O O Ø O O O O
Opt-In(sane)
I can hear you now. “Kjell has had a blog for almost a week and no intellectual property rants yet?” Indeed, I have been lax. But you see, I knew I had the pode. It takes precedence, you see.
Kahle v. Ashcroft is an important appeal, and an issue that has been bugging me for a long, long time.
With all the bickering about how long Copyright should (or should not) be extended, we, the keepers of the public domain, took one for the proverbial team. When the copyright process changed from an opt-in-publication-date-based system to an opt-out-author-death one, the public domain lost more than just a few years worth of titles. For starters, economic viability no longer enters into the copyright equation at all. Every doodle, blog entry, and IM made in the (Berne Convention’s) world has exactly the same copyright term as Mickey Mouse, or Peter Pan. To make matters worse, the shift from a registration-based system to an automatic one, and the move from publication date (plus whatever) to author’s death (plus whatever) effectively makes it impossible to clear a copyright even if you have the inclination.
Case in point: I recently checked the copyright status of an old issue of Phrack. A visit to the web site (now that yesterday’s slashdotting is over) refers me to some kind of copynow declaration:
The contents of all material available on this Internet site are copyrighted by Phrack Inc. unless otherwise indicated.
That’s nice, but seriously: who exactly is Phrack Inc.? This is a magazine populated entirely by authors living under pseudonyms. Is there any chance that in 95 years (or author’s death + 50 years) I am going to be able to verify the copyright status of a particular phile?
Of course not. With no copyright registration, there is little to no chance that a particular author’s death will go recorded. Effectively, there is no way to determine when a particular Phrack Phile will pass into the public domain.
The same goes for your average blog entry. Blogs are transient. Authorship information isn’t necessarily easy to come by. In 70 years, how am I supposed to track down the copyright status of my favourite blog posting (which I have carefully preserved on some archaic medium like, ugh, paper)? I can’t. That blog entry, like the phrack philes and 99% of everything else being written today will pass into an unclearable copyright quagmire, and finally obscurity, without ever making it to the public domain.
That, quite frankly, sucks.
The solution is to put registration back into the equation. With an author-death-plus-whatever scenario, there’s really no other way to keep track. Opt-in (and optional renewals) would be nice, too, but at the bare minimum, our copyright system should give us the ability to determine exactly when a work falls out of copyright, and into the public domain.
How do you do that?
Registration, and renewals from publication date. Say, 20 year terms, with two freebie extensions if you kick-off. That would just about match the existing system (in Canada), if you took your revenue generating piece of IP to the max. For everything else, and for works without registration, 20 years from publication date. Period.
Why care? There’s no money in the public domain, right?
Right. Just ask Cinderella. Or Snow White. Or Dracula. They never made money for anybody. And it’s all about the money, right?
kj
January 25, 2005
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