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Taiwan Rejects US Copyright Extension Demands
An anonymous reader writes "Taiwan has rejected the US's demand to extend copyrights from 50 years to 70 years. Here's the news article on the Mercury News."
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I'm with the protesting students. Haven't the heirs of these long since dead artists recieved enough royalties from thier work? I am all for *certain* people getting paid for what they create, but the patent holders need to take some cues from Linus Trovolds and learn how to sustain on the satisfaction of millions gleaning pure joy from your creation. Not Money.
Well it is well with in their rights to do so. What is America going to do raise the tariffs? Better yet what is Disney going to do? Not a damn thing. They can try to not sell movies anymore but then again where do you think a good portion of the bootlegs come from? Beside living overseas for a while I have noticed that American media "takes" allot of idea from foreign TV and adds them into theirs and visa-versa.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Perhaps they'll serve as inspiration to other countries.
There are a whole lot places that lose out on this - places that don't have giant entertainment industries with 100-year back catalogs to recycle endlessly.
Can anyone explain further how the harmonization treaties work, and whether everyone is for some reason actually bound to follow the US' lead?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Washington, Taiwan's main trading partner and arms supplier, has said the island's failure to protect intellectual property rights is causing hundreds of million dollars damage annually to U.S. recorded music, software and motion picture industries.
But pirating music and software is what makes Bill Gates and Brittany Spears "Super-Stars Number One !!!! {:>" in those countries minds.
Then why are you posting here???????
The point is that an issue that is undergoing some debate domesticly is being debated abroad as well. The copy protection in games/music cds/dvds/etc. isn't there as much for script kiddies who want to burn copies for their freinds as it is for the people in "shitty little third world aisian countrys" who are more likely to buy a bootleg copy than a real one.
It's people who think that America is the only place that matters who are make the rest of the world hate us. If you are too stupid to realize that everything you do is affected by the rest of the world, you are too stupid to post on slashdot.
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
Regarding the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, aka the "Steamboat Willie Preservation Act" and Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, there's a great article in this month's Wired magazine that gives a little bit of depth and insight on what the timely extension of copyright law means to the artistic world.
The big problem, as Lessig sees it, is that continual extensions of copyright prevent anything new from entering the public domain. This is most ironic, notes Lessig, since Disney dredged the public domain for its most lucrative properties... Because of the Bono Act, Lessig asserts, "no one can do to Disney as Disney did to the Brothers Grimm."
# Users are merely variables. I prefer to comment them out.
Its bad enough Taiwan's copyright duration was increased so much...10 years does seem a little short, but 50 seems too much, its still better than 70 or 99 though. It's good to see a country not give in to what was most likely pressure from the media.
Taiwan's decision is right for all the wrong reasons. They are just going to use that as a bargining chip for more arms or something, I guarantee it.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Disney's fortune has been made utilizing public domain works. Their entire movie list is made up from the works of the Grimm brothers (Grimms Fairy Tales is public domain). Now that they are being required to add pack to the public domain they are pushing to extend the time (which they do everytime the expiration period comes up).
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Life plus X years is very bad law. Copyright should be the same period for everyone.
..."? The owner "of record"is a person not a corporation. Ever wonder how old that person is?
:)
So if you come up with the "next Mickey Mouse", just kill yourself before the copyright expires
Besides, what happens to the whole life plus X years argument when people stop dying? It seems an extreme example, but what if the medical nanotech Pollannas are right?
Certainly life expectancies have increased in the past 200 odd years. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that considered 19 years an upper limit based on the actuarial(sp?) data available at the time. His concern was for limiting the freedom of the living due to the acts of the dead. (like maybe someone with a genetic melanin deficincy wanting to perform Porgy and Bess)
Have you ever bothered to watch all the credits on a movie and then at the very nd see the notice that says "for Bourne Convntion purposes, the copyright owner of this work is
If copyright were for a uniform period of time it would be much easier to handle. Currently, everything written by Stephn King will fall into the public domain in 2070 (he did die last year didn't he?
But if copyright were for a uniform 20 years or so, we would already have his earlier (and arguably better) works already in the public domain. We also would not have silly legal arguments over the allowable name for an Austin Powers movie (as the original Bond novels would all be in the public domain)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
In truth, I don't think Taiwan needs to worry too much about either China or the U.S. China has to be on its best behavior until the Olympics in Beijing, and you can bet that beating up on a smaller democratic and practically sovereign state would be frowned upon by the international community and probably get the Olympics yanked. And the U.S. is extremely dependent on Taiwan's high-tech manufacturing industries. This fact was made obvious a few years back, when a major earthquake damaged Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. RAM prices skyrocketed for about a year, until Taiwan got their semiconductor production back up to speed. So if for no reason other than cheap motherboards and RAM, pray for the safety of Taiwan.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Outside the Board of Foreign Trade where the negotiation was held, dozens of college students protested against the U.S. demand, shouting ``Knowledge can't be monopolised.''
This excerpt of a previous post of mine explains some of the reasons why Chinese peoples (in China and Taiwan) have resisted or have not accepted the idea of intellectual property. I believe this quote is the most important:
"Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s."
Read about more of those reasons here.
are being pirated in Taiwan anyway...?
-dameron
No need to extend copyright for items that can be covered by trademark law. Mickey Mouse and Superman are trademarked characters, and can be protected, without having to lock up earlier works created using their characters. 35 years is a bit short - I'd argue we should go back to having periodic renewals for an additional 15 years, up to a period of 65 years.
Literature from the period 1908 and 1928 will now be under the complete control of their owners, which are mostly major corporations. A work of art is now deprived from the view of the public, and will in many cases be unavailable completely.
Copyright libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the British Library, already have problems with storage. Even then they don't hold works such as films, TV, sound recordings, computer programs, etc. Copyright holders often do not take good care of works they are not activly issuing.
...the world give in to all of the US's increasingly insane demands?
After all, they didn't vote for the US president or congress.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I mean, if you can't make enough profits of your work in fucking 20 years...
FRA: STFU GTFO
So? Harmonize already... Taiwan is 50 years after the death of the author, Australia is 50 years after the death of the author. What part of "Don't think originally, and adopt everyone else's laws" doesn't the U.S. understand? I guess it only works with European laws...
I would say that this was an example of "Some pigs being more equal than others", but of course, since the Sonny Bono extension, "Animal Farm" is back to being copywritten...
-- Terry
Sorry to hear you died today. Maybe your heirs can profit from this fine piece of literature
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
... than is readily apparent. Some stuff, like Windows 3.1, will be completely useless in another 60 or so years. Do you think anyone will even be able to find the source code then?
I'm not even sure the law is such that you are encouraged to release computer program source code-- but wouldn't that be something? But a kind-of long copyright term on other stuff, like.. great works of society (a tiny percentage of books, etc) deserve a longer copyright term. But what about The A-Team. The copyright on the A-Team should have long since expired, the same as Windows 3.1. www.archive.org contains a lot of early films.. but they complain that movie studios destroy the originals when a movie is about to expire... effectively hampering its descent into public domain. Extend this into a DRM enabled future, where it is unlikely that many people will have an "unauthorized" work, and media companies can revoke all DRM liceses just before something expires and then (digitally) destroy the only copy. This is highly irritating, wouldn't you say? But the examples here suggest that yet more complex laws need to exist to deal with (a) copyrighted works that suck need not be copyrighted long (b) two-part copyrighted things (i.e. programs and program source code (c) legal recourse for companies that knowingly inhibit works entering the public domain.