Three Strikes Against ACTA In European Parliament Today
falkvinge.net
falkvinge.net
Hopefully this is the beginning of an end in the US-led international abuse of copyright law.
Copyright law needs to reform and it needs to get back to its roots. It needs to get back to being limited and it needs to get back to being a temporary monopoly.
The public domain, the one thing which copyright law was actually created to ensure, is dying before our very eyes and noone seems willing to save it.
I think the best way to do it would be allowing someone to maintain copyright on their creation until they die (or in the case of multiple creators, they are all dead) after which it immediately enters public domain. There would also need to be provisions that record/movie companies etc. couldn't hold copyright, it would have to remain with the creator. Of course then there is the problem of defining the creator.
Back in the days, when things moved a million times slower than they do today, 14 years was more than sufficient to encourage mass creation of content. No author's life plus plus bullshit. 14 years. That's what you got to monetize. No more.
I see no reason it should be anything more today.
The big counter-argument that I've heard is that movie studios (Disney especially with the "vault") still make money on movies that are decades old. But this is a fundamentally flawed argument. The point of copyright (both theoretically and in the US Constitution) is to encourage creation. So it doesn't matter if copyright doesn't maximize Disney's revenue, so long as it is enough to encourage them to make movies in the first place. A term of roughly 10-20 years should be more than enough to do that.
They've thought of that. Usually the law says "50 years from creation if the copyright is held by a company" or something like that.
Can somebody please explain to me how this is not insane?
The situation in Germany: It's not possible to preemptively put works in the public domain here (except by publishing anonymously and making sure no-one manages to associate that art with the artist).
Our "Urheberrecht" (author's rights) is more along the notion of art being an expression of the author's personality, and thus needing appropriate protection. "copyright" (the right to commercially exploit these works) is merely a part of it.
Under this model, it makes sense to protect works for life time + X years. (+ X years to make sure that things can settle down, instead of controversial art flaring up right after the artist's death).
A good compromise could have been to restrict commercial value to 15 years after publication (or whatever) while keeping certain non-monetary rights to the author for life (recognition, the right to forfeit recognition, ...).
It may just be an issue that we are trying to protect too many different types of work under one law. Having vastly different lengths for writers, musicians, software, movies, games etc. may help (although it could also make things 10 times worse).
That's solved by not starting the copyright clock until they make it available for copying, that is, releasing it.
Do you have an example of a piece of music that sat around for more than 30 days before it was released unchanged? I ask because the last change starts a copyright clock....
My ideas:
• Copyright lasts 10 years from creation, maybe extensible to 20 or 30 if you pay a fee based on the amount of years you want extra. As with the existing system, copyright is instaneous and doesn't require a registration fee.
• Similar to trademark law, "everyone else is let away with it" should be a defence to copyright infringement. (e.g. You are being sued for using a P2P network, but you can find lots of people who weren't sued, ergo you get off the hook. This happens with trademarks)
• Bring the law into line with what the general public thinks are moral, e.g. format shifting, time shifting, should be legal.
• Gradual "Creative Commons-ification" of all copyright. After 10 years, all copyrighted material is also available as a CC-BY-ND-NC (creative commons, non commercial, attribution, no derivates) licence. After 15, CC-BY-NC etc.
• A work is only copyrightable in a country if the original copyright holder is commercially exploiting it (or was commercially exploiting it in the last ~5 years). Films made in the USA but not available in, say, UK, are copyrighted. If a book goes out of print, and you can't buy it, you can't photocopy it.
• Loss of copyright if there are too many false applications of DMCA-type take down notices for that work.
I have no problem with corporations holding copyright, artists should be allowed sell it.
The problem is with DRM which can't be legally circumvented, even if you are the author of the freaking thing (trying to recover your own work from a Blu-Ray or something).
It arrives at a figure of 15 years, which seems quite sensible to me..
First off, what if I create a song all by myself then on the way back from the studio I die in a car accident? The song goes on to make millions, played on every radio station. My estate sees none of that money. There has to be some kind of time allotment (life + 10 years or 25 years, whichever comes first, that kind of idea).
Secondly, corporations must be able to hold copyright over works created by their employees. Lets bring this into the software world: I create a program while working at my company. Right now, the company holds that copyright. Doesn't matter who created it; if it was made at work, the company owns it. Artists are the employees of their record label. It would be awful if I could use company time and resources to make software then turn around and sell it to their competitors.
It would make sense to me to draw a line between "creative works" and "business need", where a creative/entertainment copyright would give the studio a license to the song but copyright would remain with the creator, while non-entertainment business needs would have the copyright transferred to the company immediately and permanently.
If copyright term was 10 years (e.g. no metion of 'death'), then the copyright would be an asset inherited by your heirs, which would be valid for another 10 years. Simplies
"life + X years" can screw the public if you make something in your 20s and live to be 90.
I don't see how that would screw the public. As long as you make it available at a fair price in a popular format. Could you explain that a bit more? (I'm really interested)
An example: a relative is making a website about their home village. They found a photo in the library of the village taken in 1921. We have no idea who took it. If it was someone aged 20, who lived to be 80 (entirely possible) it would still be copyrighted. Or someone aged 60 might have taken it 5 years before their death.
There are lots of copyrighted works that are "locked away" and of unknown copyright status.
And that's why I think copyright extensions should not be possible. I, as a member of the public, am taken away a right that was "pre-acquired" by me. The right to use this work of art after certain time.
An excellent, excellent read on this is Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture". Available under CC as PDF or EPUB. http://www.free-culture.cc/
It explores the politics and history of copyright, copyright extension, freedom of use, and the importance of having freely available works.
My preference would be for a return to something much closer to the original terms of copyright. Limitations on publication, on registration only, for a limited time (14-28 years should be more than enough). Very limited restrictions on derivative use, disassembly, interpretation, or public performance (including mechanical nominal usage rates). No copyright protections for DRM. Much stronger Fair Use provisions and streamlined procedures for securing same for reasonable use cases.
The original Constitutional provision of copyright was aimed rather precisely at avoiding just what we have today: a powerful publishing monopoly with a strong interest in preserving perpetual copyright.
I'd like to see copyright ownership be unassignable (as you suggest). Derived rights could be licensed for a time, but would always revert to the original author. This would get past the abuses particularly in music and corporate works. European tradition allows for this in a weak form -- attribution rights cannot be assigned, but all others can ("droigt d'auteur").
my assumption is (roughly) that if copyright is intended to encourage and support creative output, then only the actual creators should be the beneficiaries of it.
(i don't know if i really think this would be the best -- or even a good -- system, in a way i'm trying it on for size and want to hear what others think.)