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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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December 09, 2011 10:34:39am |
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texts
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Copyfraud |
The concept of "Copyfraud" may be of interest to folks here.
Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law (2011),
Book website.
When it comes to copyright abuse, we tend to focus on teenager pirates downloading music and movies, but that misses the bigger picture: it's the corporations, government and others who are really the most guilty of Copyright fraud, who claim copyright on vast stretches of public domain material and profit from it, when they have no such right.
The author of the book, Jason Mazzone, published an earlier paper about it called "Copyfraud" which is
free to download and has a short abstract.
More on "Copyfraud" and at
Wikipedia
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Poster:
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Wileyrose |
Date:
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December 23, 2011 03:57:10am |
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Re: Copyfraud |
I do a lot of genealogy research and the local government record keepers are some of the worst abusers. The law clearly states when these records become public domain and yet the local officials use them for profit by publishing transcriptions, or just lists of the names and dates, and sell them, claiming the publications are copyrighted. Then they charge you a large research and copy fee if you demand a copy of the original document and it takes weeks or months to get the copy because there are so many requests.
Constant use is destroying the original documents and they are rotting away as we speak. They are irreplaceable! Familysearch, and other organizations, will scan everything for free and put it all on line but many locals refuse the offer because they don't want to lose the income the documents generate.
WE own these materials! Copyright laws were carefully crafted to ensure that everything eventually becomes public domain. The government is slowly taking away one of our fundamental rights and no one seems to care.
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Poster:
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garthus |
Date:
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December 10, 2011 08:20:32am |
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Re: Copyfraud |
Stbalbach,
I have been agitating about this long before Mazzone. It is good to see some establishment individuals now picking up on this. That is why I am so adamant about the Archive posting as much as possible 'in the Public Domain materials' under the Creative Commons license. These corporations know exactly what they are doing. I spoke to SAM attorneys concerning their claim to expired copyrighted materials under Photofacts when I was posting some of their materials in the Archive. They rabidly complained at first, but when I asked them for documentation concerning their copyright renewal status for the materials, they reluctantly admitted that they had failed to renew the copyrights. See:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Photofact%20garthusI have since donated to the Archive my entire 8,000 page collection of Photofacts documents, I hope that they scan them soon as it is the complete collection from the 1940's to 1963. Contrast this with companies such as John Deere, they thanked me for posting some tractor and farm implement manuals which they did not even have in their archives. I would be careful about asking our corrupt elected officials to fix this though since their track record is one of screwing everything they touch around to benefit the plutocrats.
We can merely ignore these phony copyrights and just continue posting all Public Domain materials.
Gerry
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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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December 11, 2011 10:16:29am |
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Re: Copyfraud |
Your position and activities here are admirable. Your posts and advocacy here are sinking in, I'm starting to realize how widespread it is, and can see the whole system has been fundamentally hijacked by special interests.
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Poster:
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garthus |
Date:
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December 12, 2011 08:57:47pm |
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Re: Copyfraud |
The public libraries have even bought into this lunacy. They try to copyright documents and materials which are long in the public domain by placing their institutional copyright on the electronic version of the book or document. Even a casual review of the copyright statutes will reveal that once an item is in the Public Domain, changing its file format does not change its Public Domain status. I recieved a good bit of criticism for questioning such antics when I worked for a library consortium in New York. They actually believe such crap and really have this feeling of ownership of Public Domain materials which are in their custody.
A short time ago I was able to obtain a good number of issues of a popular local historical journal. I could not convince the leadership of the consortium to digitize them do to lack of interest. I then digitized several volumes as a test and the result was:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=long%20island%20forum%20garthus&;
A good number of downloads and much interest on the part of local libraries. Basically they would not agree to the digitization of this material because my requirement was to place them in the Public Domain and they had this feeling of ownership if they would have supported the work. This, even though the consortium was completely publically funded. I brought to their attention that they could place all of the items which they were placing in their digital library (at great cost to the taxpayers) on the Archive for no cost; but they did not like the fact that the Archive's name would be associated with their materials. This is the mind-set that we are dealing with. Public-sector workers who have this feeling of entitlement and ownership of something which not only belongs to the public, but, which is being paid for by the public. This is why I am 'very' cynical when I hear mention of asking our government officials for permission to do anything. They literally corrupt and destroy nearly anything which they lay their hands on (witness the current economic mess both at the Federal and State levels). Copyright no longer protects intellectual property (as if it really ever did), it institutionalizes corporate plutocracy, enabled by our elected officials.
The only possible action which we can take that may help protect our Public Domain works, is to quickly place them up on the Archive under some sort of Creative Commons license. Once this is done, it will be difficult for the Corporate interests and their elected associates to undo their Public Domian status without exposing their duplicitous motives.
Gerry
This post was modified by garthus on 2011-12-13 03:56:40
This post was modified by garthus on 2011-12-13 03:57:47
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Poster:
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coollee |
Date:
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December 13, 2011 03:24:32am |
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Re: Copyfraud |
If only we have thinking like yours in Washington. Want to run for POTUS?
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