Orphaned Works and the Requirement To Preserve Metadata

An anonymous reader writes "Orphaned works legislation promises to open older forgotten works to new uses and audiences. Groups like ASMP think it's inevitable. But it comes with the risk of defanging protection for current work when the creator cannot be located. Photographer Mark Meyer wonders if orphaned works legislation also needs language to compel organizations like Facebook to stop their practice of stripping metadata from user content in order to keep new work from becoming orphans to begin with. Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?" The author notes that excessive copyright terms may be to blame; if that's the case why lobby for Orphaned Works legislation? On a related note, Rick Falkvinge asks if we should revisit the purpose of the copyright monopoly.

Comments

good luck with enforcing that

[lister king of smeg]

How can you ban people from deleting the meta data. Are you going to ban hex edditors or text edditors? What about file systems that don't support metadata like fat? Or what about when people don't like your naming/notation conventions will that be banned to? A while back I had a itunes giftcard that I wanted to redeem so I had to install itunes. It went through "cataloging my music library" instead it indescriminatly deleted meta data and other files and renaming and disorganizing many. How will they deal with faulty programs like that will they be liable for removal of metadata?

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you ban people from deleting the meta data.

+1 retarded.

Just because you (should) make something illegal doesn't mean that you can enforce it completely.
Murder is illegal but completely preventing it would create a society that we don't want and we are willing to live with an occasional murder every now and then.

If stripping of metadata was illegal then it would be hard for large companies to have this process automated or to have an widely know policy about it.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Slalomsk8er]

I really hope that crap like itunes messing with music files get apple a fine for destroying the meta data.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't I tell you? I told you, didn't I Listy? But no, you didn't listen to ol' Rimsy.

I told you about installing old software from the past, I told you about how Apple caused World War 3 through software alone, but you didn't listen.
Now look what you have done, Holly can only speak in Esperanto. Now what will we do? Shout loudly at him?

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, comparing stripping metadata to murder. Now I really have seen it all.

Making it illegal to mess with metadata has to be one of the most retarded things I've heard in a while. That's like telling someone they aren't allowed to rename files. If you have data you absolutely cannot live without being in your pictures, either encode a watermark into it or put the damn image somewhere on the picture in a non-compromising location. Modifying your pictures is something people aren't allowed to do because of copyright. Leave it at that please. We don't need anymore absurd laws on the books.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Half-pint HAL]

The law doesn't have to say "it's illegal to change metadata", just that it's illegal to remove copyright attributions that would result in an erroneous orphan work. Stripping metadata is like removing the name-tag from someone's jacket or computer so that it becomes lost property. You hand it in, and when the owner doesn't claim it within 3 months, it becomes your property. But if you hadn't removed the tag, it would have been easy to reunite it with its owner. Removing identifying marks is dishonest, and potentially fraudulent.

The BBC is one of the groups supporting "orphan works" legislation in the UK, but the BBC routinely strips meta-data from readers' contributions to the site. Contributors could claim that the BBC misled them, claiming they would retain ownership of their works, but then failed to take insufficient measures to protect the rights that they had promised their readers. That sounds like a lawsuit in the making....

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[king neckbeard]

Except for the fact that reverse image searches exist. Also, 'internet photos' aren't a particularly big concern in the orphan works debate.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

The law doesn't have to say "it's illegal to change metadata", just that it's illegal to remove copyright attributions that would result in an erroneous orphan work.

It's already "illegal" to do that. I used quotes because I don't feel like getting into the particulars, but using layman's terms you're not allowed to remove copyright notices.

But as to the article, most of what people post on Facebook isn't copyrighted from the start. When you first create a work of art (writing, images, etc.) you have what is called a Manuscript Copyright. If you distribute the work, that inherent copyright vanishes. You must note the work as being copyrighted in order to keep any protection on it at all, and if you don't formally register it it's known as a "weak" copyright. It's "weak" because anybody can remove the notice and claim it as their own, and the onus is on you to prove it was your work originally and produce some form of documentation. Which is why if you actually care about the copyright, you need to actually formally copyright it.

The concern is when we're dealing with officially copyrighted materials. If we allow for too short of a period prior to it becoming "orphaned", then all someone has to do is circulate it in such a manner that the original holder doesn't become aware until it's too late to do anything about it. But on the other hand, if we set it to a period which is far too long, the copyright holder can feign ignorance until a large pool of potential victims begins to use it and clean up in the courts. A good example of this would be the "happy birthday" song.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. You don't lose your copyright by distributing your works, they are still protected by copyright law and you still own them. You can stop someone from using the works without permission, but you can't recover monetary damages if you haven't registered your copyright.

The real issue is licensing. You agree to let Facbook use your photos etc. when you accept the terms of service. Facebook's IP License says "you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook." Notice that doesn't say anything about modifying the works, just using them.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice of you to make up legal terms whole-cloth in order to mislead people. Over here in *reality*, *EVERYTHING* on Facebook is copyrighted. In fact, with out the license you agreed to when you signed up for Facebook, your friends 'liking' or 'sharing' your posts would be copyright violations. (The Facebook ToU gives the permissions necessary for these actions to *not* constitute copyright violations.) On the other hand, posting that cool picture you found on the web? That's still a copyright violation, unless you got permission from the copyright holder for that picture. Posting a link to it is *probably* ok, depending on exactly what snippet Facebook shows to represent that link, but since you didn't make that choice, it's not your skin on the line in that scenario.

You gain the Copyright in any work as soon as you've fixed it to a tangible medium. (Once it's saved to hard drive, printed to paper, burned to CD, etc.) It doesn't even have to have your *name* on it, much less an actual copyright notice. It also doesn't need to have any way to trace it back to you. You still have the Copyright. It's still a violation of copyright law for someone to make a copy of it without your express permission.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

r u sirius ? ? ?
copyright - in the ewe ess of ehh- adheres the femtosecond the creation is 'fixed', ie committed to paper/media...
there is NO registration requirement (yes, it *does* give you somewhat more legally enforceable 'rights'), and there is no requirement for a 'circled-c' notice, nothing, nada, zero, zilch...
(mayhaps you are conflating copyright/trademark law)

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes doesn't 'mess with' any metadata. It just reads it. (It allows you to edit it, sure, but that's *you* messing with the metadata, not iTunes.)

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Half-pint HAL]

But as to the article, most of what people post on Facebook isn't copyrighted from the start. When you first create a work of art (writing, images, etc.) you have what is called a Manuscript Copyright. If you distribute the work, that inherent copyright vanishes.

Howdy, pard! When did you step out of your time machine? Cos the Berne Convention made it pretty clear that copyright requires neither registration nor notices, and is rather an automatic right granted to the creator of the work. The USA was a bit late in actually ratifying the treaty, and many claim that the current legislation is still in breach of Berne thanks to the prejudicial treatment of registered works in terms of damages, but still: technically, even the USA doesn't require registration.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[lister king of smeg]

my audio library would beg to differ

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Half-pint HAL]

Also, 'internet photos' aren't a particularly big concern in the orphan works debate.

Perhaps not, but they are the main point of this particular debate on stripping metadata!!!!

