Rumors of a 'Whisper Campaign' Forming Against Fair Use 174
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica reports that a group of companies and organizations it calls 'big content' is currently engaged in a worldwide 'whisper campaign' against Fair Use. 'The counter-reformation in question takes the form of a "whispering campaign" in which ministries in different countries are told that plans to expand fair use rights might well run afoul of the Berne Convention's "three-step test." The Convention, which goes back to the late 1800s, was one of the earliest international copyright treaties and is now administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).'"
The "3 steps" (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Wikipedia, the three steps are:
1) certain special cases
2) do not conflict with normal exploitation of the work
3) do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder
I'm no lawyer, so I don't have the background to understand that kind of gobbledygook. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe laws written for the sake of the governed should be written in a language they understand.
Berne Convention can go piss up a rope (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use? How about "expanding" fair use in the US to what the founding fathers envisioned, and "limiting" the endless copyrights that would have appalled them?
I have decided that I will respect no copyright older than ten years old, period. I urge everyone else to join me. I think twenty is reasonable, but damn it THIS IS WAR.
Oh yeah- I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation. Only a writer or painter or other artist should hold a copyright. Disney can go to hell (actually he probably already did).
Yeah, I'm in a bad mood. So sue me.
-mcgrew
PS- I hold copyrights. I have two ISBNs that should have already passed into the public doimain. I'm not against copyright law, only the INSANE copyright laws that are in effect now.
support copyright (Score:0, Insightful)
It is amazing to me the lengths producers of nothing except dissent will go to acquire and misuse intellectual property of others.
Oh the shame.
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fixed that for ya. And it does not need to be a "group" to be doing that. They do it anyway as this is what their interests call for.
Re:That's not how I heard it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some possible issues... (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yeah- I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation.
Bless!
Only a writer or painter or other artist should hold a copyright.
Think about how that might work with, say, an instruction manual.
An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737).
Each of those 200 content creators would have a share of the copyright. To print a new copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them -- or their descendants.
Of course, you might say you were only referring to Art with a capital A. In that case, let's consider a movie like Event Horizon. I'd say about 50 people had major creative input into that. Perhaps the right to distribute the movie to a given theatre should be split between all 50?
But the practical problem is only really the *small* half of the stupidity contained in the post above. You're saying that artists should not be able to sell their copyrights. That they should only be able to make a living by distributing their own works -- that artist and publisher must be combined into one role. That nobody should be allowed to buy the rights to creative work on spec, thus nurturing and publicizing new talent.
I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation.
So 6 guys get together and form Little Green Man Entertainment Ltd and make a computer game and sell it. But not to *you*. No, *you* pirate it because you refuse to honor any copyright held by a corporation. To buy these guy's game would compromise your *principles*.
Maybe if they all shared the copyright, rather than giving it to their company, you'd shell out the 20 bucks. But not until then. Because *you* are making a *stand*.
I assume that if they sold the copyright to a larger, multinational company so they could get on with making the next game rather than publishing, then your rage and bafflement would tower *even higher*. The mind boggles.
I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation.
Rarr!
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some possible issues... (Score:4, Insightful)
This illustrates the problem with the thinking. Corporations are made of people and corporations are set up by people so the people can work together in an organized way. Ever heard of "United Artists". It's one of the big studios now, but it was set up by actors and other "artists" who got tired of the man taking their money. Now they are the man. Is it fair? Should they be able to use the money they made doing the real work to finance the work of other artists? Really what is the difference between a corporation investing in a film and an artist giving a helping hand up to the next generation of artists? Not much, in practice.
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:4, Insightful)
You could make the same argument for software and users, or science and "the public" and hit the same problem - "plain English" isn't really suited to the required degree of exactness. Often what looks to be straightforward really isn't, and provides too much wiggle room for a skilled arguer. That's worse than having laws that normal people don't understand - it potentially leaves you with laws that simply aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Re:Berne Convention can go piss up a rope (Score:5, Insightful)
Support Lawrence Lessig's Change Congress [change-congress.org] movement.
Re:Berne Convention can go piss up a rope (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, yeah, whatever
I gotta go now....
Re:Berne Convention can go piss up a rope (Score:3, Insightful)
How would you handle group projects like a movie? I mean, at least with a band you generally have only a half dozen or so individuals and they generally hang together better than marriages. With a movie you have potentially hundreds of actors, musicians, makeup artists, scene designers, etc...
