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Copyright Rumblings
dcunning writes "The Economist has a short opinion piece entitled Copyrights: A radical rethink that suggests (horror of horrors!) going so far as reverting back to the original copyright term of 14 years, renewable once. The article suggests that, in exchange for this, the 'content industries' be given 'much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies.' A worthwhile and fair tradeoff?"
For the first 14 years of release, the content industry would actually be able to leaglly force me not to read a book aloud? (If you recall this is one of the looney rules they have been trying to make fly with eBooks.) I don't really see how this is fair at all, especially given that 90% of attempted use of such material happens within a few years of its release.
Ñ'
That makes me wonder, which current bands have a history going back so far that their music, some of which is currently played too would be then free to use?
when it comes to rolling stones i think some of their oldest stuff is whats still defining them, but i dont know if they go back 28 years
Here's why ...
If someone is to create something that they feel is theirs then they should not be forced to give up their rights to it after an expiration of a legal copyright. However, releasing a product in the public domain means anyone can benifit from your work, which if you aren't happy with all aspects of life will cause a person to wonder why someone else should be benifiting from their work.
There is no solution to this problem, there will forever be the marxists who believe everything should be for free and for the betterness of humanity, but then there are those who believe to the victor go the spoils and whoever gets their first wins. Greed and capitalism will always but heads against socialism and communism. Hence why the copyright debate will never be over.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
It's an old tactic:
First: present the consumer first with a horrible way of doing things.
Second: the consumer will take almost *anything* else, and even something else bad seems good.
This is a regular management tactic in some places. You should be able to sniff this one a mile away.
Much of the inefficiency of current copyright law comes from the lack of registration, deposit, and renewal, all of which strenghtened the public domain in earlier copyright law.
h ives/ EAFAQ.html
Larry Lessig has proposed a tiny tax 50 years after a work is first copyrighted. If the tax is unpaid, the work goes into the public domain. The tax represents some positive move to show the work has commercial value.
Maybe 50 years is too long. But if we are to lobby for such an act we need to make compromises with the strong copyright interests such as Hollywood.
It might seem immodest to have an act named after me, but I have grown accustomed to the loss of my name after the case Eldred v. Ashcroft. I think it nicely opposes the Sonny Bono Act.
For more on the Eric Eldred Act, see
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/arc
What do you think?
It would certainly change the business model. Those artists would either have to live off of what they've made already, or go on tour to do music and make money that way. Or *gasp shudder die* write new material. Not that all don't, but you'd see more of it for certain . . .
It'd be a boon for musicians starting out, because they'd no longer have to secure rights to play those classic songs, they could just perform them. And it would ALSO spell an end to those stupid bad substitutes for Happy Birthday you hear at resturants.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
Make copyrights like tyrademarks.
You get copyright protection for only as long as you use it. Mickey Mouse gets used today, then Steamboat Willie and the MM icon used by Disney gets protected.
Sony doesn't sell N'sync CDs anymore to retailers? Fine, their music is now public domain.
On the plus side, it allows vendors with known icons (the Mouse) to retain the legal proection they need, while allowing 'abandonware' to go where it rightfully belongs - the public.
Don't forget this would cover games too, solving that nasty question of older games that aren't being made anymore.
How about this.. you are either entitled to copyright protection (current books, records, etc)... ie: no technological protections...
OR
you are entitled to technological protctions. not both.
If you want to restrict sometihng by technology, you are free to, but you have no protection of the actual work under law.
"the Congress shall have power...to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Everyone argues about how long the "limited times" should last. And all the arguments have totally missed the point. They all come from the standpoint of "I want to do something with this old work-- it should be public domain so I can," or "I want to keep making money off of this old work-- it should stay copyrighted so I can."
The phrase we need to be concerned with is "promote the progress of science and useful arts." The government should appoint a team of unbiased experts to study the benefits and downfalls of differing lengths and mechanisms of copyright, come to a final conclusion about what would most "promote the progress of science and useful arts," and go with that.
c-hack.com |
These differing criteria illustrate the shift in logic for copyrights from public to private interests.
