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EU Copyright Reform: Your Input Is Needed!
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has finally (as of last month) opened its public consultation on copyright reform. This is the first time the general public can influence EU copyright policy since fifteen years back, and it is likely at least as much time will pass until next time. In order to help you fill out the (English-only, legalese-heavy) questionnaire, some friendly hackers spent some time during the 30c3 to put together a site to help you. Anyone, EU citizen or not, organization or company, is invited to respond (deadline fifth of February). Pirate MEP Amelia Andersdotter has a more in-depth look at the consultation."
Just because politicians are corrupt asshats doesn't mean that the idea of politics and government is a bad one. Likewise, just because copyright is broken doesn't mean we should get rid of it either.
We should fix it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your numbers sound reasonable, but to me they suggest something more like an upper bound on how long protection should last, not necessarily a target.
I believe copyright is best treated as a purely economic tool; it may have some desirable side-effects like giving credit to artists or maintaining confidentiality, but these are usually better treated as separate issues IMHO. On that basis, the job of copyright is to provide sufficient economic support to allow reasonable financial returns to be generated from creating and distributing useful works.
So, if a AAA console game has made 90% of the revenues it will ever generate today after the first few weeks, or a Hollywood blockbuster makes 90% of its revenues within a couple of years because that's when cinema showings, DVD releases and first runs on broadcast TV happen, then a period of perhaps five years from first public performance might be sufficient.
On the other hand, something like a school textbook can be very labour intensive to produce in good quality, but might bring in substantial revenues over several years if it can be adapted to produce slightly modified editions suitable for different national markets, not all of them necessarily available immediately in the first year of publication. A period as short as five years might cause a sharp reduction in returns in this case, potentially meaning it's no longer worth putting in the effort to produce a good textbook and corners get cut instead. This clearly isn't a desirable outcome if our goal is to promote the creation and distribution of good quality works, so maybe longer protection is needed in such cases to maintain sufficient incentive.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I think some tweaks could be made to the legal code without discarding it completely. You could set it back to around the original term -- 10-20 years of a legal monopoly on the work in return for it being released into the public domain at the end of that time would be fine. I'd also set it up so that if you wanted to be eligible for any additional damages for infringement, you'd be required to register a DRM-free version with the Library of Congress, which will be released at the end of the copyright term. And under no circumstances could copyright ever be used to prohibit you from using hardware you purchased and own for whatever purposes you wanted to put it to. Under my regime.
Since politicians like money and the current copyright holders will deliver large briefcases of cash to them to prevent their little racket from being up-ended I really doubt this is much more than a dog-and-pony show before the back-room fuck-and-suck starts between the politicians and the political donors. By the time they get done I'm sure they'll have dismantled anything contributed by The People.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?