Russian President: Time To Reform Copyright

An anonymous reader writes "While most of the rest of the world keeps ratcheting up copyright laws by increasing enforcement and terms, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appears to be going in the other direction. He's now proposing that Russia build Creative Commons-style open and free licenses directly into Russian copyright law. This comes just a few days after he also chided other G8 leaders for their antiquated views on copyright."

Comments

Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[cgeys]

I'm starting to like Russia. It's also understandable why US tried to fight for copyrights so much - that's basically the only thing they produce now. Rest of the world produces actual products. US can try to attack rest of the world all it can, it only makes other countries see it faster - when rest of world start supporting free licenses and free copyright, US collapses really, really bad.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[MoonBuggy]

I think we'd be far better off if that were the entirety of the reasoning behind US copyright policy; an economy based on cerebral creative work is not inherently worse than one based on welding and riveting. That's not the whole of the issue, though: an awful lot of recent copyright legislation - from domain seizures to DMCA to term extensions - does little to help the creative industry as a whole, but an awful lot to help the few companies (many of whom are just middlemen anyway) with deep pockets and a vested interest in preventing their business models from changing, often even to the detriment of both the consumers and the actual creators.

It's not an attempt to protect an IP-based economy, it's straightforward crony capitalism stemming from the lobbyists who don't want change. Their business model isn't threatened by infringement: 'piracy' is barely even slowed down by any of the countermeasures attempted, yet the industry continues to post record profits, implying that people do recognise that they need to pay, even for a crippled product. What they're actually threatened by is the emerging landscape in which they aren't the gatekeepers of all creative content.

Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Russian, and let me assure you that these talks are just that - talks to BS electorate for president elections this fall.
D.A. Medvedev is like Russian's Obama - he talks a lot but nothing is ever gets done -)

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[kerohazel]

It's also understandable why US tried to fight for copyrights so much - that's basically the only thing they produce now.

Although I share your worry that the US will become an IP-based economy, there's still a long way to go before that happens.

Manufacturing and trade still dwarf other the information and entertainment sectors:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/IBQTable?_bm=y&-filter=&-sortkey2=&-defOrder=N&-sortkey1=&-ds_name=EC0700A1&-sortkey0=-RCPTOT&-NAICS2007=00|21|22|23|31-33|42|44-45|48-49|51|52|53|54|55|56|61|62|71|72|81&-ib_type=NAICS2007&NAICS2007sector=*2&-geo_id=01000US&-dataitem=RCPTOT|GEO_ID$|NAICS2007|NAICS2007$|OPTAX$|FOOTID|ESTAB|PAYANN|EMP|NESTAB|NRCPTOT&-_lang=en
(Sorry link got FUBAR, paste it manually if you want to see it.)

The US also remains the world's largest manufacturer:
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/10/us-still-worlds-largest-manufacturer.html
(Sorry to have to link to a blog, but the reference in the post is a dead link.)

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[Xelios]

What it boils down to is the simple idea that copyright as it stands is too big to fail. Much like certain banks were deemed too big to fail when their shoddy business practices landed them in a world of financial trouble. If you ask me "to big to fail" is just another way of saying "it's broken". We let it run out of control for too long and now we're in a real bind. I don't see any way out but to let it fail and suck up the consequences, otherwise it's just going to get more and more ridiculous until it eventually collapses anyway, possibly dragging other good things down with it (like the internet as we know it today).

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[sirlark]

Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.

I think even 15 to 20 years is too long. To me it makes more sense to have a very short initial term, say 5 years (which can change depending on industry circumstances, e.g. motion pictures might get longer terms than music because of heavier initial investments). Then rights holders may extend the term by another year at a small cost (say $100). To extend a second year, the cost doubles. Then again, and again. As long as the ownership of the rights remains profitable, it's worth extending, but the exponential increase in price means that the ownership of those rights will become untenable pretty quickly ($102400 within 15 years of original date). You can even put a cap on the maximum term duration, again, possibly different for different industries.

The idea being, that if your idea hasn't paid off by the end of the initial term, it was probably crap anyway. At least everyone else thought it was! Your work can be considered the equivalent a defective material product; something for which nobody should be forced to pay, but can freely use the parts of to repair something that does, i.e. remixing. If your idea has paid off, you can hang on to it for as long as it stays profitable, but there's a check/balance that ensures others will eventually get access to your work. Also, as the costs of keeping the rights increases, the government, and indirectly the taxpayer, benefit from the profits of the work too

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[JasterBobaMereel]

Parts of the Creative industry do not have copyright or Patents at all ... The fashion industry , they are almost totally US/Europe based outsource most of their production the the far east, and seem to be doing very well ...

It is a myth that the creative industries would not survive without Copyright and Patents, they do already, the only downside for the fashion industry it they have to keep innovating, constantly, "That's so last year.." was invented by the fashion industry for a reason ..

Note fashion houses/designers copy each other, the public, students etc.. and the high street stores copy the fashion designs with cheaper materials, and pay the fashion house little or nothing, but the designers still make plenty of money ...

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[phoomp]

Agree completely. In fact, I'll take it a step further. The current copyright system creates a disincentive in the creative industries; by artificially inflating the value of old ideas it discourages the creation of new ideas (yes, there are still some new and innovative ideas).

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[JBMcB]

I think 15-20 years is entirely reasonable. Think of all the movies that tank at the box office, but become "cult classics" years later. I think the people who put the work and sweat into making them should be able to profit off of that success. Ditto all the songwriters whose songs become popular after some other band has reworked it, such as the endless covers of Not Fade Away in the 60's.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[c0d3g33k]

I like your idea of rights ownership being something you have to pay for to maintain. That would actually provide more of an incentive, it seems, to *actively* work at keeping your IP valuable, rather than just sitting back doing nothing while the terms get extended for work produced a life-time ago.

I would also add some form of property tax. I have to pay taxes on things I own that are considered valuable (my land, house, automobiles, boats etc.). If rights owners (and their apologists) want to insist that creative works and exclusive rights to them are valuable 'intellectual' property that warrants police-state-like measures to enforce (often at taxpayer expense), then this property should be taxed just like other highly valuable items. (I would love to watch the rights owners tie themselves up in knots as they simultaneously try to inflate the value of their IP to exaggerate the impact of unauthorized copying and deflate it to minimize the tax liability.) Shifting to a CC-license of some sort would reduce or eliminate the taxation, much as non-profits are tax-exempt.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[LWATCDR]

Copyright and Patients are all about the differences in the cost of production and duplication. Many products are very expensive to produce. Software, electronics, music, books, movies, and TV Shows are all examples but are easy to duplicate. Copyrights and patent law allow the cost of production to be spread all the users of the item produced. It may cost millions of dollars to make a wireless networking chip. The company then makes the money back by charging everyone that buys it just a few dollars.
The same is true of say video editing software or a movie.
Yes the law is in many ways broken as far as protecting the rights of the consumer and the destruction of Public domain needs to be reversed but copyright law does actually protect those that risk the most and work the hardest.
What most people on slashdot really want is free stuff. They see that they can take it and get away with not paying and want to justify it. They then wrap it in a fiction that they are all about freedom.
There a few that don't fit that category but for the most part the Slashdot discusion of copyright vs piracy has all the moral weight of millionaire baseball players striking for better pay from billionaire team owners.

Hey that gives me an idea on how to solve professional sports strikes. If any professional sport strikes prevents a single game from being played all the owners forfeit 25% all their their TV, merchandising, and sponsorship revenue for the season and it goes to the teams home town school district. The Players loose 25% of all their pay for the season and it goes to the teams home town food kitchens and pantries. If it goes to a second game it is another 25% and so on.
I bet you will never have another strike again.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[hotseat]

There's actually quite an extensive economic literature on what the optimal economic term of copyright might be. See for example Pollock, R., 2009. Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term. Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 6(1), pp.35-60.

The short answer is that the rational term is much lower than the present one - of the order of twenty years or less. The majority of works make no money that long after release, so the average economic value of the longer term is tiny, especially when the net present value of the income is calculated at a reasonable discount rate.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[coofercat]

...or how about you get 5 years by default. When you can show the Patent office an actual, working, implementation you get an extra 15 years. Of course, that doesn't mandate you actually go ahead and sell/use your invention, but it does mean you at least had to spend the time trying to make it. For everyone who's genuinely trying to invent something and make it, well, they've got 5 years to perfect it, and then another 15 to make money off it - all stuff they were going to do anyway. For all the leeches, well, they've got the cost of that initial build/manufacture to deal with. The more significant the "invention" the greater that cost - if they choose not to bother, then they get 5 years and then it expires.

