughts; you have to make the thought/vision/etc. manifest before you have anything even remotely resembling a claim, imo.

I get what you're claiming re: things implanted/present in the brain (whether it's "clearly the case" is debatable, as who actually knows how similar the visions are beyond the general forms, etc. and to what degree viewing the art affects people's memory/sense of what they saw/experienced), but (afaik) copyright doesn't deal with this. Who can prove that Harry Potter wasn't present somewhere in everyone's brain and J.K. Rawlings just happened to be the first person to pull it out? It doesn't matter as she was the first person to make it manifest, and therefore "wins" the copyright.

The truth is that copywrite is simply an infringement on the creative process in general, beacause all ideas build on each other. It's how things evolve. There really is no concept of an "original" idea. It all builds on each other. Such as musicians all of the time play some of the same tunes for different songs and it's not because one stole the idea from another, but because they both throught of it creatively subconsiously and independently from each other. Comedians do the same thing with jokes. Though sometimes it is true that someone who is uncreative steals an idea, many times that's not the case. The artists just reached similar conclusions independently of one another.

We all know this, just like Star Wars is essentially a hodge podge of old Western and Japanese motifs, it seems creative because it's harder to connect to the source material. But in this media satruated enviroment we are becoming more connected with what inspired what, and thus the concept of orginality is somewhat dimminised. The idea of claiming something is yours totally and people who come up with anything similar owe you for that is essentially a greedy ego trip. At least a lot of the things that have been perpetrated under copywrite infringement laws are. Most of it is rarely justified.

The truth is NO idea is every truly original. Just like Thomas Edison didn't come up with the light bulb (we've had light bulbs for years before that, he just came up with the first commecially viable one). Or such as Apple wanting to sue Droid for its smart phone (smart phones are the next evolution in societies communication technology), and if they win they could essentially monopolize the market. And as we learn from evolution, monocultures are a bad bad thing. Though all of that being said, due to the nature of our society sometimes you have to have a copywrite to be commercially viable. Though if we could tweak and expand these ideas both technologically and artistically we would have a more rapidly evolving society and creatively open society.

The idea that you can personally own an idea is nothing more than a glorified ego trip.

Agreed...and while I'm all in favor of a completely open-source society, the unfortunate reality is that it does not exist.

It is the specific image you have copyright to, not the idea behind the image. So 40 people could take a picture of the same mountain and they'd each own the rights to their own image. There are exceptions for 'fair use' such as reviews or news reporting. 'Sampling' seems to be a grey area the law is still trying to get a hold on.

Also in the US at least you automatically have copyright on an image for 75 years as soon as it is created. Doing things like registering the copyright or putting the (c) symbol on there may help you if you try to defend the image later but are not needed to have the copyright. In truth, for most purposes it is too expensive for an individual to ever really defend the copyright anyways.

The wikipedia page on this is pretty good.

I agreed with most of what you said, just thought I'd call you on this one point. Copyright doesn't only deal with tangible works. I have a terabyte hard drive full of intangible ones and zeros that came through my phone line which definitely breach many copyrights.

Tbh I think copyright is a delusional claim. You can own (in some sense) a physical object, but to claim ownership of an idea or an intangible product is nonsense. I'm not entirely opposed to having some legislation in place to help people make money from their ideas, but I think those people should accept that in reality once they take the idea from their head and set it free into the world they give up any ownership of it.

As the system stands just now we have situations like this where someone successfully argues in court that they own the concept of taking a photo of a red london bus on a black and white background. I think this contradicts what the previous poster said about anyone being able to take a photo and own the rights to their photo but not own the rights to the subject of the photo.

Ok...sure if you want to split hairs you're more than entitled to, but you know what I mean. Music ain't tangible but it sure is copyright protected. If we remove "tangible" and replace it with...oh...I dunno..."discrete" (or something else which creates a dichotomy between a "work" and an abstraction, or the idea behind it) ...would that be more accurate?

I'm not sure there is a line between a work and an abstraction. Melodies are copyrighted... surely that is a copyrighted abstract concept? The notes exist independently of the songwriter, yet they claim ownership over a certain pattern of notes, and what if two people came up with the same melody independently (has of course happened) and one copyrights it, can they then legitimately suppress the other person from using something that they both happened to create?

I wasn't trying to split hairs btw, and if you can think of a word that accurately describes what copyright should be allowed to cover, or what it does cover, then I'd like to hear it because I haven't managed to figure it out either I don't think discrete seems right either, but it's closer than tangible.

I agree...although I think that a melody could be defined as discrete arrangement of notes/rests/timings.

I didn't mean anything by splitting hairs...again I used inaccurate terminology...I merely meant that I got the sense you knew what I was driving at yet (correctly) pointed out that my terminology needed some work.