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Kahle v Ashcroft Appeal Filed
An anonymous reader writes "Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive has announced that the appeal of Kahle vs. Ashcroft has been filed.
Here is the appeal.
Kahle vs. Ashcroft concerns the constitutionality of changing from an opt-in copyright system (which existed for almost 200 years in the US) to the current opt-out system, where every doodle on a piece of paper is copyrighted for 95 years. Yes, they used the word doodle in their appeal.
Previous stories here, here, and here."
Sounds like what the judges will be doing while they hear the case :(
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
But I thought it was 70 years after the death of the author (as opposed to the cited 95) or is that just for literature?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
You mean this comment is my own property for 95 years just because I wrote it...
Stay back fools and don't quote me. You'd better believe I'll protect my rights!
I'm sure that's how long it will take this case to get through the court system. If it manages to survive it's conception.
I personally fail to see any reason to change mid-stride like this anyways. Was the old opt-in copyright law in some way broken?
If you want something copyrighted, you should be responsibile to take care of it. I don't give a shit about your Intellectual Property or otherwise if you can't be bothered to copyrighted.
Not to troll, but I noticed that this link had something to do with http://www.archive.org.. If you haven't been to this page before, you must go! It has been around for several years, and has some pretty kick ass archives of the internet.. yes.. the internet. You can get a look at snapshots of sites differet points in time. A must see.. I like looking at tech sales sites and lookin at the crazy prices :)
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This isn't a Constitutional issue. It's a Congressional issue. Congress has the Constitutional power to establish copyrights. In order to change that system, Congress simply needs to pass a new copyright act.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I believe the current copyright law is
A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death. In the case of "a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire," the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author's death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author's identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter
Before you all start freaking out about evil corporations, corrupt governments, and everything else (too late)...
Understand that this is not some change that happened overnight while you were asleep. We have not had an "opt-in" copyright law in the United States since January 1, 1978. And the law was changed even before that -- Congress actually elected to amend the old copyright law in 1976. So I'd be willing to bet that this is the way copyrights have worked since before many of you were born.
Breakfast served all day!
I won't argue that life +70 is too long etc, but the point that I wanted to make about opt-out verses opt-in copyright is that under the old system, a creative work was unprotected from plagiarism until the work was officially registered with the copyright office. Here in Canada, I mail myself a copy of my work to prove date of creation (left unopened) and I'm done. Maybe the current US copyright law went too far, but opt-out copyright as a system ain't all bad.
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The traditional contours of copyright have been warped in a much worse way than the opt-in/opt-out division. Until the 20th century, the only way to infringe copyright was by unauthorized publication of a copyrighted work. Making a private, personal copy of something only became an infringement under the 1909 copyright act revision. If we went back to the traditional contours, all the MPAA bullshit lawsuits would have to go away at once.
However, there is no way that Kahle could seriously litigate the above. He instead goes after opt-in/opt-out, but will get nowhere, because the same media conglomerates who stopped Eldred will stop this. They do not want a public domain to exist. They opposed the Eldred bill which tried to get abandoned works back for the public domain, by requiring a copyright renewal with a fee of one dollar after 56 years! Lessig explains:
The Kahle lawsuit is an interesting intellectual exercise, but we need to treat this as a war, not a parlor game. We need better tactics to raise real political awareness, rather than filing these silly lawsuits without having the awareness wide enough.Opt-out copyright has the very important benefit of providing coverage to all individual creators without requiring registration or meaningless copyright notices. Contrast this to the patent system, where only corporate entities can regularly handle the legal hassle and expense of registration. If we go back to an opt-in system, expect to see corporations claiming ownership of every scrap of paper they produce on the one hand while on the other ripping off any material they can find that isn't legally nailed down.
If you want fair use exemptions for archiving, fight for that. If you want shorter copyright terms, fight for that. Don't push for a change toward a system that pollutes the world with even more useless copyright filings and notices than we have already while punishing those who don't have a legal department to handle the issue.
I'm suprised more people have not pointed this out.
However the solution is to have a fairly short default copyright that you have to opt-out of. Not just for GPL but to get rid of the legal loophole that *anything* somebody writes is apparenty free for the taking until they manage to get the paperwork done. In a practical sense a short default copyright would stop a lot of unnecessary paperwork because the contributors could think about whether it is worth copyrighting or not, rather than being forced to submit it as fast as possible.
I'm not sure but a length of perhaps 5 years or so would be good. Even a five-year old copy of Linux is not much use so it may not matter for GPL code if nobody filed for the copyright. After that you have to opt-in, and you have to renew the opt-in every 10 years or so after that.
It may also help that the threat that your stuff will go into the public domain if you don't change it and you don't do the paperwork will get some of the authors to work a little more on their stuff and keep it up to date.
Opt-out has its good sides - it avoids the problem of mistakenly releasing something or having to clutter everything with copyright notices. Opt-in in itself isn't the problem. The problem is the form it has taken, where protection has gotten longer and longer.
I'd have no problem with opt-out if it was structured differently. Say, copyright on a work that doesn't either have a copyright notice, OR have been registered expires after a short amount of time after publication - say 5 years - unless copyright is registered in the meantime. It would mean that even if you couldn't prove the publication date, if you receive a work and it is not registered, you KNOW it will be out of copyright in 5 years unless there is registration at the end of that period. That's not much of a burden.
If you then further requires all work to be registered to get longer protection than, say, 20 years from publication, and be renewed every 20 years after that up to a maximum, then works that have commercial value can remain protected, while work where the owner loses interest or "disappears" will still enter the public domain relatively quickly.
It would give you automatic protection, the ability to easily prevent "mistakes" where you released something without a notice, and the ability to get protection up to 20 years without a registration by placing a notice on your work, or significantly longer if you bother with the paperwork.
There are many ways of making both opt-in and opt-out work. The problem is that the people with significant investments in copyrighted works aren't interested, and they spend fortunes on lobbying.