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EU Proposes Retroactive Copyright Extension
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has unveiled a plan to retroactively extend musical copyrights by 45 years, which would make EU musical copyrights last 95 years total. Why? They're worried that musicians won't continue to collect royalties when they retire and this will give them an additional 45 years during which they won't have to produce any new music. Perhaps the only good point is that the retroactive extensions won't take effect for any works which aren't marketed in the first year after the extension. Additionally, while there are many non-musical retirees wishing they could get paid for 95 years after they finish working, McCreevy has not announced any new plans to help them."
Why? Copyright is not some kind of inalienable natural right. It was never even thought up until a couple of hundred years ago. In ancient Rome, when poets' recitations were transcribed, mass-copied by amanuenses, and sold in the marketplace, they never saw a dime in royalties, but it didn't bother them. The only protest we hear from antiquity is when Martial lampooned a talentless aristocrat who was putting his own name on copies of Martial's verse. The American Founding Fathers enshrined copyright in law because they thought it was good for the public, not because people have some absolute right to it. And the concept is very eurocentric, for outside the West, to this very day, copyright makes absolutely no sense. Try explaining to a person in Eastern Europe, Asia, or South America that they are doing something wrong by downloading or copying a CD, and they will look at you like you're a lunatic.
Sure. If someone wants to use a suddenly public-domain Linux 0.1, they can go right ahead. The current version will still be under copyright and available only under the terms of the GPL. Oh, and the Linux name is trademarked, not copyrighted, so Linus and his successors retain that indefinitely.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I don't know how it is where you are, but physical property here in the US is taxed apart from the income you earn from that income.
In other words, even if the land is just sitting there, you still get taxed on it. If you don't pay the tax, the government seizes the property and sells it off to someone who will. Remember, this is completely apart from the income tax applied to any revenue you generate from the property, whether it's from building a house and renting it out, farming it, grazing animals on it, or paving it over and charging people to park on it.
There is no double standard because intellectual "property" isn't real property. There's a lot of impetus to treat it that way because there are a lot of business models built on being able to buy, sell, rent, and re-exploit movies, music, and writing, completely ignoring the fact that:
1. While they like to treat it as real property, real property doesn't expire after a set period of time. Anyone stupid enough to build a business model assuming an asset that is supposed to become free after a set period of time is going to retain value forever deserves to lose their investment.
2. The ability to control the property exclusively is a monopoly (generally a bad thing) granted by the government, as a trade off - we give you a monopoly for the time being, in exchange for you making the property available to the public, and ultimately part of the public domain when the monopoly ends.
3. Traditionally, there was no such thing as "intellectual property". If you saw some something cool and wanted your own copy, you'd copy it or hire someone to make you a copy. If you heard a great story, you'd retell it. This is why guilds formed - to protect "guild secrets", and create a competitive advantage for guild members. The problem is, anyone who was really innovative would more often than not, refuse to share their new process, forcing other people to have to rediscover the secret, a horrible waste of time and energy. To get rid of this waste, promote innovation, and enable those innovations to become public so that they're not lost, the idea of patents and copyrights was born.
4. Patents and copyrights are used today to print money, quash innovation by other people, and bribe politicians to extend monopolies (generally a bad thing) indefinitely, at the expense of the public. Because they don't have to pay property tax, they can sit indefinitely on IP and just sue anyone who starts making money on something that does or might infringe on it. You should either get a limited monopoly to exploit your work, or if you want to hold onto it forever, you should be required to pay property taxes on it as a royalty to the public who are guaranteeing your monopoly. Consider all the governmental resources that have been diverted by private parties to enforcing ever longer copyrights in court, and on the streets.
So to answer your question, there's a huge difference between how IP and real property are treated. There is no double standard. The fact that you think there is one is a strong indication of how badly the public has been misled about how copyrights and patents are supposed to work.
Okay Muscians actually do get paid and this isn't about record companies. This is the poor sap playing his ass off.
Read this and this. Thank you.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Poets were funded quite well in Rome. The slaves mass-producing their works were not those of the patron, but of whatever enterprising fellow decided to transcribe recitals, much like the guy responsible for several early Shakespeare editions.
You're joking, right? The B.A. Classics is one of the oldest academic degrees around. A fine arts track at most universities involves at least some study of Roman arts. The Aeneid, the poetry of Catullus and the dramas of Seneca are evidentally assigned often enough to encourage new translations to come on the market every few years.
We obviously are thinking of very different parts of Asia. In China and SE Asia, finding legitimate media for purchase can be a hassle. Everything sold on the street is pirated. Nonetheless, Hong Kong has a flourishing film and music scene because the local industry has adapted to a post-copyright set of affairs.
The Register had this yesterday, but with a different slant on the proceedings.
In summary, this is not about the songs but the performers themselves.See here, here and here
The whole point of copyright is to encourage the creative arts. Retroactively extending copyright creates nothing. We get no new works for it.
The whole point of copyright was to encourage the creative arts. Now it is all about Asia. Asia is a huge emerging market for the EU and the US. Extending intellectual property is a reaction to the new wealth found in that region.
The US and the EU cannot compete with the now-strong manufacturing base of Asia. The only thing we can sell to that region is Mickey Mouse (copyright), Coca Cola (trademark), and Boeing (patents).
Asia does not need the US or the EU to create any of those products. So if they do, we want them to "license the rights" from us.
Happy Birthday is indeed not a folk song, it is a ripoff of Good Morning To You, which was written by the Hill sisters in the 19th century. The Hills then used copyright law to claim ownership of Happy Birthday, and the copyrights are now in fact owned by Time Warner.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
Work is intermittent (Jon Pertwee used to say actors spend 95% of their time unemployed)
Then that means they can simultaneously work other jobs 95% of the time instead of sleeping, sitting on their asses, or partying. Only the most successful richest artists are going to have people still interested in their music decades later. This is pure welfare for the richest musicians, musicians that live in mansions, ride around in limousines, and snort and fuck everything that moves.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr