5 ms·

France: All your books are belong to us

63 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

darxius 15y ago
Happy to see that the Pirate Party is standing up for fair copyright laws regardless of who their opponent is. Hopefully this law will whither away.
- cturner 15y ago
  Not so in this corner. Use of the idea of fairness in argument is a red flag suggesting a lack of foundation by the person arguing. I think this opposition suggests that the party takes its positions from who its opponents are, rather than extending from a coherent underlying philosophy. The Pirate Party should take a strict line - abolish copyright altogether - rather than buying into the premises of their opponents but then trying to make a murky case about fairness. The French law could lead to good things. I'm on the lookout for an event where a government makes a significant concession against copyright and then finds that there are trade advantages to it. A well-publicised example of this could cause the floodgates will open, and there will be a race to liberalise. I see a parallel to the period of history where England lost the US colonies. They abandoned mercantalism for a free-trade model, and actually got richer despite the loss of a major colony.
  - darxius 15y ago
    From what I understand of the Pirate Party's mandate on copyright law, it seeks only to reform -- not abolish -- current copyright shenanigans. I got this information from the Pirate Party of Canada (but I'm pretty sure it's a universal mandate).
pfortuny 15y ago
Once again, France proves itself the paradise of Socialism... This is utterly unbelievable.
- pierrebai 15y ago
  Unbelievable is the level of comment on HN. Let's see, the law: 1. Aim to make available orphaned work. 2. Only applies to work unpublished for at least 5 years. 3. The public publishing right can be revoked by the author or publisher. 4. The author is getting royalties. 5. There is no censoring. Let's compare to another somewhat related case of royalties land grab, iPhone publishing: 1. Aim to control and profit from other people work. 2. Applies to all iPhone published work from day one. 3. There is no alternative other than not publish your iPhone app. 4. Apple gets a cut, always. 5. Apple gets to decide what gets published or not, unilaterally. It's funny also to compare this to, say, how the music radio system works. Hey, it's compulsory diffusion of work without the author consent with a government-prescribed royalty payment system. For current works. Ah, but music radio stations are mostly privately owned, so this all right? All in all, the law is reasonable and makes a honest attempt to leave the author in control. I could even envision that small and amateur author would want their work exclusively distributed by such a system, if the royalties are fair.
ggchappell 15y ago
I'm not clear on what's supposed to be so bad about this law. The article fails to explain that the intent of the law is to deal with the problem of orphaned works. It creates a process whereby out-of-print works can have have their copyright seized by the state, in order to make them available in digital form. Out-of-print works with a copyright date prior to 2001 are to be entered into a publicly available list. Listed works can be challenged for 6 months. Works that are not challenged within this period, have their rights seized, so that they can be published again. Perhaps the specifics of the law are problematic, but on the surface, it looks like a great idea to me. Authors get rights to their works for 11 years, after which, if the work remains available, things proceed as they do now. But out-of-print works whose authors cannot be found, can be legally made available again. And the process has checks on possible abuses. So what's the problem?
- icebraining 15y ago
  If the problem is orphaned works, why not simply turn them into the public domain, an let everyone distribute them? Why keep this quango as a monopolist over all orphaned books? This is nothing but corruption, giving those select members of the quango a cash-cow at the expense of both the authors and society. The article by the AFUL explains it well: http://aful.org/communiques/french-senate-proposes-to-legalize-piracy-french-20th http://aful.org/communiques/french-senate-proposes-to-legali...
  - davweb 15y ago
    The "collective management organisations" set up to manage this will be paying royalties to authors, something they wouldn't get if their books were made public domain. Similarly, an author can assert their rights and ask for a republished book to be removed from sale, something which would not be possible if works were made public domains. I'm not saying this a good idea, just that this is why they're not just removing the copyright from the works.
    - davidw 15y ago
      > The "collective management organisations" set up to manage this will be paying royalties to authors, something they wouldn't get if their books were made public domain. To me it looks like the incentives are not really in place for that. 1) If the authors are already present, registered, in touch, etc... they're already getting paid. 2) If the authors "can't be found", the big bureaucracy gets to keep the cash. Italy has a 'collective management organization, the SIAE, and the thing is pretty much pure evil.
thyrsus 15y ago
This appears to be an attempt to make orphan works available to the public. While I might like to see adjustments more friendly to authors (a longer period before being appropriated, easier terms under which authors may retrieve distribution of the work on their own terms), I'm not opposed to this measure in principle.
nmcfarl 15y ago
I would really like to see a sane analysis of this law. From this article it could merely require registering your copyright to use it, if it's more than a decade old. Which I personally would consider a sane way out of the current mess when it comes to finding someone to pay when remixing, resampling and quoting outside of fair use. However given the opponents this probably isn't the case. But this article gives us nothing.
- aevodor 15y ago
  I recommend this in-depth analysis (in French, published on Feb 19): http://scinfolex.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/oeuvres-orphelines-une-conclusion-en-forme-de-trompe-loeil-legislatif-et-les-consequences-a-en-tirer/ http://scinfolex.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/oeuvres-orphelines... (Creative Commons license, with attribution).

