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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!)
In 1995 or 1996 due to US pressure copyright protection was extended from 10 to 50 years.
Now the US wants 70 years.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
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
Absolutely not! It's an anonymously published work, which fully qualifies for copyright protection.
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.
What's that you say? The movie industry is enjoying record profits? How is this possible, when in addition to Taiwan's criminal 50-year copyright protection, Jack Valenti assures me that 50 TB of pirated movies in DivX flows through the Internet each day?
Right....
This seems like an odd thing to do. The US has been one of Taiwan's biggest supporter in their fight against the PRC.
Personally, if I were in their situation, I wouldn't want to piss off anyone in the US. Especially not people in large industries.
The legitimacy of the copyright extension still remains a question. But it's in their best interest to play along with whatever the US wants. They might tick some politician off (Senator Disney??), and then our carriers might not be in the waters between China and Taiwan the next time China decides to run "Routine Training Missions".
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.
It is lifetime PLUS 70 years... pretty silly, huh?
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)
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.
another country that's sticking to Life+50 (or, why you can download 1984 and The Great Gatsby from a legit server).
Way to go, Taiwan!
I think the way copyright works needs a major reform. Here's a few examples on how I think copyright could be reformed. (all numbers are just fictitious for the point of the argument and may not all work in conjunction).
* Standard copyright is 35 years. Everything falls into this.
* If something is still being produced. IE: Mickey Mouse, Superman comics, etc... by the original company/owner (Disney, DC Comics), copyrights for those works/characters can be extended up to 100 years.>BR> * There should be different copyrights for different mediums: litterature, movies, music would all have different lenghts of time for a copyright. Just a few ideas. I'm sure the lot of you have other ones that may be better than this.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Jack Valenti assures me that 50 TB of pirated movies in DivX flows through the Internet each day?
Well it didn't yesterday - I was out. How does Jack Valenti know what I'm doing anyway?! Have the RIAA been haxoring my box?!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'd like to see copyright extended to 2,500 years, and it should be retroactive like the previous laws. That way I can copyright the Bible and *really* rake in the bucks.
Disney thinks so small sometimes...
The extension of copyright terms clearly is of no benefit to society as a whole, apart from the additional revenue they would generate into the United States from abroad. 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 holders often like to hold onto their material EVEN IF they're not currently publishing and selling the work. This is because of ZERO benefit the copyright holders will receive by releasing it to the public, and the marginally possible benefit of a revival in the unpublished work's popularity. In essence art, which is undisputably helpful and necessary to the advancement of society as a whole, will either become more expensive (unaffordable), or unavailable. I fail to see how the additional money the US will make, justifies any concession from art to commerce.
Taiwan rejects some of U.S.' IP protection proposals at meeting
2002/10/12
The China Post staff
Taiwan yesterday flatly rejected the United States' request that the protection period for copyrights be extended to 70 years from the current 50 years.
Economics Minister Lin Yi-fu said the government has already imposed heavier punishments for violations against, and broadened the scope of, copyright protection. Thus, there was no reason to extend the protection period.
Speaking to reporters after a three-day meeting on intellectual property protection with representatives from Washington, the economics ministry said there is no reason for Taiwan to accede to all of the requests put forth by the United States.
But the government, said Tsai Lien-sheng, who is in charge of intellectual property-related affairs at the ministry, will definitely continue to improve its IP protection in accordance with World Trade Organization rules.
Representatives from Washington urged Taiwan to make 27 IP-related law revisions during the conference, ahead of the U.S. decision next week on whether to sign a free trade agreement with Taiwan.
Chen Chi-mai, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, said some of the U.S. requests were unreasonable.
Taiwan rejected those it believed had no legal basis or was beyond what was required of a WTO member, said government officials.
In a statement, Joseph S. Papovich, assistant trade representative for services, investment and intellectual property, said Washington had hoped the discussions would lead to real progress towards the lowering of IP piracy and counterfeiting in Taiwan.
"Specifically, we discussed the importance of Taiwan revising some of its laws to conform with international IP obligations," said Papovich.
He added that Taiwan should continue to "increase its enforcement efforts by shutting down and seizing equipment from optical media plants and owners found to be pirating, stepping up its level of prosecutions against IP violators, and working to shorten delays of this process."
Papovich said Taiwan is considered one of the largest makers and exporters of pirated CDs, DVDs and other optical discs in Asia, and is perhaps one of the largest producers of such pirated discs in the world.
Tsai's deputy Lu Wen-hsiang said the U.S. representatives will bring home the proposals both sides have agreed upon for further discussions, before a formal agreement is signed in November.
The U.S. representatives were happy that Taiwan was planning to revise its laws to impose heavier punishments on photocopying for profit purposes, said Lu. According to Lu, Taiwan plans to make photocopying an offense subject to indictment, and offenders will face punishment including imprisonment between six months and five years, on top of a penalty ranging from NT$150,000 to NT$1.5 million.
But Taiwan did not agree to U.S. request that photocopying for non-profit purposes should also be made an offense subject to indictment.
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
Disney even stole stories from various Japanese anime series.
Lion King - based on "Kimba the White Lion", an anime series from the '60s (do you see the resemblance? "Simba" - "Kimba").
Atlantis - based on "Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water", made by Studio Gainax (which was based on books by Jules Verne, but at least Gainax give credit).
Sorry to hear you died today. Maybe your heirs can profit from this fine piece of literature
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Hmm, that's where the dog bites its own tail. I always thought the EU would blindly adopt US legislation.
Um, you can't go around copyrighting other peoples' stuff... the Bible is copyright (c) God,
Actually, the Bible is (c) a lot of crazy antisocial misfits and (c) some more moderate, less antisocial misfits, although to incorporate them all, including (c) a very social, prince gone bad and done turned revolutionary (Moses) you'd have to extend copyright terms to 6000 years or so.
Of course, the Catholic Church would probably own the copyrights on much of the new testament (and portions of the old) which bear little resemblence to the original gospels and torah, assuming of course there is no estate of the aforementioned Crazy Antisocial Misfits to sue the church for copyright violation in their own right.
And whether Moses was a raving, hallucinating lunatic driven mad by too much sun and too much sand (and lamenting his lost life of privelege), or whether he was in fact spoken to by a superior being (divine or otherwise), the fact is that the books of Genesis et. al. are his writings paraphrasing the alleged words of said being, and not the being itself. Therefor the copyright would belong to Moses as the authoring reporter of the event, not God as merely a participant.
In other words, God wouldn't enter the copyright equation regardless, even if he did have the bad taste to exist.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy