On the contrary, that's protected political speech.
No, it's not political in any way whatsoever. But the First Amendment protects artistic speech anyway.
But free speech does NOT give you a right to say anything you want at any time you want for any reason you want.
This is actually a matter of some debate, I think you'll find. Remember, we're discussing the natural right of free speech, which exists even in a state of nature, and with which every person is naturally imbued. Even if we get into the First Amendment, which is merely a recognition and guarantee of the pre-existing right, rather than a grant of such a right, there have been plenty of prominent figures, even Supreme Court justices, who felt that the First Amendment should be absolute.
But we're getting off point.
Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission, claim it's yours, and sell copies of it.
Let's fix that to match what I actually said, just to avoid any unnecessary complications:
Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission... and sell copies of it.
In fact, it entitles me to do exactly that. To wit: I am not William Shakespeare. Shakespeare has never given me permission to do anything, which is unsurprising as he was long dead before I was ever born. I can go online and download a copy of the script to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as it was printed in the First Folio. I can print up copies of that work, and sell them. I have a natural right to do this, I was never given permission by the government to do this, and neither the government, nor the author, nor the author's heirs or assigns, have any right to stop me.
Copyright is a legal structure implemented on top of this underlying natural right to speak freely, even if it involves verbatim repetition of the words of someone else.
204 only requires that a memorandum be signed to make the transfer of existing rights effective.
Well, let's bring up the specific language, including a useful definition from section 101:
A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
A "transfer of copyright ownership" is an assignment, mortgage, exclusive license, or any other conveyance, alienation, or hypothecation of a copyright or of any of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, whether or not it is limited in time or place of effect, but not including a nonexclusive license.
In this case, the instrument would be the ticket. To be at all valid as a means of transferring the copyright, it would have to have the appropriate contractual language written on it, and it would have to be signed by the person (or by that person's duly authorized agent), from whom the rights are being transferred pursuant to the terms printed on the ticket. Merely redeeming the ticket to gain access to the stadium and to be seated would not suffice.
One party can still contract with a second in a manner that the second is obliged to transfer any copyrights to the first party and refrain from exercising any of said copyrights pending transfer.
You mean refrain from publishing the copyrighted works; a copyright is exercised by prohibiting others from using the work (in certain ways), but it is free speech which is exercised in publishing the work, etc.
Also, while it is perhaps possible to make a binding promise to make such a future agreement, it is contrary to the legislative intent of section 204, and I would be surprised to see many cases in which it worked out this way. If you've got cites, I'd be interested to see them. I don't recall any cases along these lines, and the analogous 'hired to invent' doctrine of patent law seems to be more closely related to the work made for hire doctrine in copyright, and can be defeated in any event, IIRC.
Or the first party can simply include assignment of copyright in the terms. The rights are secured in advance, it is not a transfer of rights, because the creator of the work never owns the rights in the first place.
Copyright vests according to rules set forth by statute, not by contract. Since it always vests in the author, as the Constitution requires, the issue is who is the author? Normally it is who you think it is, the person who first fixes the work in a medium of expression. In some cases it is possible to show that the person doing the fixation isn't creatively involved, and is merely a spare set of hands (e.g. a photographer who looks at a monitor, and tells someone else where to aim the camera, which lights to point where, how to pose the subject, etc.). But what you're apparently thinking of is a work made for hire. There's only two ways to get one of those: First, if the attendee is the employee of the NFL, and is creating the work in his work capacity. Given that this involves a whole plethora of complications, since the employment has to be real, and not just a sham (e.g. did the NFL fill out a W-4 for each person who attended the game that day), it is pretty clearly not going to fly here. Second, if there is a written, signed agreement stating that the work is a work made for hire, and the work falls within one of a few extremely narrow categories, for example, a globe.
A common example of this is a contract work situation. If you pay me to write a piece of software for you, and the contract owns copyright, when I finish the product and give you the code, the copyright is automatically yours.
Only if you are my employee (making me the author in whom copyright initially vests), or if the software can be shoehorned in one of the work made for hire categories and the agreement covers this
No. But the moment you fix that collection of facts into a tangible form, your fixation of those facts becomes copyrightable, and your contract with the NFL (as included on the ticket) automatically confers the exclusive ownership to the NFL, the moment you fix or state your account of those facts.
Why do you think it's necessary to attend the game? I can just as easily learn those facts by watching the game on tv, and posting those facts to a web page in real time.
Also, copyright law -- in particular, 17 USC 204 -- requires that copyright transfer agreements and exclusive licenses be signed by the author, so your ticket theory is wrong anyway.
I think your definition of infringement is too narrow; I think the definition of infringement in Title 17 just means an interference with the copyright owner's rights under that section.
Well, here's what the Copyright Act actually says. There's no need to think about it, or guess, when we can just look it up:
Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122... is an infringer of the copyright.... 17 USC 501(a).
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights... to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords.... 17 USC 106.
"Copies" are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term "copies" includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
"Phonorecords" are material objects in which sounds, other than those accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work, are fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the sounds can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term "phonorecords" includes the material object in which the sounds are first fixed.
A work is "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. 17 USC 101
So, you're only an infringer if you violate one of the enumerated exclusive rights of the copyright holder. One of those rights is to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. Reproduction (not expressly defined, for some reason) consists of fixing a work into a material object; depending on the sort of object and sort of work, the object may be either a copy or a phonorecord.
So, if you somehow could download music without actually fixing it in some material object, such as RAM, or a hard drive, you would not infringe the reproduction right. If you could download music without fixing it in some material object other than an AHRA-compliant medium (or if you used an AHRA-compliant device, which I think would be the better option), you would technically infringe, but due to the AHRA, you could not be sued for that infringement.
The real question is, what happens if you download to an ordinary computer, the work is temporarily (but sufficiently) fixed in the computer's RAM, and then you immediately fix it in an AHRA-compliant medium, where the temporary fixation in RAM is pretty much an unavoidable step when using such a medium without using a compliant device (a situation which the AHRA foresees, given its wording)?
I don't know. I'm not optimistic. I'd prefer to see an el-cheapo AHRA-compliant device that consisted of a network interface, software that allowed downloading but not uploading as directed by the user, and which stored works which the AHRA permits the copying of, with the appropriate SCMS flags, on, say, an AHRA-compliant flash card that could be easily read by a computer. But it sure is an interesting thing to think about.
