News Mozilla calls for EU copyright reform

Say you created the Y U No image. Would you like 2,224,327 emails over the past 5 years asking you for permission to create a new meme?

https://memegenerator.net/Y-U-No

 

yes - and paying a licence fee to use it

 

But this is where copyright gets abused all over the place. If 'your' picture features something as subject matter, did/would you 'ask' permission to feature it? Would you pay a licence fee? How far to you go with that line of thinking and if you answered 'No'... Well then why should they?

The argument has never changed ever since (and it probably existed prior to) the first patent rush which was caused by Marconi's abuse of the system regarding wireless telegraphy.

 

or they get a different image where they wouldn't have to pay a licence fee

 

Yeah, pretty much.

 

Playing devils advocate here as I'm bored, what about if i used a small section from one of your images in my new app, I agree content creators should be paid for their work but what about if someone used only part of your work?

 

Mozilla are largely going after fair use for education parody etc. not commercial applications.

 

At what point does your original work no longer become your original work though?

If a musician uses 3 notes from another artist would that be copyright infringement, how about 1 or 2 notes? What about if i used 50, 100, 500 pixels from your original work, what if i used your work to teach a pupil about what's in your work.

 

Fair dealing in UK law would disagree with your views. It's quite likely that the rest of the EU will be brought in line with that sort of reasonable use of copyrighted works.

 

There's plenty of laws to prevent you being ripped off. There are allowances made for use under educational, criticism, satire and other situations without your consent. Whilst you may see it as unjust, most people don't care that you think so and neither does the law.

Basically people can't profit off of your work. Most fair dealing uses are non profit situations. Critics who are generally for profit can use snippets of your work as part of their own as can satirists.

 

Not every case of copyrighted material being used in a youtube video is illegal under American law which has the fair use clause more or less like the British have their fair dealings law. Critics often have problems with this and the copyright system has been abused in order to censor criticism of products such as games and movies.

Whilst you would see these legitimate use cases as the original creator being ripped off, many countries do not.

 

What I find laughable is generalised hypocrisy... It's amazing how many people would support means to protect 'their' work while at the same time arguing against any form of DRM within games and many other situations that would affect them from the other side.

 

Check.

 

fair dealings does apply to teaching but - if you publish your work using the copywrited material it moves from section 29(1) *non commercial research and/or private use* to public use , which is therefore a breach of the copywrite act 1988.

The precedence was already set under HM Ordnance survey vs greenamps ltd.

 

http://questioncopyright.org/understanding_free_content

http://questioncopyright.org/promise

All I will comment as these explain why copywrong is broken.

 

Is it though?

Stealing would see the person doing the stealing gaining something of financial value, don't get me wrong i think content creators should be compensated, however i feel the current copyright laws do need tweaking, I'm not a copyright lawyer so it's just my layman opinion/understanding, but i agree with the general gist of what Mozilla are saying, that the current copyright system restricts opportunity and innovation.

It's just a layman's opinion but I'd like to see a copyright system that compensates the content creator based on the profits from using their work, in other words if someone uses your content in something like an app and that app earns them money then you get a share of that money, that way we don't stifle opportunity and innovation as the sharing of content is free.

Yes that would be very complex but I'm talking about in an ideal world here.

 

If you can milk a single work for 70 years after your dead, where is the incentive to continue to create? While you may not be interested in continued iterations of a work others could well be and could make new derivative works but are prevented by copyright. Copyright does restrict innovation but protects monitisation.

 

I kind of have the same view. Once you create a work for a purpose and it has fulfilled that purpose (like a picture accompanying an article), what happens to it after that is largely irrelevant. I'd wager in many cases, further monetizing beyond the initial use is unlikely anyway.

Since you have at least one book that I know of, what is your opinion on duration of copyright. The likes of RMS reckons it should be around 5 or so years. The like of Disney would see it run as long as possible.