Copyright, yours, mine or your ISP's?

[pecunium]

herowlness explains it all for you.

Not really, and I am sure the EFF will have more, but the quick version: the people who sell you your cable, and your ISP, and even places like Blogger and LJ, are beig offered the right to own the copyright, for 50 years, of the things which they "publish" as a side effect of you paying (or not, in the case of MySpace and LJ) to write your thoughts down, share your pictures, show off your kids artwork; the lot.

If this is as it appears, it's a huge grab of private intellectual property. It would make all sorts of things problematic (selling art on E-bay comes immediately to mind).

Look into it.

Comments

[qp4.livejournal.com]

IIRC MySpace actually already owns everything that gets posted on their site.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Wasnt there a huge thing about this with geocities a while back? How their TOS said that? And that went over like a lead balloon...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

A ToS may have things which won't stand up in court. This is an attempt to get the issue defined as the default status in the law, any by international treaty.

Post a song on YouTube, and discover that TimeWarner owns it, and can sell it to Sony, without you seeing a penny of the millions of copies sold when nSync record it.

TK

[kasheesty.livejournal.com]

All I know is that Top Ten List is MINE,baby, and it goes where I go! LOL

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I happen to harbor considerable prejudice against WIPO, considering them possibly the greatest threat & danger to the Human Intellectual Commonweal (or "the clerisy", in its broadest sense). And the U.S. Copyright Office input to it tends to be especially pernicious. Not to mention my disapproval of amending Treaties in a way that bypasses Congressional approval of the changes. So, yes, we need to keep a sharp and cautious eye on anything WIPO propose. We also need to understand the meanings & implications of what they're proposing, and they seem to do a magnificent job of obfuscating this (and the fact that they are sometimes utterly clueless about how the net actually works -- a few years ago they were trying to make ISP's necessary copying, caching, & backing-up of text a violation of copyright -- can lead to even more confusion). I'm planning on waiting until a few people who seem to be credible Experts weigh-in on this before I come to even a tentative conclusion. Other, of course, than to be highly-suspicios of _everything_ people & organizations in postions of Power and Authority do.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

See here for more details of the current SoP - there's an LJ feed of the blog at ip_watch that's well worth reading if you've any interest in what WIPO is doing. Looks like webcasting is out of the draft treaty again (for now), but there's no guarantee it'll stay that way...

(an minor irritation that may or may not affect you: they insist on formatting their pages at full screen width, which is a PITA if you have a 1920px screen and run your browser at 820px wide)