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Kahle vs Ashcroft: Copyright Battle Continues
Robotech_Master writes "People may remember librarian Brewster Kahle as the man behind Archive.org's Wayback Machine and the Internet Bookmobile. He was one of the big supporters of Eldred in the Eldred vs Ashcroft case. Well, he's at it again. A new lawsuit, Kahle vs Ashcroft, has been filed as of March 22nd. Lawrence Lessig comments on this case in his blog." Question number 3 of the FAQ explains that while the Eldred case challenged the length of copyright expansion, this case challenges the breadth.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Obligatory IANAL. I think "unconditional copyright" is a good idea. I might write a hundred songs (or poems or whatever) in a year and not make any money off of them. It costs money to register your work as copyrighted.
Not needing to register each work simply puts the burden on the "fair use" user. If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it. But that doesn't mean that I give up copyrights.
If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it.
As it stands, I am able to create a work and the copyright exists immediately. I can even register the copyright after an infringement takes place and win in a lawsuit.
Want to prove that you created the work on a certain date? Mail it to yourself and don't open it.
People may remember librarian Brewster Kahle as the man behind Archive.org's Wayback Machine and the Internet Bookmobile.
I remember Brewster from when he developed WAIS ......
Since authors are, largely, unlikely to care about the rights of people who want to derive from their works, couldn't a reinstatement of copyright registration for works within the United States theoretically drive authors to nominally publish their works in other nations (in order to get automatic protection as per the current U.S. system), and thus drive creativity out of the U.S.?
I don't know if this would occur in practice, and I'm not saying it's a good reason to maintain a flawed system, but it seems like something to think about if/when we design new copyright policy.
Would this case, if ruled in Kahle's favor, make abandonware legal?
People have been distributing old, abandoned software (mostly from the 1980s) on web sites for years, knowing that it is illegal but under the likely correct assumption that they are doing the publisher no harm whatsoever. I have never heard of any true abandonware resulting in legal action, but currently a company that holds the copyright for a program can go after someone distributing it online for free. It makes no difference if they still sell it, support it or even remember it exists.
Of course, there would have to be some kind of definition for what constitutes abandonware, but that would be the case with all other works as well so I'm confident they'll figure that part out. I hope Kahle wins this one, personally.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The works described as "orphan works" in the linked FAQ show a need for some sort of copyright reform. Clearly, there are works out there which hold a good deal of intellectual value, but hold no commercial value for their owner.
Perhaps what we need is some sort of system that if a work has not been used commercially for x period of time, it should be deemed to have no commercial viability and be released to the public domain.
Not to mention, the Berne Convention is a world-wide treaty (and well-liked by megacorps) that may as well be carved in an adamantium tablet. No way they'd be willing to disadvantage US content owners while foreign copyrights are being extended just as freely.
- If the author doesn't want the work released, he should have the right to keep it that way.
THE HELL HE DOES.That line of thinking has caused thousands of hours of vintage TV programming to be lost forever.
If you can't legally buy it, you should be able to freely trade it around.
Besides, since everything is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually, what better way to preserve something?
You forget that copyright is not meant to solely benefit the copyright holder, and noone else.
Amiga Unix is now being spread around the net thanks to someone who had a tape of it and had the forethought to back it up before it degrades. The source code was already lost long ago, so if this were lost, there would be no existence of Amiga Unix at all. And it's said that AMIX is one of the better implementations of it's time, I believe. With your line of reasoning, AMIX would be lost.
Abandonware could be set at, say, 15 or 20 years. More than plenty to let something sit around. And if it can be legally acquired (not used, brand new), then copyright protection is fine. But something like this literally allows someone to destroy a part of history, intentionally or otherwise. And that should be prevented above all, because what good is it if the future generations can't benefit from it?
I'm wondering about something:
Can anyone but the owner of a copyright sue you for copyright infringement? The reason I ask is because I'm thinking about this concept of saving abandoned art. If no one is left alive who provably owns a work, then who is going to sue you if you copy it? If nobody can be found who has legal standing, even if copying would be illegal, wouldn't it be not much of a legal risk to go ahead and copy the work?
While I wouldn't have chosen your examples, I agree with your point.
An example closer to home: 20 years ago I wrote the original CoSy software used by, among others, the BIX conferencing system. The original copyright was held by University of Guelph, they later sold (some?) rights to a company called SoftWords. When BIX eventually closed up shop, a number of Bixen wanted to keep up the community on their own CoSy system. SoftWords hadn't been selling the software in some years, but an appeal to both U of G and SoftWords got them to agree to release CoSy under the GPL.
Problem was, neither of them had a readily available copy of the source nor were they inclined to spend much effort digging for it.
Fortunately, I still had a copy (ancient but readable), and the project lives on on Sourceforge. (The "son of BIX" lives on as Noise Level Zero, nlzero.com).
But what if Softwords had gone out of business, the assets dissipated and nobody even knew who had the rights to the software anymore? (Hmm, sounds a bit like Unix in some ways). That's certainly abandonware, but under the current law it wouldn't be public domain for another 75 or so years.
-- Alastair
What if there was a compromise between the two systems? For example, as an author, I automatically got 5 or 10 years of automatic copyright protection of a work upon creation. This gives me time to create something and then decide if it is going to be profitable enough to continue copyrighting. At the end of the grace period, if I want to keep the item copyrighted, I have to register it for a fee with the government. This copyright then lasts for whatever the government says (currently set at 50+ life of the author).
Hell, though this system you could even set different fees for different lengths of copyright (up to a max # of years). You have a piece of software? Set it's copyright for 25 years and save yourself 1/2 the fee. If it is still profitable at the end of the term, you can extend the copyright to the remainder of the term for the remainder of the fee. Granted, the fee may have gone up by then. You have a comicbook character that might be profitable the whole time? Copyright the whole time and pay the full fee.
But if the author does not think the work is worth taking the time to do a few hours of research over a period of 5 or 10 years, the work becomes public domain. And don't tell me that 10 hours of research, plus 1 hour to fill out forms for each piece of work is excessive. This is spread over a few years after all. How many people are going to create nothing but profitable works?
Just my 2 cents.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.