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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."
I reside in the European Union and listen mainly to recordings of contemporary art music that were produced with the aid of state subsidies, since they probably wouldn't be profitable on their own. Even if the government taxes the sale of the CD, it's still a net loss for them. Governments here have no qualm with offering free music. Their support of the arts is one thing that keeps quality of life constantly high here.
Add to that the fact that most new artists lose all there copyrights to the labels by contract and you'll find the only ones not getting screwed by the extension is the labels. Infact for the most part many artists will lose more money since the labels "own" most of their songs they will have to pay royalties to the labels every time the perform them!!!
In other news, people whose great great grandfathers fenced off land and invested in *property* retain the ownership to it still, despite having died many years ago.
Nobody shows any sign of caring that they can inherit property which they contributed *nothing* towards, and have full expectation of leaving that same property to their children.
yet if that property is intellectual rather than physical, there is huge outcry.
Why the double standard?
because a big chunk of many populations expect to benefit from inheriting daddy's house, whereas the people who benefit from IP are a smaller number, and thus easily attacked.
All earnings from old IP are taxed. All earnings from property are taxed. What is the difference here?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Here's a novel idea: abolish copyright.. We should act now before this gets even more dumb.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The upshot is that shills like McCreevy are trying to keep the artists on board by proposing that they get something which no other professional gets, (if 95 years copyright for a writer, why not 95 years for a patent?) hoping that Ireland will benefit in some way from tax collection. Apple is also strongly represented In Ireland and can presumably afford lobbyists.
The economic downturn and the gradual ending of EU structural funding (supposedly for building railways and roads but actually diverted to building country houses for the rich Irish) is putting a strain on the Irish economy. They need the money
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
but without copyright, the creative commons and GPL wouldn't work, these things rely on copyright law.
personally, have no problem with an automatic 14 year copyright term being applied to any creative endeavor, hell, maybe even throw in a one-time-only 14 year extension for a fee. but after that, everything should enter public domain.
I can't be the 1st person to think of this system...
-I only code in BASIC.-
If there were no copyright of software, RMS would have never needed to create the GPL to begin with. It's well documentation that through the GPL Stallman was only trying to restore the state of affairs that existed before copyright on code became an issue.
Yes, If commercial companies want to use 45 year old technology that was GPL'd why not? Just think, Fortran iv would just be out of copyright now. Next year we can look forward to DEC PDP-8 becoming public domain. See timeline of computing.
Just an addendum: You can use the music to "Happy Birthday" - that is a folk tune, and anonymous' copyrights have expired. (Just be sure to credit the music under the name of that forgotten folk tune.)
All that it copyrighted are the words. All 5 of them:
"Happy birthday to you... dear _________"
How ingenious.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Please explain how "discovering" certain numbers / symbols work well in certain situations is any different to "discovering" certain notes / words work well in certain situations, to the extent that the "artist" is entitled to free-load for the rest of their lives, while the mathematician is not.
Now they (the copyright lobby) want to break that deal by lobbying the gov't to retroactively extend the monopoly by Y years. Now tell me again, why should I respect the deal when the other side doesn't?
... it would give even more power to the European Commission.
They're a bunch of unelected bureaucrats which do not in any way consider the interests of the EU citizens but instead bend over backwards to serve the interests of those corporation which will give them well paid jobs once they've done their time in the European Commission.
(notice how all help-the-industry-f**k-the-consumers proposals of late have come from the commission)
Good thing the Irish brought down the sham attempt at bringing back the EU constitution through the back door that was the Lisbon Treaty.
The funny part is that I'm actual pro-EU and actually feel European. The concept is good, it's just that some EU institutions are degraded and corrupt and need to be eliminated or thoroughly remade.
We need elected legislators instead of these puppets.
But also Mathematics gets designed by mathematicians to "somehow work". And it takes some time until the "works somehow" settles down to a nice, elegant theorem or a small lemma you teach your students.
Look at the different attempts to pinpoint the continuity of the Real Numbers (Dirichlet, Bolzano-Weierstrass, Cauchy...). All those approaches were not discovered, but obviously created to generalize the idea, that infinite fractures are Real Numbers. The discovery lies in the fact that all three approaches are equivalent.
Similarly you could look at the approaches to define computability. How many different definitions for computability are there? 10? 30? But nevertheless all are equivalent and boil down to the same set of functions. Each of them is a creation, and the discovery is just the fact that the newly created version of computability is equivalent to the already known ones.
The only reason I can't use your car or house when you aren't using it is because of artificial laws saying I can't and granting you protection from such actions - whats the difference? I deprive you of something?
Yes, that's the difference. A pretty important one.
Why is that important?
Because if you take my car, I won't be able to use it. I will have been harmed by your actions. Harming people is bad.
On the other hand, if you copy my song/program/movie, I won't have been harmed: I'll still have everything I had before you made that copy. (I might wish you had given me some money for it, but that money was never mine anyway, no matter how hard I was wishing. I might be sad about that, but I won't have suffered any actual loss.)
Surely sharing is a good thing?
Sharing is usually a good thing, but not when someone is harmed in the process. Surely you already knew that?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Well music really is maths then isnt it.
If you add up all the number of timings and all of the different notes... There are only so many different chorus's and melodies that you can come up with. Sure its probably more than the possible number of chess games but hell, you can't copyright an opener in chess now can you? or can you?
Sorry Kasperov, you cant move there, that's the Coke(tm) opener and you haven't paid appropriate royalties. Nope not their either. That's Pepsi's(tm).
The big music companies are always complaining about "stealing" music.
The purpose of copyright was to give a limited monopoly to the creator for a certain time, after which the work was to become public domain.
So by paying the politicians to extend copyright lengths over and over, aren't they using the legal system to steal the public domain music from us?
But their artists! we must protect them! and coddle them!
and pet their long fur and tell them of greener pastures where all the other artists get to romp and play...
Yup. The entire world has gone nuts. I was expecting europe to have some sanity, as some of you are living in houses that were standing when most musicians made their money by playing in the streets, or by selling their copyright to some rich nutjob that collects sonnets.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From a fair use essay I wrote:
Society benefits the most when something that is created is in the public domain, meaning that nobody holds a copyright. Society, as a whole, owns the work. Shakespeare's plays, most of the writings of Mark Twain, and music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach are in the public domain. Everyone is free to create alternate versions, perform them, or even make a movie with them without getting permission or paying royalties.
However, society also recognizes that people might not have any reason to write books, make movies, or sing songs if everyone else can immediately copy their work. Copyright is a carrot offered by society to help promote the creation of new works. When you get down to it, society is saying, "We understand that there must be some reason for you to create. If you create something, then cannot benefit from it, you will not have a reason to create more works. So, to encourage you, here is a limited period of protection so that you might benefit."
Emphasis on the limited.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters