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UK Copyright Extension Not Happening
chiark writes "In a surprising move (surveys said that the public supports extending copyright), the UK will not extend copyright to 95 years following a recent study. Back when this was was covered on slashdot last year, I wrote to my MP and thought no more of it, but recently a UK thinktank has called for fair use to be enshrined in UK Law. Looks like the government is realizing that the public are the ones that vote 'em in or out." From the article: "Sir Cliff Richard and Jethro Tull had been among artists lobbying for copyright to last 95 years, rather than the present 50. The decision means that from 2008 Sir Cliff's earliest recordings will start to come out of copyright. "
I think the way to solve both problems (creators keeping copyright and it not being abused for too long) is to make it last 50 years OR until the death of the creator of the work. This way, creators who are still alive do not feel cheated like they do currently (after all, they made it), but the timeframe is not extended in all cases, so the work still enters public domain if the author has passed away and 50 years expired.
From the article:
'Music journalist Neil McCormack told BBC Radio Five Live it was a blow to the industry..."You can make a record in 1955 and have been getting royalties... been living on that and suddenly they're gone."'.
Well yep - honestly if you haven't done anything else in 50 years it probably should be gone too. In a not especially long amount of time, some Beatles stuff will be coming out of copyright. Now I'm no Beatles expert, but it seems to me that absolutely all of them went on to do more work elsewhere and didn't just sit back living off their early work. I see that statement as a good thing, not as a 'blow to the industry'.
Be interesting to compare and contrast with film - what's the UK limit on film copyrights?
Cheers,
Ian
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of new works. Anything more than 10 years (in my view) is actually counterproductive. Derivative works are stymied by the monopoly the original creator has. Sure, you can negotiate and pay big dollar to license a derivative work. But, for example, had Disney been the original creator of "Alice in Wonderland" you can bet that the video game "Alice" would never have been made.
Music copyrights are messy, because there is a copyright on the song, and seperately on the performance and recording of the song (called 'mechanical copyright'). If my understanding is correct, Cliff Richard's early work will only be coming out of mechanical copyright. This means a prospective seller of these works would have to pay rights for the songs but not the recordings, in they same way they would if they made cover-versions of the songs.
I believe that our British copyright law was not backdated last itme it was extended, so works recorded before the life + 70 tariff do not get an extension. Oddly enough this was something Hollywood actually lobbied strongly for, as there were quite a lot or films in production that were based on 'just out of copyright' works that would have gone back into copyright (I think this was the case with character of Sherlock Holmes when the previous extension was backdated).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The pro-copyright crowd loves to scream "theft" when the crime is technically copyright infringement and even though a person has a new copy, the original copy owner hasn't lost possession of his copy.
But here I think "theft" is the right term.
These works were published and purchased under the terms of copyright at the time - that after a specified number of years ownership would transfer to the public domain - we would all own it.
When copyrights are unilaterally extended, as has been the case many times recently, the public is deprived of the ownership that they were promised under the original agreement. In this case, we have something that is tangibly missing - public ownership of the work and I think that fits the definition of theft far better than making copies does.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Various studies have shown that a book or film usually makes over 90% of its overally money within a year of release. Music is a bit less likely to drop off that sharply, but it's not much better, and new technology, such as re-releasing LPs as CDs, may have caused much of the extension we see in the curve there. Even there, most of the money is made in the firt year, and the 90% margin is usually reached within 3 years.
One estimate I've seen is that going from the U.S.'s current Life+70 copyright to completely unlimited will have no effect at all on over 98% of author's estates, and the remaining small percentage will see a modest average 3% average additional income. An author who banks a modest 5% of his income for posterity at the time he or she makes it can take advantage of compound interest and much less inflated money to easly beat everything copyright extensions are likely to do for his kids and grand kids by a factor of at least two orders of magnetude. Statistically, only about three artists from the 20th century are likely to see significant potential profits more than 70 years from their deaths. Since we already have J.R.R. Tolkien, Steven King, and George Lucas, what's with those musicians, film-makers and writers who seem convinced they are also one of that tiny elite fraction? At best, a lot more of them are deluded than right. For them, a clue - just because you are a better artist than these guys, doesn't mean your work will be more commercial than theirs 70 years after your death - in fact it practically precludes it.
The price authors, musicians, and others pay for that slight chance of bettering their great-great-grand children's lives by a bit? "Life plus" can't be treated as the transfer of a natural right to copy, as no one has a natural right to copy after they die. So now, copyright isn't based on one of those "inallienable rights" that come from "Nature and Nature's God", as the US founding fathers so quaintly put it - instead, it's a right the government manufactures from nothing by politically divine fiat. Ergo, the government can now take away what they have created, with no legal principles to require any checks or balances. If copyright is later shortened, the government has already laid all the necessary groundwork for the claim the additional time (and control over publication) reverts to the government, and not to the people.
Who is John Cabal?
copyright should not apply to personal use, period. Can we have a law that has some relationship to its enforcability please? Here's a litle experiment for ya:
Go see your mother (you should anyway), have a look through her CD/DVD/sewing pattern collection (which she has depends on age of your mother), pick one you like and ask "can I have a copy of this?" I absolutely guarentee she will say "yes." If she doesn't, it's probably because you never visit her.
Now I ask you, if a law exists that everyone's Mom is willing to break, what the hell kind of society are we living in?
How we know is more important than what we know.
It seems to me the idea (piece of music, recording, whatever) is not and cannot be property (at least not in the sense that physical objects or land can be property). The copyright itself - i.e., the limited-time monopoly created and enforced by the government - is the property. Let me emphasize that: the property here is created by the government. As an encouragement for artists and others to produce ideas, society rewards them by creating a kind of property and granting it to them. Society moreover provides resources for the enforcement of that property right. But the right is time limited: after a certain period, society no longer recognizes or enforces the right it previously granted.
Think of it like this. You write a song. You take that song to the government, and they give you a document stating that you have an exclusive right to copy and perform that song for the next N years. The song may not be property, but the document certainly is: its ownership is enforced by the law, you can sell it, and so forth. When those N years are up, you still have the document, but the rights in conferred have expired. Did anyone take anything away from you? On the contrary, they gave you something. Oh, and incidentally, you still have the song you wrote.
These days there's no document proving your rights; the grant is automatic. I don't know if there ever was such a document, although filing used to be required. The point is, copyright is a social construct, and the right is property. Ideas, on the other hand, are not.
The fact that this was an online poll means that it's not scientific, the results totally depend on what sites they put the question on and what sorts of people decided to respond.
Also the way the question was phrased: should [UK recording artists] be protected for the same number of years as their American counterparts?is a blatantly biased way of asking the question. Sounds like they wanted to drum up some phony polls to present to parliament, and it sounds like they're not buying it.
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller