[zootm]

I think you probably all (certainly most) know how I feel on this matter, but I'm interested to see if we can have a debate here. There's a proposal in the UK at present on whether to extend the term of copyright (similarly to the Sonny Bono act in the US) to a longer term, and the ORG blog is carrying a transcript of a debate on the matter between the CEOs of two media companies of various types, and Lawrence Lessig, progressive copyright lawyer and chair of the Creative Commons organisation.

It's quite a lively discussion, not particularly well transcribed (hard to blame the transcriber, given the length!), but well worth a read. So here we go:

Do people believe the Sonny Bono act is justified?

Do people believe that a longer copyright term is beneficial to society?

Would perennial copyright ever be justified?

Is the current erosion of the Public Domain justified?

Were our American Pabookers relieved or offended the first time they found out that no works whatsoever can fall into the public domain until, at the earlier, 2048?

Is the proposal of the US's Eldred Act (or, for a British alternative, the 14+14 - forget about the actual numbers here - proposal) a better, or worse alternative? (for those not wanting to read that, the general idea is a shorter copyright term with the option of the creator to apply for extensions, so that works where the author is no longer actively profiting from their creations fall into the public domain, and can be freely amalgamated into culture without the author having to specifically gift their work to PD).

Copyright law reform is a much larger issue than this, but I'm trying to narrow it down to this one specific issue. I'd be interested to see what you people have to say, particularly free market supporters, as I believe that things like Sonny Bono are bad for the free market in general.

[Hugh]

I'm nowhere near informed enough to have formed an opinion on any of this. :/

[zootm]

Yeah, that's kinda a prevalent thing. The biggest problem is that this has a strong and fundamental effect on a lot of things that a lot of us hold dear, but precious few of us know very much about it at all.

[baafie_]

Copyright law was created to stimulate publication of creative material. Nowadays people tend to think that copyright law was created to allow authors to make a living, but that is an incorrect assumption. The idea was to increase the creative work available to the public. This is why the initial copyright terms were much shorter than they are today - because the public interest was not served by long copyright terms. But these days public opinion has swayed much in favour of the author's compensation. So much so, in fact, that the public interest is usually forgotten in debates concerning copyright.

The public interest is the only factor of importance in deciding on copyright terms. Is the public interest served by extending copyright? Most certainly not. Why? Because it limits the creative uses of works created long ago. Consider how influential creative works written a hundred years ago were. The most famous books and the most familiar melodies are older than 90 years. Over the years, those works have been used and reused in other works and libraries and record stores have been filled with derivatives.

So what's wrong with ensuring author's rights are defended for a longer time? Authors (or more likely, author's rights groups) will prevent those works from being used in new and inventive ways. Those works will stay locked away and the diversity of new works will be reduced. But the author's rights groups will get slightly richer, but more importantly: their competitors will be unable to use their works for even longer.

The internet has provided us with a new perspective. It has been shown that the free sharing of music has not stopped the growth of music sales. One might consider this surprising if one thinks of copyright as protecting author's interest. But it is not surprising if one considers that it is in the public interest to encourage wider publication -- the original idea behind copyright. Ultimately, wider publication will result in more compensation for the authors, even when that compensation is voluntary.

In light of these things, it is also not surprising that some economists have calculated that the ideal copyright term is less than ten years, from both the author's and the public's perspectives.

The ideas of free software, creative commons and filesharing have been demonstrated to increase, rather than decrease innovation and creativity. We must reduce, and not increase, copyright terms in the interest of the public good and of the authors, because the two are inseparable.

This post has been edited by baafie_: 26 January 2009 - 04:59 PM

[hestermofet]

baafie_, on Jan 26 2009, 10:33 AM, said:

The ideas of free software, creative commons and filesharing have been demonstrated to increase, rather than decrease innovation and creativity.

Not sure if that is the case. The free software scene is littered with dozens of apps that do the same thing. The creative commons idea is still in its infancy, so it's still too soon to discern trends from it.

[zootm]

hestermofet, on Jan 26 2009, 05:53 PM, said:

The free software scene is littered with dozens of apps that do the same thing.

I think that's more a sign of the low barrier to entry rather than any lack of innovation. It's got a lot of cruft but the shining examples often really do shine.

[hestermofet]

Not sure how open source lowers the barriers, versus proprietary source models. To create is free in either case, to distribute is what changes between the two models of development. I guess you could say open source spawned a lot of free development tools, but that's a bit of a stretch, because proprietary vendors such as Microsoft have always maintained very low cost versions of their development tools designed for use by students and the like.

[zootm]

hestermofet, on Jan 26 2009, 07:22 PM, said:

Not sure how open source lowers the barriers, versus proprietary source models. To create is free in either case, to distribute is what changes between the two models of development. I guess you could say open source spawned a lot of free development tools, but that's a bit of a stretch, because proprietary vendors such as Microsoft have always maintained very low cost versions of their development tools designed for use by students and the like.

The internet has played a role in this as well, but effectively open source fosters communication and collaboration; people put together websites to help people work together and the features that these sites provide are available freely and are beneficial to any software project. As such it is actually now actively easier to work on an open source project, even on your own, than to work locally (actually that's semi-reversed recently but it's still at least roughly the same for more benefit).

Generally speaking, programmers program in the their spare time (well, a lot of us do), but the promise of collaboration makes that more fulfilling, and furthermore whereas previously one's local projects might be considered a little useless, people now frequently put them up online as open source in case anyone sees the same problem and feels like taking the solution. And the other issue that has to be considered is that there's a lot of duplicated functionality in the open source "world" for the same reason that there's a lot of duplicated functionality in the closed source world - there's many solutions to any given problem, and these solutions can and will compete for the betterment of all of them. The interesting thing with open source is, however, that genuine advantages can be swapped and shared, without the barriers of legality or of money. The jump-start Apple got from taking KHTML to make WebKit, and the subsequent benefits to the open source community when their development work was shared back, are a great example of mutual benefit in open source.

Being a software engineer by trade probably makes these trends more pronounced to me. And the closed source world has a lot going for it too - a lot of innovation is driven by the profits of such companies, and it's sometimes hard to see how some of the things done there could be otherwise completed. Is closed source the reason for that success though? I'm not so sure.

[marvinbarcelona]

I do think that the copyright laws should be changed, not dramatically, but they should be changed. I believe the simplest way would be that copyright remains for 10 years after the artists death. This way the artist receives a living from their work, but the descendants don't.

That's my 2p