Public Domain Enhancement Act petition 669
EricEldred writes "Please sign the petition and support the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act. See eldred.cc for details. 'This statute would require
American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty years after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the
copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work should pass into the public domain.'" See the brief description of the Act if you aren't familiar with what Eldred and Lessig are proposing.
automate it (Score:4, Insightful)
Tacit approval (Score:4, Insightful)
With the amount of material they generate? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure how well that would work... (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands a few companies have tens of thousands of copyrights that their just sitting on for the sake of others not having access to them.
If you set some low fee, it would just legitimize their sqandering of literary material.
Still not a solution .... (Score:4, Insightful)
-A.M.
A novel approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Infeasible (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, what prevents me from paying the dollar and renewing the copyright on "The Wizard of Oz" (movie, not the book, the book is public domain)?
Re:automate it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is to allow the works of artists and writers who have gone missing to become public domain, so that their books and such don't just sit around collecting dust (and potentially disappearing from the face of the earth). This would allow people to save obscure works by republishing them even if they can't contact the original author to get permission.
This will become more and more important as the term for copyright gets extended indefinitely by congress, and we lose more and more works of brilliance to the dustbin of history.
Too Long (Score:3, Insightful)
Why wait 50 years? Heck if I have to pay to renew my domain name every few years... why not a copyright, too? Also, there's no reason why it should have to cost any money at all. Just fill out the paper work every 5-10 years.
Likewise, if somebody in your behalf (children, their children, etc.) continues this tradition... I see no reason why the copyright should not legally be able to be maintained forever.
Davak
probably not effective (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt this would be effective because corporate copyright holders have already shown that they will fight to keep control of material which is no longer directly profitable. The issue is that if more material went into the public domain then the public would have free material to watch/listen instead of paying for something newer. It would be worth it for the MPAA/RIAA to renew for $1 or even $100 just to prevent this. What we need is a law setting a hard cap on the length of a copyright, and for a much more reasonable period of time.
You're missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Limited usefulness (Score:3, Insightful)
It is useful for removing restrictions where the restrictions are merely there by default and not intent. A book that was written in the 40's where the author (and/or his/her heirs) doesn't care about the copywrite. Under the proposed system this would drop into PD even without the CW holder explicitly putting it there.
That's a fairly minimal benefit, but at least it IS a benefit and by not destroying the money-maker (extending the rights period) perhaps this could get passed? No, why bother, it's still an added hassle for the corporations that are controlling the law changes.
That's not the point tho... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about making it so that works that the copyright holder doesn't care about anymore, lapse into public domain after 50 years.
As things stand now, the copyright is in force for the current excessively long term, even when the rights-holder is dead, buried, and forgotten. This is a minor tweak, to make it perfectly legitimate to re-publish "abandoned" works after 50 years, rather than the longer terms now in effect.
perhaps the fee should double every few years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm not sure how well that would work... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With the amount of material they generate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they can.
Any corporation that has 100 copyrights can certainly afford $100.
Any corporation that has 1,000 copyrights can certainly afford $1,000.
Any corporation that has 1,000,000 copyrights can certainly afford $1,000,000.
I can't see any value at which a corporation couldn't afford $1 per copyright. Perhaps if it was $10,000/copyright or renewal was required every year (after the first 20 or so). In my opinion the only solution is to reduce the copyright length significantly.
But that will never pass Congress, and this might. (Score:4, Insightful)
Either it passes, in which case the law is at least improved from the status quo, or it fails due to strong opposition, in which case the opponents are smoked out and shown to be fools in the public eye.
This could be tricky. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stock photography might radically change in view of this idea
Of course, you say, but the photographer will then have to choose among his best work and pick the ones for which he wants to keep the copyright! Blah. You can't resolve it like this. Suddenly you'll have poor artists who will be exploited because they didn't pay their copyright fee, and you'll have rich art whores who'll pay to have every single piece of their crap copyrighted.
It won't work. You might as well decide to have the copyright last ten times as long as it took to create the particular artwork. So if it's a photo, say ten days at most. If it's a book, 10 years or thereabouts.
