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What Would You Ask For in Copyright Law?
BlastM asks: "The Australian Attorney General's Department, as reported recently on Slashdot, is accepting public input in a review of fair use exceptions (or lack thereof) in our copyright laws. Being an Australian citizen, I'll be directly affected by any reforms that are made, and under the Copyright Act in it's current form it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day, whether format shifting music, recording broadcast TV shows or sharing movies via P2P or with friends. The question I pose to the freethinking minds, here: What fair use rights should be defined under copyright law? Is the use of a static, defined set of rights too restrictive? What's right/wrong with the copyright laws where you live?"
Copyright was originally 14 years, renewable once. But that was back before movies, radio, and TV. Typesetting was done by hand, books were distributed by horse-drawn carts. In this day and age 5 years is more than enough time to display your work and make a tidy profit.
None of this Disney/Sonny extending for ever and ever and ever shit.
The only 'fair use' clause should be, if you've ever heard it or seen it, its yours forever.
I mean, otherwise what are they going to do with people with an eidetic memory? Give them memory suppressing drugs? Lobotomies? Develop a mind wipe ray??
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I don't want any form of copyright laws .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...if it is broadcast (tv, radio) over the airways free to the viewer, listener i should be able to do what i want with it. ie. record it, edit out commercials etc. share it with all my friends. if i am paying for the content (cable tv, xm radio) i should be able to record it and view, listen to it later.
always mosh clockwise
1. Copyright should expire faster. Somewhere between 3 and 20 years.
2. There should be some way of ensuring that the source code is still around when a program hits the public domain.
Would you say then then GPL should be replaced on code more than 5 years old and a do as you please license attached?
In a world without might-as-well-be-perpetual copyright, it would be lawful to make and publish a commented disassembly of a proprietary computer program whose copyright has expired.
are very reasonable starting points IMHO.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Everything was fine pre-DMCA.
"Here's a story that was posted on /. about 45 minutes ago. For some reason I couldn't just read the discussion of that story, so I'm asking you to repeat it in this identical one?"
The lack thereof. Protected monopolies just really doesn't fit into my messed up mind. Guess I'm going for a Milton Friedman kind of world.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
1) faster expiration.
2) the ability of a media consumer, having paid for a legit copy of a movie or a cd, to manipulate it in any way he/she sees fit short of redistribution for profit.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
1. 15-20 year limit on all copyright
2. All sufficient quotation to talk about a specific copyrighted material allowed.
3. All parody allowed, even if it violates trade dress, or any other contrived notion of property
4. Limited copying for immediate friends and family allowed
5. No EULA's allowed (unless specifically signed by both parties, in person)
6. You can't copyright something that is already in the public domain (silence for example), merely you're specific version of it. (Someone makes a story based of a centuries old fairy tale, you can do the same, even if they get all sorts of trademarks from it)
You don't get 2-6 if I don't get number 1.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I think that if it isn't possible to legally obtain a work within your own borders, then copyright law should not apply for that work until it is available for purchase/consumption. This kind of issue is most prevalent with anime fansubs, but those tend to be tolerated. What I'm specifically referring to is something like the Chinese film "Hero." Miramax had the rights to distribute it in English, but left it unreleased for three years, then they had the gall to sue people who had imported Chinese copies of the film and were selling it.
Thing is, I know I don't have much to stand on with this. You could use this as an arguement that it's okay for a big budget box office film to be leaked, copied and sold as long as it's before the official release of the film, not something I think is right. What I'm really at issue with, though, are region codes and arbitrary region specific release schedules. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents.
Yup...
I always wonder why there can't be something concerning commercial availability. If software isn't sold anymore, shouldn't that modify copyright? What about when a book or CD or movie is unavailable? What about so-called abandonware?
In both cases, these are driven not by the creators, but by the greedy businessmen who are selling their creative works. The problem is that they are the ones who have been essentially dictating copyright law for the last 40 years or so, and their only purpose is to maximize their monopoly profits.
Mickey Mouse should have died and been replaced a LONG time ago. Preserving the Disney franchise is *NOT* the primary goal of copyright.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I'm probably in a minority, but I think America's Fair Use Clause is already pretty sensible, it states:
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
If we'd actually enforce this doctrine and not pass things to circumvent it, like the DMCA, I think oftentimes we'd find the law on our side. How does Australian law differ from these provisions?
I think alot of the bickering about IP rights comes from industries using money to skew the issues and interpret the law in their favor, and no strong voice stating what the law actually is or moving that it should be enforced fairly.
Yeah, in general it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day, whether stealing milk trucks or burglarizing orphanages. (Yes, I elided two-thirds of that. Is it really impossible to tape TV shows or rip CDs in Australia without breaking the law?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"What Would You Ask For in Copyright Law?"
How about... Oh, I don't know: Fairness? Balance? Reasonable limits?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
My main problem with copyright in the U.S. is that it is used to basically remove works from the populace. The vast majority of works are tossed in storage after they don't become hugely successful and are never seen again and often become completely unavailable. If I were rewriting copyright laws I'd require that all copyrighted works must be available for sale at a reasonable market rate or the copyright on them expires immediately (with an exception for works still in progress or about to released) and cannot be reinstated. I'd also require that two copies of every work to be copyrighted be provided free of charge to a national archive, thus ensuring that they will not disappear. (This used to be law in the U.S. but was repealed at the same time most of the rest of our copyright laws were rewritten by lobbyists.)
This still allows artists and publishers to make money on works, but also preserves them for the public when those companies stop offering them.
It'd be 5 years inherant at the time of creation. Registration isn't necessary, but you'd want some way to prove date of creation and ownership, so a good idea. During this time you'd have exclusive and total control. Now after 5 years you'd have three choices:
1) Do nothing and allow it to fall in to public domain.
2) Reregister for an additonal 5 years under the same terms.
3) Reregister for 25 years, but under different terms that included compulsory licensing for derivitive works with reasonable and non-discriminitory fees.
This would ensure that the ability to make money is there, but that the public gets the work in a timely fashion. If you creat it and just abandon it, the public gets it in 5 years. If after 5 years you still find you are cashing in, you can have another 5 to continue to do so. A decade is more than enough to cash in on a work. However if you find that you aren't selling a lot, but there's interest from others in licensing it, you can get a quater century where you are gaurenteed royalties for any derivitives.
I'd also mandidate fair use clauses making illegal to implement any technology that interferes with fair use. You are free to work out a copyprotection, if you like, however it must be one such that all fair use rights are protected.
However, that's a pipe dream and I know it.
Other than that, cut out this crap about the medium. I bought a song, and it's simply not relevant if I bought it on a CD or whatever - I can listen to it anywhere anyhow.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I'd say really, short of changing the mindset of the society in which we live, there's nothing that really "should" be changed about copyright. I mean really, if you think about it, people need to make money to live, therefore they "should" fight to the death to protect anything they have that is worth "money". Why shouldn't Disney have exclusive right to make money off of Mickey Mouse indefinitely (ok so maybe that would be a change from current law, since they can't do that now)? Why shouldn't the RIAA try and defend the music it pumps out for profit (assuming it does it legally, not through abusing the legal system, that's another can of worms)?
I'd say that all in all, copyright law for our time and place is relatively good in concept. The biggest problem, and something that I would make clear, is that the limits of that copyright need to be clearly defined. I think the problems that arise from copyright law these days tends to come from both sides bending the rules and trying to exploit the system.
Unfortunately, until we evolve past a state of fighting for "money" to "survive" we are still going to have to face issues of how much "money" our ideas are "worth". I'm all for stopping people from ripping off other's ideas, which copyright law does "in theory" but unfortunately the limits haven't been well defined and thus are being exploited.
Now Patent Law, on the other hand, needs some serious readjustment, but that, again, is another can of worms.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps instead of drafting a brittle system of strict rules, a standards based system should be developed that gives judges some discretion. Lets trust our judicial system to recognize that perhaps 11 year olds ought not to be sued for all their parents have.
No, you don't get all of them, but at least you get the most utterly critical ones like being able to make private copies for markup etc, trade or sell the works, and so forth.
Uses such as excerpt for parody, commentary, etc. are understood to be related because they don't compete with the copyright holder's sale of the original work. Again, the copyright holder received his reward when the work was "placed in the stream of commerce."
You'll notice that this doesn't include any right to make copies for friends and family. That's not fair use; in the USA it's quite a different matter and was established as the quid pro quo for a tax on blank media.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
What I would like to see:
1) The ability to change the medium of "my" music/movie/etc.
- putting downloaded music onto mp3 player, backup DVDs etc. This includes having a CD in the car, AND a mp3 on the laptop
2) circumvent copy protection and encryption as long as it fits within rule one.
- deCSS, deDRM and so on
3) disable regional coding completly.
- DVD region coding etc
Fifty years or death of author, which ever is longer . However, works not available for purchase for a price no more than twice their origional price (inflation-adjusted) loose their copyright protections.
The Copyright Office in the US has finally decided to take a look at this, unfortunately comments had to be in by May 9, 2005.
http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/
This allows the artist the opportunity to choose what licence the work will be distributed in.
All licences are free for personal use. Restrictions can be added for commercial use, sampling and other derivatives.
I personally use Creative Commons for my releases.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
To me, if I buy a copyrighted work, I have the right to use it for personal use in any way I wish, as long as I do not distribute it to others outside my household. If I buy a CD or DVD, I ought to be able to make backup copies, store them on a home server, transfer them to a portable device, etc., so long as I don't give away copies to others. It's my media to use. If I'm not allowed to make backups, then the studios have an obligation to replace damaged copies, since they aren't allowing me to safeguard them myself.
And, as others have said, copyrights must be limited. They were never intended to be permanent, so extending them indefinitely is wrong. Otherwise, our culture will always remain owned by copyright holders and never return to the ownership of society.
Signed.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Copyrights last 10 years, but with unlimited free 10 year extensions during the life of the author. If he or she doesn't care to apply for an extension, the work enters the public domain. Works for hire and transferred works have a 50 year limit.
1. Copyright must be applied for. If copyright is not applied for within 1 year of publication, the work is public domain.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
To get a copyright for a work, you should have to register a highest-possible-quality unencrypted digital copy of the work with the copyright office.
At a minimum, this guarantees that works don't vanish from existence before their copyright expires, denying the public domain their content.
Additionally, you could add criteria to address abandonware-- if a work is not produced or sold for a period of 10 years, it becomes available from the copyright office for a small copying fee, and has becomes part of the public domain.
Alternatively, this could act as a form of "mandatory licensing," where you can purchase the work for a nominal fee from the copyright office, and the proceeds are split between the office (for maintaining this library of works) and the copyright holder. This way, even people who are no longer able to sell their works could make a modest sum from the sale until the copyright expires, and people would have access to works that would have otherwise disappeared.
I would ask for very strong copyright laws and abolishment of patents. I am all for copyright that lasts at least a 1000 years if that was possible. Of-course people are going to jump on me saying that the 'works of art' (Hollywood?) should belong to public sooner but I disagree. I am against patenting ideas and stifling innovation that way but I am all for protection of specific implementations.
--
That said, I am also pro-fair use. The end user who (for example) bought the final product should be able to use this product in any way that technology allows at the moment. So I see nothing wrong with being able to make copies of digital material as long as it is for your own use. These could be used either as backups or as time-shifting devices or as media-shifting devices (if I licensed my application to you, you should be able to run it on any computer that you own as long as the technology allows that.) However there is a huge difference between making copies for your own use and for distribution. In my version of copyright law the end user would be allowed to make N legal copies of the product for distribution for himself and whoever else (s)he sees fit, as long as it is not for profit. Let's make N=20 just for argument's sake. Anything abotve that number would be regarded as illegal distribution (even if it is not for profit,) and should be punishable by (ok not by death) but by some antient form of torture. Maybe cutting off your finger for the first offence. The small one.
You can't handle the truth.
I'd ask for unrestricted use for education. Specifically state-funded education at the k-12 level. One of the stipulations should be that the copyright holder/publisher should provide, at cost, a copy of material for each student that needs the material.
As much as I loved books like Tom Sawyer, I hated having to pay for them out of pocket.
And I know something has been written in the last 100 years that students SHOULD be reading, but can't because of copyright.
This should include music (sheet for the band members and performances for appretiation classes), movies, books, software, etc. Basicly anything that can be copyrighted should be avalible at no cost to students.
There would be an exception for books written specifically to be used as textbooks.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Great story.
Killed for being above average.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Consider: A 1997 decision in Canadian courts involved a union picketing outside a Michelin property. Union members held signs with a drawing of a giant Michelin Man, foot raised, about to stomp on a worker. Michelin sued and a court ordered the union to turn over all the posters to Michelin and stop using the image.
Whatever you do to your copyright law to reflect the changing digital technologies, never forget that copyright and freedom of expression are in tension, and we must always be on guard not only for new ways in which the rightsholders can increase their control but for existing rules that give too much control to copyright holders over what we can say about them and how we can say it. For those who care, the case (Michelin v. CAW) is here
In the UK, and most of Europe, I think, it is technically illegal to put anything on an iPod unless you destroy the original after doing so. Otherwise you are copying copyrighted material, a crime punishable by slavery to the BPA for all eternity.
Should we be asking what specific rights we'll give the consumer, or should we be asking what specific rights we'll give the content owner? I would suggest the latter. The US Constitution, for example, takes that tack; all powers not explicitly reserved for the federal government are implicitly remanded to the states. I'd like to see the same thing in copyright law so we don't have to go change the law everytime someone thinks of something new to do with content - any rights not explicitly reserved for the content owner are implicitly remanded to the consumer.
2. The duration of copyright on a work is set at the time it is first published. It may not be later extended.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
and patents after 17 years.
And educational and parody use.
Also, a danceable beat.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Twenty years at start. After that, renewable at the rate of $1/year until the death of the original authors. (Note: NOT the corporation that hired them.)
Copyrights can be sold, but only the original author can elect to renew the copyright.
The cake is a pie
Australia doesn't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. (Merely political speech.) This is a counterbalance to copyright law which the USA has but we don't. You should mention this at least once.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I think that the emphasis of any copyright legislation should be based on promoting the production of scientific and artistic works. That should be the guiding principle behind any law and any enforcement, not profit.
Intellectual property is about the government granting someone a temporary monopoly on something, in the hopes that it will have a net benefit for the society. The monopoly is not a right that a creator has, it's a tradeoff. The government will permit you a temporary monopoly in exchange for you helping society when that temporary monopoly expires.
