Oooh this makes me mad! I remember writing a letter to my MP about this proposed law when it was being considered - it seemed outrageous! I don't think it passed in the UK. It makes me want to deliberately go there, photograph a bird flying next to the Atomium and publish it as "Beautiful bird - unfortunately the Atomium got in the way of the photo".
I think I remember pointing out in my letter to my MP that many of these buildings were built using public money, and if we're not allowed to take photos of buildings that our money paid to build, why should I pay taxes?
I've just been editing a video, and I've found that many old newsreel films that were out of copyright have been bought up by big agencies who now hold the copyright. I can understand an artist wanting to protect their work, but when the people who made the original films were paid a pittance and are now long dead anyway, it's simply a crime for some agency to expect payment for it. I think I've found a way round it, but it makes me furious!
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Copyright law itself, is a work of fiction; a figment of someone's imagination jotted down on a piece of paper that should through it's own creation be protected as intellectual property not to be exploited by a corporate entity known as the gubmint who didn't pay for it nor paid for it's use.
In most cases the original creator of a copyrighted item is credited to the person, but the monetary rewards are granted to his/her employer. This is especially true for Engineers working for large corporations, even if it was not an item related to the work they were doing for that company. If you want to benefit from holding a copyright, you must be unemployed :)
Greetings!
You're right, and that's one reason I decided to go freelance way back, around 1989. I had been working as a magazine journalist, and all the companies started to bring in contracts saying that you had no rights to your own work. Before that we kind of did have rights (if we wanted to risk losing our jobs). One of my first jobs was writing stories for teenage magazines, and one day the company asked me if I would agree to my story being syndicated, because a Dutch company wanted to buy it. I was flushed with pride that someone wanted to buy my story, and said yes. Of course I got no extra money for it. That was the last time anyone asked me for permission to make extra money for my work, because after that all of those contracts came in.
In the late 1990s I had what seemed like a great freelance commission editing travel books from home. I agreed to a payment of about £4000 for each one. However one of them was in a terrible state and had to be practically rewritten. The whole process took several months, as I kept being told to do revisions of various bits. Eventually I demanded more payment, as it was working out about £1.50 an hour! The company boss just kept avoiding my calls, and eventually a more junior person agreed to pay me more. They never hired me again - but that book was in print worldwide for years, consistently got five-star reviews and must have made tens of thousands for the company. Every time I googled my name I would see five-star reviews of that book. At one point I was googling the 1960s soul legend Jimmy Helms, and I noticed that my name had more hits than his name! And all because of that book. Yet the company was so pissed off at having to pay me £6000 to rewrite the thing that it never hired me again!
The book still comes up linked to my name, but these days it's mainly Russian bootleg copies. Good on em!
Damn, that kind of stuff really makes me unreasonably angry. How is is that even possible? Shouldn't it just remain in the public domain?
Completely agree with the rest of your post and just want to say that I commend you for actively trying to do something about it. With the recent votes in EU parliament for these new copyright rules (article 11 & 13), I called to every party in my country to ask them personally about their stance.
Good! We will beat this! I cannot imagine who benefits from these laws, except for big business interests and maybe a small handful of very privileged artists, but certainly not most of the people who slog their butts off to produce the work!