As insane as the copyright limits are, given the capitalist drive for the cheapest possible solution, reducing copyright terms would mean that instead of funding new creative works because they can't use old ones, big movie studios and publishers would just endlessly republish and remix existing works. Cheaper to redo than create from new and why go with something risky when you can redo something that succeeded again and again and again...
Yes, one of the central arguments in favor of copyright is that it encourages the creation and publication of original creative works. This comes at the expense of the creation and publication of derivative works (and n.b. there's no inherent difference in quality -- Shakespeare was an almost entirely derivative playwright, for example), but only temporarily.
Modest fees are already charged, and as with the PTO, the registration system is moving online. The renewal form seems like it would be quite simple. At a minimum you only need:
1. GUID number associated with the work / registration.
2. Checkbox if copyright holder contact information has not changed. Lines to enter new contact information if it has changed or if there is a new copyright holder.
3. Checkbox and lines if any other information is to be changed, e.g. abandoning part of the copyright but not other parts, though I can't think of why this would be likely to occur.
You could make it more complex, asking for the title of the work, publication dates, etc. but I'm sure the Copyright Office can figure out what it needs and doesn't need, and how to best cope with the paperwork.
Given that the US had renewals (admittedly on a less frequent schedule) from 1790 to 1992 (and there's still a bit of a renewal system left for older works), it doesn't seem to have been a big deal before. Especially since most authors never bothered to renew, not caring if they got as much protection as they possibly could. That's one of the core goals to frequent renewals: if an author only wants, say, 8 years of copyright, and not 14 or 28 or 56 or life+50 or life+70 or what have you, then his failure to bother to file for a 9th year is a good way of not granting superfluous copyright.
You're ignoring the fact that many people refuse to torrent because they know it is illegal and equate illegality with a general moral "wrong". The minute you make unlimited copying legal, you tell these people that it's no longer wrong, and that's when the money goes away.
Despite the infamous publicity campaigns of the music industry back in the day, I'd say that no one ever thought that home taping was morally wrong when it used to be illegal (or now when it is effectively legal, though not technically so). The music industry said that home taping would kill music. Not only did it not die as a result, but they wound up making record amounts of money.
I'd also point out that laws should conform to social norms in the absence of a very pressing reason to go against them. With Prohibition, alcohol was made illegal, but few found it actually immoral, almost everyone drank, the disrespect for that one law caused massive disrespect for more important laws, and we wound up with rampant corruption, violence, and organized crime on a level that we still haven't escaped from. With desegregation, there was a lot of popular support for segregation, but it was important for the government to protect everyone's civil liberties, and the government ignored the will of many, perhaps most, of the people.
Which do you think copyright infringement by natural persons acting noncommercially is more like? If it helps, you may wish to recall the height of the Napster era, when everyone and their dog was sharing music. I even have it on excellent authority that at least several US Senators were trading pirated music around.
In any case, I'm not convinced that people would stop paying for works in such quantities so as to jeopardize the entire existence of the various industries. There might be a loss of some money, and budgets might have to go down, as I said, but I think plenty of commercial works would still be made.
And like I said, I'm willing to try it and find out. If I turn out to be wrong, and it turns out that the public interest is better served by making non-commercial infringement by natural persons just as unlawful as any other sort of infringement, I'll gladly support reinstating the ban.
Just because an independent author is not currently selling his book in Burkina Faso doesn't mean that someone else should be able to do it for free.
Well, I would say that that's up to the people of Burkina Faso to decide, but generally why shouldn't other people be able to step in?
The public benefits when works are created and published. The public doesn't benefit when works are not created and published. If you're refusing to publish a work, why should you be given the right to prevent other people from stepping in and doing what you refuse to do? To give you a monopoly at public expense only to have you turn around and refuse to use it for the public benefit (and, if you like, for your own benefit, though that's not mandatory) seems to me to indicate that maybe you should not have been given the monopoly in the first place.
If I'm publishing on Lulu.com or whatever, I'm small-fry. I can't afford to register my book everywhere in one go.
That is an economic decision you will have to make. You should only register your work in places where you think you can exploit the copyright in order to make a profit after considering the costs of getting a copyright and publishing there. If you don't believe that you can successfully make a go of it in Pottsylvania, or wherever, then don't bother. But don't be upset if someone else takes a stab at it, which at least is better than letting the whole thing go to waste.
This is already how things work for patents. Inventors have to decide, within certain time limits, which countries they want to apply for a patent in. Failing to apply for (and receive) a patent in a particular country means that the invention is in the public domain there. It makes good sense: the inventor can get a patent where he likes (subject to local laws as to what is patentable), but it's up to him to decide where, and then he needs to comply with the various local laws. If the inventor doesn't care to get one someplace, that country benefits far more from having the patent in the public domain than from giving a monopoly to an absentee inventor who will never bother to use it in a productive manner. The inventor doesn't lose anything, since he had given up on that country to start with. No one loses and more people win than otherwise would.
