NationStates Jolt Archive

WHEREAS, the UCPL has been accepted as UN resolution, purporting to universalize copyright law without the slightest indication what that law is to be, rendering the resolution meaningless and moot; and

WHEREAS, draconian copyright laws discourage innovation in the arts and sciences and favor monopoly over competition; and

WHEREAS, free trade requires restrictions upon trade to be lessened, rather than increased,

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that no Member Nation may adopt copyright law inconsistent with the following principles:

1. Copyright shall inhere in a creative work upon creation.

2. Ownership of the copyright in a creative work shall be vested in the actual real person who authored or created that work. Under no circumstance shall a corporate entity be deemed the author of a work.

3. The duration of the copyright in a work shall never exceed the life of the author, unless the author dies within ten years of the date of creation, in which case the duration of the copyright shall not exceed ten years from the date of creation.

4. No exclusive license in a copyright may be granted for a term greater than five years.

5. If the creator of a creative work transfers the copyright interest to a corporate entity, the copyright shall expire after ten years. If the author is still alive after that time has expired, he or she may recover the copyright at that time.

6. No entity, government or otherwise, may claim copyright on any document which is or purports to be a statement of the law of the land.

In many countries, software is not allowed to be patented. In those Countries, software is copyrighted material, and as software is often the product of corporations, well, you can see the problem coming up.

Corporations have just as much right to copyright their works as individuals. The only proviso is that the work must have some basic creativity. I'm sure rules can be established as to the treatment of corporate copyrights, but I still feel that this is an issue best left to individual nations.

Valiant attempt to mend an impossible broken law though, Gwenhwyva.

It seems we often hear the phrase, "property is theft", from certain political systems and regimes. While the Conglomerated Oligarcy of Frisbeeteria thinks this idea is ludicrous, we have a suggestion for an addition to this proposal.

Let those nations who have patentable materiel, but do not wish payment or recognition, place such materials in a United Nations Open Source Repository. The patent officials can verify the legitmate 'ownership' (as it were) of the submissions in question, and copies may be delivered to any and all who want them. This UNOSR need not even limit themselves to UN membership, but may choose (at the behest of UN Membership) to allow non-members to both contribute and withdraw.

Naturally, certain States (such as Frisbeeteria) would have no desire to contribute, and might in fact be heavy users of such a library ... but we see no problem with that. The UN's internationist mission should involve assisting those nations who most need aid, and this would be a way to provide industrial and scientific aid to all, for the mere cost of a few copies or an internet connection to the Project Database.

There are no doubt some finer details to be worked out, but we submit this as a potential addition to this document for your perusal and suggestions.

Torvald P. Tux
Director of Infomatics, TransScan Genetics, Frisbeeteria

There is an obvious need to modify the Copyright Resolution, and we hope that Gwenhwyva will adapt this proposal with some of the suggestons of the UN membership at large. We wish to offer this additional suggestion for the modification of the UCPL - a name.

Let the Copyright Resolution Amendment for Managing Intellectual Tenure be a collaboration of all UN members who are interested in fair representation of intellectual properties.

Once we have a consensus, we trust we can count on your vote to CRAMIT to the UCPL.

While this clarification is a nice start on the road to fair IP laws it is still far from complete. Intellectual Property needs to be considered as a set - copyright, patent, trademark and tradesecrets. Just as patents are divided into patents and design patents (a sort of patent on a copyright), perhaps copyrights need to be divided into copyright (for artistic expression) and functional copyrights (for software, business processes, etc).

We have resigned from the UN because of the UCPL, but we would return if it were repealed or properly amended.

While this clarification is a nice start on the road to fair IP laws it is still far from complete. Intellectual Property needs to be considered as a set - copyright, patent, trademark and tradesecrets. Just as patents are divided into patents and design patents (a sort of patent on a copyright), perhaps copyrights need to be divided into copyright (for artistic expression) and functional copyrights (for software, business processes, etc).

Copyright law, which is fiercely defended by a certain class of person despite its unpromising beginning in the notion a king could dictatorially grant monopolies to publish works such as the Bible, is a hash of warring concepts. It is full of what our nation considers, frankly, bullshit.

One example of the sort you cite is that ship hull designs, for instance, have an entire set of law devoted simply to them. We state that like most intellectual property law, it exists as a special class of copyright solely because at the time the laws were written, boat manufacturers were very wealthy and could afford to bribe legislators to pass legislation to their liking, which in fact was drafted by industry representatives.

I believe anyone who has examined the legislation process can closely correlate modern intellectual property with the flow of bribes to legislators, or as bribes are called these days, campaign donations. This kind of nakedly corrupt legislative process, in which industry representatives openly write laws and then openly pay for them to be passed, as is clearly apparent from the record and campaign finance databases, to those who look at them, is only tolerated in copyright law because the average citizens simply do not even understand the rudiments of intellectual property law.

That citizen may have the vague notion that the file sharing applications on their computers are "stealing" in some vague sense, but not having any respect for the intellectual underpinnings of this abstraction, feel no guilt over such "theft." That is because the underlying philosophy of intellectual property law, while phrased in high-faluting terms of fairness and equity, simply does not actually exist. There is no such thing as "intellectual property." It is, to use the Marxist metaphor, "theft" from the public domain. The citizens cannot be blamed for having only a vague notion of intellectual property law and its philosophical underpinnings, since as the legislative history shows, copyright laws are determined mainly by the steady flow of bribe money to corrupt legislators.

The whole concept of such laws is a money-making fiction. The intellectual "property" mongers have paid well to purchase the redefinition of infringing an imaginary "right" as "theft" and "piracy" and other similar terms which represent actual crimes recognizable morally. The basis of copyright is that a person, having said something, then has the "right" to prevent others from saying it.

However, all this said, we do recognize there is one advantage and one advantage only of copyright and other intellectual property laws. It makes money, for the creator and for businesses, and therefore encourages further creation. Therefore, it is of some social benefit. However, our studies show that on the order of 95 percent of profits from copyrighted materials occur within the first 10 years of protection. The rest merely extends control while rarely increasing profit. Therefore we curtail such protections and forbid them entirely for corporate entities.

This encourages corporations not to alienate copyrights, since living human beings who own copyrights are protected for life. (While issues may arise after immortality, we need not address them here. When we face that issue, we will have time to deal with it.)

So in short, we have a compromise proposal, since there is a dangerous vagueness to the UCPL. Indeed, we contend (see below) that the UCPL is so vague as to have no force at all and we intend to ignore it completely.

We have resigned from the UN because of the UCPL, but we would return if it were repealed or properly amended.

Personally, our nation does not see any need to resign the UN over the UCPL. Someone may see the need to attempt to have our nation thrown out, but my position is that when we enacted laws to comply with the UCPL, those laws stated that our copyright laws are to remain identical, and that no foreign copyrights are to be granted any greater protection than they are accorded in Gwenhwyva. Our copyright laws are only slightly more strict than those in our proposal, and are in fact as strict as can be allowed under our Constitution.

Our rationale for this decision is that the UCPL makes no statement whatsoever as to what copyright laws are now universal. Therefore, we choose to assume that the laws that have been made universal are our own. If anyone wishes to challenge our continued membership in the UN over our refusal to change our copyrights at all, we challenge them to point out any language in the UCPL of which we are in violation.

If despite our stated intention that we will completely ignore the UCPL in our nation's laws, we are not removed from the UN, we will take this as proof of our original thesis: that this proposal is ludicrous and impotent and should never have been passed. Its only advantage is that, being completely ineffectual, it is at least harmless.

We do invite alternate proposals. Our own is a compromise. We had initially considered a proposal to abolish all copyright and intellectual "property" laws. However, while that is philosophically pleasing to our little commie hearts, it would never pass.

It's possible the UCPL is too fatally flawed to be rescued even by this heroic effort, in which case its demise on the grounds of its vagueness and impotence is a good thing.

One concern I have just realized about my own proposal is that the UCPL seems to literally require all copyright laws be identical. Unless it can be interpreted in a sane fashion, our proposal would force nations with more strict copyright laws to abandon them.

It is our belief that the UCPL can be interpreted to establish a minimum standard of copyright law, and in that case, nations are free to enact stronger protections. They are just not free to attempt to enforce those standards on other sovereign nations. They also invite troubles such as hordes of foreigners hiring lawyers in order to sue other foreigners in their courts to avail themselves of these laws. (Many might not consider this an actual problem.)

In any case, I advise anyone who has resigned from the UN because of the UCPL to adopt our position of retaining their current copyright laws unaltered and demanding that anyone challenging their position provide actual resolution language specifying what copyright laws must be enacted in order to comply with it. It is our position that any copyright laws at all, even "our nation respects no copyrights at all," is valid and compliant. (Our own nation has slightly stricter copyright laws than we propose, largely because our politicians are as corrupt as those anywhere else. If it were left entirely to legislators to dictate laws, they would be even stricter, but our Chancery Courts have consistently refused to enforce stricter laws as against our Charter of Rights.)

We have stated our intent of doing this and we now state that we have, in fact, done this. We defy anyone to challenge our continued membership in the UN on these grounds.

"REALITY" CHECK FOOTNOTE:
I could cite "real world studies" to this effect, but since this isn't the "real world" it would have little relevance. However, I consider it a reasonable statement for a hypothetical world and not "god moding." It's tempting to just pull things entirely out of your ass when making up "facts" to support an argument in an imaginary world, but I try to avoid that unless I am specifically discussing aspects of my own country that are actually within "my" control.