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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."
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.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Sometimes comercial unavailability is not a burden, but a blessing.
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.
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
While you're at it, write your congressperson and ask them what year you will be able to perform "Happy Birthday" in public without paying royalties or getting sued.
Something to bear in mind folks: the court will likely be much more impressed with "significant speech" issues that with games and the like. (I know that many consider games and entertainment to be quite significant - and I agree with them. But the court will be much more impressed with academic, religious, or political examples.) in that vein, here's what I contributed. Not much, but the best I've got. Beginning Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek originally submitted by Patrick Narkinsky: This work is a frankly revolutionary New Testament Greek Grammar published in the 70's. It has been out of print for many years, but is still widely appreciated. I spent the past several years trying to locate a copy to buy at any reasonable price. (A copy on Ebay recently went for $222). The publisher is not interested in republishing it. However, very recently they have allowed that if someone else paid to transfer it to a modern computerized format (Unicode/MSWORD) they would consider making it available on their own terms. The value of this grammar is such that a number of people are working on it, but requiring us to convert the work to their format so that they'll distribute is a pretty onerous version. There are certainly many other Greek students who would be willing to contribute their stories on this work. Stifled uses Patrick Narkinsky: First, read it. Second, have it on hand as a reference. It contains revolutionary ideas on the categorization of BIblical Greek that are simply unavailable elsewhere.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
But I seriously doubt this case has any merit from the POV of a judge (yes, I did RTFA). Free speech simply does not apply to using someone else's copyrighted work, and the U.S. Congress has the Constitutional authority to make copyright laws. The laws may be burdensome and unfair, but that's Congress's responsibilty, not the courts, and if you've studied the recent history of the Supreme Court, you know that they're not going to interfere with something that is indisputably within Congress's authority under the Constitution, regardless of its burden on society, because the court does not make laws, it simply interprets them.
The resources spent on this would be far better spent on other courses of action, like lobbying or a public education campaign. This is just expensive windmill-tilting.
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
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
One effect of this idiotic law is the wholesale destruction of nearly all of the popular books from the first half of the 20th century. The very best stuff and well-known titles are still being published and read (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Raymond Chandler) but past a hundred or so titles, the books are just disappearing.
When the paper wears out or the book stops being checked out, libraries take the title off the shelf. Large cites will sometimes save a copy in the stacks, but usually the books get pulped or burned. In a technologically advanced civilized society, each title that is worth being published in the first place would be scanned and OCR'ed before being completely wiped out. But this is illegal under the Mickey-Mouse-protection-to-infinity US copyright law. So they just get pulped and burned.
I read a book by Florence King about how white people got to be so weird (a sort of laid-back but sharp quasi-anthropological study of Caucasians in North America) "WASP, where is thy sting?". In this book, she cites many of the books that were influencial on her and her parents thoughts and attitudes when she was growing up in the 1940's. It is impossible to find any of them now even though they were read and enjoyed by tens of millions of people and had a great deal of influence on how the depression generation came to view the world.
Now the rock'n'roll generation (the baby boomers) and the MTV generation and Kazaa generations would just say 'Fuck this stupid law' and then OCR and circulate their favorite books and videos anyway. But the WWII generation won't, they'll trust that the proper authorities are taking care of the preservation of their culture. But that is not happening and their entire culture except for about 100 titles is just evaporating.
Hundreds of years from now, people will marvel at the American empire and technological accomplishments from the end of World War II. They will wonder at what these people were like; what they believed; how they interacted with each other; what drove them. But they will never know because all the popular literature from this period is being destroyed and not copied as its media wears out.
It's all happening because of this insane US copyright law. And nobody seems to be aware that it's happening.
Sure, there's a copy of every book published in the US in the Library of Congress. Maybe. One copy. Somewhere in the vast warehouse stacks. But with the current ability to fit tens of thousands of titles on a single 89 cent DVD-R there's no excuse for allowing all of the popular books from the early and mid-20th century to disappear. Future generations will not think well of us for allowing this to just happen. Just because nitwit assholes like Michael Eisner have hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't give them the right to destroy the entire culture of generations.
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.
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.
The summary is a bit misleading. It seems to imply that (if the lawsuit succeeds) if a work goes out of print, it will become public domain. This is not the case. The only thing that this lawsuit is aiming to do is to declare the three major copyright acts passed since 1976 unconsitutional, and basically revert back to the copyright law that existed in the US from 1790 to 1976. Basically, you would need to register works with the copyright office, renew them every so often, and keep records of all works that you have copyrighted. The copyright term would also be shortened significantly.
For big companies, keeping up with copyrights would be no big deal (although many would have a fuss about the shortening of the term, like say, Disney). That's why this talk about implications in video games is so silly. First of all, the oldest playable videogames are only about 20 years old, which is well under the copyright term, even with the old laws. Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies, in which case the copyrights would be inhereted. The fact that these games can't be bought commercially anymore doesn't mean anything, the companies would still own the copyrights, and the games would not be public domain.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively. The courts aren't going to say "Well, you didn't have to file for a copyright or keep copyright records after 1976 in order to legally have a copyright, but you should have been able to see into the future and see that these laws are unconstitutional, and done it anyways." It's impossible to say how many of the works people are talking about would still be under copyright if the recent laws had never been passed. It's theoretically possible that every work someone submits a story about would be under copyright if the new copyright laws had never been passed, and that they didn't file for a copyright simply because the new laws made it so that they didn't need to. That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"
Well said.
I would like to add that this also does a disservice to the memory of the creators of the works. Copyright seems to be working to insure the anihilation of their memory.
An extreme comparison, but imagine taking the graveyards of your ancestors, destroying the headstones, and putting up some parking lots. I don't particularly care about gravestones and ancestors, but that seems somehow very wrong.
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.)
She says that specifically in regard to downloading, but the same applies to out-of-print tracks.
MST3k
So who owns it now?