It looks like people have some pretty good discussion points on copyright posted and so far I agree with them all. When I started reading Bound by Law, I was excited that someone finally wrote a book to stick it to the man about copyright (Aoki, 2006). I believe a creator should have control over their work and should receive credit for it, but I don’t believe they should be able to demand unreasonable sums of money for incidental uses of their work if properly cited. There’s a method to my reasoning, and it all has to do with marketing and brand recognition.
You see, Fox may have demanded $10k for the 4.5 second snippet of the Simpsons and as a result it was removed (Aoki, 2006, p 13). However, can you imagine the audience that snippet would have reached? You can’t beat free advertising! Companies pay large sums of money to have their products featured in films, yet when it happens for free and by accident they sue. I think the frivolous lawsuits need to go away, and that should happen as the years pass and power of the internet seeps into the legal system more and more. In the case of “Margarita Barbie”, I think the suit should have been based on defamation, instead of copyright (Aoki, 2006, p 24). I would be upset if someone defamed a child’s toy I created; not because they stole my idea, but because they made it into something that could destroy my company’s image. This is one of the benefits of copyright, but as we can see since the judge ruled in the artist’s favor, this aspect of copyright didn’t work for the Mattel (Aoki, 2006, p 24).
Consider for a moment what would happen if someone took a suggestive video of you as you were waiting for a bus/train/taxi and adjusting a skirt, pantyhose, or your hair and immediately uploaded it to Qik. What recourse do you have? How difficult would it be to find that video once posted? Would you be able to have it removed without revealing your identity? Would the person who posted it be protected by copyright?
This brings me to my next point. You own everything you create for life plus 70 years (Aoki, 2006, p 11). Was that extra 70 years supposed to mean your beneficiary gets the benefit of your work until they die? As I understand it, this applies to just about everything except corporate holdings which are 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation (Aoki, 2006, p 11). But drug patents expire only 20 years after invention and are often heavily challenged (http://www.forbes.com/2005/03/09/cx_mh_0309plavix.html). The short term of drug patents is supposed to encourage lower cost generic alternatives and to prevent big pharma from monopolizing life saving treatments.
This 20 year timeline is being challenged now because long term clinical trials can take more than 20 years to complete, so just as a drug patent expires, generic drug companies can get the drugs to market and stand on the research of the original patent holder – which means lower development and testing costs and ergo, lower drug costs (http://www.forbes.com/2005/03/09/cx_mh_0309plavix.html). This is equivalent to someone stalking book copyrights waiting for them to expire and then republishing them as their own, but the book sells on title alone because it was a best seller back in the day, so the new copyright holder doesn’t have to pay for marketing. (Is it just me, or does this seem like cheating?) I guess my point is that if pharma is limited by a 20 year patent timeline, what makes life + 70 years appropriate for anything else. I suppose if I had a justification for that amount of time I might be more apt to accept it.
I am all for the by-nc-sa for our site. It just makes the most sense for the wiki platform. I had no clue you could define the terms of your own copyright, otherwise I would have done this years ago and will do it from now on; particularly with online information. What good is knowledge that cannot be shared?