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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)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
"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 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
This is to inform you that the headline
"German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences"
infringes on our trademark, Monopoly. Please refrain from using this word in your headlines, or contact us for licensing arrangements. Further use will result in legal action.
I suggest a "period."
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.
"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
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