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When Elephants Dance
One Michael Fraase has written an excellent piece on the battle between the entertainment industry and everyone else titled "When Elephants Dance." Well worth reading, and bookmarking, and referring newbies to in order to get them up to speed in the digital content wars. His solution is right on, too, IMHO.
but they did it too. I was reading an article for my silent film class at lunch today, and it described a court case where for the first time filmmakers were forced to pay an author of a book for putting it on screen (apparently a film company had made an adaptation of 'Ben Hur' without crediting or paying the author of the book). This quote from the article struck me: "There was no copyright law to protect authors and I could, and did, infringe on everything", that was Gene Gauntier, who wrote the unauthorized adaptation of Ben Hur. talk about the pot calling the kettle black in this whole distribution-of-content mess. as soon as the technology shows up, people will infringe on copyrights. it happened in 1912, and it'll happen now.
OK, but the article starts off "when elephants dance, get out of the way". That's an amusing phrase, but is it supposed to mean anything for us?
"Look out the elephants are dancing, hide behind the trees and see who comes out the winner!"
This is advocating the wrong solution, IMO. The real saying should be "when two elephants fight, and the outcome is important to you, get your ass in there and start pounding on the enemy elephant!"
Probibiting corporations from owning a copyright is interesting. I don't know if it's practical, but it is interesting.
Corporations may be legal entities, but they are not human beings. Neither are they citizens of any nation. A single one paragraph bill stating that copyrights will only be issued to citizens of the United States would do it. We would still have to recognize the Berne convention, and honor copyrights granted to corporations from other nations, but we don't have to perpetuate this myth that corporations are people.
Corporations do not create works. Their employees do. Give the copyright to the employee that created the work. As part of the "standard" employee agreement, a work created by an employee on company time would be automatically licensed to the company free of charge for any use, but copyright still belongs to the employee.
At the minimum, there is a seed for thought here.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the copyright period as 14 years, with the opportunity to renew for 14 years if the author was still alive. Since the people that passed this law were essentially the same ones that wrote the Constitution, with its limited time for copyrights, I think this law was in line with the framers original intent.
Like the article said, the 14 year period lasted for 100 years. Then it was extended 11 times in the the next 100 years! These extensions have absolutely nothing to do with the works' authors and inventors and everything to do with corporate subsidies.
The solutions he presents are exactly what needs to happen.