Everytime I see complications with copyright I think that it should be similar to patents. Short length of time with an optional renewal if the work is valuable enough. I don't think it would be too much to ask for rights holders to be required to apply for copyright (for a small fee, let's say $5/work) and provide a central authority with a copy of their work. This would solve issues such as
1) when copyright ends for a work and a source to compare claims against
2) Orphaned works without known owners that are nearly unusable until expiration
3) Everything under the sun is copyrighted for absurd lengths of time. Does a macaroni art piece I made when I was in 1st grade need copyright for 70 years after I'm gone? I don't think so, but I understand that the newest movies need some protection.
Originally, US copyrights were 14 years with an optional 14 year renewal and you had to register it with the government and deposit a copy of it in the Library of Congress [0]. Copyrights were also limited to Americans because the purpose of the law was "the encouragement of learning" not allowing corporations to profit off of stuff they made a century ago. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution also says that the purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and specifically requires that copyrights be for a limited time.
In other words, we basically had that and politicians created the current system of copyright out of it thanks to 200 years or so of lobbying from special interests.
#2 is so frustrating. I have heard multiple reports of parties who were interested in remaking a game, only to discover that due to multiple mergers/acquisition/re-licensing deals over time, nobody is sure who retains the rights. Rather than engage in the legal quagmire, the remake does not happen.
Another issue I've personally run into is historic and family photos. Since the person who took the photo is often the copyright holder, often times old photos with no known information can cause some issues with publishing or archiving.
A more detailed example: I was scanning some family photos (for backup/archive/family use, no publishing as of now) and noticed that several have small stickers marked with copyright notices of the small town photography company that took them. I asked my family members and they said the company is no longer in business, but I worry that those photos will never be able to be published until after well over 100 years after it was taken. How can I track down the copyright for such photos?
I know someone who did a translation for a game, a "doujin" Japanese visual novel. He got in touch with the author in order to license the game, and that went well. He then considered doing another game by the same author.
Problem for the next game was the music. The original author commissioned about a dozen of artists, problem is, he didn't own the rights, only a licence for having the music in the original game. So the translator had to find a way to get in touch with all of the rights-holders and negotiate a license for the translation with each one. Because he is just one man, it was simply too much work and he abandoned the project.
It is actually a rather common situation. It may result in cancelled projects, changing the music with a varying level of success or just removing it altogether.
I’d expect that if the maker undertook a thorough and well-documented search for the rights holder; then just made it anyway, they’d legally be covered
1) It might be hard for the rights holder to assert their copyright at a later stage, if they lack the evidence to do so at the outset
2) any damages awarded might be mitigated by the attempts to search for the rights holder, especially if the ‘true’ owner was contacted at some stage. Seems more likely they’d be compensatory as opposed to punitive
I know this isn’t the prevailing legal practice, but as a lawyer, the lack of a willingness to be bold in these legal situations has always surprised me
Perhaps the tail risk of being slapped down is just too large
I’ve always wondered about a business model of searching for such works, undertaking a bona-fide effort to find the owner, and then just selling it as your own if one can’t be identified. (Perhaps with a war chest kept in reserve for the rare instances licensing fees are demanded later). ‘Copyright squatting’ if you will
Practically all of Activision's PS2 era catalog falls under this banner. We only recently got re-releases of their Star Trek stuff and a lot of their Marvel/movie tie-in games are MIA.
> rights holders to be required to apply for copyright (for a small fee, let's say $5/work)
This would drastically change our current copyright regime.
As it stands, everything you write has automatic copyright, and doesn't require even the smallest, brokest artist to do anything—or pay anything—in order to ensure that their creations cannot profit others without their consent.
Requiring every work to be registered in order to be eligible for copyright would essentially change our system from a default of "assume anything you find is under copyright, get permission from the creator to use it" to "assume anything you find is free for the taking, and if the creator did register it they'll have to come after you."
In other words, it would mean that anything belonging to big corporate media like Disney and Hasbro would be near-automatically protected, while small, independent artists would be massively more screwed than they are today, with their creations basically being assumed to be available for anyone capable of monetizing it against its creator's will, medium, large, or megacorporation, to profit off of to their shriveled hearts' content.
Maybe something of a compromise then, first time making it creates a 20 year copyright, any additional years have to be applied for with a fee that increases the more years it's kept.
