Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator

> If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.

So is this really meant as some kind of backdoor activist legal hack (e.g. use this copyright case to ultimately change the environmental policy of some major countries)? It smells a little like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... [1].

[1] Also the coda of that monkey case is a pretty good example of the value of copyright outside the MPAA/RIAA/Reed Elsevier/etc. focus pushed by anti-IP activists.

Its stupid to try and assign copyright to things that aren't legal persons. At the end of the day, copyright holders have to make decisions about how to exercise their rights, which makes no sense for a tree.

Instead people should just assign the copyright to some sort of trust or non-profit dedicated to the forest.

This reminds me of the Monkey Selfie[1] dispute. A photographer set up a camera in a forest and a monkey came by and activated it and took a picture. The resulting picture became famous and PETA tied up the photographer in court for years trying to get the copyright assigned to the monkey. They ultimately failed and it went to the photographer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

So... how long would the copyright be good for then? Life of the forest + 70 years?

Probably not everyone's cup of tea but it's not bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxRjncYGLHE

(Cosmo Sheldrake is one of the composers, so this seems to be an original upload of the song.)

Would subways, oceans, individual birds and roadways also be eligible for this kind of authorship as well when they are included in songs or sounds-tracks?

I don't see how this would succeed without opening a can of worms that would muddy a whole lot of things.

Wonder if this is an attempt to create the groundwork for a legal precedent supporting "environmental personhood": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_personhood

There's two factors to copyright: economic rights and moral rights. Economic rights are concerned with the author's ability to protect personal monetary gain from the use of their work. Moral rights are concerned with the author's ability to gain reputation via acknowledgement, and prevent loss of reputation via improper framing/usage of the work. Generally, the idea of all this is to allow authors to maximize personal gain and minimize personal loss. IMO, the fundamental benefit to society of this framework is that it encourages people to voluntarily make decisions to produce creative works that will be a net benefit -- without these protections, people would not produce as much creative work because there would be less incentive to direct their effort in that direction.

From that perspective, it doesn't really make much sense for an entity other than a human or group of humans to hold copyright of a work. A non-human entity doesn't have the capacity to choose where to direct their efforts based on future economic/reputation gain, so copyright or lack thereof will not affect their contributions to creative works.

So whether this is good or bad depends on the specifics of how copyright works in the relevant jurisdiction. If a human author has the ability to unilaterally choose whether any non-human entity will hold copyright of a work, or if a human has the ability to unilaterally capture all gain resulting from the work, then I see this as generally good -- it has no major negatives, and allows humans to recognize the important of non-human entities.

However, if a non-human entity automatically holds joint copyright, and a human coauthor cannot make unilateral decisions about the work, then this could be a bad thing. Human would tend to choose to avoid involving a non-human entity in the creation of a work, since they would get less incentive from doing so. That to me feels like the exact situation that that copyright was invented to avoid.

I was really hoping this was about the iconic song "Ecuador" by Sash!