The current abuses of copyright and the persistence of several related myths are creating serious problems to all society. I feel that a real solutions to those problems must include adoption by everybody of the behavior described in the first part of this page and lobbying for the changes in laws and regulations suggested in the second half.

Guidelines for individual behavior

Forget Mozart, and accept the fact that authors must be compensated for their work

As already explained in the page about copyright myths, let's stop relying on models made to order for outstanding geniuses and only working for the the five or ten of them born every generation. Even assuming that nobody had a "natural" right to control copying, there is nothing bad and lots to gain for society if all actual authors and performers are granted some limited privileges and control on their work.

Forget any copyright replacement exclusively based on governments, rich patrons or other not accountable intermediaries to sustain authors

More or less centrally controlled subsidies for authors, be they from governments or rich people, are potentially dangerous and would encourage only some kinds of creativity. Of course, even collection agencies, at least in their current incarnations, are actually doing much more harm than good.

Acknowledge the value of productive middlemen

If we want to maximize the amount of usable, useful and valuable information and artistic works (that is, both fiction and non-fiction stuff, to speak in bookstore terms), we do need productive intermediaries which (re)organize, aggregate and assist. In other words, society needs competent people who help both society as a whole and authors and performers to save time. Many horrors are much more readable after going through some disciplined editor's check.

Editing, logistics and many other similar collateral activities are indispensable in many cases, and real talent in these fields is almost as hard to find as authorial talent.

Often, such activities are also full time, boring work which is only sustainable through copyright incentives, that is if the authors themselves gain enough from copyright to pay such specialists to help them. Without the possibility for authors to earn such incentives if they so wish, society would end up with less quality works (especially in the non-fiction field, though this is not the main point), and many authors may find themselves with a larger piece of a much smaller pie.

Stop copying illegally

If you want to hurt, for good and forever, the corporations which abuse of copyright, do not support them. Do not buy any creative work from them, even for just one year or six months. Do not go to watch their movies, do not buy corporate-produced music, movies, books, posters, or any other product sponsoring them. But please do not load their guns.

Sure, the prices for those products are outrageous and only a very small part of that money, if any, goes to the authors and performers who actually created those works. But it is just for these reasons that illegal copying is stupid, unnecessary (this is not food or medicines we're talking about) and, depending on who the copyright holders are, harmful to them or uselessly dangerous for you.

Independent authors, unless they're already quite wealthy, will suffer concrete economical problems if you don't support them. The real problem from today's illegal copying, though, is that by doing it you are actively giving corporations lots of "piracy" statistics which are used as proof that even worse laws and technologies are needed. Illegal copying is really like shooting yourself in the foot.

From an educational point of view, getting music or movies illegally with the justification of excessive prices and restrictions of fair use is also not correct. Breaking a law to get even with a villain, or because the law is unfair, is like being a vigillante. Just avoid those songs or movies and let everybody know why.

There is a way to browse the Internet which, to all practical purposes, is practically equivalent to illegal copying and equally counterproductive. Blocking the online ads included in web pages is really easy. However, by blocking all ads, all the time, of all the websites you visits, you directly threaten their ability to claim visitors. Just remember that such ability may be the one thing which, especially with smaller websites, keeps the information available at no cost for you.

Proposals for law reforms

Copyright for legal entities

At first sight, granting copyright only to natural persons seems appealing, because such a restriction would put an end to the unfair advantage hold today by potentially immortal corporations. However, limiting copyright to natural persons would not work easily for movies or any other team work, anything done on commission, companies doing technical manuals, and it would not be needed anyway, if the other parts of this proposal were implemented.

Make globalization work for consumers, wherever they are

DVD regions locks and similar techniques which attempt to create artificial separate markets should not be allowed.

Do not force users to pay twice for the same copy of the same work

Printed books can be read unlimited times until they physically break, in any place, with or without any brand of glasses, without any degradation. They can be lent to a friend and, when their cover breaks, they can be bound again, that is "moved" to another "support". Limitations of fair use of digital works should not be more restrictive than those for printed books. For the record, this is not an endorsement of unrestricted redistribution, against the author's wishes, of works still under copyright protection: fair use never included redistribution.

Do not tolerate "Out of print"

Very often, even in today's digital world, a creative work is available to everybody only in theory, for two reasons independent of price.

The first is temporary or permanent "out of print": if the profit margin of a book or music album falls below some arbitrary figure, its copyright holder can merrily stop making copies of it, even if nobody else can and there are people who would be happy to pay for a copy.

Laws should not allow that creative works like books, music, video etc.. ever go out of print for purely economic reasons. If this happens before the copyright is expired, a work should go immediately and automatically in the public domain.

Whenever applicable, demand mandatory copies for centralized digital archives of every creative work, in non proprietary digital formats

After copyright is expired, everybody should have the concrete possibility to republish, distribute and elaborate in any way, i.e. keeping accessible, a creative work.

The second reason why many creative works disappear after a while or become much harder to preserve is that, even after copyright is expired, to make one or many copies as good as the original ones without unbearable costs you must:

• have somewhere at least one complete, undegraded copy of the original work in the first place
• be sure that that copy is already in some digital format which can technically be played, processed and copied at will without any degradation on any computer system

In practice, the latter requirement is equivalent to demand that, when some work isn't published online from the start in a truly open format, its authors must (if they do want to have copyright protection) deposit complete, unaltered copies in truly open formats, in some offline repository from where it can be published online as soon as its copyright expires. Tax advantages may be granted to authors and publishers who put in the same repositories their already existing works.

Without satysfing both the conditions above the actual benefit to society when copyright on a creative work expires is almost null, regardless of the length of copyright duration, since making new copies as good as the original is very time consuming and/or expensive. This is a huge disaster and shame for a society with so much technology at its disposal.

Reduce copyright duration

This is the central point. The majority of creative works which are more than 15 or 20 years old have no longer any commercial value. According to Scambio Etico the average duration of that commercial value is 18 months, that is immensely shorter than current duration of copyright (the same site also urges end users to self restrain themselves, just as recommended in this page). As a consequence of this fact, very often it becomes impossible to purchase, that is to preserve if you aren't the author, any creative work which stops, even for a short period, to have significant monetary value.

A copyright lasting many decades actually makes all the works with short lived commercial value disappear faster. It also limits the benefits of those very few works which are still profitable many years after their publication to people who were not their creators, be they music company stock holders who didn't create anything, or descendants who weren't even alive when the work was created.

Consequently, the most important action, maybe the only really necessary one to put an end to copyright abuses, the one which would make all the other proposal in this document happen almost automatically, is to reduce copyright duration, worldwide and as soon as possible, to five or ten years from the moment a work is published.

Such a measure would still reward fairly those who deserve it the most, that is the actual creators: in almost all cases there would be no significant financial loss for them. At the same time, reducing copyright duration would cancel all long term dangers.

Above all, a copyright reduced to a few years would make huge media corporations and the problems they create to free culture and independent authors unsustainable: terribly expensive organizations like those only make financial sense if they can guarantee to their stock holders exclusive rights to make money off some creative works for long periods.

Why support this proposal?

The short answer is that, otherwise, there may be very little good, free culture left in the near future. Large media corporations are doing all they can to make governments extend copyright duration and limit fair use rights. Sure, eventually those media corporations will fail: the problem is if what will be left by then, in terms of fair, concrete incentives for actual authors and performers, will still be enough to sustain the richest possible cultural life. This is why it is important to act soon.

From this point of view, the core proposals of this paper are much more practical, effective and simpler to lobby for than those based on the current copyright related myths and can be summed up in
this way:

1. wherever applicable, make the free deposit in offline archives of digital, high fidelity copies in open formats of creative works a necessary condition to claim copyright on them

2. reduce copyright duration to no more than ten years from the moment a work is published

These two simple measures would finally make both technically and legally possible to distribute and remix works as soon as possible but still after authors have actually earned what they do deserve. Most other alternatives are either counterproductive or really hard to implement in a fair and efficient way.