Hey look, a worthless online petition. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want something, quit copping out and write or call your representative. Or better yet, pay them a visit when they're at their home office.
fee should increase with time (Score:2, Insightful)
Make it $1 for the 51st year, and double every year thereafter. Some posters have already mentioned the "automated copyright for perpetuity" problem. If the copyright is still worth $1M after 71 years, fine, let them keep it. If it's still worth $1G after 81 years, fine, let them keep it. But copyright in perpetuity? C'mon...
Thoughts and ideas are not born in a vacuum. The public domain contributed something to those thoughts and ideas, it's only fair to give back eventually. That's the whole idea of mentioning "limited times" in A1S8. Personally I think 50 years is already too long, 25 years should be sufficient.
even worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse, it seems like it could open the door for endless copyright, as long as the owner continues to pay the fee. It seems to imply that only works with no commercial value are worthy of the public domain. This makes me a little uneasy...
one reason (Score:3, Insightful)
The society can't progress if the sons and daughters of our most brilliant citizens don't need to contribute.
It's already been approved. (Score:3, Insightful)
At least this would mitigate some of the damage that's been done by allowing important, un-shepherded works to pass into public domain before the paper they're printed on crumbles into dust.
Is it a perfect solution? No. But it does addres many of the major problems of Infinite Copyright.
Re:Infeasible (Score:2, Insightful)
2) The same mechanism that prevents you from selling your own VHS tapes of The Wizard of Oz will prevent you from renewing the copyright does not reassign the copyright. The copyright office will simply register that 1$ has been paid for the Wizard of Oz. If you want to send them a dollar, they'll record that fact. It won't assign the copyright to you.
Re:automate it (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm... We get about $10000, a year for expireing copyright extension. And these corperations are only paying a 1$ fee to make additional millions? Let's bump it to $1000/renewal and POW an extra 10Mil/year!
At $1000 companies will have to think about what they want to keep.
Sure you'll never see Mickey Mouse go out this way, but that's not the point. The point is there are 1000s of copyrighted things that the owner maintains, "just because". After all, if there's no cost to maintain ownership, why not maintain it?
=Shreak
Re:I'd rather see "use it or lose it" (Score:3, Insightful)
It's possible now for companies to keep their content (books and CDs) available for purchase either online, or in small production run printings. "Use it or lose it" would mean that the copyright on those works would never expire (much like the current system).
Don't limit "distribution" to dead-tree or plastic disk versions collecting dust on store shelves.
Re:automate it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:50 years ... (Score:2, Insightful)
But this also goes against the spirit of competition as it grants you a monopoly on said design/creation.
The whole point of there being a 50 year limit is to allow the creator time enough to collect profit and then pass the design/creation on to the public where anyone and everyone can use it freely.
Re:You're missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Hold on now ! Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted an author/artist etc. as opposed to it belonging to the public to begin with. Its us (collectively) granting the favor here, not the other way around. What's proposed here is simply another kind of copyright limitation, of the the kind that already exist. Given that, in the US, copyrights can only be granted for "limited times", the public ARE owed the works (eventually), this law just redefines eventually.
-- Rich
Public Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:probably not effective (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care how long Disney holds on to the mouse. Just because you place no value on your work doesn't mean that the rest of us don't place value on ours.
You've missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
The reform is aimed at non-corporate copyrights, the stuff that no one will bother to renew. Say some author wrote a scholarly book in 1924, which is now considered to be important. Because it's still under copyright, people like Project Gutenberg [promo.net] cannot use, reprint, or archive it without the author's permission.
After 80 years it'd be very difficult to legally acquire permission, even from the author's estate. He may have multiple generations of descendants, or no descendants at all, so it's nontrivial to figure out which party has legal authority over the work. For most purposes, getting permission to use the work is simply not feasible.
This change to the law would fix that problem. After 50 years, if the author's heirs have stopped caring (or have just died out), the $1 will go unpaid and the book will become public domain. Scholars and archivers can do with it as they will. On the other hand, if the work is important enough that someone does bother to pay the $1, we'll know that the payor is the person with legal authority. Scholars and archivers will know exactly whom to ask for permission. Either way, we no longer have the problem of unused works gathering dust under unnecessary copyright.
