Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yes, different in a way that makes registration a total unworkable nightmare.
The US Copyright Office currently has an 18-month backlog -- for optional copyright registration. If registration becomes mandatory, the CO would be overwhelmed.
In the digital era, massive amounts of content is generated and distributed instantaneously. A photographer can crank out 500 images in a day -- and the client will want the images within hours. A blogger can post multiple entries a day, and will want to post immediately. 275,000 books were published in the US in 2008.
If registration was required, the volume of data they would need to host and index would be tremendous. And who's going to fund it? Do you genuinely believe that Congress will appropriate $500 million to the Copyright Office and increase their annual spending to build a registration website, when they are cutting funds to everything in sight?
And of course, a prospective screenwriter can send around his work to dozens of studios, and revise it during the process, without worrying about registering each and every draft at $35 a pop, or waiting a year to get the confirmation of the registration.
Automatic and immediate copyright registration is a vital right for content creators in the digital era -- and that doesn't mean just the big companies, it also means the small or independent artists who are actually doing the creative work. They aren't "clinging to the status quo" for its own sake, they're doing it because requiring registration will impose an onerous burden on the way they earn a living.
I do not see how what amounts to putting a small percentage of work into the public domain ahead of schedule -- or worse, granting Google an exclusive monopoly over those works -- justifies screwing over the content creators and increasing the bureaucracy by several orders of magnitude.
On a side note, let's keep in mind that a major problem with what Google was trying to accomplish did NOT involve orphaned works. Rather, it affected out of print books, where the copyright holder was still alive and aware of his or her work. What Google did was sweep up every book in a given library in its scanning project, and force the authors to opt out -- and if they did not opt out by a certain date, they were in whether they liked it or not. Google made zero effort to track down or find the copyright holders, did not allow any proofreading or review of the scanned book, and did not allow any sort of negotiation on rates. The Settlement also would have given Google an effective monopoly over the orphaned works -- hardly an ideal situation.
Nor, ultimately, does the Author's Guild have the authority to settle in the first place. They don't hold the copyrights, thus they can't give away someone else's rights in a legal settlement.
Like it or not, this is a job for Congress; and the solution is not going to involve shortening copyright, or requiring registration, and will need to protect the artists who are alive and working.
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Kali, if you want to treat copyright as property, then you have to do the sort of things that make property legal in most societies. Like registering ownership. You do it with land, and many chattels. (You want to claim something is stolen? You
HAVE to prove ownership.) Not enough resources to keep the processing going? Charge more to register.
Copyright is a
economic construct. And as such, it
costs. The refusal to pay for registering a copyright is just another form of free riding,
just like I.P. piracy. Only A. it's legal and B. It lets you play the "copyright lottery" for free. You want to play the "copyright lottery" - pay for the ticket!
Not everything I (or anybody else) do or say is worthy of copyright. I'll pay for the items I think have value. If I'm wrong, <shrug>, I lose. But I'm required to subsidized by the public for my lottery tickets. And as teh public, I'm annoyed that people expect this sort of subsidy...