(no subject)

[learnedax]

I've been musing on a recent post of jducoeur's, regarding a Swedish political party's attempts to limit copyright to five years (and more specifically Richard Stallman's not terribly convincing complaints about it). Now, I think the copyright situation we are in is bad: large, bullying companies hold on to the agglutinations of purchased copyrights for remarkably long time periods, and use their legal strength to make a mockery of fair use whenever they feel like it. It seems like this does not serve the original creators well, nor the consumers, nor later creators that have to watch their steps with exceeding care to avoid these intellectual property behemoths. And there is something tempting about the five year notion, yet I don't really like the idea of someone who makes a thing losing their ownership of it while they are still alive to care.*

The corporate acquisition of those rights is tricky, too, because it is often very beneficial for musicians to have labels, authors to have publishers, and directors to have studios. It's possible to do without them, but at least in principle they are a good thing. And in order for them to make large-scale reproduction of creators' creations an effective business, they need to secure some rights on, well, copying. But we often see the case where, say, a comic book author does not have any rights at all to the work he did twenty years ago, because the copyright is held by the publisher.

With these problems in mind, I wonder whether the following might work better for everyone. Or at least, everyone who isn't DC Comics: while you are alive, you retain copyright on your work. Your ownership of it would be non-transferable. You can license the work as you like, but we enforce a short maximum term on any such license. This is where I think five years becomes an appealing period again. If I record an album for Apple Records, and it's a big hit, or even a quite prolonged sleeper success, they do quite a good bit of business in the first five years exclusively selling it. And when five years is up, we can renegotiate. The big juicy upfront profit window is still theirthere for middleman organizations, but they don't get to sell your property to someone who sells it to someone who sues people who put it up on YouTube decades after you die. You can sell someone an option on the film rights (for five years), but you can never be made to sell the right to decide who gets the film rights.

And, of course, if you do die right after producing a work, the longest it stays out of the public domain is five years.

Comments

[dsrtao]

The senator from Disney will not be pleased, but otherwise, this certainly seems more fair and equitable than what we have now.

[laurion]

I wondering if your asterisk indicates a footnote that wandered off?

Otherwise, this seems reasonably equitable, but will face giant opposition not only from corporations, but also private estates of various artists (e.g. Tolkein estate style arrangements), and would require a lot more tracking and paperwork, especially if an individual wants to revert something to public domain or put it under an open license, but must remember to do so every 5 years.

I still think the original 7 years, renewable once, copyright struck a modest balance. 14 years is a fairly significant length of time these days when culture and creation are at such a rapid pace. When the original was set things were at a much, much slower pace, but it was also harder to control things, and the ability to enforce copyrights beyond a certain length of time were difficult. Once the enforcement became easy, the stakeholders wanted to stretch the temporal lock...

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

Sorry to seem cynical--call it devil's advocacy--but I don't think it would change things all that much. Managing all the licensing of all their works, even for only five years apiece, would be more paperwork than some creative artists will want to do, or for others, will be able to do well even though they want to, so there will inevitably be a niche for licensing agency/management professionals. The underlying principles, the vocabulary, may have changed, but there will always be middleman organizations with a vested interest in extending the length and strictness of protection, and we're back to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"there will inevitably be a niche for licensing agency/management professionals"

Agreed. When properly implemented, a niche which is very valuable to creators.

"there will always be middleman organizations with a vested interest in extending the length and strictness of protection"

Agreed.

"and we're back to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act"

This does not necessarily follow. If there is enough political will to make such a sweeping change in the first place, that will will also serve to (at least for a time) retard the grasping of the middlemen.

And even if the long-term trend was one of expansion, there would still be significant tangible benefit in a one-time reset.

[jducoeur]

The difficulty, of course, is the word "you". This proposal makes a certain amount of sense for cases where there is a single, clear author to own the copyright -- but that's a modest subset of the sorts of things that copyright applies to. It's not even true in the case of most comics, which at least have a writer and artist involved (and frequently half a dozen other people). That's the thing: some sense of "corporate" ownership makes sense for *most* creative works, ranging from games to movies to software to comics, which are all typically the work of many hands.

I personally agree with laurion -- I'd like to see a return to the original definition of copyright. IMO, we've developed an unhealthy attachment to the idea of *controlling* creative works, that I honestly don't think is all that good for society. I understand the argument for fairness to the creator, but I think that the original copyright rules did a good job of striking that balance in an equitable way...