The Lonely Pirate MEP's Holocaust copyright stunt backfires A tasteless attempt to recruit Holocaust victim Anne Frank to the case of weakening European copyright protection has backfired on the EU's only Pirate Party MP, Julia Reda. On WIPO’s World IP Day last week, copyfighter Reda tweeted that she was “trying to read Anne Frank’s Diary” but couldn’t because of copyright terms. …
It's not Google, Facebook, Youtube etc vs the creator or artist.
Julia Reda is fighting the wrong war. Most creative types are simply treated as employees. The Corporation gets the patents, design rights, copyright.
The USA Radio pays less to music than European as they only pay composer /lyric copyrights, not performance rights to the "band".
A book author only gets 5% to 10% royalty. Or nothing other than wage if a hired writer.
The "war" is between the new Corporates and traditional publishers (Disney, Hollywood, Marvel, DC, Big Six Book publishers, record labels etc). The extensions of copyrights mostly benefit traditional corporates, not authors, though they get something.
Google (Youtube) wants to give nothing.
Amazon at least in cutting out the Publishers, do want to give authors decent royalty, but they want to be the ONLY publisher (then how much will people get?). KDP select is evil.
Engineers and Programmers creating stuff should get same rights as fiction authors, painters, musicians and composers, who may get paid as well as a royalty.
We need better designed Berne Convention copyright, better enforced copyright, encompassing all creative works. Not longer, not secret TTIP, DCMA, not weakened to suit Advertising driven parasites like Google (YouTube), Facebook, Pinterest (maybe they are just a parasite).
Not to create publisher monopolies (Amazon owns IMDB, Goodreads, CreateSpace, Book depositary and more and aim is to completely control book publishing)
Nor sites persuading people to give away their rights such as Flickr, most people don't understand CC.
Wikipedia can't simply be walking over copyright either.
So at the minute Copyright benefits one group of companies (the ones that have directly exploited the creative workers) and are being fought by a newer group who don't want to give as musch, or anything to the real creators.
The anti-copyright lobby are hoodwinked by big corporates like Google. Let's figure how to compensate the real creators better.
"A book author only gets 5% to 10% royalty. Or nothing other than wage if a hired writer."
Why should a hired write get anything more than a wage? This is exacty what a hired engineer or software developer gets. The author gets a guaranteed secure income the company that pays them takes the risk and rewards of selling the result. This is governed by the terms of the employement contract. Why on earth would this not be the case?
5% to 10% does not sound bad to me given that all of the overheads are taken care of by someone else who probably took on risk by paying an advance and paid for the promotions, marketing and distribution of the book.
Right.
I can see that between the author's apparent point of view and that of the unfortunate MEP's we seem to have covered both extremes of the spectrum of opinion on this issue.
What I personally would prefer, really, is something more towards the middle.
By far still the best work I read on the subject remains "Free Culture". Strongly recommended reading for those seeking a better perspective on things and any who would rather avoid reinventing any number of wheels.
This post has been deleted by its author
The author of this article on El Reg just assumes it's still in copyright.
Clearly (based on reviewing the related news) that assumption is at least arguable.
The root cause of such controversy is the sharp bifurcation between In and Out of copyright. If there was some method (I have no idea either) to have a smooth transition (a middle ground) then there would be less arguing.
Sharp arbitrary bifurcation is the root cause of much human suffering.
How would the creation of a enormous grey area the size of planet Earth between Public Domain and In Copyright simplify things, or create legal certainty? Perhaps you need to think this through.
The ebook costs £1.99. It's in libraries. It's not inaccessible.
Andrew, the cost (and beneficiary) of the (DRM, rented) Kindle edition is irrelevant, the whole of the story is around copyright terms.
I know you have a dog in this race as a journalist, but even taking that into account, you can see the bigger problem. Copyright as a concept was created to give creative people an incentive to carry on creating new works. Extension of copyright term by any length is not going to give Anne Frank any more incentive to keep creating, so the purpose has been hijacked.
Apparently you don't care, and that's fine. I do, and that's fine. And other people not caring doesn't mean they oughtn't - slavery continued because people didn't care. It stopped when people did start caring.
