Slashdot Mirror
The Mouse That Ate the Public Domain
An anonymous submitter writes: "Antitrust lawyer Chris Sprigman has written a thoughtful column In Findlaw's Writ on the issues behind the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act and the legal challenge (Eldred v. Ashcroft) to that law. I only spotted one mistake. Sprigman states that Disney's 1967 movie The Jungle Book came out a year after Kipling's copyright expired, but I can't see how, under the terms of the 1909 copyright law, an 1894 book could have had its U.S. copyright expire much later than 1950. Except for that one glitch, (if that's what it is) it's a fine column. There's no explicit mention of computer software except in the mention of the title of a 1970 article by Stephen Breyer, but everything he says about the usefulness of the public domain in literature applies with a vengeance to source code. And his is discussion of the U.S. Constitution's framers reminds us (though Sprigman doesn't develop this point extensively, and might not himself put it in as blunt terms as I'm about to) that there's even a deeper reason than utility to cherish the public domain: it is our right."
If you follow the link
Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison regarding the drafting of the Copyright Clause
and then read the mailing list message, there is a beauty in there by Madison. He thought that "monopolies" would be OK, for a limited time, and that there was little probability of abuse because of the democratic system being created in the US.
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greates nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
Follow the link ! The Madison and Jefferson writings are just great. It's the "inifinitely less danger" part which kills me. It's obvious our current payola system of government would be abhorrent to the founders.
Absolute statements are never true
you really have no reason to write more songs, other than you might enjoy it.
I'd say for the vast majority of songwriters/performers that they enjoy writing songs is the primary motivator, money is secondary.
Stephen King is a rich man several times over, but he still churns out books. I recall reading somewhere that Paul McCartney makes something like $10K a day on royalties, but he still writes music and tours occasionally. The guys in R.E.M. aren't hurting for money either, but they're still recording. Granted, the pace may have slowed somewhat -- but I don't think that in itself is a bad thing.
Hell, they paid Maria Carey something like $7 Million to dump her from her label and she's trying to get a new deal. (Note: I have no idea if she actually writes her own music, but work with me here...) From my perspective, it's a shame if she does record again, but the point is that money must not be her primary motivator to do music (if you can call it that...).
OTOH, the guys in XTC have never had a big hit, but they keep making records. Robyn Hitchcock isn't burning up the charts, but he still records and tours. Many people would probably have looked for "real" jobs after they'd realized that they weren't going to get rich, but writing music is obviously what they want to do. In the case of XTC, they'd probably have made a few more albums if they hadn't had money/label problems. So, cutting off the money supply isn't the answer here.
Expiring copyrights prior to the life of the artist is, IMHO, unfair. Even when you're talking about code -- if a person or company owns the code, they should choose what to do with it. Even if what they choose to do is selfish, it's their right.
Something else to consider, given the mentality of most record labels -- if copyrights expired after a shorter period, how many labels would just sit on material waiting for the rights to expire before exploiting it so they didn't have to share any royalties? I'd almost guarantee it'd become a common practice. Songwriters would be getting just above minimum wage while the labels cash in a few years later.
Not according to the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't talk about IP. It talks about copyright for the creator. The P part of IP is just one of those "well surely that's what they must have meant" things. (Response: Maybe and maybe not. And don't call me 'surely'.)
I am seriously thinking of putting my IP where my mouth is: adding a line to each source file I create, right below the copyright and the GPL blurb: "In ten years this work will automatically revert to the public domain. That is, if the latest copyright date listed above is from at least ten years ago, the copyright has been abandoned." Does anyone have a better way to express this?
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
It's all about the old saying "you can't take it with you" except everyone now is trying their damnedest anyway.
Artists and innovators produced art and innovation prior to copyright and patent law, and they would continue to do so if it was abolish. In fact, it would drastically increase quality in all likelyhood, as pop garbage would stop.
The US needs to take a hint from Parliment, who had this figured out centuries ago. Ownership lasts for existing life + 20 years, and stops, no extension.
An awful lot of America's woes can be blamed squarely on the puritans (bloody conservatives) who came up with the rediculous idea that anything you earn or own in your lifetime belongs to you to do with as you choose until the end of time, utter complete hogwash. Now as a direct decendant of their idiocy we have the travesty of modern IP, and whiny brats squaling about death taxes and other limitations on ownership.
Under the '09 Act (as it existed upon its supercession by the '76 Act on 1/1/78) the term of copyright was 28 years plus a renewal term of 28 years. Add 'em together, you get 56. Add 56 to 1894 you get ..... 1950!
All laws will be imperfect laws, however the laws dealing with theft, fraud, murder, the stock market, etc. are laws that are usually created by people who have at least some knowledge of the things involved and the implications of the laws they are creating.
By and large, people are scared of technology and uneducated about it. I would prefer to see no laws governing techology than see laws created by those who do not understand the technology they are trying to control. We've already seen the results of that with the DMCA where technologically saavy people with a vendetta have been able to pass a law governing technology because the people that allowed the law to pass most likely did not understand that they were permitting a law that more or less goes against Fair Use which has been part of this country forever.
It's almost as though the lawmakers and courts of this country are "Under the age of consent" with regards to technology. They do not have enough real-life experience to understand the implications of their actions.
-Sara
Kipling's copyright expired in 1956.
In the United States only. It didn't expire until 1966 (life + 30) in a few other major markets.
Disney released their version in 1967.
Worldwide.
The real reason for DVD region coding: a publisher may not be able to secure the worldwide rights for a particular copyright.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I continually find myself at a loss as to why so many consider software as something to be covered under Copyright Law. Unless I am mistaken, and I rarely am, Programming Code is nothing more than the ordering of electronic gates through a high-level intermediary, i.e., a text document which is then 'compiled' into the necessary arrangement to form a machine that acts on electrons.
You can copyright all the blueprints you want, but that doesn't give people the legal right to market your 'invention', which is the arrangement of electronic gates found in the CPU, regardless if they obtain or duplicate your blueprints.
Computer Code clearly falls under the auspices of Patent Law, and nothing further. It is a purely mechanical system, and the code is ultimately just shorthand to arrive at the desired effect. In other words, a diagram. Just as a lawnmower or lightbulb would require for a patent. That it is inconvenient to show a physical diagram of software is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant to copyright computer code.
That this simple fact continues to elude even the most (self-styled) brightest minds of our age boggles the mind. Individuals and Companies have been getting away with 'copyrighting' their mechanical inventions for far too long now, and I say it is high time that some sense is brought to the table.
Why not? He's already running your country, right? You silly americans should probably just overthrow your government, and be done with it. I'm kidding, of course. At the current rate of decay of your rights, you still have more than ten good years of "freedom".
Honestly, it scares me to know that if US citizens can't protect their rights now, then the civilized world doesn't stand a chance when our turn comes. US laws have a rather insidious way of becoming global. Can you spell embargo?
FWIW, IMO, copyright is a good thing. There are only two really major problems I see:
- 20 years *total* is more than enough. None of this lifetime+time until december 31+320 years+6 full moons crap. 20 years. If you haven't made your money by then, I don't think another century is going to help.
- Copyright is not a right that should be given to a non-person. Sure, corporations should be able to negotiate the right to use copyrighted material, but not to own it. Just how does that lifetime part work anyways with an owner that doesn't technically die?
Heh. Well, *technically* it's legal to download and burn music here in Canada, so I'm going to go enjoy my rights while I still live in a free country.I was going to point out the huge flaw in your first sentence, but you've very kindly done it for me.
I'm sorry, but you fail the clue check. The vast majority of people involved in song creation are now doing work-for-hire. The concept of an "artist" is the exception, not the rule. The labels already own the right to the song. Any royalties that they choose to pay to the people involved (to the creators of the lyrics or music, or to the meat puppet miming to them, for example) are a purely contractual matter. When the rights expire, it's the label that loses out, because they can't stop other labels or you or me copying or creating derivative works without restriction.
The same applies even in the unusual case of an artist retaining rights and licensing them to a label. If the label chooses not to exercise their right to copy and distribute the work, they lose out as well when the creator's rights expire, because then their license become worthless.
What you really illusatrate is how badly understood copyright laws are, and that what we need more than anything else is a single, coherent way of dealing with copyright and intellectual property. "Author's life plus some" is both relatively recent, and already obsolete!
Consider that the majority of content that you and I experience on a day to day basis is done as work for hire. Songs, TV, film, some reference books; they are created by individuals, but the rights are owned by corporations. In this case, the expiry of the rights is based not on the creator's life, but on a fixed term. (And considering that that terms keeps getting extended on demand, I mean "fixed" largely in the sense of fraudulent).
There's also a misconception that individual rights can only be licensed and not sold. Guess again. Once created, rights can be sold lock, stock and barrrel. No, this doesn't mean that you pretend that OmniMegaHyperCorp created the work or caused it to be created, you just sign a contract that says you give them all rights in perpetuity and without restriction, and (as if by magic) it happens. It's not part of copyright law, it's contract law, but it's de facto and supported by case law.
But in this case, how long should the rights last? Lifetime of the creator? Fixed term? If the individual signs them over after fifty years, does that reset the clock on the fixed term ownership by the corporation? Or what if the creator dies two minutes after signing them over? Does that start the "death plus some" expiry? What if one individual sells rights to another individual? Or what if an individual doing work-for-hire for a corporation buys the rights to the work that they created some time after the fact? What if they then sell those rights back again? Most of these questions have yet to be answered by case law, because we keep changing and extending terms so often that most work is essentially worthless and not fighting over before the issue comes up. Where there's an exception, like early Disney work, Congress is happy to extend the duration of their copyright to avoid the issue.
The whole issue of expiry is a big kludgy minefield. The only solution that makes any kind of sense is the original solution before we confused it by tying it to a lifetime: a fixed term associated with the creation of the work. It doesn't matter who caused the work to be created, or owns the rights, or how often the rights are bought or sold. The clock starts ticking the instant the work is created, and the bell rings after a fixed period, regardless of where the rights are in the pass-the-parcel world of modern IP.
That's the way it used to work, and it was a damn shame that we "fixed" it, because it wasn't broke.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wish I could remember who.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Chris Sprigman writes : "Authors in ancient times, as well as monks and scholars in the middle ages, wrote and were paid for their writings without copyright protection. Taken as a whole . . . the evidence now available suggests that, although we should hesitate to abolish copyright protection, we should equally hesitate to extend or strengthen it."
It should be noted that in ancient times and in the middle ages literacy was a rare skill. I'd hazard a guess that writers were paid for their ability to write rather than the content of what they wrote.
I doubt that this specific argument about the success of writers in ancient times can be applied in any meaningful way to today's literate society.
What sickens me is how hypocritical some posters seem to be regarding EULAs and Copyrights on slashdot.
If you want copyright laws to be only 5 years, well, guess what, Linux, Apache, etc., are all in the public domain, which means that people can freely use them WITHOUT the use of the GPL and other free-mod licenses.
When it's in public domain, no one can own it, which means no one can impose licenses to use the copyrighted material.
Don't forget, Copyright law protects open source projects from abuse and misuse as well. It's not an evil, and making it as short as possible would allow big corps. to win with software as well.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield