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The Woman Who Established Fair Use
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"
Now I know who to blame for the demise of the public domain. It's all her fault! Get her! I've got my pitchfork. j/k
Put identity in the browser.
IANAL As a law librarian, it's always my understanding the 4 fair uses tests were already well establish by a large body of case laws. The congress merely codify them into the United State Code explicitly. Of course, the congress could had choose other directions if they wanted to, but they didn't. I haven't read the article yet. I am sure she is instrumental in the codification of the case laws into statutory language, but don't oversell it.
"fair use," a not clearly defined defense, meaning you get sued and have to prove you didn't infringe. Copyright holders got life + 50 years and no need to file.
Faust got a better deal.
My heroes are rather the big bearded one for the GNU GPL and Lawrence Lessig for Creative Commons. The mess left by this "heroine" obviously needs to be cleaned up, without a flourishing public domain innovation is doomed. Life plus 50 years, come on...
Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from
the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed,
the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties.
That seems a hell of a lot more fair than the in perpetuity that we have now.
We really should go back to that or life of the author or 20 years which ever comes later.
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
what? people might mod down a snide strawman that contributes nothing to the discussion? Let me try!
"No, strangling a composer with a piano roll is not fair use"
wow this is fun!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The 1976 copyright act was what got us into the mess we're in now. It was a huge power grab by the copyright owners. It extended the copyright term, retroactively, to the insane death + 50 years nonsense. It dropped the registration requirement (perhaps the biggest stupidest idea in copyright law ever). It extended both the scope of what was copyrightable and what was considered an exclusive right. Fair use was already common law, so claiming that the 1976 law established it is bullshit. It codified it, that's all. The only thing that the 1976 copyright law did was remotely good was that it clarified that transfer of copyright required a signed document.. something that wasn't actually clear before the law. But hey, Hilter made the trains run on time too.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Unfortunately, considering what else Marybeth Peters has said about copyright to Congress, I really can't believe anything she says about anything anymore.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hitler: the man who made the trains run on time.
In the fight between the holders of the copyrights, and the rest of us. I wonder what her thoughts on the DMCA would be.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Heroine? Seriously? Extending copyright to 50 years past death? Giving major copyright holdiers just about everything they wanted?
She should be scorned as the woman who betrayed the American People for the sake of the greed of lazy corporations.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that fair use is an old common law concept that was just (partially) codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. Putting that in the law was a good thing, but adopting the Berne Convention (life + 50 years, no registration) was not a good thing.
Heroine? Seriously? Extending copyright to 50 years past death? Giving major copyright holdiers just about everything they wanted?
You're right. They misspelled Heroin.
I own the copyright on the torrents I create.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm afraid as AC i already patented methods of trolling involving being a strawman that contributes nothing to a discussion! .'. for the part of your text where you are demonstrating this, mainly paragraph 2, sentences 1 through 1:
"No, strangling a composer with a piano roll is not fair use"
I intend to sue you for 1...billion dollars!
cuz when your not sure if copyright law is fucked-up enough to sue somebody, just wait for the relevant patents to be applies!
It's all about money? Fine. Then why not just let the market decide. Anything that is earning at least 2 or 3 standard deviations below the mean after an arbitrary number of years, 10 years is a good target, is automatically copyright-renewed for another 10. But there has to be provision for adequate supply relative to demand rather than prices being artificially raised by scarcity, that is, prices are based on costs of production, and copyright is based on volume sold rather than per unit pricing. As a result, even stuff that is free could be copyrighted as a sign of its impact.
The existing and even the old system seems to be a bit outmoded. Copying was a lot harder in the past so that was already a deterrent. Now, the opposite is happening. Not only is it easier to copy, but it's so much easier to create that good stuff is buried under the unending streams of average and mediocre. The
For vendors, the catch is that copyright would expire if they do not adequately market or make something available. Material that becomes obsolete should lose copyright quickly. Material that does not have price competitiveness would also lose copyright quickly but is that really a big loss?
The whole idea of copyrights will come to a technological head anyways. The algorithms and guidelines of creativity will become more understood, and computers will be creating very appealing works, but these algorithms will be available for everyone to use. So who has the copyright if independent computers generate the same output? Maybe for the sake of example someone can point out claims over snapshots of the Mandelbrot set?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dude, if you're a namefag, we can tell who you are. Also, EPIC WIN OP!!!
Hope that the fact to mention this lady falls under the fair use!
Recave
Copyright is one of those things that everybody on /. seem to have a strong opinion about. We've gone through this innumerable number of times, really. Time for me to take a shot at it, I guess..
The thing with the current copyright law (both in EU and USA, it seems), is that it needs to please both the public and the authors, with the latter currently having the upper hand. I'd suggest having a two-tier scheme, with a grace period of say 20 years since publication, for which the government guards the copyrights of a work. After that, the individual is required to pay a non-trivial annual fee (probably based on the declared income on the works -- IRS will definitely know how much that would be, and a with a hard lower limit), essentially a tax to the public, for extending the copyright further. This way, Walt Disney could afford probably to pay up say 5 or 10% anually of its income out of Mickey and Co., and still generate profit. For the 90's teen-band, long disbanded, well -- tough luck if you can't cough up the $1000 for extension.
Of course, everything here's just speculation, and the way to work is through your congress/parliament member. I know which Swedish party I'm voting for on the EU elections in June..
+ 3.14 Transcendental
It seems to me that codifying fair use rights in return for lifetime+50 copyright terms and no requirement for explicit copyright registration was very bad deal.
Without explicit copyright registration, the public domain becomes severely restricted, since the burden to prove that something is public domain is on the user--often an impossible burden.
(I won't even go into why lifetime+50 is not justified either constitutionally or economically.)
So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals
Renewal isn't just important in order to drum up business for registrars, it's important so that public and orphan works actually become usable by the public.
However, even proposals like registering works for $1 every 10 years have been strongly opposed by publishers. Why? The current legal uncertainty means that they don't have to compete with orphan works and that they can potentially retain copyright for their works indefinitely.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
The US has signed some really bad international treaties: Berne is one of them, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits any kind of rational drug policy, is another. There are more. These usually get passed by special interests while nobody is paying attention, and people are tied into those conventions for perpetuity.
(Not all international conventions and treaties are bad, of course, but separating the good from the bad is hard.)
A cookie for you, you are absolutely right.
Another item people often miss through ignorance about the law (almost everybody) or deliberately (the RIAAs and MPAAs and their disgusting ilk pushing lies) is that the courts have said resoundingly that the 4 items codified in the statute are examples, only, and do not encompass the totality of fair use.
I have the cases in my office and not where I am now or I would provide citations. But wise up, people, stop listening to RIAA and MPAA lies, and exercise your damn rights already. The 4 items codified in the US Code are examples and not the only instances of fair use, not by a longshot.
(Heck, IIRC one of those cases from a persuasive jurisdiction (federal appellate) held that not only are the 4 items mere examples of fair use, but they represent only a small subset of fair use rights. This is established US caselaw, people, and not debatable).
I am shocked at Slashdot's headline for this post. The Washington Post's title "Force Behind Copyright" is much more appropriate. Anyone involved with bringing the 1976 Copyright Act into existence should be jailed, not commended. It is the most significant blow to Free Speech since the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, Barbara A. Ringer is a traitor, a modern day Benedict Arnold, for helping to draft this legislation.
Long before 1976, Fair Use was recognised in common law (decisions based on precedent rather than legal code). However, until 1976, Fair Use was not codified in any laws. This meant that the scope of Fair Use was up to the judges to decide. This also meant that it was virtually unlimited because any judicial decision could expand its scope as people understood it. By codifying Fair Use, it became possible to restrict the boundaries of Fair Use by limiting it to the encoded law. This means future actions that might be deemed Fair Use by the courts would be limited or avoided by the law (as for future uses, P2P and other file sharing comes to mind). This was precisely the argument used by the opponents of the codification of Fair Use, and it is obvious today that they were right. If ordinary citizens can be sued for hundreds of millions of dollars for having a few mp3s on their computers, Fair Use clearly is not protecting the public enough.
