
Copyright myths explained - bearwithclaws
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
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pbhjpbhj
There's a spattering of tiny little issues I have throughout the post -
perhaps I'll blog about it. I also wish that people commenting on a particular
legal jurisdiction would be totally upfront about it - "11 myths about US
copyright law" would have been better; thankfully he does not in several
places he's talking about US law (though there were no quotes or mentions of
caselaw or statute IIRC, except for Berne)

He rather belittles moral rights, making them appear to be tacked on, the
right to be named as author of your own work IMO should be considered the
cornerstone of copyright and is a key part of the Berne Convention adopted in
most places outside the USA early in the 1900s.

~~~
ubernostrum
Historically speaking, the modern European conception of moral rights is quite
far from being the "cornerstone" of copyright. And with good reason: they
raise some rather significant problems which aren't present in jurisdictions
which "lack" them.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You've piqued my interest, can you follow through: what are the problems of
attribution and control over modification (and other moral rights?) that
you're thinking of?

~~~
ubernostrum
Well, to take one example which will be relevant to HN readers: moral rights
pose real threats to open source software, since in many jurisdictions which
have them they are considered inalienable and can be asserted even when all
other rights are licensed freely. Thus, for example, someone who lives in a
moral-rights jurisdiction and writes open-source code would still have --
regardless of the terms of the license -- the right to quash particular uses
of the software, or the creation of forks.

This is why a number of larger open-source-supporting organizations have
contributor agreements which include a clause stipulating that contributors
will not assert moral rights against the projects to which they contribute.

Moral rights also interfere with uses that people in the US can largely take
for granted; authors in moral-rights jurisdictions can, for example, quash
parodies or satires of their work even if those parodies or satires would
otherwise be permitted by the relevant copyright laws.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If a coders moral rights are inalienable to the extent that some right can be
asserted after he has license away those rights then he cannot create open
source software under certain licenses. If he can later demand attribution
then he must choose a license that includes teh possibility of attribution -
yes I can see this could be a problem. Do you know of any specific
jurisdiction in which a creator can't license away the rights needed?

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cduan
With regard to US copyright law, one important point not mentioned is
statutory damages for infringement. Generally, if you are found liable for
infringement, you owe "actual damages," that is, the amount of harm you did or
profit you gained from the infringement. However, if the copyrighted work was
registered, then statutory damages may be available, meaning that you could be
liable for up to $200,000, even if you caused no actual damages.

My personal opinion is that this leads to a strange imbalance in the copyright
law. If an individual makes a creative work (e.g., a blog post) and makes it
available for free, the individual is never going to pay the $60 to register
the work. So when someone else comes along and rips off the blog post, the
individual only wins actual damages, which the other person argues are minimal
because the blog post was up for free anyway.

But if a big corporation makes a creative work for profit, it expects to make
more than $60 off the work, so it registers it. So someone who copies the work
is suddenly liable for hundreds or thousands of dollars in statutory damages,
regardless of the harm actually done.

This seems, to me, to create an unbalanced incentive: works created for profit
receive greater protection than works created for free. There are a number of
legislative options to fix this, which I will leave to the rest of you to
devise.

~~~
hristov
I don't see the big deal. First of all, the fee has been reduced to about $35
for online registration. So if copyright infringement is that important to
you, then just register your blog posts. The registration requirement is not
there to help big corporations but to create proof that you had control of a
the thing that is allegedly copyrighted at a certain date.

The US legislature decided that in order to fairly charge statutory damages,
it should at least have some evidentiary certainty to when something was
copyrighted. So the registration requirement was created to provide some
certainty.

The fee seems proportional to the costs of running the whole registration
scheme by the library of congress. So it is not there to punish you for being
poor.

If you really care about your blogs being registered I can suggest a couple of
tricks:

\- register a bunch of blog entries together. For example you can register a
whole year of blogging as a single work.

\- You can not register all your blog posts, but if you see someone stealing
something from you, register the thing they stole. They will probably continue
the copyright violation after your registration.

(PS while I am a lawyer, none of the above is legal advice and no client
attorney relationship is created.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
[IANAL, this isn't legal advice either]

If you register your whole years posts as one work then a large excerpt from
one post would probably not be a significant part of that whole work. Copying
of an insubstantial part usually rules out the copying as being commercial -
this is where lawyers earn their fee, what is an substantial part?

In the worst circumstances I can see such a registration meaning you get no
damages at all as it supports the copiers claim that the amount copied is not
enough to be commercial damaging.

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quoderat
It's depressing reading this, and realizing how much large corporations have
co-opted the entire culture, hurting both individuals and the culture itself.

Some of them I don't think are correct, quite, as it's obvious written from a
copyright maximalist angle, but I don't have time to quibble with it.

------
nudded
And most importantly you only have the rights on the actual representation of
the idea (be it a drawing, a blog post,...) and not the idea itself.

------
joe_the_user
You can pretty reliably predict that any article featuring the terms "myths"
is going to be some kind of propaganda... The term is a rhetorical device
which assumes that the conceptions you're arguing against are so childish that
they don't merit serious discussion. Generally, it is used by some kind of
authority trying to re-impose a black-and-white view of things on a complex,
shades-of-gray world - "drug myths", etc.

