UK Copyright Under Fire Again

stupid_is writes "Following on from the story on the Gower Report in the UK, a host of musicians (over 4,500 of them, including poor, starving stars such as U2, Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel) have taken out a big ad in the FT to back the call for an extension to copyright in the UK. Allegedly, that's what the British public wants — although the survey seems to be asking a different, rather biased, question." From the article: "A spokesman for the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for greater digital rights, said: 'The big music firms have done a good job of persuading some artists to sign up to this but anyone who reads the Gowers review will see it demolishes the arguments for extension. An awful lot of content creators are not represented by this and recognise an extension will do nothing for creativity and nothing for the public.'"

Comments

It's logical they would feel this way.

[Maxo-Texas]

Copyright was instituted for society so work would be created. It was not instituted for the creators. It was instituted to encourage them to create for society. I do not see any evidence that creators are boycotting and refusing to create new works because they "only" have copyright for 50 years.

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[nine-times]

It's not even to encourage the artists to create. Never, during the whole of human history, has there been difficulty in getting people to participate in creative works. There are going to be people who want to make music, paintings, movies, and books, even if there's no reward but fame.

The purpose is to make it economically feasible to publish works. Without copyright protection, the large investment to bring a work to market would not have been worth it, considering that someone else could simply copy that work and sell it if it actually became popular enough to cover your investment. Therefore, record companies and book publishers would not have been able to make a profit from funding new works.

Therefore, as the technology improves and the price of development and distribution costs come down, and it becomes cheaper to bring a work to market, it follows naturally that we should become less strict on copyright protections. Should development costs, production costs, and distribution costs ever reach the point where they're free, then it probably means that we'll have reached the point where IP protection is completely obsolete.

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[Blue Stone]

> Copyright was instituted for society so work would be created.

As I understand it, originally, copyright was a monopoly handed out by the King, usually in return for money.
This is the problem - although there have been laudable attempts to bend 'intellectual monopolies' to the benefit of society (limited times for the advancement... etc,) at root, copyright is about restricting dissemination of culture/creativity for the benefit of a few (the monopoly holder of that creative expression): the noble objectives are just patches; the kernel is about restiction.

Human's being what they are, greed sets in, and whaddayaknow, the patches are circumvented to return copyright to its original purpose - a simple monopoly state.

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[eldavojohn]

No, it's not logical they should feel this way.

I once considered myself a bass player. At bars we would play songs & work 50% originals with 50% covers. We were pretty much illegally performing songs (Don't Let Me Down by The Beatls, Karma Police by Radiohead, Yellow by Coldplay, The Door by The Turin Brakes, etc.). Now, why do we do this? It pleases the crows and shows them that we like their music and that if they listen to ours hopefully they see the influence and elements. Yes, every band borrows these things--you can't deny it.

It doesn't make any sense that Sir Paul should say this. Look at the line up of The Beatles' first album:

• 1. "I Saw Her Standing There" - 2:55
• 2. "Misery" - 1:50
• 3. "Anna (Go to Him)" (Arthur Alexander) - 2:57
• 4. "Chains" (Gerry Goffin/Carole King) - 2:26
• 5. "Boys" (Luther Dixon/Wes Farrell) - 2:27
• 6. "Ask Me Why" - 2:27
• 7. "Please Please Me" - 2:03
• [edit] Side Two
• 1. "Love Me Do" - 2:22
• 2. "P.S. I Love You" - 2:05
• 3. "Baby It's You" (Mack David/Barney Williams/Burt Bacharach) - 2:38
• 4. "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" - 1:59
• 5. "A Taste of Honey" (Bobby Scott/Ric Marlow) - 2:05
• 6. "There's a Place" - 1:52
• 7. "Twist and Shout" (Phil Medley/Bert Russell) - 2:33

Ok, so nearly half the songs are covers of other musicians. Now I would like to ask Paul how it is that a starting band (exactly like him) gets enough money to pay the licensing costs to half their songs which are covers. Was it easy for you, Paul? Would it be that easy for bands today? Shouldn't you be honored that musicians are influenced by you and worship you?

When you look at the irony of Paul's statements considering that first album, it really makes me wonder how much money he'll need before he's a happy man. Does he realize the implications this has on the music in his country and possibly the world?

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[Dachannien]

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. The quality of work has probably increased as a result of copyright (okay, if you ignore the past ten years' worth of music...), so there's likely some minimum copyright term needed to maintain that level of creative motivation, beyond which the important motivating factor is protecting the credit given to the original author.

