Part of the Pirate Party Core Policy suggests:
Pirate Party Core Policy

This is a laudable goal, but attempting to achieve it solely by reducing copyright term would fall far short of the ideal. Books made available on the Internet would, at least initially, be scanned images of varying quality, unnecessarily heavy on bandwidth and storage requirements and unsearchable. It would not be possible to copy and paste text from them or perform machine translations, and they would be inaccessible to the blind and the illiterate. Proper electronic copies, if and when they did become available (and for many books it may simply never happen), would likely contain transcription errors.

The situation for computer programmes may well be even worse. If history is anything to go by, programmes may simply no longer run on newer operating systems after a while. The source code may have to be reverse engineered from the programme in order to retarget the programme for a modern platform, and this could be a real mission.

The ridiculous thing about this situation is that all this material, the book scripts and computer source, are already available to the copyright holder. Trying to reobtain them would be a massive unnecessary duplication of work. Further, that work would benefit many, but may bring little reward to the person performing it, hence giving little incentive to do it, which is precisely the problem that copyright was supposed to solve in the first place. Copyright is granted to promote progress, and releasing this information is something the copyright holder could do fairly easily that would greatly contribute to this aim.

Patents, that are justified on the same basis as copyright, require method disclosure for this very reason. Copyright initially did not, however there was originally nothing the author had and could disclose that was not already available in the copies. Copyright originally only applied to books, and books were printed on printing presses using letter blocks assembled on plates. There was no computer file or anything comparable. The only way to set up a printing press for printing a book was to manually assemble the letter blocks onto plates.

Now that the situation has changed, and there is something that the copyright holder could disclose, it only seems sensible to me that such disclosure should be required for copyright grant as it is for patent grant.

I think this is a significant omission from Pirate Party policy.

I also think it has the potential to garner support from free/open source software advocates, and from the blind community.

I've suggested this in another thread here:
DRM
but I thought I'd expand on it in a separate thread.

This is the libertarian in me speaking here:

Copyright or no copyright, if you want to avoid "a massive unnecessary duplication of work", then make the creator an offer. Presumably, you both stand to benefit from it. Of course, the point of copyright (and patents for that matter) was to make the amount due significantly more than what someone would offer just to avoid duplication of work.

What i do like about your concept (even though it sounds horribly like the patent system) is that it has the potential to make creators think about whether they really want to copyright their work in the first place. If a large minority of creators choose not to, and people get to see more of what less copyright looks like in practice and how to build a business model on it, well that opens the door for real change the following generation.

Yes, you could make the creator an offer, or commission another person or people to transcribe or reverse engineer the work, or you could transcribe or reverse engineer it yourself. This would make complete sense if there was no copyright, or if the work wasn't under copyright, IMHO. But isn't copyright essentially supposed to be an alternative to commissioning work? If the government used tax payers' money to commission a work, but didn't ask for the computer file or source code, but rather only asked for a printed book, or a compiled programme, wouldn't this be selling the tax payers short? If there was a significant amount of money involved, wouldn't we expect a protest? Wouldn't people find it offensive? Copyright pays for works with the public's liberty, rather than from the public purse, but does this make it any less offensive to sell us short? I don't think there is a conflict here with libertarianism at all, besides the inherent conflict between copyright and libertarianism, which, if anything, is lessened if we get a better deal for our loss of liberty.


I'm guessing you're responding to this bit: "Further, that work [transcribing/reverse engineering] would benefit many, but may bring little reward to the person performing it, hence giving little incentive to do it, which is precisely the problem that copyright was supposed to solve in the first place."
To clarify this, I didn't mean to say that copyright was originally intended to compensate copyright holders to the value of the work that would be required to transcribe/reverse engineer their work, rather I meant that copyright is intended to provide an incentive for individuals to perform work that benefits many, and that the work of transcribing/reverse engineering a work is precisely this kind of work--work performed by individuals that benefits many. Thus, while copyright solves one problem, it (nowadays) creates another of the same kind.


It would be particularly interesting to see what happened if this law was implemented in a small country like New Zealand. I can't see, though why you think it's unpleasantly like patent law because of requiring disclosure for the grant of a right. Surely patent law could only be worse if it didn't require disclosure. Even if you're entirely opposed to patent law, surely you can't think that requiring disclosure makes patent law worse?

What i was getting at with the comparison with the patent system, is that just because there is a system in place (such as with the patent system), does not mean that it functions as intended (as the patent system doesn't).

Oh okay, I could certainly agree with that.

I'm optimistic that it would be workable somehow, although I know there would be plenty of details to work out. If we managed to get into a position of being able to implement legislation, I expect we could get some useful input from a few sources. The FSF might be able to offer suggestions in regards to legalities, given their experience with licences such as the GPL and FDL. Project Gutenberg and Archives New Zealand might be able to offer suggestions in regards to good practices for archival formats generally. The Foundation of the Blind might be able to offer suggestions in regards to good practices for accessibility in particular. I do think it would be worthwhile.
If this kind of thing is not pursued for any other kind of work, though, I think it is particularly important for computer programmes. Without it, I would honestly question whether commercial copyright on computer programmes (aside from games) produces any net good at all.

With any system like this, how well it works is more dependent on the people who actually administer it, rather than the initial legislation. Whether you can get something working in the first three years is one question, what that office ends up doing 10 years later...

What could be useful is what sort of appeals people trying to use the archive have. If something turns out not to be what was expected, the copyright can be revoked.

One of the things about patents, which could be avoided, is how you can get a patent for something you didn't create, as long as you file first. this creates an environment where the travesty of the commons occurs - you NEED to get a patent, or someone else will. If you could guarantee this won't happen, people would think more about what is best, and if they get copyright, take more time to do it right.

I wasn't thinking of a system like the patent office, I was hoping it could be done in a more decentralised fashion. I was thinking that if someone wanted to copyright something, they would have to keep an accessible electronic copy themselves, and make copies available for as long as they wanted to hold copyright. Say for example if someone published a printed book, perhaps it could be required that if they want to be able to enforce copyright on it, they must make electronic copies available for no more than the recommended retail price of the printed book. If they decide not to bother keeping electronic copies available before the copyright term ends, then there's probably no point continuing copyright protection. Anyone who wants to archive the work for the long term could do so themselves. Perhaps Archives New Zealand could request an electronic copy of anything they deemed worth archiving, but I wasn't envisioning them, or any other office, being responsible for administering copyright like the patent office administers patents. Yeah, there would have to be some kind of effective remedy available, but I was hoping this could be achieved through the courts without the need for a central copyright office/register etc..

They already got an offer, a very valuable "monopoly" on reproducing the work for a fairly good stretch of time.
If they're not meeting their end of the bargain then we (the public) shouldn't be held to ours.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterp ... right.html

This is a good read.