The following question, ‘What Would You Ask For in Copyright Law?’ was brought up on Slashdot in regards to the public input requested by Australian Attorney General’s Department. Don’t bother readin the commentary. Most of it is pretty horrifying.

My belief on this issue? *sigh* This is a hard question. As a coder, and aspiring writer I have a hard time answer it. But I guess this is my view.

• Copyright Length: Owner’s Life + 10 years or 75 years. Which ever is longer(Companies are bound by the 75 years).
• Ability to reassign the work into the public domain by the author at anytime during his life
• Abandoned copyrights (rights in which the owner cannot be found) can go through a public petition to fall into public domain (Thus giving the owners a right to step up and reclaim their property).
• Fair use is any PRIVATE usage, modification, etc of a product. This includes removal, inserting or copying for non-distribution.
• Re-sale of copyrighted material is allowed, iff the content of material has not been modified (ripping covers off books and reselling by libraries doesn’t change the content of the book).
• Remakes of public domain material can be copyrighted, but the original material still stays within the public domain (ie, doing a new picture book of Alice in Wonderland gives me rights to product my book, but doesn’t let me sue someone else for making their own book based on the public domain works).

The only things I can’t resolve is the whole “Abandoned software and expired software copyright” issue. I honestly don’t feel Microsoft, Apple or anyone else should be punished and be forced to release source code for a software product that they no longer sell. They should be encouraged, and maybe they should give up rights to sue for redistribution rights on abandon-ware (IE, Since Windows 3.11 isn’t sold, they can’t come after me for selling copies of 3.11 as long as they are clearly marked).

Movies and TV shows are also hard. A good example is Dr Who (or most Japanese anime). It isn’t shown in the US right now, and I have no ability to “legally” acquire them until months or years after they are aired(if ever). This is really hard for me.

Half of me wants to say, “you don’t sell/show, you lose rights to enforce your rights until you do.” However, doing that would put a large burden on smaller shops and would encourage copyright violation in Pango-Pango where no one has TVs, VCRs or books except those that are stealing and reselling other’s works outside of Pango-Pango.

On the other hand announcing ‘intent’ to sell/show may not be good enough. Disney owns rights to translate and show “Howl’s Moving Castle” and they could say they ‘intend on showing it in movies theatres, but not until 2020.’ Thus they can sue anyone they want for reselling the Japanese version until 2020 when they are forced to finally release it. And what if Disney goes under before than? Or in 2019 decides they aren’t going to release it and thumbs their noses at all those they sued.

This is really not an easy issue to solve, and I doubt anyone can give a perfect fair usage and copyright law configuration.