The extent and expiry of the monopoly should be designed so that society benefits, and not so that the artist/creator benefits. So, if the country is going to permit software patents, it should limit their duration to one or two years, something long enough so that the invention is worth it, but short enough that the technology is still relevant by the time the patent expires. I think it's best to exclude software patents entirely but that's just me.
I think another main feature of the law should be to guarantee that creators are compensated, rather than huge corporations. I would make it illegal to assign copyrights, patents and other IP to companies, and permit them to only be assigned to individuals or small groups of individuals. A person can choose to exclusively license his/her IP to a company if he/she so chooses, but such agreements must be made on a per-property basis. No contracts saying all IP created during a period is owned by a company.
Finally I think having terms in the law dealing specifically with Open licenses. This is the very core of "for the public good". Make it much harder to prosecute open-source developers for IP infringement. Even perhaps set aside some public money to advise and defend registered open-source development groups from lawsuits.
IP laws shouldn't be about money, they should be about freedom and public good.
3. All copying of a work is permitted so long as absolutely no money is made as a result of it (including ad revenue).
(C'mon, this is what we really want, right?)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
All works copyrighted at creation (generally already true), renewable through registration.
Reset the lifetime of the monopoly. That could be 5-10 years, renewable a few times.
Repository of all works that are renewed, with public release of all content at the end of the renewal. Expired content is made available at no cost, or perhaps for a very small annual usage fee. In the case of computer programs, this includes manditory release of all source code being copyrighted to the copyright office, and all code being released to the public after the renewal expires.
Ability to send content to a "public domain office", where the object is cleared of copyrights immediatly, and made publicly avaiable at no cost.
An army of Copyright Office workers, who are able to rapidly accept or reject copyright applications based on the evidence submitted. No more of this 2-3 years for acceptance garbage.
No more "register only the first and last 10 pages". You register the whole thing if you want legal protection, and the only protection you get renewed is the stuff you register.
Expidited court cases, assisted by the required submittal of renewals. For renewed copyright challenges, only the actual registered content would be accepted. No more of the 2+ years getting ready for the trial and everybody registering all their stuff with the copyright office, another year to get an injunction, then another five or so years waiting for the groups to settle out of court.
I'm sure I could think of more, but that's a good starting point.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: governments only offer to hear "public input" to pacify the citizenry -- they never really act on any of the public input or take it seriously.
That said, "fair use" and copyright law can and should be defined as follows:
Every person has the right to transfer (to/from any storage medium), transform (to/from any format, regardless of any intellectual property restrictions pertaining to the formats), or duplicate (an unlimited number of times), any content that person legitimately holds, so long as all instances of the content in any form remain under ownership of that person.
Every person has the right to make any subset of the content available for public consumption at no cost if and only if the purpose of doing so is to reference the content in the context of discussion, analysis, or parody of the content.
It is illegal for a person "A" to transfer any instances of the content to a second party "B" without transferring all instances of the content owned by the person "A".
That pretty much covers every case I can think of... right to parody, right to reference, right to analyze, right to decrypt any format, right to make personal copies, right to use that MP3 you bought in your car, iPod, and PC without having to buy it three separate times, and the right of the content producers to not be deprived of a potential sale by piracy/counterfitting.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
A constitutional provision demanding limited copyright...oh, wait...
Help us build a better map!
I would like the explicit legal right to do WHATEVER I WANT to any media I purchase, irrespective of how I gain the information or the tools to do so. Nintendo shouldn't be able to get away with lying about the law, stating that emulation and game copiers are illegal in and of themselves, rather than the actual law which states that distribution is an infringement, and that it's generally accepted that private, non-redistributed use is often fair use. Things like IPS patches, that contain no material copyrighted by anyone else, should also be explicitly legal under this provision. After all, if I create new art for a game, entirely on my own, then I own the copyright on that game, and the onus is on the user to patch the original ROM, which they can obtain however they'd like.
I would also like the explicit legal recognition of 'abandonware'. New versions of a game would count as a derivative work and gain their own copyright protection, including emulators that package the original binaries within them (such as the GBA NES Classics series).
I think the "media industry" would see major gains if they would cut some of the costs they incur into current media.
By using existing P2P technologies and allowing a person who paid X dollars for media content, they could essentially cut out a step in the supply chain by removing marketing, or perhaps shipping and distribution channels.
There would be a rise in the number of units sold due to the lower cost to produce and distribute, consumers are happy because they pay less for the content.
Lower prices and piracy is less likely to be as rampant as it is. Why pay $20 for a cd it cost $.69 to manufacture? Other than it's the right thing to do.
This would offer the consumer incentive to spend rather than use illegal means to aquire media.
The media moguls could then funnel all the money spent to persecute pirateers into other avenues to better product quality or even lower production or distribution costs even further by financing new technologies of dispersing content.
I think the current thinking is to treat the cause and not the symptom.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
To all of this I would add, I would like to see a resolution like this: "Corporations, by definition possessing no intellect, cannot possess intellectual property."
Yeah, seems catchy at first glance, but I guess some people who actually do have some intellect might kill you for that - because they could no longer WILLINGLY SELL their rights to corporations. If you were a succesful coder, wouldn't you really NEVER EVER regret having lost the possibility of selling your code to some corporation for an obscenely fat paycheck?
4. The notion of "derivative works" is abolished. Only copying is prohibited. New creations are OK.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
If an author works years to create some opus, then copyright law should give them long-term control over distribution. Some authors create very few works in their lifetime and, arguably, might deserve "lifetime" protection.
But this same law is used (abused) by mass-market content creators to protect every bit of pulp/drek/shovelware they put out. The current copyright law is geared toward individual authors (with corporations only too happy to ride the coat-tails).
You could argue that patent law has the same problem - how do you afford appropriate levels of protection to ideas that take millions (or billions) of dollars to create versus those created in the blink of an eye by some patent-happy company.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Last year, a group of graduate students (myself being one of them) asked that exact question and came up with their (our) suggested answer. Link below. It's under a CC license. It's US-centric, but feel free to forward to any Australian (or anywhere else) leaders you feel it would positively impact. :-)
http://www.garfieldtech.com/copyright/
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
By "WHATEVER I WANT", I didn't mean to include copyright infringement as one of the aspects of that, but after rereading what I wrote, I realized that I didn't specify one way or the other.
Is it wise for a country to have laws which the majority of its citizens break on a routine basis every day? Is it wise to have so much press coverage telling the majority of citizens that they are breaking the laws every day?
How long before people think of themselves as lawbreakers and begin to ignore any laws that they find annoying? This is how civil societies are destroyed. It begins with BAD LAWS. The next step is that people ignore the bad laws. Eventually, the government is overthrown, either violently or through the ballot box, and the laws are reformed.
Life is much better if we just avoid making BAD LAWS to begin with.
I'll be ready to discuss copyright reform after we've pirated all of the *IAA members out of business. I don't see that happening anytime soon either, so in the mean time I'll just continue to not buy their products and instead pay my ISP, Seagate and whoever makes good DVD-Rs.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
5. Let software be protected by patent only. Back-end code is no more a "creative work" than engine-block design.
(The immediate result of this will be that most software will not be protected at-all-against copying, since patents are expensive to acquired.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
here are just some ideas that I think is fair to both the consumer and to content creators.
Anytime content is sold, it should be a license for the person who purchased said content in whatever form or medium he or she choses. That means that if one buys a CD or a DVD, that person is within their rights to convert that audio or video recording into whatever format they want, and view it whereever they want (car/pc/mp3 player/etc).
As a consumer purchases a license to use the content, that person should be able to backup their investment, by copying files to a hard driver, burning to a CD/DVD, etc.
As per 1 and 2, if a distributer takes steps to prevent copying or re-encoding of content by the end user, then they are liable for providing the content in an acceptable alternate format, and providing replacement media should the original be damaged. (If they put copy protection on a CD, then the user should be able to get an electronic copy of the music should they wish to listen to the music on an mp3 player. If their original CD is damaged, then the seller should be required to provide a new copy of the medium).
If a person obtains a copy of some content without a license, that person is permitted to preview the content for a period of 24 hours, after which they must delete/destroy the their copy of the content, or purchase a valid license.
A license is transferable.
If less than 1/3 of the total content, or 15 minutes (whichever is less) of the content is used, it should be considered fair use and not require any additional licensing.
A license for content may belong to a single person, or at the option of the purchaser, be limited to a single source. (ie, a person can buy a CD, and then be allowed to copy that cd to a computer, listen to it on the computer/in the car/whatever, or they can have the license follow the original media, so that whoever has posession of the media has the license to use it, but can not keep a copy for themselves and provide a copy for someone else (with the 24 hour preview exception as noted above) ).
All content must enter the public domain after 20 years, or upon the death of the creator (if an organization owns the rights to the content, so there is no "creator" to die, then the content must enter public domain after 10 years).
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
To make matters worse, we have pundits who know so little about the issues at stake, but do not know that they know next to nothing at all! Yet they (these pundits) continue to "write" on the issues authoritatively.
I've always felt that a balance should be in place, but weighted more towards the interests of citizens/society than corporations. I'd like to see the following implemented:
Ten year copyright to the original author. The original author is defined as the single "person" or "group of people" who actually wrote/crafted/composed the work in question. Corporations and companies do not qualify as an original author.
The original author may transfer ownership of the work to another entity. Corporations and companies may qualify. This entity is considered the copyright holder, but is NOT considered as the original author.
If the original author still holds ownership of the copyright after the end of the original 10 year term, they may choose to extend it for 1 additional ten year term. The original author must explicitly seek the extension. By default, the work would fall into the public domain. If the original author is no longer the owner of the copyright, or has not maintained sole and exclusive ownership of the copyright for the entire original copyright period, then the copyright cannot be extended. No matter what occurs, all copyrights revert to the public domain after no more than 20 years maximum.
I believe such an arrangement allows plenty of time for an artist/author/composer to profit from their work, while protecting the publics interest of extending the public domain. It would also greatly curtail corporate hoarding of cultural works.
As far as fair use goes, I believe it's time to stop treating citizens as criminals by default. Time shifting, format conversion, and sampling should be completely unencumbered.
As far as the work as a whole is concerned, illegal redistribution should remain so. However, no government should attempt half-assed means to restrict technology with the short sighted goals of protecting copyright holders. Prosecute and punish the violators, not society as a whole.
Just my $0.02
put links to their NON-EXISTANT websites on slashdot?
sum.zero
I can live with changes that shorten the time spans for the copyright (in fact, I'm in favour of something on the order of ten years), but I do not support any that would (even marginally) shorten the time spans for my life.
--MarkusQ
6. All copyrights revert to their individual (human) owners when their durations have half expired. No contract trying to evade this reversion is enforceable.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
So I don't think my opinion counts here. But, does Aus Code have the same fair use provisions as does the US Code? In that case, nothing needs to be changed, the courts just have to recognize that fair use exists, and the legislature has to give it a nod when they write new bills (i.e. those bills that chip away at the freedoms afforded by fair use).
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
(1) Right to make an archival backup for personal use, including the ability to keep the original as the archival backup and to use the duplicate instead.
/not/ okay. Space-shifting onto a random stranger's P2P client is /not/ okay.
(2) Right to time-shift and space-shift for strictly personal use. 'Personal use' does not automatically include friends and family with the exception of broadcast media, or in other cases when involved friends/family are otherwise entitled to watch/partake prior to said shifting; it would be odd to prohibit recording a broadcast television program unless it were to be watched solo particularly when everyone involved had the right to watch it at the original time.
Explicitly permit technological subversion of protection schemes as necessary for such, so long as such subversion does not involve unauthorized access to anything not owned by subverter. Breaking into the licensing server is
(3) Full disclosure of protection schemes. If a program uses copy protection schemes, this information must be made readily available prior to transaction -- e.g. clearly described on packaging, not buried inside shrinkwrap.
(4) Full disclosure of licensing terms. For both this and the above, failure to do so in any meaningful regard entitles the purchaser to return all purchased items for a full refund plus any necessary shipping/handling costs during a short period after purchase, regardless of broken shrink wrap or other EULA terms.
(5) With regards to protection schemes, such a scheme may *not* interfere with other media or possessions. It may *not* deliberately require that other software be uninstalled, or actively disable them for full functionality to be enabled. If the protected program is uninstalled, any related protection mechanisms must also be completely uninstalled if the user so chooses.
Ultimately, a consumer should be assured that his transaction will not be rendered meaningless by deliberate and undisclosed protection methods. And if a software product's license requires a license per CPU core, it should be fully disclosed prior to purchase. And so forth.
(6) Continued limited rights regarding educational and editorial purposes. Quoting excerpts for the purposes of review is fine; quoting the entire book for a short "review" is not. Distributing unlicensed copies of Doom III to your 200 students ostensibly for teaching them about human-computer interaction is right out.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Copies for Personal use only (IE.. A Backup)
Record Broadcasts either on computer or Tape or DVD again for personal use
Convert File Formats
Be able to loan original material to a friend for a brief period of time.
Basically I would want to be able to do anything with a copyrighted item that I legally purchased, or someone else purchased, for me. As long as I do not destribute the copyrighted material to anyone else I feel I should be able to do anything else.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
If I have a copy of a song on one media, that I own, I should be able to move it to any media I want to as long as I, or my immediate family, are using it. I should not have to buy it once for VHS, again for DVD, and again for HDDVD and again for my portable player and again to view it on my notebook. Conversely, this does NOT mean I can copy it to all my friends, that should not be allowed.
it seems to me that a content creator should be able to make some money initally to recoup costs, but after a time locking up the content begins to harm a society's culture. perhaps maintaining a copyright should cost more and more over time - certain copyrights would be worth keeping for the long term if they kept covering their owner's cost. but the bulk of content would revert to public domain when its owners decide to stop paying for it. in the meantime, the public is funded through a "tax on the copyright".
of course, the time required for the release of the copyright into the public domain for the average case would be a key element - to me 5-15 years would seem about right. maybe the costs of maintaining the copyright for the first 8 years is minimal, then starts ramping up from there.
as a bonus, different fair-use policies could cost various amounts for the holder. if a DRM scheme were used, maybe an upfront cost could be assessed based on the future date when the DRM "unlocked" (of course, DRM is a whole separate part of this)
this approach would also take care of abondoned copyrights...
Perhaps yearly. One of the big problems with copyrights is that tracking down the owner of a 50 year old work that you want to use... perhaps every work should have a unique ID and cost, say, $10 or something.
This would make
7. Anything you do to a legally acquired copy of a work is OK (e.g. stripping the protection, backing up, resequencing a DVD to remove parts you don't like), but making more copies is not.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Normally i would have been reasonable and say "oh, change this and that", but i'm vengeful towards the content industry now. Abolish all copyright law except a GPL-like provision and fuck'em all.
