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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?"
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
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.
Seriously? Follow the money in US politics. This will not happen.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.
Twenty is too long, but I agree that five is way too short. I'd go to seven with an optional seven-year extension (for a total of fourteen) much like the original copyright scheme used in the US.
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
It's not as if anyone in Congress is inclined to reign in one of their most prolific lobbyists. What is the point of such musings?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
In other words, the copyright ratchet is built right into the Constitution.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
... but I do write music. Sorry, I have a real problem with Congress taking away my own rights to my own music after just five years. That's a flash in the pan, in terms of my life; for crying out loud, I don't even get some of my own music finished in that short a time. I don't sell my music (or at least, nobody's bothered to buy it yet), but I have a problem with someone saying they can appropriate my own creative works that quickly.
There are other solutions than this that have NOT been tried yet, because the lobby is too big for Congress to act. And this would suffer the same fate.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Traditionally, copyright was for the life of the author + some reasonably large number. The optimal lifetime has been studied under economic maximization theory. The result was ~ 14 years, which is rather closer to the 20 year patent life time than the proposed 5 years. The link is: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html
But are they actually suggesting that they reduce an artist's ownership to just 5 years?
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but there are plenty of other ways to nail them to the wall with less collateral damage. It's the method of enforcing copyright that's been so despicable, not the duration of the copyright(for music that is).
The 120 years only applies to corporate works created more than 25 years prior to first publication.
An example might be a movie that was made but not published until a generation later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In order for Congress to pass such a law, they'd have to be angry at the RIAA for behaving badly.
In order for them to perceive the RIAA as behaving badly, they'd have to have the same sort of world view as I, Lawrence Lessig, probably most Slashdot readers, and probably most Americans who have any awareness of what's going on with (so-called) intellectual property.
But if they had that sort of world view, they would never have passed the DMCA and the various copyright extensions in the first place.
So, what's the point here? Unless it's a tongue-in-cheek Swiftian "modest proposal."
As a serious proposal, it makes about as much sense as suggesting that Congress pass a law allowing unrestricted legal immigration in order to increase the numbers of young workers and thus solve the demographic problems of Medicare and Social Security.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Do I actually have to RTFA? Congress isn't about to punish any corporation for anything.
And limiting copyright to half of what it was (IINM) in 1900 is hardly punishment. I think it would be a GOOD thing to limit it to at least 20 years; the present incredibly long copyrights last longer than all non-acid-free paper and longer than any file format or encryption sceme. The present lengths insure that little copyrighted today will ever be seen by anyone after its copyright expires.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
However, the USSC has held that the takings clause applies to anything of value, such as water rights, income streams, etc. Copyright is, IIRC, one specific example explicitly addressed.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is just a dumb idea.
1. It really couldn't happen because it would violate more than a few international agreements.
2. corporate vs personal copyrights? A lot of artists when they start make money incorperate. Where do there works fit in?
It is a non solution to a real problem. But lots of people will click on the blog and read the ads and they will make money off it.
Thank you for playing and paying.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And if independent artists are also limited to 5 years' copyright, what's to prevent a label from discovering them, liking their songs, but leaving them in obscurity for 5 years until they can take their songs and get some pretty boy band to record them?
Sounds to me like you'd be handing the industry a gold mine of free songs and screwing the little guy. After all, which one has the marketing and payola to make sure something is an instant hit? Which one has to struggle for a decade to become an "overnight" success?
Cut back corporate copyrights from 120 to 5 years makes complete sense
That's one of the many reasons it won't happen.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
What I would put into law are 2 specific reforms:
1: Copyright cannot be extended beyond its original term. The reason for this is simple. Copyright exists to encourage creation and publication of the arts. Once that art is created under the copyright terms of the time, copyright has served its entire purpose. Anything beyond that is just giving more unnecessary rewards to a few at the expense of the many.
2: Copyright is lost to any item not available for new sale in a 3 year period at a fair price. If you're no longer selling it, then you have no right to prevent other people from duplicating it and keeping it available.
Change on any issue starts when people start talking about it. Let copyright change begin here now!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mickey Mouse(TM) is already well protected by trademark law. If you are suggesting that "Look and Feel" or heavens-forbid "Image" should be protected under Intellectual Property laws, then just take ten seconds to think how quickly everything would be "ImageMarked" by the scammers and locked up by "ImageMark" trolls who make nothing but sue everyone around for near-misses and co-incidence.
/me shudders...
If I remember correctly, the whole point of IP laws is to foster innovation. If Disney does something new with Mickey, then that is protected. Protecting the old images forever does not serve to foster new creativity.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Traditionally, copyright was for the life of the author + some reasonably large number.
The only tradition associated with copyright terms is the practice of extending them beyond the previous limit. Copyright started out at 14 years[1] with an optional 7 year extension. Actually, I guess there is also a second tradition, that of abusing the monopoly granted to copyright holders regardless of the term.
yp.
[1]http://download.nowis.com/index.cfm?phile=FreeCulture.html&tipe=text/html#2_2_1
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).
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
I don't think so. Most people are mad at the US, not because we break treaties (which has traditionally been done in compliance with the actual treaty) but they are instead mad because we won't SIGN treaties that we know we can't live up to, like Kyoto.
Then again, the US was the first to ban aerosols, has significantly cleaned up our lakes since 1970s, just recently upped the CAFE standards for gas mileage in cars, and subsidizes alternative fuels. Far from perfect, granted, but we have still done more without a treaty than most with one.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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 ....
So what? Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
Who the hell do you think wrote those agreements in the first place!?The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property (IP) regulation. It was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States.
The United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilized corporations in the United States and made maximizing intellectual property privileges the number one priority of trade policy in the United States (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7).
You can't take the sky from me...
How about we just end the copyright on a song or album the moment its no longer on the charts, lets say the Billboard top 200 for example. If its not on the top 200 popular or within its category then its really no longer deriving meaningful value.
A step further it you can't buy it anywhere because its no longer in print same thing, end of copyright. I have long felt that same rule should apply to books and computer software. If I can't buy it at any price because you longer make it available, then someone else should be able too.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
and i don't see drug companies starving
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The original purpose in the US Constitution seems to me to be still valid: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The current state of the law is very clearly not doing this. Ownership has become separated from the source of creation for most cases. Ownership in such a case is what leads to the hoarding and tying up of wealth that belongs in the public domain. And ownership has created such an amount of wealth and influence that the owners are in arms fighting to keep wealth not created by them (RIAA, MPAA, Pharmas, ...). So, how do you change a system that has gotten corrupted to such an extent?
Machiavelli's comments on change are relevant: "because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
The degree of loss of the hoarded wealth and its impact in impoverishing us as a planet is not readily apparent. The incredible flourishing of open source does give us some hint of how huge that loss is in the many areas where there is little or no open source.
So, change in this area is going to be very difficult in a direct fashion. It may come about through disruptive technologies, e.g., open source. The causal factors keeping the status quo and the great loss of wealth have to do with the concentration of decision making into fewer and fewer channels. Oligarchies and aristocracies arise naturally in human affairs. And they are not willing to let go of the reins they have so artfully constructed over decades and centuries.
Thinking at the level of should it be 5, 10, 15, 20 years of IP protection is working at the level of writing code without an architecture, design, or specification. Of course, it is so satisfying to start writing code and one does get the feeling of accomplishing something.
With the new targets being significantly more modest than the European equivalents.
Also, most people are not too upset about the US finding it difficult to cut greenhouse gas emissions. We can understand that. What we are REALLY pissed about is that your government has decided to launch a corrupt attack on the scientific process rather than admitting they have a problem and that it is hurting the entire globe. The disinformation they are promoting in order to save their own face is making it difficult for countries that DO try to make a difference to explain it to their population.
In short, the Bush administrations anti-scientific propaganda is causing Europeans who don't know better to reject their local governments attempts at curtailing emissions. Thus while they may just be doing it to save their own face, their lies are causing major trouble across the globe, and it is pissing of a lot of people.
It doesn't matter, at present, if two works are similar or identical. If two people happen to write the exact same poem, BOTH people are entitled to, and hold, copyright.
Your music example is easier to understand. If an orchestra records a performance of Beethoven's 9th, the orchestra holds the copyright on that recording. If a different orchestra records the same tune, it holds the copyright on its nearly indistinguishable recording.
I don't see why we'd need special "look and feel" regulations just because the term drops from 120 to 5 years -- especially considering that existing copyright law handles examples like yours already.
Required reading for internet skeptics
In America, this group of people called politicians make these things called laws.
Traditionally, they answered to the will of the people. If the people didn't like what they did, they got voted out. Therefore they tended to do whatever the people wanted.
However, people are lazy. People pay no attention to who does what, 99% of the time because it's a hassle.
Instead, people generally vote for whoever's already in power in the vast majority of cases. This tends to only change when on candidate spends a huge amount of money on advertising, telling the electorate that he did GoodThings(tm) and the other guy did BadThings(tm). This doesn't have to be true, as the electorate's far too lazy to fact check - they'll just believe what they're told.
So the only really motivating force in politics, so long as you otherwise generally keep your head down, is money.
And who gives politicians money? Big companies and lobbying organizations. Like the RIAA. "We should do what we do to children who misbehave," he writes. "Take away their privileges." Two perspectives:
As the public sees it: The big mean RIAA is misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
As the RIAA sees it: The naughty public are misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
Who makes the decision over whose privileges get taken away? Oh, yeah, that'd be the politicians... who now only care about money thanks to years of voter apathy.
And who gives money to the politicians? That'd be the RIAA.
Who do you think is going to convince the politicians that they're right and the other side is wrong and deserves to have their rights taken away?
And there we have the DMCA, a progressively more conservative supreme court that will back businesses and a media surcharge tax in Canada.
As requested, the naughty ones are being punished... You just missed that your opinion over who the naughty ones are counts for absolutely nothing unless you can motivate the politicians to enforce it - and they listen to the other side because they give them money and we'll give them votes regardless.