(no subject)
I've been musing on a recent post of jducoeur's, regarding a Swedish political party's attempts to limit copyright to five years (and more specifically Richard Stallman's not terribly convincing complaints about it). Now, I think the copyright situation we are in is bad: large, bullying companies hold on to the agglutinations of purchased copyrights for remarkably long time periods, and use their legal strength to make a mockery of fair use whenever they feel like it. It seems like this does not serve the original creators well, nor the consumers, nor later creators that have to watch their steps with exceeding care to avoid these intellectual property behemoths. And there is something tempting about the five year notion, yet I don't really like the idea of someone who makes a thing losing their ownership of it while they are still alive to care.*
The corporate acquisition of those rights is tricky, too, because it is often very beneficial for musicians to have labels, authors to have publishers, and directors to have studios. It's possible to do without them, but at least in principle they are a good thing. And in order for them to make large-scale reproduction of creators' creations an effective business, they need to secure some rights on, well, copying. But we often see the case where, say, a comic book author does not have any rights at all to the work he did twenty years ago, because the copyright is held by the publisher.
With these problems in mind, I wonder whether the following might work better for everyone. Or at least, everyone who isn't DC Comics: while you are alive, you retain copyright on your work. Your ownership of it would be non-transferable. You can license the work as you like, but we enforce a short maximum term on any such license. This is where I think five years becomes an appealing period again. If I record an album for Apple Records, and it's a big hit, or even a quite prolonged sleeper success, they do quite a good bit of business in the first five years exclusively selling it. And when five years is up, we can renegotiate. The big juicy upfront profit window is still theirthere for middleman organizations, but they don't get to sell your property to someone who sells it to someone who sues people who put it up on YouTube decades after you die. You can sell someone an option on the film rights (for five years), but you can never be made to sell the right to decide who gets the film rights.
And, of course, if you do die right after producing a work, the longest it stays out of the public domain is five years.
The corporate acquisition of those rights is tricky, too, because it is often very beneficial for musicians to have labels, authors to have publishers, and directors to have studios. It's possible to do without them, but at least in principle they are a good thing. And in order for them to make large-scale reproduction of creators' creations an effective business, they need to secure some rights on, well, copying. But we often see the case where, say, a comic book author does not have any rights at all to the work he did twenty years ago, because the copyright is held by the publisher.
With these problems in mind, I wonder whether the following might work better for everyone. Or at least, everyone who isn't DC Comics: while you are alive, you retain copyright on your work. Your ownership of it would be non-transferable. You can license the work as you like, but we enforce a short maximum term on any such license. This is where I think five years becomes an appealing period again. If I record an album for Apple Records, and it's a big hit, or even a quite prolonged sleeper success, they do quite a good bit of business in the first five years exclusively selling it. And when five years is up, we can renegotiate. The big juicy upfront profit window is still theirthere for middleman organizations, but they don't get to sell your property to someone who sells it to someone who sues people who put it up on YouTube decades after you die. You can sell someone an option on the film rights (for five years), but you can never be made to sell the right to decide who gets the film rights.
And, of course, if you do die right after producing a work, the longest it stays out of the public domain is five years.