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Copyright Extension In Australia
femto writes "The Motion Picture Association and
APRA have commissioned a
report
from Allen Consulting into the
effects of extending Australian copyright from life+50 years to life+70years.
This forms the MPA and APRA's contribution to
US-Australian free trade negotiations,
currently underway. The report recommends that copyright terms should be extended.
An extension of copyright would not be in Australia's interest.
Some would argue that it is not in anyone's
interest. Projects such as Project Gutenberg of Australia
would be adversely affected by such an extension. Perhaps now is to time to write to your Member
of Parliament, asking them to oppose any extension of copyright or patents, and shore up whatever resistance there is to an extension of IP in Australia?"
Don't make it retroactive. If it's really about encouraging new products, only make it apply to new products. Any extension to copyright lifespan shouldn't apply to anything created before the law is enacted.
Ironic. Companies like Disney, which make their money by deriviting copyrighted material from out of copyright works, want to retain their own copyright for even longer.
I will certainly be writing to my MP. Unfortunately as it is John Howard this won't make much difference.
Sadly this is another example of policitians putting corporate needs before the greater good. Until corporations can have their leverage over politicians dissolved, this will always be the case.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
yes good point.
however I cynically suspect that this kind of sensible point of view has absolutely no place in politics these days, especially over anything relating to intellectual property or innovation.
laws are made by companies with money. companies with money have already succeeded. the last thing companies that have succeeded want is innovation.
Will an extra 20 years really make that much difference that movies will either be produced or not produced? If you can't enough make money in the first few years (and ideally the first year)of realease, why bother at all?
How much (other than as much as their pockets can fit) money do they really have to make to justify their projects?
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
yes apparently most movies make their money back in the opening weekend or thereabaouts. which is why we had the story a while ago aboutt wanting to ban mobiles because they allow bad opinions to be spread too freely and interupt the PR machine.
but so long as you have absolute control over something, even if you're not clever enough to do something profitable with it yourself, at least you can stop anyone else trying.
if you can't raise yourself up, then keeping everyone else down is just as good.
the USA wants Australia to take away the Pharmacudical Benifits Scheme (PBS). PBS gives millions of Australians access to cheap medication. I am a diabetic, and if PBS is taken away, I will have to pay $500 or so a month for my meds.
Fuck The Corporate Scumbags and there Free Trade.
The original justification for the length of copyrights, to keep them long enough to make money, no longer exists because of the rapid transmital and sales possible by current technology. IE a 100 years ago, it could have taken awhile to start amassing sales world wide. Today, distribution is possible worldwide immediatly. Copyrights should be *shortened* in todays climate. It borders on insanity (or an unrighteous desire for monopoly) to wish to extend them in this climate.
The way I see it copy right term extension is transference of public property into private hands without payment being rendered in return. What has Disney --and all those companies that have successfully lobbied for longer copyright durations-- given back to the public in return? Nothing. That's right. They got what was to be public property for free and gave the public *nothing* in return. Its corporate welfare and its theft.
So Walt Disney Corp can still sell Mickey exclusively and so that Time Warner can sue you for singing 'Happy Birthday' of course. What? You don't see the point in that??
I was not arguing for a socialist model at all, merely a reasonable appraisal that if a project is not going to make sufficient profit to justify its going ahead within 50 years, it is highly unlikely to generate that extra money in the final 20 years.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
...it's actually surprisingly understandable.
It's also surprisingly balanced. Their conclusion is that the benefits and costs of copyright term extension approximately balance each other, and hence harmonisation arguments result in a net gain for extending the term.
I noticed that they, like most pro-copyright-term-extension reports, miss out on one crucial thing, and that's that they do not acknowledge that thanks to modern technology, there is a burgeoning "public domain industry" which consists of real stakeholders whose interests are directly in opposition with the existing copyright holders on this issue.
Moreover, this industry is making a real foothold in Australia. I own a number of Australian-produced DVDs of 1930s era animated shorts, for example.
People writing to their MPs might like to point this out. A copyright term extension would effectively kill a new Australian industry.
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The answer is a utilitarian one: Human progress happens by building on the fringes of what we have now. If what we have now is locked up indefinitely, progress will effectively stop due to the cost of determining who owns what already exists.
Think about this for a moment. How much would your computer cost if, for every component in it, you had to pay a royalty to the descendents of Faraday, Telsa, Volta, Planck, Boole, Turing, Babbage and so on for everyone who discovered something crucial to its operation?
