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Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories

Posted by timothy on from the widespread-availability dept.

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."

6 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Does not being able to play old games count? by foidulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Counterargument by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Counterargument by pod · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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  3. Photos by Ms.XingTianCai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Photos by kai5263499 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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      -Wes
  4. Sad tale of orphaned silent movies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.