The original conception of limiting copyright monopolies in the context of generational time indicates the framer's intention for copyright monopolies to be an economic engine of creativity, not by ensuring exclusive profits to creators forever, but primarily by ensuring a constant and steady flow of information to the public sphere as fuel for further creations.
You have to wonder if people like Jack Valenti who advocate European style copyrights, which were firmly rejected by the framers, are answering to foreign interests who have a stake in weakening the creative output of the United States.
I've been suggesting this for a while:
Reduce the term of copyrights to somewhere between 20 and 40 years. (Basically, the working lifetime of an author.)
More importantly, I believe that copy protection clashes with the Constitutional purpose of copyright. I propose to not allow materials which are copy protected to be copyrighted. Make the author choose between the two. I think this is important since the purpose of copyright (at least under the US Constitution) is to produce art & science which eventual enter the public domain. Since copy protected materials are designed to impede reproduction, propogating those materials will often be difficult once copyright expires. Since they can't easily enter the public domain, they should not be copyrightable.
(You might also be able to convince me to make the penalties for violating copyright more severe if this is done, to help convince people to not copyprotect materials.)
I am for strong copyrights. I don't think Gone With the Wind, the Three Stooges, and maybe even Elvis should be under copyright any more, though, and I don't think any copyrighted materials should be copy protected.
John
OK. This sounds reasonable, with the following additions:
0) Corporate copyrights are set to 14-year terms, renewable once. Copyrights held by natural persons remain in force for the lifetime of the author or 28 years (nonrenewable), whichever is greater.
1) After the original period of 14 years, a copyright may be renewed once, unless no editions of the work have been released for sale in the past three years and plans have not been formally announced to release it within the following year. In other words, if you haven't been actually making money off the copyright then you shouldn't be able to hold it "defensively".
2) Copyrights apply to specific versions or editions of works, rather than the work in general. To give an example, Version 2.0 of a piece of software is protected by a different copyright than Version 1.0 was.
3) All copyright-protection mechanisms must stop working when the copyright expires. While this need not necessarily be automatic, if it isn't then the mechanism to disable the protection must be made available to the public, free of charge, at that time.
4) All copyright-protection mechanisms must allow for the fair-use rights of all users. To aid in this, a minimal, non-exhaustive list of fair use rights may be drawn up; at the absolute least this must include both time-shifting and space-shifting rights.
5) Content creators may not specify how a product may be used (also known as End-User License Agreements). Standard copyright law will forbid illegal redistribution, public performance without permission, etc. and this may not be modified by content creators except to grant permission there the law dows not automatically do so.
6) Computer code is to be considered a written work, protected by copyright but not patent. Copyrights will, as noted in Point 2 above, apply to specific versions of the software, rather than the software in general. When copyright on a specific version expires, the source code for that version is to be released into the public domain.
7) When and if this goes into effect, all corporate copyrights still in force will be set to expire in 14 years. Some old copyrights will be extended by this, and some will be truncated. Oh well; we can't pick and choose. This will be the last time copyrights can retroactively extended or shortened; see Point 8 below.
8) Congress may, at its option, pass laws extending these terms, by no more than five years at a time. Further, these laws may apply only to copyrights on works created after said extension was put into force.
OK. Build these into the law -thus putting binding restrictions on content creators to make their copy-protection mechanisms fair- and I'll let them have their little legal restrictions on DRM-circumvention (modified to take these into account, of course). If they want this, fine, but only if they agree to restore the balance between creator and user first.
This article makes a fair enough point, but it still doesn't sound terribly much like a 'radical rethink'. The Economist is simply asserting that current American law is too permissive, not calling for a return to copyright in its original sense as a social rather than economic bargain.
Writing as an economist, I personally think this entire approach to IPR is a plague on society. A much healthier debate would throw out the absurd notion that only commercial systems provide good content, or the implicit corollary that the current system of industrial organization in the United States is the "only way" content will be or has even been produced.
This isn't to argue that copyright is a bad thing -- just that debating the appropriate LENGTH of protection is to engage in a loaded debate. Doing so implicitly accepts the highly-questionable assumption that commercial copyright is necessary for ALL content provision, and comes without significant costs on other parts of society. This distracts attention from the way indiscriminate protection crushes non-commercial content producers, academic researchers, open source developers, etc.
A healthier approach would worry less about duration than about the way protection is structured.
...until they extend copyright protection to databases like they've done in the EU with the European Database Directive.
The European plan not only extends copyrights to protect databases (which are large assemblages of facts... which have been the one thing you can't copyright here in the U.S. ever since copyright was written into our laws) but it also creates a new protection (that is not a copyright) that they term "sui generis" (in a class of its own). This protection is beside that of copyright and is renewable with olny a modest updating of the database... and, yes, this does mean that all you have to do is update your database every 15 years to get your protection extended another 15 years!!! This is truly perpetual copyright!!!
"Is there any such expiration date on open source code licenses?"
Here in the free software world, we gave up on the public domain long ago, after it became a barren wasteland, completely destroyed by government and corporate greed.
We've replaced it with our own version, the GNU domain. It's a way for authors to build on each others' work, and to promote the progress of art and the useful sciences.
Some people are even using it in conjunction with a limited monopoly on distribution, by releasing software which becomes GNU a few months after its initial release. Some people are using in a more efficient way, selling extra services in addition to the art. Some people are being employed while they create GNU domain software.
But most people and most companies are content simply to contribute freely to the GNU domain, knowing that they're helping to promote science, art, and understanding.
Well said. Even 14 years (really 28 years if renewed) is too long if in exchange we must forfeit all reasonable uses of the material. And if consumers have the ability to make a copy for the office, they have the ability to make any number of copies for any reason, using the sound-out jack if nothing else. No: in general, circumvention for fair-use purposes is absolutely required.
My proposal (which I heard from someone else, but I've forgotten who, so forgive me for failing to provide a credit, and pray don't sue me for copyright infringement):
If you put your copyrighted material in the marketplace with no copy protection mechanisms, then you will receive one 20-year term of copyright protection, non-renewable. Consumers will receive a number of legitimate fair uses of the work, including quoting small sections, time-shifting, space-shifting, backups, playing for family and close friends, even sharing with close friends (like I make a compilation tape and give it to my wife). However, any non-fair-use of the material is a crime, and all copyright crimes will be aggressively punished by authorities. That means sharing a copyrighted work on Kazaa could mean a hefty fine, and enough violations could mean jail time. Kinda like getting a nasty speeding ticket. In other words: create reasonable copyright laws and then do everything within the state's power to enforce them. BTW, I am referring here to casual or non-commercial copyright infringement; for-pay infringement is a different kettle of fish and would probably involve jail time by default.
On the other hand, if the copyright holder uses any form of copy protection, including schemes to lock consumers into approved players or any other nastiness of that kind, that's fine; but the copyright work loses all protection of the laws. In other words, you can rely on copy protection if you wish, but then if the consumer circumvents your protection you are shit out of luck. Attempts to circumvent your protections would be 100 percent legal, and it would also be legal to pass around the cracked work all you liked.
In short: make copyright law reasonable; make fair-use mandatory (at least if you want legal protection for your copyrighted work); and then enforce the reasonable copyright laws aggressively.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd guess it more likely to be known as The Corporate Decade.
Two reasons. One, the "Me" decade was already here, the 80's. Two, the "Me" decade was called that because a whole lot of people were quite selfish and materialistic, which seemed odd at the time but now we're more used to it. The "Mine" decade doesn't work so much because it isn't a whole lot of people being grabby, it's just a small bunch of insatiable corporations and their leaders being unimaginably grabby.
Will the US move forward or continue to make a fool of itself?
My $5 goes towards the latter.
Sadly enough, I have learned to never underestimate the ability of a lobby to legally bribe their way to the outcome they want. Politicians will continue to do what the money dictates they do.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term
Not if even more intense lobbying results in legislation accepted by 2/3 of the US House, 2/3 of the US Senate, and 1/2 of each of thirty-eight state legislatures, to limit the term to an absolute maximum of 50 years once and for all:
Wishful thinking, but as they used to say in the McWorld commercials: "Hey, it could happen!"
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's still copyright theft. You may use that as an excuse to pirate software, but it won't protect you then the BSA comes along.
Copyright law, 17 USC 107, lists four factors used in discerning fair use from infringement, and one of them is the effect on the market for the work. By taking a work out of print for several years, the copyright owner admits that he sees no significant market for the work. Thus, an otherwise infringing use would have zero effect on the market and inflict zero actual damage to the copyright owner. Fair use. And even if the judge doesn't see a use as completely fair, he can still reduce the section 504 statutory damages far below the maximum when some fair use factors apply.
Will I retire or break 10K?
OK, Copyright is providing a protection service of a work. No need to impose a time limit, rather impose a fee for the service. Maybe make it a progressive fee. As long as the fee is paid up, you would have a valid copyright. Let the fee lapse, you no longer have one.
As for the progressive part, let the fee double each year. You could start low to provide a reasonable time of relatively low cost protection, but the geometric progression would impose a practical limit.
So, you would start off with something like:
year 1 $10
year 2 $20
year 3 $40
year 4 $80
So any entity that wanted the protection could have it for as long as they cared to pay. The payments would balance off against the ever increasing value to society to allow the work to be shared.
This should apply to all works to be protected. A business would use something like a trademark to proctect their assets, again with an anual fee, but not geometrical.
Also, anything copyrighted should have the full work on file in a useful form. That means source if you are copyrighting source to a program. ect.
To me the worst thing of the copyright question is, that companies acrue title to the rights to copy and THEN decide not to as it is economically not "prudent" to do so. As a consequence a lot of important material never sees a reprint even though there is a need for it.
When material is "available" the cost of getting things that are rare like classical music is such that it cannot only be described as in money terms but also in effort. I live in a 200.000 person town and my personal collection is bigger that what can be found in the record shops. The function of a recordshop is to allow me a listen befor a sale. Without an infrastructure for the sale of material how can the punters be held responsible for not buying or for copying copyrighted material?
When I need a book for study and I cannot have it because of it being out of print, is it not criminal that I cannot get it? That I cannot have a digital copy and print it myself because of this "copyright" joke ?
When the Economist argues for a short period where an artist is to be protected, where does the publishing company come into play when they DO NOT provide the service that they ARE named for; publishing?
In my opinion, any period I can live with as long as there is an equal weight on the other side of the balance. That weight must be service.
Thanks,
Gerard
Everyone keeps saying how "copyright can't be protected" on the internet. Well, that's absolutely right if you follow this rediculous method of turning a blind eye while crimes occur, and attempt to make it impossible for the crime to happen at all.
People learned long ago in the real world that for a free society to function properly, many things must be possible, but actual crimes need to be policed and criminals punished to have law and order. How long do you think it'll take them to realize that even in the digital world crime can not be coded out of the system?
The two questions of copyright:
1) Is it a crime to take some things apart and understand how they work? Yes! Even worse if you share that knowledge!
2) Is it a crime to knowingly aquire copyrighted works illegally and use them? Not at all!
Best of all, Congress would see it as a source of income and might not dismiss it out of hand.
Dyolf Knip
I think a fair solution would be to limit the term of a copyright except when the copyrighted material is still being used or distributed by the copyright holder. This would grant Disney full use of Micky Mouse, and would allow people to distribute works that havn't seen the light of day for, say, 25 years. If the copyright holder is the original author then they should be given the option of extending the copyright. If they don't, then it enters the public domain.
This way:
Disney would still maintain the copyrights of their material.
