On 27 December 2011 09:42, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
The Government has recently announced a consultation on about changes to copyright law. This follows a review of the existing arrangements by Professor Hargreaves over the summer.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/pro-policy/consult/consult-live/consult-2011-copyright...
Do people feel we should respond?
With a lute perhaps? Fiddling around the edges while copyright burns. The whole orphan works issue. Or the abolition of copyright for the little guy to give it is proper name. Its simply a predictable result of the insanely long copyright terms we have at present. The rest is much the same 172 pages of fiddling with little to no actual significance.
(Or to reverse the question, can anyone see good reasons for us *not* to respond? Just to be clear, charities are quite allowed to do things like this so long as lobbying doesn't become their main purpose...)
Better ways to spend our time mostly. So far the only thing I've found that might be of any real interest to us is the proposed Copyright Notice Service. Since it would the power to clarify the law in certain areas it seems unlikely that it would be in our interests to see such a body to come into existence. At the present time we benefit from grey areas.
The other thing we need to defend against is the Extended Collective Licensing stuff. We need to make sure that CC-BY-SA and the GPL and similar are recognised as opt outs and that attempts by any societies to claim in such cases should be classified as fraud and prosecuted as such.
The rest is mostly relevant to libraries, archives and schools. Not us.