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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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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.
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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....
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.
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!
Perhaps they'll serve as inspiration to other countries.
Yeah, like maybe the U.S.
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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...
besides; US has already backed out / backstabbed taiwan on the PRC thing.
;^) -- 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.
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
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...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
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