Posts by Matthew Poole
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Copyright limitations as they currently are - lifetime plus 50 years - seem good to me. Any more than that, & you tip over into extreme territory.
May I point out that, when I was a child, most of my olds were dying in their 60s? Now, it's 80s + and reasonable projections head into the early 100s for current generation of children. My grand nevvies & nieces.
None of whom will be allowed to derive from your works without risking being sued. Just, how? Useful, how? Are you really saying that you wouldn't be compelled to create unless your works were going to provide an income stream to several future generations of your family? You've been writing since before the last term extension! Obviously it didn't stop you back then.
If ACTA passes, we'll be going to life-plus-70 for sure. There won't be any wriggle room on that point. Similarly if the EU/US decide to extend terms again, it's almost certain that signatory parties will be obliged to bring their domestic legislation into line promptly. Vallenti may be dead, but I have no doubt that his suggestion of copyright terms of "Forever minus one day" is the ultimate goal of the maximalists who work for big media. Never happen, because the courts need something firm with which to work, but adding a couple of decades here and a couple of decades there is working for them thus far.
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Not meaning to nitpick, but life of the author plus 70/95 years is not perpetual.
It is for the purposes of nearly anyone alive at the time of creation. Hell, my parents hadn't even met when the Beatles were recording and I still very likely won't be alive when their work comes into the public domain.
You can't assume the copyright term will be further extended. The last extension was controversial and caused the US some issues with the EU and other countries.
The EU now has a life-plus-70 term, so it obviously wasn't that controversial. What was really controversial was the retroactive nature of the application, and there's already shit being caused in places in Europe that haven't kept Donald Duck under copyright by extending his protection beyond this year.
But the fact a song is somewhere on the interwebs doesn't amount to prima facie evidence the alleged infringer has copied. The more obscure the site the harder it will be for the plaintiff to show
So far it's never come up, to the best of my knowledge, but obscurity isn't much of a protection when you're talking about a global library with search tools like Google. Also, given the presumption of guilt, good luck proving that you weren't exposed to the song.
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Firstly, only the most rabid of copyright proponents (and I agree there are some) argue for perpetual copyright.
Scott, at this point in time life-plus-significant-percentages-of-the-average-lifespan is the ordinary copyright term. As I pointed out here, current limits ensure that the children of creators will be dead before their parents' works enter the public domain. That is, effectively, perpetual, and based on historic evidence it will be extended again in the near future to prevent Mickey Mouse entering the public domain.
If I write a song, only to find someone else wrote the same thing in the past, I won’t be infringing their copyright unless it can be shown that I copied that person’s song. If I come up with something independently it’s not copying.
In the internet age, that's a much harder argument to make. The assumption will be that any work that's been released onto the 'net has been encountered by a creator who's being sued for infringement, in the same way that residing in a market where an allegedly infringed song has received airtime will be considered to be prima facie proof against independent creation.
You have a point about copyright still only existing in the expression, not the ideas, but if you look at when that story was written it's not exactly an unreasonable prediction to have made that that fundamental would change.
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Me again. I know, I know, I should just let it die.
This fictional piece, though, is a very good explanation of why endlessly extending copyright terms is a very, very bad idea.
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Wait, I thought it was Aucklanders using up our dwindling oil stocks with their SUVs in hour long commutes?
The commute's down to an hour? Wow, they've done wonders with Remuera Road and College Hill, obviously.
I have to say, speaking of stereotypes about Auckland traffic, that it amuses me no end when Hamiltonians of my acquaintance (such as my family) deride the rush-hour up here when it can take 40 minutes or more to get between the northern and southern outskirts (Te Rapa to Glenview via Avalon Drive, for the curious) of Hamilton if you catch the wrong time of traffic. At least Auckland has the excuse of a million people!
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Still not following your logic. North Korea is subject to UN sanctions that, amongst other things, forbid it from exporting weapons. How is an investigation into an NZ-registered company leasing an aircraft that's been caught up in breaching sanctions "spook bias"? There's a legal obligation to look into it, and it will be the Police, not the SIS, doing the looking.
If you're referring to suggestions that there could be charges brought under the Terrorism Suppression Act, big whoop. Nations supplying weapons to entities that engage in terrorist behaviour is not at all unknown, and we're signatory to any number of conventions relating to international activities against terrorism. Again, there's a legal obligation.
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I don't understand what that has to do with "spooks bias", actually. A company registered in NZ leases a plane that gets caught carrying weapons from a state that's subject to UN sanctions, with a flight plan that has it landing in an area with an ongoing insurgency, and suddenly the investigation into that company is a reflection on our intelligence services? That particular leap says more about you than about them, I feel.
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The industry's resistance centres around general principles that copyright and DRM ought to be sacredly preserved at any cost
At least in the Wired article the author found sources that have big copyright saying, absolutely honestly, that their objection is to any lessening of copyright restrictions, with the obvious implication that the only acceptable movement is to further limit what is permissible.
One disturbing thing I've found about copyright is that the EU used the passage of the Berne Convention to revive dead copyrights. That's just wrong, on so many levels.
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the ones I've discussed it with (ANZ ones) think of it as I do - a social service for the small percentage of people who use the services of the RFOTB (in this country) and equivalent services overseas.
Exactly. It is a social service, and a recognition that life is quite shitty enough when you have vision problems without tossing capitalist fuckery into the mix.
As I understand the article, there's currently no money in publishing for the blind. The publishers appear to want to change that, though, and also don't want to set any kind of precedent of liberalising copyright no matter how minor the liberalisation may be. -
Islander, that makes it even worse. You're (and this is going to be one of those royal "you" situations that covers all authors, I suspect) contractually excluded from royalties, but the publishers want to make the blind pay to get these versions. Getting the shaft much?