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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 the public.
According to the approved legislation, if producers, 50 years after the publication of a phonogram, do not make it available to the public, performers can ask to terminate the contract they signed to transfer their rights to the label.
That would SO never pass in the US.
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!
I've reduced the copyright duration I'm willing to observe to 0 years.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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
The US already grants copyright up to 70 years after the author's death. They're just doing this to harmonize their laws with the United States. But wait, in 2002 the key argument presented to the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft is that we extended copyright to harmonize with the European Union.
TFA doesn't clearly state that for this to come into effect it needs to be approved by every single EU member state. It is rumoured that Belgium, Slovenia, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia and Romania are opposed to this.
From the fine article: Composers already enjoy copyright protection for 70 years after their death.
Does that mean composers have even more fun in heaven, or the fire in hell is turned down a bit for them?
-- Cheers!
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"
Indeed. Many of us will be dead before the works our parents enjoyed before our conception enter the public domain.
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people. Something has gone very, very wrong with copyright law. The value society now takes from offering artists the protection of copyright is now extraordinarily questionable.
If these industry groups were so concerned with the future of their artists they shouldn't be calling for 70-year long copyright terms, they should be offering artists a pension.
Highlighting shared sentiment? Copyright is after all the balance of artist income and value to society through public works. If society at large believes there to be no balance then the gp was insightful.
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 and Patents should be MAX of 5 years. They are supposed to give the author a limited monopoly in order to facilitate future works/inventions. It is to the point of absurdity and, frankly, is disgusting.
-SaNo
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.
How long does it take the wave to brake and hit the shore shit. They are creating laws that only impoverish us by forcing us to pay for culture when it should be free. Our education will suffer by these laws as well. We are selling out our freedom and the futures freedom with these ridicules laws. I am currently in the process of working on my music cd. I can not believe any audience I might get is going to appreciate me if I use this copyright to protect my creations in order to make money for lazy fucks who don't deserve a penny. I mean for fucks sake, who deserves to be rewarded for their creation after they die, let alone more than 10 - 15 years at best. For your lazy spoiled kids? Either create in a timely manner or GTFO. No one on this planet is a fucking god, so lets not write laws that make them so. Yah Think? I've made up my mind, just me and my creation and a respectful option to pay for my hard work to whom may appreciate my efforts. Fuck these companies and these laws, they are completely insulting, absurd and create a HUGE cultural imbalance for US, the people and the future. FUCK YOUR GREEDY LAZY BULLSHIT 70 YEARS!!!!
14 years.
The US constitution had a similar copyright law from 1789 to 1909, 14 years + 14 year extension if requested, and you had to file for the copyright and the extension no reward for laziness.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creative arts not to make heirs and corporations wealthy.
Seriously, if copyright were tied to death + only a short time, JK Rowling would be toast. All the publishing houses would be hiring professional hitmen. And striking it big with the Great American Novel would pretty much be your death knell.
On the other hand, that sound like a good setting for some kind of post-apocalyptic copyright thriller.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
According to this paper, optimal copyright duration is 14-15 years.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
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,
So some moron can make a completely idiotic post and just add "Go ahead burn my karma" and that suddenly makes it insightful?
Not only that, his copyright on his post won't expire until 70 years after he finally dies.
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.
The magistrates that control the music industry in the European Union have obviously been playing quite a game of roulette, with specific regard to industry charlatans who claim to represent the wishes of the people to be frogs.
Nevertheless, these actions must be accounted for in a court of law. This means sacred cows will be sacrificed on the court of public opinion, and pimps and thieves will run free. Hunter S. Thompson would be proud.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Patents are a disaster. Economist David Levine has a catalog of devastating evidence and arguments. David Heller writes that "Almost half of patents litigated to judgment are invalidated; of those found valid, half are found not to be infringed." Just think of the costs of that for a moment. Most inventions are small and incremental, not original and earth-shattering. And if you're the little guy, forget about it: if RIM couldn't fight off bogus patent threats, what hope do little guys have?
But the real scandal is the drug industry.
Right now we have drug companies that:
This is what they do with the profits from patents. These guys are the big tobacco of the 21st century. Please tell me why paying monopoly rents for drugs from a corrupt industry that's not particularly interested in saving lives is better than at-cost drugs researched with public funding.
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.
Until you're paying royalties to the descendants of Sophocles for Oedipus, you have no moral standing.
And I'm not calling to the people. I'm echoing their screams. Can you not hear them? It's your head they want on a pike.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Listen to yourself. This is hysterical. You don't make a single cogent argument. You don't even respond to my proposal for public funding.
Let's be clear, because your example is insidious. It implies that eliminating patent law would be akin to seizing personal property. If I own a knife, then it is my personal property. So long as I don't break any laws, it is mine to do with as a I choose. Anyone proposing to ban it or take it away from me must have a significant justification.
Patents are nothing like this. They are a policy instrument used by government to achieve certain ends. A government choosing not to make use of them is not a matter of "banning" anything. Patents are only legitimate and useful to the extent that they achieve the objectives they are intended to achieve. You do not have a right to patent laws. This is merely a question of choosing the right tool for the job.
The question, then, is first: do patents do what they're supposed to do, and second: is there a better tool for the job. I referred to economist David Levine. He answers "no" to the first, and provides a convincing array of evidence. As to the second, I have pointed to another tool that works better. Public funding of research is not known for the kind of thorough corruption evidenced in the proprietary pharmaceutical sector. And because it is not dependent on patents, the benefits of drugs are not subject to the huge additional costs of monopoly.
But hey, since you made a ridiculous comparison I'll make one too. With a choice between a knife and a chainsaw to cut vegetables, would you choose the chainsaw even though you kept losing fingers?
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.
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.
You should probably start here: philosophy of copyright (consequentialist theories). Actually, the whole article is probably worth a read.
There are multiple rationales for copyright. You seem to believe in the natural rights of the author and their heirs to control the uses of the work. Wikipedia mentions that the cases you present are related to the concept of personality rights.
In the United States, the U.S. Constitution gives the rationale of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The view you reference is that that means copyright is a sort of loan from the public to the creator(s) and that copyright exists purely to allow creative works to be sold for a long enough period of time to ensure their creation is sufficiently profitable for it to actually happen -- and no more. That is, copyright is far from being a natural right: it is a necessary evil that should be minimized as much as possible without damaging the creation of new works.
From that perspective, the question is not "Why is copyright bad?" but "Why is copyright good?" based on the belief that all limitations on personal liberty need to be justified.
Centralization breaks the internet.
(...) with specific regard to industry charlatans who claim to represent the wishes of the people to be frogs.
I'm French, you insensitive Claude!
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
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.
A pharmaceutical company that pours billions of dollars into research and tials to finally develop a drug that takes away disease gets a 20 year patent.
An automaker that develops new type of breaks that saves peoples lives gets a 20 year patent.
Someone who goes "la la la" into a microphone gets 70 year copyright.
Yes, I know that patents and copyright aren't exactly the same but still. The proportions are WAY off here.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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.
You are right that software patents are the bigger evil. However, I think a lot of the injustice that people feel about what's happening in the copyright world is that it spells out so obviously the corruption that has come to play to achieve what is happening. Corruption that has little to do with benefitting the full range of society, but only those who already have a lot of power.
A lot of the people that read this list probably quite like the idea of the potential of running some small software business and all forms of corruption that increase the ability to large companies to oppress upcoming small companies is abhorrent to them.
I once had a company that someone wrongly used the DCMA law, claiming my software was theirs, to take the software out of circulation for a year. After a debilitating year of legal costs and no income the court found that the copyright was my own, but the company was destroyed in the meantime. Where's the justice in that? These sort of laws become tools for large players to wipe out small, pesky upstarts.
If you are a small software company with a great idea, you better get bigger and amass enough capital to sustain a court battle very quickly, or sooner or later someone will try and eliminate you from the race via these laws and it won't matter much if you are right or not, it's just a tool.
* Why is it that an engineer or scientist will only be granted a 20 year protection of his or her idea after spending piles of money and maybe 5 to 10 years working on an idea, while a guy with a guitar gets a monopoly for life?
* If I buy an original potatoe at a store and I reproduce it and share copies with my friends, why isn't that called theft? Making that initial potatoe available can potentially cost the store thousands in lost potatoe sales.
(... sampled from the swedish debate)
She made the willows dance
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.
What right does an artist have to 70 years of income from a single piece of work? What makes an artist so much more special than a doctor or even a supermarket shelf stacker?
If a doctor save's someone's life, is he entitled to royalties from that person for as long as they remain alive?
As you pointed out, most artists don't get rich, but a small percentage of them take the piss and make billions for doing relatively little work. The difference has nothing to do with how hard someone works, or even how good their music is, it's purely down to brand recognition and media hype.
Why should someone who performs his work every week in a bar earn less than someone who hasn't performed or produced anything in years?
The system is unfairly stacked to benefit a select few at the expense of everyone else, and these people have pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses by convincing them they somehow have some inherent right to continue ripping everyone off.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Bear in mind as well that most contract with artists were sign when 50 years was the law so the contract will state they get royalties for 50 years. The extra 20 years royalties is going straight to the label in most cases and the artist won't see a penny.
