This is a great idea. Broad sweeping measures, hopefully with a catchy name, to counteract the current nuttiness. Call it something like "The Internet Freedom Act"
You can't be against Freedom, cay you?
* Reduce copyright terms to 4 years, non-renewable
* Require registration of works with the copyright office
* Assess an annual fee proportional to revenue earned from the copyrighted work
* Provide for stiff penalties for asserting copyright over works you do not hold the copyright to.
* Affirm that public domain works can never be copyrighted.
Yaay - more bureaucracy and competitive advantages for the established business that can afford the fees/process. Kill open-source copyright claim validity in the process ?
>Assess an annual fee proportional to revenue earned from the copyrighted work
Yaay - taxes on top of taxes !
If that's what they want, give it them. Bringing back copyright registration might not be such a bad idea, at least in a form where after 14 years of free copyright, you have to pay $1 per work per year and provide the contact name and address of the registered copyright holder. All unregistered works older than 14 years would automatically fall out of copyright into the public domain.
(1) It's low enough that it doesn't exclude anyone. If it was $10,000 per year or some other large amount, it would exclude a significant number of people.
(2) The aim of registration is not to extract fees. It's to make sure that works are registered; as soon as an organization goes out of business or loses track of what it's claiming, it forgets to register it, and it's public domain permanently.
Point (2) reveals a flaw, which is that organizations would spring up to do the registration (you'd pay them $100 and they would keep the registration going for 100 years). That's why the copyright holders' real name and address is required -- so that these intermediaries need to keep track of the claimant. You might also try banning such intermediaries, if that would work.
It's not bulletproof, but it's surely better than the current case where long-abandoned works rot on floppy disks that can't legally be rescued. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft...
> As long as companies like Twitter are openly
> embracing country specific censorship
This is not about the tech industry, this is about civil rights. If the tech industry starts messing with the law in the same way the copyright industry has done, the general public will just get screwed in a different position. Don't for a second think that the major corporations in tech won't march on and start lobbying against privacy laws and such.
There's nothing about the tech industry that is inherently more ethical or less self-serving than the entertainment industry. Corporations messing with laws that affect civil liberties is never a good idea.
The problem is that you can censor the internet in the first place, not that some assholes want to censor it. There are always going to be assholes.
The current strategy of doing nothing is only going to help the copyright industry, even if they don't always get what they want - but they do get something eventually, and it's usually to the detriment of the tech industry.
MPAA said they are now willing to have an open discussion with the tech industry (which by the way still isn't enough, it wasn't just the tech industry protesting SOPA), but apparently they are up to the same old tricks, and they are starting to discuss a new international copyright treaty, once again in secret:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/03162017547/public...