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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?"
Does this work the same way in the US? Is older music no longer copyrighted? I assume this is NOT the case, or else P2P networks would have alot more legitimacy. Will US music ever go into the public domain?
"It looks like he's shipping his grandmother a CD-R of 'Rock Around the Clock' remixed 13 times... ARREST THIS MAN!"
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
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.
Yeah, but, I just don't think Elvis sounds as good when he's been translated to French.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
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
"The import of those products would be an act of piracy," said Neil Turkewitz, the executive vice president international for the Recording Industry Association of America, which has strongly advocated for copyright protections. "The industry is regretful that these absolutely piratical products are being released."
I'm quite regretful that such stupidical comments can make the NYT
Any music that has an expired copyright is of the public domain.
However, the RIAA & MPAA and other organizations have government backing, and have extended United States copyright laws well beyond the European 50 or so. I believe the current law is 95 years in America, and it can only be made longer by our wonderfully corrupt politicians.
Can I have like, +5 for calling politicians corrupt? Everybody else gets points for just spouting crap, and as long as they say something against the "system" they get hella points. Oh well.
From yahoo
What, me Tweet?
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.
Are their any existing laws that would prevent me from bringing something back here for personal use?
-- James Dornan
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
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.
The correct response to combat an influx of recordings imported from countries where the copyrights have expired would be to SLASH PRICES on domestic copies of these same 50-year-old recordings. Sell an Elvis CD for $3.99 and there's no incentive for consumers to pay $5.99 (to cover shipping costs) for the identical CD from a European label.
Unfortunately, the RIAA and their constituent member record labels have grown so accustomed to using legislation as a weapon against their own sales base (that's US, yo) that the idea of selling CDs for cheap (it doesn't even have to be at a loss, they could still profit healthily) hasn't even crossed their minds as a way of maintaining their market share.
For crying out loud... only 50 years?! Poor Elvis, he is going to have to stop collecting European royalties from his music. Luckily, he can still collect money from Americans. I wouldn't want Elvis to have to get another job. What will he do? Start flipping burgers?
Sex - Find It
"All these works are yours, except Europe's. Extend no copyrights there."
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
Yes, that is true, European copyrights ARE 95 years, for NEW copyrights. They didnt make the extension retrospective like the USA's act. (And oh how the *AA tried). So anything made in the 1950's had a copyright of 50 years in Europe stayed at 50.
The retrospective extension of copyright is one of the issues that Lawrence Lessig is fighting in the supreme court. I hope for all our sakes that he is victorious.
Excuse me. Was there ever an EXPENSIVE Elvis?
When those works were created in the '50s, it was with the understanding that their copyright would only continue for a couple of decades -- not for a couple of centuries. There appeared to be sufficient economic incentives to create them back then. Now that they're legitimitely PD in Europe, I think that that's a good thing.
It's the people who want to keep these recordings out of the public domain that are the real pirates.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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.
Now a lot of the jazz catalog is public domain in Europe, while in the U.S. we're limited to pre-1922 dreck like Moonlight Bay.
It would be really cool if jazz could start to flourish again in Europe via the internet, with people being able to trade their recordings of songs, broadcast their gigs via internet radio, etc.
Find free books.
Please refrain from using the word "Google" in the form of a verb or in any manner that does not directly refer to the noun known as the Google search engine web site (www.Google.com) and its associated services.
We wouldn't want to diminish their trademark, now would we?
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
I see your point, and it's very valid, but there's a flaw in that argument. Let's use Mickey Mouse as an example.
The root of the problem is that when Walt created Mickey, and published his film, he essentially entered into a contract with the public. He agreed that he had a specific number of years from which to profit off of his creation (and he clearly took great advantage of this). Now, the Disney corporation (standing in for Walt himself) has not held up their end of the bargain.
The public agreed, in exchange for not using the intellectual property of Disney for some period of time, that they would gain the possesion of that property for the good of society at large. We held up our end of that bargain (sure some people didn't, but Disney was allowed to sick their lawyers on those folks, as well as use our legal infrastructure for that purpose), so where's the part that benefits us??
Yes, it's certainly in Eisner's interests to extend copyrights (including doing it retroactively). I do not fault him for endorsing such a policy. What I do have a problem with is the way he endorses it, and the fact that Congress doesn't understand or care about the public's side of things. The RIAA/MPAA have made quite a few shady deals (Hollings isn't called "senator Disney" for nothing) in order to get legislation to swing their way. This is really what's wrong with copyright law as it stands (and how it seems to be progressing).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
No copyright expires in Germany just after 50 years. If a work is copyrighted, these rights will expire 70 years after the author's death. (Substitute "droit d'auteur" for copyright if you want to).
What expires now, after 50 years, are the rights of the perfoming artists, and the those who made the records and distributed them.