Since copyright is a 'legal monopoly' on a given 'work', it should be severely limited:
- limited in time (other poster(s) have covered this): probably 5 years and only a single (lesser?) renewal available
- must always be attributed to a single person, never a corporation or an estate (but is otherwise entirely transferable)
- a 'derivative work' has a shorter limitation, say 2 years, again with a single (further limited?) renewal
- if a given work has a patent covering it, it cannot be copyrighted (and filing a patent causes copyright to be lost); e.g., the source code for a given software application cannot be copyrighted if the application has been patented
- a copyright holder has at most 6 (12) months to engage a copyright violation, i.e., legal action must start within 6 months of discovery of said violation and within 12 months of the time of the violation itself
There seems to be plenty wrong with copyright laws as they are, but those are a start...
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
License it. You retain copyright, they get to exercize it, and the duration is still the same.
I'm not arguing for either side here, just playing devil's advocate.
When a copyright term ends, the author should take reasonable measures to make sure that the work enters the public domain. With books, that work automatically enters the public domain, but with closed source software, the source code remains secret. This undermines the original spirit of copyright, which was to provide government protection (funded by public funds) in exchange for the eventual benefit of the public by adding to the body of works in the public domain. With software, this model is severely broken as copyright owners have done nothing to contribute to the public domain (by the time the copyright expires the platform is usually long gone, and source code is required for porting). If anything, they have tried their best to ensure that they give nothing back.
I'd also mandidate fair use clauses making illegal to implement any technology
/. technoliberateurs! Descend, descend!
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Since we're talking about Australia, I think it would be a great thing if their new law said something like this:
The first sentence should look familiar to Americans. The second sentence would prevent many of the abuses of copyright we're seeing today.See what I've been reading.
8. Works that go out of print for 1 year are abandoned and anyone may reprint them until the copyright holder resumes publication. If 10 years pass from the time the copyright holder stops publication, the work becomes permanently public domain. In any event, the copyright holder is not entitled to sales during periods of lapse.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Copyright law is needed by some industires in order to justify the massive R&D costs. Most industries however, don't need the extremely lengthy "Life of the author plus 70 years" here in the United States and most free nations. For industries such as software, the technology is continually changing and the development costs are extremely significant, asside from salaries. So companies can make large profits of the technology and after 4 or 5 years the technology is almost irrelevant anyway and should be released into the public domain, so technology can continue to advance without burden. So I would suggest four yesrs. Joe
Math
Particularly in this digital age, it is not the act of copying that should be protected. It is the act of distribution. So I would change things such that it is legal and legally protected that once you have acquired a work by a legal distribution means, it is yours to do with as you wish. Any further clarification on what one does with the work is unneeded and counter-productive.
Also, I think the neverending extension of copyright expiration is silly. Copyright is a limited and government granted (not natural) monopoly to encourage the creative potential, not as a guarantee of exclusive profit. The limit should be reasonable and practicable (ie. not a lease of 999 years).
Remember, the Open Source community also uses copyright. Personally, I am happy for my work to go into the public domain after a few years, once it has encouraged it to be added to freely.
Possibly, in this case I would also like to see some sort of guarantee that the original, master or high quality work does become available to the public after the limitation period has ended...this may not be easy though...
ALSO: Derivative works should be unencumbered. That is, if person X translates a bestseller by person Y into Pig Latin, ONLY person X gets the royalties. The caveats:
* the derivative cannot be in a format that can be easily used to recreate the original;
* the derivative must differ substantially from the original (you can't change 1 word and resell a book).
Person Y cannot restrict the creation of the PigLatin version.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
1. All your base are belong to us.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
How about: Copywrite ownership ALWAYS remains with the original author. Also meaning you cannot copywrite Public Domain. Copywrite lasts for up to 25 years, or when the author dies. Copywrited works can be used in any manner other than re-distributing in whole or in part without the author's explicit consent. I'm an Aussie too! Let's get something that works.
So that if you were to "redo" Star Wars and "add" things to it, the original work would become free.
Thus if it wasn't an improvement, most people wouldn't "redo" things to extend and expand their copyrights, because they would have a disincentive to do so.
However, adding extra footage would not invalidate the original, but wouldn't extend the copyright either. So you could do a director's cut.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I work in animation, and though I'm not a creative genius myself (and will never create an original property) I've known quite a few people who are, some who've made it big, others who've fallen by the wayside.
I see a lot of people in this discussion throw out "5 years from date of creation" and similar time frames. I find that to be ridiculous. It could take five, ten, fifteen years or even longer for a creative type to find success. Someone could write a book or song in their twenties, release it in relative obscurity and then find success with the next generation (or two generations later, it happens.) Why shouldn't they be entitled to reap the rewards?
Look, if you create something, a property, a song, a character, whatever, it should be YOURS. As long as you are alive. This isn't patent law, where an invention and variations of the technology could be good for society. Nobody needs Mickey Mouse, it doesn't benefit the world for "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" to be free for everyone to use, and Steven King should be always be the first to profit when an edition of "Christine" is published. This has nothing to do with digital rights, Bittorent and all that... It has to do with who owns the rights and says what can be done with his or her intellectual property.
Of course, many if not most properties are in the hands of corporations, and I would suggest that copyright law be changed so that only individuals, not companies can own a copyright-- otherwise it's "leased" for a specific period of time (and here is where the five years figure could come in.) After which, the creator can renegotiate for a fair value or take it back. No more cases of Marvel screwing Kirby or Nickelodeon dumping Kricfalusi from his own show.
I would further suggest that copyrights cannot be owned by an estate. Public domain happens when the artist dies, period-- and then the work is released to the ages to be remembered or forgotten. Anyway, wives, children and grandchildren are notorious for "selling out", caring more for cash than any integrity.
I think it is utterly wrong or even illegal to sing out loud, the same very song you just heard on the radio. Although you could eventually, maybe not in public, only at home, or in the bathroom or shower or so.
Or only when you can't remember who' song it is... or where you heard it before...
But then again, you should pay someone, to sing it to, so he could look up the one you should pay for singing his or her song...
Nah. Forget it.
--------
* Sigh *
Copyright is more than about money. It also dictates whether, for example, someone is allowed to make a movie based on your novel. Consequently, arguing for rights to be reduced to 5y is pretty nasty, since that would mean open season of movie adaptations (indeed, given the lead time for many movies, you could start pre-production on a movie adaptation as soon as the book was in print, knowing that it wouldn't hit theatres until the book was out of copyright).
Similarly, many books aren't immediately successful. It seems rather unfair to penalise writers of sleeper hits.
The life of the author. The old 50y rule (or was it "author's life + 50y"?) seemed fairly reasonable for books. The problem with movies is that their "authors" (companies) never die and all kinds of loopholes and extensions have basically allowed certain examples of IP to be protected in perpetuity. E.g. Disney can digitally remaster "Snow White" and then reset the copyright clock. It's all well and good that copyright of the original "Snow White" has expired, but no-one has a copy of the print which they can duplicate.
Mighty Morphin' Licenses It particularly irks me that copyright is used to convert "ownership" of a good into "license" to use it in a way that is always to the disadvantage of the consumer. E.g. if I buy a CD, I do not "own" it in the sense of "it's mine so I can do anything I like with it including make copies of it or broadcast it over the airwaves", but a "license to listen to it" along with a physical object. Suppose, however, my CD is broken or scratched, but my license is still valid -- surely I am entitled to a free or cheap replacement copy! Nope. In fact, ideally the music company wants to sell me a higher quality version of it (DVD-audio, or CD+) if it can.
This kind of behavior has become particularly nasty with respect to movies. You see a movie at the theater. You can't take away a "copy for personal use" (and soon in the US you may be imprisoned for 3y for trying to). You like the movie so you buy it on VHS. Later, a director's cut VHS comes out so you buy that. Then it is released on DVD. You buy that. Then it comes out in letterbox with special features. Each time you're burned as a licensee when it suits the vendor, or burned as an owner when it suits the vendor.
In my view, having paid for a personal copy of something you should be entitled to obtain at cost replacements or make backups or obtain duplicates to replace it for your own personal use. Any improved versions (e.g. higher resolution) should be provided as upgrades and if not you should be allowed to obtain copies. Then at least it's a real license.
http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyri ght/
I would like to see protection for new business models to fund creative works. More specifically, I would like to see a safe-harbor for copyright violations of works incorporated into works released into the public domain and for the more free versions of the creative commons license. Any damages awarded for such a case would be limited to no more than the net revenue generated by the work.
This would allow a business to form enabling a work-for-hire model without fear that an accidental inclusion of an "old-style" copyrighted work would destroy the business.
For example, you record a song and it happens to include a bass-line that has been copyrighted by some music label 20 years ago. Studio time, etc costs you $600 to get the recording mixed and ready for production qualit release. You charge $1000 to release it to the public domain - 500 fans each pay $2 and so you relase it. Said big music label decides to file suit for copyright infringement, the most they can get are two things:
1) Song is "withdrawn" from the public domain.
2) $600 in damages because that was net revenue generated by the sale
This avoids the ability of the sudio to sue for $150,000 or so for every copy of the song ever made which is about what the current (USA) copyright laws allow for. $150,000 x millions of downloads would totally bankrupt any business.
So, if alternate business models are going to get off the ground, they need to be protected from legal attacks designed more to protect the current business model than to protect the artist. Changes to the law should enable creativity in art and in business, not fight it.
I would require that all copyright "protection" measures must allow the fair use part of the copyright bargain in order to have legal protection against circumvention under DMCA-like laws.
Just randomly thinking, but it would nice if we had a system where anyone can write or send off electronically a request for a work to be entered into the public domain, and if in 30 days, the owner does not respond in the negative, it happens automatically.
(Obviously, only so many such requests would be allowed per year, in case people try to spam the system.)
Does that mean that corporations aren't considered people for copyright? And can't "buy" copyrights, only "lease" them?
OK.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We should think of IP more like we think of real property, not personal property -- the better analogy for wholesale infringement isn't stealing, which deprives the owner of the use, but trespassing, which is unconsented use.
I think that transformative uses of material under copyright should be judged under a related real property concept -- nuisance.
Nuisance is part of this branch of law -- basically, let's say that your neighbor is doing something really valuable, but that imposes a cost on you (say noise or pollution or something). In general, nuisance law says that if he can afford to pay you for your harm, he should. If he can't, though, then you can't close him down.
So, let's consider Star Wars Revelations (mentioned previously). In theory, George Lucas could shut it down -- it uses the original Star Wars logo, Star Wars characters, music and so on. But, it was done on a shoestring -- if they had to pay for the right to do it, it never would have been made. That's transformative use, and it differs from just plain wholesale infringement -- downloading entire movies or songs or whatever. That sort of use, like when a 16-year-old remixes his favorite song, should be allowed.
In theory, US Fair Use could cover this. In practice, it doesn't.
On a side note, you're going to have to pay attention to when Australia is a party to the Boerne Convention and the TRIPS agreement, both of which spell out minimum protections.
For those considering "life of the author" as a factor in copyright law, it may be interesting to consider how that may change if human lifespans are radically extended. Do we want to allow for copyright periods measured by the millenia?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
It really helps to say that you want a reasonable balance between the rights of the general public and the rights that society has given to copyright holders to further the arts and sciences.
IMHO a reasonable balance would be something like:
I agree...these laws are tools of repression, much like how the Jews were simply a means to empower Hitler. In this case, it's not Hitler being empowered, but the oligarchs.
Check out the CIA World Factbook, GINI index--the US has one of the worst wealth disparities of "civilized" countries. It's all about the benjamins, baby.
The GPL is a Distribution liscense, it places no limits on end-users whatsoever. The GPL only grants rights, it does not take any away. It grants permission to people to distribute copyrighted material when they would not otherwise have a right to do so. End Users can do whatever the Fuck they want.
The GPL is binding as long a contract along the lines of "You pay me X money, you get to print my book" is binding.
No, that's just to register a copyright. Something doesn't actually have to be registered to be copyrighted. Any work is automatically copyrighted at the time of completion, whether or not it's registered or even published.
Breakfast served all day!
Right now, copyright law regulates the act of making copies. The copyright holder is allowed to prevent anyone from making copies of their work, even if those copies never see the light of day.
If I copy a CD I purchased onto my hard drive, then erase the file without ever listening to it, I've committed copyright infringement. It's considered legal (in Canada) as an exemption to copyright law.
This is why SODRAC (a Canadian copyright body) pushed to get an levy on ISPs. After all, routers make copies of the copyrighted content they push around.
So far, the courts have acknowledged that this sort of thing--copies that nobody ever sees--are fair use but I think this highlights a fundamental incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital age.
I say, copyright law should explicitly allow all copying unless it grants unauthorized access to the work to another person. I should be allowed to make however many copies of my purchased content as I want. If I want to fill my hard drive with MP3s of Oops! I Did It Again, I should be allowed to as long as I've paid for the right to listen to it (by buying one copy somewhere) and I've taken reasonable precautions to keep more than one person from listening to any of my copies at a time.
I don't think that sounds unreasonable, do you?
Seriously, this whole question is very biased. It's like asking, what would you ask for to make slavery law just? Well Duh. How about GET RID OF IT!
Copyright monopolies are unjust by their very nature. Why in the hell should we make it anything more than a term of 0 just for the sake of appeasing the common masses who are more interested in appearing to fit in than swallowing simple honest facts. Yeah, extreme, I know, so was democracy, free speech, free religion, and a round world. Societies of the future will look at us like ignorant fools for trying to cling to a poor belief system that just doesn't work, just like the way we do today toward the poor fools who clinged to dear life for hope of the slave states getting along with the free states.
That is the title of one section of this suggested answer at GarfieldTech.com.
I think this is an important concept to get down. Copyright is just one facet of this monster that we now call "Intellectual Property". All Intellectual Property has one underlying property, it is created by one (or more) intellects. It is NOT created by these artifical entities called corporations. Ownership of Intellectual Property should be limited to the original creators. These creators should be able to enter into some contracts dealing with their creations, but these contracts are limited to the length of time of the copyright/patent/..., the creator(s) life, or the "natural lifetime" of the creation; which ever is shorter. In some circumstances, the creation has a "lifetime" longer than the creator(s): for example, many books are still "alive" centuries after they are written. Some creations have short lifetimes. In the world of copyright, manuals on fad computer languages would be an example of something with a short life. If the language only exists a couple of years, a 20 year copyright is silly.
What benefit would that serve?
You're only creating more paperwork and potentially screwing people that forget to register a copyright on everything they create.