Re:You're missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd rather see "use it or lose it" (Score:2, Insightful)
what about the small copyright owner who may not have the resources to provide said material? suppose I write a book and self publish it. years from now, i'm unable to self publish it again due to economic reasons nor am i able to find a large publisher to market it.
under the situation you propose, i could lose out to "someone else" such as a large publisher who could simply wait for the deadline. such a system would adversely affect copyright holders with limited means. larger holders could easily comply with a "use it or lose it" system and protect their property. everyone else is screwed.
the end result of such a proposal would be that large companies and wealthy individuals would be the only ones who could protect their intellectual property. don't we have enough of that already?
Re:automate it (Score:3, Insightful)
Because they married the author, and aided in a significant way in its creation.
Because they are children, and fundamentally supported by the author.
Because the author wrote it on his or her deathbed, and as a moral nation we want to never make it profitable to "wait for the author to die."
A better extreme law, IMO, would be to limit copyright to individuals, and not corporations.
Re:Still not a solution .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, so you're only pirating works that are more than 14 years old, or 28 years old with extention, right?
Yeah, I didn't think so. Don't try to talk about being all high and mighty when you're just a cheapskate.
The copyright laws have gone into the land of the absurd, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Book banning for $1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose an author wrote a book 50 years ago, and he dies, leaving no heirs. Now suppose I don't like the ideas in that book, and I don't think it should be available. For $1, I can see that it doesn't become available for another 50 years.
Re:automate it (Score:5, Insightful)
I would assume there would have to be a provision that stated WHEN the $1 could be paid.
Perhaps something like "From the 48th to the 50th anniversary of the first creation of the work".
Re:This could be tricky. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, if they still want to claim copyright after 50 years!
If someone is still making a profit off of a photo after 50 years, more power to them. I think it's highly unlikely that they'd feel the need to keep their copyright on the hundreds of thousands of photos they've taken.
Re:probably not effective (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that you can enjoy any copyright privileges at all is a gift from the nation to you. This is exclusive right is given to you in consideration for your agreement to place that work into the public domain at a later date.
If you wish to truly protect your work, the answer is easy: never show it to anyone.
Re:probably not effective (Score:3, Insightful)
The purpose of copyright is to allow an author/creator the fair chance to make a profit for a while after he creates something. It's not to ensure that he/she makes a profit, or that his/her grandchildren have a chance to make a profit.
Just because you consider your work to be perfect and deserving of eternal protection, doesn't make it true.
Re:Tacit approval (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright exists as an incentive for individuals to create. From the point of view of society, there is no difference between an individual or corportation creating something and hiding it to them not creating it at all, so these should not be protected.
Of course, there should be a reasonable lapse period, so if a publisher decides to drop a title then the author has some time to find an alternate distributor (or even post it on the Internet with a copyright notice prohibiting furthur distribution).
An Interesting Start... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fifty year limit sounds like an interesting start.
do you think.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:probably not effective (Score:5, Insightful)
Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8:
That's who gets off telling you.
Re:probably not effective (Score:4, Insightful)
Say, ten years after you build your house, I copy your innovative design in building my own house. You've benefited from your design for years, now it's public domain and we should all get to build houses using the same design.
To which I would certainly agree. Sound very reasonable, doesn't it?
Re:probably not effective (Score:2, Insightful)
duh, no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into automobile maintenance, don't I have the right to profit from those automobiles for the rest of my life? No? Then what makes you so special?
Just because you place no value on your work...
I place a value on my work. And I get paid for it too. I just don't see any reason that my work should be a gravy-train I can ride in perpetuity. And I don't see any damn reason why yours should be either.
Re:probably not effective (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if you extend copyright to cover your grandchildren, and your grandchildren's grandchildren, then you have effectively created a disincentive to create. many generations of people can add nothing to the nation and just sponge off of the greatness of their ancestors. This is obviously not what was intended when copyright was concieved, yet it is the direction we are headed in due to ill-advised extensions to Copyright law.
