Email from France – 6
p2pnet.net News Feature:- Public Domain is a strange notion. It’s like the sand on a beach, both pushed and created by the waters of copyrighted works. Sometimes you want more sand for people who like sunbathing, sometimes you want more water so boats can float.
For the mayor of a sea-side town, this is just a question of nature and policy. Build dikes to get the amount of sand you want.
At the moment, Public Domain is a peaceful beach. Or at the least it should be. But it’s not. Lionel Sawkins revived a public domain work and successfully copyrighted it. Great for him, bad for the music industry, but above all bad for the public domain.
Why should someone who didn’t express creativity in his work be able to obtain a copyright from it? I don’t say he should not be paid for his talent, I just say he should not be able to get a copyright on a work he didn’t create.
But at the end of the day, all this is just a question of money.
Copyrights enable authors to be compensated from the use of their work, and the public domain enables the public to use works for free.
Well, perhaps this won’t be the case anymore. If Lawrence Lessig was French, he’d certainly love a new idea coming from France. But Sir Larry isn’t French, so let me introduce this brand new idea:
The Big Five labels need money to compensate for piracy of their works. They say they need funds to support artists and produce good quality ‘product’ at a reasonable price.
So – let’s levy public domain downloads and use the income to help the Big Five labels.
Great idea, isn’t it ?
It comes from a report by our Economic and Social Concil, an institution close to the Senate.
Le Monde, a notorious French newspaper, covered the report which recommends the creation of a payable public domain.
In France, works fall into the Public Domain 70 years after authors’ deaths, meaning they’re free for anyone to use. For free. So, suggests the Concil, every time someone downloads a PD work downloads from the Net, make them pay for the privilege.
Interesting.
“Where’s my Cyber-beach?”
Oops. Sorry. It’s gone.
“Why?”
Well, that’s where it gets fascinating. This will create a fund for artistic development, which isn’t something totally new under French law…
We already have levies in France, on blanket media, supposed to compensate the right for “private copying”.
So artists get money because the public copy their work (who said ‘pirate’?). However, our law says 25% of this levy imust be used to finance ‘cultural actions’. But a previous 1997 report showed the interpretation of ‘cultural actions’ by the collective societies was everything but narrow.
The money is used, for example, to finance artists’ unions or to buy buildings for the society.
And what if I tell you that US artists don’t receive any money from this private copying levy?
Yep, that’s right.
We collect the money on behalf of American artists, but our collective societies HAVE to use it to support only French ‘cultural actions’. So we’d theoretically be able to collect from American public domain works and use it to finance French works, or rather French collective societies …
Not that I don’t like the idea of supporting our local artists.
But I thought you should know.
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Guillaume Champeau, who runs Ratiatum.com, p2pnet’s opposite number in France, and p2pnet editor Jon Newton, decided they owe it to their respective readers to trade items every now and then.
Champeau Emails from France: One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
A new Ratiatum and p2pnet collaboration will be announced when p2pnet changes its look in the very near future.
Stay tuned.
