[Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Todd Allen]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:42 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 May 2012 20:30, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 14 years is a fine place to start.  Are there any existing campaigns
>> pushing for it?  S.
>
>
> Now that I'm looking, I can't find any campaigns as such!
>
> I thought the Pirate Parties asked for 14 years, but I'm wrong: the
> Swedish party says five years,[1] the Uppsala Declaration[2] suggests
> local Pirate Parties can agree on a demanded term themselves.
>
> Creative Commons offers the Founders' Copyright, 14 years:
> https://creativecommons.org/%20projects/founderscopyright
>
> O'Reilly is offering works under 14 yearsa all rights reserved, thence
> CC-by: http://oreilly.com/pub/pr/1042
>
>
> [1] http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english
> [2] http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/european_pirate_platform_2009
>
> - d.
>
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The term of copyrights isn't even the only problem, though it probably
is the biggest one. Another issue is the switchover from requested to
automatic copyright. This means that even for works for which the
author doesn't care at all about the copyright, you'd still have to
either seek them out and ask permission, or take the chance. For
orphaned works, that's a major problem, since the user of an orphan
work may find someone coming out of the blue to sue him someday. For
orphaned works whose authorship is unknown, that's an even more
significant issue-if you don't know who wrote it, you don't even know
when the "+70" starts, and so such works may remain unusable in
copyright limbo for far longer than they are actually in copyright.

If we're going to advocate for sane copyright law, I'd propose the following:

-Copyright must be for a reasonable term. 14 years would be the
outside maximum. It was pretty onerous to write, publish, and
distribute a work in the Founders' day compared to ours, so I'd say we
should probably have a shorter term, maybe 3+3 or 5+5. That would give
us a rich public domain with a lot of content that's still relevant to
the present day, while still allowing authors a reasonable exclusivity
period. The vast majority of works by 10 years have either made money
or never will, and we should write the law for normal cases, not edge
cases.
-To get the initial term of copyright, the author should be explicitly
required to put a clear copyright notice on the work (or, when
infeasible, otherwise clearly indicate that the content is copyrighted
and when the copyright began). Saying "If you want it, you have to ask
for it" is not exactly an onerous requirement.
-To get the extended protection period, a nominal per-work fee should
be charged. This would force large organizations, especially, to
carefully consider whether it's worth keeping a given work in
copyright for the extension period, or whether they'd rather have it
fall into the public domain early.
-Copyrights must be registered with the Library of Congress (or
similar national organization) within 90 days of first publication of
the copyrighted work. This process should be made as easily as
possible (probably online), but even as such, would discourage people
and organizations from indiscriminately slapping copyright on
everything, since they then have to register and keep track of it.
-No orphan works. If the author (or author's agent) cannot be
contacted at any of the contacts listed with the LoC or national
equivalent within 60 days of someone requesting permission trying to,
the copyright is forfeited and the work goes immediately and
irrevocably into the public domain.
-Clarify that when a work is copyrighted, its move into the public
domain is -fixed-, and that no future legislation can change the PD
date of existing works.
-Currently copyrighted work will gain protection for the maximum
possible term under the new law (6 or 10 years) from passage date of
the law, or the remainder of the existing copyright, whichever is
-shorter-. Work that would have fallen into the public domain but for
the passage of extension laws falls immediately to the public domain.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.