Slashdot Mirror
RFC Deadline Looms For "Orphan Works" copy
psychonaut writes "As previously
reported on Slashdot, the US
Copyright Office is currently reviewing the law as it applies to
"orphan works" and "abandonware". The question is how to treat works
(books, films, software, etc.) for which the copyright owner cannot be
found so that permission can be granted to republish or create
derivative works. "The issue is whether orphan works are being
needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination
inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work," they write, "it
appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work
would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be."
The Copyright Office has been soliciting
comments from the public since 26 January 2005. Now, as their 25
March deadline draws nearer, the EFF, along with freeculture.org and Public Knowledge, have
teamed up to produce a website,Orphan Works, which gives
some background on the issue and makes it easy to submit comments
directly to the Copyright Office." And while you're at, contribute to the EFF. Good organization.
My child, you don't understand how the world works. He who has the gold makes the rules, you don't have any gold so what you want won't be the rule.
Personally I have no problem with "copyright as enforced monopoly", because frankly that was the whole idea with copyright to start with. You give them a temporary "monopoly", in exchange for getting those works from them in the first place.
Thing is, most people only work for money. Yeah, in open source too. Check out the email addresses of contributors to all major components of Linux. Most work _is_ done by people paid to do so, even if they're paid by some OSS company.
So copyright is a way to say "ok, if you do publish a book, here's how we'll allow you to make money out of it."
I see nothing wrong with that. I _am_ willing to buy a good book, or a movie, or a music CD, rather than not have it available at all.
"Why your work should be available for free" demagogue theories are good and fine, but in practice it never works that way: practically _noone_ works for free nowadays. The freeloaders actually get something paid for by someone else, not for free. E.g., everyone who downloaded a SuSE Linux ISO for free, rest assured that SuSE's work was paid for by people like me who bought the boxed distro repeatedly. E.g., everyone who has some free Linux distro installed on ReiserFS, can know that ReiserFS was sponsored by SuSE, so again, it was people like me whose money went into making that.
So, again, I have nothing against copyright as a way for authors to make money. Beats not having those works available in the first place. Maybe it's not the perfect system, but it's the best we have so far.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wouldn't it be wiser to support the EFF who's already working on these things?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
That's easy to fix. If Disney wants to extend the copyright from 50 to 70 years say, then it has to go and pay royalties (complete with interest) to all the copyright holders that had their works used royalty free by Disney because it had passed the 50 year mark but not yet reached the 70 year mark, at any point in the past.
It would then immediately become far less favourable for Disney (or any other organization) to presue such copyright extensions. Imagine thay they had to pay out the first 20 years earnings plus interest on Pinochio to the estate of Carlo Lorenzini! It is also morally and ethically fair. If Disney think that Steamboat Willy deserves added protection, then surely Pinochio does as well. Very hard to argue against and not look like obviously greedy and grasping.
What I find all wrong about copyright, as it is right now, is that it also gives the right to _kill_ a work of art or a program. You can buy the copyright to something for the _sole_ purpose of burying it 6 ft deep. I.e., making sure no more copies of it will be made.
Which was _not_ the purpose of copyright in the first place. The idea was to secure a source of income for those publishing books, _but_ that was only a means to another end: having those books available to society. Using copyright as a way to make them UNavailable, is IMHO contrary to the whole spirit and idea of copyright.
And just for the sake of a wanton comparison with Soviet Russia, I find it stupid that while we all were/are outraged when a dictatorship tries to suppress a book, we all shrug and find it normal when a corporation does the same via copyright. I mean, geesh, Stalin could have just bought the exclusive distribution rights in the USSR of the exact same works, and killed them via copyright, and we'd all suddenly no longer find it abhominable. It would be just normal business. Think about it.
So IMHO the copyright should only last as long as people can still order that book or program or music from you, for no more than the original price (i.e., no "yeah, it's still available, but we'll charge 10,000,000$ for it" scams), and have it delivered within a reasonable time frame. The moment that's no longer possible, the copyright should become public domain.
It would also be a self-regulating kinda thing. It's up to the company in case to decide when it's no longer profitable to keep that stock of old books, just for the 1-2 people per year still ordering it. When they decide it's no longer profitable to play that game, sure, make it public domain. But ffs, don't bury it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It wouldn't even need an amendment- all that needs to happen is for Congress to not pass another law extending existing copyrights when the issue comes up again in 20 years.
> why? if a copyright owner can not be found, a corporation can not buy the work. I see no corporate interest here.
Let's say a company that wrote some useful software a few years ago has gone. Now, only the competing software from Microsoft (tm) is widely awailable and supported. If the old sources went to public domain, they could easily be adopted by some new company or even a crown of hackers. And MS does not need yet another Firefox. They just don't like competition.
Consider a book that has gone to public domain. Everione can publish it at will, it's available on the net for free, etc. Unneeded competition to the new books (for which the copyright is "belong to us" (c) ).
So, the less public domain, the less competition in IP areas, the more profits.
BTW, when it comes to art, old works are usually filtered through the waters of Lethe: only the best ones remain. "Manuscripts do not burn" (c) M. Bulgakov. And they are hard to compete against.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need