Slashdot Mirror
What Could Have Been In the Public Domain Today, But Isn't
An anonymous reader writes with an article from Duke Law on what would have entered the public domain today were it not for the copyright extensions enacted in 1978. From the article: "What could have been entering the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2013? Under the law that existed until 1978, works from 1956. The films Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Forbidden Planet, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days; the stories 101 Dalmations and Phillip K. Dick's The Minority Report; the songs 'Que Sera, Sera' and 'Heartbreak Hotel', and more. What is entering the public domain this year? Nothing."
And Rick Falkvinge shares his predictions for what the copyright monopoly will try this year. As a bit of a music fan, excessive copyright hits home often: the entire discographies of many artists I like have been out of print for at least a decade. Should copyright even be as long as in the pre-1978 law? Is the Berne Convention obsolete and in need of breaking to actually preserve cultural history?
...All the stuff that made it to the public domain that was retroactively clawed back after Congress extended copyright and didn't grandfather stuff that had already lapsed.
I don't mean to sound rude or ignorant, but really...who cares? Will the foundations of society crumble because someone can't get out that ONE GOOD Hamlet remake where everyone dresses like they're in present times, but speak in Shakespearean language? We should focus on the REAL issues of copyright and that's the lack of ownership of digital copies or something serious.
The the UK, publishers started printing new works from living authors without giving them anything and without permission. That is why copyright was created. It was never intended to restrict private citizens, just to prevent commercial exploitation that made authors starved.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This old rule made more sense if you ask me. And notice that, despite copyright covering only 'the work' itself rather than particular instantiations of it, the music industry was still able to grow huge and make tons of money under the old law.
The software equivalent would be to hold source code copyrightable, but not binaries. And this would make even more sense.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Cause we couldn't give a flying over your broken legal/patent system.
Then it should be treated like your house.
Taxes paid on it.
You must maintain it or have it reposessed.
If you don't evict squatters after a time they become the new owners (effective abandonment)
Public gets rights to access.
Pay tax on your "property" and if you let it fall into ruin, you lose it.
This is the obvious way to make it not matter at all what they lock down for 100s of years. Laurel and Hardy used to be on every Christmas when I was a child. I haven't seen any of their films now for a long long time. Probably they're all sitting in a vault somewhere turning to dust. I guess it is a reminder than in 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 ... years eventually it will all be lost. So, we lost all our culture early because of greedy people. Well let them have it. I'm happy to opt out of their world. What was our culture for anyway? We seem to have lost the point of it. Meanwhile at street level human creativity remains unstoppable. Those with the itch to create something will create it no matter what.
You only need to go as far as the MAME, or the (S)NES libraries to realize copyright is broken. Licensing issues or lame owners prevent at least 80% of these titles from ever seeing the legitimate light of day ever again. Copyright has become a cultural lockup, nothing more.
Maybe everything should be.
no new movie, has been made in the last 30 some years because of these copyright laws
no new book has been written
no new music made
You missed a major consequence: we don't see a lot of old movies, old books, old songs. Because no one knows who the copyright belongs to, so no one dares reissue or adapt them in case they get sued. Or the owner is known but doesn't think it's profitable to release, so no one else can ever do so either.
"copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole."
On the contrary. When these laws were created, only those with expensive equipment (publishers) were in a position to adversely affect the ability of authors to make a living from their work. Modern technology allows large numbers of private individuals to do just as much damage to living authors of all types of works by making unauthorised copies for which the author receives no payment.
Consider the majority of professional photographers who deal primarily with individual, personal clients. The photographer has only two real choices: charge lots more for doing the initial job (because they know full well that they're never going to sell any copies) or switch to a different market altogether. That doesn't benefit the consumer, does it? It just means those services cease to be available, not because the services aren't wanted any more but because the majority of consumers are too dishonest to be worth dealing with.
Sadly, I don't think there's a realistic solution to this. Not while the average consumer continues to believe it's okay to rip off the author because 'it's just for personal use'.
crazy, the only movies are the old copyrighted ones
no new movie, has been made in the last 30 some years because of these copyright laws no new book has been written no new music made
we are forced to keep on buying the same old movies over and over
It's not about being able to create new stuff. It's about ensuring unhindered access of our culture and knowledge to our children. Just imagine the possibilities if you can search, catalog and read/view/listen through hundreds of works by artistes who're dead for years, and build upon them. The current copyright law only benefits the greedy corporates, so much creativity is lost just because of that.
If you don't get source, the binary is not expressive and cannot be used to advance the state of the art, therefore should not be copyrightable.
I think that most people would agree that if you had the source code (and it WAS the source code) for the binary sold, then this could be copyrighted together since the binary is merely an operable version of the source code.
But if you don't have source, you don't get copyrights on either the code (it is a trade secret) or the binary (it isn't copyrightable on its own).
Remember: just because JK Rowling's books are "Open source" (if you can read the language it is written in), this neither stops JKR making money off the work nor means people can just make a new "Barry Hotter and the Chamber of Commerce" if it would be too much a rip-off.
It's hard to detect sarcasm on the internet, so I'm going to assume you're serious. :-)
we are forced to keep on buying the same old movies over and over
Quite. Only the big studios can afford to license the old films for remakes.
So Disney's big break was with a film based on a folk story written down by the Brothers Grimm - it was out of copyright. Nobody to pay, nobody to clear changes with... Does the modern film-maker looking for a break have such luxuries?
Can any new film maker do what Disney did? Modern copyright probably makes it very difficult indeed, and somewhat risky as there may always be someone who crawls out of the woodwork to sue you after you've done the expensive hard work...
So we are forced to see nothing but franchises and remakes of old films, as they are "safe" in copyright terms.
A great pity.
1. More politicians will educate themselves on copyright issues.
2. Something big will happen, but I don't know what.
3. The judiciary system will not change course.
The Berne convention isn't just obsolete, it should never have been adopted in the first place. Its most odious aspect is the prohibition of registration requirements, creating the large orphan works problem we have now.
The irony about the Berne convention is that Europeans pushed for it thinking that they would be the largest beneficiaries under it because Europe had traditionally been so culturally productive. But it turned out that it was instead a boon to the US movie and music industries, and they have learned to play the copyright game very well. Now, Europeans are crying foul even though they are responsible for the mess in the first place.
Actually, shortening it would reflect the changes in technology and society.
The original copyright (IIRC of 7 years) was adequate for the time when it was invented. It took a creator a long while to get his works into a format where it can be reproduced easily, reproduction took quite a bit of time and making the item known to create a stock of customers took even longer. Those 7 years was pretty much what it took to get the item produced and sold.
Today, creation, reproduction and advertising can be done in mere hours, maybe days. A copyright of about 7 months would reflect the reality of today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, thank you. I would puke having Mickey Mouse danc8ng with 101 Dalmatians to the Queens "we are the champions" in the new, exciting corn flakes ad. Seriously, ladies and gentelmen: copyright is evil and im fine with this.
Because of copyright laws entire gendres of music are missing in action. For example try finding Dixie Land jazz on any radio station including net radio. Worse yet, most of Dixie Land music was never scripted while it was in vogue. Later a few people created sheet music that matched the music they had heard in earlier years. Those copyrights prevent the playing of the music as well as free acquisition of musical scores even though the transcribers actually never had anything to do at all with the creation of the music. So we are still held captive in what we can hear and learn to play from tunes popular clear back into the Civil War era. And since the potential market for such music is rather small what publisher will take the risk of making a score available to the public even for a fee.
Isn't it a true shame that no one has created an "UNIVERSAL" (Whatever information available etc.) library that is accessible by all of mankind? Some of the contributions on the net aren't advantageous, still, I salute the internet, and those who work to make the net a better place to find "Knowledge"..... the net does say a lot about the people, doesn't it? Oh wait. I like the internet. :p May it prosper, in the best thinkable way. And the people too. *done ranting*
affect the ability of authors to make a living from their work.
This is the mistake. In 1991 I helped change the contaminated hydraulic oil in an industrial cardboard bailer/press. It was a 100% success. No one thinks it unusual that I was paid up front in one lump sum for my labor at that time of dumping in uncountable bottles of hyd oil rather than 10 cents every time someone uses that cardboard bailer for the remainder of my life plus the next 74 years, or whatever it is.
If you shrunk the copyright duration down to roughly how long it took the author to write a book, it would hardly result in the downfall of western civ. Lets give them a decade. That sounds realistically fair. For example, I'm going to cough up $15 for Stross's next book, not wait ten years. In fact I buy all his books on the day of release, so a 1 day copyright wouldn't realistically affect his income from me.
If you eliminated it completely, Stross would either have to live on a pre-order bounty system (no more laundry series until he gets $50K in the bank!) or speeches / book signings, or just apathy. Most likely it would result in the death of the middlemen. Yes I could buy a copy from a cheater of the equivalence of those shady copied DVD sellers, but in the modern internet era its no challenge anymore for anyone in the world to buy a copy of the book directly from Stross. In fact I'd throw in an extra $20 for a personally autographed copy, which under the current middleman system, my extra $20 probably represents his share of about 1K sales.