Many react to copyright with the image of a greedy, large corporation in mind. Unfortunately. While they are a bit of a problem (although mostly nuisance), solutions that attack them will not help the millions and millions of small creators and starting artists. Lawyers will see to that.
I can see the issue with larger corporations having an easier time protecting works they create, I think a system where registration is simple would solve most of the issues. Patent applications are a complex process and I don't think we should base any new copyright system on that. We have the tools today to improve the registration system.
I also think that some compromise needs to be made. Saying that all small, independent artists would be "massively more screwed" doesn't give them much credit. Having their work protected and documented as such should give them more protections if someone infringes on their work. A fast and simple process can be designed to allow everyone to register their works without limiting it to large corporations.
>I don't think it would be too much to ask for rights holders to be required to apply for copyright
Thing is most people won't even think to apply. That's why the copyright is granted automatically, with an option to renew for a longer term afterwards. An important distinction from patents. this was one of the earliest revisions to to protect he unaware, since consulting a lawyer under the original system would be too late.
I agree that patents are very broken, but I think that copyright and patents are different for these reasons:
1) Patents can cover broad topics. Copyright doesn't have a similar standard (from what I've seen). You can't just copyright all images of a sunset, but your specific image can be copyrighted. See the EFFs article for examples of broad patents: https://www.eff.org/issues/resources-patent-troll-victims
2) Patents have a complex application process. Copyright shouldn't require this level of complexity as the technology exists to detect similar or exact copies and can be streamlined for everyone (think of a simple web form with your information, copy of the work, etc).
A fee, be it $5 or $1 doubling each year, doesn't work well for a variety of reasons.
1. Big players can afford protection even when a product isn't profitable - Disney may lock things up to claim a catalog even if most, independently, isn't worth much.
2. What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?
3. Some works exist in much higher quantity. Ie, photography vs video games. A photographer would have to increase their prices dramatically to retain copyright for even a short period.
I am all for copyright reform, but this option doesn't work. I'm a much bigger fan of the idea of everything being public domain PERIOD with the arts being publicly funded - Ben Jordan has a great video defending this idea I can't link to easily while at work.
> Big players can afford protection even when a product isn't profitable
$1 doubling each year would be over $1 million after just 20 years, and over $1 billion after 30 years. Out of the big catalog of circa 30-year-old Disney content, maybe The Lion King still brings in enough revenue to justify a billion dollar yearly copyright fee, but most other stuff from that era sure won't.
> What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?
Now this is the billion-dollar question (pun absolutely intended).
>Everytime I see complications with copyright I think that it should be similar to patents. Short length of time with an optional renewal if the work is valuable enough. I don't think it would be too much to ask for rights holders to be required to apply for copyright (for a small fee, let's say $5/work) and provide a central authority with a copy of their work. This would solve issues such as
Often when I see posts like this, I wonder what the posters actually know about copyright.
In order to bring any copyright action in the US, your work needs to be registered, which costs a bit more than $5, and also requires sending deposit copies to the the copyright office to be maintained in the library of congress.
>3) Everything under the sun is copyrighted for absurd lengths of time. Does a macaroni art piece I made when I was in 1st grade need copyright for 70 years after I'm gone? I don't think so, but I understand that the newest movies need some protection.
Who cares? Honestly - what difference does it make? Has your macaroni art piece caused unnecessary litigation? are people afraid to make other macaroni sculptures, knowing that you made yours? What have you actually thought about copyright, its incentives, structures, and the creative market, if you are seriously making this assertion in the face of these obvious questions?
> After being hit with the claim, Baker's upload became demonetized, meaning the YouTuber could not make any money off of it. The claim also blocked the ability to embed the video on third-party websites. In addition, the YouTube video was given limited visibility, including being blocked from view entirely in certain countries.
The first several days after a video is released is when creators get the most views (and thus the most money). It might've been only blocked for a day, but it was one of the most critical days. But good news! It was unblocked.
> I wonder if anyone could successfully sue YouTube for lost revenue over a wrongful demonetization.
No chance, the YouTube terms give them huge carte blanche to not pay out for any reason. You could maybe sue Disney but the result would be so small it would cost you a lot, lot more to hire a lawyer to do so.
> The first several days after a video is released is when creators get the most views.
Yeah. It wouldn't be too bad in other cases that just uploaded Steamboat Willie as-is as a statement, but in this case Baker actually did his own parody dub, so it's especially egregious.
This seems like something different though - it's the audio this time and the screenshotted email doesn't mention Disney this time, so I wonder if he's used some music in it (there's some at the beginning) which is still under copyright? The original article made it sound like he'd created all the audio, but I presume he didn't create that music.
From what I know it is indeed perjury to file a DMCA claim on content for which you don't own the copyright (e.g. after it has expired).
But rather than intentional bad faith it's highly likely these sorts of actions are fully automated by both YouTube and Disney. Probably YouTube has not yet removed Steamboat Willie-related content from its Content ID database and Disney has not yet disabled its own auto-strike systems for the content.
Hanlon's razor. Disney disputed it because it disputes 1000 things everyday. They realized they screwed up (totally not because they hit someone with 1M subscribers who can probably fight), and reverted it.
Now, independently, UMG is going through the same thing. I don't know why nor how, but it's no secret that at this point that DMCA claims are rampant, with litte consequence for a false positive.
whenever copyright comes up a bunch of engineers come up with suggestions for fixing copyright that seem to be based on the idea that every country has the same theory of copyright as the U.S.
Well I would suggest that the best fix for copyright would be to bring international Non-US standards in line with U.S or some sort of compromise between the two. The main problem I find with copyright is seeing something is in the public domain but later on realizing no, it's in the public domain in the U.S because it was made in 1926 but since the creator died in 1970 it won't really be truly public domain (excusing some potential weird little countries with unlimited copyright) until 2040.
Luckily Steamboat Willie copyright was held by corporation thus it was 70 years after publication, otherwise it would be 70 years after longest living creator in Europe - Ub Iwerks died in 1971.
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Readit News
1) when copyright ends for a work and a source to compare claims against
2) Orphaned works without known owners that are nearly unusable until expiration
3) Everything under the sun is copyrighted for absurd lengths of time. Does a macaroni art piece I made when I was in 1st grade need copyright for 70 years after I'm gone? I don't think so, but I understand that the newest movies need some protection.
4) Archiving of expired works would be easier
In other words, we basically had that and politicians created the current system of copyright out of it thanks to 200 years or so of lobbying from special interests.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790
This is where Disney gets a special achievement award.
A more detailed example: I was scanning some family photos (for backup/archive/family use, no publishing as of now) and noticed that several have small stickers marked with copyright notices of the small town photography company that took them. I asked my family members and they said the company is no longer in business, but I worry that those photos will never be able to be published until after well over 100 years after it was taken. How can I track down the copyright for such photos?
Problem for the next game was the music. The original author commissioned about a dozen of artists, problem is, he didn't own the rights, only a licence for having the music in the original game. So the translator had to find a way to get in touch with all of the rights-holders and negotiate a license for the translation with each one. Because he is just one man, it was simply too much work and he abandoned the project.
It is actually a rather common situation. It may result in cancelled projects, changing the music with a varying level of success or just removing it altogether.
1) It might be hard for the rights holder to assert their copyright at a later stage, if they lack the evidence to do so at the outset 2) any damages awarded might be mitigated by the attempts to search for the rights holder, especially if the ‘true’ owner was contacted at some stage. Seems more likely they’d be compensatory as opposed to punitive
I know this isn’t the prevailing legal practice, but as a lawyer, the lack of a willingness to be bold in these legal situations has always surprised me
Perhaps the tail risk of being slapped down is just too large
I’ve always wondered about a business model of searching for such works, undertaking a bona-fide effort to find the owner, and then just selling it as your own if one can’t be identified. (Perhaps with a war chest kept in reserve for the rare instances licensing fees are demanded later). ‘Copyright squatting’ if you will
This would drastically change our current copyright regime.
As it stands, everything you write has automatic copyright, and doesn't require even the smallest, brokest artist to do anything—or pay anything—in order to ensure that their creations cannot profit others without their consent.
Requiring every work to be registered in order to be eligible for copyright would essentially change our system from a default of "assume anything you find is under copyright, get permission from the creator to use it" to "assume anything you find is free for the taking, and if the creator did register it they'll have to come after you."
In other words, it would mean that anything belonging to big corporate media like Disney and Hasbro would be near-automatically protected, while small, independent artists would be massively more screwed than they are today, with their creations basically being assumed to be available for anyone capable of monetizing it against its creator's will, medium, large, or megacorporation, to profit off of to their shriveled hearts' content.
I also think that some compromise needs to be made. Saying that all small, independent artists would be "massively more screwed" doesn't give them much credit. Having their work protected and documented as such should give them more protections if someone infringes on their work. A fast and simple process can be designed to allow everyone to register their works without limiting it to large corporations.
Thing is most people won't even think to apply. That's why the copyright is granted automatically, with an option to renew for a longer term afterwards. An important distinction from patents. this was one of the earliest revisions to to protect he unaware, since consulting a lawyer under the original system would be too late.
Good. As intended.
Copyright is several times too long, but making it more like patents wouldn't help at all. On the contrary.
1) Patents can cover broad topics. Copyright doesn't have a similar standard (from what I've seen). You can't just copyright all images of a sunset, but your specific image can be copyrighted. See the EFFs article for examples of broad patents: https://www.eff.org/issues/resources-patent-troll-victims
2) Patents have a complex application process. Copyright shouldn't require this level of complexity as the technology exists to detect similar or exact copies and can be streamlined for everyone (think of a simple web form with your information, copy of the work, etc).
1. Big players can afford protection even when a product isn't profitable - Disney may lock things up to claim a catalog even if most, independently, isn't worth much.
2. What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?
3. Some works exist in much higher quantity. Ie, photography vs video games. A photographer would have to increase their prices dramatically to retain copyright for even a short period.
I am all for copyright reform, but this option doesn't work. I'm a much bigger fan of the idea of everything being public domain PERIOD with the arts being publicly funded - Ben Jordan has a great video defending this idea I can't link to easily while at work.
$1 doubling each year would be over $1 million after just 20 years, and over $1 billion after 30 years. Out of the big catalog of circa 30-year-old Disney content, maybe The Lion King still brings in enough revenue to justify a billion dollar yearly copyright fee, but most other stuff from that era sure won't.
> What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?
Now this is the billion-dollar question (pun absolutely intended).
Often when I see posts like this, I wonder what the posters actually know about copyright.
In order to bring any copyright action in the US, your work needs to be registered, which costs a bit more than $5, and also requires sending deposit copies to the the copyright office to be maintained in the library of congress.
>3) Everything under the sun is copyrighted for absurd lengths of time. Does a macaroni art piece I made when I was in 1st grade need copyright for 70 years after I'm gone? I don't think so, but I understand that the newest movies need some protection.
Who cares? Honestly - what difference does it make? Has your macaroni art piece caused unnecessary litigation? are people afraid to make other macaroni sculptures, knowing that you made yours? What have you actually thought about copyright, its incentives, structures, and the creative market, if you are seriously making this assertion in the face of these obvious questions?
- Trivial for Microsoft
- Painful for a typical HN contributor
- Impossible for anyone earning minimum wage
I think a better standard might be "actively trying to commercialize."
The first several days after a video is released is when creators get the most views (and thus the most money). It might've been only blocked for a day, but it was one of the most critical days. But good news! It was unblocked.
No chance, the YouTube terms give them huge carte blanche to not pay out for any reason. You could maybe sue Disney but the result would be so small it would cost you a lot, lot more to hire a lawyer to do so.
Yeah. It wouldn't be too bad in other cases that just uploaded Steamboat Willie as-is as a statement, but in this case Baker actually did his own parody dub, so it's especially egregious.
https://mashable.com/article/disney-steamboat-willie-brock-b...
But rather than intentional bad faith it's highly likely these sorts of actions are fully automated by both YouTube and Disney. Probably YouTube has not yet removed Steamboat Willie-related content from its Content ID database and Disney has not yet disabled its own auto-strike systems for the content.
Now, independently, UMG is going through the same thing. I don't know why nor how, but it's no secret that at this point that DMCA claims are rampant, with litte consequence for a false positive.
Well I would suggest that the best fix for copyright would be to bring international Non-US standards in line with U.S or some sort of compromise between the two. The main problem I find with copyright is seeing something is in the public domain but later on realizing no, it's in the public domain in the U.S because it was made in 1926 but since the creator died in 1970 it won't really be truly public domain (excusing some potential weird little countries with unlimited copyright) until 2040.
Dead Comment