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Music Copyright In EU Extended To 70 Years
rastos1 writes "The European Parliament extended the copyright in the EU for the performers of musical works from 50 to 70 years. The legislation will be reviewed in 3 years. The European Commission will consider extending the scope to audiovisual works too." So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths. Update: 4/26 at 12:15 GMT by SS: Reader rimberg points out that while the copyright extension was passed in the European Parliament, it is now being held up in the Council of Ministers awaiting further debate on the issue.
What artist is going to live long enough for this to even matter? Sounds like another way for companies to wring a few more euros from the public.
... do not allow the transfer of Copyrights to other parties.
I suppose it wouldn't change much... the big music publishers would just place the artists into further eternal debt in order to continue to collect their money.
and that's how people will treat it. It tears down any pretext of respect.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
I did some work years ago helping to build a commercial building. Several in fact..
I want a cut of their profits for the next 100 years!
They're stealing from me!
Copyright laws where intended to promote creativity from artists, but by extending the years they can suck money out of one job they demonstrate they just want more money for less work.
Current social structure won't be capable of maintaining that kind of endless resource redirection. This copyright and intellectual property nonse will have to end someday, and it's not gonna be nice for anyone.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
So some moron can make a completely idiotic post and just add "Go ahead burn my karma" and that suddenly makes it insightful? I mean, read the post without that last sentence. How is "God damn fuck" insightful?
I should just start adding "I know I'll be modded down for this, but . . ." to all my posts and then they'll be modded up to 5, no matter how imbecilic they are.
I'm actually happy that they are extending the copyright of these works. The beauty is that a hundred years from now they will actually laugh at the fools that expect you to pay to watch the crap of the past century.
Disney and others will suddenly find themselves fighting a loosing war against completely unique Movies, Music, Animation and every other forms of art. Instead of realizing that Walt Disney could possible be remembered for a thousand years by providing a seed to future innovation, they will regard him as a greedy twentieth century materialist that offered nothing for people of the twenty-first century and beyond.
The dark ages provided a clean break and the new age of reasoning. It's quite likely that the arrogance of the artists of today will lead to another age of which they have no part.
William D Howell Sr
"Memory is Fleeting, Inspiration Eternal"
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer - like at most 5 years after the death of the performer. This to avoid weird situations where someone dies during recording or soon after and also to make sure that funeral costs may be paid.
As for movies with several actors - the last one will die eventually.
And also make sure that copyright can only be held by a person and not a company or other organization.
And last - no copyright for works that are related to a religion.
The ability to drain money from people for some old creation that already has made the bulk of money is just annoying and disgusting.
OK, it may cause some sick situations where a company can keep someone "alive" for several years just to get their dirty hands on copyright money!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer
Copyright should have no ties to the death of the performer. All works should share equal protection. If a performer wants income for life they should invest their money, set up a pension, etc. and/or continue performing.
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people.
Industry has always had stronger political influence than the people. It's just more obvious when industry actually disagrees with the people.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Seems to me like it's less about the originator of works making lots more money, than preventing anyone but the originator of the works from making any money.
Though the talk about "audiovisual" has me thinking. Are movie scripts/ideas counted as audiovisual, or simply printed works? Cause we all know the movie business loves to redo all movies that have been successful every few decades.
I've reduced the copyright duration I'm willing to observe to 0 years.
How would you feel if your boss decided to do the same with your paycheck? Or are you trying to tell us that your work deserves compensation while the work of others does not?
That seems a little hypocritical to me. Maybe you have no idea how hard it is to learn a song for a performance let alone the effort it requires to write an arrangement of a piece of a completely new song from scratch.
If you only knew how much effort it takes, maybe you would actually respect the rights of others and be willing to pay for performances that you enjoy. If you don't think that something is worth paying for then it should not be worth acquiring unless you are some kind of compulsive hoarder.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Most of us Slashdotters do know how hard it is, how much effort it takes, to produce worthwhile creative content. Software is also under copyright, and there's plenty of us programmers here.
