Why the Pirate Party and the Free Software Foundation Are Wrong About Copyright Limits
Reading ArsTechnica this morning, I noticed a story they ran that focused on tech, covering a proposed change to copyright laws, reducing it from the life of the author plus 75 years to a mere five years.
Ars covers the rising dispute between two tech advocacy groups, Free Software Foundation and the Pirate Party:
“Free Software Foundation (FSF) founder Richard Stallman published a statement last week expressing concern about the Swedish Pirate Party’s copyright reform platform. The party’s ambitious goals for copyright term reduction would blast holes in copyleft licensing, a serious blow to Stallman’s Free Software movement.”
Apparently, the Pirates of Sweden have argued for a five year copyright limit. So everything creative that can be fixed in a tangible form will become free to the world to use and copy without hindrances like credits or payments.
Stallman is pushing the idea of free software — software that starts free and stays free. A programmer writes a program with others, publishes it under their special license, and anyone can use it but also offer it free.
With a five year limit, commercial companies, like, say, Microsoft, could swallow up all of the code that the open source programmers have created and then start charging for it in their adaptations.
The idea that Stallman advances, I think, is almost as bad:
“So I proposed that the Pirate Party platform require proprietary software’s source code to be put in escrow when the binaries are released. The escrowed source code would then be released in the public domain after 5 years. Rather than making free software an official exception to the 5-year copyright rule, this would eliminate proprietary software’s unofficial exception. Either way, the result is fair.”
Why do I think this is bad? Right now, the copyright laws protect everyone who does creative work. For artists, a five year term is untenable.
I recently saw the amazing Paula Cole perform. In reading an interview, she said this of her hit song in Dawson’s Creek:
“On a practical level, I was able to get off the hamster wheel for eight years and raise my daughter because of that song. It keeps getting played, and it helps me live my life. “
Remember Dawson’s Creek? She wrote that song for her second album and it was used as the theme song for that hit teen show, which ran for six years.
What would have happened to Cole with a five year copyright framework? For the sixth year of Dawson’s Creek, Warner Brothers wouldn’t have had to pay her for including the song in its run. When it went to syndication, she wouldn’t have received anymoney.
The continued income from the song enabled Paula Cole to have eight years out of the limelight, and have the kind of life that feeds creativity — on both ends. It feeds the creativity of emerging artists who aspire to have a hit song, and it feeds the creativity of someone who’s had a hit song and can life comfortably and creatively.
Thankfully, the Pirate Party right now is a very small group of politicians in Sweden pushing for changing copyright laws, and I suspect the evil multi-national conglomerates will grease the political wheels to stop such an idea from gaining hold in the rest of the Western world.