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a hex editor to edit a file, and stripping away Meta Data are different things. Meta Data is the file authors information and stripping it is the equivalent of stripping their name from their work. So, your argument is basically saying is that we should allow blatant copyright infringement because the tools to do such infringement exist

That is like saying guns kill people, food made me fat, or that owning a debugger means that I am a hacker... Your argument does not apply.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[Anonymous Coward]

This is false. I manually inserted metadata in songs in my iTunes library and iTunes stripped it while "helping" me to manage the library.

Re:good luck with enforcing that

[allo]

> What about file systems that don't support metadata like fat
Meta-Data: Stuff like EXIF-Information.

Too much metadata.

[Anonymous Coward]

For photo's at least, little did I know that my phone put so much Metadata in it. Geographical location? Standard on? I see this more as a security risk so I would say: law for mandatory stripping of Metadata.

Re:Too much metadata.

[Cenan]

How about the middle ground and add a mandatory option to let the user choose? Or at least inform the user when their data enters the public, that meta data is present.

Re:Too much metadata.

[VMaN]

99% of people would just click "OK", and have their metadata, including GPS coordinates, uploaded.

While you could say it's their own damn fault, it would still be a huge privacy problem.

Re:Too much metadata.

[Slalomsk8er]

I would like to limit a law to just protect the Author field and make it apply only tho software like iTunes and services like flikr or facebook. A creator like you should not be hindered by law to strip all metadata by will.

Re:Too much metadata.

[clemdoc]

99% of people would just click "OK", and have their metadata, including GPS coordinates, uploaded.

Maybe, but the remaining 1% would at least have the option.

Re:Too much metadata.

[Sloppy]

Typically these types of laws prohibit $ACTIVITY "without authorization by the copyright holder." Since you'll be the copyright holder in these situations, you'll be allowed to do whatever you want with your own photos.

If the government mandated that you were required to strip data from your own photos, you ought to be able to safely ignore that law, on First Amendment grounds.

Re:Too much metadata.

[operagost]

Wait... I thought we hated the 1%?

Re:Too much metadata.

[allo]

no, in many cases such metadata would be good. if you show photos from some nice place, its a good feature, when the next user can just see the place on googlemaps. Who explicitly DOES NOT want it, can click the "strip place information" option.

Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Taco Cowboy]

Copyrights is actually a good thing. But like many other thing, too much a good thing can become bad, very very bad.

As the author of several software packages (some of them I'm the sole programmer, others I'm one of the many contributors) I have to say that copyrights does work, as we get paid for what we did.

But excessive copyrights (and to add insult to injuries) and patents have made the software industry filled with more lawyers than hackers.

Nowadays even an act of open-sourcing a software program you yourself have written may land you in lawsuit - as your source code is listed in the open, patent trolls can actually sue you for "infringement".

The situation has gotten way out of control.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[wvmarle]

And the solution would be so simple. Well, technically simple, not politically of course.

Copyrights: limit the time of protection to something reasonable, anywhere from 10 to 30 years would be reasonable to me. Not the 100+ years like now. And limit by counting from time of creation, not lifetime of creator plus some time as it is now. For the rest there is not much wrong with copyrights per se.

Those RIAA law suits against file sharers are not to be solved by changing copyright, that needs a different approach. Normalising the statutory damages on copyright infringement to something more reasonable (something like $100-$1000 per count would be reasonable considering a $0.99 retail price) would be a good start.

Patents: ban patents on algorithms: software and business model patents are bad, and should never have been allowed to be patented. That's all, for the rest patents are still serving their purpose quite well.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[blahplusplus]

"Copyrights is actually a good thing. But like many other thing, too much a good thing can become bad, very very bad."

You're ignorant of the law. People said the same when copyright was first implemented long time ago, the "just the right amount people" have no credibility. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Copyright has been extended EVERY single time, there was not a time where copyright was NOT extended at request of corporations/greedy rich stars.

For those interested in the law and history of law relating to copyright see here:

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/default.htm

And this speech for good measure for all the "copyright moderates". The same thing was said long before you all were born.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/commentary/MacaulaySpeeches.html

My personal view is there is not going to be a legal solution forthcoming because most human beings are not concerned/too ignorant/stupid/illiterate.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Stirling Newberry]

100x damages is obscene.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Black Parrot]

My personal view is there is not going to be a legal solution forthcoming because most human beings are not concerned/too ignorant/stupid/illiterate.

Truly, the USA has far bigger problems than excessive copyright protection. I'm concerned, and hopefully not too ignorant/stupid/illiterate, but it's hard to imagine an election where the available candidates agree on all the more important stuff, so that my decision would be based on their stance on copyright.

Free entertainment is pretty low on my list of desiderata.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[HungryHobo]

if you get caught shoplifting and get sentenced to a few dozen hours of community service it can be more than 100x damages.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[bfandreas]

Since copyright is only a temporary protection before a work goes into the public domain we need to take steps for preservation.

A copyright holder should have the duty to take sufficient measures that the work is still existant when it is ready to enter the public domain. And that means backups.
We have lost quite a lot of movies and semi-lost a lost of books, TV shows, radio recordings and whatnot to fire, negligence and not interest to publish it.

Just a couple of weeks ago I wanted to get recordings of a radio show I was quite fond of as a kid. It had 44 episodes. The publisher who currently hold the publishing rights sell it on CD or digital download for 10€ a pop. And they only sell the first 4 episodes. So not only was I facing extortionate pricing but also unavailability. As per my scheme this should void their copyright.
I say if the copyright holder doesn't want to sell his stuff or make it otherwise available he should be denied copyright protection. which would also finish off the Disney vault.

This kind of protection needs some strings attached. Basically every cultural achievement of the last hundred years is for sale and owned by whoever. We don't own our own culture anymore.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Stirling Newberry]

You are confusing damages with punishment. And your assertion that because we have a prison industrial complex now, that we should extend it, does not stand up to scrutiny. Fundamentally your position that society exists to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, at threat of gun point, shows that the use to which the law is being put is no longer beneficial to society as a whole.

IP is a concept, like prohibition, which has run its course as public policy. Both accomplished the same result: to turn ordinary people into criminals, and to make criminals into enterprises.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Attila Dimedici]

OK, you claim that because people have been saying that copyright should be limited in duration for a long time and yet legislators keep extending it ever longer, the people who say that it should be limited have no credibility. I do not follow your logic. I guess what you are saying is that we should just accept copyright law as it is, since people have opposed it for a long time.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[blahplusplus]

"I do not follow your logic."

It's very simple, I'm not proposing a solution. I'm saying that once copyright got its foot in the door it is now impossible to dislodge or moderate because the forces that have an interest in copyright have more money, time and lobbyists on their hands compared to law professors at universities that would like it to be moderated. Hence I pointed you to those sites so that you could learn these things. Looking at the evidence (over 100 years of copyright law). The same arguments for moderate term lengths were made at the beginning of copyright (before there was any such law) but we've seen how that's turned out in practice. It's been an abject failure in that monopoly has been extended effectively indefinitely. When the time comes up to review, who wants to bet it will be extended and special exceptions will be made again? Where would you put your money?

Most people advocating for "moderate reform" have already shown themselves ignorant because copyright has been abused for the last 100+ years to a huge extent already. Hence why I linked to the copyright extension act article which also has a graph of all the extensions going back 100+ years.

I was just trying to point out that most people who have opinions on reforming laws are historically illiterate in relation to the history of those laws and how those laws came to be. They don't have an accurate read on how just/unjust laws they grew up with are. The law professors and professionals have argued as opposition (testified before government) that the laws shouldn't be extended for more then a century already and were defeated every time.

The ignorance of regular people makes their opinions about the laws enormously (unintentionally or not) biased on the side of corporations simply by default through corporate media/propaganda. Since most people grew up with those laws and are raised with the perspective that the society in which they exist is not massively corrupt. Most people have difficult time coming to terms with how corrupt laws are that they take as given because of compounded corruption over long periods of time relative to a human lifespan (i.e. the many extensions of copyright going back more then a century or more for instance).

Not to mention the propaganda surrounding Copyright and IP which limits public debate because propagandists's know about the overton window. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Most discussion about such things (copyright, etc) is already significantly tainted for many reasons.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Attila Dimedici]

OK, so what you are saying is that people should give up on fixing copyright because people have been talking about doing so for over 100 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Further you are of the opinion that people who propose fixing copyright must be ignorant of the history of attempts to implement the solution they propose because otherwise they would know that fixing copyright was hopeless and give up (ignoring the possibility that people are aware of the history but still hope that maybe they can convince enough people to change things sometime in the future).
To reiterate, you appear to hold the position that our legal system is hopelessly corrupt and we should just give up trying to fix it because most people are completely unaware of the problem and can't be bothered to help fix it.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Jason Levine]

We should go back to the original system. 14 years plus a one time (non-automatic) renewal of 14 years. We can grandfather in existing works with a system designed to slowly move them into Public Domain status if their 28 years are up. Say, every 5 years release a decade's worth of material starting with the oldest items. (Assuming we start with the 1930s, it would be 45 years before present day items exit copyright. Plenty of time for copyright owners to milk the last remaining drops of copyright-fueled income from them.) The 14+14 system would mean that orphaned works would never be a problem for more than 14 years.

I agree on the different damages figures (for non-commercial piracy... i.e. you weren't selling DVDs of the pirated films), but that's a different matter entirely. If we could get the 14+14 reenacted and had to hold off on the damages reform, I'd still consider it a huge win.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Anonymous Coward]

you underestimate human/lawyer ingenuity. look how big the tax code is. do you think there are no loopholes there? you plan would work for maybe 10 minutes. as long as it takes to pick up the phone and call your lawyer.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[bzipitidoo]

Copyright is a bigger problem than most appreciate. This isn't about free entertainment, this is about legal restrictions on our opportunities to share knowledge. "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I don't want to repeat mistakes because knowledge of them are locked away by copyright.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[mcgrew]

Free entertainment is pretty low on my list of desiderata.

It isn't about "free entertainment," it's about culture. Art is like science and technology, in that everything new comes from what has come before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted a hundred years? That's how culture is stagnating.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument is hogwash spread by people that don't want to pay creative people. Look—if you know something, you are perfectly free to share the knowledge in any way you see fit (with the obvious exception of classified document laws). But copying and distributing a DVD is not sharing knowledge—it's sharing DVDs. What you are trying to do is create a right for yourself to share *my* knowledge and my work and then wrap it up in some self-righteous freedom argument.

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[david_thornley]

In other words, whenever I create something, I have to make sure a copy will survive for 75 years after my death? That seems like a rather harsh burden, and I really don't think I should be responsible for what happens after my death.

I have stuff I've already lost, and that's OK with me because it wasn't very good. There's some stuff that exists in only one easy-to-lose copy. The more recent possibly significant stuff is backed up in the cloud, but free services don't guarantee to be around for 75 years after I die, and paid ones like to be paid now and then. Do you have a problem with that?

Re:Copyrights, at just the right amount

[bfandreas]

If you yourself value your own creation so little then yes, you don't need copyright. You'd best either pass it into the public domain so others can build upon it or not publish it at all. Your call.

I've also lost a ton of stuff and if somebody had gotten hold of it and improved on it then more power to him.

Creations belong to the public domain by default. Copyright is a priviledge. Not the other way round.

When is a work "orphaned"?

[wvmarle]

This alone is an interesting question. How much work does one have to put in locating a work's copyright holder? How much effort do we have to put into remembering that information?

The summary already presents an interesting case: Facebook stripping metadata, such as the author name, from copies of works they receive. A short while later no-one can remember who it was from; so it is orphaned now? This would open an avenue of legal infringement. Especially with smaller works like photos it may be hard to find the original maker if the metadata is gone. Or should we consider such orphans as "copyright protected" and prohibit any further distribution unless the distributor can show they have the rights?

It's not exactly easy. Especially in this digital age where information can be wiped or added without a trace. Metadata can be stripped, it can also be added or changed, and then it becomes hard to prove which version is the original.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

bring back legal deposit libraries and registration.

if your work is important to you then register it.

make it so that there's no exception for works which have been registered.

If you find a work who's source you can't find then you have to do a search for registered works if you want to use it.
We have the technology.

even for images. A searchable database is totally possible and reasonable. A heavily edited or recompressed photo might not match but how often do companies want to use ultra low quality images?

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Johann Lau]

"if your work is important to you then register it."

Why? Why not leave it as is?

If you find a photo and you don't know who made it -- what is it to you? Why do you need to be able to use it? If it's that important, pay a photographer to make a similar one, or make it yourself. Easy.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Anonymous Coward]

bring back legal deposit libraries and registration.

if your work is important to you then register it.

make it so that there's no exception for works which have been registered.

No exception? Even if the entity that registered it no longer exists, and nobody can figure out who the copyright was transferred to? You would have it just stay locked up until Disney & friends stop extending copyright (aka heat death of the universe), or until a big corporation (with enough lawyers to deal with any rightsholders who show up later) decides to appropriate it as part of a new work, but you or I can't touch it?

And then there will be exceptions for non-registered works (mostly non-commercial), where again the lawyer asymmetry means corps can basically grab what they want and apologize iff you catch them out.

When you put it that way, it actually sounds likely...

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.

If you don't know what photographer took an old photo of one of your dead parents should you have to make yourself a criminal in order to make copies before it can degrade?

under the current system you do.
You may not get caught but that's beside the issue. as it stands you could be sued if the photographers grandchildren ever found out that you had made copies for your family members.

but lets take your approach: if it's that important we can always just dig up the corpse and pay a photographer to make a similar one, or make it ourselves. Easy.

oh. wait. in the real world your "sollution" is os obviously stupid that I can't believe you didn't realise that it's impractical. you know it's stupid but you parrot it anyway.

Indeed any photo of anything which can't be reproduced hits the same problem. a dead person. a long gone building. a historic event.

If you can't find the guys who snapped the photo or figure out who his estate reverted to then you cannot legally make a copy. You can only leave the origional to rot and degrade taking the fine details of whatever it records with it.

you could ignore the law and make yourself a criminal which is what people already do but any law which makes everyone a criminal is a broken law.

that's why. it's a broken system.
   

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think because the image might have some fraction of relevance to you that you have the right to use it even if you don't know who the person who took the picture is? Entitled much?

