Posts by Russell Brown
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Then again, who the hell knows? That's the problem with playing cute -- you don't get to turn around and pretend to be shocked when wild surmise and self-serving leaks fill the hole.
I wouldn't even call the leaks self-serving. Public advocacy would have been almost impossible without insight into exactly what was being proposed. I think they had a beneficial impact on the outcome.
And apart from anything else, the leaks also actually showed that our officials were taking a pretty strong line on the IP chapter, which was good.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That said we all need to thank Australia for fighting the battle over drugs that Grosser neither cared about nor had the clout to win.
That's certainly how it looks.
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Big Biotech isn't happy, which is presumably a good sign.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Martin Brown,
Matters a bit to NZ musicians or master owners that were looking at losing rights to recordings they own or control dating from the mid-60s on.
Not for the musicians/composers. Copyright in musical works currently extends 50 years from the death of the author. And now it'll be 70 years. So the copyright in, say, Graham Brazier's works will expire in 2085.
For master recording owners – typically record labels and producers – I have a bit less sympathy. Half a century is a good long time to have exclusive control of a recording that probably cost you very little to acquire.
Even the current term is locking up a lot of music that no owner claims or wishes to exploit. There are public good arguments here.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to Vivid,
Later on I played at a few, including one gig on the platform over the river where our bass player didn't make it and Paul Kean let me play his (rather iconic) bass guitar.
It is what! Made by his own hand, if I recall rightly.
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Meanwhile, The Nation thinks US Congressional approval is far from a done deal. Interesting.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to izogi,
Yet the National Library already doesn’t provide material more recent than the 1940s “because of copyright restrictions”.
That's a very interesting point.
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We have to give way on copyright rules, but for me I don’t see that as a huge deal as it only affects works that are between 50 and 70 years old. Right now it’s Elvis and early Hitchcock. Meh.
There's a bit more up in the air than that. From the government's notes:
Apart from these two changes, TPP does not affect what is or isn’t subject to
copyright. New Zealand will maintain its current copyright exceptions and will not
be prohibited from adopting new ones in the future. In addition, New Zealand will
not be prevented from undertaking a review of its copyright laws.New Zealand has, however, agreed to extend its existing laws on technological
protection measures (TPMs), which control access to digital content like music,
TV programmes, films and software. Circumventing TPMs will be prohibited but
exceptions will apply to ensure that people can still circumvent them where there
is no copyright issue (for example, playing region-coded DVDs purchased from
overseas) or where there is an existing copyright exception (for example,
converting a book to braille).It's not yet clear whether using a VPN to watch geoblocked video counts as circumventing a TPM, or whether it's more like parallel importing. The notes say "there is no copyright issue" in playing a DVD coded for another region, but also talk about TPMs "controlling access", which would be a shift in the philosophy of our copyright law, which holds that its purpose it to govern copying rather than access.
We get to keep our current exceptions on circumventing TPMs for permitted uses, but it's not quite clear whether new exceptions will be permitted.
It's a real shame the blunt instrument of a 70-year term has got through – for every work that will keep earning longer, there will be another hundred not earning, not being exploited, but nonetheless locked away from the public. This is bad for culture.
But still, the IP chapter could have been a lot worse.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to Michael.Higgins,
My next visit, two years later, was the first day of Orientation, and the Detroit Hemroids played in the Shelley Common Room.
Well now. It would be remiss not to point out that I've just had published an article about all that.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to amanda petrie-peter,
despite the architecture such a convivial space - typical that the image is sideways
Indeed. Oddly, if you click on it, it enlarges right way up.
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