Copyright Poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1808738]

Comments

[laplor.livejournal.com]

Hah! I didn't realize that I was the first to respond, so was surprised that 100% of respondents agreed with me.

Perhaps I shouldn't survey-respond before the third cup of coffee.

I feel that copying music for a friend or two so that they can fall in love with it and then buy it is okay. I guess my line in the sand is whether the intent is to increase awareness of the artist, or to replace their album sales.

[calum]

I guess i feel similarly on copying music for friends. If there was a way to actually lend a friend a digital copy, Id do that and not copy it. But since DRM has generally been a force for evil, its not going to convince

[andrewducker]

I'd be very happy with a copyright term that started off at 20 years, and then charged exponentially increasing amounts to renew every ten years after that, so that non-profitable works entered the public domain very quickly, and profitable ones could be held onto for longer.

I'm also in favour of compulsory licensing for music - along with a compulsory charge on all broadband connections that covers what the music industry made in the UK this year. We seem to have the technology to tell what music is being downloaded the most, so it shouldn't be that hard to split out the cash in a proportionate manner. According to some very approximate maths, there were about 180m singles and 110m albums sold last year, which works out to about £1bn. There are 24m-ish households in the UK, 75% of which have broadband, so that's 18m paying £1bn between them, or £50/year, or £4/month. Which strikes me as excellent value for not having to worry about personal music copyright ever again.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

I would fight vehemently against this. It assumes that everyone downloads music, and at the same volumes - which I don't think is true or fair. It's like splitting the bill evenly at a restaurant between a bunch of people when one of them has ordered champagne. Not only that, but then the MPAA will want in, and the book publishers, and ugh.

I haven't downloaded any music illegally over the last year, and have bought maybe six albums, all from the affordable, DRM-free Amazon MP3 store. My take on piracy has always been that it's alright to turn a blind eye if it doesn't represent a loss in revenue - but as soon as you can afford it and don't bother, it gets into far murkier territory for me.

[khoth.livejournal.com]

I chose SEWIWEIC for the same thing - I like the idea of an inital term that you have to pay increasing amounts to renew.

[fearmeforiampink]

For me, I just quite like 20 years; it means that you get what feels like a reasonable amount of time to make money on it, but it enters the public domain whilst still somewhat relevant. I'd also lean towards it being pretty much everything at 20 years, otherwise it gets down into quibbling edge cases, and perhaps even stuff being sold as different categories to get longer copyrights.

I could live with a longer copyright (30-50 years) if after 20 you could freely make derivative works that were appreciably different to the original.

I'm slightly questioning of the general theme of 'longer for people, shorter for corporations' that seems to be coming across from the comments here; I mostly view this from the 'people making interesting stuff based on it' and 'people having access to cool things' point of view, rather than 'Corporations are bad!'. Plus, the dividing line would get rather questionable.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Except that a large proportion of the population consume essentially no music at all -- they bought some music when they were teenagers and that serves them very well thank you. My mother is in this group, for example.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an interested party where copyright is concerned, as I make my living writing.
As a result, I feel there needs to be some level of protection for the creator -- writing words/music, painting/drawing etc require an investment of time and money, and we often aren't paid much upfront (if at all). Most book advances are far smaller than people think -- in the £2k -£5k range -- which, given a book can take years to write, is a tiny hourly rate. And some books get no advances at all. I've written 8 so far. None were paid for before I started, so they were all 'on spec' to some degree. Two were for no money at all. Two have earned me less than £200 [not a typo]. The others between them have, excluding the advances for 2 of them, earned me maybe £5k over the last 20 years. Do the sums. It's not a lot of money, but it's some, and it's helped me fund subsequent books. Most writers don't make enough to live on, but if the books bring in nothing at all, and you're not in a job which requires you to write them, after a while the investment of time can become unsustainable.
Most writers have day jobs and write in what spare time they have. Royalty rates run at between 4 and 14%, usually -- that's net, and after any advance has been earned out. Before the introduction of copyright, a writer would write a book, and hope for a reasonable payment from a publisher for it -- and then often see that publisher make much, much more on that book than its writer. Lucky writers had patrons who supported them -- or interfered, demanded and controlled. Characters and ideas could be taken up by others who then made money on them. It wasn't an ideal situation.
We still don't have an ideal situation. But writers and musicians and artists and so on have to eat, pay rent, pay bills. Copyright gives some income, and some recognition.
I *am* opposed to endless copyright extensions where the beneficiary is not a direct heir but a large company. It seems to me that, with a few exceptions, copyright should cover the originator for their lifetime, which a grace period for dependants -- which is why I ticked 20 years above. I'm opposed to the situation where a very valuable product is owned by a huge rich corporation and endlessly kept copyrighted. So I'd like to see copyright restricted so that businesses can't do this with books and so on. (Patents, I understand, have different rules.) I'd exempt charities -- I have no problem with a charity getting regular income from a book or whatever (as with Peter Pan and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital).