People could legally share music that is no longer distributed and would otherwise rot in some archive vault.
In other words, this would be a use it or lose it copyright. If a company wants to keep the copyright on their material then they are encouraged to use it and make it available. If they don't, then they lose it.
This would allow for books like Tolkein's Lord of the Rings to remain in control of his estate since they continue to use and publish the material, yet a book like "The Bulb Book" by John Weathers which hasn't been published for nearly a century would enter the public domain rather than be lost forever.
This also would give the music industry an incentive to stop pumping out crap that won't see the light of day a decade from now.
For collectors, perhapse the law should state that republishing of expired copyrighted material must state so, such that collectors can still know what is original or modern copies.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I've been accused of having half a brain in the past, so that's a possibility. But I fail to see how your arguments absolve the guilt of the person that leaked the unfinished content of the artists and assign the blame to the medium that said miscreant utilized.
My disagreement is not about the legality of filesharing networks; it is about the intelligence of the artists you mentioned. If their beef was that their unfinished content was posted to Napster (and hence, swapped)...why did they pursue Napster (and ultimately, their own fans) instead of the person that leaked the unfinished content?
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
would mean giving content industries much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies... such a concession would clearly be in the interests of consumers.
Then he clearly doesn't understand what such legal backing would entail. Not only would it outlaw all sorts of fair use, it litterally makes it crime to sit in the privacy of your home and doing stuff with a pencil and paper.
Yes, playing with numbers with pencil and paper could be a circumvention crime. Any processing a computer can do can be done with pencil and paper by hand. Hell, you can decrypt stuff IN YOUR HEAD, it is merely an issue of memeory. Many idiot-savants have enormous memory abilities, and there are pretty powerful memory techniques that "normal people" can learn. A trained person could "do" DeCSS in his head.
Circumvention can be pure thought. Fundamentally the DMCA outlaws certain thoughts. That's why it is a HORRIBLE law.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
To think that in my lifetime, we'd be able to freely peruse, use, and abuse all that content from the 30's to the 60's, just today.
I'll take it.
KaZaA'd have lots of good legal stuff to choose from. Who doesn't go a week without hearing a Beatles/Rolling Stones tune? Think of how their whole catalogs would be able to be used more artistically in the hands of new modern production methods!
Or all the classic films (Disney and otherwise) that we wouldn't have to wait on being released on DVD for 3 weeks to have the title pulled from their catalog or made into a "Special Edition" of like 150,000 copies.
Just to think that Disney's release of all the Goofy cartoon's is limited to 150K copies, makes me sick that there's millions of children out there that won't be able to watch them at any given time like I can. Not that I'm selling mine...
Greedy bastids!
Your (or whomever's) proposal sounds a great deal like the tradeoff between:
Patent (copyright): We own it for X-long, and you can all see what we did, but we control its USE any way we like for that timeframe, with legal penalties for infringement. After that, it's fair game for anyone.
Trade secret (DRM): We've hidden it, thus we *hope* no one but us can use it, forever and ever -- but IF you DO find it, you get to do whatever you want with it, with no legal penalty.
It's not a bad system for patent* vs trade secret, and I think it's likewise a reasonable tradeoff for copyright vs DRM.
* We'll ignore the issue of stupid patents for the nonce. After all, patents *do* expire. Copyrights are threatening to almost-never expire. Which is worse??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
...should we agree to any compromise? The Constitution is clear: to the author and for limited times. Any reasonable person can see that for a corporation (which is not a person) to hold copyright is unconstitutional. Corporations aren't authors; people working within corporations are authors, and they should hold copyrights to everything they write, whether for the company or not. In addition, for anything to be copyrighted longer than the author's life is clearly unconstitutional. How does a copyright term of the author's life + 70 years benefit the author solely? There's nothing about heirs, nothing about companies being able to snatch copyrights from authors. Nothing like that! Unfortunately, it appears that most of the judges who heard this case were unreasonable.
We should not have to negotiate for our Constitutional rights.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand