Copy Rights and Wrongs

The British government’s Intellectual Property Office has recently made its commitment to “reshaping” the current copyright system clear, but in this reshaping has “simplification” just gone too far?

The goals of the government have been made fairly clear, they are that the copyright system should be simplified by asking rights holders to broaden their terms of use, allow non-commercial use by individuals legal without seeking rights holder’s permission, make the enforcement strategy less “muscular”, educate of the consequences for infringement and allow an organisation to licence all works in a category (music, photography, film etc.) whether or not the work is from a person signed up with that organisation or not.

Now, I can agree with the first point. simpler licensing is one reason I release both this blog, and the vast majority of my photographs under the Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike for this blog, Attribution on my Flickr). The re-use of these articles, and my photos, are fairly broad, and I also allow people to contact me if they want to use something outside of that scope. Simple and broad terms, however don’t always solve problems, as I will come to in a moment.

The last point, however, I disagree with completely. We currently have legislation in the UK that means you cannot transfer rights equal to that of the author to anyone else. What the government is proposing, however, is that a “collecting society or other organisation with significant representation” can licence all work of a specific body, even if the original author is not part of that society or organisation. In other words, someone else, who I don’t know, and don’t necessarily agree with, can choose a licence for my content. Simpler than the current system, yes, protecting an author’s work, I would question.

Let me now come back to the first point, and the second on the list, which is allowing personal use without the original author’s permission. You can say that because I publish content on the net, I am just asking for it to be stolen. We live in a world where people have copy and paste, and they don’t understand that what they are doing is wrong. This may be true, and the government intention to “educate” may well go some way to help this, but let me use my work as an example.

This blog has, on the left hand bar, a description of my Creative Commons Licence. This is displayed on every page, next to every post, you cannot miss it. It explains very clearly that the content is released by me, for use under certain terms. It’s not hard to see, it explains that if you want to use this outside the scope I can be emailed, and even gives my address. I recently sent an email to a site hosting content, posted by someone else, that came from my blog. Now, I have no issue with my work being spread, it would be ice to get an email saying it’s being used and where so that I know who is seeing what and where, but this posting breached my licence in several ways. It listed a certain forum (who I had already emailed regarding the article’s use) as the author, and it was not released under a similar licence. I emailed the site hosting this content and asked for clarification of these issues. They chose to remove the article and we all went on with our business.

Now this may seem like a grumpy guy demanding his content isn’t used badly. Whilst this may be slightly true, I didn’t request the article be removed, I asked that the credit be corrected and a Creative Commons Licence notice be made. I also had a problem with the fact that I discovered this through a Google search, and not an email from the person who posted the content.

My photos also suffer from some problems. The government commented on how sometimes images can be difficult to identify. My Flickr account gives my name, allows people to contact me via a Flickr message, a photo comment or email, and clearly states the image licence. Whilst I occasionally receive emails or messages asking to use my photos on X site or Y site, the way I usually find my content is via a “Google alert” I have set up. Usually I have no problem with the use, besides the occasional credit to “Nick Stone”. I usually do my best to contact the site owner, or whoever is using the content, to have the name corrected, although this is sometimes not possible.

The government would like to remove the need to seek permission to seek permission for “personal non-commercial use”. As most people seem to ignore this clause anyway, why bother. I licence my content so that people can use my content how they like, if someone objects to this, why should that need to change?

I like to know what my content means to people. I like to know how my content is being shown, and most of all I like to know that people like what I do. I can’t do that if the only thing I see of my work is an email from google saying that a guy called “Nick Stone” is being credited somewhere, like a Discovery Channel blog, because I know that not even Google will show me everyone using my content.

A further change regarding the use of “orphaned” works, with no identifiable author is being considered to allow, for commercial use without credit, and work that the publisher “could not find” the author for, because somewhere like Facebook has stripped the Meta Data. I would just like to say “no” and save that rant for another day.

So yes, “simplify” the copyright law, educate people, but don’t do it if this means a bad deal for people who work hard to generate content. Oh, and people like me who don’t work so hard. Remember guys, if you want to re-use this post, send me an email, it makes me feel loved.

MTFBWY

Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike