By Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson.
The time is ripe for considering how copyright policy should respond to the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. Indeed, the top U.S. copyright official, Maria Pallante, has urged Congress to get to work on “The Next Great Copyright Act.”
As we prepared for the launch of the Authors Alliance, this call for a comprehensive rethinking of copyright law inspired our co-founders (Berkeley colleagues Carla Hesse, Tom Leonard, Molly Van Houweling and me) to articulate some principles and proposals for copyright reform that would make the law operate better for authors. In our view, reforms should simultaneously advance the constitutional purpose of copyright law—to promote the “progress of science” (that is, knowledge)—and the interests of authors whose principal motivations in creating works of authorship is to promote the public good by creating works that will be widely read, viewed, and heard. When the law is working as the Founders intended, the interests of authors and of the public at large are well aligned.
Among its shortcomings, copyright law today is so long, complicated and unclear that authors, its primary beneficiaries, must often struggle to decipher its meaning. Authors will be better able to manage and enforce their copyrights and disseminate their works more effectively if the law is more understandable. One of our reform proposals is therefore to simply to make the law more comprehensible.
In all, the twenty proposals set forth in the Authors Alliance copyright reform statement will benefit authors of all types of works and promote the public good. Let me highlight a few more of them:
- Recognizing the attribution interests of authors
- Providing better information flows about copyright ownership
- Freeing up the reuse of true orphan works
- Simplifying termination of transfer rules
- Adopting a small claims process so that authors can vindicate their rights without incurring the high costs of going to federal court
As public debate over copyright reform issues takes place, the Authors Alliance expects to be involved in a number of ways. It may, for instance, submit comments in response to policy proposals that the U.S. Copyright Office or other agencies might make on orphan works or other issues of concern to our members. It envisions participating in public forums at which copyright reform issues are being discussed and offering testimony to legislative or administrative entities considering reform measures. It may prepare white papers on reform topics to inform policymakers about the implications of initiatives under consideration.
For too long, authors who write to be read, viewed, and heard have been a silent majority, deeply affected by copyright policy issues, but without a collective voice in public discussions. The Authors Alliance was formed in part to speak out about copyright policies affecting authors and support proposals that will ensure that the Founders’ vision for copyright law—that it would promote broad public access to knowledge and works of the imagination—is fulfilled in the modern era.