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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.
To answer your first comment, if you buy 1000 copies of my song off iTunes, you can't use it in 1000 copies of your media with the intention of further redistribution (a film). iTunes copies are for personal use only. Any kind of distribution of my song or broadcast has to be approved by me or my publisher. Just for a second, for God's sake, try to imagine you are the creator.
Most of your points are reasonably valid. The one about CSIRO is pretty much crap, though.
CSIRO is not an "obscure company"; it's Australia's premier government-funded research agency. While Australia is a lot smaller than the US, the quality of work done by CSIRO is definitely up there with America's premier Federal research institutions. Of course CSIRO didn't do much of the commercialisation of Wi-Fi tech - but that's because they're an R&D institution, not a company who sells product to end-users. Would you expect DARPA to start selling DARPA-branded internet routers to the general public just because DARPA was involved in the initial development of the internet? The tech that they developed, which the Wi-Fi standards bodies *chose to incorporate in the standard*, actually derived from Australian radio-astronomy research. And CSIRO didn't sit around waiting for the tech to become popular and then show up with a submarine patent at the last minute - they've actually been involved in negotiations and court cases over this very thing for a decade now.
Just because something useful and innovative comes out of Australian research rather than Silicon Valley doesn't mean that US companies have a god-given right to take all the profit for themselves. I'm sure that when the American government funds research, you wouldn't expect UK or Chinese companies to have the right to exploit that research in their own products for free....