How to update copyright: Nigeria shows the way for Africa – and the world:
This battle over [copyright] moves to adopt an open-ended fair dealing based on the US approach, rather than one with a limited list of permitted exceptions and limitations, is an important one that is happening all around the world. Open-ended fair use is clearly more helpful for dealing with developments in technology that were never envisaged when old copyright laws were drawn up. They allow at least a basic flexibility in the way that copyright is applied, for example online.
Once again, the current resistance to countries adopting fair use or open norms is the result of the copyright industry refusing to allow any legal developments that favour the public or indeed anyone except themselves. A good example of the fierce battles being fought is South Africa, where President Ramaphosa sent the Copyright Amendment Bill back to Parliament after it was passed, largely because of lobbying by copyright supporters against its fair use provisions.
Nigeria's new law is important because the country is already a leader in Africa, and is predicted to become one of the world's top economies. What happens in Nigeria matters, because it sets an important precedent for other rising nations looking to update their outdated copyright laws to maximise the benefits of the digital world by adopting open norms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday April 08 2023, @11:56AM (9 children)
More fair use - that's great. Any step to weaken copyright is good.
Fundamentally, of course, the world needs to go back to the original purpose: Give initial creators a fair chance to profit from their work, before putting it in the public domain. A fair chance used to be 14 years. Given the speed of modern society, a reduction to 7 years might be fair.
If you write a book, or create a song, or paint a picture, or whatever: taking all the income for 7 years seems fair. During that time, you need to create something else.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday April 08 2023, @12:09PM
Sadly, the "you" there loses out to the megacorporations because the legislation they have bought is not about encouraging creation but about locking in already produced content on behalf of said megacorporations. Glyn Moody's book, Walled Culture [walledculture.org], is available as a free-of-charge e-book. Or you can order a paper copy from your book shop. It goes into a lot of detail about how the megacorporations are able to cheat the actual creators out of nearly all the money. It gets worse and worse. Another book worth reading on the topic is Chokepoint capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, which focuses a bit more on the monopoly and monopsony components of the ripoff of creators.
They play hardball and have the full help of the congressmen which they have bought and paid for. Even large studios feel it. Studio Ghibli couldn't get a foot in the door and eventually was pressured to sell to Disney. Disney was also after the muppets so hard and for so long that their abuse may have in effect killed Jim Henson [independent.co.uk].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @12:40PM (7 children)
> If you write a book,...: taking all the income for 7 years seems fair. During that time, you need to create something else.
Um, it took us 8 years to bring our 900 page engineering reference book to publication. During those 8 years our little engineering business suffered due to all the attention we put on the book. While we never really expected to make money on the book, by good luck, we hit the market at a good time and it's been a best-seller/good-seller for our niche publisher since 1994.
Since you are discussing income and "payback", I'll just say that 7, or even 14 years of royalties wasn't enough to make up for the time spent on the book--it took about 20 years to "pay back". Note that we are getting more than the usual 10% royalty, which we were able to negotiate due to the lack of other reference books in this field. Other specialists willing to condense their life experience into a reference text are likely getting payback even slower.
There is a lot more publishing and copyright out there than blockbuster movies and novels--the rest of us working in specialized areas need (C) protection too...because not everyone that has a story to tell can afford to give it to the world for cheap.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 08 2023, @01:26PM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @03:50PM
I think the IRS (tax law) agrees with this general idea of a long term assest--royalty property income and rental property income are (I believe) treated in very similar fashions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday April 08 2023, @05:47PM (4 children)
Economists have weighed in on this.
Here's Rufus Pollock's paper FOREVER MINUS A DAY? CALCULATING OPTIMAL COPYRIGHT TERM - RUFUS POLLOCK - UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE - JUNE 15, 2009 [rufuspollock.com]
tl;dr: 15 years. 95% confidence interval extends up to 38 years.
More of the same kind of analysis Blog: 21 for 2021: Term of Copyright: Optimality and Reality - Posted on Friday June 18, 2021 [create.ac.uk]
tl;dr:
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology - Volume 18, Number 2 Spring 2005 -SEVENTEEN FAMOUS ECONOMISTS WEIGH IN ON COPYRIGHT : THE ROLE OF THEORY , EMPIRICS , AND NETWORK EFFECTS [harvard.edu] - presents arguments in favour of long copyright, and retroactive extension.
Conversable Economist - The Economics of Copyright - March 22, 2012 [conversableeconomist.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 08 2023, @06:13PM (2 children)
And if we assume a modestly lower discount rate of 2%, then there we go.
(Score: 4, Touché) by pTamok on Saturday April 08 2023, @08:21PM (1 child)
And if we assume a modestly greater discount rate of 4%, then the optimal length of copyright is even shorter than 15 years. The paper describes the origin of the discount rate applied: it is not simply plucked from the air, so you would need to justify any variations with appropriate evidence. Which you have not.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 08 2023, @09:36PM
Sorry, I still think 3% discount is very aggressive. What discount rate you get depends on what investment options you have. For example, I doubt most small owners of music copyright have access to a 3% discount rate. That alone changes the value of music for a considerable portion of the copyright market.
Nor do I think 3% discount makes sense even for the largest investors. I think there's a lot of ignored inflation in discount rate estimates.
If you look at the original source [copyrightevidence.org] of the above discount rate rather than merely a description of it, then you see warning signs that the model is broken. The conclusions of the above research are:
It presents a picture of rapid decline in value of music copy sales versus live music. But consider what they say earlier in that:
In other words, new work makes up a declining portion of overall music. Further, music investment is declining. Meanwhile long term music has inordinately large value. This is not the sign of an industry with a 3% discount rate - long term investments should be heavily discounted. Rather it's the sign of a highly centralized industry that gets more profit from control over existing work than from new work - who else can protect that much work from copying enough to consistently profit off of it? It's definitely an argument for shorter copyright, but one can't determine from this dysfunctional market and its irregular discount rates what a good copyright duration should be.
