This is truly scary stuff. Any creative people should write their congrescritters, pronto. This would legalize theft of creative works, put undue burden on creators, and stifle the creative market. Why would anyone be proposing this? To make people like Bill Gates richer, of course.
Absolutely unbelievable.
So what they’re proposing is that, instead of all works having immediate enforceable copyright without having to register anything, they now want only registration to be recognised as copyright, and if it’s not done then all works are free to be used by anyone at any time?
That sounds so ridiculous it will be dismissed immediately.
Yeah, it’s so ridiculous that there is legislation pending in the House and Senate. :eek:
The article, unfortunately, doesn 't quote the text of the new law and doesn’t really explain it in any sort of detail; it’s just a lot of “OMFG this is terrible! Anything you don’t register, you’ll lose!”
Without knowing wha the law SAYS, it’s impossible to discuss its merits or drawbacks.
If you follow some of the links, there is the text of the law in both house and senate versions. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but presumably the article’s author has. Links here.
It’s definitely hard to parse, but with some effort you can, and it’s quite clear that the article linked in the OP is full of shit.
What the proposed law actually would do is say, in essence, “If you violate someone’s copyright on an unregistered work, the amount of monetary damage they could extract from you is limited to a reasonable approximation of what the market cost of a paid use would have been. If you really, honestly thought it was an orphaned work, you don’t have to pay any damages beyond fair market value if in fact you get sued. But in order for this rule to apply you have to make an honest effort to find who holds the natural copyright, and you can’t keep using it if you find out who it is; if you don’t act in good faith, woe betide you. Also, we’re going to take it easy on educational and not-for-profit outfits, providing they use such a work in good faith and aren’t using it for commercial gain, but again, they can’t keep using stuff if someone comes along and tells them to stop.”
There simply isn’t ANYTHING in this legislation that even begins to suggest that “orphaned works” no longer have copyright protection or can be used willy-nilly or stolen away by Bill Gates.
Patrick Leahy’s press release on the bill.
I think this bill is a good thing, since it allows:
-no monetary harm if a orphan work is used and the current copyright holder, if any, cannot be found after a search for said copyright holder is done.
-free use of said orphaned works by non-profit organizations.
-an online copyright database of registered visual works.
It seems to me that this has nothing to do with unregistered works- it mainly has to do with works in which the current copyright holder is unknown.
If you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ve probably read many threads complaining that they really, really want to be able to reprint a book or a picture or something that is in copyright but they have no way of contacting the copyright owner. So the work sits there unusable, and they come here and complain bitterly about it.
Now a law is being crafted that will allow people to make use of these so-called orphaned works. Naturally people are complaining bitterly about it.
Copyright law is a fantastically complex aspect of the law. Hardly anyone except the most specialized intellectual property attorneys understand it. From what I’ve read, the lawyers are in fact supportive of this bill for the simple reason that the current system works so badly that this would impose some order on it. The creative community has been split, though, and the bill has crawled through many revisions to try to satisfy some of the objections.
The problem with the bill is the unintended consequences. It’s hard now to tell whether the bill will primarily allow legitimate users to access previously unavailable works, with the provision that they would have to pay reasonable compensation if the owner does surface, or whether a legion of unscrupulous pirates will start stealing everything and get away with it.
Registration is currently a problem. Registering a copyright costs $45, and even though you can put a number of works into a single registration, short story writers, poets, and image makers today rarely if ever register their works. It’s not cost effective and the risks of piracy are too low.
The artist community argues that the risks would rise with this bill, that any registration fee would be onerous, and that claims of doing a search and failing to find an owner would be too easy. Maybe. One side always argues the worst case scenario for any bill. The worst case seldom comes to pass, though.
Here’s a long thread with an attorney defending the bill and many respondents looking at the worst case. It’s a far better back and forth on both sides of the bill than the hysterical article linked to in the OP.
I don’t have a side on this. I’m still trying to understand the bill in light of my ongoing battle to understand anything about copyright. It may indeed be a bad bill. But the bill addresses a real need. People really need to carefully vet both sides of the argument on this one.
As Exapno has pointed out, this is a complex issue. It’s a matter of balancing both the rights of the copyright owner and that of those who want to use a work but have no way of knowing how to contact the owner (or even who the owner might be).
