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Jason Scott

9 Mar, 7 tweets, 2 min read

Everyone keeps seeing me mention some doom or gloom about "copyright law changes" and either go "what is it" or "you're being dramatic".

Nooooo. I'm not.

blog.archive.org/2021/03/09/int…

The new proposed changes/additions have something for everyone, but my personal winner is "notice and staydown", which is going to be a nightmare of proportions beyond belief.

"Notice and Staydown" has been extended out for over a decade. Youtube SORT of does it - they keep an internal list of rough match formulas that say "keep this and anything like it off youtube, or demonetize the content", etc.

It has two amazing aspects:

- It's prohibitively expensive to maintain. The only way any non-big-tech sites will have it work is they will have to subscribe to some chum-bucket central machine that will pop out YES or NO against every file you send it.

- It doesn't quite work.

We have plenty of cases where they have issued takedowns to recordings of orchestras or bands playing 18th century music because Sony has classical performances on CD. We've seen false matches and we've seen other issues. And that's youtube, with billions invested.

Anyway, what it means is that there will be some "this hash is baaaaaaaaaad" law passed and so for archivists we can expect a massive disaster when people start adding randomized headers and files into items to get around this.

Anyway, enjoy the show.

While you can.

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It was unfair for me to point to the fake-kerfuffle of a suggestion by some dude on twitter that Copyright last 30 years and the resulting melee-of-ignorance that would inevitably cause on all sides as people chewed over the consequences. There's several facts some don't know.

First, copyright has changed in term multiple times over the centuries in the US. Right now, it is Life-of-Creator+70 years or Life-of-Creator+90 years if it's owned by a corporate entity at the end.

This is goddamned ridiculous. If you think it's not you're a coconut.

Quick review. In 1790 it was 14 years. In 1830, that became 28 years. We also added a way for a copyright owner to file for an extension of copyright. We have massive books at the Library of Congress with listings of people/entities who paid for and applied for those.

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