Slashdot Mirror
20-Year Copyright Extensions Coming To Europe
unlametheweak points out a story at Ars Technica which begins:
"After a UK government-led commission said that the current 50-year term for musical copyrights was fine, and the government last year publicly agreed that there was no need to extend the term, culture minister Andy Burnham yesterday made the logical follow-up announcement that yes, the government would now push for a 20-year extension on copyright. Turns out, it's the moral thing to do. Actually, by framing the issue as a 'moral case,' Burnham gets to sidestep the entire issue of logic. Critics have already begun to charge that he is ignoring actual evidence and the well-regarded conclusions of the Gowers Report (PDF), not to mention previous government policy. But when the issue becomes a moral one and the livelihood of aging performers is at stake, it's suddenly easier to avoid cost/benefit analysis."
Does Europe have their own version of Steamboat Willy?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Anything that means that Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney don't have to release more christmas songs to get money should be welcomed.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
* The majority of performers could gain as little as 50 cents per year from sales related to the proposed extension, set against as much as â4m going to each major record label
I own stock in music labels you insenstive clod. Musicians get all the hotties, even when they're poor! We fat cats are, well fat and ugly, we need the money to get laid! Geeze!
* The Directive threatens to actually decrease the amount performers receive in airplay royalties in their lifetime, as payments are transferred from artists at the beginning of their careers to the estates of dead performers
Keith Richards has to make a living while he's still animate.
* The proposal to set up a fund for session musicians (who otherwise would not benefit from the term extension at all, because of the contracts they originally signed with record labels) is low on detail. Thereâ(TM)s a real risk that the small amount record labels are compelled to set aside for this fund will be swallowed by admin costs before it gets to musicians.
Secretaries have to support the illegitimate children that were fathered by the musicians they slept with when they were young and pretty. Think of the children this law would save! Just, think of the children!
See, there is a moral reason for this law!
How sad. I wonder why I bothered spending the time to put a detailed comment into Gowers, if the government was just going to ignore the outcome anyway (and having agreed with it at that!). This is hardly the way to encourage the people to contribute to their "democracy".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Anyone not convinced of the harm excessive copyright does to society should read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. It's truly saddening to see the direction all this stuff is going.
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Governments have been ignoring logic for centuries, if not millennia now (if not longer!). Why should this change in the modern era?
Not only that, but using intangible ideals such as morality or religion to further an illogical goal isn't exactly groundbreaking in the realm of politics either.
Now, when I get news that a government is actually thinking through something logically, then we can start treating it as groundbreaking news.
~EI
...about calling my reps to oppose the wall street bailout.
Hey Andy,
When copyrights become an issue according to the European Court of Human Rights (or similar authorities), like they did for the UK DNA database, then you can claim it's a "moral case."
By the way, when is the government you represent going to get rid of that database? It's a "moral case" after all.
For all the good it might do:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NoTermExtension/
What is happening with the world? Seriously..?
It seems the politicians are just having a nervous BREAKDOWN all over the place. If it's not about increasing surveillance, it's fighting terrorism, increasing copyright timespan and frankly, just about anything that's NOT BENEFICIAL OF CITIZENS AT ALL.
I'm so tired of all this. I was seriously thinking of giving up the fighting but instead I joined the Pirate Party (Sweden). They push their core ideas such as integrity, freedom of expression and freedom to fileshare copyrighted works (that one I don't care that much about).
I absolutely have lost interest of the politics concerning e.g. healthcare, economics, welfare, defense, infrastructure and what have you. I'm 100% focused on the integrity issues - because, if we have no private life, what the fuck do we have exactly?
Each and every one party in Sweden is pushing their agenda on the surveillance except for the Pirate Party which is non-negotiably against. Parties traditionally very concerned with integrity issues have been completely HIJACKED and are now pro-surveillance. Just the past year Sweden is about to:
1) Let the state wiretap the entire country (with un-supportable claims that this will only be done to connections crossing the border)
2) Give copyright-holders the privilege to ask an ISP for the identity behind an IP-address (what the FUCK? Swedish RIIA)
3) Implement the EU directive to store traffic data (SMS, MMS, E-mail, web, telephone, cellphone) at the very least 6 months. By the way, this includes position data - now everyone carrying a cellphone can be tracked (at least 6 months back - do you remember where you were 6 months back??). Brilliant! Swedish politicians wants to go further than this and require 1-2 years of storage.
I've had it. The politicians are so fucking ignorant that I just want to vomit. This state is in a state of hijack and it's fucking time to revolt. The Pirate Party is gaining voters.
Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.
This whole surveillance thing makes me queasy. I cannot for the life of me begin to understand the politicians reasoning for fucking up this (past) democracy like this. :-((
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
The Conservatives recently reiterated their commitment to a similar policy, unfortunately, so we're basically screwed.
For the record, if you look at the submissions to the Gowers Review by members of the public (of which there were many, which are available on-line from the government's Gowers Review web site) you find that despite the huge scope of the review, many of the replies concentrated on this issue, sometimes only this issue — and I didn't see a single one in favour of copyright term extension.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How about a royalties cap. Copyright lasts 25 years or till royalties reach $x that way you protect the earning power of smaller artists while protecting fair use of consumers. But this isn't really about poor performers or consumers is it?
In other news, TPB breaks more records and piracy continues to increase. It seems the general public doesn't pay attention to this copyright BS, but they sure do know the latest popular bittorrent website! :)
I'm not going to get into details, but I'm sure every single one of you reading this can think of a time where folks losing an argument (or folks who ended up with some more campaign donations) realized that this issue they are dealing with is a moral issue that must be addressed.
Advantages of doing it: Distribution companies that own old stuff get more money. Disadvantages of doing it: People that created and sold stuff get ripped off. (I.E. You were a young musician that sold rights to a piece to a company for 50 years. You now have to pay that company to perform it. You were looking forward to the time when you could legally perform it again without paying someone else but now are SCREWED.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If we don't extend copyright, what incentive will dead authors have to create?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
What other industry do you get paid for for writing something, then sitting on your backside for the next 70 years watching the money come in? I wish I had such an employer willing to throw money at me for 70 years for writing code I wrote in my 20's.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
If we don't extend copyright, what incentive will dead authors have to create?
If we don't cough up, they are going to crawl out of their graves, and look for alternative income sources.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Isn't 50 years hilariously high already? They are now extending it to 70? What the heck?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Nobody gives a damn. Really. We don't care. Not one bit. We don't care about the current limit, we won't care about the new one. Collect your campaign contributions, and fuck off downstairs to one of your many heavily subsidised pubs where you can light up your fags in peace, while passing laws against those same things for the rest of us. We. Just. Don't. Care.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My first thought when reading this was:
Governments would do well to realize that the power of their laws ultimately depends on people's willingness to follow them. If the law stands in the way of having information and works of art, only lawbreakers will have said information and works of art. But, as we've seen, tightening copyright doesn't actually stop dissemination of copyrighted works much. It does create more lawbreakers on a massive scale.
Lawsuits have been brought, people arrested in the middle of the night, and little children accused of felonies, and what is the result? More dissent and more organized resistance. People getting speeding tickets may not be enough to mobilize the masses, but criminal charges being brought against their daughters for seemingly innocuous activities will get a lot of soccer moms thinking. And there are a lot of soccer moms. A lot of people will be wondering if the government is acting in their best interests when faced with the lawsuits. And once they start wondering that about copyrights, the cat is out of the bag.
The bright side of this story is that it might finally wake up the masses and give politicians who act in the public interest a better chance.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If it's all about ensuring aging performers (who can no longer physically perform) continue to make money, that's fine.
Just set a required minimum royalty rate of 50% on all copyrighted works more than 50 years old.
That shouldn't be a problem, right? I mean, this is being done for the performers, isn't it?
I was thinking that a solution to the problem of eternal copyrights that even a government could get behind despite the pushing of certain industries would have to be one that provided significant income to the government. What if the government allowed a, say, 20 year copyright basically for free (maybe reduced to 10 for something like software, since the real value plummets so much faster) -- just a nominal filing fee. Then to extend it another 10 years, put in a reasonably significant fee, say $25,000 (or tiered, with 100,000 for movies, 25,000 for music, ...). However each further extension doubles the fee. Thus even the richest company can't keep things out of the public domain indefinitely, but they would be able to protect works that are still realistically earning them money.
Of course, that means that things that go quickly into public domain are the dogs, but everything eventually gets there.
