Murder in the Library of Congress The US Copyright Office has been given a brutal Silicon Valley-style sacking, the first time the Copyright Register has been dismissed in 119 years. Maria A Pallante was locked out of her computer on Friday, according to Billboard, on the instructions of her boss, a new Obama appointee, Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress …
Really, has the increase made any difference to your life? I do think 70 years is ridiculous and not put in place for the children or whatever, but for the publisher, but all it means is a 20 year delay before it's free to the world, and there's not a huge demand for novels from, say, 1913 right now.
So how many copies of Jack London's first editions do you own?
I own several first editions, albeit not first printings.
Without copyright protections, anyone can adulterate the underlying story... (e.g Call of the Wild) among other stories.
What you don't realize is that while the story may be easier to read and understand because you're changing the terminology and phraseology, you lose the historical context which can be very important when you read it.
I recently acquired an "E-Go Audio Book Library", a USB FlashDrive filled with "550 books". The company that sells the E-Go has taken works that have appeared in places like the Project Gutenberg public domain library, hired some wanker to read the text aloud into a microphone, & promptly copyrighted the new audio recording as their own. So even though Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was never penned for/by them, they now have a copyright hold on his work. All because they read it, recorded it, & sell the audio "transformation" of the original.
How does that protect the author? It doesn't. It can't. So any putz with a microphone & a collection of someone/anyone else's work can now make pure profit off "their" work (the reading of the book) & not pay the author (nor their heirs) a single red penny for the essential theft.
Don't believe me? Google the E-Go & take a look at their page. They offer electronic books, audio books, & other collections for sale, works that their only link to is that they have "transformed" such books from their original into e'books (Amazon Kindle, PDF, & Epub), audio books (mono versus stereo MP3 using a reader that makes constant mistakes and an audio engineer too lazy to edit out such mistakes), copyright the "new" versions, & then sell a 32GiB USB FlashDrive packed with them for ~$120 a pop.
They do nothing to the story, they're just reading it aloud & recording the awful results. And it's perfectly legal. They are "transforming" the work from one form to another & get to charge for the transformation.
It's shit like that which makes an authors blood boil. "I've just spent two years writing it, six months getting it published, & these bozos get to resell it without compensating me for my work!" It's enough to make a person start contemplating homicide with a sharp & pointy stick.
So yes it DOES hurt us. We pour our heart & soul into writing something that finaly starts to sell, only to find these "legal pirates" (Privateers?) gleefully giving us the shaft as they steal it right out from under our noses.
Fuck that, where's a stick...
That 20 years was the difference between Mickey Mouse staying in copyright, or going public domain. You can bet that before long there will be moves from those people who think the more copyright the better to extend that another few decades as part of a strategy of perpetual copyright extension to keep Mickey under copyright forever.
Considering how much money Disney has made recycling stories that were in the public domain due to reasonable copyright terms in the past, it is well past due that they start giving back to the public domain!
What I'd like to see is a limited term like the original 28 years. You can then renew for another 28 years for $1 million. You can then renew another 28 years for $1 billlion. You can then renew another 28 years for $1 trillion, and so on. If you write the great American novel, you and your decendents can afford that $1 million to keep it copyright for another 28 years. If it is truly epic like Star Wars or Harry Potter, you can even afford the $1 billion. If you want to go for $1 trillion, be my guest, it'll help pay down the national debt!
But for most works, that $1 million would be way too much to pay, and any earnings it was making would be over long before the initial 28 year term expired.
"That 20 years was the difference between Mickey Mouse staying in copyright, or going public domain."
The specific films can go public domain, but the character of Mickey Mouse would be protected by trademark, which is usually permanent. Unique and identifying characters can and often are registered for trademark since it protects their usage by others in original works.
+1 for the concept because it deals directly with an issue close to my heart. Believe it or not, Project Gutenberg is running out of books to transcribe. The result of extending copyright so that a few blockbusters continue to make money for the descendants of the original artist (or more commonly, the major corporation that now holds the copyright - do you really think there's a bloke at Disney whose job it is to go round to the houses of people descended from Disney animators once a year with a big bag of money and tell them 'Here you go - that's great grandad's royalties for the year'?) is that many many more obscure works, unpublished for the past 50+ years because they simply wouldn't make a return, cannot be released to the public domain because they're under copyright. PGs alternative, obviously, is to track down surviving descendants of the original author and get permission to publish, or prove that the work is orphaned. Easy enough to do for a volunteer free project who will naturally have access to the millions (or possibly billions) of dollars they would need to accomplish this.
So year by year the public domain gets smaller, not larger. If a book was last published 20 years ago, it's more than likely you can find a copy to transcribe. But 70 years ago? Or the proposed lifetime + 108 years? Of course there'll be a lot of rubbish in that pile of works, but the fact remains that we'll never know. The vast majority of books published in the past 75 years will be gone forever by the time they fall into the public domain, together with all the ideas contained within them.
And that's just bloody criminal. Just so we can preserve the profit on a cartoon mouse and 7 badly drawn dwarves.
That is the type of argument one would expect from a turnip, though turnips probably have more sense. Disney doesn't tack you every movement, it doesn't track your reading habits, it doesn't track your listening habits, it doesn't scan your emails, and yet you whine about a cartoon character. Numpty!
A book that that was published 20 years ago can be bought for pennies, and have you actually seen those Google transcribed books. The quality of many that I've seen has been atrocious.
The demand for most copyrighted material is concentrated in relatively short period of time, from a few months to a few years depending the type of work. By about 10 or 15 years there will be virtually no sales. It does not matter how well the sales were at there peak. The lengthy copyrights will only "benefit" a very small number of creators.
Huh?
There was an animated movie back in the '70's. (1978)
It takes a lot to bring a story to being made in to a movie.
Even if you forget about the logistics and technical challenges, you have to deal with a studio's appetite for risk. This is why you'll see a retread made before something new. Why? because you already have a built in demographic that you can track against.
As to Tolkien's work, he was a leader in terms of Fantasy.
Maybe it's not all a Google conspiracy but related to a new head making changes (unsurprisingly when a new person takes over they often make changes to personnel / posts). Look at most companies when a new CEO arrives, it's often major cull / change time in the organization.
Could be related to Carla Hayden actually being a librarian (bizarrely it's quite novel for library of congress librarian to actually be headed by a librarian, I think shes only about the second ever & first woman) - maybe some of her views on copyright may differ from Pallante (as lots of librarians are not copyright maximalists).
... pursuing a federal copyright claim is almost impossible for the individual. However, Pallante has also recommended that certain infringements could take place in the small claims court. IOW that the Grand Theft Copyright (Google) could be on the hook for millions of $1000 claims based on their penchant to purloin the work of others.
Over the years I've become less and less fond of intellectual property law in general, and the US Copyright and Patent systems in particular, as it has become more and more obvious that these laws protect the wealthy to the detriment of the weak. The structure set up in the US Constitution was supposed to protect the interests of individual inventors and artists, to allow them to continue to make the financial sacrifices necessary to keep inventing and creating things that benefit all of society. But with ownership of intellectual property passing into the hands of immortals (corporations), that original intent has been perverted to raise permanent barriers to innovation and creative expression.
Given that, I'm torn in this case because it's clear that Google, while purportedly trying to undermine strict enforcement of copyright, has been less than kind in their apparent suppression of free expression by the masses of individual, non-corporate, users of services like YouTube -- so much so that it's really time for them to change their motto from "Don't be evil" to "Stop being evil". Is there a chance Google, or any other big media company for that matter, could repent and redirect its efforts towards expanding freedom of expression? Not much, I fear. There's just too damn much money at stake. Which is not just infuriating, but sad.
>although I think Patents are completely unnecessary now.
Do you realise it can cost around £1.2bn or more to bring a new drug to market ?
We are nearly out of antibiotics that bacteria are not resistant to so it is of the utmost importance that patents are given to reward and recognise the effort and expense that delivery of new medicines requires otherwise you won't see any new drugs.
That 20 year patent is from proof of concept stage and not when (if at all) it reaches market, by the time it has gone through testing and regulatory you get about 10 years market exclusivity. Have a late stage failure and it can be around £500m or more flushed down the toilet. I'm not saying the pharma industry is perfect and patent abuse does occur but you need an incentive to lay out that much money.
As for rounded corner patents, fuck off Apple.
"That 20 year patent is from proof of concept stage and not when (if at all) it reaches market, by the time it has gone through testing and regulatory you get about 10 years market exclusivity. Have a late stage failure and it can be around £500m or more flushed down the toilet. I'm not saying the pharma industry is perfect and patent abuse does occur but you need an incentive to lay out that much money."
Different industries run at different paces. The pharmaceutical industry, as notes, runs glacially due to the bureaucracy involved in testing and proving medicines. Same for mechanical industries (especially large ones) where machines are acquired in cycles lasting a decade or more.
The electronics industry is the speedy one here, with duty cycles often being as short as a few years. So perhaps what's needed is acknowledgement of this and a splitting of patent terms based on industry: slow-moving industries can be kept to two or three decades while faster, less physical ones can reflect their breakneck nature and be limited to say 3-5 years.
> Do you realise it can cost around £1.2bn or more to bring a new drug to market ?
Yes. If nobody can afford the drug because you want 100k per patient (and you've milked the health insurance system dry) the economics are broken, with or without patent protection. You will never get prices like that for frontline antibiotics. You need to slash expenses and reverse your massive decline in productivity, or get out of the business and leave it to someone who can.
I've heard stories from big pharma... lavish spending, pipe dreams, gross mismanagement. Sounds as bad as Silicon Valley, if not worse.
>I've heard stories from big pharma.
I've worked there rather than heard it from my mate chalkey down the pub, you have absolutely no idea of the amount of regulations to be observed and complied with, have you ever been on the receiving end of a FDA inspection or had to file a NDA ?
>You need to slash expenses and reverse your massive decline in productivity, or get out of the business and leave it to someone who can.
How do you propose to do that, cut corners ?
I've been involved in tech transfer to cheaper offshore pharmaceutical manufacturing countries and you won't believe the shit and sheer incompetence I've had to deal with, think offshore call centres.
NCEs are even getting more expensive to develop as easy to deal with small molecule entities are much harder to come by and much more complex biologicals are the order of the day as that's actually how the human body works.
The next time you need a sterile injection of something, take the trouble to find out how it was discovered, developed, manufactured and quality assured, you'll appreciate what it takes to keep you alive and the effort to try and keep it safe as reasonably possible. I'm not saying it's perfect, what is ? There is always room for improvement but think on just exactly what is involved.
We're dealing with organic life here, not slabs of silicon or fart apps.
I don't know how, or if, the pharmaceutical industry can solve its problems. My point is, considering that patents are just another unwelcome legal/regulatory burden for many (most?) industries, even with high R&D costs, it's hard to believe they're a silver bullet for yours. Is it possible you'd be better off without them?
Cable TV companies like Comcast rip off consumers to the tune of $21B a year in cable box rental fees, and the the FCC tries to come up with an alternate plan. Cable TV companies object to the loss of an easy gravy train and propose a different way that they will control and be able to still rip off the consumer.
You do know that most of the cable TV companies are tied to major media PRODUCERS, too? Heck, all the major broadcast networks are simply parts of huge media conglomerates. Comcast owns NBCUniversal (major TV network and movie studio all in one), Disney owns ABC and ESPN, Viacom owns CBS, etc.
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If it makes copyright maximalists unhappy, I'm for it. Copyright is a social contract: for a limited time you get a better ability to market your works, and when it's over it's over and the works are part of the common culture. As it had been immediately for the 10,000 years before copyright was invented.
Eternal copyright breaks the deal, indulging the creator in the fantasy of eternal profits but delivering instead consignment to eternal anonymity amongst a global forgettery where newer works are more profitable but older works can be locked away forever until they are lost to memory to make room for the new. This is not delivering the social good - progress - that was promised in the deal. A deal is a deal.
Each year we are cheated out of ever more due us under the deal. We did not agree to this and we will not comply!
"Write what should not be forgotten." - Mother Teresa
Let's face it, the advances in technology have usurped the original concept, protection and recognition of the original author/artist/performer.
It is so easy to copy today that the idea is toast.
In order to protect and reward originators there needs to be a quick and easy way to pay, even a nominal sum, for the use. The original ITunes concept was that but was hobbled by the big music interests which led to widescale piracy, added to by torrent, etc.
The really unfortunate part of this story is that it is another example of how big business gets its way. I would have hoped that the Obama administration was above it, but obviously not
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