[Cc-nl] erosion of copyright in The Netherlands

Wouter Vanden hove wouter.vanden.hove at pandora.be
Wed Aug 25 05:03:50 EDT 2004


Joost Helberg wrote:
> ls,
> 
> It used to be possible to enforce free re-distribution of work by
> using copyright, this is not the case anymore.
> In the Netherlands, companies pay a flat fee (indexed by size and type
> of industry) for xerox-copying copyright protected work.
In many countries you also pay a tax on blank media, like cd-roms and 
harddisks.

> This means that although you may publish something under GPL or other
> free-redistribution license, the person copying (with a xerox copier)
> still will pay a fee for doing this.
That in itself is not a problem, because it is a general tax.
The problem is that this tax is redistributed to a very limited club of 
authors who signed away their rights to a single private organisaton.
THAT is the problem.


> In practice, this means that it is impossible for an author to
> exercise copyrights on his own material with regards to free
> redistribution. 
Well, the paper or bandwidth costs money too.

> How can we do something about this?
None of the involved parties seem to be interested in this issue,
Try some politicians and non-dogmatic law-professors.

as everybody sees copyright as a way  to protect material from being copied.
Is our task to change exactly yhat.



> I've had contact with the `stichting auteursrechtbelangen', but I
> don't think they will allow a different view on copyright to be
> expressed. 
Of course not. It's like asking the RIAA to adopt Creative Commons 
licensing. Over their dead body.


> Anyone any good idea's?

Keep asking  politicians and academics why the remain clueless about 
this discrimination between closed-copyright and open-copyright authors. 
  If it is a general tax, both groups of authors should get a piece of 
the cake.

For open source/open content, the money could be donated to the 
important foundations like Free Software Foundation, EFF, FFII, Creative 
Commons. Ibiblio, Internet Archives,...
A little bit like the German church-tax, there citizens select on their 
tax-form their religion they prefer, the church-tax money is then 
distributed according these numbers.




Greets,
Wouter Vanden Hove
www.opencursus.org
www.vrijschrift.nl
nl.wikipedia.org




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