(Untitled)

[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

Comments

[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]

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]

"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...