A Review Of The Case For Copyright Reform (week 5)
Review Of The
Case For Copyright Reform[1]
Copyright
law is the biggest pet peeve for any Youtuber who has taken YouTube seriously,
or even aspiring musicians who completely transform the sounds that they
sample. It is so bad that copyright claiming videos has been deemed a valid
source of income for some ‘entrepreneurs’ who have dedicated bots scrambling
around YouTube to find any form of copyrighted content no matter the context or
situation the copyrighted content was used in, that is that there was no regard
for the intent behind the usage or whether the footage/ sound byte even has any
relevance to the content at hand. The situation has become so toxic that
creators get copyright claimed just for saying the words of the song with no
music or even humming the tune silently would be grounds enough for the bots to
determine that you violated copyright law. This is all even though the Fair Use law states that it is the
intent of the creator and the quantity used, that it is not just blatantly
bipolar like the 2 faces of a coin.
I
believe that this chapter masterfully demonstrated why private sharing of
copyrighted material would not disrupt the normal functioning of the movie/music
industry with the example of the opening of the first public library. I in fact
have an exemplary example to enlighten you with. A rapper known as “Soulja Boy”
released his triple-platinum song “Crank That” in 2007, he was not a celebrity
when he released, he was a struggling independent artist. He came up with the
idea of uploading his song to LimeWire and named it “In da club” which is a
different song that went 9 times platinum just so people would give him a
chance. His efforts paid off and he became a multimillionaire giant in the
hip-hop industry. He revolutionized the way that musicians use social media and
introduced the concept of generating chaos for album sales and promotions.
Regarding
protection times, I believe that it should not be just 20 years but just for
the lifetime of the creator and should always be in the hands of the creator, and with this logic, I must condemn Disney for being responsible for the
prevalence of uncannily lengthy protection times. It does this so it can keep
holding on to Mickey Mouse for as long as it can, so it keeps lobbying in court
to extend protection time. However this is not very ethical, nor very
intelligent but an extremely greed fuelled move on the part of Disney which has
now directly suppressed the right of the public to express creative freedom.
A short review of the proposals in the book:
- Moral rights remain unchanged. The authors propose no change to the moral rights of the author to be recognized as the author of their work. There should be no condition where the author is not recognized as the responsible party in the creation of his work.
- Free Non-commercial sharing. The author of the blog proposes that copyright law should not be imposed upon ordinary citizens that share copyrighted material however without a profit motive. Reading this made sense to me, the obtainment and transfer of copyrighted material has become extremely easy in a world where internet criminality is extremely hard to police. It would not make sense to try and criminalize non-commercial use of copyrighted material and the enforcement of these laws on private, noncommercial uses would most likely and/or probably involve the infringement of the right to privacy of the masses. Most likely, in fact, a gross and brazen infringement of the right to privacy considering there is no medium to ensure the maintenance of copyright law any other way.
- 20 years of commercial availability. I however do not agree with the author’s stance/proposal on the issue of commercial availability of copyrighted work lasting a measly 20 years past the creation of the character/subject by the aforementioned author. However, I do agree with the author stating that the current duration of life as well as 70 years to top it off is a bit absurd. I must say that a happy medium would correct this issue. Perhaps maybe, a work/creation of an artist lives as long as he does and no more no less, this would be fair to both the artist and the spirit of art.
- Registration after 5 years. According to this section of this proposal, the author suggests that every copyright holder must apply to attain copyright renewal every five years giving copyright the threat of transience if not tended to. The author states that this will solve the orphan works problem. This is a wonderful idea in my opinion as it allows binds the creator to his work and makes him accountable to renew his work, it also gives more power to the people of the creative world.
- Free sampling. In this portion of the proposal, the author talks about free sampling and the condition of the movie, television, and the music industry and how traditional laws are not suitable, and that there need to be clear exceptions for parodies and remixes to exist. This is important for the future of freedom of speech and the right to creative expression.
- A ban on DRM. In this last and final section of the proposal on the case for copyright reform, the author proposes to ban all forms of DRM technologies ie. technologies that prevent/mitigate any form of sharing copyrighted work in a non-professional/private setting. This makes sense considering the presence of the other proposals. If all copyrighted material is free to share for non-profit causes then the existence/use of DRM’s would be illegal and a thorn in the foot of freedom.
All in all, it is laughable that corporations try and enforce copyright law on the internet. I would consider it impossible to completely enforce copyright law on the internet even if punishments were even harsher. In the same way, a lot of illegal footage can be found with slight difficulty on the surface web. However, I would not be surprised if some authoritarian country used the excuse of copyright law to guilt its citizen into giving up a few fundamental rights.
Sources:
Hi, Kaido here. The post is good as an opinion piece, but I'd like to see also your take on the recommendations by Falkvinge and Engström (see the formulation of the task). You have written this for the next week already, so there is time to add some to make it even better. :)
ReplyDeleteOk, thank you for your comment sir!
DeleteI will get on it.
Hello sir, I have fixed the article as per your request.
Delete