Maybe I want to release worldwide eventually, but under your system I either have to be able to do that from day one, or I forego the ability to ever do it. Who does this benefit? Not the independent author -- it only benefits big business.
Well, I'd personally hope for a modest time limit, especially as some works might be published simultaneously with their creation, and it's hard to file simultaneously too -- people can only do so much at one time! A year from first publication anywhere would be fine with me.
In any case though, the goal of copyright is neither to benefit the independent author or the big business author. The goal is to benefit the public. If it happens to benefit authors of any kind, that's great, but that's merely a means to an end. Big businesses are, if anything, even more concerned with the economics of the situation. They're not going to try to get a copyright on some work everywhere in the world, unless they think they can make a profit by doing so everywhere in the world. This suggests that they would publish abroad.
I'm sure that people can manage to smuggle things through customs all the time, many of which are far more dangerous than a book.
This sounds like a call for customs to be better at inspecting imports. I think there's still a pressing need for privacy (we've all heard of incidents where customs agents scan people's hard drives at ports of entry, fishing for whatever they can find).
Honestly, I suspect that the importation rules are a little too strict. For example, there have been cases where goods were lawfully manufactured by the plaintiff, sold abroad at low prices, and imported by third parties seeking to gain from arbitrage -- goods like shampoo or wristwatches. It's claimed that these imports infringe because of copyrighted artwork on the label, or the logo, even though they were ultimately made under the authority of the plaintiff or the person the plaintiff got his rights from.
I don't think that copyright holders should have to compete against unauthorized publishers working abroad, but we do need to watch out for abuses, and we do need to figure out how they can detect infringers without running roughshod over privacy.
Tricky, but probably not a big enough problem to justify ditching important copyright reforms.
Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
Well, they're dead, so who cares.
Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter?
What if the widow and orphans decide to use the dead person in a manner directly contrary to what the dead person did in life? E.g. an 'authorized' ad using a simulated MLK in which he supports segregation.
If you're concerned with the legacy, you can't trust anyone. Of course, this results in everyone basically having to forget that dead people ever existed, having to never speak of them again, lest they do something that contradicts with what someone else feels is appropriate.
Depending on how clear it is that the book in question is fiction, there may be grounds for a libel suit in such a situation
Does libel survive the death of the person being libeled?
Anyway, yes, publicity rights vary widely, though I seriously doubt that it can be used to prevent unauthorized biographies from being published, though if it is basically libelous, and it's possible to have post-mortem libel, then perhaps there'd be something the Tolkien estate could do.
It's certainly an interesting question though, which I'd want to research more thoroughly if I were involved.
No, because you cannot copyright facts. At most you can copyright the selection and arrangement of facts, but only if it's original enough to qualify as a work by itself.
So anyone could mine an autobiography for the unprotected facts contained in it as well as collecting other facts independently. If the autobiography is arranged in some uncreative manner, e.g. chronologically, then only the selection might stand as being protectable. This wouldn't be too hard to get around, IMO.
Also, if you invent some of the facts yourself, or include theories to explain them, but you present them as being factual, it can be treated as being factual for copyright purposes. This has come up in cases where people tried to claim infringement where they had theories as to how the Hindenburg exploded, or the fate of John Dillinger, and other people reused those theories without permission.
A 'fact' that is sufficiently creative, becoming a matter of opinion, OTOH, could be protected. Blue book listings for cars tend to be protected as opinion, IIRC.
What we do know is that in today's age of restrictive copyright we are also seeing the greatest publication of new cultiral artifacts (books, music, film and so on) in history.
Of course, we've also developed publishing technology to unprecedented heights. Don't be too quick to give the credit to copyright.
In the US at least, copyrights include the right to prohibit importation of copies (subject to some modest exceptions). So the copy from Whateveristan can be held up at the border by customs.
I have no problem with a copyright holder preventing someone from importing a copy of the work that, had the laws of the country to which it is imported applied in the place where it was made, it would have been made unlawfully.
In that case, who's going to buy the DVD? Everyone will torrent it. Who's going to watch it on TV with those annoying advert breaks when they can just torrent it?
Well, we live in a world where people can do those things now. Yet somehow, people keep making DVDs and showing things on TV, and people keep buying those DVDs and watching those shows.
People are willing to pay for things even when they don't strictly have to do so, though I'd agree that it is possible that the amount of money made might decline, and so the budget for works might decline. For video, the important thing is usually the writing, followed by the acting and direction. Writers are fairly cheap, and I'm not convinced that the biggest name actors are spectacularly better than far less expensive lower tier actors. As for effects, props, costumes, scenery, etc., none of that is actually necessary, though it can be nice. And modern technology can stretch budgets a lot further than used to be possible.
It wouldn't work, sorry.
Well, I'm not as certain about that as you are. I say we try it out and see. If it turns out that it really doesn't work, we can always change the laws back again. I am, after all, all about pragmatic solutions to promoting the progress of science.
Well that would require further treaties, which would be against your "unilateral" change.
Don't confuse a preference with a bargain. I suppose that if no one else were willing to unilaterally offer national treatment (though I vaguely recall that it's been done in the past in Europe somewhere), treaties for that and that alone might be made. But I can't imagine what the US would be able to bargain with at the table.
National registration would be ridiculously onerous as there are almost 200 countries in the world.
Firstly, lack of a registration system is ridiculously onerous to the public at large, which is a far larger and more important group than mere authors or rightsholders. Registration and other formalities (e.g. deposit, notice) are vital for reducing the public harm caused by copyright to roughly the minimum amount necessary to serve the public interest; they are vital for establishing precisely which works are and are not copyrighted; extremely helpful in upkeep of the market for creative works, so that rightsholders can be efficiently found, facilitating assignments and licensing; essential for national libraries and the preservation of knowledge.
Secondly, persons doing business internationally already have to deal with a myriad of forms. Taxes, at the very least, must be paid; contracts must be agreed to, and unless the parties are naifs, they'll be in writing. Some countries may have censorship offices which will have to be dealt with. Local copyright collecting agencies may need to be registered with. So copyright registrations are no great burden; the form is about on par with a change of address form. In practice, few authors will care about a lot of these countries, and so can ignore the burden that may come with obtaining rights; others will care, and to them it will be nothing more than the cost of doing business. Indeed, if it costs more to get rights than the rights are worth, they won't even bother, since copyright is, after all, a purely economic matter.
Thirdly, while I support registration, and I think that it is probably one of the most pressing copyright reforms needed in the US, it's up to other countries to decide whether or not they want to have registrations. If France says no, then no one's going to make them do it. The result would merely be that if an American author wants a copyright in the US and France, he registers the former and doesn't register the latter; if a French author wants the same, he does likewise. (In fact, if there's national treatment, but no minimum standards, there's actually no requirement that every country have copyright at all; if they don't believe it is in their own interests, who are we to argue?)
Consider the case of a photographer that on uploading 50 new snaps to his website would have to fill out ten thousand forms if he wanted to avoid them being used by unscrupulous advertising agencies.
Fourthly, you clearly don't understand registration. In the US, for example, where we still have at least some registration formalities left, though not as strong as they were or need to be, it's often possible to register works in batches. The 50 photographs could probably be handled in one single form. Nothing would prevent other countries from adopting or reviving similar procedures.
Fifthly, while there are many countries in the world, only a few are generally worth a damn for most rightsholders. If I write a book, I might publish it in the US and Canada. If it's really popular, it might get exported or reprinted in other English-speaking countries. Only if it is really popular or somehow important is it likely to be translated into foreign languages, and then probably only a few. Even for works that need no translation, the market really isn't very global at all. It probably never will be.
And if an author doesn't care enough about how his work will be protected in every corner of the world to take at least some modest actio
If the US did that, other countries would simply drop restrictions on US IP.
Well, I do want all countries to offer national treatment, without any minimum standards. If this means that US rightsholders would have to fill out forms or something for whatever countries they wanted to get rights in, that would be fine with me.
However, I would point out that the US avoided copyright treaties of significance for a long time, and didn't even join Berne until 1989. There are ways of avoiding the problem you think would arise, if it's a problem at all, really.
The biggest advantage of bilateral treaties is that it would be much easier to pressure countries that do not actually enforce IP law.
I don't understand why I should care whether or not a foreign country has copyright laws, whether merely on paper or actually in practice.
The US should implement whatever laws we consider best in our own territory, and not accept outside interference. We should allow others to do the same. The only standard should be national treatment -- countries should not discriminate for or against their own authors.
I could go with that, but I think it would be harder to get passed into law than some variation on my idea (especially considering the Berne Convention).
Your proposal is also incompatible with Berne. Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever for the US to be a party to any copyright treaty at all. We should unilaterally grant national treatment to works of foreign authors, but we should set our own laws and not be bound by any set of minimum standards from abroad. Our involvement with copyright internationally should be limited to 1) informally coordinating with other countries so as to try to avoid conflicts between various copyright laws that would force an author to choose between protection in one place, and protection in another, due to mutual incompatibilities; 2) publish copyright forms and instructions in foreign languages to reduce obstacles for foreign authors seeking US copyrights.
That's the provenance at work, which is not copyable, and not protected by copyright anyway.
