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Congress Considers Reform On Orphaned Works
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate to liberalize copyright law in the case of orphaned works. The almost-identical bills would limit the penalties for infringement in cases where the copyright holder could no longer be identified. The idea is that one could declare their intent to use the work with the Copyright Office and if the copyright holder didn't care to respond, they would only be able to get 'reasonable compensation' instead of excessive statutory penalties. Public Knowledge has more details on the bills."
I did RTFA but I haven't yet read the text of the two bills (I'll get to it, I read a lot of bills...yeah I know, get a life). I would love to know what 'reasonable compensation' is. If the copyright holder cannot be found or doesn't exist, there should be no compensation if suddenly 10 years later someone who was once a member of the company that once held the copyright shows up and says give me money.
This one's been lurking through congress lately. Basically, it's so big media conglomerates can use things they find on the web and places like YouTube without having to pay for them. It's all about protections for them and none for artists and creators.
More to read here.
Jory
Cool! hopefully it can't be exploited to hijack orphaned works and put it back in the hands of greedy corporations.
Of course if it can't be exploited now it can be patched later for the above strategy.
Orphaned works should go into public domain.
What?
If the copyright holder can't be found or identified, why bother with limiting the penalties? Why not just make the work public domain?
It seems as though, unless it is done somewhat carefully, this could place too much of a burden on copyright holders. Suppose I want to freely copy some popular song. I register ten thousand intents to do so with the copyright office. (or ten thousand people register one such intent) If the copyright holder fails to respond to even one such request, they lose some of the rights they previously had to control the use of their work.
That said, I expect that it is not too difficult to close this spamming loophole.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
One thing they would need to do is put a time
limit for making a compensation claim
If this bill doesn't eliminate the risk of criminal penalties, it doesn't do any good. Today, someone can get a Federal felony conviction for copying a work which has no commercial value and hasn't been published in 50 years. I hope they put that in, otherwise, this reform is not a reform.
Does that mean, "when the members can't decide which of them will get the propriety of that piece of work" ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
There should be something additional in the proposed bill: A time limit for the copyright holder to respond, say, 90 days. In other words, if it is believed that the copyright holder no longer exists (the person is dead or the company went out of business), the request is filed at the copyright office. The party filing the request could choose to use the material immediately, and pay the reasonable fee if the copyright holder comes forward. However, since you have no idea what "reasonable fee" the copyright holder might demand, and since it really isn't the business of a court to decide how much something should cost, this could still put the party at risk of huge expenses. Therefore, upon filing the request, they could choose to simply wait the 90 days. If the copyright holder didn't come forward in that time, the requesting party gains the ability to use that copyrighted material as though they received from the copyright holder a free non-exclusive license to use that material. Remember, chances are that there is no copyright holder at all, since one cannot be found or identified, and the request is on file at the copyright office for 90 days before this happens.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
seems like it would then be possible to claim copyright on the works of another as long as you file before they do
tag: whatcouldpossiblygowrong ?
This has been discussed many places and the consensus is that it severely weakens private copyright. With this an artist who shows work low-res online could be anonymized by someone else grabbing the work to post on a forum or the like. This breaks the chain and makes the artist impossible to track. This isn't a problem if you're the RIAA or other MAFIAA as your spy network will catch it for you, but for the little guy, such as ever private artist and photographer out there this is total murder.
When you think about it this has mostly just been produced as a bandaid to allow things like archiving to occur in the absence of a strong public domain and working fair use.
Weren't they getting into trouble with Librarians for this earlier this year?
Congress Considers Reform On Orphaned Works
... they're the reason we're in need of copyright and patent reform in the first place!
I think that We the People are long overdue to consider reform on Congress itself. After all
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This reform should have been done years ago, but this still doesn't go far enough.
I suppose it's meaningful that some folks in Congress are just now beginning to see that copyright is a very important issue in the information age.
Now, if they would just undo the copyright laws they've passed since 1995, that would be a good start. And then they can undo some more, until the copyright period is reasonable - somewhere between 10 and 30 years. Once they get THAT done, THEN they can address trickier issues like accidental infringement.
As a content creator, having to register my work with the Copyright Office is the bane of my existence. Why should I have to spend hours sitting in an office sifting through my work to sort out published from unpublished, declaring each published work (where there might be 600 such works in a registration) as a separate line-item on a form, then pay $45 per registration just for the privilege of being able to claim my rights?!
And then if I ever decide to sue Disney or whomever because they used something of mine without asking, I'll spend years and thousands of dollars in court as they try to find the most minor errors in my record-keeping or registration procedure. Blah!
It's time to strike one for the little guy, for the creatives that don't have a whole corporate infrastructure dedicated to making sure someone gets paid for their art. Enough with this "artists should be starving or cogs in a machine" crap. Get rid of registration and even the playing field so your average Joe with an artistic side can stand up to corporations that would otherwise happily run roughshod over everyone else's rights.
This
They could set up a system -- gee, a lot like the old one, it turns out -- in which for most cases a person has to CLAIM a copyright, rather than copyrights just sort of happening automatically. If we went back to that system, a large number of the copyright "issues" we see today would simply disappear back into the dark hole they came from when copyright law was "improved".
I know that forty years sounds like eternity to the eternally adolescent Geek - but your treasure trove will almost certainly turn out to be an instantly recognizable icon of commercial art and illustration.
The page clipped from Life magazine, the poster that was taped to a dorm room wall.
What looks like a "good faith effort" to you may may look pathetically inadequate and self-serving to a judge. It is altogether too easy not to find what you don't want to find.
The orphaned works problem was arguably created by grossly excessive copyright extensions. The simple solution is a return to reasonable copyright terms, say, 20 years with an optional 20 year extension for registered copyrights.
These bills would create privately owned and operated copyright registration databases. How much will it cost me to register my copyrights? As a photographer, I create thousands of copyrighted works every year. Even if the price is less than $1.00 per work, I can't afford it. Once again, Congress is screwing over the little guy in favor of big business interests.
Apropos captcha: nonsense
Wouldn't it be better to simply limit the length of copyright of new works to 14 years, with no extensions? This way everybody will know when a work will enter the public domain simply by its copyright date.
This is just a power grab for large media companies who, if this passes, will have paid their lobbyists well.
Troll or not, I agree... Especially since the word "excessive" is actually used...
How does this impact GPL-based work?
This bill doesn't necessarily sound like a "good thing" WRT to the GPL.
Here in Norway we have automatic copyright, with no registration nessescary. So anything I produce would basically be up for grabs by any U.S. legal entity?
More FUD from the "big corporations are evil" crowd. People have been spamming this orphan works stuff to every art journal, forum and otherwise art related site.
Just relax okay. If anything, this furthers abandonware's cause because there really is a lot of software out there that was written by ?? that can't be contacted for whatever reason. This works both ways, people can also claim to be unable to locate the author for whatever content. It is a two way street, not a oneway-omg-the-corperations-are-going-to-steal-my-cruddy-webcomic paranoia that people are touting it to be.
...seeing as most Slashdot users think every 'artist's works should never be copyrighted anyway - that any image, sound file, movie clip, etc. on the web is fair game for taking and using however they see fit, including verbatim, and that 'artist's should just find some other line of work if they want fair appropriation or - daresay - compensation for their work...
The GPL License is based largely on copyright. You violate the license, you enter the domain of copyright. You violate copyright, you can be sued up the wazoo - or something.
So for those GPL projects where original authors of pieces of code can no longer be found (the same that hold back, say, Linux from going to some other license, or newer GPL license), no copyright can be established. Ergo, the code can be included in, and released with, locked down software. The GPL may be violated, but that in itself just brings things to the copyright table - and since no copyright can be ascertained over the code involved, the company walks.
I could be mistaken, though.. I hope I am.
I also hope that this doesn't get pushed through - as mentioned before, it just screws over the little guy... again.
