Czech Copyright Bill Undercuts Copyleft, Artists 282
Andorin writes "Earlier this month a copy of a draft of the Czech Republic's new Copyright Act [Czech PDF] was leaked to Pirate News. Included among several disturbing provisions are new regulations for 'public licenses' such as Creative Commons licenses and the GPL/BSD licenses. The amendment essentially requires that an artist wishing to use a public license must notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question. This goes against one of the strengths of Creative Commons and other licenses, namely the ease with which they can be applied. Additionally, collecting agencies will have increased jurisdiction over copylefted and orphaned works. ZeroPaid covers the story, noting that the amendment also reduces the royalties which artists receive from libraries by 40%, with that money instead going directly to publishers."
Think of the Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that the rallying cry of the copyright cartels?...
Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date. We're all accustomed to copyright being made more strict, but actively making it harder to release your works under permissive licensing is a new low.
It's like the copyright lobbyists didn't care about keeping a low profile anymore and shouted "we own your government" from the rooftops.
must be piracy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Speechless (Score:3, Insightful)
It costs more money to hide what they're doing and achieve their goals in secret.
They just realized theres no point in hiding it any more.
Its not like the reality tv addicted people of generation-emo will do anything anyway.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how it's fair to demand registration of copyleft and not other copyrighted works. Enforcement of copyright is (and should remain) a private not criminal matter, the government doesn't have to hunt anyone down. I imagine the authors of the work will show up in court if they file infrigement charges.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
Us: It's a bad law.
Them: But, it's a law! There must be a good reason! Why do you think about stuff like this!?!
Still just a draft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are worried about how content creators get paid then you haven't thought about it long enough. Content as a service, that is the new model. If you can't sell your content as a service to customers or businesses then the other option is merchandising, make a physical good that can be confiscated for trademark violations and earn your money off of that.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be interresting if the same laws were to be applied to all copyright licenses. Want to publishing something closed source? "notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question".
copyleft is simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Or treat copyleft as a license, a form of contract. And settle disputes in a court, presenting evidence that the license was applied to an original creation. Which is how it manages to survive in the rest of Europe.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Speechless (Score:1, Insightful)
Our reply should be: Don't quote laws to us, we carry swords.
Just to keep it Roman
Re:Speechless (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date.
Er, more like the most brutal (and direct) attack in recent times, or most brutal attack from the copyright lobby sure... I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure. The media pigopolists are thinking of the artists. Specifically, how to get more money out of their hands and into the publishing interest's own.
This kind of legalized extortion isn't reflexive, you know. It takes a fair bit of thinking, plus the scruples of a stoat, to invoke the cause of your own victim in support of your victimization.
Re:S peechless (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:2, Insightful)
Well of course. The rules of this game are simple and obvious: 1) Maximize profits 2) justify your means after the fact.
Win the hearts by saying "we protect the little guy" while simultaneously taking for yourself all the value generated by the little guy, and keeping him indentured to you indefinitely. This is nothing new or secret. It happens in plain view of the public all the time.
The public doesn't like to bother checking facts and buys the corporate line, so strategies like this work well.
Rich people got rich by learning how to use their wealth to create even more wealth. So they spend money to lobby their government to pass laws that force an increase in their own wealth, to the detriment of everyone else.
And they win, because we let them.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I'm for everyone regardless of license being required to register. If the copyright office can't find the rights holder, then the work should be public domain. Not having a registration requirement makes the "orphaned works" problem much worse.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
> Face it. The age of the freetard is over. It's time to pay people what their work is worth. Freeloader.
What if the AUTHOR declares that price to be ZERO.
Why should a Robber Baron Wannabe such as yourself have ANY say in the matter?
This is an assault on the rights of AUTHORS.
People who whine "freetard" should be all over this.
Of course that word doesn't really mean anything.
Re:Speechless (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how restricting an artists rights to apply whatever license they want to their creation is helping them in the least.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.
I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.
Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?
Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.
Re:Speechless (Score:2, Insightful)
Publishers need bread and butter as well
So do horse whip makers. Publishers were very important in the physical media world, but just like horse buggy fitters, their role in a changing world diminishes. CDs are almost dead, DVDs will be following on behind as on demand services replace them, even ereaders are gaining traction, in spite of the ridiculous prices of ebooks. The publishers role will soon be boutique and central portals like itunes. The content creators will be able to cut out the behemoth publishers, unless they manage to buy laws to force all creators into due paying guilds.
Reality Czech (Score:3, Insightful)
The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Try this:
"The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights."
In other words, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that intellectual property rights in general are not bought and sold and pass through tons of hands. Witness the entire orphan-work problem. Liberal licenses like CC make it easier to manage these problems, because the entire issue of ownership from the point of the CC license is very straightforward. (It is likely easier backwards as well, because, contrary to the fever dreams of grabby middlemen, there are not, in fact, hordes of eyepatched 14 year olds slapping CC licenses on Elvis mp3.)
Also, I don't know how this works in the Czech Republic, but in the U.S. the government's cost is court time. In civil suits, the litigating parties pays for their own discovery (subject, of course, to outcomes and sometimes other rules). I don't see how the state's costs go up because a license is CC.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Speechless (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm surprised that it took this long, actually. Charity was only legal in the first place because there was no way for charities to significantly compete with for-profit businesses as long as we were talking about goods and services. Data is any entirely different matter, thanks to the negligible cost of duplication and distribution.
If you think large businesses are going to tolerate kindness and generosity when it cuts into their bottom lines, you are in for a long series of rude shocks. Abundance is bad for business.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a performing artist wants more money, he should have to execute another performance.
Artists should be paid for live music. In the modern technological landscape, digital copies are no longer the product, but rather the advertisement.
And besides, even if that wasn't true, there is nothing that says an artist has to be an artist. If artists can't make a living being artists, then they can go get a job that pays, just like the rest of us. I see no evidence that this will result in a complete absence of new music, and if it does then the forces of widespread demand will create new opportunities to profit on music.
So your justification of your outdated business model is crap. Music publishing is an anachronism, and you need to stop taking our freedom away, move into the modern era, and get yourself a real job.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
Legally speaking, there is no copyleft. It's simply a legal issue of licensing a copyrighted work under a royalty free license. The problem isn't with the copyright, it's with the collection agencies and their mandates. Since they are set up to collect for all the works under their purview, copyleft agreements confuse them.
In the US, ASCAP collects for recordings by Spanish, French, and Outer Mongolian artists - those people never actually see any money since they aren't usually registered with ASCAP, but they do collect. According to ASCAP, it is a violation to not pay for the use of the songs, even if the songs have been released under a royalty free license. The only exemption recognized by the law that allows ASCAP to collect is public domain works - so it's possible that they are correct. That is a flaw in the law creating the collection agencies not the copyright law.
The issue is that the vast majority of the works are used under national Mandatory Licensing regulations. This allows venues to use the works without having to negotiate individual use licenses. Because they are built around the ML, individual licensing agreements aren't considered when calculating royalty payments to the collection agencies. There are 2 approaches to resolving the issue:
Given the vast disparity of volume in "collect" vs "do not collect", the easy solution is to require copyleft works to register. This also has many other advantages for the collection agencies:
Since I can't read the original proposed law, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and say it seems to be a step in the right direction in that it at least codifies the right of an artist to remove their work from the mandatory collection pool without having to deposit the work in the public domain.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:4, Insightful)
Translated more simply:
If you have the money like the MafiAA does, you TOO can buy incredibly asstarded laws to protect your illegal monopoly price-gouging and put those uppity little "artists" back in their rightful slave-labor places in shitty little countries like the Czech... or UK... or USA...
Re:Speechless (Score:1, Insightful)
They are signatories of the Berne Convention. We have a pretty good idea of the basics of their system, specifically automatic copyright protection.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, but what about the recording artists? Should they be left high and dry? Is public performance the only art venue that is deserving of reward?
Short version: yes. Long version: More or less. Thanks to autotune, the work done by a recording singer is minimal, and a lot of music can be similarly tuned or fixed by computers.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:3, Insightful)
So add one line to copyleft / GPL. (Score:3, Insightful)
No rights are granted to the Czech republic or those within its borders.
Sue the fuckers every time someone uses a piece of Linux software or some clip art.
If you don't want to play nice then you don't get to play at all.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Because their record label wants to make money. However, the radio, MTV, myspace, youtube Greatful Dead bootlegs and the like all allow people to listen to music at no cost.
"How does that work?" Somebody funds it. Your favorite band raises money and records an album. Perhaps some philanthropy happens (that's how we got Carnegie hall). Maybe somebody records in a small studio for the love of music.
"The burden of proof did lie with us, a few hundred years ago when copyright was proposed. Now that we've accepted it, and our culture has grown and blossomed so much, the burden of proof now rests with anyone who wants to change it"
The evidence is actually quite poor. especially given that in many cases the system that predates it was basically 'censor all works that are critical of the king/church and let publishers print works that make the king/church look good'. The economics for the internet age have further changed the dynamics of the system, and to assume without evidence that our current copyright system fits it is ridiculous. Nobody questioning the system is why it's so broken in the first place, and that in my lifetime, the public domain has actually shrank.