Friday, June 01, 2007

Enforcing Copyright

I'm not too sure about this one:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks

Copyright holders certainly need a way to be able to protect their digital works, and encoding the name of the licensee in the work seems like a reasonable way of doing that. Perhaps the copy should just have a unique id rather than personal details of the licensee, though.

The "fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites" (quoted from the above article) is like fearing that the law will be enforced. It's not OK to make unauthorised copies of copyright works. I don't see any grounds for complaining that copyright holders will be able to detect when their rights are being abused.

But let me restate that I think the current copyright terms are far too long. If the intent really it to encourage creativity then copyright terms should be reduced to ~30 years.

So yes, enforce copyright, but reduce the term significantly.

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