This month we celebrate the 400th anniversry of the death of Shakespeare. Anyone, anywhere can celebrate however they please, because that work is public domain - we do not need to incentivise William Shakespeare to keep on writing, so this works to the global benefit.
Disney and other maximalists, however, would have us extend copyright terms ad infinitum. They are quite happy to raid the public domain for stories though, and stand on the shoulders of giants. They want it both ways.
In fact, as a professional user of language, you'd be truly fucked if the maximalists had their way, so many linguistic flourishes and tropes would be unavailable.
Lovely little bootnote at the end there. I love the implication "If you don't like copyright then you're a dictator!!"
Authoritarian regimes are bad (this headline brought to you by the Obvious Times), but regimes that play the role of lapdog to big business are no better. As I have repeatedly said (when actually allowed to say anything at all by the mods), copyright is perfectly fine and acceptable if it's fair on all sides.
It currently is not even remotely fair on all sides because it is de facto infinite for any work from Steamboat Willy on. Whenever SBW's copyright term approaches expiration, the rules governing how long copyright lasts get extended. We were promised copyright wouldn't be forever, but in practice it is.
"I love the implication "If you don't like copyright then you're a dictator!!"
Er, no: RTFA. Authoritarian regimes don't like the individual asserting their rights. Particularly their rights over their cultural works. That's just a fact.
"It currently is not even remotely fair on all sides because it is de facto infinite for any work from Steamboat Willy on."
Copyright comment bingo: the first person to mention DIsney or Mickey Mouse wins the office sweepstake. Well, a) the system currently isn't fair to creators (as you would discover if you tried to assert your legal rights against Facebook, Google or Twitter) and b) millions of works fall out of copyright every year. But don't let evidence get in your way. You must do whatever you need to to keep up the irrational rage against copyright.
In another post grey areas were mentioned. They're already here, they're called life + x years. Instead of the money going to the creator in those x years, more often than not it goes to a corporate behemoth such as Disney (bingo!) than anyone else.
Any copyright after death doesn't strengthen the rights of the individual. Whilst Google and Facebook don't strengthen the rights of the individual, neither does Disney. If you want to be a creator and Disney is publishing, you'd better create something that the princess factory can make or your work won't be published and you'd better sign over your rights to Disney.
If copyright is to be strengthened, then it can't be just slapping more years on in 2023 when Mickey Mouse falls out of copyright, it's got to be done giving individual creators more legal tools to keep their own copyright and to go after all corporate behemoths, not just Silly Valley ones.
"Er, no: RTFA. Authoritarian regimes don't like the individual asserting their rights."
Er No. You read your own article! Which "individual", pray tell, is in possession of the copyright to Anne Frank's diary?
Authoritarian regimes have no problem with corporations asserting their rights, being as they are a de facto arm of the state under those conditions.
Raging against copyright in perpetuity isn't irrational. conversely, gifting products that under infinite copyright, essentially have infinite value is as bloody irrational as it gets.
and b) millions of works fall out of copyright every year. But don't let evidence get in your way. "
...and not forgetting that when the EU copyright harmonising began 20 years ago, here in the UK millions of out of copyright works which we were all freely using suddenly were back in copyright for a further 10-20 years.
I initially wasn't even going to dignify this was a response, but....
Your article stopped short of "Not liking copyright == FASCIST!" by the narrowest of narrow margins, presumably so you could get all self-righteous when somebody called you out on it. Sorry buddy, you don't get to use language like the kind you used in your article and then get all uppity that somebody took exception to it.
Then you utterly dismiss the Steamboat Willy Permanent Copyright complaint, even though it's a perfectly valid complaint. All the people who had creative input on that film is now long dead. How does it benefit anybody other than the Mouse House that the copyright on that film keeps getting extended? As for hundreds of works falling out of copyright every year, I wonder what proportion of those copyrights are individuals versus corporations? I'd wager it's a fairly safe bet that there aren't an awful lot of corporate copyrights being allowed to expire. Hell, it took a protracted court battle to get the copyright on Happy Birthday To You overturned, for crying out loud.
As for Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al abusing the copyrights of individuals, what is it that they have in common with Disney? Could it be that they're big corporations? Just a thought!
Copyright is heavily biased in favour of the wealthy and powerful, those with legal teams who can fight for every concession and lobbying teams who can butter up lawmakers for stacking the deck even more in their favour. Meanwhile I don't get to enjoy any of the benefits that strong copyright is supposed to afford me. I don't get an extension on my holiday snaps or creative writing exercises, if I use a big corporation's IP in one of my own projects I'm subject to being sued into enough debt that my grandkids would be born owing, yet in the reverse situation I'm expected to lube up and take it.
Copyright does not protect individuals. If it did, Facebook, Google, Twitter et al wouldn't be able to abuse it so egregiously. You even admit it yourself that they do it (And I know that because I RTFA). It doesn't even protect creators. It's not creators who are issuing an endless stream of bogus DMCAs on YouTube, it's "IP enforcement companies" that are doing that. Copyright as currently implemented simply allows those with big legal budgets to bolster their bottom line.
Finally you try to paint me as having some sort of "irrational rage" against copyright. That's pretty rich coming from someone who accused me of not RTFA. As I keep saying, I'm all for copyright as long as it's fair and equitable, and does what it was intended to do (protect the works of a creator for a limited period in exchange for the work becoming public domain when the copyright expires). It currently does nothing of the sort.
Ironically I suspect we basically want the same thing, for people who create things to get their dues. But you fetishise copyright so blindly that you won't even engage with somebody who thinks that copyright reform is best served by limiting it and levelling the playing field rather than making it even stronger than it already is. The current system does not work and needs to be heavily reformed.
"Authoritarian regimes don't like the individual asserting their rights. Particularly their rights over their cultural works. That's just a fact."
You don't seem to grasp the substance of your own argument.
Culture is shared expression and behaviour. Authoritarian regimes undoubtedly seek to control people's ability to access and express their culture, but copyright does the same thing. They aren't opposing forces, they are the same restrictions, enacted through slightly different means.
Part of the issue here is silly copyright extension laws thaty are applied retrospectively. So can we just decide that work is covered soley by the copyright law as of it's first creation/publication? This would prevent the oddities where thing become public domain, the law changes and they're covered by copyright again. We could also rule that the copyright law to be applied is that of the country of origin, as that is what the creator can expect.
Ain't that the truth. To the line or be rejected. All because I suggested that perhaps based on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/22/ten_years_for_filesharing/ a persecution complex is not entirely unjustified.
Now, will I be rejected for having a link to a Reg article in a Reg comment?
No, you illustrate the copyfighter's persecution complex I describe perfectly.
The 10 year penalty recommended by the Government after a consultation applies only to industrial scale pirates, bringing the law It doesn't apply to home users as the IPO has clarified.
see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/29/slacktivism_robo_responses_shredded/
So to recap. Your persecution complex has led you to a) misunderstand the law because you need to feel you are persecuted by copyright; b) then get even angrier leading to more feelings of rejection, persecution and paranoia. It's a vicious circle only you can break.
You could try being less angry and persecuted. Just a thought.
Dear Andrew,
Contrary to your limited view of me through the medium of the internet I am neither angry nor especially persecuted. I have a much more nuanced view of copyright than either yourself or the pirate party and am open to persuasion from either side. However, what I see is governments pandering to corporations so that individual copyright is apparently optional but individuals breaking corporate copyright are to be hammered by the law.
Your view that only industrial infringers will be hit is naive in the extreme. I seem to recall people with different coloured ties telling us RIPA would only be used for terrorism and then another tie mob asking for people's internet access to be revoked should they download a few films or songs. I also recall the same corporations trying to ban cassette recorders and VHS recorders as they would completely ruin the music and film and TV industry and to make saving a TV show for your own personal viewing illegal. They have managed to ruin companies like Aereo and block various technology startups through legislation and regulation to preserve an oligopoly.
But sure, paint me as a freetard, ignore the points and attack the strawman. Ignore history and trust to the benevolence of courts, politicians, police and corporations.