However, I do agree that copyright terms have been severely extended beyond that minimum (anything beyond the life of the creator comes to mind). In fact, copyright terms are so long now that creative efforts are hindered, by blocking the creativity of people who want to make derivative works or even protect the public existence of original works.

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[Maxo-Texas]

You are preaching to the choir.

I'm saying it is logical that they would think things that benefit them are reasonable even if they are not. You ask 4500 artists who are making money off 50 year old copyrighted material if it is reasonable to extend the copyright and change the rules (even for dead people) and of course-- they feel it is.

It's also logical that as a cover band performer you would feel differently.

It's very difficult to find what is truly reasonable. Everyone asserts "Well the thing that benefits ME is obviously reasonable." A lot of time, the first person to baldly assert something as true sets the play field and everyone else goes along even tho it was basically random.

It is equally reasonable to set the copyright period for 5 years, 10 years, 30 years, 50 years. They all are someone arbitrary. It's clearly unreasonable to set it for 0 years and clearly unreasonable to set it to "forever and one day". (Well.. at least most people would agree to that- there are folks on both ends who feel 0 years or "forever" are emminantly reasonable).

The problem is there is no obvious way to measure this and pick a rational value where we get the most creative work of the highest quality for the lowest price.

A lot of rock and roll would probably not be legal since it includes older music that would have been protected by copyright (killing rock and roll in the cradle).

The hypocrisy of a band suing another band for "stealing their song" when it includes blues riffs that they stole from the public domain using their rules is amusing and irritating at the same time.

Re:It's logical they would feel this way.

[C0rinthian]

I would be amazed if you could come up with evidence of that. Take all the works that existed before copyrights, and all those released directly to public domain (or a creative-commons/open-source license), and compare them to those which have been copyrighted, in terms of quality? You are ignoring the context these works were created in. In the example of music, people tend to mention that Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. had no copyright protection. Why would they need protection if a vast majority of the population had no means to copy their work? The only way to hear a Bach performance was to go listen to him perform, or find someone who was able to play his works at an equal level. Nowadays, you can download high quality recordings in seconds.

In the past, creators had natural protections. Technology has made it trivial to reproduce and distribute the works of others, requiring artificial protections to compensate.

Who cares what the artists want?

[drinkypoo]

I know that's an inflammatory statement, but law is supposed to benefit the public. If it doesn't benefit the public then there's no reason for a law to exist.

Copyright benefits the public because it benefits everyone. But extending copyright into eternity benefits only a select few.

I couldn't care less what 4,500 artists want. It's a tiny slice of the population. Why support their greed? I think we can do without U2 anyway :D

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[HoboCop]

I care some.. If we don't protect the artists rights then we are effectively discouraging people from creating art. Being a musician today is already a dicey proposition at best. Only a very select few manage to make a reasonable living. I'm sure there are many people who would make excellent musicians who simply decided there were better and easier ways to survive. I feel like an artist should retain ownership of their creations until death, plus however many years the law decides after that.

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[Duds]

Until death is fine by me, but not one second longer.

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I agree we need to protect artists rights (I'm a musician, and am currently recording a cd). However, the current copyright is simply ridiculous. Life plus 75 years (US)? 95 for corporate works (US)? That's out of line.

What I'd like to see is: 25 years. One renewal for an additional 20. That gives 45 years total. If you haven't made enough off of something in in 45 years, tough shit. Do something new.

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[Dr Reducto]

So if it's really about helping artists not get screwed over, maybe target record companies instead of increasing copyright.

Record companies are somehow able to sell a million records and still have the artists owe THEM money after all that. That's a much more real problem than lost sales.

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[s20451]

Yes, I agree I was being lazy, but so is everyone else in this thread.

Nobody asks the right questions about copyright. These arguments which revolve around "people will still make art" are mostly nonsense, because they ignore both the quantity, quality, and cultural significance of art. Of course people will still write and perform music even if they can't do it as their day job. But a lot of it might suck compared to contemporary music.

Again using a historical example, the better question is: how many artists currently recognized as "important" (from as far back as you care to look) were primarily engaged in a career other than music? The answer is almost none.

Which leads to a second question. In the absence of copyright, is it possible for a culturally significant number of musicians to make music their primary career?

The answer is that I don't know, and I'm not sure anybody else does, either. I don't consider singer/songwriter types in this equation. I like a lot of classical music, including contemporary classical ... I know a lot of composers who barely eke out an existence as it is, who would lose a valuable source of revenue in the absence of copyright. These are culturally important people who can't charge for performances or sell T-shirts.

Re:Who cares what the artists want?

[NormalVisual]

The problem is that extending copyrights will likely do nothing to spur creation of new works

It also doesn't allow existing works to become part of the body of art which current and future artists can draw from for inspiration. There's absolutely no good reason that someone shouldn't be able to go out and hack on or cover Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", for instance. The music is more than 30 years old, the group of people that created that artisic work doesn't exist anymore, and sales from that album do absolutely zero to encourage more works at this point - there hasn't been a Floyd album released in almost 13 years, and there aren't too many visible on the horizon.

The ridiculous terms do nothing to benefit the greater good, which should have been the only factor to look at when the extensions were considered. The financial well being of any single artist or company pales in comparison to the cultural damage being done to the rest of society.

"Fair play for musicians"

[A beautiful mind]

That's what the advert says. It's almost correct. Let me fix it.

Fair use for people.

U2 = hypocrites?

[TheWoozle]

Or will they donate all their posthumous royalties to that AIDS-in-Africa cause that they're always on about?

Is there an easily accessible list of who signed?

[A beautiful mind]

So that I can conveniently never buy _anything_ from them again.

Sir Paul Has Failed Me

[eldavojohn]

... from 50 years to 95 years.

I hate to attack Paul McCartney because I love his music, Beatles & post-Beatles. But I think 50 years is enough. Let's say you write a song at age 20-25 like the Beatles. Well, you'd have the rights for that until you're 70. Ok, so you yourself should have ample time perform and record that song or to license it and profit from it. Paul knows a lot about this last part after suing the other Beatles for many of the McLennon songs & subsequently selling them to Michael Jackson.

If I were a musician, I would be honored that so many people are waiting after those 50 years to use my music. The reason I feel this way and Paul doesn't is that he's going down in history as the one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time no matter how long the copyright is held on that song. I'm not.

But why, in God's name would he want them extended to 95 years? Well, he made quite a bit of music after the Beatles & has been touring with that on and off. Some of it good & some of it quite bad. Either way, if he wants to cash out one last time before he kicks it, the rights to those songs will fetch much more if the buyers have them for 65 more years as opposed to 20 more years.

So that's what it's coming down to, not this 'fair play' bullshit. Paul's not hoping to be playing his music fairly after he dies ... he's just concerned about the money for these artists. And it's not money they're going to enjoy, it's money they're going to get and maybe try to pass on to their kids or something. Or buy another 1936 Rolls Royce Shadow with.

Who knows why they claim to need this money. Especially U2, that actually shocks me. Bono used to be all about people and to hell with money. I guess that isn't true anymore though he might try to show that he wants to keep making money to help people in a country less fortunate. At least he's got that going for him.

I saw an interview with Paul once where he basically said, "Yeah, I sold Michael Jackson the rights to these songs ... and it's too bad, you know, because I just want to play the music for my fans and have fun but I can't since I sold the rights." I guess sometimes I just have to treat them as artists with good music & just severely lacking in other departments. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and what he's done. I honestly think he's implementing publicity stunts just to work an angle of sympathy for a former Beatle. Unfortunately it's most likely going to work perfectly for him.

Copyright laws hurt musicians and music:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) overpayment corrupts artists, destroys careers and creativity.
2) music is locked away in Record Label vaults, never to be heard.
3) music is pushed based on it's "marketability" in a corrupt market.
4) only affluent audiences can afford current prices.
5) small or non profitable musicians and genres are ignored.
6) real talent is is discarded in favour of patronism.

I wonder just how much longer we will allow this corruption to continue?

If logic prevaled...

[Anonymous Coward]

we would actually be reducing Copyright times.
Think about the artists and writers of the 1800's and even the first half of the 1900's. It tooks decades just for their product to be distributed. You first had to make it big locally (less than 200 miles), and then the product had to be good enough to justify the huge distribution costs of making it a national sensation. You really ran the risk of your copyright not lasting long enough to justify the effort.
Now we live in a world with existing international distribution systems. You can become an international hit and sell your works to the whole world in a week's time. Yet, we have all these artists complaining that the copyright is not long enough. It just sounds like greed. What is their justification?

'Til death do us part

[dafz1]

Why not make it until death of the artist(or all group members)? Or, in case of sale of rights, a fixed period(like 10 years). If they were desperate enough to sell them, or stupid enough as in the case of Sir Paul, the buyer would have a fixed time in which to benefit. Why would you buy a catalog, unless to profit from it in the short term(except buying the Beatles catalog)?

I believe artists are entitled to keep the rights to their works for their lifetime. They made it, so they should be able to benefit from it. However, they shouldn't be able to put their great-grandchildren through school 45 years after they die. That's what wills and trust funds are for.

