How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)
What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?
What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?
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I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
> I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments
Copyright only works if you have faith in your government to create and enforce laws.
Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government, you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.
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Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need. When we argue about details like this, we can assume that compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.
Which government do I need to have faith in for enforcing the copyright for a citizen of Wakanda who is infringing upon my work?
The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped up into AI models.
Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.
Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would be a possibility that a country could entertain.
> Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.
Why?
Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.) All those usages of your work that you object to (which many people consider fair use), are about to become much harder to prosecute.
Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to prosecute for copyright infringement.
Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Because once you make information available to the general public, you have no way to control what the general public does with that information. (This is the reason why DRM failed.)
(In general, my proposal is more in context with things like movies, TV shows, music; situations where in the past anyone could make a DVD/CD player that could play any DVD/CD, anyone could sell any DVD/CD by buying into the patent pool. No one could sell a DVD/CD that could only play in a specific model, and a CD/DVD player maker didn't have to negotiate with every studio. So my licensing model isn't quite the same situation that you're talking about.)
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In this case, the problem is that fair use is eroded. The questions are:
> Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
1: Once you make information available to the general public, how long do you retain exclusive control of that information? At what point is the general public's fair use eroded?
> Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
2: That's really the formula. It's a wonderful thing to argue about. Again, though, it's about making sure that fair use is preserved.
> Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
3: (Please also see answer 1) Why do people still flock to the Lourve (sp?) to see the Mona Lisa? That being said, copyright isn't intended to support artificial scarcity, and I think breaking down artificial scarcity makes popular items more valuable. (IE, the knockoff prints, that you collect royalties from, make the limited "artist made prints" more valuable.)
> Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Fair use. (Sorry, running out of time, see my example about the DC/DVD market. Also, radio stations used to be able to play any song and follow a formula to pay the right holder. The artists couldn't refuse a station from playing their song.)
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> Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
The same copyright laws apply to all things that are copyrightable regardless of medium. Anything that can be put into a fixed medium, be it print, digital recording, film.
Such a proposal needs to take into consideration everything that is copyrightable rather than just literature or film productions... but also software and photographs.
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50 years after publication date. If you want to license it before then for some other purpose, that's something that depends on your use of it and what I'm willing to accept.
If you have a formula, put it on the table. How much should it cost for me to commercially license some open source software?
How much should it cost you to license my photographs for fine art replicas? for placemats?
My contention is that any price that is legislated is wrong for the majority of the use cases. Any attempt to make it right gets into absurd nuance.
It is the same copyright laws that frustrate people for getting literature or movies into the public domain that also protects open source.
The alternative to copyright isn't "everything is free" but rather "everything is locked up."
The GPL was created because Stallman wanted to be able to modify printers. Getting rid of copyright (or making it very short duration) wouldn't have changed his experience with printers. What it would have changed would have been that that the GPL would lose all its teeth to compel people make their software licensed the same (under copyright law!).
However, all of this is pretty much moot and performative. If you want to change it to something shorter than 50 years - get the WTO to renegotiate TRIPS.
That ain't happening.
Spending effort to say "this is how it should be..." go write a story and release it to the public domain about that utopia of copyright freedom.
Speaking for myself, if I lost the rights provided by copyright to my photographs after a decade and half or so - I would not have posted them.
I do not want art locked up behind patronage and restricted to those few... though if that was the only alternative to being able to make some money off my photographs, then that's what I would have done.
You're getting far too defensive, and are missing the point that I'm making about fair use.
Then perhaps let me explain what I mean by fair use:
For example, I'd like to write an ebook reader that can give me an AI summary of the last chapter that I read, or give me a quick AI based summary of who a character is on the page that I'm reading.
Fair use means that I don't need to negotiate with every publisher and every author, or negotiate with Kindle to be able to access their content.
This is why we need compulsory licensing; it makes a middle ground between the exclusive control that you have when you create something, and the eventual entry into public domain.
> If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that.
This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:
* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible
* Everyone else
Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.
Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.
The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.
Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.
[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.
[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.
The US couldn't drop to the Berne floor... because it is a member of the WTO and restricted by TRIPS which has a floor of 50 years.
Going to anything less than 50 years would entail leaving the WTO and backing out of TRIPS. That in turn would be disastrous to the companies that work with information (music, movies, microcode (software), and ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶y̶).
Want to do away with registration for punitive damages? Absolutely. On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
How do I claim it?
How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)
What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?
What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?
---
I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.