suddenly propels you into the same kind of longlasting fame that Paul McCartney or ABBA have enjoyed, 20 years will be more than enough for you to become very rich indeed, and never have to worry about money ever again.
Registration After 5 Years
An orphan work is a work that is still in copyright, but where the rights holder is not known or cannot be found. It can be a book, a song, a film, or a photo, or any other kind of work that falls under the copyright legislation.
Orphan works present a big problem for anybody who would want to use them. If you just go ahead without getting a permission, you run the risk that the rights holder suddenly turns up and sues you for a large amount. As we all know, courts can be quite prepared to set the damages for even minor copyright infringements to pretty astronomical figures. In many cases, this is simply not an acceptable risk.
But since there is no known rights holder that you can ask for a license, there is nothing you can do about it. No matter how valuable you think it would be to share that work with the world, there is no way to do it without breaking the law and exposing yourself to a great financial risk. The orphan works are effectively locked away by the copyright system.
This is not a small or marginal problem. A large part of our common cultural heritage from the 20th century falls into this category. About 75% of the books that Google want to digitize as part of their Google Books initiative are out of print, but still under copyright.
Even if it is theoretically possible to find the rights holders for many of these books by making a thorough investigation in each individual case, it simply becomes unfeasible when you want to do mass digitization.
And Google Books is not the only project to digitize works and make them available, even if it is the one that has attracted the most attention lately. There is an EU project called Europeana with a similar goal, as well as the open initiative Project Gutenberg. All of these are being held back by the problem of orphan (or semiorphan) works.
Unless we do something, a large part of our common cultural heritage from the 20th century risks getting lost in a black hole before it becomes legal to save it for posterity.
To reduce the copyright protection time to 20 years would solve most of this problem, but for technical legal reasons, this is unlikely to happen fast. In order to reduce the protection times like this we would have to renegotiate a number of international treaties on copyright, such as the Berne Convention. Although this is something Europe most certainly has the political and economic strength to do this once we have the political will, it will take time to get there even in a best case scenario. We need something that can be implemented faster.
We propose that copyright (including the monopoly on commercial use and distribution) should be granted automatically without registration when a work is published, just like today. But if a rights holder wants to exercise that commercial monopoly for more than 5 years, he should be required to register the work after the first 5 years have lapsed.
Rights holders who have chosen not to register their claim to a work that was published more than 5 years ago would still keep their copyright as such, but would be seen as having waived their commercial monopoly rights by not registering the work.
From a technical legal point of view this is perfectly compatible with the Berne Convention, since this does not alter the existence of the right, but merely adds a reasonable and justified condition on the exercise of that right.
All we are saying is that if you want money for the use of a work that is older than 5 years, you have to make it known in a public database how to contact you and where to send the money. This is not an onerous or unreasonable demand in any way.
At the same time, the existence of public databases where anyone interested in licensing a work commercially can easily find the relevant rights holders, will of course benefit the rights holders. If you want to sell something, making your identity know to wouldbe buyers is quite obviously in your own interest.
Registration after 5 years is a win-win proposal that can be implemented quickly and easily.
Free Sampling
In its description of the documentary film Copyright Criminals, the US broadcaster PBS writes :
Long before people began posting their homemade video mashups on the Web, hip-hop musicians were perfecting the art of audio montage through sampling. Sampling — or riffing — is as old as music itself, but new technologies developed in the 1980s and 1990s made it easier to reuse existing sound recordings. Acts like Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys created complex rhythms, references and nuanced layers of original and appropriated sound. But by the early 1990s, sampling had collided with the law. When recording industry lawyers got involved, what was once called “borrowed melody” became “copyright infringement.”
Computers, mobile phones and other interactive technologies are changing our relationships with media, blurring the line between producer and consumer and radically changing what it means to be creative. As artists find more inventive ways to insert old influences into new material, Copyright Criminals poses the question: Can you own a sound?
Today, the answer to that last question is unfortunately yes. The big record companies do claim ownership on individual sounds and very short samples. If you are a hip-hop musician, be prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of euros up-front for the sampling licenses you need if you ever want to make your music available to the public.
This is clearly an unwarranted restriction on the right to create new culture.
Film makers and other artists who want to create new works by reusing parts of existing works face the same problem.
We want to change this by introducing clear exceptions and limitations to allow remixes and parodies, as well as quotation rights for sound and audiovisual material modeled after the quotation rights that already exist for text.
A Ban On DRM
The purpose of this proposal for copyright reform is to get a balanced legislation that benefits society as a whole, including consumers. But having the right to do something according to the law is of little value in itself, unless you also have the practical means to do it.
DRM is an acronym for “Digital Rights Management”, or “Digital Restrictions Management”. The term is used to denote a number of different technologies that all aim to restrict consumers’ and citizens’ ability use and copy works, even when they have a legal right to do so.