Re:Moeny in 50 Years Time isn't Survival

[Damastus the WizLiz]

This is not a question of the artists, This is about the British Phonographic Association keeping rights to songs. The article states that they already keep the copyrights till thier death +50 years. The Recording Association wants to extend that another 45 years so They, the Association, can make money off of it, NOT THE ARTISTS.

Ian Anderson

[Skjellifetti]

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times in favor of an extension.

Best responce was a letter that the FT published that basically said:

Hey Ian, You want to make more money? THEN WRITE SOME NEW SONGS!

Honestly, these songwriters, even the great ones, are thick as a brick sometimes.

4500 businesmen,not artists.Casualty is innovation

[openright]

These 4500 "artists" know that this 95 years will not create new incentive for them to create or enhance artistic works. (incentive when they are dead?). They know that this only serves to create money-for-nothing for their great-great-grandchildren: Or to create money-for-nothing for the owning corporation. They, themselves are probably also assuming to be rewarded soon for the corporate loyalty.

One casualty here is artistic creation. Innovation incentive for the heirs is limited due to inherited wealth.
But in reality, no heirs inherit these "rights". They sold out to some corporation or other individual unrelated to the original work.

The biggest casualty is artistic innovation from adaptation/derivation. Much of innovation builds on the works of others. Such an after-death copyright fights against such innovation.

Other effects of not extending copyright,.

[russ1337]

If copyright is not extended it will have a huge negative effect on the record companies / British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and RIAA groups and content distributors, beyond that of royalties paid.

Content in the public domain waters down the argument for requiring ALL content is to be 'protected'. If half of the worlds music was public domain, lobbyists would have a hard time persuading lawmakers to put restrictions on ALL devices. This has been evident with the RIAA continuously argue why DRM is required for ALL music to prevent copyright infringement. These arguments usually fail to recognize the existence of non-copyrighted music (Creative Commons etc), and certainly make no provision for it in their argument or 'industry drafted bills' (e.g DMCA). This results in systems like the Zune wi-fi sharing system which applies DRM when transferring songs, whether the media requires protection or not, and with total disregard for other licences such as 'copyleft' which may expressly forbid it.

We've seen from the Napster and Gokster cases in the 'war on file sharing' argued that "ALL file sharing is infringement of copyright", and fails to recognize the legal uses of file sharing systems. Again, if half of the worlds music was public domain, media conglomerates' argument is significantly watered down. Services like Youtube and Google Video have already been targeted, and we've seen media companies desire to shutdown the service altogether although Youtube and Google video are exceptional in that they've been careful to prevent copyright infringement from the start, and the result has been for the media companies attempts to re-define infringement. (i.e teenagers lip-sinking songs). Again their aim is to prove the majority of content that is free is infringing copyright and the services providing it should be shut-down.

Big Media have a very huge stake in extending the duration of copyright, well beyond the immediate issue of royalties for artists. (The amount of these royalties that is passed to artists is another issue altogether). The music industry and BPI will likely "pull out all the stops" to prevent an extension of copyright, which we are starting to see it with the use of artists that have done very very well out of record company who may 'win the hearts and minds of the people'. Big Media will be lobbying politicians as fast as they can, and will no doubt us scare tactics where possible. If all this British music is released into public domain, it will make shutting down file sharing networks much harder.

The BPI (and RIAA) have responsibilities "in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties" which relies on a vast library of content being under their control. Music that us currently in their control placed in the public domain erodes their breadth of responsibility and will ultimately affect their cut of the royalties.

The extension of copyright by 50 years has far further implications than just the royalties paid to the artists. It weakens many of the arguments of the BPI and RIAA groups, and reducing their value and their income. This argument is not about the artists getting more money, it is about the BPI and RIAA retaining their value and ability to "fight the crime of music theft".

They cannot fight the "crime" if the music is free to copy and share.

The American Revolution

[Nom du Keyboard]

One thing the American revolution changed was the European practice of the time (circa 1776 and back to Gutenberg at least) of Forever Copyrights. Publishing houses of the time owned copyrights in perpetuity, and if they didn't want to republish a book, it didn't get republished. The American Constitution changed that with its grant of rights for a limited period of time only.

Now the content industries seem trying to push us back to those bad old days once more. It was a bad idea then. It's still a bad idea now. And the worst idea of all is making them retroactive. Those works were already created. They don't need this extension to encourage that creative effort. Even if the laws were changed, they should only apply to new works.

As for Sir Paul, he should just shut the F* up! He's made his pile and can't claim poverty in my eyes. In fact, I rather like him less today than yesterday due to his participation in all this.