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1. Because there is no such thing as an independent idea or discovery. 99% of any idea/discovery is drawn from those that went before. Eg. your teachers, those who discovered mathematics, reasoning and language, those who have already done work in a similar area. People's ego tends to falsely convince them that their work is 'unique', noone has done anything similar, that they did not draw inspiration from others and so they deserve to 'own' an idea which occurs to them.
2. Because it is impossible to 'create' an idea. You can only 'create' physical items. For example, you don't 'create' the concept of a chair. You can only 'create' an instance of a chair. You own that chair because the only way someone else can use it is to take it away so you cannot use it. You should/do not own the concept of a chair, as use of that concept does not dimininish the chair you own.
Those are two arguments which come to mind. Hopefully I've done them justice, but probaly not.
I wish for works to be in the public domain 2 years after the ORIGINAL AUTHOR dies. And that's really it. This would seriously promote new material, as the copyright holders such as corporations would have to bring new things into market as soon as possible in order to make the most money.
But even the 2-year span is too much. The best solution would be that the original author retains the copyright, but only LICENSES the work to publishers and others to sell and distribute for profit. That way the original author would be able to do whatever he pleases with his OWN work, including revoking a license from a publisher so that no future copies could be made. Including putting it to public domain after he's made enough money from it.
This would be the best solution from the point of view of the author, i.e. the original copyright holder. Of course it's too radical and doesn't think primarily about companies, so it wil never get approved.
Look, the idea of a "Liberal Geek" party is a great one, and though it would be difficult to get any real support, it might well be worth a try.
Obviously, you realise that running as a true independent is a long shot to succeed, and hence the idea to form a party. However, a suggestion: if you want to form a party, don't form it around the basis that you'll be the one running for the Senate. A truly democratic and open party can be founded by you, sure, but the members might want someone else among their ranks to run instead. To prove how open and free you are, set up the party, come up with a fair and open party constitution and rules, get some members, and THEN see what happens with preselection.
Anyway, hell: I'd run in Victoria for the party if the party was appropriately set up, with appropriate policies. I'd certainly vote for you (them?).
Originally, the copyright term in the US was 14 years. If your work was successful and you therefore felt it was worthwhile, you could extend that term by another 14 years if you applied for it. This was in the days before modern printing technology, advertisement, and mass transportation, let alone the Internet! So if you wrote a book or recorded a phonograph, it took awhile for enough copies to be manufactured and shipped across the country. Without modern communication and advertisement, it took even longer to achieve enough popularity to sell significant volume. And yet authors survived just fine.
Today, we live in a world where near-instant capitalization is possible. A popular writer can sell millions of copies in the first week of a book's release. An unknown writer of exceptional quality can become well known in a few months. Similar scenarios exist with all other forms of media. A typical hollywood blockbuster makes several hundred percent profit in a theatrical release cycle alone. As a result, most of the capitalization occurs within a few years of a work's publishing and then quickly tapers off to a relatively insignificant level.
So the question becomes: Why are copyright terms getting longer and not shorter? The vast majority of the incentive to produce occurs in the first couple years of release. After that period, one must reasonably weigh the pros and cons of allowing that term to continue. Because copyright law is a social compromise, it must be judged by its value to society as a whole. Does allowing a term to continue into years of greatly diminished sales give enough extra incentive to authors to outweigh the costs to society of the work not entering the public domain?
There are many possible factors to consider. On one hand, very prolific authors can retire earlier on the combined trickle income from the remnant sales of numerous old works. This could be seen as an added incentive to become an author. However, at the same time, it is an incentive to stop producing earlier! On one hand, a longer term allows for certain works to go through several revisions by the original authors. But at the same time, there is no longer an incentive for others to produce derivative works of what would have been public domain material! Disney is, of course, the most classic case.. They make big money on reworking the public domain but then don't want their derivatives to ever go public domain again!
Perhaps one of the largest factors is simply the shortage of modern public domain material. Besides removing the incentive to innovate on old material, this shortage creates a gap of cultural heritage. Consider music: when people go looking for music, they generally support the artists that are currently in style and/or innovative. Most are unwilling to pay for old music, not just because it is less popular, but because they can't afford both. (and after all, why would you "support" someone who's already dead?) And yet there has been a recent resurgence in the popularity of "oldies" music in youth. It is now common to hear parents saying things like, "Hey, I didn't know you kids actually listened to that stuff! That's older than I am!" Casual investigation reveals that unauthorized P2P swapping has largely replaced the functionality that public domain was intended to serve!
