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'That's All Right' Soon To Enter UK Public Domain
jwlidtnet writes "Reuters is reporting that Elvis's "That's All Right"--currently an unlikely hit in Great Britain--is soon to enter the public domain in that country, followed by other milestones of popular music as Britain's fifty-year protection period comes to an end. Naturally, rights owners are outraged, regarding it as a "wakeup call" for Britain to adopt something similar to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, to end this "discrepancy between the United States and the EU." Copyright law uniformity has of course been a sore issue in recent years, with the exportation of "DMCA-alike" legislation raising the ire of many. Uniformity on an issue this divisive might be difficult to achieve politically."
Perhaps they could encourage the US to conform to more sane standards that benefit the people instead of the big corporations who want to milk a dead man's music for all the profit they can get out of it.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Okay I wanna know if there is ANY possible justification for this except PURE
GREED. And I don't mean the good kind of greed that drives competition,
innovation, and creation of new music.
Elvis is dead. He doesn't need the money. His estate run by spongers sure
doesn't need it. When he wrote the song, in fact, copyright law was less
draconian than it is now. So he certainly wasn't factoring in a copyright
extensions when he wrote the song "Hey, I wonder if I should write a song
today. Well, if they don't extend copyright in 2005, I won't, I have better
things to do."
Shouldn't copyright be used to *encourage new music*?? This is just sick. I
wish they would just STOP extending copyright. I wish the governments around
the world would just say, OKAY YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH.
I wish they would view copyright as an *exchange* between the copyright holder
and the public, and not just some formality that the record labels have to go
through every few years to keep extending it.
Can you think of any other situation where you can just go up to the
government and say, hey, I'd like to extract money from society for another 20
years?
And Elvis and the record companies knew it 50 years ago, when they were making the music in the first place.
>> Uniformity on an issue this divisive might be difficult to achieve politically.
Specially since Blair has been accused of letting Dubya have his way on one to many an issue.
Given that this is mostly a commercial issue (national or global security is hardly at stake), I have a feeling Blair and the Labour party will politely ask the Americans to go shove it where the sun don't shine and score with the masses on both sides of the pond.
If individual artists controlled their own music, we wouldn't have anyone lobbying for insane copyright terms, because individuals eventually die, so there's no one to keep lobbying for more and more extensions. The problem with corporations is that they're immortal, so there's no end to the insanity. Believe me, if they get the term extended to 95 years, the Slashdot headline in July 2049 will be about how the Elvis recordings are about to enter the public domain, and the music industry is lobbying the government to extend the term to 150 years so they can keep making money. Every time I read about the RIAA or IFPI, I'm reminded that there are ETLAs far more annoying than GNAA.
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...is the tone of the article - it doens't even consider that original idea that copyright might be about balance, a privilege accorded with the intent of fostering creation. Rather, it is simply accepted that the natural expiration of these copyrights, which the holders knew would happen, is somehow causing a property loss to the current holders.
Imagine if you obtained a 50 year lease, and then at the end of those 50 years, the owner wanted the property back. Would you moan to the government about extending your term unilaterally, with no other compensation to the actual owner?
I suspect that in most cases, the copyright owners make most of the money on their copyrights in the first five years or so.
By ten years, most of the copyrights are nearly worthless.
I don't see any reason why copyrights should extend past twenty years.
If copyrights are the property of their owners, why not treat them as property and require that property taxes be paid on copyrights and allow the copyright owner to make the material public docmain if the property taxes exceed the income from the copyrights?
The late '50s and '60s was more than 40 years ago! Who guaranteed anyone a right to still be profiting from music recorded before man set foot on the moon, especially when those artists are no longer around? The living Beatles, the heirs to Elvis Presley Enterprises, and anyone else who has been suckling at the copyright teat for 40 years should be grateful for what they have. Quit whining about "loss of income" from something you didn't lift a finger to produce.
I'm lucky to be paid a decent wage for the work I do today, and I'll consider myself fortunate if my job is still around next month. I sure as hell don't have any expectation that, 40 years from now, I'll still be making money from something I did today! Much less that my kids, if I ever choose to have any, will see any benefit beyond what I manage to save up and pass on to them. Even pension plans are a dying breed here in the US; when once a widow could count on her husband's years of duty to his company to provide some meager living for her when she survived him, nowadays it's generally left up to Social Security.
Why, then, is it so different when it comes to copyrighted works, music in particular? Why is it that the descendants of dead musicians feel that they're due millions of dollars for their parents' (or even grandparents') work, eternally? I don't get it. Maybe I should have been born to musicians.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
"Bitch, piss, moan, we can't rape a dead man's music catalogue for cash and many dubious "Best of" albums, boo fucking hoo, I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy etc etc"
Well, I got news for ya RIAA! EASY COME EASY GO, SHUT THE FUCK UP! This is LAW. You aren't allowed to profit by getting new laws in place which benefit you and nobody else! EVER! Especially not in countries which aren't corrupt like the US government! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. If you want profit, you have to make it the old fashioned honest way: MAKING GOOD NEW MUSIC AND SELLING IT. Unfortunately, the RIAA are used to making profit and not earning it, because "they deserve it".
Fuck that. I wish the US would break them up, considering they are an illegal cartel.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
The key defect of the Sony Bono copyright extension act is that it does not reward the creator of the work...it extends monopoly rights to the assignees of the work.
The history of copyright is one long battle between the rights of the author and the rights of third-parties. The Sony Bono copyright extension act does nothing to reward or encourage the author...it removed many works from the public domain and established criminal sanctions for any fool who might use those works newly re-copywritten. Who pushed this law in the US? Disney. THE MOUSE almost went into the public domain and a company contemplated the demise of their core IP rights and promptly made certain THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
The Sony Bono copyright extension act is only the most current power grab. It is the camel's nose under the tent of author's rights. Creator's be damned-let's reward the assignees. Mr. Michael Jackson funds his interests with the copyright royalties from the works of McCartney & Lennon. Not one dime of those royalties reward, support or encourage either of the two living Beatles. They fund Mr. Jackson's "Neverland" ranch and his defense attorneys. All you need is love? Or, is all you need are buckets of money to fund Mr. Jackson's peculiar concept of love? Any way you look at this it stinks on ice!
You can be certain that well before the MOUSE or Jackson find their IP holdings in danger of falling into the public domain again that another extension will be enacted.
Now is the time for a major nation to upset this unearned windfall for the lucky, but uncreative, assignees of author's works. Limit the rights of publishers, purchasers and offspring to profit from the (usually) under compensated creator's works!
Because nobody can trust the period of copyright not to change.
You, the author, created a work in the 60's or whatever. Society granted you, clearly and under no uncertain terms, copyright over that work for say 50 years. You understood that 50 years later, your work would lose all copyright protections, and fall into the public domain.
Society at large understood this too... and *expects* that work to fall into the public domain on the required date.
If we are going to keep retroactively changing copyright periods, why bother putting a limit on it at all?
Just because it has economic value to the owner does not mean it should continue to be protected.. the owner should work on NEW stuff, not continue to sit on the old.
"I think probably the most important thing is stability. Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights because it's an indicator that they might not protect new copyrights as much as old copyrights."
I don't follow the logic there. You're suggesting that because we have a sensible law that means that copyright expires after 50 years, "investors" will think that a copyright which is 5 years old is "not as protected?"
Here's the point: laws should not be written around the whims of "investors."
I know it's a hard point to get in today's world where it seems that large corporations might as well just bypass the whole legislature and write the darn statutes themselves (simply because it saves time and does away with the pretence that our representatives can think for themselves) but it is the critical point here.
Sometimes laws are not made to "help the economy", they're written because they're morally the better course of action. Copyright is not a right, it's a privilege extended by government to afford a balance between the creator of a work and those who may become dependent upon it.
If these corporations and lobbying groups are now complaining that they "didn't know" that this time limit was approaching and that it's an awful shame as despite the fact that the artist is long dead, they're still able to part people with their money then I suggest that they hire better advisors. It's not as if the 50 year time period was a closely guarded secret now is it?
This is the problem when you view copyrights from the perspective taught in business school.
First of all, copyright covers the right to control the distribution of your work. Songs, books, movies, etc are not a "property" and as such are dealt with by a different set of laws. Unfortunately business folks like to talk about "Intellectual Property", but there really is no such thing.
Copyrights quite simply are an agreement made between a government and an individual to allow that individual a time limited monopoly on distributing his work. When the limit is reached, the work falls into the public domain.
Copyright is a mechanism who's original purpose was to encourage creativity. The limited time monopoly allowed creators to profit from their works rather than others, but another reason for the limit in time IS TO ENCOURAGE TO CREATE AGAIN. Yet people have twisted this into something it was not intended to be. It was not meant to be a permanent source of income for the life of the author, it wasn't meant to be a right that could be passed on via inheritance for x number of generations to benefit from, nor was it meant for companies like Disney to remain the sole entity to be able to use those works forever.
Looking at it from a few feet back from an economic perspective, what do you think would generate greater economic benefit? One company profiting off from a work indefinitely, or a 1000 companies all being able to profit from that work?
That's why there is a (supposed) limit on the term of copyright. At some point that work needs to fall into the public domain so that the work may profit all of society and not just one person or company. And by profit, I don't mean just monetarily.
Your argument, that if an author would not create a work it would have never existed, is as lame as Jack Valenti's argument that all creative works need proprietary ownership to be preserved. It can be argued that if you did not build up on existing culture, you would have never created your work in the first place. So, you get from public almost fair trade to start with. However, public recognizes necessity to compensate authors, inventors and the like fairly in order to encourage this type of activity. And this is where 'mental property' rights are coming from.
Unfortunately, for practical reasons, monetary value of creative works which are subject of copyright and patent laws may not be easily evaluated. This is the only reason for the 'limited monopoly' bargain, otherwise, public would fairly compensate an author, allienate his/her work and leave to him/her only the honorary attribution.
Thomas Jefferson conceived that 14 years of monopoly is enough for an author to try to profit from their works. And this is under late XVIII- early XIX centuries means of of communication in the United States. In XXI century, when RIAA posesses means of promotion and distribution far beyond XVIII-XIX centuries authors' wildest dreams copyrights should be shorter . And corporate copyrights should be even shorter still.
Since the copyright law arises from the rights the public granted to the authors or their proxies on the condition of fair balance,
the first thing is that the period of a work's copyright protection must be the one, when the work was made accessible to public, because that was a contract at that time and an author knew the terms and still decided to publish. It must not be retroactively extended. This will create fair stability for both the public and the vested interests.
Second, term 'limited times' must be taken not literally but rather practically. It is just unacceptable that 3 generations of the mankind are and being deprived from the rights the previous generations used to have.
Third, pigopolies akin Disney Corporation, RIAA, MPAA, Clear Channel, etc. are unacceptable and must be outlawed as a matter of bargain or, at least, their rights (copy and otherwise) must be adjusted to reflect their ever increasing ability to promote and dissiminate creative works, in order to keep the balance fair.