Plan To Create Another Copyright-Like Right For Hollywood

Without addressing the copyright issue--I think what we've been seeing out of WIPO recently, along with ACTA, etc, is really a vindication of conservative concerns decades ago about participating in these sorts of international frameworks. Congress may be a bunch of boobs, but at least they're our boobs, and a stupid law out of Congress is better than a stupid treaty out of some unelected international organization.

I actually wrote a recent blog post on this subject, wherein I make the case that copyright is dying, and try to come up with something better:

http://thepenzone.com/content/copyright-dying-beware-accessr...

I think it's definitely time we have a replacement for copyright, given the irrelevance of copying nowadays, though "Publish Right" is likely a better term than "Broadcast Right", since the main issue is the commercial distribution arrangements for protected works. If some agreement can be found, after a certain date, copyright should stop being issued and the new right issued instead. Now we just need to figure out what that will be.

If true, this is concerning. The public domain is already under attack from increasingly aggressive copyright term extensions.

This does touch on a point I've been wondering about recently. Let's say I write an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where the main characters are all robots and the setting is in space. From my understanding, I can claim copyright on my new work so long as it contains sufficient new creativity and transformation. My new work would be considered a derivative work from the public domain original, and I would hold the copyright for my work.

The question is, what happens when someone else creates an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where the main characters are all pirates and the setting is the ocean?

If my work were an original, I could sue the creator of the pirate version because his version was a derivative work of mine and he didn't have my permission to create it. But obviously, he can say his is a derivative of the public domain version, not my version.

How do all these rights interact? My mind gets tied up in knots trying to work it out.

I see no reason to limit this to broadcasting. If I put something in the public domain on my website, I should be given copyright control over it as well.

The U.S. Constitution connects copyright to authorship. There is no enabling clause to connect it to broadcast.