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Lessig's Next Copyright Proposal
Fiver-rah writes "The Supreme Court voted for Disney in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Lessig's next proposal is a policy solution which needs our help. He proposes that 50 years after publication, a work falls into the public domain unless a small fee ($50 in the NYT piece, but he says $1 is sufficient here) is paid to a governing board. This has two important effects. First, it allows the vast majority of works to fall into the public domain. Second, it gives us a publicly searchable database of copyright holders, so we could easily determine what was free and what was not. Support this proposal by writing to your elected officials! We couldn't make much of a difference with the Supreme Court, but we can with Congress." Update: 01/18 20:50 GMT by T : Related news: An anonymous reader writes "With the support of Lessig infoAnarchy has set up a wiki page devoted to copyright issues."
The Supreme Court voted for Disney in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
I hate the ruling as much as anyone else, but this is going a little overboard. You obviously read Lessigs blog, so you should understand that the court was put into a difficult place. I'm sure that, given the choice to repeal the Bono act, they would. They mostly ruled that it wasn't the court's place to do so, not on the merits of the act itself.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Anybody know what the market capitalization is for Disney? Specifically, how much would it cost to buy up just over 50% of the voting stock? If the problem is that Disney wants to hold onto all it's copyrighted material, the alternative way to get the business people to understand is to buy up 50% of the voting stock, go to the board meeting, propose that all content created before say 40 years ago should be passed into the public domain then call for a vote. You might have to do more drastic things, like vote in your own CEO to get the motion to happen, but given that you own enough of the company, this should be easy to pull off.
To do this, form a holding corporation or possibly a not-for profit company, "Free The Mouse", whose sole job is to sell share of itself to investors/donators. It takes the donations/investments and uses them to buy Disney voting shares. It uses the dividens and re-invests those in voting shares. In theory this should be a one man operation, that should have only about $2-10K in operating costs per year for the accounting, lawyer fees, and money handling, assuming the one man doesn't have the required skills. You'd have to make sure that the corporation's by-laws and provisions about the spending and investment, and what to do with the value and stock once Disney had successfully been addressed.
If that stupid Mouse has that much economic value, we should demonstrate directly to the business people, we're serious about freeing copyright. Once you did it to Disney, you could move on to other companies. Heck you do it to smaller companies first. There'd be a serious move on for companies to buy up the shares, and become privately held shortly there after... Even those companies could be taken on, but there, the economic power would be diluted, because your using it to give the private investors an exit strategy. However, money talks to them, I'm not sure they wouldn't happily give up the company to get cash.
I'm only half serious, but it's about the only way anybody's going to make Disney understand that we're serious about just how much damage they are causing, and we'll use economic power to bend them to our will. The only serious problem with it is if voting shareholders decide to not sell the shares to block the holding company from getting enough shares to pull it off.
I know I'm talking about buying up a company that would take something like 50-$500 Billion dollars, but it'd still make one hell of a statement. But if the company is truely beholden to it's stock holders, this is one way to show the company it's in it's own best interest to move things into the public domain. The beauty of it, is that after Wall Street gets over the fact, that those ancient copyrights don't have any value, and it doesn't affect the bottom line of Disney, maybe other companies will catch on, that donating to the public domain makes you look like a good corporate citizen.
Kirby
Lessig has proposed an impeccable scheme. In essence, the term of copyright for almost all works is automatically shortened to 50 years, and any works that remain copyrighted beyond that date (up until the maximum of 95 years) are placed in a central registry. If you find a work that may be copyrighted, but that work is over 50 years old, and doesn't have an entry in the registry, then it's public. The small number of works that will remain on the registry, for example Mickey Mouse, are so pathetically uncreative that it is desirable to avoid seeing them.
And the best part? Because Lessig proposes to allow individuals or corporations to take a tax credit from their income taxes equivalent to the amount they pay in copyright taxes, corporations probably won't care. They already know what all of their commercially-exploitable copyrighted works are, and simply listing them on their tax filings will be no problem. The main accomplishment of this law, if passed, will be to free from copyright works that are so obscure and unprofitable that their authors don't know what they are, and don't want to bother putting in the work to form a complete list. By Breyer's count, 98% of all copyrighted works over 50 years old fit that definition... I hope he's right.
