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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.
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.
...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
Everything was fine pre-DMCA.
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)
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.
Lets see the vast majority of books, music, movies, video games, and TV shows published from 1976-2000 are completely unavailable to anyone. So it is illegal for me to make a copy of a very rare book, and entirely possible no other copies exist. That means it is erased from the public consciousness. And you think there is nothing wrong with copyright? You're very, very, very wrong.
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)
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?
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
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 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 would ask for very strong copyright laws and abolishment of patents.
The long-term influence of patent removal would quite likely be to slow technological growth within the country in question. High-cost, high-risk speculative R&D is only commercially driven through patents. We simply need more practical research input than academia will provide us with.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
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! --
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
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!
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.
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? ]=-
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
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!?
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.
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.
Instead of telling everyone how they can publish/distribute their stuff, it could instead be made legal to crack their encryption.