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Canadian Pirates Sell Spurious Songs — In 1897
Reservoir Hill writes "The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that 'Canadian pirates' were flooding the country with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. 'They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months' while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But 'American publishers had held a conference' and a 'committee had been appointed to fight the pirates' by getting the 'Post Office authorities to stop such mail matter because it infringes the copyright law.' Interestingly enough the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the newspapers' advertising while the other half went to the pirates who sent the music by mail." The AMPA never dreamed of suing their customers, though.
I hope this is a joke where you are suggesting that the OP was copying Rush lyrics without authorization. FWIW, the phrase goes back quite a ways. From the first site I came upon with a Google search:
While Rush has great musicianship, Neil Peart's lyrics are usually very derivative. He may be a bit more well-read than the average rock drummer, he's doesn't possess any especial insight. It's sad when fans try to hold Peart up as some kind of philosopher of our time. They should be reading more themselves.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?
It didn't ruin the music industry but it probably ruined any number of small composers and threw them to the mercy of big distributers who were the only ones that had the resources to defend against this sort of thing. Even back then piracy could ruin you or at least cause you significant economic harm. A classic example is the 1902 movie: "A Trip to the Moon" by Georges Méliès. The movie was stolen by agents of Thomas Edison and widely circulated in the US by Edison. This ruined Méliès plans to market his film in the US and Méliès never got a profit from this movie. Eventually Méliès was forced into bankruptcy and although the losses on "A Trip to the Moon" probably didn't help his bankruptcy was mostly due to aggressive anti competitive behavior by the big studios of the period. So perhaps the lesson is that there is not much difference between pirates and evil mega-corps from a small/independent artist's or for that matter a small software developer's point of view. Both cause you economic harm and if you are a small/independent artist or software developer you can therefore feel free to detest both equally.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Isn't the copyright valid for up to 120 years for corporate entities? The claim is plausible enough (but still insane).
The [Copyright Term Extension Act] extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Since the given date is the date of publication, the copyright should indeed have expired.
Here's a quote from his article "The Menace of Mechanical Music" from 1906:
Some would say he was just greedy, however; he had an investment in marching bands, which is what most of the article is about, especially those using the Sousaphone. The phonograph was seen as a threat to that.
except that Canada passed a law to levy digital mediums to compensate the Canadian copyright firms for their "lost" sales. There's already a "tax" on fair use defined into law... there's no need to make new laws to make things more complicated.