Court rejects Google Books settlement

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

That works fine, as long as he's the only one with access to it. If he wants to license and restrict other people's use of it, registration may be necessary.
...

Absolutely not true.

It's not required now and it is working fine.

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

I partly agree, in that to me life + 50 is ideal.

However, any renewal term will increase the costs and complexities for artists, publishers, and government agencies alike.

In terms of the examples, I think you're missing the extremity of Elfwreck's $2000 registration. It would likely bankrupt creative professionals who try to keep up. How does what amounts to a "Copyright Tax" actually encourage people to create?

There is no question in my mind that automatic copyright is beneficial for and helps promote the arts, and that registration just makes it harder to do the work.

A 2000 dollar tax would be excessive, but your reasoning that a tax would discourage creative activity is not sound. How does allowing an artist to profit from works created twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years later encourage creative production? If anything, allowing their works to fall into the public domain compels them to keep creating throughout their lifetime. I am not saying this is right or wrong. If you want to argue that an artist deserves to profit off their creations for their lifetimes for moral reasons or for some property principle, that is fine. But it does not follow that a registration fee many many years after a work has already been created discourages creativity.

What I think would be really helpful is if more people were educated about copyright. I would guess that most people believe copyright is something you have to register with the government, and not something that is automatic. This in itself poses many problems. Most of what is created is not created for commercial purposes, and a lot of content creators, especially scholars, would not mind if their works were freely distributed. The problem is that if they do not indicate that it is okay to distribute their works, most people will either not bother with them, or figure it is too much of a hassle to contact the creator. So in effect this aspect of Copyright discourages the dissemination of knowledge. I think Creative Commons Licenses offers a decent solution to this problem(albeit it still has its flaws), but more people need to be aware of this. However, I think the Creative Commons only works well for books. Photographs are a whole different issue with its own set of problems.

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Required registration is dumb. The law is correct as it is in that something created is the property of the creator.

Now as far as the duration and transferability etc -- that could potentially do with some changes as well as specifics related to digital issues.

As usual, your arguments are so well-reasoned and cogent. "I'm right and your dumb, therefore, I am right and your dumb."

A creative work may be the property of the creator, but what we are talking about is copies of the work. What the law says is that if you make a table it is your table and you have no need to register it. What copyright says is that if you make a table no one else has the right to make a table that looks anything like your table.

Kali Luga says "Does that mean I need to register my clothing, too? How about my pencils?

There is a lot of property that does not require registration in order to receive legal protection, including goods whose theft would be felonious."

What you are talking about has nothing to do with copyright. What copyright says is that no one is allowed to make clothing that looks like your clothing, or pencils that look like your pencils. Nobody is allowed to make copies of them, even if those copies deprive you of nothing. You are using a very very poor analogy.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by charleski

Format-shifting is covered in the US only under the fair-use defense, and doesn't apply to other countries.

The Google Books settlement also only applies to the US, so I think it's OK to discuss US laws.

Originally Posted by charleski

Anyone seeking statutory damages in the US is already obliged to register....

Yes, that doesn't mean you can't sue at all (though it is highly advantageous to register).

Multiple registrations still mean increased costs, increased complexity, and a bigger burden on a US Copyright Office that already has a tremendous backlog.

Originally Posted by charleski

If it wasn't onerous in 1708, I can't see why it should be onerous now.

Perhaps because the volume of content that requires copyright protection has inflated dramatically since 1708, and because the copyright office already has an 18 month backlog? Just a thought.

Originally Posted by charleski

Objections to registration seem to be founded on little more than hysterical scare-stories such as the one you provide.

Objections to automatic application of copyright also are based on hysterical scare-stories of orphaned works languishing inaccessibly in attics, with the public weeping over the perceived loss.

Originally Posted by charleski

There is no reason for it to be massively expensive or time-consuming, we have copious tools for handling and indexing data.

I agree we could build a system along those lines. If we had such a system, I would not object to a one-time initial registration.

