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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.
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."
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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.
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).
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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.
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.