Copyright Summaries

Yao's Summary Can Copyright stop communication and creation?

Copyright protects expression. It affords people protection for creating their work. With the copyright acts, authors, composers, producers, programmers do not worry about their works being stolen and used without their authorization. They feel safe to earn more money. It is good that copyright law protects everybody’s original works.

However, while copyright law protects individual’s work or a small group’s profits, it pulls the original individual work away from the whole human being within a long period of time (even 70 years after the creators’ death). Meanwhile, copyright is in someway prevents communication, which in the modern time is an important way for our society to develop. An example from http://www.eff.org/IP/ says: “You'd like to move the tracks you bought from Rhapsody to a personal stereo like Apple's iPod, but the copy protection prevents you. Creating or using the software necessary to make the switch could put you behind bars.” Copyright law has been used by some company as a tool to earn money. They control the licence. Anyone wants to use the licence should pay money to them.

With the fear of no development of the future society, there is a Fair Use Law to allow individual works being use in non-profit educational purpose. The use by reproduction in copies or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not against of copyright law. But not just education needs to use the creations; other fields need the creations more.

“Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.” (Larry Lessig, Free Culture) If Tomas Edison asked for copyright for every invention he made, our society wouldn’t develop so rapidly and we wouldn’t have a comfortable life.

So, it is good that copyright protects individual’s hard work, but the term should be limited. After all, in the long term, the inventor’s work belongs to all human races.

Kendra- Just a thought earlier this week the courts decided that even 5 seconds of sampling from artist's song is too much and he/she must be paid for that 5 seconds. Of course this applies to musicians that use sampling in their music but the ramifications are endless.

Brandi's Summary Green Eggs and Lawsuits LA Weekly July 20-26, 2001

Nancy Updike is a contributing editor to the LA Weekly newspaper. She argues that artists should have moral rights protected under the current copyright law. Updike cites Theodor Seuss Geisel's (AKA Dr. Seuss) case as ground breaking in the artists' moral rights fight in that he created a cartoon and it was copied and marketed with Seuss'name. However, he lost twice to Poynter Products who made a doll in the likeness of a Seuss character from the cartoon. He lost because he had previously signed aways his rights to the cartoon.

Updike argues that artists don't get fair representation under the copyright laws because business, which she says is "our national art form," always wins where money and control are concerned. To this, she cites two other ground breaking cases: The New York Times vs. Tasini and Greensberg vs. National Geographic where the courts ruled in favor of freelancers'rights to have payment when their works are published in ways that are non-contractual. Similarly, she mentions Styron and Vonnegut, two authors who sold the rights to their books to be publish electronically by Rosetta Books, a small publisher. Rosetta Books is currently being sued by Random House, the publisher of Styron and Vonnegut's hard copies.

Lastly, Updike argues for more strict adherence to the Berne Convention, an addendum to the copyright law that protects artists moral rights. Three premises of the Berne Convention are the following: (1) artists retain the right to say when their work is completed; (2) artists retain the right to attach their names to their works; and (3) no one can alter an artist's work after the work has been made public. The Berne Convention, which was adopted by the US in 1988, has been adhered to in a rather laize faire manner; however, Updike lobbies for the government and business to remember that the constitutional rights under the copyright laws do protect artists' originality and moral rights and she urges courts to uphold laws that are already in existence.