ARCHIVED — Bruce Atherton
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
Documents received have been posted in the official language in which they were submitted. All are posted as received by the departments, however all address information has been removed.
Submission from Bruce Atherton received on September 26, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Copyright law must benefit the public
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
As a citizen of Canada, I write to express my grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
Granting a limited monopoly over certain uses of intellectual property is an artificial right that was created in the 16th century in an effort to ensure that the creator of a work could make enough revenue that they would continue to produce works for the public's benefit.
The long term plan was always, ALWAYS that the public would ultimately own the work. This is a very good thing because there are many benefits when a creative work enters the public domain. To give just a few examples: "It's a Wonderful Life" became a cherished Christmas classic because the copyright holder failed to renew the copyright and it entered the public domain. Television stations looking for material to air on Christmas Day, a time when they believed few would be watching, seized on this free option and a classic was born. Another example is the musicals "Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Miserables", both of which were created only after the Victor Hugo estate copyright ran out and his works entered the public domain.
The amount of time that should pass before a work entered the public domain was originally a fiercely debated point, one which was finally set in the 18th century to a fairly long period thanks to the argument that the widows and children of those doing the creating would be taken care of by the royalties.
Skip forward to near the end of the twentieth century, when the Walt Disney Corporation is about to lose their copyright on Mickey Mouse. Here is a question for you: Do you think that enough revenue was made from Mickey Mouse to encourage the Walt Disney Corporation to continue creating content? Evidently not, since they (along with many other groups) convinced the US Congress to extend the length of Copyright and to vastly increase those rights through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What is copyright for. Is it to encourage the production of content that will eventually end up in the public domain, as was originally intended? Or is it addressing a moral imperative that the creators of the work have a right to any and all benefits arising from that work.
If the former, then it is clear that copyright laws are already too strident and long-lived, since we no longer live in a time when poor widows are without any resources other than their husband's estates. And without that argument, it is hard to understand what benefits are offered by revenues that are realized after the creator is dead.
But what about the latter definition, that the point of copyright law is to address the ethics of the situation, ensuring that all benefits from a work are realized by the creator of that work?
Well, as history has shown us, that is not the way it works. Copyright tends to flow to where ever there is a bottleneck in the delivery system, because the creators of the work trade their copyright in order to get past it. In the case of recorded music, the bottleneck has always been the distribution of the music to the consumers, which is why the oligopoly that control the distribution channels holds the vast majority of the copyrights in that sector. No wonder that industry is so terrified of peer to peer file sharing systems, which threaten them not just because of copyright issues, but because they eliminate the very bottleneck which allowed these companies to demand the copyright from the creators in the first place.
Then there is the question of where our society will end up if we accept the latter definition. Is it unethical to lend a magazine to someone after you have read it? If you accept copyright as a fundamental right without limitation rather than an artificial one that is limited by design, then yes it is. Libraries and radio stations are nests of piracy and will have to be eliminated by force of law, as will the lending of any copyrighted material of any kind between individuals. To do otherwise is to deny the copyright holder their fundamental rights. If you doubt that this is the view of the powerful groups that hold copyrights on many works they did not commit, just consider the cassette tax they collect, or the money they successfully demanded from radio stations. We are already sliding down that slippery slope.
That isn't the type of world that I want to live in. I hope that you don't either. Please don't lose sight of the fact that the rights of the copyright holder are limited, and for a good reason. The long term goal must be to have these creative works enter the public domain, where we can all benefit from them. Theatres operating on a shoestring can put on plays written by Shakespeare. Orchestras can put on public performances of classic music. Books can show the world images of the paintings of Great Masters. All these things are only practical because of the lack of copyright on those works.
Thank you for your consideration of these issues.
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