But just for fun, could you please inform us what "industrial scale" means? I can find no definition and since the music biz seemed to go after uploaders with claims for damages in the hundreds of thousands, and if that ain't "industrial scale" what is, doesn't that actually put regular people who share copyrighted material in the crosshairs of a 10 year sentence? If not, why not?
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/jul/27/filesharing-music-industry
@scrubber
I'm not sure why you think repeating something false and misleading makes your point any less false or misleading. Eg: "Your view that only industrial infringers will be hit is naive in the extreme."
It is regrettable you were misled by the article. But a large part of that is because you actively go out of your way to be misled, because you require the persecution complex.
eg, "They have managed to ruin companies like Aereo"
Seriously? Aereo was a short-lived engineering hack around a loophole in the law. It would not have been created otherwise. It failed, and deservedly, IMHO. It makes you sad that a startup designed to rip people off failed, but few people outside the loonysphere of copyright slacktivism would agree with you.
You really won't be able to understand complex copyright politics (and there's lots to fix here) unless you let go of your persecution complex. Yes, huge corporations rip people off - but you're blind to the ripoff.
Do RTFA. It's exactly the mentality I'm describing:
"Instead of adjusting their politics to the reality of Facebook and Google, the activists have become trapped down an intellectual cul-de-sac, and have to adjust reality to their politics."
That's what you're doing: you won't let go of your big political idea, so you've become highly selective with reality. Over and over again. I wonder if some sort of intervention is needed?
As the law has not been written, you do not know what it actually contains.
And as we know from history laws that do not make it 100% clear have been used to prosecute people that apparently the law maker did not mean to include!.
And back to your mickey mouse comment, it should be in the public domain it has been artificially removed due to corporate bribing (lobbying? call it what you want it is corruption of democracy) of politicians at the expense of the public.
Copyright time limits are ridiculous and not really been done for the benefit of individuals it has been done for corporate shills .
It's earlier than the filesharing story and it's about something completely different.
Just as RIPA was used by councils to spy on people over stuff like rubbish collection and school catchment areas, it will be argued that P2P sharing over thousands of nodes is industrial scale. Not everybody who agrees with that is angry or persecuted.
I have nothing against purchasing something that I am interested in. I am choosing to part with my hard earned money based on my appraisal of the price and subjective decision that it is worth said price. I am quite happy to wait till something has been out longer and drops down to a value I find matches my criteria. This MEP is just a muppet. She made a decision not to buy it, ergo she cannot complain that she is unable to read it! Unfortunately silliness like this only strengthens the case of DRM enthusiasts because it makes the other side look daft.
What I do have a problem with, however, is after having purchased something not being able to use it in the way I see fit due to crazy DRM measures that only cause problems for people who pay money for a product. If I buy a a book I should be able to use it on any platform I wish, be that kindle, nook, pc (thankfully using calibre to do a conversion I can, but it should be available without 3rd party tools). What would be even nicer is to be able to buy a physical copy and it include an electronic copy. Games are still the worst offenders, most of the time a new game comes out, those who buy it up front have to deal with draconian DRM measures that in many instances make the game unplayable, those who grab a pirate copy with the DRM stripped out get to play it with significantly less issues.
Along with fossil fuels, are the root of all evil.
</sarcasm>
Copyright terms could be shorter in some cases, or longer in others (I prefer shorter) but either way it doesn't really matter. If you can't protect your work when you publish it on the interwebs from being scraped or pirated, then copyright does not really exist. See the tree falling in a forest problem.
Andrew freetards like Ms.Reda will only get this when they lose a major F/OSS case. Then, miraculously, they will be in favour of strong copyright that you can defend without calling on an expensive lawyer.
Freetards also can't see that the only thing that protects licenses like the GPL is exactly the copyright law. Without it, any code under a license like the GPL could be copied for any purpose, and there would be no way to enforce the license. Even is Stallman likes to talk about "copyleft", but it's copyright forbidding to copy and use that code outside the license.
Ms. Reda is just a grandson of German anarchism - Germans often like the extremes - which always had many followers in German, probably as a reaction to the rigid culture of the country. Now that the contents they like but don't want to pay for can be easily copied, the enemy is copyright. It's the same childish approach, they want it all, and they want it now.
