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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.
...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) 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
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)
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?
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!?