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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.
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?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
100x damages is obscene.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Just because we pay for the common defense, does not mean that the military was created to enrich defense contractors.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
20 minutes into the future
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.
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.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
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!
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: Truly, the USA has far bigger problems than excessive copyright protection:
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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.
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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.
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.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No.
How is that relevant to file formats which have their own metadata built into them?
No. It's about conveying basic ownership information, but you already knew that...
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.
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...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
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.
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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... :(
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
I'm a nature photographer.
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,
I'm a nature photographer.
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.
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.
20 minutes into the future
Go, look at soup or tumblr. How many users have the right to distribute even 1% of their "stream"?