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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.
If this recording enters the public domain, what incentive will Elvis have to produce new music?
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?
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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>Imagine if you obtained a 50 year lease, and
... I suspect that fewer that 0.1% of stuff created has any economic value past a generation ... so there are arguments that government policy should be against rent-seeking behaviour on those accumulating back-catalogs. However, there are so many vested interests in the entertainment industries that it is impossible coming to broad consensus.
>then at the end of those 50 years, the owner
>wanted the property back
Firstly, copyright is not strictly a lease, its more a legally enforced priviledge which can be licensed by the rights holder. IPR is a bit of an accident which has snowballed from the Berne Convention back in 68. Secondly, there is a preceptual problem between Anglo-Saxon and European view of copyright, with the first considering it more from the economic aspecit (promoting the advancement of science/arts) whereas the EU approach it from the moral rights of authors. Thirdly, if you look at modern legislation, say the EU sui genesis Database rights, then you can see they encourage people to sustain their efforts. 15 years renewable everytime you validate/updade the database.
The practical reality (if you look at software) is that there is a definite shelf life for works
LL
It's as if he believes the Beatles were thinking, "If I didn't expect the government to extend copyright terms by 2010, I'd seriously rethink my career."
The premise of copyrights encouraging innovation and creativity is completely at odds with retroactive extension. And 70 years past the death of the artist is simply insanity. I don't expect my employer to continue paying my salary to my hairs after I die. Of course, it's no surprise that the corporate holders of copyrights (e.g. Disney through Sonny Bono) are the ones raising the stink.
On the other hand, I'd really like to see Elvis earn enough money for a flight back from Alpha Centauri.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Ugbog and Moon-Pixie Spears have contested the copyright expiration of the classic Earth music their late, departed genetic Mother* Britney produced in the dark half of the twenty-first century. Moon-Pixie has amassed a considerable thought-petition amongst the noble citizenry of the outer satellites of the Lewinsky-Shatner system. She has mind-beamed a long list of names to the central Solar executive, and is awaiting their synaptic consent. The music of the former Earth-President Britney has been studied extensively for the last 30 years by a range of conscious and super-conscious experts. They have all agreed that the sub-spiritual quality of her sonic poems, when combined with the post-Leno auto-referentialism that abounded at the time, make her work of particular historical importance. Moon-Pixie Spears is seeking to prevent the mass humming of Britney's work by neural-construction engineers that has been popular in the outer quadrants for decades, as this is an infringement of the original copyright provision. ( * Mother - an example of early 21st century outmoded genetic relationship nomenclature - it's common usage is all but illegal today. )
Recall that one key argument for the Sonny Bono copyright extension act was that it was needed to make the US consistent with Europe. Now the Europeans are saying they need to change their laws to be consistent with the US. It's beautiful --- they make "progress" by just leapfrogging each other.
... doing what? Who wants to bet that they extend copyrights just a little beyond the US in some area, so the US will then have to "catch up"?
-- The EU makes compositions death of the author + 70 years, and records date of recording + 50 years
-- The US becomes "consistent" by making all copyrights death of the author + 70 years
-- The EU restores "consistency" by
I'm not in the UK or anywhere in the EU, but for those who are I'd like to point out that about now would be a very good time to bring to the attention of your politicians things like Project Gutenberg, which directly benefit from the expiry of copyright.
Certainly part of the problem is that it's not always clear what possible benefits there could possibly be for ever letting works exit copyright. Gutenberg is an active project that's both becoming succesful, and demonstrates that people are out there trying to make an active effort to benefit from existing law.
If politicians don't realise that people are benefiting from existing law, they'll have far less reason to consider not changing it when lobbied by the corporates. It's a bonus that Gutenberg can quite correctly claim that rather than ripping off other people's work, it's saving and making accessible a lot of valuable resources that most likely would simply have vanished otherwise.... and without a reasonable expiry of copyright this simply coldn't happen.
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.