Slashdot Mirror
Intellectual Property Manifesto for the UK
feepcreature writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for a balance in Intellectual Property rights between the interests of users, creators and publishers. There are 6 key recommendations, including: DRM should not override users' statutory rights; analogue rights should apply to digital media; and copyright terms should not be extended without evidence that this would be good for society. There is also part of the debate on the UK Government's Gowers review of Intellectual Property, due to report in the Autumn."
So who are the DRM pushing companies in the UK?
Agree: "The life+70 years term is ludicrous. "To believe that anything beyond lifetime copyright impacts the incentive structure of creators takes some serious suspension of disbelief.
Disagree: "Going non-digital to digital changes nothing." It does - high-grade, repeated copying becomes a lot more easy and economical with digital media, often at near zero cost. This has two effects, pushing in different directions:
1. Immense possible benefit to consumers. You can get lots of high-quality stuff for almost nothing!
2. Immense possible harm to producers. If people are just copying your content free of charge, it's going to eat into your profits in most likely scenarios. In some scenarios, you might cease production entirely, or shift towards more difficult-to-copy formats.
Depending on your preferences, it's very likely that you will be wanting to rebalance copyright, one way or the other (more lenient, more strict), due to the adoption of digital media.
I can see some of their point, however I think they're trying to err on the side of the content creator/publisher.
:)
I still maintain that I should have the right to keep copies of ebooks and music I own on as many of my own digital devices as I please. I can not use it all at once (I can multitask, just not that well), and would have to lend my digital device to a friend in order to break the intent of fair-use (and how many times have you loaned a book or CD to a friend?).
I think I'll just stick with my personal DRM-Ban and leave it at that. I won't buy anything that employs any form of DRM (with the only exception being Windows, which I purchased then removed WPA and WGA). This includes eBooks, which thanks to Microsoft I have $100 worth or so of ebooks which are locked to an account that I have been locked out of (apparently upgrading one's computer or portable device a couple times each within a 6 year period is abnormal and breaks some sort of fair-use law). It also includes purchasing music downloads and CDs that contain DRM. I don't care if I can remove it, I will not give money to a company that employs those methods of "protecting their copyrights."
The only way the companies will learn is if you speak with your wallet, the Dollar (or Euro/Pound for you blokes on the other side of the pond) truely is the most basic and effective form of communication.
Somebody on Ars pointed out a post here on Slashdot that is, IMO, the most clear and succinct argument against life-plus copyright that I have ever seen, saying (in part):
I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law. And that's because the social contract has been trashed so thoroughly by the media industry that it's effectively invisible. Joe Average isn't stupid, but he's not an IP lawyer and given that he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it, the notion that copyright is a tradeoff of short-term disadvantage for long-term advantage never occurs to him, because as far as he knows it's just a permanent restriction. Ask Joe who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's works and he's likely to think it's a reasonable question.
(Emphasis mine.)
I agree with most of what you say, except the very last part. It sends exactly the right message. The British Library is raising a serious point about DRM and how it interferes with our legal protections. Of course they are library focussed - that's what they do.
Do you think they would be taken seriously if they went on an anti-DRM crusade? No - and neither do they want to. They actually use DRM themselves to allow them to publish copyrighted material on the internet. Without the protection it affords (to satisfy individual requests to copyrighted works) they couldn't do that, and users would have to physically visit the library to see much of their stuff.
They are making the point that even the British Library finds the new technology dangerous to our legal rights, and we should be very careful about allowing those rights to be superceded by technologically enforced contracts. Great message, to the point and relevant. If there are other interest groups with similar messages, speak up!
Fundamentally, I believe copyright to be a concept that is broken by design, but that it has taken the "digital age", with its inherently instantaneous, free reproduction capabilities and near-instantaneous, near-free distribution channels to make that obvious.
With that said, I recognise that copyright is here to stay.
So, my guidelines for a fair copyright regime:
* Copyright is recognised as fundamentally an economic tool for artificially assigning value to something that inherently has none (ie: none of this flowery "for the betterment of society" claptrap).
* Copyright protection for economic purposes becomes an opt-in process (eg: if you want to sell a book or song, you have to register it as a copyrighted work).
* Length of copyright is linked to a works "ECD". When a work is registered as copyrighted, it must include an "Estimated Cost of Development". Once the owner of the copyright has recorded income from selling the copyrighted work that meets or exceeds the "ECD", the work is no longer subject to protection from non-profit copyright infringement (ie: filesharing and the like). Note that for-profit reproduction (ie: someone else *selling* a copyrighted work) is still a crime (and would be harshly punished).
* Fraudulent reporting of "ECD" or copyright-related income would be *severely* punished. Upon confirmation of such fraud, the work would immediately enter the public domain and a fine would be issued to the registered copyright holder equal to the submitted "ROI" value PLUS any reported income from the work. Where possible (ie: with proof of purchase), refunds would be issued to anyone who had purchased the work.
* On the death of the copyright holder, all their copyrighted works enter the public domain.
>But why should a person, or their family, or their estate, or a company just have
>their copyright rights whipped away from them?
They don't. You missed a 1.5 in your list:
1.5 The public desides to give up certain rights to the created cartoon and grant a time limited copyright to the creator!
There is nothing taken away from the person, family or whatever, the limited rights they were granted have run out.
So point five should be:
5. The creator's given time limited rights by the society expires and the work is again free to be used and inspire the creation of new work to benefit the society.
By the way, you don't get copyright on recipies so not sure what that part of your reply was about. Perhaps you can seek patent for it, that is VERY different from copyright though, for one, it has a much shorter time limit on the granted rights by the society to you.
No, I am in favor of fixed copyright terms.
Fixed copyright terms of arbitrary length are inherently broken because:
a) they are vulnerable to extensions of that arbitrary length
b) they assume all works have the same intrinsic value by offering them all the same level of "protection". Thus, they do not allow the market to make a value judgement.
Yea, aristocracy was the god-chosen elite who have had the right to hold life or death jurisdiction over the "common" people, and its highest rank was "the king", who held all other as "subjects".
This was a social contract too. If people had listened to such nonsense ideas likewise your quotation points out, and thought of "long term benefits", there would be no french revolution and we would be still people subject to some "local lord" first, then the elite, then the king. Ah not to mention that all the rights and advancements that the previous 2 centuries have brought wouldnt be forthcoming.
Same goes for copyright holding. It is something that emulates a loose group of elitism in the world media, some big people who no one can expect to move into except with a very big smile from fate - same as in the days of old aristocracy.
Again i repeat - NOT all social contracts are beneficial and rightful.
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You fail to explain why promotional spending on entertainment will end. Things will not fundamentally change overnight. Content producers/distributors still need to promote their stuff in order to raise awareness and generate sales.
The idea of abolishing copyright is not about getting things for free. I think this might be the flawed premise that dismisses your entire argument.
This has already been happening -- in a sense -- in the US and Western Europe for over a decade. The results, so far, have been good...unless you believe the current culture owners who claim trillions of dollars in sales have somehow magically disappeared from the economy entirely because of piracy.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.