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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.'"
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.
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.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
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.
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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