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  • From: Wouter Vanden hove <wouter.vanden.hove AT pandora.be>
  • Cc: cc-nl AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nl] erosion of copyright in The Netherlands
  • Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:03:50 +0200

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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