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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. "
Brits here should check out the petition for private copying on 10 Downing Street's website. It's essentially asking that the government do what the think tank suggested.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
On the third hand, when copyright expires, it doesn't mean the original creator loses all rights to sell the work. It just means he no longer has the exclusive right.
So, which is it?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well, what about you? Let's say that you put your savings into a bank in 1955. Should "society" have free rights to that money after 50 years? After all, you should have still have been working, right?
Trust me, I'm not fan of ridiculously long copyright periods, but saying that you have the right to take my property just because I was unwilling or unable to duplicate my previous success doesn't sound fair to me.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Not at all... copyright law was invented by the printing press, to make sure another company would not print (copy) something very cheap, while the first one had paid money to buy the manuscript. The whole story about intellectual rights was just to make it sound better.
I don't say that intellectual rights are always bad, but in the beginning they had nothing to do with it. They're not always good either, but that's another discussion.
Fifty? How about 10? Better yet, five with a five year extension. Anything more than that is off the table for me. And while we're at it, make it a commercial copyright.
I know that was tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth noting. You can always make the same arguement at any time, so it leads to totally unlimited copyright. What about the grand-children benefiting from the creations and hard work of their grand-parents?
To those artists who actually support this. Frankly, if you're an artist, and you want your heirs unto the fifth generation to have a special advantage over everyone else's equally remote descendants, you're a lunatic megalomaniac, with some kind of fixation about founding imperial dynasties, and it's about time your fans told you off. I'm still contributing to an anuity for my kid, hope you do something similar. I worked hard when she was growing up too - instead of complaining that she wouldn't continue to receive money if I died, I carried lots of life insurance. I carry less now that she's grown, educated and mostly independant. Shouldn't she benefit some more from that money I spent on life insurance earlier? And if not her, well she's gonna make me a grandfather someday (or so she says) - why can't I pass on some of the fruits of my old carreer to those cute little hypothetical grandkids?
"Ooohhh! Ooohhh! I want my highly evolved descendants living in the Omega Centauri region a million years from now to benefit from my hard work, won't someone please think of the 19 ft. tall, cylendrical, neutronium sheathed, stardrive-up-the-spine fitted trans-transhuman children?".
Who is John Cabal?
Regardless, why do the adult children (and especially grand-children) of a musician, author, etc deserve to get money for work they had no part in creating? Let them create their own income-producing works, or earn a living some other way. My parents have told me that I shouldn't count on any special inheritance from them (they expect to spend most of what they've saved), and I'm perfectly content with that because I've done nothing to earn that money.
Providing for one's minor children and/or dependent spouse is a noble and admirable goal, which should be supported by keeping copyrights valid for some term after the creator's death if he has dependents... but not a term so long that every person who even knew the creator is dead before it expires.
Personally, since I have no dependents, I've decided to draft a will that specifies that upon my death, all intellectual property I own will be bequeathed to the public domain.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
But...that was your savings to begin with. Copyright, on the other hand, is something that you only have because society has granted it to you in the first place.
If copyright lasts for so long, then where is the incentive for the author to actually create more works? If you can write a single book/song/whatever, and live off the royalties for the next 95 years, then where is your incentive to create more works? Copyright shouldn't give someone the ability to live their entire life off of something they created when they were 20. They should have to continue to work and produce new works if they want to make a living. Copyright should last 5-10 years from initial publication, after that, write a new song, or get a job doing something else.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Providing for one's minor children and/or dependent spouse is a noble and admirable goal, which should be supported by keeping copyrights valid for some term after the creator's death if he has dependents... but not a term so long that every person who even knew the creator is dead before it expires.
I agree with this completely. I knew someone who took a year off work in order to research and write a book. He had enough put away to care for his family for the year, and his job was left open for him if the book didn't take off. He finished a draft of the book and sent a copy to a publishing company for comment... then had a heart attack and died. It turned out that that draft was the only copy in existence. The electronic copy sat on a nicely encrypted hard drive in his laptop.
If copyright expired at death his family would have been left with a little bit of life insurance and potentially nothing else. The publisher would have had a great deal --- an edited version of the draft for publication would probably count as a derivative work and thus they would own the copyright on the book, with no need to pay the author.
As it happened, the publishing company were great. They published the book and promised the author's widow a double royalty cheque for the first five years after publication.
Cogito, ergo sig.
It would be tricky to get the balance right, but this could be extended into also affecting when the work goes into the public domain. What you'd want to do is give the labels two competing priorities: one, they would like to pay royalties to the artist for as short a time as possible, and two, they want copyright protection on the work for as long as possible. If the royalty were to increase over time (up to say 100%) then the labels would be forced at some stage to declare the work uneconomic to market - and at that point, it would go into the public domain.
There is a fundamental philosophical principle in play. How far down the line of posterity should the "dead hand" control freedom of the living? In the English common law, which is the basis of US law as well, no conveyance of an interest in real property shall be valid unless it must vest in an ultimate, unrestricted owner within twenty-one years of the termination of a life in being. This means you can leave your realty to your son for life, and 21 years later to those of your descendants then living, but you CANNOT leave it to your son for life, then to your unborn grandson for life, then to your unborn great-grandson in perpetuity. If copyright protections were analogous, copyright would extend for the life of the creator plus a maximum of twenty-one years. Is that reasonable or not? It has been found to be so for how long you can control the vesting of your realty after your death. (I have left out some subtleties, but I think this poses the question.)
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
I disagree. You're falling into the trap of viewing all of society through the lens of economics, which is a ploy that a great many politicians have foisted upon us but does not reflect the realities of human existence.
I have personally registered copyrighted works that I make available for everyone to look at on the Web, for free, from which I don't make a dime. That doesn't mean I want some corporation to have free license to take those works and publish them for profit, however -- or to publish them in a context that makes it look like my work supports some position that I don't agree with. In this case the copyright is a protective measure. It's there to ensure that the fruits of my labor are used in the way that I choose, period.
Let's say, for example, that I paint a hypothetical painting of an idyllic English landscape, and in the background is the ominous tower of a nuclear reactor. Presumably I mean this painting to be some artistic commentary on society, with a very specific meaning that I choose to impart to the painting. If there was no copyright on this work (because I'm not making money from it) there would be nothing stopping BP from running it as an ad in a magazine, along with a slogan reading something like, "Don't let the crazies in Parliament do this to your countryside. Support fossil fuels." Make no mistake, copyright is the only thing stopping someone from doing this.
Breakfast served all day!
Ask authors just -how- much they make past the first six months of paperback publication. Outside someone like Rowling or Claney (and not even Claney!) Eric Flint of Baen books will tell you... "ZIP."
That's the incentive. They work or starve.
Andrew
How about a system like this?
Traditional exclusive copyright - 15 years with an option to extend another 5 for a fee.
After the initial 15 years (or 20), the copyright goes to a Creative Commons license - Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commercial for a period of 50 years from when the work was originally created. So that would be 30 to 35 years under a CC license. This would allow others to create non-commercial derivative works based off the original, and the original creator would still have control over commercial uses of his/her work.
Then after 50 years from creation, the work enters into the public domain.
This space unintentionally left blank.
10 years is a good idea, not so much because of the possibility of derivative works, but because it encourages people like Cliff Richard to continue to create new works himself. You are exactly right, a 50-year copyright is counterproductive, because it allows someone who produces a single number-one hit to retire immediately.
Mod parent up.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create works that can eventually enter the public domain, not allow copyright holders to horde their work and suck every penny they can from them. I was looking through iTunes today and saw Dumbo available for download for $14.99. Dumbo was made in 1941.
$14.99??? That's the price of a new release DVD at Best Buy, and this way I don't even get a physical object! Its just 800MB of (really old) data. This could be given away for free or a nominal charge (couple of dollars) for the encoding and download service. Disney has long since made up their investment and millions from this movie.
If they had their way they'd still be selling it and making pure profit from in 50 years.
Sure it does! The local pub sign performs every night, and draws paying customers, but the guy who painted the boar doesn't get a cut for fifty years, and neither does his manager.
Exactly what went through my mind as I was reading that line. There are those of us who have to work nine to five in an office for 50 years and still struggle to live off the 'royalties' from that effort.
However I think this 'living on that' comment is a bit of a red herring. There may be a few artists who are in that position. For the most part though, anyone who wrote/recorded something successful enough to still be earning a living off the royalties 50 years later is likely to have amassed enough wealth not to worry about the financial implications - remember what they're getting now is a tiny fraction of what they would have been receiving back then in real terms. And most likely they've had other hit records, toured, etc. Sir Cliff Richard is a prime example of this.
I don't think it's really about the money (for the artist at least). It's about control of the product. I think the artist would be more concerned about what people can do to their music when it's out of copyright, and how that might taint their 'legacy'.
As for the record companies, maybe that's a slightly different story...
You are missing the point. People created stuff before the copyright and they'll do so after it too. I'm guessing almost all the art created by people who only want to be rich is crap that doesn't give anything to anyone and we as a society would possibly be better off it.
I don't really get all this greed. Yeah, you should be paid for your job and creations one way or another. Again and again from a song released 50 years ago? Or your granddad's creations? That's just insane. It's not like you are being ripped off. If you haven't made anything else worth money in the last 50 fucking years you should have gone to school somewhere along the road. It's not like this came onto them all of the sudden.
Exactly. And this is why the likes of Jethro Tull and Cliff Richard, Disney, and other prominent copyright holders, should not be allowed to be the excuse for across-the-board extensions in copyright terms. They only own a tiny niche of the entire copyright-able work that's out there, and making massive changes just so a small minority of successful copyright owners can keep their monopoly benefits hardly anyone.
I couldn't care less about Disney's works, or about Cliff Richard's works. They still make their work available at reasonable prices for people who actually want them. What does irritate me is when continuous copyright extensions prevent lots of the valuable work that isn't being re-published from being reproduced by people who want to keep making it available for society. In many cases, the copyright owners are difficult to locate, or aren't interested enough to bother with releasing copyrighted works. To make sure that society gets paid back for the artificial fixed term monopoly, copyright expiration is very important.
If a niche of copyright owners care so much about their work, then the laws should instead be changed to allow for only those creators who care to extend the copyright on their work. Let copyright holders apply for extensions if they want to keep their rights. Ironically this is exactly how the US did it in the first place, and that's when they had it right. A useful addition might be to require that copyright holders also demonstrate that they're making the work they hold available to society for reasonable commissions.
How about this?
1) Work is owned by the author alone, and is non transferable, ie you cannot sell all rights to it. You can only license it.
2) Performance of a work can be owned by a company, but is limited to 10 years only, after that it goes into PD.
3) The Copywrite is automatic for the first 5 years, after that it must be registered and payed for 5 year periods.
4) Works can be licensed exclusively for the first 10 years only, after that licenses must be non-exclusive and compulsary.
The author can not deny licensing a work to anybody after this period. He can only fix the price.
5) The exclusive license duration of 10 years is from the time of publication, but the automatic licensing term of 5 years
is from the time of creation. So you may have to renew it twice before the expiry of exclusive licenses.
6) The first 10 years after publication are special as during this period the work can be considered exclusive property, and
can be passed down to the heirs.
Basically to continue using a work you must pay a fee every 5 years. And corporations cannot buyout a work.
-anandsr
Jethro Tull is somewhat well known 60s band
They started in the 60s, but had their biggest hits in the 1970s and a Grammy for best hard rock/heavy metal album in the mid/late 1980s (I'd guess 1987). Grammys are certainly no measure of talent, but by both critical acclaim and album sales they're more of a 1970s prog rock/1980s hard rock band than a 60s band.
Also, "somewhat" well known might be a bit of an understatement; having more than one #1 album in the USA (more in the UK) puts you pretty solidly in the well-known category compared to even successful rock outfits. They're certainly not the Beatles, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, or the Stones; they're not quite the Who or the Eagles, but not knowing them is pretty solidly in the "ignorant of 1970s/80s rock" camp. (And I don't endorse the music of the bands I mentioned, I merely mention them as measures of popularity).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
"Are we experiencing a wave of artists refusing to create works because copyright law isn't strong enough?"
wishful thinking,
Sir Cliff manages to release something around this time, every year - unfortunately
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
They will probably lobby laws that will make it almost impossible to declare someone dead.
- His head i missing you say. Well, we can probably wake him up by growing a new one or perhaps use his DNA to clone him. So he's not completely dead yet, according to the new law.
http://www.piratpartiet.se