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).'"

Comments

show as much spine as the French

[sconeu]

You don't understand. Those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys CAVED IN to the Evil Terrorist Content Pirates[tm].

Clearly we must support our patriotic "content producers" to defeat the evildoers.
</SARCASM>

Re:show as much spine as the French

[Amorymeltzer]

...the fact that criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution. (emphasis mine)

When was the last time anyone aside from the consumer expressed that view so blatantly? When was the last time anyone in government expressed that view? The two together is just about as close to Christmas in January as you can get - and I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm a Jew...

Now is the time for reform

[QuantumG]

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.