Well, the infringing part of downloading is fixation of the work to a physical medium from which the work can be perceived. If this is to RAM, or a hard drive, then that is sufficient. Download without such a medium (good luck) and there's no copying, so no infringement. So the question here is whether any intervening media (likely the RAM) would be enough to hang the case on if the ultimate medium was AHRA-compliant, and therefore not something that could be sued over.
If the download was directly to the disc, rather than a hard drive, it could bolster the argument. Of course, as I noted elsewhere earlier, it doesn't help with distribution, but then, he didn't say he'd do that, IIRC.
Free speech means that you are free to repeat and argue in favor of or against the political ideas of other people, but copyright law, even with the much reviled DMCA, does not in any way curtail this.
Oh? So you're saying that I have a natural right to make political statements, but I do not have such a right to say that I enjoy the color blue purely as a matter of aesthetics? That's ridiculous.
I am not an IP lawyer, but from what I understand the AHRA applies to certain specifically designated digital devices, and a computer isn't one of them.
That's true, but it isn't the whole story. It applies to digital and analog audio recording devices and audio recording media. Due to the specialized definitions of these devices and media in the statute, computers are not included (which is actually good, as otherwise they'd have to implement some DRM systems, pay into the fund set up by the AHRA, etc.). Assuming that a person was using an AHRA-compliant digital audio recording medium, however, they'd still fall within the protection of the statute.
Here's the relevant language:
A "digital audio recording medium" is any material object in a form commonly distributed for use by individuals, that is primarily marketed or most commonly used by consumers for the purpose of making digital audio copied recordings by use of a digital audio recording device.
Such term does not include any material object-- (i) that embodies a sound recording at the time it is first distributed by the importer or manufacturer; or (ii) that is primarily marketed and most commonly used by consumers either for the purpose of making copies of motion pictures or other audiovisual works or for the purpose of making copies of nonmusical literary works, including computer programs or data bases....
A "digital musical recording" is a material object-- (i) in which are fixed, in a digital recording format, only sounds, and material, statements, or instructions incidental to those fixed sounds, if any, and (ii) from which the sounds and material can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
A "digital musical recording" does not include a material object-- (i) in which the fixed sounds consist entirely of spoken word recordings, or (ii) in which one or more computer programs are fixed, except that a digital musical recording may contain statements or instructions constituting the fixed sounds and incidental material, and statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in order to bring about the perception, reproduction, or communication of the fixed sounds and incidental material.
For purposes of this paragraph-- (i) a "spoken word recording" is a sound recording in which are fixed only a series of spoken words, except that the spoken words may be accompanied by incidental musical or other sounds, and (ii) the term "incidental" means related to and relatively minor by comparison....
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright... based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a... medium for making digital musical recordings....
The issue is that slavery violated a fundamental moral right to freedom and human dignity. Copyright laws do not violate your rights, because you do not have the right to free (as in beer) copies of the latest Britney Spears music.
I don't know. We have a right to free speech, and free press. This encompasses not only a right to our own original speech, but to repeat the speech of other people. For example, this is why if the government attempted to prevent me from reading Shakespeare aloud in public, I'd be able be go to court to stop them, even though I am not Shakespeare.
When we empower the government to grant copyrights, we temporarily, and to a limited extent, allow the copyright holders to prohibit us from exercising our fundamental right to free speech with regard to their works. The idea is that the public will benefit from having more works created and published, and will be harmed by the copyright restricting them. If enough works are created and published, and the copyright is sufficiently minimal in breadth and length, i.e. getting the most for the least, there can be a net public benefit, greater than that which would be enjoyed if there were no copyright at all.
There's no fundamental moral right to have copyrights; they're merely utilitarian. They can be very good for society, and to the extent that they are, I support them. But free speech is a critically important right, even when it comes to verbatim repetition of the words of another person. While I can tolerate good copyright laws, I can respect the position that even the best copyright law, which yielded the greatest net public benefit, would be too much of an infringement of free speech to be tolerable.
My point is that individuals that knowingly violate laws, either righteously or foolishly, have to be aware that they will face the consequences prescribed by the law, whether or not that law is itself unjust.
Yes, absolutely. But this still leaves legitimate the choice to flout a law and complain about it at the same time.
Your example is a little extreme, but your point is valid.
Slightly less extreme might be the sit-ins by civil rights protesters in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Or any of a number of illegal activities engaged in in the Indian independence movement, e.g. making salt from the sea.
The counter-counter point I would make is that there is a huge moral difference between knowingly violating copyright laws and fugitive slave laws.
Oh sure. Violating fugitive slave laws is absolutely moral. Violating copyright laws is generally neither moral nor immoral, as legitimate copyright laws are utilitarian, without a moral component. Violating those laws is generally only self-defeating, as it can produce a net public benefit less than that the law would have produced if obeyed. If a copyright law does get to be particularly unjust, then reproducing and disseminating information that copyright holders seek to restrict may become somewhat moral.
Because if you are caught having downloaded x number of illegal copies, you can definitively prove the amount of damages (x times cost per track), and as such can avoid those ludicrous "statutory damages" that are at the heart of the record industry's terror campaign.
No, assuming that the plaintiff didn't squander his chance to get statutory damages by not registering in a timely manner, it is his choice whether or not to seek them. It doesn't matter whether or not the amount of actual damages is known. Check out 17 USC sections 504(a), (c)(1), and 412.
More likely, IMO, the reason that they don't sue for mere downloading is that 1) downloaders who don't upload are hard to catch, and 2) as a matter of strategy and efficient use of resources, the preference is to go up against major actors rather than minor ones. That's why a decade ago, they started with Napster. Winning that one case, and shutting down that one network, was supposed to effectively shut down many thousands of individuals who had been using it as a beneficial side effect. It didn't work, but that was the idea behind it.
Wow, such correct readings of the AHRA are quite rare, IME. Of course, I'd be dubious as to whether such an argument would succeed (given that intermediate copies would have to go to the computer's memory, possibly to the hard drive, etc., before reaching the AudioCDR), but it could work.
One point though, it would still be illegal. The ARHA doesn't legalize the making of such copies, it just makes them non-actionable (that is, not something that you could be sued for). There is a subtle but important difference, which is important to the record industry: First Sale only applies to copies which are lawfully made; since AHRA-compliant copies are not lawfully made, they cannot be freely distributed, at least not by means of First Sale.
Individuals that knowingly violate that law have no right to turn around and complain that the law is unfair.
Yes they have. For example, when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was in effect, anyone who aided a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to criminal penalties. However, breaking that law was absolutely the correct thing to do, and so was speaking out against it. Why should righteous law-breakers have to choose between one form of opposition or the other? What right did wicked supporters of the law have to insist upon such a choice?
This is an extreme example, but it counters your position.
In the US I believe you are allowed to rip DVDs or CDs for personal use (i.e. to transfer them to your portable media player or whatever) under fair use laws.
Well, in the US, it is unlawful to circumvent DRM on a copyrighted work regardless of the purpose, with only a few exceptions, none of which would apply here. Setting that aside, however, ripping copies to a computer is also unlawful unless there is an applicable exception, such as fair use. But fair use is tricky. There are no types of uses which are always fair or unfair; rather, each case has to be decided on its own merits. So just saying 'personal use' doesn't work. That specific personal use has to be a fair one, and there is no guarantee that it will be merely because some other personal use was a fair use.
Well, the issues that instantly spring to mind are:
1) The costs of tracking someone down in order to connect a person with the observed infringing behavior, and then sending out the nasty letter, are likely to exceed 1/3 of the amount demanded (assuming that the other 2/3 are to make the copyright holder, etc. 'whole' for the infringing copy). Thus, they still lose money on the overall deal.
2) Because they can't observe every infringement, and can't successfully track down every infringer that they did observe, many, perhaps most, infringers will get away scot-free. This may encourage more people to infringe in the future, if they think that the money they save when they don't get caught will be greater than the money they would spend legitimately, or would lose if they did get caught. This having been said, enforcement efforts currently only deter people from going to court if they have been caught; the odds against being caught are low enough that they don't seem to deter anyone.
3) If there is another person who had their rights infringed, who isn't represented by the authors of the letter, they could still sue, using the infringer's acceptance of the settlement offer as evidence of infringement. Unless the infringers are protected from this in some way -- by the letter-writers offering to indemnify them for any other damages caused by the infringement at issue -- then the infringers aren't made safe. And the letter-writers are never going to willingly accept that kind of risk for such a low reward.
Copyright is supposed to be an _EXCLUSIVE_ right to copy the work... (right to copy = copyright). Anybody else requires permission by virtue of that exclusivity. If somebody else does it without permission, they literally *DO* deprive the copyright holder of some measure of his or her exclusivity on their right to copy their work, since by definition, exclusive means that nobody else is supposed to be doing it.
Well, to be slightly more precise, copyright is not a right to copy, but a right to exclude (hence 'exclusive') others from copying. The right to copy is already handled by freedom of speech and of the press, and is the reason why, if you wrote something libelous, say, you could be prohibited from making copies of it, while still having a copyright.
The analog of copyright in the world of real property would be a negative easement, which is when you have a right to prohibit the owner of a piece of property from doing certain things with it, regardless of whether or not you have a right to do those things, or any thing, with that property yourself.
Infringing doesn't alter the copyright holder's right to exclude. In fact, that's finally the point at which he can exercise that right (no need for an enforceable right if people will just honor your request). In fact, only two things can reduce the copyright holder's ability to exercise his right: If he gives permission to someone, he can't turn around and sue them for doing the permitted deed. And, the law, which puts boundaries on the right, including the statute of limitations, which can result in the copyright holder's apathy toward an infringer limiting his ability to sue that infringer for that infringement once the clock has expired.
So again, I just don't see where this 'stealing' thing comes from, other than as vilification.
It's not even a very meaningful list. Just because a use falls within the list, that doesn't make it a fair use, and just because a use doesn't fall within the list, that doesn't make it not a fair use. The list is basically just a loose suggestion, and IMO confusing and somewhat pointless. Since the four factor analysis is what actually matters for determining whether a use is a fair use or not, I'd just as soon see the Copyright Act amended to get rid of the list. And if there are uses that are deemed so important that they should always be allowed, they should get new exceptions just for them, rather than relying on fair use.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Getting the most into the public domain the fastest may or may not be the best way of doing that.
Well, just science, actually, which meant knowledge, back in the late 18th century when they wrote the Constitution. The useful arts are what patents are supposed to promote. (We have more vestiges of art meaning a technical skill: prior art, state of the art technology, a person having ordinary skill in the art, etc.)
Anyway, as it happens, getting the most into the public domain the fastest is basically exactly the best way to promote the progress of science. Consider a utopia of knowledge: Everyone who can create works, and is willing to create works, does so. These works may be instantly published to everyone else in the world, who may choose to enjoy or ignore those works as they see fit. Everyone has a universal library, containing all known published works. If one person enjoys a work, he might make some copies at trivial cost in order to give them to other people he knows who, he thinks, would also enjoy it. If an old work is discovered in some ancient ruin, copies are made and made available to everyone, so that the work is no longer rare, and no longer in danger of being destroyed and lost forever. If someone wants to create a work, they can do so, whether that work is original or derivative of something else; the creative impulse is never squashed or dismissed. Works might not all be good -- in fact, most will be lousy -- but that's true of anything.
That's the ideal world: One where public knowledge is preserved and made available to everyone for every purpose and at the least or zero cost. The reason we can't really have that is because we don't have the resources to afford it. Not everyone who wants to act can spend all their time at it without concern for basic necessities. Because our resources are limited, we don't get so many works created if authors can't make money derived from those works.
Now, sometimes they can -- Shakespeare had no copyrights as we know them, but became reasonably successful financially because he got a share of the box office from his own theater company, and invested wisely. He didn't get money from other actors staging his plays, but neither did he have to pay the people he copied from when he wrote them, nor pay other playwrights when he staged their plays. And, closer to home, I used to be a professional artist, and I made a comfortable living, but that was by selling my labor (which I still do, now that I'm a lawyer). Neither I, nor any of my clients, made money based on copyrights, and a total lack of copyrights would not have made us a penny poorer. Most fine artists don't rely on copyright to make a living, not that most artists of any sort make a living from their art anyway, even with copyrights.
So if works are most valuable to the public, and most promote the progress of knowledge if they are in the public domain -- free to acquire, share with others, base more works upon, etc. -- but we might be able to increase the number of works generally by granting copyrights -- making authorship more attractive financially, though other incentives exist independently of copyright -- then surely we only want to grant copyrights for as short a period as possible, with as few restrictions as possible, in order to get the most works in the public domain the fastest.
No copyright would get works in faster, but there'd be fewer of them. More than the ideal amount of copyright would not result in as many works (the financial incentive only goes so far, is iffy to begin with, and can result in authors engaging in anti-competitive behavior against one another, rather than compete fairly), and less freedom and utility for the public.
Still, if you have an idea that would result in a greater net public benefit than copyright could ever deliver -- the current system is a bad implementation, however -- feel free to tell us about it.
Given that 800 new books are published *every day* - it is fair to say that copyright does entice people to produce.
No it isn't. You haven't shown that those books would not be published, but for copyright.
For example, if literacy rates dropped significantly (IIRC the literacy rate in England was around 30% in Shakespeare's day), fewer books might be published due to a lack of audience. If books could only be published on a Gutenberg-style press, using laboriously hand-set type, and requiring manual labor to fold the signatures into pages, to collate the signatures into the proper order in the book, to sew the signatures into a binding (itself hand-made), to cut the signatures so that the book can be opened, fewer books might be published due to the cost of printing them. If inks, paper, and binding materials were not made by machines on an industrial level, and to consistent levels of quality, the high cost of materials (due to the labor and skill to make them) might similarly result in fewer books being published. If we did not have bright gas or electric lights, the audience for books would diminish, because it would be impractical to read them at night (reading by the light of a fireplace sucks -- try it). If our society hadn't industrialized, so that people had spare time in which to read, and if our society hadn't liberalized, so that people could write, sell, and read whatever books they chose, the number of books would likewise diminish. Then there's medicines to keep authors and readers alive, glasses to allow people to keep reading as their vision goes, motorized vehicles of all sorts to carry books to be distributed, pens that can write for more than a brief amount without needing replacement (quill pens suck tremendously), etc.
There are, frankly, a lot of differences between when copyright did not exist, and today, which have had tremendous influences on the number of books that are created and published. Quite frankly, copyright is probably far from the most important of them. Does copyright entice (I would say incentivize) people to create and publish works? Sure. But it isn't nearly so much of an incentive as you imagine. It absolutely isn't the difference between 8 books a day and 800. But get rid of electricity, and then you'd see a big decline.
this amount of new content (which, because of copyright, isn't just rehashes and remixes of existing copyrighted material).
Content is content. Copyright doesn't care. Indeed, it mustn't care.
It is totally inappropriate for the government to grant or withhold copyrights on the basis of artistic merit, which not only subjective, but something that the government just isn't competent to judge. There are plenty of original works which are complete crap (e.g. Gigli), and plenty of derivative works which are better than their predecessors (e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, an unauthorized adaptation of earlier works). Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I'd rather have Shakespeare (a brazen rehasher and remixer with few original ideas) than be stuck with the not-so-good materials he was ripping off left and right. And of course, copyright is granted to original and derivative works alike today. Are you suggesting dismantling that part of it?
Is dismantling a system that entices authors in English speaking countries to publish 800 new books *every day* worth risking so that less-than-original works based on existing concepts can exist?
If it gets us even as few as 801 new books every day, then yes. In fact, I'd say it would be imperative.
But we needn't go so far. We can massively reduce copyright without massively reducing its incentivizing effect (the incentive isn't distributed evenly -- works lose value very rapidly, which is why you don't subscribe to month-old newspapers, or pay full price at the theater to see a movie that's on broadcast tv the same day), resulting in both of us being happy.
Besides, works aren't as original and non-pre-existing as you seem to think.
Take Slashdot hivemind favorite Neal Stephenson. Are you trying to tell me that I -- or better yet, some e-e-e-e-vil Hollywood studio -- should be able to make a movie today from his "Snowcrash" -- same title, characters, lift the dialogue, whole nine yards -- and not pay Stephenson a dime? Is that what you are proposing? Seriously?
Well, he published it in 1992. Rufus Pollock wrote a pretty good paper on how to determine copyright terms a few years ago, and after running through the numbers, he estimated that a term of 15 years would produce the best results. Assuming he's right, then the public would benefit from Stephenson being able to stop the 4-e's evil studio in 1992. And as late as 2007. And come 2008, then yes, the public would start to benefit more from as many studios making Snow Crash movies, tv series, ballets, etc. as they liked, then allowing Stephenson to keep sitting on it.
Remember, the public benefits not only from having the underlying work created and published, but from having all of the derivative works created and published. I for one would like to see a Snow Crash movie. Stephenson, apparently, is not so interested, or you'd think we would've had something by now. We want the copyright term to be long enough to get the underlying work created, and short enough that it doesn't last one second longer than it absolutely has to, so that unauthorized derivatives can get created.
This also might further encourage Stephenson to pursue film adaptations in a more timely manner. Zodiac at least, right?
Except that over the time period since we've adopted automatic copyright, people have grown used to the right to not have their vacation pictures used by a corporate advertising department that sees them on Flickr. There's a lot of non-commercial works out there, ones that people would (rightly or wrongly) be upset to see misappropriated.
How about a 5-year grace period before requiring registration?
I don't mind a 1-year grace (same as for patents) simply because some people might publish instantly upon creation, and need some time to figure out the paperwork. Nor do I mind a more substantial grace for works still being created, or which are unpublished. But ultimately, copyrights should only be granted if works would not be created and published but for a copyright, and for the least amount of time necessary. If the people who don't want their vacation photos used are serious about it, they should either 1) not publish them (e.g. by putting them on flickr), which I think is unlikely to occur, or 2) register them, which is also probably unlikely.
But have no fear: I doubt that the corporate advertising departments will care enough to use the photos. They're not interested in them, which is why, despite the fact that you probably wouldn't charge very much, they probably don't even call you to get a license.
Indeed. We used to have a system for this: works automatically entered the public domain if they were published without being registered, and the copyright term expired fairly quickly, requiring the author to file a renewal in order to get an additional copyright term. Most authors who created and published works did so without ever bothering to get copyrights; of those who did register, most didn't bother to renew.
Apparently, there are a lot of authors who don't care about getting copyrights, or who care enough to get them but not keep them. That's fine with me. We should reserve copyright for authors who won't create and publish works without it, and then only for the minimum time necessary. The best way I know of that we can do so is to require these authors to identify themselves by registering for copyrights, and to frequently renew those registrations.
I agree that this thing with Google isn't ideal, but I suppose it's better than the status quo, and perhaps we might even get lucky enough that it will encourage meaningful reforms to be made that lead to better results for the public generally.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, that's protected political speech.
No, it's not political in any way whatsoever. But the First Amendment protects artistic speech anyway.
But free speech does NOT give you a right to say anything you want at any time you want for any reason you want.
This is actually a matter of some debate, I think you'll find. Remember, we're discussing the natural right of free speech, which exists even in a state of nature, and with which every person is naturally imbued. Even if we get into the First Amendment, which is merely a recognition and guarantee of the pre-existing right, rather than a grant of such a right, there have been plenty of prominent figures, even Supreme Court justices, who felt that the First Amendment should be absolute.
But we're getting off point.
Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission, claim it's yours, and sell copies of it.
Let's fix that to match what I actually said, just to avoid any unnecessary complications:
Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission ... and sell copies of it.
In fact, it entitles me to do exactly that. To wit: I am not William Shakespeare. Shakespeare has never given me permission to do anything, which is unsurprising as he was long dead before I was ever born. I can go online and download a copy of the script to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as it was printed in the First Folio. I can print up copies of that work, and sell them. I have a natural right to do this, I was never given permission by the government to do this, and neither the government, nor the author, nor the author's heirs or assigns, have any right to stop me.
Copyright is a legal structure implemented on top of this underlying natural right to speak freely, even if it involves verbatim repetition of the words of someone else.
204 only requires that a memorandum be signed to make the transfer of existing rights effective.
Well, let's bring up the specific language, including a useful definition from section 101:
In this case, the instrument would be the ticket. To be at all valid as a means of transferring the copyright, it would have to have the appropriate contractual language written on it, and it would have to be signed by the person (or by that person's duly authorized agent), from whom the rights are being transferred pursuant to the terms printed on the ticket. Merely redeeming the ticket to gain access to the stadium and to be seated would not suffice.
One party can still contract with a second in a manner that the second is obliged to transfer any copyrights to the first party and refrain from exercising any of said copyrights pending transfer.
You mean refrain from publishing the copyrighted works; a copyright is exercised by prohibiting others from using the work (in certain ways), but it is free speech which is exercised in publishing the work, etc.
Also, while it is perhaps possible to make a binding promise to make such a future agreement, it is contrary to the legislative intent of section 204, and I would be surprised to see many cases in which it worked out this way. If you've got cites, I'd be interested to see them. I don't recall any cases along these lines, and the analogous 'hired to invent' doctrine of patent law seems to be more closely related to the work made for hire doctrine in copyright, and can be defeated in any event, IIRC.
Or the first party can simply include assignment of copyright in the terms. The rights are secured in advance, it is not a transfer of rights, because the creator of the work never owns the rights in the first place.
Copyright vests according to rules set forth by statute, not by contract. Since it always vests in the author, as the Constitution requires, the issue is who is the author? Normally it is who you think it is, the person who first fixes the work in a medium of expression. In some cases it is possible to show that the person doing the fixation isn't creatively involved, and is merely a spare set of hands (e.g. a photographer who looks at a monitor, and tells someone else where to aim the camera, which lights to point where, how to pose the subject, etc.). But what you're apparently thinking of is a work made for hire. There's only two ways to get one of those: First, if the attendee is the employee of the NFL, and is creating the work in his work capacity. Given that this involves a whole plethora of complications, since the employment has to be real, and not just a sham (e.g. did the NFL fill out a W-4 for each person who attended the game that day), it is pretty clearly not going to fly here. Second, if there is a written, signed agreement stating that the work is a work made for hire, and the work falls within one of a few extremely narrow categories, for example, a globe.
A common example of this is a contract work situation. If you pay me to write a piece of software for you, and the contract owns copyright, when I finish the product and give you the code, the copyright is automatically yours.
Only if you are my employee (making me the author in whom copyright initially vests), or if the software can be shoehorned in one of the work made for hire categories and the agreement covers this
No. But the moment you fix that collection of facts into a tangible form, your fixation of those facts becomes copyrightable, and your contract with the NFL (as included on the ticket) automatically confers the exclusive ownership to the NFL, the moment you fix or state your account of those facts.
Why do you think it's necessary to attend the game? I can just as easily learn those facts by watching the game on tv, and posting those facts to a web page in real time.
Also, copyright law -- in particular, 17 USC 204 -- requires that copyright transfer agreements and exclusive licenses be signed by the author, so your ticket theory is wrong anyway.
I think your definition of infringement is too narrow; I think the definition of infringement in Title 17 just means an interference with the copyright owner's rights under that section.
Well, here's what the Copyright Act actually says. There's no need to think about it, or guess, when we can just look it up:
So, you're only an infringer if you violate one of the enumerated exclusive rights of the copyright holder. One of those rights is to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. Reproduction (not expressly defined, for some reason) consists of fixing a work into a material object; depending on the sort of object and sort of work, the object may be either a copy or a phonorecord.
So, if you somehow could download music without actually fixing it in some material object, such as RAM, or a hard drive, you would not infringe the reproduction right. If you could download music without fixing it in some material object other than an AHRA-compliant medium (or if you used an AHRA-compliant device, which I think would be the better option), you would technically infringe, but due to the AHRA, you could not be sued for that infringement.
The real question is, what happens if you download to an ordinary computer, the work is temporarily (but sufficiently) fixed in the computer's RAM, and then you immediately fix it in an AHRA-compliant medium, where the temporary fixation in RAM is pretty much an unavoidable step when using such a medium without using a compliant device (a situation which the AHRA foresees, given its wording)?
