Lawrence Lessig Criticizes Proposed 140-Year Copyright Protections (techcrunch.com)

EqualCitizens.US reports on growing opposition to the CLASSICS Act proposed by the U.S. Congress, which grants blanket copyright protection to all audio works created before 1972, leaving some of them copyrighted until 2067. Importantly, the Act doesn't require artists or the rights holder to register for the copyright. Rather, any and all pre-1972 sound recordings would be copyrighted, greatly limiting the public's access to these works. Various organizations and scholars have responded. Equal Citizens along with a coalition of internet freedom and democracy reform organizations, is sending this letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge its members to reject this Act in its entirety, or at a minimum, at least require registration of pre-1972 works. Otherwise, if the Act passes as is, famous artists and wealthy corporations will benefit greatly while the public will get absolutely nothing in return, as Professor Lawrence Lessig notes in Wired....

This act will limit access to past works and stifle creativity for new works. It would effectively remove many existing works, including some popular documentaries, podcasts, etc., from the public arena. The Coalition recommends adding a registration requirement to secure the extended copyright term, such that works that nobody claimed could be allowed to enter the public domain. As this TechCrunch report on the coalition letter explains:

By having artists and rights owners register, it solves the problem for everyone. Anyone who wants to have their pre-1972 works brought into the new scheme can easily achieve that, but orphan works will enter the public domain as they ought to.
"Either way," Lessig writes, "it is finally clear that the Supreme Court's prediction that the copyright owners would be satisfied with the copyright protection provided by the Sonny Bono Act turns out not to be true."

Comments

You've got a lot of influence

[rsilvergun]

you choose not to exercise it. Show up to your primary. Also, and this isn't popular to say, but join the Democratic party. The Republicans are too far too the corporate side to redeem at this point. They shifted right in response to Bill Clinton and the Democrats followed them. Today's Democrats are Regan Republicans, but there's a core of progressives who oppose pro-corporate crap like this. They run candidates every year in the primary and they lose because nobody shows up expect old, economic right wingers. But there's _very_ few of them. If folks would just show up to vote for things that benefit them they'd be drowned out.

Sorry to get so partisan, but there's no other way to fix this. We need to move the country left, and the best place to do that is in the Democratic party's primaries.

Re:You've got a lot of influence

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL.

Did you fail to notice who the Dems ran last time? Really? Was that all just a bad dream to you? You didnt notice their huge corporate support?

Oh Dear.

First off, Hillary is not nearly as bad as the right wing noise machine makes her out to be. She is just not. Second, the democratic party is made up of people. Join up, organize, change it, if you don't like it. Also vote. Always vote. If you can tell one candidate that can win is half a percent better than another then vote. If you have the time volunteer. If you have the money contribute, but be very careful to whom you contribute.

Also, there was more than enough people who _didn't_ vote to put Bernie over the line. Did you vote for him? I did. He was the better candidate. Then when he lost, I voted for Hillary, because she was sure the hell the better candidate. Of course I think everyone who ran was the better candidate. Hell Blago would have been infinitely better. Romey or McCain would have been infinitely better.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.

New works are already de-facto illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

With the precedent set by the Gaye vs. Thicke court case (ruling upheld by 9th circuit court of appeals this year), you are committing copyright infringement when you write a song that "feels" like some other song. Because it would be very difficult for a songwriter to listen to every song ever written and ensure that his new song does not sound anything like them, this effectively criminializes songwriting in general. If you are a songwriter in the 9th circuit, the case is already settled precedent, and anything you write may be illiegal.

All for the copyright holder's profits

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, this smells like the crap music publishers would write themselves to try and keep a tight hold onto their meager profits from old songs that very few people even still buy today, other than certain movies, media and what not.

My modest proposal to fix this

[steveha]

Politics is the art of the possible. I have a modest proposal that I think is possible: Allow unlimited copyright extensions that are not automatic or free.

Given how much money Disney and other big content-owning companies are going to spend on this, our elected representatives are going to roll over again... so it is not possible to roll back copyright protection to anything like the original short terms. It's pretty much certain that the terms are getting extended again. So my question is whether we can get the deal changed in some way that makes it better for us.

Disney is very motivated to keep the copyrights going forever on old cartoons like "Steamboat Willy". To them, it's just collateral damage that nothing else ever falls into the public domain... I don't think they care that old black-and-white movies not owned by Disney also aren't falling into the public domain.

So my modest proposal is that a corporation can extend the copyright on any property by filing a form and paying a nominal fee. For the sake of argument I propose $5 to be the fee and for the form to get a 5-year extension. A dollar per year! Cheap!

But if you fail to list some piece of content and file the form, it lapses into the public domain.

This fixes the murky issues around a lot of content, such as obscure video games from three decades ago. In many cases it would take lawsuits to figure out who is the current owner, so it's not possible to get a license for the content... so nobody is going to file the paperwork to extend the copyright, and the old forgotten content will lapse into the public domain.

This is still a screaming good deal for the content owners. The US government still acts as an enforcer to go after people infringing on the copyrights, and it would cost way more than $1 to hire private detectives or whatever to do the same thing without government.

But I don't see why the content owners should get endlessly-extended copyright terms where nothing ever falls into the public domain automatically for free and without even lifting a finger.

