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from the do-no-evil-only-when-it-suits-us dept.
"Give us torrents or give us freedom!" Cried absolutely no one in Australia after Google decided to start filtering out torrent site results from search queries submitted from Australian locations.
The tech giant has voluntarily agreed to remove sites that facilitate copyright infringement from its search results, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Google has reached a voluntary agreement with Australian ISPs and content rights holders to de-index sites that have been blocked by internet providers under recent laws.
With the search giant of the internet on their side local content owners will no longer need to jump through hoops and costs to petition for sites to be occluded based on a purely voluntary agreement between ISPs and and content owners. The Australian Federal Government introduced laws in 2015 for blocking sites deemed to be breaching copyrights, following up in 2018 with 65 sites and over 378 domains blocked. This way of dealing with the issue has been roundly criticized for years by interested parties.
In response to this recent agreement a spokesperson said "Google supports effective industry-led measures to fight piracy," while local content representative Graham Burke has said that "Google is leading people to the back door" "shamelessly facilitating crime by leading people to pirate sites" while everyday Australians follow the advice of a former Communications Minister and just use a VPN making the filtering by Google moot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:37PM (1 child)
First, since this article was in the context of copyright and since copyright and patents are nothing like each other, I'm going to stick with copyrights.
The devil would be in the details. First, you assume the publisher is the copyright holder. That can happen, certainly, but is by no means guaranteed. Second, part of the publisher's value is that they have the exclusive right to produce the content. Yes, you can tamper with that as your proposal does, but the second you do you remove part of the value that the publisher could claim. The publisher would now be in competition with anybody else who wants to publish the material, so would have to lower their prices. I'm not saying that isn't desirable, but it does muck up any equations you might try to come up with as to what "fair" is.
How do you determine a "reasonable value" in a system where no holder has an exclusivity? And if the production costs are 10% and I as the holder am getting 90% of the value (let's say I'm marketing directly and hosting everything myself), then why do you get 80% of that value? And turn it around - I sold my rights to the publisher and their production cost is 80% (including paying me off as the rightsholder) and now you want to take away all the profit and then some.
Aside from that, I fear you've just created an even more draconian system of government-mandated prices which is even worse. Plus you still require someone to be policing the world to find violators.
All in all it sounds much better to say that the creator of the work has the exclusive right to produce it and anyone else who wants to reproduce it must license the right to do so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @09:11PM
As the author of a book who makes money on copyrights, I feel I should speak up here. First, I found the grandparent poster's proposal interesting and, at first look, quite workable. Perhaps even better than the publishing deals I've managed to get (and I haven't done too badly).
The grandparent brought in both patents and copyrights, calling for them both to be banned. The parent suggested a more workable, reasonable compromise that maximizes freedom while retaining mechanisms for paying copyright (or patent) holders.
The devil is always in the details. The grandparent poster said as much, and admitted the details would probably need to be tweaked.
I don't think your assumption as to the poster's assumption holds. Their approach works just fine whether or not the publisher is the copyright holder. The copyright holder is entitled to remuneration. The publisher's remuneration would be down to whatever contract is between them and the copyright holder.
So what? Who cares if that value goes away. Publishers can compete on other grounds, marketing, or perhaps a more favorable percentage when licensed by the copyright holder directly rather than reverting to unlicensed rules and percentages.
If you have an agreement directly with the copyright holder, those numbers shift. I don't really follow where you get the 80% value from, but if I understood the grandparent correctly, the grandparent is proposing rules that fall into place for unlicensed use. Presumably a copyright holder and publisher or filmmaker could negotiate more favorable terms, not unlike trading under EU rules vs. the default WTO rules (as Britain is about to find out if they crash out come Halloween). Both work, one is more profitable than the other, but in both cases, the work is free to use but not cost-free to use.
Aside from that, I fear you've just created an even more draconian system of government-mandated prices which is even worse.
Hardly. People aren't being threatened with prison, or financial ruin. Just required to pay some pre-determined percentage of their gross to the actual copyright holder if they use their work without permission. Enforcement mechanisms can be triggered by the copyright holder, via civil claims through a regulatory body, or maybe via a lawsuit. Not quite the same thing as having the RIAA pounding on your door.
And if you're not selling anything, just making copies for your own use, then you're either not liable at all, or maybe liable for the cost of buying a copy of the song, book, or whatever. Far less draconian than what we live under now.
All in all it sounds much better to say that the creator of the work has the exclusive right to produce it and anyone else who wants to reproduce it must license the right to do so.
In other words, back to having knowledge owned exclusively by some person or, more likely, some faceless corporation. It doesn't get much more draconian than that. There may be issues with the approach the grandparent poster suggested, but they seem minor compared to what we have now, and what you're proposing we stick with.