Comments on: ‘Talk about your Long Tail…’

By: Thinker

Thinker — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:21:51 +0000

“I suppose a 5-year copyright term could work”

A fixed copyright term for all types of works is nonsense.
A poem can be made in five minutes, at no cost.
A movie may cost many milllions of years and thousands of man-hours spread over many years.
Then some works are a gift to humanity and others are worthless and damging.

Different incentives are needed for each. Some works should not be given any incentive.

I agree that the current copyright duration rules (particularly the one size-fits-all) are not an incentive and are ridiculous.

By: Henry Ermich

Henry Ermich — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:19:56 +0000

The only problem with this is that he says “renewable” — that’s where the whole problem with Copyright started originally: people wanted longer and longer and longer terms (mostly so they could have monopoly power over distribution). The “renewable” aspect is just the same shit as we have now, even if it’s only one renewal.

Far better option than preserving any sort of “copyright” nonsense would be to convert the “copyright” registration into a system whereby people would NOT need “clearance” to use material, but would instead be legally bound to pay a percentage of their earnings on the project equal to the amount of “registered” material they used TO the person who originally filed the registration.

Additionally, the registration would have to be kept current (up to date info on how to pay the person etc.) or it would immediately be voided.

The main problem with “copyright” is that it’s a State-granted exclusive monopoly power. Everything else — up to and including how long that Monopoly “should” last — is window dressing.

As a musician myself, I’ll freely admit that this site (among others) has changed my thinking on a lot of these topics quite extensively. I may also have “hated” on Jon Newton quite a bit, but like I’ve always said, when the mentality is “screw ‘em all” it still pisses me off.

I like the fact that this guy is actually trying to come up with some kind of real strategy.

Keep up the good articles, Jon!

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:09:12 +0000

I suppose a 5-year copyright term could work, but I get the feeling it’d do more harm than good in the computer industry because there’s no requirement for source code to be released when copyright expires and copyright is also what powers the “copyleft” licenses which keep Steve Balmer foaming at the mouth over his inability to snatch code from Linux the way they do with BSD-licensed software. (most famously, the BSD sockets implementation used in 9x-series Windows)

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:40:55 +0000

If we can figure out another way to fairly compensate a creator for a creation,
maybe we can get rid of this copyright thing totally.

How did we used to compensate creators of music before copies ever existed? – before recordings existed?

By: Rekrul

Rekrul — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:12:50 +0000

I agree, but I’d also add that renewing a copyright should cost the copyright holder a substantial sum of money (more for corporations than for individuals). The reason being that it would be all too easy for a company to just automatically renew copyrights indefinitely while keeping a small supply of a particular work in a warehouse somewhere just to satisfy the “available” clause. It would also keep companies from easily doing what Disney does, where they just re-issue works for a limited time every few years.

It would force companies to decide which of their works still have value enough to renew and which aren’t worth hanging on to.

Finally, I’d add that there should be a central archive that maintains a copy of every creative work that’s published, so that when those works pass into the public domain, the public will have a way to access them. There are several one-season TV shows I remember watching years ago, that will probably NEVER be available to the public in any way, since they were commercial failures and if copies even still exist, they’re locked away in the depths of the network vaults, never to see the light of day again.

Of course this is all just a pipe dream, since the media corporations which control the US government would never allow anything like this to happen.