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
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!
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 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."
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
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.
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
Email him. Linky
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 performance copyright, which is 50 years from date of publishing, and is separate
The thing that gauls me is that the audio books that I purchased where the actual book is out of copyright (for example Great Expectations), but the recording of the book is not. However when I purchased the book I had an expectation that during my lifetime the copyright in the recording would expire, and I would be free to do whatever I wanted with the audiobook. This is a factor when I purchase audiobooks.
A change to the law to extend that copyright, is retrospectively changing the value of the purchase to me. That is morally wrong.
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.
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
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
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.