Boing Boing: The EU is mooting a new copyright regime for the largest market in the world, and the Commissioners who are drafting the new rules are completely captured by the entertainment industry, to the extent that they have ignored their own experts and produced a farcical Big Content wishlist that includes the most extensive internet censorship regime the world has ever seen, perpetual monopolies for the biggest players, and a ban on European creators using Creative Commons licenses to share their works.
4 comments:
As a budding member in the creative industries, I can appreciate the need for copyright laws. It's not fun (and potentially career- threatening) to have intellectual property stolen. But there is so much potential for abuse in this proposed set of copyright laws, I don't see the benefit of adopting. The language of the proposal sounds like Mark Zuckerburg's congressional hearing: baby boomers trying to legislate industries for which they have no real knowledge or connection. Copyright protection is important, but should it implemented on the scale proposed to the detriment of the industry (for now, in 2018, it is a real industry) of YouTube? I think not. The fact that this article could list so many questionable copyright claims (quick sidetone: white noise is not a recording, but a random sampling of the same amplitude frequencies that have a total mean of 0) goes to show where the heart of this proposal is: not protecting artists, but the corporations that supposedly "own" content.
I feel like Europe is making things up again, though I am not sure if someone named Arnold is behind it. This is insane. Copyright law is a mess as more and more companies with deep pockets try to claim ownership over everything they can get their hands on. Why? To whose benefit will it be? I remember watching an episode of Adam Ruins Everything where he talked about how companies like Disney sue to keep things out of Pubic Domain which stifles creativity and further development. I feel like this will do the same in Europe. A bunch of politicians sitting around talking about creativity and fair use and public domain and not a single one of them a creative artist trying to protect their work but some stuffy person who just wants to make sure the people putting money in the campaign coffers gets what they want is not a basis to be writing a law that makes things worse. I say scratch the entire law and write something that makes sense. The same thing that needs to be done here in the U.S.
I completely agree with Sydney on this. As an artist, I think that copyright laws are important in protecting intellectual property but this proposal seems much more interested in protecting the interests of select corporations rather than the individual. I think that copyright laws should exist so that the artist can make a reasonable profit from his/her work and then, after the a couple of years - like after the artist has passed - their work should be submitted to the public domain. All art has built on the art before it. Having strict copyright laws like this and the ones that the Disney lobbies in the US is an obstacle to creative freedom and prevents really cool innovations and ideas. In this age, where the internet is vast and filled with shared information, the older generation can no longer dictate our rules. They do not understand what they are governing and so they can only make laws to protect what they know – the corporation.
The European Union is a flawed system just as many systems of government are this seems just like one of those flaws that was able to slip through the cracks of the system and make its way into a proposal of law. There are definitely some very obvious cross interests here with the big money being prioritized over the little creator. Intellectual property and the ability to claim what you though as your own is one of those things that has been a struggle since it was first conceived but is also essential to were our society is going with the ideas behind things being the most important aspect of what we do in the world. As we move farther and farther into an intellectual society this will become more and more important and while we as artist and creators have seen this for a long time the rest of the world I think is finally starting to catch up and the battle between big money and little guy will get more and more important.
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