I work in software and my company is about to be RIF'd by 15%.
so, not only do I _NOT_ get any royalties from the lines of code I wrote, but I get my job outsourced and then I get fired.
cobra runs out and if I can't afford healthcare, I could go broke and be homeless.
is society taking care of ME at all?
hardly!
why the fuck should society take care of aging musicians, then?
it aint right and we all know it.
I put as much sweat and talent into my code as any damned musician does, these days. why do THEY have lobbies to grant them legal powers to harass customers and sue them but us programmers can't do squat?
it aint right. kids today see that and so they rebel. more power to you, kids; the future lies with you and not the old guys..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The claim that support for aging musicians is a moral issue is ridiculous. Musicians are no different from people in any other occupation. Everyone works for a certain period of time, then ceases to work and has to rely on some combination of savings and investments made when they were working, whether by themselves or on their behalf by the government or some other source of pensions. When they were performing or writing the musicians had no expectation that their copyrights would last longer than they currently do, nor any certainty as to whether anyone would be interested in their work, so it isn't as if they are being discriminated against or a contract has been broken.
When copyrights become an issue according to the European Court of Human Rights (or similar authorities), like they did for the UK DNA database [slashdot.org], then you can claim it's a "moral case."
FYI: From the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Article 15, Number 1: "The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone... To benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author."
There is a lot of debate over the meaning of Article 15, but many pro-IP people take it to mean that copyrights are a human right.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
This is a move to synchronize the copyright length across Europe. EU members (and US) have a term of authors' life +70 years, whereas UK has a term Life +50 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_length
Riots in the streets and utter mayhem can result from too much "control". The EU is already straining and fraying at the edges as enough anti-globalist, anarchist, and nationalist pressures are attempted to be pushed aside foo far and too fast.
Those who attempt to control everything often end up controlling nothing at all.
So glad to hear you say that, Mr. Burnham. I have a few letters here for you. Here's the royalty bill from the farmer who grew the corn that you consumed on March 17, 1983 (after all, he created something of real value to you -- without it and other food like it, you would have starved.) Here's the bill from the guy you hired to paint your house on June 23, 1996. The other seventy-three bags of bills like them are waiting just outside your front door -- your prompt payment will be appreciated.
Also good because the longer the industry spends fighting the inevitable, the harder they will fall.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Copyright unfortunately means more for the big business, than the artists. I want to see a clear calculation as to how many people actually get to live long enough to loose their copyright under current system, and how much money we are talking about for these people. I would also like to know their living status at the time they reach the +50 years age from the time the work got copyrighted. I don't believe there are that many 5 year olds who copyrighted their works get any meaningful compensation here at age 55. The solution of course is Retirement planning which you have 50 years to prepare for from the day you did work and did do something.
The other side of course is that an artist that would have had any meaningful income from copyright 50 years later should be considered a national hero and obtain an honor pension according to that - that only apply in the event other income does not exceed a certain level. Copyright is not meant for retirement planning.
If it's an issue of harmonisation, then why not just harmonise everyone to the life + 100 years term of copyright under Mexican law?
This is the thing that really annoys me. The statement from Burnham is quite open that his priority is supporting the artists no matter what. When do the other 60 million of the population get their go?
The artists (or more precisely their labels) can -- and probably do -- provide kickbacks to the politicians, either directly or as campaign donations while the ordinary citizens provide "only" votes... and vote usually like sheep (if it were not so, the Pirate Parties would flourish all over the world). From a politician's point of view, acting as they do is a pretty rational way of earning their 30 pieces of silver.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
In another 5-10 years, all new works will be protected by encryption. The DMCA makes it illegal to bypass any copyright protection measures, and does not state that it's ok to bypass such measures after 50, 70 or 100 years. Therefore, after 100 years it will still be illegal to bypass the measure, regardless of whether the copyright itself has expired.
The poor artist is not the issue here, or the reason for extending the period. Before anyone will publish your work, most authors are required to sign over their copyright to the publisher. All of these rights are owned by the publishers, not the artists. It's that business which is being protected by laws such as DMCA.
In answer to a previous poster/programmer about him not getting paid royalties for his code, he got paid a salary in return for the copyright to the code. The code and copyright to it does not belong to him, but to the company he worked for. This is in fact similar to the case of the modern artist/publisher relationship.
Copyright, as it used to be 50 years ago when authors or artists retained ownership, hardly exists anymore.
This 'extension' is a red herring. If they made the period only 5 years after the death of an artist instead of 70 years, the DMCA would still protect the copyrighted work in perpetuity. Publishers would still be able to sell these works and be protected from other people selling the same work, as they would be held liable for breach of the DMCA, not copyright!
We should be more concerned about the imposed & implied loss of fair use rights, such as the ability to freely use copyrighted works in education, research etc.
In the next decade, a number of extremely profitable back catalogues of 1960s UK music groups would be going out of copyright without an extension: at least the early works of the Beatles, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Kinks, The Who, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Is their any good reason for copyrights to be transferable? Other than that it's a great way for record companies to extort artists and the public and get fucking rich and powerful?
I think the first copyright reform should be that copyright be made non-transferable.
Then, we should get rid of copyrights and patents altogether, because ideas, information, in any medium, is inherently copyable and restricting peoples right to do so is nonsensical and unenforceable.
How should artists make money? Some other way. But not this way. Its just wrong.
assignment != equality != identity
I realise you're being sarcastic with respect to publishing companies getting all the benefits anyway (at least I think you are), but I still don't think copyright terms should be extended under any circumstances.
I've already paid those performers for their work by giving them the copyright term they've already had. If their work was any good, they've already had all that time to make money from it. The only reason I offered to do this (through my government) was so there would be an incentive for them to create it, and now it's created. Why on earth should copyright be extended on existing works?
If artists can't afford to live on the existing copyright monopolies offered by society, they should find another source of income. If society decides that the quality or quantity of new creative works isn't good enough in a way that extending copyright terms might help, then perhaps governments should consider extending copyright.
Moreover I can think of a couple times morality was used to justify a completely unmoral action. i.e. certain world powers aggressively invading certain third world countries. Obviously morality something that is repeatedly exploited by those in power. If only the general public wasn't so oblivious *sigh*
Email him. Linky
Might be different in other countries, but here authors have the right to their works for their entire life, plus 70 years after their death (well, their heirs do...).
So I guess this piece is about the exploitation rights which start to tick the moment a work is sold for exploitation to a company.
So saying this is to protect creators is spurious, at best.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As I understand it, copyright in UK is now AUTHOR'S LIFE + 50 years. They'll extend it to AUTHOR'S LIFE + 70 years. What does this have to do with aging musicians? I don't think a person dead for the last 70 years needs money, unless we're really talking about welfare payments for children of famous artists.
By the way, this entire "author's life" thing in copyright is downright idiotic - to determine whether a given work is copyrighted or not I have to find out when did the authors die, and this information isn't easily accessible. It would be much easier if it was e.g. simple 50 years from publication - this information is usually contained in the work itself.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Conventional copyrights for printed works (c)... expire according to a "death plus" rule. In the UK, they used to expire at "death plus fifty years", and were then extended to "death plus seventy years" to harmonise with the US and with some other parts of the EU. For those cases, "twenty-year extensions" came to Europe a while back.
Online sources tend to give the impression that musical scores and songwriting are included in the "literary" rule, and I don't have any reason to believe that that's wrong. Anyhows I haven't seen anyone in the UK complaining about songwriting copyright terms.
What HAS been discussed in the UK for the last few years, amidst talk of things being unfair, is the separate recording copyrights issue (p) ...
Unlike conventional copyrights, recording copyrights in the UK are (AFIK) currently set to a simple fifty years from the date of the recording.
This means that if you were a recording artist in the 1960's, and you didn't write your own songs, or if you were a member of a band, and your name wasn't listed as a songwriter on the tracks you played on, then your payments for those tracks being played or sold are about to stop dead.
So David Bowie's going to be fine, and the members of the the Kinks, the Who, the Rolling Stones etc who have songwriting credits are going to be fine. All the songs stay in copyright.
But the other band members who didn't get their names listed as co-writers are going to find their performance payments stopping. The people who're most pissed off are likely to be the band members who contributed a significant part of classic tracks - a key guitar solo or bassline intro, f'rinstance - but were never listed as songwriters. Up until now, they've been getting the performance payments. On expiry, they're no longer going to own the rights to their voices or to their playing on those recordings.
This is just silly. When I first read the title, it looked like they were moving from a 50 year copyright to a 20 year one. Instead, they are moving to a 70 year one. This is really stupid. It should be a maximum of 20 years (for anything cultural), and I'm willing to swallow a 7 year (absolute maximum) on anything technical. Technical innovation can come from an entire generation, and allowing that generation to participate in improvements within should be allowed. 20 years on copyright because no one wants to listen to their parents crappy music. Where I work, I make parts. There are also blueprints that I create. Is it reasonable for me to be paid for 50 or 70 years for a few hours work? Serious? It sounds like so much welfare. Overcompensation must be overcome.
Of course, it's impossible to reconcile that with freedom of speech (which encompasses the verbatim repetition of others' speech) so perhaps it's not really a human right after all. Certainly it's no natural right, like free speech is. And it's a negative right (i.e. copyrights aren't a right to do anything -- that's free speech -- but instead is a right to prohibit other people from doing things), which makes it even more dubious to claim it's a human right.
Frankly, while I have no problem with the idea of copyright as a utilitarian system meant to benefit the public, or with copyright systems that actually accomplish that, the notion that it's a human right is obvious bullshit.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yep. I believe the technical word for this is "religion".
Please read and attempt to understand:
IT'S ABOUT RIGHTS TO PAYMENTS FOR THE USE OF EXISTING RECORDINGS.
Recordings. Not songwriter copyrights.
So your example is crap. The case simply doesn't apply to it. If your hypothetical struggling musician accidentally sold the rights to their hit song fifty years ago, and was hoping that the song would now go public domain, and is against this extension for the reasons that you gave, then the musician is an idiot, because,
Eric Baird
Here is my question, It does not make sense to me. The person that takes out you're trash gets compensated once for the work he has done. The person working in the supermarket get minimum wage has to pitch up every day but still only gets compensated once for their work. They have to setup a pension and special provision for old age. Why not artists. What makes an artist work more valuable than mine ? They already get compensated millions of times for their work. Hello if you spend say 10% of you're 20 million dollar income for a pension you will never in you're life ever again need money. Yes by all means compensate the artist for his perfomance. By all means compensate him for the work he does but why compensate him for 20 years for about a weeks worth of work (depending on the song) that is mostly about taste and luck anyway.
In other news, the FSF has just released an educational game entitled "World of Freedom", a new MMORPG, in which you play the bearded katana warrior who must raid the same graveyard filled with zombie lobbyists, zombie politicians and chief zombie executives over and over again.
Beware of the zombies' most potent attack: the copyright extension! Our experimentation shows the three most effective counters to be:
Available freely for $60 at all good game shops. Get your copy today!
the livelihood of aging performers is at stake
Oh really ? And we care because ____ ?
It's funny, if I decide to not work for the rest of my life, and spend what little savings I had on hookers, booze and coke, does this mean the government will cover for me when I'm old, rotten and broke ?
Many artists make it big, then crash even worse than they were before the fame. I don't feel guilty for their lack of foresight. A pathetic fuck-up with an album cover is still just a pathetic fuck-up.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In mainstream copyright law, they made a comparison between the work required to be, say, a writer, and the work required to set up a small business that would provide for yourself and your family, and they decided that someone who decides to produce creative work shouldn't be penalised compared to someone who spends a similar amount of effort and risk setting up in a more conventional business. That's where the "death plus fifty years" rule came from, it was based on how long the family of someone who set up a successful small family business could expect to have income from it, at the time that the laws were drafted.
Now we can argue about the exact amount of time, and whether the original evaluation criteria are as meaningful in a society that now provides a social security safety net, but that was the basic founding principle of UK copyright law - that a man should have the right to profit by his own work, and prevent his competitors from unfairly exploiting it, and that the legal protection should be comparable to that enjoyed by other risk-taking businesses.
The additional wrinkle that we have here is that in the case of professional performers, there's a legal anomaly that prevents them from having the same protection for recordings of their work that authors have for their books (and songs, etc).
Currently, if you produce the world's finest recording of "Amazing Grace" when you're twenty, then when you're seventy and in a nursing home, CocaCola can decide to use it their adverts without crediting you or paying you a penny, or asking your permission. That doesn't seem right, and it doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the law.
