Russian President: Time To Reform Copyright 293
An anonymous reader writes "While most of the rest of the world keeps ratcheting up copyright laws by increasing enforcement and terms, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appears to be going in the other direction. He's now proposing that Russia build Creative Commons-style open and free licenses directly into Russian copyright law. This comes just a few days after he also chided other G8 leaders for their antiquated views on copyright."
Pink glasses off! (Score:4, Interesting)
Reaction here is straight opposite to opinions on russian tech-related sites.
CC-like licence is just to not use the original CC. Original CC will become outlaw. If you want to use CC or GPL licensed product - make sure it is registered in a new "CC-like" government registry. What do you mean "I don't know if Linus and all his thousand of developers signed all the documents to apply to this brand new CC-like license?" Not licensed - not legit. Go back home poor opensource boy.
Re:Copyright is main US industry, while not others (Score:5, Interesting)
Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.
I think even 15 to 20 years is too long. To me it makes more sense to have a very short initial term, say 5 years (which can change depending on industry circumstances, e.g. motion pictures might get longer terms than music because of heavier initial investments). Then rights holders may extend the term by another year at a small cost (say $100). To extend a second year, the cost doubles. Then again, and again. As long as the ownership of the rights remains profitable, it's worth extending, but the exponential increase in price means that the ownership of those rights will become untenable pretty quickly ($102400 within 15 years of original date). You can even put a cap on the maximum term duration, again, possibly different for different industries.
The idea being, that if your idea hasn't paid off by the end of the initial term, it was probably crap anyway. At least everyone else thought it was! Your work can be considered the equivalent a defective material product; something for which nobody should be forced to pay, but can freely use the parts of to repair something that does, i.e. remixing. If your idea has paid off, you can hang on to it for as long as it stays profitable, but there's a check/balance that ensures others will eventually get access to your work. Also, as the costs of keeping the rights increases, the government, and indirectly the taxpayer, benefit from the profits of the work too
Re:Citation. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hogwash. There's no scarcity of creativity or artistry whatever. Hell, there are dozens of local bands here in my city of 100,000 who have CDs of original content, most of which is far superior to the dreck that comes from the RIAA. Have a listen to some of my friends' music [archive.org]. Those are live shows, they have studio CDs as well.
There's no shortage whatever. The "shortage" has always been because of the fact that recording and filming were incredibly expensive. Today recording is dirt cheap, and the price of making a movie is coming down fast -- Star Wreck only cost a few thousand bucks and is better than 90% of the multimillion dollar dreck that comes from Hollywood (it's also hilarious, every Star Trek and Babylon Five fan should see that movie).
Re:Citation. (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be forgetting a few other inventions from the US and Europe like: automobiles, airplane, helicopters, computers, telephones, fiber optics, microwaves, the transistor, and nuclear power.
Bringing this back on topic... the US invented (or discovered) powered flight, and subsequently tried to patent it which essentially shut down any further innovations in the field. Europe however basically ignored the patent and as a result within a few years had far better planes due to the number of companies pursuing active development.
Things got so bad that by the time WWI started, the US had to buy planes from Europe since they were so much better than the US ones.
It is clear patent law does nothing to protect the inventor and has a massive negative impact on creativity and progress. It's time for a massive patent overhaul.
Re:Citation. (Score:4, Interesting)
This echoes a similar move of USA after the revolution, where it ignored UK patents. This allowed a much quicker industrialization of the nation then would have happened if license fees was payed on every machine deployed.