Emily L. Ferguson wrote:
At 10:31 AM -0600 11/25/07, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
(In my personal opinion, life + 70 is grossly excessive; in
particular, lots of work that's still in copyright, you can't find
the owner for, so it's essentially taken out of the marketplace. Only
major corporate properties and "best-sellers" can you routinely find
the rights owner for anywhere near that long after the death of the
artist. And the uncertainty of the "life +" part makes it very hard
to tell when something can be used without finding the rights holder.)
And for the other side, in my personal opinion copyright should never
expire, like property ownership, it should be subject to all the
vagaries of property managment. Why do you want to use something that
belongs to someone else without recompense?
"Intellectual property" is a legal fiction; there's really no such
thing. The deal with copyright is that you're granted a short-term
exclusive license to copy the work, in return for the work going into
the public domain pool at the end of that time. It's an optional deal;
you don't need to do things that way, you can not publish the work, or
you can distribute it only with a restrictive license agreement, if you
want to use some other approach to protecting it.
Since when do we value the ability to accumulate money more than the
ability to create music, poetry, prose, art, photography? And why
should money be more transferable through the generations than the
results of our creative energies?
Apparently, you do right now; because taking away the ability to build
on previous work would greatly impede creating art, for the purpose of
securing more money for the creators of previous art.
If people wish to use my creative energies and their results they can
pay a fee, which they can negotiate with me or my heirs. Why should
they be able to just use it without honoring its value? They can't
just walk into my house when I'm gone and take up residence, or drive
my car off the lot when I'm gone.
Your photos are largely based on the creative work of others, which you
are using without a fee. All the clothing, props, buildings, and so
forth, are intellectual property of someone or other. Trying to really
implement a firm "everything is intellectual property" rule would be the
end of photographic art. It wouldn't be possible to take a landscape,
or street photos, or much of anything. Even the flowers in your back
yard are intellectual property of the breeders.
The whole reason copyright seems so onerous is because creators have
succumbed to the pressures of licensing schemes perpetrated by
obnoxious recreators like Disney, not to mention the publishing
industry as a whole. Those people know how valuable that stuff is and
force work-for-hire contracts, or outright purchase contracts on
unwitting creators. If the creators all insisted on the actual value
of their creations they would not be so ripped off and perhaps they
would be forming licensing organizations to manage their contracts.
You're thoroughly wrong about the publishing industry, at least. Very
little is done as work-for-hire, particularly in fiction. (This is
probably the part of the copyright space I know best, my wife and many
friends are authors, editors, even small-press publishers, with some
agents thrown in.)
For big group projects, works-for-hire is pretty much necessary;
otherwise any future use would require finding and negotiating rights
with each of hundreds of people. Something as simple as assembling an
anthology of fiction is often made difficult by finding who now controls
the rights to each story; for a film with hundreds of people working on
it in creative roles, it'd be hopeless.
Unfortunately that is not happening and every fool who fills up flikr
with their cute pix is contributing to the commoditization of their
creative efforts. Check the contracts you agree to by clicking that
button on those sites. They all lay claim to reuse and often to
license use of your deposits without any payments to you, and
generally without your even knowing.
Flickr makes no such claims. Read the terms of service carefully at
<http://flickr.com/terms.gne>; you're probably thinking of 9a and 9b,
but 9a is limited to use in promoting the service the content is on
(which means it gives them the right to make one of your pictures the
"featured picture of the day" on the homepage and such) and it ends when
you remove your content from the service. 9b is "solely for the purpose
for which such Content was submitted or made available"; that is, you're
giving them permission to display your photo as part of your photo
album. Neither of them give them any resale rights, or anybody else any
rights.
(9c does look troublesome to me, but it's limited to "[c]ontent other
than photos, graphics, audio or video".)
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