My take is that with a more sensible copyright duration there would be less copying of protected works both because it would have better optics (I think some level of pirating is due to the ridiculousness of the situation) and because there would be a lot more public domain work competing with that copied work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @08:58PM
> The graph shows that, assuming a 3% discount rate ... publishers can expect to earn nearly 100% of expected revenue from a work in its first 30 years,
I'm the engineering reference book author that posted earlier. That 3% & 30 years may be true on average, but our book is nearly 30 years old and sales have been between 400 and 600 copies/year for the last 15 years. The publisher did a little bit of marketing the last few years and sales have been toward the higher end of the range during the pandemic years. We are no where near 100% of expected revenue.
For a 900 page reference book that lists for USD $100 and is full of graphs and lots of algebra I think we're doing pretty well. I'm not going to retire on the royalties, but the mid-4-figure checks that come in twice a year are a nice reminder of the 8 years we worked to create the book.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 08 2023, @12:49PM
If the law is vague (another word for open ended) then new technologies will fall under the purview of the courts to decide what is and isn't fair use.
Laws can be rewritten annually, if the legislators can get out of their own way. Rapid changes in the law aren't generally good for business, but our current courts seem to be.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Saturday April 08 2023, @12:55PM (9 children)
It takes an investment to create a copyrighted work. Some time years of investment. Why shouldn't you own the result for the rest of your life? If I buy a house, do expect me to hand it over to the public hosing authority seven years later? I suppose some people would rather their be no private property at all, but then where is the incentive to produce anything?
(Score: 5, Touché) by khallow on Saturday April 08 2023, @01:27PM (3 children)
It takes an investment of education to create your life. Why shouldn't the educators own you for the rest of your life?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @03:54PM
> Why shouldn't the educators own you for the rest of your life?
First reaction, ha, ha, funny. Second reaction, I think I had a fairly good education and the best (and worst) teachers do "own" me in the sense that they are in my memory, I can't get rid of them (and that's mostly a good thing).
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Saturday April 08 2023, @10:01PM (1 child)
Educators? LOL. No. It takes a sperm and a cell to create your life.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 08 2023, @10:22PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dwilson on Saturday April 08 2023, @04:56PM (3 children)
Not at all, if you make the substantial financial investment to buy a house, you shouldn't have to hand it over to anyone until you're done with it and choose to do so.
But consider: Someone wanders by the street outside the house, decides they like it, and waves their electrically-powered computationally-magic wand to create a perfect duplicate of the house, down to the last hidden bent nail. Then they go place it on a lot of their own across town.
You still have the house you bought. You have lost literally nothing.
Not such a clear and unambiguous problem now, is it?
- D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @09:06PM (1 child)
> You still have the house you bought. You have lost literally nothing.
I call BS. For your argument to fall apart, assume that the house I bought & own is rental property--I invested in the house and I get steady revenue from it. If someone can build a copy of my house for free (only paying for the property), they can rent it at a lower price and I've lost my renter (or I'm forced to reduce the rent I charge).
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Tuesday April 11 2023, @12:49AM
That's an excellent argument! So what do you do? Litigate? Spend your money lobbying for laws and regulations to protect your passive revenue stream?
Or do you decide to engage in an arms race? Innovate, move forward, generate new ideas? Add a hot-tub to the property. Re-do the fence, and the flowerbeds. Invest in new shingles for the roof. Justify that sky-high rent you want to charge!
Of the two options, one is going to cost you time, money and effort, forever and ever, without end. The other option? Is doomed to failure, and you'll get nothing but an empty wallet courtesy of our lawyers and lawmakers, gnashing teeth and possibly an ulcer.
I'm not advocating for the abolition of copyright. I'm not saying that magic wand should be free of consequence, if it's used. But we have to face the fact that it's out there, in the hands of everyone, rich or poor. If you don't like the game, and trying to enforce the rules isn't working, maybe it's time to change the rules, and the game.
- D
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Saturday April 15 2023, @03:02PM
Architectural drawings are copyrighted because it takes an investment to design and draw up plans for a house. If you steal the plans for my house to build yours, you are clearly infringing on the copyright.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 09 2023, @12:28AM
No, but they do expect you to pay property tax each year. Part of that tax goes into maintaining the system that says you own the house. After all, without government backing your property claim anybody bigger and meaner than you can just kick you out and take over.
I would be fine with any length of copyright with registration and an annual fee per work. Said fee being enough that the total collected is enough to fund the entire copyright system including the costs of maintaining the register as well as enforcement. Miss paying one year and that work is irrevocably in the public domain.
Land titles are backed up by government, Land Titles Offices, or however it works in your state. If copyright is government enforced then there should be no such thing as unregistered copyright.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2023, @01:56PM (2 children)
Nigeria?
That paragon of jurisprudence being the only bloody country in the world to have units in other countries financial and legal systems dedicated solely to crimes/frauds/scams originating there, that Nigeria?
The country whose neighbours all have sayings which are variations on 'shake hands with a Nigerian, count your fingers afterwards' (a more complex version ended '..and if all your fingers are still there, then he's stolen your penis'), that Nigeria?
Seriously?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday April 08 2023, @03:14PM (1 child)
Nah.. It's the country formerly known for Nigerian Prince.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday April 08 2023, @08:23PM
TCFKAN? (The Country Formerly Known As Nigeria?)