Corporate copyright makes sense in many cases.
only the INSANE copyright laws that are in effect now
Actually, I think that they're mostly OK, they simply need some modification. For example, limit corporate copyright length to ~20 years, extendable to 40 years with a multiple thousand dollar fee per 10 year increment.*
Stuff still held by the orginal creater, who's a person, can still be held for life, or the 20 year deal, which ever is longer. The 'longer' part is so somebody like Robert Jordan, who was seriously ill, can still write and have publishers pick him up with the confidence that they'll keep exclusivity long enough to profit. For things like bands, where they more or less 'share' a copyright, often in the form of a holding corporation where the band members hold the shares, I'm sure a law can be come up with to keep the copyright as long as any band members are alive and still hold their own shares, perhaps with a buyout clause**.
*Enough that even Disney will take a hard look at those 20 year old films and decide whether or not to renew.
** When one of the band members die, their shares in the corp is automatically bought out by the corp. Corp worth $1Mil, evenly split between 5 members and 1 dies? $200k from the corp to the estate, shares to the corp, the 4 surviving members are now 25% owners. Buyout could be done by 'current valuation' or predetermined.
it's interesting they are digging this deep (Score:5, Insightful)
it is simply that at one time, the means of production and distribution of media was confined to a few players. this meant that agreeing on rules, and compliance and enforcement was relatively simple and straightforward. as recently as the 1980s, if someone was counterfeiting vhs tapes, for example, the operation was ponderous, slow, required a heavy initial investment, and was relatively easy to trace and shut down those few random players. this limited piracy to a few hardy organizations
but today, the power of global distribution that was once confined to the likes of bertelsman and sony is in the hands of every college kid. enforcement? ha! compliance and agreement on the rules? ha!
the assumptions about distribution that created copyright law as we know it is so fundamentally altered as to be so alien a landscape that copyright law is simply completely and utterly destroyed. for those of you doubting this, you are simply in denial. you can't make a law that is impossible to enforce. well, you can, legislative bodies do it every day. but it simply doesn't mean anything, it's hollow, it's a joke. that's what our copyright law has become
the last ten years has simply been a slow process of awakening the world to this fact. the next ten years will simply be more awakening to this fact, everyone getting on the same page: copyright law is broken. utterly
this is what they mean by disruptive technology. the internet destroyed copyright law by making every single individual in 2000 have the same distribution power that was confined in 1990 to sony and bertelsman
obviously, rights and morality and ownership in the realm of media are issues that are still valid. these issues still need to be addressed legally. but the legal and compliance framework around these issues will need to be built almost from scratch, and copyright law as we know it must be thrown out almost in its entirety: all the basic assumptions it is founded upon are completely reordered
personally, i think some form of copyleft a la "free" software will be the basis for our new legal framework about all media and distribution: music, books, movies, etc
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:5, Insightful)
I find your post interesting, primarily because it sounds like a reasonable interpretation of the three steps, yet it's quite different to what I'd come up with (as someone who has been actively involved in the consultations about this topic in the UK recently).
In particular, your version implies that anything that may cost the copyright holder any income cannot be fair use. I would qualify that (and I do think the phrasing of the TRIPS three-step test supports this) by saying that normal exploitation does not mean the same as absolute control. We could argue, for example, that selling a second full-price copy of software to someone because their installation DVD got scratched would be profitable for the copyright holder if making back-ups were illegal, but I think most people would consider this excessive exploitation and the law in most jurisdictions reflects this.
Getting back to the proposals at hand, I think if these rumours are true, the big content guys are going to have a tough time. What's happening right now is that several countries are seeing the balance of copyright tipping toward the copyright holder and finding their laws out of sync with common perceptions of what is reasonable (and done routinely, regardless of legality, by much of the population). We've had a string of investigations over the past two or three years, such as Gowers in the UK, which have proposed changes to redress the balance. The US actually has a pretty good deal with their fair use; while DRM/DMCA issues are screwing things up, the law is otherwise pretty reasonable and the four tests are fairly transparent. In most other countries, the law is not so general, and commonly expected behaviour like making back-up copies and format shifting is actually illegal in several places!
Now, we're seeing governments actively start to implement those proposals. For example, the UK government is consulting on a proposal to legitimise format shifting, which is technically illegal at the moment even though everyone does it and media industry organisations have stated publicly that they will not chase anyone to court for doing so. (The closing date for the consultation is today, so if anyone else thinks the exception should be far more general than just format shifting, get those e-mails in to the consultation response address!)
I suspect this is just making mountains out of mole-hills, though. The whole point of fair use is that there are plenty of things you can reasonably do with content you have legally obtained that are beneficial to you yet cause no unreasonable damage to the copyright holder, and the law should allow you to do these. No-one is talking about, for example, legalising P2P file sharing in breach of copyright or letting someone buy one legal download and then burn it to many CDCs and sell them on separately, which might actually do some real damage to the big media industries. It's hard to see how Big Media can credibly argue that the changes proposed in places like the UK are in violation of the three-step test when US fair use has allowed them since forever, the US is also a TRIPS signatory, yet until now Big Media has not attacked this position.
Re:That's not how I heard it... (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean "hypocrisy", not "irony".
Re:Only the US has fair use anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
Other countries don't use the same term, and the exceptions aren't all the same, but "fair use" is a very common concept.
Few countries make the use of snippets for review, criticism or quotation illegal, for example. The details vary, but the basic principles are pretty global.
Some countries go considerably further than the US. Over here in Germany, for example, I can legally copy a CD for a friend. That's called the "Privatkopie" ("private copy") and is the law's acceptance that people will do these kinds of things anyway, so within some limits (very few copies, and for personal friends only), it's allowed. (and yes, it's under attack from the copyright lobby)
Copyright laws are slightly different in every country, and with so much variety, every claim that something is a world-only is almost guaranteed to be a lie.
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:2, Insightful)
Well this means only one thing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It will probably turn into.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anyone remember when... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that isn't what it means. That definition could be twisted to apply to *all* uses.
Oh, you are using your copy of windows to reinstall on the same PC? That just cost Microsoft a sale they would have made if you instead purchased an additional copy. Oh, you are watching a DVD for the second time? That just cost Sony Pictures a sale of another DVD.
And of course what is consider legitimate fair use now, for example watching a purchased DVD movie with a couple friends- you just cost the movie a couple sales because you let your friends view it for free!
Re:Berne Convention can go piss up a rope (Score:3, Insightful)
And thus we get people like you. People who see copyright as unfair, unbalanced, biased and unjust, and thus either ignoring it altogether or making their own rules based on their set of standards and morals.
A law, to be upheld by the general population, has to be understandable and deemed fair. Of course you'll always have people breaking laws, but you will notice, the less understandable a law is, the more often it will be broken. Compare murder and theft to tax evasion and speeding. The former being very easily understandable laws, the latter are much harder to grasp. Then also compare the amount of people breaking the former and the latter.
Now, like copyright, tax laws are quite often broken unintentionally, simply because they're written in ways that nobody but a dedicated lawyer can understand, but speed limits are easy to understand and I guess everyone here (if he has a car) has been speeding, while I doubt that any gun owner here has murdered anyone.
Laws either require consensus of the population or insane checking to be upheld. With copyright, we're moving towards the latter. Usually, such means are limited to dictatorships where the general population does not support the laws they're subjected to.
Re:The "3 steps" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's not how I heard it... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all part of the new moral and ethical code. It goes like this: "we get to win".
Anything -- no matter how despicable, harmful or dishonest -- that causes "us" to win is holy and justified. Anything else fails some moral and ethical test and further demonstrates why "we get to win" -- because the other side is shown to be monstrously evil by the moral and ethical lapses that we've applied to them.
Don't you know how important "we" are?
Re:Anyone remember when... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oppression? If by that you mean legal historical social discrimination or segregation, sure but to a much lesser degree than black segregation in the U.S for instance and based on varying interpretations of hadiths, not the Koran. Shame on any muslim who is guilty of lack of love, tolerance and respect for human life, regardless of belief. Hell, shame on any human.
Enslavement? No. Specifically forbidden and a mortal sin.
The problem is that people amalgamate religion and fallible, temptable, potentially evil adherents. People are the problem with their pesky free will and weakness of character. If you expect a religion to just reprogram any self-proclaimed muslim into a saint, then feel free to bash Islam all you want because it clearly failed.