(Though copies can be valuable; if you discovered that you had the only known copy of some very notable lost work, you might be able to get millions of dollars for it, even though that particular copy was written by some anonymous student or scribe who no one cares about)
The text seems to be independently written (i.e. not by copying Tolkien's texts), even though it contains ideas, names and themes from Tolkien's famous books. That's completely ok as far as copyright is concerned (no copying, no problem).
No, it's a derivative work, which is one of the things covered by copyright.
Which is not to say that copyright should be based around the life of the author. It should be a term of years from publication or some other fixed point in time. This makes it predictable, which is good for everyone.
But copyright isn't intended to benefit authors or people who made deals with authors. It is intended to benefit the public. The value to authors is just a means to an end; we give them a monopoly in order to encourage them to create things that will enter the public domain, and if the work is popular, the monopoly is worth something for them to exploit.
Ideally then, we should grant the bare minimum copyright necessary in order to get works created. Less would not be as beneficial as possible to the public, more would be superfluous and wasteful. This may not be possible on a work-by-work basis, but we can probably work out some good average numbers.
That the work is still popular by the time the copyright runs out is no justification for granting a longer term. And why should the public only get to enjoy worthless works freely anyway?
How about just making it annual up to some maximum?
If a copyright holder is only interested in copyright for, say, 3 years, and is so uninterested after that point that he can't even summon up the energy to deliberately release the work to the public domain (but wouldn't care if it did enter), you're still giving him 7-12 years for no good reason.
Given that most of the economic value (and copyright is about nothing other than economic value) is realized very quickly upon publication in any given medium, most works don't need long copyrights. (E.g. a daily newspaper is fishwrap by the end of the day, a book has maybe 18 months, there being nowhere to go after a release in paperback, and movies are little more than movies of the week after 10, maybe 15 years.)
It's really rare to have a work of long-lasting value, and we may as well design the system around the majority of works, rather than the rare, successful outliers. And the guys with the long-lived works can surely afford the more frequent renewal schedule.
Pretty easily, now that we have photography. It can be done by hand, too, though (sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, as in the case of art forgers). The only thing you can't copy is the provenance, but copyright has nothing to do with that; the Mona Lisa painted by Da Vinci is in the public domain and it's still worth more than an exact duplicate by someone else.
I said there would be fewer things of value produced if works could be copied freely without the people who did the work getting paid.
That's not necessarily true, though. Increased copyright does not necessarily mean increased numbers of works created. If you were to graph the value of copyright over time, you'd find that it spikes quickly, turns into a matter of diminishing returns, and eventually peaks, then trends downwards.
While we probably aren't there yet, it is possible to have such restrictive copyrights that it discourages people from creating and publishing new works due to the threat of rent-seeking established copyright holders who don't want competition, resulting in less creation and publication than if there were no copyright at all.
but I don't think any Hollywood type movies would be made if any theater could legally make a copy and show the film without paying the film company.
Perhaps there is a middle ground? For example, allow natural persons, acting non-commercially, to make copies as they like, but don't allow businesses or anyone acting commercially to infringe, which would require the movie theater to still pay to show movies.
Well, one of the rights that comprises copyright is the right to prohibit others from preparing a derivative work, which the novel discussed here would qualify as. So it probably is a copyright issue. Whatever trademarks are involved, they'd really only derive their power, in this context, from the copyright to begin with, as trademarks are not allowed to function as a substitute for copyrights.
There were groups of patriots during and prior to the Revolutionary war who would burn down the houses of loyalists, tar and feather their enemies, steal their property, whip them, etc. Notable figures of the era were involved with this, such as Samuel Adams in Boston, though I do know that Paine opposed at least some of that sort of behavior.
Well, I am something of an optimist. And in any case, the alternatives are what?
Having the state censor them would violate their civil liberties, and as much as we may all despise WBC, their rights should be protected. (Plus it's nice when hateful people out themselves; saves a lot of trouble exposing them)
Ignoring them would be okay, to the point where they're basically outcasts from society and commerce. But they could probably get a rise out of some people, sometimes; in the absence of opposition, some people might fall for their crap; and some people would be too spineless to maintain such an embargo. Plus pithy quote by Burke.
What would you suggest? How effective do you think it would be?
Regarding lawsuits, if they're just trying to find deep pockets, I doubt that Anonymous will have them. We're basically talking about high schoolers, college students, and parents' basement dwellers, mainly, as I understand it. Plus they may be a pain in the ass to track down and get jurisdiction over. And I think we've all seen recently that it's not a great idea to antagonize them.
Slashdot Mirror
As insane as the copyright limits are, given the capitalist drive for the cheapest possible solution, reducing copyright terms would mean that instead of funding new creative works because they can't use old ones, big movie studios and publishers would just endlessly republish and remix existing works. Cheaper to redo than create from new and why go with something risky when you can redo something that succeeded again and again and again ...
