A loose organization of reformers, mostly lawyers and professors at the nation’s top universities, known as the Copy Left are working to reform Copyright Law in the Internet age that they argue hinders the spread of culture and the growth of creativity. According to the Copy Left, the extension of copyright laws over the years has slowed down the growth of public domain material, which is “essential” in order to allow new ideas to be made through the borrowing and using of past ideas to lend toward new ideas.
Many believe that copyright laws were intended to simply bolster creativity through protecting creative ideas for a limited time, making it necessary for people to continue to create new works over time in order to maintain possession of new copyrights. The extensions of the length of time that material is protected has made it so that people may benefit from their creative works for a longer time, reducing the need to create.
In the most recent years, copyright law has grown to make it so that material does not have to be formally registered for it to be protected. Copyright laws created in 1976 defined material as “copyrighted the moment it was ‘fixed in a tangible medium.’” This is why the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was able to be applied to a case following the 2000 presidential election in which Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country, demanded the removal of e-mails obtained by students of Swarthmore from their website on the school’s server. The e-mails contained information about weaknesses in the software that hackers may easily take advantage of. The students saw it as a form of whistle-blowing, but Diebold, using the restrictive parameters of the DMCA, was able to have the material removed without going through the legal steps that were so important to making such decisions in the past.
Opponents to the Copy Left are sympathizers with the “romantic notion of authorship.” They also believe that culture is a market in which everything of value should be owned by somebody. Because copyright arises from creating a work, the author has a moral claim that can’t be claimed by either corporations or consumers. Lastly, the argument that the iTunes store model for distributing material is the most effective in building the culture because it allows the consumer to democratically show the producers of material what kinds of culture it is that they want.
In order to ensure that the creators of material may profit from their work, the Copy Left is proposing that all works that could be transmitted online would be registered with a central office, whether government or independent. This central office would monitor how frequently a work is used and the creators would then be paid out of money that is collected through the taxation of devices such as DVD burners and blank CDs.
The solution proposed by the Copy Left is a more restrictive system than the copyright system could ever dream of being. They seem to have failed to realize that registering the works is the exact point of copyright laws to begin with, and the use of taxation to pay the creators of material is absurd as it means that consumers would be paying for material simply through raising the costs of other products in the market rather than by simply paying for the material that they want when they decide that they want it.
The Copy Left is overly concerned with eliminating the existing laws rather than working to revise the new laws that are making things too protected. By simply fighting the part of the laws that state that material is instantly copyrighted upon creation, we allow people to choose whether they want to protect their own material, returning the power to the authors, rather than to a group such as the Copy Left who can use their power to manipulate the culture, rather than letting the creators simply create the culture.
Posted by mraneo 