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."

Comments

Re:Whats the problem?

[Rei]

Surely you jest. As any child could tell you, it is critically important to the well being of our democracy that songs like The Happy Birthday Song remain copyrighted until at least 2030.

Compromise

[Tlosk]

The most reasonable compromise I've seen suggested is to have them expire by default, but allow extensions for a fee. Making available all the out of print works that would languish in obscurity otherwise, while still allowing the truely valuable properties to continue.

But I would like to suggest one further refinement that would make it fair, any application for extension would automatically make ownership revert to the original creator or their heirs. Forty or fifty years ago when the rights were signed away it was under a framework that the rights were of limited duration. If they are going to continue in perpetuity, then fair selling price needs to be renegotiated.

Re:Compromise

[AeroIllini]

The most reasonable compromise I've seen suggested is to have them expire by default, but allow extensions for a fee. Making available all the out of print works that would languish in obscurity otherwise, while still allowing the truely valuable properties to continue.

I agree, but where do we place the price point? Even if it's a million dollars a year, giant corporations like Disney will gladly pony up.

I propose that once the copyrights expire (no more than 35 years after initial publication), the fee to renew for one year is $1.00. Then the fee doubles for every year after that.

So if Disney wanted to extend copyrights an additional 35 years, they would be paying $2^33, or $8.5 billion, for the 35th year. That doesn't even count the $4.3 billion they paid for the 34th year, or the $2.2 billion they paid for the 33rd year, or...

Nothing like exponential math to "promote productivity." Hey, we might even reduce the national debt!

Re:Whats the problem?

[russ1337]

I'd like to see some rich dude state the following in his will:
- Use all the billions of dollars left in the estate to buy the rights to as much music as possible
- Re-release all that music under a Creative Commons licence, allowing full use (essentially setting it FREE!!!)
- Set up a P2P sharing network to allow those CC hits to be shared, and request donations per track (suggesting 5c per song), Also have Google ads embedded in the app (just tiny ones)
- Use the donations and ad-funds to generate more $$$ to buy the rights to more music
- Repeat from step 2

BTW. The above is patent pending...

Re:Whats the problem?

[bersl2]

Of course, when you look at the history of the current copyrights, you'll see that the Berne Convention was written at the behest of one author, Victor Hugo, who was displeased that other people could publish his works outside of France, because copyright was not recognized internationally.

I agree that copyright should be recognized internationally, and it should be bestowed upon creation of a work, but I also think that the life + 50 was a completely unnecessary unilateral money grab (even then), unopposed by anyone, because no one knew how important this would all become.

If anybody could give some cited insight into the history of copyright pre-Berne, or even point us to something peer-reviewed, that would be very helpful.

Melancholy Elephants

[dcclark]

Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but Spider Robinson's excellent short story Melancholy Elephants discusses that exact idea. Its point is that, if copyrights are extended indefinitely, we eventually smother our own creativity.