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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.
are very reasonable starting points IMHO.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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 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.
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.
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!?