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Uncle Sam Finally Wants To Hear From Us On Digital Copyright Law?
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Can it be true? The US government claims it really wants to hear from us on the subject of how copyright law needs to be modified to accommodate the developing technology of the digital age? I don't know, but the US Patent & Trademark Office (which btw has nothing to do with administering copyright) says 'we really want to hear from you' and the Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force wrote a 122-page paper (PDF) on the subject, so they must really mean it, right? But I couldn't find the address to which to send my comments, so maybe that was an oversight on their part."
It's a trap!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Just like in the recent Obama said in his speech about NSA operations, the government is really concerned about public opinion and very much wants to know the best way to make you comfortable getting screwed. After all, people being uncomfortable with getting screwed is the biggest impediment in a democracy for advancing to the next level of screwing them over. So your feedback is important to them.
Another one of those articles with question-titles that can be answered with a simple "No."?
Is the government so up-to-its-tits in lobbyists it cant complete a single google search without a campaign contribution? Here are a few license models that might work for some, hell in fact all, digital media in the 21st century.
BSD
GPL
copyleft
LGPL3
MIT
Creative Commons
the list goes on but at no point does it include the whistling clown-car that is DMCA or the iron boot of DRM. copyright in the 21st century is premised on the idea that expiration encourages innovation and that on some level, we all benefit and advance greatly from sharing as opposed to consolidating the knowledge and power amongst a cloistered few. yeah, its a radical departure for some but discourages cashcowing a product or franchising something to death (the Matrix series anyone?)
Good people go to bed earlier.
Dev.null@uspto.gov
Silence is a state of mime.
Homer: “Don't worry, baby, the tube'll know what to do.”
He takes her form, puts it into a canister, and sends it through the pneumatic tube system. The canister takes a wild ride through the tube system, eventually being deposited... outside, where a nearby beaver collects it and adds it to a dam built entirely of message canisters.
Yes we recognize artists have the right to be paid for their work, but....
1) Please reduce the absurd duration of copyright. We can argue about exactly how long, but anything above 30 years is definitely absurd. Also copyright would be better if anything above 20 years required a substantial payment.
2) Copyright should be non-transferable and belong to the artist producing the work.
3) Please ensure that all private copying from media to media for personal use only is regarded as Fair Use.
4) Commercial Piracy should attract large fines, however small personal acts of piracy should be penalized in the region of a few thousand dollars TOTAL, not several tens of thousands for each work. As an example, Jammie Thomas was definitely guilty, but a maximum fine of about $5,000 would be seen as far more reasonable especially as she made no significant financial gain from the act.
Anything else?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The NSA will forward it for you...without you needing to even send it!
1. Stop trying to control the non-commercial filesharing. The damages to creators are, at worst, about as big as trespassing on private property that isn't near a house or is actively exploited - like say, a forest. The positive effects, meanwhile, are huge and not to be neglected. Instead focus on the commercial filesharing efforts and the people making money on protected works without sharing those profits.
2. Lots of works can no longer be used because their right holders cannot be found (orphan works). In order to solve this problem, copyrighted works should be registered or face a very short copyright term on e.g. five years after publication. An extension of this idea is that economic copyright should only be allowed as long as the copyrighted works do have a substantial value, therefore we have a yearly fee of 2^x where x is the number of years a copyrighted work has been published. This ensures orphaned works become public domain, but it also ensures that copyrighted works that no longer have any commercial value also falls into public domain.
3. Copyright terms either need to be severely reduced, or there needs to be an exception clause for archivists, museums, libraries and the like to let them complete and create as complete collections of works as possible, lest our entire culture from the fifties and onward disappear.
Just a couple of ideas to get started...
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Absolutely! I trust the government to put my best interests first. They genuinely want to hear from people on this issue.
In completely unrelated, totally not relevant news, the NSA just found out about the hundred flowers campaign, which I support. I mean, hundreds of flowers? That can't be bad in ANY way.
The government believes, and I quote, that "The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science".
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
But I couldn't find the address to which to send my comments, so maybe that was an oversight on their part.
You can find the comment form in the We Want to Hear from You article.
Use it.
I don't see why digital content is not treated in the same way as the physical media it replaced.
I think I have a right to play my digital content on ANY device I see fit. Realize that this means all these "walled gardens" should be illegal. If you equate what is happening today with digital content vs physical media, it would be like Walmart creating their own version of DVD and then Best Buy creates their own version of DVDs. A Walmart DVD would not be playable and a Best Buy DVD player, and vice versa. NOBODY would have tolerated that bullshit so why are people happy with buying iTunes content that is not playable on an Android device?
Also with physical media I always had the right to lend the content to a friend or family member. But realize that while it is lended out that I no longer have access to it. I think it should be perfectly acceptable to share my digital content with a friend or family member. However realize that NOBODY has 1 million friends so that does not apply to sharing it digitally to the whole world.
The only thing different about digital content that I feel should not be analogous to physical content is that I should not have to rebuy the content in a different resolution and there is NO REASON why an HD version of a digital movie is more expensive than an SD movie. The reason why Blu-ray's are more expensive the DVDs comes to the cost to author/produce a Blu-ray disk, but even then that coast hast diminished greatly over the last 5 years. I should be buying access to a movie and then have a choice to view it in whatever resolution suits the device I am playing it on, whether its SD, HD or 4k or 8k in the future. Unless the movie had to be remastered to get it to look better at a higher resolution I should never have to buy a movie twice.
Of course the US government is taking a page out of Canada's government handbook. Before making an absurd and unpopular law, get the citizens opinion to make it look like you give a rat's ass about the common person before making sure to protect an industry right to maintain a monopoly and charge high prices for products and services, just like what Canada's CRTC does.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The USPTO cannot change the law of the land. That's what Congress is for.
This will amount to nothing.
1.Change DMCA s512 to impose penalties on anyone who sends a take-down notice for content for content they do not own. This stops take-down notices being sent when the entity doing the sending doesn't actually own the content they are claiming to own.
2.Change the DMCA and other laws to state clearly that any search engine or aggregator that uses automatic content collection systems (like Google or Bing or similar) gets 100% legal immunity for the content aggregated by their sites (i.e. takes away the ability for copyright holders to target or go after search engines because of content their spiders pick up)
3.Change DMCA s103 to state that it is NOT a DMCA violation if you are breaking protection for the purpose of using content if you have permission from the copyright holder to make or use copies of the content.
This means that it would be legal to break protection on phones, games consoles and other things in order to run "homebrew" or "side-load" software where the copyright holder has given permission for such uses.
It also means that for example its legal to crack protection on proprietary camera RAW formats so you can access the photos you took without buying the proprietary tools to access it.
4.Do something to handle "orphan works" (that is, works where the copyright holder cant be located). Plenty of old works (e.g. old computer games) cant be enjoyed again because no-one can identify who actually owns the rights.
5.Pass laws to once and for all declare that APIs are not copyrightable (and end the Oracle v Google fight over API copyright for good)
4) Commercial Piracy should attract large fines, however small personal acts of piracy should be penalized in the region of a few thousand dollars TOTAL, not several tens of thousands for each work. As an example, Jammie Thomas was definitely guilty, but a maximum fine of about $5,000 would be seen as far more reasonable especially as she made no significant financial gain from the act.
Interestingly, this is already in copyright law. It's just being misapplied.
First, as a premise, when given a range, juries (or anyone) tends to default to approximately the geometric mean of the range. For example, if a crime carries a sentence of 1 to 20 years, you might expect that people would default to around 10 years, but they don't. After all, if 1 year is a possible sentence, then 10 is an order of magnitude larger! And the top of the range at 20 is only just double that. Clearly 10 is too high. Instead, juries will default to around 4-6 years.
Well, it's the same thing in monetary damages: given a range (say, $750-$150,000, as in the "willful infringement" tier of copyright statutory damages), the geometric mean is $10,606. Tenenbaum was dinged for $22k per song. Thomas got hit for $9,250 per song. So, pretty close to the geometric mean.
But wait, is that the right range? The statute says up to $150k for willful infringement, which the RIAA has defined as any infringement that's intentional (as opposed to accidental copying?). Their argument is that, if you've ever seen a copyright notice, and you then distribute a copyrighted work, that's willful, 'cause you knew it was wrong.
But that's not what Congress intended. If you go back to the original House comments, it appears that they intended "Willful" to mean "malicious, or for commercial purposes" as in the trademark and patent acts. Like, if you sneak into your author neighbor's house and steal his manuscript and publish it to destroy his career, even if you didn't do it to make money, that's pretty evil, and you should be responsible for enhanced damages.
So, the non-enhanced range is $750-$30,000. The geometric mean of this is $4700. Your suggestion - "about $5000". QED.
Hence, we need to fix that interpretation of "willful", not go try to rewrite the copyright act, which can be done by arguing this issue in court and persuading judges, rather than fighting with well-monied RIAA lobbyists for Senators' favor.