RedBlog

I must first apologize to any international visitor; most of the links are to swedish-only texts and sources; you will have to use some online translation service for those. In addition I have to warn you that any translations of swedish legal terms are my own, and they might or might not be apropriate. This post is a translation of and original swedish post

Some time ago, Richard Stallman, founder of The Free Software Foundation, and thus, in principle, the initiator and inspiration for the island of free culture that exists today, wrote an article entitled How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software. It is, ironically, about how our ambition to make culture more free, by limiting the copyright, may limit the amount of free culture.

In this blog post, I try to respond to Stallman's critique and raise a debate within the party about how we should deal with free software and free culture by providing a proposal on possible legislative changes and a justification for why it would be feasible. It is an independent continuation of my post Proprietary code and digital oblivion.

Stallman's argument is, in brief, that works which are published in a form other than the one which is easiest to change (think word document versus PDF document or printed text), a shorter copyright term means that fewer items will be available in the editable form, and thereby destroying the remix culture that currently exists around such works, which use different types of free licenses such as Creative Commons or GNU General Public License. This is because the publisher of unfree works after the copyrights expiery date can copy bits of the editable version of the free works, but vice versa is not possible.

Stallman proposes two different solutions, the first (and in my opinion only realistic) is a kind of escrow solution, where the publisher of a work to the public is obliged to submit a copy of the editable version to a sort of depot. This copy is then published when the term of the original work has expired

Now, many I've spoken with have dismissed the solution as unfeasible, but the fact is that we already have a very similar solution for certain types of works, namely the Law (1993:1392) on compulsory copies of documents. This could quite easily be extended to include the editable form of those documents I mentioned above. More interesting is that while changing the copyright term requires that we break international treaties (e.h. the Berne Convention), there is (to my knowledge) no international agreement that would prevent us from incorporating something like this. On the contrary, there are agreements on different types of compulsory copies, for example, the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure.

Such a change would actually be interesting even without the shorter term of copyright protection as there are already today many computer games from the childhood age of computers, that are no longer possible to play - the platform they were able to run on no longer exists, and neither does the documentation for how it works internally, nor does the source code of the game remain, making it impossible to reconstruct an environment in which the game can run. A great deal of cultural connection can be lost. Such a compulsory copy scheme would prevent todays games and applications from suffering the same fate.

I have written a proposal for legislative change. I'm not a lawyer, and this proposal should hardly be seen as definitive (it certainly has loopholes big enough to run freight trains through - crosswise), but it shows how small changes are needed. Law (1993:1392) on compulsory escrow § 5, Documents to be submited is amended to read

Of writing referred to in the Act (1960:729) on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works, Chapter 1. Subject and content of copyright, § 1 which has been prepared and published in this country seven compulsory copies is to be made, unless otherwise follows from 7, 8 or 9 §.

In addition a § 4a is amended which reads as follows:

In this Act source version of a work is defined as the form of a work which is the preferred method for making modifications to it. For works which have not been created through a process involving various forms, this is the published form. For other work, this is all the source versions of all partial works and processes used to achieve the final shape.

finally a § 32a is amended reads as follows:

Compulsory copies to be submitted under the provisions of this Act shall be accompanied by the same number of compulsory copies of the source version of said compulsory copies.

Thanks to Marco Baxemyr and Rikard Fröberg who both come with good comments and suggestions to improve this post.