Specifically, say a college student or a hobbyist created something wonderful which gets published in some magazine or newsletter.
They didn't register a copyright and then people discover it over a year later and it becomes huge shouldn't they get some credit? Corporate greed would swallow this up because other people would use their work and not give them a penny if they could get away with it.
I think copyright should be maintained as automatic on anything you create.
What needs work is the terms to convert it to PD.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
So you are feeling idealistic, aren't you? :P
Fine, but who owns the work until it's published? Right now, copyright is automatic. If you write a novel, you own it. If publication is the benchmark, who has the right to publish? Until the work is published, there is no copyright ... so, in theory, if you left your manuscript in the back seat of my taxi cab, I could make a copy of it and rush it to press. If I immediately applied for copyright, would I then own it?
Breakfast served all day!
...to redo the entire copyright system, I would rather present suggestions within the current system, to halt a disturbing trend:
1. It should be illegal for any copyright protection scheme to enforce restrictions on non-reproductive use.
Examples:
Fast forward disabled, protected by CSS: Illegal
Fast forward in an "open" bit: Legal.
Region restrictions, protected by CSS: Illegal
Region restrictions in an "open" bit: Legal.
2. Copyright must be granted under the Berne convention. But protection of a copyright protection scheme is only granted on the condition that decryption keys are placed in escrow with the government, to be released into the public domain at the same time as copyright expires. If this key is protecting several works, it will be released when the first work enters the public domain.
Example:
[Movie company] releases a DVD. The symmetric key is placed in escrow with the government. When the copyright expires, that specific key is released.
[Music company] releases a compilation CD with a single key. When the first track enters public domain, the key is released (which would quickly lead to a system where each object is protected by its own key).
The public/private key pair in CD/DVD/TV players are never released, only the specific instances of keys.
3. All DRM systems which have the characteristics of a sale must allow resale under the first sale doctrine free of any comission, even if a license can not be reliably revoked (i.e. the buyer gets his copy, the seller keeps his). However, after invoking this the old original is considered an illegal copy, subject to relevant copyright law.
4. If the work is protected by a DRM system, the company must provide replacements at cost. Proof of ownership may be either damaged media, or reciept if the content is uniquely tied to the user. (As medialess content is).
Example:
DVD broken: Replacement.
iTMS tunes lost in disk crash: Replacement
DVD gets stolen: Car/home insurance case. Too easy to commit fraud otherwise.
These are areas where DRM is threatening to undermine basic consumer rights. While this is not nearly enough, I fear it will be hard enough to save even this much.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The problem is not with copyright law. The problem is with our Congress. They get campaign finance money from the movie and record industries. So to ensure that the money keeps flowing in they whore themselves by passing legislation to extend copyright length. Our constitution prohibits an infinite time period for copyright. So instead of making it forever which would be unconstitutional they just keep extending it. I say they should put it back to fourteen years as it was intended or stop pretending that they care about enriching our culture and just make the length twenty-five billion years and be done with it. F**king whores.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If John Cage makes a musical work consisting of silence, and you make one which is identical to it, but without copying from it, then your work is not infringing and is copyrightable to you. OTOH, if you based your work on his, then that would be infringing.
Problem is that if you have heard his work once, the court will assume that you based your work on his, whether you intended to or not. This precedent of strict liability for subconscious copying (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music) could easily lead to a chilling effect on composition of new music.
As a rule of thumb, since it's improbable that works of even moderate length and complexity will happen to be independently created
The problem is that a work doesn't need "moderate length and complexity" to earn a copyright. For instance, "He's So Fine" is just one three note pattern repeated four times, followed by a five note pattern repeated four times. Read it and weep.
After all, what are the odds that I would write War and Peace, word for word, without reference to the other one? But if I can show that that's what happened
Please skim the two pages I linked to and then answer the following question: How would you go about showing independent creation in a court of law?
I believe that one way to improve the laws would be to debate the difference between the personal use of materials and the publication of materials. I believe that there should be very little restriction on personal use. The laws should deal primarily with publication.
Now, I do realize that there is a blurry line between personal use and publication, especially when you are dealing with presenting information to a small audience, business or classroom. It seems to me that the the aim of the law should be focused on the extent to which a person is publishing an item.
Is playing a CD at a crowded discotech a personal use or a publication of the song.
When I look at a P2P network, it seems to me that when I place something into that shared directory, I am in effect publishing that file. There should be no restriction on my making personal back ups of CDs. However, my placing the my backups in a shared directory is a form of publication.
Giving copies of my CDs to cute girl in a pathetic attempt at seduction is a form of publishing.
P2P is also problematic in that the person who puts a file on the network might be different from the person who owns the machine on the network. The person who published the file is the one violated the copyright. The owner of the computer is complacent if they do not remove the file.
If the laws were aimed only at the publication of material, then copyright issues would really only arise during the act of publishing materials. The above statement would only be true if you were publishing something everyday, or if you had stolen a copyrighted material and are using it everyday. For example if you use the shareware Winzip everyday and did not pay the shareware fee then you are violating its copyright everyday.
Personally, I think we would be in a better position if the laws were centered on differentiating between personal use and publication. In such a system, our debates about when to use and not use a given piece of copyrighted material would could be framed within the question of whether or not we were publishing that information.
While we're at it, the elimination of abusive corporate copyright clauses (i.e., the current 100 year wall) would be more than fair.
This sig no verb.
Something doesn't actually have to be registered to be copyrighted.
In the United States, you already have to register a copyright before you use it to sue someone, and you already have to register before infringement in order to collect (ridiculous) statutory damages and (less ridiculous) attorney's fees unless the alleged infringement occurred within three months of first publication.
and not more then that. That should make it possible to make money and it still will not be outdated when it becomes available.
It will make it also that after 25 years companies will have to go and see that there is new material. This will cause them to promote new things that can be copyrighted.
For those who like music, next year the music of Carlos Gardel will be free for his music. Look at the end of this page
in 1943 José Razzano was able to buy the rights to of Gardel's recordings for meagre 30.000 pesos. Needless to say, Razzano and his heirs have profited quite well from Gardel's popularity and will have done so for a total of 70 years, until Dec. 21, 2006, the year that the author's rights expire in Argentina. Uruguay, on the other hand, has already declared Gardel's music to be in public domain.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Expires when the last author (if a group project) dies.
That's all.
No extensions for the company.
No extensions for the family.
5 guys develop it, last guy of the 5 dies. Public domain. Period.
I bet you company health care programs will improve.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Copyright law is completely outdated and hasn't kept up with the greedy bastards who seek to twist it to their advantage. In that way, it's very similar to the US legal system. In a beautiful sunny place I like to call "Software development land" we change our product to meet the needs of the consumer, we don't tell the consumer "this is all you're getting for the next 100 years" so I think it's about time that this and other socio-economic processes were re-thunk. Copyrights should expire after 5 years. They should be limited to resale or plagiarism, not to copy or distributing for free. The whole notion of "MINE!!!! YOU CAN'T SEE IT!!!" baffles me. Take our good friend Bill for example - if the source code of his product were accessible, third party products would WORK BETTER and make his product MORE ATTRACTIVE to consumers. Instead - there exists the daily battle to make things work that should inherently be easy to integrate. This is a direct result of the ridiculous patent laws perpetuated around the world by greedy money-men. Someone said earlier "allow them to make a reasonable amount of money" - that's difficult to gauge, but a nice concept. "We need to make Billions to be able to afford the research". No - you make billions, so people charge you more for their services. It's a never ending cycle that could be chopped down to the knees with a simple restriction on what can be copyrighted and for how long. In the IT industry, if you're still using the same technology after 5 years, you're probably out of business. We are forced to adapt and innovate. Strict copyright laws will dampen the enthusiasm of the innovative and will condemn us to a ridiculous "how much will you pay for me to say hi" state of affairs. There has to be a point where enough becomes enough. While technology is driving the arguments on this at the moment - it can be applied to many other areas - automotive devices - the more knowledge, the faster improvements can be made to increase efficiency, safety and cost - how does this not benefit everyone? The people who want to hide their toys and not let anyone play are usually the ones who are making sub-standard crap they don't want exposed for what it is. Open up the box and let us look inside. If you've done your job properly, we'll appreciate it and maybe try to help you make it even better. I guess this really highlights my open-source mentality, but that's a lifestyle as much as a working ethos and is completely relevant to this topic.
Let's face it, Disney is NEVER going to let the copyright on Mickey Mouse expire. They are going to throw every dollar they have in bribing --err, I mean lobbying -- the government into extending copyright laws forever.
With that in mind, I think a solution would be something like 15 or 20 years and then after that if you want to keep the copyright, you just need to file for an extension. While it would be nice to have Mickey Mouse in the public domain, that doesn't seem likely, but what this does is let all the abandoned works to go into public domain. There are lots of books, movies, music, etc. that are still in copyright, but no one really cares about them and the original copyright might have disappeared. As it stands, it is still illegal to copy those things.
For example, right now IU has a huge collection of educational films from post WWII to the early 80's. Lots of universities used to have similar collectsion back in the 50's and 60's but most got rid of them with the onset of VHS. For whatever reason IU still has them. However, partly because of copyright limitations (and partly because of bugetary reasons), they sit in storage. Now, is there anyone that could argue that making a copy of some 60's educational film is really going to hurt someone's profit? Or even digitizing it and putting it on archive.org? But they can't do that because the material, as out of date and forgotten about as it is, is still copyrighted. That's just stupid.
If my system of renewing copyright were in place, and there were a system to make sure that the renewer had a legitimate claim to the work and wasn't just a speculator, then Mickey Mouse could be in copyright forever, but more marginal things would be allowed to fall into public domain.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
2. The duration of copyright on a work is set at the time it is first published. It may not be later extended.
...if you're able to push through a law, it will change this paragraph, as well as the duration. You can't put into law what future laws Congress can pass. Unless you're looking for a amendment to prevent such a law, but that seems silly. Oh, and the amendment could still be counter-amended.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Of course the problem here is that since this book was highly critical of the first author's work, if the first author would have been thin skinned, he could have easilly said no and thereby stifled the debate about the issue.
An author who refuses criticism of his work is much more likely to make the work subject to the fair use limitations on the scope of copyright. Not only did the Supreme Court of the United States uphold parody as a permissible fair use, but when the Court upheld repeated copyright term extension in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003), it also clarified that without the right to criticize and make other fair uses of copyrighted works, copyright would likely unconstitutionally abridge freedom of the press.
Copyright Durations
...the copyright term began on the date of publication or registration, and originally lasted 28 years... g ht_durations.html
1 33.html
h tml
http://www.bromsun.com/practice/copyrights/copyri
bulk.resource.org
Data rescued by media.org.
http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/
Copyright Clearance Center
http://www.copyright.com/
Copyright in Cyberspace
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/0963702513p
Copyright Management Center
http://copyright.iupui.edu/
Copyright Website
http://www.benedict.com/
FAIRCOPY
http://www.faircopy.com/
Janis Ian
The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.
FALLOUT - a follow up to The Internet Debacle
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html
Musicians Against Copyrighting Of Samples
http://www.icomm.ca/macos/
Stanford University Libraries
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
What is Copyright Protection
http://www.whatiscopyright.org/
Words to men, as air to birds.
If you look at the PDF document linked in the story, hop to page 38 and you will get a list of the current exceptions to Australian Copyright Law. Some of what has been asked for has already been covered there. (Free for educational, governmental and judicial use - making backups of programs and data etc).
Most of it is quite reasonable, to me anyway.
I doubt application for copyright would be a simple process
You don't need an attorney to register a copyright in the United States. All you need is to send 30 USD, two copies of your work, and a simple form to the Copyright Office.
Problem with this is that your relying on accountants to tell you when's enough. I think Disney's accountants can game any money-based system easily enough.
Time limits are better, 'cause we can pretty easily pinpoint the release/first sale, and we all know how to count... ergo: they are enforcable.
So if I change the least significant bit in one sample on a video/audio recording, is it a new work? Derivative works specificly deal with the problem "When is this new?" Maybe you want to redefine it somewhat, but I think your idea might get messier than the current one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Copyright protection laws establish Fair Use rights to holders of copies of protected works; therefore copyright protection shall not be extended to any work that uses technological or other means to deny Fair Use said work, whether such denial of Fair Use is intentional or not.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I would like to see more emphasis on moral rights and changes in punishment for copyright violations: It is ridiculous to have people going to jail because they violated the copyright laws; jail terms should be replaced by monetary punishment and a compulsory seminar in copyright laws so that violators would learn more about the laws they broke.
As the society and the human creativeness is focused more and more in knowledge and intellectual creations, new citizens should be more informed about copyright laws. Why not teach some basics in the high school, or mail a copyright law handbook to every new citizen after they get 18 years old?
Copyright law should also recognise the social needs of people for sharing: Friends love to share their books, music CDs and software. It is not nice to refuse sharing the stuff you have bought with a good old friend and telling them you do that because you don't want to break some copyright laws that don't take into account the human need for sharing. Some people cannot not share what they have got!
1.) Shorten length of copyright. Drastically. Copyright lasts for 7 years, period.
2.) Registration and notice of copyright required. The notice must contain the date of creation, the name of the creator, and some form of contact information (address, phone, e-mail, website, whatever). A work distributed without a copyright notice immediately falls into the public domain (with some sort of provision noting that the work must not have been changed from the original incarnation - no ripping the title page out of a book and then declaring the book public domain).
3.) Copyright can only be held by a natural person (i.e., not a corporation). A corporation may by contract secure license to some or all of the copyright holder's rights, but may never *exclusive* license to those rights for any duration of time.
4.) You may apply any sort of DRM technology, with as much legal power against breaking it (DMCA) as you like provided the technology automatically expires/removes itself the second the copyright term is up (but only if you give me #1).
5.) I am willing to give up the Fair Use provisions in their entirety provided you give me #1. In other words, no Fair Use at all for 7 years, but then it falls into the public domain.
Fine, but who owns the work until it's published? Right now, copyright is automatic.
And it should remain automatic until the work is first published.
so, in theory, if you left your manuscript in the back seat of my taxi cab, I could make a copy of it and rush it to press. If I immediately applied for copyright, would I then own it?
Copyright registration in the United States already requires the person filing the two-page application to certify that he is the author, copyright owner, or designated agent. Fraud is a crime in all 50 states.
I would further suggest that copyrights cannot be owned by an estate. Public domain happens when the artist dies, period
And what happens when the cost to hire a hitman and cover one's tracks is less than the profit that one could make by selling copies of a work?
If you want to know more about this birthday song history, then read Dmusic's article.
