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."

Comments

Why not?

[Quasar1999]

Disney did it... why not let others do it too? Either everyone gets extensions or no one does... it's only fair...

Re:Why not?

[The Only Druid]

Actually, it does mean it's fair. It just doesn't mean it's right. To be fair (there are at least 8 or 9 seperate meanings, but only one for this context) is to be even-handed in the administration of rules. If we're allowing one sector of the copyright industry to have these extensions, there's an obligation (if we want to be fair) to allow the other sectors that same obligation.

I don't think this is the right course of action, since I think these extensions are problematic at best, but I do think it's fair.

Re:Why not?

[Kjella]

7. Being in accordance with relative merit or significance: She wanted to receive her fair share of the proceeds.

Copyright is meant to divide the proceeds between the public (e.g. the public domain) and the copyright holders. Except the copyright holders take all their input from society, and want to give none in return. In that context, it is not fair.

Re:Why not?

[SnapShot]

I've fought this battle many times as well. Patents are not trademarks are not copyright.

However, the general problem is similar. Large corporations have co-opted all forms of legal intellectual property protection to the detriment of personal rights. Whether we are talking about Angus McDonald's pub being sued by McDonalds Inc., effectively infinite copyright terms, or patent arsenals designed to forstall competition there is a general trend of those with the money and power abusing the IP laws to expand their power and increase their money.

Now, no one honestly expects the corporations and their governments to do anything else, but we don't have to like it and, hopefully in the long run, we won't have to accept it.

Re:Why not?

['nother poster]

One of the main differences is that patents have something resembling realistic expiration terms. 20 years from application, the last I remember seeing. That means that IBM, or Microsoft, or whomever can only monopolize the information for 20 years, then anyone can use it to produce an item. That means that if I invent something at 30 that pays well, and I want to continue getting income after I turn 50, I need to invent something new. Thus adding to society. If I write a book or song, my grandchildren will still make money off it with them making no contribution to society. That's the problem as I see it.

it is almost

[__aahlyu4518]

'strawberry fields forever'

well.. another 50 years feels like forever to me :-)

Can we just tax copyright already?

[QuantumG]

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?

Re:Can we just tax copyright already?

[l3v1]

so why don't the copyright holders have to pay a tax

Simply because that would be insane. For if you ever wrote a poem you'd have to pay for it, which sounds just crap. If you go to a publisher, and sell those poems by twelve a dozen, then he's got income, you've got income, and hey, if you don't live on the moon's dark side, you have to pay taxes after all that, don't you.

Re:Can we just tax copyright already?

[hey!]

For if you ever wrote a poem you'd have to pay for it, which sounds just crap.

Well, not necessarily. Nobody's interested in anything you haven't published. Once it is published, it irretrievably becomes part of the public consciousness. You are asking the public to do something very unnatural, which is not to use information that you've deliberately put in their heads. So, I think it is fair that copyright tax should be designed to kick in after publishing.

Actually, I'd like to do it like this: You are taxed on your copyright based on 1% of your peak annual revenues for a work. If you haven't published, that would be zero. Suppose you made a million dollars this year, your tax would be ten thousand dollars, hardly an amount that would be an economic distortion. Now suppose your million dollar seller isn't selling anymore, and you decide to take it out of print. Then you'd have to decide whether it was worth it to you to keep paying the annual ten grand or to let the work go public domain. If you were planning a sequel, of course you'd pay. If you were just cussed about it, then you'd probably still pay, but the amount you pay would be roughly based on how much money you've made in the past, and the proven potential of your work (and derivative works) to generate revenue.

There are two reasons I like this way of doing things. First, if you publish some obscure literary work aimed at a small number of people, you aren't asking much of the public not to use your work, so you don't pay much. It scales the benefits and costs of copyright fairly. Secondly, I imagine huge companies with vast libraries of IP would be forced to evaluate that IP and decide whether they're going to do anything with it. Right now they can just leave the creative work of prior generations rotting ina vault somewhere without ever thinking about it. They'll either decide to rerelease it, build some kind of derivative work on it, or let it go into the public domain. Disney can still keep the copyright to Mickey Mouse if they have a sufficiently profitable use for it.

Re:Can we just tax copyright already?

[MourningBlade]

There's another proposal I've heard: after an initial term (15 or 20 years), you pay a "copyright renewal tax" of $x per work.

This has several benefits: copyright of immediate works does not require registration, there is no complicated tax system[1], the first - most profitable - period is guaranteed for free, and (most importantly) it becomes easy to discover whether or not a work is in the public domain and who the rights holder is.

