RFC Deadline Looms For "Orphan Works" copy 200
psychonaut writes "As previously
reported on Slashdot, the US
Copyright Office is currently reviewing the law as it applies to
"orphan works" and "abandonware". The question is how to treat works
(books, films, software, etc.) for which the copyright owner cannot be
found so that permission can be granted to republish or create
derivative works. "The issue is whether orphan works are being
needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination
inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work," they write, "it
appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work
would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be."
The Copyright Office has been soliciting
comments from the public since 26 January 2005. Now, as their 25
March deadline draws nearer, the EFF, along with freeculture.org and Public Knowledge, have
teamed up to produce a website,Orphan Works, which gives
some background on the issue and makes it easy to submit comments
directly to the Copyright Office." And while you're at, contribute to the EFF. Good organization.
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Part 1: What I find _ok_ about copyright (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, most people only work for money. Yeah, in open source too. Check out the email addresses of contributors to all major components of Linux. Most work _is_ done by people paid to do so, even if they're paid by some OSS company.
So copyright is a way to say "ok, if you do publish a book, here's how we'll allow you to make money out of it."
I see nothing wrong with that. I _am_ willing to buy a good book, or a movie, or a music CD, rather than not have it available at all.
"Why your work should be available for free" demagogue theories are good and fine, but in practice it never works that way: practically _noone_ works for free nowadays. The freeloaders actually get something paid for by someone else, not for free. E.g., everyone who downloaded a SuSE Linux ISO for free, rest assured that SuSE's work was paid for by people like me who bought the boxed distro repeatedly. E.g., everyone who has some free Linux distro installed on ReiserFS, can know that ReiserFS was sponsored by SuSE, so again, it was people like me whose money went into making that.
So, again, I have nothing against copyright as a way for authors to make money. Beats not having those works available in the first place. Maybe it's not the perfect system, but it's the best we have so far.
Duplication of efforts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:4, Insightful)
It would then immediately become far less favourable for Disney (or any other organization) to presue such copyright extensions. Imagine thay they had to pay out the first 20 years earnings plus interest on Pinochio to the estate of Carlo Lorenzini! It is also morally and ethically fair. If Disney think that Steamboat Willy deserves added protection, then surely Pinochio does as well. Very hard to argue against and not look like obviously greedy and grasping.
Part 2: What I find _wrong_ about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Which was _not_ the purpose of copyright in the first place. The idea was to secure a source of income for those publishing books, _but_ that was only a means to another end: having those books available to society. Using copyright as a way to make them UNavailable, is IMHO contrary to the whole spirit and idea of copyright.
And just for the sake of a wanton comparison with Soviet Russia, I find it stupid that while we all were/are outraged when a dictatorship tries to suppress a book, we all shrug and find it normal when a corporation does the same via copyright. I mean, geesh, Stalin could have just bought the exclusive distribution rights in the USSR of the exact same works, and killed them via copyright, and we'd all suddenly no longer find it abhominable. It would be just normal business. Think about it.
So IMHO the copyright should only last as long as people can still order that book or program or music from you, for no more than the original price (i.e., no "yeah, it's still available, but we'll charge 10,000,000$ for it" scams), and have it delivered within a reasonable time frame. The moment that's no longer possible, the copyright should become public domain.
It would also be a self-regulating kinda thing. It's up to the company in case to decide when it's no longer profitable to keep that stock of old books, just for the 1-2 people per year still ordering it. When they decide it's no longer profitable to play that game, sure, make it public domain. But ffs, don't bury it.
Re:Corporate influence (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Part 2: What I find _wrong_ about it (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that even if corporations *could* bury their unprofitable work, it would be good PR if they chose not to, and it wouldn't cost them a dime. Are any publishers known for doing this?
Re:But it's broken (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, guess what, I DON'T happily publish my works in order to get recognition. I am not stupid, I want to make money from my works - therefore I want the protection that copyright gives me. And the vast majority of people who produce IP agree with me.
Just because sf.net has 100,000 unfinished mp3 labelers available doesn't mean we should get rid of the copyright system which has served us well for over 100 years.
Re:Why doesn't Slashdot start a PAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and lemme take a look at that when you've pieced it together.
"Our?" Who's "us?" Do you mean to imply that there is some commonality among the people posting on slashdot beyond gadget-fetish? The editors would like it if we were all left-leaning anti-copyright urban CTO's (so would their advertisers, for that matter...), but you need only spend 20 minutes here to realize that there is no "typical" poster, that our politics are all over the map, and that today's high school and college kids aren't getting nearly enough exercise and fresh air...
support politics and issues that reiterate our beliefs and values as a community
Stop it. You're killing me.
