[d@DCC] C-36 thoughts

[Russell McOrmond]

On Sun, 25 May 2003 mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:

> than in the regulations, and if we're revising the requirement at this
> time, now might be a good time to make it a condition for copyright
> protection, which would be a good thing to do.

  I don't think I agree with the thinking so far on this.

  I would prefer if we supported having the term of copyright dependent on
such a requirement, not copyright entirely.  As an example, copyright is
10 years across the board from date of publish/etc.  If copies are then
sent this would be used to increase term by some additional amount (up to
50 years total).  No 'after death' clauses for economic rights.

  Moral rights should be separated.  50 years after death is appropriate,
but only for natural persons which are capable of death.  Corporation
should not be able to claim moral rights at all, and 'work for hire' (if
it should exist at all) should only apply to economic rights.  Whether an
unpublished work can be published in the future should be clearly
understood as a moral and not economic right, and thus not transferable
(other than to an estate after death).

  I tried to approach this topic with someone from the writers union last
week who supports term extension.  Their reasoning claims that some
unpublished works that say things that 'may harm the reputation of people
still living' was a legitimate reason.  I think this is another case where
those who have spent too much time talking about hammers believe that the
only thing that exists are nails:  term of copyright should not be used in
this way.  Separating economic rights from moral rights or tort law issues
is very important -- different laws, or parts of laws, exist to serve 
different purposes.


  I don't care who these people are who would be harmed by words written
in the past by dead authors -- the harm to the public domain of term
extensions is greater.

  Maybe there should be a condition for publishing of unpublished works
that they may be optionally subjected to tort law.  If a living author
would have been successfully sued for defamation, then those unpublished
works should simply be purged and never published.  Having a defamation
time-bomb capability built into our copyright regime does not seem
appropriate at all.  Dead authors should not be able to defame!

> Also, whether it's limited or made a condition for copyright or left
> completely intact, I think it'd be really cool and totally in the spirit
> of the legislation for the regulations to require that the two copies sent
> to the central authority, must be TPM-free.

  It should be in the 'most usable format' -- this means raw unencumbered 
media (TPM-free) for multimedia, source code for software, etc..

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or
 electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than 
 politicians should be bought.  -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/

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