Slashdot Mirror
O'Reilly Commits to Short Copyright Durations
Sam King writes "I found the following link on the lisnews.com site: O'Reilly Adopts 1790 Copyright Durations. A small but encouraging step taken by a publisher." We should provide direct links to O'Reilly's announcement and the Founder's Copyright website.
How could it possibly be a dupe? The O'Reilly announcement dates one month later than the old Slashdot article you were pointing at. The fact that this new slashdot article first was posted one week after the announcement is another issue though.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
An even better idea is the Baen Free Library
It makes much more sense to put older works out there for everyone at no charge in order to generate interest in newer works. And it's been working just like that for Baen. I know that I've bought quite a few books from various Baen authors after reading some of their work through the Free Library.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
I have a idea that just jumped into my head while reading this thread.
Why not make copyrights variable? The author could choose to accept the free default (short) copyright, or pay to register for a longer one. And the extra premium you pay for additional years gets more expensive the longer you want it.
Ok, in order to clarify what I mean, how's this for an example.
20 years copyright: Free, no registration required.
30 years: $10,000 registration fee
40 years: $25,000 registration fee
50 years: $100,000 registration fee
75 years: $1,000,000 registration fee
That way, if you're a big company like Disney and you have something you think will be big, you can pay more to lock it up longer. But if you're willing to let your stuff go into the public domain sooner you don't pay anything.
Maybe you would allow a copyright holder to change their mind and extend the copyrights later. If you didn't regiser to extend it and your product was a big hit, maybe you could sign up for the longer protection at a later time. Although I think that should be even more expensive than buying the longer copyright protection up front since you could wait till you see how successful your product is before registering (less risk = more cost).
Even better would be a way to make the copyright charge based on the "value" of the property. Like you'd pay more for a long copyright on Star Wars than you would for a long copyright on Battlestar Galactica. I have no idea how that would work, but it would obviously be a better system than a fixed rate since people who make less from their item don't pay as much to register it.
I don't know if even *I* like this idea, but it seemed to me that it might be worth throwing out there. Thoughts?
My motto is: Never give up - unless it's harder than you want it to be.
And copyright law becomes an issue of choice, in the same way that you still have the choice to close-source your software. You think copyright terms should be shorter? Vote with your work. You think it should be 130 years? You have that option.
This is just what I'd expect from a publisher who espouses the value of choice, including the choice to not share. This could be good.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
One would imagine so. Otherwise mere commerce power trademark law would consume a constitutional limit on copyrights.
But I haven't seen it come up much. There's the Comedy III Productions thing; the Amos 'n Andy case is vaguely related.
However, there is a very important caveat. Consider Mickey Mouse: the original Mickey Mouse from the 1928 shorts (Steamboat Willy, The Galloping Gaucho, and Plane Crazy) looks and acts and talks differently than the 'modern' Mickey.
If the copyright on the original Mickey expired, you could create new works that were derivative of that. But they could NOT be derivative of later works that were still copyrighted. So the later changes to the character (e.g. facial structure) couldn't be used by you, though you could change your own Mickey in new ways.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yeah... I agree... that is precisely why I want short copyrights.
Humor aside, it's the political speech that scares the crap out of corporations. Disney *knows* that people are going to pound them the minute their stuff gets into public domain.
For music, however, they have no excuse. Some really terrific stuff can come out of public domain music. The political stuff will be irrelevant in this area, I believe. If people aren't buying music, they are searching for popular music for free. Few people, if anybody, search for political music. The '60s protest rock is the extent of my political noise.
Laws are for people with no friends.
For another data point, you might find it interesting to check out the changed rules at Nature magazine. For some reason, /. wouldn't accept the usual html tag, so here's the URL:
x ml /05_news.xml&style=xml/05_news.xsl
http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=
In February, they basically dropped the old rule that you had to sign your paper over to them to get it published. Now their rule is that copyright must stay with the original author(s). To get it published, you assign to Nature a license that leaves you with ownership and the right to do essentially everything except give up ownership of your paper. You can use it freely in classroom material, make reprints, and put it up on web sites, as long as you maintain control. You can't hand it over to an employer, no matter what their rules may say.
If your employer already has a legal claim to your paper, Nature won't publish it. To get it published, your employer must first give you full rights.
And they are assigning ownership of all previously-published papers back to the authors under the same terms.
Their intent is to guarantee that any research that they publish can be made available to the public by the author(s), and that employers can't take any publication rights away from an author.
It'll be interesting to see what other tech publishers do.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I agree with your objection that copyright intervals should not be tied to some perceived (and, no doubt subjectively determined) intrinsic "value" to a work.
However, if a work does have high value, as measured by the degree to which it can be exploited in the market place for profit, there will be a desire on the part of the copyright holder to retain the copyright as long as possible. Hence, high-priced lobbying for effectively infinite copyright terms and extentions.
Understanding this, I wonder if it would be unreasonable to permit copyright extentions, at increasing cost, beyond the initial term (granted at no cost because of no need to formally file to get protection). The revenues collected could be redirected back to promote the development of new works.
Yes, this smells like a tax, and, as a libertarian, there are few things I detest more than taxes, particularly new ones. However, the only protection one has for a monopoly to reproduce and distribute an original work, is consent of the consumer, presumably obtained (if not by direct contract), by laws relating to issues of what could be called "intellectual property" (encompassing copyright, patent, and trademarks, in different ways). Enforcing such protection requires funding, and this "extended copyright tax" could also be a source of that funding.
These are partially baked ideas, and I reiterate that my initial reaction to such a "tax" revolts me, but I would not dismiss the notion of financial consideration in exchange for granted copyright extention out of hand.
You could've hired me.
Likewise with Aladdin, you can make Aladdin movies, but if in your movie Aladdin had a pet monkey, the princess had a pet tiger, and Jaffar had a pet parrot, you'd probably be hearing from Disney's lawyers.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD