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[Nadaka]

https://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976

This is culture that belongs to us.  Culture that we have been deprived of. Culture that has been legally stolen and ransomed. Copyright is theft of the public domain. The best thing to do is return copyright to its original term.

[Frumple]

https://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976

This is culture that belongs to us.  Culture that we have been deprived of. Culture that has been legally stolen and ransomed. Copyright is theft of the public domain. The best thing to do is return copyright to its original term.

Fourteen years sounds pretty fair for a single creative or innovative work, really. If you haven't done something new that's profitable by then, it's probably time to get back to work. Not that losing copyright prevents you from continuing to profit from the work, just gives other folks the chance to do a better job of it.

Why'd it get so long, again? Is it just because it allows (theoretically immortal) corporations to keep a stranglehold on stuff?

[Bauglir]

https://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976

This is culture that belongs to us.  Culture that we have been deprived of. Culture that has been legally stolen and ransomed. Copyright is theft of the public domain. The best thing to do is return copyright to its original term.

Yes, yes, yes, no, yes. The current state of copyright is theft of the public domain, or close enough to it that even I (somebody writing a post this nitpicky) don't care to quibble, but I'm going to have to disagree on the entire concept being theft.

[palsch]

Why'd it get so long, again? Is it just because it allows (theoretically immortal) corporations to keep a stranglehold on stuff?

Essentially. There are a few (very few) cases of certain properties holding near perpetual value. The US Constitution doesn't allow perpetual copyright, so instead we are seeing period extensions of the current maximum term as certain works are threatened by the public domain.

One of my favourite takes on this is Justice Breyer's dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that extended copyright an extra 20 years (life +70 or 95 for works-for-hire). Breyer's argument has debatable legal force - it did lose - but he essentially went back to look at the justification and reality of copyright.

Copyright is supposedly a financial incentive for a given work. Breyer wanted to examine just how much of an incentive 20 years of copyright was on a work over 50 years old. His findings;

    In conjunction with official figures on copyright renewals, the CRS Report indicates that only about 2% of copyrights between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value--i.e., still generate royalties after that time.

    Using assumptions about the time value of money pro-vided us by a group of economists (including five Nobel prize winners)... it seems fair to say that, for example, a 1% likelihood of earning $100 annually for 20 years, starting 75 years into the future, is worth less than seven cents today.

That is, unless you actually hold one of these valuable copyrights then the value of the copyright extension was pretty near worthless. The sort of change you don't worry about being shorted in the shops.



My own solution that I feel is fairly moderate is moving back to a copyright registration system. Unregistered materials are protected for one year after publication. They must be registered with the copyright office by that point or they lapse into the public domain. Registration lasts for five years. A registered work can have it's registration extended only in the final year for a further five years each time, up to, say, six times for a total of 31 years.

Then all you need is massive reform and good sense around copyright enforcement, a solution to the problem of trademarks and a completely new flexible patent system (having the same terms apply for drugs and software as kids toys or car parts is absurd).

[G-Flex]

Regarding companies like Disney, wouldn't Mickey Mouse (at least, the character itself, in name and design) still fall under trademark law? I'm not sure how relevant that is here.

I bring this up because I can understand a person or corporation indefinitely keeping hold of a trademark image or character that is important to their business, although keeping individual works copyrighted for damn-near-eternity is, of course, ridiculous. I can understand Disney owning the rights to Mickey Mouse as a trademark a whole lot more than them owning the rights to "Steamboat Willie" another 50 years from now.

[palsch]

Regarding companies like Disney, wouldn't Mickey Mouse (at least, the character itself, in name and design) still fall under trademark law? I'm not sure how relevant that is here.

Yes.

Trademarks are... problematic in a few ways. They have to be defended in every case otherwise they are considered abandoned. If some kid violates your copyright you have the choice of ignoring them. If the same kid violates your trademark and you let them get away with it, anyone else who chooses to use that trademark later can use your leniency as evidence you abandoned the mark and they can legally use it all they like.