Well the AF fonds appears to want Otto Frank's editing to take the copy right onwards ,
tps://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/11/17/the-strange-copyright-case-of-anne-franks-diary/
And if I recall correctly there's another editor waiting in the wings with another 'refresh' of her diary, not they want to retain permanent control of the diary (did I mention the money and jobs at stake?) oh dear me no.
Mickey Mouse any one?
"Mickey Mouse any one?"
This is very different to the Mickey Mouse case because the version which goes out of copyright will remain out of copyright in the same way that Charles Dickens original works are out of copyright but derivative works using the same storylines or characters may not be. Likewise I can make and sell as many copies of the original sheet music of a Beethoven sonata or my own performance as I like but I can't copy a current copyrighted recorded performance of the same sonata or even someone else's more recent sheet music arrangement.
Why do I need copyright law to exist to know it's moral to give to a charitable foundation? That's the insulting bit.
I can read a book and still pay my dues. I know that's baffling to a lot of people. The idea that I somehow wouldn't be able to do that if it weren't for some intellectual monetary law - the JPEG standard instead of the gold standard - is ridiculous. For one thing it gives readers of second-hand books a moral high ground they don't deserve, for another it profanely encourages artists and audiences to believe in an unenforceable, exploitative empty promise that'll only get worse as Moore's Law advances. I know Ron Paul wants to abolish the fiat dollar and introduce private competing currencies. But not even a crackpot such as him would expect a private JPEG currency to be a viable business model for any bank. And for a reason.
Yet we're supposed to take such an absurdity at face value for its ability to protect artists! It's rather like those folk who walk up to me and ask "how on Earth are you as an atheist meant to know right from wrong if you don't have a God to lay down rules for you?" They don't even realise how arrogant they're being. Some of us can take labour rights seriously, thank you very much. We also have solutions to free-rider problems - assurance contracts that is - to protect artist rights. We also understand that moral rights can be covered under trademark, which does the trick enough.
Copyright shouldn't just be abolished, it should be refused by any artist who seriously thinks about the protection of fruits of labour. Asking for the money before the work is done and not after - like tickets for gigs, subscriptions, pre-orders, crowdfunding (with refunds for no-shows) - is the only way to guarantee the right price for a work and protect everybody.
Not some overly complicated, dysfunctional, anti-Occams-Razor law that can be subject to massive corruption just through copy and paste. Is it any wonder why artists are so easily exploited? They can't even call the police, they have to call lawyers. It's a farce.
Authoritarian regimes hate copyright... For state socialist and fascist regimes [copyright] is an anathema: the state should decide... Pirates owe more to fascism than they are prepared to admit.
Saying pirates owe anything to anyone misses the point of piracy and implies they would feel inclined to give something back in exchange for their plundered booty. They are equally at home looting the state's galleons as those of a private company. Arrr!
What? Not those kind of pirates?
Oh, never mind.
This isn't just some random Harlequin novel. This is history. This is a work that's already older than the typical human lifespan these days. It covers a very important bit of HISTORY. It's intrinsically valuable beyond whatever pure market value it might have. In American terms, it's far more like Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech. Trying to treat it like a Beatles song really completely misses the point.
I would have hoped that Brits would have a better sense of history.
I write about the problems with digital copyright every day. People like the protections that copyright gives them (it's an automatic right - no registration) and they want the system to work well. The "abolition of copyright" movement never even got off the ground. Modern technology allows people to create and share their work more easily but the legal protections haven't kept pace.
A few narcissistic nutters want to weaken the protections, and cling desperately to any evidence they can find that it doesn't work. It's sad they still think that it's 1995. Term length is one of the few "unfairnesses" left. But we are in Comical Ali territory here.
Copyright used to exist to grant a limited monopoly to the author to encourage them to write more so increasing human knowledge. As dead authors don't continue to write books they have no need of copyright hence in my world the copyright expires with the author. I have no qualms at all about pirating the works of dead authors.
Of course if someone starts writing again after dying I will have to reconsider this.
"Of course if someone starts writing again after dying I will have to reconsider this."
Upvoted for that. It made oi larf.