:)
I posted this on AQFL long time ago.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One great idea he suggests is to have an online registration that costs (say) $1 per year to register, with a maximum life of (IIRC) 50 years. If the copyright owner doesn't register it every year, it's in the public domain. If it's not worth $1 to register, then it shouldn't be copyrighted anyway.
Although when I'm feeling idealistic I like to declare that all copyright laws should be thrown out, I'm willing to take the pragmatic approach.
I think the problem here is that the "pragmatic" approach here has already been tried 200 years ago, and it failed miserably just as society hit the information age. And that makes allot of sense. You can't go telling people that they have this "moral right" to restrict what people copy, and then expect them not to try and secure this "right" by using every resource they can to push it to the extremes.
With regular physical property, you have natural limiting factors that limit those extremes, with copyrights you don't because they are not a natural law creation. Copyrights are simply people coercing limits on things that have no natural limit for the sake of greed and monopoly.
If someone said "lets limit food to the 3rd world more than it already is because we want to get more profit" most people would see this as the pure evil that it is. But when they do the same thing with the worlds information, then oh my God - it's a RIGHT!?
5 years isn't enough IMHO, for the reasons already mentioned by others.
Here's my idea. 5 (or maybe 10, I don't really know) years from the date of creation, plus X from when (if?) the work becomes commercially available.
X would be determined once as an average across industries which are based on selling copyrighted material.
I'd like to see is a graph of profit from sale of something as a function of time. I couldn't find one but I imagine it would look not unlike a graph of decay of radioactive material: starting high, and then falling at a decreasing rate. Dropping the copyright when the profit decreases in half is probably too harsh, so X would be set at the time when Rate of Change gets to a certain low* value.
This, in my view, should result in copyright lasting as long as people specifically look for the average item, and would expire when the only profit is from people accidentally bumping into stuff.
*absolute? Maybe there's a better way to mathematically express this point...
how about making information about a person the property of that person.
the theory is that information about an individual, such as buying habits, web surfing habits, reading habits, hobbies, investments, medical history, etc. is a compilation of creative and factual information created by that person and only recorded by a commercial database manager.
redistributing information about a person without permission then becomes a copyright violation. database owners would have to get permission from the individuals whose information is recorded in their database before they could sell that information.
individuals who don't want their information distributed can refuse permission and will have the opportunity to sue under copyright law if, say, their amazon.com buying habits are sold. individuals who don't mind their information being distributed can ask for consideration (i.e. money or free stuff) in exchange for letting their personal information and tastes being packaged and sold.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Because the profit I can made stamping out and selling public domain CDs significantly exceeds the $10000-or-so it would cost to have the artist in question killed.
I think something fixed in the 10-20 year range and non-transferable is more sensible.
Following logic of libraries, such exception would be great: User is allowed download/upload a copy of copyrighted work for nonpermament use.
1. Copyright should be easy, and cheap. Big business should not have an advantage over the little guy. This means:
* No charge to register
* No need to register
* Copyright lawyers paid for by the government
2. Copyright should encourage creative works. Creators should be able to make BIG BUCKS (if their work is good, of course).
3. Expiry: There is a long set expiry date (e.g. 100 years). BUT! to remain in copyright, published sales in the last 1 year must total more than 1% of the highest sales year. This means anything that goes out of print will become public domain. Conversely, anything given away for free (or still in developement) will remain copyright for a very long time.
4. When a person receives a work under copyright (e.g. purchase or gift), they may do anything to it at all FOR THEIR OWN USE. Copy it, convert it, make derivative works, blow their nose with it. Both the media and the art is theirs to do with as they please.
5. Parody, review, and criticism may make use of no more than 1% of the origonal, for them to be distributed to others.
6. A person who owns a copy of a copyrighted work may give or loan that work to any other person. They then have *NO RIGHT* to possess or use that work (until it is returned), including any copies made under section 4.
7. No copyright holder may do anything to block any of the rights any other person has (e.g. CSS). No person may do anything to block a copyright holder from their work (as Nikon did in their RAW format). No copyright holder may dictate how a person views their work (e.g. MacroVision).
8. Any person may make unlimited references to a copyrighted work (which includes machine-readable references, and web links), provided that no data from the origonal work is included. This means also that derivative works may be distributed by saying "my video clip, then the first 10 seconds of this movie, then...", though a viewer would need to own a copy of the work to put the bits back together.
9. Any person distributing (illegal) copies of copyrighted work will be fined the (retail) cost of a new copy for each copy sold. Any person caught in possession of a illegally copied work will be required to buy a legal copy, and pay a fine (about the cost of a legal copy).
10. Copyright owners must make available on request, at no cost, a historic account of sales income for products sold, for any product still in copyright. They can, of course, withhold that information by admitting the work is in the public domain.
Which is a short story by Spider Robinson. http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___ 1.htm
It addresses the issue of what will happen to the artists do when there is nothing new to discover.
Copyright infringement is about making copies. If i have a copy sitting on a warez server, then i made only one copy.
It is the downloader who makes copies of the stuff. Not the uploader.
The idea that an uploader is somehow like a counterfeit printer is wrong. If i print off 8000 copies of a book without permission, then i made 8000 copies of it, and 8000 copies are in my posession at some point. On the other hand, if i upload one copy of a program, then i make just one copy.
On the other hand, if i copy a cdrom from your collection, then it is not you that cops it but me. But in effect, all i have done is do a download, not an upload.
It would be nice to do copies for private use, because the medium is more critical than books. A book that is dog-eared and stained is still servicable, while a cdrom may not.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Arn't we missing the point. What other country actively seeks input from it's citizens with regard to copyright law?
Because that is not the purpose of copyright. Copyright law is based on the premise that works should revert to the public domain as soon as possible while still providing an incentive for authors. You may argue that 5 years is not enough incentive, but you have to realize that that is all it is, an incentive, not a guaranteed income, not a reward for time spent or money invested.
I would suggest that an artist who spends 10 or 20 years on a single work a) has independent means and b) is engaged in a labor of love and needs no further incentive.
Test 1 2 3 4
Copyright should *only* be about copying and protection of authorship. That is, if I write a book and copyright it, you can't claim it's your work. You can't distribute copies of my work (original or altered) until the term expires. That's all.
No automatic copyright. No free renewal. No licensing or control of how I use the work that I paid for. No prohibition of derivative works. No dictating how, when, where or to whom I can re-sell the copy I paid for.
I'm quite tired of being told I can't back up books or audio for my own use, being told I can't reverse-engineer software that I paid for, just so I can know what's running on my *own* damn computer. Tired of being told I can't show a DVD I paid for at a public viewing, even for free. Tired of not being able to play my music for other people in public. Tired of perpetual Mickey freaking Mouse never going into the public domain!
Down with intellectual property! Up with simple copyright law!
I would also like to see copyright last for 95.
.. try michael jackson/sony/emi your gonna takeaway their cash cow.
Unfortunately though i believe this would be impossible for the big companies to agree to.
The amount of material generated in the last ~50 years is massive and releasing it for free distribution would destroy the marketplace for new product. Remember kids its all about capitalism and you gotta keep generating new revenue so the copyright laws keep on getting extended.
Also the copyright to something, (like the beatles), is brought and sold based on its future value
(not that i imagine they would of argued it like this in the sonny bono case though
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
It makes it all the more difficult for the entertainment cartel to fight the provision. Using the VCR as an example, going forward the VHS tape VCR is going to become extinct. Replacing it is digital. Tivo. MythTV, Knoppmyth. Digital cards/units like Air2PC, HD3000 cards, and other versions that will come out now that the broadcast flag has been temporarily set back. Ideally, you would want the same rights for these new products that you currently have with your VCR, right?
You can currently record a television program or movie from over-the-air or cable, pop the tape out, take it to your vacation home or friend or relative's home, and watch that movie while on vacation or at your friend or relative's house. You can even pop that tape into the mail and send it to your mom's house so you can watch it together when you stop in from your business trip on your way back home. Or visiting temporarily from school prior to going home for summer break. Or simply let your mom watch it while you stay at school for extra studies.
With a digital recording and a networked home, why bother with VCR tapes? You simply transfer the recording over the internet to your mom's home. And if you forget to do it while at your home or dorm, you can do it remotely by logging in to your home network and then transferring the program to your current location.
Digital Restrictions Management schemes all interfere with the above. Interfere with rights you already have when those programs exist in other forms, on other media. Why does innovation result in lost rights?
It is very important to frame your statements using the above examples. Simply stating that proposed copyright rules or digital restrictions management or treaties dealing with "IP" and "copyrights" will outlaw future VCRs is not enough. Legislators aren't experts. Far from it. You telling them that the proposed legislation or actions by them in a treaty will outlaw future VCRs falls flat on its face because they won't believe it. They didn't believe it with VCRs even though it almost happened (remember the Sony Betamax case and MPAA's suggestion of a $100.00 "tax" on each blank tape payable to them as compensation for "lost" sales like they had/have with the current $1.00 per blank VHS tape or whatever on blank cassettes or on other media in other countries outside US like Canada and elsewhere).
You need to frame your statement in clear, short and easy to understand terms. Something that the MPAA/RIAA will have a difficult time arguing against. They will use tactics like changing the subject, or use other unrelated examples to argue their point but when they do, unbiased legislators sometimes catch it. Always frame it over rights already held with VCRs against the same rights being lost in the new technology (digital, Tivo, transferring a recording to mom's home, etc.).
Include examples that highlight constituent backlash. Imagine what will happen when cable companies (not the studios, check the MythTV mail archives) enable a broadcast flag to prevent recording of Desperate Housewives. Or have the program expire a week later. Or prevent the transfer of the episode to mom's house while on vacation at her home and she can't operate the old VCR (or reset the clock) let alone the newfangled Tivo thing. That will start them thinking what happens if they allow the entertainment cartel legislation and their own wives can't record Desperate Housewives. Or their understanding on how they can't watch football on the big screen because the wives need to watch Desperate Housewives and can't Tivo it for later or to watch over someone else's house during a playoff game or the Super Bowl.
Each one of the examples above are good if you take the time to frame the statement properly. Sho
How about simply less copyright and more free access to data, especially stuff that is older that 50 years?
How about copyright laws not being written by the MPAA and passed verbatim by Congress. How does that sound?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you make no gross income (not net) on the use of the copyright material it is fair use.
Just the fact that you do not collect even a dime off of the work in any way, shape, or form, incidentially, or coincidentally, would be enough to stem off any abuses against the author whom is trying to make a living off their work.
In order to copy a movie, you need to spend money on buying the blank DVDs, and then spend time and resources on it. So just the fact that you can't collect money off of it is a good enough "punishment" to cut off the serious "piracy". The petty "piracy" is due to the unreasonable price the *AA are trying to make. And the serious "piracy" that really does the damage is for profit, so this would seperate it sufficiently.
The only thing copyright/patent law should say is that you must give credit where credit is due. It will be against the law to say that the song Stairway to Heaven is by someone other than Led Zeppelin. However performing, copying, mixing or doing anything else you want with the work is fair game.
People will keep making art even if there is no possibility of getting fabulously wealthy. Even better than that, popular culture will evolve into something that doesn't suck. Much unlike the corporate controlled consumer culture of today.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What if a company spends millions upon millions hiring, training, and supporting a huge staff to just pump the product out in the first place? A set profit limit is very good for a single programmer, and very bad for a huge team.
A lot of people on slashdot seemt to think "fair use rights" are some legal prohibitions against copy protection. As in: "This DRM system violates my fair use rights." They are talking out of their asses. Fair use rights merely say that, having copied some copyrighted material, you won't get sued, providing certain (rather subjective) criteria are met. They don't guarantee that you can, or can easily, make the copy in the first place. Furthermore, fair use rights are not constitutional rights, they are merely rights recognized by common law precedent. So if the government writes a law that narrows the scope of your fair use rights (e.g. DMCA), you can argue that the law is unwise, but you can't argue that the law is unconsitiutional. (Or if you do, you can't expect any court to pay attention to your argument.)
The US Constitution guarantees freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, arms, and more. But not the freedom to copy. I wish it had. (Of course, with great difficulty, the Constitution can be amended.) Instead, we're stuck with "intellectual property rights" and "fair use" as a softener. Most people have been brainwashed into thinking that copying is a freedom the public should not have, and that copying is a crime, if only a very minor one, that "harms" others (starving musicians, right?). Artists and scientists deserve compensation for their work. So also editors, publishers, and other contributors. But giving them absolute control over how others use their work is not just overcompensation, it's wrongful compensation. Much like those EULAs that try to claim rights and restrictions beyond what the US Constitution does cover.
It's easy to point to democracy as clearly better than fascism. The same is true of capitalism vs communism. I don't know what to point to for a replacement of copyright. Tax the people, measure the popularity (and therefore the value) of works, and dole out the money accordingly is the usual alternative. Tax and dole has a disagreeable flavor of socialism with the potential for corruption, inefficiency, and unfairness, while measuring, besides being hard, could infringe on privacy. Perhaps copyright is like democracy: the worst form, except for every other form. But I'd like to see altermatives. So far, "copyleft" ala GNU licensing and derivatives, seems to be it. But GNU's answers on how compensation would work are unsatisfying.
Meanwhile, rolling back the limited time to 14 years or 5 years is a fine idea.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
1) Acknowledge the supremacy of the doctrine of first sale : When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work, your rights to view,use,modify,combine,interoperate with, dispose or resell that one instance are not impeded by either legislation or technology. This fact has been recognized time and again by the US courts.
2) The doctrine of first sale applies to both physical media and digital content where the receiver pays a transaction for an instance of a copyrighted work: When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work that involves the buyer making a choice for that instance of copyrighted work and entering into a transaction with the seller, then the buyer has the rights to that instance under the doctrine of first sale. Sellers of instances of copyrighted work cannot hide behind provision as a service, when you pay for an instance, you own that instance.
3) You do not have the right to record content without permission of the copyright holders of a live performance ( play, concert etc ) or private performance ( Film theater ) on private property or venue. You pay to attend a performance at a physical venue, not for a copy of an instance of that performance.
4) Broadcasted ( as apposed to downloaded ) copyrighted works as content received into a household or to device held by individual person or on that persons property, may not be redistributed outside of that person's household to anyone who does not receive the content though the same service. You may record a instance of copyrighted work for later viewing ( timeshifting ) and distribute a copy along to any person whos household also receives that same broadcast service ( Samaritan clause ). You many not redistribute or resell content recorded from a broadcast service to anyone not receiving that same broadcast service content.
5) Although you may not redistibute recorded copies of broadcasted copyrighted content outside of the terms of (4), there should be no limit to what you may do with instances of those works within your household. You should have the right to modify the works, combine with other works and interoperate with other works.
6) Copyright protection extends only to the particular work copyrighted. The Copyright holder's exclusive rights should not extend to the right to deny other combining an instance of copyright holder work with other works. You should have the right to distribute and/or sell, patches, recipes and addon components that refer and link to the content of the copyrighted work, but do not contain content from the original copyrighted work. The resulting combined and/or transformed work that contains content from the copyrighted work sources can not be legally redistributed without the permission of all the copyright holders.
A variation: Make copy-rights into a property right that is just like real property rights.
When you buy a piece of real property ( land), it's yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on the land and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you. That's harsh but, in a democracy where landowners get to vote on taxes, fair.
Likewise, I suggest that when you buy or create a piece of intellectual property, it would be yours for-ever. However, the gummit can vote property taxes on it and if you don't pay up, it gets sold out from under you to pay the tax.
There are of course practical issues, e.g. valuing intellectual property is difficult, but then again, there are practical issues to real property as well, e.g. valuation. For intellectual property, a nominal valuation of $1/year would give all the advantages of Lessig's scheme plus the advantage of direct reference to the well-established principles of property law.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
nuff said
Sure looks looks like EULA to me. I bet you may even find the same sentences if you diff it to the other EULAs. I'd post the sections that say we aren't liable for whatever but they are all in caps and i can't get around with the slashdot's filter. And eula can add rights, I could write an eula that say, "this object is free with out any restrictions(like the bsd license)". GPL doesn't add rights, instead of payment in cash, you pay in bandwidth and other work that may get infected with the GPL disease(viral and all). BSD License and similiar adds rights with one restriction, i can't touch the license agreement text.
And here's killer to your arguement for adding rights, MySQL AB. If i need to explain it, you obviously have no clue.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Because that is not the purpose of copyright. Copyright law is based on the premise that works should revert to the public domain as soon as possible while still providing an incentive for authors.
No, you have it completely wrong. Copyright law was created to protect authors (and publishers.) Prior to that, everything was public domain-- anyone could publish whatever they wanted. That may sound like heaven for the Bittorrent crowd who wants everything for free, but in such an environment there's little incentive to publish anything of quality.
It also guarantees the work won't be bastardized-- e.g. a publisher putting someone else's name on the book, or another author releasing a nearly identical work... Or these days, turning a book into a schlock movie without the author's say.
You may argue that 5 years is not enough incentive, but you have to realize that that is all it is, an incentive, not a guaranteed income, not a reward for time spent or money invested.
There is no guaranteed income for any creative endeavor. It's all a risk, it usually comes with a tremendous amount of effort beforehand, and more often than not there is no reward at all. Copyright law guarantees the creator won't be ripped off.
I would suggest that an artist who spends 10 or 20 years on a single work a) has independent means and b) is engaged in a labor of love and needs no further incentive.
"Labors of love" are what need to be protected, as they are more likely to carry artistic merit (that is, if they're any good) than an Eminem song whipped up in a day. There are plenty of examples in literature of novels that took years, if not decades to complete.
And ideally artistic satisfaction should be the ultimate motivator, but the fact is intellectual property has value. Whether or not you respect that value (and I would say anyone who demands work to be public domain five years from its release has no respect for what it really takes to create truly good art), I prefer to see the author/artist/musician/filmmaker/whatever justly rewarded for their success.
Of course, that would prevent us from getting music and Playstation roms from 2000 for free, which is all this is really about, right?
What about large projects (EG any video game made in the last 3 years or so) with multiple coders? Do they all get a copyright on thier portion of the code and then license that to the company? wouldnt this solution give $company the right to tell its employees something like "we pay to license your code, thus we no longer pay hourly."? Sounds like it would be a bit more complicated to me. I'm not entirely against the idea yet, but it sounds like it might be more trouble than its worth.
Now don't quote me on this, but I recall a legal decision that allows someone to legally obtain roms for gaming platforms that have been discontinued. As long as you can't get the game system itseld easily via normal retail channels, it's legal to obtain and play roms for that platform.
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A un-encrypted copy of any encrypted material should be kept in a safe archive in order to ensure it will be enter the public domain as required by law.
These archive can be kept in national archive or library.
The content can be used to make index to make it more accessable before it enter public domain.
One thing I've been pondering: copyright protections have values beyond the commercial. They make it illegal to, for example, steal someone's private diary and display it to the world, complete with embarrassing comments about who they're sweet on, who they're pissed off at etc. This is often cited as a reason to keep/extend long copyright. Problem is, it means we're trying to solve several problems at the same time.
I think that this form of copyright encodes a valuable privacy right, which is often overlooked (I hadn't really thought about it myself til Bill Thompson of BBC News mentioned it). However, the only systems that offer protection of this sort are the opt-in ones. This naturally leads to the problem of orphan works, which is frankly a pain in the ass.
What I'd suggest is that works be tagged with the status of either private (my diary) or public (my novel). All works default to private, which offers copyright protection for the lifetime of the author (or x years for corporations, where x is between 30 and 70).
If a work is redistributed commercially or in bulk, it instantly gains public status, which means that the lifetime of copy protection is shortened to, say, 30 years. If an artist is still surviving off the paychecks from a 30-year-old work, I'd say they have bigger problems than the copyright system.
The advantages of this are:
-- privacy protection
-- no orphan works problem (they'd drop into the public domain at a predictable time regardless of the lifetime of the author
-- less evil copyright restrictions
The only disadvantage I can see (apart from the reaction of industry bodies like the RIA) is that the definition of what constitutes redistribution of a work is unclear. Say I make public (by the above definition) a binary program. Does this mean that anyone who gets their hands on the source code can redistribute that? (I'd say yes, although they might still be liable for trade secret issues, depending on the means of procurement of the code).
This is just a random idea that I've been kicking around with. It seems to me to be a fair separation of the two main purposes of copyright. I'd be interested to know what other people think.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
First. dump the DMCA!
Then set all copyrights to expire 25 years after the death of the author.
Then enforce all the others laws as written. E.g., the right to record tv, sony v universal. The right to make back ups of our software, section 107, and the right to share music with friends and family, the Home Recording Act.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It is important to ensure others to have rights to index the content as fair use.
It is also important to ensure linking to content (depth link) as fair use.
The copyright law should make access to information easy, that is the goal of it.
GPL is not a free license. It put a lots of restriction which others hard to comply.
Making information free should also a goal for copyright law. Make everybody have access the informaiton they need.
Copyright law should encourage people to make new information base on other information they have access.
The current law give many power to copyright holder. They can ban others to access the information.
Copyright law should only protect their interest, not allow them to block access.
I see a lot of people are suggesting copyright periods of five years.
If copyright were five years: Windows 2000 would be in public domain.
If copyright period were ten years: Windows 95 would soon come into public domain.
If copyright period were fifteen years: Windows 3.0 would be in public domain within a fortnight.
I would be comforted by the thought that the Australian Attorney General is actually given the link to this Slashdot article, and can read the responses. Is this happening?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
"As things are now, we reinvent the wheel way too much because of the way Intellectual Property is implemented. It hinders progress and innovation."
What are you talking about? At least when something is patented there's no reason an inventor shouldn't release information on the invention, and charge a fee for use of the invention.
As things are now, many companies will keep an invention secret, choosing to call it a trade secret. They do this because they figure that they can benefit more from having the advantage over the competition in perpetuity (essentially) than from announcing and licensing the technology. The result (especially in the microelectronics industry) is that each company has its own proprietary technology. This is very wasteful, and the solution would be more intellectual property rights, not less.
I don't know what leads you to believe that people need to reinvent the wheel because of IP.
A lot of the problem is that similar laws might apply to anything from computer code to a novel to garage proof-of-concepts of antigravity to biotech breakthroughs that will take years to test and get approvals for.
My personal take is: give 'em a ten-year global (or as near as feasible) monopoly for a nominal fee, then start charging annual monopoly fees starting at the same nominal fee and increasing by 50% each year.
If a physical invention or trademark is so wildly lucrative that it's still profitable to pay the stupendous fees twenty or thirty years down the track, more power to the monopolists. Eventually, however, the fees will start running into the multiple billions of dollars and even Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain.
But what about the artist who falls out of favor for a time and then has a comeback, or who finds lukewarm success and then is "discovered" later? [...] Just as an example, look at Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski-- they didn't see their books in wide circulation until late in life, years after the first works were written.
So what? You're assuming that the purpose of copyright is to reward the authors and musicians. It is not.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage them to create and publish additional works. Paying them for things they did years ago doesn't accomplish that, except insofar as it makes them able to quit their day job and create new works full time.
So the only scenario in which long copyright terms help such artists is for those who create something that doesn't become popular, don't create anything else for a long time, meaning they have to have a job and can't support themselves with further creation, and then suddenly have their old works discovered.
That doesn't happen much. What does happen is that a writer or artist who has published various works over a course of years releases something new that suddenly catches on in a big way and creates a demand for the previous works. In that case, the individual will be paid for the recent, still copyrighted, works, and be able to focus more time on new creations.
I think quickly expiring copyright of works that fall out of distribution is a very good idea. Won't happen, though.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
You talk about "natural" limiting factors in terms producing physical goods, well I can tell you that it is hard to produce (worthwile) ideas as well.
So, now lets think about physical property. What is it, intrinsically, that makes something physical yours? There are some societies who think it is rather unnatural to believe that physical objects are the sole property of an individual. This is an understatement, to these cultures, the entire concept makes no sense. How can some claim to have dominion over a pice of land? They simply don't understand the concept.
This is much the same way you do not understand how an idea can be someone else's property. If you are raised to believe that intellectual property is real, than you will believe it.
It's easy to see that any property (including "physical" property) exists only because of the common agreement amongst individuals that it does. So, if everyone respected intellectual property as they do physical property, there would be no dispute.
"Copyrights are simply people coercing limits on things that have no natural limit for the sake of greed and monopoly."
You say that at though it's a bad thing.
"If someone said "lets limit food to the 3rd world more than it already is because we want to get more profit" most people would see this as the pure evil that it is."
The problem with this argument is that it almost never is profitable to do something that most people would consider evil when all costs are taken into account. How would limiting the sale of food to the third world bring about profit?
I know:
1) limit sale of food to third world
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
You might say environmental damage and all that, but the problem with that argument is that environmental damage is a negative extremity that should be paid by the polluter (since it certainly costs someone a lot of money). It is bad, then, because the polluter is using a resource (the environment) which they are not paying for.
Fundamentally, since copyright today is simply a vehicle for artificially imposing scarcity to allow revenue generation, the length of time this is allowed *must* be tied to both revenue and costs related to protected works. It's the only fair way to determine an expiry period for a concept whose whole purpose (now) is making money and recovering costs.
With that in mind, I propose:
1. Copyright be changed to an "opt-in" system. That is, if you want your content to be protected by copyright (and make money from it), it must be registered as a "protected work". Additionally, a copy must be provided for the National Archives. The cost of this registration should be kept low - ideally free - so as to not discourage individual creators.
2. When a work is registered for copyright protection, it must include a statement of "development cost", which gives the overall cost in creating the work. This statement would be legally binding, and fraudulent claims would be dealt with harshly.
* Corporate entities must detail this cost as precisely as they would any other "expense" in their financial reports. Tax incentives could be created to "encourage" them to accurately detail these as, effectively, R&D costs.
* Individuals would be allowed to submit a "reasonable estimate". The "reasonable estimate" is something that would eventually be ruled on by a court of law, but I personally think a guideline would be a function of (time taken * average full time wage).
* A fraudulent claim for "development cost" would attract severe penalities - immediate placement of the work into the Public Domain (as in #4 below) and a fine equivalent to the sum of the original "development cost" *plus* any revenue generated by the work thus far would be levied against the copyright holder. Additionally, any previous legal judgements made against defendants with regards to copyright infringement of the work would be retroactively rescinded, any reparations paid to the copyright holders would be refunded and any fines paid would also be refunded by the copyright holder (these would initially be paid for out of the fine levied against the copyright holder and then, if necessary, directly by the copyright holder).
3. Once the work has generated enough revenue to meet (or exceed, depending upon accounting details) the "development cost", *non-profit* reproduction of that work would become legal (ie: filesharing, swapping CDs with friends, scanning onto web pages, etc). This transition in legal status would occur at the beginning of the fanancial year following the work's "breaking even" point.
Note that any for-profit reproduction would remain illegal and subject to significant legal and financial penalties.
4. Upon the death of the work's creator - or, in the case of a collaborative work, the last collaborator - any and all reproduction becomes legal (ie: it enters the Public Domain). Note that works *cannot* be "owned" by entities that don't "die" (eg: corporations). Some form of "work for hire" contract, however, would allow them to collect revenue on the creators behalf.
* Note that condition #3 overrides condition #4. That is, even if the work's creator(s) should die, the work is still protected by copyright until such time that it has "broken even". Should the creator(s) have already died when this point is reached, the work enters enters the Public Domain the next financial year as outlined in #3.
(In the past I have expressed a strong opposition to the idea of copyright extending past the creators death. The above is the only scenario I would consider is justifiable, and only in the context of the other guidelines I have outlined - primarily to protect individuals in "work for hire" arrangements (since they would hold the copyrights) from asssassination by corporate competitors).
5. The "attribution" of the work is protected perpetually. That is, no-one can ever claim someone else's work as their own.
I would also like to see patents treated in a similar fashion.
As a person who relies on copyright to put food on the table, essentially as a creative producer of content, I have a different take on this issue. Thus far, I've seen some ridiculous suggestions for copyright law that could only be written by what is commonly known as "leechers" who would only support free (as in beer) stuff. Yes, this is probably flaimbait, but it angers me when people who know nothing about the purpose of copyright (both socially and personally) start spewing out their crap about how everything should be free and in the public domain. I did read a few good comments, but those were the minority when I began this.
What we produce on our time is our work. We have the right to do with it as we see fit. This is implied in any society, except for a communist or totalitarian one, where what we produce is a product of the state, whether in principle or by force, respectively. Copyright laws exist to clearly define the boundaries of this right that is as unalienable as life and liberty.
Just to give an example that is close to home for most people, this concept is especially important for the FOSS movement. Without the proper copyright protections, something like the GPL and its derivatives could not exist. Remember that the GPL is viral--works that include GPL'ed material must also be GPL'ed. With very weak copyright, anybody, including major companies, could copy code line-for-line that a programmer writes under the GPL, without paying the requested price of making the copy GPL'ed, or even crediting the original programmer.
So don't bash copyright. It's your friend. It's your right. It's your choice.
Disclaimer: I have my own biases and my own views on the whole thing, and these changes to copyright law are as much a product of my logical thinking as those biases. Also, IANAL, so I might just be restating something already in copyright law that I don't know about or I have never before seen interpreted in this manner.
That having been said, there are revisions I would like to see to existing copyright laws. They are:
1) Allow jointly independent copyrights. This is somewhat already present, as the owner of something like an mp3 would include the renderer and the owners of the individual parts. However, jointly independent copyrights are such that if there is more than one producer or creator of one work, both would have the copyrights to the work. So if Yao Ming and Shaq decide to sing a duet, both would be able to sell and distribute their rendition independently, or jointly.
2) Allow copyrights to be transfered postmortem. Inheritance, essentially, but with one catch: The transfer must be explicitly stated in the copyright owner's will, or the work would immediately go into the public domain.
3) Make copyright violations a criminal offense (something already done in many places), but prohobit civil suits at the same time. Copyright violators should be prosecuted as criminals, where defendents would be provided legal council. Any and all reparations would be determined by a judge, not by the plaintiff. Basically, no frivilous lawsuits and intimidation tactics.
4) Prohibit non-producers (middlemen) from claiming exclusivity to any part of the copyright. But with the internet, the need for such middlemen has been drastically reduced. What constitutes non-producers are entities or persons who did not participate, in part or in full, financially or creatively, in the original production of the work. Furthermore, prohibit the transfer of copyright with the exception of the case described in 1).
Of course, Fair Use is a completely different beast to tackle. The changes to Fair Use I'd like to see are:
1) Unconditionally allow the replication of copyright works only when the person performing the replication does not gain financially or otherwise through the work's replication, whether directly or indirectly, and only when the replication is perceived as perfect. In this case, a lack of a loss does not necessarily imply a gain.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
It is insane to think that property rights and law would have evolved the way they have if not for that simple truth that not everybody can use something at the same time. Half the issue is that it's not about what people think or feel should be property, it is about certain realities that are just not subjective.
If you do not publish your work, no protection.
That's what the US Constitution says. The why is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, the how is by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Of course, that would prevent us from getting music and Playstation roms from 2000 for free, which is all this is really about, right?
No, it's about me wasting time talking to a complete asshole.
Test 1 2 3 4
Repeat after me: the GPL does not add any restrictions. It gives you more rights (under certain conditions) above and beyond those given to you by the law. You can choose not to accept those rights and the conditions they are under, but you're left with no right to redistribute the GPLed work.
In addition to many of the fine suggestions I've seen (return of the public domain, registering digital copies with a central library, etc.), I have to say I would like to see some provision for mandatory media replacement, at a fair price for all copyrighted works.
With the advent of filesharing, the entertainment industry has been adamant that it is the content, not the media, that we are paying for. So if my CD/DVD becomes damaged, I should be able to recieve a replacement copy for no more than the cost of the media, plus the cost of shipping, plus maybe a buck or two for overhead. Granted, on some titles this might be the same as buying it (cheaper CDs, for instance)...but for certain things (more expensive DVD titles, box sets, software, etc), it would make them much easier to replace.
There is no reason I should ever have to pay for the same movie/album/software twice, assuming I can present the original media (however damaged it may be). Software companies generally have a system in place for this already, with instructions for recieving replacements in the manual. Movie/music companies not so much. While some MAY do this for you (though I doubt many would), none are in any way compelled to, and figuring out who to contact is up to you.
I remember I used to shop at a music store in the eastern US called The Wall. With every CD purchase you got a little sticker to put on the case. If that CD got damaged, they would replace it as long as you still had the disc. No questions asked. It was well worth the extra buck or two you paid at the register over other stores.
> If you do not publish your work, no protection.
Your scheme seems to hold an assumption that "publishing" of a creative work is always simple or free or convenient or even possible.
I write music. I hold copyright on the music I write. Publication is irrelevant, and I would not support a change in the system that takes my rights away, only to protect the rights of those who can publish their work while punishing those who cannot.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I think he really hit the nail on the head. Mega media is shooting themselves in the foot short term (losing digital market opportunities) by taking away fair use rights and shooting themselves in the head long term (loss of respect for copyright) with the ever lengthening terms.
As far as I'm concerned, if a single law related citizen (ie: police, lawyer, judge) has broken one of the copyright laws in Australia such as timeshifting, they should be imprisoned or the law should be changed - it just makes a mockery of the law - and if this law is allowed a mockery, then why not extend to every other law?
Also, why does this document talk about USA so much. Living in Australia, why would I care about the copyright system of other countries?
Well, I'm sorry but I think you're wrong. That is exactly the propose behind copyright. From your constitution:
What do you mean "Once the cats out of the bag with information"? We've had intellectual property for hundreds of years. It's nothing new. Sure IP lay is always evolving, but property law changes from time to time as well.
"The thinking behing slavery is that it costs allot of money to import slaves from affrica, and the plantation masters need to be insured that they can recoop their investment before the slave leaves."
You say that something is wrong purely because the social standards today says that it is wrong, but you haven't considered the social context at the time, or what economic pressure lead to slavery in the first place. You're basically parroting back a commonly used societal meme without really considering what it means.
"Well my point is the thinking is irrelavent, and just because someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is. It's not about thinking"
You can not detach concepts from thought, thought comes first, then concepts. Property as a concept is derived from thought. If you'd give what I'm saying due consideration, you'd realize that property is a very abstract concept.
I'm really of several minds about this. We're really talking about two kinds (maybe 4) kinds of copyright here.
First, is what I would term "duplicative" copyright. That is, the right to 100% duplicate a work. I think that 5 years (renewable to 10 maybe) is a good thing for duplicative works.
Then there are what I would term derivitive works, and there in lies a bigger problem. If copyright were 5 or 10 years, how do you figure out what's copyrighted in an evolving derived work? (Such as the Linux kernel or Mickey Mouse).
I don't really see any good argument as to why a derivitive work should go into the poublic domain so long as it is being actively updated (or derived from) by the copyright holder. Why should you have the right to profit from Mickey Mouses likeness while the franchise is still "in business"? Issues like Trade Dress and service marks are important here for a continuing business and often copyright plays a part with them.
Then there is the issues of art versus science or entertainment versus function. Why should a scientific copyright be held from the human race for decades because of copyright? It's arguable whether art has the kind of impact that science does on the benefit to mankind (though some might also argue that free expression of art and culture help shape society).
In any event, I don't see the issue as clear cut as others.
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Uhhh... you may already know this, but a corporation is not legally defined as having no intellect. It it is the same to the US legal system as any person. In my opinion corporate personhood is ludicrous, but that's the current state of things.
You made it, it's yours. Upon your death, your right to your works CEASES. YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD. Maybe it shouldn't even last that long, but from creation to death of creator seems fair.
People sharing music P2P for FREE should be legal. Nobody's making money off of your works, INCLUDING YOU. Probably because YOU SUCK THE BIG ONE at marketing.
I should have every right to do whatever I want with any signal that enters my home. IE, if Hughes insists on radiating my brain with their digital television signal, then I insist on decoding it and using it as I see fit. What if tomorrow, I fall on a pile of radioactive waste, and can suddenly decode the signal in my head? Are you gonna chop it off and use it as evidence against me in a DMCA Act lawsuit? IF YOU DON'T WANT ME TO TIME SHIFT OR FORMAT SHIFT OR SHARE OR EVEN SELL YOUR CONTENT, DO NOT SEND IT OVER PUBLIC AIRWAVES. If I threw a giant wad of cash at you, I'm sure you'd be much obliged to take it. So don't throw your EMR at me, because I'm going to do the same.
Musicians? I will pay to see you in person. I will pay a very small fee to cover your costs for the media and recording of your music. If you want me to give you a glamorous lifestyle because you can play repetitive, shitty music, FUCK YOU. I will NOT be poor so you can drive a fucking Porsche. It is ART, a PASSION, not a FUCKING CAREER.
I'm 18, and a student. For a living, I clean floors. The only laws that protect my living protect yours too. When I get a contract, it isn't for life. It's until I FUCK UP. I don't need no fucking laws to protect my livelihood, so you pussies shouldn't either. Metallica, BURN IN HELL. Unless you would enjoy that, that is, if that is the case, may fluffy white bunnies rape you all day long.
For any media:
For music especifically:
You misread the title - Do not protect closed source software..
So music isn't software and isn't closed - someone can re-create the staves and that's fine. However, you NEVER get to see the code of a CSS product. When copyright expires, even if it is ~25 years, there will be no benefit back to the public in doing so because the OS/hardware will not be available and you cannot rewrite it for the current systems.
The code is still copyrighted, but give the source code out too. The SW house has not lost anything and the public gain a benefit when the SW gets public domain.
Right here in the netherlands, copyright is quite restrictive. There's no way to put your own copyrighted material on the web without paying the copyright organization and getting money back from them minus 13 % administration. I run my own small creative commons based label and experience lots of troubles. I can't get cd's pressed with cc licensed material, creative commons licensed music doesn't get airplay, because the broadcasters don't know which paper to fill in. Furthermore, it is prohibited to start a high quality online web station in holland (must be 22.1 khz, 8 bits!!!) and you pay a lot for permission!.
A good licensing model? Let the artists decide themselves what they want for their material.I think compatibility with creative commons is very important.
I notice you use the word 'theft' a lot. I see it as an echo of what the RIAA says when they claim copying music is like 'stealing from a shop'.
First off all, I have difficulties with their acclaimed 'stealing' of music. As far as I know, stealing implies that the one that has been stolen has been derived of something. When you take a copy, you do not take the original away, thus they have not 'lost' anything. They might claim that they loose money when ppl d/l music, but even that is far from certain. Not only is it not shown statistically to have had that effect (they didn't even show a correlation thusfar - see aussie music-news - let alone a causality). Furthermore, in an individual case, they would have to show they actually lost revenue. Which is far from said, because I sure know some guys who d/l music, but would NEVER have bought that music if they were unable to d/l it. So, how did the RIAA/IFPI loose revenue, exactly? And if they didn't lose anything, how can the term 'stealing' apply?
It would still be copyright-infringement, ofcourse, but that's another matter. I think maybe it's time we went beyond our current system of copyrights and walk into the era of cyberspace. With the industrial revolution, patents and copyrights knew a high flight, maybe it's time to let it leave and try something new (or, in fact, old)?
You act as if innovation would stop, if IP would be thrown into the bin, but, as the other poster already indicated, you seem to ignore the fact that, during most of mankinds history, inventions were made without any help of IP-rights. You also seem to ignore the fact that even today, huge projects have been very succesful without needing the artificial monopoly of IP that the state gives. All those things point to the fact, that for innovation, it is not really a necessity to have IP.
One may argue it 'promotes' innovation, as you have done in your first post of the thread, but does it really? In australia, in the 80ies, they have done research into this, and the commision there concluded that it didn't do what it was supposed to do: promote innovation (in all honesty, it was about patents in particular, because 'IP' is a misnomer to begin with). Also, for software patents, there have been enough independent studies to show that it does not promote innovation, and in fact, the opposite may be true. International studies of the use of 'IP' as a whole have been few, but it wouldn't surprise me if they came to the same conclusion.
So, where does that leave you? I'm all for further studies on the subject, but if they, indeed, continue to show that IP does not really promote innovation, then one of your own basic premises to allow them are void. The only reason, after all, why the state allows you to have an artificial monopoly on your IP (even though everyone knows monopolies are bad), is because it is supposed to promote innovation. If it doesn't do that, there is no reason for the state to give it.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Yes copyright laws are the boon as well as the bane !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
There should be no restrictions on private, completely non-commercial copying.
Copyright infringement should be a civil matter only---not criminal.
Anything "executable" (software, firmware) can be copyrighted only if the applicant lodges the full source code with the copyright office and agress that the office will publish it when the copyright expires and publish it and revoke the copyright if the product becomes abandoned or there is a compelling public interest to do so.
I will start with the questions in the article and then continue with some other additions:
Your question points out a very obvious problem: every time rights are defined, they are restricted. The Founding Fathers, the authors of the US Constitiution, probably would have found the idea of locking up a book ludicrous, but today we have DRM where publishers have fine tuned control of how we, the owners, use our own books. I am pretty certain the Right of Access would have been assumed by the Founding Fathers. Now that it cannot be assumed, many people claim it is not a right.
Having said that, if you are going to create enumerated rights, they should be as broad as possible. Things like: You may do anything with the copyrighted material except sell it for such and such a term.
The entire idea of derivative works should be eliminated. If I translate a book, that is a new book. If I want to make a better Star Wars, let the public choose whether or not I have beaten Lucas at his own game. If I want to annotate or critisize a book that I agree or disagree with, I should be able to. And I should be able to sell that book with same protections as the original author got even if it contains the bulk or the entirety of the original text.
Where I currently live, the Republic of China, copyright is imposed by another culture. Europe is taking its ideas of censorship and exporting them to the rest of the world. These information control laws have been imposed on every Asian country, and the US government is constantly putting pressure on the ROC government to extend and enhance enforcement of these foreign (barbaric?) copyright laws. The USA is even a victim of this exportation of European feudalism. The 1976 Copyright Act imposed the "moral rights" provisions of the Berne Convention which altered the entire face of copyright. It increased copyright terms, added derivative works, and made copyright automatic. The last addition, when applied to the Internet makes copyright an enemy of free speech.
China has a long history of annotation going back thousands of years. Many editions of books have extensive and very useful commentary added by subsequent authors all throughout Chinese history. While the original author's words were often preserved, other educated people were able to contribute to their works without fear of any sort of punishment. Chinese society for centuries was the most educated society on earth for precisely this reason.
This was the first society to have paper and printing, and the prices of books here have always been lower. People here read way more than people in the West. Text is such a part of life that it is impossible to watch a movie without subtitles. In the USA, people complain if the movie has subtitles because "It's too much work". This is in large part a result of the lack of restrictions with respect to the exchange of information here.
The cost of information access in the West is staggering. The best example of this is college text book "business". Ten years ago, some books cost up to US$80. They were updated -- rarely noticably -- every two years or so. Often, a student could not sell the book back because the new edition was out. By contrast, when I studied in Taiwan, I never paid more than about US$8 for a book. In addition to that, the language books were better than any language book I ever had for any Western language I ever studied.
Another good example is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China. In the USA, each volume is about US$120. In the ROC, each volume is around US$30. It is exactly the same book. Here, I can afford it, in the USA, I cannot.
Copyright, in this case, se
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Like Patents.
With Patents it's up to the patent holders to sue those that infringe their patent or break license agreements, & doing such things are consided totally irrilivent by law enforcement bodies & the criminal courts, because infringing patents is not a crime.
