http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000D3F62-378C-11E7-B78C83414B7F0000

February 14, 2005

Beyond the Big ©

Copyright becomes "no right to copy"

By The Editors

If William Shakespeare were working today on Broadway or in London's West End, he would be spending a lot of time with lawyers. The Bard adapted Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which Brooke, in his turn, had based on a French translation by Pierre Boaistuau of various Italian stories.

The history of creative works, whether Romeo and Juliet or the Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic," is a chronicle of "borrowing" from others. Intellectual-property lawyers might use a harsher word. But the framers of the Constitution always intended to provide owners of creative works with only limited monopolies, ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old.

Over the years, however, Congress, sometimes at the behest of media companies, has erected immense barriers to derivative works by extending repeatedly both the length and the scope of copyright protection. A copyright holder no longer has to register a new work. Any blog, poet's sonnet or even a child's crayoned drawing now receives copyright automatically. Permission is needed for republishing or excerpting, with limited exemptions for fair use. Copyright in its current form fails to strike a balance between the extremes of allowing total control over every work--"all rights reserved"--and an anarchic system in which pirates steal wantonly without recompense to owners. Overly strong property rights can threaten the Internet as a medium capable of fostering dynamic interchange of ideas.

In 2001 Stanford University legal scholar Lawrence Lessig set about righting this imbalance by becoming the leading force behind Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that furnishes a much needed middle ground that lets owners give up some but not all of their rights. An author still retains a copyright, but only some rights are reserved by choosing among the dozen or so free licenses, denoted by the Creative Commons's mark, that are available for downloading off the Web. One license permits others to use a work as long as attribution is given. Another gives the right to sample (take a snippet to mix with music or other content) as long as the entire work is not used. Some five million Creative Commons licenses are in use. The BBC plans to license archival material to the British public without a fee as long as it is not used for commercial purposes. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploits the licenses to give free access to excellent online course materials. Creative Commons has started a Science Commons effort that will even explore the open licensing of technology contained in some patents. The Public Library of Science already takes advantage of one of the licenses to specify the conditions under which scientific journal articles are made available free of charge.

The Internet, as a universal publisher of sorts, needs to be more than an outlet for commercial interests. Nascent communities of artists, scientists and nonprofits want some way to share and rework one another's intellectual output without the enormous legal burdens that come with increasingly draconian rights management. The entertainment industry has been largely silent on this issue--its idea of innovation having been the launching of lawsuits against 10-year-olds to punish music pirating. In this environment, the introduction of Creative Commons's middle path of "some rights reserved" is surely a welcome arrival.

© 1996-2005 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

I have seriously been giving thought to an idea that copyright should not apply whatsoever on the Internet. It may be a pipe-dream, but harm would there be in allowing true freedom of expression to take place on the web. We could still protect creators with copyright in the physical world. Books, CD's, visual arts, radio and television broadcasts, magazines, newspapers, etc. all still have a robust real-world business model, same as before the advent of the Internet. We should think of the online realm as a totally unrestricted meeting place for the exchange of ideas by the folks who use it. The web should be above and beyond the reach of all entities and individuals who use copyright as a club to beat down expression for commercial and idealogical gain.

Again, maybe it is just a pipe dream. But it is a nice one.

If we can't have a TOTALLY copyright-free Internet, perhaps we can shoot for a REQUIREMENT that copyright holders use the Creative Commons model if they want to restrict access to their works in the online realm. That way, at least you would have to "opt-in" (and register) with the level of legal protection you want for your particular copyrighted works. The people would then at least have a clear way of knowing what is a fair use or not of things found online.

I second that. In a world where every wall and article of clothing is a corporate controlled billboard, the internet is a much needed consumer medium.

"Congress, sometimes at the behest of media companies, has erected immense barriers to derivative works by extending repeatedly both the length and the scope of copyright protection"

SOMETIMES at the behest??? How about EVERY TIME!!! Why else would Congress get off their ass and do anything anyways? Only to chase the almighty dollar. Now, as a result, we have lengthy copyrights that cause copyrighted works to appear to have no limits. I won't see many works created in my lifetime enter the public domain in my lifetime. Therefore, it is just as if there were no limits on copyright. Not to mention the damage that such copyright terms does on our economy.

"A copyright holder no longer has to register a new work. "

This is the part of the law that puzzles me. How is anyone supposed to know WHEN copyright terms END if their is no registration? Without registration, how do you really know when the work was created, and when the terms of such a work will begin? You don't. If you don't know when the copyright term BEGINS, how can you know when it ends? Therefore, again, this part of the law is unconstitutional, because it leads to copyrighted works appearing to have no end, no limit as REQUIRED by our Constitution.

Reducing Copyright terms and requiring registration are two things that are needed to help elminate the problems that exist in copyright legislation today. Until such laws are fixed, wars will ALWAYS continue over copyrights.

"How is anyone supposed to know WHEN copyright terms END if their is no registration?"

Because it is the life of the author plus X number of years (75?). You start counting when the dude dies.

Correct.

Ridiculous. But if it's owned by a company and the company never dies?

If its owned by a company, its a fixed 95-year term (in the US), starting with the date the content is fixed (the last bit is a little more complicated than that, otherwise works produced over many years would have a blured copyright). This long enough to ensure the work loses all commercial value and can enjoy a few decades locked in the company vault, gradually fading into obscurity until it is lost forever.