Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Eek!
..or if there is, would someone let me know what they are.
There is no public benefit to having copyright restrictions for such a long period of time.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
i think the real discussion here should not be about life+70 or life+50
it should about how absurd life+anything really is.
can't people see that the existence of widespread law breaking from copyright violation is a CLEAR signal that people do not see that the copyright contact is fair? it is so obviously not fair now that people blatantly and purposefully flaunt the laws.
as I put into another post, below. 15 years should be plenty.
While we're on the topic of IP, Patents and Australia, does anyone know what Australia's position on software patents are? Just wondering because it's something that may become important for me to know, but yet I have no idea about it...
Better yet, does anyone know of a comprehensive online listing of which countries have software patents, and what exactly can be patented in each country? I was unable to find such a list, but I'm sure there must be one.
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
Not only that but the heirs of the creator of Pooh Bear are sueing Disney for shortchanging them in royalties.
Which franchise does Diney gets its most $$$ from? Not Mickey mouse or Donald Duck or any other Disney creation... it's Pooh.
Slightly offtopic, but one bizarre thing a free trade agreement with the US would mean for Australia, is more US television content. There are currently laws in place that mean television broadcasters must allocate a certain amount of hours to Australian content. It's much cheaper to buy television content than it is to make it, so the broadcasters are well and truly in favour of it. Many consumers feel that we get too much US content as it is without opening the flood gates.
There are many ways a free-trade agreement would benefit Australia as well. As a largely primary producer, the subsidies the US government give its wheat producers price Australia out of the market. No-one has managed to convince me either way that such an agreement would work out better or worse for Australia. I certainly can't see any benefit for the US. Obviously, things will change (some for better and some for worse) for both parties. But is it truly worthwhile for either?
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
Check this out.
Use of copyright to restrict redistribution is actually immoral, unethical, and illegitimate. It is a result of brainwashing by monopolists and corporate interests and it violates everyone's rights. Copyrights and patents hamper technological progress by making a naturally abundant resource scarce. Many, from communists to right wing libertarians, are trying to abolish intellectual property myths.
Who the hell wrote that? Well, it's better than the RIAA's version. Interesting :-)
No.
While I certainly support people's efforts to obtain educations for their children, most artists would not benefit from this. Artists generally don't make a significant amount of money from royalties (which copyrights impact, as opposed to artistic labor such as concerts, or the sale of actual pieces of art as tangible things). Art is just not a money making profession. A few people can become tremendously sucessful as artists -- but the odds of being one of them are on par with winning the lottery. And of course, the economic value of those few works that have ANY noteworthy value to begin with declines rapidly over time.
So the only people that would get enough money from a life+20 term -- or even a term over perhaps 20 years -- are the people who are raking in a fortune, and thus don't NEED the extra money just to send their kids to college.
Thus it is extremely unfair to have long terms as a system for providing for widows and orphans since it only helps a small group of them (those that are the widows and orphans of artists), AND it is a tremendous failure because most of those artists never made, and never will make, enough money to provide for their loved ones anyway. A life+20 or longer term does NOT translate out into making money. Probably it's economically worthless, and if it's not it's probably only worth less than you could make at a minimum wage job.
The ultra-small minority of people (often not the artists) who hold copyrights to very successful works will of course benefit tremendously. This could be worth millions of dollars to them. But they're already making assloads of money -- do we need a half-assed flop of a social program to provide for them?
If you want a widows and orphans fund, if you want to help kids go to college, then may I suggest that you just have the government directly fund such things? It's fairer, since you don't have to be a close relative of an artist to qualify, and it's simply more practical since more than a fraction of 1% of people will actually benefit from it!
-- 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.
I think you should be guaranteed 20 yrs, and anything after that (up to life of creator, or 100 years for a corporation, whichever comes first) would be fine as long as:
1. The owner pays for continual upkeep and maintenance on a pristine "master copy." This mean recopying it, restoring it, digitizing it, or transcribing to new media/formats as necessary to guarantee that a usable copy is available at the end of the copyright term. This also includes storage costs for the Library of Congress (or equivalent body in country where copyright is being extended.)
2. For every year beyond the minimum, compulsory licensing must be made available if there are no publicly purchasable copies of the work. For example, if Vol 1, Issue 9 of Comic X is out of print, and the publisher wants to hold on to the copyright, they must make that material available for sale (ie, via a digital download, on-demand copy, graphic novel or other compendium) or else be subject to compulsory licensing of the work. This ensures that copies of the work are publicly available (even if they have to be extremely expensive.) None of that stop selling for X years to build up demand crap that Disney pulls.
Why these conditions? To make sure that the material is available to the public, and if the owner doesn't want to pay for the master copy (to ensure that the work is accessible after the copyright expires) then the copyright expires right there and then, and if people think it has value, they will copy/distribute it and preserve it that way.
For an example of where this is happening, some copy-protected programs/games from the 80's are no longer available from the original owners (no master copies exist.) The copyright has yet to expire, but even if it did, there are no master copies exist for people to copy and examine. However, there are collectors (ie, pirates) who might have broken the copy protection, archived those copies, and have kept copying them to new media (5 1/4 floppy -> 3.5 floppy -> hard drives -> CD-Roms -> DVD, etc.) This is moot without the hardware to run this stuff, so enter emulators to run the software.
Thus, an item that had value was maintained by the copying of collectors even when the original owner lapsed in their duty to preserve that original. Ironically, this behavior, preservation of a public good (which it would have been, once the copyright lapsed), is illegal under the DMCA. What a way to erase cultural history and hundreds of man-hours of creative work in the name of profit and greed.
What happens to IP which is, for example, at life + 60 years? It's been in the public domain for 10 years and there may well be people out there happily exploiting it - for example, a publisher publishing a public domain book. Do they suddenly need to withdraw it from sale or start paying royalties?
It seem bizarre to me that something could enter the public domain and then leave it again.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
As to why, if someone creates something, it should _ever_ have to go into the public domain? If I create/discover something...why shouldn't it be mine and my descendants for ever? (not flame baiting here...I'd be really interested in learning the finer points of this debate)
I just wrote to my local MP voicing my objection to this. He is a member
of the current government, albeit a mere backbencher at the moment.
Here is hoping he doesn't tow the party line should they choose to tow
the corporate American line.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Dear Mr Wilkie,
A report has recently been commissioned to discuss the issue of increasing the life of copyright from 50 years after the creator's death to 70 years after the creator's death.
http://www.allenconsult.com.au/resources/M PA_Draft_final.pdf
Leaving my personal views on the actions of major corporate bodies with significant Intellectual Property assets aside for the moment, I would like to make two points.
The first is that copyright is supposed to encourage creation of new material. That's what the artificial structure called copyright is all about. The basic question behind the existence of copyright is "Why would people create something if everyone can just copy it?" Ignoring that people do readily create works for which copyright is applicable, yet still give freely to the public domain, I would just like to say that if any extension is made to the life of copyright I can find no way to justify retrospectively increasing the life of copyright on works that have already been created.
My second point is that the reason for encouraging creation of works is to enrich the public domain, not line the pockets of big business. Government should always be on the side of the public domain and should be constantly striving for ways to bring more material into it, not less. As such, it is my belief that copyright should only exist on a work so long as the copyright owner actively maintains it. The most simple method of encouraging this it to require a token payment be made every, say, ten years to keep the copyright work registered in a central database. The payment need only pay for the upkeep involved in maintaining such a database. The result is that if any copyright work becomes abandoned, it enters the public domain before it becomes worthless.
Please consider these opinions should any relevant vote come before parliament.
Thank you for your time,
Chris Johnson
However, there are cases where movies which were never popularized under copyright flourish after the copyrights expire. The classic example of this is, of course, "It's A Wonderful Life". Although now one of the most-watched Christmas movies and most-imitated storylines, the initial reception for the movie was cool at best, with the movie barely making back the production costs. It wasn't until the copyrights expired that it began showing regularly every December and saw its popularity skyrocket.
If there'd been the same trend towards perpetual copyrights back then as there are today, we all would have missed out on this kind of gem. The public (especially later generations) got to see a movie that would probably have otherwise disappeared into the discount bin, and he studios lost nothing from the experience (it wasn't until IAWL was out of copyright that it took off). In fact, given how often the formula for IAWL has been copied, it could be argued that they've benefited by using its popularity to spawn a bunch of derivative works, which they later capitalized on. (I've lost count of how many TV shows and movies have used this theme.) It's unfortunate that the studios seem to prefer to take the shortsighted "milk-it-to-the-last-drop" view to a more longer-term and broader perspective.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
I am an Australian who is quite frankly sick and tired of the corporate world slowly stomping away all our rights, privileges and national identity in the name of $$$. Look through my older posts for more insight on my views on copyright (short answer - they should be abolished).
I also don't believe in this "War on terrorism" we have enjoined with the United States. I see it as nothing more than a global land grab for US oil and gas interests. Read "Rebuilding America's Defenses" if you don't believe me (http://www.newamericancentury.org/).
Ironically it has taken the "war" to get me interested enough in where we are potentially headed to actually decide that if I can't change those IN power, I better get my voice heard by being in government myself.
So to this end I am interested in hearing from fellow Aussies (and others if you want to make your view known) on whether or not you want to support a future Senate candidate who is a geek at heart, and who plans to have a party based online with forums where everyone can make their voice heard. You've all heard that sending email to politicians is useless; well my view is that email and forums such as this are the BEST way to make issues known to those in politics (well, those that really care, anyway). It will allow me to disseminate my ideas and allow for consensus based policy making.
Anyone who wishes to help by donating a small amount of server space and forum expertise to set up a fledgling party page, please contact me at quizo_NOSPAM_69@hotmail.com and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
As we have learned from Pauline Hanson's screwups, I would need 500 registered party members to make this a legitimate endeavour, in time to run for the 2004 Federal Election. I'm not kidding myself though - as a lone Senator I would not be in much position to formulate national policy and have it succeed constantly, but I would be a tech savvy person who would vote down stupid laws that take away our privacy, and give $$$ to corporations at the expense of the citizenry.
Oh, and instead of a fridge magnet, I'd give everyone a CD with free software such as OpenOffice.org etc, and mandate that government use open standards to deal with the public.
Anyway, if anyone thinks they would like someone in office who is not a politician by nature (I'm a pilot by profession) then drop a comment here or email me (bear in mind Hotmail will die silently after the inbox fills so posting here is preferred!). If there's enough interest I'll begin the process of running for parliament next year.
I don't want to make this post too long so read my other posts for more insight into how I view the world.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
The report "addresses" this criticism. From the report:
IOW, it's only a relatively small theft from the public domain, so don't worry about it.