Consumers vs. IP Owners: The Future of Copyright

conJunk writes "The BBC has a thoughtful article about new challenges in copyright. The problem: The rights to the audio recordings of the Beatles first album will expire in 2013. While consumers stand to benefit from competing releases of the materials, the copyright owners are of course terrified. And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them."

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[ackthpt]

While consumers stand to benefit from competing releases of the materials, the copyright owners are of course terrified. And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them."

Which is one of the reasons Disney was among those who fought tooth and nail to get copyrights extended to 70 years after the creator's death. Now they've re-acquired the rights to the first character Walt created and lost to someone else, back when he was paying his own dues.

Of course it's rarely the dead guy who cares about making more money, it's those who feel some eternal sense of entitlement.

Just imagine where we'd be if Mozart's works were still held by his heirs. Back in his day after the initial performance works fell to the public domain, which was to encourage the creator to be more productive. Now we have a system where the same tired crap gets dragged out for years and years and someone build theme parks around it.

When was the last time Mickey Mouse actually appeared in an original cartoon or film?

Congress calls them "copyright owners"

[tepples]

Please, stop using the words "owner", owns" etc. when you're talking about copyright and similar things.

Precise discussion about law uses words defined in the letter of the law. The statute in question, 17 USC 101 et seq., defines and uses the phrase "copyright owner".

The Corruption of Copyright Law

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1790 Congress passed the Copyright Act, which set the period of a copyright at 14 years, with the opportunity for the original author to renew for a second 14 years if he was still alive. This law existed unchanged for the next 100 years. The feeling of the original lawmakers, who were, incidentally, the same people who wrote the Constitution for the most part, was that copyrights and patents encourage authorship, science, and industry by providing a limited monopoly to authors and inventors. This monopoly was required to expire after a short time so that the public could then reap the benefits of these new works in their turn. There was, therefore, a balance between the good of encouraging authorship and invention with a limited monopoly, and the good of public ownership after a short period of time.

Since 1890 Congress has seen fit to extend the term of a copyright eleven times. It has gone from a maximum of 28 years in 1790 to the life of the author plus 70 years currently, or 95 years if the ownership is corporate. The issue that prompted congress to enact all of these extensions had nothing at all to do with encouraging invention, art, or science, and everything to do with the fact that valuable corporate properties such as the copyright for Micky Mouse were due to expire. The clear and unequivocal result of this Congressional effort is that the public suffers by not being able to freely access and use works that would have long since become public property under the intent of the constitutional framers . . . and the corporate copyright owners maintain their lucrative legal monopolies. There is no question at all of public benefit here, only corporate subsidies at public expense.

http://breakthelink.org/Costs.php

Congress is not so disrepectful yet.

[twitter]

Quote a little more next time. While he might be confused by the publishing industry, Congress is not. Here's your definition: "Copyright owner, with respect to any one of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, refers to the owner of that particular right.

They own the copy right, not the work. The right is the exclusive ability to duplicate the work. A right is never property, even when it's artificially created by the state and may be traded for real property. People get confused about that, which lends to the disgusting coporate welfare known as perpetual copyright. If you can own a song, like a bag of marbles the ownership should never end. Your government is not yet so asinine as to say a song can be owned.

Indeed, Congress does not even believe in "Intellectual Property". While the terms occurs some nine times in the definitions and scope you cited mostly referencing a 2002 law which is named that way. There is no definition and, hopefully, never will be.