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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.
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.
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
... 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
The lifespan of software is pretty short anyway. A 5-year protection cycle is a huge motivator to get a new product out the door on a regular basis and keep the programmers employed.
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).
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!
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.
A 30 year old cobol program running on a mainframe is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing that should be entangled in copyright shenanigans. This is THE perfect example of something for which the owner of the copy should have the ability to fix and maintain the program. Quite likely, the individual or company that original wrote or sold the program is gone, LONG GONE.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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?
Yes but software like that is generally business software that is held internally by some business and hence not copied at all(commercial in confidence protect it etc). The only bits of the industry that would have to worry would be things like games and other shrink wrapped software. Personally Id feel fine is say MS office feel out of copyright every five years as I dont think it would really affect anyone... MS would simply release a new version(Is office 95 really worth anything to anyone these days)?
Games could be a problem as they seem to like to release platinum editions of older games and I honest have no idea how much that brings in for the games industry... its probably a nice little earner they wouldnt like to lose. But on the other hand it could solve the problem of abandonware... games Id still like to play but cant because I cant physically purchase it anywhere.
For other sectors like niche vertical market sector software developers(Ive worked in such and industry) they are generally doing pretty bespoke stuff and being used as a service provider to their clients.
Id be honestly interested if anyone has any examples of really bad things happening in any sector of the software development world. Settop boxes for sat and cable TV perhaps? If you argue that the software on the sim code falls out of copyright every five years then whats to stop you duping a bunch for your friends.
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
I just thought I'd attack the first cynical apologist for no good reason other than I don't like people like you.
Those who whine and mumble "It will never happen" think they are being 'realists', but they are just dragging everyone
down with their own depressive lack of vision. Neil, you are as much a part of the problem as the RIAA and other criminals.
What do you possibly feel you have added to the discussion, other than what we all already know?
Want to add something other than vague accusations?
Want to print the names of those you accuse of corruption?
Want to cite some examples of their criminal behaviour?
Your hand waving dismissal just insults us all.
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.
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.
Lessing argued EXACTLY that before the Supreme Court. That unrestricted additions to copyright length for free, constituted "takings" from the pubic interest. The Supreme Court ruled the public had no case as the Constitution granted the term limits to Congress to do with as they pleased.
So taking back copyright is perfectly legal, and the argument has ALREADY been argued in court!!! We just have to get Congress to vote to change it!!
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!
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...
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.