Copyright is supposed to be a three-cornered deal between the content owners, the government, and the people. The people are supposed to benefit by things falling into the public domain; that's why the phrase "for limited times" appears in the Constitution. The people would get nothing from a 140-year extension, but would get something from my proposal.

That's a common mistake

[rsilvergun]

they're not Progressives. Being a Progressive doesn't just mean you're tolerant of gays and abortion. Those are social issues. The folks you're referring to are Hollywood, and to a man they're economically right wing.

The Democratic party is being run by economically right wing and socially moderate (the Hillary wing didn't support Gay Marriage until forced to by the base) conservatives. Being Progressive means being _economically_ progressive too. That means these things:

1. Medicare for all.
2. Living Wage.
3. College for all.
4. New New Deal (google it).
5. End the Wars.

Disney, the most Hollywood of Hollywood definitely opposes #1-#4 and I'm guessing if forced to answer would oppose #5 (their board of directors owns stock in the defense industry along with everybody else at the top).

Re:The Result

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd that, I think everyone should just pirate anything created over 14 years ago, fuck the stooges.

When I was a kid, I bought something in a store, and they did not give me my change. I tried to sort it out, but they would not listen to me. The clerk who rang me in was conveniently gone. I got the feeling that they were in the habit of cheating kids like this. So I "shoplifted" the equivalent amount of goods. Was it wrong? The law may say yes, but I say I only took what I was due.

How is this any different? They are taking away what is ours by changing the agreement without our consent. It may be against the law, but taking what should rightfully be yours is not wrong. (Remember, in exchange for the limited time copyright, we get it in the public domain after. They are taking that away.)

So if someone wants to pirate something (especially anything older than 14 years), I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for the other side.

People are Stupid

[Jodka]

Suppose some of my buddies and I pooled our money together and bought the U.S. Congress for one billion dollars. We then pay congress to enact a law which transfers a 100 billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury to us. We would earn 100 times what we invested, which is an excellent return, so this would be a fantastic business plan.

Would it work? Probably not. It is too overt and brazen, just intolerably offensive. Judges would find some law which disallowed it or, if none actually existed, would detect some applicable penumbras and emanations. Also, the public would be outraged, and nothing terrifies incumbent politicians more than the prospect of not being re-elected. Futhermore, the fact that this is not known to have ever actually occurred suggests that it is not feasible.

But suppose we tweak the plan just slightly. Under the previous plan, Congress would confiscate currency from the public and transfer it to me. Under the new plan, Congress instead confiscates property from the public, in the form of extended intellectual property rights, and transfers it to me.

Would that work? Certainly. Why? Because people are idiots; They are easily befuddled by a direct transfer of wealth from the public to a small group who has paid to influence Congress, if the form of the wealth transferred is any more abstract than cash.

Generally, with any scheme where corporations make monetary contributions to politicians in exchange for those politicians using the coercive powers of government to transfer wealth from the public to the corporations, the form of that wealth must be abstract and represent a sacred political cause. For example, allegedly to protect the environment, Congress enacted law governing ethanol mandates and agriculture price supports instead directly handing taxpayer cash over to agribusiness. Targeted tax breaks are the stand-by when executives and lobbyists are too uncreative to finesse a compelling custom rationale.

Politicians of both major political parties are in the same business, accepting money from special interests in exchange for giving them larger sums of taxpayer money. The only difference between the parties are their justifications. Whereas right-wing taxpayers like to hear things like "We gave these millionaires and billionaires your money to help the economy", left-wing taxpayer prefer rationales such as, "We gave these millionaires and billionaires your money to save the environment."

Re:Wait, wut?

[dgatwood]

That's a very bad idea. Some works take more than 14 years to author, and you'd have the copyright expiring on the first parts before the work is even finished.

Copyright should be 30 years from the date of publication; the date of creation is irrelevant. For unpublished works, the copyright countdown should toll until the end of a five year grace period after the author's death, to allow the heirs time to publish them. At the end of that grace period, the 30-year copyright period should start even if the work has not been published.

For works of corporate authorship, it should be 30 years from publication or 45 years from creation, whichever is shorter, i.e. there should be a maximum of fifteen years from the date of creation to the date of publication during which the copyright countdown is tolled, after which it starts to count down whether the work is published or not.

Here's the logic behind a thirty-year period: The purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works. For works of corporate authorship, the copyright duration is completely irrelevant; all the money gets made in the first two or three years anyway, after which it is generally a paperweight. But for works of individual authorship by people who aren't incredibly famous already, it can take many years to start bringing in any real income from your early works. And although the argument could be made that this forces authors to write more works because the old works become worthless, the reality is that knowing you won't ever make money from your first several works would likely mean that many fewer authors would bother to start writing in the first place.

Also, I would suggest that the copyright period be split in half, with a renewal requirement at the midpoint. The cost of renewal should be proportional to the income that the creator has received from the work—say 5% of gross revenue to date, or perhaps 10%. Continuing to keep a popular work under copyright clearly diminishes the public domain considerably, so it should cost considerably more to continue to protect such a work than a work that nobody has ever heard of. The revenue from the popular works copyright tax should fund federal and state grants for creative and arts education in our public schools — music, art, dance, theater, creative writing, etc.