We’ve got a leak of the European Commission's copyright plan

The European Commission has pedalled back from making radical changes to Europe’s copyright regulations, according to a leaked version of its draft Copyright Framework seen by The Register. It’s a draft that isn’t due until 9 December. The Commission rules out creating a new copyright title - “one title to rule them all” - …

[Vince Lewis 1]

Anything about software?

Any chance they've decided to sort out the corruption of software copyright caused by publishers being able to put ridiculous terms in their EULA's.

We desperately need proper legislation to stop this continued abuse from publishers.

Why can a business sell their oracle licenses yet consumers are trapped in life long contracts with a DRM snake oil producer unable to use 2 (or more) different games at the same time on different computers.

Consumers should have the same rights as big business when it come to their software.

[Grubby]

Hmm

No doubt the final version will be a million pages long, contradict itself many times and be so ambiguous that it's interpreted differently by every member state and therefor completely meaningless as a 'single european plan', which is the case with every other european plan.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hmm

> which is the case with every other european plan.

Funny how political unions between groups of the people with different languages and cultures tend to work that way. Especially if the said groups have had centuries/millennia to develop a national identify first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Futile cowards

All IP (Industrial Protectionism) is dogmatic magical thinking as far as mythical "social benefits" go, especially now that we have cheap and effectively invisible mass storage, and rapid data distribution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Futile cowards

Well one person or a very small group has to own everything or else we might risk being called dirty commies. Look at what FOSS is doing to IT. Madness.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Futile cowards

I installed communism on my computer, and now I upgrade in 5 year plans.

[Dr Stephen Jones]

Re: Futile cowards

Without strong copyright there would be no open source or free software. You would not be able to enforce a license.

Orlowski gets this but I am not sure the freetards do.

[asdf]

Re: Futile cowards

Keep thinking Orlowski gets it because he wants the public to have access to IP and not because of his own vested pocket book. That said decent content creation is hard and so his view is valid as well.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Futile cowards

Without strong copyright there would be no open source or free software. You would not be able to enforce a license.

I support limited IP protection myself, but this claim is implausible. There was open source and free (speech-sense, beer-sense, or both) software before the FOSS movement. A lot of it was published without any explicit license, and that continues (albeit more rarely) in the FOSS era. Of course, even a lot of commercial software was historically widely available as source in the pre-unbundling era; but besides that there was simply a lot of source written by individuals or small teams and passed around on BBSes and Usenet and similar forums.

Some people who publish open-source software simply don't care about license. Sometimes they explicitly put it in the public domain; sometimes they use a very liberal license merely because it's expected (so people will look for one) and/or because they don't trust the government to protect the public domain.

It does seem likely that we'd have a lot less open source and free software, because licensing has become a powerful ideological rallying point that has helped popularize FOSS among developers. And many of those developers choose licenses with significant restrictions, suggesting they'd be less likely to develop FOSS if those licenses weren't available. Licensing also provides grounds (even when they're contentious grounds, as with the GPL and copyleft) for potential users to determine whether they can legally make use of the software, and so removed one impediment to wider adoption and increased demand.

Saying there wouldn't be any free software without an IP protection regime is definitely dubious. But saying license hasn't contributed to the growth of FOSS would be equally suspect.

[Youngone]

Re: Futile cowards

Just wait until the TTIP happens, and see how that will trample all over whatever stupid IP rules are already in place.

If the full text is ever made public, which might never happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Harmonisation

They want ever closer political and financial Union, but can't even tackle harmonisation of copyright, hopeless

[asdf]

Re: Harmonisation

Well one could argue at least Disney doesn't get to set eternal copyright like in the US but the fair use thing is one rather sane thing about US copyright (so of course it was written many years ago). Patents on the other hand the US mostly serves as an example of how not to do it.

[Mark 85]

It does make one wonder how much of this confusion and contradictory rules that according to the article are in the draft, come from corporate meddling and.... umm... suggestion? Clearly, Google is being called out but we'll have to assume that the other players are in background.

[Christian Berger]

It's actually a sad thing how Europe has developed

The only interests which seem to have been considered were the ones of the banks and large companies.

I mean look at this show from 1973:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGYxwvzSG4A

This is a Dutch show master singing that borders are a "stupid idea"... only to list the countries this show is shown in live and delayed.

Today television is incredibly local. I know it may sound weird to you, but for example Doctor Who doesn't run on German TV. The only way we can watch it is via Bittorrent. I couldn't even subscribe to Sky, only to Sky Germany... which is mostly sports and some bad movies.

As mentioned above, it used to be much different. There was a time when there was true European TV. A time when you had Cartoon Network Europe transmitted in clear over the most popular European satellite position. There was a time when the Luxembourgian TV station Tango TV showed English language Simpsons episodes for all of Europe to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reminded of Harry Enfield's "Modern Wank" sketches when the subject of copyright arises.

It's a great analogy where some shyster buys up a load of old crap (for buttons) still protected by copyright where the original artist last received a penny on it about 20 years ago, then it is re-packaged and sold to gullible idiots for obscene amounts of money. Meanwhile shyster shop owner pockets all the cash; no idea why Getty Images pops into my mind.

I Saw You Coming

[Buster]

No shit Sherlock

The EU bods fall for some half baked idea dreamed up by Google glove puppets and their brainless meat bots that sounds like something the EU should be behind. EU bods start bleating on about Geoblocking as usual without a clue of how the AV markets work and how difficult it is to get a script made into a film and the economics of the multitude of national industries across Europe. EU Bod crap themselves on mass when they discover what a straw man Geoblocking is and how it would fuck up the EU wide film industries.

Cue next "crisis/problem of copyright"..........................

Not unlike the Orphan Works problem that was not so much a problem as a minor issue that could be used to mobilise anti copyright lobby groups. So the UK has an OW scheme which while has many problems (It is run by the IPO nuf said) it requires minimum effort by a prospective user and the payment of a nominal licence fee. It has allowed a number of publishers to cash in but as for the release of all the masses of pent up Orphan Works that will have such a massive impact on internet and mass culture SFA. This is because it is competing with free and anyway that was not the purpose because the purpose is to give the anti copyright walkers a sniff of blood.

[Tom -1]

Bloody Insanity

To me it all seems pretty simple.

We need strong copyright - we mustn't allow people to steal other people's work.

We need sensible rules - if I buy a book (and the right to read it) in Paris, I need to be able to take it with me and read it when I go from Paris to Seattle.

It's all as simple as that. Why can't these idiots understand it, and tell the corporations who are trying to prevent such simple rules from applying to get lost?

[Vince Lewis 1]

Re: Bloody Insanity

exactly. A lot of technology has been developed to control Digital media so it works more like traditional media in order to protect the publisher, yet it goes beyond that restricting users in ways that would be impractical or unethical in the physical world.