Tag Archives: copyright

Copyright and Patent reform

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I’ve just read a great post by a fellow PPUKer on Copyrights and Patents, which is well worth a read before you continue reading my post here.

Despite wanting to make non-commercial file-sharing legal, that doesn’t mean the Pirate Party UK wants to allow things such as counterfeiting and people profiting from other people’s works without proper permission. These will remain illegal, though the maximum copyright term will fall from it lasting 70 years after the original author dies, to a maximum of 10 years after the work is created. This is done to encourage the creation of new works, and prevent reselling and repackaging of old work for profit.

When it comes to the Pirate Party‘s copyright position the common counter is about fairness. How fair is it for someone’s work to be taken by others and used without payment? How fair is it for people to take advantage of the creations of others? etc. etc.

This talk about fairness is perhaps what frustrates me the most. How on earth did we reach a point where thoughts, ideas, words, sounds, and other intangible things are treated like physical limited goods that ought to be owned?

How can it be fair that use of an idea be artificially restricted to the person that first conceived it to the point of depriving the rest of society of that idea? The only way it can be fair is if that restriction is finely tuned to provide the perfect balance between giving the creator incentive to be creative, while at the same time making sure the creation eventually becomes free for all of society to benefit from.

Copyright terms of 70 years after the death of the creator very clearly are designed to benefit corporate entities that have copyrights signed over to them rather than benefiting the creator or society.

How can if even be fair if copyright terms were just 70 years even if the creator was still alive? Why should anyone deserve to be paid for 70 years after coming up with an idea? When I spend a year working in my job, I get paid for the year. I have to then keep working to keep getting paid. I recognise creative works can often take many years of unpaid work before being finished, and that’s why a fair balance needs to be struck that allows a creative person to get sufficient financial return for their work.

Frankly if a creator of a piece of work can not recoup sufficient earnings for their time working on an idea within 10 years of announcing it – then the chances are it’s not that revolutionary and useful an idea. At which point why does a capitalist society owe them anything?

It’s that fairness, and the desire to rebalance fairness in favour of the rest of society, that is one of the primary reasons why I am an ardent supporter of Pirate Party policies.

Happy birthday, dear Copyright, happy birthday to you.

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Three hundred years ago, today, Copyright was born.

Conceived in 1709 the Statute of Anne, as it is sometimes known, came into force on 10th April 1710. Despite going by the nickname of Copyright Act 1709 it was born with the much grander appellation: ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned’.

Taking another look at that impressive title, we can imagine how the ‘parents’ intended for their product to develop. If they had been cursed with considerable foresight, and saw how Copyright grew-up and developed I believe they would be as horrified as those of us who can see Copyright for the monster it has become.

If we try and draw a parallel between the Statute of Anne (Anne) and recent Copyright legislation, including the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988 (CDPA1988) and the Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEAct) we can see a stark difference in their intent.

Anne speaks about ‘encouragement of learning’, breaking the monopoly held by publishers, a 14+14 year protection limitation, and fines for infringment were to be split between the Crown and the author. The very central tenet of Anne was to create a mutually beneficial system between creators and the public that would encourage creativity by giving short-term protections to commercial exploitation whilst ensuring that the very creations themselves would become the free public property of society (public domain).

Contrast this with the language of more recent legislation:

  • In the CDPA1988 protection terms are extended in some cases to 70 years after the death of an author – anyone finding me a dead author who is encouraged to further creativity by this length a term wins a prize.
  • When we come to educational provisions (Remember, Anne was an act for the encouragement of learning) the CDPA 1988 makes the following provision ‘reprographic copying is only permitted within the limit of 1% of the work per three-month period’ and ‘Works may be performed in educational establishments without infringing copyright, provided that no members of the public are present (s. 34): the parents of pupils are considered members of the public’

So who does get excused from ‘respecting’ these new Copyright laws? The CDPA1988 states that ‘Copyright is not infringed by anything done for the purposes of parliamentary or judicial proceedings’. Should we be surprised? Those that have been accused en masse of dishonesty and even theft (expenses) have unfettered parliamentary rights to ignore copyright, and at the same time they point their fingers and accuse others of stealing.

With the technology turning the world on its head, it is important to understand Copyright in the digital age, but when we look at the 2010 Digital Economy Act what we see is a gross misunderstanding from Parliament of (i) the technology, and (ii) the original purpose of Copyright acts. Instead of following Anne in breaking the destructive monopoly of the publishers, vast swathes of the DEAct 2010 were in fact written by those very entities.

So here we are, looking at disastrous new legislation, so how can we pay homage and respect to the original intentions of Copyright on this the 300th birthday? Instinctively we might wish to gather and sing Happy Birthday, but even that simple act is now fraught with difficulties and Copyright implications. Were we to try and do this publicly, we’d either need a licence to do so, or we would risk breaking the law.