Would I buy a copy of HP Lovecrafts work from one of his heirs? Hmm hard question. God knows they don't deserve the money merely for having the luck of being born to the author. On the other hand if they guilt tripped me by maintaining an museum or using the money for a touring exhibition of artifacts or even something like a tuition scholarship for young wannabe authors, well, yeah, they'd be doing enough good work to deserve my cash.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Professional photographers are providing a service -- they take better pictures with better equipment than giving your camera to your buddy to take the pictures. But then, that's it. If they try to enforce any monopoly that they should be the ones printing the pictures, that needs to be ended. I don't feel sad they can't have their stupid exploitation. Charge a real price, drop any monopoly dreams, and if there's not enough money in it for them, they can get a real job. There's a market -- we paid our wedding photographer for the digital negatives and for a print album. My wife loves the album, I like having the digital negs in my collection. We wouldn't hire any photog that thought he could own our pictures for us.
If houses were like IP, those bricklayers would be rich, after all, they could charge everyone living in the house, even 70 years after they died.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
This is an interesting idea. While I'd rather see copyright abolished completely, what about this:
* if you hold copyright on work X, you declare how much it is worth
* a periodic tax is levied, based on the value you declared
* at any moment, you may declare a higher value. It can go up but never down (valuable works that are no longer profitable should go public).
* at any moment, you may abandon the copyright, irrevocably putting the work into public domain
* anyone may buy the copyright from you for the listed price
* if the other party intends to buy it to keep (as opposed to freeing it to the public), you may instead raise the value [1]
* the tax rate increases with time
[1]. You could have immediately bought it back for the same price, this rule merely resolves such a loop for the benefit of the old holder.
Such a scheme would ensure any copyright is taxed based on its fair market valuation.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Sure, you wouldn't want to wait ten years to buy the book. But suppose the publisher waits ten years to publish a book, so they don't have to pay the author anything? Without any way aside from publishers to get books, that could be a real problem.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Modern technology allows large numbers of private individuals to do just as much damage
Damage: 0. Not giving you money != damaging you. Unless, of course, you waste someone's time, use their resources, take something physical (something that actually exists), or alter something of someone else's.
Sure, pre-internet, that would work. Now authors can release and sell books without the publishers help.
It's pretty clear to me that nothing will ever again be allowed to enter the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It probably doesn't say much that most slashdotters aren't already familiar with, but this video is both entertaining and informative about the subject.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The copyright term was intended to reflect the economic life of the work to the author -- not how long it took the copyrighted work to be reproduced. The economic life of today's works are longer. In today's society, we consume (e.g., watch movies, listen to mustic) from generations ago. We, as a society, have more leisure time to enjoy these works, and the mediums used to store these works are much longer lasting.
The copyright system is to protect the creator's interests -- not to protect the interest of the consumers. The consumers already have a legitimate way to obtain the work -- purchase it or borrow it from a library or a friend.
Copyright consumers don't add anything to society as it pertains to artistic works beyond their ability to pay for it. The Copyright Act was meant to provide a mechanism by which the creators of artistic works can be paid. Personally, I don't have any sympathy for people wanting to get something for free.
Like most things, if you are honest with yourself, this debates centers about the economic interests of the two sides. In such a debate, I'm going to side with the creators – not the copiers.
As if life + 50 years wasn't enough! You know, if you put 2 or 3 notes together they would appear in virtually every piece of music ever published. I wonder how long it will take the music companies to start suing over those strings.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Taxes paid on it.
Dead people earn a lot of money, and pay taxes on it: http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/1024_dead-celebrities.html
And no, you can't take it with you, unfortunately.
Vampires are undead, who live off the living. In the case of celebrities, there are living people who are living off the dead.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Still in 2013 there seems not to be any system on slashdot to prevent execution of smaller webservers... :-(
The way Western democratic countries are run.
What a strange explanation for copyright. It runs counter to my understanding which is that the primary purpose of copyright (and patents) is to encourage the creation of works that will, after a fixed time, enter the public domain. That's why I get so angry at the abuse of the original intent. We're allowing the creation of an aristocracy of ideas and that is a very, very bad thing.
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I would create a web page that will let people download copyright works that are about to expire in a year. And see if anyone tries to sue. If no one does, I will put up copyright works that will expire in two years and see who cares to sue. Keep bumping the number up to see what the real threshold is for years in copyright before someone decides it is appropriate to spend money protecting these works.
Actually, copyright was originally a censorship mechanism for the Crown. It's true that there was a transformative change to protect authors with the Statute of Anne, but there were laws in place before then you could fairly refer to as copyright law.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I do not get paid for work I did 8 years ago and I don't think you should either.
In the case of celebrities, there are living people who are living off the dead.
Ghouls, in other words
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
There's a market -- we paid our wedding photographer for the digital negatives and for a print album. My wife loves the album, I like having the digital negs in my collection.
Did you actually request digital negatives? I mean, I imagine most people would be satisfied with the unaltered, positive RAWs. However, perhaps this is something else about professional photography I don't know.
There's another side of the coin, since that means that software protected under GPL would loose its protection
GPL is designed to protect users from companies who would take free software, add compelling features to its own product, and restrict users of the improved product. Under a 14+14 year scheme like that of the original Copyright Act, such a company would have to replicate the existing 28 years of improvements before doing that.
In my opinion it's much better if copyright holders voluntarily decides to contribute their work to the common good, rather than doing that by force.
Some people claim that allowing people to "voluntarily decide[] to contribute their work to the common good" destroys the market and then go and successfully sue anybody who makes another program that performs the same function as their own copyrighted program.
Let's just say... you don't really understand how houses and real property are treated under the law.
Sure, you wouldn't want to wait ten years to buy the book. But suppose the publisher waits ten years to publish a book, so they don't have to pay the author anything?
Then add up to the first 25 years of unpublished status to the term. (This is what the U.S. already does for works made for hire and pre-1978 works.) So assuming the ten-year copyright term proposed by vlm, the publisher would have to wait thirty-five years, by which time the publisher's exclusive option on the manuscript will likely will have expired several times over and the author will have pitched it to other publishers.
Is your country accepting refugees from our "broken legal/patent system"?
Unless I'm interpreting the Berne convention wrong, literary works of authors that published in signatories outside of the USA either solely or simultaneously as publication in the US, will still enter the public domain 50 years after the authors death or the lesser of the terms granted by any of the signatory country publications. Combined with the summary , this leads me to believe that A) the summary is false and works from other countries did enter the public domain, B) No authors died in 1962 and the summary is true, or C) All other signatory countries with authors that died in 1962 gave equal or greater duration for copyright than the USA and the summary is still true. Or some combination of A, B, and C. My vague understanding is that the extensions to copyright in the USA only apply to works published first solely in the USA and not published in other Berne signatory countries for 30 days after the initial publication.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
The consumers already have a legitimate way to obtain the work
What's the legitimate way to obtain a copy of the film Song of the South or the animated television series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea?
Copyright consumers don't add anything to society as it pertains to artistic works beyond their ability to pay for it.
They add the ability to produce fan-made derivative works.
The Copyright Act was meant to provide a mechanism by which the creators of artistic works can be paid.
Then why is it implemented as a ban on copying rather than a regulated royalty?
I wonder how long it will take the music companies to start suing over those [short] strings [of notes].
They already are suing over these strings. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, for example.
The reason for the corruption is always money, yes, but the destruction it causes in this case is the loss of culture.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Your proposals sounds really clever.
I deserve you a symbolic +1 Interesting because I have no mod points today.
Léa Gris
The details are somewhat complicated, but in most cases the Berne convention is better than current US law. For example, under the Berne convention, copyrights for movies only last 50 years (Article 7 (2)), but under US law is 95 years. Copyrights for a new book last 70 years after the author's death under US law, but only 50 years after the author's death under the Berne convention (Article 7 (1)). For photographs, the term is 25 years under Berne (Article 7 (4)), and 70 years after the photographer's death in US law.
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html
For some cases it the current term under US law is longer than the Berne convention, for example, a work written in 1923 will expire in 2018 (Publication + 95 years), but if the author died in 1975, it would still be under copyright until 2025 (author death + 50 years).
The Berne convention allows countries to keep shorter terms, but I don't think that it allows countries to go back to there shorter terms than the Berne convention allows after they extend them. See Article 7 (7).
I think it would be very useful to pass a law in the US that the copyright term should be the minimum of current law or the Berne convention.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
I got the idea earlier from someone's slashdot sig around then which I saw in passing -- wish I could figure out who. The sig was something like: "If it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
In the variant I proposed, anyone could pay the money to put the copyright into the public domain (not purchase it for themselves).
Lawrence Lessig proposed something simpler -- a small ($50) tax after fifty years to re-register a copyright. That way at least all the abandoned works would become public domain when the tax was not paid on them (which would be a matter of public record). So, even some simple steps could be a huge step forward.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
It benefits society to have multiple sources for copies of works, and to have various sorts of copies of those works. You can go to a bookstore and buy copies of Shakespeare, and some of them will be of high quality, and others will be cheap, and you can go online and download the same works for free.
It benefits society to have derivative works. Other composers can create works based on yours without having to get permission (which may be withheld) or having to meet your standards of quality (which they might not even want to do, due to differing tastes), and other authors can use your works as soundtracks for films or such.
It benefits society to have works publicly performed. A commercial but low-budget orchestra or venue might be able to afford to perform your material based on ticket sales, selling ads in the program, etc., but might not be able to pay licensing fees as well. If the material is in the public domain, it might reach more people.
And it benefits you to have a thriving public domain, since unless you're some sort of weird ascetic, you're likely to listen to more works than you create, and the cheaper they are, the easier this is for you, all else being equal. And if you don't have to seek permission or pay licensing fees, you're freer to create derivative works based on those works.
