EFF Confronts World Copyright Committee (eff.org)

The EFF debated delegates on WIPO's Standing Committee on Copyright this week, joking the whole week could be summarized as "proposals for a broadcasting treaty continue to edge forward, while rich countries remain at loggerheads with users and poorer countries about copyright exceptions for education and libraries."

An anonymous reader writes: The EFF continued to push for more rights for libraries, for example to preserve "orphaned" works and to lend works across national borders. But they also report that at an EFF-sponsored side-meeting, one independent recording artist made an interesting suggestion about Mycelia, an open and distributed "verified" database of music metadata that's blockchain-enabled. "Although it remains mostly a vision for now, the widespread adoption of Mycelia-enabled services could, in theory, provide better transparency to artists about how and where their works are being used, as well as enabling many new innovative uses of music, both free and paid." (One audience member even asked whether it could resurrect Napster's model of peer-to-peer music-sharing with a mechanism for artist micropayments.)
Meanwhile, the EFF characterized the music industry's stance as "Blaming online content platforms for the low returns that artists receive, and moves to target them with additional responsibilities or obligations." But they added, "As frustrating as the long-winded discussions at WIPO often are, our ability to participate in them is a key advantage that this multilateral forum has over the secretive, closed-door negotiations over copyright that take place in trade negotiations such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership."

Comments

The Societal Value of Works

[rtb61]

P. How about a reassessment of copyright law in line with patent laws. Works must demonstrate true worth and value to society prior to achieve copyright protection, which is actually copytheft protection, the ability to steal the work of others because it is a copy of a protected work. The US constitution puts it very well, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", should any work fail that test, it should not have copyright protection and the taxpayers most certainly should not be expected to fund that protection. It is about time that test was used as it was reasonably and soundly intended to do.

Re:The Societal Value of Works

[sumdumass]

Naive nonsense. And here is why.

Suppose you write a program and nobody finds it useful. It doesn't pass your test so it doesn't have copyright. Now suppose I find two or more of these useless programs and group them together to work as a single unit and everybody finds it useful in promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts. You and the other people do not have a copyright and all the sudden, I do. You may even see how I applied the other programs and may have thought that others would have conceived that to which is why you didn't bother. But now I have a copyright on your work and you do not.

But lets go further. Your house catches fire, I'm on the clean up crew that is meant to dispose of all the damaged items and prepare the area for the workers who come in and rebuild. In this mess, I find your diary or memoirs of your happy but boring life. I decipher it, put it in a novel called why flammable houses suck and use it to enrich myself while claiming to be promoting science in spreading the word about the necessity of inflammable building materials being used in building homes. It's your story, you wrote it, you do not have any copyright, you essentially threw it away, and now I have a copyright on it and am making money. Well, according to your "test" that is.

That phrase is in the US constitution because the federal government was never intended to have unlimited powers. It is a justification for the power of copyright and patents resting within it. The laws should be crafted to that end and need to be changed when they do not. However, it should not be a specific requirement of copyright for the reasons I already laid out. Perhaps mandatory licensing and shorter terms of life (especially for short life span products like computer programs and such) would be appropriate. Definitely no Tax dollars should be spent on defending your copyrights outside of what is normally absorbed by a sitting judicial process.

I do not disagree with your sentiment, just the parts of your purposed solution. If the work has value to me or you should be all that matters. Otherwise you could be in copyright violation when making copies of your own diary or memoirs under some conditions without any intentional actions of your own (I stand over your shoulder and read the diary as you write in it then publish it).

Re:The Societal Value of Works

[james_gnz]

P. How about a reassessment of copyright law in line with patent laws. Works must demonstrate true worth and value to society prior to achieve copyright protection...

Patents are supposed to be novel, non-obvious, and useful. However, as far as I know, to qualify as useful they don't actually have to be any better than, or even as good as, existing free alternatives. The Microsoft FAT patents cover a way of storing long file names that is arguably novel and non-obvious precisely because it is a needlessly convoluted way of doing something that had already been done. In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.

If not for the rise of cloud computing, I would say scrap them both. The patent system only provides a net benefit in the areas of chemicals and pharmaceuticals (Bessen and Meurer, 2008), and I expect government research grants could do just as well. I'm not convinced copyright provides a net benefit at all, since for entertainment it seems to deliver form over substance, which I think we could do without, and for practical works, it takes mind share from free works. However, scrapping copyright would accelerate the shift to cloud computing, which is even worse than copyright.

Bessen, James & Meurer, Michael J. (2008) Patent failure. Princeton University Press. <http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8634.pdf>

Mycelia

[silas_moeckel]

First things thats getting stripped. Why do I want my music sending back info to the artist. It's a one time transaction I give you money you give me goods period end of story. The whole well I'll sell you another copy every time a format changes or we made a better copy from the masters is BS rent seeking. Plenty of artists have allready shown you can sell music without DRM and make money doing so. We lost sight of to promote arts and moved to how much money can we possibly leach out of the system.