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Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: Articles | November 2007

Can our IP/Copyright laws kill? Click to read more!

We are Pro-Copyright, but the system needs to be fixed.

If I bought a book, I could lend that book to my friends as much as I wanted to. I could take the pages, rip them out of the binding and scrapbook them. If I did it in such a way that the book’s pages were merely decoration, I could even reproduce that scrapbook for non-profit use. I could scan that book into a computer and read it to my heart’s content.

If for some reason the book had a lock on it, then I could break that lock to read it. If the company uses a special kind of binding that’s supposed to allow me to read the book, but not take the pages out of it, I could circumvent that binding all I want. I could sell the book to somebody else for whatever price I wanted to. If a page of the book started fading or was scratched, I could photocopy the page so I’d have a backup.

The software/song/video is my property after I buy it. I should be able to exercise all my rights just as if it where a book.

There is something wrong with a country’s copyright laws when a private citizen can get more time in jail for intellectual copyright infringement then someone guilty of attempted murder. The Constitution places clear limits on Copyright and we believe the laws of the 21st century need to realigned with the Constitution. As Americans, we face many issues: the Iraq war, assaults on liberties, a collapsing economy, climate change, a total lack of accountability in most of our government, and the list goes on. There is also another issue we should be aware of even though it isn’t quite on the same level as those others. However it is still an important issue and it has implication for everything. To find a solution we must stop ignoring the problem. Over two hundred years ago the Founding Fathers of this great nation decided one of the best ways to ensure smart people are rewarded for their work was to create a Copyright system.Today we need to call on Congress to fulfill their Constitutional duty to ’secure for a limited time’ copyrights and patents. Limited time means limited time. It doesn’t mean extending the copyright for Mickey Mouse. It doesn’t mean sitting on patents for things you didn’t invent hoping you can sue someone later and profit. When the Constitution was signed, it meant twenty years. If twenty years was a very reasonable limit at the time and twenty years is still a very reasonable time now. We urge Congress to send a bill restoring the terms of intellectual property law to their original forms, and make it clear copyright is a civil matter, not a job for the FBI. Osama bin Laden is still out there and we believe the FBI has more important things to do then personally enforce the profits of American corporations.

Singing "Happy Birthday" at a restaurant (unauthorized public performance) and capturing the event on a video camera (unauthorized reproduction) could increase his liability, and that’s to say nothing of the copyrighted artwork hanging on the wall behind the dinner table (also captured without authorization by the camera). Tehranian calculates his yearly liability at $4.5 billion. [1]

Although perpetual copyrights and patents are prohibited—the language specifies "limited times"—the Supreme Court has ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003 ) that repeated extensions to the term of copyright do not constitute a perpetual copyright. This is unconstitutional and needs to be fixed.

The expanded enforcement of copyright laws precipitated by the P2P revolution has forced us to reexamine the rationality of our reigning intellectual property regime. For example, the statutory damages provisions of the Copyright Act have enabled the RIAA to file multimillion dollar infringement suits against thousands of individuals, including many children and grandparents,56 on the basis of P2P activity. The cases rarely advance to an adjudication on the merits, as all but the bravest (or, perhaps, most foolhardy) defendants quickly settle instead of fighting the well-financed behemoth and the powerful threat of statutory damages—up to $150,000 per infringing act.57 In one pro bono case that I handled, the RIAA sued my client, a middle-aged, terminally ill Mexican immigrant on welfare who could not speak English, for the alleged file-sharing activities of hisson.58 He ultimately diverted funds from his welfare checks just to finance the settlement. [1]

What we are suggesting

Problem 1) Copyright is automatic, you do not need to register a piece in order to have a copyright on it. Simply replying to an email could be a copyright violation.
Suggestion 1) Require copyrights to be registered and renewed by their owners.

Problem 2) Copyright infringement of more then $1,000.00 or more then 180 days is a felony.
Suggestion 2) All copyright infringement cases should be strictly limited to civil court like it was originally intended unless the prosecution can prove the defendant profited from the crime.

Problem 3) Copyrights are not only automatic but currently (in the US) , an individuals copyright is good for life plus 70 years !
Suggestion 3) Society doesn’t benefit from a near endless copyright period.

1. The copyright limit should be reduced to a more reasonable number of years. It was originally limited to 14 years once it was registered and could be extended another 14 years if applied for. Even for the 21st century that is a just and reasonable period.
2. All copyrights should be registered to become legit. With todays technology this is certainly possible. Just look at Norton’s software subscription system on your home computer. When copyright was first signed into law in 1790 this was the case [2] and was not changed till 1891 when copyright protections were granted to non-citizens.

[Help us by submitting your suggestions for fixing the US Copyright system ]

[1]* Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap ,

[2] * The First U.S. Copyright Law, July 17, 1790