EU Strikes Down French "3 Strikes" Copyright Infringement Law

Erris writes "Opendotdotdot has good news about laws in the EU: 'EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading ... [and instead pushed] for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property." [This] indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do.'"

Comments

Re:Better to be accurate than alarmist

[Garwulf]

Right now, you're sounding like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. You're taking a possible scenario, and depicting it as an absolute scenario.

And you are very, very wrong.

"Let us not forget one of the more sinister side effects of this: the complete destruction of large parts of our history. In all likelihood 99% of the film and audio ever shot is on rapidly decaying mediums, yet we the public have no rights to preserve it. So if the IP holders let it rot it is just gone."

A big assumption here - you're saying that in all likelihood copyright holders are letting 99% of their work simply rot, rather than championing them. This falls under the "copyright conspiracy to deprive the world of culture" idea, and there's so much wrong with that statement it's hard to figure out where to begin.

First off, in order for a piece of property in copyright to be of any use to the copyright holder, it has to be available to the public. That means that the copyright holder has to preserve it, make certain that it can be archived properly, etc.

Second, while the first point is true, it is also true that the majority of books (I use that as the example, because that's what I know best, but also because frankly there are a lot more writers than musicians or filmmakers) have an active lifespan of around 10 years or less. So, why is that? Put simply, it's because in that time, the public stops caring about the work, making it no longer economical for the publisher to keep publishing it.

Think about that. The public stops caring. The work effectively disappears at that point.

The argument that you're making is that if the copyright term is shortened, then preservation societies and whatnot will be free to take all of these works and reprint them. But that makes the assumption that those works will even cross their radar in the first place. In fact, since there wasn't enough interest to keep those works circulating to begin with, they're NOT going to be saved, with the rare exception of some gem that gets discovered in a vault somewhere.

Here's the reality - the longer a work is in copyright, the longer it has an actual champion who cares whether it survives or not. That raises the odds of survival, not lowers them. If you have a 25 year copyright while the average lifespan of a work is less than 10 years, then the majority of works will still vanish into the ether when they hit the public domain. As I just wrote in another post in this thread, for every book that got saved onto Project Gutenberg, there are dozens that didn't, and that we'll never see again.

"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."

That's the typical rant right there - the greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations holding culture hostage. Well, they're also keeping that culture available and in distribution...and making sure that those old films get preserved and remastered for their DVD releases.

Try this on for size - rather than foaming at the mouth about the evil corporations and how copyright is taking away our culture, why don't you actually learn a bit about the law, how it works, and what the impact is. Start with this: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf - it's an examination in a peer-reviewed law journal of how the public domain actually works.

"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."

No, it's not. It's about the law, and understanding it. You might want to keep that in mind in the future.