White Paper Decries RIAA Attempts To Raise Infringement Payouts

Little Big Man writes "Public Knowledge, the CEA, and six other industry and public interest groups have issued a white paper critical of the attempts of the RIAA and other major copyright players to have statutory infringement levels raised. 'Noting that the courts can currently award massive statutory damages without rightsholders having to demonstrate that they have suffered any actual harm, the white paper calls current copyright law a "carefully designed compromise" meant to balance the interests of both parties ... The authors of the white paper paint a dreary future where "copyright trolls" file lawsuits in order to rake in massive amounts of statutory damages, where innovation is stifled, and where artists are afraid to "Recut, Reframe, and Recycle" because of the financial risks involved.'"

Comments

Nice idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

A hundred whitepapers wont do much good unless you can afford to lobby a few politicians and they only deal in cash.

Re:Nice idea but...

[CodeBuster]

Its called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and they would be pleased to accept your tax deductible donation right now. I have donated money to them each year for the past three (3) years now. I think you will agree, after reviewing their website, that their lobbying efforts have been intelligent, organized, informed, and as their list of successful actions attests, surprisingly effective as well. The professional lobbyist is an inevitable and some would say unfortunate part of our democracy, but the EFF proves that it does not take a fortune to effectively agitate for positive change or resist unwelcome changes. If you can donate even fifty ($50) US dollars on a yearly basis then that would be a useful and powerful statement against the RIAA and other special interest groups who are fighting to take away and roll back your rights and carve out unwarranted new rights and protections for themselves at your expense.

CEA to RIAA:

[Enlarged to Show Tex]

We are in your politics killin' your business models

Poison Pill

[TubeSteak]

Let them raise the statuatory infringement cap...
But only if they cut copyright back to 14 years instead of life + 70 yrs.

Re:Poison Pill

[TheRaven64]

That would put everything before 1994 into the public domain. That includes things like Super Mario Bros., the original Linux kernel, the first two Terminator movies, Blade Runner, the first six Star Trek movies, all the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, and more into the public domain. And, of these, which are you saying has not made enough money to finance the original development and make a reasonable profit? The aim of copyright, after all, is to promote the development of creative works by allowing the creators to make money from them. If 14 years is enough time for the creators to make enough money from their creations to both fund their development and provide an adequate return on investment to encourage for future funding then 14 years is long enough. It might not be, but none of the counterexamples you cite back up your claim that it's too short.

Re:Poison Pill

[Maxo-Texas]

Regarding "Blade Runner", released in 1982 (26 years)

Aug 3, 2007
Ladd jury orders WB to pay up over profits

The 12-juror panel then ruled 10-2 to adopt the plaintiffs' suggested damage calculations for 12 films produced by the Ladd Co., including "Blade Runner," "Chariots of Fire" and the "Police Academy" movies.

The Superior Court jury delivered a unanimous verdict in finding that the studio breached its duties to the producers. The 12-juror panel then ruled 10-2 to adopt the plaintiffs' suggested damage calculations for 12 films produced by the Ladd Co., including "Blade Runner," "Chariots of Fire" and the "Police Academy" movies.

---

The movie was profitable loooooong ago and the studios are still ripping people off with fancy accounting.

I personally support the original "14 years + option to reup 14 years".

The current disney purchased "forever" system is obscene and removes any respect for the copyright system because it is so obviously unfair and corrupt.

Re:Poison Pill

[mrxak]

Copyrights should last 70 years because that's probably how how the artist will live after they've made it, and possibly help their family after they're dead. Copyright holders are rarely the millionaires you seem to think they are. Yeah, you have the big record companies and movie companies, but a lot more copyrights are being given to authors or freelance photographers, exactly the sorts of people that need long-term protection because chances are they aren't making a lot of money off of their work. You want to shorten patent terms, sure, you want to make it harder for the RIAA to extort people, sure, but let the starving artists have control of their work during their lifetime.

Re:Poison Pill

[Shagg]

Think of it the other way. How many artists will stop creating because they "only" have 14 years to make money off of it.

Copyright was not originally intended to guarantee the artist a paycheck for the rest of their life. Having copyrights that last for the life of the creator isn't about "encouraging the arts" it's about locking in control and legally enforcing a profit, neither of which are what it was created for.

Re:Poison Pill

[Chosen Reject]

You have just demonstrated that you haven't any idea why copyright was created in the first place. People are by nature creative. We do stuff all the time that is new. Not all of it (or even a majority of it) is interesting or useful to other people, but a lot of stuff is. As a society we only grow when everybody's creative ideas are out on the table. We take the best ones and build upon that.

However, ideas are an infinite good. Some people don't want to share their creative ideas unless they have some way to profit from it. Because ideas can't be controlled like a physical thing can, some people a long time ago designed copyright to give incentive to those people. In brief, copyright is the government granting a temporary monopoly on your idea (so that you can profit from it) to you in exchange for you to share that idea with society. During that copyright period, you are free to charge however much you want for the use of that copyrighted material (free use excepting). After that copyrighted period though, the public and society as a whole is now free to build upon that idea however they see fit. If you want to have another monopoly that allows you to create money off an idea, then you have to come up with something new and creative again. Thus, copyrights give incentive to create more copyrighted work from even the original author. However, with a copyright term that is guaranteed for life, what incentive do you have to create something new more than once? Sure you can create more works to make even more money, but if you are content with what you have, you have no reason to create new works. Let's take an example. If the copyright for Star Wars ran out in 1993 (14 years after 1979) then George Lucas would have been forced to come up with something new to make money. He couldn't just continue riding the Star Wars wave the rest of his life. (For those of you who didn't like the prequels, this means that after 1993 anybody could have made them). As it is, he just sits around and makes money off of a few properties he's made.

