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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?"
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 :-)
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.
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