I’m sure that many of them never were, or were never re-registered way back when, especially before 1964.
And here’s another thing. Why is my sitting here in California and accessing a web site in Europe any different than me flying there and accessing it locally? I’m not ‘buying’ the material from here. Why is one source of acquisition infringement, and the other not?
]]>This includes a great paper by Rufus Pollock on the economic value of the public domain, something we also attempt to tackle in chapter 2 of the final report.
Please read it and let us know your comments if you have the opportunity.
]]>I read the news article you refer to. Unlike you, Professor, I read to the end. He very clearly laments the absence of economic evidence for the public domain, and public domain benefits of shorter terms, such as sampling.
You owe him an apology – if your ego allows it.
]]>And Sharon: yes, that’s the way to email me.
]]>FAIR COMMERCIAL COPYRIGHT PROPOSAL:
1. Protection of an artist’s or author’s rights, including the right to receiving income derived from their work(s), for their lifetime.
2. Should the creator of a work have no immediate family who are dependents on his or her income (e.g. young children or an elderly spouse), then copyright should expire upon their death, with the work becoming public domain.
3. Should the creator of a work die and leave behind immediate family who are *entirely or almost entirely dependent* on the creator’s income, and not capable of beginning to generate their own income (i.e. get a job), then copyright should be extended beyond the creator’s death for a fair and reasonable period (e.g. until any dependent children turn 21, or in the case of say, an author’s elderly widow, or mentally retarded child for the remainder of her/his life).
4. If the creators of works see fit to sell or otherwise transfer their rights to all or part of the income deriving from their work to another party (e.g. to a publishing house, other person or company), the exclusive right of the other party (or their legal successors) to receive income deriving from the work should continue until either (a) the creator of the work dies, leaving no dependents (as in point 2); or (b) the creator’s dependent children come of age, or any elderly or incapacitated dependent dies (as in point 3).
Greedy, parasitic, culturally sterile companies should no longer be allowed to feast exclusively on the creativity of the long-dead, and stifle derivative works. Assuming we haven’t destroyed the planet, in 300 years’ time will there be huge corporations which produce nothing new, simply living off copyrights preserved from the 20th Century? The way things are going in the USA & elsewhere this may not be as silly as it sounds.
I took children to a theme park recently, and found that I knew all the cartoon characters (which were old even when I was a child). Sylvester, Bugs Bunny, etc. Many of these characters are more than half a century old: where was the new stuff, I wondered? I was expecting a generation gap and found none: it has been filled with a congealed mass of legal and creative constipation.
“Consume our plastic product”
Bugs Bunny seemed to say
“Have a happy jolly time,
just like yesterday.”
And yesterday it was the same
and same tomorrow too.
Don’t check out that indie stuff
as *we’re* not selling it to you.
Our marketing is simple,
our marketing is clean,
not confused by creativity:
just buy from our Machine.
Hmm.. sound a bit like the fast food, pharmaceutical, & other industries too…?
]]>Even if it is true that ex post facto laws are only considered to be those that take away rights, the wording of the copyright clause seems, at least to me, to imply that there is some sort of trade-off with longer copyright terms, or at least the people who wrote the Constitution thought so.
]]>NB e-mail addresses are spam-protected on this site.
]]>