How the fuck is this supposed to work internationally ? Oh , sorry the copyright holder isn't American so the US copyright office doesn't know him, his work is now free for all ? So let me see if I get this right, US media companies can put threaten our ministers, bribe our police force, and launch DDOS attacks against our web-pages, then ignore the copyright of Swedish artists without consequences, and apparently we are supposed to feel bad about file-sharing because we ought to respect international treaties? Perhaps they care to explain why we shouldn't just declare all US media "free for all" until Washington starts recognizing that there are other sovereign countries in the world?
The end result of this type of legislation is infinite copyright for some and no copyright for the rest.
While I understand that many see this as a way to stop the infinity + years copyright duration, it does nothing to the corporations who exploit the extended duration for their own benefit. It does not put corporately shackled works back into the public domain. These corporations have legal departments on retainer to maintain their claims in perpetuity. These works will NEVER become orphan.
This will just create a legal way for content corporations to poach the work of individuals not actively defending their copyright. US copyright registration cost $45 per individual work. How many photographs have you taken? Have you filed for copyright on all of them? If they find their way to the internet and someone uses them after "reasonable effort" to contact you they are an "orphan work" under this legislation. Remember that story you posted to a forum back in college? It's about to be a major motion picture. The forum shut down 2 years ago, and you don't use that isp any more so there was no way to contact you.
Sure, you can make a claim and take the infringer to court, but if they can make the orphan work defense stick, they are only liable for a token sum instead of statutory penalties. That is if you can prove they are infringing your work. If they have deep enough pockets, they could tie things up in court so that you end up losing money. Or you could take their offer to sell them all rights to the work for $100. Either way they would still get the work at less than the market rate from a professional. If you don't make a claim, they file copyright on their use and defend it in perpetuity. No public domain. This is what big content providers want. Cheap work for hire content that they own instead of the creators.
Everything you write, photograph, draw, video, everything you create is protected by copyright now so that other cannot profit from your work without you getting anything. This would force everyone who creates anything to pay registration fees per work and make sure that their records are up to date. Professionals who do this will be undercut by corporations poaching the work of amateurs who don't.
This is an idea that's far more than overdue. "Submarine Copyright Infringement" claims should have been outlawed long ago - especially with statutory damages to unreasonably high now. This doesn't hurt the author of the work at all since s/he will still get the compensation they would have gotten from the beginning if they had been found. I am just so sick and tired of copyright suits - the latest on the movie Charlie Wilson's War - that start out by demanding that all distribution of the infringing work be halted, and millions of dollars awarded for something that's so brief in the movie that you can barely even tell that it's there. And there are just too many truly stupid juries in this country that uphold that kind of garbage. This type of reform will only make society richer if it can pass in its relatively present form!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Making these changes to copyright law, regardless of whether they're net beneficial to multinational corporations or individuals, means little with the international agreements on copyright. An American multinational corporation may do their "owner search" and find nothing, but still be on the hook when the true owner is outside the United States. United States limitations don't matter to a copyright holder suing from Canada to a Canadian operation.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Are we trying to put the entire creative sector out of business here?
If I had to put a copyright claim out for every single piece of work I had, it would quickly engulf any profits I had made on those works. Hell, DeviantArt alone has over 56 MILLION images in its repositories - are we supposed to believe that everyone is going to rush out and get those images copyrighted immediately?
If you're looking to crush small businesses, this is the way to do it.
(Hell, the art communities threw their arms up in the air about this TWO WEEKS AGO -- To put it bluntly, this is how you piss off the internet.)
A whole can of worms. I could see this being used to strip plenty of small time authors of rightful copyright protection.
...
I haven't read the bills, but your idea is like a Louis Black joke,"Hey Congress has got a really sh***y idea, let's make it even worse!". If the bill doesn't allow for the age of a copyrighted material to be considered, then anyone who writes anything on the internet or self-publishes, could see all of their copyrights disappear in days from publishing. Whereas things that are old (say 10-20 years) and no author can be found, I'm all for PDing them, so long as a certain definitive bar is met in searching for the author.
R**A: "Well, your honor, we didn't know where to write to to contact the author, it was posted on Youtube, and we didn't receive a response from Google with the poster's address."
