European Commission Consultation On Copyright Reveals Chasm Between Views Of Public And Publishers
from the now-they-can't-deny-it,-but-will-they-act-on-it? dept
In January of this year, we urged Techdirt readers to express their views on copyright by participating in the European Commission's consultation on the subject. It seems that many of you did, judging by the final numbers, which have just been published by the Commission (pdf):The public consultation generated broad interest with more than 9,500 replies to the consultation document and a total of more than 11,000 messages, including questions and comments, sent to the Commission's dedicated email address. A number of initiatives were also launched by organized stakeholders that nurtured the debate around the public consultation and drew attention to it.Some 5600 response came from the public, 2400 from authors/performers, and a thousand or so from companies. The European Commission has published an analysis of the comments on a question-by-question basis. This makes it slightly hard to get an overall sense of what the various sectors are saying, but fortunately Leonhard Dobusch has tackled that problem in an illuminating post on the Governance Across Borders blog:
I tried to have a look at the bigger picture here: what do we learn about the state of copyright at large? And what overall direction should copyright reform take?Here's how he addressed those questions:
What I have done is to check for each of the 24 issue sections whether one of the respective stakeholder groups sees a need for copyright reform or is content with the current copyright system (for details check out a public Google spreadsheet with original quotes). The results are not entirely surprising and very clear: we have a strong divide among copyright stakeholders with end users and institutional users (e.g. libraries, archives, universities) strongly in favor of copyright reform and authors, collective management organizations, publishers and producers in favor of the current copyright system.He then turned that information into two striking graphics:
For those that can't view those images, they show the public massively in favor of reforming just about every aspect of copyright, and publishers massively against doing so. As Dobusch writes:
the two charts above indicate that current EU copyright is very unbalanced. When one side is completely satisfied with the status quo and the other is very unhappy then this is not a balanced situation. Given that a good compromise should leave everybody equally unhappy, the results of the consultation also show the direction for copyright reform efforts of the new EU Commission: re-balancing copyright requires at least some reform as demanded by end users and institutional users, most importantly a more harmonized and flexible system of exceptions and limitations.
This is what Techdirt and many others have been urging for years. What's important here is that with this significant response to the consultation, it is now impossible for the European Commission to ignore the chasm between the views of the public, hugely unhappy about the current imbalance of copyright, and those of the publishers, desperately trying to keep things as unfair and as profitable as they are currently. Whether the Commission does anything about it is quite another matter.
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Filed Under: copyright, copyright reform, eu, eu commission, europe, public, public interest, publishers
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Not correct. It shows that the self-selecting part of the public who chose to participate massively in favor of...
The problem with any process like this is that those who are okay with things they way they are generally don't get involved. So it's hard to draw conclusions without sampling a group of non self-selecting citizens.
The numbers may or may not reflect the public's opinion as a whole, but we will likely never know.
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Here's a test. Find someone you know and ask if they know the current duration of a copyright. When they almost invariably don't tell them what it is, (lifetime of author + 70 years in 'Murica) and THEN ask them if that sounds pretty reasonable or not. So far I haven't found one person who thinks that makes any kind of sense. Obviously I am not a scientist and I haven't polled a truly random and statistically significant portion of the population, but I bet most people would think that it's total insanity.
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So please, think of the starving zombie artists and their potential snacks, and support life+(obscene amount of years) copyright duration.
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A better question would be "do you are about how long copyright on a song or movie lasts?" That would be a good indication to find out if the issue even matters.
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or, that they haven't considered the issue and don't know what the consequences of copyright length actually are. People don't care about a lot of things until the consequences hit them. That doesn't mean the subject itself doesn't matter.
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"No because I will ignore copyright/pirate it anyway."
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Sure, ask them that question, then if they say 'no', point out how many things they likely do on a daily basis are technically illegal, thanks to the insanity of current copyright law.
Point out how the simple act of finding a song/picture/movie clip they like, and sending a copy of it to a friend to listen/view/watch, something that most people wouldn't even bat an eye at, is considered a crime worthy of hefty fees if the rights owner wants to try it in court.
Point out the thousand, tens of thousand or higher fines people have been threatened with for downloading and/or sharing a handful of songs, or even simply due to being accused of such.
Direct their attention to the fact that companies 'borrow' and build off of the public domain left and right, and then turn around and threaten and shut down the efforts of anyone who dares do the same with what they've created.
Point out how numerous technologies, and every technology build on top of them, would simply not exist if copyright maximalists had their way throughout history.
Point out how nothing created in a person's lifetime will enter the public domain for others to build upon, if it ever does, given the repeated retroactive expansions to copyright duration.
The general public may not care either way about copyright, but that's pretty much solely because they know nothing about it. Start educating them on how utterly broken and insane it is, and unless they're among those who are currently benefiting from the current system, odds are most of them are not going to be in favor of the law as it currently stands.
