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Extending Pop Music Copyrights
InklingBooks writes "According to TimesOnLine, the UK is considering doubling the copyright term for popular music to 100 years. That means the Beatles' "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me," scheduled to to go into the public domain in 2013, would earn royalties for record companies until 2063."
Disney did it... why not let others do it too? Either everyone gets extensions or no one does... it's only fair...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
'strawberry fields forever'
:-)
well.. another 50 years feels like forever to me
Why is it that people have to pay land taxes but they don't have to pay copyright taxes? If you own land you are required to pay a tax on it because the state spends a heck of a lot of public resources on protecting that land for you. The same goes for copyright (especially now that copyright violation has become a criminal act in some countries) so why don't the copyright holders have to pay a tax?
How we know is more important than what we know.
This can be seen as giving the record companies more money to generate/find new talent /or/
Giving the record companies more money as they rehash the same old talent.
It's amazing how record companies can make themselves sound like poor orphans with no money, food, heating, or shelter.
It seems to me that copyrights are turning from a temporary privilege into an actual property right, despite all indications that only a self-interested minority of our society wants that. So when are copyright holders going to pay property tax on their holdings?
That changes everything - it'll stop illegal downloading at a stroke!
AT&ROFLMAO
"Bands like Coldplay will make enough money for their company to help them discover around 50 or 100 bands."
Excuse me? EXCUSE ME??? The point of a band is to make money for its label???
What about the label paying its bands living wages? Or does that just not count?
What about using the internet to develop and promote new bands? That doesn't count either?
Thank god I live in France where my right to download CDs and movies is now protected by "activist judges".
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Why must copyright extensions always be retroactive? Are we afrad that The Beatles won't write Love Me Do in 1963 if he didn't expect royalties for a hundred years? Wait, that doesn't even make sense. The copyright deal back then was given, and works were created as intended; the incentive worked. So why would we need to give a guy in 1963 more incentive to create?
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I am FUCKING furious.
If this goes into force, anything you hear today is unlikely to be returned to the public domain within the lifetime of your GRANDCHILDREN. This is completely fucking unacceptable.
Copyright is already 30 years too long. These media cartels have stolen our public domain and culture, and are renting it back to us in perpetuity.
I'm off to write to my MP.
GRRRRRR
...except the record companies, of course. 100 years is more than likely beyond the lifespan of any given musician, so they can't exactly hide behind the 'it's about the poor artists' on this one. Heck, the Beatles are already halfway there, any bets on whether McCartney will see 2063?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Artistic protection! For artists that compose their first evergreen in the womb, write it down immediately after being dried and live to a hundred.
What a load of manure. Like record companies don't have enough money already. And as if classical music is easier to compose and hence needs merely 50 years.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Copyright was intended to temporarily reward the artist, to encourage them to produce art.
(s/innovator/innovations/ but it's all the same).
Artists do not commonly live for 100 years. Especially not 100 years from when they produce the work that gets them the most praise.
Even if the artist got 100% of the royalties from the copyright, extending it past the artist's natural lifetime is meaningless.
In addition, even compensating the artist for their entire natural lifetime is counter-productive, since it removes the driving force (according to traditional wisdom, above) behind their production or art. If you're singing to eat, then giving you all the money you'll ever need reduces your need to sing. This is the exact opposite of what copyright is intended for.
Finally, artists commonly don't even get 10% of the profits from their work. Why? Because the copyright is usually owned by a large corporation, which had no hand whatsoever in the creative, artistic work. They simply publicise the artist and distribute the art, and reap 90%+ of the profits from it.
Given this state of affairs, extending copyright does nothing but feed more money to already overcompensated multinationals, while either shutting out the originating artist or (if they own their own copyright and get all the profits) discouraging them from producing further art.
This is fucking obvious. Why don't people see it?
Or are they just blinded by all those dollar bills the entertainment industry keeps piling over their heads?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Love love me doe
I act like a ho
You'll pay me some mo
so pleeeaaaheaaheaheaaaaasssee
Give me doe !!
Well, I guess now we know those christian music listening, family oriented, clean cut types love to pirate music. So much for family values. Servers you right for targetting your business to such a degenerate crowd.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
There seem to be more and more of this style of funny post appearing on Slashdot.
No matter how hilarious they are (and they are hilarious), they never crack me up as much as the serious, gullible responses they always provoke.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
The most practical form of this proposal is to reduce the automatic copyright period (i.e. the initial period of protection for all copyrightable works) to something like 10 years, and then charge the copyright owner a certain amount to renew the copyright after the initial period. Variations include increasing the renewal cost for every renewal (so that it costs more to renew the copyight for something that's been copyrighted for 50 years than to renew the copyright for something that's been copyrighted for 20 years).
It's a good idea, as it ensures that all works that the owner didn't consider worthwhile renewing the copyright for automatically go into the public domain after a reasonable period of time - which is what copyright was originally intended to be.
I wonder if the real reason for extending the copyright to 100 years is so there won't soon be completely legal rampant sharing of some of the best music ever produced. Why pay money for new crap when you can have a free catalog of all of the music from the 60s?
Now that I think of it, does this mean all of the music up to 1955 is now public domain? If so, someone should start a legal torrent site of public domain albums up through 1955.
He glanced around at the motley collection of thugs, pimps and record company executives that skulked on the edges of the dim pools of light with which the dark shadows of the bar's inner recesses were pitted. They were all very deliberately looking in any direction but his now, carefully picking up the threads of their former conversations about murders, drug rings and music publishing deals.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
Given that this Supreme Court just ruled that someone growing their own marijuana for treating their own medical condition can be "regulated" under the interstate commerce clause, I have little faith that the justices will be receptive to logical Constitutional arguments.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
It's better than lining the pockets of a pervert.
Now, now. Let's wait to pass judgment until, y'know, the trial's over. I, for one, hope he is guilty, because if he's innocent, he'll have gone through hell and a half for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I am an attorney, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice on this type of issue, you're strange even by slashdot standards.
Anyway, there's a big difference between "not guilty" and "innocent." Neither the United States nor any other Common Law (english speaking) country has an "innocent" verdict.
If the jury is pretty sure that someone did it, that isn't enough. In fact, most (all?) of the OJ jury thought he did it, but that the proof didn't meet the standards.
OJ was acquitted due to sloppy legal work, sloppy judging, and the admission of flat out nonsensical quackery as "expert" testimony.
On top of that, Furman's interview in which he uses that word that he'd testified he'd never said a couple of times in each sentence, and in which he acknowledged planting evidence to frame black defendants he "knew" were guilty should have established reasonable doubt as a matter of law--no reasonable person could lack doubts after hearing that.
hawk, esq.
Mickey Mouse should have entered the public domain in 1935.
+++ATH0