On 2 February 2010 18:58, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
The contractual limitations are of course unacceptable under the principles of a common law system. More importantly the anti DRM languages places limits on what you can do with a PD work.
Huh? I don't understand this - please could you explain?
It creates two problems. First it limits my freedoms. It prevents me from forming a contract where I lend you a PD work in return for your agreement not to say scan it.
Secondly it means that if I wanted to release say a slideshow of PD paintings on blu-ray I can't do it. Even more fun if I include a PD work as part of a film (say a portrait of Shakespeare in passing) I can't then release it through any format that uses DRM broken or otherwise.
Even more fun it would technically make the United States dollar illegal (PD work that contains technical protection methods in the form of the EURion constellation).
Better to base it on commercial rather than public interest?
Better neither. Some of the caselaw on the subject of "public interest" isn't too good.
"The excessive length of copyright protection combined with an absence of formalities is highly detrimental to the accessibility of our shared knowledge and culture."
Implementing formalities such as registration is a great way to reduce the effectiveness of CC licenses and the GPL.
I'm not sure that I see the connection here?
Formalities means registration. Since almost no one is going to register open source and CC works without automatic copyright the relevant licenses become unenforceable.
As I understand it, if the 1978 US copyright law hadn't have been retroactive then a lot more content would now be in the public domain though.
Depends how you define retroactive.
"When material is deemed to fall in the structural Public Domain in its country of origin, the material should be recognized as part of the structural Public Domain in all other countries of the world."
Oh Zeus no. I mean yes I can understand that mexico could probably do with the boost to it's film industry but creating a situation where countries have an incentive to create the harshest possible copyright terms is not advisable.
It would, however, solve a lot of problems with understanding international copyright law when things go out of copyright. As it stands, we're left with e.g. the crazy situation that some of Yeats works are out of copyright in the UK but still in copyright in the US (and until recently, the reverse applied).
That one is going to solve itself over the next 50 years or so (well other than in Mexico). "Country of origin" ceased to be a reliable concept some time before WW2. Again for some fairly minor gains (Most of the world is already heading towards life+70) you make the system a lot more complicated.
So it's better to have out-of-print works locked away and unusable than risk having a system where "big guys" can take advantage of it?
Orphan works proposals are unlikely to have much of an impact on out-of-print works. Even in the case where you somehow allow the little guy to access them without destroying the ability of the little guy to copyright anything of their own (and yes this is a complete fantasy) it is unlikely to impact books since they tend to take a significant amount of time whilst having fairly straightforward copyright ownership setups.