The second reason that Fair Use was codified in the 1976 Copyright Act is also insidious. The copyright lobby wanted this law to appear fair and balanced when presenting it to Congress. Including Fair Use allowed them to claim that they had conceded something to the public. This is disgusting because it was something that the public already had, and the copyright lobby took it away, crippled it, and returned it saying, "Look, we have given you a gift!" This is as if your neighbor took your car out for a drive without your permission, destroyed the transmission, and returned it to you saying, "Here is a new car for you!"
Finally, by keeping the different interested parties together, she brought into being a horrible law which we have all suffered from ever since. If the law had failed, as it should of, I certainly would not be calling copyright unconstitutional today. Unfortunately, though, the law did pass, and so today we have no system to show what copyrights exist (the 1976 Copyright Act abolished the requirement for copyright applications and certificates -- the very copyrights themselves -- eliminating the creation of all records of which copyrights covered which information and who the copyright holders actually were), "limited Times" that are longer than the average human lifespan (obviously unlimited from the perspective of and given human and, thus, unconstitutional), and derivative works rights (allowing copyright holders or even claimants to expand their monopoly to speech that the holders themselves did not create just because it was similar to what they created).
All of these additions to copyright created massive legal uncertainty. Which words are whose copyright? No one knows. Which works are a derivative? No one knows. Which authors are living or dead, and how do we contact them? No one knows.
Since 1976, it is nearly impossible to distinguish copyrighted speech from Free Speech, and because of automatic copyrights, all speech recorded in any medium (any server, any computer, any phone with memory) is a copyrighted work. Before 1978, when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect, copyright affected a very small percentage of speech. Today, nearly all speech is copyrighted. I ask the question again: If all speech is "owned", how can there be Free Speech?
Barbara A. Ringer was a criminal, and enemy of the Freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, and an opponent of Free People everywhere in the world. She does not deserve anyone's praise.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
To the copyright cartels perhaps, for granting them copyright far in excess of a lifetime.
To me, it's a simple case of theft. I, along with everyone else, have ownership of the Public Domain. A significant part of this has been stolen (in the true sense; what should have been public is now still grasped firmly by corporations).
What I find to be truly incomprehensible is that copyright used to be 14 years + 14 extension, in the days that it would take 20 years to have your work travel the world (and probably a good 5-10 years to cover your homeland). This was deemed sufficient to cover the author, and still ensure they had to work and produce new content.
These days, it takes days to cover most of the world. And the term of protection required is life plus 70 years (on average, say about 110 years). Face it, the lobby groups have stolen 80+ years of open culture from us. I'd like it back please.
This is established US caselaw, people, and not debatable
But it isdebatable... In other US courtrooms. (Granted, courts are loath to overturn prior case-law, but it happens. Bigger changes have happened.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I'm beside myself waiting for the infamous Mr. Anonymous Coward to appear at the courthouse.
I've got the tomatoes. Who's got the rotten eggs?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I lost the game.
any money I put into my retirement fund is going to make no difference to my pension.
Isn't this unfair?
Now to the copyright: the right is supposed to make the person who is making the work make the work.
If he thinks that there's no point in doing so because he's old and expects to die soon, then why not just let him not make it.
Of course, one reason why people die after retirement earlier than those who continue to work (proper work, mind) is that the work stimulates interest, so the old dude may die earlier than expected if he doesn't do work he loves.
And so its in his best interest to continue to work. Why give special interest to him because of his age?
And lastly, why should he make any work if he's still getting cash from something written 50 years ago and will continue to make cash for another 50? Surely if his older stuff were already out of his control, he'd be financially motivated to create new works.
And isn't that why copyright was put there?
"Isn't the point exactly to help enrich the creator, thus encouraging creation in the first place?"
No.
What it does is break the free market and hand a monopoly for a limited time to the creator so that they may profit from their works without competition reducing the profitability of their work and by this method enable them to persue an artist as a career.
