Internetrecht door Arnoud Engelfriet

Auteursrecht duurt tot zeventig jaar na de dood van de maker, maar is dat wel de optimale duur? Niet volgens onderzoek van Rufus Pollock, die promoveert op innovatie en intellectuele eigendom bij de Universiteit van Cambridge. Ars Technica vat het samen:

Pollock’s work is based on the promise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.

Dat laatste verbaast natuurlijk niet. Zo schrijft Pollock zelf ook:

the level of protection is not usually determined by a benevolent and rational policy-maker but rather by lobbying. This results in policy being set to favour those able to lobby effectively – usually groups who are actual, or prospective, owners of a substantial set of valuable copyrights – rather than to produce any level of protection that would be optimal for society as a whole. Furthermore, on this logic, extensions will be obtained precisely when copyright in existing, and valuable, material is about to expire.

Op Slashdot wordt er uitgebreid op doorgegaan. Eén reactie wil ik u niet onthouden:

Ironically, longer copyright protection is arguably more valuable to the Free Software movement than it is to commercial software developers who publish their works in binary form. With a 14-year copyright length, for example, Windows NT 3.1 would soon enter the public domain, but since only binaries were published, free access to it would be of little value. In contrast, all of the GNU software from the same period was published in source form, and with the expiry of its copyright, would become free for commercial developers to use in closed source software.

En inderdaad, de kracht achter het open source model zit hem in de samenwerkingsovereenkomst, het verplicht delen van wijzigingen zodat iedereen op elkaars werk kan voortbouwen.

Arnoud