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German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences
Glyn Moody writes "You think copyright can't get any more draconian? Think again. In Germany, newspaper publishers are lobbying for 'a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolize speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder. According to the drafts circulating on the Internet, permission shall be obtainable exclusively by closing an agreement with a new collecting society which will be founded after the drafts have matured into law. Depending on the particulars, new levies might come up for each and every user of a PC, at least if the computer is used in a company for commercial purposes.' Think that will never work because someone will always break the news cartel? Don't worry, they've got that covered too. They want to 'amend cartel law in order to enable a global "pooling" of all exclusive rights of all newspaper publishers in Germany in order to block any attempt to defect from the paywall cartel by a single competitor.' And rest assured, if anything like this passes in Germany, publishers everywhere will be using the copyright ratchet to obtain 'parity.'"
Dying creatures thrash about as they go to meet their doom.
News at 11 (please don't sue me gemany)
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"German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences" I'm posting this now before /. can sue me for it.
Raters gon' rate.
Knowing how German works there is clearly lots of room for creativity in word construction (or is that Wortbildungkreativität?) :D
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I really, really hope they do this.
Of course the consequences will be awful but at least the anti-software patent people will have a perfect analogy for their arguments and one that the public (and politicians) can understand.
No sig today...
I wonder what the definition of "newspaper" will be for the purpose of this law--will it be dead-tree only? Otherwise someone should generate all possible combination of words resulting in (perhaps nonsense) sentences of lets say 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 words, and then of course protect them with this law.
Once the list is generated, the now idle servers can be stuffed up the ass of the greedy bastards who want this law.
Which will come first, this "Second Renaissance" or the year of Linux on the desktop?
Halley's Comet
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"German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences"
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I suggest a "period."
This is Slashdot. "-1 Lame" is implied on all posts. We just moved the zero-point to compensate.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
These publishers need to learn a little about combinometrics. The Associated Press said they wanted to be able to copyright phrases as short as five words. Consider a 500 words story which would have 495 five word phrases which could then match up to anything that was ever written -- or just try googling for the exact string. I just googled the string containing the 2nd-6th words of this comment, "said they wanted to be", and got 3.2 million hits. If AP had gotten their way with the copyrights bit, AP would have had to have determined who had the rights to this phrase and negotiate use with the owner. Then AP would have to search for the owner of the string containing the 3rd to 7th words, "they wanted to be able" which had 7.8 million hits. And so on. Further this would have to be repeated for six, seven, ... word strings. Someone must have pointed out to AP how they would be not just hoisted, by destroyed by their own petard.
This inane copyright that the German publishers are proposing would end up preventing them from writing headlines.
You do realize you're riffing on Ayn Rand, right? Not saying that's good or bad, but few people realize that was her principle point.
Even fewer people realize the difference between principle and principal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"What will you do when more people are breaking your law than obeying it?"
The same thing we do with drug prohibition: expand the police force and increase the power that the police have, and then go ahead and incarcerate millions of people.
Palm trees and 8
This view seems at least as old as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, 1840 (quite a different school of thought than Objectivism for sure).
With respect to Ayn Rand's contributions to be revisited for the present debate, one might rather point at the bureaucrats' stance in Atlas Shrugged:
Not wanting their laws observed but broken to cash in on guilt as it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
One thing's for sure if you could get the followers of both authors to agree:
The proposed bill would be, to rehash Lawrence Lessig's take on the dreaded DMCA, "bad law and bad policy."
Indeed, headlines are purported to be facts, and they certainly look like facts (man drowns in river, oil spill to break record, etc). Under pretty much all copyright law in the world facts are not copyrightable. The very idea of it is insane. It's the composition that's copyrightable, not the content. You can't copy someone's article word for word, but you can use that article as a source and say the exact same facts.
I can't believe newspapers of all people are dumb enough not to see what this could do to them. It's not going to make any kind of effecitve "headline exchange", people will just use different headlines. They'll start adding things like "New York Times says 'Headless Man Runs Nude Through Central Park'" instead of "Headless Man Runs Nude Through Central Park". That would pass muster, because it is a quote: The NYT did indeed say that (if they said it of course).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You do realize you're riffing on Ayn Rand, right? Not saying that's good or bad, but few people realize that was her principle point.
Maybe because it wasn't? Have you read any of her work? Or do you just get the liberal Cliff's notes?
She wasn't about stealing from society by force of law, she was about freedom from being coerced into giving to society. They are very different things (though to a socialist, they are identical). What about this law increases the freedom from being coerced into giving to society?
Frankly, Ayn Rand would be appalled at the proposed German law. It represents the exact opposite of the ideals she supported. In fact, it is very, very similar to the central theme in Atlas Shrugged. In Atlas Shrugged, it was impossible to exist in mainstream society without breaking the law. Her solution was to step out of society completely, and form a new one.
There was one pirate in the story, but he was characterized as quite a narcissistic asshole (though irresistible to the main character), and most of the people in the reclusive society of "doers" did not approve of his methods. John Galt, the elusive figure around which the story was built, and the ultimate role model pushed forward by Rand, was certainly no pirate. He did preach too much, in my opinion, when given the opportunity. That part of the book sucked.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The article is right about about the "copyright ratchet", but it's extremely short-sighted and, frankly, wrong when it says that it is the US pushing its laws onto the rest of the world. It has recently been driven by the US - things like the DMCA and Sonny Bono act and such, but most of the draconian copyright laws did not exist in the US until the 60's, where we were the ones who were "ratcheted up" to the rest of the world's standards, which had already been ratcheted up by the French (who still have the most restrictive copyright laws in the world, in my opinion). The French still give far more rights to author's/artists than the US does, so to say it is US driven is a little disingenuous, or at the very least completely ignorant of history. It also goes squarely against the articles main point: that copyright harmonization is any different than any other harmonization. There are swings back and forth.
The real difference between copyright harmonization and other types of harmonization is copyright law affects everyone every single day, where most laws only affect a few people at any given time. Yet only a very small number of people are involved in the decision making process. Our supposed representatives are too easily swayed by lobbyists, they aren't considering the people any more.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
French copyright still gives far more rights to the creators than US copyright, and it always has. It was one of the driving forces behind the Berne convention.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
>In Germany, newspaper publishers are lobbying for 'a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolize speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder
This is not quite true. The auxiliary copyright ("Leistungsschutzrecht", draft leaked: http://www.irights.info/index.php?q=node/880) is mostly aimed against big players such as Google (News) who systematically and continuously reuse headlines, snippets and images from publishers for their own profit (selling ads) without paying (in the publisher's mind: adequate) royalties. The average blogger commenting (and quoting) a certain news story is not meant to be affected... but, of course we know, laws like these tend to get out of hand.