Should Copyright Law be Strengthened, or Abolished?

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• This is what trolling on behalf of the copyright industries looks like. They're pretending to protect your "art," but they're actually destroying the commons on behalf of a few rich corporations.

  The principle should be that once the economic value of a work drops to zero, copyright is counter-productive. Millions of works are now "orphaned" -- they can't be sold, but law won't let them be seen free either. And copyright terms extending to life plus 75 years? Copyright is designed to protect the artist -- not their great-great-grandchildren. 

  And it's not the great-greats that win in all this. It's the corporations who buy the copyright.

• +Dana Blankenhorn  - how do things get 'orphaned'?  (example..)

• Copyright that is held by the individual who created the art should be valid for the life of that artist, once assigned to anyone else - including the legal fiction of a company - a ten year clock should start before it becomes public domain. Art created for someone else should immediately have a 10 year copyright.

• +Joshua Caldwell I'd be willing to negotiate on that, but I think you're on the right track. 

• +Dana Blankenhorn  The proposal that photos of mine which have been separated from me by theft might be classified as "orphaned" and made available for free and magically-legitimized use strikes me as similar to calling illegally obtained money laundered through a legitimate business "orphaned money".  There's all of this "orphaned money" out there which might benefit the economy if only it could be put to use legally.  In other words, what you're describing is the business model of the Mafia and drug cartels, only in the case of photography technology executives want to profit off of our photos laundered through their site or others by serial copyright violators (or the deliberate removal of EXIF metadata on some pretense such as reducing storage cost).

  Do those same technology companies propose the same treatment for their Web site designs, their software, and other forms of creative property, if those creations become similarly separated from their rightful owners by any means, including theft?  Of course not.  Singling out photography and photographers for unusual treatment under the law reveals the hypocrisy of the proposals to create that odd construct for labeling stolen property as "orphaned".

  Copyright protection does not destroy the commons, there's ample room for content creators to designate several types of creative commons licenses.  There are also many types of fair use.   As for the value of a work dropping to zero, if there's a commercial use for it, its value isn't zero.  Creating a clearing process for stolen works however would drive the economic value of photography towards zero, and that seems to be the agenda of the so-called "orphaned works" proposals.

  Regarding the 75 year term, photography is often a family business, the Muench family for example is in its third generation.  The value of art often climbs only after the death of the artist.  The families which suffered as the original artist was struggling to make ends meet definitely deserves more than anyone else to finally reap any rewards which come after the artist dies.  My son and daughter have both won awards in international photography competitions, and being 15 and 17 at the moment, they could easily manage my portfolio for the next 75 years.  So your claim that 75 years is to "great great grandchildren" is colorfully dramatic but patently false.  Then you claim that the family (great great grandchildren or whatever) doesn't benefit when they sell copyright rights to corporations.  That's a bizarre statement when you seem to prefer that instead the family should not have those rights for 75 years at all.  

  So no, this is not what "trolling on behalf of the copyright industries looks like".  It's what photographers tired of disingenuous proposals to legitimize the theft of our work look like.  

  May I use your writing for profit Dana if someone else steals and re-posts it without attribution, making it an "orphaned work"?  If that were happening to you every single day, if major corporations and start-ups were profiting from the theft and creating proposals to legitimize and legalize it, I suspect that you'd have a very different take on the topic.

  Whether it's laundered money or laundered photographs, legitimizing the theft of property, the theft of someone's hard work, is a sleazy business.

• +Jeff Sullivan There is no theft going on with a link. There are many technological solutions for your problem of re-posting, like digital watermarking. And the question in terms of copyright law we were discussing involved the length of the copyright, and whether it should extend past the economic value of the material in question.

  The rest of what I say I agree with. 

• If there's a link and the source is known (and there's no copyright violation)+Dana Blankenhorn, how is the photo "orphaned"?  The sort of use you seem to be describing, like an on-site Share function, is typically authorized in a site's terms of service.

  The orphaned works proposals I've seen have proposed to legitimize the use of any photos separated from their creator, including ones which may have been separated from through copyright violations (right mouse click save and re-upload).  

  That technical solutions may theoretically exist isn't particularly useful or relevant while they're not being implemented in current editing software or checked by sites using photos (Facebook, Google, etc).  

• +Jeff Sullivan Right now millions of books are subject to copyright, have no income, and are thus "orphaned." They literally can't be read because the copyright owners have no incentive to distribute them and the copyright has many decades to run. 

• How does checking a book out from the library sound when these issues are applied?  The author does not get more money from the library buying the book.

  I think every technology has its own separate issues, and the more tech we have, the less responsible the 'artist'.

  If a machine is actually doing the work, regardless of who programed/built it, or who is operating it, where does the value come from, and to whom does the remuneration go?

• I'm aware of that story often being circulated +Dana Blankenhorn, but books are only part of what will be affected by orphaned works legislation, and presenting a partial view paints a very inaccurate and misleading picture of the topic.

  Photographers have legitimate and serious concerns about this issue, as described by the American Society of Media Photographers describes: 

  What are “Orphan Works”?
  "As described in a 2005 report that the Copyright Office prepared for Congress, an "orphan work" is a work (such as an image) that is protected by copyright but whose copyright owner cannot be identified and located. It is clear that such a situation harms both creators and users. However, the remedy that was proposed to the 2006 Congress was needlessly unfair to creators, leading ASMP and many other groups to seek changes when the bill was introduced."
   
  "ASMP lobbied the issue all year long, presenting our case to Congressional staffers, testifying before the House and Senate committees and, at one point, asking our members to fax letters to their elected representatives. ASMP also helped form a coalition of creator associations (including overseas groups) to press for amendments to the House and Senate bills."

  You may talk about the additional applicability to books if you like, but that does not contradict or invalidate my original points about photography, as your original, unnecessarily rude response seems to imply.