Instead one's just infringing on another's exclusive commercial rights. Afterall that's what a patent is - the government rewarding the innovative for being creative by giving them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Well copyrights were traditionally pretty similar - the government rewarding the artistic for being creative by giving them them exclusive commercial rights to their own work for X amount of years.
Now WTF should infringing on copyrights be a crime but not but patents is beyond me.
I see absolutelly no public interest slash pragmatic imperitive for government law enforcement of the commerical exclusivity of copyrights but not patents.
From my understanding traditionally copyrights & patents were enforced in similar ways (by the holders themselves at their expence via legal threats & the civil law courts) but over time lobbying in the US has meant that the type of criminal provisions relating to trademarks have creaped into copyright law. Theses criminal provisions in relation to trademarks originally came out to protect the consumers from fraudelent suppliers, like fake Made in USA Hamilton Railroad watches from Switzerland (Oh how things have changed, today now all Hamiltons are made in Switzerland & one can buy fake Rolexes with genuine Swiss ETA movts, virtually the same as in real Rolex Tudors). Over time the US thrust criminal enforcement of copyrights on the rest of the world via the multilateral treaties & bodies like the WTO & bilateral treaties (like the way a DMCA style bill is being offloaded onto us Aussies as a consequence of the US/Australian FTA).
"Charging who by the hour? Who is going to pay by the hour for me to create something which can then be freely redistributed by anyone who gets ahold of it?"
Ermm...People or companies that need the software? Since you claim to be a coder, I'm rather amazed by the fact you seem to forget a lot of todays' earnings for software devls is because they make tailored software for specific needs. A company that has a specific need will pay developers to create the tool they want to handle that need.
And, even when it doesn't involve specific needs of a certain company, it still is possible that a company "pay by the hour for me to create something which can then be freely redistributed by anyone who gets ahold of it", as SUSE and Red Hat clearly demonstrates just that, which you claim can not happen.
"And anyway, only pretty popular musicians can hope to have enough fans to support themselves through concerts."
And only very popular musicians earn money with the copyright they have on CD-sales/etc. So that point is no argument.
"Open source and the renaissance both fall under the other 1%."
One percent of what? OSS, seen as part in the software market, is growing rapidly, and already passed the 1% long ago within the field of software. And the renaissance... the argument seems rather self-fulfilling. In its time, the inventions made during the renaissance, were 100%, obviously. That the inventions as a whole, including those of modern times, make their part less then 1%, is a bit of a falacious reasoning; if we hadn't had IP, all inventions made today would be 100% of the part that were IP-free.
Besides, copyright and patents weren't widely introduced untill the 19th century, so it's above your 1% in any case, and it DOES show it is not a neccesity to have IP for having inventions.
You also claim that we would have *less* innovation if we hadn't had IP (something that IP-owners always seem keen on asserting), but in reality, this is only a biased opinion. Studies that have been done about IP and innovation in a historical context, have shown that it is not the amount of innovation that lessens if there is no IP, but that it is the kind of innovations made that changes whether or not one has IP protection.
Innovation as a whole, thus, is not really promoted by having IP or not.
"Most of the informational products of the renaissance were created by rich people or funded by rich people, just because they had nothing better to do with their money. Such a system could work today, but would only produce a small fraction (probably less than 1%) of the information available on the market."
You forget that it is just the informationage that makes it possible for a new kind of funding. In modern times, wealth is not divided in the same way as it used to be; there is now a large base of resonably wealthy populace (certainly compared with a few hundred years ago). The Net gives the possibility to that populace to act as funders/fans, where once, only rich people could afford to. So, instead of having one rich dude being the mecenas and funding him with lots of money (as during the rennaissance), we now have the possibility of thousands of mecenas/fans donating small amounts of money.
This will be easier for musicians then for coders, true, but even that is possible (Freenet has been paying a coder full-time for the last 4 years, thanks to donations, for instance). But coders can be payed if they make tailored software for companies, as I said above. Or if people enjoy their software so much they are willing to support it. Ofcourse, when (the progs of) coders and (the music of) musicians are not popular, they will not earn enough. then again, this is exactly the same with or without copyright; if people don't like what you make, you won't earn enough to 'feed your family'. That's life of an artist. If you look for a more secure job, one should go for being a civil servant or something.
"Please, by all means, tell me how I can make money f
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
maybe just. If it's not too much trouble to only give out patents that make sense.
Don't worry, you'll be dead soon.
Fucking kangooroos....
The following are two IMO noteworthy points in German copyright law (disclaimer: IANAL), which seem quite reasonable to me; so take this both as a description and suggestion:
You can legally make so-called Private Copies of any copyrighted material, which includes sharing it with your friends. (This doesn't mean file-sharing is legal, though, because there you're publishing stuff [to the general public], not just sharing with a friend.)
You can also create private recordings of TV or radio.
This avoids criminalizing private persons while still enforcing the interests of the copyright holders, and it solves the OP's problem that "it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day".
Copyright expires after a long time, typically 70 years after the death of the creator.
Since many people in this discussion asked for a shorter expiration time, I'd like to note that I've never found this to be a problem, and even some software I'm currently using (on my Linux box) is older than 20, let alone 10, years.
(It's quite similar in the other EU countries, I suppose.)
In case you're interested on my point of view, I'm running a Linux box (with almost only open source software), and I'm developer of an open source project myself.
Foritems published under more than one name, a la textbooks, the copyright should extend to the lifetime of the last surviving member of the authoring team, with the same provisions to shorten the term if the authors wish.
As to items published by corporations, the copyright shouldn't extend more than 45 years, or the life of the corporation, which ever is shorter. Companies that are likely to still be around for a long time (I'm thinking the GE, IBM, Ford types), 45 years is plenty of time for them to benefit from copyright protection. If the company fails before the 45 year point, there's no one around to lay claim to the publication anyway, so let it enter the public domain.
antipaucity
"because they could no longer WILLINGLY SELL their rights to corporations."
"Sell or you dont eat". Doesnt sound that willing to me. Kinda puts you at a disadvantage, considering the obscenely massive supply surplus of people with creative talent as compared to the demand.
Dont kid yourself, copyright law aint meant to make the authors rich, or it'd contain exploitation protection. It's meant to make those who control the mass duplication equipment and distribution channels rich. Now, as it was back when the kings gave monopolies to the owners of the printing presses in exchange for censorship control and monetary support.
It wasnt the authors who lobbied for copyright, it was the publishers. The 'poor authors' were just a good excuse at a time when people were fairly pissed off at monopoly abuses.
"If you were a succesful coder, wouldn't you really NEVER EVER regret having lost the possibility of selling your code to some corporation for an obscenely fat paycheck?"
Try working in a burger joint and spending your paycheck on the lottery. You'd have a better chance then.
Dont forget that it's _your_ money that goes into the 'lottery', and for every IP-encumberance-taxed product you pay extra for, far more goes into the 'bookies' pocket than goes to the 'winner'.
Still, if you felt were a lucky gambler, wouldnt you really regret having lost the possibiliy of cashing in the big win...
Personally I'm too pissed off at paying for the bookies to live it up, when I could have both lower taxes and lower prices for many things if I didnt have to pay for that game anymore.
No the parent was right.
I find that 99% of the time, the people talking about abolishing (C) or limiting it are the very people that steal everything that isn't nailed down. Virtually NONE of them actually create anything. OF COURSE they want to abolish (C)!
I'm sure that rapists would like to abolish sex crime laws... Sorry, but those few of us that DO create really don't like being ripped off by everyone else that doesn't. It's happened to me enough times that I would push for capital punishment for (C) violators if I thought that would fly.
Make it or buy it. Those are the ONLY two aceptable actions.
There are provisions in copyright law for multiple authors already. I don't think it would be any more complex than it already is. *shrugs*
Companies can already write whatever they want into the contract. The nice part about forcing the copyright holder to be a -human- is that there is only one standard for how long the copyright endures.
4) Broadcasted ( as apposed to downloaded ) copyrighted works as content received into a household or to device held by individual person or on that persons property, may not be redistributed outside of that person's household to anyone who does not receive the content though the same service. You may record a instance of copyrighted work for later viewing ( timeshifting ) and distribute a copy along to any person whos household also receives that same broadcast service ( Samaritan clause ). You many not redistribute or resell content recorded from a broadcast service to anyone not receiving that same broadcast service content.
IMO, Internet Radio and other streaming media (videos, music, etc) would fall under Broadcasted as its the same content that comes over a typical broadcast (and you have as much control - i.e. requesting songs, tuning to a specific station, etc) even though the broadcast would technically be downloaded and, if I have digital cable, I'm downloading it from my cable provider on the on demand channels anyway!.
Also, if this were the case, even though I receive Family Guy episodes on Cartoon Network(?) it would mean that I can download them from someone who was kind enough to record it for me in a media that I could readily use.
Um...he's advocating ONE renewal. The way he worded it is a little ambiguous, but if you read it again, you'll see it's designed to allow a maximum term of 10 years with full protection, or 30 years with limited protection.
Man, doesn't anybody actually read what they reply to? Articles or posts?
Yeah, yeah, "I must be new here..."
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
pan out if copyright were done away with completely. But that's not gonna happen.
So, creator retains and good for
50 years or lifetime whichever is longer.
If death prior to 50 years, balance goes to estate.
Copyright can not be sold, only licensed.
As far as terms of use, that would be entirely up to the copyright holder. Holder defines fair use. Holder defines conditions on reproduction. Holder can not change terms after the fact for copies distributed under prior terms. The market will sort things out.
As for sales of material, from a consumers POV, I would be very happy with a pay once scheme. If my media becomes degraded or the technology changes, I do not like having to purchase the same material a second or third time. I strongly suspect that this is how things would evolve if left up to the market. The guy who sells me the right to enjoy his material will have a much easier sale if I know I have purchased my copy, once and for all.
1)Copyrights should expire in a reasonable time and be non-renewable. Like other posts above, I think 5 years is enough.
I do not think that their should be any requirement to distribute source code. After 5 years the software is free game BUT does not carry any 'GPL' status and can be held on to for as long as one is capable.
2)Trademarks should not expire! Disney should be able to have "Mickey Mouse" but after 5 years another party could use any party of the mouse EXCEPT the trademark(s)
Wouldn't the code simply be considered a trade secret whenever disclosure of it was not allowed? They copyright per se may be expired, but in the formal legal sense, a trade secret can be maintained indefinitely. (Much like the oft-abused example of KFC or Coke's secret recipes). So, given the proper controls that maintaining a trade secret requires, a company could still keep their source code to themselves.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
EULAs are ostensibly contracts. You can't see them upfront and you wouldn't necessarily agree to them if you could, but, they are nonetheless only enforceable as contracts.
Look at the case law: the cases that uphold EULAs do so because judges liken them to the implicit contracts one agrees to, eg. at amusement parks or theatres -- in other words, because people expect them, therefore they're enforceable.
The GPL is a copyright license, not a contract. It is absolutely nothing like an EULA. The scope of an EULA is outside copyright: it derives its powers from contract law, not copyright law. The things EULAs restrict are outside the scope of copyright law for the software vendor to restrict. The GPL does not require any of the elements of a contract in order to be enforceable: it doesn't require competent parties nor does it require consideration. The GPL is enforceable by statute alone.
They are not the same. I repeat, the GPL and EULAs have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Nothing. Not one thing.
So, in summary: go fuck yourself you trolling piece of shit.
As long as copyright is legally limited in length, powerful companies will fight to get the time increased.
What about a system where you have to register for copyright (or maybe allow a 5 year unregistered default) and you can renew it indefinitely, but every time you renew the price doubles?
For example start with $1 and have a 3 year renewal period.
Disney could pay $2 billion for their 100 year renewal of Mickey Mouse, they will be happy and virtually anything else would go out of copyright within a decade or 2.
"but one thing I've become certain of is; the current system doesnt do what we'd like it to do. It desperately needs to be changed, because the costs it's incurring are starting to get painful."
This is true of the entire (civil) legal system. It consists in large part of people who are profiting by exacerbating the disagreements of others. It is almost completely unacceptable. I think there should be actual criminal liability associated with bringing a frivolous case before a court. Both for the plaintiff and for the lawyer.
Furthermore, in order for a patent to be honored, the patent holder must actually make an effort to develop the product described by the patent.
"Think pharmaceutical corporation R&D money with generics price structure."
The only way something like what would be possible is if pharmaceutical companies were forced to license their patents. The problem is that most of them are willing to do this, but ask a price other companies are unwilling to pay. I don't see how you could develop a rational system to determine the fair value of a patent license. Companies will usually ask for a price that would allow them to make a similar amount of money to what they would earn with the complete monopoly, which is quite a lot of money. I haven't found a solution to this problem, but I have come up with a slightly more holistic approach to the problem.
The way I see it, most scientists and engineers aren't really in the kinds of jobs where they should be salaried or paid by the hour. Most of them work on projects, they get that project done, then move on to another project. So, realistically there's no reason they should be tied to a particular company. It would be more realistic for them to be self-employed and move form project to project at their own discretion. If an engineer or group of engineers develop a patentable idea, they could take a patent out with all of their names on it. If the project was funded by a corporate entity, they would work out an agreement such that the corporation would get a preferential price on the IP (free), but the engineers would be legally entitled to set the licensing price for other people who might want access. This way, the engineers would a set a price for the license that would maximize their profit, which would almost certainly be less than what a corporation would ask, since they can't leverage their monopoly to push products.
I don't know, that's pretty far reaching. But I think that if they just changed patents so that they were owned by individuals only, and legally those individuals were entitled to sell the IP, it would go a long way.
I don't care about copyright, that's more of an entertainment thing (frivolous) and I don't think revising it would be of any benefit to society in general. Besides, that kind of revolution is about to happen in the music industry already.
1) A single term of definite, fixed length. No "life of the author", no extensions, no renewals, no difference in length for different classes of authors, and no renewals. If a work has been available for longer than the term length, it is public domain, PERIOD. This provides a clear and concrete guideline for those who wish to make use of public domain works.
2) All transfers of copyright holdership (to not include "work-for-hire" situations, in which the employer would be the initial copyright holder) must be registered with the Copyright Office. Unregistered transfers are legally void. This prevents a copyright from being "lost" in mergers, acquisitions, and other business dealings.
3) Automatic statutory licensing of unregistered pubicly available works (works not made publicly available with the author's consent are not eligible for privacy / trade secret reasons; don't want to encourage a system that makes you sign an NDA every five minutes), with royalties paid into escrow. If the work is registered before its copyright term expires, royalties are paid to the holder, perhaps less a small percentage as an administration fee.