I'll agree with most people posting here that conventional copyrights are too long and that there's a lot of stupid patent law that should be rolled back ... "D+70" really isn't supportable for source content IMO. But I also don't think that it's supportable to say that fifty years after you create something on film or tape, everyone else has a right to make money out of your voice or your image, even if you're still alive, without you having any say in the matter or receiving any money.
I understand the argument that society is richer if we relax the copyright laws on the use of songs (because this results in more interpretations and variations on those songs, producing more cultural diversity), but the same argument can't be used so well on the relaxation of rights on performances. So it seems perverse that an artist's right to benefit from recordings of their performances is weaker than their right to benefit from written records. Currently if you have a recording of a great operatic performance, the protection for that recording is less than the protection given to the printed theatre programme. It's not obvious why audio recordings should be regarded as artistically inferior to text.
Eric Baird
You could try patenting it, but the codes that you'd have been cracking would be "prior art", and if anything, your code might be classified as an attempt to circumvent a protection system ... then again, the military context would probably give you an exemption from prosecution, and in any case, German intellectual property rights tended to get "nixed" in the US and UK after the war.
There might be a potential loophole, though in that although the Allied forces wiped Nazi Germany's IP rights, I'm not sure whether this was also done within Germany itself, so the people who wrote EU IP law might have accidentally left open the possibility that since all states signing up to the international IP laws have to regard anything copyrighted in any member state as automatically also being copyright in all the others ... that the old wiped Nazi copyrights might be inadvertently back in effect. Dunno.
And since copyrights on work produced to order for institutions doesn't tend to expire in the same way as work produced by individuals, your hypothetical WW2 code might actually be owned by ... hm. That could be embarrassing.
Eventually, someone's going to launch a test case for something like this, and its going to be a real car crash.
Eric Baird
then artists would be granted the right to negotiate the terms of sale of rights regarding their recordings during the 20 year extension period. When they sold their rights in the 60's their negotiating position was based on the value of their rights during the copyright period that existed at the time. This extension is for the benefit of the record companies that bought those rights in the 60's, not the artists.
Then we should stop paying copyright fees to dead artists... like john lennon, jim morris, and others.
Especially those two ladies that wrote "Happy Birthday, To You."
Perhaps we should way the moral benefits to society of having stories like Snow White available for various other artists to create new stories from (too numerous to count) instead of locking down stories and characters forever (like Micky Mouse).
The situation in music is even more ludicrous. Locking down a particular sequence of 12 notes forever is the death of music long term.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Write a law that says that if an artist/group of artists doesn't get at least 10% of the gross revenue after a period of 5 years, then the copyright returns them. That will make sure that artitsts get rewarded. If the companies don't comply any copyright they own is returned to the original artist/artist. Artists themselves will not need the ridiculous long copyright terms.
Also, let's add a thing to copyright law that if an artist infringes on the copyright of another artist, he owes them half his royalties. That will make sure they don't want terms longer than reasonable.
Bert
Why is it that the recording rights must be increased and not that other rights not reduced?
"It would be a reduction on the rights agreed at the time" doesn't wash: this extension is a reduction in EVERYONE'S rights apart from the owner of the right being extended.
Turn it about and it's a reduction in a few people's rights and an increase in almost the entire world's rights.
"It's in the Berne Convention" doesn't either for two reasons:
1) recording rights aren't.
2) So is the right to use for personal use and if a copy is needed, this is not a copyright controlled action. Yet the EULA gains its power SOLELY due to having to make a copy to install. That's not being put in place in the UK either.
Here's an example to highlight the problem
Here in London UK the vast majority of muggings are committed by black people. Nothing wrong in pointing that out so far as I am concerned. But you would be going a whole lot further if you thought it reasonable to make the unqualified statement that "black people are muggers", solely because there is 'truth' in that generalisation.
The problem is that despite the huge disparity in representation within the mugger community... the vast majority of black people aren't muggers. By generalising you are casually damning the innocent, and stirring up tension in the process.
Someone more famous than me once said that a generalisation reveals nothing but the prejudice of its author. They were right.
When you buy a car and don't have all the money at once, you get a loan and you pay it off in small amounts at regularly scheduled intervals. WHEN you buy the car, the number of intervals and the amount of money that you are spending for the car is fixed. You and the seller agree on a price. That price is the number of car payments that you are going to make. When you have finished making all those payments, you own the car.
