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."

Comments

Knowledge can't be monopolised.

[billstr78]

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.

Re:Knowledge can't be monopolised.

[hey!]

It's not the heirs of the people who did the work who hold the copyrights -- it's the companys they sold their work to.

It sounds0 to me that you are somehow against posthumous copyright. There is a good reason for there to be some posthumous copyright -- it enables authors to enjoy some of the future value their work will generate within their lifetime.

However, once the copyright has been effectively relinquished by the author, either by actual sale of the copyright or by granting of exclusive licenses to a corporation, there is little rational reason for a copyright term more than ten years, at least if you think the purpose of copyright is to reward authors. Events more than ten years out simply don't factor into any corporate decisions, and therefore do not contribute to the price authors receive from their works.

The position of creative people with respect to copyright is different from corporate entities -- it is more balanced. While the ability to claim exclusive benefits from their own works are good for them, they are restricted from working with other author's materials. It follows that copyright terms over ten years (except for material that remains within the full control of the author), are a pure evil for authors, since its restricts their ability to create on one hand, and compensates them with nothing on the other.

They Can

[Martigan80]

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.

ROC's copyright was only 10 years long

[Andy Tai]

In 1995 or 1996 due to US pressure copyright protection was extended from 10 to 50 years.

Now the US wants 70 years.

Wow, nice to see someone showing some backbone

[raju1kabir]

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?

Re:Wow, nice to see someone showing some backbone

[mbogosian]

Perhaps they'll serve as inspiration to other countries.

Yeah, like maybe the U.S.

Re:This first post

[jms]

Absolutely not! It's an anonymously published work, which fully qualifies for copyright protection.

Piracy == ++Popularity

[billstr78]

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.

Damage... Yes...

[Flamerule]

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.

Oh, that's great! So the slump in music industry revenue is due to Taiwan's copyright protection lasting 50 years, instead of 70 like the US... I suppose the RIAA can stop lobbying Congress to lock down all our computers now, and focus instead on squeezing those last few hundred million dollars out of Taiwan.

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....

Further reading

[harper18]

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."

Re:Further reading

[x136]

This is a real bad example even though I agree with Lessig. The Grimm Bothers didn't invent or created the stories as such. They collected and wrote up old German folk tales and made them available so they could be read and cherished.

That's exactly the point. They took something in the public domain and remade it, and when that entered the public domain, Disney remade it. Except that now, Disney's remade versions aren't passing into the public domain to allow the next generation of interpretation.

Re:Further reading

[Redline]

No sure what Disney stole other than the Mermaid.

Jungle Book from Rudyard Kipling.
Alice in Wonderland from Lewis Carroll.
Peter Pan from J.M. Barrie

That is just the animated features. Most of the "classic" Disney films are based on works with expired copyrights. (Black Beauty, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Heidi, etc.) Have a look at this list of books that have lost copyright and passed into the public domain. Then count how may are Disney flicks.

Disney had a rich culture of stories to draw from and reinterpret. They are trying to prevent the next generation of storytellers and media producers from doing to them what they did to earlier content creators.

Re:Further reading

[mpe]

They took something in the public domain and remade it, and when that entered the public domain, Disney remade it.

This is what people have done since prehistory.

Except that now, Disney's remade versions aren't passing into the public domain to allow the next generation of interpretation.

Copyright is fairly new idea. It was invented when the printing press originally as a way for the state to control who could use that then new invention. This was later revised into copyright V2 which gave rights to the author, rather than the publisher. This is the version the writers of the US constitution used as a model.
Since then copyright has grown both in length and scope, such that it is completly out of step with "the next generation of interpretation". Not a problem for the big corporate publishers though, since they can easily cross licence with each other, but a big issue for those outside that cartel.

Re:Further reading

[Gumshoe]

No sure what Disney stole other than the Mermaid.

The complete list of Disney films that were adaptations of works in the public domain.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
Alice In Wonderland
Beauty and the Beast
Cindarella
Hunchback of NotreDame
Jonny Appleseed
Jungle Book
Kidnapped
The Little Mermaid
Mulan
Paul Bunyon
Pinocchio
Sleeping Beauty
Sleepy Hollow

By the way. Steamboat Willie aka Mickey was lifted from a Buster Keaton film.

The Buster Keaton movie, Steamboat Bill, was not in the public domain. However Steamboat Willie was a parody of the film, which constitutes fair use of the copyrighted work.

Re:Further reading

[puppet10]

You answered your own question. Look at the lengths involved after Disney sent the letter to stop using the Donald Duck likeness (although thats not what Christensen was doing in his mind). Copyright does not only prevent you from creating exact duplicates, it also prevents you from making derivative works. That means anything based on the story using the characters, or bearing a superficial resemblance can be determined to be infringing. So if as you say it was an interpretation of Donald Duck as something else it is technically an infringing work, because it is derivative. Disney might not have dropped its legal suit so quickly if the comic was in english.

Or for another example look at the case of the Gone with the Wind Estate (note the author is dead) vs. the author of The Wind Done Gone, a parody of the Gone with the Wind book. Even though its very different and a parody as well it was found to infringe the copyright of Gone with the Wind, and although the ban on publishing was lifted a monetary settlement had to be made to the copyright holder of Gone with the Wind.

Wise decision

[Jinjuro]

Copyright was designed to give the creators of some kind of intellectual property a reasonable amount of time to profit from their creation before opening it to the rest of society for use in derivative works, not to tightly control use of one's works, even long after they may have been dead.

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 are hypocrits

[Poilobo]

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).

Re:Disney are hypocrits

[DragonMagic]

Don't forget:

The Little Mermaid (Anderson)
The Lion King (Kimba the White Lion)
Atlantis (bears a STRIKING resemblance to Dinotopia)
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)

Probably many more that I can't name right now. But so far, Disney has made most its money off titles based on or too similar to others' works.

And they want control over their derivative works for as long as possible to ensure no one can profit off them.

Too bad people are crying for them about this who don't know WHY the CTEA truly is bad.

Re:Odd Move

[Hal-9001]

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.

Some info...

[DigitalHammer]

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.

Just like Australia

[dmoynihan]

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!

Re:Copyright reform

[silentbozo]

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.

I want to extend copyright even further

[JohnsonWax]

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...

Re:Odd Move

[lingqi]

besides; US has already backed out / backstabbed taiwan on the PRC thing.

a few moons back the taiwanese president got carried away when vid-conferencing with some activists in the states and was (caught on tape) saything stuff like "yeah you know taiwan is really its own country from the start"...

china got pissed and issued statements about "taiwan is disrupting the stability of the straits". taiwan't stock market dropped like 20% the following monday, and the taiwan president's office apologized profusely - along the lines of "yeah he didn't know what he was saying at the time / he does not represent our ideals / he was on acid" etc... all the mean while, the US basically said: "hey listen, if you piss off china and they come after you, you (as in taiwan) are on your own, and don't expect jack shit from us."

which is, really, kinda sad. granted US has a good reason for this: china is a BIG market and there are tons of US money poured there(*1). point being: (1) I think after the US realized that the communist(*2) government are not impeding the free-trade capitalism taking root, they stopped being so rough on it; and to sacrifice a 386B "country" to a 4.5T market (with unbelieveable potential to grow)? yeah, of course. (2) it's kinda sad that the US would go and abandon one of its storgest (as in, most faithful) allies / followers / groupies for $$, as I personally believe this is what it boiled down to; but hey... this is capitalism -- and a wise man (don't flame me now ;^) -- the guy's name is Lenin) said that (a version of it, anyway) "a capitalist would sell the roap to hang another capitalist if it meant making money..." ha! this should go down in the history books as the perfect example.

note(*1): China is the second most economically powerful country in the world, you know -- no joke -- not japan, not taiwan, not germany; (US GDP: 9.963T; China GDP: 4.5T; Japan (3rd) GDP: 3.15T; taiwan is at a measly 386B -- all figures are 2000 estimates from maps.com atlas

note (*2) communist / communism is a misnomer since they (PRC) don't even call *themselves* communists! the first thing they teach in school's policital science classes is that perfect communism is unachieveable (i went through the class) so the (PRC) settles on socialism instead...