Standardista Kyd

Well, I had a load of interesting thoughts yesterday and I’m kind of thankful I held off blogging them, because looking back, some of them are quite embarrassing.

I was researching into copyright last night seeing it’s a bit of a touchy subject, and I have a few creations that I’d love to share with the world, but can’t. Of course, having a few screws loose and very little restraint I went and typed up a great big rant on how copyright law sucks, and this and that, throwing the odd expletive into the mix just for the sake of it. Luckily a little voice in my head gave me the idea to sit on it for a few days, go to bed, and re-read the article in the morning.

Lucky, indeed. It was kind of crap, and ill-informed and generally cringe-worthy. Essentially, I’m going to rewrite my findings from a fresh perspective in the hopes that I can get it off my chest.

Copyright in general sucks for the end user. In Australia (and most of the world,) copyright is automatically applied to anything that someone creates, and lasts their entire lifetime plus 70 years. Don’t ask me who controls the copyright after you’re gone, but that’s the way it is. Essentially, if Bloe Joggs created a recording of her voice and put it on the Internet for everyone to use, it would still be copyrighted for give or take a hundred tears. If someone wanted to use it in a ring tone, song, presentation, whatever… They’d have to wait around for one-hundred and twenty years. That’s a massive amount of time.

Considering copyright’s automagic, if someone creates something and doesn’t release it with a license… Or doesn’t declare it into public domain… It’s still copyrighted and they can still reserve rights, regardless of whether they plan to or not. So if this person dies in a fire, whomever the copyright is transferred to can suddenly demand royalties. This just ends up being both a sticky and tricky situation for people like me, who have unknowingly sampled copyrighted material on a good-natured basis.

Of course, I’m not pretending to be an expert: I’m just regurgitating things I’ve gathered from repositories such as Wikipedia. Essentially I’m not going to be able to release aspects of my work until at least 2132. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not planning on being around at that point. With all the proposed copyright extensions, let’s just hope there’s going to be a shakeup (Or preferably: Break up) of copyright law sometime in the near future.