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Czech Copyright Bill Undercuts Copyleft, Artists
Andorin writes "Earlier this month a copy of a draft of the Czech Republic's new Copyright Act [Czech PDF] was leaked to Pirate News. Included among several disturbing provisions are new regulations for 'public licenses' such as Creative Commons licenses and the GPL/BSD licenses. The amendment essentially requires that an artist wishing to use a public license must notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question. This goes against one of the strengths of Creative Commons and other licenses, namely the ease with which they can be applied. Additionally, collecting agencies will have increased jurisdiction over copylefted and orphaned works. ZeroPaid covers the story, noting that the amendment also reduces the royalties which artists receive from libraries by 40%, with that money instead going directly to publishers."
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date. We're all accustomed to copyright being made more strict, but actively making it harder to release your works under permissive licensing is a new low.
Taking things a bit out of context? It's not actively making it harder, it's just making it so that people actually have to show they have a right to license the content that way. How would you like it if you released something under a particular license, and then somebody else got the content, then put it out under some other license which you didn't approve of? Maybe the Czech government just wants to be sure that anything they're being asked to protect in certain ways is actually being done right.
Is that not a valid concern? Beyond that, given that this is written in legalese, do you not think that maybe, just maybe, that it's the translation at fault, not the actual law?
It's like the copyright lobbyists didn't care about keeping a low profile anymore and shouted "we own your government" from the rooftops.
Nor has any indication been made that any lobbyists were involved.
Sorry, but the outrage? I'm not buying it, if anything, it makes me think even more than I shouldn't listen to the Copyleftists, because they get hysterical over every little thing, and think the sky is falling, they're crying wolf and...
Yeah, it's not good for your side.
Make a better case, don't go speechless, don't get up in arms, and maybe you'll be able to persuade better. Probably wasting my time pointing it out here, but eh, I just felt that this was typical propaganda, not as bad as the whole Obama is a Muslim who wants to build a Victory Mosque at Ground Zero from the Bones of American Soldiers, but similar in spirit.
Excuse me... Free has little to do with price.
Bullshit. You can claim "it's free as in speech not as in beer!!!" all you want but when the first thing that people always say when they try to sell you on Linux or GCC or whatever piece of FOSS is that "you can get it for no cost" then the arguments and protests such as this ring extremely hollow.