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Mexico to Abolish the Public Domain?
Anonymous Mexican Coward writes "The mexican congress is considering a revision of the copyright law. Among other changes the law will extend the term of copyright from life-plus-70 to life-plus-100, and at the end of that term, the mexican government has the right to charge royalties for works in the "public domain."
Go Mexico!
Check it out"
cant wait till the RIAA starts making the argument "it is completely unacceptable that mexican authors have more protection than american authors".
They made the same argument about europe when they put in the latest copyright extention act.
Nailing my great-great-great-great grandkids for more tax is not acceptable just because they are not born yet.
Grrrrr.
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Seems to me there are a few things at play regarding this. It could be a test of public opinion, as another reader suggests. It's done, rather shamelessly, here in the US *all the time*. Other thing it could be as well, that since the US and Mexico are trying to be a bit closer together, who knows what deals are being made with them regarding copyright. Look what we're trying to do to ourselves. If certain parties who intend to serve self intrests are global, or at least multi-national, wouldn't they try to influence governments in each region they had a stake in?
So back to my question above, who set the precident first of life-term + some number of years for copyrighting works? Seems to me the US is to blame for this, even though it will really, really, really, hurt our youth and generations to come. It's poison in the resevoir. Beware Mexico.
--SuperBug
Mexico may /not/ be the best place to go if you enjoy various liberties!
Im from México, and guess what, I laugh everytime I see that "Welcome to the land of freedom" bullshit that welcomes you to the USA.
Say whatever you want, I can reverse engine al the crap I want and dont need to worry about the DMCA, Patriotic Acts or any other thing like that, USA is proud of the liberty slogan, but as we say here "el gobierno los tiene de los huevos".
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Why should anyone be surprised by this news? Governments always get bigger and more intrusive until they are overthrown. It's the nature of the beast.
When have we seen governments decide, "Hey, we don't need [fill in some social program] anymore, the citizenry can take care of [fill in something people want] all by themselves without our help."?
The taste of power only leaves the unquenchable thirst for more. And government power is the ultimate power, for it is the only power which wields the legal right to use deadly force to acheive its goals.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Fire is really more of a natural phenomenon, I'd say. Just about on par with water boiling. The Bostonites were upset enough about tea as it was.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
When copyright expires (70 years after publishing, under curent law), they don't have to do anything. It would however be in the public domain and if someone had a copy they could then publish it freely. But we all know that copyright will be extended indefinitely using the "Mad Hatter's tea Party" method:
All in all, it's a bad thing but in practice in Mexico it makes no difference at all.
-- American living in Mexico for last 7 years.
The hits disappear as soon as one adds amendment, proposed, proposal to the search terms.
Those should have turned up hits even in Spanish, I think. While my Spanish sucks rocks, that's one of the languages for which machine translation sort of works.
As far as I'm concerned, given that someone else checked Mexican government sites and didn't find it, the burden of proof that this isn't a troll is on the original author.
It would be a suicidally stupid thing for a national government to do. Imagine a 6 year old having to do an intellectual property search on the Net every time she was assigned to write a story for school and then try to find the intellectual property owners... if they can be found after 100 years.
While it's hard to quantify or model the economic loss due to the inability to use public domain work as a basis for further creativity, if I wrote fiction for a living, I'd be packing if this passed where I lived. Or if I were a parent.
However, we have no credible evidence of such. What we have is a blog posting that doesn't cite a verifiable URL from a government source. This is a credibility killer given that the subject is a proposed act of public law.
The article shouldn't have been accepted without one from either the author of the original article or the poster.
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This is the real problem that I have with neoliberal capitalism. It isn't liberal, it isn't capitalism, and if I read history correctly, it isn't neo.
It's part of the privatize/nationalize cycle that wealthy and powerful people use to steal from not-so-wealthy and not-so-powerful people.
There is NO WAY that this form of dominance benefits those around the world. It's called stealing, and it's as old as the hills.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This is based upon the Socialist concept of government: The Govt. owns everything, including your money, your property and ideas. If you are good, we will let you use them and profit from them.
The idea that I could not give the world something, donated to the public domain, without the government claiming ownership just shows you how fucked up socialism is. This is like the current problem in the US where congress acts like they are 'giving' us something when they offer tax cuts, instead of the reality, which is just TAKING less.
This is EXACTLY the dangerous crap I get tired of preaching about. Anytime the government acts in a way that puts it ABOVE the people, you are setting yourself up for tyranny. It shocks me that more people do not see this as a dangerous philosophy.
This is one reason I am so PRO 2nd amendment. A fully armed people has less to worry about when it comes to a dominating government. Unfortunately, Mexico has a history of corruption at the government level. Too bad, since it has more natural resources than the US, and COULD be one of the richest nations on earth. This idea is one example of why they are NOT, and not likely to be in the near future.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I clicked on the link and was presented with an e-mail message which states at the bottom "Please circulate this important notice." I usually delete chain letters and yell at the people who send them to me. Why does this one get posted to /. with no confirmation?
This has more meat than what the paltry email in Mr Lessig's blog implies.
First of all, this is not a hoax.
You can find the text of the proposed ammendment here (paragraph regarding "derecho de autor").
I will not invoke the Fish, you can do that yourselves if you are so inclined, there are several interesting points:
Article 29: Yeah, 100 years. I will begin to pester the right people, not that they will care (or maybe they do, this may pass under their noses and then the leaders of the parties tell them how to vote).
Then later on, the most interesting bits, in synthesis:
Article 40. Copyright holders have the right to be compensated for any copies that are made without their permission for private use and with no intention of profiting from them.
I. Compensation will be paid by manufacturers or importers of any machines that can store, compress, duplicate or reproduce (as in play I guess) the copyrighted works. Same thing for blank media manufacturers and importers.
The big surprise here is that this seems to legitimize your MP3 collection on stacks or burned CDs as long as you made it from sutff you legitimely own. I believe this may be a first worldwide.
Nowhere says how the compensation will be calculated.
II. Any sellers (retailers, wholesale buyers, etc) have to make sure that compensation was paid, otherwise they are obliged to pay the compensation in solidarity with people in point I (second translation: we can't police all of them, so we force retailers to police manufacturers and importers. Maquiavelian).
IV. Money goes to, surprise, the associations representing the copyright holders. 20% should be used for a nebulous item called "cultural activities"...
V. Stuff with copy protection mechanisms does not pay this tax (i.e. DVDs ant their ilk).
To check the public domain situation you have to go to the ammendment to article 152, first of all anybody can use public domain as long as there is no intention to profit from the work, otherwise who is intending to profit form a public domain work should pay a tax that will be divided 50% for the respective association of copyright holders (writers, composers, etc.) and should be devoted to social spending (whatever that is) and to promote the reperotire of their association members (uhm). The other 50% goes to, yes, you guessed it, the goverment.
Nowhere I found that public domain is abolished, it is being restricted if you want to profit from it.
Finally this is going to the Culture comission in the Congress. It may die there, get uglier or get better.
Finally, even if you are not Mexican you can put pressure: just imagine my poor congress critters receiving loads of emails from North Rio Bravo (Grande) and beyond threateaning to boycott any Mexican copyrightable material if the terms that are clearly abusive (like the 100 year term) are not repelled.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.