So, what did the UK government do? In September 2011, four months after it got the Hargreaves report on its table, it pushed for a copyright term extension in the EU Council of Ministers, and got it through.
Having the studies is one thing, getting the policy-makers to read them and act upon them is another. But having access to the studies and knowing what they say brings a clear advantage to anybody interested in policy-making in the copyright field.
Chapter 6
More About The Proposal For Copyright Reform
The Proposal Revisited
Let’s have a more in-depth look at the proposal that was presented in Chapter 2. This is what the Pirate Party and the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament propose:
• Moral Rights Unchanged
• Free Non-Commercial Sharing
• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly
• Registration After 5 Years
• Free Sampling
• A Ban On DRM
Taken together, these points constitute a proposal for copyright reform that solves 99% or more of the problems today’s copyright legislation is causing, while at the same time allowing 99% or more of the business models that are viable today to continue to be viable.
Moral Rights Unchanged
We propose no changes at all to the moral right of the author to be recognized as the author. If you make something, you have the right to be identified as the author of what you made.
This part of copyright is completely uncontroversial. In fact, good etiquette on the net is often more strict on the subject than any copyright legislation.
Bloggers tend to give credit and link back to sources in a way that far exceeds any legal requirement. There are several reasons for this. It makes your blog more trustworthy if you link to sources so that readers can check the background if they want to. It makes the people you link to happy, so they will get more likely to link back to your own blog on some occasion, and perhaps increase traffic. These are good, practical reasons why it makes sense out of pure self-interest for a blogger to be much more generous with giving credit than any law requires.
But there is also the basic human feeling that if you found something that was interesting to you, you want to give something back by showing your appreciation. This is just human nature, and a very positive aspect of it.
The right to be recognized as the author is under no threat on the Internet, and we propose no changes to this part of the copyright legislation.
Free Non-Commercial Sharing
Trying to stop or reduce file sharing through ever harsher legal enforcement doesn’t work. File sharing continues to grow exponentially, no matter what repressive means governments are introducing.
If you think it would be good if all illegal file sharing disappeared, please feel free think so (even if the Pirate Party and others disagree). But that does not alter the fact. Limiting file sharing with laws and punishments doesn’t work. More of the same won’t either. File sharing is here to stay, like it or not.
We should keep copyright, but limit it to when there is commercial intent. All non-commercial copying and use, such as file sharing, should be legalized. We can add this as a limitation in the copyright legislation, in full compliance with the international treaties like the Berne Convention and WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT).
In Chapter 3, we saw how the attempts to enforce today’s ban on file sharing is threatening fundamental rights in the EU and elsewhere, which would be an unacceptable solution even if it worked, which it doesn’t, or if the cultural sector was in fact dying, which it isn’t.
In Chapter 5, we saw that the artists and the cultural sector as a whole are doing fine despite file sharing (or perhaps thanks to it), so there is no real problem to be solved.
The key to finding a better way for Europe is to separate commercial use from non-commercial.
If copyright is brought back to only cover commercial activities, it will present no major problems to society. There are some adjustments to be made (in particular the unreasonably long protection times), but there are no problems in principle to enforce copyright for commercial purposes.
The reason is very simple. The principle of “follow the money” is enough to enable the authorities to keep track of commercial activities. If an entrepreneur wants to make money the very first thing he has to do is to tell as many people as possible what he has to offer. But if he is offering something illegal, the police will get to hear about it before he has had the time to attract any larger circle of customers. No further restrictions on fundamental rights are necessary. The control systems that are already in place for other reasons are enough to keep track of commercial activities.
But where do you draw the line between commercial and non-commercial?
It is true that there is a gray zone between commercial and non-commercial activities, but this is a problem that the courts have already solved many times in different areas.
We already have a number of different laws that make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial intent, including copyright legislation as it exists today. This is a good thing, since it means that the courts have already established a praxis for determining what is commercial or not.
If you need a detailed answer as to exactly where to draw the line, you should ask a copyright lawyer (and pay 300 euros per hour). This is about how courts interpret the current legislation, and there the lawyers are the experts.
But generally speaking, the line between commercial and non-commercial intent is roughly where you would expect it to be. If you as a private person have a blog without any ads, it’s non- commercial. If you get a few euros per month from Google Ads, your blog is probably still non-commercial, since it is a limited amount of money and your primary purpose with the blog is not to earn money from it. But if it is a big blog that generates substantial income from ads, it probably crosses the line and becomes commercial.
There are a number of copyright licenses, including the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, that make use of this already existing definition.
Even if it is true that drawing the line can sometimes be a problem, it has already been solved in a reasonable way.
20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly
Much of today’s entertainment industry is built on the commercial exclusivity on copyrighted works, and we want to preserve this. But today’s protection times – life plus 70 years – are absurd. No investor would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long.