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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?'"
Oh no! The dead have risen and they're voting for copyright extension
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
i wonder what the net worth of these 4500 "artists" are ?
then compare it with the net worth of 4500 Wallmart shop employees or 4500 Ford car plant workers who wont be getting paid either for work they did 50 years ago
perhaps the music industry needs a close audit to see where those 4500 poor, poor starving musicians are going wrong
if you have nothing to hide as they say...
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 don't see why Lessig is so surprised. Not only can the dead sign petitions, but they can vote, too. America has lead the way in the legal frontier of corpse-rights and suffrage, at least as far back as the 1800s.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
They're using every means possible to ensure their copyright gets extended. If copyright is not extended it will have a huge negative effect on the record companies / British Phonographic Industry (BPI), RIAA groups and content distributors, beyond that of royalties paid.
Content in the public domain waters down the argument for requiring ALL content 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, Public Domain 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 "file sharing is always infringement of somebody's copyright", and fails to recognize the legal uses of file sharing systems. Again, if half of the worlds music was public domain, the argument agaisnt services like Bit-torrent 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 etc). 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.
We are seeing the music industry / BPI "pulling out all the stops" to prevent an extension of copyright. They're using artists that have done very very well out of record company who may 'win the hearts and minds of the people' (Cliff Richard), and now their padding their 'stats' with dead people. It is certain they are lobbying politicians as fast as they can.
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 is currently in their control placed in the public domain erodes their breadth of responsibility and will ultimately affect their cut of the royalties.
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 half the time it is perfectly legal to copy and share.
Of course, I'm from Chicago. The dead regularly climb out of the ground to vote up here...must be something in the water...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Makes me wonder how 2pac or Biggie would feel about this. I guess we'll find out on their next albums!
... called "Decomposing Composers".
Although in this case I think they're recomposing composers.
If you post it, they will read.
Instead of signing petitions, why don't they just release a couple new albums like 2Pac? It's totally paying for the henny and the hos in the afterlife.
The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.
You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, you can tell your kids about them.
You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. There is nothing "ethical" about that; it's an artificial construct and a compromise between the rights of the people (which copyright infringes on) and the desire to encourage creation of new, useful content.
The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff. Expiration of copyright is fundamentally necessary for intellectual property to work--if stuff didn't fall into the public domain, others couldn't derive benefits from ideas that build on the old ideas.
Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.
You confuse copyright with ownership. Not a surprise that muddling these terms is exactly what the "intellectual property" mafia has been doing for yours.
The painting is yours as property and will belong to you forever, your heirs will inherit it, etc.
The copyright enters the public domain, i.e. after n years someone else can take a photo of your painting and publish it in a book without paying you for doing so. Someone else can sing your song without paying you for it.
The ethical rule fails here because copyright is not a limit on what people can do with your property, but what they can make with their own hands and work.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"if you make something, it belongs to you"
Copyright, however, isnt about the possession of the object, it's the right to prevent anyone else from possessing a copy of that object.
If you're a carpenter and make a great chair it doesnt pass into the public domain, but you cannot prevent your neighbour from making a chair just like it, nor do you have the right to prevent anyone who purchases the chair to pay another carpenter to copy it.
"It's basically judicial theft."
Except it's the other way around. Preventing the neighbour or customer from making a chair just like the original means you're depriving them of the right to do what they wish with their property.
The value of copyright does not come out of nowhere; it derives its value by depriving others of value and rights. From an ethical point of view it's just the same as other taxation methods; you're depriving one group of people to give to another. Wether that's good or bad is arguable, and mostly a question of public utility.
Remember that corporations meet almost every criteria for being psychopaths that doesn't involve age or sexuality (Jokes about getting raped at the pump notwithstanding).
Pathological lying, conning/manipulative, shameless, parasitic lifestyle, irresponsibility? I consider it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know that a member was dead (seeing as he wouldn't be showing up for recording and all), and even then, so what? If the signatures were genuine, no dead person's name could possibly be on the list. Yet another in the media industry's endless stream of manipulative lies. Naturally, when called out, they will shamelessly deny any previous knowledge. Parasitic lifestyle? We hear every day how the Internet makes the recording industry obsolete. Irresponsible? Like forging dead people's signatures?
Corporations are psychopaths. But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit). If this nonsense is to stop while it's still possible to get corporations back under control, the law needs to change. Seeing as it's 4am, I leave it to the rest of you to propose the changes.
With a UID that low, GP is likely dead.
If this is an Advert in the UK Edition of the FT, then the appropriate action to take would be to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. ASA rulings are usually considered newsworthy in a minor way, and would raise awareness of the issue.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Cliff Richard is the face of the multi-national companies who want to destroy fair use, remixing, amateur music and anything they cannot control. Therefore lets boycott Cliff this Christmas, refuse to listen to his crappy contrived whining. The last thing we want to do is to "incentivise" Cliff Richard to produce new songs.
My little Linux and tech blog
One of the biggest problems with the recording industry is that the artists sign over their copyright holdings permanently instead of leasing them. Right now the transfer of copyright is complete and permanent.
The lease should end when the contract does. The artist or artists would then have the option to renew their contract and lease, sign a new contract / release indie, or release it into the public domain.
With a lease, you can be assured that there isn't an abuse of the power that record labels have now. A simple law could make these current types of contracts obsolete and illegal. Artists should also be able to reference this law and get their copyrights returned to the rightful owner.
This kind of thing is being done with the LOTR Trilogy and The Hobbit. The movie rights were leased to Miramax for a short period. If they do not finish the movies within that timeframe, they cannot release them.
Lets face it, record labels themselves are an obsolete business model. There are many ways to do self promotion now and you don't need to include a 3rd party publisher. A simple website, some iTunes tracks and a live tour are you really need to promote yourself. All labels really do is publish little plastic discs. They don't need exclusive rights to your material to do that.
If copyrights don't expire, you probably couldn't even make a table - there'd be copyrights on screws, on table legs and anything else you may want to make. For copyright to work for the next generation, it's important that the copyright of this generation expire. By endlessly extending copyright, you're doing a great disservice to future generations.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years. And most of the people who made them are dead. So the question isn't "Do I have enough incentive to create this table?" because removing copyright extension takes no rights from you, it just doesn't give you extra rights. So the argument here is that artists will arise from the dead, build a time machine, and then go back and stop themselves from entering the recording business, because their kids and grandkids are only making thousands instead of tens of thousands.
If you make something physical, that object belongs to you. You paid for the materials, you did the work. If you show it to someone, and they like it, they might decide to build one themselves. The one they build does not belong to you, it belongs to them.
Intellectual property is very different from real property. Here's another example:
Let's say you tell someone that you have this ESP-like feeling that the numbers 17 35 8 7 22 and 19 are going to be this week's lotto numbers. You go ahead and play those numbers, and guess what...the person you told them to figures they might play them as well. You both win. Now the jackpot is divided between the two of you. Do you think you should have the right to sue them because it was your idea to play those numbers? If you didn't want them to play those numbers, why did you tell it to them?
Music is pretty much the same way. If you don't want to share it with the world at large, you can write it and keep it a secret. Record it, play it to yourself when no one else is at home. No one is going to "steal it" from you. However, you want other people to listen don't you? You want to make money off of it? Well, once they listen, it becomes part of their culture. They might get it stuck in their heads. They might be whistling it while they work. They might like to sing along with it when they hear it on the radio. They'll reference the lyrics when they think they would bring something to the conversation. The music is now theirs. It's part of them. By letting them hear it, you gave it to them.
Any rights you have to prevent them from singing it in public (like Happy Birthday in restaurants), or to otherwise copy it, is purely artificial. Nothing is being taken from you. You still have the guitar you used to compose the music (unless you sold it), you still have the original recordings (unless you threw them away), you can still play them yourself. The only reason people can copy your song is because you let them have it in the first place. So choose. Keep your song secret and profit from it, or give it to the community.
You want both? Well, if you're a good musician, society wants to encourage you to write more songs. So we'll give you the artificial right to control what is now our song for a set number of years. They should be small enough that you can't really live off of that one song for the rest of your life. After all, that defeats the purpose of encouraging you to write more songs, doesn't it?
Do you want to profit from the song after the copyright has expired? Feel free. Society has this strange "celebrity complex." If you perform the song in public, the people who like the song will pay to be near you, to see you there, next to them, singing it live. Society has taken nothing from you. You definitely gave something to society. Stop trying to steal it back from us, while at the same time keeping our money.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Copyright law is there explicitly because the legal system recognize that there is no such thing as "intellectual property". I.e. copyright law is needed because "intellectual property" isn't property, and as a result, copying an idea or expression of that idea isn't theft.
Yes, I know the RIAA wants you to think it is, but it isn't. Copying without permission is copyright infringement, not theft.
The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time) limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.
Copyright is in any case a "recent" legal construction - it's original intent was to enrich people friendly to the British Crown by handing out artificial monopolies, and now we see corporations trying to move copyright back to that from it's more recent goal of promoting the arts and sciences.
I'd also like to point out that most great art through history was made without any form of copyright protection at all. Artists still created works, and still made a living, in much the same way as all but a tiny minority of the most successfull make most of their money now: By selling originals to wealthy patrons or by performing.
Do they really want us to believe that today's musicians will record more music if they get 95 years of copyright? Is there a musician (who doesn't write his own songs -- compositions get life ) for whom the deciding factor on recording a song is the infinitesimal chance that her song will be commercially viable after 50 years?
The risk that a musician is so dispirited by only getting 50 years of copyright on the recordings of her work is wholly theoretical. No one can point to such a musician. That musician, btw, isn't tomorrow's artist -- it's all recording artists since the term of phonogram monopoly was set at 50 years. Every song recorded for for the 20th century was produced with that incentive (or less).
However, there are two very real, non-theoretical groups of musicians for whom the existing term of 50 years is too long:
* Samplers and remixers. This is a non-theoretical, concrete and visible group of working musicians. They are unable to incorporate other works from culture into theirs without paying -- and not just paying, either. It's nearly impossible for an artist outside of the label system to clear samples from the labels' catalogues. That's because the labels give preferential treatement to one another in a mutually assured destruction dynamic (if EMI doesn't license its samples to Sony, then Sony can refuse to license to EMI). The effect of this for samplers and remixers in the UK is that they have to either:
1. Be criminals
2. Not make art
3. Sign up for the deal the labels offer, assign copyright in their works to the labels, and take the crummy "recoup"-based payment scheme the labels offer.
Talk about creating a buyer's market for what musicians have to sell!
* The other group of musicians harmed by the overlong term is those whose work is forgotten -- orphaned by society. In these cases, either the label still holds the copyright but won't reissue the musician's work (Universal's Decca warehouse in London holds the entire, unreleased catalogue of roots music, back to steel cylinders, and Universal hasn't even catalogued that collection, let alone made plans to re-release it); or no one knows who hold the copyright, because the deal was done so long ago.
At a recent Future of Music conference, Alanis Morrisette's attorney said that in his research, over 80% of all music recorded is not in the stream of commerce. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court fount that *ninety eight percent* of all copyrighted works are "orphans".
For these musicians, alive or dead, there is a fate worse than penury: obscurity. Their works -- the art they cherished and midwifed -- have been eliminated from the historical record. We have piled their recordings up in a huge bonfire and burned them in slow motion.
Finally, there's another non-hypothetical, real, visible group of artists for whom term extension is directly harmful: composers.
People who write songs get a much longer term of copyright than those who perform them. When Elvis goes into the public domain and his records are re-issued, the black songwriters whose work he performed *still* get paid by the reissuers. Right now, these composers are hostage to Elvis's label: if they don't re-release, the composers don't get a cheque. But the elimination of the majors from the equation makes it possible for a much more diverse population of entrepreneurs to arrange for such a re-release.
It's pure sophistry to wring your hands about some theoretical economic situation that will arise for musicians in 2056 when their present-day copyrights expire; that would be fine if there weren't great groups of concrete, present-day musicians crying out to have this happen.
The holders of today's 50 year copyrights fall into three groups:
* Holders of commercially non-viable copyrights (almost all of them fall into this category) -- this group receives direct harm from term extension
* Giant corporations that non-negotiably forced their artists to assign all copyright t
I cannot.
And since I cannot, I can't make the table in the first place, because I need to make money so I can feed myself and rent my flat and buy clothes.
That, sir, is neither my nor society at large's fucking problem. How do you get paid for something that seems inherently unprofitable? Well, either you find a way to make money off it, or you do something lese for money. The world does not automatically owe you something just because you worked hard at some arbitrary task.
Now, as it happens, we as a society decided a long time ago that all this writing, music, and such are a great boon for the cultural commons. In order to encourage the expansion of our common culture, we decided to add a little incentive to the process. We decided to allow the creator, for a limited time, to abridge the rights of others to freely share via copying the work, thereby giving him the means to make a little cash off the monopoly. This scheme has been twisted by publishers over the years via legislation and prpaganda into a de jure "ownership" of the work, and fools like you have bought into it, actually believing that artifacts of our common culture (music, literature, etc) can somehow belong to anyone.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And the rights granted under copyright law are not "property". Without the time limited monopoly granted by copyright law as a limitation of free speech you wouldn't have any property-like rights to prevent copying at all.
It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.
Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.
Ethics is entirely subjective. Using it as an argument as to what belongs to whom only works when you talk to someone who agrees with you about what is ethical or not.
Legally on the other hand, it clearly is NOT property. Historically as well, it has never been considered property by society at large. On the contrary, the history of copyright shows very clearly that it has been assumed by most people that there was no natural property right to prevent copying, and that there were no ethical issues with doing so.
Indeed, patents arose from the same idea - that there is no inherent right to prevent copies, even of a physical object - so in addition to copyright, government also granted a temporary monopoly to give an economic incentive to publicize the internals of machines that would otherwise be hard to copy, so that once the monopoly expired, it would be easier to copy. Hence we have patents.
A similar protection was granted for trademarks. That is perhaps the one case where an ethical consideration comes in. Trademarks have two justifications: 1) That it would be unfair for someone to take advantage of the work someone else has put in to make a brand well known, 2) That it would cause consumer confusion, possibly leading consumers to pick inferior products if people could use others trademarks at will. Even in this case, property rights were only part of the consideration, and the original ethical aspects relates as much to the consumer protection issue as to protecting the trademark holder.
Further, your argument that something is ethically the creator's property just because "he invested the time and money to make it" is quite obviously flawed. No right arises just because one has spent time and money on something: If I spend time and money to make public land look prettier, the land doesn't suddenly become mine, and I get no other special rights to it. In fact, if I spend time and money to do just about anything, it only gives me ownership within the confines of a very restricted set of circumstances:
The idea that using your time and money to create something somehow automatically makes it yours certainly has no basis in the legal or ethical frameworks most of us live under and by. It might do in your ethical framework, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.
If anything, contrary to your view, the ethics of restrict
I think they should just charge "Property Tax" on "Intellectual Property". Then when you do your taxes, you have a choice as to how much you are going to value your "Property" at. If you value it at $100, then when you sue someone, you can only sue for $100 in damages. If you value it at $300,000,000, then you have to pay taxes on $300,000,000. Of course at any time you should be able to abdicate rights to the "Property", and then you would no longer have to pay taxes on it.
You were using circular logic. Everything you mentioned -- novel, music, software -- revolves around copyright. What happens if you have a job like plumber, carpenter, electrician, mechanic, accountant, doctor, lawyer, nurse, cop, firefighter, etc.?
The problem isn't with you making money on a creation after you stopped, it is sitting on your ass and making money for almost a CENTURY after you stopped. Or making money after you're dead.
Copyright has ONE purpose, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. If you are dead, you aren't promoting the progress of science or useful arts -- you're dead.
LIMITED time was meant as a prod, meaning that after a SHORT period whatever you created would belong to everyone and you could then create something new. If you live off your past successes for you entire life, you are not promoting the progress of science and useful arts, thus not deserving of a government enforced monopoly.
Don't like it? Create something new.
As far as passing more than liquid cash assets to your kids, that is a great idea. May I suggest real estate, vehicles, stocks, bonds, investments, boats, airplanes and most importantly, a solid work ethic that doesn't involve the idea of living off the imagination of a long dead relative.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I've seen a lot of comments arguing about "intellectual property" and I just want to straighten something out right now: there is no such thing as "intellectual property". Ideas and property are nothing alike; ideas can be copied infinitely at no cost. Property cannot be copied infinitely at no cost. No one can own an idea.
The state (of the people, by the people and for the people) may temporarily grant someone exclusive _rights_ to the copying or use of an idea, but this is nothing like property rights. Property rights are in place because multiple people can't use a piece of property at the same time. Copyrights (and patents) are in place to encourage the advancement of new and useful ideas and art (go ahead, look it up, it's in the constitution).
Don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer about so-called "intellectual property". The first thing she will do is ask you "are you talking about copyrights, patents or trademarks?". You'll notice that none of those has anything to do with property. Don't use the phrase "intellectual property"; it's deceitful language used by manipulative people to try to get you into the frame of mind of treating ideas as property.
Nathan's blog
You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.
(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)
If you'd like an example of how current culture always makes use of the past, and how that past has been taken out of the hands of creators, there's an excellent presentation by Lawrence Lessig.
If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)
If you'd like anecdotes, you can start with Save The Music's overview, then read anecdotes from researchers who had to change or abandon projects because there was no way to clear rights for orphan works, archivists and documentarians who can't use materials from companies that went out of business many years ago, or old folks who can't get their wedding photographs repaired if their kid tears them, or the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America--hardly a bunch of Napster-licking college students--collecting anecdotes where the early pulp heritage of SF can't be reproduced or even preserved because early magazines folded, and no one knows who owns the copyright.
An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.
So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)
(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca