I'm not sure which is more embarrassing: today's ludicrous copyright terms that automatically lock away culture from all of us for potentially over a century, or the fact that legislation that spans centuries can be bought for a mere $149,612. The article claims Trent Lot got a piddling $1,000 (well, publicly at least) for getting on board. That's less money than Disney generates for itself per second of its existence.
They'd probably do it for free. It was seen as protecting American business interests. It was argued that it would protect art by incentivizing storage and restoration of old works. There are counter arguments to these arguments, but it wasn't a super controversial bill.
The biggest part of lobbying is just getting people to notice your issue. Meeting the right people and getting the right language crafted is like 9/10ths of the process. Not all (probably not even most) lobbying is bribery.
I'd be hesitant to make the latter statement in isolation. Given my experiences with various levels of "important individuals" over the years, the money is MOST useful for opening that door in the first place.
It's a lot easier to offer a group of high power individuals a 5 star dinner with a realistic expectation they'll who up, as opposed to cold calling them as just another average joe. Once that connection is established, the relationship is much less active bribery and much more "let's have a little chat and see if we can't find something mutually agreeable"; although to be frank, I'm not sure I'd say the latter is any less worrying.
I wouldn't take that quote too seriously. If you read the doc where those quotes came from, it's clear the traders are joking around. They would have done it for favors anyway, no coffee needed.
Still, normally I imagine all these finance people as people in suits, not the type who says this "if u did that i would come over there and make love to you[,] your choice"
Actually this is a very good thing. Politicians being such cheap dates over this topic means that it should be possible for a bunch of us to chip in and buy them all off when the next extension comes up. A PAC or a public pledge of donations devoted to ending the copyright mafia’s control would not need much support to get real results.
Yes it could get into a bidding war, but it would at least be worth trying.
The most likely chance of success would be a fight for better handling of orphan works. We could free 99.9% of all material that should be coming out of copyright while having very little or no impact on the copyright mafia.
It would probably be best to not get into specific cases, but try to find a way that could be more general - say let a current copyright holder extend the copyright of an item for 10 years for a nominal fee (say $100). The money could go to fund a website that would list which old works were still copyright protected.
Mickey would be safe from entering the public domain and everything else would automatic become public domain.
Why not get into specific cases? I know it smells funny to a programmer, but pragmatically just giving Disney an explicit exemption would take them out of the lobbying game.
If that happened, it'd probably be big enough to get mainstream media attention ("grassroots VS corporate lobbying bidding-war!"), at which point politicians might well be forced to side with the grassroots for fear of their image permanently being stuck as "a corporate sell-out", at which point we've won regardless of how much money corporate lobbying puts in.
Maybe we can do it the way protagonists of the book Makers did? They figured out a way to make some IP lawsuits against Disney look profitable enough that it attracted VC investments and suddenly all the power of startup funding industry was redirected to destroy Disney.
You made the point well, maybe the U.S. Govt should squeeze a little harder. Something like a perpetual copyright for 10% of the gross, taxes not included. That's a deal the Hollywood set can understand.
I'm sort of embarrassed to contemplate how much emotional energy goes into casting copyright arguments in such overwrought terms. Locking culture away from us? My god, the violence!
Nothing has entered Public Domain until 2019 IF it isn't extended.
Good case of how it sucks: Sherlock Holmes. Half the stuff is copyrighted and the earlier stuff is Public Domain. So we only get half the stories and nothing about an older Sherlock.
Where do you get violence from a metaphorical lock and the idea of culture?
Care to explain how copyright does not achieve that? The term isn't overwrought, it actually perfectly describes what it achieves. It puts a lock on cultural works.
