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EU Parliament Group Opposes Long Copyrights and Oppressive DRM
the_arrow writes "Apparently there are some politicians who 'get it.' At least it seems that way after reading an entry on the blog of Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party). He says the Green party group, fifth largest in the European Parliament, has officially adopted several of the Pirate Party's stances in a new position paper (PDF). The Greens say, 'the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time,' adding that a 20-year protection term is more reasonable than 70 years. They go on to say, 'Net Neutrality must be guaranteed,' and also mention DRM: 'It must always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions, and we should consider introducing a ban in the consumer rights legislation on DRM technologies that restrict legal uses of a work.'"
and there were some people who thought a "pirate party" is crazy and nobody will vote for them. The old saying is always true "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Well, for the Green Party they skipped the 3rd step.
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They're just trying to get Big Media to toss some cash their way.
"getting it" and doing something about it are 2 different things. Poloticians can talk the talk, hardly do they ever walk the walk.
1. Masterpiece (Potter/Tolkien/Shakespeare/Jane Austen/Picasso etc.) These usually make a tone of money in the first 5 years - or don't make any till after the author is dead. In either case, there is no point in extending the length of the copyright. It won't affect the author significantly, either way.
2. Profitable, but not masterpieces. These make their money in the first year, and then fade out quick. By the 5th year, it is practically nothing. But they might do a sequel, which can extend profits. Still, 10 years after the first original work, it won't matter. Either the series has made someone very rich, or their new profits come from the new books, not the old ones.
3. Not profitable. Not in 1 year, not in 10, not in 20, not in 70. NEVER profitable.
There is zero reason to extend copyrights past 10 years, let alone 20.
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The proposal in the Swedish Pirate Party's program is 5 years from publication. I don't know why the Greens in the EP thought that they needed 20 years, but either way it's infinitely better than today's life + 70 years which is usually 3 or 4 generations from publication and is obviously insane.
No, the article is about the copyright policies adopted by the Green group with 56 elected representatives in the highest legislative body of the European Union. Which happen to coincide to a large degree with the copyright policies of the Swedish Pirate Party, probably because they have a MEP who is a member of the Green group.
Which one does Disney fall under?
With Hollywood accounting, all movies are failures on paper.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=star+wars+david+prowse+profit
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Content creatores make content, big media makes money, big media evades taxes.
American IP principles? That's a good one. The US had much weaker laws than most of Europe for over a century (Berne convention was 1886, and the US joined in 1988, and we didn't really pass Europe up until the DMCA in 1996). During that period, global demand for US entertainment media rose dramatically. Perhaps some Europeans were paying attention and realized if they had a more permissive culture, they might get their own Hollywood.
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IMO, the law on DRM should be this: you can protect your property with DRM or you can protect your property with copyright law but not both. If you elect to protect your property with DRM, you can still seek injunctions or collect real damages but you are no longer eligible for statutory damages under copyright law.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I don't want my nurtured stuff to be sold on some thieves bazaar by hoarders and internet opportunists.
And I want free ponies, doesn't mean the government should spend taxpayer money forcing confiscating and giving me them.
Why would anybody be against copyright?
They're not. They're for a more limited copyright. One which doesn't impose an unreasonable burden on the government and on society.
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Believe it or not, this is to follow a proposition originally made by Stallman. He said that one must be careful if you want to preserve free software while limiting copyright.
The proposal is therefore that an author gets a minimum of 5 years of exclusive commercial exploitation of his work but can get 10 or 20 years if he authorizes (from the start) derivative works under a free license.
In the absolute I think it is a good idea, and politically it gives room for negotiation, which is always a good thing. Anyway, even during the 5 years period, non-commercial filesharing would be perfectly legal.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Never forget that. Long copyright steals our public domain.
Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea. You'd think that number would go down with faster distribution because the creator could get it out there faster.
Which happen to coincide to a large degree with the copyright policies of the Swedish Pirate Party, probably because they have a MEP who is a member of the Green group.
It should be noted that the Greens were already fairly critical and that is why the Pirate Party joined it rather than be an independent, but I'm glad to see they're moving in the Pirate Party's direction. For all those that don't know the EP though, it has 736 representatives so the Greens in total are 7.5%, obviously fighting most for their green policies. They're a long way from changing EU politics, but hopefully they can at least be the critical voice.
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Of course, a lot of Stallman's concerns and hypothetical were rooted in EULAs. While I often find myself in agreement with him, I think it's simpler to just make certain elements of EULAs unenforceable. Another alternative might be that copyright degrades over time. For example, you only get 5 years for the right to prevent derivative works, 10 years for outright copies.
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For most people on here, the issue isn't the existence of copyright - not even the summary states that. The issue is the fact that, in America and apparently the EU, most works copyrighted in our lifetimes will not enter the public domain until the overwhelming majority of us are dead. In America, the copyright laws have essentially ensured that the songs I hear on the radio today won't enter the public domain until my grandchildren are due for retirement.
Ideally, the working principle of copyrights should enable the author to recoup their time and monetary investments in a work, and then provide a platform upon which subsequent works can be based. If copyright worked the way it is supposed to, sampling in the style of Timbaland (roughly one old song sampled per new song) wouldn't be the norm; sampling as originally started with the Beastie Boys and De La Soul in the late 1980's and early 1990's would have continued throughout the decade (interesting article on sampling here: http://clearance13-8.com/AShortClearanceHistory.htm). That article discusses the fact that the budgets for sampling royalties for many of those records far exceeded the recording budgets, because everyone and their cousin wanted a slice of the album sales because a five second sample of a song recorded 30 years prior was being used.
The general consensus here, as much as I can group it together, is that copyright isn't *bad*, it's simply being abused. As a mobile DJ, my clients don't owe me money every time they watch their wedding video, nor would I expect them to. No one is saying that it's bad for your "nurtured stuff" to be protected and earn you a living. What is generally held with disdain is the fact that it's kept that way for decades past the point where the original work has earned the creators a profit, and THAT is what is being fought against.
That's not the proposal in the Greens' position paper though. It says that you need to register after five years if you want an extension (to 20 years, I assume). It doesn't mention any requirement to allow derivative works.
H. G. Wells's work seems to be some of the most recent stuff that's in public domain without the author explicitly saying so. With Disney trying to protect Steamboat Willie forever, I don't see that changing. So from now on (almost certainly for the rest of my life, at least) there will be essentially two bodies of work that can be gotten: reprints of stuff older than about 1920, and whatever is currently for sale. That's it. And that's not fine. That's not "Progress in the Useful Arts" in my book.
So while I understand why you as an author want your rights protected, and I'm happy to keep you fed and housed and producing new work if it's any good, I'm not happy enough to keep your grandchildren fed and housed off your work that I'm willing to watch the good-but-not-fantastic stuff just vanish.
Not only that, but Hollywood started as a pirate operation. You know all those people wanting to make movies, why did they choose to go to california instead of staying on the east coast? For the weather ? No, they went to the west coast to get out of reach from Edisons' patents. Isn't it ironic, that the pirate industry par excellence is giving lessons of morality to the entire world. Fuck Hollywood, they are a cancer to society. Edison should have sued the hell out of them, and if not he should have sent his thugs to fix things.
The author of the original book deserves to get royalties from that.
So should Disney track down the ancestors of the people who wrote Snow White and Cinderella and pay up?
You can legitimately argue that extending copyright beyond some point ceases to be a motivator for the creative process, but cutting off copyright at ten years is basically cutting the knees out from under book authors. Indeed, if you're even asking about people who have been dead for hundreds of years, you completely missed my point. I'm not talking about somebody digging up something written fifty or a hundred years ago and thinking, "I'd like to make a movie version of this." I'm talking about the fact that with the relatively rare exception of books and movies written simultaneously (pre-greenlit movies), it normally takes more than ten years to go from "Hey, this book got published" to "Hey, this movie got released":
So even in the best case, the movie company would be barely halfway through their release process when they stopped owing the author a penny. Drag their heels another two years, and they'll still be able to easily leech off of the author's success without having to give anything back. That's just not right.
In effect, limiting copyright to ten years would ensure that only three types of people continue to write:
If ever there were a way to guarantee that the quality of creative works will go into the toilet, a 10 year maximum copyright duration is it. That's just absurdly too short for any sort of literary work, and anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly not thought through the effects of such a change.
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Simply do what California does in regards to EULA's. They're non-enforcable due to being applied after the doctrine of First Sale unless and only unless the EULA is clearly stated upon the outside packaging before Sale and considering that EULA's tend to run to 50+ pages, I've never seen any packaging that was large enough to fit On Walmart's shelves.
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As someone who makes a living off of creative works, I strongly disagree. Say that you have an author who writes an incredible book. He or she dies a week after its publication. Under your scheme, the author's family gets one week's revenue even though the author put in five years of his or her life to create the book in question. That's hardly reasonable.
What you're failing to take into account is that unlike other occupations, unless an author, painter, sculptor, composer, or performer is working for a corporate overlord, he or she gets paid over time as the product sells. That means that he or she has spent years creating something that will help support his or her family afterwards. The incentive to create is based on the promise that the creation will be worth something to his or her family going forward, and it is that promise that encourages authors to accept that delayed payback. If you change the law so that the delayed payback won't happen at all if you die too soon, you're encouraging people to limit themselves to jobs that pay you as you go along, and thus significantly reducing the incentive to create.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create creative works. It's unimportant whether copyright will continue to encourage a particular author to create new works. The promise that the new work would pay to feed his or her family after its creation was what encouraged the author to create the existing work. Therefore, it should not matter whether the author is alive or dead; the author's kids or other beneficiaries should have the right to that income.
Further, your scheme could encourage less reputable publishers to off their authors so that they don't have to keep paying royalties. :-)
I'm strongly of the opinion that copyright terms should be for a period of 14 years, renewable by the author or his/her descendants for 14 more. The author's death should have no part in the copyright term whatsoever.
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A lot of money is still made through channels that aren't purely digital. For example, movie theaters. Most people don't have movie theaters in their homes, so if you want the full experience of a film, you need to go through a commercial channel, and said channel would be protected by copyright.
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... do you even know what the pirate party is about, or just assume based on the title?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Longer terms of copyright is no solution but short copyright terms means FLOSS programmers end up contributing to proprietors as if they were public-minded charities while giving the public nothing in exchange. Considering a 5-year term of copyright, Richard Stallman correctly points out:
[W]hat would be the effect of terminating this program's copyright after 5 years? This would not require the developer to release source code, and presumably most will never do so. Users, still denied the source code, would still be unable to use the program in freedom. The program could even have a “time bomb” in it to make it stop working after 5 years, in which case the “public domain” copies would not run at all.
Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright — one that free software does not share.
I think the Pirate Party should take Stallman's warnings more seriously than I've heard Falkvinge take them in the past (I believe it was a Google talk in which Falkvinge merely dismissed Stallman's concerns without ever responding to them seriously and the questioner, perhaps not recognizing the dismissal, didn't follow-up to get a serious answer). Like Stallman says, "I'd rather not be an advocate for a stronger copyright" and I would rather not have to forgo FLOSS development because copyright law is written to favor proprietors in the form of gifting FLOSS contributions to proprietors.
The form of time bomb Stallman speaks of could be done in a way that would not qualify as DRM in most people's minds, so any discussion of disallowing DRM would not necessarily save anyone: a program that is designed and built to require a server to run and provide any functionality coupled with server-side accounts that are built to expire after 5 years. The program runs but becomes useless to most people running the program in the ordinary fashion. Couple this with no source code under a free license and the user is not only left out after some planned obsolescence but possibly facing a community of apologists who claim that the user should expect no better.
Most computer users today are taught to think of personal convenience and price first, not ever taught to think of the consequences of their choices. Thus most users are left vulnerable to arrangements they won't discover until years after they've paid for service (buying Major League Baseball recording viewing privileges online, or doing business with most media services like iTunes or Wal-Mart, are a few examples).
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I think 20 is still an acceptable. Take A Song of Ice and Fire for example. G R R Martin won't get anything from HBO from the first book if that is the case and god forbid he won't finish the series