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.'"
Established in USC, not the law (Score:3, Interesting)
So We Got... (Score:5, Interesting)
"fair use," a not clearly defined defense, meaning you get sued and have to prove you didn't infringe. Copyright holders got life + 50 years and no need to file.
Faust got a better deal.
Heroine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Heroine? Seriously? Extending copyright to 50 years past death? Giving major copyright holdiers just about everything they wanted?
She should be scorned as the woman who betrayed the American People for the sake of the greed of lazy corporations.
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, dropping the registration requirement was a requirement of the Berne Convention. Also, I happen to agree with it. Why should individuals who don't have lots of money not be able to copyright a book they wrote? Oh no, only large corporations should be able to do that. If you ask me, the current system around registrations is fine (no registration means you can only claim for actual damages, having a registration causes punitive to come into play)
Re:Coming up at 11, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have any idea what it costs to register a copyright? $35.
If you can't pony up $35 to register the book that took you several months (if not years) to write, then well...I'm at a loss here. That's like turning down a job solely for the lack of casual Fridays. And if that scenario ever popped up, I'd think that any number of publishers would be willing to advance the guy $35.
Re:Established in USC, not the law (Score:5, Interesting)
The infallible resource has your back [wikipedia.org]:
The doctrine only existed in the U.S. as common law until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. Â 107
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:4, Interesting)
What about things less than a book though?
Take The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen's blog. He posts one or two posts each weekday. Should he have to register each of these? At $35/post, that's somewhere around $10,000/year. I don't see any ads on his blog, so I'm not sure he gets any income from it except from the book that's a compilation of entries. If he doesn't copyright each entry, can he copyright the whole blog? What does he send the copyright office for the entries he hasn't written?
What about entries to my personal blog? Or posts to /.? Do I leave them uncopyrighted?
I'm not saying that these challenges can't be overcome, but saying that "if you can't afford $35 to register a copyright" leaves a lot of challenges that you need to overcome before it's practical today.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Interesting)
Her law as written wasn't too bad. Back then a lifetime +50 wasn't that bad; though I do think it is a bit much. I'd say lifetime or n years, where n is the average life span of the time and set n every 20 years, which ever is greater if you don't want to have to establish stricter registrations(to establish start dates).
Re:Ya kiding right? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you ask me, the current system around registrations is fine (no registration means you can only claim for actual damages, having a registration causes punitive to come into play)
But it also has a major downside in the fact that it's not clear who owns what. Also, the lack of registration has extended copyright over basically everything. The grocery list I jotted down this afternoon is subject to copyright. Heck, this post is subject to copyright.
And it's not as if registration is an inherently bad idea. There are two issues to address with it -- the cost, and the difficulty of processing registrations. The last time we tried mandatory registration, the price was set by the government, and the processing had to be done by hand on paper. We can do better than that.
I would prefer mandatory registration similar to the way the domain name system works. Thus:
In this way, we get a definitive record of who owns which copyright, and exactly when the work was registered. Because the registrars are in competition with one another, we get cheap registration fees and convenient service. And by making registration mandatory once again, we have ensured that copyright is only applied in cases where the author wants it.
It's obviously not a perfect system. I imagine we'd probably have to deal with fraudulent or competing copyright registrations. But we already have those anyway.
A bigger concern would be whether or not the market for copyright registration services would be large enough to sustain itself. Copyright terms are very, very long. The lifetime of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years for corporately owned works. Say I'm the owner of H. K. Fessenscheimer & Daughters, Copyright Registrar. If one author registers a book, that's one sale. Then I don't get any more business from that author till they've created something new to copyright, which could take years, or might never happen.
So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals. Say, a copyright registration lasts for five or ten years, and then you (or your estate) has to re-register. If you don't, then you get a grace period of maybe six months, and then the copyright expires and cannot be renewed.
Of course, large institutions which do a lot of copyright registrations (corporations, universities) would be free to establish in-house registrars which would handle all registrations and renewals for their own copyrights without involving a third party. Hell, they could even write their own software to do it. Amortized over time, their costs for registering and renewing copyrights would be extremely low.
I'm sure that the existing copyright holders will scream bloody murder at the idea. They worked really hard to get rid of registration. They wouldn't be happy to see it come back.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
Re:So We Got... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we attempt to put this into a little better perspective?
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.
Lifetime +50 might be a little to much, but I can live with it.
Lifetime +25 seems reasonable to me - even if the old goat's work is published the day he dies, his estate has a quarter CENTURY to make something of his work.
The problem is, WHO OWNS MOST COPYRIGHT TODAY?!?!?!
It isn't the old goat who wrote a book, a song, or a software. It's the CORPORATIONS!
And, what, precisely, is the lifetime of any given corporation? In effect, we have non-expiring copyright law today. Even if a corporation goes bankrupt, someone, somewhere BUYS their assets, becoming the new corporate owner of the copyright.
Time limits on copyright needs to be addressed all over again, bearing in mind that the vast bulk of copyrights are either created by corporations and/or their employees in the name of the corporation, OR bought by corporations.
Personally, I could justify limiting all copyright to 50 years, period.
Aside from that, fair use really needs to be defined quite clearly. Copyright law was NEVER intended to inhibit creativity and free expression. It's ONLY legitimate purpose is to prevent other people from plegiarising and/or profiting from an original work.
Re:Reguarding (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright on software should be significantly lower because it becomes obsolete quicker so it needs to enter the public domain sooner for there to be any real benefit.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh why not just make it "Y years from first publication" regardless of when the author dies?
And frankly, I think depending on the work, the term should be from 3 years (graphics hardware and printer drivers) to, say, seven, with no more than three renews, which require payment. But we can argue about the numbers.
Actually, I wouldn't mind if the term was indefinite, as long as you had to declare a value that you a) pay copyright taxes on and b) must sell for if offered by an organization that buys IP into the public domain. I don't like the idea of all the government revenue, but I do like the idea of not over-valuing IP. Also, there ought to be a grace period depending on industry for determining value.
Hmm.. On second thought.. I think I know what how to handle the revenue. The copyright tax should be somewhat different from a regular tax, in that it never hits the general fund. The copyright office itself should be an organization charged with buying works into the public domain, and they should spend 100% of the "copyright tax" money on that every year. It will be easy to figure out, since they would have a database of the buy-prices for everything.
The tax would begin after the Nth year (where N is some number that we will certainly argue about), and the office could take it's administrative costs out of the initial fees for the first issuance.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
You make a good point, but I think you're being a little harsh. There are other assets that get passed on after death, like stocks and wealth and houses and boats. Why should copyright be any different? It's also no guarantee that the heirs will get rich--the vast majority of copyrighted works don't make much money, especially after the first few years.
I personally think that the 1909 law (28 years + renewal) was a much better length of time (though I am skeptical about the renewal), and that fair use should have simply been added to that law. If the unfortunate author would still have held copyright while living, it makes sense that his heirs would retain it until it expired, yet the strict time limit would keep pressure on a still-living author to create more works.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I'll repeat. "In effect, we have non-expiring copyright law today."
A copyright on a corporate work goes into effect right now, tonight. How many people born tonight will live long enough to see that work go into the public domain? 95 years is a long time. My great-grandchildren may be dying of old age by that time!!
So, IN EFFECT, we have non-expiring copyright law.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Interesting)
"only have to renew if it's worth it" is bullshit. The ONLY reason to have copyright last beyond ten years is for the case of people for whom what they have created isn't worth it, yet.
Something like 10 years, non-renewable, starting from the time the work becomes generally available, might be sane. This means that someone who has been shopping around for a publisher for 10 years won't wake up one day to find that the first publisher to reject him has just started selling his book (in electronic form) at no risk and pure profit.
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Interesting)
define "generally available".
If some college student working at one of the publishers he sends it to leaks it in a torrent has it been made "generally available"?
If he then sues that publisher and the draft becomes part of publicly available court records has it been made "generally available"?
What about changes between publications?
If at age 10 I write a short story and the teacher pins it on the classroom wall for everyone to read or it gets included in some student publication and at age 20 I decide to flesh it out into a better written longer short story will I still have copyright?
How big does the change have to be to get my 10 years back?
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Why? Why should the estate get anything from the public (copyright is, after all, justified (and justifiable) taking from the public) for years after the author died? What did they do to earn this continued revenue stream, again, courtesy of the American public?
Re:Now I know who to blame (Score:4, Interesting)
"But that's just a nonsense. The copyright on works expire every day."
No, they don't. Not in some countries for a while now. Not when copyright is arbitrarily and retroactively extended beyond the expiry date that applied when the work was originally created. In the U.S., there won't be any new works entering the public domain (unless people explicitly put them there) until 2019 [wikipedia.org].
How much do you want to bet that before 2019 some enterprising legislator will come up with some dubious reason for extending copyright terms yet again, and "stealing" another 20 years from the public domain?