The Woman Who Established Fair Use 226
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"
A "heroine"? (Score:5, Insightful)
My heroes are rather the big bearded one for the GNU GPL and Lawrence Lessig for Creative Commons. The mess left by this "heroine" obviously needs to be cleaned up, without a flourishing public domain innovation is doomed. Life plus 50 years, come on...
Ya kiding right? (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1976 copyright act [wikipedia.org] was what got us into the mess we're in now. It was a huge power grab by the copyright owners. It extended the copyright term, retroactively, to the insane death + 50 years nonsense. It dropped the registration requirement (perhaps the biggest stupidest idea in copyright law ever). It extended both the scope of what was copyrightable and what was considered an exclusive right. Fair use was already common law, so claiming that the 1976 law established it is bullshit. It codified it, that's all. The only thing that the 1976 copyright law did was remotely good was that it clarified that transfer of copyright required a signed document.. something that wasn't actually clear before the law. But hey, Hilter made the trains run on time too.
Marybeth Peters isn't a reliable source (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, considering what else Marybeth Peters has said about copyright to Congress, I really can't believe anything she says about anything anymore.
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's definitely something wrong with a system that makes a scribble on a napkin in a bar be automatically copyrighted.
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should individuals who don't have lots of money not be able to copyright a book they wrote?
Red herring. Copyright registration was never difficult or expensive. You just had to mail one sample and a simple form to the Library of Congress. The main reason for the change was because the volume of stuff being sent in got to be unmanageable, mostly because corporations were registering everything. One example that was used in the Congressional debates was McDonald's sending a copy of every one of the paper tray covers they used.
no registration means you can only claim for actual damages, having a registration causes punitive to come into play
My understanding is that without registration you can't press a copyright infringement suit at all. That's not a big deal, though, it just means you send in the registration just before you file your suit.
Re:Established in USC, not the law (Score:4, Insightful)
So in return for a codification of Fair Use, we got lifetime plus 50 years.
Excuse me if I don't celebrate Ringer's monumental achievement.
I guess the European Union recently celebrated her ground breaking success by passing life + 70.
But shame on them for not going with their original plan and making it life + 95
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=european+union+copyright+70 [google.com]
Re:Reguarding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to Slashdot, where the libertarians want everything for free.
If by "for free" you mean "free of legitimized violent force" then, yes, that is what libertarians want.
Re:Reguarding (Score:5, Insightful)
We really should go back to that or life of the author or 20 years which ever comes later.
That would be a good start, but I'd argue that it's really too long.
The question is: What's the shortest term that would enable most creators to capture most of the potential income from their works? That's what it should be, and not much more.
The goal is to provide sufficient incentive to produce works, but get the works into the public domain as soon as possible. That's how copyright promotes progress.
Re:So We Got... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then Sonny Bono came along and really screwed it up. He did it all for Micky Mouse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act [wikipedia.org]
Re:Established in USC, not the law (Score:2, Insightful)
hey it's ok, only in the EU are we retarded enough to re-copyright stuff that had already fallen into public domain
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reguarding (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should I work again if I can do it once and still get an income.
We need to look at the benefit of free information. Copyright is detrimental, after 10 years if everything became public domain we would have many books freely accessible online.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
A lifetime is generally unfair to a lot of authors - if the old dude wrote his greatest work only days, months, or two or three years before croaking, he and his estate make very little.
You don't seem to understand why we have copyright law. The purpose of copyright isn't to enrich the creator and his heirs, it's to encourage the creator to create more. If he dies, that's over. If the heirs want to get rich on creations, let them write their own shit. And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
If a plumber does a job and then dies before collecting payment, his heirs are entitled to the money. That's the reasoning behind extending copyright past the life of the author.
That being said, the current "life plus the number of years since Steamboat Willie was released" is insane.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
There are other assets that get passed on after death, like stocks and wealth and houses and boats. Why should copyright be any different?
Well let's see. All the things you mention are MATERIAL THINGS. Copyright is not. You're damned right we should treat IDEAS different from MATERIAL GOODS.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
A lifetime is generally unfair to a lot of authors - if the old dude wrote his greatest work only days, months, or two or three years before croaking, he and his estate make very little.
You don't seem to understand why we have copyright law. The purpose of copyright isn't to enrich the creator and his heirs, it's to encourage the creator to create more. If he dies, that's over. If the heirs want to get rich on creations, let them write their own shit. And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
And if an old dude keeps writing because he knows it will help his younger wife and children once he's gone, he's been suitably encouraged.
I wouldn't tie life to it at all. Just make it 50 years and be done. Or make it 15, $1 renewal for another 35.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the fact is, few works are worth millions and millions of dollars to an author. An author may reach the end of his productive career, and all of his works taken together may earn him a couple thousand dollars a month. He deserves that couple of thousand, IMO. More, if he dies a short time after publication, his estate should be entitled to something.
It is the rare author who earns so much on a single work (even if it is his last and greatest) that he could afford to retire on it, and live the life of leisure. Authors aren't exactly movie stars, after all.
bad deal (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that codifying fair use rights in return for lifetime+50 copyright terms and no requirement for explicit copyright registration was very bad deal.
Without explicit copyright registration, the public domain becomes severely restricted, since the burden to prove that something is public domain is on the user--often an impossible burden.
(I won't even go into why lifetime+50 is not justified either constitutionally or economically.)
Re:A "heroine"? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you are confusing everything that has happened since her work with her work (Sonny Bono for example). She struck a balance and she should be applauded for that.
I'm sorry - but we just can't refuse someone's right to protect their work. Even the name Linux is trademarked, most GPL code is in fact copyrighted - it's just given out under a unrestrictive license (so say we, not the GPL enemies).
But this line; without a flourishing public domain innovation is doomed... shows some ignorance. If everything is public domain there is no reason to innovate. Is it not the restrictions on everything else out there that became the motivating factors behind the GPL et. al.? And if you can just use whatever whenever, why create something better.
It can't be denied that patents and copyright keep the mind moving forward. Otherwise we'd have stagnation. (I'm coming off as a Disney lover - but even in their work you see how using public domain stories [the first 20 years of Disney movies] let them rest on that without writing anything new for a loooong time.)
Re:Established in USC, not the law (Score:3, Insightful)
Lifetime + 50 was a prerequisite for becoming party to the Berne Convention, which the U.S. was going to do anyway. Berne sets the minimum copyright term as lifetime + 50. So it wasn't Ringer's fault.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright isn't and was never designed to be an asset of any kind. Art works are to be considered part of the public good, and to encourage their creation, we hold our breath and let the artists have temporary Copyright despite the stench.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of public domain accessible works, which should be free to all within a reasonable time to enrich society and culture.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Answer: People naturally create art without any financial incentive. Look at remote tribes in Africa singing, telling stories, decorating things with drawings, that's all art for the sake of art, there's no financial reward involved.
When you get down to it, art is not a business. The moment art was made into a business was the death of art. Today there is no more art, there's people who think if there's no profit then why should I bother? Art for profit is not art, it might as well just be fart.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is what it always was.
Society at large are bearing the burden of those creators. And if we're going to bear that burden, we should be able to maximize our return on investment by distributing the creations as far and wide as we can.
Copyright destroys value. It's effect is to systematically remove access to knowledge and culture from the majority of people in the world.
We need a different mechanism that doesn't destroy the value of the creation as a side effect of calculating the reward due for the creative act. If we agree on one, we'll all get richer. Societies that refuse to do so will have a population that are stupid and ignorant compared to the global average, and will be on a one way ticket to third world status.