Recently the Supreme Court decided against Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft. As you know, this means that copyright can be extended for an additional 20 years. The lawyer for Eldred in that case, Lawrence Lessig, has proposed a congressional compromise. (NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/opinion/18LESS.h tml?ex=1043470800&en=97d153dccaa9d220&ei=5007&part ner=USERLAND)
This compromise would put all works created more than 50 years ago that no longer generate revenue to to be put into the public domain. This compromise would have the effect of enriching the public domain, thus helping for more works to be created, while not damaging the revenues of any companies or persons who depend upon the copyrighted work. I urge you to look at this proprosal, and propose a bill in congress of the like.
Sincerely,
Me
You can write your congressperson in the house at http://www.house.gov/writerep/
House and Senate:
http://www.congress.org/
Sig!
If they are Republican/independent/other, point out this page on opensecrets.org. The jist of it is that the entertainment industry dropped 84% of their funding to Democrats for the last election cycle. The enemy is large, slow, and easily defined here, you just need to point the ones with the guns in the general direction of their enemies. If you support the repeal of this measure and others, vote and fund a less braindead canidate, regardless of affiliation.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I LOVE this idea!
When reading the recent Supreme Court decision, after the initial sorrow, I thought of this myself.
Congress has extended copyright in an effort to protect Steamboat Willie and a few other very profitable creations of the late 1920's. The vast majority of content created at that time is unfortunately decaying in vaults and warehouses, or forgotten completely. It can't be brought back alive in the public domain, because of the copyright extension.
The idea of a registry is great. People might gladly pay the tax to be listed in the registry, to make it easier to be found! When there is a desire to reuse an old creation during a new production, and pay money to that copyright holder, oftentimes the difficulty of finding the legitimate copyright holder is too great. Nobody wants to take the risk of having somebody crawl out of the woodwork after a production is completed and distributed worldwide, and sue for damages. So the use doesn't occur, which is a lose-lose situation. The idea of a registry fixes this! I can see the issuing of copyright numbers, similar to current patent numbers.
(C) #10,000,000 - 2003 Krellan
This compromise idea is great! It allows the public domain calendar to become unfrozen and finally start advancing past 1923. It protects Disney's big moneymakers. And it generates some extra revenue too!
The minute details would still need to be ironed out. What exactly constitutes a copyrighted work? If I create an album of music, do I have to pay the tax on each individual song, and/or on the album as a whole? If I write a software package, does each program, module, etc. need its own separate copyright registration?
Rolling all the way back to 50-year expiration would be too much to realistically expect now, I think. I support going back 80 years. This between the pre-SBCTEA and SBCTEA time periods. And this is exactly where the public domain calendar is currently stalled at (1923), so it makes sense to start here. There would be no sudden rush to register works in danger of immediately expiring.
Copyright law is different for individuals vs. companies, and this might need to be sorted out before a registry can be created. The "death plus X years" rule might need to be standardized and shortened to just "X years". Otherwise it will be a source of confusion: would works revert to their individual creators after the corporate copyright time expires, and if so, who gets the copyright when there are multiple people involved?
I hope the copyright tax is fair: not insignificant, but also not painful to an average individual person. A fee of $50 to $100 per work seems appropriate. It might be a lot of paperwork to assess this annually. I would much prefer the idea of assessing it every 5 years. As others have suggested, this would make it too easy to simply lock up content forever, so I also support increasing this over time. Mathematically doubling, as some have suggested, would quickly get ridiculous. As a compromise, a simple progression: $50 for the first 5 years, $100 for the next 5 years, then $150, $200, $250, and so on. If this outpaces inflation, it will provide an incentive for some people to simply drop it and let their work enter the public domain.
I am going to write my representatives. I hope that one of them is brave enough to introduce a bill!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!