There Is No "Next Great Copyright Act", Remain Calm 93
Lirodon writes: A YouTube video has gone viral, particularly around the art community (and the subsection of the art community populated by the same type of people who tend to spread these around to begin with), making bold claims that a revision to U.S. copyright law is being considered, with a particular focus on orphan works. Among other things, this video claims that it would require all works to be registered with a for-profit registry to be protected, that unregistered works would be "orphaned" and be usable by "good faith infringers" and allow others to make derivative works that they would own entirely. Thankfully, this is all just hyperbole proliferated by a misinterpretation of a report on orphan works by the U.S. Copyright Office, as Graphic Policy explains.
Shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Random Youtube video found to be distorting facts and be less than insightful. I never saw THAT coming.
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Not that we don't need a totally revamped copyright law, just that it doesn't seem likely any time soon considering who is in charge.
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Not that we don't need a totally revamped copyright law, just that it doesn't seem likely any time soon considering who is in charge.
You seriously think the Republicans will reform copyright if they get in office? If they do, it'll be in favour of their corporate overlords, and We The People will git shafted even more.
Re:Shocking. (Score:4, Insightful)
You seriously think the Republicans will reform copyright if they get in office? If they do, it'll be in favour of their corporate overlords, and We The People will git shafted even more.
I think they're a little more likely to. Freshwater economists (who the Republicans favor) are generally against long copyrights and protectionism/mercantilism of any form (Milton Friedman was one among several who signed a letter urging congress to vote against the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, saying that it's a "no brainer" that it shouldn't be passed.)
Keynesian (aka salt water) economists, which Democrats often favor, tend to like that kind of thing however, along with other protectionist measures (e.g. tariffs, "make work" projects, and the like.) Also, the Democrats are basically owned by Hollywood.
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That'll be why the Mickey Mouse Act was passed with a Republican house majority.
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Not that we don't need a totally revamped copyright law, just that it doesn't seem likely any time soon considering who is in charge.
You seriously think the Republicans will reform copyright if they get in office? If they do, it'll be in favour of their corporate overlords, and We The People will git shafted even more.
True, but they are slightly less in the pocket of the copyright cartels than the opposition, so if only Obama would say something about strengthening copyright legislation, the Republicans would all over weakening it ;)
Re:Shocking. (Score:4, Insightful)
I meant corporations are pulling the strings in both parties. The corporations are pretty much in control now, just ask any politician who is grubbing for money on Wall Street. I see virtually no difference between the two major parties at this point. They spout different red meat rhetoric, but they bow to the same master.
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It has been the final death blow since Windows ME. XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and not to forget the many variations such as CE, Itanium, and Tablet, have all been the death blow to Microsoft. I do not typically use their products but, I must say, they have not died yet - and I am glad for that.
Re:Shocking. (Score:4, Funny)
It's almost like you can't get your information from random strangers based totally on your friends/family saying "Hey did you hear about this" anymore.
Next, you're going to tell me that Bill Gates really doesn't enter me in the International Lottery every time I forward cat videos to Nigerian Princes. (Hey, those guys keep dying. If anyone needs mindless entertainment, it's them!)
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Jurassic world cost an estimated 150 mil
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03... [imdb.com]
People love making things too much, and they love doing it even if they aren't the exclusive owner
People might still love making things, but you are going to have a much harder time getting people to pony up 150 mil
Re:The next great copyright scam (Score:4, Insightful)
but if it doesn't make that back in 14 years, is it ever going to?
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but if it doesn't make that back in 14 years, is it ever going to?
A lot of franchise-oriented work these days takes longer than 14 years to even wrap up, as a series/format. There's no reason that someone deciding to risk tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and untold thousands of man-hours on a project that they hope will launch another Potter/Star Wars/Trek/Marvel/Whatever franchise wouldn't be thinking in terms of the work still paying back that risk for fifteen, or twenty years. And why shouldn't they? Playing long ball with creative franchises is perfectly reaso
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Then why should it get a benefit of a monopoly rent and free government support at the expense of free expression?
For the same reason that you get it, when it comes to your own works.
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Why would I want that? You can quote my posts here for free, I don't care.
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Then why should it get a benefit of a monopoly rent and free government support at the expense of free expression?
For the same reason that you get it, when it comes to your own works.
What kind of a reason is that? It sounds like you're saying that we should just set limits based on whatever the greediest want -- after all, it means it applies to everybody, so it must be fair, right?
There's a phrase for that: tragedy of the commons. Our shared culture, of which creative works are a large part, is being gobbled up and locked away behind effectively infinite imaginary property laws. Just because anybody can do it doesn't make it right or acceptable.
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Re:The next great copyright scam (Score:5, Informative)
Some francise-oriented work goes on for 14 years. Not a lot.
And they aren't going "well, this first one bombed, but we'll go ahead with the other 6 anyway".
The first one makes a jillion, then they go ahead with #2. And sometimes, if #1 is a really huge hit, they'll go ahead and film #2 & #3 at the same time, particularly to make the movies cheaper and retain the characters at the same age. If #1 bombs, the rest don't ever see the light of day.
The VAST majority of the money received for 99.99% of all movies are received in the first couple of years after the movie is released.
Past that, for movies, music and books, it's a lottery ticket. Every once in awhile, it winds up being popular for longer than that, or it comes back into vogue. Basically a fluke.
Nobody OK's a movie based on the financial returns of a 90 year copyright term. They go ahead if it projects to making a good profit inside a couple of years. After that, it's straightup gravy.
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There's trademark law to cover franchises. eg James Bond is trademarked so no-one else can make a James Bond movie even when the books are out of copyright.
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Life without Jurassic World movie... oh noes...
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Well considering it lost money, perhaps we would be doing the investors in discouraging these scams.
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http://www.qb64.net/forum/ [qb64.net]
http://sourceforge.net/directo... [sourceforge.net]
http://freebasic.net/forum/ [freebasic.net]
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Your welcome to live your own life. I happen to like big budget movies that are made really well.
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"... because the typical person does not benefit." Utter bullshit. Anyone creative enough can obtain a copyright, patent or trademark and benefit from it. If someone writes a book, without copyright protection the first lazy moron who comes along can take it and publish it as their own.
"People get paid by the fact that only they can create a particular piece of art or item, up against true competition." This time shallow bullshit. Without protections, the moment any creative item is available a *corpor
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Utter bullshit.
This is about term limits for copyright. 20 years seems reasonable, 90 does;t.
Same old screed from those who don't create - they believe creation must be done in a vacuum without any influence from prior works.
The OP said "Not only copyrights, but trademark and patents. Gone. For ever."
That doesn't sound like a limit, but an outright elimination. That was the mindset GP was replying to.
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So what is wrong with the first lazy slob coming along and copying it?
I just don't see why book writers won't continue to write books but do it for free or little return.
I also believe in ditching capitolism entirely and moving to pure communism. The kind where there is no money or class system, and everyone works for free but also gets everything provided for free such as housing, food, education, healthcare, clothes, transportation, and everyone gets the same amount of it.
Pure communism has never existed
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Let's look at trademarks first. They don't stop you from doing anything other than misrepresenting the stuff you're selling as somebody else's. They're beneficial, since they make enforcing the misrepresentation a lot easier. Trademarks are artificial monopolies that apply only to artificial distinguishing features. They do not stifle honest competition.
Patents are much abused nowadays, but there's a lot of work that wouldn't be done without patents. One example is pharmaceuticals; it takes a LOT of
that's a shame (Score:1)
From the summary it sounds like good reform
Re:that's a shame (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't register a work you can never receive monetary damages from infringers, only an injunction.
No. If you don't have the work registered, you can only go for the injunction, and for your customary rates/invoicing on the work in question. What having the work registered does is allow you to take the infringement case to federal court, and to seek punitive damages.
Are we reading the same US code? (Score:5, Informative)
No, if you haven't registered the work, you're only able to get actual damages (which is something like your 'customary rates' but it depends on what you can prove) rather than statutory damages and attorney's fees. Actual damages are close to what you said, but statutory damages are not "punitive" damages at all.
But don't take my word for it, read the actual law on the subject [cornell.edu].
Oh, and it so happens that you can register just before filing suit, but a registration that isn't timely doesn't have the same presumption of validity that it would if you were registering long before there was a lawsuit close on the horizon.
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From the summary it sounds like good reform
Probably because you have a rose-tinted view of how it would work. Here's how it really will work: Big companies have lawyers and systems to keep track and will do the legal minimum to avoid "orphan" status. The little guy won't keep it available for sale, file the correct paperwork or keep up with his payments, giving big corporations a free source of expired material.