If, right before your last scheduled payment, the seller says that you must now make ANOTHER 20 or 30 payments in order to own the car, then he is stealing your money by breaking the legal sales contract. Which said X number of payments for ownership of the car.
Copyright works the same way. The owner of the copyright gets fixed payments for a fixed number of years for allowing the 'property' to be used. After that period of time, the 'property' passes into the public domain, where no one has to pay the copyright owner for using the 'property'.
By changing the number of years that an item is in copyright, the lawmakers are breaking a legal contract between the public and the copyright owner. They are stealing money from the public and giving it to the (what is supposed to be the former) copyright owner. They are stealing the public domain.
This often happens after the copyright owners give money to the people who are changing the law. They are bribing the lawmakers to get the lawmakers to give public resources (the intellectual property public domain) to them. They, the copyright owners who bribe and the lawmakers who take these bribes, should both be sent to prison.
Parent misses an important information:
The duration of a copyright is 50 years AFTER THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR. This time extension to 70 years cannot be aimed at helping the aging authors, obviously.
You have your band and your music and you've recorded a good-sounding album using ProTools...
Now what?...
Now you contact the internet radio station that podcasts or webcasts music that is similar to yours. You send them your best three minute song. They play on their webcast and include it in their daily--updated downloadable podcast MP3 file of newly arrived music. You song is linked in their data base of downloadable file collections (a 'mix-tape' MP3 file of similar songs by different bands) so when someone likes a song on the podcast file that is similar to yours, they know what file and songs to download from the data base of the Podcaster.
If the downloader likes your song and wants a few more songs by your band, then he/she can download two or three more from the PodCaster's data base. And, the downloader can buy the CD that you recorded from the Podcaster. You get half of the price paid for the CD and the Podcaster gets the other half (for business expenses, etc...).
The material is self-promoting using the interactive characteristics of web. And neither the PodCaster or the band has to have anything to do with the 20th Century media monopolies like the record/media companies or Clear Channel. Your audience is 21st century; your people have no need for record companies or Clear Channel and would be embarrassed to be associated with them.
Oh, this model doesn't encourage the rock-star phenomenon which is a characteristic of 20th-century mass-media centralized-distribution-of-entertainment-product patterns of thinking for both the audiences and the bands.
Those old farts have children too, don't they, or somehow will the copyright end up in the hands of corporations.
Those copyright extensions are not just immoral, they are obscene.
I've already paid those performers for their work by giving them the copyright term they've already had. If their work was any good, they've already had all that time to make money from it. The only reason I offered to do this (through my government) was so there would be an incentive for them to create it, and now it's created. Why on earth should copyright be extended on existing works?
The business model's changed, and its still changing. As we move away from the monolithic record companies running everything, and move towards more fragmented small-scale sales and marketing across the internet and across social networks, there's more emphasis on building large catalogues of work where each work might have comparatively small sales, but where those sales will (hopefully) persist for a long time.
With online electronic sales, records no longer go out of production, and there's not such an obvious cutoff. Instead of records being obvious all-or-nothing hits or misses, we're now into the realm of the "long tail". You can already see this happening in book production, where university publishers with huge back catalogues are moving that inventory to electronic print on demand, with the idea being that even with obscure titles that are decades old, the cumulative effects of marginal sales on lots of titles, over decades, adds up and can generate a significant revenue stream.
So, increasingly, it's about the long tail. And for songwriters, their extremely generous death-plus-seventy protection means that they're sorted. But for the people who actually sing and play on those recordings, a fifty-year cutoff kinda damages the new business model. If their new income plan is longer-term, rather than being based on getting big hits and banking the money and retiring, then the fifty-year cutoff cuts into the "tail" and makes the whole thing rather less worth the risk.
If artists can't afford to live on the existing copyright monopolies offered by society, they should find another source of income. If society decides that the quality or quantity of new creative works isn't good enough in a way that extending copyright terms might help, then perhaps governments should consider extending copyright.
I think that perhaps the reason why recording artists didn't originally get assigned the same protection as everyone else was maybe because in the early C20th, people perhaps didn't see a decades-old recordings as being worth much. Tracks were constantly being rerecorded and re-rerecorded, and older recordings were being dropped. if you were a singer, and there was a particular song that people liked, you might re-record it every ten years of so, and the musicians would get a steady stream of repeat work. There was a lot of "churn" in the system, and if a song was a hit, the version that people would be listening to in five years time wouldn't be the same version they were listening to now.
