One of the clearest demonstrations of how copyright is actively harmful is the lawsuit that four of the biggest publishers brought against the Internet Archive. As a result of the judge’s decision in favour of the publishers – currently being appealed – more than 500,000 books have been taken out of lending by the Internet Archive, including more than 1,300 banned and “challenged” books. In an open letter to the publishers in the lawsuit, the Internet Archive lists three core reasons why removing half a million ebooks is “having a devastating impact in the US and around the world, with far-reaching implications”.
Cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17259314
Overhauling copyright is not the same as getting rid of copyright. How about those artists that make original art, graphic novels or movies, how are they supposed to sustain themselves? Are you saying that the copyright is held too long?
I personally think so. 20-30 years for the authors would be enough, in my opinion. For company held copyright, it should be 8-12 years, counting from the date of creation - transferring the rights back to an individual would NOT give any extra time
That’d make basically every game and movie become public domain after a decade or so. If you applied 30 years of copyright to everything, nowadays we’d have public access to every game released up to 1994, which means the majority of the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis catalogs.
Too bad any change wouldn’t apply retroactively, so we’d still have to wait for the 2030s to come by before 1940s stuff becomes public domain.
These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.
I agree with 20-30. Stuff I’ve sold 20 years ago I’m not going to touch again ever. If someone gets creative with it , go for it. In my opinion.
It can be a tough call depending on what type of creation it is. I’m more undecided on how to limit ongoing properties. Life of creator? I don’t know. That’s tough.
I think for ongoing properties, it could create an interesting competition between different companies/artists, and I’d expect the original creators to fully cash in on “I’m the creator of [whatever], this is the real canon!” in order to keep loyal customers/fans
I fully expect game companies to not like this one bit, because live service games, like World of Warcraft or Fortnite, would, sooner or later, have to release source code in the public domain, allowing anyone to check it, create identical, better or worse clones or, worse, hacking tools that might still work on the more current version.
For stuff like the current offering of Adobe that relies so fucking much on “the cloud”, now that would be tricky and another significant battle, as they’d eventually have to give up the code for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc, as well as whatever server software their cloud uses, or point to said cloud’s owner. The same would apply for Autodesk, Corel, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Imagine finally having an open source Windows XP! 😆
EDIT: What is a lot more likely to become problematic is server-side bank software and some government software that is used for a country’s respective army or intelligence services. Boy, THOSE will definitely fight, or want a very specific clause for their cases, which makes sense.