John Degen posted some comments to the Professional Writers Association of Canad BLOG. (Note: There is ongoing discussion on that BLOG in the comments, and it is quite worthwhile to read and participate).
I'll add some commentary to what he wrote.
Mr Degen did not like the mention of Sam Bulte. The traditional cultural community liked Ms. Bulte for the same reason the next generation did not: Ms. Bulte believed she already understood the needs of the cultural community, believed she had the solutions to the problems, and did not allow her "work" to be "distracted" by those who had differing opinions. As an author who saw Ms. Bulte as the greatest threat to my creativity, and future Canadian creativity in general, I strongly disagree with John Degen who said that she "put in more good work than anyone else during the last session of Parliament".
For many of us Ms. Bulte personified everything that is wrong with the current copyright revision process. Incumbent stakeholders are given undue influence over the process, and those competitors with alternative positions are largely shut out of the process. This is a radical change from hundreds of years of copyright revision where governments recognized the need to limit the control of past creators over the future of creativity.
To not mention Ms. Bulte in a talk about Canadian cultural policy and copyright is to pretend that the process thus far has been fair. There has been negativity for certain, and I look forward to a reduction in this negativity, but I believe that people like Ms. Bulte have been one of the major sources of that negativity.
Mr. Degen suggested that Online Rights Canada was "a very organized interest group". While this is flattering to an organization only created last November, it is far from realistic. Bulte received feedback on her views during the election predominantly by individual Canadian voters, both authors and our fans. This was because of her constant attacks while she was an MP on our alternative methods of production, distribution and funding. This was simply a citizen response to her promotion of largely US-based incumbent content industry special interests, groups which are very well financed and organized with professional lobbiests.
I hope that we can as a creative community further explore copyright term. I believe we need to move towards a protection of the clear entry of works into the public domain, and to try to grow the public domain as much as we can. The public domain is the raw material upon which all future creativity is built, and should be promoted as strongly by creators groups as the authors monopoly itself.
There are a number of problems currently which need to be resolved.
a) Different forms of creativity have different amounts of time when they are commercially viable. While literature may have value beyond the death of the author, software has value for possibly a maximum of 20 years. The term for software and literature should not be the same.
b) We need to recognize that now that all creativity is regulated by copyright, and not just commercially created works, that the vast majority of works under copyright were never intended to be commercially exploited. There is a major difference between two friends doodling on napkins in a bar and a big budget motion picture, and yet current copyright law largely treats them the same. I believe we must move to a system where we require renewal of copyright after a short term so that we can remove the excessive regulation over the majority of works where the author has no copyright interests in them.
c) We need to recognize that while some forms of creativity naturally contain author and other copyright information within them (such as books), other works do not have that information available. We need to be moving to (or retaining) fixed terms for these works where the term starts at the day of recording for things like music and photographs, never tieing the term from the date of the largely unknowable author.
Mr. Degen asks, "What writer could argue with that?". Maybe the writers he works closely with wouldn't argue (I have experienced otherwise), but some specialized professional photographers and the major music labels have been arguing (even though both groups represent a tiny minority of photographers and sound recording makers, they are the ones with the well paid lobbiests). For both sound recordings and photography there were radical extension and obfuscation of the term of copyright contained in Bill C-60, both proposals pushed by Ms. Bulte. Why various creators groups have allowed such a blatant attack on the public domain, and future authors' rights, I will never understand.
On differing terms for literature and software
One problem with different terms for books and software is the rise of things like poetry written in computer languages, which does potentially have the longer lifetime of literary works while being difficult to distinguish from other sotfware that does indeed have a much shorter
lifetime.
But maybe it's a small enough niche that it's worth sacrificing (after all, many books were written with a 14 year term).
We already have a variety of terms of copyright...
We need to remember that we already have a variety of different terms of copyright. Some works are the life of the author plus 50 years. Some works are 50 years from the date that a recording/photograph is made. For other types of works it is 50 years from the date of publication. The difference in the terms of copyright for works created on the same date can be from 50 to over a hundred years.
Having the term of software be 20 years from the date of publication while photographs are 50 years from the moment the picture is taken turns out to be far less complex than the situation we have today.
I'm not saying that it isn't complex, but that it is a reduction and not an increasing of complexity from what we have today.
When more than one art form is mixed together it always complicates matters. For a less technical example, look at motion pictures which can have soundtracks embedded within them. The movie may run out of copyright 50 years from the date of publication, but the rights of the composer would run out 50 years after the death of that composer. While the Canadian Copyright act excludes the soundtrack from being a "sound recording" (See: Definitions section) to deal with the problem of the term of a sound recording possibly being longer than the term of the movie, I don't see anything that would deal with the problem of composers being owed a right of remuneration for any public performance of that movie beyond the term of copyright for that movie.
Entertainment software has been said to have similar problems, but I guess I don't agree. In software we already deal with combinations of software which have different licensing agreements. It seems quite reasonable to me that the computer instructional component of a computer game could expire at an earlier time than the sound and video contained within the game. It could be perfectly legal to extract the code from the game and modify that code without permission, while the sound and video is still under copyright. You couldn't publish your modified game along with the sound and video, but you could offer a "patch" that would allow those who already purchased the game to play a new game based on the unmodified sound and video.
Poetry is always expressed in the most "human readable form", and I see no way to separate the "source code" (that human readable format) from "object code". I don't see this as different than in the early 1980's when computer software program listings were published in magazines. Even if the software was dedicated to the public domain (the only type of software in the public domain, as none has expired that I'm aware of) it did not mean you could republish those pages of the magazine.
Sorry for the following rant (Not aimed at Chris, but other readers), but I feel the need to express this:
We are in a time when new communications technology has increased the ability of individual members of society to participate in culture, and yet the law is being made more and more complex to exclude this participation. While it may be beneficial to the incumbent intermediaries to make things more complex, I am always confused by organizations that call themselves "creator" groups promoting more complex or "stronger" (to the benefit of past copyright holders) copyright.
For an example of such a confusing position, see the April 2005 Joint Declaration of the Creators’ Copyright Coalition and DAMI© On the Process of Revision of the Copyright Act, which is in the documents section of the "Creators’ Copyright Coalition" website.
Users rights, the limits on the control of past creators necessary for future creativity, is possibly the most critical part of creators' rights. I do not understand how a group of creators can suggest that the courts protecting users' rights "seriously limits the rights of creators". That is like suggesting that water seriously limits our ability to drink.
If it were not for governments stepping in and limiting the control of songwriters on performers (by creating exceptions to copyright), there would be no recorded music. If it were not for limiting the control of songwriters, performers and makers of sound recordings, there would be no radio .. and so on.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) consultant.
Justice Served in Latest Election
Yeah, Sam Bulte may as well have worn a jacket with a great big American flag accrossed it as far as I'm concerned. Thankfully Canada essentially fired her in part for her misdemeaners of being in the pockets of the Copyright (according to some) mafia.
She was the biggest threat to Canadian culture since Graham Henderson himself. As it is, Canadian culture is struggling against American cultural icons.
I do have curiosity as to what Bev Oda is up to on this whole issue. She's been a huge mystery this whole time. At one point, she seemed to be asking for more copyright restrictions, the next moment, she might be defending creativity. It's really hard to say what she'll bring into the House of Commons at this point from what I can tell.