The system in this regard isn't broken. You just think you have more claim to something than you really do just because someone in the picture is a family member.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

You think you have more right to the last picture or recording a husband has of his wife or a child of their parent because 50 years ago your grandfather spend 3 minutes setting up for a shot?

If you'd abandoned a house for that long and showed no interest in it and someone moved in then in most places it would legally belong to them after that much time.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Tapewolf]

So you think because the image might have some fraction of relevance to you that you have the right to use it even if you don't know who the person who took the picture is? Entitled much?

The system in this regard isn't broken. You just think you have more claim to something than you really do just because someone in the picture is a family member.

Yet you are arguing that the photographer's descendants should be entitled to a continual cut for something their grandfather did, and that the photograph must not be preserved if there are no descendants.

I might just about buy the descendants-get-a-cut part if it was something like a major film that benefited many, but in the example you're arguing with, the photo is only important to that one family and it's essentially being held hostage by the photographer's descendants. The essential point of being able to record media is to allow a creator's works to survive after they are gone, after all...

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think because the image might have some fraction of relevance to you that you have the right to use it even if you don't know who the person who took the picture is? Entitled much?

What is this "right to use it"? What "right" do I have to use works in the public domain? None but the universal right, in the absence of other restrictions, to use my property (paper and ink, or bits on a hard drive) in such manner as I like, affecting only myself. It's not that I should (maybe) get that right in the specific cases the GP raises, but that the restrictions imposed by copyright should (maybe) not extend to those cases.

Copyright is not and doesn't pretend (in law -- not in propaganda) to be about any inherent moral right an author may have to control their work -- authorial rights are a different, if often confused, body of law existing alongside copyright in many European jurisdictions; they simply do not legally exist in the US.

The creator of a work, in the US, has absolutely no inherent rights in their work -- they are granted by the state, on behalf of society, a temporary privilege of prohibiting others from using it, to provide more incentive to create new works, because that's one public interest pertaining to creative works.

The exact terms are a matter of government fiat, ostensibly to maximize that incentive while minimizing interference in other public interests (and GP raised some legitimate ones), and whether exceptions should be made to limit the copyright monopoly in such cases is a legitimate discussion; trying to shut that discussion down by asserting one side is acting "entitled" when you yourself raise no argument stronger than your own feelings of entitlement to a certain extent of the monopoly is ugly and non-contributive.

For my part, I disagree with GP; there are a number of public interests, including the ones GP raised, that are generally increasingly destroyed by increasing copyright terms, and rather than making exceptions for each one till each photocopier comes with an attached lawyer, we can find a term length that balances all those, in aggregate, against the increasing incentive with longer terms. Fourteen years was not an unreasonable compromise in the past, and it's not unreasonable now, though I'd be willing to consider substantial variation in either direction.

(Disclaimer: As a Jeffersonian liberal, I'm not very comfortable with the notion of the state making such a societal tradeoff of individual liberty in the first place. But as a member of a more-or-less-functioning democracy, I'm well aware this is a minority view, so I'm willing to accept the premise that such a bargain is a legitimate state role, and work to optimize the terms of the bargain to maximize societal utility.)

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Half-pint HAL]

Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.

And that irreplicability is sometimes what's called "art". Your example's a fairly good one: the restoration of a cherished family portrait or similar. That's one of the reasons why orphaned work legislation is considered inevitable by many (see the summary). But making that orphan works law happen relies on some manner of preventing the accidental (or even malicious) orphaning of modern works that may be suitable for mass consumption (a picture of a nice sunrise, an amateur reportage shot from a warzone etc).

Which brings us back to the original point of this thread....

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[AmiMoJo]

We shouldn't even be considering metadata as some kind of legal standard for determining ownership. It is trivially easy to forge or deliberately remove so that someone could claim the work was orphaned.

A simple solution to this problem already exists: search engines. If you are a photographer who cares about his photos you can create a web site with them on and search engines will index it. Anyone can then do an image search based on their copy and find your site. The system could be improved by allowing interested parties to submit images directly to a database set up just for finding the author of works.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

hence my suggestion further up. if you take a remarkably photo then by all means: register it. idealy registration should be free like uploading an image to photobucket or posting on a board.

Simply upload it to a registration server with your details. Anyone who want to search for orphaned work can then search it just like a google search or a tineye search .

this would also guarantee preservation of such works for future generations.

once it's registered it largely solves the malicious or accidental orphaning problem since they can't really say "oh we ran it through the search but nothing came up" when the registered work pops up.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

bleh.
Me no speak well today.
*remarkable
*wants

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[wvmarle]

Searching images and videos is an unsolved problem.

Currently you can not search Google for images: you can only search image meta data. If you want an image of a cow, you can search for images that say they are an image of a cow, but whether that image actually contains a cow or not, Google doesn't know. Also many images with a cow in it will be missed because no-one added a description to it. You may have noticed how few image search results you get are from sites like Flickr, even though they have millions upon millions of photos. They just don't have the meta data, especially no descriptions. Good luck finding the source of an image that's simply called "image.jpg" and does not have any EXIF or other meta data attached to it.

You can also not give an image as search term, like "look for images that look like this". I actually tried this a while ago, and found a web site that claims they can do it, but the results looked more like a totally random selection of images than anything remotely resembling a search.

If you think it's simple to search images based on images and not meta data, you should set up a search engine that indexes images. I'm quite sure it can make you rich if you actually pull it off.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[fyngyrz]

any law which makes everyone a criminal is a broken law.

Only in a democracy. And I'd remind you, the US is not a democracy. It was supposed to be a constitutional republic, but turned into a corporate oligarchy instead. The one thing it is not is a democracy.

The mistake you make is in thinking these laws were (or should have been) passed for your benefit. They were not. They were passed to benefit the largest copyright holders, those that can afford to litigate. They do that very well.

The only way to get this to change is to change the system. Attacking the laws themselves involves a complete mis-focus, and will be roundly ignored by any representative in the system until or unless you can put more money and/or power in their hands than the large copyright holders can. Can you do that?

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[TFAFalcon]

But who would be harmed if copyright expired in this case? The photographer? He has no way of profiting from the photos, since no one even knows who took them.
The only thing that copyright achieves in this case is to make us loose parts of our history, since we can't preserve them legally.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Johann Lau]

That just means those who already have money will register any- and everything habitually, while amateurs get screwed over further for no reason other than corporations having easier access to their works.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Tuoqui]

Like any legal matter... it only matters how much money you have to defend against a claim.

So basically if you use something that's been orphaned apparently and is owned by a big company you're screwed... but if they find something of yours that has been orphaned they can strike it rich.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

only if it's cost effective.

it only seems better for amatures than the current system.

As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.

Everyone gets easier access.Not just corporations. You might as well attack public right of way laws because it allows corporations employees to walk over your land or public libraries because it allows corporations to educate their workers without buying your books.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Johann Lau]

Well, you kinda have to decide wether you'd want that to be free or "at a small price", because I ain't discussing shit when that just gets constantly switched ^_^

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

"at a small price"?

I've done a quick word search for that and you're the only one saying "at a small price" as far as I can see. unless I missed something in my earlier comments I always said "free" or at worst "ideally free".

Where did I switch it?

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Half-pint HAL]

As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.

A Google-like free system, you say? You mean one that's constantly mining your data in order to advertise to you more and more in multiple media, while riding roughshod over creators' rights right up until the point where they're sued, at which point they strike a deal which is to their best interests but leaves the content creator with 1% of sweet FA?

There's no such thing as a free lunch -- someone's going to have to pay, and right now world's governments are mostly beating the "small government" drum (and often doing so at the point of the richer countries' guns -- see also "Greece" and "Spain").

The system you propose would have to be international with international funding and international agreement -- operated by WIPO, perhaps. But the agreement would never come. The US and the UK would demand that it was truly "private sector", and the whole idea of a public service would slide down the chute of private interests.

An ultra-rich company would see it as a way to get an archive of all the world's creative material, and they'd have the world's biggest back catalogue to remaster and exploit when the original copyright expires. Other people wouldn't ever get to see the whole database.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[IndustrialComplex]

That just means those who already have money will register any- and everything habitually, while amateurs get screwed over further for no reason other than corporations having easier access to their works.

Once something is published, it is no longer 'their' work. The only reason that people have any ability to control what happens to 'their' work once they make it public is because the public voluntarily decides to refrain from using the now public work.

If the work is unpublished, then it doesn't matter. No one has seen the work, it is as if it never existed. However, if a creation is abandoned, the amateur loses NOTHING if their creation is propagated.

If the amateur in your example were to withold the work and never publish it, then they need no protection for the work as it might as well never have existed. If the amateur publishes the work, and then witholds it from the public, it fails to serve its purpose as a copyrighted work. If the amateur publishes the work and wishes to market it, then it is in the artist's interest to maintain the registration.

The artist is really only a minor stakeholder in a work once it has been published. The 'owner' of the creation is in reality, the public, and their interests must be considered. Given that orphaned copyrights are one of the biggest threats to the longevity of a creation, requiring the people who wish to benefit from copyright perform minor custodial tasks is hardly an onerous proposition.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[mcgrew]

The only thing that copyright achieves in this case is to make us loose parts of our history

On the contrary, rather than setting parts of our history free (loosing), current copyright lengths imprison them.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[ZmeiGorynych]

Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

sigh. here we go.

Google-like as in searchable like a google search where similar works can be found quickly and easily.
The point was that the technology exists.

believe it or not legal deposit libraries exist and have existed in the UK for a long long time and are traditionally publicly funded with the works stored within availible to the public.They're not remotely controversial.

for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has expired, being used by companies.
You don't seem to get the point of public domain. it's not reserved for amatures and hobbyists. Everyone gets to use it.
Including big evil companies.

When your copyright expires it stops being yours. Evil corporations and hobbyists alike gets to use it whether you like it or not.

It no more has to be international than copyright terms have to be international and perfectly synchronised. which they're not.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

Just to be clear since I'm sure you're going to act the jackass and fill any blanks I don't explicitly cover with some strawman: legal deposit libraries exist in almost all first world countries. sometimes a company may have the contract for maintaining them but they're still libraries open to the public where you can go in and read the books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Half-pint HAL]

for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has expired, being used by companies. You don't seem to get the point of public domain. it's not reserved for amatures and hobbyists. Everyone gets to use it. Including big evil companies.

When your copyright expires it stops being yours. Evil corporations and hobbyists alike gets to use it whether you like it or not.

It no more has to be international than copyright terms have to be international and perfectly synchronised. which they're not.

For no sane reason whatsoever, you have missed the point. I'm not against the public domain, and I am personally working on a system that will (hopefully) allow me personally to derive profit from public domain works. What I'm against is giving a private body a monopoly on storing in-copyright works that means that they (and only they) will have a complete database of out-of-copyright works to exploit when copyright expires, whereas other companies will have to go out of their way to collect and pay for the works that they hope to reproduce with copyright expires. It's not just a matter of money, either, but opportunity. Even if you could buy a DVD film for a penny, who would want to store millions of DVDs for just so that they might have a chance to reproduce it somewhere down the line?

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Half-pint HAL]

A deposit library isn't a digital entity though, and the library still must do considerable work to render their materials into a reproducible state. A digital deposit library... well, ever New Year's Day they'd be able to flip a switch and republish anything and everything for their profit, leaving their competitors trailing in their dust....

And why resort to insults? Why not just engage in an adult-like debate?

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

Stunningly easy sollution: either run them as a public entity like current deposit libraries accessible to all or if you really want a company to run it then include in the contract that they must give copies of the database of all public domain material to other entities. you'll notice that many countries have multiple such libraries.

Adding "on a computer" to the description doesn't make things strange and scary.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[HungryHobo]

Then don't give them a monopoly.

have a dozen companies or even a dozen companies and a few state bodies all keeping their own copies. require them to share entries.

You don't have to hand it all to one company and give them the keys to throw away.

problem solved. just like that. poof. gone.

There isn't just one legal deposit library in the UK. there's half a dozen. some of them university linked bodies and some pure libraries.

"who would want to store millions of DVDs for just so that they might have a chance to reproduce it somewhere down the line"

Lets try an example.
the library of congress.
They archive massive massive quantities of text, film, music and other media all for the sake of archiving it.

are they exploiting the material and fucking everyone else over? or are they providing a valuable service to everyone? are they waiting till things expire then making a fortune by refusing to give anyone else access?

hell they archive every twitter post and you can't get much more inane than that.

just for the sake of archiving it.

Re:When is a work "orphaned"?

[Half-pint HAL]

Yes, but the Library of Congress isn't a corporation. As I said, today's politicians won't create new public stuff -- only private stuff. I wouldn't have a problem with a digital deposit library in public hands, only one in private hands.

Sure, let's make stripping metadata illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Who could forget about all the times broadcasters deliberately aired things out of production order.
Or the phones and cameras that append sensitive information to your photos' EXIF data.
Or all the other ways metadata can be maliciously (or merely incompetently) incorrect.

Next you'll be telling me that DRM is metadata and that is illegal to strip as well.

Wait...

Metadata Stripping Needs to be Legal

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook etc. strip metadata to protect people from inadvertently giving away their location. iPhone photos contain GPS coordinates and the date/time they wer taken; without this data being stripped, a savvy person could figure out where they live/work or if they're out of town. Laws requiring that this data be left in the file would lead to privacy problems greater than the problem it's claiming to solve. Archiving this data in a private database while stripping it from the public photo, or making the data more generic like saying "August 2012" instead of "August 07, 2012 05:11:23:475" would be a much saner idea, since month and year should be all that's necessary to determine if a work is orphaned. It's also merely an assumption that the metadata accurately represents the time of creation of the work; e.g. some cameras have inaccurately set clocks, or a photo might be created at one time but have its metadata updated when it's copied.
Also, realistically, Facebook et al will be dead and buried before the copyright to anything posted to them expires, even given hypothetical 'orphan works' legislation.
This is also assuming that anyone cares about the copyright status of online photos (few do, 'legitimate' websites regularly blatantly steal copyrighted photos from Flickr etc. without permission).

Re:Metadata Stripping Needs to be Legal

[Half-pint HAL]

That's why the law can't say "metadata is eternal", but must force a balanced, sensible definition of which metadata can be stripped. The GPS coordinates and the camera settings are irrelevant to copyright law -- they don't identify the author, after all -- so can be stripped. It's circulating a photo without identifying the author that creates accidental/incidental orphans....

Copyright Terms.

[MnemonicMan]

Copyright terms are a farce. The emperor has no clothes. It's completely distorted for how long the terms are. What should they be? 20 years for video, audio, and written works. 10 years for software as that changes so fast.

If I'm ever brought before a judge for the contents of my hard-drive I'll plead guilty to everything within the above given terms and no contest for everything older.

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as a short copyright term (10 years - still longer than the 7 years, without requesting 7yr extension, of the original) are in place, then I'd like to propose one more change:

Once the term expires NO-ONE can use the material to make a profit.

If you don't add that - then companies will simply get the material and hold it for 10 years, then make obscene amounts whilst giving the originator nothing at all, not even a nod. Yes, we could argue that right now that's not a lot different to how it can be in sectors of the music industry (without the 10 year wait), but these companies will do anything to make bigger profits - including setting themselves up in a system where the promotion of artistic wares is simply on a 10-year delayed production line and they'll promote the output as such, when the time is right. If you think for a second that corporations could not work a system like that then you are sadly, in for quite a few disappointments in this life.

If you don't try and think like them, then they'll always get the better of situations.

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh!

Missing comma!

"you are, sadly, in for quite a few disappointments in this life."

My own grammer nazi - lovely!

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Black Parrot]

Once the term expires NO-ONE can use the material to make a profit.

Wouldn't be any Hobbit movie.

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I made the suggestion ;-)

Seriously - my whole point is to develop a discussion - if I had the perfect answer I'd be rich already ;-)

Tolkien is quite old material - perhaps there should just be a bigger gap, then:

10 year term - no profit period of 30 years or more - (enough to allow free use for cultural purposes) - then a return to "anyone can do anything with it" - BSD style ?

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Anonymous Coward]

"companies will simply get the material and hold it for 10 years, then make obscene amounts whilst giving the originator nothing at all, not even a nod."

This strikes me as a terrible business plan. Hiding a potentially-hot book for 10 years (during which time it could easily become less hot) in order to cut the author out of -- I guess -- a 10-20% royalty? That's the plan?

What looks like a better strategy to you:
Acquire J.K. Rowling's next manuscript, hide it for 10 years, hope everyone is still interested in her in 10 years, then start selling it.
or
Acquire J.K. Rowling's next manuscript, start selling it, and give her a cut

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Half-pint HAL]

If it makes you feel better, I can pick you up on your misspelling of the word "grammar".... ;-)

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Jason Levine]

Once the term expires NO-ONE can use the material to make a profit.

That's kind of the opposite of the Public Domain. The Public Domain says "you can use this for whatever you want to use it for." You're proposing "you can use this for anything you want, but you can't make any money off of it." This can also get into all kinds of legal wrangling. Are ads on your website - intended to cover costs - profit makers? Can you make derivative works and profit off them?

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Hatta]

So?

Re:Copyright Terms.

[TFAFalcon]

It'd change that to No-one can use the material to make a profit without the consent of the author for, I don't know 20 years or so?

That way there would be an incentive to release compilations like 'greatest hits of X', reviving old works while rewarding both the author and the one doing the reviving. Of course people would be free to find or copy works on their own and those would be free.

Re:Copyright Terms.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fix for that particular suggestion is simple, and it's *doesn't* require a change to copyright law. Once something has risen back into the Public Domain, *ANYONE* can use it IN ANY WAY and FOR ANY REASON. That's what the Public Domain *is*.

Re:Copyright Terms.

[mcgrew]

Once the term expires NO-ONE can use the material to make a profit. If you don't add that - then companies will simply get the material and hold it for 10 years, then make obscene amounts whilst giving the originator nothing at all, not even a nod.

That's just stupid -- no publisher will want to do that. -- once Foundation is in the public domain, anybody can publish it, not just Asimov's publisher.

They would have a ten year monopoly on publication. After ten years the monopoly ends, which is as it should be, and anyone can publish it. Remember, copyright is primarily about publication.

You can get a hardcopy of Huckleberry Finn for under five bucks. That's what the public domain does.

stripping metadata?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like stripping of DRM to me? Where's the DMCA when you need it?

Re:stripping metadata?

[Joe Decker]

Actually, the DMCA does have an anti-copyright notice stripping provision.

I'm not 100% convinced that Facebook's Terms of Service legally allow them around this, but I'll be damned if I'll be the one footing the bill for that case.

Re:stripping metadata?

[Joe Decker]

Funny, I had just been talking about this the day before yesterday.

In any case, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202

(b) Removal or Alteration of Copyright Management Information.— No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law—
(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information,
(2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, or
(3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law,

Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[girlintraining]

Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?

The solution to bad laws is not more bad laws. The reason we got into this mess is because of copyright, and the idea that websites like Facebook have any right whatsoever to your creative rights beyond non-exclusive publication. If you want to set things right, start by making the authorship rights of the individual who made the creative work something that cannot, by any contract or legal instrument, be abridged in any way. Oh, I know, businesses everywhere will be screaming bloody murder: What about our marketing? Our advertising! Oh however will we pay the bills without access to all your personal data! It's easy: Clicking like isn't a creative act. Telling people your likes and dislikes isn't a creative act. Creating metadata based on creative works (like keywords being used in status updates or comments) isn't a problem either -- in fact, the company can happily claim copyright to the resulting database and use it however it wants. And that's what most of the marketing and crap is based on. That's where the money comes from.

And one more thing: Those rights aren't transferrable or abridgable in any way, nor are they exclusive... but they do expire at the time of your death. No hand me downs for the relatives. No "150 years plus the life of the author" crap. No: Once you're dead, everything you ever said is fair game for the general public. You're the only one that should be allowed to benefit from your own work, and once you're dead, there's no more benefit to be had... so the rest of the world can reproduce your work freely... They just have to give you credit, like always.

Don't get into this argument about who owns what and derivative works and derivative derivative works and works for hire, and blah blah blah. It's a trap. An Ackbar trap, even. The moment you start to play that game, you lose, because there'll always be another argument, another subtle change, another justification. No. If you want to get a handle on intellectual property, you draw a firm line in the sand and say "This far, no farther." You do not ask for new laws to patch up old ones -- you get rid of the bad laws, strip it down to the bare metal, and then build it up right.

Re:Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[Black Parrot]

The reason we got into this mess is because of copyright, and the idea that websites like Facebook have any right whatsoever to your creative rights beyond non-exclusive publication.

Is someone making you post your stuff there?

Re:Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[HungryHobo]

So... if I want to make a multi million dollar movie of a book and the negotiations are going badly the cost for the rights has an upper bound as the cost of having the author quietly killed?

If you work 10 years on creating a book which does well you get to provide for your family for a few years.
If you work 10 years on creating a book which does well but then get cancer your dependents are shit out of luck it goes straight into the public domain.

An author with failing health effectively loses any way to provide for his dependents.

A fixed reasonably short term makes far more sense than truncating it at death.

Re:Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick question: does

1.0^10E6 = (1.0^10)E6 = 1E6 = 1x10^6 = 1 000 000

or

1.0^10E6 = 1.0^(10E6) = 1^(10 000 000) = 1

?

