None of what you just said proves Mike wrong. Desperate? Whiny? I’ve got one for YOU… “childish”.

The corporations who stole their copyrights, most likely. If not corporations, then lazy good-for-nothing trust fund punks.

Very true, one thing IP-Maximalists love to parade is the fact that it is all for the creators, now if they is dead what he takes from it?

Well the solution for that is to do what they do and that is write the laws we want.

To do that we need a forum to discuss and create laws that is outside of the political sphere.

I wonder when the first website “Write a law” will come online.

We have the means, now is just a question of actually doing it.

ps: On the plus side since politicians don’t actually read legislation it is just a matter of handing it to them.

No, you are reading wrong it is there somewhere written “you got owned”.

Seriously, that is real theft, piracy is just payback.

But I’m tired of payback, I want to move on to greener pastures, where the sun really shines and those a-holes are not there. They can go peddle their stuff to whatever schmuck they wish for because I’m not “buying” anything from them ever again.

Who’s going to start this? I’d be very interested in it.
I think people would indeed participate, but how long would it take for the shills to show up as well?

Publishers bought the rights.
But increasingly with media industries of all types, the only option they want to offer members of the public is a license to a copy.

They want everyone else to be denied the rights of ownership that they enjoy.
The law supports this behavior, perhaps because the industry pays its “licensing fees” at every election cycle.

Here is a link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

A misleading question. See, the content creators sold their rights (or assigned them to others) and profited from those rights when they were alive. If they maintained the rights themselves, they profit for the ability to pass them on to a future generation. While they may not be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labors, it is no different from your grand parents dying and leaving you a million dollars. Will you turn it down because it was only their money to spend?

The copyright minimalists should take a page from the PR campaign of the content industry and re-brand copyright extension as “theft of public goods”. That way, every time some in the pocket of industry Congressman goes on about copyright, someone else can get up and accuse him of supporting theft from the public. Big Content was able to get copyright infringement changed to theft. Why can’t we get copyright extension changed to theft as well? Each one is equally ridiculous.

How come nobody proposed a… retroactive law to forbid retro-action on new IP laws ?

Phrases to use:

“theft of public goods”
“government enforced monopoly”
“the copyright privilege”
“privilege holders”
“intellectual privilege”

The problem is that unless that letter has a check for several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars attached, you’d get (at best) a form letter in response saying “Thanks for your feedback, you’re valued, you’re precious to us, etc.” And I guarantee you, absolutely nothing substantive would be done.

To get action from a Senator or Congressman, you have to convince them that one of two things is about to occur:

1) They will get paid in some fashion (campaign contributions, a job offer after their term is up, a donation to their pet charity, etc. — all perfectly legal)

2) They will get voted out if they don’t act on your request. This has to be convincing. Plenty of media to back you up, lots of rallies, political opponents making it a talking point about why you don’t do this, etc. A petition with a few hundred votes won’t cut it, let alone one letter from one person.

Cynical of me? Probably. But prove me wrong.

No, the point is that technology has reached a point where the long term retention of these works isn’t dependent on a film stock that turns into a bomb over time (nitrate film), or that is easily destroyed by water. It is also important that the storage of these works in digital format means no loss of color, clarity, or the like over time, the digital version looked at 40 years from now will be as good as it was today.

Finally, it is important that this digital storage can be done economically, in restricted space, and duplcate copies can easily be kept in remote locations without concern for physical constraints. We also have multiple digital platforms that can be used for media backup, which means that rights holders can choose to archive their material on tape, on disc, on hard drives, or on optical media, or even better can do so on each of those medias to assure long life and recoverablity.

We can never cover for human error (such as that BBC situation discussed above), but as the choices for backup become more widespread, the more likely it is that the materials will survive for a very long time indeed.

So it is not really about creators at all and how the poor things will survive right?

It is about commerce that keeps robbing society of its dues.

Can you show me anything from the last 30 years that is “lost to time”?

