Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories

Joe Gratz writes "Lawrence Lessig and his legal team are asking for your help. Kahle v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit that challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of 'orphan works' -- creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright. To win the lawsuit, we need more examples of people being burdened by these copyright-related barriers to the use of orphan works. Visit the Kahle Submission Site and tell us your story."

Comments

Does not being able to play old games count?

[foidulus]

as being "burdened"? There were a lot of fun games way back in the day that are now abandonware, but since they are copyrighted you really can't do much about them. Either you can't find them anymore, or if you can find them(and pay an arm and a leg for them on eBay) you usually have to keep old hardware laying around to play them.

Counterargument

[Short Circuit]

Sometimes a company may cease distributing a product because they want to focus consumer attention on their new offerings.

However, I definately support returning the ownership of IP to the employees that authored it...assuming their employer went out of business.

On a more speculative note, it'd be interesting to see a system where patents and copyrights had to be in the name of individuals, and ownership of that material followed the individual wherever he went.

Re:Counterargument

[pod]

Or may want to raise the value or appeal of the product.

I don't know if this qualifies, but look at the back catalogue of just about any music act that dates back to the beginnings of CDs. Soooo much stuff is out of print now, and you can't buy it at any price from anywhere. I mean, don't know if that's a 'burden', but it's certainly a pain in the ass to have to track down and download all the stuff I can't pay for anymore. You'd think if there's money to be made re-releasing ancient material the labels would be all over that in an instance (hey, money out of thin air!) but not so.

Photos

[Ms.XingTianCai]

I do this for a living, photography printing and scanning. I have a very hard time telling people that I can't copy a picture because it isn't 75 years old yet. This stands true for any picture taken by a company that is still in business regardless of whether they are even able to make reprints anymore! Now with the digital age the copyright has been quoted to me as 100 years from the date of creation.

Re:Photos

[kai5263499]

I love photographers who are so bent on the copyright of the image that they never stop to grasp what the image actually represents.

My fiencee's close uncle recently died and I was asked to create a video memorial (basically a video slideshow), most of the pictures I scanned and put on the DVD were professionally taken and supposedly copyrighted.

When a copyright restricts my right to do what I will with my (or my relative's, friend's, anyone else's) memories, that copyright is no longer valid.

Don't forget orphaned movies and televsion shows

[g00z]

Everybody seems to be focused on video games and music around here, but let's not forget one of the biggest areas where copyright becomes a serious problem with orphaned works -- television and movies. I bet each person in here could name at least 5-10 movies and 5-10 television shows that's they would love to be able to see again, but can't because the companies that own the copyrights to those works refuse to release them on video/dvd or air them again. So why is it illegal to buy or sell fan made copies of such works if there is no other means to acquire or view them?

Obviously most of these things aren't in print because a lack of substantial demand for them, but lets consider that some of the films that are acclaimed for their worth in terms of art are also those that are the least popular among the consumer masses. Wouldn't it be fantastic if none of us could legally view "Casablanca" anymore because Viacom decided it doesn't sell well enough, but still held onto the copyright so nobody could watch it again?

I would name some movies and shows I'd love to see released again, but I'm sure I'd get laughed at. I have some pretty low-brow tastes :)

Sad tale of orphaned silent movies

[Anonymous Coward]

The copyright extension has devastated the preservation of movies from the 1920s and earlier. One famous distributor of silent movies on video has gone out of business. Previously, many small mom and pop business would preserve 1920s films and transfer them to video for resale.

No one got rich, yet it enabled the private sector to fund preservation through the resale of videos of long out of print materials. The output of famous movies stars like Clara Bow (the "It" girl) and Colleen Moore is becoming almost completely unavailable to the average person unable to arrange a private screening with the an archive.

It is no accident the the copyright law was pushed through to make 1923 the cut-off year. After 1924 movies became more "modern" in quality of camera and film, and adaptation of the standard speed of 24 frames per second. Also after 1924 phonograph recordings began to use the new electronic recording techniques which allowed for higher fidelity and sound quality compared to the old acoustic recordings.

The saddest part about the films is that the owners of the copyrights have no interest in preserving them. These movies are literally dissolving into dust as the nitrate based film stock decomposes. Copyright extension has been a complete disaster with respect the preservation of film and early sound recordings.

Accedemic Works

[IAmElvis]

I've taken many philosophy classes where the prof. has had to hand out inch thick stacks of photocopies because the work is out of print. If someone really wanted to, they could get them in trouble for this. Along the same lines, the Kemp-Smith translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was out of print the last time I checked. It is THE definitive translation which is refered to in all the literature. One pretty much can't study Kant without it.

Kudos to Red Hat

[DdJ]

I was wondering if the old credit card processing software my startup company wrote, most recently owned by Red Hat, was still available for download to users who already had license keys. No new license keys will ever be available, but for users who already had them, it's conceivable that they'd need to redownload the software if their credit card processing server crashed, or if they migrated operating systems (for example from SCO, which we did support, to Linux).

So, I wandered over to Red Hat's anonymous FTP server, and there it was -- a piece of closed-source software that the company hasn't supported since 2001 is still available for download at the same location it was at when it was a supported product.

Kudos to Red Hat for this. There's an extremely slim chance that some ex-customer could have been screwed if this closed-source copyrighted software had been removed from their download servers, but it hasn't been. It's still there. I applaud them.

(And it's not Red Hat's fault it was closed source. The NDAs that the banks and credit card companies required pretty much gave no other options to anybody who tried to do this sort of thing in a legit manner. There were pseudo-open-source efforts to do similar stuff, but none of them had the approval of the banks, and as far as I know they actually violated the terms the banks set for using their merchant accounts.)

(By the way, if anyone at Red Hat sees this message -- I'd love to re-obtain the rights to that old source code. To some extent I'm screwed by the copyright on the thing's source code. I've signed the NDAs, but I can't get my own source code back, even though I'd like to continue fixing bugs and updating clearing house compliance for free. But the customers were not screwed, and in the end that's much more important.)

Beautiful example

[bersl2]

MST3k

So who owns it now?