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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.'"
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...
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.
The old 28 years + optional renewal was a brilliant system. Abandonware entered the public domain after 28 years. The vast bulk of copyrighted material is abanoned well before this. The tiny fraction of material that's still making money after 28 years could be renewed for another 28. Also, you don't have to hire detectives to find out when an obscure author died, just to figure out whether a work was in the public domain or not. The old system was better.
We really should go back to that or life of the author or 20 years which ever comes later.
That would be a good start, but I'd argue that it's really too long.
The question is: What's the shortest term that would enable most creators to capture most of the potential income from their works? That's what it should be, and not much more.
The goal is to provide sufficient incentive to produce works, but get the works into the public domain as soon as possible. That's how copyright promotes progress.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A lifetime is generally unfair to a lot of authors - if the old dude wrote his greatest work only days, months, or two or three years before croaking, he and his estate make very little.
You don't seem to understand why we have copyright law. The purpose of copyright isn't to enrich the creator and his heirs, it's to encourage the creator to create more. If he dies, that's over. If the heirs want to get rich on creations, let them write their own shit. And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.