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Copyright Cutback Proposed As RIAA Solution
An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe proposes a novel solution to the ongoing spate of RIAA lawsuits over alleged music copying. He suggests legislation which cuts back corporate copyrights from 120 years to 5 years. 'We should do what we do to children who misbehave,' he writes. 'Take away their privileges.' Wolfe says this is regardless of the misunderstanding surrounding the latest case, which apparently isn't about ripping CDs to one's own computer. As to those who say copyrights are a right: "That's simply a misunderstanding of their purpose. Copyrights, like patents, weren't implemented to protect their owners in perpetuity. They are part of a dance which attempts to balance off societal benefits against incentives for writers and inventors. You want to incentivize people to push the state of the creative and technical arts, but you don't want give those folks such overbearing protections that future advances by other innovators are stifled." What do you think; is it time to cut off the record industry?"
120 years is INSANE.
Everything should go into the public domain after a period long enough to have allowed the creator to profit under most circumstances.
Copyright should also last at least long enough that it discourages companies from just waiting it out.
I figure 10-15 years for most things.
corporations abuse the copyrights too much, and they don't do more than distribute really. So, they abuse the people giving them money (the consumer), and the artist as well. Something like this seems more reasonable:
Corporation owned copyrights should be 5 years (with possibly an expensive continuation fee to add another 5 years).
Individual copyrights should stay 15-20 years (again with the possibility of a continuation fee). If any of my books get published, I think 75-120 years, whatever it is now, is absurd in terms of amount of time to keep it copyrighted. 15-20 is a good amount to make it worth publishing. Too many books don't get second prints anyway.
The continuation fees are basically to say "Well, people still find it worth buying, so you can continue to hold the copyright, but not long after that it enters the public domain".
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Anyone know how this would affect the artists? I mean, I know that most of them make their money off of merch and concerts anyway - but I'm just trying to understand who this would really end up hurting. Obviously older bands that still have reasonably good record sales (Led Zeppelin) aren't going on a lot of tours. I'm all for giving RIAA a good gut punch, I just don't want to screw over the musicians I love in the process. I'm no IP / copyright lawyer so I'm looking for some insight here!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Corporate Copyrights are not just Music and Videos produced by Evil Inc. They also include a lot of software, which is the livelihood of many slashdot posters. Are you sure we can live without commercial software development?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
If copyright is limited then every creative product will be accompanied by a license that specifies draconian limitations to be visited on the first and all subsequent buyers. Copyright already has fair use provisions that the media giants wish would disappear. In a contract the media companies can probably visit plagues upon the buyer's progeny unto the seventh generation. The only problem for media companies would be decriminalization of copyright infringements but the RIAA doesn't seem to try to jail people, just destroy their lives. It is better to have the wounded walking around as a reminder to others. If they are jailed, they might be forgotten.
IANAL, but a lot of this depends on how you define "private property". One could possibly argue that copyrights are protection granted by the government, and supported by taxpayers, making copyrights a form of public, not private, property. One could also argue that several decades worth of profits constitute "just compensation", though that would be harder to justify.
I'd say either 14 years as I've read was originally the caase, 40 years (a generation) or the lifetime of an author, which would be 77.8 years these days. However, perhaps there would be a different copyright for a corporate entity and another one for the author, with the author having a lifetime copyright, but a corporation only one sabbath year - 7 years, allowing the author to renegotiate.
A successful artist might produce other artists under a label, or start a production company to finance their side-projects, but unless they're too stupid to hire a lawyer, they won't do anything that isn't THEIR OWN copyright.
The law is very clear on this already, btw. If you make a work that's yours, it's protected for your entire life, plus (IIRC) 80 years. If you make a work while working for your employer, and it's your employer's work, it's only protected for (again, IIRC) 120 years from the date its first "published".
Cutting way back on the length of corporate copyright would be a good thing, and give the balance back to the creative folk who made it in the first place. And you could even do it without compromising the "lifetime plus heir" copyright.
The RIAA would never agree to this as the industry is making the bulk of it's profits now off of back-catalog music that's >5 years old (where royalty contracts have been renegotiated lower or expired completely and the cost of creating the content has long since been paid off).
There's a pretty good reason to let individuals have longer copyrights--they're less able to make money quickly from their work. Any given production studio probably makes 95% of their profits from a film within the first 5 years of its release (theatrical runs, initial DVD release, special edition DVD release.) An individual who is trying to market it without the help of a corporation will likely need to rely heavily on word-of-mouth advertising, which will be slower than a nationwide advertising campaign.
I'd be pretty happy with 5 years for corporations, 10 years for individuals, each with the option to renew for one more term. If you can't recoup your investment within this time frame, you don't need to be in this business.
Of course, I'd also like to see perpetual copyrights for free-as-in-speech works, but that's probably too much to ask.
Why does copyright have to have a single fixed period of validity? Why not implement tiered pricing? Have copyrights registered, and allow them to be extended, but charge a greater amount each time to reflect the increasing cost to society of limiting cultural extension. Something like the following (pick whatever times and dollars make you happy):
... and so on.
First 5 years: Free
2nd 5 years: 1,000 dollars
3rd 5 years: 10,000 dollars
4th 5 years: 100,000 dollars
The idea being that everyone should get an initial shot at capitalizing on their ideas. After that, you have to either start turning a profit (and sending a piece of the action back to the public coffers), or you let it go. As time goes by, the cost to society of not being allowed to draw on their cultural history increases - and so the cost to the rights holder of maintaining their monopoly should increase. But if they are doing a good job of capitalizing and/or if it is a really valuable idea, they should have the option to continue to renew their monopoly grant.
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It's never going to happen because of the "Mickey Mouse" rule. Music copyright in this country goes back to 1925 because the Disney corporation has copyright to Mickey Mouse, who dates back to 1925. If you were to limit copyright to anything any of us considers reasonable, Disney would lose ownership of Mickey Mouse, which would be huge for them. They've been paying Congress for decades to keep moving the copyright window so they could continue to hold Mickey Mouse. We have the best government that money can buy and Disney has been keeping up on their payments.
Killing off copyright, or at least reducing it to anything less than 80 years isn't going to happen anytime soon.
copyright is an absolute monopoly.. that's the point. At 5-10 years it makes sense to let a company aggressively protect its profit because it's SHORT. Does anybody really care about sharing Beatles on P2P as half the band is DEAD 50 years later? But in legal terms a pre-release leak and sharing 50 year-old songs on P2P is the same thing! That's why nobody respects it. Make the law reasonable and more people will respect it.. strange but it might work.
It shouldn't. If you look back in my comment history, you can see that I've proposed something similar to the grandparent on several occasions going back several years. (short term, unlimited renewals, exponentially increasing fees).
I'm just saying that the terms should be the same for every work. They shouldn't be tied to what the creator decides to do charge for their work.
it's a double edged sword, it cuts both ways ....
Actually, I'll continue to advocate what I've always advocated:
1) 10 year copyright by default
2) Two available extensions for a total of 30 years
3) Those works that account for the top 1% of copyright-protected gross revenue in each medium in a 10 year period are not eligible for renewal
That last item is the most important. It allows us to put a metric on what our most culturally significant works are. It's not a perfect metric, but it opens up to the commons the most important cultural icons without harming artists (let's face it: if you are one of the top 1% grossing movie producers, then you've gotten your investment back, and you probably have many spin-off sources of revenue including sequels, merchandise, etc. - the one who needs financial protection for another decade or two is the movie that's just barely recapping the money that was spent to make it). The goal is to enrich both the artist AND the commons, not just the artist.
If an individual can't recoup their investment within 5 years, especially with the Internet, they should probably apply at McDonald's. Just because you're a starving artist doesn't mean you should get a guaranteed advantage. That's your choice.
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If my salary was because every signatory to the WTO was going to pay me money for the next hundred and twenty years -- that people AS YET UNBORN would be born and die without the right to express certain ideas without writing me a check -- you will allow that perhaps they'd have a point.
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Imagine law or medical degrees were only good for five years. Would it be worth the significant investment to go to school? Most people wouldn't even have the time to finish school, let alone set up a practice and recoup the costs put into going to school.
This is not an analogous situation. The analogous situation would be if you only got paid for five years' work every time you won a case or performed an operation. Just because something you created is not covered by copyright, it doesn't mean the experience you gained creating it goes away.
It takes a serious investment to build up a portfolio of worthwhile and marketable work and do all the legwork of getting into the hands and consciousness of your potential audience.
So? Why would your portfolio need to remain in copyright for you to get work?
Cut it short to something like five years and in many if not most cases you'll never get the time to pull an income from your work before the right to copy/redistribute it is open to anyone.
Huh? Since when do people build a portfolio, get a job, and then just use what's in their portfolio? The stuff you create when you get the job will have new five year copyright terms separate from your portfolio. Just because your portfolio is public domain, it doesn't mean you are no longer the creator or that any subsequent work you do is in the public domain.