Judge: "Did you try contacting the poster directly?"
R**A: "We didn't have his/her contact information from Youtube."
Judge: "Did you try to send an email?"
R**A: "It is a company policy to block internet traffic to or from Google and youtube, so no one in the company can send an email to a Youtube or Google account."
Yep, and then it will be a case of; LAWYER: Well your honour we made a good faith effort to find the copyright holder, but as we couldn't contact the holder we released an exact copy of all their work in a box set for $59.99 as it was no longer covered by c
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
The only people who are required to register are the people who want to use orphan works. Creators only have to register if they're suing... same as before.
supporting it? Along with libraries, archives, museums, etc.
Both versions have protections for creators (in particular the House version, which might even go a bit overboard). At any rate, all the FUD being spread about the bill is disturbing (like requiring registration by creators, which is simply not true, or that it was written by big media, which is also not true).
No to you as well. :P
Under both bills, if a copyright holder identifies their work being used, the user of the orphan work has to compensate them.
Furthermore, the proposed definitions of what constitutes a "reasonable" search are pretty heinous. It seems like they were expecting this "big corporations" scenario rather than the people who legitimately need to use orphan works.
This bill does have the best of intentions behind it. Unfortunately, when put into practice, it would be viciously abused at one point or another. Again, the problem comes of internet anonymity, as mentioned. The problem then becomes, for small artists, personal artists, or writers or photographers, who frequent websites such as, say, deviantART, that post many many works, even a token fee stacks. A $5 fee might not seem like much, but if you have 100 works... well, that speaks for itself. Think of the little guys, congress. C'mon, stop being fxcktards for ten seconds and think of us.
It's good that Congress recognizes the importance of reforming law on orphaned works, but this is the wrong way.
Congress should simply require copyright registration for all works every 10 years, for $1/registration, with submission of an electronic copy (or approximation thereof when that's not feasible). Once you don't renew, your work falls in the public domain. The list of all currently registered works should be published.
It's simple, reduces bureaucracy, is self-funding, and it creates legal certainty.
Both bills require a "good faith effort" to find a rights holder. Such loosely defined terms are fodder for litigation. Registration provides a clear-cut way to prove rights or lack therof. How about automatic registration for a short term like 5 years, and then required registration after that? Then creators wouldn't have to register anything until it proved itself valuable enough, and re-users would only have to establish that material is more than 5 years old and not registered. Is that too simple for the minds of legislators?
But enforcement of copyright continues even when there is no revenue (and hence no tax gained). So if the taxes from revenue were paying for "IP" then IP should stop existing when there is no revenue.
Add into this the Hollywood Accounting that ensures there IS no tax (and the other outsourcing tricks that corporation manage) and you could start saying that IP isn't being taxed so should have no copyright.
Or you could just say that you pay taxes on the value of your IP irrespective of revenue. After all, your shops pay rent AND taxes on their revenue. They don't get to put rents down as a business expense, do they?
If the work gets to Norway (even if by inernet), you've got 'em.
Most of GPL HAS been gievn an author (the author: section in the man page or code header). Some bits are not assigned bu they can't include the WHOLE thing if any of it is found with a copyright holder.
I put out a GPL'd plugin for Winamp about seven years ago. For various reasons, mostly lack of time due to the birth of a child, I stopped working on it, and the project languished.
If I read this right, some big company could say they couldn't find me, put up some notice with the copyright office that I likely wouldn't notice, and then later take the software I wrote and put it in a proprietary app against my will by giving me some low cash payment.
Now my particular software wasn't great shakes, but isn't this in general a problem with GPL'd code?
The cake is a pie
- "certain special cases": Limited to works where reasonable investigation does not turn up the copyright owner's identity.
- "which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work": Works to which this bill applies are no longer exploited.
- "and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder": The copyright owner can retrieve his interest in the revenue from a work by filing a tax return on the work.