I don't know. I'm not optimistic. I'd prefer to see an el-cheapo AHRA-compliant device that consisted of a network interface, software that allowed downloading but not uploading as directed by the user, and which stored works which the AHRA permits the copying of, with the appropriate SCMS flags, on, say, an AHRA-compliant flash card that could be easily read by a computer. But it sure is an interesting thing to think about.
Well, the infringing part of downloading is fixation of the work to a physical medium from which the work can be perceived. If this is to RAM, or a hard drive, then that is sufficient. Download without such a medium (good luck) and there's no copying, so no infringement. So the question here is whether any intervening media (likely the RAM) would be enough to hang the case on if the ultimate medium was AHRA-compliant, and therefore not something that could be sued over.
If the download was directly to the disc, rather than a hard drive, it could bolster the argument. Of course, as I noted elsewhere earlier, it doesn't help with distribution, but then, he didn't say he'd do that, IIRC.
Free speech means that you are free to repeat and argue in favor of or against the political ideas of other people, but copyright law, even with the much reviled DMCA, does not in any way curtail this.
Oh? So you're saying that I have a natural right to make political statements, but I do not have such a right to say that I enjoy the color blue purely as a matter of aesthetics? That's ridiculous.
I am not an IP lawyer, but from what I understand the AHRA applies to certain specifically designated digital devices, and a computer isn't one of them.
That's true, but it isn't the whole story. It applies to digital and analog audio recording devices and audio recording media. Due to the specialized definitions of these devices and media in the statute, computers are not included (which is actually good, as otherwise they'd have to implement some DRM systems, pay into the fund set up by the AHRA, etc.). Assuming that a person was using an AHRA-compliant digital audio recording medium, however, they'd still fall within the protection of the statute.
Here's the relevant language:
The issue is that slavery violated a fundamental moral right to freedom and human dignity. Copyright laws do not violate your rights, because you do not have the right to free (as in beer) copies of the latest Britney Spears music.
I don't know. We have a right to free speech, and free press. This encompasses not only a right to our own original speech, but to repeat the speech of other people. For example, this is why if the government attempted to prevent me from reading Shakespeare aloud in public, I'd be able be go to court to stop them, even though I am not Shakespeare.
When we empower the government to grant copyrights, we temporarily, and to a limited extent, allow the copyright holders to prohibit us from exercising our fundamental right to free speech with regard to their works. The idea is that the public will benefit from having more works created and published, and will be harmed by the copyright restricting them. If enough works are created and published, and the copyright is sufficiently minimal in breadth and length, i.e. getting the most for the least, there can be a net public benefit, greater than that which would be enjoyed if there were no copyright at all.
There's no fundamental moral right to have copyrights; they're merely utilitarian. They can be very good for society, and to the extent that they are, I support them. But free speech is a critically important right, even when it comes to verbatim repetition of the words of another person. While I can tolerate good copyright laws, I can respect the position that even the best copyright law, which yielded the greatest net public benefit, would be too much of an infringement of free speech to be tolerable.
My point is that individuals that knowingly violate laws, either righteously or foolishly, have to be aware that they will face the consequences prescribed by the law, whether or not that law is itself unjust.
Yes, absolutely. But this still leaves legitimate the choice to flout a law and complain about it at the same time.
Your example is a little extreme, but your point is valid.
Slightly less extreme might be the sit-ins by civil rights protesters in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Or any of a number of illegal activities engaged in in the Indian independence movement, e.g. making salt from the sea.
The counter-counter point I would make is that there is a huge moral difference between knowingly violating copyright laws and fugitive slave laws.
Oh sure. Violating fugitive slave laws is absolutely moral. Violating copyright laws is generally neither moral nor immoral, as legitimate copyright laws are utilitarian, without a moral component. Violating those laws is generally only self-defeating, as it can produce a net public benefit less than that the law would have produced if obeyed. If a copyright law does get to be particularly unjust, then reproducing and disseminating information that copyright holders seek to restrict may become somewhat moral.
Because if you are caught having downloaded x number of illegal copies, you can definitively prove the amount of damages (x times cost per track), and as such can avoid those ludicrous "statutory damages" that are at the heart of the record industry's terror campaign.
No, assuming that the plaintiff didn't squander his chance to get statutory damages by not registering in a timely manner, it is his choice whether or not to seek them. It doesn't matter whether or not the amount of actual damages is known. Check out 17 USC sections 504(a), (c)(1), and 412.
More likely, IMO, the reason that they don't sue for mere downloading is that 1) downloaders who don't upload are hard to catch, and 2) as a matter of strategy and efficient use of resources, the preference is to go up against major actors rather than minor ones. That's why a decade ago, they started with Napster. Winning that one case, and shutting down that one network, was supposed to effectively shut down many thousands of individuals who had been using it as a beneficial side effect. It didn't work, but that was the idea behind it.
I wouldn't rely on it either, and I also noted an error with his reading of the law, but could you please be more specific?
Wow, such correct readings of the AHRA are quite rare, IME. Of course, I'd be dubious as to whether such an argument would succeed (given that intermediate copies would have to go to the computer's memory, possibly to the hard drive, etc., before reaching the AudioCDR), but it could work.
One point though, it would still be illegal. The ARHA doesn't legalize the making of such copies, it just makes them non-actionable (that is, not something that you could be sued for). There is a subtle but important difference, which is important to the record industry: First Sale only applies to copies which are lawfully made; since AHRA-compliant copies are not lawfully made, they cannot be freely distributed, at least not by means of First Sale.
Individuals that knowingly violate that law have no right to turn around and complain that the law is unfair.
Yes they have. For example, when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was in effect, anyone who aided a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to criminal penalties. However, breaking that law was absolutely the correct thing to do, and so was speaking out against it. Why should righteous law-breakers have to choose between one form of opposition or the other? What right did wicked supporters of the law have to insist upon such a choice?
This is an extreme example, but it counters your position.
In the US I believe you are allowed to rip DVDs or CDs for personal use (i.e. to transfer them to your portable media player or whatever) under fair use laws.
