On 27 December 2011 09:42, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
The Government has recently announced a consultation on about changes to
copyright law. This follows a review of the existing arrangements by
Professor Hargreaves over the summer.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/pro-policy/consult/consult-live/consult-2011-copyrigh…
Do people feel we should respond?
With a lute perhaps? Fiddling around the edges while copyright burns.
The whole orphan works issue. Or the abolition of copyright for the
little guy to give it is proper name. Its simply a predictable result
of the insanely long copyright terms we have at present. The rest is
much the same 172 pages of fiddling with little to no actual
significance.
(Or to reverse the question, can anyone
see good reasons for us *not* to respond? Just to be clear, charities are
quite allowed to do things like this so long as lobbying doesn't become
their main purpose...)
Better ways to spend our time mostly. So far the only thing I've found
that might be of any real interest to us is the proposed Copyright
Notice Service. Since it would the power to clarify the law in certain
areas it seems unlikely that it would be in our interests to see such
a body to come into existence. At the present time we benefit from
grey areas.
The other thing we need to defend against is the Extended Collective
Licensing stuff. We need to make sure that CC-BY-SA and the GPL and
similar are recognised as opt outs and that attempts by any societies
to claim in such cases should be classified as fraud and prosecuted as
such.
The rest is mostly relevant to libraries, archives and schools. Not us.
--
geni