Unfortunately, Paying For The Public Domain Already Exists In Many Countries
from the locking-up-the-public-domain dept
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, partly as a result of the outrage it generated.
Naively, I assumed that this was a lucky escape, but that the idea would be back unless we were on our guard. I was wrong: the idea won’t be back, because it has already been implemented in a number of other countries. For example, Jorge Gemetto pointed out on Twitter that something called the “paying” public domain has existed in Uruguay and Argentina for many years. He linked to an interesting article on the topic by Maximiliano Marzetti, who lists even more countries blighted by this copyright perversion: Algeria, Kenya, Ruanda, Senegal, Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Paraguay. Marzetti refers to a 2010 report from WIPO, which explore the idea of the “paying” public domain further.
A recent article in the Guardian reveals that Italy, too, has this awful approach, whereby any use of the country’s publicly owned art to sell merchandise requires permission and payment of a fee. That includes works that were never in copyright, and have been in the public domain for hundreds of years, as the French fashion house Jean Paul Gaultier found to its cost:
Italy’s Uffizi Galleries are suing the French fashion house Jean Paul Gaultier for damages that could exceed €100,000 (£88,000) after the company’s allegedly unauthorised use of images of Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus to adorn a range of clothing products, including T-shirts, leggings and bodices.
The article goes on to explain that the Uffizi Galleries sell merchandise themselves, which means this is about money, as it always is. That’s what copyright does, even to some of the people running the greatest art galleries and museums. The idea that the real public domain – not the damaged, “paying” kind – should be defended for itself, as a matter of principle, never seems to enter their heads.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, or Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: algeria, argentina, congo, copyright, cote d'ivoire, culture, italy, kenya, paraguay, public domain, rwanda, senegal, uruguay
Companies: jean paul gaultier, uffizi galleries
Comments on “Unfortunately, Paying For The Public Domain Already Exists In Many Countries”
Isn’t this a goverment retro-activily grabbing the copyright on everything.
The french government is not gong to give the money to the distant decedent of Botticelli.
They are not even going to give It to the Italian government.
I could see this eventually leading to a shortened period of copyright to decrease the time before the government receives the funds.
Re:
This is one of the most absurd aspects of copyright. The original copyright term in the US was 14 years with a 14 year renewal. That was in 1790 when it took sometimes years for publishers and printers to distribute a copyrighted work from Massachusetts to Georgia. 200+ years later, a book or a movie or a song are instantly released everywhere and instantly monetized. Profits are realized in days, not years or decades.
Copyright should be shorter than 14 years, not the life of the author, plus 90 years, plus Disney is a profit-mongering asshole, plus we need to profit off of what someone did forever ago because we can.
Re: Re:
I’d go as low as ten years. If you can’t monetize your own work within a decade, either your work sucks or your marketing sucks.
“You wouldn’t steal a car”
“You wouldn’t steal something from the public domain then accuse of theft the people who would bring these works to the people.”
We’ll go to prison to save culture! Send copyright back to Hell where it belongs!
Copyright is theft
Astronaut 1: You mean you have to pay to use free works?
Astronaut 2: \while holding gun to Astronaut 1’s head\ You always had to.
then instead of joining them, the USA should do whatever they can to stop it from happening! using the fact that it’s done elsewhere should NEVER be an excuse to join them!!
There's bigger fish at stake..
I never understood why copyright minimalists are always trying to stretch copyright’s rules? Is your ability to innovate with the technology so poor that you need to go to legal areas where no other company is allowed to operate? That’s what the stretching of copyright and asking for more and more permissions of doing things without actually passing along money to the authors.
This is the real problem, instead of innovating with awesome technology, your technology is so poor that you need to find legal area which has not yet been explored by tech people because those areas have been illegal to operate? Why an earth you want easier market entry when rest of the market needed to fight their way to the top of the mountain?
“lets ask for easier entry point to the markets so we do not need to build innovative technologies, it’s enough if we just use “illegal” area where no other company is allowed to operate”.
Re:
And now this comment section is going to get clogged with TP…
Re: Re:
I can give some toilet paper response to it:
https://meshpage.org/view.php?id=642799475
coming directly from the all famous sketchfab, our gameapi technology can actually display the 3d model.
Re:
You realize “stretch” means to extend copyright’s rules, not reduce them? I get that English is apparently not your mother tongue, but if you’re going to insult people it helps not to look like a dumbass doing it.
You realize that by the time works fall under the public domain the authors involved are long dead, right? What additional innovation or creation could be incentivized from corpses, even if you assume the money made it to their estates – which it doesn’t?
Unfortunately for you, using software other than Meshpage will never be declared illegal. I suspect, though, that with regulation coming for NFTs and cryptocurrencies, Meshpage will be rendered even more cumbersome to use, and that can only be a good thing for the sane, thinking, rational world.
You’re the one who wants to use brainwashing to force everyone to use your terrible code. You’ve got no right to bitch about other people leveraging better tech when you insist on having easier entry into everyone’s minds.
Re: Re:
It’s not better tech when it needs to find a niche from the market where other companies are not allowed to operate. If it was better tech, they would have no trouble competing against existing companies directly. When your tech is better, you will eventually get other people’s customers. This isn’t the case here, when the only way to find any markets is to become a criminal.
Re: Re: Re:
This accusation would be worth a damn if you had a single shred of proof that any of this was happening. You’ve had countless opportunities to prove that your tech was not allowed to operate in the market because other companies or their software like 3dsmax, Maya and Blender were operating illegally. The fact is they haven’t, and you’ve been invited countless times to bring legal charges against them, but you haven’t.
The one thing you have is an insinuation that other companies cooperate with pirates purely because file formats like .mp4s are tangentially compatible with their software, which is like claiming that everyone is a mass murderer because mass murderers eat food.
Your company barely exists beyond the angry rants of a washed up Finn who has no users and a compulsion to boast about rape in the name of copyright. Someone’s getting competed against. Hint, it’s you.
Case in point, nobody’s going to use software that includes a kill switch by the developer because he thinks they haven’t masturbated to copyright enough.
You’re the one who chose to use Nazi brainwashing methods as part of your business plan, chucklenut.
Re: Re: Re:2
The pirates are using techniques from cookbook:
1) force everyone to support standard file formats
2) build distribution networks for those file formats
3) copy,copy,copy,copy,copy — ignore money to the authors.
4) ???
5) get free content without paying anything from commercial content
Re: Re: Re:3
File formats were determined by those who created the hardware and software to make their lives easier. Pirates had nothing to do with it. Pirates are usually portrayed as losers and weaklings with no monetary or social influence, and now you expect everyone to believe the reason why we use .doc and .mp4 and .wav as formats is because pirates somehow forced people to?
I thought the whole point of piracy was to get free stuff, why would they be putting in work just to avoid payment? It’s funny how pirates are simultaneously both incompetent boobs and superhuman criminals whenever it fits your sad, broken narrative.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yes, these are examples of de-facto standards, i.e. stuff that enabled piracy is flourish and the resulting popularity required the file format’s standardisation. mp3 music files started this trend.
Re: Re: Re:2
If you just consider the practice by youtube that they immediately publish any videos that users post to the site, without any legal checking whatsoever. They basically take risk of direct copyright infringement, if that video that user posted contains hollywood movie material or songs from RIAA catalog.
This kind of practices where new products take a position in the marketplace which was considered illegal before they came to the market. This “immediate publish operation” without any copyright review is clear example of stretching the copyright laws and taking unnecessary copyright risks.
Of course history of this area is that publishers spent months evaluating copyrighted content, when all communication between author and publisher happened via snail mail and floppys. The existing practice before youtube was that they could evaluate the copyrights properly and even ask the author to add some features to the material in such place where ordinary pirate who rippeed the material from hollywood movie simply cannot add. For example terminator 2 movie “hasta-la-vista baby” scene could have large red curtain added to the scene, so that publisher’s chosen feature would be clearly visible in the output. All the ripoffs simply cannot add that simple element to the material, given that they have no way of recreating the scene. This kind of easy copyright checks are simply completely missing in youtube’s flood of pirated videos.
Re:
How much are you paying for all the software that you use but did not write when implementing mesh pages? I doubt that you wrote more than 10% of the code that it uses, excluding operating systems code needed to actually run it.
Re: Re:
I’m not paying anyone anything. I expect all my dependencies to be open source.
I’m actually controlling my dependencies very carefully. I don’t like my software to break every week, like many of the projects where proper dependency management has not been done.
Keep in mind that our specialists immediately respond to a “help me with annotated bibliography” request and provide detailed instructions on how to place the order.
https://123helpme.org/articles/write-my-annotated-bibliography/