Expanding Fair Use To Reform Copyright Law

Hugh Pickens writes "Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, presented a six-step program for reforming outdated US copyright laws in a speech at the New Media conference at Boston University. Sohn expressed no patience with the 'disconnect between the law and the technology' of media production and distribution. He puts Fair Use at the top of the list for changes that will help return balance to copyright laws that have limited innovation, scholarship, creativity, and free speech. In addition to the four-part legal test for fair use currently on the books, Sohn recommends that Congress add incidental, transformative, and non-commercial personal uses to the list of fair uses enumerated in copyright law, and in addition expressly provide that making a digital copy for the purpose of indexing searches is not an infringement. Beyond Fair Use reform, Sohn advocates punishing copyright holders who 'knowingly or recklessly' send out false takedown notices, protecting the manufacturer of a technology from liability for the infringing activity of others if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, promoting fair and accessible licensing of copyrighted works, limiting damages for the use of orphan works, and requiring copyright holders to provide notice of any limitations on users' ability to make fair or lawful uses of their products."

Comments

Harmonize US copyright term with TRIPS agreemen

[Animats]

US copyright terms should simply be "harmonized" with the TRIPS agreement. The TRIPS treaty (a WTO thing pushed by the US) calls for a minimum copyright term of 50 years, and most countries have signed on. So let's take that as the US term - 50 years, maximum.

Call it the "Copyright Term Harmonization Act", and trim back US law to the minimums required by the TRIPS agreement. That's a good first step.

As part of this, provide that willfully publishing content with a false copyright date voids the copyright in the material. This punishes criminal copyright fraud (it's a crime now, but there have been no prosecutions), and will discourage re-stamping old content with new copyright dates. This provision should be retroactive.

Those are provisions one could probably get through Congress.