UK's brazen copyright land grab sneaked into Enterprise Bill A huge expansion of bureaucratic power over UK copyright has been smuggled quietly into draft legislation – giving civil servants the ability to sweep away copyright protection by statutory instrument rather than primary legislation. The new amendments also allow new agencies to be established to permit the licensing of …
"Anything else and I'll see you in court..."
Sadly this is a question of you and who's army? The larger corporations have multi-million pound legal budgets, and they will stymey your chances of justice by simpling by delaying. You'll run out of cash long before they do, and I know of cases where big corporations have offered juicy contracts to law firms to persuade them to drop even non-win no fee work.
Not to mention that the UK government are specifically seeking to remove your rights, because their mates don't want you to have those rights. It would be really nice to see the British government act on behalf of the resident British population for once and stop this nonsense, but that would be a first, wouldn't it?
The larger corporations have multi-million pound legal budgets, and they will stymey your chances of justice by simpling by delaying.
That's nothing. Wait till they use your photo after copying it from some obscure image blog you use. 6 months later you'll upload it to another site or try to use it in some kind of creative work and you'll be hit with a take-down notice and/or sued for copyright infringement. Just like happens to Indy musicians now without the aid of legislation.
That's what really scares me!
I wanted to show the kids some sort of sci-fi/fantasy epic on the goggle box tonight, so I found this lovely artistic work called "Avengers" on something called a pirate bay. I performed a diligent search and found that this is an orphaned work (as far as I can tell) - there were no attributions where I found the content, at any rate.
Anyways, since this abandoned piece of work is going missed by the general populace, I've run off a couple of thousand on DVD, selling them for £2 a pop in the car park of my local. I'm collecting 20p per DVD to give to the copyright agency, so its all good right?
was the discussion whereby it was established that such idiocy represents the will of the people?"
That's easy to answer Neil.
It was in a very public consultation (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/consult-2011-copyright) that ran from December to March of this year. I took part in it, didn't you?
http://www.ktetch.co.uk/2012/03/consultation-response-to-uk-ipo.html is my response.
Even better, it was the FIRST consultation by the UK IPO that had a REQUIREMENT that claims be backed by evidence, and that evidence include facts, figures and methodologies, so that the quality of said evidence could be judged.
If the rights to copyright do not extend to the content of a web site as a whole, then what would inhibit corrupt ISPs and spyware merchants like Phorm from processing the content of third party communications..?
And even claiming they were 'unable' to do a diligent search (despite knowing the source of the communication, and knowing they were duplicating and exploiting copyright protected material without licence).
Unlike RIPA, Copyright was always the insurmountable hurdle for network spyware like Phorm... because it wasn't in the hands of malleable policemen and corrupt politicians.
I can see one area of innovation arising from this - namely, the rise of systems for steganographically encoding owner/authorship information into images or recordings. Which will then be countered by systems designed specifically to remove such data.
Meanwhile, individual rights get stomped on some more by the same bastards getting rich from selling X-Factor-type tat to numpties. Same as ever, then.
I'm going to upload an episode of "Top Gear" - I have no idea who owns the copyright* but I tried to find out so I will assume its an orphaned work.
*obviously bullshit
So what's the difference between this and the BBC nicking my photos off flickr and sticking them all over their news website using the same excuse?
Maybe a good precautionary measure would be to watermark all photos with the text "Daily Mail readers are all Paedophiles and the BBC kill kittens" and at least then, if they do nick the pics, they look stupid.
Perhaps instead of watermarks we could hide trojans in our images? Only display thumbnails on your website, these will then link to the infected full size image. Place a large disclaimer on every page along the lines of "by downloading these images you consent to the installation of fibbs_really_really_necessary_image_viewer.exe on your system". Email actual clients clean copies of the image whilst sitting back and waiting for your inevitable backdoor into News Corp.
No, those statements aren't libellous or slanderous. (They're sufficiently vague that no one person could credibly stand up in court and say "This is aimed at me!", which is one of the hurdles you have to clear to bring a libel action.) If you want to deface your images with slogans like that, no-one will stop you.
On the other hand, there's a saying about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
This is such a crock of shit!
I take photos and sell them and as I understand it if one of my shots gets used the company using it has no obligation to find me and pay me my due, unlike current law where they have to make a reasonable effort to pay me for my creative work.
Teams of lawyers at Disney have all the resources to get what's owed them, solo photographers will have to waste time making sure they don't get get ripped off by scumbags using their shots and not giving two shits about paying them!
I take photos and sell them and as I understand it if one of my shots gets used the company using it has no obligation to find me and pay me my due, unlike current law where they have to make a reasonable effort to pay me for my creative work.
So just how many haystacks do you expect someone who accepts a bogus statement made by a third party and taken in good faith that your needle is within the public domain, to have to search through and at what expense to them ?
I'm not talking about a large corporate customer here either. Possibly a one-man band local historian who wants to publish a book on local history which might contain your photo, who genuinely wants to find you and tries hard but can't, and who probably won't make much of a profit if any from a few hundred copies sold, and where your photo constitutes less than 0.2 % of the proposed publication's value, but really doesn't have money to spend in court cases. Under current law this book can't be profitably published unless the small litigation risk can be acceptably insured against.
It's reasonable to premise the concept of a commercial market in copyright work when zillions of examples exist on the basis of owners being findable and value being limited otherwise. If governments want to facilitate markets, in preference to imagining that these theoretical but for the most part unenforceable rights should never be tampered with, then some kind of searchable copyright registry is needed to fix this problem.
The problem is, that when we look through the data registration and processing requirements for such a registry, including that efforts carried out by an indentified party to find your work within it should be stored as evidence within a future case which you might want to bring against them, this makes it increasingly improbable that this job can be done by the private sector representing the interests of the sellers alone, as opposed to a public sector database similar to the land registry which is intended to balance the interests of purchasers and sellers.
If it is not worth the local historians time tracking down the creator of an image then the image must have little perceived worth to the historian and is therefore inconsequential to the book. If, on the other hand, the image is vital to the book then the resources spent locating the creator will still be less than the perceived value of the image and it is therefore a worthwhile endeavour. It's the sort of value based judgement that gets made all the time in a commercial situation.
This doesn't mean though that copyright is holding back human knowledge (if you could even say that about not being able to publish one photo). If the historian is writing purely for educational, non-commercial purposes and the image, as you say, only makes up 0.2% of the book, then the historian is entitled to use it under fair dealing (fair use in the US).
There have been so many times I have seen people go along with the Creative Commons stuff until they find some nasty evil company wants to use the picture. I imagine the same gang will be up in arms when they see how this really pans out (though presumably in reality this ends up at the ECJ, anyway).
CC-BY-NC is the (rather sensible, I thought) Australian solution.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-egov-ig/2012Jul/0006.html
It seems to me the sensible part is thinking a move ahead. There is no Judge either in the UK, Australia nor most jurisdictions who will not accept de facto sovereignty of the sovereign. Copyright Holders forget that they are protected by Sovereigns not the Sovereigns themselves. When it comes time for the Royal Navy to drag an Aircraft Carrier into Court to "prove" they have them, then the Courts have lost all legitimacy.
"Tory ministers met Google chiefs 23 times - Conservative ministers have held meetings with executives from Google once a month on average since the General Election, it has been disclosed."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9276468/Tory-ministers-met-Google-chiefs-23-times.html
The plan is coming to fruition.
A discussion on copyright and nobody has yet suggested that everybody in the creative industries should work for free because they're not real jobs anyway? Come on... at least tell me we should go back to the blissful utopia that existed before copyright. I do so want to go beg the local nobleman for his patronage.
There will be no end to Intellectual Property disputes until the concept of Intellectual Currency arises.
The common wisdom of self-interest leads to cognitive dissonance.
1. Copyrighted documents, pictures, etc. have no existential value - they are all entropy and no enthalpy, with immutable value out of time.
2. Copyrighted documents, pictures, etc. are all enthalpy, no entropy, with immutable duplication rights out of time.
The Web lacks (queue the Fanboi Flame) any democratic principle to resolve this issue "fairly". Certainly, information handling has methods, but, others have put it better ...
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John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich: "Egad sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox." John Wilkes: "That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
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"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My point, simply: Anything you or Google "discover" on the Web is Intellectual Currency, not Intellectual Property. It is the difference between property rights and fishing rights.
Sorry, Andrew, I know how you Brits wish we Americans would just go away. But you've had the Jubilee, and we're having Woodie Guthrie's 100th Birthday Party this Saturday (Bastille Day, for irony fans)
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As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm
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Anyone who has tried to get copyright clearance for any work knows that the present nineteenth century system is not working. Creatives spend more time on trying to get copyright clearance for the works than actually creating the new works. Frequently the cost of copyright clearance destroys the commercial viability of making the new work. The Shakespearian solution "Kill all the lawyers" won't work so this is a reasonable compromise.
AK
Will the creative darlings be quite so happy when it is their works that are declared "orphan"?
Perhaps the feckless, lazy b*****ds who want to use other people's output without a "by your leave" should instead accept that (just as they would want protection of their rights) the producers of original images are entitled to protection. If that's expensive or impossible to obtain, then just move along, and produce something genuinely original that isn't so derivative as to potentially infringe other people's rights.
"Creatives spend more time on trying to get copyright clearance for the works than actually creating the new works. Frequently the cost of copyright clearance destroys the commercial viability of making the new work"
let me fix that for you:
Creatives spend more time on trying to get copyright clearance for the works than actually creating the DERIVATIVE works. Frequently the cost of copyright clearance destroys the commercial viability of making the DERIVATIVE work.
Genuinely NEW works created by creatives do NOT require any form of copyright clearance but if you want to use my work in yours you DO need to ask and if your use is commercial then there will be a fee.
Not in any way difficult or overly time consuming, really, is it ?
"If the new laws manage to make it onto the statute books it won't matter"
It will, it will. Because with all the masses of time freed up, the "creatives" might be able to spend more time dressing properly, and shaving. So we won't have the f*******s turning up for business meetings in jeans, suit jacket, wing collar shirt, goatee beard, trillby, and spectacles last seen on Groucho Marx. As recently seen pitching to my outfit's marketing director.
So there you have a silver lining to the big grey cloud that is the loss of copyright for us little people.
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