Yes, one of the central arguments in favor of copyright is that it encourages the creation and publication of original creative works. This comes at the expense of the creation and publication of derivative works (and n.b. there's no inherent difference in quality -- Shakespeare was an almost entirely derivative playwright, for example), but only temporarily.
However, we seem to be suffering through a drought of originality regardless.
Modest fees are already charged, and as with the PTO, the registration system is moving online. The renewal form seems like it would be quite simple. At a minimum you only need:
1. GUID number associated with the work / registration.
2. Checkbox if copyright holder contact information has not changed. Lines to enter new contact information if it has changed or if there is a new copyright holder.
3. Checkbox and lines if any other information is to be changed, e.g. abandoning part of the copyright but not other parts, though I can't think of why this would be likely to occur.
You could make it more complex, asking for the title of the work, publication dates, etc. but I'm sure the Copyright Office can figure out what it needs and doesn't need, and how to best cope with the paperwork.
Given that the US had renewals (admittedly on a less frequent schedule) from 1790 to 1992 (and there's still a bit of a renewal system left for older works), it doesn't seem to have been a big deal before. Especially since most authors never bothered to renew, not caring if they got as much protection as they possibly could. That's one of the core goals to frequent renewals: if an author only wants, say, 8 years of copyright, and not 14 or 28 or 56 or life+50 or life+70 or what have you, then his failure to bother to file for a 9th year is a good way of not granting superfluous copyright.
That's why they might want to care, not why I should. Or are you saying that what's good for GM is good for America?
You're ignoring the fact that many people refuse to torrent because they know it is illegal and equate illegality with a general moral "wrong". The minute you make unlimited copying legal, you tell these people that it's no longer wrong, and that's when the money goes away.
Despite the infamous publicity campaigns of the music industry back in the day, I'd say that no one ever thought that home taping was morally wrong when it used to be illegal (or now when it is effectively legal, though not technically so). The music industry said that home taping would kill music. Not only did it not die as a result, but they wound up making record amounts of money.
I'd also point out that laws should conform to social norms in the absence of a very pressing reason to go against them. With Prohibition, alcohol was made illegal, but few found it actually immoral, almost everyone drank, the disrespect for that one law caused massive disrespect for more important laws, and we wound up with rampant corruption, violence, and organized crime on a level that we still haven't escaped from. With desegregation, there was a lot of popular support for segregation, but it was important for the government to protect everyone's civil liberties, and the government ignored the will of many, perhaps most, of the people.
Which do you think copyright infringement by natural persons acting noncommercially is more like? If it helps, you may wish to recall the height of the Napster era, when everyone and their dog was sharing music. I even have it on excellent authority that at least several US Senators were trading pirated music around.
In any case, I'm not convinced that people would stop paying for works in such quantities so as to jeopardize the entire existence of the various industries. There might be a loss of some money, and budgets might have to go down, as I said, but I think plenty of commercial works would still be made.
And like I said, I'm willing to try it and find out. If I turn out to be wrong, and it turns out that the public interest is better served by making non-commercial infringement by natural persons just as unlawful as any other sort of infringement, I'll gladly support reinstating the ban.
Just because an independent author is not currently selling his book in Burkina Faso doesn't mean that someone else should be able to do it for free.
Well, I would say that that's up to the people of Burkina Faso to decide, but generally why shouldn't other people be able to step in?
The public benefits when works are created and published. The public doesn't benefit when works are not created and published. If you're refusing to publish a work, why should you be given the right to prevent other people from stepping in and doing what you refuse to do? To give you a monopoly at public expense only to have you turn around and refuse to use it for the public benefit (and, if you like, for your own benefit, though that's not mandatory) seems to me to indicate that maybe you should not have been given the monopoly in the first place.
If I'm publishing on Lulu.com or whatever, I'm small-fry. I can't afford to register my book everywhere in one go.
That is an economic decision you will have to make. You should only register your work in places where you think you can exploit the copyright in order to make a profit after considering the costs of getting a copyright and publishing there. If you don't believe that you can successfully make a go of it in Pottsylvania, or wherever, then don't bother. But don't be upset if someone else takes a stab at it, which at least is better than letting the whole thing go to waste.
This is already how things work for patents. Inventors have to decide, within certain time limits, which countries they want to apply for a patent in. Failing to apply for (and receive) a patent in a particular country means that the invention is in the public domain there. It makes good sense: the inventor can get a patent where he likes (subject to local laws as to what is patentable), but it's up to him to decide where, and then he needs to comply with the various local laws. If the inventor doesn't care to get one someplace, that country benefits far more from having the patent in the public domain than from giving a monopoly to an absentee inventor who will never bother to use it in a productive manner. The inventor doesn't lose anything, since he had given up on that country to start with. No one loses and more people win than otherwise would.
Maybe I want to release worldwide eventually, but under your system I either have to be able to do that from day one, or I forego the ability to ever do it. Who does this benefit? Not the independent author -- it only benefits big business.
Well, I'd personally hope for a modest time limit, especially as some works might be published simultaneously with their creation, and it's hard to file simultaneously too -- people can only do so much at one time! A year from first publication anywhere would be fine with me.
In any case though, the goal of copyright is neither to benefit the independent author or the big business author. The goal is to benefit the public. If it happens to benefit authors of any kind, that's great, but that's merely a means to an end. Big businesses are, if anything, even more concerned with the economics of the situation. They're not going to try to get a copyright on some work everywhere in the world, unless they think they can make a profit by doing so everywhere in the world. This suggests that they would publish abroad.
I'm sure that people can manage to smuggle things through customs all the time, many of which are far more dangerous than a book.
This sounds like a call for customs to be better at inspecting imports. I think there's still a pressing need for privacy (we've all heard of incidents where customs agents scan people's hard drives at ports of entry, fishing for whatever they can find).
Honestly, I suspect that the importation rules are a little too strict. For example, there have been cases where goods were lawfully manufactured by the plaintiff, sold abroad at low prices, and imported by third parties seeking to gain from arbitrage -- goods like shampoo or wristwatches. It's claimed that these imports infringe because of copyrighted artwork on the label, or the logo, even though they were ultimately made under the authority of the plaintiff or the person the plaintiff got his rights from.
I don't think that copyright holders should have to compete against unauthorized publishers working abroad, but we do need to watch out for abuses, and we do need to figure out how they can detect infringers without running roughshod over privacy.
Tricky, but probably not a big enough problem to justify ditching important copyright reforms.
Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
Well, they're dead, so who cares.
Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter?
What if the widow and orphans decide to use the dead person in a manner directly contrary to what the dead person did in life? E.g. an 'authorized' ad using a simulated MLK in which he supports segregation.
If you're concerned with the legacy, you can't trust anyone. Of course, this results in everyone basically having to forget that dead people ever existed, having to never speak of them again, lest they do something that contradicts with what someone else feels is appropriate.
Hooey, in my opinion.
The world belongs to the living.
Depending on how clear it is that the book in question is fiction, there may be grounds for a libel suit in such a situation
Does libel survive the death of the person being libeled?
Anyway, yes, publicity rights vary widely, though I seriously doubt that it can be used to prevent unauthorized biographies from being published, though if it is basically libelous, and it's possible to have post-mortem libel, then perhaps there'd be something the Tolkien estate could do.
It's certainly an interesting question though, which I'd want to research more thoroughly if I were involved.
No, because you cannot copyright facts. At most you can copyright the selection and arrangement of facts, but only if it's original enough to qualify as a work by itself.
So anyone could mine an autobiography for the unprotected facts contained in it as well as collecting other facts independently. If the autobiography is arranged in some uncreative manner, e.g. chronologically, then only the selection might stand as being protectable. This wouldn't be too hard to get around, IMO.
Also, if you invent some of the facts yourself, or include theories to explain them, but you present them as being factual, it can be treated as being factual for copyright purposes. This has come up in cases where people tried to claim infringement where they had theories as to how the Hindenburg exploded, or the fate of John Dillinger, and other people reused those theories without permission.
A 'fact' that is sufficiently creative, becoming a matter of opinion, OTOH, could be protected. Blue book listings for cars tend to be protected as opinion, IIRC.
What we do know is that in today's age of restrictive copyright we are also seeing the greatest publication of new cultiral artifacts (books, music, film and so on) in history.
Of course, we've also developed publishing technology to unprecedented heights. Don't be too quick to give the credit to copyright.
In the US at least, copyrights include the right to prohibit importation of copies (subject to some modest exceptions). So the copy from Whateveristan can be held up at the border by customs.
I have no problem with a copyright holder preventing someone from importing a copy of the work that, had the laws of the country to which it is imported applied in the place where it was made, it would have been made unlawfully.
In that case, who's going to buy the DVD? Everyone will torrent it. Who's going to watch it on TV with those annoying advert breaks when they can just torrent it?
Well, we live in a world where people can do those things now. Yet somehow, people keep making DVDs and showing things on TV, and people keep buying those DVDs and watching those shows.
People are willing to pay for things even when they don't strictly have to do so, though I'd agree that it is possible that the amount of money made might decline, and so the budget for works might decline. For video, the important thing is usually the writing, followed by the acting and direction. Writers are fairly cheap, and I'm not convinced that the biggest name actors are spectacularly better than far less expensive lower tier actors. As for effects, props, costumes, scenery, etc., none of that is actually necessary, though it can be nice. And modern technology can stretch budgets a lot further than used to be possible.