Just because something benefits companies that are hostile to you doesn't mean that it can't benefit everyone. Those companies benefit from taxpayer-supported police, and fire departments, and judicial systems, and so forth, as we all do. Dismantling them out of spite would just harm ourselves more.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So if I'm writing a song, what steps should I take to make sure that I don't accidentally infringe the copyright in any of the millions of copyrighted songs under the control of BMI and ASCAP? To make the example more concrete, what should I do to keep another Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music from happening?
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool. I'm barely making ends meet as it is, but I do it because I love this work. However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music, I'd have to get another job. That's the cold hard math. The rich composers would just make a little less. But they don't really have to care. I do.
I have to say I feel really sad reading stuff like this. I feel a big kinship with the geek culture in general, having grown up loving my VIC-20, C-64, Amiga, tinkering with open OSs, and in general just being strongly anti-DRM and pro open source. My music background is strongly influenced by my demoscene work, freely distributed of course, like a lot of my other music. But I feel completely alienated by the pro big business turn the discourse has taken. I've been a strong advocate for file sharing and consumer freedom in general, but I've started to feel I've perhaps made a mistake. Because it seems the only groups caring about my right to tell a company not to put my music in a shitty TV ad that they profit off immensely are the same ones suing people for file sharing.
It's almost like there's no one who cares about the little guy anymore. It's just big technology interests like Google and Netflix that would love free content and keep all the money to themselves, versus the big media interests that also would love to keep all the money to themselves. I'm clearly in neither camp. I hope my impression is wrong and the silent majority in the open source movement still believes in protecting the little guy even if he happens to only create content for a living.
What that he said do you think is inaccurate? Provide link to show that it is inaccurate.
The whole point of US copyright is providing works to consumers. Think about it, would a book be of much use if the author was paid but no body ever read it? Paying for it creates dead-weight losses that are necessary under the current system, but ideally should be minimized.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/1/8/122920/9442
Let's just say... you don't really understand how houses and real property are treated under the law.
Let's also say that you miss the point.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
Considering the completely recycled nature of most of today's music, I really hope it doesn't become even more derivative. However, for wider use interesting mashups, sure. But that seems like a niche benefit compared to the immense harm I see in screwing over people like this. Note though that even the existing legislation is too weak to protect the original artist here, because the big business interests are so powerful.
I think the next copyright extension will be very hard to pass. Back in 1976 and 1998 when copyright extensions were passed, it was not very obvious that out of copyright materials were easier to obtain. Project Gutenberg existed in 1998, but it was not very well known. Now, most people know about Project Gutenberg or Google Books. It will be much harder for the copyright term extension lobby to argue for term extension when the downsides are so obvious. I guess we will what happens before 2018.
1 generation=20 years. You get 20 years on your copyright. Patents likewise. Trademarks we will give you 100. Oh, and if you want to sell patents, every time you sell, the remaining time gets cut in half. You burden 1 generation with your legal monopoly. After that, the next generation gets it without restriction.
Now for some software if you need a old ver for say an older os or even older cpu's (think mac 68K and even ppc) and they don't sell the older ver any more. What can you do download it? try to find it on e-bay?
also there is a lot of abandonware that you can't buy at all.
By the same token though, if the original publisher waits until the copyright has expired there's nothing to stop a competing publisher from immediately duplicating it and selling at half-price. If you know the original publisher is completely ripping off the author anyway, why wouldn't you wait a few weeks longer to get the half-priced book? More to the point, why would the author sign a contract with a company that behaved in such a manner? They might be able to screw over one author once, but then they're out of business. Better all around if a company with such aspirations plays it straight and simply purchases an exclusive royalty-free license outright. They'd have a hard time attracting market-proven authors, but the (presumably) larger up-front payment might actually be attractive to many more niche authors.
And that of course is ignoring the fact that we no longer live in a world where publishers are a necessary intermediary - digital distribution, e-readers, and print-on-demand means that book publishers are entering a situation not unlike music publishers have been struggling with. The big difference being that book publishers haven't built their business around artificially inflating the careers of a few superstars and completely screwing over their contracted artists, so an equitable solution may actually be possible.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If your understanding is correct, it seems likely that if it was just a matter of a publisher waiting 30 days before publishing outside the US, they would have to keep the rules in force.
It is human nature for one who is accustomed to copyright protection to feel he is entitled to it.
But feeling so does not make it so if continuing it is contrary to the original reason for the protection.
IMHO, there were two arguments that won the day for the Mickey Mouse copyright extension.
The leading argument was simple greed and political favor.
The fig leaf argument covering this was the moral argument that it is unfair to take what we created from us.
Counter arguments include:
1) When you created it, it was under the understanding that this would happen.
2) When folks bought it, they expected the right to use it freely now, it's also unfair to take that away.
3) Society benefits greatly from having things in the public domain, be it Bach, Beethoven, or in your case Brother's Grim.
4) An extension of copyright diminishes the creative arts which is contrary to the purpose of copyright.
5) We are not taking anything, you still have your copy to make neat, new stuff from. It's just that everybody else does too.
6) You have milked that cow long enough.
The free flow of ideas requres a balance between incentive for new ideas versus the ability for them to flow.
Copyright, as wisely chartered in the constitution, supported that balance.
The current trends in Intellectual Property and Copyright Extension don't.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
You set the value of your work, and it can go up or down as you like. But damage awards for copyright infringement are limited to that value. Don't allow others to take your work, that's not fair. Have a higher tax rate for works that are not available for purchase. Require a copy of the work be submitted to a central library for storage so it never gets lost.
I make computer games in my spare time. I put them for free on my website as a portfolio and because I'm a generally nice guy.
In your case I'm required to pay extra taxes because I've created something that I want to share for free under my own terms. Mainly some advertisement to pay the hosting, credits and the ability to get feedback.
I do actively control that people don't copy the executable and mirror it without credit, because then I miss those advantages. However I'm not willing to pay higher tax on free games I create to prevent people from claiming then as their own.
Copyright is a very broad law that anything anyone creates is protected. If I write a poem on a birthday card that is protected and Hallmark can't copy that, just like if I create a multi million dollar movie it's protected so someone at home can't share it for free.
While the idea for taxes is nice, it's not a practical solution given the broadness of copyright law.
My freeware games
No, the Berne convention isn't "better", it merely sets minimum requirements. All European members have stronger requirements than the minimum set by Berne. The reason the Berne convention isn't more severe than it is is probably that the US opposed it.
I think that would be good. But I think the most disastrous part of the Berne convention is the fact that it makes registration requirements impossible; registration requirements would eliminate a lot of the legal problems with copyrights: orphan works, takedown notices by people who don't own the rights, verification of ownership, etc.
Moral argument supporting Mickey Mouse law:
It's not fair to take what we created XX years ago.
Counter argument.
If these laws existed XX years ago, what you created would not have been possible.
Your work was only possible because you drew from the public well of ideas,
but now you feel no obligation to give back to the well?
If you want to be part of the cultural history, just publish your works under a copyright that ends immediately after your death. You don't have to be the best artist of your era to be the one that gets remembered. The artists that released their works under a standard copyright life plus 75 will be forgotten after they have died, the works go out of print, and no one can find who owns the copyright. There are a lot of orphan works now that cannot be copied. Films rotting in canisters that cannot be copied. They will disappear from our cultural history. It is sad and stupid, but that is the way it is. A law that requires a renewal fee every year or every 5 years at the life plus 40 mark would bring many of these orphan works back into our cultural history. It doesn't matter how cheap the fee is. It is just a check to see who even owns the artistic rights, if anyone. What congress did with copyright was an act of greed and stupidity that did not help the common good, just certain special interests(think Mickey Mouse). It is a misdeed that needs to be rectified, or taken advantage of.... Be the greatest remembered artist of your era, release your work under an expiring copyright. You get your works copied when the others do not. Ideas not shared die in time. If these ideas were created by those who valued the money over the ideas that they created, then maybe their ideas should die.
It may also be a great way punish future generations and teach them the value of protecting cultural heritage. On that note I am going to write and publish some really bad polka music into the public domain. This post is public domain.
...and your total lack of an argument is just so convincing.
You're the one that sounds like he has no clue.
If we are going to ruin people's lives over this stuff we should do a better accounting of it. We should also subject all "property owners" to the constraints. If my real property requires annual payments to the state or to the crown, then so should 30 year old pop hits.
If you are willing to ruin someone's life over a 30 year old pop song, then everyone should know what it's worth and you should be willing to pay the taxes on that amount.
Of course the industry won't want to be saddled with anything that interferes with their "Hollywood accounting".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A number of old shows haven't been released in their original form because of music rights issues.
Similar issues with both copyright and trademark have interfered with the process of making documentaries.
Of course if you are only fixated on licensed remakes of old TV shows and 40 year old comic books, I could see how you would have tunnel vision.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool."
Without numbers to back it up on either then, I think thats probably not true. The majority of music sold is current and follows trends; you can't pull anything from the past and expect to popularise it.
For anything which is already popular, it's probably largely already owned by those who enjoy it and for those who don't, you'll probably only really be able to sell it once.
You also need to accept that the state backs up your copyright by force. That you recieve this service makes it only fair that you give something back. Releasing your art after a limited period of time seems like a fair compromise.
I don't think copyright is some great evil though. I don't see why disney can't keep their mouse, they invented that and it's only fair. As an alterative, perhaps we could agree to a term where copyright expires after a period where the product is dumped.
This would mean your good old games would become free where the companies are too inept to keep them available on at least some digital download but not in the case when they repackage them and keep them available. Thats significantly more complicated and rife for abuse though.
I feel a copyright should be held valid and I'm perfectly fine with this. However, if it goes out of print and the rights holder has no plans to release more or re-release said albums within a reasonable period of time (Say, five or ten years) then the material should go into Public Domain but not be available for sale in any medium without the express permission of the previous rights holder. HOWEVER, that being said, should the original rights holder decide to print again, I feel they should have the right to print and charge for their production and any enhancements they should make even though the works are in Public Domain but this should mean that they cannot litigate any individual who also has Public Domain versions of the media.
It should be pretty cut and dried and not this ridiculous current version where the Copyright Law states one thing, the Media Moguls get away with another and the common person goes insane trying to figure it out. For example, per the Copyright Law and the DMCA, you are entitled to a backup of digital media that you own. It does not specify how that backup is obtained. Therefore, if you own a copy of a DVD (as this is also digital media) you are technically legally entitled to a torrent of that DVD wherever you may happen to get it and legally the Media Moguls cannot litigate you for it, but this is often brushed aside under the whole 'Illegal Downloads' umbrella they have been pushing across the board. Revamping Public Domain laws and Copyright Law to explicitly and clearly state so that those who are subject to the laws can clearly understand what they're subject to and can and cannot do would fix much of the problem but of course, the lawyers want to keep things deliberately obscure so they can get away with pretty much any 'interpretation' that makes them and their clients money.
Your analogy is wrong. If I buy a book, I only have to pay once, not once per year, or even once per read. If I buy a house, the same thing still applies. Architectural plans now also fall under copyright too, having previously been outside of it. So each house made with the same plan or a similar, derivative plan, would be fee charged by the copyright holder. However, there are few plans out there that are not themselves entirely derivative, so it wouldn't seem to be an issue for most homes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Is the Berne Convention obsolete and in need of breaking to actually preserve cultural history?"
Just cause you cant download it for free, use its images, sounds or any other part any way you see fit does not mean its disappeared to the ages. Also a lot of people, even in this thread seem to think they only made one copy of this shit, and some evil villain is sitting on it in a scrooge mcduck vault. Well its not, there's thousands if not millions of copies, for you to consume.
Just pay for your fucking elvis
I think you're off by a few hundred miles (in a Westerly direction) and about 50 years late.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
You must've missed the part where I explicitly said I've been pro file sharing and consumer freedom.
The public funding remark is simply incorrect. Most of the films I have scored have had state funding.
Apparently yes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The whole point in patents and I think copyrights should be the same way is to stimulate innovation in the sciences (I guess in the case of a lot of copyright it would cultural innovation). Anyways a big argument for shorter copyright term IMHO is its effect on both the original creators and the people that would innovate on top of it. Given enough money from their original hits (I read in Business Week this week that the Platters I think it was still rake in 65k (probably not for them though :)) just from Pandora royalities. Some of these (I think in the case of radio) it only goes to the song writer, for cable and internet it goes to everyone but still regardless 65k (probably at least 3X more if you count all sources) a year for something you did 50+ years ago why would you bother doing new stuff. You can be like the old rock bands that are always on tour and their last 10 albums were greatests hits + 1 new Christmas carol.
You need to protect things enough that people have an incentive to create them and than no more. I say use it or lose it clause: copyrights 10yrs unless you are still producing content (same industry with similar distribution/sales numbers no limited release garage tracks released in eastern Siberia when your original releases were distributed world wide) then you get another 10 years. If your telling us you need the protection to keep creating you better keep creating or you lose your existing gravy train so someone else that will innovate on it can give it a try.
Case in point: Muppet Babies. Go try to find a (legal) copy of that anywhere. You might be able to find some old VHS tapes on Amazon, but no DVDs, Blu-Rays, streaming, etc. Why? Because the show used music and clips from movies. To put the shows on DVD, you would need to get rights to every single movie clip and song snippet they used. Even if said snippet was 50 years old. The complexity of this is so overwhelming that there is no Muppet Babies DVD out there.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Actually, the price the photographer charges (all inclusive) wouldn't change much in the end, it's just that none or it would be hidden. By laying the actual cost out up front, the consumer benefits by being able to make a better informed decision. They also get something that much closer matches what they think they are buying anyway, and something that doesn't defy all sense of propriety (why in the world would anyone but the happy couple own the rights to images of their own wedding?).
Meanwhile, the photographer reduces his level of risk as he isn't forced to under charge up front and hope he makes enough on copies to at least break even just to have a chance of being hired instead of a competitor who may be in a better position to absorb risk.
For a patent you don't get grace so why should you for copyright? If you come up with a great idea and spend 20 yrs raising the money and building the factory that is your problem but come up with a new jingle? Take your sweet time finding the perfect label to sign with and wait for Christmas before you launch it, no problem. There is even more expiry on a lot of copyright stuff anyways though especially non-fiction and software. Word 98 anyone? ... Anyone? How many people are reading Borland C++ books, or books about the dotcom bust? A lot of books start smelling like month old cabbage quite quickly they either got to publish it or let it go. This is probably why a lot of books get advances upfront because few top notch people are going to bother spending 6 months to right a book about the latest flavor of OS X only to have a couple month window to try to get published sell it before the next version is getting hyped.
Its even worst than that with some photographers they keep the copyright for themselves not just so they can charge you to print additional copies but so they can use it for advertisement, sell them to stock image houses etc. The next time you buy a picture frame you could end up with a picture from your wedding already in the frame :)
I'm not going to bother reading these comments, because I'm sure somewhere therein is a freetard complaining that none of this matters because public domain takes their freedom, and that everything should be released/published under a GNU-based license.
"Public gets rights to access"?
Since when was that a legal requirement of home ownership?
That was UK, and long, long ago.
Copyright in the United States was intended to serve the public (it even says so in the Constitution) by encouraging new works by granting creators an exclusive right to their works for a limited time. That limited time was originally 15 (or 17?) years, same as patents.
I argue that it should be the same now. Certainly no more than 20 years.
Arguing with the original poster would be like arguing with someone who is claiming that the sun rises in the west and sets in the north. It's just not possible to argue with someone (like him, or yourself) that disconnected from reality.
*yawn* You don't want to do the time, don't do the crime.
Should copyright even be as long as in the pre-1978 law? Is the Berne Convention obsolete and in need of breaking to actually preserve cultural history?
Maybe it is actually a good thing that some elements of pop culture seem to find away by becoming old and out of print without being released to the public domain? This might help push our culture to continue to evolve and put new spins on old ideas rather than simply relying forever on old work. Old art should be admired but it was not always old, someone had to create it, and if we dwell too much on the past we will not create our future. Perhaps the Berne Convention, et al. spur continued innovation by limiting use of old works?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society?
Well, depending on HOW OLD that work is, that answer varies from no, to maybe, to a definitive YES - something that was very much true of copyright laws back when the term was considerably shorter.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
If an intellectual property isn't worth keeping available for sale, then the copyright owner should lose their exclusive copyright. Copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, not facilitate their abandonment and loss!
I agree with you about the registration requirements being a big problem.
The Berne convention states (Article 5 (2)): "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality" However, the US requires registration in order to get statutory damages and attorney's fees. ( http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf pg 7) I wonder if registration could be required for things like takedown notices.
I do wonder how far it would be possible to go without needing to modify the Berne convention. For example, it states (Article 9 (2)) that: "It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author." It might be possible to argue that orphan works are a special case in that they are not being normally exploited and the author has abandoned their legitimate interests.
I make computer games in my spare time. I put them for free on my website as a portfolio and because I'm a generally nice guy.
That is nice.
In your case I'm required to pay extra taxes because I've created something that I want to share for free under my own terms.
Well, I'm not the earlier poster, I can't comment on his proposal, but mine is probably not too different.
Provided that no one else has a copyright or patent that would prohibit you from doing so, having a copyright doesn't help you. A copyright isn't a right to share a work; it's a right to prevent other people from sharing a work. If your work is in the public domain, you can still host your games on your own website, you can put a credit in the game, and you can ask for feedback.
A copyright is only useful if you want to keep other people from hosting them as well, making modifications, etc. If you would've created and published your games even if you couldn't control what other people do with them, why do you feel a need to? If you wouldn't've created and published it without that control, that's fine, but if you're getting power over other people, some sort of quid pro quo is hardly too much to ask.
I think that for published works, copyrights should only be granted if the rightful applicant registers the copyright with the Copyright Office. Further, the copyright term should be quite short, with a number of renewals available (depending perhaps on the type of work), provided that the rightful applicant files for a renewal in a timely fashion. And there should be some fee associated with registration and renewal, though it should probably be fairly modest; the idea is simply to present an easily-jumped hurdle so that the applicant has to think about whether or not he wants a copyright, without actually being a prohibitive amount.
Patent fees can vary depending on whether the inventor is a small or large entity (e.g. a single person working in a garage or IBM); perhaps the fees for copyrights could vary depending on the applicant's ability to pay (although again, they should still be large enough even for the smallest author to have to stop and think).
This is all because copyrights are intended to be an incentive to authors to create and publish works which otherwise would not have been created and published, all in order to increase the size of the public domain as fully and rapidly as possible. If an author would have created and published a work regardless of copyright, he didn't need the incentive, and shouldn't receive it. Since we can't read minds, the best way to determine who should get a copyright and who shouldn't is to have them identify themselves. If an author cares about copyright, he will take action to get one; if the author does not care, he will take no action at all. Thus it has to be an opt-in system.
A modest fee helps to keep applicants from just mindlessly getting copyrights even when unnecessary. After all, even the internal memos and papers generated by a company in the ordinary course of business are usually copyrightable. If they can automatically get rights over them that they don't otherwise care about, they very well may, just to cover their asses. But if it affects their bottom line, they won't bother unless it's worth it on a per-work basis. In fact, we even know from our long and distinguished history with copyright registrations and renewals that most works won't be copyrighted, and most copyrighted works won't be renewed -- getting them into the public domain all the faster because no one actually cares enough to keep them out when it comes down to time, effort, and money.
(People usually like to object that this is onerous for photographers, but we already have procedures for registering multiple works under a single application now. There's no reason to think that photographers would have a hard time of it, though I bet that as a rule they too would not bother with copyrights for most of their photos
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I don't recall if this changed recently, but in the US there was a one year (previously two year) grace period for patents.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I wouldn't have a problem with these long terms if there was a requirement to renew every 10 years or so. What pisses me off is the works that no longer have commercial value, you can't even find the "owners" without spending many thousands, and yet still I'm a felon if I copy them. That makes no sense. Set a 10 year renewal with a modest fee,
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I think that is the whole "patented pending" sort of thing. What I mean is they don't start your patent expiry after you actually have your product on the shelves. If you take too long too bad. Not sure why copyright things like books should be any different. Value is most definitely lost over time "Who Let the Dogs Out" was relevant for ~3 months, you miss it too bad. Similarly, though I guess the free market would discount things appropriately, most books are only relevant for a short period of time. Even with fiction who wants to read the "new" detective fiction book featuring a crime that happened in the latest model of a Chevy Bel Air? Most books won't end up being great classics if they didn't come out than the next book on the shelf would get a buy instead bathroom/plane reading isn't that picky (and you should see my mother go through romantic trash books, 1-2 a day she doesn't care who wrote what she'll read them all).
Yes, so? Or another publisher from distributing it for free and putting the second one out of business. The whole point is that copyright is entirely artificial and its sole original purpose is to give the original creator a reasonable change to live off his work. It is not there to protect publishers at all (but today primarily misused for that purpose). It is not intended to make creative people rich. And there really is no reason why somebody should own or control what they wrote. They do own the right to be identified as its author, but that is it. Other than that, a reasonable protection time that makes sure they get the initial sales is an acceptable trade-off, but that is it. 8 or 12 years is already pretty long for that. 4 years would more likely be realistic, but I do acknowledge that writers, musicians, etc. do have downtimes and may not be able to be creative for a few years on occasion. Both 8 and 12 years would provide amply for that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It is not an "explanation", it is the historic facts. Copyright was created because play-writers would literally starve, because others sold their writings in volume immediately after they themselves published. So you have it backwards: It was not created to create incentives to create, creative people do that all by themselves. Copyright was created to stop massive counter-incentives to being creative that were cropping up, namely the publishers (at that time called "printers"), that destroyed any chance of the play-writers earning something from their works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What it says and what it really is for are two different things. The US did not invent copyright, and they cannot change the historic facts as to why it was created. The reasoning on your Constitution is just marketing bullshit.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not to mention the SOPA protests.
I think that is the whole "patented pending" sort of thing.
Patent pending doesn't mean anything in the American patent system, AFAIK. And it's considered fraudulent if no patent application has been filed.
The grace period I was referring to comes from the novelty requirement: you can't get a patent if the invention was disclosed or patented elsewhere, or if the invention was in public use or on sale, more than one year prior to the filing date. (IIRC; I'm not a patent attorney) This includes the inventor's own actions. My understanding is that in some countries, if an invention is disclosed it is instantly unpatentable.
Once the application is filed, it may take some time for the patent to issue, but the patent term runs for 20 years from filing now, so it's of no matter. And FYI, this may start well before the product is out for sale. Check out the pharmaceutical industry for some good examples.
As for copyrights, well, we do only want to encourage works to be created and published (where publication includes public performance, etc.); unpublished works don't do anything for society. But neither do we want authors to have to be wary of people pirating their manuscripts before a work is published. And neither do we want authors sitting on manuscripts instead of publishing them in a timely fashion.
There's not any great solutions, given that you can't really determine for sure whether an author was still tinkering with the work, or whether he was sitting on it, but we ought to have a term of years for unpublished works that's not excessive, and limited remedies against infringers to help nudge them in the right direction. And ultimately, if the author still isn't releasing his work, well, then he's not really doing anything that benefits the public, while a manuscript pirate would be. Hard to side with the author in such extreme cases.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool. I'm barely making ends meet as it is, but I do it because I love this work. However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music, I'd have to get another job
If you define Free Contemporary Music as music that was created around or before the year 1900 or so, then yes, you're right. With the copyright extensions that have been put through since 1976, that are retroactively applied to existing copyrights, nothing made after 1910 is yet in the public domain.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
>
Consider the majority of professional photographers who deal primarily with individual, personal clients. The photographer has only two real choices: charge lots more for doing the initial job (because they know full well that they're never going to sell any copies) or switch to a different market altogether. That doesn't benefit the consumer, does it? It just means those services cease to be available, not because the services aren't wanted any more but because the majority of consumers are too dishonest to be worth dealing with.
Sadly, I don't think there's a realistic solution to this. Not while the average consumer continues to believe it's okay to rip off the author because 'it's just for personal use'.
When I am commissioning some photography, I'm much more willing to pay a fair amount up-front and have unrestricted use of the works rather than pay far below what the actual market rate should be for the initial work and then have to pay inflated prices for prints of said works.
Sure, some people shopping around for, say, a wedding photographer will pick someone who charges a relative pittance up-front, not realising that they're going to get stung when it comes time to get some prints of the photos and you'll never be able to get the negatives or RAW files, but I specifically shopped around for a photographer who charged a higher, yet fair, amount up-front to cover the work they put in on the day and the work involved in processing and retouching the photos, but then sold me prints for what they cost to print (possibly with a small markup) and gave me the RAW files on disc.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Good info thanks.
Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author. I might like to read that unpublished book but if they don't chose to publish it than I don't have a write too. Even if the person is already a well known professional writer they still should have the right to only publish some of the stories and keep some of them as personal projects keep them for later years so they can go away for a while without losing their audience because nothing new comes out etc.
It could just be the author doesn't think it is as good as the rest of their stuff and isn't interested in working on it any more so stops. Pirating and then publishing this kind of think is similar to publishing someone's diary: it is still their personal ideas for them to chose to share with or without payment involved as they see fit.
plenty of things from the past have been re-popularized. are you not familiar with "retro"?
Figure out how to break Berne, and this might actually happen. Article 5(2): "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality" Formalities include registration. (Tho' there is no requirement that it be a felony in Berne.) http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html
Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author. I might like to read that unpublished book but if they don't chose to publish it than I don't have a write too
I agree, but I feel no obligation to enable this behavior by giving them copyrights when they engage in such behavior. Let them do that on their own dime as it were. Copyright should encourage publication, otherwise what good is it?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The way Western democratic countries are run?
For one.
For another, when you open up your private place to business, you lose some rights of privacy there too.
Try again. The use of copyright to protect authors and guarantee them some income came *long* after copyright was invented. Copyright was invented for *publishers*, to protect their business against the cheap, unlicensed printing presses that started up shortly after the Gutenberg press was invented.
It was also designed to restrict the publication of Bibles: Bibles in the hands of non-priests? What heresy might people come up with?!!? And they most certainly *did* come up with interpretations not sanctioned by their Popes and Bishops.
I think it is a matter of protecting personal property at that point. Perhaps theft laws could deal with it I guess but it seems kind of strange to protect a creators rights only if they are going to publish. It pretty much says "one way or another this will be published, do you want your cut or not?" Things might get leaked before they are good enough for the author to want to share it with others, the story could involve personal details that they don't wish to share but just felt compelled to write about etc. Like a conversation until the person who created the ideas wants to share it, and who they chose to share it with, there should be the expectation of privacy. Granting copyright to everything that the author doesn't explicitly grant rights to seems to be a pretty good way of helping protect privacy.
> The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool.
Wait, why shouldn't this be allowed? I thought the reason to make art was to make something *new*, not to remake what already exists. If your new stuff is not adding anything on top of the old stuff, there is no reason you should be paid.
"However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music"
Are you seriously labeling music from 1956 "contemporary"? That's a stretch. In 1956, my parents weren't even born yeat and my grandmother wasn't allowed to Vote in Mississippi. We hadn't even been to the moon yet.
I understand where you're coming from, but no offense intended: I seriously think you are overvaluing your artistic contributions if you're willing to label something from the late 50's as "contemporary".
And that sort of music is actually fairly movie-specific. It's not like you can film another movie and "lift" the score from another to use it - it's completely wrong and generates the wrong mood, etc.
Scores are very source-specific and are designed to fit the theme, mood and action in the movie. Sometimes a movie trailer will use another movie's score (I think the very early Robocop promo trailers used the Terminator score), but that's just a 30 second clip.
At best, a composer will use a score written by someone else for inspiration for a sequel - but that's because the themes are identifiable to that series.
People who are into soundtracks use them as a way to :relive" sequences of the film - a score by a good composer will evoke the same feelings that happened in the movie. In fact, a score is often the primary emotion manipulator in a movie - take it away and the movie will feel lacking. But take away the pictures and the impact of the movie will still be there.
The only worry as a score composer? The current era of Hollywood remakes where they take 15+ year old films and remake them, at which point the new composer will draw inspiration from the old score.
Would anybody like a free copy of Forbidden Planet?
TL; DR version: The Internet has pretty much made these outdated copyright laws somewhat irrelevant, merely an annoying series of obstacles that forced all of humanity's cultural traffic to reroute itself around them.
The only time the public domain issue might be a problem would be for those who want to make products for commercial exploitation. One suggested solution might be to crowd-fund them if production budgets are needed, and just give the result away for free!
As long as there is no expectation of direct financial gain and we manage to stay globally connected (regardless of who controls the copyrights), our cultural heritage is pretty much guaranteed to safely survive.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
I have to say that as ambient music for working, the tracks on your homepage are terrific. I understand them to have been written for film scores, also a form of ambient music. I actually had to pause Beethoven's 9th to listen to them and I figured that I would bail out after a track or three to get back to my precious. But I'm now up to the 12th track (Interstellar Travel) and thoroughly enjoying it. They are more dramatic (remind me of Wagner) than I usually listen to, but they are not excessively dramatic like most Western film scores. I think that one would call that 'tasteful'.
I hope to be nearby in Tromso in a few months, are the films playing outside of Finland?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I do not get paid for work I did 8 years ago and I don't think you should either.
Did you take a loss on the work you did 8 years ago as an investment in its future value?
Why would a single entity pay a composer up front for the months or years it takes to create a symphony, when as soon as the work is release it has no financial value anymore? The composer or author works unpaid for long periods time as an investment for future earnings. I agree that it shouldn't be 70+ years, but a decade or even the author's lifetime really is reasonable. Extending that to a corporation's lifetime, or to heirs, it excessive to the point of being offensive.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It benefits society to have multiple sources for copies of works, and to have various sorts of copies of those works. You can go to a bookstore and buy copies of Shakespeare, and some of them will be of high quality, and others will be cheap, and you can go online and download the same works for free.
It also benefits society to encourage people to create new works of art, and not to simple repackage currently-existing material generation after generation (derivative works). Nobody but the composer or author is investing the time (and money for food and rent and kids' expenses) while the work is being created, except in the rare cases of already-established artists. And even in the case of the already-established artist, how do you think that they because established.
Creating art is an investment. Denying a return on that investment would prevent art from being created.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool.
They already have the incentive to use their vast back-catalogs. Nothing's changed there. It's always going to be cheaper to resell old stuff than pay for new stuff. Free stuff will be distributed by anybody and everybody - little profit in it and at least the benefit is going to be distributed more fairly. Incidentally, that's why free stuff is more valuable than paid stuff, even when sold at 1c/copy.
It's almost like there's no one who cares about the little guy anymore.
We do, just in a more sophisticated way than you are doing.
Copyright, by definition, benefits copiers (=publishers), not creators like yourself. You're unlikely to make any significant money, whether it's because you've gone your own way and don't have access to the distribution and advertising networks or because you have gotten in bed with them and they are taking the lion's share because they hold the power.
I'll repeat that: copyright intrinsically benefits copiers, not creators. Reward is tied to the number of copies distributed/advertised, not to the quality of the creation. The system is fundamentally unfair and until a fairer system is developed I for one and am just going to ignore it. Personally, I thumb my nose at the big distributors and try to support small players. That's a lot more fair than the current system.
And then that same book could be legally copied from day one.
And that sort of music is actually fairly movie-specific. It's not like you can film another movie and "lift" the score from another to use it - it's completely wrong and generates the wrong mood, etc.
Scores are very source-specific and are designed to fit the theme, mood and action in the movie. Sometimes a movie trailer will use another movie's score (I think the very early Robocop promo trailers used the Terminator score), but that's just a 30 second clip.
At best, a composer will use a score written by someone else for inspiration for a sequel - but that's because the themes are identifiable to that series.
People who are into soundtracks use them as a way to :relive" sequences of the film - a score by a good composer will evoke the same feelings that happened in the movie. In fact, a score is often the primary emotion manipulator in a movie - take it away and the movie will feel lacking. But take away the pictures and the impact of the movie will still be there.
The only worry as a score composer? The current era of Hollywood remakes where they take 15+ year old films and remake them, at which point the new composer will draw inspiration from the old score.
I've worked on quite a few so indeed I know how it works. I've seen how in Hollywood especially the temp tracks are almost gospel, and sometimes the expectation is to pretty much plagiarize it. If the studios could just plaster Gladiator all over their new films for free today, you can be sure they would.
But I don't think even that matters. Trying to define what is best for art is almost as impossible an endeavor as is defining art. Again, most of new stuff is really derivative anyway, so it'd just be one step further into that pit. Many people do prefer originality, so not everything would be the same. But the point is, no one knows the extent of this change.
So I worry about what happens to the people who make a living on creating content, if you radically change the system suddenly. There's an immense amount of conjecture here about an industry most don't really know enough about. It reminds me of when I see people suggesting how bands should make money instead of selling records. You know, sell T-shirts and all that. Not realistic. It's the typical cognitive dissonance from applying an ideology to the extreme.
The fact is, no one really knows what would happen. That's why you should do incremental, not radical changes. Maybe it would be fine for mostly everyone. We don't know. People who aren't intimately familiar with the workings of an industry definitely don't. I think those in the technology world of all people should know how frustrating it is when people (e.g. politicians) that have at best a cursory understanding of an issue try to tell others how it should work.
Just as an example, CRCulver's reply above is completely nonsensical with its art music tangent that applies to a tiny niche of composers, and furthermore offensive with its ad hominem about low brow cinema (take a look at my list; Nanking for example was on the documentary Oscar shortlist, and I've been nominated for the Finnish Film Award for The Home of Dark Butterflies). Yet it's at 5, Insightful, because it fits the ideological narrative that has become popular in tech circles.
Guys, if you want to be of the opinion that copyright has to be abolished even if it hurts a lot of people, that's fine. I'm totally ok with that, if you sincerely think that. But please don't make up stuff to try to support that case.
I would rather everyone try
There are situations where it does make sense - for example, parts of Tolkien's works are much older than the rest of the books they are published in (especially parts of the Silmarillion and History of Middle Earth, or the unfinished works), or books which were previously censored or were unpublishable at the time for some other reason.
Trademarks have probably evolved even further form their original intent than copyrights, since originally they were about consumer protection and preventing passing off, whereas now they've become almost a property right and can be used as a weapon even where there is no possibility of confusion.
There is no universal law that says copyright was granted in the U.S. for the same reason as it was previously created in England. They are separate laws, created under different conditions, by different people.
You can believe it is bullshit if you like, but your opinion does not make it so.
Say one has what could become a big hit if it were promoted well. How should one overcome the long-term anticompetitive deals between the established proprietary music industry and the established promotion channels such as radio and television?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is why I like the idea of an escalating fee schedule for copyright. First 7 or 14 years, very small fee. And then double it every 7 years. You could renew copyright indefinitely, so long as it was financially viable for you to do so, but when a given copyright became unprofitable for you, then you could let it go into the public domain.
Copyright was never intended to be permanent for any work.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In the current legislation, if I don't claim copyright on my creation anyone can download it, edit it, change the credits screen, repost it and claim it as their own.
And this has happened quite a few times in the past. In each case Ive been able to succesfully contact the webhost, show my previous creation and get them to take it down.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it, except by keeping everything closed source and hoping no one decompiles it.
While I would certainly agree that the current copyright system is flawed, I don't think taxing the creators is the best solution.
An other example, if I post a photograph I've taken online, without a copyright system, Hallmark could take that photo and make a christmas card out of it and sell it without any credit or other requirements. Your suggestion would mean that to protect every photograph, poem, text, book, song, creation, you make, you have to pay money or else anyone can copy it, repackage it and sell it for big bucks.
There is a reason copyright is such a broad and wide reaching legislation, it's to protect the citizens and I'm happy it's there in it's broadness. Not necesserely in it's longetivity though.
Because like every other occupation on earth, why aren't I being paid in perpetuity for work that I did a decade ago?
If you want more income, perhaps you can make a new song, or go on tour and get touring money (which I might note is how most bands actually GET most of their income).
But seriously, stop trying to retire off of something you made a decade ago. A roofer isn't getting paid for every day that the shingles are on the house, and you shouldn't be paid for every time a song is listened to.
You want money, go and MAKE it instead of just sitting at home and getting free money mailed to you.
if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music
The issue is with your definition of contemporary. Think of the music 20 years ago. Would you consider it "hip"? Worthy of sticking behind an add for a new phone? Now consider all the songs from 40 years ago that you still hear today. The really good stuff is the classics and are tied to us culturally. As pieces of history. Often documenting historical events. The vast majority (ie, YOUR music) is simply forgotten and unplayed. If you are lucky enough to be a rockstar, you don't need the money. If you're not a rockstar, decades latter your copyright isn't worth anything.
Also, for "cold hard math" you seem to have a lack of actual numbers.
Sorry, but limiting copyright is not pro big business. The only people who care about copyright from 70+ years ago are big businesses that own portfolios of intellectual property. And get this, if 20 year later your public domain work starts getting used a lot (those thieves!), don't you think that your new works would garner a little more attention. I mean, that's why you put out some of your music for free, right?
The legitimate way was to have bought a copy when they were available.
Time machines do not exist. And when were copies of the television series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea available for purchase?
if I start to sell copies of an artistic work, and then stop doing so, that's my prerogative.
If you stop selling copies, how does it "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" for the government to force everyone else not to treat this as an opportunity to make and sell copies?
This dread I carry hangs heavy in my heart. The woe of a generation is mine to exude through every more of my skin, every tear, every half-hearted sigh. What have we gained if we have already lost all? That which was the very cornerstone of our society, LOST I say. That perfect pearl, that wondrous ever-glistening ray of hope, that historic work of cultural significance, that exquisite MASTERPIECE!
Muppet Babies. On DVD.
so what you are saying is, it is ok for big business to take anything a little guy makes? And just because the value of something goes down, doesn't mean it is no longer profitable.
I didn't realize Mortimer Mouse was based on a Grimm Fairy Tale. But yes a modern film maker still has the same luxuries. A modern filmmaker can still make a movie on John Carter or even one of the Brother Grimm Fairy Tales. Modern Copyright doesn't make it difficult at all.
What I mean is they don't start your patent expiry after you actually have your product on the shelves.
U.S. patent terms for products that are "subject to a regulatory review period", such as new drugs, are routinely extended by the USPTO for undue delay by the FDA or other regulator. For example, the term of the patent on Xenical (orlistat) was extended for several years pursuant to 35 USC 156.
In the current legislation, if I don't claim copyright on my creation anyone can download it, edit it, change the credits screen, repost it and claim it as their own.
More accurately, assuming you're in the US, you'd have to specifically disclaim copyright and place the work in the public domain. It's an affirmative act, not a passive failure to claim a copyright (which would have no effect). That is, copyright is currently an opt-out system. You're automatically opted in even if you take no action.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control? I'm not interested in trying to wring money out from you, or in penalizing you. I just think that all works should be in the public domain unless they are both copyrightable and the author (or other legitimate claimant) wants a specific work copyrighted. The fees are basically just to prevent people from casually saying that they want everything copyrighted. I want them to think about it, and to think about whether it's worth it to them.
An other example, if I post a photograph I've taken online, without a copyright system, Hallmark could take that photo and make a christmas card out of it and sell it without any credit or other requirements.
Yes. So what? If you, the author, don't care about it enough to pay, say, a dollar, annually, why should I care if Hallmark uses it? It's better that someone uses it productively than that no one does. By all means, use it yourself, or license it to someone who will. But I absolutely don't understand the desire to not only fail to make commercial, copyright-related use of a work oneself and to deny others the right to do so. It strikes me as being very miserly. I don't see why the law should enable this behavior.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author
If a work has not been published or exhibited, there are adequate penalties for trade secret violation. It does not require copyright. But would you continue to side with the author after the author's death?
It also benefits society to encourage people to create new works of art, and not to simple repackage currently-existing material generation after generation (derivative works).
Of course, there's nothing wrong with derivative works. Shakespeare had like one original plot idea in his life; almost all of his stuff was derivative. And it's quite good. Disney does this a lot too, with all their fairy tale movies.
Creating art is an investment. Denying a return on that investment would prevent art from being created.
Copyright is a fairly crappy investment; most works don't recoup their costs from copyright-related income. And copyrights are generally excessive, burdening the public while not benefiting the author (e.g out of print books that nevertheless are encumbered with life+70 year terms).
I'm happy to see copyright reformed to produce the greatest benefit to society, and should this happen to benefit authors, then that's great too. And yes, I think that some amount of copyright probably is better for society than having none at all. But having too much copyright can be worse than having the right amount, and in excess, can actually be worse than having no copyright whatsoever.
The trick is to find the right amount. IMO we've gone too far and will have to shrink it to get to that sweet spot. But there were plenty of authors working when copyright lasted for a shorter period of time, and covered fewer types of works, and had fewer types of protection. If we ditched the 1976 Act and went back to, say, the 1909 Act that saw the golden ages of movies, television, jazz, rock, and no small amount of great literature and works of fine art, I think we'd somehow survive.
(This isn't an endorsement of the 1909 Act, however, nor do I mean to merely go back to a preexisting law)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yes, the theft of a manuscript (as distinct from pirating it) would clearly be some sort of tort -- conversion or trespass to chattels or unjust enrichment or something. But once the work was out there, it wouldn't be a substitute for copyright. That is, there would be an action against the person or persons who actually stole it, but not against unrelated third parties who merely republished what had been published. This presupposes though that access to the work is wrongfully gained. If such a work were shared with someone without any conditions, publishing it would not be wrongful at all.
it seems kind of strange to protect a creators rights only if they are going to publish
Well, publication is an essential part of what copyright is meant to encourage. What good are unpublished works to the public?
It pretty much says "one way or another this will be published, do you want your cut or not?"
Well, there's no obligation that the works ever get published. The vast majority will never be interesting to anyone and will likely just be lost once people stop preserving the few or only copies that exist. Did your parents really save every single drawing you ever made in elementary school? Even the ones they put on the fridge?
Meanwhile, bear in mind that we have this now. Under current US law, the copyright on unpublished works does expire eventually (for whatever that's worth) and it already expired ten years ago now on a big backlog of them that were not published within a certain time.
Things might get leaked before they are good enough for the author to want to share it with others, the story could involve personal details that they don't wish to share but just felt compelled to write about etc. Like a conversation until the person who created the ideas wants to share it, and who they chose to share it with, there should be the expectation of privacy. Granting copyright to everything that the author doesn't explicitly grant rights to seems to be a pretty good way of helping protect privacy.
No, I don't think so. We already have laws regarding privacy. But copyright requires that the work be fixed in some medium of expression. Suppose that the work leaked before it was fixed, e.g. by the author simply telling someone about what was in his head which had not yet been committed to paper. Then copyright wouldn't apply, but the loss of privacy would be exactly as severe. And likewise, copyright can cover things about which there is no privacy interest at all; an author might have decided not to publish merely due to the flip of a coin rather than any other consideration as to the quality of the work, etc.
If you're concerned about privacy, why not have a separate privacy law that doesn't interfere with copyright? Let copyright stick to the progress of science and not get misused for other purposes.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There are situations where it does make sense - for example, parts of Tolkien's works are much older than the rest of the books they are published in (especially parts of the Silmarillion and History of Middle Earth, or the unfinished works), or books which were previously censored or were unpublishable at the time for some other reason.
I don't see why this would merit protection. Just because Tolkien is Tolkien doesn't justify granting copyrights, and I really don't see any other rationale here. Perhaps you'd like to expand on your post?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
s/take/buy at a price you demand/. Wasn't the whole officially stated point of copyright[1] to make sure the author is properly rewarded for his work?
As for the value of something going down -- if the monopoly rights in a given work no longer generate that much profit, this means any further blocking of the public is no longer in society's interest. That the work generated profits before proves it is valuable, and if ways of monetizing that value are drying out, it's time for the public to benefit.
[1]. The true point was to ensure a stream of bribes for the king from printing outfits. Same for patents, you can read of an early attempt to limit king's abuse here.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We agree on every point, but I would like to clarify two:
1) Derivative works are great, but as a supplement to and not a replacement for original works.
2) The goal of copyright reform should be to produce the greatest benefit to society, but there is no way possible for it to benefit society if it does not benefit authors, i.e. produce incentive (financial) for the creation of new works.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control?
My website is my portfolio, and because of the games and resources I have created I have gotten several jobs. So this is important to me. This consists in part out of a few dozen games I've created but also out of hundreds of tutorials and articles I've written, most of which are shared under a creative commons attribution license.
While it is important for me to protect my portfolio, at $1/piece/year this would be in the neighborhood of $200/year. Currently I have some sparsely spread advertisement on my website that just covers the hosting cost. This means that hosting tutorials and resources to help the community is costing me money. That would likely result in me taking most of them down and hiding them from public.
In the past I have gotten regular complaints and negative press that I'm stealing other people's idea and re-hosting them under my own name, while in fact it was reverse. In those cases I have managed to rectify the situation by using the copyright law to get the offending items taken down, or if that creater did read the license, point people to the relevant credits page.
Without copyright law I will get a lot more bad press and negative feedback for helping others. So I do not wish to share my creations unprotected and I find a Create Commons Attribution license is a very fair deal to help these people.
I started this website as a student, and at the time did not have a lot of income that I could give $200/year as loose change for copyright. So then end result would be that I would not have shared these items and kept them private.
... a dollar, annually,
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1. The administrative cost alone to handle would easily be a hundredfold of this value in any government system. Which also means you are not asking a student like I was for $200/year but $20000/year which I would surely have declined.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
True, if someone steals my work and becomes very rich with it, I'm not directly hurt. But I've did quite a bit of the work to create the resource and I'm not paid for that because I don't have the money and the marketing drive to protect myself. I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation. Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Also, lets say your local photo print shop copies all your photos and sells them to a marketing firm. And the marketing firm decides to start a new ad campaign, picks a photo of your dog at random because of its looks, and uses it as the model for their new ad campaign against rabies.
Copyright law prevents them from doing this, without it you'd have a famous dog and nobody would ever visit you again if they found your dog has rabies.
Copyright law is very broadly defined and protects basically any original creation. This has a lot of uses and not all are bad. While the current system certainly has flaws I don't think an extra layer of bureaucracy solves it, this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corporations.
My freeware games
Not that I expect it to ever happen, I'd like to see two things:
1) I would love to see 10 years -- 10 years for copyrights, patents, and to a certain degree, trademarks. Yes, even trademarks. A business name (like Microsoft) or a person's name (like an J.K. Rowling) should distinguish between "the real" deal and "a knockoff". (A business name trademark would be permanent.) My argument is this: if someone wants to make a better Mickey Mouse, then why not? If I can create a Mickey Mouse that makes me money, why shouldn't I? It's not like anyone will confuse my Mickey Mouse with Disney's. If a parents wants to show a wholesome movie (instead of an explicit one) to their kids, they can look for the Disney brand. Another example: If I want to make a Star Wars movie, why shouldn't I? So long as I don't say or imply that my works are from Lucas Arts or Disney, I don't see a problem with that? There's nothing stopping Disney / Lucas Arts from making their movies. They can out market me anyway... as long as they give society what they want. (This is what copyrights, patents, and trademarks are pretty much about: giving society what they want.)
2) If you have something to copyright, patent, or trademark, then you must set a price and everyone gets the same deal. If I invent a widget and patent it, I cannot stop my competitors from using it... as long they pay me the price that everyone else is paying. No favoritism. If I write code and copyright it (through $government copyright system), then everyone can use my code after paying me a certain price. My allies can work closely with me on improvements before I copyright it, so we may have an advantage over the next iteration of my product, but after all is said and done, everyone will be able to use it. No hording. No holding back on technology because you want to sit on a patent and hurt everyone else.
After the 10 years expires, it's a free for all. You're free to copy and use it for personal and business use. This applies to movies, books, drug creation (in the pharmaceutical industries), car design, electronics, furniture, space ships, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Are there problems with my ideas? Yes. Do I have all the answers to make this work perfectly? No. I'd like to see others flush it out, but overall, I think society would gain a tremendous boost of creativity, technological advancement, and companies would still make lots of money in those 10 years. It would also open up a lot of opportunities for the little guy and that's where the best creativity usually comes from.
I wonder if, on that basis, one could argue that any retroactive copyright extension is unconstitutional. It does nothing to encourage new works to extend the copyright on existing works by few years every few years. One might even make the argument that it discourages new works by allowing content management entities to continue to profit off of existing works.
Who will argue against it that has any kind of lobbying clout? Google?
I did not talk about "granting copyright". I did talk about the reason it was invented. I do understand that for US people it is always difficult to acknowledge some things (well, in fact most things) were not invented in the US. But Copyright was copied from the British for exactly the same reasons they dis invent and introduce it. The "spin" put on it in the US constitution non-withstanding. At least you should be able to recognize spin when it stares you in the face....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, I'd say that neither original nor derivative works are inherently better than the other; the goal should be to maximize the number of works. The artistic choices of authors and of what does well in the market will take care of the ratio; copyright policy needn't be used to discriminate.
And as for authorial benefits, there is one way that society can benefit without copyright policy benefiting authors, and that is if there is no possible copyright law that can benefit society more than having no copyright law at all, in which case, there should be no such law. The abolitionists think that this is what we should do, but I'm not convinced that copyright can never provide a greater benefit for the public than would be enjoyed without it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1.
You've got two misconceptions here.
First, unless you're big enough to buy a lot of political influence, governments aren't going to protect your works at all. If there's some sort of dispute it will still be up to you to do something about it, such as hiring an attorney, going to court, etc. What I'm describing is a mere registry system that would be the sole way for you to show, in such a proceeding, that you claim a copyright over a particular work.
Second, copyrights have never been worldwide in nature. They're all national -- a US copyright is different from a UK copyright which is different from a Japanese copyright and so on. People think that there is an international copyright law that they can rely upon, but really all that is is a set of minimum standards that each country is expected to implement in some way, and agreements to grant national rights to foreigners if they are granted rights abroad. E.g. if someone in the UK writes a book, the UK can only grant them a British copyright, but the US would be willing to grant them an Americsn copyright.
All I'm interested in is US copyright law; I don't care much about what the rest of the world does. I'd like to see the US treat foreign authors just like it does American authors, and I'd like to see us implement a system of formalities that would be equally applicable to authors seeking US copyrights whatever their nationality. Thus, the $1 fee I've been describing would only help you in the US. If the UK had a similar law and charged £1, you'd have to pay both separately to secure rights in each place.
It's all part of getting works into the public domain as much as possible as fast as possible, while providing copyrights when sought. If an author writes and publishes a book abroad, with no intention of bringing it to the US himself, and thus doesn't bother to get a US copyright, it benefits the people of the United States to have the work in the public domain here so that anyone else can step in and do what the author has failed to do. The same logic applies elsewhere; if a US author ignores the market in Nepal or somewhere, why would it be in the best interests of that place to grant rights in the work regardless?
I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation.
Well, they wouldn't be entitled to; copyrights would still only be able to be granted to the author. This is the sort of thing we'd want to deter with strong civil and criminal enforcement methods, as it is both fraud against the government and the public. There are laws against this sort of thing now but they'll need to be strengthened.
Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Again, without harm, I don't see why. Suppose you own a plot of land that has no evident economic value -- nothing grows there, it's inconveniently located, has no known redeeming qualities at all, but you own it completely. If you sell it to someone else for the low price that it is worth, but then they promptly discover that there is a valuable vein of gold there, located just below the diamond-bearing rock and just above the plentiful oil deposits, you'll probably wind up kicking yourself. But I don't see how you could manage to undo the sale or get a share of the profits; you had your chance and you gave it up.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corpora
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"The US did not invent copyright, and they cannot change the historic facts as to why it was created. The reasoning on your Constitution is just marketing bullshit."
My argument was that in the United States, copyright was demonstrably implemented for a purpose different from what you claimed. The "reasoning on [our] Constitution" is far from bullshit, however it is true that Congress, over the 200+ years since, has made something of a mockery of it. Still, those are two different things.
So as I said before, I don't believe the government can do anything for $1/year, the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
If I make a digital creation and somebody pirates it in for instance Congo, I'm probably not loosing a potential customer and missing money. However if that same person uploads my creation online then anyone worldwide can download this. They are downloading a creation from a Congo-lean which is not copyrighted in any country worldwide. That this person would not have been entitled to create this if he would have lived in a country with copyright is regardless, he did nothing illegal in his country and you download an unprotected work.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point.
Your idea would basically make it impossible to create copyrighted content and protect it, given that we live a global economy.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
I'm not saying a work is worthless to me, it's just not worth to pay thousands of dollars a year to protect it globally. And without it, if you succeeded with your idea locally you have no ability to go global because somebody else has very likely already copied it there. It also means that if I make a significant investment to create something, be it money or time, if I don't instantly copyright it globally people can freely copy my work into that nation, saturate the market and make it impossible to sell my idea there.
I fully agree with you that the current system is flawed, but you are converting it to the patent system which in my opinion is way more flawed then the copyright system at this point. I personally think the proper solution should be in reasonable terms after which copyright ends together with clear and useful fair use legislation. And also add clear and appropriate punishment for copyright violation. I'm from the Netherlands and I find the current law here that downloading is not illegal but uploading is quite reasonable.
However as soon as you start putting tax in this on a per country basis you break the entire worldwide market of digital and easily copy-able goods. That makes it near impossible for consumers to earn money online and would break the whole economy of websites, ebooks, movies, music and anything else that is effortless to copy.
My freeware games
the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
It's not intended to cover its own costs. As I said, the point is to limit copyrights to those works where the author or other legitimate claimant actively wants a copyright enough to take some action to get it. So the fee is just a token; people will stop and think more if there's some cost involved. Actual funding of the Copyright Office should come out of general tax revenue -- after all, if copyright is meant to benefit the public interest, there's nothing wrong with the public bearing the cost of administrating it.
Neither should copyright registrations be given evidentiary weight as to the copyrightability of works, thus eliminating the need for examination. The point is that applicants have registered a claim over something. If there's a dispute, courts are in a better position to make these determinations if there is a dispute, and if no dispute arises, who cares? In fact, right now there is but the most trivial level of examination, meant to get rid of cases where a work is obviously not copyrightable, but which is given way too much respect by the courts, as if it were a real patent or trademark examination (and we all know that those are not too thorough these days either).
So it is perhaps a bit more like domain name registration. Anyone can come along and try to register coca-cola.com if it's available, but should a dispute arise, getting there first may not be of much help.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
Which is much like the patent system. Personally I'd hope that international copyright law would consist of two commonly held principles: first, national treatment -- that all countries should treat foreigners the same as their own people; second, mutual compatibility -- that whatever sort of copyright law each country decides to offer, it is not so incompatible with the law of another country that they are rendered mutually exclusive.
Of course, I'd expect that absent outside pressure, a lot of the world would abandon copyright altogether. That's fine with me. As I said, I'm interested in what the US does, and not at all interested in what other countries do. If we are going to act in our own best interest, it would be pretty hypocritical to insist that others not act in theirs.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point
No, copyright (at least in the US) already deals with this issue. If something is copyrighted in the US, importing copies or downloading from another country where the work is in the public domain is prohibited, because if it were allowed it would clearly undermine the whole system. Enforcement can be a pain in the ass, but this is already the case. And it has been known to happen in real life.
Remember the kerfuffle a couple of years ago when Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 from the Kindles of some American users? This was because those particular users had obtained it from a person in Australia (IIRC), and while that book had fallen into the public domain in Australia, it was still copyrighted in the US, where our term lengths are even more ridiculously long.
So even though I don't offer practical solutions for enforcement, which is a real problem, right now, in the real world, without changing the law at all, there's no particular need to worry about countries that an author doesn't view as a market. If the author values control mor
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"In my opinion it's much better if copyright holders voluntarily decide to contribute their work to the common good, rather than doing that by force."
And America will be given back to the Indians the very same day. If that was ever going to happen, it would already BE happening! How can that not be totally clear to you? Copyright-holders lobbied for the 1978 extension, right? Are they now going to lobby against it?
There is currently a petition at we the people to shorten copyright terms to 10 years:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/shorten-excessive-copyright-terms/XMc72zjc