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New IFPI Boss Vows to Extend Recording Copyrights
JamesD_UK writes "John Kennedy, President and COO of Universal Music is to succeed Jay Berman as Chairman of the IFPI, the worldwide equivalent to the RIAA. Andrew Orlowski of The Register has written an article covering John Kennedy's views on copyright infringement and the public domain. Although Kennedy's thoughts on the former are predictable, he has vowed to fight hard to extend European recording copyrights past the current fifty year term. An extension of the European term to match the US would be particularly damaging to the public domain and efforts such as the Internet Archive as well as increasing the control that the recording industry holds over performers. For those interested, I run a small blog of articles regarding copyright recordings."
The combative former shipping lawyer will succeed Jay Berman as head of the lobby group the IPFI - the international version of the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) - and he defended both the the lawsuits and file poisoning at the In The City music conference in Manchester this week. (emphasis mine)
Coincidence on their choice of abbreviations? I think not.
He'd be more sympathetic to songwriters, he said, the day that record companies had "50 per cent margins". In fact, he claimed that record companies spend more on R&D than technology companies, because of the marketing spend required to create a hit [*]. The implication was clear: the success of an artist was down to the Shock and Awe bombing of the record company's marketing team, which is very expensive.
I can guarantee you a hit every time. Let me listen to the song. If the song sucks I'll tell you that. Then you can go and pay off every one of your little radio stations owned by ClearChannel and Inifinity (and various other conglomerates) and they can play the sucky song over and over again until people like it. If the song is good the artists should go on tour and make their own money as they have talent and they don't need your pay-offs.
"For 79p you've got a work of art that's like a Picasso, only one that's as close to the original as you can get," he said. [**]
To each their own on musical tastes but man, fucking Picasso is painting a gigantic brown-eye all over the inside of his grave after that comment.
Isn't there something the music purchasers can do to stop this asshole from taking over? Write letters, boycott, something?
If governments won't stop this trend, maybe competition can. If people come up with a licence that expires in, say, 15 years, and a trademark logo ("Sane copyright inside!"), and companies who wouldn't be impacted by this start using it, it might become popular. Then, people who care could exert direct competitive pressure against those who don't go along.
No, I don't think this will actually happen, but wouldn't it be cool?
Exclusive licences should be limited to 5 years and carry an obligation to publish; if a licencee fails to publish they should lose their rights without compensation.
>>>>truth; beauty; unix.<<<<
An interesting sidenote is this: remember when copying a chord (dunno how many notes that was) of song was considered infringement? I wonder what would happen if someone went out and made a pseudosong with every possible combination of a chord. Then they could sue every new song as being "infringing." The whole notion is ridiculous
Copyright was put in place from the point of view that if you don't have copyright, you'll get people just ripping off your work and therefore, people won't create. That's very reasonable.
But, 50 years is quite long enough for a person, but then this is more about corporations, not people. Copyright was not created in a time of giants of publishing. When copyright first arrived, it was more about individual creative people, for whom a copyright of even 20 years would grant them sufficient income.
If you record something age 18 and have 50 years, that means it expires when you are 68.
Seriously, that's a real question. There's a really good round-table discussion in this month's Playboy about the music industry and how they're running themselves into the ground with this crap. Most everybody - except for the RIAA dick - seems certain that the record industry's days (as we know it) are numbered.
No, they are. At least the stuff that has lived on to become part of our culture.
These de facto infinite copyrights that we have now will enable the entertainment industry to charge over and over again for music and movies that should be in the public domain.
You can be guaranteed that if a new physical format for distributing music (the successor to the CD or whatever) takes hold, the record companies will re-release old Elvis and Beatles albums in this format (among plenty of others). They'll probably release them as "commemorative editions" and charge up the wazoo for them as well.
With how things are now, some record company executives who weren't even born yet when the Beatles were creating music will continue to get rich off of their work, even after the remaining two are long dead and buried.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
On the other hand they borrowed from Carlo Collodi to make Pinocchio. And they made Pinocchio in 1940, the year after Carlo Collodi's Copyright ran out. He died in 1890, just 50 years before. Strange, isn't it? ;)
Disney played very well on the copyright instrument, grabbing everything as soon as it was free of charge and put their own version in place, for which the copyright should never ever expire.