Copyright Reform Poll

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quoth

As soon as it starts to be written or recorded in any fashion, it's copyright today. It doesn't have to written, a chapter of a book dictated (using ANY recording method) has the same rights as a published book.
Also Patents and Design Patents/Registered Design are absolutely copyright ALSO and that mess is an extension of copyright. An expired patent or invalid patent, unless plagiarised, is absolutely copyrighted. You can't at all discuss copyright reform without also considering Patents and Design Patents/Registered Design and even to an extent Trademarks, including the text, style and logo.
You can't copyright a title. Yet no-one can use the names of the Seven Dwarves in Disney's version of Snow White as the names of dwarves. Though that was written in maybe 1936. The actual non-Disney story is in the Public Domain.

Copyright isn't just the manuscript source of books, or books.

You don't seem to be reading my posts at all, as we are complete agreement about when copyright comes into existence.

Certainly the text of a patent is copyright, but that has no bearing on the substance of a patent, which is of an entirely different kind of protection to copyright.

Trademarks are also entirely different.

Any further posts in this thread on patents or trademarks will be moved to a new thread.

[Tex2002ans]

Back in 2014, I wrote a thorough post in "New Paper Argues for Reasonable Reduction in Copyright".

I quoted one of the best books on the topic, "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Boldrin and Levin and discussed a lot of issues with culture + Orphan Works being lost to dust.

And 2017 posts in "EU Piracy Report" (especially see Posts #172+#179) where I discussed even more (journal articles, video games, Super Bowl, Doctor Who)... even the "funny" article "University Requires Students To Pay $180 For 'Art History' Text That Has No Photos Due To Copyright Problems".

And just last week, yet another example of degrading physical media (and trying to recover obsolete formats):

Ars Technica, "Here’s why “baking” damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again"

[sun surfer]

I had chosen 'Some fixed length, renewable a limited number of times.' So I'm glad to see it did decently.

[Ekaros]

50 years from release for the version for traditional works, 25 years for software.

The different revisions could even be treated as separate works. So if book is updated or revised the count for that revision starts from 0. While earlier revisions might get out of copyright earlier.

[pdurrant]

Members are reminded that party political posts are not allowed in this part of MobileRead.

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by issybird

I wonder how many would change their votes based on the discussion? Which is a sign of a good discussion.

I originally voted for fixed length from publication, and that still seems the best choice to me. It levels the playing field for works which seems the most logical to me; genes plus luck shouldn’t be the determining factor. And I think 50 years is about right, too.

I would change my vote (which was Life +X) to this. For the reasons pdurrant gave as well.

[pdurrant]

I intend to continue the discussion here for another week or two, and then have a new poll (with the same options as this poll).

The question, of course, really only relates to works published in the author's lifetime. Although I'm happy to have side discussions on unpublished works and posthumous publications.

But I hope we can keep the main discussion on the vast bulk of copyright works - those published in the author's lifetime.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Members are reminded that party political posts are not allowed in this part of MobileRead.

To repost the point that I was actually making (which had nothing to do with politics), the reason we won't see copyright reform in the US is because there is no moneyed interest that wants shorter copyright. The copyright holders, especially with regards to movies and music since they drive the discussion, want that golden goose to keep laying golden eggs for eternity. If we could somehow extract books from movies and music, then I think we would see the US go back to what I consider a rational copyright length.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

there is no moneyed interest that wants shorter copyright.

I think this is exactly right. And unfortunately, the politicians who ought to be working for the public good tend to be influenced by the people with money instead. And have been for at least a couple of hundred years.

Although I suppose some of them may just be honestly mistaken.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think this is exactly right. And unfortunately, the politicians who ought to be working for the public good tend to be influenced by the people with money instead. And have been for at least a couple of hundred years.

Although I suppose some of them may just be honestly mistaken.

You are too kind.
(The classic definition of an honest politician is "the one that stays bought." )

The politicians with the power to change/reduce copyright are themselves people with money. No politician who's been around much is ever poor. And when it comes to copyright, the traditional publishing system is one of their bigger avenues of enrichment.

May I assume politician autobiographies and "vision statement" books are a thing on your side of the pond?

Cause on the US side every politician with any significant aspirations has at least one (typically ghost-written) book on their resume, with an attached seven figure advance that rarely if ever earns out.

Considering the folks dishing out that largesse make their money off control of copyrights they won't see any reduction with friendly eyes and those advances can be very, ahem, persuasive. So let's not hold our breaths.

[Tex2002ans]

Another example of cultural destruction because of copyright is memes + creations by "anonymous people" (usernames).

(Since copyright is now assigned automatically—and who knows when this "Tex2002ans" person is going to die so I can count 70 years after that.)

One of the funniest/best/insightful talks I've seen on the topic is a 2011 one given by the founder of ArchiveTeam.org:

DEF CON 19 - Jason Scott - Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack

He discusses dying media (floppy disks, obsolete digital formats), but especially funny is ~13 mins when he:

Spoiler:

shows an example of every single "Under Construction" GIF ever.

They've preserved sites like:

• Early Web
  
  • Geocities
• Social Media
  
  • Myspace
• Image Hosting Sites
  
  • Flickr
• Now defunct/dead forums
  
  • Yahoo, Google Groups, yuku
• Gaming
  
  • Statistics for every Halo match ever + all photos taken/shared via the game.
    
  • Similar situation with Madden GIFs.

So much of this culture on the internet is put out there and shared, most becomes abandoned. Companies shut down eventually, and all those old photos/information/links die with it... and this is modern digital stuff created within the past few decades—imagine 100+ years of trying to lock that stuff down.

Side Note: And on more "dying media", here's another example:

"A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them"

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think this is exactly right. And unfortunately, the politicians who ought to be working for the public good tend to be influenced by the people with money instead. And have been for at least a couple of hundred years.

Although I suppose some of them may just be honestly mistaken.

To be fair, once you get past a certain number of years, it become difficult to show how extensions of copyright damage the public at large. What's the difference between the Berne Convention copyright (life plus 50 or 75 years for corporations) and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (life plus 70, or 95 years for corporations)? From a movie point of view, if they hadn't extended copyright, any movie prior to 1945 would be in public domain, yet I can still go out and buy DVD of the most of the major movies for 1939 (Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach...). From that stand point, the public hasn't been seemingly harmed. In both music and movies, you really needed to original master to have a credible option of generating a copy to sell. It's only with DVD's that making quality copies is possible, and DVD's didn't come out until the mid 90's.

The major harm is more on the book side of things, since books are much easier to reproduce. I would tend to argue that the major harm of copyright in the past, from purely a book point of view, is that once a book goes out of print, and most books go out of print very quickly, you are reduced to either libraries or used book stores if you want to read it. Thus, they quickly are forgotten. But while a rich author drove the Berne Convention, books don't really drive copyright law anymore.

Most recognize the issue of orphaned works, and if books were not grouped together with movies and music, I suspect that the issue of orphaned works would have been fixed by now. The most recent attempt at addressing orphaned works in the US was in 2015, but for the most part, Congress simply doesn't have the will to pass anything simply because it's tied to movies and music.

Plus, from a pragmatic point of view, there simply isn't that many people interested in reading old books. In general, life plus 50 means that most books are long forgotten before they go into public domain. Life plus 70 doesn't significantly change the equation. Tolkien died in 1973. In a life plus 50 world, his works would go into PD is a few years. In a life plus 70, it's 20 more years. We don't have to worry about people forgetting Lord of the Rings. but who remembers what other books were published in 1954? Not many, I'll bet. That was before I was born, and I'm not young.

On the other hand, if the US was back in the 28 years plus 28 renewal, then any book written prior to 1963 would be in public domain and the vast majority of books written prior to 1992 would be in public domain. That changes the equation a lot. Those books are still in the public's mind. There are a number of books from the 80's and before that are still in the public's minds.

H. Warner Munn, author of Merlin's Ring (1974) , died in 1981. He is one that I point to when discussing the problem of orphaned works. By the time his works go into PD, odds are pretty much no one will care. On the flip side, one can likely find this on the dark net. I'm actually slightly surprised that it doesn't pop up on some of the ebook sites since it's pretty unlikely that whomever holds the copyright would issue a take down notice.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Another example of cultural destruction because of copyright is...

It's certainly quite possible to have all the benefit of automatically assigned copyright, which is as it is and should be, and still reform the law to better account for modern media, anonymous publication, orphaned work, enforcement, etc. It's doesn't need to be either/or.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

[*] Now defunct/dead forums

• Yahoo, Google Groups, yuku

[/LIST]

Yahoo groups is dead (when they shut down the group formed by former xyz employees had no home)

Google groups is still alive, the neighborhood association (invite only) is still posting

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by theducks

Yahoo groups is dead (when they shut down the group formed by former xyz employees had no home)

Yes, looks like it started in 2001 and was killed off late 2019 + fully-disabled in early-2020. About 2.1 billion posts saved:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.ph...=Yahoo!_Groups

Ars Technica wrote an article about it too, "Verizon reportedly blocks archivists from Yahoo Groups days before deletion".

Originally Posted by theducks

Google groups is still alive, the neighborhood association (invite only) is still posting

Archive Team has all the details of each project on their site.

They also have this thing called the "Deathwatch", which are sites that are on shaky ground, and are most likely going to be killed/deleted soon.

Anything Yahoo has been on death's door for a while.

For example, Flickr in 2019 decided to delete all images beyond 1000 per account:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr

Similar situation with Tumblr 2 years ago (the great "porn" purge).

* * *

Raptr was one I personally got hit with. ~2007ish, Raptr was a gaming site used to track how many hours you played per game (long before it became now-common functionality).

They shifted their name into Plays.tv, trying to become a game streaming/video/photo site, but closed their doors permanently in 2019:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Plays.tv

* * *

In 2018, Nintendo killed off their "Miiverse" social media site, ~8 million users with hundreds of millions of posts/screenshots:

Ars Technica, "Miiverse archive recovers 17TB of social mirth after Nintendo’s shutdown"

As you can imagine, most of the users were probably children/teens, creating accounts, losing access to passwords, etc. (Do you remember all the usernames and sites you used when you were a kid? But no, lock it up for 100+ years.)

Plenty of examples. Luckily, there are people out there backing this stuff up in spite of copyright.

Originally Posted by ApK

It's certainly quite possible to have all the benefit of automatically assigned copyright, which is as it is and should be, and still reform the law to better account for modern media, anonymous publication, orphaned work, enforcement, etc.

Automatic assignment is one of the worst things to ever happen in copyright, and is the root cause for many of the above-mentioned issues.