I will only be for lifetime+ copyrights once my work as a plumber guarantees me and my posterity money for all individual jobs I do. If I make a toilet and install it somewhere, then guarantee me that I can get a decent income from that work for the rest of my life and my childrens' lives as well. If I happen to want more money, then I will install a second toilet and then you have to guarantee me profits from two toilets. But it doesn't work like that in real life and it shouldn't be that way for anything else. To make a more appropriate analogy: Say you are a marketing guy and you come up with a neat way to advertise a product. Should you be guaranteed an income for you and your posterity for that one idea? No, that would be silly. You get paid a salary and if you stop coming up with ideas then you're fired and the next idea-man gets hired in your place. Same with individual authors of creative works. They should have to keep coming up with ideas if that is how they want to make a living. If they don't, then they can go work as a salaried employee somewhere.

In either case, if you want to leave your children some inheritance, that is your deal. People who don't make money off of copyrighted things have to save up and invest in order to provide for their families. Why should a person who came up with some idea before anyone else be treated any differently in that regard? We, as a society, gave them an opportunity to market their creative work and make money, now it is our turn to build on it.

I have kind of gone astray. Anyway, the purpose of copyright is to grant a temporary monopoly to give incentive for you to release your work of art into society. Society grants that (through the government) and in return we get your creative work and get to build upon it. Copyright gives incentive to people who have creative works to release it upon society for the express reason of society being able to use that

Obvious really

[Recovering Hater]

The RIAA won't be happy until they can sue someone for "100 Jillion dollars" *

* Spoken in Dr. Evilese

Having their cake and eating it too

[Shagg]

Why is it that the RIAA (and I guess the MPAA too?) are able to basically have the best of both worlds with current copyright laws. They have the reduced burden of proof that a civil court gives them, but are also allowed to basically get criminal levels of punishment. If they really want to be able to financially ruin someones life for a single infringement, shouldn't they at least have to do it in criminal court with a "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof.

Re:Having their cake and eating it too

[jedidiah]

You would get about 1/100th punishment from just shoplifting it.

"carefully designed compromise", my ass!

[sm62704]

...the white paper calls current copyright law a "carefully designed compromise" meant to balance the interests of both parties

I don't. I think copyright is WAY out of hand. Terms should be brought back to the eighteenth century's tewnty years, and no noncommercial use should be called infringing except in the case of plagairism.

P2P is advertising and MP3s are free samples of a far better commodity.

If copyright were reasonable, you wouldn't have folks on slashdot calling for its abolition like you do now.

-mcgrew

PS- I hold hundreds of copyrights, two having ISBN numbers. The two registered ones would have gone into the public domain already if I'd had my way, as they are both over 20 years old. How are you going to convince Jimi hendrix to record any more songs? That is what the US Constitution says the purpose of copyright is!

Re: limited terms

[Migraineman]

Do you have any idea how ridiculously fucking short 14 years is?!

Long enough so you have a reasonable time to market your work and make money; short enough that you don't get to sit on your ass for the rest of your life, and short enough that you are prohibited from obstructing other peoples' progress.

Go re-read the Constitution ...

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.

As copyright stands now, the term can outlive the author. That's bad. Exactly how does that beyond-death structure encourage the dead guy to create additional works? (hint - it doesn't.)

Colors

[Teflon_Jeff]

White papers aren't going to et it done, Green papers are the only way to make a change in laws.

Corporate use of an individual's copyrighted work?

[Christoph]

A corporation took a photo from my website (cgstock.com) and used it in an entire ad campaign (phone book, brochures, newspaper). I saw it, they refused to pay, then sued me for defamation when I wrote about it on my website ( http://www.cgstock.com/essays/vilana ).

The case went to trial in federal court November 5th, 2007 (case 06-01164, District of MN -- my copyright infringement claim and multiple counterclaims over me "disparaging" them...it was a bench trial and I'm still waiting for the judge's ruling).

I explicitly permit non-commercial use of my photos -- personal web pages, schools, etc. (I require a photo credit, but I would not sue over it). But I greatly object if you are making money from my work, you HAVE A BUDGET to pay me, but are cutting me out of the loop to inflate your profits while I'm earning nothing.

There are excessive penalties for copyright infringement where the infringer does not seek to profit, but (speaking subjectively) I would like the corporation that stole my photos (two photos, actually), lied about it, forged evidence, and tied up in court since 2005, to pay "a billion dollars"...not just a token amount, or a few hundred. The risk of getting caught has to be a deterrent, which (for this company) it was not.

(licensing photos largely relies on professionalism and the honor system; if a local bank tells me they are going to use my photo in 1,000 brochures, I assume they are not using it in a TV campaign, billboards, and 100,000 brochures -- if so, the damages should outweigh the benefit of lying).

I guess this relates to the change in copyright law (to address P2P) that equated infringement without a profit motive = infringement with a profit motive.