I dont read
Keith Richards will keep playing? Holy mother ... please make it stop. This is against nature and all that's good and true.
..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.
With the conviction of The Pirate Bay administrators having immediately abolished all filesharing, the EU has approved an extension of sound copyright to seventy years past the point of theoretical death, and death to seventy years past actual death.
The media industry sponsored move is intended to properly suppress the very notion of the production of unapproved works of art. The major record companies' value proposition has changed from being the only people you can get music from to being the only people who will stop you getting music. "We own all the back catalogs we've been buying up," said Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfmann, the luckiest sperm in the whole USA, "and YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! And we'll sue your grandmother's ass if you try going around us!"
Without an extension of copyright, the dead might never record again. "If I'd known in 1958, when the copyright in 'Move It' was due to expire in 2008, that the copyright in 'Move It' would in fact expire in 2008, would I have bothered? I don't bloody think so!" said Sir Cliff Richard (died 1961). "I can rest safe in the knowledge that my mouldering corpse will not feel ripped off by this turn of events, and that my many, many descendants can continue to live off 'Summer Holiday' for the term of their rather unnatural lives. Remember that I am a born-again Christian and non-drinker, so beer and hookers mean and meant nothing to me. Money, however, is next to Godliness."
Feargal Sharkey of UK Music stressed the necessity of the move to his never having to write another song after "Teenage Kicks." "I urge you to picture a world in which Girls Aloud and Jason Donovan have no motivation to record."
The government's Cowell Report recommended that copyright should be reduced to one year, software patents made a hanging offence, Mickey Mouse declared an unperson and musicians told to stop whining and get a real bloody job like the rest of us. "It's not like there's some sort of national shortage of bad pop records," said Sir Simon, "although a world in which Jive Bunny recordings irretrievably disintegrate into dust before they could possibly enter the public domain does have a certain appeal. Nevertheless, we desperately need to demotivate surplus pop star wannabes. I urge you to picture a world in which Girls Aloud and Jason Donovan have no motivation to record."
Richard Dawkins spoke in favour of the perpetual unavailability of music, as per his new book The Art Delusion. "'Music' appears to be an entirely subjective phenomenon with little or no objective measurements possible — much like any other brand of snake oil or balderdash. Music seems to be a sort of virus on human consciousness, parasitically sapping the collective intelligence of the human race." He defended his own attendance at his local church's Christmas carols: "I'm only putting them at their ease so they let their guard down while I work on plans for mass re-education camps for the sufferers of musical appreciation."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Artist collection agencies, like Sabam gets money from all the artists, dead or alive, which they've got their exclusive contract with.
To my opinion, it's purpose is not to protect the artist, but those who collect afterwards....
I've been writing about this exclusive-licensing-crap limiting our (Belgian) artists at large.
Be sure to check out Sabam, really for the common? & Music industry, wake up call for alternative licensing! for more information...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
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
Better check with Dan Quayle to see if he has the rights to Potatoe.
Meanwhile, I feel like there's a Judo move being set up here.
For a little bit of early pain, we're establishing the groundwork for copyright enforcement.
Maybe not this administration, but eventually someone with a populist streak *with nothing to lose* - say a President in his last year in office, could then do a tombstone piledriver on Hollywood Accounting using the fiscal reform laws.
I'm thinking that Mr. Scientist just has to add some Performance Coating and get BOTH a patent AND a copyright on his ideas. "Ooh, it's a CD with Extended Data features! In a story about a scientist who seeks to get past the limits of silicon on a computer chip, he desperately tries higher grade lithography, before changing paradigms, and turning to the new photo-sensitive materials in that other slashdot post 2 stories away on the front page."
Get a drama class to film things, write up a script and novel version, get a soundtrack, post it as a webisode and a Community-TV special, and Voila, Copyright lock.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You're forgetting one important thing: derivative works. Sure, Rowling's publishers wouldn't want to bump her off, because they'd lose their monopoly. And the existing books wouldn't be worth a whole lot. It would be about like re-publishing Victor Hugo or Jane Austen
But we're talking about the ability to make MOVIES while Potter is still hot, and churn out scads of sequels with an army of sweatshop writers (and since it's a collaborative work, we'll just give it to the corp., which means it gets a tidy 95-year copyright, regardless of whom you kill). So while I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, there ARE really big financial incentives, especially if you are guaranteed the ability to cash in while a craze is still hot.
Also, you only go to prison if you get caught. That's why you hire a professional. If they can't catch him, they can't catch you.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.