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Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.
[...] I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.
I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:14AM (2 children)
If I may paraphrase that - we the people should seize back the power that corrupt government has misappropriated. Best example has been the copyright power grab by Disney and company, which predated that disgusting penis head Sonny Boner going to Washington to do their bidding. We the people need to stand up and overturn that nonsense, and put copyright back where it was prior to about 1920. No copyright should be good for more than 10 to 20 years, and it should only be renewed one time, at a prohibitive cost. I'm willing to negotiate the length of that first copyright - neither 10 nor 20 years seems unreasonable. Anywhere in between is good for me.
You may well have a good point with this question and answer. Regulation is lacking. Or, rather, good regulation is lacking. That rat bastard Shkrelli never should have been able to pull his shit. There's a lot of nonsense that should never happen, much of it in the pharmaceuticals. Entertainment as a whole needs serious regulation - and not regulation bought and paid for by the entertainment industry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 05 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
I think we can all agree that adding more poor regulation of the sort we're complaining about won't solve anything. That's the situation we're in.
At the federal level in the US, Trump's first year was the lowest increase [cei.org] in regulations (by one of the few measures used, number of pages) in a quarter centuries. It still took over 60k pages to describe. Why is it that Trump is making the most progress towards mitigating one of the obvious ills of the US economic system, its crippling regulatory burden? I doubt he'll touch copyright reform, but he's doing more than a fair number of previous presidents did.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday September 07 2018, @05:46AM
Well, part of the NAFTA renewal includes Canada extending copyright by 25 years, a take down system where a company can accuse a site of infringing copyright and remove it from the internet with no judicial oversight (as if the Canadian courts would stand for that). There's also a bunch of stuff about patents and the pharmaceutical companies that are not being publicized.
The thing with regulations, which do need pruning now and again, is which is being pruned. Removing the food handling regulations from the restaurant industry while leaving various regulations designed to create a high barrier to entry isn't a good way to remove regulations for a hypothetical example.