Put the needle to the record by tricky

Not quite law yet,  but with cross-party support from the three main parties, it looks like the Digital Economy Bill soon will be. Unfortunately, being driven by the small-minded folks in the record and film industries shouting loudly about lost profits (not the Welsh band though), the bill is far from being what creative industries and the public need, rather it looks like being a massive missed opportunity and another example of the law being dragged into disrepute. To quote Mr Bumble, the (proposed) law is an ass. » Continue reading “The law is an ass…”

You could see photos you take of your family and kids, or of a family vacation, used in a magazine or newspaper without your permission or payment to you. You would have to pay to register your photos, all of them, in every new registry in order to protect them. Say the average person takes 300 photos per year (I take a lot more than that). If a registry only charges $5 per image, that is a whopping $1,500 to protect your photos that are protected automatically under the current laws. If there are three registries, protecting your images could cost an amazing $4,500. Not to mention the time it would take to register every photo you take. Plus, you will also have to place your copyright sign on every photo.

From an article in Animation World Magazine where the author describes some horrendously bad legislation being created in the USA whereby an artist will have to register each and every artwork they produce in order to achieve the same levels of protection under copyright law currently afforded. What is more worrying (from my UK pov) is that Europe is noted as looking at similar legislation. If this happens, i would have to register each and every one of my Flickr photos in order that they can be listed as my copyright and not treated as ‘orphaned works’ and therefore free of copyright. Ridiculous! I am currently protected by the current copyright laws and therefore stand to lose protection not gain by such proposed legislation. Not to mention the logistical nightmare of maintaining registers of copyrighted works and potential for errors.
Hopefully this will turn out to be another example of the US legislators failing to understand basic principals (remember how it always used to be the way that to win an election, you needed more votes rather than more friends and relatives in positions of power?) and our legislators in Europe will not go down the same route (if only because they are arguing over the straightness of cucumbers or how dangerous barometers are). But then again, there’s nothing like a bit of new legislation to make it look like you’re doing something useful…