If nothing else, it would curb a lot of the "teleport by imginatron" type of patents which are basically fantasy and a waste of everyone's time. It still allows for business process patents, although they'd be quite hard to demonstrate if they're genuinely just a process (something like 1-click is pretty easy to demo though). So crappy software and business process patents are still possible, if that's your bag.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[sirlark]

Fair enough, I concede that the value of copyrightable work is not always immediately apparent, and hence not always immediately profitable. However, in counter argument to to your two examples

1. Movies: would get a longer initial period based on outlay, i.e. longer period to recoup investment. There's a balance that needs to be struck here of course, and the figure of 5 years was, I'll admit, pulled out of my ass as something I thought would be reasonable. But as the slippery slope argument goes, if we set an initial period of X years, and tanked box office film number 1 becomes a cult classic in X-2 years, recouping enough to at least tempt the owners to extend a few years, but film number 2 doesn't make the cut off, what makes the first film any more deserving of the profits, because ultimately X is essentially arbitrary.
2. Songs and covers: I think it's fair to say the song would not be popular enough to make a profit without the cover being released to make it so. So really the original artist owes something to the cover artist in this respect. If the song is still under copyright, the cover artist has to negotiate rights to make the cover anyway, so the original artist doesn't lose out. If the song is already out of copyright, then my argument about slippery slopes applies again: at what point is it fair for someone to stop profiting from their work.

All that said, 15 to 20 years really strikes me as too long in the internet era. Distribution is cheap, success is viral. If you haven't made any money within 5 years, chances are you're not going to.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[Politburo]

You forgot the most egregious example, John Fogerty. As some might know, he was the lead singer of a little band called Creedence Clearwater Revival. The band broke up and John went solo. The music label for CCR (which owned the rights) ended up suing him as a solo artist, claiming that he copied his own song.

Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others

[Politburo]

No, that wasn't even proposed, let alone implemented. It was a comment in a report to Congress that got blown way out of proportion. Very similar to the "miles driven tax" that people claimed Obama was proposing. It's just some bureaucrat filling out the pages of a report, not a serious proposal.

Finally!

[ThunderBird89]

A 'Soviet Russia' joke that's not disparaging of Russia: "In Russia, you reform copyright law. In America, copyright law reforms you..."

Re:Finally!

[Forty Two Tenfold]

"In Russia, you reform copyright law. In the United States of America, copyright law reforms you..."

FTFY

Re:Finally!

[Deus.1.01]

I can't speak for ThunderBird but i feel slightly insulted when i get modded insightful/informative every time i try to be funny.

well...I guess its better then being modded funny when vice versa.

Well, he's right

[LordNacho]

IP rights seem to have gone to point where only lawyers benefit. As anyone who's ever been billed by one knows, it's friggin expensive. Probably a lot of the world's productive capacity is used on this kind of paperwork, and with questionable results (will Metallica really stop making music if they didn't have copyright? Are drug patents approved for the drugs people actually need? Etc, big can of worms...). Time for a cleanup. Not sure how, as any transition phase would be internationally fragmented and highly contentious, but we'd all benefit from a less complex system.

Re:Well, he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

will Metallica really stop making music if they didn't have copyright?

I can dream, can't I?

Citation.

[headkase]

Just to support your comment a bit, see this story which just happens to be on CNN's front page: here.

From that:

"The increased difficulty in protecting data comes as the value of intellectual property is skyrocketing for companies. In 2009, 81% of the value of S&P 500 companies was "intangible assets" such as patented technology, proprietary data and market plans, according to an estimate by Ocean Tomo Intellectual Capital Equity. In 1985, only 68% of the S&P 500 market value was from intangibles, according to Ocean Tomo."

So, you're not far off the mark: The USA says it's wealthy because it is counting "intangibles" as wealth, or more accurately: things that do not suffer from scarcity. If your main assets do not suffer from scarcity, you have a problem because supply, once known, is infinite: and if supply is infinite then the real cost of it is zero.

Re:Citation.

[MoonBuggy]

The real scarcity isn't in the intangible 'products' themselves, it's in the people who create them. For now, the West has a great advantage in skills and education - China and India might be able to pump out generic copies for a pittance once the designs are leaked, but so far the latest and greatest designs are still coming largely from the US and Europe.

Of course, this will change, and is changing, in the same way that most companies wouldn't have been able to outsource their manufacturing to China fifty years ago. For now, though, it isn't so much an economy based on closely guarded ideas, it's an economy based on creating those ideas.

Re:Citation.

[slashqwerty]

Most proprietary data and market plans do not benefit from copyrights that last 95 years. In fact, most of that material will never be published. Actual published works such as movies, music, books, and news are a tiny fraction of the US economy. Of that tiny fraction, a very small portion is for works more than 14 years old.

Re:Citation.

[mrchaotica]

If you say "manufacturing economies" and "IP economies," then your argument becomes a tautology anyway.

Re:Citation.

[pmontra]

You're suggesting the possibility of an IP bubble? if you do you might be right. Furthermore there is another side to this issue. It's easy to trade atoms (i.e.: meat) for other atoms (i.e. water) but if you trade ideas for food well... you must be either very talented or very convincing. The second alternative scales better and many industries are indoctrinating us since we are born about video clip music, movies, smart phone apps, etc being so much important for our happiness and well being. However even if you manage to make the whole world believe that, there is a real risk that the time will come when your customers stop believing you or spend their money for more fundamental stuff and leave you with nothing in your hands.

Re:Citation.

[mcgrew]

Hogwash. There's no scarcity of creativity or artistry whatever. Hell, there are dozens of local bands here in my city of 100,000 who have CDs of original content, most of which is far superior to the dreck that comes from the RIAA. Have a listen to some of my friends' music. Those are live shows, they have studio CDs as well.

There's no shortage whatever. The "shortage" has always been because of the fact that recording and filming were incredibly expensive. Today recording is dirt cheap, and the price of making a movie is coming down fast -- Star Wreck only cost a few thousand bucks and is better than 90% of the multimillion dollar dreck that comes from Hollywood (it's also hilarious, every Star Trek and Babylon Five fan should see that movie).

Re:Citation.

[cyn1c77]

Just go to about any Asian country and you'll be quick to find store shelves packed with products NOT designed or invented in the US or Europe, and the products from the US and Europe will be things that aren't really all that great - like garlic peelers, microfiber towels, and plastic containers you can use to cook pasta in the microwave...

You seem to be forgetting a few other inventions from the US and Europe like: automobiles, airplane, helicopters, computers, telephones, fiber optics, microwaves, the transistor, and nuclear power.

Your post (and general thought process) is playing into the GP's point. Many countries in Asia are fantastic at adapting existing technology into cost-effective products, but not so great at developing pioneering modern technology. Japan and Korea are leading the Asian pack, but they still have a long way to go before they can compete with Europe and the US on the groundbreaking discovery front.

I am not trying to be offensive to any culture. China had some amazingly novel inventions several thousand years ago like paper and gunpowder, but recent history speaks for itself.

Re:Citation.

[pnewhook]

You seem to be forgetting a few other inventions from the US and Europe like: automobiles, airplane, helicopters, computers, telephones, fiber optics, microwaves, the transistor, and nuclear power.

Bringing this back on topic... the US invented (or discovered) powered flight, and subsequently tried to patent it which essentially shut down any further innovations in the field. Europe however basically ignored the patent and as a result within a few years had far better planes due to the number of companies pursuing active development.

Things got so bad that by the time WWI started, the US had to buy planes from Europe since they were so much better than the US ones.

It is clear patent law does nothing to protect the inventor and has a massive negative impact on creativity and progress. It's time for a massive patent overhaul.

Re:Citation.

[hitmark]

This echoes a similar move of USA after the revolution, where it ignored UK patents. This allowed a much quicker industrialization of the nation then would have happened if license fees was payed on every machine deployed.

Re:Citation.

[suutar]

and, iirc, where Hollywood ignored Edison's patents.

Pres. Medvedev is a great troll!

[Cyberax]

Pres. Medvedev is a great troll! Unfortunately, he doesn't decide anything in Russia - Putin does.

For example, quite recently "Deep Purple" was forced to pay $15000 for performance of music by "Deep Purple" (http://russian-law.livejournal.com/44954.html)!