However, the reality is that we are not dedicating the resources to such a system -- even in a time when registration is optional. So as I asked earlier: Who gets to tell Congress, in an era where people apparently want less government interference and are slashing discretionary funds for critical functions like public education, that we need to spend $500 million to upgrade the Copyright Office's website and databases? And a few million every year thereafter for maintenance and further upgrades?

Originally Posted by charleski

The function of copyright is to provide a balance between private remuneration and public good, and that balance is currently not being achieved. We should not allow ourselves to be shackled by the mistakes of the past.

Every time I turn around, someone is modifying what copyright and/or the public domain is about. I swear, I'm getting whiplash.

So remind me, what is the horrific fear-mongering -- oh, pardon me -- the critical data for which the public is crying? The 10% of books that Google scanned, that were sitting in libraries, no one bothered to republish? Yet again, keep in mind that per Google's own estimates, 90% of the books they scanned are NOT orphaned -- they're just out of print.

And realistically, how many works will we save from being orphaned this way? At least some of the works will get re-registered at some point, only to later come under dispute and/or the rights holder goes out of business. I.e. unless you make registration an onerous burden, you're not going to rescue a lot of work.

Required registration is a bad idea, that only gets worse when the government agencies in question are already overburdened and/or underfunded.

[SleepyBob]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

The Google Books settlement also only applies to the US, so I think it's OK to discuss US laws.



Yes, that doesn't mean you can't sue at all (though it is highly advantageous to register).

Multiple registrations still mean increased costs, increased complexity, and a bigger burden on a US Copyright Office that already has a tremendous backlog.

/snip/

Every time I turn around, someone is modifying what copyright and/or the public domain is about. I swear, I'm getting whiplash.

So remind me, what is the horrific fear-mongering -- oh, pardon me -- the critical data for which the public is crying? The 10% of books that Google scanned, that were sitting in libraries, no one bothered to republish? Yet again, keep in mind that per Google's own estimates, 90% of the books they scanned are NOT orphaned -- they're just out of print.

And realistically, how many works will we save from being orphaned this way? At least some of the works will get re-registered at some point, only to later come under dispute and/or the rights holder goes out of business. I.e. unless you make registration an onerous burden, you're not going to rescue a lot of work.

Required registration is a bad idea, that only gets worse when the government agencies in question are already overburdened and/or underfunded.

The public is crying about the out-of-print books, too. The ones that the copyright holder obviously doesn't care about selling anymore, but are protected by excessive copyright terms.

And if we were to charge $2000 (or whatever) for registration of a renewal, I think it would fund itself quite nicely. In fact, I'll volunteer to do it myself.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by SleepyBob

2. Most of the profits from most books are realized in the first X years (say 20, or 50 even) after initial publication.

We've discussed this here a little bit before. I wish I knew what X is for books. I know that for music, X is only eight weeks! 80% of a CD's sales occurs within eight weeks of its release.

Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I don't really care about the issue of encouraging the writer to write more books. I don't think that that should be a matter of public policy.

I think that an author should be fairly compensated, and I would be quite content if this compensation lasted the rest of his life. But when he dies, the work should belong to the world immediately, not decades later.

By the way, while we here are drafting new copyright laws, it seems reasonable to me to make a distinction regarding the book and profit-making ventures based on the book. We can have two types of public domain. The first would allow the world to publish the book. The second would allow the world to make movies and t-shirts based upon it. I don't have any sympathy for the heirs when it comes to publishing the book, but I might have a lot when it comes to making a movie based upon it.

[spellbanisher]

The issue of orphan works affects academics mostly. When scholars do research they often have to travel to libraries and archives all over their country, if not the world, which can costs thousands of tax payer dollars or require the scholar to have to spend much of his time trying to get grants.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

As usual, your arguments are so well-reasoned and cogent. "I'm right and your dumb, therefore, I am right and your dumb."

A creative work may be the property of the creator, but what we are talking about is copies of the work. What the law says is that if you make a table it is your table and you have no need to register it. What copyright says is that if you make a table no one else has the right to make a table that looks anything like your table.

Kali Luga says "Does that mean I need to register my clothing, too? How about my pencils?

