E-SPEAIT Week 5

The amount of music, art and all creative works overall on the internet is massive. And since so many people are using it, there tends to be people who are misusing or falsely claiming authorship of someone else's work. That's where copyright rules come into play. The idea is to prevent misuse of content, but it also blocks creativity. Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström share their opinions in their book "The case of copyright reform".

Setting up an efficient copyright system seems like a really hard task. How can you design it, so that original authors get what they want/deserve and that people would know exactly how to use someone else's work.

One example could be music. If someone wants to make a  remix of a song or upload their own cover of it to Youtube, should they ask the author for permission? In that case, the author would probably get bombarded with emails and making it very difficult to respond. Now, what I think is, if  you take a song and add your own spin to it, it would be enough just to credit the original author. That raises another question. What qualifies as „adding your own spin“? Can you just add a little peep sound to it because technically the song is modified. I would say that is not enough, but also I couldn’t say what the limit would have to be.

The book mentioned that there is no point in having parliaments introduce balanced copyright legislations, if the big corporations are allowed to write their own laws and enforce them. I think a good example of that would be people using songs in their Youtube videos. Not even actually using the song, but humming it or playing it on an instrument you picked up for the first time in your life (meaning the song would not sound like the original). But big corporations could claim the revenue of the whole 20 minute video, even if the uploader hummed the song for 9 seconds. Yes, the uploader can fight back but if the system would be built up better, there wouldn’t be a need for all those extra activities.

I didn’t know that protection times on copyrighted works are a thing. As the book mentioned, life plus 70 years, this seems awfully lot. I support idea to tone it down, but 20 years from publication might still be a bit high number. Also claiming authorship for something that isn't yours is false. So I agree with the book authors  that the moral rights should remain unchanged.


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