Artful at best. The point is that the main “loss to time” is in works that never get created because of possible copyright infrigement and you know full well that it is all but impossible to demonstrate a negative. If I were more cynical I’d suspect that’s why you asked that question… oh.. wait…

These days, everything is kept in multiple copies. This is in part because of the value inparted by copyright

You’re suggesting that copyright is directly responsible for things not being lost? I suppose that may be in some very small way possible, but overwhelmingly larger to the tune of thousands of percentage points different is the ease and low (~zero) cost of doing so. After all what copyright holders complain about most is the number of copies that are made without cost or charge. If copyright were abolished I think you’d find the number of available copies of works would go down by considerably less that 1%.

I suspect that copies made, kept, and not distributed until copyright expired wouldn’t provoke lawsuits.

Do you indeed? I on the other hand suspect that if I were to make a film based on something currently copyright Disney and wait ’til their rights expired to release it(if indeed such a thing ever happens), their very expensive lawyers will find a way to sue me for millions of dollars because it was “created while copyright was in force” or some such bull. Neither of us can prove such a thing and I suspect many others wouldn’t take the chance of me being right.

would they be doing their jobs or just giving into some people who will vote for them in the next election?

If it happens as you suggest then they would be doing their jobs of course. I seem to remember your consitution says something about “government by the people, for the people.” In your republic this means that elected officials make decisions in order to fulfil the will of the electorate who then register their liking by voting. I don’t recall the rubbed out bits that said “government by the people, [only] for the people [with most money to pay the elected officials].”. You knew that… right?

It’s good to see that people who have passed away are still provided, via copyright, the incentive to create additional works. Without this most valuable legislation, our culture would surely slide into oblivion.

“Almost a very good devil’s advocation, except the ‘doing their jobs’ part. They aren’t doing their jobs. They are doing work on behalf of the copyright holders, not the American public.”

Awww, but corporations are people too! They are special people. They are like illegal immigrants getting all the white tax payer benefits white people bitch about but are white and are just handed tax payer money.

Damn if I ever run for office I’d be a billionaire in a month!!! good gig

What we want is for other artists and writers to be able to use these works to create new works based on them without worry about being sued.

Yes I read it, and I agree with the courts. The new book would not exist nor would have been created without TCITR exisitng to start with. It isn’t inspired by, it is copied from, and that is a huge difference. Those who hold the rights are the ones who get to say yes or no on that sort of thing until copyright expires.

The work does little to advance anything other than the author’s greed to profit from an existing work. His singular lack of creativity in the matter is very obvious.

As for you lists of changes, please consider the difference between changes in the laws and adjustment made to meet treaty agreements. There has been 1 law and 4 adjustments in 220 years, which isn’t very often. In that time frame hundreds of thousands of works have fallen into the public domain.

There is another reality you have to accept: The US is becoming more and more of a IP and service related economy. The US doesn’t do much heavy manufacturing anymore, that is done offshore where labor is cheap. Copyright is, in many ways, to protect what it is that the US produces. Like many things the government trades away your short term gain of being legally able to copy 5 year old movies in return for stronger defence of the nations products. It might not satisfy your little world, but the government has to look at things overall, not just working to get you your binky so you feel better.

Technology – and the ever “corruptable” human nature – restores the bargain broken by overlong copyright, dead men earning for corps they’ve never met, and the sanctioned theft of the public domain…

Break a deal, face the wheel – gulag!

From all indications (that I am aware of at least ), when you buy a DVD, you DO own that copy-just not the right to make other copies. It is COMPUTER SOFTWARE that is the real problem -so far the “license” interpretation has been allowed in THOSE cases and THAT is thing problem we must fight (I am not aware of Time Warner claiming they only license a physical DVD to you (though I am sure downloads are different)

Maybe the numbers are wrong (five years is probably not enough) but are you really saying that the current length of copyright is just right to you?

You can’t prosecute people for actions that weren’t crimes when they happened.

But that has little to do with retroactive changes to the terms of copyright.