However, there are people out their who claim dead people can write. Mediums who claim to do auto-somthingorother while in a trance and "possessed" by dead people. (ICBA to look it up)
Quote: "Authoritarian regimes hate copyright, which is an Enlightenment idea that the individual should own and control their work. For state socialist and fascist regimes this is an anathema: the state should decide; the collective knows best. Pirates owe more to fascism than they are prepared to admit."
That's the point, isn't it. That INDIVIDUALS should own and control their work. That was the intent of the Statute of Anne. But it wasn't governments that owned copyright at that time, it was a CORPORATION, the London Company of Stationers. And we're moving back to that. Now it's corporations that own the copyrights. If an individual attempts to assert their copyright, they get buried in the costs of defending that copyright, because making the process expensive is to the benefit of the corporations.
So we've gone from a system that had no public domain and everything was copyrighted (pre Statute of Anne), to a system that had a growing public domain because copyrights expired, explicitly forbade perpetual copyrights, and broke the back of the copyright monopoly, to the current system where the public domain hasn't really grown since 1923, we have perpetual copyright again due to ever-increasing copyright terms, and YET AGAIN fucking corporations control just about everything. Including recent laws about "works for hire" that make corporations ascendant again.
Copyright today benefits large corporations, not the copyright owner. CopyRIGHT was meant to GRANT the right to copy, reuse, and generally play with previous works. CopyRIGHT was meant to encourage authors to create by granting a LIMITED ownership before their work entered the public domain. Today? We're almost back to the pre Statute of Anne days, and the London Company of Stationers, after 300 years of fighting, has almost won back everything they had prior to that original copyRIGHT legislation. Except it's not copyRIGHT any more. It's copyNEVER.
In conclusion:
Those who oppose modern copynever laws aren't the ones who benefit from a fascist mindset. Modern copynever laws are the real meat and potatoes of the fascist/corporatist governments. It's the facists/corporatists who benefit from these copynever laws, and those who defend them are either part of that system, or want to be.
For Andrew Orlowski, of all people, to accuse his opponents of having a persecution complex is truly the outside of enough.
Andrew, if you really feel that "in reality, copyright lasts about five seconds", then what exactly is your beef? Let's cut copyright terms already, since according to you they make no difference anyway.
If you want to strengthen the individual content creator's rights - not only against Google and Facebook, although I agree that those are in crying need of a hard kicking - but also against the old-school publishers, from Disney to El Reg, then that's a cause I can get right behind. But somehow, you always seem to have Googbook in your sights, you don't acknowledge the just-as-manifest evils of Sony, Pearson, News International, the BBC, Time Warner, Marvel, and all the other monstrous regimes out there.
You'll never weaken Google without weakening all of the above as well. That would be a good thing, but for some reason you shy away from arguing for it.
You need to look in the mirror, veti.
" Let's cut copyright terms already, since according to you they make no difference anyway."
If getting copyright to work properly, it probably wouldn't be in the top ten issues to address. Only a few loony obsessives care, who are desperate to avoid reality.
I think a few of the high profile figures have so much of their identity invested in this they don't want to lose face.
No one cares about copyright term lengths. People care about problems with copyright that are real and immediate - like not getting paid, or being able to walk out of the room with a fair deal. Or access to justice.
The loonysphere clings on to term length because it needs to feel aggrieved, and it needs to avoid reality - It's a bit of driftwood for a drowning man.
I think the ever-lengthening terms are just a symptom of a greater, probably intractable problem: the problem being no individual right or protection is really safe against a bully strong enough to either smother you (you bring a gun,they bring Uzis) or change the rules (you sue, they bribe the judges and buy the elections). Screw the laws, I have enough power to change or ignore them. What now?
"Authoritarian regimes hate copyright, which is an Enlightenment idea that the individual should own and control their work. For state socialist and fascist regimes this is an anathema: the state should decide; the collective knows best. Pirates owe more to fascism than they are prepared to admit."
Ah, a good old fashioned false dichotomy.
It might suit the screed to present the choice as one between state ownership and individual ownership, but, the anti-copyright position is about a completely separate third option - no ownership.
If somebody can't conceive of a situation other than one where absolutely everything is classed as somebody's property, it's not surprising when they reach bizarre conclusions.
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