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.

[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.

[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).

[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 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.

[andrewducker]

Does anyone still sell DRM'd music?

[calum]

I think various subscription services do - eg Napster, Kazaa. Nokia uses DRM on music purchased from their store for their phones, etc.

But point taken, I was thinking of copying copyrighted material in general not music.

Generally with music, if I copy some for someone I say "if you want to keep it, buy it. If you dont, delete it".

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I expect rental services to use DRM to prevent me from running off with the music (although you can use libSpotify to stream their music direct to MP3s with a little fiddling, if you want to).

[calum]

Copyright on Peter Pan has expired. Its just that Great Ormond Street have a specific exception in the Copyright Act that allows them a right to royalties. (not the other provisions of copyright).

I wonder if its the only work specifically listed in a copyright act, it has its own clause even! :)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, it's expired now, but they complained loudly about Lost Girls when it first appeared. Thankfully it's now past the point where they can do that either.

[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.

[calum]

They can still demand royalties on performance of the play, etc, though. The Copyright Act grants them that in perpetuity.

[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 ...

[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.

[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".)

[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.

[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.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[andrewducker]

Six albums, at somewhere around £8 each (if they're similarly priced to the average) means you've paid pretty-much exactly the same as you would do under a blanket licensing scheme. In fact, you've covered a whole household, so anyone else living with you is also covered!

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

... Although at the same time, I also think there need to be very broad and lenient rules for fair use.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

$5, but fair play. So, should my parents, who don't download or buy music in any way at all (seriously) also pay?

[andrewducker]

There are always issues of fairness and equality with licensing systems. Should I pay as much for my refuse to be collected as the people next door who have three children producing rubbish all the time? Well, it might be fairer to meter our rubbish, but it's cheaper and easier for everyone to have a standard charge.

Similarly there are people who don't watch any BBC shows, but still pay a television license, but it's considered worthwhile in general because it means that overall there's a great service that improves society.

Personally, I'd say that a blanket charge that means that music is a universally available good is worth it. Just being able to get all of those lawyers off doing something more socially useful would cheer me up. Obviously, not everyone is going to agree :->

[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.