Uncertain Landscape Ahead for Copyright Protection - Specter to Lead...

washingtonpost.com ^ | Thursday, December 16, 2004 | David McGuire

[crushelits]

Specter to Lead Key Panel as Industry Ally Hatch Steps Down

In the final few weeks before the 2004 election, lobbyists for high-tech, entertainment and civil liberties interests were crammed into an icy room in the Dirksen Senate office building, trying to hammer out a bill that would have put Internet song-swapping networks like Kazaa and eDonkey out of business.

It was a controversial measure on a difficult topic, and could have easily been lost in the end-of-year shuffle. But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) was the lead sponsor of the measure and had ordered the warring factions to keep talking until they came up with language everybody liked.

Talks eventually collapsed, but the fact that the measure was being debated at all in the October before a national election testified to the power that an influential committee chairman like Hatch has in managing the legislative agenda.
"People were in that room for two reasons: One, because Senator Hatch has a history of wanting to get stuff done on intellectual property issues; and two, because he's the chairman," said a former Senate Judiciary counsel, who asked to remain anonymous.

[Terpfen]

Copyright protection is perfectly fine.

It's consumers' fair use rights that are being attacked.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Roll back copyright duration to its original length, and everything will be fine.

Extend copyright duration every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, and soon we will be executing people for having mp3s on their P2P server.

[ARCADIA]

Copyright protection is perfectly fine.

The more we protect the accomplished deed the greater the burden on future progress, since each innovation build upon prior accomplishments.

[zeugma]

Copyright protection is perfectly fine.

I'd have to say I disagree with that. Copyright is too long by 60 years. Here's what they need to do if they really want to "fix" copyright law.

1. Rerutn to the way it aws when this Republic was founded. A 14 year term renewable once.
2. No "automatic" copyright. If you want something copyrighted, submit it to the copyright office, just like it was done until about halfway through the last century.
3. Declare any copyright older than 28 years to be expired.

The people would benefit greatly by this. The only ones who would lose are Disney and other media conglomerates.

[MattDillon]

The media companies' position on this is totally anti-free market. File sharers aren't thieves; they are rational market actors. File sharing isn't a "social problem"; it is the black market which conservatives understand always emerges when government arbitrarily tries to keep people from what they want.

One of the most important reasons why free markets are efficient is because they give consumers the freedom to express market preferences. New technologies can make markets more efficient by better enabling consumers to express their preferences. However, because the media companies' antique pricing models don't fit well with new technologies, they would rather we respond to their decisions about what we hear, watch and read than they respond to ours. A private-sector compulsory licensing system, similar to what has been used in the radio and cable industries for years, is LESS SOCIALISTIC than what we have now because it would increase bottom-up self-regulation of content markets and decrease top-down command-and-control.

For the record, I have never shared a single file, and I am a copyright holder. When I see my stuff copied illegally, am I mad about it? Sure. But I'm NOT MAD AT THE FILE SHARERS. I'm mad at an outdated pricing mechanism which prevents me from being paid even when consumers want what I produce.