By and large, there is great need for copyright length reform. What was once intended to create vibrant culture of quality, public information has become a system that often chokes innovation and rewards greed and slothfulness. Copyright is a good social institution, but its implementation has been greatly corrupted. It is high time for citizens to petition their lawmakers bring reason, fairness, and the public good back into the picture.
This post is public domain. Do with it as you please.
I was listening to the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony recently, and I wanted to see how the choir parts are put together. Because it's in the public domain, I was able to find a PDF of the score online, and print it out (88 pages for the fourth movement, so far I've only printed part of it). It's absolutely a work of genius, and far more complicated than I would have been able to transcribe while listening to the CD. In the 16-bar passage I've been looking at, the tenor part goes above the alto part periodically, and the soprano part just has rests for the first four bars (with the melody in the alto part; the melody shifts to the soprano part in the 7th bar).
Of course it's difficult for me to read; in addition to everything being in Italian (the international language of music) - except the vocal lyrics, which are of course in German - several of the parts are written with bizarre clefs (I figured out that the pointy thing in the middle of the clef points to middle C, but why the soprano part is written with a clef that puts middle C on the space below the bottom line of the staff, instead of a perfectly normal treble clef which puts middle C on the ledger line just below it, I have no idea). Also, not being a conductor, I'm not accustomed to reading full scores, so it's sometimes rather confusing to figure out which parts are on which lines when there's a different number of lines than there were the last time the parts were labeled.
There are also parts for A clarinets (instead of the usual B-flat), and for D trumpets (in addition to the usual B-flat). Of course one must remember the German convention of writing what we call B-flat as B and what we call B-natural as H, so the B-flat trumpet part actually says "Corni in B."
Now tell me - to whom would you have me pay money for the privalege of exploring the music of Beethoven? He himself certainly doesn't need it, and I don't even know who his descendants are. Those who may be living obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the work.
Public domain is a GOOD THING.
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This is the time to ask for a shortening of copyright terms. Life is too long already. What use do dead people have for royalties? Also, the original intention of copyright was to encourage the creation of works which would eventually enter the public domain. This needs to be borne in mind in any discussion. Oft has it been said that "my ideas are my babies": well, babies have this tendency to grow up and develop an existence independent of their parents.
Here's what I would do if I was drafting a brand new copyright law:
Default term of copyright
Copyright should run for five years after the receipt of the first royalty payment, or five years after publication if no royalties are ever paid. If you can't make any money out of it in five years, then face it - you're probably never going to.
Extension to five year term
Extensions would be granted by court order and charged at five times the national median annual wage for the first six months, doubling the multiplying factor and recalculating the median wage for each additional six months thereafter. The onus would be upon the copyright holder to demonstrate why the work should not enter the public domain immediately.
Prevention of abuse of copy-prevention measures
If any technological measures are used to prevent unauthorised copying, then at least one unencumbered copy must be placed in escrow with the national library or a similar organisation in order that the work should be able to enter the public domain upon expiry of copyright. Failure to provide such an unencumbered copy would be grounds for termination of copyright. In such event, any penalty for attempting to circumvent copy-prevention would not be applicable in the case of such a work: it is in the public domain and the public has a statutory right to access it, using reasonable force if necessary. That the techniques used might be {illegally but successfully} applicable against other copy-prevented works should serve as a strong disincentive against "snake oil" merchants.
And finally, the bit I think is really the most important: Protection of works in the Public Domain.
Once a work has entered the public domain, whether by the expiration of copyright, by consent of the copyright holder or by court order, it would be legally protected against any attempt to re-copyright it. Exactly the same provision would be made for the fair use of PD material in copyright works as for the fair use of copyright material, except that nobody would be entitled to grant permission over and above what constitutes fair use.
It's harsh, but so was the Thirteenth Amendment. We moved out of the age of muscle power and into the age of engine power; thanks to James Watt, there was no longer any even remotely legitimate reason to allow people to be kept as slaves. Now we have moved out of the Age of Scarcity and into the Age of Plenty, and the law needs to change to recognise that -- not to create artificial scarcity.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!