Re:Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[Half-pint HAL]

Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?

The solution to bad laws is not more bad laws.

Quite right: the answer is to pass some good laws, such as those that prohibit stripping ownership information from creative works. Now they may make a balls-up of the legislation (in fact they probably will), but as with many laws throughout history (but not so many these days), the underlying principle is (correctly) designed to serve the public good.

Re:Picard facepalms 1.0^10E6

[ZmeiGorynych]

I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.

Re:Falkvinge is an idiot

[Stirling Newberry]

Just because we pay for the common defense, does not mean that the military was created to enrich defense contractors.

Re:Falkvinge is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But if one potential defense contractor thinks he might make a few bucks as such, and another is pretty sure he won't, which do you think is going into production? The fact that copyright was created for the enrichment of society doesn't mean that the enrichment of the author wasn't an incentive the founders intended to leverage.

Really, I cringe every time I hear another big media mouthpiece complain about how the food's being taken off their table, but if there is anybody worse, it's the "you have no right to your work, gimme everything for free" crowd. Yes, the authors of the Constitution distrusted monopolies, and with good reason. They also realized that the profit motive was powerful indeed, and that is (whether your fevered and uninformed mind can grasp it or not) the reason Congress was given the power to grant them. It doesn't mean that what is going on now is reasonable or desireable, but it is a fact and pretending otherwise is not going to improve the situation.

Only ban the deletion of some metadata

[grahamm]

Maybe the solution is to only ban the deletion of some metadata by anyone except the creator of the data.. This would include the creation date and the creator or copyright owner, and allow other metadata to be deleted. This would prevent the problem of premature orphaning whilst preserving any privacy issues.

  Alternatively, as far as privacy issues are concerned, the creator is at perfect liberty to edit the metadata, to remove anything which they do not want published, before uploading/sharing/distributing the work.

Laws to make stripping metadata illegal?

[flimflammer]

Is this a serious honest to goodness question? Is it a joke? Is someone making a funny?

The answer is quite easily no, we should not make laws against stripping metadata. That is quite possibly one of the most absurd notions I've heard in a while. Lets take bad laws, learn from them, and then make worse laws! That will solve our problems, alright!

I think it's already illegal in Europe.

[SuricouRaven]

Not intentionally so, but rather a consequence of an entirely different copyright law. European union copyright directive:

1. Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts:
(a) the removal or alteration of any electronic rights-management information;
(b) the distribution, importation for distribution, broadcasting, communication or making available to the public of works or other subject-matter protected under this Directive or under Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC from which electronic rights-management information has been removed or altered without authority, if such person knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement of any copyright or any rights related to copyright as provided by law, or of the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.

2. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "rights-management information" means any information provided by rightholders which identifies the work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC, the author or any other rightholder, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work or other subject-matter, and any numbers or codes that represent such information. The first subparagraph shall apply when any of these items of information is associated with a copy of, or appears in connection with the communication to the public of, a work or other subjectmatter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.

Exact details will vary by country. The EU directives say what a country must achieve, it's up to them how they will do it.

Re:I think it's already illegal in Europe.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts:

So they just get permission from the copyright holder to do so, somewhere in the Terms of Service. Problem solved.

Just Dead Brilliant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what we need, more laws dealing with copyright.
Here, I'll make it damn simple the way it was INTENDED TO BEGIN WITH!!
4 years you get to ride copy/patent, 4 years to make a profit.Then the world gets it to promote progress for mankind and eliminate these childish monopolies. Don't like it? What have you done for us lately? If you can't profit from a protected work in 4 years ,GFY!
Sure it will change things, some big companies will fall. Screw em, they were part of the problem and others will rise. Some business models will fail. So what?! The ones that fail will have been part of the problem. In fact, eliminate copy/patent on intangibles and let the world get down to living instead of slaving. I for one refuse to recognize rights for invisible crap and live like it everyday.
Less laws dealing with Copy/Patent, less time, less trouble and anyone can use their "invention" to rise.
Medical industry isn't going anywhere, medicine and research aren't going to drop off the face of the planet. I do instead see a lot of reform happening and some long needed regulation. A lot of bullshit won't survive tho.

Re:far bigger problems than excessive copyright...

[Anonymous Coward]

re: Truly, the USA has far bigger problems than excessive copyright protection:
.
Yes: unreviewed and unreviewable drone killings of foreign declared terrorists and of US citizens declared terrorists; border patrol run awry throughout the country and deep into the states and highways well past the actual borders; retroactive okaying of warrantless wiretapping of USA citizens; abuse of civil forfeiture law to increase LEO coffers; declaration of "1st amendment zones" (how brave-new-world double-talky is that phrase?) around political activity areas to suppress free speech; TSA at the airports abusing their authority; ICE at the subways/trains/buses and now roving through highways well past their initial bailiwick of the border for immigration and customs enforcement; generals living like corporate royalty and having their suits laid out for them by valets and them being unable to deal with civilian positions like being Director of the CIA.
.
There are many many other problems that are more important than copyright, and sadly the citizenry takes those problems just as seriously as they do the abuse of copyright and patent laws: they don't really notice it at all.

You make it sound complicated...

[MikeRT]

Are you going to ban hex edditors or text edditors?

No.

What about file systems that don't support metadata like fat?

How is that relevant to file formats which have their own metadata built into them?

Or what about when people don't like your naming/notation conventions will that be banned to?

No. It's about conveying basic ownership information, but you already knew that...

How will they deal with faulty programs like that will they be liable for removal of metadata?

iTunes removes metadata on your personal files. Facebook is a completely different case. Anyone who puts two brain cells into it can see a fundamental difference in liability between software meant to organize a personal collection and software meant to facilitate public consumption of media. It would not be hard to pass a law requiring the preservation of copyright ownership metadata in file formats which support that metadata in software intended to be used for the public dissemination of media.

Not just Europe, most of the world

[langelgjm]

The EU Directive is a result of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Both those treaties require members to protect rights management information from alteration or removal and provide penalties. The U.S. has a similar implementation as the EU directive.

I'm not sure how Facebook's stripping metadata wouldn't violate the plain language of this law, but I'm sure they have some fine print somewhere that makes it legal.

Note that most metadata probably doesn't qualify, but I think on high-end cameras you can set up copyright information to be embedded in the metadata...

as a photographer

[Anonymous Coward]

I rely on those metadata to not only make a living but to protect my copyrights. They serve the same purpose, if not more, by officially registering my copyrights. I can just show my infringing client that I was at X location at a specific time, and bam there's my name attached to the photo as well.

As a small-fry photographer (and many others in my community), our first response is to tell the infringer to stop using out images. If they made 6-digit profit on our work, then yes we will sue. Most of the time we just chalk it off as a loss (not in the IRS sense). Playing photographer, businessman, marketing, and customer service is busy enough.

Re:as a photographer

[Anonymous Coward]

I rely on those metadata to not only make a living but to protect my copyrights.

You have to explicitly state the work is copyrighted against unauthorized distribution, ownership data is meaningless in that regard. If all you have is the metadata (no official copyright filed) then if someone strips the data and passes it off as their own, the burden of proof is on you to show that you are the original artist. All they have to do is alter the metadata and now it's your word against theirs as to who altered the metadata. They could easily claim that you added metadata where there had originally been none, and then you have to go to court and it can get really messy.