That's precisely why we cringe at laws such as this. It is hard, it does require effort, but it's nowhere near deserving lifetime compensation let alone extend that for 70 years after your death. As far as I'm concerned, the last person ever to deserve lifetime compensation for his work was a german patent officer for what was essentially a bunch of math and, as such, uncopyrightable.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Some performers aren't recognized until they have died - like Franz Kafka.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
... something like 20 years is more realistic. A reduction is what's needed, anything else is a step backward.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Franz Kafka was a writer, not a performer. Franz Kafka was "recognized" during his life. Otherwise, Max Stein wouldn't have bothered translating his work.
Quite the opposite. If her death reverted her works to the public domain, anybody could then publish them, so her publishers would no longer get a juicy slice of her copyright-protected works, as they do now.
What exactly is your point?
There is no obligation to ensure that a works value is recognized within its term of copyright. Again, if you want to profit from your work financially market it while it is under copyright protection. And, again, we shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence. To do so literally robs society of access to works in public domain.
How on earth would extending the copyright help those artists? How would it promote culture for the common good?
If they aren't recognized until after they're dead -- they're still dead and penniless.
How the hell did we ever let copyrights become transferable?
You wanna stop all this shit? Return all copyrights the the actual owners. The music industry would be destroyed overnight and this bullshit would end with it.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
The reason copyright is bad is that it promotes the loss of humanity's works of art. In the last 70 years, there was a world war and plenty of local wars around the world, and now a lot of people have nukes. People regularly blow up buildings, companies go out of business, even whole countries disappear from the map regularly. The only way to ensure that art is preserved for the next 70 years is to copy, copy, copy.
It changes a lot for the company still making tons of money selling Elvis. They can continue to do so for another 20 years, while they work on the next extension.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
The problem I have is not so much the copyright extension - it's the ex post facto fashion that it's being done. Changes to copyright law should not change the terms of existing copyrights.
Copyrights were originally an arrangement to promote public works by letting the creators have a monoply of copy rights on their works for a period of time (20 years originally) before the works become public domain.
It's a good idea, because by ensuring that the creators can profit from their works, society is enrichened with more works in the public domain (after the copyrights expire)
Can you imagine a deal where you pay for a number of years before you own your car, but then the car company changes the deal just before your term is up so you have to pay for another 5 years before you get your car?
Changing terms for EXISTING copyrights is, in effect, a similar situation - the artist knew the deal going in, there is already a clear 'no ex post facto law' ban in the constitution, and by never changing the term of existing copyrights, you limit the incentive to extend them until the heat-death of the universe!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Paying for live performances is great, the money goes to the artist in exchange of their creativity and skill.
Paying for a performance more than once, and essentially, every time you experience it does not make sense. The artist does not make an effort every time someone hears their song.
I pay a car mechanic to fix my car and then stop. I don't continue paying them for the rest of my life despite the fact that I continue to enjoy their effort.
Yes, the artist may invest a lot of time and effort in their creation, and that's why they get money from every member of the audience, for each audience they perform to.
A recording of a performance is not a performance.
I know this may sounds harsh. The monetization of everything has created laws that don't make sense, like IP laws. The nature of IP is not material and unlike physical matter, IP is very difficult to fence off and contain. Artists are made successful by their audience, the general public.
If not for the endlessly greedy corporations still standing between creators and their audience, things could be much simpler, with shorter copyright terms, clear ownership for every piece of media we buy and the ability to share the stuff we like.
It is not mandatory for every successful artist to become a millionaire. Many programmers, writers, painters, inventors do create useful and beautiful works and never become very rich.
An idea or a tune may pop in more than one head at the same time. Calling it "mine" and trying to fence it off and make everyone else pay is ridiculous.
The IPI and other industry groups like to talk about the billions lost to piracy on the internet. But what they've done here dwarfs that. When you copy a song in violation of copyright you "steal" it once from one person or one company for a few years or however long goes by until you delete it or lose the disk its saved on.
But what has happened here is that the industry groups have stolen every single song written or recorded in the last 70 years from every single citizen of the EU for a duration of at least 20 whole years. The scale of their theft is many orders of magnitude greater than the worst case scenario for "internet piracy."
As far as I'm concerned, any rights owner that supports or benefits from any copyright term extension legislation has zero standing to complain about piracy. They broke the social contract that was in place when they created the music. Just because they have co-opted our so-called representatives to put a rubber-stamp of legality on their contract violation doesn't give them the moral high-ground in the conflict. They want new terms? Well, the only terms they deserve are a termination of their copyrights, termination with extreme prejudice.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Sorry but patents and copyright are completely different things. Why do you have so little respect for creative works? Is it because you have no talent or creativity of your own or are you too damn lazy to try to create something new?
I write and record music, mostly for my own amusement. I have uploaded some of my stuff on the internet for friends and strangers to check out. I would never ever dream of charging anyone anything to listen to my music. When I need money, I go to work just like anyone else. I would never expect people to support my livelihood just because I spent a couple of hours of my time writing a tune.
If you ever had to prepare for a performance you might have some respect for the arts. As a spectator it must seem easy to you. I assure you that it is not easy and a good live performance can take hours of practice over a period of months to get right.
You are mixing the performing of music with the recording of music. Performing artists should rightly be paid for their work, because it's just that, work. They learn the songs, go to the venue, play music for hours - of course they should be compensated for their time. They should not, however, be given money indefinitely because of a song they wrote decades ago. But that's exactly what copyright is designed for.
Pensions keep paying no matter how many people keep using your works, royalities can hit near-zero quickly once people stop caring (provided they ever cared).
Besides, it's death + X years, after your death YOU aren't going to receive royalties anyway no matter who owns the rights.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
No. Copyright has served its term. These laws are going to be passed in every country that matters ,in one way or another, just like all those other laws we didn't like were passed. Listening to music from the mass media organisations is becoming immoral. What are we supporting by enjoying their music? We are supporting the subservience of art to money. Nothing more, nothing less. Black Sabbath is my favorite band. I first heard them after sneaking into my brothers bedroom and listening to his records. I thinK (due to burglary and media changes) I have bought the entire catalog of Black Sabbath several times. Well, fuck them. There is only one way to really say this. ..
cd Music/
mv Jamendo ~
cd
rm -rf Music/*
mv Jamendo/ Music/
Join Jamendo folks. Search, find, advertise, and promote the musicians on there. Any musician from the labels is either clueless or trying to fuck you over. That the bands that I grew up with, supported, lived with, showed me beauty, tears and life can support this situation guts me. Spineless little fucks they have become. Delete your music folks, delete your movies. If you see or hear something you like from them then email them asking for their album/movie/whatever under creative commons. Our failure to do this with lead to the death of our culture and the emotional death of ourselves. Subsumed in the search for more and more money.
If the RIAA and it's members want my remorse. It can turn it's body to a corpse.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
wouldn't get that juicy copyright either.
So in return for committing a jail-worthy (even to the CEO) criminal act, they get to print an out-of-copyright work in competition with the thirty other publishing houses, none of which have the sword of damoclese of a criminal act over their head. And one of which loses the monopoly rights.
Yeah, that makes a LOT of economic sense...
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Those who support copyright are asking for a different standard, not the same, as everyone else gets. If you are employed to do something, you continue getting paid as long as you continue the work and no longer. If you want to get paid into your retirement, either ask for a pension as a condition of your employment (at which you may not be successful) or save and invest money during your working years.
If, on the other hand, you go into business for yourself, you must continually market and sell the products you offer. And if someone comes up with a technology that means you no longer can make money the way you once did? Tough. Find a new way to sell, find a new product, or file Chapter 11.
Copyright is an artificially created monopoly. Its like does not exist for anyone else. I don't continue to profit from my work after it's done and sold to someone. I don't get to tell people not to share it without slipping me cash. I don't get to tell them they can't tinker with it and improve it. That's the way it should be.
Removing copyright would simply level the playing field. Ideas aren't inherently scarce. If you can make money off selling them, or performing certain types of them, or coming up with them for people who enjoy your work, good on you. (People do sell bottled water, and water, at least in the US, is not inherently scarce and is effectively free, so it can work). If not, go find something else to do, and get paid in the same way on the same terms all the rest of us do. Quit whining that you have a "right" to a profit from doing anything at all. You have a right to try. You do not have a right to tell people they cannot share in an attempt to profit from something they could've replicated on their own.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The real problem is that copyright is not an election issue. While most of slashdot readers are convinced that extension of copyright is evil, none are going to make it a big enough issue to force governments to back down.
Personally, I would prefer copyright was similar to patent rights. 17..20 years should be sufficient time for the Autists to be fully compensated.
..at least in Sweden copyright is already an election issue, at least with regards to the european parliament election coming up. Yesterday the swedish Pirate party passed the 40k member limit, soon they will be the third largest party in Sweden(~43k). When it comes down to the national election though, I'm afraid you are correct.
Try "powerful people have always had more political influence than people without power." Not too likely to change, either, until humans stop having human nature,
But industry organizations are also fundamentally different than real people. Real people care more about the local hospital that might be closed down because it affects them directly, while the industry cares about the health care reform bill that'll let them charge 300 million people a little more. Consumer organizations don't have nearly the same strength because people constantly abandon it for other short-time and personal benefits.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hell of a poor rationale for locking up our culture.
This change of law increases the value of something already produced. I guess the copyright cartels are arguing that they are creating wealth, when really they're printing money. Further to that, the cost to society is not even considered.
This is yet another example of uncreative trolls, completely estranged from the artistic process, lining their pockets with silver.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I have done so many times here on Slashdot. To make it short: the concept of "private property" can be applied only to objects with certain physical characteristics, like a unique location in the space-time continuum, for example, amongst many others. Which restricts the idea basically to physical objects. Thus, say, a chair, can be "owned" (i.e. controlled) by a person, transferred (with a corresponding loss of control by the original "owner") to another person, etc and so on. Information lacks these properties. We do not even know its true nature, but what we do know is directly contradictory to the idea of "private property". For example, an integer number "5" is a singular (i.e. there is only one of those in existence in the entire Universe) entity, but which lacks a specific space-time continuum coordinates, and which at the same time can be present in minds of billions of people, encoded with an infinite number of different encoding systems on an infinite number of media, etc and so on. The same applies to any sequence of integers. So to say that a series of numbers has an "owner" would imply that somehow a person can "control" the integer numbers, God-like, in whatever ethereal dimension they exist. Which is clearly not the case. Information cannot be simply so restricted by humans. Furthermore, its other properties (like an ability to propagate infinitely) present additional departures from the idea of "private property". Since information can be transmitted (i.e. patterns are replicated) rather then "moved" (as it is with physical objects) in order to "control" it one has to supervise all transfer of information in order to restrict the "owned" kind, in any form, which is what the MPAAs and the like are attempting, without regard of the type of information being transmitted as all channels can contain the "owned" patterns. In short the idea of "intellectual property" and "total surveillance" or "thought control" are synonymous from the point of view of theory of information. But then again, information can propagate without transmission. Two people at the other ends of the planet can independently discover that 2+2=4. The view of the "intelectual property" demagogues is that the second person doing so, without ever being aware of the first one, is then a "thief". I could go on, but this should give you a general idea.
Clearly you have not been giving it much thought.
These are illogical. But some people use these phrases because they, intuitively, feel that something is seriously wrong with the whole concept of "intellectual property". Their instincts are correct, but they simply have not looked at the problem in depth.
No, it is nowhere that simple. This is the, patently and demonstrably incorrect, position of the "intellectual property" peddlers. The objective truth is that information can be "discovered" quite independently. In fact we do not know the true nature of information, as it appears to have a duality similar to that of, say, light, whereby at one time the light can be thought of as composed of discrete particles and at another time as a wave. Similarly, information can be "transmitted" and at some other times "discovered". And at the same time only one integer number 5 still exists in the Universe, thus making the idea of its "transmission" rather peculiar, giving to notions of multiple "impressions" or "representations" of the same uni