If you had copied a work which was, at the time, public domain, and then the terms were extended retroactively such that the work was no longer public domain, and THEN you were prosecuted under the terms of that new law, THAT would be unconstitutional.

But CTEA only effected works that had not yet become public domain, precisely to avoid these sorts of problems, so that situation couldn’t possibly happen.

That said… just because something is constitutional, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

That is pretty much my point.

Can anyone explain why this comment was “flagged by the community?”

Are people really flagging comments that just oppose the conventional TD groupthink…er, wisdom?

and in many instances they want old works destroyed for political reasons, such as to hide a history that many disagreed with. One example is some of Babies earlier days and how Barbie sued for infringement over people who have pointed out certain things about Barbies history that Mattel wants to cover up (ie: Barbie the cigarette model mentioned in No-Logo by Naomi Klein under the section entitled Copyright Bullies in Chapter eight, which is definitely worth reading because it gives example after example of IP being used to censor things like this). Another example is this

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101005/12204511290/why-won-t-universal-music-let-you-see-the-20-20-report-from-1980-about-how-the-music-industry-is-dying.shtml

and there are more examples of videos being removed for similar reasons. Another example was this video

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatta_Mari

That video, or at least parts of it, was removed for political reasons using copy’right’ as a pretext. Allowing videos to be removed for political reasons using copy protection laws as a pretext is unacceptable and it distorts our history. A description of why (at least parts of) that video was removed could be found here

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100727/15403110387.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101213/09353512255/supreme-court-ruling-you-may-not-be-able-to-legally-sell-product-first-made-outside-us.shtml

Oh poor little baby! Why don’t you just call the wahhhmbulance?

See. Annoying isn’t it.

Why do you hate zombie artists and their works so much?

I don’t see anything that tells why that video was
removed on teh link you provided

Well, maybe I didn’t explain it very well.

I found it here.

http://www.vbox7.com/play:6c4c51fa

A little bit of background.

The U.S. government worked with Warner Brothers (and others) to create this (and other) videos. Much of it is propaganda and the intended audience members were adults (back then people didn’t have color televisions in their houses, they went to, often late night, cinemas to watch these programs and left the children at home).

In the video Plane Daffy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_Daffy ) various characters reveal state secrets to Hatta Mari. Back then it was common for videos to contain “spies” with accents that are intended to depict specific racial groups, implying that people from these racial groups can’t be trusted. This video is no exception (ie: with Hatta Mari’s accent) and years later people started pointing out this common tendency for villains to be portrayed as having specific accents depicting specific racial groups. When this video was put on youtube people started using it to point out the propaganda that this video depicts (not to mention how these sorts of videos were used as propaganda to justify putting people, like Japanese citizens, in containment camps, as if Japanese citizens could somehow magically acquire state secrets by simply living somewhere in the U.S.) and Warner Brothers wasn’t too happy about people using this video to point out its discriminatory past and how its videos it were designed to promote political propaganda and so they demanded that this video be removed from Youtube and so it was.

Actually, studies have shown that we are losing far more works in this digital world than ever before. Digital works are NOT being preserved and are being lost at an alarming rate, and the only way to preserve them is to BREAK THE LAW.

It’s hard enough under the current system to get a movie funded, let alone if you’re trying to make a product that will go public domain in 5 years.

While I’m not certain I disagree with you in that particular case and there’s debate to be had about the right number in each case, doesn’t that point more to a broken system propped up by the massively overblown copyright laws?
Is it not at least as possible if not more so that if (in the wonderful world of fantasy) copyright was suddenly reduced to 5 years that initially some studios would go under, but what would emerge from the “wreckage” would be a leaner, meaner film industy actually capable of producing something profitable in those kind of timescales?
You say that would result in “cookie cutter” projects but looking at the product of Hollywood in particular and the amount of “cookie cutter” dross already there, I’m not entirely certain that cutting the “training wheels” support wouldn’t result in less formulaic projects as capturing the public’s interest would be paramount to survive in such an environment.

> If it was that short, I’d also expect people to lose out on real potential income as well – e.g. a movie studio interested in licensing a book would just wait 5 years to make the movie rather than pay the original author.

But that is not the purpose of copyright. It is not intended to ensure authors make as much money as ‘potentially’ possible.

The purpose of copyright is to help authors cover the costs of production. If five years is sufficient for that, then authors will see it is economically viable to produce, and the job will have been done. If movie studios want to wait that out so their costs are lower, so much the better for them, and, assuming that saving is somewhat passed on in prices, so much the better for us too.

That is the gist of it. More widely it is very suspect of course, but we should at least be fairly clear about the basic proposition.

> I’m more of the mindset that 15-20 years is best, with the option … to renew after that, every 15-20 years until death

Where is the evidence to show that is economically sensible?

Why limit things to only 30 years? Or are you arguing nothing of value has been made in the last three decades? Hmm..you could be right there. Say coincidentally when did copyright get extended to infinity?

[ponders] Nah, correlation is not causation. It is an interesting coincidence though, is it not?

Any way you wanted an example–will this do? It was reported on this very site not too long ago: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100118/1050427800.shtml

Yeah I know the reports later emerged that CBS had an issue with this specific group not so much with getting the episodes preserved before they were lost forever. Still, I’d imagine there have been no other efforts to do so and the film continues to rot away while CBS refuses to allow shows ALREADY in the Public Domain to be released. That right there ought make it clear just how much the tail has begun to wag the dog.

That’s just the thing: the long tail in copyright is supposed to belong to the public.

Even so, I would agree that the appropriate term probably falls somewhere between 5 and 20 years depending on the type of work.

So, I agree, five years is way too short for most things. (Software might be an exception.) Originally it was 14 years + 14 renewed; that still seems about right to me.

I’d say that if anything films were the exception – I’m still not totally convinced there as in a hypothetical “5 year copyright” world I still think such things as distribution methods would adjust to “reality” and many of the problems Paul descibes would vanish. There are at least significant logistical challenges in producing a film and so a higher cost associated that has to be recouped though.

On the other hand, take music – cost to produce, well…. very little really. You might pay for a studio, the expertise of someone that can “produce” the music for you, maybe you’ve hired a session musician or 2 then you have your product. Distribution? Worldwide distribution is only a few thousand pounds away at most with a hired payment service, server space and a number of off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions. It’s not even capital outlay so you can stop any time you like if it turns out your music sucks too much for anybody to pay for it.

Books? Write book on word processor, use same distribution method as above or other (hypothetically existing in “5 year copyright world”) low cost PAYG online publisher.

My (rambling) point being that if much of the “reason” for having long copyright is so the endless middlemen can get their wedge too and recoup the “costs” to leave some actually left over for the artist and such a process takes time, current technology suggests that this does not have to be the case and so a reduction in copyright should consider what is possible not what is.

And after copyright is up, if someone make money off something of yours, well then them’s the breaks – you already made your money on your thing and them making money is not losing you anythign it just means you now have to compete over it.

On the other hand the 5-year number is a POOA number anyway and I’d damn well hope that rather than c*ck it up again that if such a utopian vision as reduced copyright for anything was going to happen that there would be an actual independant study by, well you know, smart people (as opposed to politicians and people with a vested interest) to make a decent evaluation of a “reasonable” time to get a return in investment for things. Instead of the partisan “stuff should be free” versus “I should get paid forever for work done 100 years ago every time someone thinks about it”.
Ok.. I dream, but what the hell?

“See, the content creators sold their rights (or assigned them to others) and profited from those rights when they were alive…”

…and then new laws were passed to retroactively extend the terms of those rights. How does THAT benefit the artists? How is that EVEN within the scope of the constitutional authority of Congress to make laws regarding copyright when that authority is expressly granted “to promote the progress,” and retroactive copyright extension by definition does nothing to promote the progress?

Don’t forget about all those old works that were unceremoniously yanked out of the public domain by Sonny Bono in 1998 (copyright terms increased AND applied retroactively!).