The line where a trademark is genericized (eg, becomes a generic term rather than protected mark) is pretty vague. That tends to mean that particularly popular trademarks need to be especially aggressively defended and re-enforced. And that leads to often insane stuff like the recent Bethesda lawsuit over the use of 'Scrolls' in a game title.

I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea of protected trademarks, and have no idea how you would reform the system to make more sense, but it is fun how absurd all forms of IP can get right now.

[SalmonGod]

My own solution that I feel is fairly moderate is moving back to a copyright registration system. Unregistered materials are protected for one year after publication. They must be registered with the copyright office by that point or they lapse into the public domain. Registration lasts for five years. A registered work can have it's registration extended only in the final year for a further five years each time, up to, say, six times for a total of 31 years.

This puts larger businesses at more of an advantage, who have more resources to deal with official registration type stuff.  The poor man's copyright (mailing a copy of your work to yourself) needs to remain viable.

There was a huge panic among the artistic community a while ago, because... let's see if I can remember this right... there was a big government initiative to hand official registration of copyright over to privately owned and operated databases, plus make it so that searching for your registration in one of these databases could be legally considered a reasonable effort to make contact with you for permission to use your work, after which they wouldn't be subject to any penalties for going ahead and using it.  So basically, if you wanted to defend your copyright, you were going to be required to register all of your works with any number of these databases that private businesses were going to generate.  This never happened, but thousands of independent artists were all panicked that it was going to make their lives tons more difficult.

[G-Flex]

Trademarks are... problematic in a few ways. They have to be defended in every case otherwise they are considered abandoned.

"Every case" is probably a serious oversimplification. I know they do have to be actively defended, but minor cases of trademark use go unnoticed all the time, and I doubt that a trademark is considered abandoned simply because they miss one or two here or there.

The line where a trademark is genericized (eg, becomes a generic term rather than protected mark) is pretty vague. That tends to mean that particularly popular trademarks need to be especially aggressively defended and re-enforced. And that leads to often insane stuff like the recent Bethesda lawsuit over the use of 'Scrolls' in a game title.

Yeah, but to be fair, a company like Disney already does get pretty lawsuit-happy when it comes to copyright/trademark. It wouldn't really be a change of policy, especially since they're already defending their trademarks to begin with.

I'm just saying that a company like Disney losing copyright on their early works might not be as disastrous as they might say it would be.

[palsch]

This puts larger businesses at more of an advantage, who have more resources to deal with official registration type stuff.  The poor man's copyright (mailing a copy of your work to yourself) needs to remain viable.

I don't believe that anyone has used the poor man's copyright in court and have seen a lawyer take the whole idea apart with ease.

For example, tomorrow I go buy a stack of double ended envelopes. I send them all through the mail at various times without sealing them. Not all will be usable but one or two will be viable. I take those ones and wait.

Then someone who I plausibly interacted with at some point creates something really popular. I take a copy and create an apparent early version. I then seal that inside one of my pre-stamped envelopes. I then try to take the other person to court, saying I showed them my early version and they have ripped me off. Given that such precedent fights are the only cases where such a copy would matter I've just reversed the entire system.

As to the database it would need to be public and have accessibility as it's top priority. I was thinking of a system where you simply send an email with your work to some address and receive a registration hash that must be included in your work.

Right now copyright doesn't require registration at all so my priority isn't screening or adding any substantial burdens. Allow registration at any point in the first year after publication by a range of methods, with no screening on registrations, and I think that's fairly safe.

"Every case" is probably a serious oversimplification. I know they do have to be actively defended, but minor cases of trademark use go unnoticed all the time, and I doubt that a trademark is considered abandoned simply because they miss one or two here or there.

Any substantial case then.

Realistically it's any case the trademark holder would be expected to be aware of. Any cases they don't pursue become part of the defence for anyone who chooses to violate their trademark in the future.

As for the rest, yeah, I was pretty much agreeing with you.

[Powder Miner]

OK, for those who consider copyright theft, if somebody invents a fantastic new invention, is patenting it now stealing it from the community? Should everyone now be able to create and sell his invention?

[Nadaka]

OK, for those who consider copyright theft, if somebody invents a fantastic new invention, is patenting it now stealing it from the community? Should everyone now be able to create and sell his invention?

1: invention is covered by patents, not copyright.

2: the value of art exists only in the context of culture and the people who are exposed to it, not so with invention.

3: Patents have not been subject to endless extension and will return to the public domain within our lifetime.

[kaijyuu]

Has plagiarism and derivative works come into this debate, yet?


I remember waaaaaaay back in grade school, for a school writing project I wrote what was essentially a Space Jam fanfiction. I was pulled off to the side by the teacher and lectured about how that was stealing other's ideas and wouldn't fly in the real world. Now today and I'm making fanart galore, so she was obviously wrong about that, but it's probably the extreme view of protecting authorial control. Fanart can be considered plagiarism, as you're taking other people's characters/stories/etc and adapting them. It's not just about credit, but control.

As for derivative works, that's the loophole most fanart goes through to be legal (not to mention there's not much point in trying to get rid of it). If you modify it enough, it stands on it's own. Weird Al uses this for his parody songs (he asks out of courtesy first, but IIRC he outright invoked it and kept selling Amish Paradise against the original author's wishes).


So yeah. It's not just about who has control over distributing original works, but works based off of them. Does copyright protect against plagiarism? Should plagiarism be protected against in the first place? And what about all these wacky loopholes we have for parodies and other such "acceptable" derivative works?

[G-Flex]

So yeah. It's not just about who has control over distributing original works, but works based off of them. Does copyright protect against plagiarism? Should plagiarism be protected against in the first place? And what about all these wacky loopholes we have for parodies and other such "acceptable" derivative works?

Those aren't "loopholes". Fair Use is a very important part of copyright law, and you should probably look into it, since you don't seem to have heard of it before.

[lemon10]

Has plagiarism and derivative works come into this debate, yet?


I remember waaaaaaay back in grade school, for a school writing project I wrote what was essentially a Space Jam fanfiction. I was pulled off to the side by the teacher and lectured about how that was stealing other's ideas and wouldn't fly in the real world. Now today and I'm making fanart galore, so she was obviously wrong about that, but it's probably the extreme view of protecting authorial control. Fanart can be considered plagiarism, as you're taking other people's characters/stories/etc and adapting them. It's not just about credit, but control.

As for derivative works, that's the loophole most fanart goes through to be legal (not to mention there's not much point in trying to get rid of it). If you modify it enough, it stands on it's own. Weird Al uses this for his parody songs (he asks out of courtesy first, but IIRC he outright invoked it and kept selling Amish Paradise against the original author's wishes).


So yeah. It's not just about who has control over distributing original works, but works based off of them. Does copyright protect against plagiarism? Should plagiarism be protected against in the first place? And what about all these wacky loopholes we have for parodies and other such "acceptable" derivative works?

No, weird al is a different thing, that falls under satire/parody of fair use, rather then because its very different/unique.

[kaijyuu]

So yeah. It's not just about who has control over distributing original works, but works based off of them. Does copyright protect against plagiarism? Should plagiarism be protected against in the first place? And what about all these wacky loopholes we have for parodies and other such "acceptable" derivative works?

Those aren't "loopholes". Fair Use is a very important part of copyright law, and you should probably look into it, since you don't seem to have heard of it before.

I've debated this several times before, so please don't condescendingly dismiss me Use whatever word you like. "Loophole" or no, it allows one to make a new work based on an old (copyrighted) one.


My questions are A) is that plagiarism, B) where should the line be drawn in your opinion, and C) should copyright be used to protect against plagiarism regardless.


For the record, it'd be an understatement to say I'm ok with derivative works, but I do find all the requirements for "fair use" works to be extremely convoluted.