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Then ask how many of them have paid a fine, been taken to court, or even been concerned... answer will be about zero.
Point out how nothing created in a person's lifetime will enter the public domain for others to build upon, if it ever does, given the repeated retroactive expansions to copyright duration.
I am still stuck on trying to figure out how it matters if it's 50 years, 60 years, or 2000 years? At what point do you think that the number would really make a difference? 5 years? 2 years? A few weeks?
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The murder hyperbole works both ways.
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Anything beyond 30 years seems excessive. 30 years is a generation and it is more than enough to avoid speculation in it. What I think most have an issue with, though, is not the specific number, but that it is consistently changing in an increasing manner. The change of copyright lenghts will cause damage to the investments companies wanting to use the recently PDed works have made and it is generally a negative disruption of the market, since few 100 year old works are that popular today as to cause demand for licensing...
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And guess what, the result is not fear, it is not compliance, it is defiance. The general mindset is, that they deserve all the piracy for the audacity to threaten or sue over a fucking *movie*. A movie that will be eventually available for free in TV.
Nobody I know thinks it is even remotely reasonable to threaten with hundreds or thousands of euro over a movie or a few songs.
Nobody *cares* what the law is on this matter anymore, because the law has absolutely no because it is absolutely incompatible with the reality people live in. Criminalizing behavior that is just one mouseclick away, be it sharing media, or remixing media is just incomprehensible to most people. And therefore the law gets ignored.
Copyright as it is is a relic of days long past. It is an artificial restriction on normal behavior and people refuse to follow it. That is your problem and neither educating people about the law or punishing them changes that.
The duration of copyright does not matter anymore for this reason, but if you want to argue what people tend to think is reasonable it will be around 5, maybe 10 years maximum.
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Even that's not the point. "Free" is a driver for many, but it's not the main driver in most cases. A lot of the content being pirated is either pre-release, not available in the country yet or has been windowed out of peoples' reach (e.g. a cinema release where a family may have to pay $100+ to see it). If the content was available for a reasonable price at the time, many would pay rather than pirate. But, they have to insist on those windows and resrtictions...
"Nobody I know thinks it is even remotely reasonable to threaten with hundreds or thousands of euro over a movie or a few songs."
That's actually one of the main points, I think. If they sued over the retail cost of the content downloaded, or maybe 2-3 times that amount as a punitive fine, people would probably pay up. They probably wouldn't stop "pirating" as most people see that as sharing and were doing it long before the internet. But the cartels would get their money.
But, they got greedy. They tried to make examples of people and started asking for thousands or even millions *per song* or *per download*. That's not only clearly more than most people could ever pay, but the lack of proportion to the crime is absolutely offensive. So, instead of people becoming compliant or even handing over money they became, as you say , defiant.
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Well, you do find basic facts mystifying in most of these discussions.
The point is that copyright is meant to be a *limited* monopoly to allow artists to profit from their work and thus drive the creation of new work. 50 years fits this definition, though I'd argue it's too much (I'd prefer to see a system where it's 20-25 years with the option to renew but without the option to sell the copyright to a corporation or another non-physical legal entity).
But, anything over the standard lifetime of a person becomes too long. Why? Because then it's not effectively "limited". If nothing from the year a person is born enters the public domain by the time they die following a natural lifespan, then copyright on that content is effectively infinite to that person. No, copyright should not be infinite, and people here will be happy to discuss the many, obvious reasons why that is. Assuming you've found a taste for honest discussion, that is, which I doubt.
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Wait, forgot to factor in bribes. ... status quo forever!
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Stating a fact and asking someone what they think of that fact is a leading question?
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Who do you think the public is going to believe, whether they choose to involve themselves or not? There isn't a choice like you believe - in fact, because actual pirates will have made themselves less traceable, the average person who doesn't hide his activities is more likely to get hit by the RIAA, who claim they are legally empowered to financially ruin anyone they please because copyright law.
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"The numbers may or may not reflect the public's opinion as a whole, but we will likely never know."
...but you'll assume they won't and base your entire premise on that so you don't have to discuss anything. Pathetic as always.
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Which totally explains why the publishers overwhelmingly supported no change.
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Oh yeah?
I bet there's an army of industry lobbyists with mountains of money that beg to differ.
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Smiler
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Yes it is possible to ignore
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I suspect this same chasm would be found virtually anywhere if anybody cares to check. It's another stance of politics being completely apart from the ones they should be benefiting.
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I happen to know that it is currently illegal to filter email to EU MPs -- subject lines can be tagged, but filtering is not allowed.
They are also required to respond to all messages in a certain timeframe -- which is probably where the grumpiness comes from.
This makes spam an interesting situation for them; same with phishing attacks and malware.
The good news for them is that they don't personally have to be the responders, so they can hire someone to do that work.
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Sure, tell me I'm wrong and then watch the commission put exactly that spin on it.
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I think you're mistaken.
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