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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.
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...
"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
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.
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 problem in America is that Congress has implemented retroactive extensions to copyrights.
What this means is that someone created some content, at year 0, with full knowledge that the copyright would expire in X years. At year (X - 1), Congress extends copyrights to (X + Y) years. Now, said content is still under copyright until year (X + Y), even though it's creator had accepted the fact that it would fall into the public domain at year X.
This is what Lessig was in front of the Supreme Court for. Congress can arbitrarily apply a copyright extension every time a chunk of media (eg. "Steamboat Willie", owned by Disney - the first appearance of Mickey Mouse) is about to fall into the public domain.
Clearly, Walt was okay with the idea of Mickey becoming public domain in X years, but Eisner sees things a bit differently...
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
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.
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.
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 am not one to defend Corporate America, but if you were Eisner, wouldnt you do the same? If one of the cornerstones of your business were to all of a sudden become freely reproducible, wouldnt you try to stop that from happening?...
Will having "Steamboat Willie" (or any other equally old work) in the public domain really hurt the copyright holder? Is there really so much demand for Steamboat Willie tapes, DVDs, T-shirts, cereal, and whatnot that if it was freely available it would really affect their bottom line? Ok, I'm exaggerating slightly, but my point is some media company's (like Disney's) whole operation is not going to come crashing down if some near-100 year old work is in the public domain.
sudo eat my shorts
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.
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.
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!!!!
So what you're saying is that Disney don't want their most famous character being used by any old mickey mouse outfit...
If Pro is the opposite of Con, what is the opposite of Progress?
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
If Mickey Mouse is a trademark, Disney have failed to aggressively defend it.
There's at least two instances where Mad Magazine have parodied Mickey Mouse (Mickey Rodent) using exact copies of his, and Donald's, Goofy's and Pluto's image, for the purposes of parody, which isn't allowed under Trademark Law, I believe.
The cartoons went unchallenged, and were created in the early 50's, so their Trademark could be argued to have lapsed. [IANAL etc.]
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
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? It's like building a house and after 95 years of owning your house it suddenly becomes a historical landmark and you're evicted by the county. WTF? Wouldn't YOU be a little pissed off at getting kicked out of your house and having tourists romp around it? The world operates on the principle of intellectual property more than ever today. Trillions of dollars of the economies of countries of the world revolves around this idea that a person's ideas are property and that they can exploit it as they wish without another stealing it. I wouldn't be suprised if in the future copyright expiration in the USA is abolished entirely. 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.
Because "intellectual property" is not the same as physical property. An idea, once published, becomes known to everyone.
The copyright law was created to encourage creation of new ideas that would eventually benefit all of us. The public promised to give the creator certain rights, in exchange for making their ideas public.
If you have some precious "intellectual property" that you don't want to share, then do not publish it.
Of course, anything Disney does is worthless, unless they do publish it and let people see it...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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