Slashdot Mirror
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
Is this just a case of really poor journalism or is there some provision of UK copyright law that foreits the life of the author in the duration of copyright when they transfer the ownership of the work or something? Cause I'm looking at the UK copyright act here and it says life + 50 years, and apparently in '97 there was an EU-wide ammendment that made that life + 70 years. I thought this recent news story was about people complaining that they can't have life + 95 years and when their kids grow up they'll ask for life + 125 years, and so on. As for the people who "make their living" from collecting royalties on songs their dear old dad sang back in the 50's, cry me a freakin' river.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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
If you listen really really carefully, you can hear a faint cheer from the 2 people that A) listen to Cliff Richard and Jethro Tull and B) have mastered P2P music sharing.
That was a direct quote from Lars Ulrich from when Tull got the Grammy everyone thought Metallica would get, dude. There's some kind of weird poetic justice here.
So, which is it?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Oh save us, Cliff Richards, the people's poet!
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
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.
If you can't make money from it then it shouldn't be under copyright. That's the purpose of copyright, to give people a monetary incentive to create new works.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
This applies only to music recordings, not to copyrights in general. For other works (such as the musical compositions and lyrics themselves), the rule in the UK is that copyrights last for the life of the creator plus 70 years. Although the recordings of the Beatles' early recordings may become PD in the UK in 2013, even if Paul were to choke on a stalk of brocolli tomorrow morning, all those Lennon-McCartney compositions would still be copyrighted until 2077, and until then you wouldn't be able to make copies of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" without paying composition royalties to... well... Michael Jackson, I guess.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
... to quote a song title from Jethro Tull.
... mutter mutter ... it was one of those protected 'CDs'. So I stuck it in my pc (Windows 2000 with Cdex) and sucked it out to ogg. And then went to the web site and sent a message off telling Ian Anderson what I thought of the copy protection scheme.
:-(
A few years ago I bought another CD in my quest to get the complete collection of Jethro Tull. Got it home and it wouldn't play in my car
'The Tull' still make great music, but they seem a bit confused of the whole where we are now. They seem to be a bunch of 'Heavy Horses' - beautiful things but outdated
Extending copyright has some advantages, but disadvantages as well - how many musicians started off signing their soul away to the record company to discover that the record company own their work. Changing record companies can mean that they can't include a recording of theirs in their greatest hits (I'm reminded of a hit of Donovan's "Catch the Wind" that had to be rerecorded for a greatest hits CD). Having stuff slide out of copyright means that those 'souless' musicians can reclaim their music. Of course those that have been able to retain the ownership of that are likely to protect what they can to the detriment of the greater public, and ultimately themselves.
Just my highly opinionated thoughts.
I hope the lawmakers eventually realize how much that fair use contributes to the value of the content. How content's value after a generation, when pop can pass into folk (or disappear), is created at least as much by the people sharing it as by the people creating it.
And I hope they then consider the American founders who created an artificial monopoly "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" as temporary, a concession of some freedom to the reality of capitalism. The reality of 1700s capitalism, which took a lot longer for inventors to recoup their risky investment than in the Internet Age.
Then, I hope, they recognize that the past couple of centuries of promoting progress in science and the useful arts have created a world where copyrights can last even less than the original 17 years, a human generation. And even carve out exceptions to copyright that not only accommodate freedom and less risky investments in invention, but serve to promote, rather than retard, that progress.
Useful innovation in copyright law. That would promote progress.
--
make install -not war
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.
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!
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
Which perhaps highlights that there are wider patterns in the way that broken laws/treaties/politics are being
crafted to suit specific interests while basically breaking democratic systems overall.
This conception is both atomistic and unrelational. It takes the form of individual security-seeking practices that are self-defeating and in a profound sense oxymoronic (Loader 1997b), an 'expression of the desire for sovereign agency' (Markell 2003: 22) that depends upon and projects a semblance of security produced by lifting oneself out of co-existence with others in order to render one's own existence less contingently vulnerable and the future more predictable. These practices are often at the same time exercises of private power. They eschew democratic political life in order to achieve 'distributive outcomes according to one's assets, skills and preferences' (Offe 2003: 450) in a manner corrosive of the forms of trust and solidarity upon which any sustainable notion of the public good of security draws and, in its turn, replenishes. Neo-liberalism remains committed, in other words, to forms of security that 'organize the world in ways that make it possible for certain people to enjoy an imperfect simulation of the invulnerability they desire, leaving others to bear a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens involved in social life' (Markell 2003: 22).
http://libertysecurity.org/article232.html
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.
I think that, by default, all information should go to the public domain after a fairly short period of, say 5 years after publication. The duration has to be less than the typical half-life period of the media and data formats involved, otherwise stuff can too easily get lost before it gets legal to shift to and distribute in current data formats. After all, getting more stuff eventually into the public domain IS the stated purpose of copyright law.
If someone wishes to retain copyright privileges for a longer time, say up to 25 years after publication, which is half the current limit and more than enough to allow the author (in reality: the media companies) for reasonable compensation, then it should be required to submit the work in a specified digital format to a public database which is there to make sure that the work is readily available to the public after the copyright has expired.
The cost for such a database could be covered by a yearly fee from the copyright holders. After all, they get a prolonged state sanctioned monopoly over the work at the expense of everyone else. It's only fair for society to expect something in return. Also, the existence of such a database would greatly simplify the resolvment of legal issues in the enforcement of the granted monopoly.
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
On behalf of my client, I am serving you with a cease and desist order for illegally reproducing the following lyrics
"The times they are a-changing".
As you are aware, artists rely on the income from their work and they deserve to be rewarded for it.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
She was part of the whole "Artists against Piracy thing" back in the Metallica debacle. You can google it, there are articles about it, and a mention in wikipedia as well. Now, granted on many other issues she seems pretty cool, and even reasonably informed and on topic.
The simple fact is slouch musicians who can't deliver live are going to have to, or get out of the way. Making money off of a record is a dead horse. It'll be a quaint idea in 20 more years.
The only real losers are the record companies anyway, since artists usually make the bulk of their income off of live shows already.
What with Sony's rootkit shenanigans, and the over all AWFUL music that has been funded by the record companies over the last 50 years, well, I say good riddance.
I play in a band, and I'm prepared to give the album away at cost and make money on shows now. So should anybody else, unless they are lazy ingrates. If you can't do a live show you have no business making music anyway (I'm looking at YOU everyone on MTV and almost all of R&B!!).
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The BPI (UK equivalent of RIAA) must be over the moon about the FUD surrounding this issue.
All the 50 year rule concerns is the copyright of the SOUND RECORDING and the money the PERFORMERS and COMPANIES get.
The WRITERS of the lyrics and music will still have copyright on the lyrics and music.
Taking the example of Move It sung by Cliff Richard and if it was played on the radio or bought in a shop.
In 2006
Song writer - gets money
Music writer - gets money
Singer - gets money
Muscians - get money
In 2008 (when the recording copyright runs out)
Song writer - gets money
Music writer - gets money
Singer - gets nothing
Musicians - get nothing
Seems fair enough to me...