Mr. Stallman's "copyleft" turns around the exclusive rights of copyright. In the same way, taxing copyright turns around the mentality expressed by the phrase "intellectual property". If the major publishers of proprietary entertainment media want to treat copyright in a work as property, then perhaps it should be taxed like real estate.While the new laws will be a minor inconvenience for a large media company that can afford teams of lawyers and staff to stay on top of the registration requirements to keep their large body of copyright claims current and up to date, they will add proportionally tougher burdens to smaller organizations and individuals.
I'm all for reform of copyright law, and often take the side of the anti-imaginary property people, but one thing I am sick of are such people lauding such bullshit one-sided in favor of big business things like this as "progress". It is progress, for certain, but it's progress towards even greater large corporate advantage.
Basically, with the current two parties in office, people need to accept the fact that if they offer a "solution" to something, their paying constituents are benefiting from it and others will pay for it. It will not be meant to "fix" anything in the sense of making something less broken, but rather, it will "fix" things in the sense of fixing a sporting event to have a desired outcome. That's not cynicism at this point, that's realism. Anyone who would call it cynicism needs to cut back on the Kool-Aid.
...allowing both large media holders and individual content creators to play fairly under the same set of rulesIf the objective is fairness, then I would think that every party to litigation should have to draw from the same common pool of lawyers - financed by patent and registration fees and/or some other means such as royalty payments - when and if the time came for a contested registration or patent to come before the courts.
It seems to me to be inherently unfair that the big corporations can command the talents of $100 million law firms, while the small artist/inventor has to use Cousin Vinny who got his degree at night school.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
International copyright law holds that copyright starts at the moment of creation and applies to the creator. This law makes it so that the Library of Congress is no longer the body for copyright but Bill Gates' Corbis and other large media houses. Basically only works registered with these places (for a cost of $5 each) will be copyrighted. ANYTHING available anywhere that is not registered with pieces of silver to these organizations is fair game (as far as the US is concerned, the rest of the world will still hold to the idea that the stuff people make belongs to them).
Imagine for a moment that a picture of some friends at a party that you took and posted to Flickr ends up in an ad for anything from beer (good) to STD treatment medication (bad). Worst is that the photo is yours, but a company paid a agency to create this ad and you don't get a cent or have any say on how they use it.
That is the gist from the previous versions of the bill.
It does not matter where you stand on software patents or intellectual property, this is about the rights of a creator to dictate where and when a work is used. If you deny Corbis it's money, the work is not yours. That is fundamentally wrong.
If the Library of Congress is so behind that they can't keep up with copyright claims or these ownership issues need a central registry then it should be a public, free registry. Not a paid registry that furthers the ideal that a MBA is the only one that can truly manage creative people and also the only one really making any money in an office of programmers/developers/designers/artists/etc.
Comparing copyright and patents is totally unwarranted. From the point of view of corporations,
one patent cannot replace another : they need the patents that will apply to their business. One patent cannot generally substitute for another.
Not so with copyright. A publisher will publish anything that brings money in, whether local or foreign. If copyright on foreign works is not protected, then it is much cheaper for corporation to use foreign work for free rather than pay royalties for local works, to the detriment of local authors. In the 19th century, the decision to protect foreign copyright was taken by Congress when people such as Mark Twain requested it to be on an equal footing when trying to be published in the United States.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva74.html
This should not however be overly generalized. How foreign creations compete with local ones depends on their nature and on the structure of the market.
And the point of this bill is to limit the scope of statutory damages. As I understand it, the copyright owner can recover actual damages (the back royalty) from the Copyright Office. Does Berne ban governments from withholding taxes, alimony, child support, etc. from payment of damages to the prevailing party in a lawsuit?
Besides, works copyrighted by MPAA members aren't Berne works; they're United States works.
If you run into an orphan work, you submit it to the copyright office and wait a certain period of time, during which the copyright office lists it as an orphan work.
If after the waiting period, nobody comes forward to claim it, you can go nuts.
If the owner surfaces, he is presumed to have vicariously done everything that you did with you as his agent. Pretty much, he's licensed it to you by his inaction and may be entitled to back royalties.
I think something similiar should apply for patents (Yes rambus I'm talking to you)