A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform - my opinion about it

This time I will share my opinion on what I think about a copyright advised changes proposed in a book The Case for Copyright Reform [1]. There are two thing I will bring up - first is my general opinion about software reform and second is what in my opinion has changed since the article release.

My opinion

To make things short - I am a total supporter for a copyright reform. I am 90-100% agree with every word authors wrote. Copyrighting might indeed be an obstacle for a personal privacy and one of fundamental rights - freedom of speech. Here is an example of how absurd copyright laws can be. On the 15th of February 2013, a meteorite fell in Chelyabinsk. Most of video footages were taken by dashcams. People started sharing those videos and to much surprise videos were blocked in Germany because of the copyrights [2]. Since most of drivers were listening to a radio, there was some song playing, but German rights did not allow using it without authors permission. On the other hand the music in those videos had no value (especially commercial) - it is just a background and meteor footage actually has value. In my opinion this is nonsense and it shows where copyright supremacy can lead.

On the other hand there are a lot of good examples regarding using of copyright. Let us take WinRAR as an example - basically everyone can use it during a trial period with no copyright issues. Than user will receive a notice, that they should buy it, but it is not a strict rule that blocks users from using it. However companies are obligated to get a license, which makes WinRAR still profitable [3].

A typical WinRAR joke [4]

What has changed

I think one big step which was made since a book The Case for Copyright Reform first appeared is the growing popularity on streaming services (take Twitch as an example). It widens the possibilities for artists to get money for their creations or monetize their hobbies. It widens their possibilities and brings value not only to the result, but the whole process. Let us take drawing a picture as an example. In a typical copyright world there is one step - picture is drawn and this is the moment it gets its value. But if we take an artist, who is streaming the process of picture - they could receive value the whole time they are drawing it - maybe actual money or at least satisfaction from somebody watching their stream. This is somehow close to street musicians, only in a slightly modern way...


1. The Case for Copyright Reform by Christian Engström MEP & Rick Falkvinge

2. https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/21/4013172/dashcam-meteor-videos-blocked-in-germany-because-of-copyrighted

3. https://www.thestockdork.com/how-does-winrar-make-money/

4. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/c16kwr/when_someone_buys_winrar/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One of Virginia Shea's 10 Rules for Netiquette (and my own observation)

Image
 This is my personal example of my observation of Virginia Shea's 10 rules in action. I am going to talk about examples in gaming/streaming industry. Currently I am not a gamer anymore, but several years ago I was actively playing videogames as well as watching streams. The games I was playing included League of Legends, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, CS and some more and I watched gamers streaming them. Watching game streams led me to a conclusion, that there are basically two main behaviors of streamers - either they are polite and respectful or totally unbearable from a social perspective. It was hard to find somebody somewhere in the middle. When I found about Virginia Shea's 10 rules for netiquette, I noticed that first ones generally follow all the 10 rules, whereas second  often break all of them - they swear, ignore other players privacy and bring negative to game. But I will focus on one rule and try to explain how those who follow the netiquette and those who don't ...
Read more

Wikipage article review - Low-code and no-code programming

Today I would like to give my opinion about a wiki article written by my fellow students about no-code and low-code programming. The article can be found under this link: https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/Low-code_ja_no-code_programmeerimine To start, I would like to briefly tell why I chose this article to give my assessment. Although I have been working in IT for some time, I have never heard about these concepts and their use. I even mistakenly thought that low-code programming had something to do with low level programming. So it was very interesting and educative for me to read about these topics. What I liked in a introduction part, is the fact that in this article probable Estonian names for these concepts were given. In my opinion it is a nice habit for native speakers to have local naming for words as an alternative to English terms, this is why it could actually be a good idea to actually post this article on Wikipedia, so that these terms could be populated before these co...
Read more

Supporting solution which I discovered for myself lately

Image
I would like to share about one supporting solution in Microsoft Windows, which I started to use recently. The solution itself is pretty simple and many know about it. On the other hand it turned out that actually there are also so many people who do not know about it and discovering it could greatly help them. It is called a copy clipboard. The idea is very simple - when one wants needs to copy a data (text, pictures) from one place to another they usually select the data which you want to copy then paste it. And the process is repeated several times until all data is copied. Taking use of clipboard solves this problem - you can select any amount data you want to copy and then paste it accordingly. This could be especially needed when you have only one monitor or use a laptop as in this case switching between apps might be too much and separating a screen vertically might not be very convenient. But this supporting solution also has one negative point - it stores everything and user h...
Read more