Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Fixing the DMCA is making all the right people mad" video.

@ZeroB4NG Copyright used to be 14 years in the USA with ability to register the work and get one time extension for another 14 years. This law was in effect 1790–1831. In 1831 the copyright time was changed to be 28 years for everybody. The law was again changed in 1909 to allow one time extension to another 28 years (making it total 56 years long for registered works). This was changed next time in 1976 to automatically grant period of 75 years or 50 years from the death of the author (whichever is longer). And it was again extended in 1998 (thanks, Disney!) to 120 years or 70 years from the death of the author (whichever is longer). The Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022 tries to shorten the copyright period back to 28 years with one time option to extend it to 56 years (for an extra fee, probably). I'm hoping it goes through but I'm expecting media companies to lobby it to halt. It's pretty clear that artists did create new works even with the year 1790 rules. All the extensions have been worse for the public but allowed companies to make more money.
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DMCA is problematic because it was introduced to protect DRM which is a mathematical impossibility. So the only way to "fix" DRM is to raise legal barriers (read: DMCA) against specific use of mathematics (in practice, reverse engineering any given DRM implementation and sharing information about the results). If you were to fix DMCA you would break DRM as a side-effect and big media companies will push back very strongly against that. Not because DRM makes sense but it allows inflating media company profits. I'm afraid that public at large should be first educated how DRM is only working if your own devices work against you – by taking features away that would otherwise be available in your devices. And DMCA is about making removing those limitations illegal. Make no mistake, I strongly believe that DMCA should be taken down and everybody should be educated enough to understand that DRM is similar to perpetual motion machines. Neither does exist but some people still like to pretend so to extract money from other people. And the parts about DMCA which make some sense (e.g. ability to make YouTube possible) should be applied as real fixes to copyright legislation.
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@johanmetreus1268 I agree. I think the least worst solution would be something that's sometimes called "declared value copyright system". The idea is to grant gratis copyright similar to copyright we currently have for 5 years only. After that all works fall in public domain immediately. You can extend your copyright indefinitely by declaring it's monetary value and paying 1% (exact figure to be decided) of its value as yearly fee in exchange for the public not having the works in public domain and using legislation to protect your intellectual property. If anybody pays the sum of declared value to you, the work immediately falls to public domain. This would have following results: (1) If your work has no monetary value for you, you won't register it for a fee and we have more public domain content. (2) If you register the work, you have strong incentive to declare true value of the work. If you overinflate the declared value, you have to pay overinflated yearly fee to keep your copyright. If you undervalue the declared value, you pay lower yearly fee and the public can free your work for less than it's worth. (3) Nobody can force you to lose access to the work because it's not forced sell but forced release to public domain. Once you get the monetary compensation that you've decided (the declared value for the work) you should be happy with the compensation and the whole public can then freely enjoy your work. (4) Disney could keep Mickey Mouse behind the bars but they couldn't do that without paying compensation to the society. Mickey Mouse would get free once Mickey wouldn't make enough money every year. (5) If you encounter any piece of work that you know is older than 5 years and it hasn't been registered, you can be sure it's public domain. I'm pretty sure everybody would agree that having more public domain content would be better for everybody. The current system results in huge amount of abandoned work with zero financial value to be unusable for a century!
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@johanmetreus1268 I totally agree. I think the same problem is here in Finland when we try to fix our local copyright laws, too. I'm not sure how the international treaties can be fixed relative to local laws but it shouldn't be possible. For sure it will be a really slow progress. And I think patent law is in similar state.
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