Review on 2012 The case of copyright reform

-

Today we are going to review the book named "The case of copyright reform" and I will show my opinion on it.

        Background

Christian Engström (Image source)    Rick Falkvinge (Image source)

This book was written by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström back in 2012. They were two Swedish Pirate Party activists. Their intention on writing this book was that the current copyright system is broken and creates some difficulties for new artists and ordinary people. So, they proposed several reforms that could fix that problem.

    Introduction

In the book they clearly mentioned that they didn't want to abolish the copyright system. Instead, they propose a reform to it.

In the first chapter authors mentioned how broken the copyright system currently are when it comes to intellectual property (IP) owned by some organizations. They also mentioned that those reforms are aimed to "end criminalization of the young generation and provide the foundation for a diverse and sustainable cultural sector in the Internet age".

    Proposed reforms

In the second chapter they propose several reforms to the copyright law.

One of those reforms are that the longevity of copyright should be shortened. Authors meant by that the longevity of copyright protection should be much shorter, because it currently isn’t reasonable for society and investor's point. They said that the copyright protection should only work after 20 years from publication, not a lifetime of an author plus 70 years after.

Another reform they proposed were to make free the sampling process. By that, the Authors meant that musicians should be able to create remixes of copyrighted materials, because technically it is not the same song.

    Personal opinion

From my perspective, people should be able to create new content, even though it may be originated on the copyrighted material. Because currently, some new artists could be easily sued because they created something is based on the other work. 

In the book, author also mentioned about non-comitial sharing, which, to me, should be also implemented. Currently, companies didn't want you to share some of their work to others, even if you bought it and you aren't intending to sell it. They even implementing DRM security to not let you share something with your friends. However, this implementation, won't affect them that hard. I'm pretty sure that they will even gain profit from it, because more people will know about their company and thus buy their product in larger scale.


Conclusion

To me, these reforms could really help new authors create content more freely. Some of them are even useful for large companies too.

In my opinion those reforms won't delete the problem entirely because some companies will find a way to ignore them. However, those reforms clearly will renew the copyright law and minimize those problem's effect on everyone's life.


References

    The book

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review on 2004 Report about the Information Society by Pekka Himanen

-
Image
Today, we are going to review the report about the challenges that Information Society faces back in 2004. We also will look into, how the author proposed to solve those challenges and which of those challenges is relevant to this day.         Background Pekka Himanen ( Image source ) That report was done by a Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, who was born in 1973. This report was aimed to show how the Information Society impacts the world. How previously created standards changed because of the globalization. In the report the author also covers good and bad effects dealt by this society. For example, how changed the work environment, their ethical aspects from globalization and internationality.     Global trends In the report he mentioned several global trends and how each of them affects the world. One of these trends were the "population ageing". By that the author means the growth of the average person age in Europe and the arising possible problem w...
Read more

Two technologies from early days of the Internet and their place today

-
Image
When the Internet first started developing, back in those days there was plenty of new technologies that really helped people then. Most of these technologies became a standard, because of their usefulness. Sadly, not all standards have lived to this day. Some of them were replaced by other standards that became even popular. However, some are still relevant to this day. Today we are going to talk about two of those. One of which is still relevant, while other is disappeared in the dust.         Computer keyboard Image source One of the technologies that is still relevant to this day is a computer keyboard. Even though the computer keyboard were invented in early 1940s it is still most popular way of inputting an information into a computer. Also, it still mostly uses the QWERTY layout, which was created even earlier, in 1880s and have proven to be effective and comfortable.  Although it is merely a century old device, we still actively using it to type a mail, ...
Read more