Its welcome when anyone is in favor of reducing copyright or patent scope, penalties, or terms. But that is because these laws are totally unjust, and zero IP law is the goal, and so any move toward that is an improvement. Likewise, if you oppose income tax, then even a 5% reduction is good, if not ideal. If you oppose the drug war, reducing the prison sentences is good, even if abolition is ideal. But the only reason to favor reducing drug penalties, income tax, and IP scope, is that you have some ideal you are pushing for--ZERO. So while I welcome people like Doctorow and Reda saying they want to have sensible improvements to IP law, I dont understand what their argument is. Unless you think there should be no copyright law, you literally have no coherent basis to argue that copyright law should be weakened or retrenched. Because if you think there should be *some* copyright law, you think there is some optimal amount (as do its typical advocates) -- so if you argue we should reduce copyright protection, then you have to claim to know (a) the optimal amount of copyright protection so that you can conclude that (b) that it is less than the current amount. But neither the IP proponents nor the IP reformers know (a). They have no idea. They are all stuck in the utilitarian mentality. So unfortunately the criticisms of extant copyright law by unprincipled utilitarians is completely empty. If it persuades some people with no coherent ideas, fine, I guess, but I dont see how it can. The only way forward is a sober and economically-informed, principled approach to social relationships--that is, property rights allocated via the libertarian-Lockean approach, which leave no room at all for IP. It is not a matter of balance or reforming IP law any more than the solution to the drug war is to find the right way to outlaw narcotics. Julia Reda, the sharp-as-a-tack Member of the European Parliament for the German Pirate Party, has just tendered her draft report on copyright reform in the EU. It is full of amazingly sensible suggestions. Among them: harmonizing EU exceptions to copyright (what would be called fair use in the USA), so that things that are permitted in one EU state are permitted in the others. This is very important because as it stands, a work that is legal in one EU country can be a copyright infringement next door, meaning that by crossing a border, you commit an offense, and meaning that artists who make transformative uses in one EU member state can be held liable for punishing fines next door. Another good un: shortening the term of copyright to the term set out in the Berne Convention (life of the creator plus 50 years), ending the trend of extending EU copyright every time the Beatles and Elvis near the public domain.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 01:17:07 +0000
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