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ISP Filters & Copyright Extension Defeated In EU
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Last November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking at how culture affects the economy and recommended a 'balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property' saying that 'criminalizing consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution.' Industry lobbyists, of course, immediately sprang into action to try to turn that around, writing amendments that would set up mandatory ISP copyright filters and extend EU copyrights to match the USA's life-plus-70 term. Thankfully, the committee rejected all of those amendments: 'Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).'"
The worst response reward goes to Barbara Boxer. When I contacted her regarding proposed legislation that was intended to further erode fair use and hand more of the public rights to the media companies I got a form letter in reply. That form letter thanked me for my letter and let me know that Barbara Boxer was listening and fully intended to support the legislation that I was writing about (and against).
I don't expect any representative to do what I wish - but it would be nice if they took a few moments to actually READ and maybe THINK a little about what the people they supposedly represent are thinking. Ms. Boxer has clearly identified herself as being on the side of further abuses by the media companies - I don't know about other "representatives" but this one clearly does NOT represent the people who elected her.
Stopping the already insane copyright system from becoming more insane is a good thing, but it is not the same as actually trying to make it less insane.
1. The copyright must be registered
2. An actual person must be named (just like with patents)
3. Death of the registered person means death of the copyright (you can't encourage dead people to make new works no matter how hard you try)
4. At time of registration a term can be chosen, and an appropriate fee paid.
5. A reasonable number of extensions (say, three) are permitted, provided a new fee is paid.
6. A set of standard royalties for a common class of work (say, songs) should be decided, and made available to anyone who cares to pay the standard rate.
7. Willful royalty evasion justifies reasonable punitive damages (say, 3 times the standard royalty), nothing else does.
8. Indoctrinated fair use should be ratified by international treaty and be recognized as a means to end a complaint pre-trial.
And that's about the bare minimum needed to make copyright fit for the intended purpose of encouraging the science and the useful arts. It still doesn't make copyright just but it would at least make it something people would be willing to respect.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually, it's not the lengthy term that's obscene. That's just irritating. The real problem is that every time some valuable copyrights threaten to expire, congress extends the term. And here's what's obscene: the Supereme Court's inability to grasp that endless extensions abrogate the Constitution's requirement that copyrights be "for limited times".
But here's some good news: more and more old books and music will go public-domain in Europe, and will be available for order at a reasonable cost — or downloadable from the inevitable "pirate" servers. Another reason to buy a Kindle.
I wonder what current/future legal/technical restrictions will prevent the movement of material that is public-domain in one jurisdiction but under copyright in another will appear. There are already issues surrounding Australia (which IIRC at least up until recently had a more limited copyright term).
My greatest fear however is still that an effective DRM mechanism will add massively to the usual problems involved in the long term accessibility of culturally relevant material. After all DRM doesnt (currently) recognise or pay heed to the copyright status of the work it protects.
DRM can be broken quite simply. DRM isn't the real evil, software patents and DMCA-style laws that prevent you from breaking it is the problem. I can see documents stored in digital form being unreadable in 75-100 years due to a lack of standards used and DMCA-style laws though, just think about all those floppy disks with all those documents from '95 made on some application and today are just about unreadable, also data from obsolete storage formats are heading the same way.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
"If I create a copyright, I sure as hell want my children to at least be able to profit from it, even if I suffer an untimely death."
Then, like most people, you can invest some of the money you make during your lifetime, from copyrighted works or otherwise, and leave that as part of your estate. Life insurance helps as well.
The bad thing that isn't mentioned, is that some countries in the EU already have adopted the US life+70 years term. For example in Germany, it is exactly the same rule. Making copyright law univeral across the EU would be a great success if it would decrease this term, but actually I don't think the EU has done much for its citizens in terms of copyright or ISP filters. The article is simply wrong about this because many things that are mentioned haven't actually been decided yet.
The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.