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Proposed Chinese Copyright Changes Would Encourage Re-Use
New submitter BBCS writes "The National Copyright Administration of the People's Republic of China ('NCAC') is seeking public comments on a controversial draft amendment to China's copyright law. A number of recording artists and musicians have reacted strongly against this proposed amendment because it appears to encourage using others works without compensation. The amendments that have drawn particular ire are article 46 & 48. Per Article 46, one does not need consent to make recordings of another person's musical work if 3 months have passed since such work was published. Per Article 48, to use such person's musical work, one must contact the NCAC, identify the published material and its author, and within 1 month of use, submit a usage fee as per the NCAC, to facilitate the distribution of payment to applicable parties. I wonder what happens when someone applies to make use of Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses." What would you do, if copyright were so strongly time-limited?
There's nothing here about using others works without compensation -- this is about manadatory licensing of works, with rates set by the state licensing board. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on who you are.
What would you do, if copyright were so strongly time-limited?
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...that we're talking about China a LOT lately?
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The lifetime of entertainment media is surprisingly short. Most movies make at least 1/3 of their ultimate revenue in the first weekend. Perhaps the way to define "orphan works" is to expire copyright when 95% of the ultimate revenue has been extracted. The movie industry already makes that calculation to decide when to end theatrical release.
China is already eating our lunch because they don't have the ridiculous laws like every child left behind, accessibility rules that forced my friend to put a wheelchair capable bathroom at the end of a 2 mile hiking/rock climbing path no wheelchair could ever pass on and such... If they now go ahead and enable quicker re-use of knowledge, art and whatever, they'll just cement their position. Like it or not, but patents and copyrights have become the main inhibitor of progress in the US - just think of the billions of dollar each year wasted due to pointless copyright claims.
I for one welcome our new chinese overlords!
Yes but it looks like its a one time fee. i.e. 3 months after Lady Gaga has released her single you can copy it, pay a 1-time fee of say $10, and then make as many copies as you like for your own ends. Unless the summary misses out that the fee scale is more complex than this, I'm not sure that the balance is right and normally I'm in favour of drastic cutback of Intellectual Property time periods.
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China has no history of embedded civil code; it has always been run from the *center*, by powerful interests that made the law punitive only when one upset "the natural order of things" - e.g. poisoning a rice paddy, or carrying a sign in 1967 that claimed "capitalism is good" - those things would get you killed. However, if you stole someone intellectual property, the dispute was settled strictly between the parties, without the intervention by a civil authority; essentially, it was between you and the thief. In those situations, the person who had the most political power, or local connections, would win. This is simply the way things have been, until very recently, in China.
In other words, no LEGAL sense of protected IP. That is starting to change, slowly, as the world gets wired up, but it will take a while. Another way to say this is that many, many people in China have no problem with lifting someone else IP, because that's the way things have always been. btw, this doesn't make China a thieving culture, but rather a culture where there have been no strictures embedded in civil code to prevent this sort of thing. This is one more reason why international companies need to be cautious with IP in China, and understand how to play hard ball when they have IP stolen.
I don't understand why this is so controversial. In fact, I'm surprised there is a 3 month protection period before one can release a cover of a song.
Because, as the parent points out, this is about mandatory licensing for derivative works. That is a Good Thing.
Although many in the content business will fight this and not concede until it is pried out of their dead clawing hands, there is no question that this is inevitably where things should be going....
Music biz laywers will hate it most of it, because streamlining the entire process over which they historically have had control is not going to be pretty for their firms' balance sheet.
Other than that, I would say that the terms is a bit short, otherwise the intent is precisely going along the way of what the constitution meant when they were thinking that copyright should To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Personally, I would think that the 14 year term that was originally in place sounds good for this sort of thing; three months more than a bit too short. Allow any use, in any manner, as long as the person using it is paying a flat licensing fee (as set by law, and just like mechanical royalties are for songwriters) to the original owner.
I'd say that with regards to the broad strokes of the idea - even if the proposal is far from perfect - it's about time someone went in the direction of common sense.
(sudden outbreak of it or otherwise)
What would you do, if copyright were so strongly time-limited?
Celebrate.
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Rejoice.
Something like author's lifetime + 20 years. That seems more than fair. It is outrageous that Disney has all of their films from some 70 years ago, still copyrighted, yet, they make use of stories from the 1800's and earlier.
China is simply putting the screws to the west. They grabbed the business via illegal means, and will now control the legal setting. It is time for the west to re-evaluate what they are doing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What would you do, if copyright were so strongly time-limited?
I'd do a big party and enjoy free music! Does the above implies that we should care about {RI,MP}AA? Hell, we don't and they should die. For once, USA should follow the Chinese example.
I think china is doing to control its people to do anything.
Thasariya
Not having to ask permission to play a song, but having to pay royalties to the songwriter, is "mechanical license", not copyright.
Okay, we've seen the real problems of locking up IP for a century in US copyright law.
Here come the Chinese to say "Hai. You have 3 months to sell it, then it's fair game."
That creates a rapid promulgation of culture. (I didn't read the article) but it doesn't prevent the original artist from using it. Same thing, you can grab someone else's stuff for your own project 3 months later.
It's a hyper-accelerated sharing cycle.
The final end is unknown. They "claim to want to educate children" (in the US) but after the stock basics of who was who in the civil war, "education" gets all tied up in Journal fees.
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China has Copyright laws?
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Tell the RIAA that is time to invest into some new Concert Halls and shutdown their lawyer offices!
I know that this strongly appeals to the Slashdot crowd who think they would be "sticking it" to the "1%ers" but if this law was actually used in areas other than music like in oh... software... then the GPL would effectively become worthless. Any company like Microsoft could just wait 3 months and expropriate code wholesale.
Oh.. but you say that this would mean piracy is suddenly OK right and that's wonderful right? Well imagine a world in which technical DRM is about 10X stronger to put up even higher barriers to prevent you from copying the software since there's no legal recourse to go after commercial piracy. The same people who act like this would be a magical utopia would be the loudest complainers after they get what they wish for.
"Well imagine a world in which technical DRM is about 10X stronger" It wouldn't sell, they would go under. The "RedHat" business model would take over.
If it were technically possible to make a functional DRM system, it would have been made already. Since it isn't possible, 10x stronger isn't really a concern.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Good to see the Chinese taking a more sensible stance on copyright. Copyright has been grossy abused in the West for blatent profiteering, and extortion. All of society would benefit from much shorter copyright terms. Personally, I'd like to see copyright on media expire after 1-2 years at longest.
I will celebrate progress, if we can achieve such widely desired changes. I have little faith that the corrupt regime in my own country will see sense unfortunately.
Yes, exactly. Sounds fair enough to me. If you don't want your music "covered" then don't publish it. I don't see why anyone would need the copmoser's (or rather "rightholder's", nowadays) consent to play, record or remix any original works. As long as they pay royalties, if required.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I never expected, in my lifetime, to wish I had some of the freedoms enjoyed by Chinese citizens.
Here's the thing. You legalise people making derivative works of GPL software, without complying with the license, as long as they wait a reasonable period of time. (I might argue for 3 years not 3 months but certainly shorter than the eternity under US law currrently.) And that in isolation may not be unalloyed good.
But you also repeal the laws that prevent me from immediately reverse engineering the resulting product, and incorporating what I learn back in the GPL product immediately. And all the laws that make it difficult for me to pay someone else to do the job, of course. You legalise an entire new business world. And the GPL would STILL function better than the BSD license ever has. So I could live with that.
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the life of the creator? anything else is arbitrary. and then, add some protections from usurius payments for copyright. maybe whatever the market will bear for 10 years, with a lower rate after that. or, charge whatever you want, but you lose the right to refuse copyright use after 10 years. you can charge, but cannot deny.
Well, I think it's also a bit ironic also because in the US there's rather similar laws involving doing a cover version of a song. Yes, there is the issue of whether it's a one time fee or a continuous fee based upon units sold, but in either case it's a mechanical, compulsory process where the copyright holder has little to no say over it. The most interesting part to me of it is that such a law only covers music, AFAIK.
It could be argued this is because music is special, either in that each performance is unique and hence it is that which should be treated as copyrightable, but that leaves the question of why plays and other similar performance works aren't treated the same. After all, it's rather different in whether a group of children or a group of trained actors do Hamlet and whether the play's creator has the right to avoid some sort of "blasphemy" against his artistic vision.
It could also be argued that music is not unique enough in its production--given the seem argument of how few chords are available and how even a few notes might be enough to violate someone else's copyright--but then works like books are based upon a generally unique selection of phonetics and words, although of a grander scale, and based upon plot lines and characters of a generally limited flavor as well. At the same time, authors don't have to pay a "genre" fee and it's usually quite trivial to copy a work or character, so long as one makes a few alterations along the way; still, that would presumably be the same with music since clearly there are many sound-alike songs.
So, overall, I'm just curious about why compulsory licensing of the sort is accepted and whether it's more a means to expand the artistic availability of some authors or more of a money grab by authors (or likely their producers, given how it works in the US) to try to take in more money on copying that is presumed would happen regardless. To that end, it's more of a tax system meant for a subclass of people, and that seems rather dubious.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Yes, exactly. Sounds fair enough to me. If you don't want your music "covered" then don't publish it. I don't see why anyone would need the copmoser's (or rather "rightholder's", nowadays) consent to play, record or remix any original works. As long as they pay royalties, if required..
If they're not careful, they'll turn into another US. Draconian copyright laws abound!
But it's pretty difficult to 'steal' an IP, anyway.
Part of the problem of the copyright laws, specially if last very long, is that you can't do anything even barely similar for very long, at least without paying potentially high fees if enabled at all. Low term copyright laws if well not ensures, at least opens the door for innovation and evolution of works. How can be improved something that someone else did? How far you could reach?
This isn't without precedent. In the United States we already have mandatory licensing of song writers' and composers' works. When a band at a bar, or even someone in Hollywood, wants to "cover" a song, they can do so without the consent of the song writer. The Copyright Act specifies a mandatory fee to be paid, yet oddly the fees on the private market (e.g. through ASCAP) are less than the mandatory fee, which is already quite low all things considered.
Of course, most bar bands don't pay the fee, although they're supposed to. ASCAP usually collects royalties through the establishments themselves, and then everyone looks away when the bands play their covers. A lot of people dislike ASCAP's tactics when collecting royalties (they employ an army of spies and snoops, and then shakedown establishments), but if you step back to see what the rest of the industry is like sans mandatory licensing, it's not so bad.
As a person who lives in china there is the increased fear among us that china will at one point strictly enforce copyright. Now i feel much better. Freedom of culture adn education for everyone at anytime is one reason why they are gonna be #1 soon.
Protecting pointless patents only serves to destroy creativity and create monopolies.
The only reason there are negative comments in this thread is because China proposed this, so it must be a nefarious ploy by the Evil Red Menace to destroy America. If this were proposed by the American government all of you would be fainting from excitement.
But it's pretty difficult to 'steal' an IP, anyway.
It's very easy, actually. Just take the IP and improve on it (or remove unwanted pieces.) Then your fork will be more valuable than the original.
Microsoft wouldn't want that to happen with Windows 7 and Windows 8 because all their horrible Metro model would fall apart if a company shows up that is willing to sell Windows 7 for $25 and to support it until the end of time. Then Windows would be essentially stolen because MS would be unable to sell it. MS would have to actually invent something new that people want (I'm not sure that MS even knows how to do that, considering ribbons and Metro.)
I think 3 months is a little short but say 12 months would be good. That gives them a heads up.
There should be some limitations on blatant copying and redistribution, but any restrictions should only apply to retail sales of original content, not remix, reuse, incorporate etc. The idea of paying to simply use a piece of music is ridiculous. Artist should pay some of these for advertising for them.
I think a similar thing should happen with patents. You get 12 months head start then its open up to the rest. encourage innovation and expansion on current ideas etc.
Artists themselves blatantly copy other artists, for example they sing the same songs, or "remake" which is blatant copying.
They have a more natural culture of sharing... They don't have mass thefts of property that deprives the original owner, they only copy ideas and information... This is how people have learned for thousands of years.
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MS could easily afford to sell windows 7 for less than $25, and still turn a tidy profit.
The reason things like ribbons and metro, that you clearly don't like, are forced on people is because MS can, thanks to there being no competition.
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Aside of the 3 months period, which I consider a wee bit too short (make it a year or two), what's your problem?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I so wish 3 months was the standard for all IP. Imagine all the good it would do!
If obscure companies had no way of showing up years later and demanding payment for ideas they helped write the initial specs for but never put any effort into.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/04/01/2011245/australian-wifi-inventors-win-us-legal-battle
If you could sing "Happy Birthday" on tv without getting sued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
If movie compression algorithms could be implemented on hardware based on what works best, not who's gouging the least or who's pet project it is.
The definition of IP is to intentionally HURT the end users of your own products as well as your competitors by maintaining a monopoly, retaining ownership even when sold, and requiring licensing long after the usefulness of such is insane.
I think it's high time to get rid of IP permanently.
Qybix
Qybix ----- I do not have a belief system; I'm an Anti-theist and proud of it! Saying that not believing in anything i
If you don't want your music "covered" then don't publish it.
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear citizen,
Happy birthday to you!
Or Mike Jittlov's version:
Merry birthday to you,
Merry birthday to you,
May all your good dreams and fine wishes come true
May every day bring you its own special cheer,
The gift of our friendship, and fortune this year!
Imagine this: I have copyrighted the letter "e". Muahaha!!! (That is how I envision the RIAA/MPAA goons defending their decisions: with inappropriate laughter.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
This appears to be a compulsory, non-discriminatory, universal licensing scheme. It doesn't destroy or limit copyright, as the copyright holders will (presumably) get paid for each usage. Compulsory licensing seems like a good idea, except that with 1.3 billion people, that's going to be a challenge to administer.
You do have to register and purchase the copy. It does facilitate shifting the material to different mediums and media and making copies on the spot. So theoretically one can have kiosks that one can go to purchase music on the spot and those kiosks don't need to be specifically licensed. It also opens up online stores/cloud storage purchases rather than limiting them to physical media.
I remember years back; China was trying to make it's own media formats. Arguably I would say limiting physical purchases would actually give China better control to audit purchases. Copyright would actually be better enforced.
I'm still surprised China hasn't adopted digital money and started discouraging physical money.
In my perfect world
1. copyright would exist for the artists life plus 10 years.
2. allow for cover version royalties
3. prohibit across the board bootlegging (yeah that would include p2p sharers of copyrighted materials, yeah it's not piracy, it's bootlegging!)
alot of fair use for people who sample others peoples work, especially when there's not a profit made
I got alot of the ideas from the 'sonic outlaws' documentary, especially the negativland v u2 case.
I have the feeling these new rules are not compatible with Berne convention, which China signed. Did I miss something?
start cheering.
In other words, no LEGAL sense of protected IP. That is starting to change, slowly, as the world gets wired up, but it will take a while. Another way to say this is that many, many people in China have no problem with lifting someone else IP, because that's the way things have always been. btw, this doesn't make China a thieving culture, but rather a culture where there have been no strictures embedded in civil code to prevent this sort of thing. This is one more reason why international companies need to be cautious with IP in China, and understand how to play hard ball when they have IP stolen.
That's like saying the Somali pirates aren't pirates because there's nothing in their culture that makes it wrong. There shouldn't have to be laws for people not to steal, and people who steal are thieves whether there's a law saying so or not.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
That's like saying the Somali pirates aren't pirates because there's nothing in their culture that makes it wrong. There shouldn't have to be laws for people not to steal, and people who steal are thieves whether there's a law saying so or not.
Laws are dependent on culture. Here in Germany we have a law that explicitly makes it a felony to deny the Holocaust. We also have laws (and would be willing to put up more if loopholes arose) that require services like Google StreetView to erase or blur out individually identifiable information - faces, number plates and, upon request from the owner, even whole buildings - from photographs. Both examples are rooted in our nation's history. Our neighbours may very well shake their heads over our "silly" laws. And we would not force our regulations on them. But we expect everyone to respect those laws when they are in or deal with our country.
So if China does not have a notion of legally guaranteed monopolies on ideas it is up to them and no-one else to decide whether copying a film or album or software constitutes thievery. And believe me, Chinese culture does have quite a good idea of what constitutes theft and how to punish people for it. You may remember the case of Wu Ying?
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I was going to argue that there is competition, it just sucks (from a consumer perspective). But then that would be a lot like the rugby scene from Monty Python's "Meaning of Life".
So yeah, no competition.
Also, I happen to be one of those tools who actually likes the ribbon /shrug ;)
competition that sucks is no competition at all ... specially if it sucks in KPIs by several orders of magnitude than that which they try to compete against. ;)
In Africa where slavery was rampant long before whites came, there were no laws against slavery...and yet there was slavery. In ancient Greece, Egypt and elsewhere slavery was legal, and yet still it remained slavery.
Lack of a law against something does not change that it still objectively exists. Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something, be it slavery or the theft of intellectual property, that culture defines itself. Ancient Greece was a culture, in part, of slavery. China is a culture, in part, of theft.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The Somali pirates quite likely consider themselves to be freedom fighters. Due to the lack of an effective government Somalia is abused by foreign powers, their fishery is being stolen and their coast is used for dumping toxic crap so they fight back the only way they can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There shouldn't have to be laws for people not to steal, and people who steal are thieves whether there's a law saying so or not.
In other cases, rather than being thieves, they're just copyright infringers. But that really is dependent upon the copyright laws in your country...
[...] Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something, be it slavery or the theft of intellectual property, that culture defines itself. Ancient Greece was a culture, in part, of slavery. China is a culture, in part, of theft.
Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something that it does not know or that it does not deem wrong, that culture is defined by other cultures who have those concepts and deem them wrong. Ancient Greece was in retrospect from our enlightened point of view a culture of slavery, because we have a concept of slavery, and this is seen as a bad thing because we, in our society, deem slavery bad. China is a culture of theft when it comes to "intellectual property" because we see it that way.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
As both Oracle and SAP are horrible, horrible products that are kept that way on purpose just to sell you very expensive 'consultancy', I'm very much OK with lowering the price of the software itself.
Fight back?
It's business, nothing more nothing less. They're hungry and there are soft targets ripe for the taking. Sorry I don't share your viewpoint on this one -
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Read my later post - law or lack of a law does not change the shape of the thing.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Slavery is slavery whether it is recognized or not. It is or it is not. Either someone is owned by someone else or they are not. This is not subjective and not subject to the view of a person or a culture and has nothing to do with being enlightened, or not. People had stone tools because they had stone tools. Had nothing to do with us having electricity and being enlightened about tools.
China is a culture of theft when it comes to intellectual property because they are a culture of theft of intellectual property. It is an objective reality and has nothing to do with perception.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The reality is so objective, actually, that it seems to be a non-issue in those cultures. Nice talking to you.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Reality is what it is, perceptions are what they are. Been good talking with you as well -
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I think part of the problem is that there is no hierarchy of copyrighted works.
A "Work" is everything from an icon picture to a superhero movie. Let's just say it takes someone at most two days to create a good icon, vs it can take years before a movie gels together after all the script wrangling and then all the effects. There's also a kind of curve or equation relating the initial investment vs the ease of copying.
Let's ignore the cheap "the creative decisions suk" and look at something like Superman Returns. It was a typical imperfect but competent movie. It drifted around in the creative stages for easily ten years, but apparently the end was finally worth it. So I can see how the MPAA gets grouchy when people copy it.
On the other hand, something like an icon is ... just a little picture. Yet the Shareware crowd likes to charge these $29.95 prices for stuff - more than the price of a movie! (Though maybe not much longer with the 3d fad! Yeesh!)
So take a draft law that was designed for a movie, and one that was designed for an ICanHazCheezburger picture and you get absurdities.
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law or lack of a law does not change the shape of the thing.
Says the one conflating copyright infringement with theft.
Actually I'm more talking about the prevalent copy and paste strategy used to make 'counterfeit' (although identical) products for everything from clothing to networking hardware and medicine and their policy of commercial and governmental industrial espionage to steal, quite literally, any information that may be of use to them - be it design information or resource location information.
Or perhaps you're one of these people who thinks that intangibles can't be stolen, regardless of how much real time and effort was put into developing the intangible?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I'm sure there's a word for what you are doing. You're applying your personal norms to define a culture. I'm not even saying that in a cultural relativist kind of way. Western culture itself is currently somewhat hypocritical about digital copying (Many say they are opposed to it, and yet many do it anyway).
Assuming for the moment that you're not one of the hypocrites, what gives you the right to judge another culture (or even your own) by your personal norms?
Or perhaps you're one of these people who thinks that intangibles can't be stolen, regardless of how much real time and effort was put into developing the intangible?
Considering what the word 'steal' means, yes, I am. If you're going to argue otherwise, you really have no standing to be calling out others for redefining terms.
If you have to fall back on semantics to win the argument then there isn't much point is there.
I'll rephrase it for you. The Chinese (and others but at this point more the Chinese than anyone else) feel free to access valuable information, using any methods possible, and copy what they can and profit from it, without any restriction or thoughts of remuneration to those who put the time, effort and whatever other form of investment was necessary to design, create, build, test, verify, refine, etc products and services numerous beyond counting. This might take the form of hacking and breaking into systems or it might take the somewhat less refined method of videotaping what the companies you've invited to come and build you a maglev train as a demo have built (which when they were caught on film doing so actually stated this was their research and development, which in itself says a lot).
This hurts the people who live in the countries where such intangibles are being developed in at least two ways that immediately come to mind:
1) The people who invested time, money, effort, etc. who wanted to make a living from their work now find themselves competing against those who will build it for 1/300th of the price.
2) The people who would have been employed manufacturing said products or providing such services are competing against people who must / can / will work for 1/300th of the cost. Can you live on 1/300th of whatever you currently take in? I cannot.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
law or lack of a law does not change the shape of the thing.
It's not semantics. You're claiming one thing ('theft') when it's another ('copyright infringement'), and now you're setting up a strawman talking about actual theft.
Whatever - you want to argue about words and you don't talk about the actual topics at all.
Semantics (from Greek smantiká, neuter plural of smantikós)is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
It is semantics. Either discuss the topics or stop wasting my time with meaningless argument over, yes, semantics.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial