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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."
Won't somebody please think of the artists?
Isn't that the rallying cry of the copyright cartels?...
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.
It's like the copyright lobbyists didn't care about keeping a low profile anymore and shouted "we own your government" from the rooftops.
Currently the Czech law requires you to pay royalties to collecting agencies regardless of the fact that you are not a member of any such agency and therefore will never get any money of them back.
It doesn't matter that you are only playing music composed by you, you are still obliged to pay.
I don't see how it's fair to demand registration of copyleft and not other copyrighted works. Enforcement of copyright is (and should remain) a private not criminal matter, the government doesn't have to hunt anyone down. I imagine the authors of the work will show up in court if they file infrigement charges.
Although I feel as many others do, that this has obscenely nefarious elements, my indignation is slightly lessened when I remember this is still only a draft. Who here knows about Czech law that can enlighten us on the likelihood of this becoming real/passed/enforced?
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Better solution, get rid of copyright entirely. Society is producing content at to fast a clip for it to be necessary any more. You produce a work and by the end of the week someone has already produced a derivative work. All this copyright stuff does is slow down progress.
If you are worried about how content creators get paid then you haven't thought about it long enough. Content as a service, that is the new model. If you can't sell your content as a service to customers or businesses then the other option is merchandising, make a physical good that can be confiscated for trademark violations and earn your money off of that.
Standard issue in the dysfunctional state of Czechs (according to Wikipedia, of turkic origins, not slavs). Highest prices of every day items in the EU, highest prices of communication services in the EU, highest prices of energy & fuels in the EU. Country ruled by economic mafia for good 20 years, whose biggest thieft and a man with obvious blood on his hands, callous Kalousek, has been voted by Brussel's byrocrats as "the best finance minister in EU." That's not a spit in the eye, that's kung-fu kick in the eye! And it will be worse. (P.S.: Even the iPhone costs there 100 euro more per month with Vodafone plan than anywhere else in the EU, with Vodafone plan.)
Czech Republic = a black cancer in the hart of EU, comparable only with Kosovo jihadist mafia.
Pavel007, Amsterdam.
I'm waiting to form an opinion until Cory Doctorow posts some long winded treatise on Boing Boing.
Or treat copyleft as a license, a form of contract. And settle disputes in a court, presenting evidence that the license was applied to an original creation. Which is how it manages to survive in the rest of Europe.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Government exists to serve the interests of the people ... not vice versa.
Isn't this a violation of the Berne Convention?
According to Wikipedia:
While the above is probably rightly marked flamebait, there is a truth hidden in the midst of it. Czech policies on some level have been causing massive migration of Romi to France and Italy, sparking off the recent debate over who's allowed to be in what country (despite fairly broad travel agreements under EU treaty).
Personally, I'm for everyone regardless of license being required to register. If the copyright office can't find the rights holder, then the work should be public domain. Not having a registration requirement makes the "orphaned works" problem much worse.
Free Martian Whores!
I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.
I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.
Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?
Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.
The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Try this:
"The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights."
In other words, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that intellectual property rights in general are not bought and sold and pass through tons of hands. Witness the entire orphan-work problem. Liberal licenses like CC make it easier to manage these problems, because the entire issue of ownership from the point of the CC license is very straightforward. (It is likely easier backwards as well, because, contrary to the fever dreams of grabby middlemen, there are not, in fact, hordes of eyepatched 14 year olds slapping CC licenses on Elvis mp3.)
Also, I don't know how this works in the Czech Republic, but in the U.S. the government's cost is court time. In civil suits, the litigating parties pays for their own discovery (subject, of course, to outcomes and sometimes other rules). I don't see how the state's costs go up because a license is CC.
I forget what 8 was for.
The problem with that naive view is that removing copyright really does remove the incentive to create and gives every incentive to copy. I don't see how it does not. If everyone can copy and sell, r give for free and sell advertising or profit in another way from distributing a book, software program or a movie, the we have a race in marketing instead of a race in creativity. The creator of the work becomes the most disadvantaged party because he is the only one who has to recoup the cost of creating the work (could be many millions in case of say a major software application or a movie etc) to even break even, while for the copiers any money they make out of distributing that work is free profit.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The article was written in Czech for Czech readers so it doesn't say some facts about Czech copyright law that may not be obvious to foreigners. First, Czech collecting societies have complete monopoly over their culture area once they register. The law also states that collecting societies don't need any contract for collecting royalties from TV, radio and their Internet equivalents. That means that if you start an Internet radio, you have to pay royalties even for most CC-licensed music. The registration is there to opt out from this. This draft is a nice example of what happens when collecting societies get to write copyright law while the big media is busy lobbying somewhere else. They write the law for themselves.
Take it from someone inside the Czech Republic. The reason: this is still not a full democracy in the Western sense. Corruption is still rampant. And that extends all the way up to Parliament. If you think lobbyists in your country have power over legislators -- try living in this place. Translation: if anyone with an interest in destroying copyleft has enough money or interesting favours to pass to the politicians, the bill gets passed. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, like one of our recent ones, may well turn up standing on a beach in Italy somewhere with a boner. Will the Czech people do anything to protest? Even the ones who understand this issue will not. After fifty years of the old regime, no one feels any power to stop what the politicians do. This is precisely the dynamic they take advantage of to pass things like this. It is the perfect location to set this kind of precedent.
A few weeks ago, I read an article about the lack of copyright in Germany in the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Compared to England - where copyright had been introduced a long time ago - there were significantly more books available at cheaper prices. The authors were paid better, too.
Here it is:
Google Translation / Original German
(+1, Disagree)
That assumes that 18th century psychology about the incredibly complex dynamics of motivation for creative activity was accurate, with a fair amount of evidence suggesting otherwise, such as the following article. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,709761,00.html Also, if we reasonably suggest the abolition of copyright and actually get someone to listen, the legislators might pick a happy medium such as a reasonably short term and expansive fair use
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Except that the actual truth is on the exact opposite side of the spectrum.
Fashion industry shows how profitable it is, especially compared to most other industries, and in Fashion industry there are no copyrights or patents. Sure there are trademarks, but no copyrights or patents at all, and they are highly creative and profitable, thus proving your position inconsistent with reality.
You can't handle the truth.
Let me make this crystal clear. Per work, per infringement, per anything, copyleft is far less of a burden for the government. If the government wants to save money, they should actually FAVOR copyleft. This is like putting a heavy tax on more fuel efficient cars that are safer, more reliable, and cost less to build. As for what the regular system consists of, we have a pretty good idea of it because the are part of the Berne Convention, which means copyright is automatic for them.
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Unless it was butchered beyond recognition in the English translation, the article doesn't say that authors were paid better than in England at the time but I guess it is possible.
Here's the part that says that (my quick & dirty translation):
The German knowledge initiative led to a curious stituation which sure enough nobody noticed at this time, though: Sigismund Hermbstädt, a long-forgotten professor of chemistry and pharmacy from Berlin, earned a higher royalty with his work "Fundamentals of Leather Work" than the British author Mary Shelley with her famous horror novel "Frankenstein"
(+1, Disagree)
Up to 14 times as many books were produced, presumably of relatively equal value. The state of authors isn't directly of concern, at least not within the British and American traditions where the point of copyright is to enrich the public availability of works. However, it's quite possible that the publishers were actually less capable of extortion of authors without the copyright system.
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Not something that any kid with a computer can do. Right... it's something that any kid with scissors, a sewing machine, and a charge account at JoAnne's Fabrics can do!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
No rights are granted to the Czech republic or those within its borders.
Sue the fuckers every time someone uses a piece of Linux software or some clip art.
If you don't want to play nice then you don't get to play at all.