Hi Timothy,
I read your submission on the Registrar of Copyrights with great
interest. I want to ask some questions about two passages in
particular, and Creative Commons' positions generally.
The Register should also have a firm grasp of
technology and
understanding of how creators and users share over the internet,
and be willing to reconsider policies that impede the sharing of
content in the digital era.
Do you consider the use of compulsory licenses imposed on commercial
content hosts an adequate response to the problem of mass illicit
sharing of restricted works?
Do you think compulsory license distribution schedules designed to
address compensating creators harmed by mass illicit sharing but not
necessarily shared by the same commercial content hosts which pay them
would impede or promote sharing?
Regarding authors’ rights, copyright policymaking
should uphold
a principle of “copyright neutrality”. This means that when copyright
policy is made, it needs to treat all stakeholders (authors) equally
and take all authorial needs into consideration, not just those who
wish to maximize their protection under the law, or who have an
outsized ability to influence the policy-making process.
I very strongly agree with that, but wonder whether it goes far enough
to make a difference.
Some authors are interested in commercialization,
while others
wish to share widely under permissive terms.
What proportion of authors are able to afford the time and resources
to create free content because they are supported financially by their
production of commercial content?
In general does CC support transitioning to sliding-scale compulsory
license fee incidences, to support the end result of paying authors
and artists in the same relative amounts observed in the 1970s, prior
to the advent of mass illicit copying and subsequent media
conglomerate consolidation?
Do you and CC agree that the current compulsory license schedules
result in unfair enrichment of the largest top-40 artists and
bestselling authors promoted by the remaining relatively few media
publishers, at the expense of small and emerging artists and authors?
What is the appropriate way to ask Creative Commons to make a formal
decision on these questions as a whole?
Best regards,
Jim Salsman
On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 11:27 AM, Timothy Vollmer
<tvol(a)creativecommons.org> wrote:
Possibly useful for you, here's what CC
submitted:
https://creativecommons.org/2017/01/26/new-register-copyrights-put-public-c…
timothy
On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:14 PM, Charles M. Roslof <croslof(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi folks,
As has been mentioned on this list before, the US Librarian of Congress is
soliciting input to help her select the next Register of Copyrights[1]. The
deadline to submit comments[2] is January 31. I’m working on preparing
comments for the Wikimedia Foundation, and I’m interested to hear from you
about the themes you think are important to touch on.
The Register of Copyrights is in charge of the Copyright Office[3] in the
US. In addition to maintaining (and hopefully improving) the copyright
registration system, the Copyright Office plays an important role in
advising Congress on copyright-related matters. They gather information
about copyright law and the functioning of the copyright system and they
analyze and interpret that information for Congress. As such, they can have
significant influence on the perspectives and considerations that form the
basis of proposed changes to US copyright law.
I currently plan to emphasize that the Register should understand the full
scope of the copyright landscape and who the stakeholders are and will be.
Discussions of copyright law often involve simplified narratives of legacy
rightsholders like movie studios versus online platforms like YouTube. The
Register must see beyond those narratives. They need to recognize the
creativity and expression that online platforms for individuals and other
small creators. They also need to understand that copyright exists
ultimately to benefit the public—to encourage people to create and share
works in order for the rest of society to benefit from those works
(including by sharing, building on, and remixing them).
What other themes do you think are important to Wikimedia? What should the
Librarian of Congress be thinking about when looking for the next Register
of Copyrights? There are a lot of potential topics to discuss, so we won’t
be able to mention all of them, but your input will help us decide what to
focus on. If you’re interested, I encourage you to submit your own comments
as well.
- Charles
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_of_Copyrights
[2]
https://www.research.net/r/RegisterOfCopyrights
[3]
http://copyright.gov/
==
Charles M. Roslof
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
croslof(a)wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885
NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
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