> From: Richard Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Maybe I missed something in the threads and what is its link > to Disney and the RIA? American copyright law has become a hostage to a short animated film called "Steamboat Willie". That film marks the first appearance of the character who evolved into Mickey Mouse. Twice, congress has acted to extend the term of copyright on or about the time Steamboat Willie was about to enter the public domain. As the most valuable piece of IP in American history, Disney will lobby and fight to the end of days to keep the term of Steamboat Willie's copyright continuously extended. As a corporation, they must have "no expiration" as their final objective. As a result, the original intent of the law (that a creator would get a reasonable amount of time to gain direct benefit from the work via a system of exclusive rights, and then the work would pass into the public domain for use by anyone without restriction) has been eroded. As corporations are immortal, and IP continues to gain in value, the forces on congress to remove the term for copyright are immense, and I expect those forces will prevail. In any event, for all practical purposes, copyright has already ceased to have a term with respect to any peice of modern story or character that anyone might want to use in an unlicensed derivative work. RIA (I expect he means "RIAA") the Recording Industry Association of America, has been the primary focus of litigation on behalf of the record distribution companies to squash Napster and its peers. To achieve that, the RIAA had to figure out a way to get a court to erode one of the modern pillars of infringing, but excused use of a work - the right of an indivdual to make copies of a copyright work that individual owns for his or her own use. That right was established during the video tape wars of the early 70's, with Sony losing the most cited case (the court found that simply because a VCR >could< be used to violate a copyright, that the device itself was not automatically illegal; the court enumerated a much higher burden that a device must bear before it could be considered a device >primarily< designed to infringe a copyright). During a copyright revision in the late '80s or early '90s, congress added an additional right to make copies of a muscial work; you have the right, per that change in the law, to rip all your CDs to your hard drive, for example. (In fact, all magnetic recording tape sold in the US carries a small tariff that is paid to a fund administered by the recording business which is supposed to offset losses incurred by making illegal copies of music). In the recent Napster decisions, the RIAA managed to get a court to decide that Napster was >primarily< designed to faciliate copyright infringement, and that it was an infringing use to make a copy of a song, and transmit that copy to a 3rd party (even if the 3rd party would, under normal copyright law, have a right to own a copy of that song). Thus, the RIAA managed to gut the consumer protections won in the Sony case, and enumerated in black letter law by congress in the revision to Title 17. The DCMA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) establishes new law that forbids you from reverse engineering a copy-protection scheme. If that law is upheld, in combination with the Napster rulings, it will be possible for content creators (movies, music, etc.) to produce works that you will >never< be legally allowed to copy, even if, were those works printed on paper, you could. Again, this is all part of a larger trend to treat copyright as real property, rather than a limited set of rights with a built-in expiration timer. Ryan _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
