Copyright ban isn’t the answer
p2pnet.net news view:- There’s been an interesting series of articles on SlashDot between Karl Fogel, who’s a copyright abolitionist, and Greg Bulmash, who suggests abolitionists shouldn’t be using Open Source as an example given Open Source requires copyright in order to enforce the license agreements. Greg suggests that the goal should be reform, not abolishing.
As a very vocal proponent of FLOSS and other modern methods of production, distribution and funding who is involved in copyright reform, I agree with Greg. Abolishing copyright wouldn’t accomplish our goals. What we need to do is look much more closely at the parameters and decide what would best protect the interests of both authors and the general public.
What types of activities, and carried out by what person, should be regulated by copyright?
What activies should require permission, and what activities should only require payment (compulsory licensing)?
Should copyright be automatic and never require renewal, and only allow for cultural recycling generations past the death of the author?
What rights should be able to be sold, and what should be retained with the human author unless explicitly waived?
I have my own answers to these questions, and abolition isn’t part of what I think would be beneficial. While I have to admit I believe abolishing would be better than the direction we seem to be going (copyright holders granted the right to choose brands of tools that can access works, with copyright regulating private non-commercial activities of all citizens, with an ever-increasing term which is effectively perpetual), for me, it’s a second last resort.
What do I believe modern copyright should look like? While some changes can be done domestically already, some will require modernizing international treaties such as those administered by WIPO. Existing treaties are modified all the time via newer treaties, and there’s no reason to believe we can’t move towards these improvements given other far more radical changes have already been included in recent treaties.
1. copyright is automatic only for a short term (10 years), renewable every 10 years for a maximum of 50 years.
2. copyright only regulates public and/or commercial activities, and never the private activities of citizens.
3. following on (b), time, space and device shifting of content wouldn’t be regulated by copyright. Once a citizen obtains a license for a work, ir’s a license to do whatever they want to do privately with that work. Copyright would only regulate situations where works are shared publicly (communicated by telecommunications, including on-demand or P2P or distributed mechanically).
4. non-commercial public sharing of multimedia (music, movies, television) by private citizens, verbatim or modified (mashups, clips, etc), shouldn’t require permission – only payment. This would for instance involve reasonable rates for a compulsory license for non-commercial P2P sharing of multimedia.
5. radio, whether terrestrial, satellite or Intranet, should have the same compulsory licensing regime for all aspects of communicating the work including both the rights of composers and performers. We should not allow a situation where terrestrial radio only pays music publishers, while satellite radio also pays fees to performers and labels and Internet ratio is under a higher fee structure making Internet radio impossible.
6. industries who only provide the technical means for recording, communicating or distributing works should not be offered copyright. Only human creators (authors, photographers, performers, directors, etc) should be offered copyright, not broadcasters or sound recording makers. Creators should be offered tools to enable them to skip intermediaries and make their own choices as to how to exercise their own rights. No matter how a creator is employed, the first holder of copyright should be the creator and copyright could only transfer to an employer as part of a contract.
I’m curious to read what other people would consider to be an ideal structure for copyright. While we may not achieve our goals, it’s still very valuable to articulate a desired direction.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
Also See:
uploading movies – Man jailed for file sharing, November 7, 2005
Standard - ‘Big Crook’ adopts civil approach in Net appeal, May 10, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by governBryan Adams slams Net radio hikement restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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May 10th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
The Copyright should be given a term of seven years. No more than that. I agree with the rest of the article, though.
May 10th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
but what about creators children… with only 7 years they wont be able to profit from their parents work
will someone please think of the children. . .
>.>
Your suggestions certainally make a very good starting point to work from. I myself agree with most of it however i think copyrights should last the lifetime of the creator, however the only usage that would require payment after a initial period (of say 7 years) would be using the work to directly make profits yourself. ie using someones music as a soundtrack for a film.
i write computer code, and am more than happy for people to use my code for their own uses for free, however i dont want other people profiting from using my work unless i see a fair share of it.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:00 am
The children will have to write their own code if they want to profit thereby promoting useful arts and sciences. I write code myself. SpamFryer and SpammerSkewer are only two examples.
May 11th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Hi Russell,
I agree that abandoning Copyright is not the answer and I think your list is a good starting point. As I have described here before [1] I think concentrating on ‘rights’ not ‘copies’ is the way to achieve this transition which is why free software we should be kept free to protect ‘rights’ as we have discussed before[2].
One interesting aspect of granting and regulating the rights of all users, not just authors and creators, is that the Copyright term (point 1) could be made indefinite. The reason why this will work is that over time a broad section of the community will obtain ‘rights’ to the original work and an even larger audience will obtain access therefore the controlling effect of the original rights holder will reduce (eventually virtually to zero). The advantage here is that the original rights holder will always be recognised as the original creator and people can always refer back to her if they choose to go to the original source. It also avoids the need to set an arbitrary term limit which might need to be different for different types of work.
[1] http://p2pnet.net/story/6358
[2] http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/2523
May 14th, 2007 at 12:29 am
The only thing I disagree with about here is the extension. I believe returning to a “founder’s copyright” (14 years with one optional extension of an additional 14) is probably a better solution then allowing for up to 50 years of protection. 14 or 28 years is generally enough time for a commercial life, yet short enough for a work to start its noncommercial life in the public domain at a reasonable time.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
There are several really large gaps in your proposal:
1. What exactly do you propose should happen to all of the material that is ALREADY copyrighted under the current system? Say it was recorded twenty-five years ago. Should that be counted as “two and one half extentions?”
Given the fact that the current U.S. law presumes copyright, even without registration, and, thus, no practical way to track anything in cases where the holder’s identity is obscure — what’s to be done there? Declare everything that’s not explicitly registered to be “public domain”? What happens if someone with a reasonable claim to be copyright-holder of the work surfaces afterward? Vital questions that you didn’t cover.
2. What does this do to the FLOSS distribution model (either for software, or for “Creative commons” cultural content, etc? What happens to Stallman’s ability to enforce GPL compliance, at the end of the ten years, or however long?
To my way of thinking, it would basically shatter the FLOSS structure as it currently exists. Does every revision of the Linux Kernel get a different copyright term? What about all of the various Emacs modes and stuff? One of Stallman’s biggest contradictions is that he is a complete power-and-control freak, who seems intent on saddling “free software” with an increasingly restrictive and downright draconian license (GPL 3). If Stallman — as pissy as he is NOW, in regard to GPL compliance — ended up with less ability to pull strings, you can bet he’d bail on any such “reform” proposal.
3. What exactly do you mean by “any noncommercial use?” Does that include (for example) emailing an mp3 as an attatchment, to twenty different relatives? What if THEY pass it along to others? This is not as far-fetched as it may seem, given the fact that that godawful “ate my balls” internet fad has touched just about everybody.
“the devil is in the details”, as they say — and this is no exception.