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European Copyrights Expire; RIAA Nervous
colmore writes "This article in today's New York Times (free reg. req.) discusses the expiration of European copyrights for recordings made in the 1950s. Now "bootleg" labels can legitimately print a lot of still-popular early rock, country, jazz, and classical albums. The good folks at the RIAA are trying to establish stricter customs controls. So does this mean cheap Elvis or a diluted pool of products?"
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Ass'n of the AMERICAS... but you can bet anything they'll try to get their fingers into that one. If there was an RIAE (Europe) in the 1450's, Gutenberg would have been shot and his press burned.
I never thought I would see in my own lifetime a copyright expire. Honestly, this is an interesting feeling that I can legally use some music of my culture I grew up with without being charged with a crime to do so? Except, this probably doesn't help me much since I live in America, eh? *sigh*
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Well, what I would like to see is a lot of european bands doing their own versions of the songs as they no longer have to have permission of the original copyright holders. Many copyright holders of those older songs have been very reluctant and restrictive to allow other artists to record and publish them. so I predict a wave of creativity in ways of making updated 50's tunes from european bands. It may be quite interesting what they come up with.
If you think that society will fall apart without the stratifying influence of capitalism, and that the idea of intellectual property is necessary for the continued prosperity of the US, I say that's b.s. and there are other possible viable economic models.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Nop...the US has been presuring the rest of the world to fall in line with their copyright restrictions. Thank god they've failed :)
:)
As for me, I'm so damned happy about this: I love Callas, and the great jazz and blues bands/songs. They also make great 'film' music, very atmospheric/moody. Now I can put them under my homemade 3d movies totaly without fear of being asked uncomfortable questions about payment whenever or wherever I show them of.
And what to think of actual good filmmakers, who couldn't secure the rights to that piece they wanted to have under that certain scene in their movie...now they have a few more options. This is a good thing
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
That's another annoyance of DRM - it doesn't disable when the copyright expires. It's de-facto permanent copyright.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Think about what Turkewitz is saying. Importing public domain material from Europe to the US is piracy.
I'm sure Neil firmly believes what he is saying, and that Jack Valenti firmly believes watching tv without watching the commercials is "theft of programming." These people live in a COMPLETELY unreal world, which is why we have to make them shut the hell up and go away, instead of letting them write our laws for us. This is why you should not buy RIAA music. Pay to listen to local bands, support musicians that distribute their own music online, ignore the RIAA-created fantasy world of big-time music and let the RIAA shrivel up and die.
I'll leave the Elvis to others, but I can imagine doing really great things with remixes and resamples using the old Maria Calls, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk as freely available source material.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
all this means is that lessig is right in eldred v. ashcroft.
copyrights should foster innovation. that is the only reason they should exist. they should exist to line corporate pockets. so they should expire with the death of the author. if corporations via sonny bono extend them unnaturally beyond the lifetime of the author, then copyrights instead suppress innovation. 50 years? 95 years? whatever. copyrights should rightly expire when the author is rip.
this expired here but not there bs is just another example of why extending copyrights unnaturally by greedy corporations is a bad idea.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Close, but wrong. "Xerox" and "Kleenex" were diluted because people began to use them to refer to photocopies (mimeographs?) and nose-tissues that were not produced by these companies.
Since the conventinal usage of "Google" seems to refer specifically and exclusively to Google's own services, there's no dilution here.
To "Google" something doesn't mean "to search for it using an arbitrary search engine". It means "to use Google's search engine".
Nobody in their right mind would think of using "Google" to mean "Lycos", or "Alta Vista".
I think the dilution of Xerox and Kleenex came about because the competing products were of similar appearance, quality, function, and availability. Xerox photocopies were conceptually interchangeable with Ricoh's, and Canon's, &c. On the other hand, I don't think anybody's going to confuse Google with Inktomi.
Rather than diluting the brand, the verbing of "Google" indicates increasing mindshare--the more their brand becomes a part of everyday conversation, the better off they are. So long as their product remains distinctly superior to the competition, of course.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I think another big problem is that the RIAA is saying that the copied works in Europe are still piracy, even thought its perfectly legal to do so in the EU.
Spider Robinson wrote a short story, called Melancholy Elephants that has an interesting take on the copyright issue. Do artists REALLY need a 95-year copyright? I can understand copyright for the life of the author, and possibly his family, but beyond that, it's a little ridiculous. I recommend reading the story .. Very good insight..
-- Karma is for people who think they matter.
I wonder if we can call the act of copyright cartels and corporations trying to prevent a work from entering the public domain [via buying laws/politicians or whatever means] an act of piracy?
It would seem that they're taking what is intended for us, hijacking it as it's on it's way to us, and keeping it for themselves.
That sounds closer to the original definition of piracy, than copying a mate's cd.
Hilary Rosen and Senator Hollins are supporters of piracy.
Doesn't that just sound right ?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
In case you haven't been reading this thread, the copyright holders did not create the content. The content creators (like Walt Disney) are dead and buried, or at least frozen. Our original deal with Walt calls for the content to go into the public domain. Why hasn't it?
I think the house-building analogy you use doesn't fit. To me, it is more like the copyright holders are a neighbor borrowing your lawn mower "for just a week". (The lawn mower is the exclusive right to use that art.) A week later, they come back and say "I need it one week more." This goes on all summer, and you haven't gotten your lawnmower back. Next summer doesn't look so good either.
Sorry, only the sheet music copyright has expired; for audio recordings the situation in the US is much worse (and NYT neglects to mention it). From the Public Domain Music site: "Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember: Sound Recording Rule of Thumb: There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain."
The problem with their perspective is that it's wrong. The idea that somebody can own an idea just because they blurted it out first is absolutely ludicrous. Somebody first came up with the idea of using insulated wire to convey an electrical charge from one location to another. Should that person be the only one allowed to do so for 95+ years? What about the first person to think of making marks on paper to symbolize words and ideas? Ideas cannot truly be owned solely by given individuals, regardless of what words on pieces of paper distributed throughout a culture say. Copyright in the United States was created as a bargain "to promote science and the useful arts," with all works falling into public domain in a limited time. When that "limited time" is defined as a length of time that completely destroys the spirit of the law (I don't consider periods of time that almost certainly exceed the length of my life, birth to death, limited enough) the public has no incentive to uphold their end of the bargain. If there was anything actually redeeming about the so-called "intellectual property" released in the US, a person might be pushed to civil disobedience. As it is, however, there would be very little to gain.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. --H.L. Mencken
It's actually life + 70 years, which is a pretty long time
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the law that defines the copyright term as a function of the life of the author discriminatory?
Here's my logic:
Person A is 10 years old, and is a prodigy. There's no history of major disease (like cancer) in his family, and everybody in his family lives for an average of 100 years - for the sake of argument, he lives until he's 100. He writes his first symphony at the age of 10 years, and (as he lives to be 100 years old) his copyright lasts 160 years (100 - 10 + 70)
Person B is 46 years old, but has a family history of cancer and diabetes. She writes her first symphony at 46, lives to 50, and so her copyright only lasts 110 years.
So if all people are equal under the law, why does Person A get 160 years of protection, but the same law grants Person B only 2/3rds the same amount?
It's quite clear that the current copyright law discriminates against the elderly, as well as terminally ill, and people who have a genetic predisposition to cancer or other life-shortening diseases.
I'm not an American, so can someone tell me if there are laws against discrimination?
Well, but you have to see it from their perspective. They created content (or signed acts that created content) that brings in millions of dollars a year. Why should they have to suddenly at some arbitrary date no longer be able to exploit their intellectual property?
:-) And I think that it's a good thing to be able to understand the arguments on all sides of a debate, as well as seek out the counter-arguments that go along with them. Thank you for the opportunity for an polite and insightful discussion; it's something all too rare on Slashdot these days.
Well, because their so called "intellectual property", if you insist upon the term, is built out of our intellectual property. If you believe in intellectual property, you have to face up to a commonly ignored fact: the public owns most of the world's "intellectual property" rights! Words, language, drawing techniques, characterization, folklore: all these count as "intellectual property". Everything ever created is, by overwhelming evidence, an derivative work of some work in the public domain. Hence, under the standard "intellectual property" rules, the public gets to dictate the terms under which our "intellectual property" can be used. In the US, (and many other countries), copyright law is those set of terms.
Disney owes the public: they were allowed to use our intellectual property, granted a decades long monopoly on their derived work, and now they want to back out of the agreement that says they have to return the results to the public's domain. That's not fair.
A honest businessman, (if such a mythical creature existed), wouldn't try to get the courts or the law changed to back out of a contract when it came payment time. Eisner is, and that's why people are upset.
It's like building a house and after 95 years of owning your house suddenly becomes a historical landmark and you're evicted by the county
No, it's like building a house on public lands with public funds, with the express understanding that after those 95 years pass, you have to give the house back to the public. Then, when you've enjoyed the benefits of the agreement, and it comes time to pay, you then cry "Foul!", and try to get the law changed so that you don't have to live up to your side of the bargain.
Even if you accept the notion of "intellectual property" (and I don't), this reasoning is still flawed. It ignores the rights of the public; the silent majority stakeholders.
I wouldn't be suprised if in the future copyright expiration in the USA is abolished entirely.
I don't think anyone in the general public today thinks copyrights are important enough to ammend the US constitution. Many people don't pay much attention to politics, much less "intellectual property" disputes, but most people in the USA get very upset when you mention changing their constitution.
Don't get me wrong, I don't support this by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just trying to play Devil's advocate.
Your points are both well argued, and insightful. I just don't agree with them.
--
Ytrew