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Dead Musicians Signing Media Rights Petitions
epeus writes "Following from the Gowers coverage and the Musicians' ad in the FT, Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension: 'If you read the list, you'll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire. I'm not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?'"
I find it depressing that /. readership mods views they disagree with as flamebait and troll.
It should be clear from the post that I'm making a serious point, which means I'm not trolling or angling for a fight.
When debate - which inherently means the positing of disagreeing views - is modded as flamebait, you have ossified.
> BTW, you have an opinion that is not popular here on /. You got modded down because you didn't lace the
> comment with provisions, niceties, and "I know the reason for this, but..." clauses. Basically, tread
> carefully in future.
Certainly not! why should I be all nice-nice because I hold view A and other people hold view B? it makes no sense. If people holding view B are nasty to people holding view A *because* they hold view A, they're a bunch of tossers and deserve all the directness they get.
Anyways, I don't think this is the reason. I think people mod down because there is a human instinct to be unpleasent, suppressive, towards that which is considered different and wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't really capable of thought and instead hold a unreasoned, learned belief system, and anything different to that is by definition wrong - and they are then unpleasent and suppressive towards that difference.
People mod annoymously, so any superficial pressure to behave reasonably because other people are watching is removed. Only people who genuinely think for themselves, rather than merely reacting emotionally, are capable of modding reasonably (or indeed of being functioning adults).
You want money, you do some work. Record an album
And how will you recoup the costs of making that album? Say you have 50 studio orchestra musicians, hald a dozen engineers, and all sorts of post-production people working on something that you cannot take on the road - since it's not that sort of performance (or the various performers cannot be gathered for that sort of activity). The work of doing the recording is done specifically because there will be people willing to pay for their copy of that work. Are you saying that they should be paid the day they do all that work, and only that day? No? Then getting paid for selling copies of it afterwards is the only way that such work can be done, and having the copyright to the work protected is the only way to keep it from getting ripped off.
Some artistic work can't be handled the way a bar band collects their take of the cover charges from the door. Know anyone who works for years at a time on a single film? You can't get all the actors together to perform that in front of an audience ever time they want to afford groceries, or invest in making even better films later.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.