[andrewducker]

I don't mind people being allowed to sell their copyrights to corporations, but I wouldn't want that to extend the copyright on them.

My problem with Peter Pan is that I really do feel that by now it should have been well and truly in the public domain so that other people can do their own versions.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

(Not a writer but my boyfriend is a photographer so I hear his rants on the subject often enough.)

I was going to type a long comment but but then read yours and would just like to say ditto although I went for more than 20 years after death. Thanks for mentioning Peter Pan.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Agree with all of this, except for Great Ormond Street Hospital. Specific exemptions are never good, and undermine what should be a fair market for intellectual property.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

SEWIWEIC. I'm not certain all media should have the same copyright period... some, such as newspaper articles, would be ludicrously overextended at 20 years but others, such as books, would be horribly underprotected with a 5 year copyright. Though I'd never, ever support the "life plus" range bands given how prone they are to abuse... and, besides, what did the grandkids have to do with writing a novel anyway?

As for dubbing for friends, I think that should be left up to the artist(s) to determine if they're okay with bootlegging. Some bands obviously are and have benefited from it, while other bands aren't.

-- Steve was okay with the old quarter-century mark for books, and wonders how anybody got fooled into extending it past the century mark as seems to be the case today.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

SEWIWEIC should be a checkbox, not a radio button.

And I'd favour different copyright terms for different types of creation. Notably, shorter fixed-length terms for items produced by a corporation or for corporate-owned copyrights. Much shorter terms for software (max 30 years; possibly max 15 years). And less than (life plus 70) for written work; either a long fixed term (50 or 70 years) or life plus a shorter term (maybe life 20 years).

And I'd really prefer an entirely different remuneration model. But we seem to be locked into the current one with no obvious way out ...

[andrewducker]

It would seem odd to me if you had control over your books for 50 years, but could only sell on 20 years worth (for example). Not that the world isn't full of odd things, of course.

[fub.livejournal.com]

Here in the Netherlands, copying music for personal use is allowed. There is a 'tax' on blank CDs (as there was on cassette tapes) which should get redistributed to the artists whose work is being copied. However, the recipient should make the copy himself -- making a copy for your friends is illegal. (This is why downloading music is legal in the Netherlands -- you're just making a copy for personal use.)
Unfortunately, the 'collective management organisations' that are responsible for redistributing the money are shockingly corrupt -- just like the rest of the copyright organisations. So very little money ever makes its way to the actual artists.

I would like a compulsory licensing model for music and other content, wherein a content creator has to license his content for a set price. In that way, copyright can not be used to force others out of a certain creative space. The creator gets paid, culture gets enriched -- and that should be the goal of any copyright legislation.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Also it's an unfair tax on those who buy media for backing up their own data or indeed to produce their own music.

[simont]

I find I can't in good conscience answer the "Copyright should" questions, because it's a morally tricky concept. I would certainly say that there should, morally[1], be some means of arranging that people are rewarded for creating (good) content of the types currently considered copyrightable, and that there should, tactically[2], be incentives for people to create such content. Whether copyright should (in either sense) be the thing in question is rather contingent on what other options might turn out to be feasible, and although most of the alternative options I've heard proposed look rather unconvincing, it's hard to be really sure either way without experiments involving an entire control society. (And perhaps it's also to do with what you're used to – maybe if we had adopted some other method in the first place, anyone who now proposed copyright as an alternative would be found similarly unconvincing.)

So the question as a whole has a moral part which is easy, and a sociological part which is intractably hard, and hence I mostly think "dunno".

Supposing that we do keep copyright, I'm not at all sure there's a single answer to its optimal duration across all kinds of thing. I'd be very tempted to constrain copyright on computer games to 5 or 10 years, on the basis that they'll be obsolete by then anyway in terms of the big money; on the other hand, I can't find it in me to see it as hugely excessive that the author of a book currently gets to retain copyright for life plus 70. Software other than games, music, films, and so on, who knows? Perhaps something else again. And as well as depending on the kind of thing, I think it might also reasonably depend on individual vs corporate creation. It already does, of course ('life plus 70' doesn't even make sense when the creator is a company, because they don't necessarily die), but I'm inclined to wonder if it would be fun to make the difference even greater, by reducing corporate copyright quite drastically but perhaps not mucking about too much with the rights of individuals. (This would reduce the incentive for companies to milk their existing cash cows again and again and again and instead motivate them to come up with more cool new stuff.)

I'm vaguely inclined to think that copyright is behaving at its worst when it actually prevents things from happening, rather than simply arranging that the right people make money out of them when they do. I have a hard time seeing how that benefits anyone, in general, although I'm sure there are a few corner cases here and there.

I suppose there's also the question of whether I'd turn round and be more supportive of copyright in its aspect as a stick with which to enforce free-software licences like the GPL, rather than in its aspect as a lever with which to move money around. I'm not sure about that one; perhaps if software copyright was less vicious in the first place, the GPL wouldn't have been quite so necessary. Or perhaps it would.

[1] (Of course "this should morally be the case" is just code for a particular flavour of "I personally approve of this", and should not be taken as describing an objective cosmic truth or even attempting to do so.)

[2] (And by "this should tactically be the case" I mean "it is in society's selfish interests to arrange it".)

[andrewducker]

How would derivative works fare? Ten years after Doom came out, would anyone be allowed to make Doom II?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I think there should be an exception if you make three prequels that destroy the childhood memories of your fans. In that case you should lose copyright so that someone who actually understands your creation can make good movies in that universe.

[andrewducker]

I liked Dave Sim's approach to it, which was that anyone was free to make their own Cerebus comics, and if they were better than his then that would be awesome.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I felt perfectly justified in illegally downloading copies of all the albums I own on tape.

[drplokta]

Numerous caveats:

50 year copyright seems about right, but it should require a token renewal fee every five years to keep it current, with a public register of works for which the renewal fee has been paid. If it's more than five years old and it's not on the register, then it's out of copyright. Creators should retain moral rights over their works from copyright expiry to death to prevent them from being used in ways that they find objectionable (with safeguards to prevent them from finding all ways that don't make them money to be objectionable).

Licenses of copyright for periods of longer than five years should be unenforceable, so that creators can always get their rights back after a reasonable time. Creators should always have the right to distribute their own works non-commercially, and to authorise others to redistribute them on the same basis, regardless of any contracts they may have signed, and even against the wishes of their co-creators.

If I make something available via BitTorrent, I'm not copying it. It's the receiver who makes the copy, not the originator. Given better wording on the question, it still has to be legal to copy data without limit for non-commercial purposes (regardless of scale; there's no such thing as copying "on a commercial scale"), because enforcing the alternative requires a repressive police state (and there should be no laws on the books that aren't/can't be enforced, of course).

[andrewducker]

I don't really care about people's moral rights, in that sense, but I know many people do.

How does work for hire fit in with your second paragraph?

And I'd argue that making a copy of the bits on your hard drive, placing them in a packet, and sending said packet to someone else is you copying it. They copy said bits into a file at the other end as well, of course, but that's not a violation of the "Making Available" right that seems to be what people get in trouble for (and why the rights holders go after the sharers, not the downloaders).

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I went for author’s life plus 50 or 70 years. For corporately created works I’d opt for 50 or 70 years. I’m erring on the side of generosity for rights holders. I could settle for 30 or 40 years but I wouldn’t be happy with 100.*

I’m currently watching corporately created works that would be out of copyright if the copyright term were set to 40 years and where some of the people who worked on it are still alive. It doesn’t strike me as unreasonable that part of one’s life’s work should still be economically valuable whilst one is still alive.

I don’t have a problem with creators of work being able to hand on a pension to their heirs. If I build up a shop with a great brand I can pass that on. I can pass on a factory. I can pass on a stack load of cash.


I do feel that if I own a physical copy of a work I should be able to access it in other formats. I figure I’ve already paid for the creation and most of the distribution of the work already. I don’t pay for dinner and then pay again to see the kitchen porter do the washing up.

I definitely think that we could do with a good global sit down and a think about what we want Intellectual Property law to do for the individuals and groups who create the ideas and for society more widely.

It was clear to me when I wrote my law degree dissertation on the IP of brand protection that our IP law was incoherent and not really keeping pace with technology. Over the last 20 years this have become more noticeable.

*Of course if I were Homer’s heir and successor I might well be arguing for life plus 5,000 years and the spend my time shouting loudly about how derivative everything was and demanding a royalty cheque.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Measures based on creator death are terrible. How would you define creator?

Is Madonna the creator of a Madonna song? Is it all the writers, one of them, the producer, the musicians, someone at the record label? Who creates a film? If an editor has a hand in the final form of a book and it would not have been published without them, who created it?

[andrewducker]

For music it gets complicated I believe, in that you have the writers of the music, the writers of the lyrics, and the performers of the particular recording.

Movie people assign all copyright, in my understanding, to the company.

But you'll note that my vote wasn't about date of death at all.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I feel guilty copying music for friends who I know will listen to it a lot but never buy it. I don't feel guilty copying music for friends who will then buy it in some format, whether digital or physical.

That said, I buy a lot of music much of it physically so am not a hep modern consumer.

I think that people's views on copyright, let alone the law, are too skewed towards the past (witness people talking about creators, as if things that can be copyrighted all have a sole creator like books can be said to) and need to change. It doesn't help that laws on copyright are basically an unenforceable joke sometimes based on outright lies which are not seen by many consumers as having an impact on them.

The disinction between corporate and individual copyright makes me uncomfortable too. I can see that people don't want corporations taking up copyright that was once with an individual and milking it, but being wary of that should not mean something original created by a company and copyrighted by them is less valid than something created by an individual.

[andrewducker]

I feel that people should be allowed to sell their copyright to a company if they want to, and basically get paid up front while the company takes the risk/profits. Banning that would feel draconian to me.

And I'm very glad that Spotify lets me legally try music without being charged by the song.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

My own view is that *non-commercial* copying should be legal for everyone (and possibly use a bandwidth tax to help compensate creators, but that's only a possible - I've yet to see any evidence that torrenting actually reduces sales), but that the right to create commercial copies or derivative works should be something like the greater of author's lifetime or twenty years.

[ckd]

Life of the creator or 20 years, whichever is longer. (20 years for corporate authors/WFH.)

This protects moral rights and takes care of the Stieg Larsson sort of situation (also potentially providing for minor children) without the continuing extension of copyright except by also continuing the extension of authors' lives. (Since I have many friends who are authors, I am very interested in their lives being extended.)

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd agree about providing support dependent children etc.

A basic 20 years after death should be fine for almost all cases, possibly with the option of extending it specifically if the money is going directly to pay for the care of a severely disabled dependent who needs more than 20 years of care.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I think I could live with 20 years or death of the creator, whichever is longer. I take Kari's arguments, but the expected post-20 year return of new work created now is so close to zero for 99% of creators that creators are locking up *their right to spark off other people's ideas* -- a very valuable thing -- for a supposed benefit that is almost always minuscule in practice.

Consider designers by comparison. I think we can say that they are just as creative as novelists or photographers, right? But the effective protection for their designs is minimal -- in the US, for much design, it doesn't exist at all. EU has slightly more. But still, designers work and earn a living -- and incorporate lots of ideas from other designers.

Photography is pretty well a dead career anyway. Yes, there will still be some art photographers. But photography journalism is almost gone already, portraits will be much diminished, stock is being subsumed by Google and Flickr.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

And as for creator death - it's straighforward enough; if the work is solely created, then that person; if the work is jointly created, then nobody gets it.

[usmu.livejournal.com]

I ticked the no to download if you own a copy, not because you shouldn't be able to have a digital copy, that's fine by me, but to stop people from making digital copies available to the masses who don't. If you own something and want a digital copy, make one yourself. Supporting people who don't support your ideas about copyright seems a bit counterproductive to me.