But all that depends on your metadata (or a watermark on the image, overlay, etc.) explicitly stating that it is copyrighted. Simply saying you took the picture does not give you a copyright. Manuscript Copyright only applies until you have distributed it. Most pictures posted on Facebook do not bear any sort of copyright, so as soon as it is posted you just lost any claim you may have had. In addition, if there is a clause in the terms of service which grants them license to use, alter, etc. the work, by voluntarily uploading it you have granted such license to them.

If you have an actual registered copyright, then it doesn't matter if they stripped the metadata or not- you can show that your original work was copyrighted and that they altered it to remove such notice.

Re:as a photographer

[Ankh]

Published works are automatically copyrighted in most countries, including the USA, because of ratification of international treaties such as the Berne Convention. The old US-specific requirement of marking something as copyright has long gone. (in other countries requirements varied, but e.g. in most Western countries items published anonymously, or published without explicit marking, get full copyright if the creator's identity becomes known. Just because a photograph is unmarked does not mean you can use it without permission!)

However, it's true that if you mark something as copyright you may do better in court, particularly in the USA, and that registering copyright, still available in many countries, can help.

institutionalized fraud

[kenorland]

There used to be a very simple mechanism for protecting works to become orphaned: authors registered them with the Library of Congress. This also ensured that the work eventually could enter the public domain.

It was greedy European publishers that killed this, and then forced the US to comply. And now they are using orphan works legislation to enrich themselves; if you look at the European proposals for orphan works, they want to charge for the reproduction of such works and then redistribute the money to current publishers and authors. That is not how orphan works are supposed to work.

We should bring back mandatory copyright registration; it's the only sensible way of dealing with orphan works and the public domain.

Yeah, you're not too smart, are you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see.

You kill the author. He is now dead.

His works are now public domain AND ANYONE CAN MAKE THE MOVIE (or whatever).

With the added advantage that they aren't hiding a criminal case.

THEY can produce a film the same cost as you but without risking being killed by the numbers for murder 1.

And given how badly you thought this through, you're not going to manage to get away with it, are you.

Re:Yeah, you're not too smart, are you.

[HungryHobo]

Only if they can catch up. it takes time to set up to start filming a major production. a few months prep can make a huge difference.

And if there's that kind of money on the line it can't be hard to make it look naturalish.

Licencing

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you have legal ownership of the photo, you should be allowed to edit the metadata.

So Facebook asks for a licence to edit the metadata as a condition of them accepting your photo for posting.

And the new law gets us precisely nowhere!

Re:Licencing

[grahamm]

So you just introduce a law that anyone who publishes an image, video or audio file electronically is not allowed to remove any author attribution metadata from file as they received it. This is in effect enforcing article 6bis or the Berne Convention

Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation.

Re:based on their copy

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm this far down and I seem to be missing something. Why do you (for example) have a copy at all? This is what I see as the big coming collision of the Sharing 2.0 web. Let's say I upload a picture to my website or YouTube channel, meta-data it, register it, and all. Why do any other copies go anywhere at all?

It's because we have an old web culture to the point of "if it's cool I'll share it" and then someone *forwards a copy*. BANG. That's where all the stuff the music industry has been doing kicks in. The person forwarding/reposting/whatever is making those copies.

There's different kinds of works but copyright law is struggling to encompass all of them. Handed a movie DVD people will at least need and have some kind of hand-waving answer to copyright about "sharing" it with their friends. Handed a clip of a cat doing a backflip and they'll go "ooh, kittiez, I'll post this to my page."

orphaned works = plan B

[tverbeek]

The reason to lobby for "orphaned works" legislation instead of fixing copyright terms is the fact that Big Media will never allow copyright terms to be shortened. But - being really easy to locate and immortal - they have nothing to fear from orphaned works exceptions, so that's an opening for others to chip away at the copyright monopoly.

Free, Unregulated Internet?

[edibobb]

Are the people proposing this micromanagement of my photos the same ones who are demanding a free and unregulated internet? It's like making it illegal to copy a paper photo without including any comments that were penciled in on the back. I do include the metadata on my photos whenever possible, but I prefer to do it voluntarily.

We are our own worst enemies....

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a few hobby sites devoted to vintage model boats and associated equipment. Google 'Keil Kraft EeZeBilt boats' for an example if you're interested...

Old model boat kits and plans from the 1950s or earlier are part of our social history. But they are (were) copyrighted and so the few people who have them in their collections frequently won't copy the data. We are generally talking about older people here - say, 50 years old and upward. They were brought up to obey the law, and are scared of the news reports of 'copyright pirates' being hounded and fined. So the kits stay unoccupied, and when the collector dies their collections may well be thrown away as rubbish - since they are not obviously valuable. I am trying to change that attitude, but it's an uphill struggle.

I am now trying to widen my sites to include ALL the early kits. I am following the EU MoA on orphan works, which states that a 'good-faith' effort must be made to find the owner, the data must be withdrawn from distribution if an owner is found later and objects, and provision must be made for compensating the owner if a profit is made from the distribution. So nothing is released until I have documentary evidence that this has been done. This seems reasonable to me, and is fairly easy to do in these days of email. For the Keil Kraft boats site, for instance, I checked with the current owners of the name who were very happy for me to be doing this and keeping the old name in the (UK modelling) public eye. In most cases the kits are completely orphaned, and are being forgotten altogether...

But I am still finding that, when I try to talk about what I am doing, model boat forums either refuse to engage, or, on occasions, ban me for proposing piracy. You would think that they wanted to lose their history... :(

Question needs to be "why not"

[Anonymous Coward]

The way you're looking at the problem is inappropriate for the 1700s or later, or at least in America. The question is "why not?" or to turn it around, "Why should the government be involved in forcefully opposing people doing a thing?"

Sometimes there are really good answers to that question. The US constitution framers decided that the federal government's fists should come out "to promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences" and that's why we don't want people "ripping off" photos or at least it's half of the balance.

But when a work is not for sale, so that the incentives for using government to create the monopoly are not being used, then the monopoly serves no purpose. There's no reason to use the government to deny people the right to copy a photo; nobody loses when the photo isn't for sale.

At least that's the theory. Interestingly, the Free Software guys are some of the first to step forth shouting something about an exception! They even convinced at least one judge, a year or two ago if I recall. They had an explanation ready, though.

If someone can explain the case for anonymous non-commercial government-forced monopolies, they might win some mindshare.

So go ahead and answer the "why not?" question; it might be possible. If you can't, though, then please step down.

Country of origin

[tepples]

GPS coordinates help determine in what jurisdiction the work was created, as countries' copyright terms for photographs vary. They have to be stored with at least enough precision to distinguish, say, Netherlands from Liechtenstein or Italy from San Marino.

What about creators rights to anonymity & priv

[Alimony Pakhdan]

I've published several pseudononymous and anonymous works in various media which I dont want associated with my or my family's name for various reasons. Someday they may become "orphaned works" but I'm curious how the greed of others to access these trumps my right to anonymity and privacy.

Much of the socialweb is based on broken copyright

[allo]

Go, look at soup or tumblr. How many users have the right to distribute even 1% of their "stream"?