False Copyright Claims 268
FreetoCopy writes "Teenagers downloading music may not be the worst copyright offenders. See this item (available for download in PDF file with free registration) about the growing problem of copyfraud — in which publishers, archives, and distributors make false claims of copyright to shut down free expression. From the paper: 'Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet's Water Lilies, and even the US Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner's permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use...'"
All over the place. (Score:1, Insightful)
There should be consequence (Score:5, Insightful)
However, when you create a "derivative work" based on public domain content, it's probably eligible for copyright protection in and of itself. The problem comes from where you draw the line. Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain. Imagine how viral that could be...
As far as I'm concerned (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All over the place. (Score:3, Insightful)
The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example), and of course like any law with good intentions, is being gamed and rigged by those who are less than honorable. The situation under the DMCA is better than the previous regime, where an ISP could find itself liable for someone simply having uploaded something that's a blatant violation. Unfortunately, the "easy out" that it gives ISPs is responsible for the number and scale of the bogus takedowns too.
I want to see, in the words of FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (great name!), "a few public hangings" for bogus DMCA takedowns. I'm not deluded enough to believe it will happen. Why we don't see any perjury prosecutions is simply representative of endemic corruption that implicitly favors the monied interests (because they're "good for the economy"). But blaming it on the DMCA itself is just naive.
So screw the copyright regimes. I don't do much copying, but I don't shed a single solitary tear for the labels and studios. Cynicism sure does breed contempt for the law.
What we need is DRM! (Score:4, Insightful)
But we need an effective way for marking content with important details such as copyright owner, copyright date, contact details, and perhaps even licensing details in terms of what the licensor explicitly allows to be done with the content, even if there is no artificial technology restriction imposed on what is disallowed.
For example, if I find a piece of music on the Internet and I want to use it in something that I'm creating, how do I know if I can? Who do I contact? What if I don't even know what the song actually is? Sure enough, even knowing that the copyright holder doesn't want me to do such a thing might not stop me from doing it, but at least I know I'm acting against their wishes.
If we could have some form of DRM that was actually more like "digital rights marking", and survived transcoding/editing, that would probably be very interesting. To the extent that it wasn't used to restrict our actions, but merely make us aware of what we were doing (in terms of our actions being acceptable or otherwise), maybe that's something we as a society could agree to adopt.
Re:Could This Mean.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All over the place. (Score:4, Insightful)
Broken thinking makes good comedy - but not so good politics.
Not all false copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All over the place. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:All over the place. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me up the first time someone is convicted of perjury for making a false DMCA claim. Its not real until the prosecutors, well, prosecute it.
Re:Fight Back!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What we need is DRM! (Score:3, Insightful)
Practically, I agree it's very hard. To even get the ball rolling we need some kind of a standard that says "you encode the information this way, it should contain the following data, here are some guidelines to help you ensure that all of the contact info you enter today will still be useful in ten years time, the mark data itself should be digitally signed in this manner, your public key should be published here for ease of verification, etc.". Then we need next generation file formats to natively support this in a means that is free of IP issues, and then for the tool sets we use to read, manage, and maintain the data hierarchy as works are arranged as parts of larger productions.
Can it be done? Not unless we try. Are there going to be problems? Surely. Maybe I don't want to publish a short film and have all the internal details open for viewing by hundreds of people. But at least the information is there up until a point. If someone chooses to erase or ignore it then eventually, once this marking becomes common, on most occasions they will have done so knowingly. And for most works, assuming society at large accepts such a schema, the majority of copies of the original works with the correct information will be readily available. You could still file your work with a digitally signed digital rights mark with the copyright office if you wanted to.
I don't think the intention of such a scheme would be to prevent idea theft, after all patents and copyright are already two somewhat separate concepts.
Is a digital rights mark system impossible to create? I'm not so sure. If I look at the JPEG format today it's possible to write copyright information in fields of the EXIF data and most modern editing applications preserve that information after the image has been edited. We need something more global that supports all (or the majority) of the common media use cases today, and is extensible by design.
Personally I don't like digital rights management, but I would love to be able to publish media online and know that if my work becomes popular in five years time people can still see who actually created it and if it's being used in a way I indicated was acceptable to me, even knowing that realistically I didn't have an option of actually restricting that use via the marking scheme itself (there are already other ways to challenge infringers if it's important enough to you).