[d@DCC] The battle of the anti-copyright exceptions

[Sydney Weidman]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 12:33, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>   I don't get the impression they have an interest to organize webmasters
> at all.  Most do not want a royalty, and would have no reason to ever want
> to be part of a collective society. The plan as I read it seems to be to
> claim that they are 'zero rated' (Like all my software CDs, right? ;-)  
> when in fact they are over-collecting for their incumbent membership.
> 

If internet content is zero-rated, in what sense would Access Copyright
be over-collecting for their incumbent membership? Do you mean they
would use "zero rated" status as a way of making the required changes
palatable, and then raise the rate later? Or is there some other
connection I'm missing? I'm opposed even to zero rating, but an argument
that someone is over-collecting doesn't make sense when you're saying
that it's zero rated. Overstepping the limits of their power, perhaps.

>   You can require licensing for derivatives for publicly distributed
> works, but claiming a royalty or any restriction on royalty-free verbatim
> distribution on the public (password-free) Internet is as much nonsense a
> concept as pay-per-view books.
> 

Defining "derivative works" is like walking a tight-rope. On the one
hand, derivatives represent the kind of follow-on creativity that the
idea/expression dichotomy was intended to encourage. The transformative
use is a use that needs to be as free from restriction as possible. On
the other hand, the control of derivative works allows for licenses like
the GPL and CC ShareAlike licenses. Like you, part of my interest in
this is derived from my support for Free Software, and thus my
sympathies are divided. I think, however, that verbatim copying would
seem more insidious to copyright reactionaries than derivative works,
and so the contrast you present might puzzle rather than enlighten them.

Regards,
Syd

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