63 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

Happy to see that the Pirate Party is standing up for fair copyright laws regardless of who their opponent is. Hopefully this law will whither away.

cturner 15y ago
Not so in this corner. Use of the idea of fairness in argument is a red flag suggesting a lack of foundation by the person arguing. I think this opposition suggests that the party takes its positions from who its opponents are, rather than extending from a coherent underlying philosophy. The Pirate Party should take a strict line - abolish copyright altogether - rather than buying into the premises of their opponents but then trying to make a murky case about fairness. The French law could lead to good things. I'm on the lookout for an event where a government makes a significant concession against copyright and then finds that there are trade advantages to it. A well-publicised example of this could cause the floodgates will open, and there will be a race to liberalise. I see a parallel to the period of history where England lost the US colonies. They abandoned mercantalism for a free-trade model, and actually got richer despite the loss of a major colony.
- darxius 15y ago
  From what I understand of the Pirate Party's mandate on copyright law, it seeks only to reform -- not abolish -- current copyright shenanigans. I got this information from the Pirate Party of Canada (but I'm pretty sure it's a universal mandate).

pfortuny 15y ago

Once again, France proves itself the paradise of Socialism... This is utterly unbelievable.

pierrebai 15y ago
Unbelievable is the level of comment on HN. Let's see, the law: 1. Aim to make available orphaned work. 2. Only applies to work unpublished for at least 5 years. 3. The public publishing right can be revoked by the author or publisher. 4. The author is getting royalties. 5. There is no censoring. Let's compare to another somewhat related case of royalties land grab, iPhone publishing: 1. Aim to control and profit from other people work. 2. Applies to all iPhone published work from day one. 3. There is no alternative other than not publish your iPhone app. 4. Apple gets a cut, always. 5. Apple gets to decide what gets published or not, unilaterally. It's funny also to compare this to, say, how the music radio system works. Hey, it's compulsory diffusion of work without the author consent with a government-prescribed royalty payment system. For current works. Ah, but music radio stations are mostly privately owned, so this all right? All in all, the law is reasonable and makes a honest attempt to leave the author in control. I could even envision that small and amateur author would want their work exclusively distributed by such a system, if the royalties are fair.

ggchappell 15y ago

I'm not clear on what's supposed to be so bad about this law. The article fails to explain that the intent of the law is to deal with the problem of orphaned works. It creates a process whereby out-of-print works can have have their copyright seized by the state, in order to make them available in digital form. Out-of-print works with a copyright date prior to 2001 are to be entered into a publicly available list. Listed works can be challenged for 6 months. Works that are not challenged within this period, have their rights seized, so that they can be published again. Perhaps the specifics of the law are problematic, but on the surface, it looks like a great idea to me. Authors get rights to their works for 11 years, after which, if the work remains available, things proceed as they do now. But out-of-print works whose authors cannot be found, can be legally made available again. And the process has checks on possible abuses. So what's the problem?

icebraining 15y ago
If the problem is orphaned works, why not simply turn them into the public domain, an let everyone distribute them? Why keep this quango as a monopolist over all orphaned books? This is nothing but corruption, giving those select members of the quango a cash-cow at the expense of both the authors and society. The article by the AFUL explains it well: http://aful.org/communiques/french-senate-proposes-to-legalize-piracy-french-20th http://aful.org/communiques/french-senate-proposes-to-legali...
- davweb 15y ago
  The "collective management organisations" set up to manage this will be paying royalties to authors, something they wouldn't get if their books were made public domain. Similarly, an author can assert their rights and ask for a republished book to be removed from sale, something which would not be possible if works were made public domains. I'm not saying this a good idea, just that this is why they're not just removing the copyright from the works.
  - davidw 15y ago
    > The "collective management organisations" set up to manage this will be paying royalties to authors, something they wouldn't get if their books were made public domain. To me it looks like the incentives are not really in place for that. 1) If the authors are already present, registered, in touch, etc... they're already getting paid. 2) If the authors "can't be found", the big bureaucracy gets to keep the cash. Italy has a 'collective management organization, the SIAE, and the thing is pretty much pure evil.

thyrsus 15y ago

This appears to be an attempt to make orphan works available to the public. While I might like to see adjustments more friendly to authors (a longer period before being appropriated, easier terms under which authors may retrieve distribution of the work on their own terms), I'm not opposed to this measure in principle.

nmcfarl 15y ago

I would really like to see a sane analysis of this law. From this article it could merely require registering your copyright to use it, if it's more than a decade old. Which I personally would consider a sane way out of the current mess when it comes to finding someone to pay when remixing, resampling and quoting outside of fair use. However given the opponents this probably isn't the case. But this article gives us nothing.

aevodor 15y ago
I recommend this in-depth analysis (in French, published on Feb 19): http://scinfolex.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/oeuvres-orphelines-une-conclusion-en-forme-de-trompe-loeil-legislatif-et-les-consequences-a-en-tirer/ http://scinfolex.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/oeuvres-orphelines... (Creative Commons license, with attribution).