The difficulty of implementing current copyright legislation has been highlighted during this election campaign. In the first place both Labour and Conservatives appeared to use a copyrighted image in their campaign without permission – reported in the Telegraph.
Secondly BPI spokesman Adam Liversage was allegedly caught advising his wife via twitter on how to infinge someone’s copyrighted images.
Thirdly today twitter is chirruping away like crazy about how the French Hadopi organisation is having to rebrand because its logo uses copyrighted font. The Hadopi Law, if you are not familiar with the name is the French three strikes equivalent of the Digital Economy Act.
I’m not an expert on copyright but it seems to me that if the organisations and individuals mentioned above find it hard to not break the rules then what hope everyone else.
We could do with a repository to collect similar stories to build up a body of knowledge in respect of this.
2 replies on “Why copyright needs reforming #DEAct #ge2010”
When you say “copyright needs reforming”, do you mean ‘reform’ in the sense of “slavery is good, but it needs reforming”?
Do you think people should be at liberty to share and build upon their own culture, or not?
Many use the term ‘reform’ in the sense that ‘slavery’ becomes ‘indentured servitude’ and ‘copyright’ becomes ‘literary monopoly’, i.e. nicer names, better regulation, but not much changes. People still remain without their cultural liberty.
A reform that would restore individual liberties such that ‘slavery’ became ’employment law’ and ‘copyright’ became ‘information & communication law’ would be more accurately described as abolition. This is because copyright is by definition a suspension of the individual’s natural right to copy/perform/communicate published works of art, their cultural liberty. A reform that restores that liberty is consequently a repeal of copyright’s suspension, and properly termed abolition. ‘Reform’ should be reserved for keeping copyright essentially the same, but making some ‘improvements’.
What does ‘reform’ mean to you?
I take your point Crosbie. The point of the post was really to highlight that something needs to be done. If the people we are meant to look up to for these things can’t understand internet copyright what home us mere mortals.