If you were a sax player, you'd get constant work from all the recordings and rerecordings, and you might reckon that you didn't need a pension plan, because you'd still be playing sax when you were eighty, perhaps even rerecording a lot of the same songs.
But when the big bands and crooners gave way to more individualistic pop music and arrangements, the game changed. Bing Crosby sang "White Christmas" in two or three movies and probably recorded it god knows how many times: The Beatles only recorded the White Album once. Pink Floyd's fans didn't clamour for them to go back into the studio in 1990 and re-record a more "up to date" version of "Dark Side of the Moon", complete with Acid House beats or whaever else had become fashionable since.
We left the age of the Disposable Recording, and entered the age of The Definitive Recording, where a hit song might only ever be released by the original artist, and where people who liked the track increasingly wanted the original, not an updated Cliff Richard cover v
Eric Baird
Copyright itself is only an artificial construct designed to provide an incentive for the initial creation, after all, and it's supposed to provide rights for the rest of society just as much as the creator.
No, that wasn't the original reason why we decided that we needed IP laws.
The problem wasn't that people weren't creating. When Europe started getting technology, people were creating like crazy. They were researching, inventing, writing books and poetry and music like there was no tomorrow. Some folk have trouble understanding this, but creative people will tend to create (given the opportunity) even when there's no profit motive.
That wasn't the problem.
The problem was that a lot of those people weren't then sharing their creations. They had no proper incentive to. The development of the printing press meant that if you wrote a book, and you lent an early manuscript to someone, they could have it spirited across the channel and copied, and a few weeks later you'd hear about a rotten copy of your unfinished book full of typos and unauthorised changes being sold across Europe with your name on (or someone else's). This even happened to Isaac Newton, he lent a copy of something to the monarch, they lent it to a friend, and the damned thing got pirated. After that, Newton never showed any of his stuff to anyone if he could help it, until it was actually in print, and English science suffered as a result.
If you were a composer (and you didn't have an "installed" position), you usually had to make your money from commissions from wealthy patrons who wanted the first public performance of their commissioned work. So what you'd do between times was to write loads and loads of material, so that when the commission came along, you'd pull something out of your trunk, and tweek it, and present it as if you'd just written it from scratch. But you'd have a stock of music that you'd never play to anyone, in case it got "borrowed" before you'd had a chance to use it yourself.
But the thing that motivated people to bring in the new laws wasn't music or literature but technology. People were inventing useful things, but keeping them secret, and this was reckoned to be having a horrible effect on the economy. Suppose that you'd spent ten years developing some magical gadget (say, a steam engine) that would double the productivity of a factory. You might then put the thing into production, in the hope of getting one installed in every factory in the country. That would be good.
But without some form of IP law, what would tend to happen would be that you'd produce and sell one engine, your competitors would get hold of it and strip it apart, and take mouldings, and then they'd sell copies of your engine to the rest of the country, cheaper (because they didn't have your initial R&D costs to make back). So you'd sell a couple of machines and go bust. Maybe some of the copies would be faulty and blow up and kill people, and people would blame you.
Now, by your argument, this wouldn't matter: the machine would have been be invented, and circulated, and society would benefit from its widespread introduction, even if the original inventor ended up penniless and distraught. The greater good would be served.
Snag is, our hypothetical inventor would tend not to be a complete idiot, and would tend to be able to anticipate being ripped off. If not, he'd probably learn pretty quick when he saw the same thing happening to other people. So instead of putting the machine into full production, he might decide that his best chance of making money out of the thing was to team up with a single factory owner, and install machines in that one factory, and make that factory more profitable than all the other machineless competitors, in exchange for a share of the profits. So instead of the earlier country-wide industrial revolution, we'd have a single factory with the machine, with nobody else in the country allowed to look at it or
Eric Baird
Another crazy oversight in the old UK legislation that looks like it's finally going to be fixed is an explicit exemption for archival work and some academic work, and it looks like they're going to be trying to implement some sort of workaround for "orphan works", too. About time.
Some British Libraries currently have archival problems, because they're expected to follow the exact letter of the law, and UK law didn't have an explicit clause to allow the copying of materials for preservation purposes.
US law is supposed to be better in this regard, I think.
Eric Baird