Week 5 a.k.a. The Case For Copyright Reform

This week our task was to read and give our opinion about the second chapter of The Case For Copyright Reform by Engström and Falkvinge. This is Week 5 of SPEAIT2021K course and I would like to reform the copyright legislation.

In 2012, Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström from Swedish Pirate Party published a book called The Case For Copyright Reform. In this book, authors propose reform to a modern copyright system and in Chapter 2 particularly they outline 6 main points of their proposal.

First point states that moral rights should stay unchanged. Even though this work proposes quite a shift of paradigm, some things should be kept same. That includes author's moral right to be recognized as the author.

Second point proposes free non-commercial sharing meaning that sharing copies of copyrighted files for non-commercial purpose should be legalized.

Third point aims to reduce copyright protection time from lifetime of author + 70 years to 20 years. Although 20 years may seem too short of a time period, it is needless to say that current protection time should be reformed.

Fourth point addresses the orphan works problem with the following solution - implementing a system where all new works will recieve copyrights but these copyrights will need to be extended after 5 years.

Fifth point suggests allowing remixes and parodies as well as quotation rights for sound and audiovisual material.

And finally, sixth point considers introducing a ban on DRM - Digital Rights Management - since it restricts the ability to use and copy work even when having legal rights to do so.

In my opinion, the most important points are second and sixth. If you think about it, they even kin of work together as a whole. Second point suggests allowing people to copy and share copyrighted files for non-commercial purposes and sixth point bans technological means that would prohibit people from doing this. Overall, I think that this reform is really needed and should be implemented all across the globe.