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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."
No, seriously. Copyright does more harm than good. Just get rid of the whole damn thing.
Obligatory reading.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Do *NOT* create any kind of web interface which automatically will send a letter to them based on some kind of template.
Someone who was very well meaning in Canada did this during our copyright consultation and the results backfired heavily... they received a staggering number of submissions, but because of the lack of effort that it takes to simply use a website, fill in your name in an appropriate field and hit "submit" without altering any of the letter content, and the fact that a very significant majority of the letter submissions were unaltered verbatim copies of one particular website's letter, the government chose to completely ignore those submissions... although the remainder of submissions that said similar ideas but were not based on that template still accounted for a majority of the total submissions, discounting that many submissions entirely almost certainly had a negative impact on how the government interpreted the consultation and the actions that they took in the aftermath of it. If even a quarter of those so called automated submissions had been an original letter from a concerned citizen which expressed the same basic ideas, I expect that the government may have interpreted the results of that consultation very differently than they did.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Most of the EU contries are signatories to the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) treaty. That sets a minimum copyright term of 50 years. Many EU countries now have longer copyright terms, after heavy lobbying from the US music industry.
So suggest that the EU should harmonize their nations' laws by using the 50 year TRIPS limit. The EU can do with without renegotiating any external treaties. Few works over 50 years old generate significant revenues, and longer terms just keep many works orphaned and forgotten, rather than in the public domain.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years. The US, with its much longer terms, would then be the major exception, and would be under pressure to reduce its copyright term.
It's a goal that's within reach. Whining about "copyright is evil" wiil get nowhere. Asking the EU to harmonize their laws with the WTO standard has a good chance of playing well in Brussels.
Copyright is made out of people. This isn't a joke or being funny, by the way and as a result it will NEVER be "right".
... because there are always at least 2 angles for exploit (the too lax exploit and the too strict exploit). This will, in fact, be a perpetual issue ...
Since copyright is made out of people, and people come up with laws to try to maximize productivity and creation, there will always be scavengers and predators looking to exploit copyright for private gain.
Google, for example, loves weaker copyright protection so they can sell 3rd party content. Media companies and small-time authors love copyright because it rewards the creation of works.
Meanwhile, fans dislike copyright because it creates an imbalance between quality vs. convenience (cracked software is ALWAYS better) or availability (a movie or game isn't available in a certain region or is no longer sold).
Because copyright is made of out of people, there isn't going to be a "final solution" --- it must always be subject to revision because any legal system is subject to exploits.
I'm not implying "you shouldn't try", actually I'm saying you always SHOULD try to improve it.
But the results will be imperfect next time too
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
There's only one month left, don't procrastinate too long.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years.
I appreciate that there is an element of fighting for what you can realistically achieve in political matters. I'm also generally in favour of retaining the basic principle of copyright, at least until a better idea for promoting the creation and distribution of new works comes along.
Even so, I think the fundamental problem with your position is that it still implicitly accepts that a copyright term comparable to many humans' adult lifetimes is reasonable. With the rise of modern technologies, a much shorter term would still provide a substantial commercial incentive to create and share new works, without locking up aspects of our culture to the same degree. I'm open to discussions on the specifics for different types of work and for special cases like orphan works or works that continue to be developed over time, but I would expect a period of no more than 10-20 years from public disclosure should be more than adequate in just about any case today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So suggest that the EU should harmonize their nations' laws by using the 50 year TRIPS limit. The EU can do with without renegotiating any external treaties. Few works over 50 years old generate significant revenues, and longer terms just keep many works orphaned and forgotten, rather than in the public domain.
This is an OK suggestion, with the caveat that the TRIPS limit should be a limit cap, not the actual limit, since the effect of setting it to the TRIPS limit would be immediate and incessant lobbying to raise the TRIPS limit. This is a likely outcome of setting the TRIPS limit as a cap as well, but then there would be no obligation on the part of the EU to raise their limit, should such lobbying be successful.
Assuming this is done, there should also be a proviso that, should the TRIPS limit be lowered, that the EU limits are also automatically lowered, while any raises in the limit should require explicit EU legislation to match. So if the EU "harmonizes" to 50 years to equal the TRIPS limit, then the TRIPS limit goes down to 40 years, the EU automatically goes down to 40 years, and if the TRIPS limit is then jacked back up to 50 years or higher, the EU remains at 40 years, low watermarking the EU limit.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years. The US, with its much longer terms, would then be the major exception, and would be under pressure to reduce its copyright term.
