…provide some good reasons why they should be then.
You do realize that the world has changed, don’t you? Marriage was originally only between a man and a woman, but as societies grow more enlightened rules, laws, and habits change. The original reasons for copyright are irrelevant in the modern world where a work can be copied in the blink of an eye. The only thing that protects the work of a creator or those who he/she assigns that right to are strong copyright laws. There is a greater need now than ever for strong copyright laws.
You’ve linked to an opinion piece that essentially quotes another opinion piece. Neither of them showed examples of copyright protection inhibiting creativity. Not being able to watch an old movie does not inhibit the ability to create.
There is no natural right to copyright either: which is why they last as long as they do now. What exactly is your point?
And the constitution is irrelevant. The opinions of long-dead Americans mean nothing to the rest of the world.
User-oriented software (word/excel/SVN, but not things like games) from 10 years ago is, in most cases, expired – only a handful of software from 10 years ago is still really in circulation.
Video games from 10 years ago are very often not expired – hell, Mario Brothers 3 came out in 1990 and is still incredibly popular. However, I think there really should be a rule for every medium along the lines of, “If you don’t publish it in some reasonably open form once every five years at least, you lose right to control publishing of it”. This is where video game piracy becomes legitimate – because there is literally no other way to play, say, Mother 3 unless you want to spend quite a while hunting both it and a Japanese Super Famicom down. Letting companies sit on products like that is stupid. Let them keep ownership of the IP, but let the copyright on the actual product expire.
Books from 10 years ago… Well, how many books are considered good that aren’t more than 10 years old? We get a lot of tripe nowadays.
Movies from 10 years ago… Uh, we’re still getting Star Wars rereleases that sell like hotcakes.
The fact is, different forms of copyrighted media have different shelf lives. I do think the “Publish it, make it available, or lose rights to sole control over reproduction” rule should be in effect, though, because seriously? If it weren’t for roms and emulators (which are technically copyright violations, but nobody seems to care), nobody would still know what Super Mario World is, and that would be a tragedy.
Thanks for the informative links. That’s what we’re here for.
Hey, at least I eventually got around to it. The 9 page paper -which I assure you is way above average compared with the Republican’s other efforts- made no mention of international agreements of any sort.
It’s a fee. Intellectual property only exists on the back of the laws that protect it. And it is inherently different than the more conventional sort of property as it has a pronounced public goods aspect: if I take your loaf of bread, you don’t have it. But information once produced can be replicated so that one consumer’s gain isn’t another’s loss. The public policy question involves setting up the proper incentives for costly information production. Currently the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of protecting information creators.
Take Steamboat Willy. It would have been created whether copyright was 14 years or 124. There’s no reason to allocate the Disney Corporation those extra profits. You are awarding the company monopoly power -with all its attendant economic inefficiencies- without any purpose or compensatory benefit.
Easy solution then: don’t expect the federal government to enforce your desire to hold your copyright beyond 12 years (in the proposal). As for Tobago, what’s sauce for the goose…
One topic which I thought would be brought up by now: what are the odds of passage of this plan any time soon? To my fellow Americans: your guess is as good as mine. To my friends abroad, IMveryHumbleAndTentativeO not bloody likely.
…so in simpler words: its not to be taken seriously?
Yep. What is it the fee for? Apparently its a fee to pay for your military, your health care and other US institutions. The fee most certainly won’t be going towards the laudable goal of encouraging the production and dissemination of art and knowledge. So why should content creators support paying the fee?
I’m sorry: but I’m sure there is a “copyright word salad” generator out there somewhere and this is a prime example of it. All you’ve done is proved that without copyright: a content creator has no protections. Strong copyright protections are more important now than ever and you’ve just proven it.
The pendulum hasn’t swung too far: insisting that it has doesn’t mean that it has.
I ask you once again: why shouldn’t Disney get those extra profits? You haven’t provided a reason yet except that you think that it shouldn’t.
And “Steamboat Willy” and Disney is always trotted out in these discussions, but I have to ask: is that really all you’ve got? You want to screw around with the copyright system to dick with one company?
I’m sorry: I wasn’t aware that your Federal government would compensate me now if I had to take court action against an infringer based in the United States. Can you show me where to get this free money?
As the cite to wiki shows: the US is the only signatory to the Berne Convention that currently charges registration fees but the basic protections of copyright remain. What the proposal would do is legalize piracy to works over twelve years old. This is extortion. It flys in the face of what the Berne convention is all about.
Consider the impact of the US practice of taxing their citizens who are living abroad. The practical impact of this is that a US citizen has to jump through hoops in order to get a bank account open in their country of residence. The US government tells banks that they have to report details of US citizens and if they don’t: the bank gets penalized. The solution international banks take for this issue is simply not to let US citizens open bank accounts.