Oh, and it discourages IP hoarding, which is a real problem now. But it doesn't set the bar very high. Even a $1 per 15-year renewal wouldn't be that bad, and would confer numerous benefits.

Your proposal is an interesting one, though. Yours and this one seem to have slightly different aims.

It's the difference between taxing production and taxing rent seeking behavior. The proposal is Lawrence Lessig's, and there is much discussion of it out there.

[1] - the more complicated the calculation is, the more likely it will be abused by "special interests." You also bring in the IRS (auditing, valuation, paperwork). Simple "if it's not in the list as having paid $15, it's public domain" is something the Library of Congress could easily keep track of.

Because...

[JimDabell]

...everyone knows that unless the Beatles continue to make money from recordings made fifty years ago, they'll have to quit music and get day jobs. Then society won't get any new Beatles music, and then where will we be?

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?

Re:Because...

[Professor_UNIX]

..everyone knows that unless the Beatles continue to make money from recordings made fifty years ago, they'll have to quit music and get day jobs. Then society won't get any new Beatles music, and then where will we be?

Yea, this is one area where I think we've gone totally wrong. Copyright should last at most 10-20 years. Works that persist longer in the spotlight become more a part of the culture than a creation of the artist. For example, I doubt many people here know who actually wrote the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone knows it, everyone sings it at a birthday party, and yet it's still under copyright.

Imagine a society where an orchestra couldn't play any classical music without acquiring the rights to that performance from a copyright holder that has been passed down through the centuries by inane copyright law and they end up paying a large amount of money for you to enjoy their performance. When a work of art persists for decades in the hearts and minds of a large group of people it becomes part of our unique culture and our government has the obligation to help protect that cultural identity IMHO.

As an artist there seems to be two camps, those who do it for the money and those who do it for the art. For the latter I would imagine they enjoy making money off something they love as a side effect, but if they couldn't sell a single song or book I'm sure they'd continue writing or singing. For the former group they'll wither away and leave us with less bubble gum pop bands, manufactured grunge groups, and corporate "gangsta" rappers, but in the end our cultural identity will thrive as a result. We'd be cutting out the crap and keeping the true art made by people who love their work for the sake of making it and not for the money it brings them... I guess it'd result in a situation like we have with open source programmers in the end.

Aw screw it, I guess I'm sounding like a big old commie now, but I had to get that off my chest. The fact that Mickey Mouse is still under the iron thumb of Walt Disney Corporation so long after Walt's death just annoys the hell out of me.

Pure Genius

[Linker3000]

That changes everything - it'll stop illegal downloading at a stroke!

Misplaced priorities

[otter42]

"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".

Why retroactive?

[RPoet]

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?

What the?

[bobintetley]

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

What The Fuck Is The Justification?

[Shaper_pmp]

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?

Love

[__aahlyu4518]

Love love me doe
I act like a ho
You'll pay me some mo
so pleeeaaaheaaheaheaaaaasssee

Give me doe !!

Re:I'm all for it (not a troll, please read).http:

[njcoder]

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.

It's been proposed before.

[BJH]

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.

Re:Sigh...

[ssj_195]

Why do governments feel the need to continually prop up the record industry?

Kickbacks.

HOWTO: Neverending Copyright Extensions

[Gumshoe]

In America, copyright protection lasts 90 years -- and British ministers are considering a similar period.

If you look at the history of copyright reform, you can see this leapfrogging of other countries copyright period as standard practice. In fact, it's tempting to think that it's deliberate. The reasoning here is, the US has copyright for 90 years so the UK must have a period of 100 years otherwise it must be unfair. Expect in the future, US legislators to use the UK's period of 100 years to argue for 110 years. Ad Nauseum.

record company executives

[ZorroXXX]

I think Douglas Adams was quite on spot in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books where he describes a bar populated with somewhat less attractive clients:

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.

Re:FFS...

[Eccles]

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.

Pervert?

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:Pervert?

[huge colin]

for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.

Disagree. Have you seen how weird he is?

Re:Pervert?

[StrongAxe]

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.

Hoping someone is guilty just to salve society's conscience is a bit like robbing someone at gunpoint, and then afterwards hoping he was a criminal because then he would deserve it.

Much like the rationale for the Conquistadores raping and pillaging the Americas, because, after all, the natives were merely heathens, which made it "all right".

Attorney: "not guilty" does not imply "innocent"

[hawk]

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.