Hey, no, seriously, what would you say are the shared values of an anti-copyrightist/artists-should-be-paid-only-for
Is there a wiki for that?
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporate influence (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say a company that wrote some useful software a few years ago has gone. Now, only the competing software from Microsoft (tm) is widely awailable and supported. If the old sources went to public domain, they could easily be adopted by some new company or even a crown of hackers. And MS does not need yet another Firefox. They just don't like competition.
Consider a book that has gone to public domain. Everione can publish it at will, it's available on the net for free, etc. Unneeded competition to the new books (for which the copyright is "belong to us" (c) ).
So, the less public domain, the less competition in IP areas, the more profits.
BTW, when it comes to art, old works are usually filtered through the waters of Lethe: only the best ones remain. "Manuscripts do not burn" (c) M. Bulgakov. And they are hard to compete against.
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Again, that's not the case (Score:2, Insightful)
Wedding photos would work fine without copyright. You pay the photographer to take some pictures, you get your photos. None of this "Photographer owns pictures of your event that he was *hired* to make" bullshit.
My idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I think if the work is unavailable to someone at a reasonable price and with reasonable terms (no overly bad EULA or DRM stuff), they should be allowed to copy them (e.g. via ftp or P2P networks) as long as the unavailability persists, at least if no profit is derived. It is not strictly necessary to put the work into the public domain as soon as the work becomes unavailable. We can allow the publisher to resume their exclusive right as soon as they publish the work again; in this way copyright won't be accidentally lost forever if the publisher's employees had a one-week strike, and we also have a solution when some work is available to only part of the population (for example, region-coded DVDs).
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Other copyright issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why it would pretty much take an amendment. And while we're wishing for the impossible, the amendment should also set the copyright term back at the original 14 years with a single option to renew for an additional 14 years, and would grant copyright only to works which explicitly claim copyright protection and deposit a copy with the government. Oh, and lets add a rider striping the citizenship and office from any legislator who introduces a bill with a cutesy name that spells out something the exact opposite of what it actually does.
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Re:heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Society is made up of people. Copyright is set at the life of the author + 75 years. Given that you have to be alive to copyright something (at least, as far as I'm aware) and that the average life expectance is sub-75 years, that means that anyone born at the time a copyrighted work is created will be dead prior to the copyrighted work being put into the public domain. Hence, there's a serious lacking in the claim it "benefits society" or is "limited times".
One of the benefits of a copyrighted work, after all, is the time when it returns to the public domain. The whole "limited time" is there for the work to be created in the first place. The fact is, we're currently at the point that if we were to decide today to put all copyrighted works in the public domain, by law, while enacting in the same legislation that such a mass conversion won't occur again for a "limited time" (to make clear the risk reduction of one's copyright hence forth being nullified arbitrarily), we'd be in the possession of a ton of works and wouldn't be in some massive "need" for new works.
Sure, new works would be great, and I'm sure they'd be made regardless. And I think that's the core issue. The foundation of the claim for the need for copyright is that without protection there would be few new works. Yet I'm very sure that if copyright were rescinded for all previous works and only allow for works past date X, we'd still see new works. Ie, even with massive amounts of "free" works out there, there'd still be people willing to dish out money for new works.
One main reason is that, at least for software, there's a group of dedicated people who already have access and knowledge to the code and could make the proper updates. Reverse engineering the binary into source then updating it as necessary is a rather large financial investment. Because of this, it's not financially feasible for everyone to do the work. In fact, it's very much the prisoners' dilemma*. So, as long as the original software company has copyright long enough to recoup the costs by mass purchases by industry (and if you'll notice, NT 4.0 and OS/2 machines are being pushed towards Windows 2k/XP Embedded in those industries which are normally slowest to change), there's little reason to believe that any company or group of companies will work together to reverse engineer an already working product.
Having said all that, I would have to state that there's clearly inefficiency to this whole model** anyways. At least for software, having every couple reinvent the wheel unnecessarily doesn't help things. Yes, it does mean less of a monoculture, but it's hard to disagree that a combination of cooperation and open forks tend towards the minimal amount of redundant work. And all work requires time. And time is money. So, the actual cost imposed upon everyone by copyright is much more than the direct taxation that government imposes.
Is society gaining a net sum now days?
*Linux, et al are the exception, if only because they were never proprietary in the first place and each company who wants to become involved for their own benefit only has to dedicate a small detachment to help tune the source to their own needs. Getting to the point of there being an actually working OS that's already out there (no company wants to just "give away" a *lot* of their hard work to the competition) is the rough hump.
**The Free Market is based on a form of self interest with limited resources. The problem, of course, is that software is a mostly intangible good with nearly zero cost to redistribute. The real main cost then is the fixed cost of production. In a system where there was no copyright, surely there would be companies that release encrypted binarie