But if you have a winner that will still pay enough to live on for 75 years, where's the incentive to write more? If 90% of the money is made for 90% of the works in 5 years of marketing, then why make copyright last longer than 5 years? That's more than long enough to make and start selling a new work so being an artist full-time is now possible.
And with the money earned WHILE ALIVE, they can invest it and create a monetary legacy for their offspring (in addition to passing on their fame: you think Paul McCartney's daughter would have a job in a fashion house if her data was a nobody?) just like everyone else does.
And what about out-of-print works? There is no way to profit from the sale of works when they are no longer for sale. So while copyright lives, the work MUST be made available. Otherwise all the extended copyright allows is the locking away of works until any possible version of the work has deteriorated or been lost.
Who profits then?
One publishing company will assassinate an author so that even though they get put in jail when found out, all the other publishing companies get to benefit from not having to share profits with the author.
They're so selfless like that.
2016 is drawing near, so expect a massive lobby for extending copyright expiry to go beyond 50 years after author's death (probably to 70, even 100 years or more). Why is 2016 significant? Because that is the year marking the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney's death, and I do not expect the House of Mouse to let go of the keys to its money printing business without a long, drawn out fight.
my hero
The four statutory factors are not exclusive, as you say. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of courts consider those four and only those four. For example, take a look at Barton Beebe, An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 549 (2008).
That's the shit that feds me up
This is what I had in the back of my mind and as soon as I read this newsarticle, the parts connected...
Why not call Free software by the name "Fair software"?
See answers.com (just google the word and click on definition), but I emphasize here:
- free of storms: fair sky;
- free of stains;
- equitable, not partial;
- in accordance to merit;
- consistent with rules/ethic;
- (archaic) free of obstacles;
The major reason is to stop at once and for all the use of the word "free" which in English leads to confusion and give English-speakers the same advantage people have in other languages: to be able to say "Fair Software is not necessarily free" or "it's free, ok, but it's not Fair Software".
English os not my native language, sorry if it's a bad idea.
Oh, thanks for everything. We don't agree 100%, but you're certainly needed in these present days. Please don't stop what you're doing, k?
Yours truly,
RSS.
PS: actually, "fair" would be a problem in other languages which already use the translation of free without problems... like "livre", "libre" etc.
As the author of the original work, your derivative work should be allowed copyright protection from the date of publishing. This would not be applied retroactively to the original work which would then be public domain.
None of your examples would qualify as "generally available", unless in the last case your teacher submitted the work to a publication.
It's not YOUR 10 years, so you can't get them back.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
As for the old dude who created the original work right before he died: he's not going to be rewarded no matter the length of the copyright, so extending the copyright past his death is an insult to the purpose of copyright. Rewarding dead people at the expense of the living isn't the purpose of copyright.
Explicitly rewarding the dead at the expense of the living is an insult to the purpose of copyright. But assuming death sets its own schedule, his dependents should still enjoy the term he would have assumed he would get had he not died.
But not a single year longer.
Unless, as an element of the author's artistic expression, his works are withheld from publication until after his death on a schedule set forth in his will, and altered post mortem only by the deterministic methods (i.e. as by a program) set forth in that will, where copyright duration would be determined by the state of the law at the time the will was last amended with the willed publication date. If you want to provide for your future offspring, arrange to have your works published after your death. (An exception to the unpublished works copyright duration would need to be carved out to allow for the last-willed publication schedule of works, unless as part of the alterations to the work is something unique to you, such as the state of your decomposing corpse.)
If you can invent a machine that is left running after you die that can create works long after your death based on how you programmed it, you can provide for your offspring forever. Hopefully you can accurately predict the future market's demand for your works.
Imagine if "In the Year 2525" only released new verses on the year of the previous verse.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This whole work once and profit for life bullshit needs to stop. It only serves the corporations, so they can buy everything up and horde it for hundreds of years. Look for the extensions to just keep on moving out further and further.
Nothing has entered public domain in my entire adult life.
See subject
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1206409&cid=27680343