Well, in the US, it is unlawful to circumvent DRM on a copyrighted work regardless of the purpose, with only a few exceptions, none of which would apply here. Setting that aside, however, ripping copies to a computer is also unlawful unless there is an applicable exception, such as fair use. But fair use is tricky. There are no types of uses which are always fair or unfair; rather, each case has to be decided on its own merits. So just saying 'personal use' doesn't work. That specific personal use has to be a fair one, and there is no guarantee that it will be merely because some other personal use was a fair use.
Well, the issues that instantly spring to mind are:
1) The costs of tracking someone down in order to connect a person with the observed infringing behavior, and then sending out the nasty letter, are likely to exceed 1/3 of the amount demanded (assuming that the other 2/3 are to make the copyright holder, etc. 'whole' for the infringing copy). Thus, they still lose money on the overall deal.
2) Because they can't observe every infringement, and can't successfully track down every infringer that they did observe, many, perhaps most, infringers will get away scot-free. This may encourage more people to infringe in the future, if they think that the money they save when they don't get caught will be greater than the money they would spend legitimately, or would lose if they did get caught. This having been said, enforcement efforts currently only deter people from going to court if they have been caught; the odds against being caught are low enough that they don't seem to deter anyone.
3) If there is another person who had their rights infringed, who isn't represented by the authors of the letter, they could still sue, using the infringer's acceptance of the settlement offer as evidence of infringement. Unless the infringers are protected from this in some way -- by the letter-writers offering to indemnify them for any other damages caused by the infringement at issue -- then the infringers aren't made safe. And the letter-writers are never going to willingly accept that kind of risk for such a low reward.
Copyright is supposed to be an _EXCLUSIVE_ right to copy the work... (right to copy = copyright). Anybody else requires permission by virtue of that exclusivity. If somebody else does it without permission, they literally *DO* deprive the copyright holder of some measure of his or her exclusivity on their right to copy their work, since by definition, exclusive means that nobody else is supposed to be doing it.
Well, to be slightly more precise, copyright is not a right to copy, but a right to exclude (hence 'exclusive') others from copying. The right to copy is already handled by freedom of speech and of the press, and is the reason why, if you wrote something libelous, say, you could be prohibited from making copies of it, while still having a copyright.
The analog of copyright in the world of real property would be a negative easement, which is when you have a right to prohibit the owner of a piece of property from doing certain things with it, regardless of whether or not you have a right to do those things, or any thing, with that property yourself.
Infringing doesn't alter the copyright holder's right to exclude. In fact, that's finally the point at which he can exercise that right (no need for an enforceable right if people will just honor your request). In fact, only two things can reduce the copyright holder's ability to exercise his right: If he gives permission to someone, he can't turn around and sue them for doing the permitted deed. And, the law, which puts boundaries on the right, including the statute of limitations, which can result in the copyright holder's apathy toward an infringer limiting his ability to sue that infringer for that infringement once the clock has expired.
So again, I just don't see where this 'stealing' thing comes from, other than as vilification.
It's not even a very meaningful list. Just because a use falls within the list, that doesn't make it a fair use, and just because a use doesn't fall within the list, that doesn't make it not a fair use. The list is basically just a loose suggestion, and IMO confusing and somewhat pointless. Since the four factor analysis is what actually matters for determining whether a use is a fair use or not, I'd just as soon see the Copyright Act amended to get rid of the list. And if there are uses that are deemed so important that they should always be allowed, they should get new exceptions just for them, rather than relying on fair use.
Well, there's a troll under the Aurora Bridge, which is only a couple of miles away.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Getting the most into the public domain the fastest may or may not be the best way of doing that.
Well, just science, actually, which meant knowledge, back in the late 18th century when they wrote the Constitution. The useful arts are what patents are supposed to promote. (We have more vestiges of art meaning a technical skill: prior art, state of the art technology, a person having ordinary skill in the art, etc.)
Anyway, as it happens, getting the most into the public domain the fastest is basically exactly the best way to promote the progress of science. Consider a utopia of knowledge: Everyone who can create works, and is willing to create works, does so. These works may be instantly published to everyone else in the world, who may choose to enjoy or ignore those works as they see fit. Everyone has a universal library, containing all known published works. If one person enjoys a work, he might make some copies at trivial cost in order to give them to other people he knows who, he thinks, would also enjoy it. If an old work is discovered in some ancient ruin, copies are made and made available to everyone, so that the work is no longer rare, and no longer in danger of being destroyed and lost forever. If someone wants to create a work, they can do so, whether that work is original or derivative of something else; the creative impulse is never squashed or dismissed. Works might not all be good -- in fact, most will be lousy -- but that's true of anything.
That's the ideal world: One where public knowledge is preserved and made available to everyone for every purpose and at the least or zero cost. The reason we can't really have that is because we don't have the resources to afford it. Not everyone who wants to act can spend all their time at it without concern for basic necessities. Because our resources are limited, we don't get so many works created if authors can't make money derived from those works.
Now, sometimes they can -- Shakespeare had no copyrights as we know them, but became reasonably successful financially because he got a share of the box office from his own theater company, and invested wisely. He didn't get money from other actors staging his plays, but neither did he have to pay the people he copied from when he wrote them, nor pay other playwrights when he staged their plays. And, closer to home, I used to be a professional artist, and I made a comfortable living, but that was by selling my labor (which I still do, now that I'm a lawyer). Neither I, nor any of my clients, made money based on copyrights, and a total lack of copyrights would not have made us a penny poorer. Most fine artists don't rely on copyright to make a living, not that most artists of any sort make a living from their art anyway, even with copyrights.
So if works are most valuable to the public, and most promote the progress of knowledge if they are in the public domain -- free to acquire, share with others, base more works upon, etc. -- but we might be able to increase the number of works generally by granting copyrights -- making authorship more attractive financially, though other incentives exist independently of copyright -- then surely we only want to grant copyrights for as short a period as possible, with as few restrictions as possible, in order to get the most works in the public domain the fastest.
No copyright would get works in faster, but there'd be fewer of them. More than the ideal amount of copyright would not result in as many works (the financial incentive only goes so far, is iffy to begin with, and can result in authors engaging in anti-competitive behavior against one another, rather than compete fairly), and less freedom and utility for the public.
Still, if you have an idea that would result in a greater net public benefit than copyright could ever deliver -- the current system is a bad implementation, however -- feel free to tell us about it.
Given that 800 new books are published *every day* - it is fair to say that copyright does entice people to produce.
No it isn't. You haven't shown that those books would not be published, but for copyright.
For example, if literacy rates dropped significantly (IIRC the literacy rate in England was around 30% in Shakespeare's day), fewer books might be published due to a lack of audience. If books could only be published on a Gutenberg-style press, using laboriously hand-set type, and requiring manual labor to fold the signatures into pages, to collate the signatures into the proper order in the book, to sew the signatures into a binding (itself hand-made), to cut the signatures so that the book can be opened, fewer books might be published due to the cost of printing them. If inks, paper, and binding materials were not made by machines on an industrial level, and to consistent levels of quality, the high cost of materials (due to the labor and skill to make them) might similarly result in fewer books being published. If we did not have bright gas or electric lights, the audience for books would diminish, because it would be impractical to read them at night (reading by the light of a fireplace sucks -- try it). If our society hadn't industrialized, so that people had spare time in which to read, and if our society hadn't liberalized, so that people could write, sell, and read whatever books they chose, the number of books would likewise diminish. Then there's medicines to keep authors and readers alive, glasses to allow people to keep reading as their vision goes, motorized vehicles of all sorts to carry books to be distributed, pens that can write for more than a brief amount without needing replacement (quill pens suck tremendously), etc.
There are, frankly, a lot of differences between when copyright did not exist, and today, which have had tremendous influences on the number of books that are created and published. Quite frankly, copyright is probably far from the most important of them. Does copyright entice (I would say incentivize) people to create and publish works? Sure. But it isn't nearly so much of an incentive as you imagine. It absolutely isn't the difference between 8 books a day and 800. But get rid of electricity, and then you'd see a big decline.
this amount of new content (which, because of copyright, isn't just rehashes and remixes of existing copyrighted material).
Content is content. Copyright doesn't care. Indeed, it mustn't care.
It is totally inappropriate for the government to grant or withhold copyrights on the basis of artistic merit, which not only subjective, but something that the government just isn't competent to judge. There are plenty of original works which are complete crap (e.g. Gigli), and plenty of derivative works which are better than their predecessors (e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, an unauthorized adaptation of earlier works). Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I'd rather have Shakespeare (a brazen rehasher and remixer with few original ideas) than be stuck with the not-so-good materials he was ripping off left and right. And of course, copyright is granted to original and derivative works alike today. Are you suggesting dismantling that part of it?
Is dismantling a system that entices authors in English speaking countries to publish 800 new books *every day* worth risking so that less-than-original works based on existing concepts can exist?
If it gets us even as few as 801 new books every day, then yes. In fact, I'd say it would be imperative.
But we needn't go so far. We can massively reduce copyright without massively reducing its incentivizing effect (the incentive isn't distributed evenly -- works lose value very rapidly, which is why you don't subscribe to month-old newspapers, or pay full price at the theater to see a movie that's on broadcast tv the same day), resulting in both of us being happy.
Besides, works aren't as original and non-pre-existing as you seem to think.
Take Slashdot hivemind favorite Neal Stephenson. Are you trying to tell me that I -- or better yet, some e-e-e-e-vil Hollywood studio -- should be able to make a movie today from his "Snowcrash" -- same title, characters, lift the dialogue, whole nine yards -- and not pay Stephenson a dime? Is that what you are proposing? Seriously?
Well, he published it in 1992. Rufus Pollock wrote a pretty good paper on how to determine copyright terms a few years ago, and after running through the numbers, he estimated that a term of 15 years would produce the best results. Assuming he's right, then the public would benefit from Stephenson being able to stop the 4-e's evil studio in 1992. And as late as 2007. And come 2008, then yes, the public would start to benefit more from as many studios making Snow Crash movies, tv series, ballets, etc. as they liked, then allowing Stephenson to keep sitting on it.
Remember, the public benefits not only from having the underlying work created and published, but from having all of the derivative works created and published. I for one would like to see a Snow Crash movie. Stephenson, apparently, is not so interested, or you'd think we would've had something by now. We want the copyright term to be long enough to get the underlying work created, and short enough that it doesn't last one second longer than it absolutely has to, so that unauthorized derivatives can get created.
This also might further encourage Stephenson to pursue film adaptations in a more timely manner. Zodiac at least, right?
Except that over the time period since we've adopted automatic copyright, people have grown used to the right to not have their vacation pictures used by a corporate advertising department that sees them on Flickr. There's a lot of non-commercial works out there, ones that people would (rightly or wrongly) be upset to see misappropriated.
How about a 5-year grace period before requiring registration?
I don't mind a 1-year grace (same as for patents) simply because some people might publish instantly upon creation, and need some time to figure out the paperwork. Nor do I mind a more substantial grace for works still being created, or which are unpublished. But ultimately, copyrights should only be granted if works would not be created and published but for a copyright, and for the least amount of time necessary. If the people who don't want their vacation photos used are serious about it, they should either 1) not publish them (e.g. by putting them on flickr), which I think is unlikely to occur, or 2) register them, which is also probably unlikely.
But have no fear: I doubt that the corporate advertising departments will care enough to use the photos. They're not interested in them, which is why, despite the fact that you probably wouldn't charge very much, they probably don't even call you to get a license.
Indeed. We used to have a system for this: works automatically entered the public domain if they were published without being registered, and the copyright term expired fairly quickly, requiring the author to file a renewal in order to get an additional copyright term. Most authors who created and published works did so without ever bothering to get copyrights; of those who did register, most didn't bother to renew.
Apparently, there are a lot of authors who don't care about getting copyrights, or who care enough to get them but not keep them. That's fine with me. We should reserve copyright for authors who won't create and publish works without it, and then only for the minimum time necessary. The best way I know of that we can do so is to require these authors to identify themselves by registering for copyrights, and to frequently renew those registrations.
I agree that this thing with Google isn't ideal, but I suppose it's better than the status quo, and perhaps we might even get lucky enough that it will encourage meaningful reforms to be made that lead to better results for the public generally.
Adobe is about 28 this year. It's Photoshop that is 20.