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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.
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!
This is about copyright, i.e. ownership of a work, not the licensing models. The main issues seem to be the duration of that ownership (which is pretty much defined as being as long as necessary for keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public domain), and the penalties for violating copyright law. Changing copyright law would affect those Open licenses as well: if we reduce the duration of intellectual ownership to a term of 20 years, then works released under BSD, GPL, CC etc would revert to the public domain after 20 years as well (free them up for commercial use and removing the requirement of attribution, for instance)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
if we reduce the duration of intellectual ownership to a term of 20 years, then works released under BSD, GPL, CC etc would revert to the public domain after 20 years as well (free them up for commercial use and removing the requirement of attribution, for instance)
And this would be bad how exactly?
If some company wants to take 20 year old FOSS code and build something on top of it that they can sell, more power to them. Note that they wont be able to incorporate ANY updates made to that code base in the last 20 years, so it is not as if any software project that began more than 20 years will become public domain, just he oldest versions.
After all, the 20 year old code will still be public domain, so others can use the same codebase to build a (possibly free) alternative. And if there really is a market for something built on top of the old code, someone was dropping the ball during the 20 year copyright period.
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.
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.