At our distance education class this past week Carl Johnson from BYU copyright came and visited our class to discuss copyright issues and education. This had obvious implications for the course I'm taking in Open Education as well.
It was interesting to me that Carl seemed to promote the use of Creative Commons licenses and author rights. Although he was careful to say that he needed promote the interests of both authors and the university in general, he seemed to feel that a day of open-access was coming and that there are lots of benefits in this regard.
In the Open Ed class I was made aware of a comment by a member of BYU's legal counsel who said that on both professional and personal reasons he supported Creative Commons. I'm obviously spending too much time hanging out with open-access people but I started to wonder to myself, "What would happen if copyright was done away with?" Or, more practically, dramatically reduced?
For me as an author would I care? No--it seems doubtful that anything of value that I create will not be worthy guarding 10 years from now. But what if? What if I became like JK Rowling and came up with a slam dunk, home run of a story. How would JK Rowling feel if copyright ended after ten years. What would that mean?
So I could publish cheap versions of the Harry Potter books. That would be bad for JK Rowling (no longer receives royalties) and bad for the publisher (too much competition now). Would it wreck the brand of Harry Potter? Not likely. If somebody publishes Harry Potter 8 and it stinks, nobody will buy it. If on the other hand it is an amazing piece of work, I'd be grateful for new culture (though Ms. Rowling might not be).
What percentage of works are like mine, and what percentage are like Rowlings? An interesting finding by James Boyle in his book The Public Domain is the following: "We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to renew."
Isn't that amazing! Boyle states that this can be viewed as an approximation of commercial viability. So if after 28 years people don't renew, it's likely that it wasn't worth it.
I wonder how many years copyright would need to be in place in order for half of people to bother renewing it. Let's suppose that it was ten years.
If that were the case, what if a mechanism was set in place so that copyright expired after ten years; however, those who wanted to renew could renew the copyright by paying a nominal (15$) fee. And they could renew it every 10 years until death. And as long as I'm proposing new policy, what if we made it so that nothing was copyrighted unless the author specifically asked for the copyright to be in place by affixing a little logo to the work.
Although others have pushed for a less radical solution, this is what I am proposing today. :)
This review of Lessig's book Remix also had some helpful insights for thinking about copyright.
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7 comments:
I'll take the liberty of commenting on my own post (silly I know). As soon as I published the post I realized that I had limited my discussion to print books. But I think the application for educational resources is similar. For example, Carl Johnson talked about Virtual Chemlab. Here is a great resource that is making BYU a lot of money. Well if it still is in ten years, no problem, just renew it. I also believe that the idea of not automatically copyrighting works would benefit educators, most of whom (I believe) are interested in sharing their content.
I sense a revolution! You radical, you :)
Seriously, though. It would be interesting, and I think useful, to explore the implications of an opt-in copyright system in more depth...
When you said you had responded to your own post, I thought you were joking!
Anyway, I think I agree if I have understood correctly.
Personally, I am happy to give everything I create away for free. But I know that for some, their whole income structure depends on copyright laws.
So I would be a proponant of a mixed set of rules where authors can somehow select when they want things to be protected and when they don't care.
People should be rewarded for their own work as long as they are living if that is what they chose.
That's just my opinion.
I like Mike's idea of having the copyright in place until the person dies. But then you have the issue of corporate and institutional copyrights...when are they considered dead? How about just 50 years after creation. You can say most people live until about 70 and don't start registering copyrights until about 20...Anyway when you got cash depending on it I doubt it will change. I like the idea of not automatically copyrighting works when they are created. If that were the case though I think the should make it free to register copyrights.
I'll give another comment :)
@ Mike--the mixed set of rules...it has arrived. Creative Commons licenses allow authors to reserve "some rights." And the rights reserved may vary depending on the desires of the authors. See
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
I think there is a lot of merit to your idea here, John.
Let's try to take this same idea to a different discipline--biology.
What if organisms couldn't reproduce but once in a lifetime? Furthermore, what if organisms could not reproduce with other organisms that had DNA that was "too similar?" Essentially, this would mean the end of life as we know it.
The reason evolution has worked out so well is that organisms that are slightly different reproduce and have offspring that are more different still.
Same thing with ideas. Two ideas that are similar, yet slightly different, when mixed together have created ideas that were brilliant. This is what academics is all about. Almost nobody comes up with it all on their own.
But copyright, in essence, prevents recombination of ideas but once in a lifetime.
That might have been a lame analogy, but whatever. I think you get the point.
At the risk of having left a silly comment earlier, here's another thought:
This whole "renew your work every X number of years" business is great if you have one work. But what if you have many different works? Would it be a pain to renew them every when the expiration was coming around?
What if you had 100 works that you published on the web? (This could happen.) How much time would you have to spend worrying about re-registering copyright? And would it cost money? Would it cost $15 dollars each? Would you then have to pay $1500 every time you wanted to renew your copyright?
There may be some scalability issues here.
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