New North American Trade Deal Has Bad News for Canadian Copyright
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The idea that it’s about money also is hard to reconcile with the relatively weak lobbying power of tech companies. Tech companies are vastly richer than Hollywood and have been for a long time. Facebook earns five times the profits of NBC Universal but employes just half the people.
Your idea also fails to explain things like FOSTA/SESTA. How much money do victims of sex trafficking have? Why couldn’t the tech industry, with its blinding amounts of cash, stop it?
Just want to add that money has always been in politics. This trope that it was only a prob after the CU decision is (apparently effective) misdirection, IMO. The game of politics is about securing interests/power, period.
The EFF has to spend money they don’t have to fight for their beliefs, but the copyright extension people likely make a net profit over time fighting for their own interests. It’s like a negative sum game- the net result is worse for almost everyone to a greater degree than it benefits a few. If money played no role in politicians’ decision making, those decisions would be much more rational and responsible. For all I know, maybe most of them would still support copyright extensions, but it would at least be because in their judgement it was the right thing for the American people. The ridiculous amount of money in American politics muddies the waters and forces all participants into moral hazards and perpetual conflicts of interest.
Except, of course, nearly everybody.
IMO, it would be better for the group to curtail copyright somewhat in the US. But here I meant "profit" in the depressingly literal, "a specific individual or group, that can afford an IP attorney, who makes money on whatever they consider to be their IP" sense.
For better or worse, the system in the US currently favors those with the desire and resources to hire great IP attorneys, who are themselves motivated to always argue for stricter IP laws, whose firms have the resources to make huge campaign contributions.
There is no one spending equal amounts of money to push things in the opposite direction, therefore as long as there's money in politics there will always be an invisible hand guiding things in favor of "individuals or groups who stand to profit from something" over all other criteria.
I don't think it is weird considering that US is a mass-exporter of Intellectual Property. Hollywood is big global business. It is good for the US economy if other countries respect the copyright laws and are willing to pay for movie-tickets.
US is also a massive software exporter. I don't have the numbers but we know US has Oracle and IBM and Microsoft.
Think about Intel and AMD, without copyright their processors could be copied by anybody and pirated and sold much cheaper.
What's the best length for copyright protection is a different discussion, I agree that "Monopolizing works for most of a century after the life of the author is bad policy." But I don't think it is weird that countries which benefit from it would support longer terms and better IP protections in general.
The rhetoric seems to have shifted to treating IP as a fundamental right. No longer is it a legal fiction to benefit everyone, which had a side effect of allowing a few to reap more profits. Now politicians talk about it as if patent protections, etc. exist solely to protect the IP holders and their revenue, which for some reason is treated as an inalienable right, and not as a compromise for the greater good for everyone. At least that’s my impression as an observer.
A movie or song might become a classic, but software just gets old.
I wonder what would US trade deficit look like if we remove IP related trade from the statistics? My gut feeling would be that the deficit would look quite a lot worse, but is there some "official" measure on this?
When the US dropped TPP, Canada took up leadership of the process as CPTPP. TPP was called two treaties in one, though not often in the US press. Canada kept the free trade part, and "postponed" the Hollywood copyright, pharma patents, and corporate ISDS. But what's the point of being a hegemon if you can't provide one-stop shopping for arm-twisted world-wide regulatory capture?
I don't see how it actually promotes the creation of new works, and I definitely don't think laws should have effect retroactively. (Isn't that a basic premise of the rule of law?!)
But when it has bipartisan support, I'm not sure what else to do, other than try to support more like-minded challengers when those senators are up for reelection.
If the US can't get it together, I guess "harmonization" is inevitable.
Article 1 of the US. constitution prohibits ex post facto laws, but the supreme court has traditionally interpreted this to only apply to criminal law.
Civil laws can and have been applied retroactively.
Criminal law is based on the concept of crime and punishment. Depending on the crime, the punishments can be very severe (e.g. loss of liberty or life).
Permitting ex post facto criminal laws would allow legislatures to arbitrarily criminalize actions that were perfectly legal at the time they were committed.
Given the potential severity of criminal punishments, this just lends itself to abuses of power. Because of this, most countries explicitly disallow retroactive criminal legislation in their constitutions.
Civil law pertains to rights and duties. In this context, there are legitimate occasions where retroactivity may be useful.
Sure, retroactive civil laws can still be used to target specific entities or persons. However, the potential negative outcomes are milder (at most, the loss of movable or immovable assets).
Because of this, there is no universal consensus on retroactive civil laws. Most countries allow them; many other countries frown on them; a few ban them outright.
First, there are textual arguments. For example, why does the Constitution prohibit states from impairing the obligations of existing contracts if the general prohibition on ex post facto laws would do?
Further, in the normal course of governing, one must sometimes rearrange the rights of others. For example, to pass bankruptcy laws, one must abridge the rights of creditors. Changes to property laws necessarily alter preexisting rights, e.g. to keep people off your land or to sell it or to build a particular thing on it. Civil law is all about rights.
Which leads to the special nature of criminal law in expressing moral condemnation and imposing often-severe punishment (as opposed to the civil law requiring payment of damages). There is an element of moral humility in requiring the prohibitions to be stated ahead of time. Reasonable, thoughtful, and well-intentioned people disagree enormously on morality, but if we spell out the prohibitions ahead of time, we at least put everyone on notice as to what is expected.
Also consider that contract and tort law, being judge-made law, have an inherently retrospective component whenever new issues come before the courts, or whenever a doctrine is altered or reversed. It would be odd to tolerate this in some parts of civil law (those that are mostly judge-made) but not in others (those that are statutory).
All of which is not to say that retrospective civil laws are always right. It would definitely be immoral for Congress to pass a law tripling the tax bill for your income from ten years ago. But the Constitution is not a general prohibition against bad laws. Perhaps in this case, the ex post facto clause could be read to prohibit such practices as well, but at some point you have to rely on the legislature to get it right.
I was wondering about that the other day. See, I just discovered Moshe Koussevitzky a few months ago (Wikipedia says "a lyric tenor with a spectacular and perhaps unparalleled upper register among cantors. Koussevitzky is regarded as among the greatest Cantors of the 20th century.") and I bought a track of his and I was wondering about just that: he died in 1966, who the heck gets that money now?
Ps. https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Various_Artists_Th... Christian/Gospel slowclap