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Copyright and Copy Rights
neocon writes "Today's National Review Online has an interesting
piece from John Bloom of UPI on the origin of Copy Rights (what Copyrights really are) and the
current attacks on them in Congress and elsewhere."
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Everyone bangs their drum about how bad things are in the world today. Then they return to their own little world and do nothing.
I'm sick of reading about the ills of society and corporate america. If anyone actually gave a shit we wouldn't have the Republican Nation.
Americans need to shit or get off the pot. Either we have rights and freedoms or we don't.
The Weekly Standard has also had a number of editorials on copyright--a writer has even come out in favor of mp3 sharing! This issue is finally coming up on the radar. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the NR article this morning. I think some political thinkers are slowly starting to realize that this is a very important issue to a number of young adult professionals, and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently getting.
William F Buckley founded and runs the National Review. He is considered the senior voice of conservatives in America. He, and National Review, are strongly pro-life and also in favor of drug legalization.
It just shows that those who blithely put all Republicans into one stereotype are undereducated.
The only good weather is bad weather.
I'd like to suggest "chessboard copyright", as follows: The term of an unregistered copyright shall be five years. Thereinafter, the copyright must be registered. The registration fee shall be one dollar for the sixth year; two dollars for the seventh year; and so forth -- for each subsequent year, the fee doubles.
The rationale here is that the cost of copyright to society is not merely linear with each year -- rather, it increases exponentially, since it cuts off the creation of whole genealogies of derivative works. Imagine if derivative works of the first Linux distribution were forbidden -- we would not simply have been deprived of the second Linux distribution, but of all the diverse branches of that family tree.
Chessboard copyright permits the holding-out of copyright over works which are exceptionally profitable -- such as Mickey Mouse -- for around twenty-five years. (The registration fee for the twenty-fifth year is $2^19 = about half a million dollars, still quite safe for a media mogul's profit margins.) However, soon after that it becomes untenable and shortly exceeds the size of the world economy. This is, of course, intentional.
Tweaks to this system might include adjusting the duration of unregistered copyright, the base fee, the exponent coefficient, and whether or not these values are the same for all classes of works (e.g. books vs. software vs. audio). If unregistered copyright lasted ten years, and the base fee was a penny, then a forty year copyright would cost just over 5.3 million dollars in the fortieth year.
That might be about right.
Clarification: This is a thought experiment, intended to balance between highly profitable companies' desire to hold copyright and the public's demand for innovative derivative works. I consider copyright itself much more problematic than this "proposal" suggests.
Whoever turned "copy right" into one word had to be a lawyer. We don't say "freespeechright" or "gunright" or "assemblyright" or "religionright."
As a result, 99 percent of the public thinks that a copyright is some kind of formal legal document. They think you have to go get it, or protect it, or defend it, or preserve it, or buy it, or hire a lawyer to make sure you have it.
Fantastic point. From now on let's refer to "copyright" as "copy right". It's an informative and accurate meme that need to be spread. Who's with me?
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
Revenue is up since September 11, 2001. See Through the Night With a Light from a Buck for details.
...I lost all respect for this author's argument here, "There was no argument ever made for a third- or fourth-generation royalty, much less a perpetual assignment of royalties to a corporation that never dies."
US Copyright law limits the duration for corporations to 96 years from date of creation. Had Mr. Bloom done a little bit of research he would have discovered this tidbit of info.
Here's my stupid idea regarding copyrights:
1) No copyright should ever under any circumstance exceed 100 years. A nice round figure that's easy to compute and no one can really complain that it's too short. Personally I'd like it much shorter, but this is a figure I think everyone can agree on as an absolute maximum.
2) If a copyrighted work is ever out of publication, then a clock starts ticking: depending on the class of material, if the total time out of publication exceeds the time for that class, then the item becomes public domain. These times are cumulative to keep a company from thwarting it by offering items for 1 day every few years or so. Such categories might be 20 years for books and other printed material, 10 years for audio and video, and 3 years for computer programs. The idea here is to get abandoned stuff into public domain before it totally loses all value. (This would also have the result that Microsoft would have to keep selling Windows 98 or else 3 years later everyone could copy it for free.) After all, does anyone have any doubt that PKZIP will be totally useless in 2101 except for historical purposes?
3) If an author sells the copyright on his works, and it subsequently goes out of print, all copyrights revert to said author immediately. This will let said author possibly get some value out of it before the copyright expires due to inactivity.
There are some details that would have to be ironed out in a system like this (e.g. what's to keep a company from having something 'in print' but only sold at some exorbitant rate), but hell, it's much better than what we have now.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.