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."

Comments

Don't do it!

[Ol Olsoc]

It's a trap!

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

So I went and said something anyway. All I got was:

Your comment was marked as spam and will not be displayed.

It apparently was too wordy. Their attention span doesn't last past 1000 characters, when the question is 122 pages to start with.

Of course they want your input

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Of course they want your input

[AmiMoJo]

We need to start hacking the political system. Politicians already do it with their spin doctors, but we can do the same to fight back.

It's about controlling the narrative. We need to find ways of making it almost impossible to argue against our point of view. Making a convincing case is not enough, we need to make it impossible for anyone else to oppose it.

Think about the way terrorism and children are exploited to this end. No-one can be against safety from evil terrorists. You are either with us or against us, nonsense like that. No-one can be against child safety either, or for greater sexualization of children, or on the side of child molesters.

We need something along those lines, and we need to make it the narrative, the frame for every debate.

found the address

[wbr1]

Dev.null@uspto.gov

Simpsons did it!

[RenHoek]

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.

Suggestion List

[maroberts]

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?

The best way?

[wertigon]

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...

You can send them your comment

[jones_supa]

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.