You see, there's a mandatory 'performance fee' in Russia which goes toward central agency which then distributes gathered money to artists (minus 15% commission). Also they receive 1% of sale price for all computing equipment. And about 0.1 cent from each square meter of hotel space. And also there's no practical way to opt-out out of this system for artists.

So Medvedev can talk all he wants, it won't change a thing.

Re:Pres. Medvedev is a great troll!

[jovius]

Where's the topic?

Besides the concert organizer skipped the payment (and paid). Deep Purple didn't pay anything.

Right societies around the world demand compensation from concert promoters for the music performed. The artist is paid first for the performance (promoter pays) and for the music they play (promoter pays, 10% taken by rights society). The payment for the rights society (of which artists are members) is for their services of tracking the usage of artists' music worldwide - the societies' mission is to protect the artist, so in this case they demanded the promoter to pay so that Deep Purple is rightfully compensated.

That's what the article you linked says too.

The situation in Russia may be a bit underdeveloped (and one should follow if the society forwards the money to Deep Purple) but it's not that different from the rest of the world.

Pink glasses off!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reaction here is straight opposite to opinions on russian tech-related sites.
CC-like licence is just to not use the original CC. Original CC will become outlaw. If you want to use CC or GPL licensed product - make sure it is registered in a new "CC-like" government registry. What do you mean "I don't know if Linus and all his thousand of developers signed all the documents to apply to this brand new CC-like license?" Not licensed - not legit. Go back home poor opensource boy.

Ethical Morals

[TemperedAlchemist]

The copyright laws [url=http://www.law.northwestern.edu/colloquium/ip/documents/gordon.pdf]are morally inconsistent[/url]. We should all strive to not support them.

Re:Ethical Morals

[jd]

Sorry, BBS codes aren't valid here. Slashdot uses Real HTML. :)

Against Intellectual Property

[trout007]

Here is a great book http://mises.org/books/against.pdf against intellectual property laws.

I am a believer in natural law theory. This basically means there are laws that govern how humans interact with each other just like those that we describe with physics. The goal of human law should be to work with those laws.

There is a natural intellectual monopoly that goes with any discovery. When a new product is first created it isn't obvious if it will be successful. It is only after it is successful do others want to copy it. This gives the creator a natural monopoly in which they can be the only seller. Also what is interesting is that unlike our legal monopoly the natural one adjusts based on how advanced the discovery is. Something that is obvious like the one click buy button can be instantly copied. But a new piece of hardware that is a generation more advanced might take competitors years to reverse engineer and gear up for fabrication

Re:Against Intellectual Property

[trout007]

If you have the time please read the book. These are some of the things discussed. One of the major roles for governments in libertarian thought is to enforce contracts. There are some solutions that don't lead back to an IP rights situation. An employer and employee can have a legal contract that can help prevent this. But if the employee leaves it is the employee that is breech of contract not the company that paid for the information. If the first company finds out about the offer in time it could get a restraining order against the employee to enforce the contract.But if the information gets out then it is public and cannot be protected.

It makes sense

[Aceticon]

Copyright rules designed to create/protect monopolies and cartels in intellectual property business areas and more in general give them a huge first mover advantage only make sense for countries which already have large and well-established "creative" (not just media but also product design) multinational corporations.

If a country's companies have already been out staking claims in the "ideas territory" and charging for access to it for a long time, it makes all sense for that country to try and protect those claims and revenue sources.

(It's not by chance that countries such as the UK and the US that have the biggest and oldest media industries are the ones pushing hardest for international rules that create artificial scarcity and establish/protect monopolies in the ideas space).

If however you are a country without big creative companies and/or whose companies are late entrants, the kind of copyright protections pushed by first-mover nations serves only to hinder your own company's progression and increase their costs in that space, something that the companies that went there first did not have to face.

Pretty much all BRICs are in the position of being tol-payers rather than tol-owners in the ideas space, thus it makes all sense for them to be against copyright as pushed by the likes of the US and the UK.

Re:Against Intellectual Monopoly

[glodime]

There's no need to subscribe to natural law theory to support the liberalization or eliminating of intellectual property laws. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating intellectual property. They argue through empirical study that eliminating intellectual property laws would actually improve innovation and creation.

Golgafrinchans

[mcgrew]

Your comment made me think of HHGTG.

TFA says the writer doesn't understand why CC should be baked into copyright, well, I'm no lawyer and I don't speak Russian, but perhaps he's doing what I've suggested all along -- that no noncommercial copying be deemed "infringing". You're no more going to stop P2P file sharers than you're going to stop potheads from smoking, or stop people from drinking back in the 1920s.

Noncommercial "infringement" doesn't harm anyone, and studies show that "piracy" actually increases sales. Music pirates spend more money of music than non-pirates. A book publisher commissioned a study a couple of years ago to find out how much piracy hurt sales, and was flabbergasted to find that there was a second sales "spike" when the pirate version hit the web.

The RIAA is at war with their competetion, the indies. The indies rely on P2P and the web, while the RIAA has radio. If there were no such thing as radio, the RIAA would embrace file sharing. Hell, back in the 1950s there was a "payola" scandal where RIAA labels would PAY to have their songs on the radio.

As Cory Doctorow (who gives his ebooks away for free on boingboing) says, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.

Exactly.

[headkase]

I was observing the core of the issue. Unfortunately I didn't give the implied conclusion: Copyright in specific and intellectual property in general is about adding scarcity to things that do not inherently suffer from it. Especially in the Information Age.

Now, with that said: there is a future problem for content industries. Technology and content are becoming commoditized. Rendering technologies, places like Pixar, are becoming more and more realistic. And those technologies will eventually have Free implementations. Also, Free content, right now predominately in operating systems, is beginning to spread to other areas: props, character models, textures, sounds, music, and scripts: anything imaginable to make a story whether interactive or not. Eventually, using nothing more than creative commons material and lots of computer rendering power any individual or small group of individuals will be able to match the creative quality of today's Hollywood. There will be a collapse eventually for movies, fictional books, and music. It can only be held off.

Until then, I also will continue to buy all my games, and books - I don't really buy any new music nowadays: for that I'm satisfied. And the reason I will: because in the now I want to enjoy quality entertainment - if not for the current work then as you say for the next. But above all that: I do see the end for for-profit content approaching unless giving away your effort is made illegal for everyone.

Re:Copyright is major US export

[Blymie]

I'm Canadian, but I pay attention to US politics from time to time.

I don't think it's quite fair to state that Obama didn't take action. He did. However, the first *big* change he advocated during the election, Health Care Reform, was quite effectively blocked. He's spent years on that, and years fighting to prevent a reversal for the meager changes he could push through.

It isn't like Obama can wave a magic wand, and make change. It isn't like any president can. He did what he could, he brought forward the idea of change. He spearheaded change. Many attempted to block that change, including many Democrats.

I'm all for pointing out flaws, but at least point at the right flaws.

An alternative example, was during first few weeks of a Conservative government up here. They canceled the national day care program. Many people were upset by this, which is fine, but people claimed Harper was a 'bad leader' for doing so.

Ur, bad leader? He *campaigned" on abolishment of that program, and was democratically elected. If he *hadn't* canceled that program, he'd have been a bad leader! He'd have *lied*.

So, I guess what I'm saying is -- is sounds to me like health care reform was an attempt at massive change -- that failed through no fault of Obama's. So, what are you blaming him for, exactly?

Re:Taking it with a grain of salt

[shutdown -p now]

So before they didn't allow authors to use free licenses?

Ironically, you're hit at exactly the right question.

Yes, under the Russian law as it stands, there is some doubt among lawyers whether CC licenses have legal standing. It's not about whether the authors are allowed to say that such-and-such is licensed under CC, it's about whether the license is valid; in particular, whether the author can actually sign away his rights like that. The problem is with interpretation of licenses, or rather contracts, in Russian law. For considerable time, you couldn't have a license contract where one side didn't get any material compensation - it always had to be tit-for-tat (even if the pay could be entirely symbolic, like 1 rouble) - that ruled out all FOSS & CC licenses.

This was changed in 2008, but there's one other problem - Russian law does not permit the author to sign away his exclusive rights to intellectual property easily; it has to be made in a written contract, and every such contract must be registered with the government. This requirement is still in place, and, technically, means that most FOSS & CC licenses are not valid, and for any works released under them, normal copyright regime applies (which does not give permission to redistribute or modify).

This is what Medvedev is talking about reforming. It's not at all about shorter copyright terms, nor decriminalizing personal sharing.

Nothing to see here, move along.