I’ve seen questions on this very issue right here on the SDMB. IIRC someone wanted to reprint an old aviation book he had found and had no idea if there was a copyright. The general idea of the law is no harm, no foul: if the publisher did a search for the copyright holder and came up with nothing, he can publish the book without the owner showing up and claiming infringement.
The devil is in the details. What constitutes a diligent search? How do you document it? (“Honestly, I didn’t realize the author of this was that Stephen King.”) Do publishers have to have an escrow or such to pay the author (or heirs) if they can prove ownership? How long after publication do the copyright owners have to make a claim?
It’s really an issue primarily because of the change in 1977 that the work was the author’s life plus 50. Prior to that, you knew that the work was PD after 28 years from the copyright date, unless it was renewed. The copyright office would have a record of the renewal. But now you need to know when the author died, something that can’t be determined merely by checking the copyright date.
SFWA put out a position paper on their feelings about how the law should be designed. It’s a difficult matter balancing the interests of all those involved.
Incidentally, it wouldn’t be just big corporations who take advantage of orphan copyrights (if the copyrights were valuable, the corporations would never have let them lapse), but small presses and individuals who would be affected.
The real issue here is that it’s a solution in search of a problem. The posts here saying that people really, really want to use something that’s under copyright but they can’t find the owner to ask permission… Who cares? They have no right to publish it. Someone can really, really want to republish someone else’s book on aviation all they want, but that gives them zero rights to do so, and no compelling rationale for why they should. Write your own book. Take your own photo. Find an image you CAN use. Problem solved.
There’s no real upside and a major, major downside. If this law is passed the basic presumption of usage would go from not being able to reuse something someone else owns without permission to using it without permission and only getting the most trivial of slaps on the wrist if you abuse it
Considering how easy it already is for people to steal stuff and try to claim innocent mistakes, and how easy it is to strip copyright notices off of text and images, and the rampant “I want so I can take it” mindset of so many people, this proposed law would do nothing but make the situation far worse. What they really out to be doing is making the fines for reusing things without permission much harsher than they are now and try to make a decent effort to stamp out the pandemic of intellectual copyright theft already going on.
There are two problems this bill attempts to fix.
One was created by the 1976 Copyright Act, which not only extended copyright for current works, but extended copyright retroactively. Although it is technically true that works that were not timely renewed may have slipped into the public domain, the lack of available information on those works means that essentially everything that was created since 1923 needs to be treated as if under copyright until proven otherwise. This prohibition lasts 95 years starting from 1923, so the first works that will re-enter the public domain won’t do so until 2018.
How does anyone know if works were renewed in a timely fashion? How does anyone know now when a work was copyrighted if it is not registered with the Library of Congress? That’s the second problem. The bill directs the LoC to investigate the best means for creating a proper copyright registry. This is exactly what was called for in the SFWA position paper that **Chuck ** linked to. Note that the position paper was written back in 2005. That’s how long the details have been being argued over.
You can certainly argue that the registry might be inadequate or burdening or expensive. People have been arguing over the bill for years.
But saying that the bill is “a solution in search of a problem” is just plain wrong. The problem is huge, has been recognized for years, and is desperately in need of fixing.
**Chuck ** and I are among the staunchest defenders of copyright on this board. If we’re both saying there’s a need for movement on this issue, you can take that pretty strongly.
This is just begging the question. “They have no right to publish it” in the status quo. “The posts here saying that people really, really want to use something that’s under copyright but they can’t find the owner to ask permission” are posts advocating changing the law, so as to perhaps grant people certain rights they do not currently have (of course, at the expense of other contradicting rights they do currently have). It’s completely besides the point to argue against changing the law on the grounds that the sought-after rights aren’t ones which currently exist.
The question is primarily for works where it’s impossible to tell if it’s PD. Say you want to reprint a book written in 1940. The first term might have lapsed in 1968. Or it might have been renewed and still be in effect. How do you know if it’s public domain or not?
Maybe all evidence is that the book is PD and you reprint it, but it turns out it was renewed by a someone other than the original author, because copyright had been transferred in the meantime. Then the copyright holder comes out. Is it reasonable to make it a violation if a good faith effort indicated that copyright is PD.
Or say the author died in 1986. The work is under copyright, but how do you track down who owns it? If our author’s name is Jones, how do you know who the heirs are?
And what if someone wants to make a movie from the book? Obviously, they should be required to pay, but should the project go down the tubes simply because they cannot find out who to pay for it?
One solution would be for the person using the work to put money aside for copyright claims and pay that to any legitimate copyright claim instead of having to be an infringement lawsuit. Everyone wins – the book gets reprinted, the author (or heirs) are paid, and the publisher is able to make a profit. But the details bog everything down.
I am a firm believer in uphonding copyrights and making sure the creator gets paid for his work. But orphan copyrights are definitely an issue – and they do not apply to cases where the author is known and able to be contacted. If a good policy is developed, it will be good for everyone.
Well, I read the House version of the bill. It’s tough reading, and there were a few parts I couldn’t understand, but on the whole I think I get the gist of it.
The guy at Animation World seems chiefly incensed about the “registries” or electronic databases that will supposedly be created to handle visual works. He apparently assumes that under the new law, lack of registration in any of the certified databases will be considered sufficient to classify a work as orphaned.
The bill I read definitely doesn’t say that. On the other hand, I think it doesn’t say enough about how this database system is supposed to work. How will the managers of the databases be expected to verify that their information is correct? How is the Register of Copyrights supposed to be sure that their information isn’t fraudulent? What if two databases contain the same work but attribute it differently? Could I and my pirate friends create a bot to roam the Internet, collect images, and put them in a database with our names attached? Basically, how much responsibility should we hand to a system that doesn’t exist yet?
If I had my druthers, all copyrights would apply from the moment of creation but pass into some sort of orphan status after fifty years unless renewed. (Actually, I would be comfortable with a lot less than fifty years.)
There’s machinist books which routinely sell for several hundred dollars on eBay because they’re pretty much the book in there area, but nobody prints them, because the copyright holder can’t be found (and the publishers have looked). Folks are begging the publishers of one of the top machinist magazines to make the back issues available on the DVD, but the publisher can’t because of copyright issues.
If you want to find a copy of The Indomitable Tin Goose you have to find it on eBay (and potentially pay close to $100 for the hardback edition) because it’s out of print, and no one wants to print new copies, and the Tucker Club can’t find out who holds the rights to see if they can’t work out a deal with them. Getting someone to write a new biography is certainly possible, but who’s going to publish it? I’ve checked around a bit, and none of the standard publishers for this kind of thing aren’t interested.
A good question. Yet, the problem requires a system to be created. Can we trust the Librarian of Congress to ensure that a good fair thoughtful thorough job is done? I don’t know. I’m sure that he will have many many eyes watching every move, which may keep the quality higher.
I find most authors would agree to a fifty year term. Not even fifty years after death, but a straight 50 years. The obstacle is that our terms were revised to conform to the Berne Convention so that the U.S., the EC, and most of the Major industrialized countries in the world are all on the same schedule. Backing off on that unilaterally would create chaos in the system of world publishing. So it ain’t gonna happen. And some sort of registration would still be necessary beyond taking your word for when you created something.
I had another concern about the bill that I forgot to mention. What about authors and other creators who wish to publish their work anonymously yet still protect their copyright?
For a good example of how companies will try to get away with it, read this tale.
So? Nothing in the new law would allow the company to get away with this, either. Also, this was in the UK, where there are major differences in copyright protection.
Further, this was in the news because it was an unusual example. This sort of thing does not happen routinely.
To get full copyright protection in the US, you need to register it and I don’t believe you can do this anonymously. If you don’t register the copyright, then it does have some protection dating from when the work is published. If someone wanted to reuse this, they would have to ask permission, but since you published it anonymously, it would probably fall under the regulations of orphan copyright.
How would they protect their copyright today?
The current copyright registration form has checkoff boxes to indicate that a work is anonymous or pseudonymous. However, you have to supply your real name, or at least corporate identity, as contact information. The form is of course public information.
Now it’s true that the work is under copyright when you write it anonymously. But if somebody takes it, how do you prove you are this particular anonymous?
The notion is impossible. You can’t protect anything if you don’t put your name on it. The new bill won’t change a thing about that.
This is already completely illegal. They wound up having to pay for their mistake. Which is what would happen if the bill is passed, because it would remain illegal. Payment would still be required as well. Nothing in the law would change. This is why I keep saying that people who are commenting don’t seem to understand today’s law well enough to discern what the bill would and wouldn’t change.