The price of registration would likely be a flat fee, favoring large commercial successes made by big companies over small artists. If it wa
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The companies would presumably have to use due diligence in finding the actual copyright holder. This is similar to misplaced money, in which the person who owed someone has to use due diligence to find the person or enterprise owed the money. This means that some people in Minneapolis have failed to find the University of Minnesota when doing their due diligence.
This means that, if you create something and register the copyright, a corporation will come along, do due diligence, fail to find you despit
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No, it wouldn't be. Requiring a "for profit entity" to register copyright would mean that any home/hobbyist/non-profit who created work might as well hand it over to giant ad companies to use without compensation or possibly even credit. In short, it would be handing even more power to corporations.
Thankfully, this isn't really happening.
oh my my, oh my my (Score:1)
WHUT (Score:2, Insightful)
"Thankfully, this is all just hyperbole proliferated by a misinterpretation of a report on orphan works by the U.S. Copyright Office"
Why 'thankfully'?
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Why 'thankfully'?
Because if the breathless crap being fretted about were actually to come to pass, it would be a huge pain in the ass to everyone who actually creates things for a living.
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Just because copyright needs radical change doesn't mean that ANY change is good. In particular, were this rumor true, requiring a for-profit entity to exist to register copyright to would mean that all casual creators (that includes anyone who posts a photo online), hobbyists (including people who contribute code to not-for-profit open source projects), and non-profit entities would be at the mercy of for-profit companies. Especially big for-profit companies who could take the "orphaned" material, use it
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I could see my way to agreeing to a 20 year copyright, a 15 year patent, and trademarks being in perpetuity as long as the company exists and the trademark is defended. I say this as someone who has worked with all three professionally and someone who has never assumed copyright in my private life - anything I code I give away, with no strings attached, for example. However, what I do with my private creations is my choice. I believe in allowing others to choose as well.
Copyright needs reform (Score:2)
If anything, the digital dissemination of copyrighted works, on the whole, increases the speed with which they depreciate, since more people who desire to purchase a legal copy of a copyrighted work can do so much more quickly than was previously possible, and since legal copies of copyrighted works don't degrade in quality over time (if you have a good cloud to store them in). I think that copyright term should be reduced to account for this.
Re:Copyright needs reform (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were able to reshape copyright law myself, I'd do three things:
1) All new works are copyrighted for 14 years plus a one-time 14 year extension that you must file for.
2) All non-commercial infringing (i.e. no profit motive - and, no, ads don't count) would carry a penalty of $100 times the market value of the work. For example, get caught distributing 500 MP3s? Your fine would be around $50,000 (500 * $1). Still high, but not "bankrupt you for life" high.
3) All existing copyrights would phase out gradually. (This would be a concession to businesses.) Starting with the oldest material, five years' worth of material would enter the public domain every year until all material was under the new copyright length. This should give companies plenty of time to plan for the public domain.
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2) All non-commercial infringing (i.e. no profit motive - and, no, ads don't count) would carry a penalty of $100 times the market value of the work. For example, get caught distributing 500 MP3s? Your fine would be around $50,000 (500 * $1). Still high, but not "bankrupt you for life" high.
But that's not the relevant market value. For example, Apple distributes MP3s on the iTunes Music Store. Do you think, for example, they only paid $1 to Taylor Swift to distribute Bad Blood? Of course not. They're paying royalties and likely have a fixed floor amount too (e.g. 30 cents per copy sold, minimum of $100,000, with the expectation that they're going to sell way more than a million copies). Or, for another example, remember a decade or two back when Michael Jackson bought distribution rights for a [celebritynetworth.com]
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The big problem is that copyright fines were set when the major copyright violators were commercial in nature. Sure, people would make mix tapes and distribute them, but they were small-time operators compared to the CD presser who could make a hundred copies of the latest CD, sell them for a couple of bucks each, and make a major profit. The fines were set to bankrupt such operations so they couldn't just spring up elsewhere.
Nowadays, though, anyone can become an unauthorized distributor in a matter of m
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Making a "non-commercial" copyright infringement tier would level the playing field a bit. It would still let copyright owners smack down infringers, but it wouldn't allow for the abuse of "settle on our terms or face a $75 million fine!"
There actually already are two tiers for commercial or non-commercial infringement, but they're rarely utilized: there are criminal penalties for for-profit infringement that don't apply to non-commercial stuff; and you know how people always say that statutory damages are "up to $150,000 per work"? That's for willful infringement. The regular tier is $750-$30,000 per work. And, in this context, "willful" does not mean "intentional" or even "I knew this was under copyright, and still infringed" (there's an
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Well, with a 14 year + one-time 14 year extension, "the vault" becomes less of a concern. Suppose you run a company and a movie under your copyright was just released. The clock is ticking and you have only 28 years (assuming you extend the copyright, which I'm sure most companies would do) to profit from it. Putting the movie "in the vault" is essentially saying "We're not going to profit off of this for a period of time." Put it in the vault for 5 years and you're giving up 18% of your copyright term.
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But what about Mickey Mouse?
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congress sucks (Score:1)
Orphan works wouldn't even be that much of a problem if Congress didn't keep extending the copyright term. Most of those orphan works would be in public domain by now, and commercial entities could appropriate them to their heart's content.
In Fairness To Chicken Little... (Score:2, Insightful)
The last 20 years of copyright law has been a vast collection of Evil Genius Plots To Take Over The World, with no small number successfully being implemented.
People can be forgiven for believing the worst without checking the facts.
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Yes, but this is different, because the supposed copyright law was in the other direction. If there's anything that the evil geniuses behind our copyright laws would *not* do, it's to make it *easier* to copy works legally, which is what this claims is being done.
abandonware issues and old IP being split up (Score:2)
abandonware issues and old IP being split up to muilt owners putting it in a messy limo.
Isn't that pretty much what Google did with books? (Score:2)
>> require all works to be registered with a for-profit registry (Google?) to be protected, that unregistered works would be "orphaned" and be usable by "good faith infringers" (Google again?)
Isn't that pretty much what Google did with books a few years ago?
But there is a "Next Great Copyright Act" (Score:2, Informative)
It's called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [eff.org] Extends the copyright term to 120 years, eliminates fair use as a copyright infringement defense, and institutes extrajudicial legal proceedings that allow copyright holders to seize your property if it is being used to "infringe."
In favor of paid copyright protection (Score:3)
This is how copyright should be changed: give every 'work' ten years of free protection - plenty to understand whether it is making money or not. And beyond that, allow for infinitely repeatable five-year terms, paid for at a progressive rate. That way everyone can be happy: basic protection is in place for free, and anything that is valuable can be protected up to its economic value but not beyond.
Copyright owners can be happy: they finally have their infinite copyright - or at least as it makes sense economically.
The public can be happy, as older works will eventually fall into public domain.
The government can be happy, as copyrighted works become a steady source of income.
See, everybody is happy!
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We already have a system where copyright is extended indefinitely in exchange for money. It's called lobbying.
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"Copyright owners can be happy: they finally have their infinite copyright - or at least as it makes sense economically."
They would not be happy in the slightest. You're saying they should start PAYING for their copyright after as short as 10 years compared to the current 90-100 odd years. An ever more expensive payment at that which will force them to eventually drop it out of fear of bankruptcy. Likely long before the 100 years they currently enjoy is up.
What they want is infinite copyright that's free.
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Their lobbying clearly indicates they want indefinite copyright. I'm simply asking them to put their money where their mouth is - and in the process stop bothering the rest of us with ridiculous copyrights on ancient works that have no economic value whatsoever. It is not at all an unreasonable request that the user pays, so to speak - that copyright holders who want protection beyond a reasonable timeframe, also get to pay for enjoying that protection.
It is precisely those continuous extensions that I want
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This is how copyright should be changed: give every 'work' ten years of free protection - plenty to understand whether it is making money or not. And beyond that, allow for infinitely repeatable five-year terms, paid for at a progressive rate.
Other people have mentioned the "infinitely repeatable" issue, so I'll simply mention that aside from that, your idea isn't terrible and has parallels in patent law: patents are valid for 20 years from filing, provided the patent owner pays maintenance fees at 3.5 years, 7.5 years, and 11.5 years... and those fees are $1600, $3600, and $7400 respectively. As a result, many patents get abandoned long before their full 20 year term.
Thankfully? (Score:1)
The video I watched... (Score:1)
This is the video I watched on the subject. It seemed more than plausible. I didn't get all the way through - only about an hour.
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.... [blogspot.com]
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And here is the link to the copyright office's document requesting input by the 23rd July.
http://copyright.gov/fedreg/20... [copyright.gov]