This means that only a piece of music can be copied legally if, (a) the composer, songwriter etc. has been dead for at least 70 years, (b) the original release was 50 years ago, and (c) you make your copy from one of the origianl records. (With subsequent, say CD, releases, the record company gets new rights for 50 years.)
So I doubt that many mass-market compatible music recordings will suddenly become unencumbered by copyright law, at least here in Germany. I suspect the situation is similar in other European countries.
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.
Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in Europe compared to 95 years in the United States
Only 50 years?
"The import of those products would be an act of piracy," said Neil Turkewitz, the executive vice president international for the Recording Industry Association of America
Piracy? When it's perfectly legal, not to mention more than reasonable?
Mr. Turkewitz said, "We will try to get these products blocked," arguing that customs agents "have the authority to seize these European recordings even in the absence of an injunction brought by the copyright owners."
In other words, only abide by the rule of law as long as it's convenient and profitable?
I guess this just goes to show, yet again, who's really in charge.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
When Europeans start LEGALLY posting MP3's of this material on the internet? After all it IS legal in Europe so those countries don't have to demand this stuff be banned from the 'net. Oh it's illegal here in the states, well foo on you!
I think that copyrights on books, music, plays (any performance or written art) should only be legally held by individuals NOT corporations and the copyright limited in term to the lifetime of that individual. IOW it becomes public domain AFTER the copyright holders death.
Now when it comes to things like movies where there isn't a single person to claim the copyright things do get a little muddy, but since a human lifetime is about 72 years on average and a person might copyright something at anytime during that lifetime set the life of a corporate copyright on
art at something between 50-75 years NO LONGER!!!!
No need for P2P. It's perfectly legal to put this stuff up on Web sites in Europe. Of course, the RIAA will try to make US ISPs block access to these sites, but this will give the US telecommunications industry more incentive to oppose the RIAA's agenda.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The US bitches about China and other nations about censorship all the time.
Will the US take steps to censor European websites? (Hey! Be like China and censor websites that conflict with the -ISM your country worships even if the content of those websites is perfectly legal within those other countries!)
Heck, if it's legal to import this music, then it's got to be legal to download it...Right? If you can sell records and sell downloadable music, how is downloading any different than making some copies and shipping them here?
I wonder if this also means that all those old Disney movies are no longer under copyright.
It also leads to an interesting question about a possible long term strategy. The **AA's could assert that it's illegal to link to sites legally loaded with content if the content is under copyright anywhere. They could then lobby for perpetual copyright in some other country and still effectively keep control over the Internet distribution of content forever...
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
If the copyrights expire on Elvis, then what impetus is there for Elvis to create more works if he know he can only profit from them for 50 years?
Its the beginning of the end!
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This is how this should work 1. A work is copywrited for the life of the author, and no longer. 2. A work is considered to be part of the public domain (IE, can be shared through whatever means available, not for profit) if the author is not actively distributing the work, or an authorized distributor of the work ceases to distribute said work (As in out of print CDs, movies... Basically, if I can't go to the store and buy it, I should be able to get it through whatever public domain channel of my choice without having to fear being chased after.) These two simple things would basically turn the market on its ear... All kinds of things would be going public domain within reasonably short periods of time because there would just be too much content to distribute.. Publishers and record companies can not afford to continue to distribute every single release that has ever been made, nor can all of these fit into. Also, its good for the authors of these works to have things go into the public domain during their lifetimes under these set of rules as it can cause interest to surge to the point that a distributor that is doing their homework would see that something is becoming popular again, negotiate distribution rights with the author, and once again have the work put out in its whole, possibly in a higher definition media, or with new artwork, etc. After the authors death, then simple supply and demand can drive distribution.. You can just get the public domain kazaa version, or you can pick up a store copy from the distributor of your choice if its a popular item, being that the popularity of the item drives the distributors into maintaining the quality of the release. This would also probably lead to a boom in restoring older works that have deteriorated or have been edited or otherwise abridged. oh well enough babbling...
Natasha: Vhat Are you doink Dahling?
Boris: Burning coppies of that Capitalist pig Elvis' first album. Ve vill sell them by bajillions and buy a nuke from Korea for Fearless Leader's Birthday.
Rocky: Stop right there Badinov! Jack Valenti sent us to put the kibosh on your illegal operation.
Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky, watch me pull a customs agent out of my hat!
Boris: Foiled again!
Natasha: Don't worry poopsie, I hear Saddam Husein has some Anthrax he vill sell cheap. That vill make good gift for Fearless Leader's birthday.
Bullwinkle: Kinda makes you wonder if we're going after the wrong people for the wrong reasons don't it?
Customs Agent: (Snapping on latex glove) I'm affraid we're going to have to search you two to make sure there isn't any contraband coming into the country.
Rocky: Not again!
What if it is just turtles all the way down?