The problem is that coperations (and some artists) see copyright as merely a tool for making money, not something that improves the human condition, and they lobby to make changes to the law that makes it more suited towards making money than encouraging artists to create. Would an average author go and find work in another field if Copyright only lasted 20 or 30 years instead of the 90?
Oh, and nobody has a right to profit. They have a right to be treated according to the laws of the land, but there is no guarentee of profit.
Uh, no, I would prefer *real* reform (Score:4, Insightful)
This will help solidify the imbalance already in effect, and it will not address any real problems. For the majority of the general public -- the supposed beneficiary of this proposal -- this will be meaningless. How many people will actually notice that some obscure work has slipped into the public domain? If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it...
If the copyright owner really believes they deserve an extension, perhaps the burden should be on them to prove, in court, that their retention of their copyright is more important to the public than the release of their work into the public domain. That would be ultimately more meaningful than some silly administrative fee that wouldn't have any impact on copyright-protected works that the majority of the public would be interested in. It would also restore the balance (because at the expiration of the time limit, the benefit to the public becomes the primary interest), and presumably result in very few works actually staying out of the public domain.
The key problem is imbalance, and this trivial fee notion does nothing to restore it.
Then why wait 50 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
After 10 years, pay $10
After 20 years, pay $100
After 30 years, pay $1,000
After 40 years, pay $10,000
After 50 years, pay $100,000
After 60 years, pay $1,000,000
Thus eventually, a work becomes no longer economically feasable to maintain, yet the artist still retins a fair amount of control. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollar tax to maintain their Mickey Mouse monopoly after 70 years, power to them. I say billion, 'cuz there's a lot of derivative works they'd have to pay taxes on as well.
Re:probably not effective (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No. A man can work in the fields for thousands of hours, or work on a sculpture for thousands of hours, and profit from it only as much as he can do so directly. And after he sells his creation to someone else, he has no right to control what that person does with it. I don't see why a book should be any different.
Now, our system of government is based on certain British, French, and German philosophies. In particular, it is assumed that in the state of nature, people are free to do whatever they want without external restrictions. It is only because the state of nature does not exist in a pure form that a government is allowed to make certain restrictions on everyone to protect the individual. Thus, your copyright is a favor the government has done for you, by restricting the right of everyone else to make as many copies as they want of pieces of paper. It is most definately *not* a right you are entitled to.
Re:probably not effective (Score:1, Insightful)
Why can't copyright holders do the same?
How is it determined what has been "published"? (Score:4, Insightful)
What if I put a copyrighted work (say a written work, in an HTML file) on a password-protected web server using HTTPS, and the password is known only to me? Then I certainly haven't published it. Now suppose there's no password, but only I know the URL and I haven't linked to it. Is it published yet? What if someone goes to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/menu.html, which is on search engines and linked from other sites, truncates it to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/, and gets a directory listing including my copyrighted work? What if there's no directory listing, but I tell the URL of the web site to one of my friends? What if the friend tells a bunch of other people and links to it; has he caused it to be "published"? What if I'm the only one who knows the URL and then I graffiti it on the wall of a public restroom (say a unisex one)? The general public can now access it if they want to, right? Suppose someone cracks my web server, finds the secret URL of my copyrighted work, and posts it on Slashdot where it can be seen by all; is it published yet?
Similar dilemmas occur with physical media, as well. What if I make a backup copy of my unreleased copyrighted work on CD, and then the CD is stolen? What if I leave a few such CD's in a public park where anyone could get them? What if I try to sell people my CD's but no one buys any?
And what if I make a great movie, but the only way anyone can see it is by coming to my house and paying admission. (Assume for the sake of simplicity that this doesn't violate zoning ordinances.) Is that publishing? What if I only let friends see it for free, but they decide to donate money?
Not everything is "published" by a huge company that issues a press release and starts advertising it everywhere. As someone who's been in a few of the above situations (let's not get into which ones), I think they need to be considered.
I intend to sign the petition anyway, because no copyrights will be lost before 50 years are up, which is too long anyway. (I believe an ideal copyright term would be somewhere from 15 to 20 years.) Still, I can see some ugly legal fights going on in the future if cases like the above aren't considered.
Bad idea, and so is the petition. (Score:4, Insightful)
Signing one of these things is WORSE than doing nothing.
It gives you the feeling that you have accomplished something, making it less likely that you will do anythign about the problem. If you REALLY think this is a good idea, write a letter to your congressman, it will do a HUNDRED times more than signing this kind of online petition crap.
But the idea itself is a bad idea. We need congress to put Reasonable limits on the greedy sscumbags that keep raising the copyright limit, not to simply try to pick off the cheap idiots.
Re:probably not effective (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, you may deserve the right to profit from you intellectual property. But if you want your children to profit off copyright, teach them how to write well, then tell them to write their *own* best sellers.
I say copyright should go, if any, to the *creator* of the work.
Thousands of hours (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats a great way to destroy the public domain. (Score:4, Insightful)
I sent them an email regrding my concerns, it follows:
To whom it may concern,
I have some question about your proposed 'Copyright tax'
first,
"So why wait 50 years? Why not impose the requirement after 7 years? Or 10 years?
Obviously, we believe that would be better. But let's start with something that seems reasonable to all. It will make shorter terms seem more reasonable later on."
If this should happen, I find it doubtful that it would be able to be changed. It would seem to me it is better to start off asking for 7 years, then settle for a lengthier time frame.
Second,
Don't corporations own copyrights as well? It would become part of the 'day to day' activities of running a corporations to automatically see if any copyrights need updating, then update them, regardless if they are making money or not. this would effectively keep works out of the public domain forever. even if the corporation should fail, another one will buy it's assets.
I think it is a noble attempt, but counter productive. Perhaps 7 years, with a renewal fee every 7 years by the originator of the copyright, not the owner or licensor. Also make it so corporation can not be a copyright originator.
Re:With the amount of material they generate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With the amount of material they generate? (Score:3, Insightful)
The obvious stratagem of the bill is to keep increasing the renewal fee until some equilibrium is found between to value of a work to the publishers and the value to the public domain. With a fifty-year free term, I think that the right renewal amount would be around $300K, indexed to inflation. And, there should be no distinction between individuals and corporations. Fifty years is plenty of time for you to commercially exploit your private creation for free. Most people don't even live for fifty years after their major creations.
Re:Isn't this a little smug? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's talk about a world without copyright laws first.
An author writes a novel. This novel is entirely her property, and if she locks it in a safe and never shows it to anyone, nobody can take it from her. On the other hand, she can't sue anybody for copying her story or characters, either.
If she chooses to publish the work, then she can run into some problems. Some people will pay her for a copy of the book, but some will surely just reprint the book for cheaper. This forms a disincentive for her to publish, because it really does feel a lot like being taken unfair advantage of.
Here, the State steps in. The author is given a monopoly, so that nobody may copy her work. In addition, she would be able to sue somebody who tried to write a very similar book afterwards. This now forms an incentive to publish.
However, other authors and the public as a whole now suffers. The names you could use for characters and other copyrightable elements of a story will decrease as each work is published. In the distant future, it's possible that any non-trivial work will violate some copyright. This is clearly not beneficial to society, which is why copyright is usually a time-limited monopoly, not a perpetual one.
Here's the important part: by publishing the work, the author implicitly agrees to the deal. If you don't want it to ever lapse into the public domain, don't publish it, or use some other form of enforceable protection (such as an NDA).
The notion that the public is owed the work comes from the author or artist having taken advantage of the benefits of copyright. We aren't owed anything unpublished, but any published work is "owed", and should by right be given to us for free in some years. That's the deal.
Do I hear 5? (Score:2, Insightful)
What a horrible idea (Score:2, Insightful)
If I were the parents, I would've asked that he send the 1$ to MADD or some other appropriate charity . . . I wouldn't want the reminder, and at least then the money would go to some appropriate cause . .