It wouldn't work, sorry.
Well, I'm not as certain about that as you are. I say we try it out and see. If it turns out that it really doesn't work, we can always change the laws back again. I am, after all, all about pragmatic solutions to promoting the progress of science.
Well that would require further treaties, which would be against your "unilateral" change.
Don't confuse a preference with a bargain. I suppose that if no one else were willing to unilaterally offer national treatment (though I vaguely recall that it's been done in the past in Europe somewhere), treaties for that and that alone might be made. But I can't imagine what the US would be able to bargain with at the table.
National registration would be ridiculously onerous as there are almost 200 countries in the world.
Firstly, lack of a registration system is ridiculously onerous to the public at large, which is a far larger and more important group than mere authors or rightsholders. Registration and other formalities (e.g. deposit, notice) are vital for reducing the public harm caused by copyright to roughly the minimum amount necessary to serve the public interest; they are vital for establishing precisely which works are and are not copyrighted; extremely helpful in upkeep of the market for creative works, so that rightsholders can be efficiently found, facilitating assignments and licensing; essential for national libraries and the preservation of knowledge.
Secondly, persons doing business internationally already have to deal with a myriad of forms. Taxes, at the very least, must be paid; contracts must be agreed to, and unless the parties are naifs, they'll be in writing. Some countries may have censorship offices which will have to be dealt with. Local copyright collecting agencies may need to be registered with. So copyright registrations are no great burden; the form is about on par with a change of address form. In practice, few authors will care about a lot of these countries, and so can ignore the burden that may come with obtaining rights; others will care, and to them it will be nothing more than the cost of doing business. Indeed, if it costs more to get rights than the rights are worth, they won't even bother, since copyright is, after all, a purely economic matter.
Thirdly, while I support registration, and I think that it is probably one of the most pressing copyright reforms needed in the US, it's up to other countries to decide whether or not they want to have registrations. If France says no, then no one's going to make them do it. The result would merely be that if an American author wants a copyright in the US and France, he registers the former and doesn't register the latter; if a French author wants the same, he does likewise. (In fact, if there's national treatment, but no minimum standards, there's actually no requirement that every country have copyright at all; if they don't believe it is in their own interests, who are we to argue?)
Consider the case of a photographer that on uploading 50 new snaps to his website would have to fill out ten thousand forms if he wanted to avoid them being used by unscrupulous advertising agencies.
Fourthly, you clearly don't understand registration. In the US, for example, where we still have at least some registration formalities left, though not as strong as they were or need to be, it's often possible to register works in batches. The 50 photographs could probably be handled in one single form. Nothing would prevent other countries from adopting or reviving similar procedures.
Fifthly, while there are many countries in the world, only a few are generally worth a damn for most rightsholders. If I write a book, I might publish it in the US and Canada. If it's really popular, it might get exported or reprinted in other English-speaking countries. Only if it is really popular or somehow important is it likely to be translated into foreign languages, and then probably only a few. Even for works that need no translation, the market really isn't very global at all. It probably never will be.
And if an author doesn't care enough about how his work will be protected in every corner of the world to take at least some modest actio
If the US did that, other countries would simply drop restrictions on US IP.
Well, I do want all countries to offer national treatment, without any minimum standards. If this means that US rightsholders would have to fill out forms or something for whatever countries they wanted to get rights in, that would be fine with me.
However, I would point out that the US avoided copyright treaties of significance for a long time, and didn't even join Berne until 1989. There are ways of avoiding the problem you think would arise, if it's a problem at all, really.
The biggest advantage of bilateral treaties is that it would be much easier to pressure countries that do not actually enforce IP law.
I don't understand why I should care whether or not a foreign country has copyright laws, whether merely on paper or actually in practice.
The US should implement whatever laws we consider best in our own territory, and not accept outside interference. We should allow others to do the same. The only standard should be national treatment -- countries should not discriminate for or against their own authors.
I could go with that, but I think it would be harder to get passed into law than some variation on my idea (especially considering the Berne Convention).
Your proposal is also incompatible with Berne. Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever for the US to be a party to any copyright treaty at all. We should unilaterally grant national treatment to works of foreign authors, but we should set our own laws and not be bound by any set of minimum standards from abroad. Our involvement with copyright internationally should be limited to 1) informally coordinating with other countries so as to try to avoid conflicts between various copyright laws that would force an author to choose between protection in one place, and protection in another, due to mutual incompatibilities; 2) publish copyright forms and instructions in foreign languages to reduce obstacles for foreign authors seeking US copyrights.
That's the provenance at work, which is not copyable, and not protected by copyright anyway.
(Though copies can be valuable; if you discovered that you had the only known copy of some very notable lost work, you might be able to get millions of dollars for it, even though that particular copy was written by some anonymous student or scribe who no one cares about)
The text seems to be independently written (i.e. not by copying Tolkien's texts), even though it contains ideas, names and themes from Tolkien's famous books. That's completely ok as far as copyright is concerned (no copying, no problem).
No, it's a derivative work, which is one of the things covered by copyright.
No.
Which is not to say that copyright should be based around the life of the author. It should be a term of years from publication or some other fixed point in time. This makes it predictable, which is good for everyone.
But copyright isn't intended to benefit authors or people who made deals with authors. It is intended to benefit the public. The value to authors is just a means to an end; we give them a monopoly in order to encourage them to create things that will enter the public domain, and if the work is popular, the monopoly is worth something for them to exploit.
Ideally then, we should grant the bare minimum copyright necessary in order to get works created. Less would not be as beneficial as possible to the public, more would be superfluous and wasteful. This may not be possible on a work-by-work basis, but we can probably work out some good average numbers.
That the work is still popular by the time the copyright runs out is no justification for granting a longer term. And why should the public only get to enjoy worthless works freely anyway?
How about just making it annual up to some maximum?
If a copyright holder is only interested in copyright for, say, 3 years, and is so uninterested after that point that he can't even summon up the energy to deliberately release the work to the public domain (but wouldn't care if it did enter), you're still giving him 7-12 years for no good reason.
Given that most of the economic value (and copyright is about nothing other than economic value) is realized very quickly upon publication in any given medium, most works don't need long copyrights. (E.g. a daily newspaper is fishwrap by the end of the day, a book has maybe 18 months, there being nowhere to go after a release in paperback, and movies are little more than movies of the week after 10, maybe 15 years.)
It's really rare to have a work of long-lasting value, and we may as well design the system around the majority of works, rather than the rare, successful outliers. And the guys with the long-lived works can surely afford the more frequent renewal schedule.
How do you copy original works of art?
Pretty easily, now that we have photography. It can be done by hand, too, though (sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, as in the case of art forgers). The only thing you can't copy is the provenance, but copyright has nothing to do with that; the Mona Lisa painted by Da Vinci is in the public domain and it's still worth more than an exact duplicate by someone else.
I said there would be fewer things of value produced if works could be copied freely without the people who did the work getting paid.
That's not necessarily true, though. Increased copyright does not necessarily mean increased numbers of works created. If you were to graph the value of copyright over time, you'd find that it spikes quickly, turns into a matter of diminishing returns, and eventually peaks, then trends downwards.
While we probably aren't there yet, it is possible to have such restrictive copyrights that it discourages people from creating and publishing new works due to the threat of rent-seeking established copyright holders who don't want competition, resulting in less creation and publication than if there were no copyright at all.
but I don't think any Hollywood type movies would be made if any theater could legally make a copy and show the film without paying the film company.
Perhaps there is a middle ground? For example, allow natural persons, acting non-commercially, to make copies as they like, but don't allow businesses or anyone acting commercially to infringe, which would require the movie theater to still pay to show movies.
Well, one of the rights that comprises copyright is the right to prohibit others from preparing a derivative work, which the novel discussed here would qualify as. So it probably is a copyright issue. Whatever trademarks are involved, they'd really only derive their power, in this context, from the copyright to begin with, as trademarks are not allowed to function as a substitute for copyrights.
There were groups of patriots during and prior to the Revolutionary war who would burn down the houses of loyalists, tar and feather their enemies, steal their property, whip them, etc. Notable figures of the era were involved with this, such as Samuel Adams in Boston, though I do know that Paine opposed at least some of that sort of behavior.
Association with Anonymous, even defending them here, will turn out to be to their disadvantage in the future.
Out of curiosity, had you been around in the 1930's, which side would you have supported in the Spanish Civil War?
Well, I am something of an optimist. And in any case, the alternatives are what?
Having the state censor them would violate their civil liberties, and as much as we may all despise WBC, their rights should be protected. (Plus it's nice when hateful people out themselves; saves a lot of trouble exposing them)
Ignoring them would be okay, to the point where they're basically outcasts from society and commerce. But they could probably get a rise out of some people, sometimes; in the absence of opposition, some people might fall for their crap; and some people would be too spineless to maintain such an embargo. Plus pithy quote by Burke.
What would you suggest? How effective do you think it would be?
Regarding lawsuits, if they're just trying to find deep pockets, I doubt that Anonymous will have them. We're basically talking about high schoolers, college students, and parents' basement dwellers, mainly, as I understand it. Plus they may be a pain in the ass to track down and get jurisdiction over. And I think we've all seen recently that it's not a great idea to antagonize them.