There is a lot of property that does not require registration in order to receive legal protection, including goods whose theft would be felonious."

What you are talking about has nothing to do with copyright. What copyright says is that no one is allowed to make clothing that looks like your clothing, or pencils that look like your pencils. Nobody is allowed to make copies of them, even if those copies deprive you of nothing. You are using a very very poor analogy.

As usual, your arguments are so well-reasoned and cogent. "I'm right and your dumb, therefore, I am right and your dumb."

And learn the difference in your and you're! Please.

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

And learn the difference in your and you're! Please.

Still, your post is a red herring.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

Still, your post is a red herring.

Glad you think so, but you are wrong. The default registration method works just fine.

And you really don't have a clue about what copyright is apparently.

[CommonReader]

And so the great book heist by Google was thwarted. While I agree that a solution for orphaned books needs to be found this was just a brazen attempt to grab a huge number of books for a pittance and to squeeze the competitors who play by the rules out of the market.

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Glad you think so, but you are wrong. The default registration method works just fine.

I never commented on the efficacy of the default registration system.

Originally Posted by kennyc

And you really don't have a clue about what copyright is apparently.

Not a critique, but a snide retort and dismissal. If you are so all-knowing and wise, perhaps it would be best if you did not waste your time with someone as intellectually impoverished as myself. Perhaps it would be best if you added me to your ignore list.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

The Google Books settlement also only applies to the US, so I think it's OK to discuss US laws.

Well, if we're only talking about the US, the section 107 defence might protect the private creation of a single copy for the purposes of preservation, but unlike the section 108 rights, it wouldn't allow that to be shown to anyone else.

Yes, that doesn't mean you can't sue at all (though it is highly advantageous to register).

The point is that, contrary to your portrayal, copyright's current approach to registration represents the exception, not the rule. Other IP rights need to be registered to be valid.

Perhaps because the volume of content that requires copyright protection has inflated dramatically since 1708, and because the copyright office already has an 18 month backlog? Just a thought.

So? No-one's asking copyright holders to trot down to the Stationer's Office and write their claim in a book. We're perfectly capable of handling similar large databases in a cost-efficient manner. Advances in information technology have more than outstripped the volume of copyrightable data that is produced. Your figure of $500million was plucked out of thin air. The real cost would be a fraction of that.

Objections to automatic application of copyright also are based on hysterical scare-stories of orphaned works languishing inaccessibly in attics, with the public weeping over the perceived loss.

If it's gone, it's gone. Our culture has already lost an untold wealth of material from the past because in earlier ages the process of copying and preservation was difficult. Now this is no longer the case, yet copyright seeks to impose artificial restrictions to prevent it. Maybe you don't weep over the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, but plenty of others do.

Every time I turn around, someone is modifying what copyright and/or the public domain is about. I swear, I'm getting whiplash.

Article 1, Section 8 of the US constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

Are you not familiar with the constitution? It was pretty clear in stating that the purpose of copyright is to promote cultural progress. The problems with copyright all stem from later modifications to its initial purpose which we need to reject.

At least some of the works will get re-registered at some point, only to later come under dispute and/or the rights holder goes out of business. I.e. unless you make registration an onerous burden, you're not going to rescue a lot of work.

What, precisely, are you suggesting here? Because this paragraph makes no sense.

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by charleski

Article 1, Section 8 of the US constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

Are you not familiar with the constitution? It was pretty clear in stating that the purpose of copyright is to promote cultural progress. The problems with copyright all stem from later modifications to its initial purpose which we need to reject.

I don't think Kali is from the U.S.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

I never commented on the efficacy of the default registration system.



Not a critique, but a snide retort and dismissal. If you are so all-knowing and wise, perhaps it would be best if you did not waste your time with someone as intellectually impoverished as myself. Perhaps it would be best if you added me to your ignore list.

No thanks. Your response to me was what started the snide remarks. I suggest you learn to conduct yourself in public.

If you want to discuss copyright then let's discuss it, but leave the smart ass remarks and personal attacks at home.