Similar things will happen here. Rather than deal with providing financial statements to the US government companies will simply stop dealing with them.
Do you seriously expect a writer in Auckland New Zealand to report their earnings to the US government? As a photographer how do I determine earnings for a one-time fee for images that I’ve licenced to a client for an unlimited term? New Zealand has the commisioning rule: which means unless I contract out of an arrangement the person who commisioned the image owns the copyright. How is this situation handled? Is that new episode of Doctor Who a new work or not? Does this nine page document even begin to cover the huge scope that copyright covers in so many different creative fields?
Pretty much. If this proposed law change were to go ahead (and it won’t) countries will react by implementing their own set of fees. If the US wants to treat the Berne Convention as not worth the paper its written on then so will everyone else. And as a consequence: creativity will suffer.
Its stupid law. And as infuriating as the US government can be at times, they aren’t completely stupid. It will never pass. Copyright at the moment really isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. And for those in the creative industries it is the only set of protections that allow them to make money. Don’t mess with it just because you want to sell Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck slash porn.
I’m not comfortable with applying a double standard on copyrights on the basis of “dude, screw corporations”. If we’re going to apply a standard of life plus so many years for works by individuals, then works produced by corporations should similarly enjoy an amount of protection roughly equal to how long the youngest person working on the project might live, plus a reasonable buffer period.
As to the second question, I’m not going to claim that short copyright terms would stop people from creating works in the first place. After all, when Doctor No was filmed, the max for copyrights was 56 years - and it was based on a book four years old, with a character nine years old, so elements of it would have started to become public domain in 2009. The question becomes - is there an incentive for the rights-owner to continue monetizing the product towards the end of its copyright term, if they know full well that in a few years any Joe Schmoe will be able to start profiting off the franchise they’ve invested so much in?
Rather, I’m assuming that corporations are profit-seeking entities. I came up with my 30 year interval by taking the term of the longest-term bond that is not a niche product. (Yeah, there are 100 term bonds and even perpetuals but they are rare.) I’ve also fooled around with a few spreadsheets: the profit stream 30-100 years out is pretty small after discounting with reasonable parameters.
But people are different. As stated upthread by MEBuckner, it’s a little strange to put something in the public domain when the artist turns 60, for a work they created when they were 30. In some ways this is “Welfare for creators” while for corporations I’m applying strict rate of return criteria. I don’t think this is unreasonable.
Let’s work through the James Bond example. It’s a good thought experiment. The first complication is if you change copyright law, Big Biz will shift to trademarks to extend their IP. Set that aside for now. Ian Flemming died in 1964: under my plan, all his novels enter the public domain in 1988. What would happen? Would film-makers create The Living Daylights starring Timothy Dalton in 1987?
Of course they would. Copyright of that work would expire in 1987+32=2019. The only difference would be that you wouldn’t have to license the James Bond name from Eon Productions (or whomever) after 1988. Essentially James Bond would become a character like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes, and frankly those (unmonetized) franchises do fine. Arguably, adding Bond (James Bond), Godzilla or Gilligan to the available artistic pallet would enhance creativity. Well, maybe not Gilligan.
Would such a state of affairs make it less likely that Eon would buy the movie rights from Ian Flemming? Not really. Remember present discounted value: profits 20 or 30 or more years hence just aren’t worth that much.
The real hit might be taken by TV actors who collect royalties. But even here I’m dubious: I understand for example that the actors of Hawaii Five-O no longer receive royalty payments: syndication funds just go into the coffers of the parent company.
The Republican Study Group treats corporations and individuals the same, however.
I take the Republican Study Group (RSG) very seriously. It’s not often I take their ideas seriously: this is an exception. Their treatment certainly isn’t comprehensive though: ignoring Berne is highly problematic and more than faintly ridiculous. The underlying problem is that considering international treaties explicitly would not endear them to their base.
That said, I think the US should push for less expansive copyright protections.
Content creators benefit from access to a richer public domain. Content creators would pay a fee to the extent that they value access to the US market. If they don’t, then they don’t get government provided protection of their royalties.
Actually, it’s textbook micro-economics. The concept is that certain goods -for example military protection, public parks and the fictional character James Bond- have different properties than conventional market goods.
Because it serves no public interest to grant Disney this sort of monopoly power, just as it serves no public interest to eliminate anti-trust law.
I discussed James Bond above. It’s a better thought experiment: Steamboat is trotted out to show the absurdity of the status quo. Also, Disney lobbied to retroactively extend copyright protection backwards -and won. So this is pure corporate welfare at work.
The court system is a subsidy for those who use the courts. There’s no human right to indefinite copyright.
I expect them to report their US revenue to the US government. That said, I think this implementation problem is one that should be taken seriously. As you can see, the RSG didn’t address it at all.
A final note: Banquet Bear has done a fine job of putting forth international complications and the very real challenges that the RSG proposal could place on foreign content creators. Kudos.
…wow. After reading the paper I can only say what a complete load of bollocks. Your summary in the OP actually did the paper some favours. Its nine pages of propaganda. It makes the claim that “Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets rather it destroys entire markets.” What an ignorant thing to claim.
I have no reason to doubt that the paper was withdrawn because it wasn’t properly vetted despite the conspiracy theories flying around on the blogs you have linked to. How on earth did the RSG let this get published in the first place?
i.e. If the US starts charging fees, like is is already doing, other countries will implement fees, as they have not done despite the fact that the supposed event that would trigger this terrible calamity has already occurred.
Kudos for putting enough padding between these mutually exclusive statements to maintain a pretense of respect for the reader’s intelligence.
Maybe President Obama ought to try that “heated discussion” thing sometime. Apparently it works like Kryptonite on Superman or water on the Wicked Witch of the West.
…as I have noted and if you had read the cites you would know: under the current registration schedule my work is still protected by copyright in the United States even though I have not registered my work…the difference between registered and unregistered work is the amount of damages I can claim.
Under the proposed changes after twelve years those copyright protections disappear. Can you not honestly see the difference? I can use smaller words if you like.
This is a huge difference and the creative industries and other countries wouldn’t stand for it. This policy paper was only online for a day before it was removed because the policy, if implemented (and it won’t be) would have been catastrophic for the movie, film, book, artistic, sculpture, and any other sort of art based creative industry.
Heh. Well, consider this other gem Tax Facts 2012 (PDF) These policy papers tend toward the bullet point approach. This one compares the word length of the US Tax Code with the King James Bible and is outraged that the IRS makes as many as 1199 publications and forms available. The solutions? It recommends that all estate taxes be repealed, the elimination of the Internal Revenue Code and repealing the IRS’s authority to withhold taxes.
The copyright brief was released over the weekend and wasn’t noticed by anybody other than lobbyists and a few bloggers. It was also a model of intellectual clarity relative to their past efforts. Sanity checks have never influenced the Republican Study Committee in the past: this withdrawal smacks of unsurprising political pressure by their funders.
Content creators are the ones who benefit least from a “richer public domain”, because they’re the ones whose work is contributing to it. Content consumers are the ones that benefit most from not having to purchase rights to copy works.
You missed my point, such as it is. Creating James Bond vs. Godzilla vs Strider would be difficult, as it would involve the licensing 3 franchises. Now that’s a silly example, but the makers of Who Framed Roger Rabbit had to deal with proportionately greater headaches. I agree though that the main benefit would flow to consumers, but my original link emphasized the producer angle: http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/05/336892/copyrights-and-creativity/
I would say it destroys markets. Someone up-thread already mentioned older video games-- emulating the system it runs on is easy (well… most of the time), but getting a (legal) copy of the actual game is nearly impossible.
If I wanted to buy a copy of, say, the Commodore-64 game Parallax, it’s literally impossible for me to legally obtain one. It’s sold nowhere. Even if you somehow find a copy, the medium it originally shipped on (5.25" disk) is de-magnetized by now. I can emulate a Commodore 64 easily enough, but the software is literally impossible to obtain.
Why? Because the copyright is still valid. The only possibility to play and study this cultural artifact is to make use of an illegal copy. If it weren’t for software pirates, this work would be lost to the world.
So there’s a market that current copyright laws have indeed killed. If Parallax were in the public domain, it would be worthwhile for someone to publish it in a format modern emulators could easily play.
…you can still buy video games. You can still buy old video games. You just can’t buy “this” game. The market isn’t destroyed. I live in New Zealand and never had the chance to buy a twinkie. Now it looks like I never will. But the junk food market still exists: I just won’t be able to buy a twinkie. I won’t be able to play with a twinkie. I won’t even be able to study a twinkie.
Is your desire to “study” an old Commodore 64 video game great enough that the US should abandon their international treaty obligations and completely change the environment copyright holders currently operate in? Remember this isn’t a general discussion on copyright: but a discussion on this particular withdrawn policy paper.
120 years after creation for corporations is ridiculous. We’re supposed to promote competition in a free market but these corporations are successfully lobbying protectionism for themselves.
Life of the creator plus 20 years for heirs sounds fair or 100 years.