Copyright Alliance Presses Presidential Candidates

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not satisfied with the current copyright terms of life plus seventy years and huge financial liabilities for infringement, the Copyright Alliance is pressuring presidential candidates for stronger copyright laws. In particular, they want the candidates to promise to divert police resources to punish even non-commercial copyright infringement. After all, without copyright, what would become of the next Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, or da Vinci?"

Comments

Shakespear would not have happened

[Phantom of the Opera]

Some of the Bard's work was based on the work of other artists. Romeo and Juliet come to mind. From Wikipedia :

Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to Ancient Greece. Its plot is based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562, and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1582. Brooke and Painter were Shakespeare's chief sources of inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. He borrowed heavily from both, but developed minor characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris, in order to expand the plot. The play was probably written around 1595-6, and first published as a quarto in 1597. The text was of poor quality, and later editions corrected it, bringing it more in line with Shakespeare's original text. In such an idea ownership culture, those works would never have propagated and come to maturation.

Penn and Teller need to do a show about this

[rolfwind]

From TFA:

The introduction to the questionnaire states that "the livelihood of the next generation, and America's global competitiveness, will increasingly depend on the strong copyright protection that allows creativity to be rewarded."

Quite the opposite. I don't quite see how the author's life + X amount of years rewards productivity.

I know someone who is older, around 60, whose father wrote music for movies and TV shows between the 1930s-1950s. He still gets a very handsome check each month for every time one of those shows or movies are broadcasted. The son lived his entire without working, just resting on the fruits of his father's labor. No new music is being produced nor does it encourage anyone to make any.

So I am left asking, what is this BS? This would encourage less productivity, not more.

Re:Great Works

[belmolis]

Sorry, the OP is right. The quote is not from Einstein. It is from a letter of Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1675 (corresponding to 15 February 1676 in our calendar).

Ron Paul won't bend to this nonsense!

[SonicSpike]

If you have not researched Ron Paul, then you should.

He doesn't take money from lobbyists or large corporations. Over 99.999% of Dr. Ron Paul's donations are from individuals, not PACs or corporations. Lobbyists don't even bother to talk to him in Congress because he is known as "Dr. No".

Contrast this to Fred Thompson who was a lobbyist for years.

If you vote, consider voting for someone who is principled and honest.

Shoot whoever let this "journalism" through...

[Garwulf]

This piece of garbage actually made my head hurt. One of the things I do to help keep a roof over my head is edit the news stories for the Faculty of Law of the local university, and if one of my writers ever tried to pass me something like this, I would have their head on a plate.

The first four paragraphs are fine. They state the facts, raise questions (which is always healthy), and everything is backed up. And then it descends into ranting and fear mongering.

"It is ironic that the content industry invokes the Constitution to support their position."

No, it isn't. In the face of acts by the FBI and the government that plainly are unconstitutional, this is a laughable statement. The intention of the American founding fathers, as has been mentioned many, MANY times, was to promote science, research, and art by providing some protection for the creators. The American Constitution, however, was built so that it could be amended, as the founding fathers were also smart enough to realize that things change over time. To call upon their intentions is hardly ironic, particularly since those same founding fathers passed the first legal extension to copyright law before the 18th century ended - so the history says that the founding fathers were flexible.

"Recent changes to copyright law influenced by the content industry--most notably the egregious Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act--have undermined the balance by restricting fair use and expanding the length of copyright protection to preposterous durations."

This is where the editorializing starts to get even less subtle, and the factual content pretty much disappears. The word "egregious" is a value judgment completely out of place in a news story, as is the statement that copyright protection has been extended to "preposterous durations." Lifetime plus seventy years is the author's lifetime, plus that of his/her children and grandchildren - in short, the people who knew him/her in life. It is far from unlimited. And just because some corporations have tried to abuse copyright law, that doesn't mean that fair use has disappeared - it hasn't. There is a great distinction between the content of a law and the abuse of that law.

"The steady expansion of copyright law poses a grave risk to creativity and innovation because it threatens to further erode the public domain. Artistic creation will suffer gravely when the cultural heritage of America can be chained down and held ransom."

This is a statement better suited for an op-ed, not the news section. Aside from which, history has already proven it wrong. The writer has conveniently forgotten that the United States has tended to lag decades, and sometimes generations, behind the rest of the world on copyright law. If expansion of copyright law to meet the European standard of length is so terrible, how is it that Europe and Canada, which have been functioning under those terms now for decades, have remained vibrant in their cultures, rather than becoming a literary and artistic wasteland?

"When the public domain shrinks, the potential for modern adaptation of classic works is severely constrained. In the future, innovative companies that want to bring older content into new mediums will be deterred by excessive and unjustifiable licensing costs as a result of copyright expansion."

Another unfounded statement. The public domain is NOT shrinking. In fact, the Sonny Bono act specifically stated that work that had already entered the public domain could not be brought out of it from the copyright extension. The Sonny Bono act also mandated that private letters and correspondences from public figures that had been kept out of the public domain due to lack of publication ("common copyright") would now enter the public domain, vastly INCREASING it.

Aside from which, a cursory knowledge of copyright law leads you to understand that you CANNOT copyright an idea. You can only copyright the exact implementat