This is highly unlikely; the two California Senators with the most power in regard to U.S. Copyright law are strongly incentivized through campaign contributions from the movie industry bodies (MPAA, et. al.), and, to a lesser extent, since it is less localized to California, the music industry.
In other words, there would be about as much pressure on the U.S. to lower its limits as there is for Disney to put Mickey Mouse in the public domain, and about as much as there is on the current WIPO to lower the TRIPS limits -- which is to say "effectively none".
Please add these provisos:
(1) If a work is explicitly placed into the public domain, then it receives indemnity protection equivalent to that provided by the BSD two clause license, so that authors are not *required* to keep a work out of the public domain and place a license on it in order to obtain a legal "hold harmless". Most BSD licensed software, for example, would have been placed in the public domain, rather than licensed at all, if it were not for the need for the author to disclaim legal liability.
(2) If a work is placed in the public domain, it shall not be legal to place it under other terms; it remains in the public domain in perpetuity. You can't just take a public domain work and slap a license or DRM on it; for example, a book placed in the public domain can not be converted to a DRM protected eBook format which would prevent further dissemination of the work (e.g. no grabbing Joseph Conrad from Project Gutenberg and making it non-redistributable).
Which is why the EU needs to tell the US to go fuck them selves when the US demands longer copyright terms.
this will probably be studied by the various copyright holders, and used against the populace. They will find all the direct reasons why people hate them, and use that in some more insane marketing strategies and enforcement.
Take out all the parts that were lobbied for.
Take it back to something reasonable, like 20 years since creation. Perhaps require copyright registration so there is a place someone can go to check if something is under copyright.
That, or adopt the Marshall Islands copyright laws.
Maybe. On the other hand, 10 year terms means no movie company ever has to pay the author of a book for making the movie out of a book, or adher to the authors wishes. Just wait the years out.
When the public is allowed comment, they typically reply using terrible logic. And I mean logic that terrifies the reader. The arguments are not thought through, and only seem like rational thoughts because the author believed the premise.
Any legitimate evaluation of the general public opinion would have the same effect as tossing 80% of replies at random, due to poorly laid out arguments which boil down to "my opinion is based on the news I get from one or two aggregators and I have not considered real world implications even to myself".
I cannot distinguish failure to consider public opinion, from considering it and finding it useless. Or another way, if we could trust the public to make coherent arguments, we could disregard the conclusions as a setup job.
In far too many cases, I actually think 'I agreed with you, but when you started talking your logic made me change my opinion."
Specifically, pure opinion is irrelevant because it is not a vote. Personal experience can rarely be generalized, especially when corporate experience can be so much more easily. Redundant mass verbatim copies are just "me too" opinions.
You can argue that this is intentionally designed to get the most ignorable feedback. But is there an alternative? Until we can make neutral arguments using the target audience's language, it seems unfair to expect to have any effect
One of the things Amelia Andersdotter suggests people say 'yes' to, is required copyright registration. I'm sure the idea is that it makes it harder for some random person or company to come after you for placing their image (usually with all credits cropped out, if posts on imgur and such are any indication) on your blog/tumblr/whatever.
Of course this does cut both ways. If you take a news-worthy photo, you'd better register the copyright first - which takes some time and I have no doubt may eventually lead to some processing fees - or every news outlet in the world is just going to yoink it, use it, may not even bother with attribution, and enjoy all the advertising income it helped generate.
Maybe you don't mind, maybe that's what you want to happen for your photo. Then again, maybe you do mind and only want 'the little guy' to use it and not the big media companies (think BSD-type licensed software and some people complaining about companies using that without giving back, with the usual co-comments 'should have used GPL instead').
Slapping a CC-BY-NC type license on an image previously got you the best of both worlds - at least where the license is respected.. the 'little guy' can still drop it on their tumblr, while Fox News, CNN, etc. will have to contact you and at least request permission first.
That is an immediately available choice that required copyright registration takes away entirely, and puts up a barrier (be that in time taken for the registration or, and don't think it wouldn't happen, a processing fee required to be paid) for most other avenues.
I understand her goal with this (one more step to abolishing copyright - and I'm in favor of that, but also in favor of more stringent distribution rights - via making sure that anything not registered is essentially public domain), but I disagree with the method. If anything, it favors big media.